Grieving & Preventing the Spiral
Today I found myself grieving the loss of my family. Since the divorce, nothing is the same.
My daughters have gone their own ways, have begun living their lives in separate towns far from me. This weekend, they were visiting to celebrate my birthday. This morning they left.
The tears came with no way to control them. My chest ached and my head went foggy, making it impossible to concentrate on my work of anything of importance.
What I’ve learned about grief is that it can appear like a tsunami — unexpected, unannounced, uninvited.
But today was different. I felt the need to sit with my grief in a new way.
At first, I let it be. I allowed the tears to flow and the pain to well up into my throat and the pain to begin to thicken and get heavy in my body. But just before it took me over completely, I had a new awareness.
In the moment that my grief seemed to get momentum enough to pull me downward into a dark, spiraling pit, I decided I could take control. I decided that I could be with the grief but not allow it to own me. I could remain in sovereignty, not allowing it to control me.
When I felt the grief taking over and closing in, I decided to energetically erect a retaining wall. Much like you see on the hillsides in Malibu, retaining walls keep erosion from pulling homes down to the road or ocean below during storms. Something in me said I could erect my own energetic retaining wall for my grief and this felt true.
As I sat, with eyes closed, I imagined that there was a solid boundary all around me. I could sit in my place and just feel all the grief without moving. I could be with the grief and feel it, label it, own it without getting lost in it. In this awareness, something shifted. I felt free from shame. I could indulge the grief that wanted to flow without fear because, for the first time, it no longer felt destructive.
Grief can actually help us heal. For me, sitting in the grief helped me slowly shift my focus from the pain to gratitude.
I am so fortunate to have two amazing daughters who came and spent this time with me. I am blessed that we all are in good health so that we could spend time together in person during this pandemic. I am lucky to have made it through divorce and have my family in tact, ironically, despite the dissolution of the relationship between my husband and me. So grateful.
I am certain that grief will show up again, unexpected.
With this new approach, I feel more likely to welcome it next time. I feel that I now can do what I’ve done with so many other emotions through the years - I can sit with them and ask them what they want me know.
I can lean in and listen to what it is that they are trying to inform me of.
What I know to be ture is this: Inner personal work continues to bless me on many levels after twenty years in my practice. We never stop doing our work, we only have new days and new ways to engage with the lessons learned.