When we finally touch “I am”—our authentic presence—there is often profound grief waiting. This grief is the natural response to recognizing how long we’ve been abandoning ourselves.
Client: “There’s a lot of like grief, like a lot of grief.” Joe: “Yeah. You’ve abandoned that for probably decades now.”
The Nature of This Grief
This isn’t ordinary sadness about external circumstances. It’s the heart’s response to finally acknowledging how much we’ve been away from ourselves. Every time we doubted, questioned, and retreated into the mind—we left ourselves.
The grief can feel overwhelming:
“It’s so much… I feel like it’s never ending.”
Why It Feels Endless
Joe points out a crucial insight: the grief feels never-ending precisely because we’re not fully with it.
“The reason it’s forever is because you’re actually not being with it.”
Like a child who keeps crying because they’re only half-tended to, our grief persists when we judge it, question it, or try to manage it rather than simply being present with it.
Grief Is Part of Purpose
The client sees her grief as an obstacle to living her purpose. Joe reframes this completely:
“Your purpose is being presented to you and you keep on avoiding it by looking for it.”
The grief of self-abandonment is part of living purpose. It’s not something to get through before purpose can begin—it’s the doorway itself.
How to Be With It
Joe demonstrates: stop questioning whether the sadness has purpose. Stop judging it as endless. Simply ask the heart—not the mind—what the grief actually is.
“Ask your heart if the sadness has no purpose.”
When we truly ask and truly listen, the answer is clear: the grief just is. It’s there. And being with it fully is the path back to ourselves.
Related Concepts
- The expansiveness of I Am
- Doubt is leaving your heart
- Purpose is lived in the present moment
- When love shows up, unloved parts surface to be loved
- Sustained grief transforms everything it touches
- Searching for purpose avoids it
- Self-blame is a way of holding onto what you’ve lost
- Our stories and identities cannot survive death