From a friend: I never thought I would have any trouble grieving a great loss because as a kid, I often felt betrayed by how readily tears came. Moments of feeling exposed and tender seemed like a major handicap in a world where appearing ‘better than’ was somehow a win. But then, when everything fell apart, I think the ability to live in denial for a time, though costly itself, also saved my life. Even as I became an abyss (relative to the radical contact with life that I I love the most), I also didn’t fall into one. Over the past few years I’ve begun to grieve, and even just the brief spurts I’ve so far accomplished have reconsecrated my heart and my living. While reading this article, floodgates opened again. Here are some of the excerpts (from https://bit.ly/2gPLXyM ) which catalyzed that. May be helpful to you also if any heartbreaks have been so overwhelming to your nervous system that you simply haven’t been willing or able yet to reclaim the heart that still wants: ______ Sometimes … you don’t even recognize that you’ve lost something and that you need to grieve. Grief is a word that is used interchangeably with bereavement, but grief is not exclusively about the physical death of a person. Grief doesn’t fit in a box, either. Some forms of grief take years to work through, other types take a few solid months, some take a single moment of deep acknowledgement. Everyone grieves differently and for different reasons, but one thing remains constant in the process. It’s the one thing no one has ever said about grieving: “I did it right on time.” Grieving is marked by a lag, a delay, a freezing, “Wait. What just happened?” ______ “But grief isn’t some evil force that’s only there to cause pain, grief is escorting up an even deeper feeling, a truth about your life, what you value and what you need. Perhaps how much you wanted something, how deeply you care about someone, how far you’ve come from where you were.” ______ “Some losses are so exquisitely painful, in a way that no one else could ever fully understand…” ______ 3. TOUCH – You have to touch the loss (as well as all the anger, sadness, bitterness, resilience, compassion and any other feelings you encountered during your loss). ______ “You’re in touch with your grief when you make space for the feelings your loss brought into your life. It may feel counter-intuitive to go back to the feelings that you want so desperately to let go of, but there’s simply no way to move through grief without making contact with it, without fully touching it, without fully feeling it.” _____ “You have to pick it up, hold it, feel the weight of it in your hands, on your heart and within your life. You have to feel the whole loss. Grief demands to be felt with an insistence that needs no sleep. You either allow yourself to encounter the feelings or you remain encased in a shell of yourself…” ______ “Still, if you want to genuinely address the grief, you have to continue to move through the peripheral, familiar parts of your grief and go right into the epicenter of your grief. As the classic hero’s journey goes, you have to get inside the belly of the whale. There (and only there) you will find the door to the unpredictable pieces of life that are patiently waiting for you on the other side of your pain.” Corinna Bloom
- Terry Ballantyne
