Grieving and healing

Have the British forgotten how to grieve? says the headline of a Telegraph article
 


You will trust your life and yield into its guidance or your social conditioning runs it for you. Of course one can flip in and out of both.

There is no right way to grieve because everyone is different.

If we leave our business unfinished, we carry it around until we finish it.
But no one will open to what they are not ready - nor accept and move on.

"Move on' is a full willingness to embrace the now and look forward from a sense of connection.

We none of us control life. Never did. Never will. But the heart has a wisdom we cut off from in our self-vanities.

Honouring that someone is in our life need not wait on their passing - but at least in joining to honour someone who we share, the love that they are IS shared - regardless their 'faults'.

Perhaps the dead disappear to our sight because we cannot bear the light. We see but darkness and absence.

The public figures are symbolic to our times. Can one grieve for who one does not know? If one has been truly touched - why yes.
How much of grief is about our self - our own life - our own desires and perhaps broken dreams? Most. But relationship is the love in which we know we exist. Our private thoughts do not give us life - but only seem to hold something back from Life.
Learning of Life is transformative. We are not as we thought. But then, how shall we think, see and act? From a more deeply honest connection? With the love we have shared in our step? Why not!

Grief - 2

It is common for another to say they are sorry for our suffering even when it is not any of their doing. Offering a 'touch' to a sense of one we perceive as hurt. I welcome the touch. I feel the hurt - but I don't seek to soothe it - but rather allow it to rest in me as one with my love. And as such it isn't hurt.

One of the things that came up strong in me while in grief was how others projected their stuff onto me and then acted out their fantasy on me - with expectations that I fit their needs.

Whilst it was easy if I paused, to understand the self defence mechanism at work I none the less felt at times outraged or completely unrelated with. In the former is my unmet desire or need for love - albeit in terms I can accept and understand - and in the latter is a true insight into the surface meaninglessness of much of what passes as currency as human relationship.

We are so unseen in this life - but then are we not ourselves likewise so often too 'busy' to notice and discern each other - until suddenly we cant find each other! We deprive ourselves of love.

I don't believe love is involved in struggle - but when we calm of our preoccupation in struggle, love's nature rises of itself - as the simple truth. And eventually we accept and align with the simple truth rather than fight with reality. At least to find the next step.

But all of us together - humanly - try to 'make a self' in a world that does not and can not last - and do so in ignorance of the love that we are. Searching for our own meanings in shifting and conflicting conditions. 

When love finds its name written in our hearts - we begin to look out upon a different world - from a fresh perspective. Love’s loss - lived humanly - re opened me to love - because it is the loss that I would lose and the love that I will cleave to. 

There is much confusion in the human heart to be healed and this can only come one willing step at a time. We generally don't like living in or through the territory of raw exposure and seek to cover it with a regained sense of self. 

It took me three years or so before I freely came to a sense of willingness to move on. Until I felt it, I trusted myself to be as I was moved to be. I also lost my marriage at the same time. I knew it in my heart - but couldn't let that come out - that took many years of pain and in many ways is a kind of grief that is hard to speak of - losing a beloved one while they are alive.

I wore myself out going round and round the same thoughts, over and over. Seeking love where it was not.

I sense somewhere that that was the point - for me to live this and be changed by having lived so.

All things are known in silence. A fullness that cannot be found from within the noise.

I don't say this as any kind of answer - but simply as a possible direction.

To live each day - to live this day - from even a little willingness for the heart’s blessing to abide and share.

When we neglect or forget to love, we starve ourselves of life.

Grief

June 29, 2010 at 4:53 am

I lost my 16 year old first born daughter to suicide. 15 years ago.
Loss has come up sharply as a fundamental thread of what I call ‘my life’.
I grieved my daughter – but I was also grieving ‘my life’.
The heart opens in ways that the mind cannot long abide – and yet the story of the mind is not the purity of the loving.
I associate the loving with Soul.
The Soul of me opened through FEELING the love – but the mind subverted that purity by asserting its story – and grabbing my attention in ways I couldn’t altogether be free of.
I didn’t fight anything during the grief – I don’t find fighting to be a way of peace.
Our minds are so entrenched – so in the grip of a willfulness to make sense of everything so that I GET what I need.
But despite the fearfulness of that sort of survival intent, love arose within my life and undid me of my grip.

I might seem whacky – but I feel to discern the gift no matter what the appearance. At least, there is a love of truth in me that prompts and uncovers this willingness in me despite experience of unspeakable hurt.

For a long while the world was simply the footprint of where she had walked. The absence of her light and being. And I had to do whatever I felt I had to do – or leave undone.

I had to let love touch me deeper than I had ever allowed anyone or anything to touch me. Words aren’t going to say much now – I’m not going to be able to say.

We put our love outside ourself and do not recognize where it really is. But you are the love – and the giving is the way you remember. Screaming and stuff can be an act of self love – for if something doesn’t release that limits us unbearably – we need to find any way to find the flow – the being – the life.

It is here – always. I forget this a lot – but I remember it more.
My mind seems to be designed to protect me from sharing love – but I don’t regard that as the truth or nature of Mind itself – but as a sort of complex story of me that once seemed so real and now really doesn’t speak for the love and life I feel graced to share – (yet still have the temptation to usurp or lose by following my own thinking-mind instead of listening in the heart).

I am glad to feel your presence- though a shared sense of loss has touched us both.

In Peace

Brian