Join Us As We Address Grief And Resiliency!

I recently listened to a talk by Frank Ostaseski about grief that was enlightening and timely for the autumn season of letting go.

Here's some of what I took from this relevant and inspiring new look at grief.

Grief is usually associated with the death of a loved one, but as Frank reminds us, grief has been our companion for a good part of our life—the break up of someone we loved, a financial crisis, or the loss of dreams.

Our collective grief about the current addiction to screens and the loss of connection of just being together as people. Boy, do I feel that!

An aspect of grief that I hadn't thought of is the grieving of what we never got to have.

I grieve never having an adult relationship with my mother, as she passed when I was 19. I find myself drawn to women that would be her age, wanting to be near older, wiser women and glean from them what I imagine I would have learned from her.

The process of grief is so tender- it's less about missing somebody and more about becoming fully alive.

Frank posed a question: How do we move towards the light of absolute truth and still accept and honor our truly human nature?

To grieve is to be human. Dark emotions associated with grief are part of the process.

Suppressing or spiritually bypassing grief is common,. To transform our grief, we need to feel it and let it happen. The more we try to push it away, the more it clings.

As with dark emotions, we can develop a spaciousness around grief, allowing it to move and unfold, to show us all its faces.

Spiritual teachings want us to let go, and our friends and loved ones want us to move beyond our grief. But there's no letting go without letting in.

Sadness is only one face of grief. It's a whole constellation of experiences: there's sadness, loneliness, blame, and shame. There are periods of anger, and sometimes, we become numb like we're moving through molasses.

Allowing grief helps us to move through the non-grieving, so our relationship with it doesn't have us by our throats; we can be in life and include this grief.

This helps us come to the fullness of our humanity and a kind of aliveness in our losses.

A woman who lost her husband said that connecting with the pain and allowing the hurt actually feels sweet.

In the Lakota tradition, a grieving person is respected as holy.

Opening to grief is more than an emotion; embedded in it are love and wisdom. It's an undoing resistance.

When the work of grief is done, the wound of loss will heal.

You will have learned to wean your eyes from the gap in the air

and be able to enter the hearth in your soul

where your loved one has awaited your return all the time.

- John O'Donohue

Join us for our next Wellness Weekend; we will practice meditation and breathwork to deal with grief.

Join the community to heal our grief as a collective and strengthen emotional resiliency.

From my heart to yours~

Namaste,

Maggie