What loss teaches that nothing else can

By Simone Claridge · True Better You

The other day I almost won a card game against my husband.

I was two games ahead and then — without drama, without any visible shift in him — he came back. Steady. Focused. And he won.

That moment stayed with me. Not as something to figure out. It just settled into my awareness and sat there, the way certain things do when they carry more than what's on the surface. I brought it into my N-Tone meditation later and let it dissolve. And what came afterward — not immediately, but in its own time — was a bigger picture than the card game.

My husband buried his oldest son twenty years ago. Travis was 27, an NFL player, and Bill has said — not dramatically, just plainly — that losing him was the hardest thing in his life. That since then, nothing has come close to that level. Nothing has been able to reach it.

Whatever your process is when something like that surfaces in you — this is mine. I let it come into stillness and see what it shows me.

What is actually happening when we lose something?

Something became curious in me about that word — loss. Not in a way that wanted an answer right away. More like the question itself opened a space.

Because here is something strange, when you sit with it long enough: we only feel that particular ache when we lose something we were attached to. When we lose something we didn't want — a bad situation, a relationship that was quietly draining us, a version of ourselves we'd already outgrown — we feel relief. The word loss doesn't even come up.

So could it be that the feeling isn't really about the losing itself? Could it be more about how much of our sense of self we had quietly wrapped around whatever is now gone? Not that we loved too much — that's not it. But maybe somewhere along the way we began to see the other person, or the role, or the certainty, as part of how we knew ourselves. And when that form changes, something in our self-image goes with it. That's where the pain seems to live. Not in the absence of the thing, but in the sudden gap where our identification used to be.

This is just an opening. Not a conclusion. Something worth sitting with rather than answering too quickly.

What the old texts were pointing at

The Tao Te Ching was written roughly 2,500 years ago, and Chapter 16 says: "Return to the root is called stillness. Stillness is called returning to one's destiny." And a few chapters later: "Every day something is released. Release and release again — until non-action is reached."

Every day, something is released. Not in one dramatic moment. Quietly, in the ordinary texture of living.

The Zhuangzi — another ancient Chinese text — tells a story that stops me every time. When Zhuangzi's wife died, his friend found him sitting on the ground, singing. The friend was shocked. Zhuangzi said something like: when she first died, of course I grieved. But then I looked back to before she was born — before there was a form, before there was breath — and I saw that she came from the great undivided whole, and she returned to it. Like the turning of the seasons.

He didn't stop loving her. He stopped gripping the particular form her life had taken.

The Bible carries something similar in Genesis 22, when Abraham is asked to offer his firstborn son Isaac — the son of the promise, the one everything depended on. He walks toward it. At the last moment, the offering isn't required. But Abraham has already released his grip. What was being tested wasn't his love. It was his hold on the specific arrangement of life he had built his certainty around.

These texts come from completely different cultures, different centuries, different languages. And yet they keep pointing at the same thing — not toward coldness, not toward not-caring, but toward something more precise. The slow release of the grip on how life must look.

Some things carry further in music than in words. This is the song that came from this post.
What Loss Teaches

What survives

Grandmaster Pang Ming, the founder of Zhineng Qigong, writes about what he calls the reference framework — the accumulated layer of ideas, fears, expectations, and stories we carry about who we are and how life works. This layer is not the True Self. It's more like something that has built up over the True Self over years, shaped by what we survived and what we were told we should want.

Real loss — the kind that reaches the bottom — cracks that layer open. And what survives the cracking is real.

You can feel this when you meet certain people. You don't need to know their story. There's just something in them that doesn't flinch, something steady that's hard to explain. Being near them makes you feel — without knowing why — that things are going to be okay. That quality isn't positivity or performance. It's what remains when the layers built on certainty have dissolved and what was underneath has been allowed to breathe. Something in them has already been tested at the deepest level and held.

The worry that stays — and what is already there

My husband still worries. About his job, about the house, about things that from the outside can seem smaller than the fear they carry. And I notice this with tenderness rather than judgment, because the nervous system doesn't forget easily. It learned certain patterns — scan for danger, prepare for the worst — and it keeps drawing on those patterns even when the original danger is long gone. That's not weakness. That's just how the human system protects itself. The pattern is old and deep, and it served a purpose once.

But here is what I also see in him, and what moves me: he has already been to the place where the worst thing happened. He stood there. And something in him did not end.

He might not use these words. He might not think of it this way at all. But the capacity is there — to stay present when everything is on the line, to focus when others would collapse, to come back from two games down without drama. That is exactly what everyone who practices Mingjue is working toward. Returning to the place in themselves that isn't moved by the waves on the surface.

He found it — not through practice, but through life itself.

What would it mean if he could recognize that? If instead of continuing to pull from the old survival patterns, he could begin to trust what is already in him — the steadiness that the hardest moment of his life revealed. The nervous system is slow to update, and the worry may not disappear overnight. But there is a real difference between a person who worries and doesn't know they carry something deeper, and a person who worries and knows.

A question that came up in me — maybe in you too

Sit for a moment with something you are holding tightly right now. A person, a plan, a version of yourself you are trying to keep intact.

Don't try to release it. Just notice the grip. Feel where it lives in the body.

And then ask — very gently, without needing an answer from the mind — what in me would remain if this form changed?

The True Self already knows.

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With love and warmth,
Simone

Sources:
Tao Te Ching — Laozi, Chapters 16 and 48. Zhuangzi — Chapter 18. Genesis 22. Hunyuan Entirety Theory — Dr. Pang Ming. Mingjue Awakening — Teacher Wei Qifeng, 2023.