Grief...the love that persists after loss

 I have a wish.

I have a wish for you.

I wish I could take from you

Your grief.

And carry it down to the river

And gently dip it in the cool water.

And you could have 

The whole day off. 

Grief reflects our connection to the energy of  the cold, clear water that snakes through the underground caves in the earth. Grief will grab a hold of you and plunge you in the river. It is a true, deep focused dive into the river of all souls.  

We dive deeper in the water with grief than we do with sadness. The water is clearer; there is more focus. 

This breathless swim is our connection with the collective consciousness.  You stand with all of the losses of all humans in all time and all space.  

Here, this is the place we live all together with our human impermanence. This is where the roots of compassion are nurtured. No one is immune to this swim.  

Grief invites you to survive your loss by immersing yourself in the deep river of compassion that constantly flows underneath our feet. 

 It is a very natural and deeply meaningful human experience. When we sink down into the waters of grief, we will feel the pain of loss, but we also discover our sacred position in the dance of all souls. 

Grief is a downward motion. Like sadness, there is a heaviness. The weight will help us to stay grounded and encourage us not to run away.

 If you leave your body behind, you'll lose your ability to grieve masterfully. It is this heaviness that anchors you to the spacious compassion revealed in everyone's suffering. This compassion is the only worthy opponent to the suffering of grief. 

Your body is a brilliant mourner. The body  has a visceral understanding of death and loss. Our arms miss. Our hands miss. Our legs miss. Our face misses. It is visceral. Our bodies know what has been lost. Our hearts know what has been lost. Initially, part of your body and part of your heart is gone.

 If your grief is not quite finished, you'll know by the wrenching physical connection that still remains. 

The downward movement of grief can take all your energy. 

We live in a grief impaired culture. We turn away from the manifestations of deep sadness. We are not connected with our bodies. We do not want to feel anything deeply. Most people cannot get near enough to their bodies to experience grief. We are lost in our logical and linguistic mind. It is not the nature of the logical mind to dive down underneath life the way the body and emotions can. The intellect does not know how to dive deep. Your intellect only rationalizes and explains. The intellect will have us out of the water and dried off before we are actually submerged.

 Over time, one loss stacks up on top of the last one. We move further and further away from ourselves. 

Look to your heart. You will feel pain. But the pain will not crush you. Your heart will break open but not apart. Your heart will not be emptied; it will be expanded. You will have more capacity to love and more room to breath. 

Breath deeply and relax your body. Grief can then begin its journey through your body and into the ground, where it will nourish all souls. 

Nx

approval

 I write these things today to know them more deeply myself. I will share.

"Often, people who perform really well are some of the loneliest people in the world. The better your performance is, the less people actually meet you. They come and tell you, "what a wonderful performance! Thank you." But as a performer, you feel very lonely and you can get quite desperate for a relationship. So I thought......

Why would I want people to like me and approve of me anyway? Well, with enough approval, I might be convinced to like and approve of myself. If enough people like me, then maybe it will convince me  that I am likable.

So I am suggesting today that you will never get enough evidence of other people's approval to persuade you to love yourself. You'll never be able to succeed at liking yourself by getting others to approve your behaviors and decisions. At some point, you know you are doing it for others, and then you resent them for making you do all these things to get their approval----while all too often they seem to be withholding their approval!

How much are you going to be able to like yourself for abandoning yourself to that scheme?"

It never works, does it? Abandoning yourself to gain recognition. Has it been working lately? You go through life putting on your best performance, yet something doesn't work. People may still not be happy with you. You are not the way you are supposed to be.

If you got all that approval. What would it be good for? Who cares? How will you get out of the worrying about the audience approval?

You think, I could love myself if I got enough approval. And when will that be? Maybe you could just go ahead and love someone who doesn't quite measure up---the person you are---who doesn't quite measure up. Maybe you could go ahead and have a kind feeling, a tender hearted feeling for this poor miserable person who still does not measure up, still hasn't gone anywhere, still isn't calm, patient, tolerant, blissful, buoyant, cheerful and kind. 

Beyond your performance, who are you? Maybe you can find a tender, vulnerable, good hearted person---also boundless and vast----who is ready to see and be seen; someone who is smiling and welcoming the world into their hearts".

The Most Important Point by Ed Brown

The feeling of what happens.....

This passage from Peter Levine's book on trauma is very revealing. It was interesting to me as I have been reading and writing on the flow of emotions in our lives and how our body is the conduit that is bringing us the truth of "what is happening".

This passage was written by Antonio Damasio.

"We use our minds not to discover facts but to hide them. One of the things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean, the ins and outs of it, its interiors. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitutes the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day.'

The emotions are the flow of life. The word "emotion" has its roots in the water. It means to flow outward. Emotions inform you about your capacity to flow and meander; to stop in unusual places; to experience startling and troubling things; and to fully engage with what you encounter. The central property of both water and emotions is movement and flow.

By thinking about the properties of water, we can more fully understand the processes of emotions. 

Water is soft and flowing, but it can wear down boulders and mountains. Emotions are strong and persistent. They gently ask for attention and persist until you acknowledge them. Water and emotions will move and flow around any obstacle put in its path. 

