Healing Rain

"Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts"...(Charles Dickens). Being free and honoring the voice within means that my emotions are raw and generally always in the present moment. With that said, as with all of the rain we have had in California over the past 10 days, I too have been experiencing my own rainfall...tears of course. My tears have been healing and have helped me process my feelings about love and about truth. Sometimes people disappoint us, not because of them per se, but because we had hoped they were stronger. We hurt when we must face peoples limitations because we feel it as a loss. It is a loss of what we hoped for. I don't mean to dash hopes...because hope is the dream that perhaps one day, the impossible becomes possible. For today however, some losses may occur when our hearts hurt for what may seem out of reach. A friend asked for my advice about love and heartache. He is utterly in love with someone and is tortured by thoughts of her. He wakes up thinking about her, thinks about her frequently throughout the day and when he falls asleep at night, she is the person he drifts off to sleep thinking about and dreaming about. He says that he now knows what love is and he feels it to the depths of his soul. She loves him too and feels the incredible chemistry between them. The problem is.....she's married and in the depths of her own confusion about obligations, responsibilities and fear. Nobody ever said that love would be easy. Love can make everything messy. Yes, overall love should make things easier, but the heart doesn't care about rules, it just knows how it feels. Just like you can't tell the heart how to feel. You can be married and tell your heart, "Hey heart-fall deeply in love with my spouse because I don't want to get a divorce." The heart says, "Nice try....but you can't force me to feel something I don't." So, people just put up with complacency or misery, because they can't make themselves love somebody that they just don't feel it for. Back to my friend and his dilemma. He wants a magic pill to try to forget about his true love. He can't and never will forget about her, I told him. It just doesn't work that way. A deep love like that is like the air we breathe, once you've felt it, you cannot ever make it disappear nor can you ever live without that feeling....because it becomes a part of you. I advised him to channel his love elsewhere, to write, get distracted and once in awhile to let himself bask in the love he feels for her. I also advised him to date, even though it may be tough. The woman he loves needs to figure out whether she will tolerate a bad marriage or whether she feels deserving enough to follow her heart. As we head into 2011, I believe that people will be tested more than ever as to whether they will honor their voice within or stay in misery. Here's the catch though, pain will continue to get more intense for those who remain in denial. I notice more and more, that people are just not able to hide so easily from their issues. Those issues catch up with you, one way or another. Back to my healing tears....I love a good cry and it honors my voice in every way possible. Equally, as easily as I can cry, I am also able to feel incredible love, joy, hope and laughter. Sometimes, I will cycle through all of those feelings in a single day! Let the healing rain fall as it is raining once again today in Southern California and when the sun comes out tomorrow, I will be the first to run outside to bask in the sunshine of a new day. "The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears"...(John Vance Cheney).