Many of you, My children, hold on to your pain, as if pain rather than joy justifies your existence. As if suffering establishes your rightful place on earth or your hold on it. As if pain is your throne, and somehow it enlarges you. Perhaps holding on to pain is a way of pinching yourself to see if you are real.

Joy won't pinch you, but it will expand you.

Consider pain like a receipt that comes in the mail for a bill you have paid. You do not have to continue to pay interest on what you have already paid. Is not pain like interest you pay on top of the inciting event? As though suffering is a tax levied on you that you must pay and continue to pay. As if it is your rightful due to pay again and again. And no one has to remind you to pay, for you are quick to remind yourself.

Perhaps if letting go of suffering for the death of a loved were looked upon with more favor, you would be better at it. Perhaps there is some thinking that you are an unlovely person to stop mourning. Perhaps you mix up grief with love.

It would seem that you think that one who grieves is a better person than one who leaves grief behind. As if grief were loyalty rather than pain. Or as if you have to practice at it and get it right. Or perhaps you think that grief forestalls other grief and it is some kind of insurance.

In the case of a loved one, perhaps you think you have to keep them alive in your life, and you do that via suffering.

When I say there is no loss, and your heart is aching, you think I am on a high horse, and that I just don't know what I'm talking about. But I am telling you that when you grieve, you are grieving change. On the surface of life, change is inevitable. Do you fight the inevitable? Yes, you do. You even fight what is already done. You fight your inability to reinstate what was apparent and now is no longer.

But coming and going are the movement of Human life. The outlying areas of life do not stay the same. Ebb and flow. And your pain can drift away too. It came in. It can go out. You can release it. I am not saying you are bad to have pain. I'm not saying that you should pretend it away. I am saying you don't have to keep it. I am saying you tend to hold on to it for dear life.

I gave you the blessing of tears. Why would I give them to you and tell you not to weep? I gave them to you to use. I gave them to you to use, but not to enshrine or install as a fixture. Tears are not holy waters.

Loss is a kind of fiction. You have embraced the idea that what you cannot see, touch, or hear is not there. You grieve for what is not in view and yet which exists in your heart and which, in reality, is ever-existent. The dear physical is missing, but not the reality. Change fluctuates. Yet underlying the change is that which is inviolate. Underlying change is a platform of immortality and eternity. The shift you call life and the shift you call death are both illusions, and your illusions are precious to you. You don't want to give them up.

Life on earth is your medium of exchange now. Later you will travel other realms, where there is other coin. Some of your loved ones have exchanged realms ahead of you. They play in other fields now. Their perspective is greater. You can have greater perspective now. You don't have to wait. Drop the veil of suffering, or consider the possibility that you can. I offer My vision to you. Take it.