Loss Also Brings Depth

Joy and sorrow are the great expanders in our lives, in the sense that whatever we feel deeply and irrefutably stretches us and leaves us more spacious (and more wise) on the other side.

Often times we have more to give and share as a result.

Some of the best teachers I’ve ever had the privilege to know and work with have had some of the most harrowing lives. But they learned to turn their hardships into their triumphs. Their losses didn’t just brutalize them and render them useless. They deepened and enriched them, too.

It’s one of the strange paradoxes for all of us. Breaking down is part of breaking open and coming into contact with our true value in this incarnation. We don’t really know our strength, our capacity, our resiliency until these parts of us are activated or tested.

Carl Jung wrote: Depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light.

It’s a spiritual workout to be actively engaged with life in these ways. To allow ourselves to express what wants to be expressed. To process the big emotions. The beauty that feels scary to trust. The grief that feels impossible to live beyond.

Our willingness to show up for the challenges on our path is how we come to test our own limitations and change in big, beautiful ways. To discover how much…