Grieving Well and Why It Matters Right Now
Grieving as an act of self-stewardship causes meaningful personal, relational and social evolution
Dear Reader, Grief is a complex and tender topic, so I want to acknowledge the following may be triggering. I hope if you feel the call to read it you feel your own courage, self-trust and self-love, and that reading this brings comfort and support to you as process through your own grief. Love only, Diana
I woke up this morning very aware of grief, like so many of us do these days. Waking up this way doesn’t happen to me often, but I have learned that when it does, I’d better stay with it.
To resist or ignore grief is futile, because grief wants acknowledgment. And if I stuff it back down in my body, the next wave will be more potent and require more presence to navigate.
The nature of grief in the body is to set off a chain reaction, illuminating all the other grief we hold. It’s been hard to learn that healing grief isn’t linear—its not here then gone. It most often requires the medicine of time to process, evolve and integrate.
Grief wants to speak and express through movement upwards, through crying, shaking, sobbing, moaning, wailing, gasping and shuttering.
It wants to express this way so we can feel and perceive into a reality beyond our grief. A reality of greater knowing, wisdom, clarity, spiritual freedom and lightness-of-being.
The culture I was raised in, my public education, my ancestral religious indoctrination, my core family dynamics, they all entrained me to believe I didn’t really have permission to fully feel and respond to the fundamental needs of my body, like the need to put a name to grief and all its forms, and allow the energy of grief to move out of my system.
We were taught it was “inappropriate,” and to “keep it to yourself and put up with it.”
Was it a matter of timing and just too inconvenient? To overwhelming or triggering for others? I don’t know. I DO know, regrettably, that I unconsciously passed that mindset on to others and unwittingly collaborated in that emotionally repressive and unnatural model.
The problem of siloing ourselves into parts
Did the institutions around me deliberately and systematically teach me to divorce my head from my body’s feelings?
Yes, they did.
“You ARE your brain,” they taught me. “Feelings are weaknesses. Get over it and move on.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. For a human, literally nothing. The body is whole all the time, and it is fundamentally erroneous and unwise to separate the little cranial brain from the great brain of body, whose language isn’t thought but feeling.
Energy medicine has taught me to not silo or dissociate my human beingness into spiritual/mental/emotional/physical parts.
We are whole all the time.
We can teach ourselves how to feel unified and coherent mind-body wise.
No one can do this for us. It’s a very personal path.
The reality of our essential wholeness is why feeling, really feeling difficult emotions can be simultaneously grueling AND creative and liberating.
Flowing with the chain reaction of grief
My grief tripped off this morning when I woke up feeling the presence of and love from my parents, who are long passed now. And realizing that love, I felt the natural opposing deep sense of loss, longing, absence and grief.
Crying about loss and love, I took my morning tea out to my garden to feel the familiar comfort of the plants and animals there. I sat down in my favorite spot as a swallowtail butterfly spastically fluttered by, alighting momentarily on a pink zinnia blossom before zipping across the yard and dissolving into the woods.
I read a blog written about student interns working along the Nogales, Arizona border with my dear friend and personal heroine, Dr. Amy Tice. The interns share their personal observations, revelations and humanitarian work with migrating human beings along the border with Mexico.
The stories they write relate their experiences of and interactions with extraordinary yet ordinary humans in the borderlands communities. These people are co-creating networks that offer not charity, but meaningful social investment with their resources, physical presence and time to save the lives of people who have made a grueling and excruciating journey of hundreds or thousands of miles, across continents and oceans, to enter the United States through Central America.
I think of my youngest daughter who lives here in Maine and her fiancé who lives in Northern India and the day-to-day struggles they face wanting to be together in a vast world and uncertain future. I think about the trials and traumas they have survived…accidents, challenging relationships, financial hardships, illnesses. I think about how capable, creative, intelligent, and devoted they are, how hard they have worked, how far they have traveled to pursue their dreams, to help their family and find each other.
I think about how light and joy streams through her eyes when they are on the phone together–how an even greater expression of who she truly is flows through her being when they are connecting across space and time zones.
I remember her as a child, tuned in to her supernatural yet totally natural capacity to see the meta-realities that overlay physical reality. “I’m having my color eyes, Mom,” she would say to me when she was 4 years old, as she peered into the energy of space, that is not empty but full of Divine light the sacred geometric structures that invisibly hold everything together.
