Dear Julia:

I'm very torn between differing reactions to a troubling situation. I'm working with a therapist and have come to view the experience I went through and the resulting confusion one way. On a more spiritual level, however, I see the person who hurt me as being inherently good and in my life for a beneficial reason. These two conflicting views are driving my crazy. I want to chalk the hurt up to experience, accept that this person wasn't good for me, believe I deserve better, and move on, but my gut tells me to hold on and love him despite my mistrust of him, to believe in him even while everyone tells me he is just plain no good. To add to the insanity, my mind is constantly trying to understand what happened, why, and how to deal with him, which is making me feel like a ping-pong ball. It's like I need to choose one way of seeing this so I don't drive myself crazy from day to day. Do I hate him? Forget him and try to forgive him? Love and accept him and have faith it will work out as it's meant to? How do I rectify two apparently opposing views and remain sane?
L.

Dear L:

I believe your distress is due to your assumption that you need to choose just one of these perspectives to adopt as your own, when in truth, BOTH may be valid and useful.

I'm reminded of the phrase that we need to learn how to live in the world but not of it. To me, this means that we maintain a wise balance between taking care of practical matters while cultivating spiritual wisdom. For example, though we may believe that we have a vibration so high that we're invulnerable to undesirable experiences, we are still wise to lock our doors and wear our seat belts. Similarly, we can see the divine perfection in another person and know them to be beautiful on a soul level and still not choose to spend our lives with them.

I'll grant you that this is tricky business; in fact, it's something I've struggled with myself many times over the years. When we strive to embody love and embrace everything and everyone who comes our way, we have to be really on top of our vibrational game to keep our journey happy and harmonious.

For example, I have a real fondness for quirky characters, and as a result, I tend to attract friends who are fascinating, hilarious and/or brilliant, who also tend to be unstable, incompetent and/or dishonest. There is part of me that can see their divine beauty, and part of me that gets really tired of being let down by their behavior.

Fortunately, I can also see all sorts of wonderful lessons in all of this. Like all of us, I'm frequently called to stretch myself into overcoming my fear of others being able to emotionally hurt me, to remember that all is well and I am responsible for what I create in my life as well as how I interpret and respond to those experiences. At the same time, I'm called to learn from experience and to love myself enough to expect others to treat me with the same kindness and respect that I show them.

None of this is easy. One of the hardest things to work out is how to love someone spiritually but still let them go because our relationship with them is consistently stressful or disappointing. In order to honor all aspects of our being, we must reach for the highest spiritual perspective and strive to embody love and compassion. We must also include ourselves in that picture, which means we honor how we really feel and what we really want, and we allow ourselves to freely pursue true fulfillment.

How we feel is a measure of the quality of our thoughts. When we blame others, we may think we feel better, but in truth, we generally feel persecuted and angry. When we forgive others and look for the best in them, we find a deep sense of peace, which tells us that this latter perspective is in greater harmony with higher truths.



In order to figure out what to do in specific situations, it's often helpful to ask ourselves what we would advise a friend if she were in our shoes. Where we may expect ourselves to behave like saints and find a way to work miracles in difficult relationships, we tend to be more allowing, practical and objective when advising others. The bottom line is when we strive to love others better than we love ourselves, we can be sure that eventually, we'll realize we need to shift our approach. When someone is incapable or unwilling to return the level of love, respect and devotion we need to be happy in relationships, then we can continue to love them from a distance, but we're wise to seek fulfillment in love elsewhere.

Part of your confusion probably stems from a desire to blend romantic and unconditional love. Unconditional love is spiritual and eternal and demands nothing in return. This is not the love of great passionate love affairs, but the love experienced between souls in heaven, and (for a lucky few) between parents and children and perhaps a few others. In relationships between equals, such as friends and lovers, there must be balance for the bond to remain healthy and fulfilling for both parties.

There is something important that is missing from all of this, and that is the role of the law of attraction, and how the way you choose to view all of this will affect what you manifest next. We've all been programmed via traditional therapy to endlessly go back and recount the past, sorting out who did what to whom and how we feel about it. While it is important to make peace with the past, the more we focus on what happened before, the more we will tend to attract more of the same.

In my experience, we don't have to be as thorough as we may think when it comes to emotional housecleaning. At some point, our efforts become overkill, and it's like we're down on a perfectly clean floor, scrubbing with a toothbrush at cracks and grooves. Many of us do the equivalent of this with the emotional dirt and baggage we think we need to clear out before we can invite someone new into our lives. Meanwhile, other people just clean off the counters, sweep the floors and get busy living their lives to the fullest.

I am NOT advocating denial or repression. Instead, I'm suggesting that sometimes, the fastest, easiest way to heal from an upsetting experience is to create new joy in our lives, for once we shift into a higher vibration and get some distance, it's easier to get clarity and perspective on what happened, at which point we can complete the healing process. So sometimes NOT scrubbing every emotional corner clean before we allow ourselves to move on actually empowers us to be able to fully heal and resolve the past. As the saying goes, time does heal all wounds.

Instead of endlessly going over what happened and how you should view it, I recommend you reach for the highest spiritual perspective you can, for the higher your perspective, the more empowered you will be to aim where you really want to go. Then focus on how you want to feel in love with faith that what you desire will come to you in whatever way is truly right and best for you. If this particular relationship is the answer, then it will come together naturally. If this connection can't fulfill your longing for love, then you will end up with someone who is a better match for you.

So let go of endlessly struggling with this for now and just focus on how you want to feel, clearly communicate that to the Universe, and then surrender your prayer with faith that you are already moving toward greater love, peace and fulfillment.

- Julia