How many times have I stopped myself from crying?

How many times have I blocked myself from feeling?

How many times have I protected myself from hurt?

To cry

For the losses, for love lost.

For lost hopes and lost dreams.

For the people I’ve loved who passed away or moved away. Love that felt eternal only to disappear in the dimmest corners of my being.

And for my grandmother, whose touch during my youth left an imprint of what it truly means to be loved.

To feel

The pain of a frozen world.

Stale and grey. Forgetting life, with beauty at its core. Forgetting my humanity, my longing to connect to other beings.

My desire to love and be loved. My yearning for truth and freedom.

To hurt

To break down in front of this bloodshed. To hurt for the people dying over interests and ideologies. To hurt for the doings of this mechanical world.

To hurt for forgetting who I am, what I truly am.

But what about the times I did cry? What about the times I allowed myself to feel?

To remember the touch of my loving grandmother?

To remember how much I’ve loved? To remember how much I wish for deeper connections? To remember the depth of my sensitivity and my love for humanity? To remember my yearning for unity, for the soul, for something sacred.

To remember how I chose to incarnate here!

These are the times I felt most alive.

More than anything else, these are the times when I felt the extent of my love.

Grief is a portal.

A portal to Love.

The source from which we drink.