I’ve been revisiting some of my old writing on grief, as I am preparing to facilitate a big full moon grief ritual for the Mourning Moon. Here is a piece I wrote before the last grief ritual I led, in 2021. If you happen to be a woman in SWFL, join us on Friday, December 1st for this important occasion.
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Our grief is sacred. Our grief is holy.
Grief is meant to be expressed. It's meant to flow like a river of what society would deem ugly, messy, imperfect emotion.
It's a raging river or a sorrowful stream. It's a crack of lightning or the dip of the branches of a willow tree. Grief is all-consuming or an ache in the background.
The thing about grief: when not allowed to flow, it will dam. Blockages of grief block the flow of joy. Life becomes a little more grey, a little more drab. The vibrancy dulls when grief is forced to lay in hiding.
As humans in Western society, most of us have not been taught how to grieve. We have been taught that to be "strong" we must hold our emotions at bay. To cry is to express weakness. To wail and thrash in grief is to need psychiatric support.
This is a lie.
To fully express grief is messy and uncontained. It's a wild thing, to be fully in the midst of your grief. To let yourself fall into the depths of your sorrow and to let the waters flow through you unabated.
This experience will mark you and shake you in ways that ultimately make you more ALIVE.
We are meant to feel the full depths of our pain as well as our joy. Whoever is selling you pills, plans, distractions, meditations, and programs to help you eliminate your pain are robbing you of the very thing that makes you most human.
We aren't meant to eliminate pain. We are meant to feel it. Flow through it. Then integrate it.
There are unfortunately no shortcuts, no hacks, to feeling the totality of your grief.
So will you continue to push your wild humanity down into the cage where society thinks it belongs or will you allow that untamed essence to be free, in all its monstrous, chaotic beauty?