Written by Dan Zak

Narcissism? Pseudo-celebrity? Boredom? Whatever the motivator, Facebook’s “25 Things” lists are surely clogging up your news feed. (Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

1. We have been tagged in a Facebook note titled “25 Random Things About Me.”

2. Update: We have received seven of these alerts in the past seven days from seven different people.

3. This is just another online outbreak of mass self-disclosure and self-importance, like personality e-mail forwards of yore (boxers or briefs? Pacino or De Niro?). Everyone is typing out Random Things this week, and asking — nay, tagging — us to do the same.

4. A friend’s No. 3 Random Thing: “One of my favorite things to do is belt out monster ballads in my car, while pretending that I don’t see people looking at me like I’ve lost my mind.”

5. We are above reading these carefully worded train-of-thought brain dumps, we think. And we’ll make our own list only if we get paid by the item.

6. We read them anyway. Each list amounts to a single-spaced, one-page document enumerating “facts, habits, or goals” about the author.

7. Fact: We are weak.

8. Habit: Checking Facebook every 30 minutes.

9. Goal: To get back to work.

10. So we turn this Facebook mini-phenomenon into work.

11. In the past week, the daily rates of note-creating and friend-tagging have doubled and quintupled, respectively, says Brandee Barker, Facebook’s director of communications. “People of all ages and from all over the world are writing 25 very touching and insightful ‘things’ about their lives and tagging friends in order to share it more broadly,” she says.

12. A friend’s No. 17: “I have pooped my pants more than three times as an adult.”

13. Sociology 101: People use Facebook like this to compete for attention. “Attention is power,” says Michael Stefanone, assistant professor of communication at the University at Buffalo. “You see this in waves, friends contacting friends with this request. It’s self-serving.”

14. Sociology 201: People are supremely comfortable sharing intimate information about themselves in this pseudo-celebrity culture of online social networking, Stefanone says, but “what happens when I can learn about you and you’re not aware of it? These information asymmetries might put people at a disadvantage.” It’s reality TV’s fault, according to his latest study. We believe it. All those on-camera confessions and weirdly personal interviews . . . all of a sudden America knows a little too much about your banal private matters.

15. A former teacher’s No. 11: “I knew I was going to marry my wife when I went over to finally break up with her — and then couldn’t. This, despite the fact that she was looking particularly unattractive that day, and yet I have never seen something lovelier.”

16. We are touched.

17. We feel stupid, getting emotional about something that amounts to a marketing boon for Facebook.

18. We feel misled when we see that many of these Random Things are just comic fabrications, or textual performance pieces.

19. A friend’s No. 5: “I killed John Updike.”

20. Fact: Lung cancer killed John Updike.

21. Maybe this contagion isn’t about self-disclosure; it’s about our obsession with lists. It’s a comfortable format. It’s an orderly way to publicize the Random Things that make us oh-so-special.

22. Once you make a list about yourself, “you’ll suddenly discover an inventory of personal secrets, fears, and desires that flow out effortlessly and surprise you. There you are, big as life, in list form,” according to the book “List Your Self: Listmaking as the Way to Self-Discovery.”

23. Wait a minute. We are more complicated than list form, than pseudo-celebrity! Our journey of self-discovery is not divisible by numbered items!

24. Goal: Not to reduce ourselves to Random Things.

25. Fact: Too late.

You could read this article from here

Written by Claire Suddath

A girl I knew in high school has memorized all of Janet Jackson’s dance routines. A college acquaintance is afraid of train whistles. Five separate people harbor lifelong desires to visit New Zealand. How do I know these things? Because they won’t stop writing about them on Facebook!

Facebook’s “25 Things About Me” meme seems harmless enough; people write 25 facts about themselves and post them on their Facebook pages, just as they do with videos, status updates and photos of last weekend’s party. An estimated 5 million of these notes — that’s 125 million facts — have appeared on the website within the past week. Assuming it takes someone 10 minutes to come up with their list, this recent bout of viral narcissism has sent roughly 800,000 hours of worktime productivity down the drain.

