Grief and Radiant Bliss
We grieve because we’re alive and we love. As fate would have it, I was initiated into womanhood and the true meaning of “Motherhood” by a long, bruise-y grief patch right in the middle of my life. A grief patch is like a cabbage patch, except instead of butterhead lettuce sprouting up, its fresh sources of heartache, fresh wells of loss. And I know for a fact this does not make me unique or special in any way.
I know I was (as you may be) feeling the grief and the rage probably of many generations of women in my family. It’s as if my deeper being, my soul, literally would not allow me to ever move forward in the serious, sacred commitments of actual motherhood or life partnership until I had deeply cleared some serious shit. And until I knew I was doing it for completely authentic, soulful reasons. Not because of my ego’s timeline or because it was what I was “supposed to do” by X age. (X age, and even the definition of life partnership and what it should be, varies wildly across cultures and historical periods, by the way.)
At first I wanted my grief to end. I kept telling myself, “Okay once I get to the other side of this stage of my life, it’ll be good. . . “ (and “this” stage was a very, very “shit” stage as far as I was concerned). I finally gave up on short-term rescue fantasies and opened fully and deeply to all the grief, all the rage. It was all transpersonal, by the way. I don’t believe any emotion ever truly “belongs” to us. I tapped into grief and rage as such. Deeply. Made good old foxhole buddies with them. As in, oh there you are again. Yes. You can move all the way through my body. Every cell. I will move you through. Back again? Welcome.🙏
One day I found myself writing in my journal, at the advent of a new source of potential, ongoing grief, “I hope I never stop grieving.” I may need to break that down because I don’t want it to be interpreted too simplistically.
I think what I meant was I hope I never stop having a heart that is an open well of any and everything I feel. In other words, a heart that is alive and that loves. Grief, after all, is just one of the many faces of love. I never want to stop loving. Maybe all emotions are the many faces of love.
We tend to prize the good-feeling emotions and to reject and disown the more challenging ones. Most people come to therapy wanting to get rid of some big emotional charge they’ve been carrying (or wanting to more efficiently repress it and then “get happy” on top of that repressed emotional charge), or wanting to get rid of some part of themselves they find really problematic. It annoys the hell out of some people (and this is why I’m not for everyone) but my approach always has and always will involve (if you want to work with me really deeply) going into those emotions and those parts we have deemed “problematic,” really exploring them, sitting with them, unburdening them and finding what treasures and gifts they carry, what invaluable soul parts they are, when they are re-owned, loved, seen and unburdened.
When you close off certain emotions or reject certain parts of yourself, you are closing off your heart to yourself (and therefore to others). You feel because you are alive and you love. Give yourself the gift of finally seeing your emotions for what they are: Not enemies, but sacred carriers of your personal truth.
One layer of gold I gleaned from my underworld journeys was a new clarity that part of my karma/dharma for this life is going through many, many initiations with romantic and erotic love, many of them quite wringer-like, and many much softer. But the feminine path is very much about having your heart wrung out and feeling everything turned up to 11, not avoiding the body or the “passions,” but allowing the body to become a clear channel for all of it, for light, for your sacred truth.
One of the most difficult aspects of my romantic karma has been that, as a woman who is considered “still single” at a certain age (a phrase that seems to falsely denote there are no major past initiations or experiences I’ve had in the romantic domain, which is false), I get lots of advice and input from people about men, about love and about romance. And through my own experiences, I have learned quite a lot. In some ways, I’ve become a deeply coffered repository of nuanced information on men, sex, dating, and the great mystery we call love.
At a certain point (in my deepest pain), I decided I wasn’t going through all of this for nothing. I was going to turn it into alchemical gold. I was going to become an expert on love and the importance of love. I decided there was no better expert on the importance of love than someone who has had to go without it, and who has had many initiations with it (that challenged me to my marrow). Through an extraordinary level of initiation ordeals, an extraordinary level of wisdom may be gleaned. And it’s all for naught if we do not then bring that wisdom to others in deep service — In service to the light, joy, radiance and liberation of all beings.
One of the greatest things I’ve learned is that we are never separate from the love we seek. It is our true nature. It sounds like a trite tea bag statement. But it came through many, many sweaty ceremony hours of deep emotional pain, the sound of vomiting all around me, and swimming fearfully to the very bottom of some of my deepest wounds, and breathing, breathing, breathing through all of it. I came to realize there is an essence holding all of this all the time. Holding the rage, the grief, the deep, heavy helplessness. Holding every challenge. And that essence is love. And if I want to know what to do in my life, all I need to do is listen to that love, and feel how that love wants to MOVE through me.
And when we do that, we become part of a greater love movement. We allow some Great Love to use us as its instrument in the world.
As usual, I did not expect to talk about all this, but I will go deeper with everything discussed here in my next podcast solo episode, launching soon! 🙌