Grief as a Solitary Burden

     “Expressing grief has always been a challenge. The main difference between our society and societies in the past is how private we are with it today. Through most of human history grief has been communal. 
     The Pueblo people of the Southwest, for example, have ‘crying songs’ to help move grief along. The Mohawk traditions have the ‘condolence ritual,’ where they tend to the bereaved with an elegant series of gestures, such as wiping tears from the eyes with the soft skin of a fawn. The healers in those traditions know it is not good to carry grief in the body for a long time. 
     But now we’re asked — and sometimes forced — to carry grief as a solitary burden. And the psyche knows we are not capable of handling grief in isolation. So it holds back from going into that territory until the conditions are right — which they rarely are. The message is ‘Get over it. Get back to work.’ 
     Again and again in my practice clients come to me with a depression that is more of an oppression: a result of so many years of sorrow that have not been touched with kindness or compassion or community. You’re left with an untenable situation: to try to walk alone with this sack of grief on your back without knowing where to take it. 
     In traditional cultures people were often given at least a year to digest a major loss. In ancient Scandinavia it was common to spend a prolonged period ‘living in the ashes.’ Not much was expected of you while you did the essential work of transforming sorrow into something of value to the community. The Jewish tradition observes a year of mourning filled with observances and rituals to help the grieving stay connected to their sorrow and not let it drift away. Most people today might get a week of bereavement leave, at best, and then everything should be fine. 
     In this culture we display a compulsive avoidance of difficult matters and an obsession with distraction. Because we cannot acknowledge our grief, we’re forced to stay on the surface of life. Poet Kahlil Gibran said, ‘The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.’ 
     We experience little genuine joy in part because we avoid the depths. We are an ascension culture. We love rising, and we fear going down. Consequently we find ways to deny the reality of this rich but difficult territory, and we are thinned psychically. We live in what I call a ‘flat-line culture,’ where the band is narrow in terms of what we let ourselves fully feel. We may cry at a wedding or when we watch a movie, but the full-throated expression of emotion is off-limits.”
     “The Geography Of Sorrow - Francis Weller On Navigating Our Losses.” The Sun Interview: by Tim McKee, October 2015. https://thesunmagazine.org/issues/478/the-geography-of-sorrow

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May You Live with Ease

     "To a mind that is still the whole universe surrenders." Lao Tzu

      For many of us, our minds are far from being still. One example:
     “Though it was a divine trip, I remember often being impatient and jittery, perhaps from culture shock, perhaps from not knowing how to live without grinding and studying. This sense of not feeling comfortable in my skin plagued me during my early adulthood. From the outside I was doing splendidly: I had married the woman I loved, I had gained admission into medical school and was performing well in every way, but deep inside, I was never at ease, never confident, and never grasping the source of my anxiety. I had some unclear sense that I had been scarred deeply by my early childhood and felt that I didn’t belong, that I was not as worthy or deserving as others. How I would love to repeat that trip now with the serenity of my current self!”
        Irvin D. Yalom. “Becoming Myself. A Psychiatrist’s Memoir.” Basic Books, 2017.

     “While we all want to move beyond trauma, the part of our brain that is devoted to ensuring our survival (deep below our rational brain) is not very good at denial. Long after a traumatic experience is over, it may be reactivated at the slightest hint of danger and mobilize disturbed brain circuits and secrete massive amounts of stress hormones. This precipitates unpleasant emotions intense physical sensations, and impulsive and aggressive actions. These posttraumatic reactions feel incomprehensible and overwhelming. Feeling out of control, survivors of trauma often begin to fear that they are damaged to the core and beyond redemption. 
     Research … has revealed that trauma produces actual physiologic changes, including recalibration of the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity, and alterations in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant. We now know that trauma compromises the brain area that communicates the physical, embodied feeling of being alive. These changes explain why traumatized individuals become hypervigilent to threat at the expense of spontaneously engaging in their day-to-day lives. They also help us understand why traumatized people so often keep repeating the same problems and have such trouble learning from experience. We now know that their behaviors are not the result of moral failings or signs of lack of willpower or bad character – they are caused by actual changes in the brain.
     This vast increase in our knowledge about the basic process that underlie trauma has also opened up new possibilities to palliate or even reverse the damage. We can now develop methods and experiences that utilize the brain’s own natural neuroplasticity to help survivors feel fully alive in the present and move on with their lives."
     Bessel Van Der Kolk. “The Body Keeps the Score. Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.” Penguin Books, 2015.

      “Be curious, not judgmental.” Walt Whitman
 

Christi Belcourt - "Quiet Moment of Gratitude" - christibelcourt.com

Who is Suffering?

     “… our illness is not a replication of something countless others have had before us, nor an accident of fate unrelated to ourselves but is in fact the opposite: a message from our deepest selves. And it is a message that is by and large not being heard. 
     Thus, beyond diagnosis, illness can be a call to rediscover our original alignment, to re-establish our essential wholeness; and chronic illness or pain is a particularly insistent caller. This realization saves a lot of energy! If, instead of encountering illness in ourselves as a call to arms in a psychic war against bits and pieces of our bodies and minds, we attempt to understand our symptoms in the light of the whole of our being, suddenly the question is no longer the primarily academic one of finding a label for a particular pattern of discomforts but rather one of a feeling investigation into our judgments and fears and the way they restrict our life energies. Instead of asking, What disease do I have? the question becomes, Why do I restrict energy in the particular way that I do? In other words, just who is it that is hurting?”


     “All emotions are modifications of one primordial, undifferentiated emotion that has its origin in the loss of awareness of who you are beyond name and form.” Eckhart Tolle


       Michael Greenwood. “The Unbroken Field. The Power of Intention in Healing.” Paradox publishers, 2004.

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