But it’s just so stupid. Most people aren’t funny, they aren’t insightful, and they share way too much. Facebook is a loose social network; a “friend” on Facebook might translate to someone you’d barely recognize in real life. I don’t care that my college roommate’s sister is anemic or that my stepcousin’s boyfriend gets nervous around old people (apparently he’s afraid they’re going to die).

Below are 25 facts I wish people hadn’t told me about themselves. They come from friends, friends-of-friends, friends-of-friends-of-friends and coworkers. They are all real, though I wish some of them were not.

1. I eat tacos with a fork.

2. I was fat in middle school. The wake of that horror has yet to subside.

3. I keep forgetting that Barack Obama is our President.

4. I have been pooped on by a monkey.

5. I am addicted to the ass-slap dance move. Sometimes I don’t even notice I’m doing it.

6. When I finally told my now fiancé that I liked him (as in, liked him liked him), I drunkenly gave him the Anchorman line, “I want to be on you.” He had only seen the movie once and had no idea what it was from.

7. Just because I realize that Asian women are smarter, more attractive, and have about themselves a generally superior level of class does not mean I have a fetish. Just that I’m racist.

8. I eat gummy bears by tearing them limb from limb and eating their heads last.

9. I can’t grow hair on my arms.

10. Two of my best friends are under five feet tall and I have an intense fear of midgets.

11. I think yoga is incredibly spiritual. I know the Lord is with me in my downward dog.

12. I was born with jaundice.

13. I was born pigeon-toed.

14. I was born with an extra kidney. I wish I could have sold it on the black market and made some money, but it was underdeveloped and did nothing but cause me to wet the bed until the third grade.

15. I like to tape my thumbs to my hands to see what it would be like to be a dinosaur.

16. A horse once fell over while I was riding it.

17. I don’t believe in democracy.

18. I cried when Spock died in Star Trek II.

19. I drink two glasses of wine every night before bed. Wait, did I just admit to alcoholism?

20. If you asked me to tell you my favorite movie, I would have a hard time not saying Titanic.

21. I once sent a teacher into early retirement by pretending to be a cheetah and swiping at her from under a desk.

22. I once ran into New Kids On the Block’s Joey McIntyre in the lobby of an off-Broadway show. I told him he was the first boy I ever loved. He laughed and kind of smiled. This was the most gratifying moment of my life.

23. My friends say that when they shave my back, I purr like a walrus.

24. I don’t understand what people see in the Godfather trilogy.

25. Sometimes I think pee smells like Cheerios.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’ve finally found something more stupid than Twitter.

Written by Michael Brooks

Dark matter ring in galaxy cluster Cl 0024+17. Some 96% of the universe is dark energy or dark matter. Photograph: Johns Hopkins University/Esa/Nasa

Even today, there are scientific phenomena that defy explanation. If history is anything to go by, resolving these anomalies could lead to a great leap forward, so what are the greatest mysteries, and what scientific revolutions might they bring?

1 The missing universe

Everything in the universe is either mass or energy, but there’s not enough of either. Scientists think 96% of the cosmos is missing. They have come up with names for the missing stuff – “dark energy” and “dark matter” – but that doesn’t really tell us anything about them. And it’s not as if they’re not important: dark energy is continually creating new swaths of space and time, while dark matter appears to be holding all the galaxies together. No wonder cosmologists are searching for clues to their whereabouts.

2 Life

I know you think you’re more than a sack of molecules, but why? Next time you see a tree, ask yourself why that is alive when your wooden dining table is not. The phenomenon we call life is something that biologists have almost given up trying to define – instead they’re investigating ways to make different combinations of molecules come alive. Bizarrely, the best hope is similar in chemical terms to laundry detergent.

3 Death

Here’s the flip side: in biology, things eventually die, but there’s no good explanation for it. There are hints that switching genes on and off controls ageing, but if our theory is right, those switches shouldn’t have survived natural selection. Then there’s the argument that an accumulation of faults does us in. However, there are plenty of whales and turtles who seem to age ridiculously slowly – if at all. Of course, if we can work out why, that could be great news for future humans (if not for the planet).

