QA240 QUESTION: My question has to do with my love that I feel for my dear sister, who is in the hospital with cancer, which she’s had for about seven or eight years. I find myself devastated every time that she is hospitalized. I feel total pain for her and I feel as though I’m suffering with her. I have expressed this to her; she understands that. I’d like to know if there’s anymore that I could do in that direction with this particular individual. Also I would like to ask about my love feelings in general. To me they seem to be out of proportion to what I notice about other people around me.

ANSWER: Actually your two questions really have one and the same answer, and I’ll show you how. I will answer the second question first and then you will see how it falls and covers also, part at least, of the first question. Your soul is indeed ready and capable of deep and beautiful feelings, and a great deal of love and warmth.

Yet, at the same time, these feelings are intermingled with a sense of need and weakness and dependency. That makes the love feelings you have very painful and very tenuous, in a sense of creating anxiety and fear within you – fear of loss, fear that if you lose that loved person in any way, that your security within yourself is jeopardized.

That is, of course, an element that enters into your real love capacity that is a disturbance, that is an immaturity, and that you will correct on your path. In other words, when you reach your total awareness of your divinity, of your self-esteem, then that will liberate the capacity for loving you have, and make it much less painful and fearful. It will be possible for you then to love, and the pain of losing someone would not have the same effect on you. It would be acceptable.

There’s always an element of guilt and self-doubt connected with your love – whether that love is for oneself or the other person, it makes no difference. This is the element that makes you doubtful. Now, it is very fortunate that your inner being has not made a decision to cut off your feeling because it is too painful. This is a decision made by many human beings who are so afraid of this pain, and who then have the misconception that love is always that painful. And that, of course, is not true.

So it is very good that you have not cut off your capacity to experience feelings of love and of pain, for that shortens your role. Now, it is a question on your path to see to what extent your love is tinged by self-doubt and guilt. You doubt, for example, that you have everything within yourself to give everything you need to yourself – even the relationships that are fulfilling. As long as you doubt that, your love for others will be disturbed by this fearful dependency on them. Do you understand this? {Yes}

As far as your sister is concerned, it is possible to bear the pain of loss and the grief of loss. It is a healthy feeling that can be sustained and that can even strengthen you and give you the confidence that there is in reality no parting, no separation. It is only in your dimension of the time-space continuum, a momentary illusion.

But as you go deeper in your own development and discover the riches of your innermost being, you will experience this to be so, and grief can then be borne. Your ability to patiently wait and forgive yourself for whatever you think you have done wrong, will grow with this ability.

The best thing you can do for her is to let her go, to let her be, if that is the decision of her higher self, and not make it harder for her. You can love her as much as you do, but not tie that bond so close. For that may interrupt her own role that she has chosen and wants to pursue.

QA241 QUESTION: Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about my mother and my responsibility toward her. Each day, when I pray, I very often feel my heart closed to her, and yet I do feel love in my heart for her. What do I need to look at in myself so that I can accept her and love her in a mature way? I know that I still do want a lot from her, and I’m seeing now that I will never get it from outside of myself.

ANSWER: That is exactly the problem – how much you want from her. And that makes it then impossible to give her this mature love. You force yourself into a state that you have not acquired through acceptance of the previous state: you want to skip a step.

That step must be fully savored – the step in which you want from her, you think you need her, you demand from her, and the step in which you want to see her much better on the one hand and much worse on the other hand.

You also want to overlook all you do inwardly in order to get from her what she cannot give you. This is the confusion, and the worse confusion is wanting to skip the step. You really need to fully experience the feelings of demand and need and pain and also, in your case, stubbornness to give it up.

You may want, on the conscious level, to give it up with her. But then you transfer it onto someone else. That still means you have these feelings originally toward her. Then you load false guilt upon yourself, and also anger and hate, that would not be necessary. You need to travel through these feelings.

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