Who wants to feel grief? It asks something of us…

Grief isn’t just sadness.

It contains a whole world of emotions, in so many different flavours. Sadness is one - and rage, anger, frustration, ‘it’s not fair!’ and railing against what we can’t change. Numbness and shut down, depression and dissociation. Sometimes guilt. Helplessness, hopelessness. Sometimes grief is a howling whirlwind, sometimes it’s a soft and tender melancholy. Grief is raw, and real, and very human.

And many of us (most of us?) are afraid of it.

Which makes sense - we don’t do grief very well. We don’t do most big emotional states very well. We’re not very good at feeling how we feel, at giving time and space to things, at moving at the slower pace of our feeling animal bodies instead of striving to move at the pace of our quick thinking minds.

Who wants to feel grief?

Grief asks something of us.

It asks us to slow down. It asks us to put aside everything but what’s immediate. It asks us to gather together - even though our grief is a path only we can walk, we’re not made to walk it  alone. Grief asks us to be raw, and real, and honest.

It asks us to feel. To take the time, in our animal bodies, outside of our thinking minds, to feel.

One of my teachers tells a beautiful story of a woman he met who was filled with joy - he commented in her joyful radiance, and her response was that she felt so much joy because she cried a lot.

It’s a story I think about a lot. What if we kept up to date with grief? If we didn’t bottle it up, but had space in our lives to feel it regularly? If we had community and ritual to help us hold it? If we knew how to create a solid ground under ourselves to rest on as we felt our way through life? 

What might happen then?

These questions are some of what inspired the gathering together of a group to explore what it might be like to tend to our losses, to gather in community, to put aside our thinking minds for a time and feel - to create a solid ground for grief, and to see what happens next.

An experiment in supporting our feeling, animal bodies, an experiment in what it means to be human.

There’s still time to join us if you’d like to :)

We begin on Monday, Australian time - click here if you’d like more info.