The labor and fertility of grief
I carry on with my grief, and I cry for her and her fiancé because it’s been beautiful and hard and wonderful and awful and awesome. I start to feel some sense of expansion in my body as this grief expands and contracts—it labors through me, for me and for them—it ebbs and flows from personal to family and back again.
Freedom and clarity, here I come. You are mine for the taking and I WILL grieve so I can feel more of you.
More lightness of being is on the other side of this grief. I know this. I’ve experienced and lived this over and over.
A chipmunk runs up to me, looks me right in the eye, postures at me, changes his mind and reverses direction, fleeing back to the security of his oak tree just outside the garden.
I think about how beautiful it is that my daughter and her fiancé believe in themselves and each other, how they have found ways to live deeply in their hearts, to giggle, make fun of themselves and each other, and to have gratitude that technology allows them to see each other’s face every day. “How are they able to bear this so patiently?” I ask myself. Just extraordinary!
Her fiancé speaks 5 languages, has a heart of gold, is a joyful, funny, warrior, a mechanical genius and more. I feel into all this as I cry about the beautiful-difficult situation of their relationship.
“Who wouldn’t want him to live in their community? Why are we living in a world that people can’t move easefully across their indigenous planet?” I ask myself.
I know the answer to that question and I grieve on, confident that I will receive great relief and freedom by willfully, consciously moving all this grief energy OUT.
Allowing nature to support us
I tune into the energy of my garden and breathe.
The bluebirds, cardinals, sparrows and goldfinches sing their usual morning songs, feed their fledglings and take sips of water from the blue porcelain birdbath. The luminescent purple poppies flutter their tissue-paper-thin petals…the snapdragons wave harmless bronze and burgundy jaws around in the fog…the phlox offers a shock of glorious lavender-tinged white blooms in a majestic dome of color that brightens the grey morning subtly.
The fog seems to emulate my mood, hugging me with its tiny bits of moisture on this unseasonably cool morning. “It’s July and I’m wearing a sweatshirt and down jacket,” I think randomly, as I stare down at my incongruently bare feet.
I return to my grief, feeling its motion through my system. It’s in my heart and throat space right now. My sternum and chest are burning and my heart center feels dense and magnetic.
I think now of my elder daughter and her profession as a nurse in the emergency department at one of Maine’s largest hospitals, and I can only image her direct daily experience in trauma, illness, overdose, broken bones, domestic violence, car accidents, self-harm, heart attacks, strokes, people who are deeply affected by mental illness, those who have been isolated for far too long, and more.
I can only imagine what it feels like to save lives, to help people in their greatest time of need, to be so personally well equipped, adept and high-functioning under multiple, extreme, complex and emerging crises.
“What a tremendously remarkable human,” I think of my daughter. Centered being and order among immense chaos. How extraordinary.
I dwell for a time emotionally, contemplating the extraordinary range of what she has taught herself to manage, how much she’s learned, how much she holds in her conscious awareness for others, how much she witnesses and may never speak about.
It makes me sad, proud, awed and in love at the same time.
Feeling is so hard. “You’re here to feel, Diana,” I remind myself, and I keep feeling.
I think about my daughter’s magnificent, powerful, capable, heart, mind and body. “She lifts weights at the gym on her days off so when she’s at work she can pick up people who can’t pick themselves up,” I think.
Ooooff. A cocktail of admiration, grief, amazement, gratitude, sadness and inspiration move over me. All at once.
And her spirit. I think of her spirit and remember her as a child lying with sunflower seeds in her pockets under a lilac bush soaking up the sun, her little pink mud boots with daisies on them kicked off and cast aside. Always herself. Her graciousness and clarity, her gentleness alongside amazing power, her conviction, acuity, decisiveness and confidence.
I think about her husband, his work, his training, his family. I think about how she and he, like so many of their generation, worry about their student loan debt and agonize over if they’ll ever be able to enjoy the fundamental desire to have their own home.
I hold a memory of them in our kitchen, tucked into each other, smiling and content, and I remember how much they adore each other.
I weep out a blend of grief and love as the catbird perches on a tomato trellis squawking loudly to locate his fledgling.
Locating the stillness beyond grief
Among the great stillness, beauty and peace of my garden, vibrant with rowdy green textures and sweet ferny scents, my mind and body search for more to grieve, to move it out of my physical being and alchemize it to the ethereal realms beyond me.
“It’s served its purpose and can move on now,” I remind myself.