4 Sex

Charles Darwin might have fathered 10 children, but he couldn’t understand why almost everything in biology uses sexual reproduction rather than asexual cloning – sex is a highly inefficient way to reproduce. We still don’t know the answer. The suggestion that sex’s gene shuffling makes us more able to deal with changing environments seems plausible, but the evidence is scarce. At the moment, sex only seems to exist to give males some role in life.

5 Free will

If you want to keep your sanity, look away now. Neuroscientists are almost convinced that free will is an illusion. Their experiments show that our brains allow us to think we are controlling our bodies, but our movements begin before we make a conscious decision to move. Some researchers have already been approached to testify in court that the defendant is not to blame for anything they did. A scary legal future awaits.

• Michael Brooks is a consultant for New Scientist and the author of 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, published by Profile on Thursday

Written by Ben Popken

From the acid-cloud haze of the Cash4Gold processing center steps forth a shadowy figure, fingers stained with orange testing fluid. It’s an ex-Cash4Gold employee and in-between tuberculosic wheezes he manages to pass you a yellow legal paid with 10 confessions about how his former employer taught him to rip people off. Then he evaporates leaving behind a pile of gold dust. You dip your finger in it and touch it to your tongue. Just as you thought: fool’s gold.

If you decide to investigate the creaky clock tower, turn to page 4.
If you decide to read the confessions, to the post inside.

Spotted on ComplaintsBoard: “I would like an article to be posted pertaining to the refinery Cash 4 Gold, located in Pompano Beach, Fl. I am a former employee, who would like to alert/warn the public on the scamming process involved with this company. There are many of us who would like to vouch on behalf of this fast growing scam. We would like to get the word out to everyone on this step by step scam which involves so many people in this country and their valuables.

Below I have attached the full details on the scam involving this company. We know this first hand, because this is how we were trained. Please take note of this information and do what you can to get the word out there, especially in a time when the economy has truly affected everyone for the worst. Thank you!

I am a former employee of Cash 4 Gold. I did not know much about the company before being hired. On my first day of being hired, I was taught the “Cash 4 Gold Scam” from beginning to end.

1. The “refiner’s pack” that is used for you to put your jewelry is “insured for UP TO 100 dollars, ” according to how much they determine from a description from you, the worth of your items to be, NOT an actual fully researched appraisal.

2. We receive your “Refiner’s Pack” within 3-4 days, BUT we are instructed to tell you that it takes “7-10 business days, for us to receive your pack, ALTHOUGH many times, your package has already arrived.
(All cash4gold customers who have called customer service to track a package can vouch for this)

3. Your jewelry gets appraised by hand, a magnifying glass, a plastic container, a small weight pad, and a bottle of ORANGISH fluid, which your items are then determined a value for. Not million dollar equipment or specially trained jewelry experts. The company was temporarily closed recently due to health and code violations. I have witness testers being transported to Medical Centers, due to the testing department environment. There is literally a cloud of smoke in the air from acid and other testing material. If you were thinking it was some state-of-the-art testing facility, you thought WRONG.

4. Although the payment (check) for your item is dated within 24 hrs of testing your jewelry, we SOMETIMES DO NOT actually send out the check until up to 3-4 days later. (if you are a customer check the date the check was issued against the stamped date on the envelope.)

5. We do offer a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee or your jewelry returned, BUT THE CATCH IS, that the guarantee is to contact us within 10 DAYS from when your check is DATED. (This begins with the time it took for the accounts payables dept. to ISSUE the check and also including the TRANSIT TIME for you to receive your check in the mail. **** NOTATE THE COMMERCIALS THAT INSINUATE THAT YOU GET YOUR CASH IN 24 HRS.*** If you request (sign) for FAST CASH (direct deposit) you automatically WAIVE your rights to have your items returned, EVEN if you are not satisfied with amount of your deposit.

6. You generally receive your check around the “7th-10th” business day, AND majority of the time Customers are outraged when they lay eyes on the amount of their check. Some Customer’s even receive a check for 0.01 cents.

