Grief Work is Soul Work
Find out how to become a willing apprentice to the heartache we each carry
Our Own Unique Journey
“So don't be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don't know what work they are accomplishing within you?” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke; Letters to a Young Poet
An essential principle that the Hakomi method cultivates in our life is the ability to be with whatever is arising, and to honour whatever is showing up in the moment. Sure, we don't just land there, it is a journey (ultimately a lifetime's journey) that we can travel together, taking in the scenery, and gathering our 'village' of parts along the way.
When it comes to Grief work, this journey is infused with sweetness and longing and heartache, but it also shows up as anger, rage, despair, jealousy, pain, confusion and any other emotion that creates the unique cocktail of experiences that we have in relation to loss.
What has been essential for me in my times of grief and loss, is to locate my experience in a much more vast experience of understanding. Wisdom teachers such as Pema Chôdrôn who live and breathe this more expansive view, can be a light at the end of a very (very!) long tunnel.
How we approach grief profoundly affects what comes to us in return; it is about finding our way, as Francis Weller coins it, in "right relationship" with sorrow, "neither too far away nor too close."
In this way, we learn to be with grief, as a consort of our soul that offers connection to self, to other, and to that which is greater than all; spirit.
This is the great service of Hakomi Psychotherapy - bringing the psychological wisdom of the West to the spiritual wisdom of the East together, and then providing the sacred container of deep listening and respectful attention that can receive the most painful and sorrowful revelations.
Below I offer some of Chôdrôn's wisdom teachings (from the Buddhist lineage) around how to be with grief and loss that have really supported my journey.
Likewise, the collective wisdom of indigenous cultures who know how to 'do grief' shine forth, offering maps and rituals along the way.
I offer one such map here - from Francis Weller, in his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow (see below).
And ultimately I offer a Grieving Space - where we grant a profound permission to enter into a place of sorrow, to work with it, to explore its contours and textures and to become familiar with the landscape of loss. This is the Hakomi approach.
Without our Grieving Space, we can fall into symptoms of depression, anxiety, dullness and despair. To start here is to acknowledge the call of the Soul and the soul-work of Grief.
“Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.”
Francis Weller
THE GATES OF GRIEF
Francis Weller introduced me to the idea of 'gates' which we pass through in life as we encounter loss. (You can read more on this in his book; The Wild Edge of Sorrow)
Naming these different gates helps us to appreciate the nuances of how grief shows up in our life, and perhaps to validate the unique challenges and opportunities in our own experience of grief and loss.
The gates of Grief can be summed up as...
1/ All that we love we will lose
2/ The places that did not receive love
3/ The sorrows of the world
4/ What we expected but did not receive
5/ Ancestral grief
I outline these gates below ...
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
~ Mary Oliver (excerpt from Blackwater Woods poem)
All that we love, we will lose
"Death is not something that happens at the end of life. Death happens every moment. We live in a wondrous flow of birth and death. The end of one experience is the beginning of the next experience, which quickly comes to its own end, leading to a new beginning. It's like a river continuously flowing." ~ Pema Chôdrôn
Wow! This is a useful acknowledgement to Life. Death and loss are inevitable in life AND ALSO Life is a continuously flowing river. It's a paradox of living that brings us closer to the Truth of reality, where we have the opportunity to hold seemingly opposite truths side by side.
And along the way, we still need to learn the art of acknowledging the small and large deaths in our Life. To do so honours the reality of our here-and-now experience.
I have learnt that when I offer a ritual to acknowledge my loss, the loss itself can be held and felt in a very tender and intimate way. I have a recent example, on a small scale, but I think it points to the principle of ritual, and the role ritual has in our grieving process.
Loss can also include Preperatory Grief – the grief of what is to come, most commony around a health crisis for our self or a loved one. This grief is the beginning of the unraveling. Grieving at this early stage, when the loss hasn't yet happened, but feels imminent, also acknowledges what is here now, in the feeling body.
There is so much to be discovered in the journey of Grief, where Grief necessitates a much-needed turning inwards to our own inner experience, as well as to lift outwards towards connection and community. Each loss brings us closer to learning our dance steps with these sometimes polarising impulses, and where we get stuck and need extra support.
"Through grief, we are initiated into a more inclusive conversation between our singular lives and the soul of the world"
~ Francis Weller
The places that did not receive love
"Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy" ~ Pema Chôdrôn
In Hakomi, we work with what is called "Exiled Parts"- these are the places within us that have been wrapped in shame and banished to the farthest shores of our lives.
When we are unwilling or unable to feel these parts, then we live with a perpetual sense of loss, but as Weller poignantly states: we cannot grieve for something we feel is outside our circle of worth. That is; we feel the presence of sorrow, but are unable to grieve it.
This shame can inadvertently cause us to act from our 'pain body' causing either harm to our Self or others. And this too must be grieved, eventually.
Regret and shame are heavy sorrows.
This is big territory and is held with so much compassion for our human condition. For this, our human conditioning needs a wider lens to help us lean towards our exiled parts.
