Good grief, people are reading what I write!

In preparation for facilitating my first public grieving ceremony I wrote this little piece on Facebook. Almost straight away a friend called me because what I had written had hit her strongly (in the best possible way I hope) and I found that so moving to think... I'm not just firing off words into the ether for them never to find a home, people are reading. Thank you!

"Grief is so closely associated with "negative" emotions and hard times but grief is immensely healing and healthy if it is given space and permission to flow. When grief is unexpressed it stagnates in our bodies as illness, depression and anxiety. It would be a mistake to think that grief is firstly only associated with death and secondly that it is a linear process with a beginning, middle and end... bereavement is the phenomenon of loss in our lives, the sense that something should be there and isn't... The process of grief is what we do to adjust to that loss, it is the reprogramming and relearning of life and love so we can be balanced again having been unbalanced by loss... That loss might be a death, or something that never was, a big change, the loss of a job, a friendship, an ideal, a fantasy... It can be personal, it can be global... The horrors of war, famine, slavery, hate... How do we adjust to the loss of innocence? To justice? The loss of our peace?

Grieving is both an inner and outer process. the inner process is yours, but what has been largely lost to us is communal grieving, keening, the art and act of collectively releasing.

Communcal grieving is a shamanic act, clearing and healing the stagnant energy in the land, the energy field, the collective and the individual. Souls that have not cleared the bardo are transported by the waves of common sorrow to the Light. The pain and wounds that have festered are cleansed. The knots of tension dissolve. The rampant voices still and quieten. A crescendo of noise, like a great storm, blows all the cobwebs away... Then stills to silence, a great pause... Like the moment before the atom bomb then the great pulse of peace washes through us, the walls, the land, the space.

this is what our world needs right now. I can imagine no greater service to the collective healing of our world today. So much of the ills of this world are due to denial and fear of endings, death, loss. This is life. Cycles and seasons come and go. Drop the resistance, weep!

And feel the healing flow into the void left behind by that you can't currently let go.

Postscript...

Also wish to add that grief is inherited, ancestral grief... So you might be the carrier of grief you simply do not understand. Considering my generation and younger have no memory of the world wars and all their attendant terror... We still carry great burdens of poor mental health, addictions, unhealthy patterns, anger and fear that often seem to have no root in this life. You do not need to know the story of the grief to express it, keening requires no words, no logic. It is the expression of whatever emotion has lost its motion. Come! If you feel called, come!"