The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment.

When you live in surrender, something comes through you into the world of duality that is not of this world.

If you are in the habit of creating suffering for yourself, then you are probably creating suffering for others too

When you see around you the human form suffering or dissolving, you have empathy on the human level. You share the suffering because it has to do with the fleetingness of form. But if that is the only level that operates in you, you haven't gone beyond suffering.

At the deepest level, an 'open heart' is spacious presence, in which the sense of separateness between yourself and the 'other' dissolves and there is the recognition of oneness, of shared consciousness. That recognition is love. Sensing the formless essence in another and recognizing it as one with your own essence - that's what love is. All this is an intrinsic part of the awakened consciousness and the revelation of the spiritual dimension of life.

To love is to recognize yourself in another. The others "otherness" then stands revealed as an illusion pertaining to the purely human realm, the realm of form.

If you accept that a relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world.