Grieving

Life’s constant stream of endings, losses, changes naturally arouses our feelings. Often a wide range of feelings and experiences, including sorrow, regret, devastation, elation, anger, relief, resentment. We may suddenly become flooded with memories, with what if’s. Our psyche, our physiology, our perspective on life is altered. We grieve. And yet our powerful capacity for grieving is largely undeveloped, overlooked, undervalued and misunderstood in our culture.

Ongoing life experiences of attachment and separation, situations of helplessness and disappointment naturally arouse grief that we tend to suppress. We experience separations, losses and endings through deaths, relationship and friendship breakups, aging, career changes, geographical moves, children growing up and leaving home, discrimination, failed dreams, interruptions in life through illness, injury or trauma.  Our personal grief is further fuelled by grieving consciously or unconsciously for our planet, our environment or the state of our world.

Whether transitions are planned or unpredicted, whether changes are chosen or beyond our control, these endings demand that we leave people, things, places, or a way of life behind.

Whether grieving, suppressing grief or stuck in grieving it is possible to learn the skill of grieving fully and responsively.

Through a range of experiential forms, including the creative use of ceremony, it is possible to release the grip that the impact of loss has on your heart, your mind, your body, your feelings, your life and create a map toward strengthening your core and renewing your wholeness in order to step forward and embrace the rest of your life.

We don’t often make time to grieve. Sometimes we just don’t give ourselves the permission and space — we keep a ‘brave face’ or ‘stay strong’ thinking that’s what’s best for us and those around us.

Other times the endings, losses, or changes are not one acute event or episode, but a gradual shift with no clear time to mourn. In such cases, we may not know how to actually process our grief.

When we don’t grieve fully and responsively, we carry the experience(s) with us and hold them in our bodies. This can have difficult implications for our physical, mental and emotional health and wellbeing in the short and long terms.