Grief, The Next Frontier

There is a part of me that knows grief is the next healing frontier.

It’s the missing piece that so many of us need to complete our journey of coming into “wholeness”

Grief is an incredible healing substance.

I am convinced it is a true alchemical nectar.

It helps us restore our innocence, find inner equilibrium, and confront reality.

It’s exceptional for clearing distortions. It heals our disconnection from life.

But best of all, it’s the ultimate tool of self reclamation.

Grief has a way of honoring

what is real, even if it’s not our preference. It helps make everything sacred.

I hate to say that it took what it did to make me an advocate of grief, but I am well and truly transformed. A legitimate proponent of it now.

It’s a shame grief has been relegated as something only for the bereaved.

It shouldn’t be.

I’ve been in inquiry around what our current culture’s aversion to grief is. And I reckon a lot of it comes down to the cultural memes or archetypes around grief. Its strong association to death. The way grieving archetypes seem be set apart from life. Like it takes us out of the world for a time, and that looks scary.

And/or it being a kind of indulgence. It looks as though we are indulging our emotions. And in our puritanical Protestant culture, that doesn’t go over well.

This week I grieved a sense of loneliness. A sense of feeling kind of discarded.

It was story. It knew it wasn’t true. But it still carried an emotional charge. Knowing it was an internal narrative wasn’t enough to rid it of its power. Neither was amplifying the feeling and “being with it”. I could have done that, but the alchemy wasn’t there. It was attached to a younger part of me.

So I grieved it. I grieved for the part of me that felt lonely and abandoned. I honored that the feeling existed. I didn’t make myself wrong for it. I just held space for that part, and grieved.

I didn’t need to know what part of me it was, or what story it was attached too. I knew the grief was necessary, and that was enough.

And, like magic, a short time later, it was gone. I felt soft, open, and reconnected to that benevolent, living, source of love that is always available to us.

One of my desires in talking about how grief is molding me is to hopefully begin to remove the stigmas around it. So more people become curious about how it can be an ally for more wholeness.