Day 65 – Sacred Grief

I friend who lost his dad to Covid, called yesterday, distraught. Unsure of what he had called for. At a loss for words. He is a journalist, a really smart guy often articulate. It was very disturbing for a couple of reasons. He said, he was not feeling anything, and his numbness was scaring him. This was a person, who in 2008, November terrorist attack in Mumbai, was in one of the suites at the Taj with his mom and came out to share his story. He did not know how to feel and understand this “grief” he said, and what to do about it. How to handle it. His vulnerability was heartening and his anguish was palpable.

It makes no sense, nothing about what happened and is happening is “Normal” – he kept repeating.

My heart went out to him. He was quarantined and could not even hug anyone in such a time. I remembered, just a few months ago My Son went through something like this. He was tested positive for Covid on the same day as his Grandfather passed away. He somehow went to the funeral, after a lot of struggle with BMC – but had to stand far away, in a covid suit, isolated, alone. Watching from afar. Not able to touch his grandad one last time, not able to hold anyone or be held in his sorrow. It was devastating. I had to stand and watch my son, grow into a Man that day.

We underestimate Grief. We underestimate because we don’t understand it. Not know how to process, how to think, who to talk, how to even listen, what to say not say. We are really Grief illiterate.

When my dad passed away in 2017, I was forced to enter this grief and understand it from inside. It was very hard, because I learnt growing up, I must “be strong’. It was like a chant. It meant, don’t be vulnerable, don’t cry, don’t be ‘weak’, don’t ask for help.

It has taken me lot of work and soul searing years to find my way into grief, and finding the beauty, yes, on the sacred grounds of Grief.

Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.

— Oscar Wilde

Last 2 years, I have also been holding grief circles, something I would never imagine I would or could do just a few years ago.  And so, I also know, one can learn, about and with grief.

One can take up Apprenticeship with Grief.

It has been one of the most rewarding journeys I have undertaken thus far. There is a strange correlation between Grief and Aliveness.

Through grief we are initiated into a more inclusive conversation between our singular lives and the Soul of the world. – Francis Weller

For me, grief and feeling it fully, talking about and expressing it, has been a subversive process to say the least.  An act of rebellion against, the quiet ‘societal’ agreement,  to behave and be in control of my emotions. To “take charge”. A Refusal to play dead and numb in the face of loss.

COVID, in the last 2 years has made it imperative that we get to know it. Perhaps, some days I suspect that was the “Role of Covid” all along. To wake us up to our numbed out internal state. Our state of Inertia. Where we lived and walked “without care” – arrogant in our notion of being invincible.

I have learnt, that Grief and Love are two sides of the same coin

As, Jamie Anderson said, “Grief is just love with no place to go.”

And yet we don’t have as many poems and books on Grief. We scream silently the things we wish we had said or not said, done or not done.

And very slowly grief turns into Shame Guilt and Regret.

Talking to this friend, one of the things he kept saying was, how bad he felt that he could not be with his dad at the time of his death, since he was quarantined. And constantly keeps thinking , if there was anything he could have done and feeling guilty about it. This was familiar. I have felt this many times.

Something, I learnt from my friend Quanita, Shame and guilt are not emotions. They are places we go to, to hide and escape from grief. When we start feeling shame, guilt and regret, we have made it about US. It is no longer about the one we lost.

Yes, we may be doing it because we don’t know how to feel and go through the process of Grief.

Grief is a universal experience, one that we need to know personally. Grief circles us all like planets orbiting the gravity of our suffering. No one is spared.

Steven Levine wrote, ‘If sequestered pain made a sound, the world would be humming all the time.’

We can only hear and address the humming of our loved ones, friends and the others we share our world with, if we’re willing to hear our own. If we’re deaf to ours, we’re deaf to theirs.

When appropriately tended to, Grief can guide us into deeper understandings of who we are as human beings, which in turn perhaps can reconnect us to the larger living systems of which we are a part. Perhaps we can feel the pain of other people, animals, trees, earth.

Such a sacred journey then is not meant to be feared, ignored, or suppressed; rather, it is meant to be tended to like one tends a fire, or a seedling.

Through the practice of cultivating our relationship with Grief, to these shadowy realities, we may perhaps be initiated into the Beauty, mystery and miracle  of life.

It helps to have some frame of reference in the this exploration like a Map of sorts. Francis Weller talks about the Five Gates of Grief in his  book The Wild Edge of Sorrow 

Gate 1 : The first gate is that everything you love, you will lose

Grief arrives at our door in many, many shapes and forms. But culturally, the only one that’s really acknowledged is the death of someone or the ending of something that we love—a relationship or a house or a pet. Our grief is given credence by others in those moments.

That’s a fierce way to start. But it’s a deep, inherent truth that we get to keep nothing. Everything that we love, we will lose at some point along the way, either by our own disappearance or by theirs.

