Grief is Grounding...

Last week I shared an invitation to work with one of our more difficult human emotions: rage. This week we're going deeper into the well of human suffering – not because it’s fun, but because it is present.

Take a deep breath. Can you sense the thickness of the air around you? Can you feel the density of the energetic field? Perhaps you are personally suffering right now. Perhaps it’s rich and deep.

Or perhaps it feels like you’re walking on eggshells, taking care not to disturb the feelings of someone (or someones) you love, lest they teeter on the verge of a great and unshakeable sadness.

Or maybe you’re not feeling this heaviness at all… and you’re wondering what the fuss is all about? Regardless, I invite you to lean in. Stay. Sit here a while. Sip tea with me. Allow yourself, if you dare, to taste the complexity and weight of this moment.

We have lived. We have fought. We have loved. And we have lost.

The poet Mary Oliver writes, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on…”

Inviting us back to our senses. To the sensate. To the deeply sensational experience that is life in a human body.

It sounds like a good idea. When we’re ready to toss away our cares – to quit being good – and open up more fully to aliveness, possibility, and joy.

But what about the moments where grief is the only body-portal we can access?

What if ‘being good’ is the only way I know how to survive?

Last month at the ACTIVATE Summit Costa Rica, we surprised ourselves with a spontaneous grief ritual. Among other things, it served as a celebration life for a host of recently lost organizations the non-profit sector, and a lifetime of personal investment in meaningful work in education, DEI and foreign aid on the part of a few of our attendees.

What we found is that each of us – in every sector, every industry, and every line of work, had something significant to grieve.

Personal losses aside (of which, of course, there have also been many), each of us found a connection with the feeling of loss when facing the hopes and dreams we had in our early careers for what our industries “could be.” When feeling into the tone of the political climate and evolution of our workplaces, we felt the presence of a wave of emotion that was much bigger than any one of us.

As we tapped into the longing in our hearts, we received guidance from the wise inner compass that guides our most purposeful work. And as we looked with eyes-wide-open at what we humans managed to co-created thus far, we felt the pain of what we – and our organizations – have not yet quite become.

How could we not?

Opening the door of grief can be scary. Like a deep dark well, it’s hard to trust that there is even a bottom. If I fall in… who will pull me out?

Yet grief is one of our most simple, humble and human emotions. And as such, we humans have been navigating its waters since the dawn of our existence.

For those of us who took the risk to spend time, energy, emotional and social capital to let ourselves feel the pain of the present moment – we received an incredible gift: the gift of a whole and integrated psych in a time of fracture, confusion and loss. And, almost unexpectedly, this gift opened another door: the door to an authentic and grounded sense of hope.

At the end of our week together this activity was almost universally cited as the highlight of the entire retreat. Why? Because where and when do we truly allow ourselves to grief, to feel and to heal…in community?

I recently joined a group session with one of my mentors. The heaviness again was palpable… but the collective resistance was high. Many members of this community, like myself, have the privilege to dissociate – to turn away from the pain and loss at least some of the time. And while that strategy can be helpful, even necessary, to retain our sanity while operating in a world that can often feel insane… the opposite can also be true:

allowing ourselves to experience the heaviness of collective grief or anger when we could otherwise avoid it, can bring us back to our own humanity.

Grief is grounding. It makes us real. When we experience or witness suffering, the emotion itself drags us out of our heads and back into our bodies…

where the power lies. Where the transformation lies. Embracing rather than resisting this heaviness opens us to our depth. The alchemy is in allowing this to bring us into contact with our rawness – and thus our wholeness.

Just a few days before, I’d woken up at 4am, shattered with despair. I wasn’t even 100% sure what I was feeling, or why. It was shortly after the riots began in Los Angeles… but it brought me into contact with an unhealed part of my own history of oppression. Holding space for myself, I let myself cry.

Like tending a child, I asked myself: “And what else? And what else? And what else?” A layer of trauma revealed itself. It didn’t make sense, and it did.

A few hours later I received a message that the perpetrator of this particular trauma had been found guilty and sentenced to prison. I had no way of knowing they were even on trial.

But again, I am shown that we are all connected.

This week I offer you an invitation to calibrate. If you are already swimming in deep wells of grief, pain or sadness, I offer you my heart and a simple invitation.

Be you. Take care of yourself. Allow the process to move you, and to move through you. Be it to anger, to relief or to action, these moments in life are designed for your grace.

But if you are sitting at the edge of the well, looking away or looking down… I invite you to risk slipping in. Not forever. Not even completely, if that would be too much for now. But in a way that requires less resistance than it takes to hold back the tears.

In your movement practice,

Feel the weight of your own body and heart. Rather than moving to run away from, or override, move to go into the well. There is no way to do it wrong. Even avoiding or running isn’t wrong. It’s all about listening to your body. Ask: what else? And what else? And what else? And if tears or sound come through, let them come.

In life,

Set aside some time alone, or time in the kind of company where you feel safe. Find a quiet space. And ask yourself – what is there here to feel? And be open to what unfolds.

Several of my clients have found both grounding and clarity over the past few weeks as a result of a process that started out with pain.

While this may be a new practice (or not)… you are not alone.

With compassion, warmth and care,