Practice

I can’t begin to express how much there is to grieve in the course of a life.

We mistakenly have it that a lucky life will entail only a few acute meetings with this perceived dark mistress. (Grief)

And perhaps if we have bad luck, we will meet with her half a dozen times.

But I say, this is backwards, and a thousand times too few.

In a lucky life we will grieve frequently.

This means we are attuned to the current of life that lives through us, and exists all around us.

It also means we have full access to our hearts.

Without taking the “time out of time”, that grief requires, we slowly loose our access and connection to both of these things.

The walls go up. Then get reinforced. All to keep the perceived suffering of grief from penetrating our doorstep.

But it isn’t exactly suffering that grief brings us. It’s our struggle to keep it at bay that hurts so much.

Grief itself is Eros. Simple grief is heart opening love. Yes, it brings us low. Low to the ground.

Yes it causes us to zoom in close, to get intimate with its origin.

Yes it involves longing, and loss.

But it is all sourced in love.

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I was born in a state of grief. I didn’t know it.

It was a kind of a detached, or dissociated grief.

I was a feral child. My adoptive parent’s wondering what planet I hailed from.

Me, emotive, expressive, and free. A lamenter.

Them bound by the baby boomer code of ”make everything look good on the outside by keeping everything locked up on the inside”

We didn’t match, so my grief as a child wasn’t met.

I then went through a subsequent major, multi-person loss portal in my early adult life.

It was the first time I grieved consciously.

When this loss occurred, in lot of ways I was a spiritual baby. Still bound by the creed of love and ascension.

Not being in approval of the shadowlands meant I spent a lot of time on my knees, forced to scrape at the edges, to crawl my way out of this portal.

Blind and on the ground. Everything I did to help myself was intuitive. Not intentional

There were some wins and some misses.

When I finally emerged years later, I brought with me, the hard won wisdom of how to grieve.

It was as if I was given the “codes” of grief’s importance in our lives.

(Yes, a guide would have been helpful. I didn’t know that was an option at the time)

One of the things I discovered in the underworld of my first conscious brush with grief is..

If we’ve not cultivated a regular grief practice, when it arises, it comes packaged with all of the other things we’ve neglected to grieve across our lifetime.

Often when we have a big loss, it brings up decades of unmetabolized pain, suffering, and loss.

I’ve watched it in my loved ones. And in my sons friends. My heart aches for their suffering. I know it. That was the same suffering I endured when the lid to my disenfranchised grief ripped off.

Like a damn breaking. The heart has finally cracked open, and the grief has an outlet.

It arrives as an eruption of all of the undigested grief we’ve neglected and stuffed down.

It bubbles up from different pockets. Making it hard to close the tap once it’s opened.

So now we are grieving our immediate loss, and all of the losses that didn’t get acknowledged along the way.

Our work is to tend to it. Tend to all the places we left the grief behind. Covered it over to move forward without it. The places we didn’t make space for it. Where it was inconvenient. Where we abandoned it. Where we hated it for even existing.

When we begin to understand her signal, (grief’s) how the body starts to bouble and shake when she needs a release valve opened. We begin to understand that there are things to grieve almost ongoingly.

Any shift or change has the potential to create an opening for grief.

So just like a healthy relationship requires attention. When we stoke up a relationship with grief, we need to cultivate our capacity to be with her. And then to keep contact and connection open ongoingly.

Grief is an energy system cleaner. She helps us digest and purge - re-story and repurpose what is within our field.

We maintain the clarity and purity of our system, by building a grief practice into our lives.

People have asked me how “I am doing grief so well” with my son.

For starters, it’s not something that can be quantified that way. You can’t really do grief well. The point is to just do it. Like the Nike slogan. The “how” isn’t really important.

What I think they are sensing is the singularity of my grief. It’s related to one constellation. Tanner. Not a lifetime’s worth of unacknowledged sorrow.

I am grieving. And yes it hurts epically to drop into the space of love with my son, that now feels so empty and unfamiliar. It’s utterly disorienting at times.

But because I know her, (grief) I know she is ultimately a benevolent ally.

A healing substance. Here to keep my heart open to more life.

It is in reverent awe of the new threads of life she reveals, that makes it so I can stay open to Her.