It’s 2 o’clock on a peaceful afternoon and just when you least expect it that wave of grief overtakes you like a tsunami, knocking you down, pulling you under, and threatening to drown you in an all-consuming, nightmarish sea of feelings. Who among us hasn’t experienced that excruciating, debilitating, numbing, devastating feeling of loss? Death can sometimes brings about that sensation but sometimes a loved one’s disappearance is even harder to bear when it was their own decision to leave you.

Many months and years after their departure, a simple song on the radio can reopen painful wounds. As you experience that grief surfacing, it feels as though your head is about to explode, offering brief but false promises of a sadistic conclusion to your endless tears, pain and anguish. And just when you thought you had no more tears to shed, that reverberating agony brings more to the surface. It’s enough to disabuse anyone from ever considering opening their heart to anyone again in the future. And who could blame them?

How can you possibly mend a heart so shreaded? I don’t mean to trivialize the pain but the first thing to realize is that it’s only a feeling. Of course it’s a horribly real, all encompassing sensation, so we naturally try to avoid experiencing the pain. But there is something that you can do to get rid of it. I’ve found that energetically, you can’t let go of it unless you unlock it and unlocking it requires you to feel it. Throughout my life I’ve observed that when a person grieves, that grief (which is now in the form of energy) is released for a very short period of time, hovering around the person’s heart like a fog, bringing about temporary relief, only to witness that pain seeping right back into the person’s heart shortly thereafter.

The reason for this phenomenon may be that we as beings would rather have our own pain than nothing at all because we fear having emptiness at our core. Over time our pain can become a familiar and acceptable alternative to the unknown. It also explains why a person can lose someone close to them, grieve for years and years and never escape the feeling—because that pain is pulled right back into the wounded heart that released it just seconds ago!

I’ve developed a very simple and effective way of mending the broken heart of just about anyone who is ready to let go of their anguish. In doing so I get the person to feel, unlock and release their grief. I then grab it energetically and literally pull it out of them, replacing it with warm, loving energy. It’s something that almost anyone can learn to do. The entire process is explained in my new book, You Are The Healer: Discover Your Miraculous Potential to Heal Yourself & Others.

The truth is that we never stop getting our hearts broken. This is something I’ve experienced again and again, having lost almost every significant person I’ve ever had throughout different periods of my life. These people are the most beautiful gifts that we could ever receive and sometimes it’s only when we lose them that we realize fully just how significant they were to us, and how we took them and their love for granted. When you look at it from a spiritual perspective, the physical universe is set up that way. Everything that we have, our loves, our friends, our possessions, even our own bodies, are destined to eventually be lost. As the old saying goes, “You can’t take it with you.” Or can you?

Let’s look at it from another perspective: Hearts break open, not closed. And once we are able to let go of the pain and grief, we realize that our hearts have become larger and more able to hold love, thus we experience love on a much deeper and more fulfilling level. We then discover that we have more love to give. You can’t appreciate love without loss and the amount of love you hold is directly proportionate to the joy and happiness that person brought into your life and allowed you to feel—the lack of which is felt as loss. It’s an empty container created by the marvelous substance it once held. That container however, can again be filled.

As spirits we’re all connected and you can’t lose a connection to someone you love, even if that person dies. They’ve just lost their body but the immortal spirit, which animated it and gave it its personality, still exists. Letting go of the pain unclogs the communication lines between us and our loved ones, enabling us to send them thoughts, to receive thoughts and maybe even feel their presence every once in a while when they come for a visit. It’s my own reality that once our short lives are over and we go back home to the “other side” we realize that we haven’t really lost anything. Our friends and loved ones are all there but we now have much stronger bonds with those whom we thought we’d lost forever—bonds forged through pain. Even our possessions can be materialized there if we desire, so nothing is ever really lost forever.

Treasure every person who comes into your life as the unique gift that they are. They are here to teach you something and you are here to do likewise. Never miss an opportunity to tell your loved ones that you love them. Let go and allow them to enter and leave your life as their own destiny dictates. You can always send them your love, which is as real a substance as anything physical, only more so. It’s that care package that will always arrive and be appreciated on a higher level. It will maintain your connection to them. Love is who and what we are and is what connects us. It’s really all there is. God is love, and so are you!