‘”Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch. A fearful thing to love, to hope, to dream, to be – to be, And oh, to lose. A thing for fools, this, And a holy thing, a holy thing to love. For your life has lived in me, your laugh once lifted me, your word was gift to me. – Chaim Stern

I have lost both my parents, my grandparents, my father in laws , my relationship. And many days I would be on the floor crying  – not believing I can go on. But the human soul is resilient. And I am often humbly surprised by it. And Grateful for it.

To Grieve to take the risk to love again.

Gate 2 : The second gate is, The places that have not known Love

We have difficulty with others grief often because we have no place left inside us. We are full of our own unfelt unknown, unacknowledged grief. It keeps on playing, in an endless loop in our system, like a song that we know but can’t remember the words of.

This grief – is for the parts of us that we have or have had to banish from acknowledging, as “US”. They have been wrapped up in shame or guilt often.

No wonder that is our goto when we start to feel grief.

Talking to another friend last night, he was sharing how distraught he was that he had an ugly argument with his mom, and how sorry he was, I could tell from the pain in his voice, he remorse was real. He also kept saying, how he is not like that. Does not like conflict or harsh words. And yet – it keep happening.

And just like that, this part of him, finds no acceptance inside him. We have many such “abandoned parts”, the artist, the fighter, the fearful, the brave, the one who cries, the one that jumps for joy, that is creative, that wanted to paint or sing, but of course couldn’t because such things don’t get you bread. And so slowly we start to wrap and put parts of us away, in a shroud called “growing-up”. They recede into the shadows and we start to become less and less – to fit, to belong, to survive in the world- which only sanctions some behaviour and shames other.

This gate open us to our own lost and dead parts. That we have to learn to allow and witness accept and make room for, without shame and guilt.

Gate 3 : The Third Gate is The Sorrows of the World

This gates opens when we feel and register the losses and pain in the world around us. The daily diminishment of species, the burning of the forests, the floods that are happening right now in parts of India, the Number of death toll of Covid. Everything.

It renders us utterly helpless and numbed at facing the enormity of the issue. As Francis says, “We go into self-anaesthesia and self-amnesia”  – we go numb and we forget, as a way to deal with this.

I remember, this phenomena that started some years ago. I would be sitting in mediation and suddenly get these flashing images of wars, complete with the audio visuals. With no fore warning. I would feel literally viscerally the pain in my body in my stomach.  I would cry uncontrollably. I had no idea what was happening to me , it would confuses and scare me. I would then call my girl friends and just bawl. They did not know what was happening either. I am very grateful to my friends who have held me so many times. Without trying to find a solutions. Because I did not know what was the problem. Some days later thought some where I would learn of the war that was actually going on somewhere in the world.

I did not have TV for a long time. I still don’t read newspapers.

Whether or not we consciously recognize it, the daily diminishment of species, habitats, and cultures is noted in our psyches. A lot of the grief we feel and carry is may not be “personal”, but shared, tribal, communal.

It is heart breaking to step out of the house some days, walk down the street and not feel the collective sorrows of homelessness or the economic insanity. It takes everything we have to deny the sorrows of the world.

Psychologist Chellis Glendinning talks about Earth grief. She writes, “To open our hearts to the sad history of humanity and the devastated state of the Earth is the next step in our reclamation of our bodies, the body of our human community, and the body of the Earth.”

When we open ourselves and take in the sorrows of the world, letting them penetrate our insulated hut of the heart, we are both overwhelmed by the grief of the world and in some strange alchemical way, reunited with the aching, shimmering body of the planet. We become acutely aware that there is no “out there;” we share one continuous presence, one shared skin. Our suffering is mutually entangled, the one with the other, as is our healing.”

Gate 4 : The Fourth Gate is, What we Expected and did not receive

This one for me was the MOST difficult gates to enter for me. I remember at the beginning of the lockdown, last year, I offered to hold the grief circle with two other friends, Leela and Savvy. And we met every Wednesday for 3 hours for almost 4 months. Working through these gates and sharing with each other, holding each other. We may never have guessed at that time but we were building the “container” for what was to come.

This gate was the “expectations” we had coming into this world. We expected a community a village, that memory which is in our psyche in our bones from ancient times – and we did not get. We wanted to be seen, to be heard, to be loved, to feel safe, to be celebrated and slowly that pool dwindled out. We learnt to “adjust” and growup and be realistic. Of course.

My strategy was , If I did not expect – I would not be hurt. And so I even forgot what I expected. It hit me like a ton of bricks that day, when my list of expectations ended pitifully short. I had taken away permission, from myself, to expect – to want. I had bought into and often quoted the famous Gestalt prayer, by Fritz Peris

I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.
If not, it can’t be helped.

I Don’t agree with this View at all. This perhaps is what keeps us broken and separate. This view of, it does not matter to me what happens to you and vice versa .

Because It is NOT true. It matters. It cannot NOT matter. Where my right hand gets hurt or left toe is stubbed I will feel the pain. Facing our emptiness is the Key to our freedom and deep joy. One that does not avoid anything. Are not afraid of anything.

