Grief, Undigested

To fling the doors open to our grief feels like a death defying prospect.

I’ll never forget my 14 year old self sitting in front of a counselor who asked me “do you think any of this has to do with your adoption”?

I had been having fits of uncontrollable rage. Acting out in the worst ways.

Hurting those I loved, yes. But hurting myself most of all.

When he asked me that question, I physically felt the vice grip that always existed around my rib cage, tighten.

Like a steel trap door, everything was instantaneously bolted down and locked away safely - “forever” (I thought)

I looked at him with a straight face and said “don’t be ridiculous, of course not”.

I had become so cognitively dissonant in my own mind, that I believed myself.

Finally feeling into all of these bolted down places. Pockets of grief and undigested rage, is a daunting task. I was brought to the well of my life’s grief a decade ago when I suffered a massive traumatic familial loss.

Prior to that my grief had been slowly rotting and molding in the darkest corners of my psyche. Shutting down life. Making it so only fragments of myself were able to interact with the world. Like I was a booby-trapped device.

Now…

I’ve watched on as an already “well grieved woman” as my loved ones are experiencing this: exposure to a lifetime of old grief.

Tanner’s death unbattened the hatches, sending spores of grief into every area of their lives.

An unenviable thing one might presume.

I’m also watching what grows in its place. More love, more life, more softness, hard won wisdom, and maturity.

I’ve said often that I believe grief work is the next healing frontier.

Grief moves. It has a current.

So many of us are living with these pockets of unprocessed loss. Unexamined sorrows.

Stagnancy. Paralysis.

I implore our culture to come into right relationship with this life giving practice. To grieve what needs to be grieved.

We are too focused on productivity, on not seeming hysterical, on not loosing control. That this type of catharsis feels too edgy, and too inconvenient.

For one reason or another, we are unable to surrender ourselves into the loving, healing, hands of our grief.

And our paradigm condones this. It is grief, death, ending, phobic. Keeping us in a perpetual state of imbalance.

To meet our losses with our own love, and tenderness, no matter how frightening they might seem, is one of the biggest gifts we can offer ourselves.

The payoff is immeasurable. If someone asked me today if I would take away the grief and pain of my losses, I’d never say yes. There is so much life inside of them.

Grief tending is a reconnection with self, with love.

It cracks us open to life.

It’s a dip into the mystery of paradox. A dive into the non-dual nature of reality.

Not in a detached way. But in a way that opens us to the most profound, sobering, reality.

Off in the distance, just over the horizon of our grief, we stumble upon the collateral beauty of being human.

We meet our own frailty, and limitation. Which in turn initiates us into the sheer preciousness of life.

This is Saturn in Pisces work. This paradoxical transit leads us into paradoxical terrain. And it is in the paradoxical that we meet God.

Death in service to life. Grief in service to Eros. Loss in service to aliveness. Groundlessness in service to grounding. Sorrow in service to joy. Lament in service to ecstasy.

This is Saturn in Pisces.