How do you know when it’s time to go?

Dealing with the heartbreak of someone leaving us is one thing, but it can be just as draining on our psychic energy trying to work out if it’s time to leave a relationship.

Every single relationship that we have allows us to learn hugely important things about ourselves, others and the nature of love itself.  Ending a relationship ourselves can be as difficult as having someone walk out on us, meaning that we can fret over the question of whether we should stay or go for years in some cases.  If you’re wondering, here are a few things to think about.

1/Are you afraid for your physical or mental safety if you stay?  I’ve listed this as the number one question as it’s hugely important.  I think those of us on the spiritual path can tie ourselves in knots about just what lesson we’re supposed to be learning. I know when I was younger I stuck out bad relationships a lot longer than I should because I thought I was supposed to be learning how to love unconditionally, when I can now look back and see it was all about me developing a healthy self love and laying down a few boundaries.  Sometimes the lesson we need to learn is how and when to go.

2/ Has it run its course?  The old saying that people come into our lives for a reason, as season or a lifetime comes to life here. Every relationship takes us on a stretch of our soul’s journey but there can come a point where you can feel that the part that you travel with someone else is over and it’s time to walk on alone.  Sometimes it’s at the point where growing as individuals sees you heading in different directions.  My friends’ parents met when they were 15.  Years later, after they had divorced, her mum was protesting about missiles at Greenham Common as her dad was rising in the ranks of the police force.  It could have worked, but they might have had some very odd conversations over the tea table.

3/What does your intuition say?  You might not know why, even though it would be useful to have a few hints, but sometimes you just get a strong psychic hit that it’s time to go.  You know when you know.  This can be a hard one because you can still love the other person to bits and from the outside it might appear that you’ve got a strong relationship, but inside you know it’s just done.

4/Delve into what lies beneath.  Are you only staying out of guilt?  Or are you afraid that you just won’t make it alone if you go and that’s what’s making you hesitate?  Do some soul searching to look at the deeper drives behind your decision.  It may even be that your urge to go is actually an unhealthy pattern around not thinking you deserve happiness.  Oddly enough, I think we can find it a lot harder to embrace good things and live with happiness and actually find it weirdly comforting to stick with problems and burdens we know.  Or if your relationship has gone stale, is it possible that you could breathe life back into it?

5/Are you having to lean on something to stay in it?  This could be anything from alcohol to endless talks with friends or even therapists about ‘their’ issues and your awful relationship.  If you need something to help you ‘cope’ with staying, it’s probably time to move on.

Only you can make the decision, and if you do decide to go try and do it in a way that honours the sacred in them.  One common approach when we lack the courage to end a relationship  is that we can unconsciously start to behave so badly that we drive them to finish with us, but that can leave us with loads of guilt and a few karmic tabs to pick up.  How to break up is a whole topic in itself, one that I’ll go into next time.  But in the meantime, consider this.  On announcing that she was breaking up with someone her friends all adored, a friend reported their howls of protest at her finishing with someone so perfect, so amazing and so wonderful.  ‘But that’s the whole point’ she explained.  ‘I need to let him go to allow him to find the love he deserves.’

Ultimately, ending a relationship that is over for you is the very act that honours the sacred in them.  It says that you trust that, even though it might be hard at first, they will be just fine without you and that actually you are sending them with all your love on the next part of their soul’s journey.

Loads of love,

Michele x

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