Water is a great conductor of heat and energy. It can support weight and create buoyancy. Water can carry things. You may get knocked down by some of your emotions, because the realm of water is extremely lively and, frequently turbulent place. But the water will hold you. It is buoyant, you will rise to the top. It can carry you for a while. 

Water embraces its environment. It always finds its way to the deepest, grounded places. Water fits comfortably in all the cracks. Emotions find all of our shadow places. It takes a light and an intimate investigation to find all the places it resides in our bodies. I love the images of the caves in the earth that flow unseen. I always believe that the water is very cold and clear there.  Water can travel upwards. From the bottom of the cave to the light of the sun. 

Add energy to water and it will change its form. Add energy to an arising emotion and it may change form too. As water changes to a vapor and disappears into the air, it can just as easily freeze into a block of ice. We add our own mental energy to emotions. They freeze. We add a story that we have written in our heads or a strong remembering of another event that was accompanied by these sensations. The movement is impeded by our minds.  It is no longer in the form of an emotion; it is now in the form of an emotional state.  It is better to just let emotions flow. No need to get into details. The mind just panics. Not helpful. Let it all flow through. Just notice them, welcome them and watch them leave. 

Water is the great container. It can hold you. 

Nx

emotions

 Humans are emotional beings. Emotions move through our bodies every minutes of every day. They carry massive amounts of information with them. These diverse messages can be distinguished with absolute certainty. Emotions are our native language. 

We receive these messages as sensations in our body. These sensations give us a remembering. The familiar emotions that remain at low intensity are just the stuff of our everyday life. Emotions communicate with all of our intelligences. What we see, we feel in our body. What we touch, we feel in our body. What we hear, we feel in our body. Without our emotions we are stripped of our intuition. We cannot make decisions or set proper boundaries. It is difficult to behave skillfully in relationships. 

It is possible to become disconnected with our emotions. We disconnect when we do not feel our body. The conduit for the messages is unplugged. Trauma is one event that can cause humans to dissociate from their bodies. Dissociation is the experience of leaving the body. This separation is triggered again and again by the conditions of our environments. So it happens that we practice and get quite good at leaving our bodies. We are not home to receive the message. 

Learning to work with your emotions will require you to focus on your body, even when unheard emotions become very loud indeed. If we do not pay attention, they will find a way to get our attention. 

Emotions are not a sign of imbalance. They provide protection and security from the ever changing realities of our lives. They increase people's ability to stay focused in their bodies. We are just embodied spirits. Our bodies are our native land. 

Unfortunately, we do not grow up as emotive people; we grow up as people who learn not to emote. Our reactivity to emotions reflect our cultures displeasure with emotions. The socially accepted view is that there are good ones and there are bad ones. The good  ones make us easy to be around. The bad ones make us difficult to be around and all the ensuing consequences of that. The good emotions are happiness, pleasantness, joy and some appropriate sadness. There is quite a list of bad emotional states. There is sadness that lasts too long, anger, depression, rage and fury, hatred, jealousy, fear, shame and guilt. How are you doing with maintaining the good emotions? 

One of the more unskillful ways we have used to not feel or listen to our bodily sensations and the messages they bring to us is to transform them. Transforming an emotion usually means repressing the life out the real but unwanted emotion. Then fabricating a better one. Completely missed the message. Nothing but confusion. 

Emotions only come in a boxed set. Each emotion has its own valid place in our lives. It is a beautiful continuum of colors. One supports the other. Interconnected. Working as a team. 

How lucky are we? It is a brilliant plan. What could possibly go wrong? 

Nx

sadness

Sadness moves forward to question our outdated or hollow attachments in a slow and persistent way. It asks you to respect the flow of time. Life is constant change. We are changed by our personal experiences. We are changed by time.

When you move into sadness, you move into the softened release of contracts that you have made with yourself and others. Sadness arrives when it is time to  uncouple yourself from your own worn out personal beliefs. These beliefs may not reflect the realities of your current life. 

You may then be able to move forward to release yourself from situations or people that are no longer healthy or wholesome to the new you. Sometimes these relationships are with people that we have been close to for a long time. This is a loss. These losses are sometimes necessary to create space for our new self. 

A change in our relationship with ourselves and the world usually requires a boundary shift. That is where sadness calls upon some anger. Anger is good at constructing new boundaries. Anger and sadness are intimately connected. As you respond to the request from sadness to release the old contracts and beliefs, anger will now step forward to help you restore your boundary and protect your new position. In doing so, anger helps you maintain the important change that is happening in your life. 

There is a natural emotional progression between sadness and anger. It may startle you. Anger will often move forward during times of sadness to help you maintain a connection to your strength and validate your intuition, while there is tremendous change happening inside you. 

Too much anger and you are unable to cry. You simply cannot release. Too much sadness and you cannot stop crying. You have no protective boundary. 

Anger and sadness dance together. You will need to learn to dance. 

It is all about balance. 

Watch the dance between anger and sadness. Listen and learn the dance of protecting yourself while you release and let go of that which does no longer serve. 

Nx