7. There have been times when we have received your package and MISPLACED or LOST it at the facility. We CLAIM to not have received the items and even try to convince you that it was lost in the hands of USPS. At which point we begin an insurance claim process on your package. We ask you to send us an itemized list of the content of the package, trying to be as descriptive as you possible can (if you can remember everything in full detail) and a copy of your state issud ID. We then issue an INSURANCE CLAIM for UP TO 100 dollars. GOD FORBID your items are worth more then a 100 dollars. If you call customer service to check on the status of your shipment, and we actually have not received your package, we inform you of the insurance claim process. For those who know that their items are worth more than a hundred dollars, they become very upset and threaten to take action against the company, at that point we inform the customer that if they knew their items were worth more they should have added additional insurance at the Post Office. BUT unless you are paying to ship your items in a completely different package other then the refiner’s kit, you are unable to add insurance to the package.

8. For those who do get in touch with us within the allotted time frame, we already know what you are calling about. Customers want their items returned, because there
check amount is so insultingly LOW. The first thing a Rep will
ask you is “HOW MUCH WERE YOU EXPECTING TO GET BACK?” This way we can know how much to “BONUS” you.

*Definition of a BONUS: We issue low checks just to have you call us back if you are smart enough to realize that you just got scammed. For the smart one’s we are paid to offer u a bonus up to 3x the original amount of your check and you accept. For ex: Sally Smith receives a check for $27.86 for a Rolex watch(which we don’t issue value for), a class ring, a ring with diamond chips, a pair of earrings with emeralds, as well as a few sterling silver pieces, and maybe a few items that were really of no value. Now Sally Smith calls the cust srvc dept, where she speaks to a rep who seems so concerned and will see if she can do better with the amount by speaking to a “SUPERVISOR”. We then place the caller on Mute, and speak to our neighbors or doodle on a sheet, or twiddle with our hair for about 45 seconds, while we are supposedly speaking to our supervisor about Ms. Smith’s complaint. We then come back with an offer to “BUMP UP YOUR MELT DATE or any other lies the cust srvc reps can think of, and offer you a total amount of $53.20 which is a little under double the amount of your original check; in which case if you accept, the cust srvc rep makes a 15.00 bonus off of your transaction. If the customer service rep offers you under triple the amount of your orig check, he/she makes 10.oo in bonuses.

9. If you accept the offer, the deal is done, and you are told that the call is recorded (which most of the time, the record button does not work, or the box if full.)It’s just a way to make your feel binded by a verbal contract. IF you do not accept the deal, you have to return your check, and it takes sometimes up to a month to receive your items back after we receive the check.

10. If you only want the items that we do not find of any value back, you have to pay 10.00 shipping and handling fee to have your own items returned, which varies. Although it is listed under the terms and conditions, this charge varies from a 10.00-15.00 charge to NO charge, reason being, UNSURE.

Cash 4 Gold is definitely not a trustworthy or credible company to do business with. You are almost better off taking your items to a local pawn shop or shopping around for other companies. With the economy the way it is, Cash 4 Gold seems to be a way out of financial stress for some, but in actuality becomes a stress of its own. I would advise you to think twice before sending in valuables or items inherited and of sentimental value, its not worth it.”

Written by thinksimplenow

Photo: stock photo

Falling passionately in love with someone is one of the most exhilarating feelings, as if you had wings and you are flying high in the sky, feeling the wind romantically blowing through your hair. And usually, when love ends, it feels as if you’ve been dropped like a rock in mid-air. You scramble to grab a hold of something … anything, as you witness your body falling at great speeds, and then shattering on the earth below.

Whether we’re talking about breakups, or facing the reality of a one-sided romance, it is painful. So much so that it disrupts our normal flow of experiences, causing us to not function normally.

With so much emotion invested and our identities tied in with these experiences, it’s no wonder that this is the number one topic requested by readers. Over the past year, I have regularly received email from readers sharing their own takes on painful breakups; tales of guilt, of fear, of regret, and of resentment. Although the stories were different, the underlying message was universal and one in the same, “I am in so much pain from not being with this person – what can I do?“

Sometimes, the pain of lost love is so intense that it can shake our beliefs about romance and relationships. When these emotional bruises are not understood and have not healed properly, they become invisible baggage that drag with us into the next relationship. This article focuses on the healing process from “love lost”.