In a Hakomi session, we learn that our 'worthless' parts are really wounded parts. While we hold this space together, it opens the door for a more compassionate view of our Self, and we share and name what is present. Here we are meeting the shame with love, respect and dignity rather than blame.
"Sorrow is a sustained note in the song of being alive"
~ Francis Weller
The Sorrows of the World
"Be kinder to yourself and then let your kindness flood the world" ~ Pema Chôdrôn
Personally, to open to the sorrows of the world is a tricky one for me. It can feel bigger and more existential in nature than our personal grief, and because of that, it has the appearance of being a bottomless hole. We can be aloof and discompassionate towards the world as a way to protect our Self, but like our 'exiled parts' we can feel it. I like how Susan Griffin puts it in her poem; "at the center of/ all my sorrows/ I have felt a presence/ that was not mine alone".
The sorrows of the world is felt as non-local and non-specific, but for those who are sensitive, it can be felt as 'mine'. Or certainly 'bigger than mine'.
There is also the sorrow of our Earth; Gaia; "each extinction is a unique voice silenced in a universal conversation of which we ourselves are only one participant. When the tiny wings of the last Xerces blue butterfly ceased to flutter, our world grew quieter by a whisper and duller by a hue" writes environmentalist Mark Jerome Walters, and to open to this is to open our heart wider and wider and wider.
I have discovered it helps to open to this tone of grief as a reflected window into my own sense of separation, and to recognise the inbuilt yearning towards connections (to my Self, to Other, to Gaia, to Spirit). I wrote about this in my blog post here.
Grief comes from the Latin word gravis, meaning "heavy", from which we also get grave and gravity. Weller points out we use the word 'gravitas' to speak of a quality in some people who are able to carry the weight of the world with a dignified bearing. ... These women and men become our elders, the ones who can hold the village in times of great challenge.
Can we metabolise our suffering into something creative, beautiful and ultimately sacred?
Holy One
Grant me the capacity to live in the creative tension of gratitude and grief!
What we expected but did not receive
"Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us exactly what we need to know" ~ Pema Chôdrôn
At the core of this grief is the longing to belong.
Be-longing. A clever word-play of the English language hey!
When we are born, we are biologically designed to anticipate a certain quality of safety, welcome, belonging, attunement, engagement and delight in who we authentically are.
When this isn't given, without knowing it, we feel this as a missing experience, and create compensatory strategies to avoid the pain of its absence.
The paradox of this sorrow is that it can only be acknowledged once the missing experience has become explicit - and usually that means having an experience of the opposite - the contrasting state.
When it becomes apparent that we've held steadfast to strategies that avoid the pain of not belonging, then we are able to take in a new opportunity of belonging. This is a gate for grief - grieving all the times we could not, or did not, receive this essential need.
"Grief work is not passive; it implies an on-going practice of deepening, attending and listening. It is an act of devotion, rooted in love and compassion"
Ancestral Grief
"The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently." ~ Pema Chôdrôn
Ancestral grief is the grief that is carried in our bodies from sorrows experienced by our ancestors.
It is the wall-paper of perception that we inherit, it is the persistent hum of sorrow in the background of our lives.
And it is the loss of our connection to our ancestors, where our foundation is missing and our relationship with the wider world is exiled. We can feel spiritually bereft and disconnected.
We need the wisdom of grief, and its movement towards connection, in order to heal these wounds and make sense of our place in the world.
"The heart that breaks open can contain the entire universe"
Grief work is Soul Work
"Let difficulty transform you. And it will! In my experience, we just need help in learning how not to run away." ~ Pema Chôdrôn
Our duty is to mourn, to live in the ashes of our loss, and to regard this time as holy. In this, it will allow us to matabolize the bitter tincture of loss, in its own time.
Everything, including healing, has its time. It's our job not to get in the way of the organic unfolding of this healing. It can help to have in our awareness, a call to a higher perspective - to reach towards our own 'greater goodness'.
These passages (below) from The Wild Edge of Sorrow are anthems to our Soul. May they inspire our healing journey with courage and devotion, knowing that grief work requires our capacity to lean in and discover our own healing capacity. After all; grief is the kindest of tricky emotions, and it is a great place to start leaning-in to our own sacred life.
... Grief work is soul work. It requires courage to face the world as it is and not turn away, to not burrow into a hole of comfort and anesthetization. Grief deepens our connection with soul, taking us into territories of vulnerability, exposing the truth of our need for others in times of loss and suffering.
... We are made real and tangible by our experience of sorrow; as it adds substance and weight to our world ... we are stripped of excess and revealed as human in our time of grief. Grief ripens us, pulls up from the depths of our soul what is most authentic in our being.
... Without some measure of intimacy with Grief, our capacity to be with any other emotion or experience in our life is greatly compromised.
As psychotherapist and neuroscientist Linda Graham wrote in her book Bouncing Back, "the process of being seen, understood and accepted by an attuned empathetic other engenders a genuine sense of self-acceptance [and] a feeling that we are profoundly okay."
This is the resilience that we can take out into the world. When we're ready.
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