{"id":2018,"date":"2012-11-07T03:00:19","date_gmt":"2012-11-07T08:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/lettinggo\/?p=2018"},"modified":"2012-11-04T12:29:36","modified_gmt":"2012-11-04T17:29:36","slug":"a-gateway-through-the-unthinkable-pain-of-loss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/2012\/11\/a-gateway-through-the-unthinkable-pain-of-loss.html","title":{"rendered":"A Gateway Through the Unthinkable Pain of Loss"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Question:<\/strong> I (and many others) have lost so much in the recent storm. How do we begin to move beyond all the grief and suffering to some kind of peace and understanding of why such a thing could have happened?<\/p>\n<p><strong> Answer:<\/strong> We can either be a student of life, understanding the innate goodness that has given us our being &#8212; and that seeks its ultimate perfection through our trials and tribulations &#8212; or we can suffer what seems the disconnected gyrations of this world, and join ourselves to its dark and descending cycle.<\/p>\n<p>Generally speaking, there would be no question as to which is the proper choice, and most would profess they prefer the former as it seems positive and life-giving. But the true student of life must always choose to look at life (despite how difficult this may be) as a school for his or her higher education. This isn&#8217;t to say that we don&#8217;t suffer, that we don&#8217;t grieve over loss &#8212; especially in the face of how unjust it seems. But what our choice does mean is that we suffer in a new way, in a conscious way, the things that come along that seem to make no sense.<\/p>\n<p>In this instance, the loss can also prove to be the gateway to a holy new understanding: the pain we feel in such unthinkable moments isn&#8217;t because love itself has been taken from us, but rather the form through which we knew that love in and through ourselves.<\/p>\n<p>Part of the pain of such a loss is losing the ways in which we knew ourselves. In the end, the true student of life &#8212; those of us who love the Divine &#8212; must be willing to see that when God takes from us the temporary forms that he does &#8212; including those we love most &#8212; He is really offering us (at the same time) the possibility of seeing that so much of our suffering is because we have mistaken what must be passing for something that is everlasting.<\/p>\n<p>Only God, Christ, Love, the Light of Truth &#8212; call it what you will &#8212; is eternal. Only our hard-fought battle to learn the truth of this fact frees us from what appears to be a loss. Persist with your wish to grow, to give yourself to what is good, and nothing can stand between you and the love you long to know, and be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Question: I (and many others) have lost so much in the recent storm. How do we begin to move beyond all the grief and suffering to some kind of peace and understanding of why such a thing could have happened? Answer: We can either be a student of life, understanding the innate goodness that has&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":232,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,515],"tags":[753,1403,288,147,1406,52,296,1405],"class_list":["post-2018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-letting-go","category-peace-serenity","tag-grief","tag-hurricane-sandy","tag-identification","tag-loss","tag-new-understanding","tag-pain","tag-suffering","tag-trials-and-tribulations"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>A Gateway Through the Unthinkable Pain of Loss - Letting Go with Guy Finley<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/2012\/11\/a-gateway-through-the-unthinkable-pain-of-loss.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Gateway Through the Unthinkable Pain of Loss - Letting Go with Guy Finley\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Question: I (and many others) have lost so much in the recent storm. 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His ideas cut straight to the heart of our most important personal and social issues - relationships, success, addiction, stress, peace, happiness, freedom - and lead the way to a higher life. Finley is the Founder and Director of Life of Learning Foundation, a nonprofit Center for Spiritual Discovery. He is the acclaimed author of \"The Secret of Letting Go\" and more than 45 other books and audio programs that have sold over two million copies in 26 languages worldwide. His work is widely endorsed by doctors, business professionals, celebrities, and religious leaders of all denominations. Through Life of Learning Foundation, Guy has presented over 5,000 unique self-realization seminars to thousands of grateful students throughout North America and Europe over the past 20 years and has been a guest on over 700 television and radio shows, including national appearances on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and NPR. The Foundation's popular Key Lesson e-mails featuring inspirational quotes by Guy are read each week by a hundred thousand subscribers in 142 countries. Guy speaks four times each week on inner-life principles at Life of Learning Foundation's home in Merlin, Oregon. These meetings are ongoing and open to the public. 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