The experiences of grief

Grief is a response to a belonging that has distanced us from who or what we love. 

We not only grieve the loss of a loved one or a pet, but we grieve the loss of faith, our children leaving home, the paths we didn’t walk, the family we never had, the suffering of the planet, and in these times we are collectively grieving humanity as a whole. 

In our culture, we are deeply unskilled when it comes to grieving. We find distractions, and keep the feelings at a distance. Over time, this unspoken shame and perceived weakness around grief surfaces into something unrecognizable.  

By trusting that every loss has meaning and all losses are to be grieved is essential to becoming whole again. Each person's grief is unique to their own spirit, but the commonality of grief with each one of us, is that we share a need to be witnessed. This doesn’t mean a need for *fixing* or lessening it, it means to have someone fully present in the magnitude of the loss without trying to point out the silver lining. 

We’ve all heard of the seven stages of grief, I restructure this into the consistent experiences of grief. 

When we hear about stages of grief and it holds an energy that once you complete those stages,  you have moved on from it and life returns to normal. 

We won’t ever go back to normal, nor should we want to. 

Grief is not something that heals with time or once we hit a particular stage it’s over and done.  Grief shows up time and again and each experience may not appear like it once did. It stings less or not at all, but it’s still the experience. 

Through different spiritual practices such as meditation, EFT (tapping), journaling, art therapy and ceremony - permission to be vulnerable is offered and it invites us to honor the process, and be in a place of curiosity rather than judgment. 

We don’t grieve because life is unfair or untimely, We grieve because we truly loved.