Personal Story: The Gift of “Love Lost”

I categorize myself as a very passionate and emotional person. I cry easily at movies and at the sight of passers-by with physical disabilities. When I love, I give it my all, and when it ends, the pain of feeling abandoned can become overwhelmingly and cripplingly intense.

In fact, my journey into personal growth began when I was confronted by a painful breakup five years ago. Out of despair, I had picked up a copy of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People – the only personal development book I had heard of, at the time. Although I would recommend a different book now for similar circumstances, at the time, this book introduced me to new concepts that helped me make sense of my emotions, and I was hungry for more.

Over the next few years, it was through dealing with recurring relationship issues that I experienced several rewarding revelations and was able to trigger several major growth spurts in my own self-improvement. While these emotionally-infused episodes of “love lost” might have seemed unbearably painful at the time of happening, they were also the catalyst for personal growth, and played a critical role in my becoming a more wholesome and complete person.

The Origins of Love and Pain

Before diving into the practical how-to of healing, let’s first look at what love is, where it comes from, and why we experience so much pain when it ends.

Photo: melissa

I believe that love is a universal energy infused in all forms of life. It is something that lies within the core of every one of us. When we are in a state of conscious awareness, the intense feeling of love and connectedness is clear and undeniable. When we are in this state of clarity and inner peace, our thoughts and actions are based in love and truth.

Within the depths of our souls, we are all connected by this unifying and essential energy of life – love. We occasionally experience glimpses of this deep connection through various and accidental happenstances, such as:

• A gratifying and intimate conversation with another person. Sharing and expressing your thoughts honestly and openly.
  
• Creative expressions such as playing music, writing, drawing, dancing, cooking, designing or even computer programming.
  
• Meditation, prayers or communing with your chosen religious group.
  
• Communing with nature during a hike, a walk or while sitting by the bed of a river flowing beautifully in front of you.
  
• During sexual orgasm (The Dalai Lama has written about this.)

When we fall in love with another person, we are essentially experiencing the love that was within us all along. The person is merely acting like a mirror reflecting our soul back at us. Technically, we can’t “fall” in love, because we are already made of love. The other person, much like a musical instrument, is the catalyst allowing us to recognize the beauty that’s already within us.

Because of our lack of understanding that love resides within us, and that we actually have the power to invoke it on our own, we credit it to the other person for giving love to us. This feeling is so strong and extraordinary, that we become addictive and possessive. We want to capture it and keep it fixed, so that we can – at last – keep this heightened feeling forever.

The desire and dependency to keep this form fixed, becomes a source of self identification that artificially justifies who we are as physical beings. We become attached to the fixed idea of how our relationship should go and our ego quickly becomes the main investor in this fund of a relationship.

The truth is that, everyone and everything is in a constant flow of change. The changes in us and in our external circumstances are inevitable and undeniable. When we change, the dynamics of our relationships change – not just romantic ones, but also friendships, family ties, and our relationships with co-workers.

Over time, some relationships strengthen and some grow apart. When people grow apart, it doesn’t mean that either one of them was a bad person, but rather that they’ve learned all that they needed to from the other person, and that it’s time to move on.

When it’s time to move on, we hold onto this invisible box that contains an idealized and fixated form of how things should be. We unconsciously and instinctively fall into the false believe that we must stop the love when we are no longer romantically involved.

Because we attribute love as being ‘to’ this other person external to us, pain happens when we forcefully try to kill the love, which is actually within us.

Let’s repeat: Pain happens when we forcefully kill the love that’s within us.

When we forcefully try to kill the love within us, it physically feels as if someone has stabbed a knife into our heart, and a sharp pain surfaces in our chest area. In reality, we are that someone doing the stabbing, because we are trying to sever our innate connection to love and our Soul is now bleeding. Our Soul is crying for help, asking us to stop the stabbing, to stop the pain.

A Love Affair & Emotional Freedom

“When it comes to love,
you need not fall but rather surrender,
surrender to the idea that you must love yourself
before you can love another.
You must absolutely trust yourself
before you can absolutely trust another
and most importantly you must accept your flaws
before you can accept the flaws of another.“
~ Philosophy: Falling in Love

My preferred suggestion to healing from love lost is the same as the one for finding love: to love yourself, first.

