Hi Alana,

Answer to your questions is very simple.

1. How do you keep faith? By letting go fully.
2. How do you trust that there is love out there for you? By not looking for love anymore.
3. How can you grow more in it? By not trying to grow more.

These all answers are what you meant to do in your meditation practice.

I had a pretty rough breakup, 1 year ago. So, I understand your situation to some extent.

When people lose one identity, could be job, relationship, family etc. they go to spiritual path to look for answers. However, they do completely opposite and create identity with spirituality and that’s when it becomes running in circles.

The wanting, the trying, the looking, the searching, the keeping, the growing, they all are parts of the same problem. Meditation teaches you that. Not to grow and have wisdom and become enlightened like Buddha of this century but simply ‘how to let go fully’

There are things that you can do something about, you must do something. Also, there are many things in life you cannot do anything about, you must leave it alone. If you can practice this, then you will see that there’s nothing going wrong with your life. Your life is going in right direction, and you are where you meant to be.

Peace
Brav3

Dear Alana:

I misunderstood what you were asking. You are asking for ideas about how to have FAITH that you will meet someone. I don’t have any suggestion about that because I don’t believe it is a matter of faith, passive faith. I think that meeting a man, “just the right kind of man” as you wrote, is a matter of action, not faith. I hope you do get a satisfactory answer here and am looking forward to read what it may be…

Best to you, Alana, glad you posted!

anita

I guess all this to ask, how do you guys keep faith. How do you trust that there is love out there for you? Maybe this is the type of questions that hit you once you reach 30?

Great Questions.

My observation is that such questions arise after a painful breakup and in the second half of life. What is Love, what’s love got to do with it… ‘it’ being faith in life, and knowing it as love…

Reminds me of the resent movie Collateral Beauty where the main character defiantly accuse, Death, Love and Time for what is ultimately his loss of Faith in life.

My observation that to answer the question of how to keep ones faith this thing we call love one should take some time to define for themselves what they mean by faith and love.

Faith is a difficult concept to define because it’s about not knowing and acting as if anyway – Fear is to courage as doubt is to faith. It is often in times when we do not know and even doubt that we discover the truth of our faith (what we lean on to move us through)

Today many I think equate faith with having to be certain in belief (and so become fanatical).
There is a difference Acting within the certainty of one’s Faith (that life is Love) and having to be certain of one belief and call it faith in order to act correctly.

Certainty does not require a Faith but times of uncertainty does. Such an understanding I think allows one to act with a strong even certain intention yet with humility and openness to learn.

For example some said that because Mother Teresa expressed moments of doubt about God’s love, plan, justice… (Understandably) that she had lost her faith. BI don’t think so – even though she did not always understand she continued to act ‘as if’ (not a fake it to you make it thing) but an authentic ‘as if’, she leaned on her faith that God/life was/is love especially at times of doubt. And the remarkable thing was that in doing so she became the experience of Love and grace for those she served!

Interestingly In fairy tales the question is often symbolized as being a key and interestingly the question and the doors it open is often more important than finding ‘a’ answer. If you are open to the method of symbolic language fairy tales can teach us a lot about love.

Like dreams using the method each character in a story represents a part of the person reading it. For example the search of the prince for the princes is a uniting of action with being, feeling with thinking… Love within a bond that contends with both living in the world, the stuff of life, and the soul/being connection with ourselves and another. Is that what you mean when you talk about the love you hope to find/experience?

Love is out there for you though and now that you are have asked the question you are called to the hero’s journey to discover where the question leads. Note that the question leads and that you cannot force it to an answer of your making. I think you will find that you will ‘find’ love in ways you did not expect

Anyway sorry if that didn’t make any sense

book suggestions

I really liked Clarissa Pinkola Estés story skeletor women
https://awakeningwomen.com/2010/07/04/skeleton-woman-a-love-story/
Which is wonderfully expanded in her book Woman Who Run with the Wolves

The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love – by Carol Gilligan is also quite illumining
Gilligan asks “why is love so often associated with tragedy. Why are our experiences of pleasure so often shadowed by loss? And can we change these patterns?

I would also recommend How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly by David Richo

Thanks for the kind words.

I believe in the beauty of this world even though it can seem ugly

I really like that!

For me this statement of belief is also a statement of faith, something to lean on in moments of doubt and those times when the world can appear ugly.

My own journey after asking the same questions about love and faith has lead me to work at being able to say Yes to Life as it is, all of it, the good the bad and the ugly and ‘know’ it as LOVE. I know that might sound at odds with many peoples expectation of love but for me that is has become a matter of faith.

Saying that it is important to recognize that we experience Love in many different ways, on many different “planes” if you will. The statement above is about the plane of universal LOVE. That in the end all we experience and are is and can only be Love.

Sorry if this feels like i’m jumping around

The same week I saw Collateral Beauty I saw La La Land and to me I see them as being connected. The first about the coming to terms with LOVE and the other with love in relationship that points to LOVE.

Spoiler
On the surface la la land appears as a old time Hollywood musical and with that I think the expectation of a typical Hollywood ending.
Two people meet fall in love, achieve there dreams and live together happy ever after. And the move shows a imagined version of that la la land dream but the story is deeper then that.

The two meet and discover authentic love, and we get a sense that they are ‘soul mates’. This experience of love enables both of them to achieve their dreams or you might say calling or becoming. Watching we want them to have the happy ever ending and to have it all, but for them to become they can’t be together.

Life it seems wants us to become and that this becoming overrides any notion of romantic love that at some level we may ache for, Even for ‘soul mates’. Love bitter sweet.

I imagine as the two characters return to their lives after their chance meeting latter in life that they understand and so say ‘Yes to life as it is’, Love bitter sweet, and because of that all the more wondrous.