“There are only two emotions: love and fear. But it’s more accurate to say that there is only love or fear, for we cannot feel these two emotions together, at exactly the same time. They’re opposites. If we’re in fear, we are not in a place of love. When we’re in a place of love, we cannot be in a place of fear.”

So says psychiatrist and pioneer in near-death studies, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. I guess it means that if you don’t choose love, you choose fear by default, even though this is an unconscious choice. Bringing it to consciousness can be a great help to the bereaved.

You see, the biology of grief is such that it feels just like fear, as author CS Lewis remarked. It happens because your body goes into fight-or-flight mode; it initiates a survival response. Oxygen is moved to the limbs (and away from the brain and digestive system), palms sweat, heart rate elevates and breathing becomes rapid.

Can love counteract such a fear response? I believe it can, but only if you remember that it is a doorway that opens inwards, as Wayne Dyer would say. Don’t try looking outwards.

“After having been lost in the world, suddenly, through the pressure of suffering, the realization comes that the answers may not be found out there,” writes Eckhart Tolle. “That’s an important point for many people to reach. That sense of deep crisis – when the world as they have known it, and the sense of self that they have known that is identified with the world, become meaningless.”

Eckhart says that the definition of suffering is arguing with the “isness” of the moment. “Everything is as it is at any moment. Accepting means you allow yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling at that moment.”

Suffering is equal to wanting reality to be something it’s not, says Alicia M Rodriguez. “Anytime you want or even demand that your reality be different than what it is you suffer because of the desire that it were different. You resist what is in front of you and suffer. Only by accepting what is can you take action that can change your situation.”

“The ego says, ‘I shouldn’t have to suffer,’ and that thought makes you suffer so much more. The truth is that you need to say yes to suffering before you can transcend it,” Eckhart writes.

So, girlfriend, how does one say yes to suffering? Most of us will run a mile, rather than stay put. Yet, Michel de Montaigne, a Renaissance philosopher, said: “A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.”

“Fear produces thoughts that cause a contraction in our hearts, minds and bodies. You restrict yourself, you protect yourself from life itself. You are constantly hiding,” Alicia says.

They say you should rather try sitting with your suffering with an open heart and in a place of love. Is this even possible? Sherwin B Nuland says that human beings are capable of the kind of love that transcends not only the physical debasement but even the spiritual weariness of years of sorrow.

“What happens is, when the grief runs its natural course . . . you come to the point where you realize that you’ve tasted something with that person that was such a living moment that that moment still exists independent of death. There’s a moment when we recognize that love transcends death,” says Ram Dass.

A hundred wise women and men have said this very thing in various ways. Millions of people have supposed that they meant nothing by it. “At this late hour in my life I have learned what they meant. They meant that love transcends death. They are correct,” admits Gene Wolfe.

You can feel it when you stop arguing with the “isness” of the moment, when you remove all expectation, labelling and judgement. “Then,” says LJ Vanier “there is only love left. Love is found in the stillness of the soul. Love is without action, without attachment or need. Love is the subtle energy that flows through all of creation . . . Love is the harmony and the music of the universe.”

So, girlfriend, the Beatles got it wrong, as Morgan Matson says: “Love isn’t all we need – love is all there is.”