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Losing a soulmate can mean the loss of a partner due to death, divorce, or unrequited love. I will cover all three cases and discuss how to survive each one.
Case 1) Lost My Soulmate: Grieving Over the Loss of a Partner
There is no person we will ever be closer to than our spouse. We share beds, we share every secret, and they are the person we rely on for strength and support. When we lose them, they leave the biggest hole in our hearts and in our lives.
The only thing that will ever fill that hole is love. Not love for a new partner, but pure love — love for this moment, love for God or the universe, love for life itself. We have to get back to living, and the way is love.
But how do we do that when there is immense anger, hatred and pain?
Don’t see pain as bad. See it as the beginning of healing. When we cut ourself, the body heals the wound immediately, effortlessly. The pain is the indicator to the body to heal a particular area. When there is physical pain, our healing journey can begin.
So too in our lives, when there is the pain of loss, that means the healing has begun. When there is the pain of heartache, the mending has begun. These are processes that are here for our benefit.
If there was no pain, a child would not pull their hand out of fire. Pain is good. It is our body’s incredible power of healing — physical, mental and spiritual. When you are grateful for pain and suffering, it eases.
Don’t be afraid of the pain. Feel it, face it, and love it because it is love. Pain is not here to hurt you, it’s here to heal you.
Don’t be afraid to live again. Give yourself permission to heal and be happy. You don’t have to succeed right away, but the journey starts with permission. Your loved one would want you to be happy and cherish every moment — the good times and the painful healing times.
“Dear Todd, I lost my soulmate. I know he is gone and am trying to let go. I have to let go or the grief will kill me. But how do you let go of love? Is it even possible because it is the only thing that hasn’t changed? My love for him is part of me.”
Never let go of love. He won’t either. But he also wants you to live.
That’s our responsibility to them. Your love is not in the clothes. It will hurt after they’re gone, but only the fabric will be gone. You don’t have to worry about losing the love.
I don’t know what you’re going through, but I know it must be the worst thing imaginable. I wish for you that you’re able to channel your deep love for him into your life. Keep him with you; make him proud. Have faith. I have seen time and time again that the strength we gain from our loved ones is more than enough to sustain us through their loss.
By learning about the nature of our grief, greater insight and wisdom can occur. But learning about grief is not enough. To fully understand anything, we have to put what we’ve learned into practice.
In meditation, we experience witnessing our pain firsthand. The more we witness the pain, the less we become identified with the pain, and the more we become identified as the peaceful watcher. As we practice observing the pain, our understanding of it grows and the less power it has over our lives.
When we face a sudden and tragic change in our lives, our bodies and mind are unable to quickly adjust to our new reality. We have become so accustomed to having this person or thing in our lives that the loss feels unbearable. We don’t know how to live our lives with such loss and our thoughts, feelings, and bodies go into shock.
Everyone experiences grief differently and for different lengths of time. Feelings of guilt or trauma may accompany grief. Our impulse is to ignore our grief, but this can often make it worse and delay the final stage of grief, acceptance.
At its very core, grief is intense resistance to loss. Our strong desire for the person or thing to come back creates immense mental and physical suffering. Because we’ve become so attached to that person or thing, their loss creates unbearable pain. It is this resistance, pain, and desire that causes our grief.
Even though we know that everything in our lives is only temporary, we still become attached and mistakenly think of them as permanent. We fall for the illusion of permanence and desperately hold on to people and things. It’s only natural. But when the illusion is shattered, so are we.
The Two Keys to Coping with Loss
Coping with painful emotions like grief requires two things: wisdom and experience.
1) Wisdom: Understanding Impermanence
First, it’s important to understand that this, like everything in life, will pass. Try to let go of expectations and just allow whatever comes to come. Don’t resist how you feel.
Accept it. Everything in life constantly changes. All suffering comes from attachment. Welcome whatever comes, let go of whatever goes. You don’t have to make peace with the situation, just try to make peace with your thoughts and feelings.
2) Experience: Sitting With the Pain
Healing from grief doesn’t happen overnight, but a deeply relaxing meditative practice can be the first step to healing. In meditation, we simply observe the nature of reality. We observe the nature of our minds.
Moreover, We observe the sensations in our bodies. We learn from this practice that everything we experience in the world, we actually only experience as a projection in our own mind. Thoughts and emotions arise and fall away.
Sense perceptions emerge and disappear. Everything is in constant flux and changing from one moment to the next. The more we observe this phenomenon, the more we understand on a deep level that everything shall pass and nothing is so unbearable if we are able to let go of our attachment and expectations.
This is a practice that takes time and is meant to be done gently, with self-love and compassion, with no expectations or feelings of failure. This is merely the act of sitting with your thoughts and emotions without external distractions and allowing your mind and body to relax and heal.
