How Love Helps Us Endure

Grief can make the world feel loud and far away, yet there’s a quieter path that helps us hear what the heart is trying to say. We invite you into a reflective, conversation inspired by Mark Nepo’s "Seven Thousand Ways to Listen", exploring how care and kindness live beneath the ideas of fairness and deserving. Rather than trying to outpace loss, we focus on how love asks us to hold nothing back, how it lets beauty in even while we hurt, and how the simple practice of listening can help us endure what we cannot escape.

Together, we walk through powerful questions designed to open both compassion for others and honesty with ourselves. Are we leading with care or keeping score? What makes the effort to love feel like a lift rather than a burden? How different is the face we show the world from the one we show no one? These prompts offer a gentle structure for grief work, inviting you to notice the feelings that signal aliveness and the ones that warn of disconnect, and to hear what each is trying to teach.

We also unpack  a reflection on how modern life can split our experience into rooms of fear, anger, sadness, or worry. The risk isn’t feeling too much; it’s getting stuck in one feeling until isolation becomes a habit. By slowing down, our scattered emotions can reconnect, giving depth, coherence, and resilience. When we honor that slower light, kindness becomes a way of life, a lamp the heart carries for others and for ourselves. If you’re looking for grounded tools for grief, spiritual direction rooted in presence, and a reminder that there is no substitute for going through things together, you’ll feel at home here.

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SPIRITUAL DIRECTION WHILE GRIEVING IS AVAILABLE

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Music and sound effects today by:   via Pixabay

Chapters

• 0:39 Welcome And Purpose
• 1:43 Introducing Mark Nepo’s Insights
• 3:11 The Work Of Love And Kindness
• 4:19 Questions For Loving Others
• 5:17 Questions For Loving Yourself
• 6:11 Preview: Presence And Endurance
• 6:41 The Stilling Of Our Pain
• 8:16 When We Split And Isolate
• 9:30 Slowing Down To Regain Wholeness
• 10:45 Subscribe And Closing Blessing

Transcript

Candee: 0:39

Welcome to Solace. Soul Plus Grief. I'm really glad you're here. My name is Candy Lucas. I'm a grief chaplain and spiritual director. The pain of losing a loved one sometimes feels beyond endurance. Yet most of us get through it. Most of us put one foot in front of the other. Most of us get out of bed in the morning and face a day. We hope you find this podcast useful to you on your brief path. You're always welcome in our circle of healing love and support. Today's material is taken from the author Mark Nepo, NEPO, and his book, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen. We have seen that care is a pathless path that lives beneath fairness and unfairness. And the work of love involves holding nothing back and being with other living things in a way that lets them grow, that affirms their sense of safety in the world. All the while we recognize ourselves in everyone we meet, both darkly and lightly. All the while we need the love of others to mirror what we have and show us what we need. When touched at the core, we are forced to listen for our lives, though we often need each other to make sense of what we've heard. The work of love enables us to let in beauty while we're suffering. The biology of love has the heart, mind, and soul open and close to the entirety of the human experience in order to make sense of things as they move through. Slowly, the reward for being kind is that we discover our kinship to other living things. And the closeness uncovered by kindness turns to light in the body until the closeness generated by kindness makes a lamp of the heart. We are returned to the mystical fact that there is no substitute for going through things together. And it is often through an unexpected empathy that we become a conduit for the human struggle until one person's humanity reveals the whole of humanity. In this way, kindness itself is a way of life. All this is the work of love, the most personal and crucial teacher we will ever meet. Take some time to describe your friendship with love and care. How does care speak to you? What do you hear? How is love asking you to grow? These questions speak to your love of others. Are you leading with your care or measuring who deserves it? Is the effort to care a burden or a lift? If it is a mix of both, what makes the burden bearable? How do you meet someone who is stuck? How do you want others to meet you when you are stuck? Do you affirm the life around you as much as you want to be affirmed? These questions speak to your love of yourself. How different is the face you show the world from the face you show no one? Is your sense of what's familiar stronger than your sense of what's good for you? What is the feeling you most associate with being most alive? What is the feeling you associate with being disconnected? What is each trying to tell you? What does the wind of love say through the hole in your heart? Where does all the love you've been given live in you? Can you now draw on its strength? Next we will explore how the work of love, how the work of being present lands us in the mystery of the moment, and explore how care fits all things together and how love helps us endure the many ways we're asked to be here. This excerpt is called The Stilling of Our Pain. In a profound moment after pain, we may fall below all the particular things we want and strive for, and the many things we fear and turn away from. For all of this, it seems that love and suffering, if we don't resist them, wear away the differences that thicken our skin, till we realize with a tenderness again and again that we are at heart the same. Being human, we keep getting lost in the running until some great kindness or pain opens us like a flower that needs nothing but light and rain to grow. Even after being transformed by such moments, we are pulled back into the complexity that living with others on earth brings. In our modern hive, it feels at times that we are a colony of light keepers buzzing about so fast that the flames we carry keep snuffing out. When our light flickers, we try to manage life and stall. In stalling, we lose our grasp and feel of the whole. Then we begin to split and isolate by living in our feelings singly, in fear, sadness, anger, happiness, worry and confusion. Confusion or doubt alone. We suffer their acuteness. Yet this splitting and isolating is not a flaw, but a feature of living. The danger is that when we get stuck in a moment of splitting, our isolation can grow into a way of life. Then we suffer even more. When we can still our pain enough to experience our feelings in their connectedness, their depth and oneness ground us and make us resilient. Together our feelings are a powerful resource. When we slow, the light we carry spreads. When we honor this, we regain our grasp and feel of the whole, which gives us the strength to stop running. When we are quiet enough to listen to our pain, we can remember and experience how everything is joined and regain a sweet resilience from every point of joining. A new one drops every Friday morning. Please subscribe to us on Amazon Music, Spotify, or Apple Music. This is Candy Lucas, your host, wishing you peace as your journey.