Regaining Your Essence

...any deep loss is an opportunity to grow, to understand more about yourself, to experience holes that you believe can only be filled by someone else....People don't know that the hole, the sense of deficiency, is a symptom of a loss of something deeper -- the loss of Essence, which can be regained.  They think the hole, the deficiency, is how they really are at the deepest level, and that there is nothing beyond it....People will do anything to not feel the hole.  But...when we stop defending against feeling a hole, the actual experience is not painful.  We simply experience empty space, the feeling that there is nothing there.  Not a threatening nothingness, but a spaciousness, an allowing.  This spaciousness allows Essence to emerge, and it is Essence and only Essence that can eliminate the hole, that deficiency, from the inside.  -- (Quotation from A.H. Almaas)