The Miracle of Death: “Nothing is Ever Gone”
Watch Directly on YouTube →Case 2) Lost My Soulmate: Surviving Breakups and Divorce
In some ways, divorce and breakups can be just as hard, if not harder, than death. This is for three reasons.
- Society doesn’t support or allow people going through breakups the time to grieve. Losing someone, no matter how we lose them, is traumatic, Earth-shattering and soul-crushing. When we stop speaking to someone who was our whole world, we need to give ourselves the time to grieve.
Setting aside a little time everyday, and perhaps a little more time on the weekends, is necessary to process our thoughts and emotions.
- Feelings like anger, confusion and betrayal may be present.
- Breakup and divorce feel to our subconscious mind the exact same as losing someone to death, but it also comes with so many other painful emotions.
Just like how our subconscious mind learns to automatically act out our habits, it also has to unlearn the habits of expecting someone to be there for us. This is painful, especially when the breakup was not our choice. How to trust finding love again after being hurt?
It’s one thing to consciously choose to move on, but we really need to reprogram our subconscious mind to heal, forgive, and let go. We do this the same way we make any new habit — repetition.
Mindfulness must become the new habit. We must be in a constant state of watchfulness over our thoughts and emotions. We can even set aside some time everyday or week to wishing our ex well, and to practice gratitude for the new opportunities our new life ahead presents. The more this becomes a habit, the less we hold on to our old life. This is how we move forward in peace.
There’s still a chance. What do we do when we are consumed with thoughts about what we should do — should we try to win them back, or should we move on?
This is a case-by-case basis. In some cases, our ex has already found someone else. In others, there may be something we can do. Either way, we must make their happiness a priority. That way, we win no matter what.
If there is some uncertainty about getting back together, we must walk that middle path between trying and not trying. We don’t want to get our hopes up, but we don’t want to give up too early either. This is what it means to try without trying.
We must improve ourselves if we had some responsibility in the breakup, we must make a good effort, but we have to trust the universe as well.
To do this, we must stay mindful of the mindset of the other person, not just our own. There are two people’s lives at stake, not just one. We can easily get so consumed with what we want, that we fail to see what the other person is trying to tell us, or what is best for both people.
Stay open, follow your heart, but listen to the other person’s heart as well. Not all relationships can be mended. You will only know for sure when there is clarity, and there can only be clarity when we are fully calm and present.
So be sure to take time to relax, don’t fear being alone, and don’t fear the unknown. Every challenge is an opportunity for growth and for new and exciting adventures.
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Case 3) Lost My Soulmate: Surviving Unrequited Love
Sometimes we find our soulmate, and sometimes our soulmate thinks otherwise. Even if we dated someone for a brief time, getting dumped sucks. The movies tell us to never give up, but in reality that often comes off needy and desperate. So what are we to do?!
Prepare yourself for the hard truth. If the love of your life stops answering your calls, they weren’t the one. That may sound bad, but it’s actually a blessing. This gives us the freedom to keep on searching for our soulmate.
We can be grateful for any chance to move on. It puts us one step closer to finding true love.
Every rejection is an opportunity to learn something. Not about changing ourselves, but about how we can be more authentically ourselves, and what kind of person we’re truly looking for.
So often, we’re looking for someone society tells us is desirable. There are a billion clues in the media about what is attractive and what kind of person is enviable. But these cues condition us into believing things that are not necessarily true for us.
So dig deep. Be more you. Become the best version of yourself. Your true soulmate will notice. Every great love story, no matter who it’s with, starts with the love we have for ourself — our true self. Take the journey within, in the book, Finding Your True Self: A Love Story.
How to Meditate for Loss
When we’re grieving, we need to take time to work through our pain. Meditation for grief and loss gives us the time and safe space to do just that. There is really no better way to process our grief than by sitting or lying down, closing our eyes, and turning our attention into our inner world.
We tend to instinctively feel as though these painful thoughts and emotions are too much to bear, but it is precisely this resistance and aversion to our feelings that make them truly unbearable.
When we can just sit with ourselves, watching our thoughts and emotions as they come and go, we learn that they are not so unbearable. They are merely thought-forms popping in and out of existence, leaping from thought to thought, and by the end of a 20- or 30-minute meditation, we will usually be feeling and thinking in a whole new way.
Meditation is about constantly accepting the present moment, surrendering to it fully, and just allowing it to be. In meditation for grief and loss, we let go of our longing, we let go of our attachment to the past, and we just become present, feeling our breath and awareness of our body and surroundings. At this moment, there is only peace.
Meditation for grief and loss allows us to see the impermanent nature of all things, thoughts, and emotions. Once we see this, we stop grasping the past and start accepting what is. The road is not always easy, but it will take you where you need to go.
