The process of grieving and the wild river of the heart.
The process of grieving is a wild river. It’s not linear, it’s not composed, it’s not controllable or predictable how it will unravel but it will unravel nonetheless. The more you fight it the more it will lash back until you learn the courage to let go.
I used to think of grief as sadness. I knew there was a process of grieving with steps and stages but I still thought of it as sadness. It is and it isn’t. It is a heaviness that feels like it’s suffocating the heart, yes, but it’s so much more than that. It may start as simply sadness, but it doesn’t end at that.
The tentacles of grief run wide and deep. It’s a vast web of complexity that cannot be constrained to simply sadness. It’s a boiling entity of every feeling and emotion you can imagine. What’s comes to the surface will vary. For each person and situation, the process of grieving will be unique to them. It’s a dark potion of visceral pain, rage, relief, disgust, guilt, joy, bitterness, resentment, gratitude, profound love, confusion, and it is illumination, offering a deeper awareness of life.
The process of grieving breaks the heart and it has the potential to crack it wide open if we let it.
Grief is everything and it’s uncomfortable. It can breed apathy, hopelessness, and it can swallow your interest in anything and everything wholly. I think part of the process is surrendering to this, allowing ourselves to fall to the ground, and it’s also knowing when to get up when we don’t want to.
So much of the feminine teaches us to surrender to the underworld, surrender to the darkness, the discomfort of the stillness and silence that reveals what we want to resist. We have to find stillness and allow the wild river to move and churn, and clear as the current moves through us.
Moving grief is a journey of finding acceptance and processing all of the emotions, and pain that come up with accepting the truth of what is, and what isn't. It's accepting all the polarities within your heart as being truth. It’s accepting their contradictory nature and allowing that to be okay.
The process of grieving has layers.
Grief isn't shed in one go. It's a spiral of transformation, and there are often layers you’ll always come back to, recalibrating deeper into freedom. The process of grieving is just like the wild river will that will take you through rapids into calmness, to a free-fall into more churning, turbulent waters, and back to calm.
The one thing grief asks of all of us is surrender and trust. It asks us to loosen our grip and allow it to flow. It teaches us that trust doesn’t mean we’ll get what we want, but that we’ll get to experience life for the richness it has to offer us. Trust grants us a fluidity that doesn’t come from fighting the uncontrollable. Trust grants us inner freedom.
I write this as an invocation for the sweet container of stillness, courage, and strength that can midwife the grieving process in all of its complexities. I write this in the name of the compassion and love that is needed to make space for the river of vulnerability to flow - for the space that allows our raw and messy hearts to release, and feel safe in the polarities of all that they feel.
I write this as an affirmation that your rage, your pain, your relief, and your confusion are all valid. I write this as a reminder that there is always new life, new beginnings, and change on the horizon that simply couldn’t be if nothing ever ended or changed.
May we feel safe in the waves, in the spiral, and in the depths of truth that doesn't make sense, as divine trust and serenity are called upon to guide us through the darkness.
The process of grieving is the process of shedding, letting go, and death - for these are all prerequisites of re/birth, growth, transformation, and making room for a new life in its many forms.
May were loosen our grip on our heart, letting it flow freely. May we loosen our grip on our stories, and to the attachment of what was, or what we had hoped would be.
There is a time when blind faith is ignorant, and there is a time when it’s all we have. Learning to trust the unknown comes from making it through the unforeseeable. Moving big grief is a process of initiation as we face the darkest hour. It’s an initiation of surrendering to the flames, burning to dust, and rising like the Phoenix from the ashes.
Grief is not just sorrow, it’s the polarities of every crevasse of emotion that are waiting for permission to flow. To simmer and release.
Slowing down, going within, and opening your inner eyes and ears can be terrifying because once you listen, you hear, and know you have to accept the truth of what is or isn’t - and from here the flood gates open. Grief beckons us to surrender when all we can do is resist. The moment we take our first breath of considered acceptance, the movement can begin.
When the fear of holding back is surrendered to, the rage can burn brightly and light your life force again, the confusion can unravel, and clarity can come. The wild river can begin to flow. It’s a culmination of endings, beginnings, and change, all in the midst of chaos. It’s a journey of learning (and/or force) to acclimate and alchemize.
Though resiliency is shedding the bindings of what’s we’ve endured finding our power, this stage of the process is different. The process of grieving needs a very precious and sacred container to move and transmute.
Grief cannot be bypassed. It can not be brushed aside as a gift in the big picture, or an opportunity for growth. Grief is raw and messy. It is not to be tamed, it is to move its course.
Emotions are energy in motion, and when the motion is dammed, it hardens. Like scar tissue. The sooner you tend it, the easier it is to break up. The sooner you practice receptivity from those you love, the more easily your pain can move on and through.
Self-nurturance, self-love, and surrounding yourself with support, people who honor your truth, vulnerability, and can be present with what is, is gold. There is a stillness that grief calls for, and there is an illumination that grief grants us. It illuminates our ability to receive and be seen and illuminates the purest of friendships and support that embraces the rawness of our truth.
We can let heartache make us cynical or we can embrace this quality of darkness that is part of life and try to learn from it. There is never-ending change, endings, and loss, and there is never-ending new beginning and sprouts of new life because of it.
No matter how much we know this to be true, it has no place in the grieving process until we are viscerally ready for that. That embrace is the light at the end of the tunnel but if we try and skip the wild river to get there, the raging waters will keep pulling us back in.
Trust, trust, trust. The light will come.
Be tender with yourself sweet one. Call upon the Divine Mother, Kuan Yin, and all the divine feminine deities, and Goddess of unconditional love and compassion. Call upon self-compassion. Call upon your dearest, friends, the earth, the sun, and the moon. Call upon patience and love.
Grief is tender, and it needs to be met with a tender embrace. Know the power of your own tender embrace. Meet the Divine Mother within yourself. Meet the healer within yourself and tend yourself with humble compassion for the strength of your fragility. Open yourself to the power of this process.
Let yourself be devoured and rebirthed anew.
With love,
Abby