In previous relationships, we probably depended on our partners to make us happy, to make us feel special, to make us whole and complete. Our self-worth may have been wrapped up in how much attention our partner gave us. This is a ‘lose-lose’ formula that works against our personal happiness, because it relies heavily on external circumstances beyond our control and is not sustainable in the long term.

Truth is, nothing external to us can give us the security we need. Only we can give that to ourselves, by loving and accepting ourselves completely.

By learning to love and appreciate ourselves, not only do we free ourselves from the chains that keep us in pain when a relationship ends, it also makes us more attractive to the outside world. Even when you don’t explicitly speak about it, something in the grace of your movement will spread that message to others, like a summer breeze softly blowing the scent of a flower to neighboring plants.

7 Tips for Healing

Photo: Nathiya Prathnadi

1. Letting Go

What would you do if your house was burnt to the ground, and everything you owned was destroyed? I’m sure you’d be frustrated and angry at first, but at the same time, no amount of anger will undo what has been done. It is what it is. Your best bet is to begin moving on, and working towards creating a new home.

Similarly, when a relationship ends, you’ll want to practice letting go and allowing the healing process to begin quickly.

If you were on the receiving end of a breakup, do not dwell on whether the person will come back or not, if they broke up with you at one point, chances are, something is wrong with the fit of your partnership, and you’ll be better appreciated elsewhere, with someone else. Even if you and the ex get back together, it is unlikely to last (from my experience).

Trust that everything in the Universe happens for a reason, and it benefits everyone involved in the long run, even if the benefits are not yet clear. Trust that this is the best possible thing to happen to you right now, and the reasons will become clear in the future.

2. Release Tension and Bundled Up Energy

We all have the need to be understood and heard. Whether we’re on the receiving end or the initiating end of a breakup, we often carry with us the tension and any unexpressed emotions. We can release this extra energy by:

• Talking about it with a friend.
  
• Voicing our opinions honestly and openly with our ex-partner, which have been bottled up in the past.
  
• Punching a pillow and crying freely for 10 minutes
  
• Screaming out aloud and imagining unwanted energy being released with your voice (seriously, I’ve done a meditation that incorporated this, and I instantly felt better).
  
• Writing in a journal (more on this later).
  
• Exercise and body movement.
  
• Meditating.

3. Love Yourself

The practice of loving yourself is the most important aspect on the road to personal happiness and emotional stability. I’ve personally had my most valuable personal growth spurts during the period when I vigorously worked on this aspect of my life.

I did everything from cooking myself fancy dinners, to spending every Sunday on my own doing the things that I loved, to taking myself to Symphonies, to taking overseas trips on my own. Each one had its own challenges and confronted my beliefs about loneliness. Through overcoming the fear of loneliness, I experienced deep joy all by myself. It was so gratifying, refreshing and empowering.

Here are some ideas to cultivate the art of loving yourself:

• Take yourself on romantic dates as if you were on a date with another person. Put on nice clothes, maybe buy yourself flowers, treat yourself to something delicious, and take long walks under the stars. Whatever your idea of a romantic date is.
  
• Look at yourself in the mirror. Look yourself in the eyes. Smile slightly with your eyes. Practice giving gratitude to what you see. You don’t need words. Just send out the intent of giving an abundance of love to the eyes that you see, and feel the feelings of love within you. As you are looking into your eyes, look for something you admire about your eyes – maybe the color, the shape, the depth, the exoticness, or even the length of your eye lashes. This will be a little weird and uncomfortable at first, but just trust me, and continue with it. Do this for a few minutes every day.
  
• Sit or stand in front of a mirror, or sit somewhere comfortable (mix it up, and do both on different days), put both hands on your chest and say to yourself, “I love you, <insert your name>”. Repeat a few times, slowly. Continue with qualities you like about yourself, or things you are good at. Be generous and list many, even if they sound silly. Example, “I love that you always know how to make your salads so colorful and appetizing.”, “I love that you have the discipline to go to the gym regularly, and you really take care of your body.”, “I love that you are so neat, and can keep your desk so organized.”
  
