I’m in a trippy situation and need your perspective. I met a woman last February who seemed to be the one. Three months later, she did a 180 and ended the relationship. I still go to work, play music, draw and try to explore who I am, but I can’t forget her. I feel like I really met my spiritual life-mate. I know all the clichés: if you love someone set them free, if they come back it was meant to be, etc. I still can’t move on. I have never been so aware of absence or felt so affected by one person. When I pray on this situation, the only answer I receive is “Time.” Is that what it will take for me to work this one out?

Time? There’s sacred time and clock time. Sacred time is the awareness of timelessness or eternity. Clock time is the struggle of expectation that your life will fit on the same timeline as everyone else’s. Which are you living with?

If she has left your life, it means only one thing: she is not the one for you. It’s as if you have been given a tantalizing taste of something, enough to intrigue you. Now you are alone again with God. Are you willing to trust that God knows the true partner for you and is simply getting you prepared for the wedding? Each relationship is like a puzzle piece. Each is a training ground for self-understanding. We learn how to like, share, care and finally, love.

I have found that infatuation usually leaves the emotional aftertaste you’re experiencing. It’s not unusual to think someone is your life-mate, but leave it to the movies and pop songs to seduce you into believing that a life-mate is a sudden certainty. That relationship is really built over time. Ah, that word again. Also, we have the idea that a spiritual life-mate is forever. That’s living one end of the polarity. Remember, we’re human, too, and we follow clock time. So, she was your spiritual life-mate for the time you were together. Now she is not. Release the dreams that you projected into the future based on your desire for the relationship, and embrace the present.

Even before September 11, I felt that God had given me more than I could bear. My mother died, a co-worker has been power-tripping, my husband lost his job and my daughter is getting a divorce. Since the terrorist attack, my burden has increased to the point that I feel sorry for myself all the time. I feel badly about being so needy when so many people lost loved ones on September 11 and when so many people in Afghanistan are suffering. Can you help me stop feeling so sorry for myself?

No. You’ve been through a lot. I’ve noticed that the last month has been emotionally harrowing for many people. When a friend of mine who is healing a cancer diagnosis asked me how I was doing, I told her about my struggles. Then I apologized for feeling sorry for myself. She later e-mailed me this message: “To call our pain ‘self-pity’ or ‘feeling sorry for ourselves’ is to diminish it, to build a wall of judgment around it so we don’t have access to it, but hurt all the more. Good for us that we feel sorry for ourselves! We are inviting our self-compassion. We are giving ourselves time to feel what we feel, time to honor that pain and sit with it, know it as deeply as it will be known, and so know love and spirit.” So there!