What is behind the fear of unwanted change? The uninvestigated mind says that I’m going to sustain a loss: "he's going away," "the business is slipping," etc. The fear of loss is connected in our mind with the image of what had previously given us the feeling of succeeding. So now here’s reality, and it's pretty different than our image of what should be, and we’d rather live with the image than look at reality. But the fact of the matter is, we can see clearly now that something "bad" has happened to us and there is this sense of loss.

Why is that loss so traumatic to us? Because that loss, if it's real, means that we’re going to have to literally reorient ourselves to life. That's why we don't want the loss. It’s because the present relationship that we have imagined defines us in our world. We are defined by our relationships, and if a relationship starts to change, the way we’re defined in life and the way we know ourselves starts to change. And we don't want that. We don't want anything we have imagined to be real to show us that it's not, because the super-structure of our self as it stands is rooted in this imagined life from which we derive these feelings of security as we imagine ourselves in it.

As society has just experienced on a massive scale, anxiety about loss of income is very damaging. Everyone can see the loss in economic terms, but at a deeper level something invisible is at work. People’s sense of abundance and fulfillment is undermined. When we worry about not having enough, we immediately think in terms of money, but what about a lack of emotional fulfillment, a lack of love, lack of creative solutions? Abundance needs to prevail in those areas first and foremost.

The most crucial thing to understand is that abundance begins in your awareness. Look at the by now familiar story of lottery winners who are worse off ten years after their sudden windfall. Why? Because they couldn’t adapt. They were used to processing their lives on a limited scale, and suddenly they were asked to process millions of dollars, massive attention, public exposure, and the demands of people all around them.

Unless you are prepared to adapt, abundance itself can turn into a burden on you. The secret is to constantly build an attitude of abundance in small steps leading to a big goal: a sense of self that can accept higher and higher levels of opportunity. Here are seven steps you can build on:

Kobe Bryant, along with his daughter and 7 others died tragically on January 26th.

Losing a loved one is never easy.

Grief is a natural process. Yet we have a tendency to suppress it and avoid feeling it. This only keeps you stuck in the pain.

We often think that if we feel the grief it will last forever. But no feelings last forever. All feelings when fully felt dissolve.

Or that if we feel the grief we will never survive.

So if you lost someone you love, give yourself full permission to feel the pain fully. It will break your heart open to a bigger dimension of love than you knew before.

Many people find it hard to move on when they lose a spouse or a partner. While some feel guilty, others think they’re cheating on the person who has passed. And then there are others who say they don’t deserve to be happy and choose to go through the rest of their life alone.

Those on the Other-Side don’t want us to linger in pain or be alone. They know that as humans, we need to touch and to be touched, to hold and be held, and above all that, we’re meant to love and to be loved. There’s never any judgment from them when it comes to affairs of the heart. When you feel you cannot get out of bed because of your sadness, it is them who gently push you forward.

To cope with the loss of your life partner, here’s the best advice I can give you: Your loved ones wouldn’t want you to suffer alone, so I recommend that you talk to someone about your feelings, be it a close friend or a professional therapist. It doesn’t help if you shut yourself off from those who were part of your life when you were a couple.

It’s never an easy thing when friends or family you were close to or once loved grow out of your life.

It can be quite painful.

You might feel some guilt or false loyalty if you feel you have outgrown them.

Or you might feel abandoned, betrayed, hurt, sad, angry, grief. Or a combination of all of the above.

Understand that you initially attracted your friend into your life because:

A) You were vibrating at a similar level of consciousness and were a vibrational match at that particular time.

B) You had certain lessons to teach each other’s souls. Your friendship was an opportunity learn those lessons and serve each other’s growth.

Friendships last as long as both of your souls need, as long as your personalities think they should.

There is a song in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton in which the character Aaron Burr says, “Death doesn’t discriminate/Between the sinners and the saints./It takes, and it takes, and it takes/And we keep living anyway…./If there’s a reason I’m still alive…/I’m willing to wait for it.” I found this to be one of the most moving and human moments in the show. I felt his pain and longing deep within me. We all could speak some variation of those words, really. Sometimes you wonder what life is about, why people have to suffer, and what the point is to your being here at all. Yet, you continue; you wait, hanging on to something inside that tells you that you are here for a reason, even if you can’t seem to see it clearly.

 

Yes, you are here for a reason. We all are. Sometimes we catch glimpses of it, a momentary peek at the big picture, but the curtain drops again, and we become distracted with the day-to-day worries and preoccupations of life on Earth. Still, an inner wisdom—call it soul awareness—carries us forward throughout our lives. This part of us knows that life is not meaningless. There is something greater that holds us in a gentle embrace of loving connection. We are beginning to experience the presence of that connection more and more as our individual awareness expands and our hearts open. Some call it God, some call it universal consciousness, some call it just “mystery.” It doesn’t need a name or label. This Presence is with us always, whatever we call it or don’t call it.