Embrace your grief, for there your soul will grow. 
-Carl Jung

   

  

Grief is never far from us, it arrives regularly in each of our lives. It is the blue mood that greets us sometimes daily. It is the melancholy that claims certain times of our lives. It is the longing that never gets filled. It is the intense shattering when our lives are torn apart by pain, illness, loss and death. It can gather in us as a result of living in a egocentric, aggressively competitive, violent, toxic, consumer society.  It is what we are all feeling from the never-ending news of oil spills, climate change, violence, war, mass extinctions and other planetary emergencies of overwhelming proportions.

Grief is an energy that invites us to express our feelings and to embody action. This mysterious energy is soul energy -- it is sacred. Because soul wants us to heal and transform, it won't give up until it has gotten our attention. Through our grief, soul guides us on a wild journey beneath the surface of our daily lives, loosening up the hard and rigid places in our bodies and hearts, allowing us to soften and sometimes to feel like we are falling apart. The alchemy of grief ultimately deepens us, connects us to our creativity, and teaches us how to transform ourselves and our community.

Grief is a normal part of our life. It is because we love that we feel profoundly sad and sometimes even quite angry when we lose a family member or friend. It is because we feel compassion for the world that we break into tears with the news of the loss of children through gun violence and wars, the news of the Gulf oil spill, and mountain top removal in Appalachia.  

We are tempted to escape the darkness of grief. But when we try to disconnect from our sadness, it can become stuck in our bodies, thereby producing toxic emotional and physical states such as anxiety, depression, numbing, and addictions.  When we deny our grief our hearts go into hiding and our grief becomes private and can recycle indefinitely. This denial of grief condemns us to the emotional flatland that we often find in contemporary society.

Feeling our grief can be a subversive act, undermining polite society's agreement to mask and control our feelings. It challenges our philosophies that overly emphasize the mantra of bliss and positivity. By acknowledging and expressing our grief we are refusing to live numb and small lives. This is a kind of radical activism that awakens us to our kinship with life all around us, and connects us to the tears of the world. It is also the needed support for the activist -- whose ability to respond in the world is reliant on an un-congested heart -- only the one who can express his or her sorrows will be available for the deep healing work that is so needed at this time.

Grief can be painful, and even more so if we are grieving alone. We need the presence of a community container AND ritual to heal our grief. With these two key ingredients present we can feel safe and confident enough to descend fully into and process the depth of our sorrows. Without them the healing process is easily aborted and we may find ourselves stuck, longer than might be necessary, in a pit of despair. By a kind of grace, witnessing helps to transform our suffering. Ritual is the primal and universal language for the living world. It is the ancient tried-and-true way to restore us to our natural wholeness, and aligns us to the rhythm of our soul.

Now is not the time to go it alone. In a very real way our entire species is in a collective Underworld/Dark Night of the Soul -- and we will need to link arms for the journey ahead. Our coming together in many new forms, especially in grief and in ritual, will determine how vibrantly we are able to show up for the Great Turning -- the great transformation of our our lives and our world.

Who is this for?:

What to bring:

Doug Van Houten 
Doug is a nature-based body & soul guide, student of Hakomi, apprentice to the honeybee, visual artist, wild ceremonialist, heart-centred activist and guide for Animas Valley Institute (www.animas.org). In this work he draws on the wisdom of indigenous cultures, the natural world, depth-psychology, eco-psychology, dreams, poetry, and many cross cultural soul-encounter practices such as vision fasting, council, trance rhythms and conversations with the sacred other. Doug's true calling lives in support of others uncovering their own unique gifts and in so doing transforming their own lives in service to the Great Turning.