This thing called “grief”…..an unavoidable part of life.
I have been dealing with grief for the last couple of months after the loss of a beloved cousin. And I have been observing my feelings and thoughts going through this process and wondering what there is to learn from this and the potential gifts locked away in this experience.
To start I had a look at the origin or root of the word grief. It comes from the Latin word “gravare” meaning “to burden”, from “gravis “ – “heavy”. I read a bit further and one of the things said about grief is that it is an overwhelming emotion. Reflecting on these and the way it’s been sitting in my body and of course, affecting my energy I realise that it has been all this and more: A heaviness of not being able to move forward and completely overwhelm after the initial shock of loss.
The stages of grief are described to be denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then eventually acceptance. It is said that we sometimes cycle through the stages quickly in an attempt to process the change and protect ourselves while we adapt to the new reality.
My personal experience is that I went through the stages quickly and now a couple of months later in the most unexpected way, it crept up on me, when my heart was most open in a moment of appreciation of a beautiful piece of music, it was like a sluice opened and I was engulfed in the overwhelming emotion of the loss and realization of the fragility of life and the finality of a loved one has left the earthly plane. A cathartic experience: and in that moment when I felt the emotion properly, where I allowed the sorrow to be real, healing happened for me.
All the unfelt emotions, the things we bottle up and don’t allow ourselves to feel and express, gets stored in our aura and if we don’t deal with it, it weighs us down and eventually could manifest as physical disease in the body. These emotions can make us “stuck” and for healing to be effective we need to remove these emotions form the aura. The Life Activation, the Shamanic Aura Clearing, the Sacred Geometry Egyptian Aura Healing, the Hermetic Soul Retrieval, and Ensofic Reiki are all sessions that can support and accelerate the integration and healing from grief and loss.
The Kabbalah teaches us about joy and sorrow. The spiritual experience of the sephiroth Binah at the top of the supernal triad has been referred to as the “Vision of Sorrow”. Gareth Knight describes grief as a “purgative and strongly disruptive force” that once its work has been done, results in a place of emptiness that can act as a purified foundation for new growth. It is from sorrow that we grow and progress as humans. If one considers Binah as the first place on the Tree of Life, where form is given to force, the place where creation takes place for the first time, it gives an indication of the significance of sorrow in the process of creation and growth. The virtue of Binah is silence – my understanding regarding sorrow in this regard is that we need to get to a place of silence and stillness to process grief and sorrow. Yet we tend to do the opposite – bury the loss in work, to escape having to face the grief and sorrow.
Meditation is a simple yet effective tool to help reach that place of stillness. The Max Meditation System™ is a meditation system that is accessible to all levels of meditation experience. It supports the nervous system; it creates neuropathways toward peace and calms every time that it is practiced. It is a great place to start with meditation and supports to get to a place of absolute stillness.
Kabbalah further refers to sorrow with relation to the sephiroth Malkuth. Malkuth, the Kingdom is the sephiroth attributed to our physical life. Malkuth has been referred to as the “Gate of tears”. Malkuth is the manifestation of the form which was “first conceived as a possibility in Binah” (Gareth Knight). The understanding of sorrow is one of the things we gain in Malkuth. If we had to consider that the purpose of our physical life amongst other things, is to experience joy, then the reference to sorrow as part of Malkuth, gives an indication of the relationship between joy and sorrow, i.e., that they are interlinked, and we cannot experience joy without having known sorry.
Khalil Gibran says that joy and sorrow both draw from each other.
“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”
Grief and sorrow are not something we consciously invite into our lives, nor something we enjoy going through, but the experience is part of the cycle of life and joy cannot be properly experienced without the knowledge and experience of grief and sorrow. If we did not love someone or something, we would not know grief when we experience loss.
“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.” – Rumi
Whatever loss or grief you may be dealing with, my hope is that you find a way to heal, a way to move forward, a way to find joy again in your life. If you need support, please reach out to me for a cup of tea and a chat, maybe consider a healing or even just come for meditation to support you during this time.