I feel and sense down into my solar plexus where so much of it originated, awaiting my attention, resolution and response to the invitation for healing, assimilation, integration.
Mentally rooting around within me, I focus my lens again inwardly on my personal experience.
I give a nod to all the hard things I have grieved in the past, and sense little remnants still held in my consciousness of my own traumas. Betrayals, abuses, violations of my body, emotions, mind. Harm suffered in relationships. Lies others told whose spell I was under for years. Things I took too personally. Things I should have taken to heart and didn’t. Things I took responsibility for that weren’t really mine. Things I should have taken greater responsibility for and didn’t. Grueling separation from my family of origin. Financial stresses and hardships. Dreams that will never come true. Disappointments. Failures. Regrets.
All right alongside all my joys, delights, abundance, capacities, successes.
Gratitude right alongside the grief. Beauty right alongside loss. That’s Love.
If only I knew then what I know now, I think, but that’s not how this human experience works.
Stewardship of our soul
Rationally, I know it’s absurd to expect myself to know back then something I never learned.
“Love and forgive yourself, Diana,” I say to myself.
Finally. Finally, I feel that sweet familiar feeling of relief and liberation that comes when we externalize the grief held within us through tears, movement, patience, diligence and heartfelt concentration. Hello, balance, harmony and clarity. Yes, this feels good. I feel good again.
In this better place of balance and coherence I let myself widen the lens to the world. I’m not alone. I’m living in a grieving world.
I feel into the present reality of so many things we humans do to each other because of the model of competition, separation, scarcity, otherness, hierarchy, how strength is defined, who is leading, who is controlling, the fight for resources…and the lot.
I breathe and feel, feel and breathe. Expand and contract. Repeat. Rest, because more laboring will come, but for now that’s enough.
A hummingbird zooms by and pokes her tiny beak into a bright germanium blossom, sipping the nectar there.
Things take a turn more toward relief than pain. I’m in this for the long haul, I remind myself, feeling grateful for teaching myself (because no one else can) how to grieve well.
Grieving is an activity, not an end point
Grieving well is a path to avoid and liberate from anxiety and depression. Grieving well is how we stay in balance. It’s how we live in a state of being that we have reserves of energy to show up day after day in a state of coherence and optimal functioning for ourselves and for others.
Grief has made me more loving. It’s made me more boundaried, discerning, generous, understanding, accepting, and tolerant of myself and others. It’s made me more intolerant of and unwilling to participate in things that do not align with the loving consciousness of my heart.
“What do you want more of, Diana?” Grief asks. “What do you want to avoid? What will you do now that you know? What will you choose, how will you behave?”
“Who will you BE now, Diana, given the wisdom I have taught you?” Grief asks.
I now realize that over the decades of my life that healing my grief has iterated and evolved me in ways that benefit me and those around me.
The waves, cycles and tsunamis of grief I have processed have come like contractions that are just like a mother’s labor and childbirth.
Processing grief is a laborious remembering and releasing
Grieving is like dying and being reborn while we are still living. Doing this well offers us an opportunity to deepen our self-love and self-regard, as we appreciate the iterations of ourselves across time. From that vantage point, it’s so easy to extend that grace to others, particularly our most beloved in their Earthly experience.
We can do this. We can teach ourselves to grieve well—for ourselves and each other.
At this tipping point in human history, we must. Humanity as a collective is unlikely to birth itself into a greater and more loving expression of itself without resolving individual and collective grief.
Viewing the world through the lens of healing
Maybe we should grieve like the quality of our life and our future happiness depends on it.
Since we feel better after we grieve, energetically it makes sense that we move out the old grief and the old, heart-dissociated ways out to make room for a more comfortable and joyful expression of our own spirit and the collective expression of our humanity.
The invitation is to behave like a human superorganism—one great organism comprised of numerous, equally significant, individual humans.
To value our own efforts as part of the healing collective.
As we look out into the world and witness horrible things, it’s so important that we assign an ultimately life-giving meaning to our efforts and the efforts of all those creating a more heart-conscious world.
What if the way things are playing out right now—in all the diverse, horrible, wonderful ways we are affecting each other—is actually the labor and birthing of an entirely new reality for Earth?
Who will we be in that new iteration of ourselves?
More free or more aggrieved?
As we move through this threshold and birth canal, I’m delighted to put my faith in you, me, and spiritual freedom beyond our grief.