This world is wildly crazy, duplicitous it seems as well. Even when you are compassionate and caring, empathic, feeling the hurts and wounds of others, sometimes tending to your own tender heart means adding pain to another’s.

I think that is why empaths stay so long in harmful relationships, or at least why I did. I didn’t want to hurt someone I loved, to cause harm, to add more harm to an already hurting world. It wasn’t simply an altruistic act. Hurting others always hurts me.

The heart of the matter, what took me so long to get to, was would it hurt more to stay or to go?

I know this can seem like self-sacrifice but it isn’t, or it isn’t for me. Dealing with the fallout of causing harm hurts even when it saves me from harm. It’s not guilt. It’s bigger than that. It comes from the deep knowing that we are not-two, the felt physical sense, the energetic connection that is never severed. That’s the merry-go-round this empath’s heart and mind attend.

In my world there is another variable that added weight to going rather than staying: if I stay will I even be capable of loving myself and others? Will this situation drain me of my joy and my ability to see that I am hurting, or that I am hurting another? If it does that, of what real use am I?

I’d truly rather not hurt another, even those intent consciously or unconsciously on hurting me. Removing myself from their life has been deemed hurtful, and yet not removing myself would be hurtful to me.

I used to play the game of spiritual evolution, believing that I just needed to evolve more, you know, that old storyline that some spiritual folks spew, that it’s my own unhealed stuff that is hurting me not the other’s behavior towards me.

While that may be true to varying degrees in the world of separation (the only world true and false, right and wrong exist), we may be free of the overwhelming unhealed stuff and still be faced with the paradox … do I stay or go … do I stay in a place that doesn’t bring me joy, that doesn’t fill me up, that doesn’t feed and nurture me, because it appears to assuage another, or do I go, go from the drain on my heart and brain, go and be fed and nurtured, even if it is simply by me.

This is the same thread underlying any situation that steals our joy, that demands our anger and righteous judgement about what we deem right or wrong. It’s all the same theme. Do we follow love, follow our open heart, our ability to listen to what we are to do (if anything) from a place of peace, or do we drop into the pit of separation and play out our lives there?

There is always something to rail against. There is no end to things we can get up in arms about. Life offers an unending supply of possibilities.

We play in the pit as long as the pit holds the tiniest bit of allure for us, as long as we believe that fighting back is a way of winning the war, that sacrificing ourselves is worthy and worthwhile.

Eventually though, we come to understand love, that it asks nothing, gives everything, that it would never ask us to take on the wounds of the world — that’s an epic fairytale about a hero’s journey, one that mistakes fear for love, abuse and control for guidance. Were its star here, he’d tell us to put down our crosses and simply love one another. A great place to start is with ourselves.