Our profound feelings of lacking something are not a reflection of personal failure, but the refection of a society that has failed to offer us what we are designed to expect.

We find it difficult to grieve – because grief is inherently a communal experience and we are waiting for that village so show up.  We have become a grief illiterate, Sorrow phobic and death denying society. And perhaps its time to change that. If we don’t we cannot know joy of connection, love, creativity and light either. They come together like the front and back of the hand. When we raise the front of the hand the back comes along, anyway.

Gate 5 : The Fifth gate is Ancestral grief.

This is the grief we carry in our bodies from the sorrows experienced by our ancestors., Much of this lingers as forgotten echoes in layers of silence. There feels like a gap a void in the dream to be “fully ourselves” be more “human”. Some stuff just does not add up and we don’t know why we repeatedly do some things.

Last evening talking to friend who is going through a rough time, we talked about how our parents and grandparents generation, “built-on” and multiplied things that were there, but with coming generations we have started to tear down and divide. How true.

It makes me shudder to think where are we headed.

Last year during the first wave when many migrants left the “city of dreams” it was a nightmare, for me. I felt such deep physical pain I even had foot sores without stepping down at all. I realised some deep memory of my own ancestors probably walking the desert for forty years, in search of the ”promised land” that we never really got to, was awakened. And I had to do the “Grief Work” on their behalf also. We never can really cut off or go away from who we are. Deep down. Slowly and surely it catches up.

We each stand on the shoulders of our ancestors and they are there with us. And sometimes waiting for us to witness,  give a few moments of silence or sacred tears to acknowledge that we see and honour them.

I realise even as I write this, here in India, we are in the period of Pitru Paksha, from September 20^th till 6^th October. We have, these inbuilt beautiful rituals but we don’t always pay attention.

Pitru Paksha is Sanskrit for “Fortnight of the Ancestors“. It is a 16–lunar day period in Hindu calendar when Hindus pay homage to their ancestors especially through food offerings and prayers.

“At the center of my sorrow I have felt a presence that was not mine” – Susan griffin

So there, those are the Five gates. To Open, To Enter to begin understanding.

Grief I feel needs to be “Composted” in a container. If things are just thrown away, like peels because it is over, it starts to rot and spoil everything around it.  But if we learnt to not just throw and put a lid and forget, but deliberately mindfully with care, keep opening the lid every now and then, churn and turn the peels, over and over, let them get some oxygen – very soon the “wates” started to turn t manure. Something that can now grow – other things.  It make us not be Afraid. It makes us Resilient.

Some of the ways and rituals  to “Compost Grief” are:

1. Create a container : Have a time and place regularly for talking and expressive grief -a kind of “sanction”. In which it is safe  because you also know it will o=be over, it wondt spill into other places.

2. Create a practice: Having some forms of ‘creative outlet’ because many emotions cannot be out into words. And yet they need an expression. Taking time out to paint, sculpt, cook, garden, sew, dance anything. Creativity I soul speak. The “stuff” of grief will slowly find a way out and it will turn to something beautiful.

When Sorrow turns to Beauty it heals.

3. Have a Gratitude journal: We often forget to be thankful for what we had, in the rush to keep point what we lost. To grieve is to also acknowledge that there is something to grieve that means we had the opportunity to love. In being grateful we also say “I love you”

“There is nothing sadder than an empty waiting room in a  hospital.”– From the Good doctor

4. Spend time with Nature: She holds, unconditionally everything. She hold because She feels it even day, every minute, both grief and love. Just touching her with your bare hands and feet. Hugging a tree, sitting besides an ocean and pouring our “conversations” into it. Heals

Grief is not a speed bump. One never “gets over it” – We have to learn to create a place for it inside of us, where it lives along with other things. Grief lives in our bodies, in our minds, hearts, walls, skin. Perhaps this process helps us stretch from the inside, the place that have contracted. Perhaps this is a way we can grow into being who we were meant to be, human beings.

Maybe we if start our reacquaintance with grief own it and pick our pieces, we may stop projecting it on to the world the earth does not then have to carry the weight of our own unshed tears. It is the ultimate taking of responsibility.

We need grief circles in our communities, or else the macabre demonstration of hollow joy and laughter can create more disturbance. Or else we will collectively keep creating pandemics and wars – Just to FEEL something. We need grief circles to heal individual and collective wounds so that we can truly embrace truth in all its shades and find Joy. Because we need to re-educate and re-introduce this in schools and families. So we don’t end up with, what my son calls “Snowflake Generation” – where everything is so fragile that a little heat and there is a meltdown. We have more children seeing therapists now than even a decade ago. More mental health challenges than a decade ago – are we still going to push things under the carpet? Perhaps we need to learn a whole new behaviour, a whole new culture where Grief is ok. Where all our parts are welcomed. Where we don’t need to feel weak, or ashamed of our tears or fears.

Perhaps Grief like love needs a warm, respected and honoured place in our hearts, minds, organizations homes and the world. Maybe it’s time.