• Practice doing things on your own to challenge your fear of being alone. For example, if you have a fear of eating alone in a restaurant, go out to a restaurant on your own. Your mission is to find the joy within that experience.

4. Love Your Ex-Partner

Allow the love within you to flow. Try practicing forgiveness and open up your heart.

Over the past few months, my friend Tom Stine and I have been chatting about the topic of overcoming breakups. Tom had been married for 13 years and went through a divorce that took him 2 years to emotionally recover from. When asked about how he got over his ex-wife, he had a few snippets of wisdom to convey:

• “I let myself love her. Even when it felt like my heart was going to break. Adyashanti says something amazing – when people say, ‘My heart feels like it is going to break.’ He says, ‘Let it break. If you let it really break – really, really break, it will transform you.’”
  
• “LET YOUR HEART BREAK WIDE OPEN. Let go of every possible belief or thought that says your ex is anything other than the most incredible, amazing, wonderful person in the Universe. You gotta love them and open your broken heart, WIDE OPEN!!!! That’s how to get over a break-up, really get over it. Anything short of that is not gonna do it.”
  
• “The key for me was getting utterly clear: we are apart, and the Universe never makes mistakes. We are over. And I can still love her. That was HUGE. I can love her with all my heart and soul and we never have to be together. And when I realized that, I felt amazing. And still do. The freedom was great. I could finally own-up to how much I wanted out of our relationship. All the hurt and anger disappeared. I was free.”

The underlying message of love in Tom’s words is pretty clear and powerful.

Photo: Nathiya Prathnadi

5. Give it Time

It takes time to heal. Be patient. Give it more time. I promise the storm will end, and the sun will peak through the clouds.

6. Journal Your Experience

Spend some quality time in a comfortable chair, at your desk or at a café, and write your thoughts and feelings on paper. No, not typing on a laptop, writing on paper with a pen. Follow your heart and flow freely, but if you’re stuck, here are some writing exercises you can do:

• Drill into the why – Start with a question or statement, and continue to drill into why you feel that way until you have a truthful and satisfying reason. The exercise isn’t to issue blame or blow off steam at someone else. It’s meant to gain clarity and understanding into how you feel, so you can alleviate unnecessary pain. For example, you might start with the statement, “I am in a lot of pain, ouch!”, and your why might be “because she left me”. Now ask yourself, “why does that hurt so much?”, and one possible why might be, “because I feel abandoned”. The following why to “why does feeling abandoned hurt so much?”, “because it makes me feel alone”, etc. More than likely, the real reason has something to do with our own insecurities or fears.
  
• Finding the Lessons – What did you learn from the relationship? What did you learn from the other person? How is your life better because of it? How will your future relationships be better because of it?

7. Read Something Inspirational

Books that deal with our emotions and ego are incredible tools at a time of healing. They help to enlighten our understanding of ourselves and our experiences.

Here are some recommended books:

• The Power of Now
  
• You Can Heal Your Life (Illustrative Edition)
  
• Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life

Parting Words

Socially, we view the end of a relationship with a negative connotation and give it the label of a ‘failure’. Just because a relationship has ended does not mean that the relationship was a failure. Both parties likely gained something substantial in either learning about themselves or for the benefit of future partnerships.

“Every relationship will end someday, whether by break-up or by the death of one partner. Relationships have cycles. They are born, they live, and they die. Just like every part of life. It is merely a part of life.”
–Tom Stine

Capture the beauty of time shared together, and note the valuable life lessons learned. Be thankful for having experienced love, and know that you are a better person because of it.

No challenge is ever presented to us, if we are un-able to handle it.

For those currently in relationships, cherish and honor your partner for who they are as form and formless Beings. Accept the reality that life is full of change, and dance with the changes and challenges as they come. And when they come, view each one as an opportunity for personal growth – when you do that, nothing is lost.

All is well, and so be it.

** What are your experiences with dealing with breakups? Any words of wisdom for others going through it? Share your thoughts and stories with us in the comment section. See you there!