Good Grief – the vital benefits of grief work
I am fortunate, no, privileged, to be part of an elder’s book group – three of us. On our WhatsApp group we call ourselves The Sages. We meet online once a month and discuss, as deeply as we dare, a chapter of a book that addresses the issues of eldering. We started out with James Hollis’ book What Matter Most and then graduated to Francis Wellers book The Wild Edge of Sorrow. Both books are ‘up there’ in importance for life, as far as I’m concerned. Ive read both books three times and have even got three copies of Weller’s book (an interesting story for another time).
You could argue that the books we choose aren’t a barrel of laughs, but they aren’t meant to be, (even though we have plenty of laughs as we talk). They are meant to be important for living a lived life. We want depth and meaning and both books certainly do not disappoint.
After our recent discussion on a section of Weller’s book, I left the meeting feeling quite emotional. Something deep and personal had been stirred. Grief work is hard and painful work. The poets Octavio Paz and Rilke both use an image akin to trying to cut a way through a rock face to get back home to yourself, which is the purpose of grieving. There is so much unattended sorrow in most of our lives. What I began to distil was Weller’s answer to the question, “Where is the benefit to me in making this journey?”[1]
He begins his answer by saying that there is a communal hall of grief within us, a large space, where all of our accumulated griefs across the life span reside; like many tributaries and streams all flowing in to one dammed up reservoir. Whilst it is a hall of grief, it has the potential within me of becoming a large space available for more of me, my potential, my life, as the grief gets metabolised.
When grief remains untouched, unattended, a great congestion builds up inside of us (Weller points out that it is not by accident that one of the biggest killers is congestive heart disease). But when it is metabolised, we experience being touched, met, attended to, seen, felt, honoured in the deepest part of ourselves. Who wouldn’t want that resource?
Grief calls us back to our souls. It is doing an active work within us, calling us to our deeper selves.
Grief invites us to wake up to life as it really is, rather than denial. To live life on its own terms, not our own. The Buddhists call this reality ‘impermanence’.
Denial of grief causes a physical compression within our bodies. Our breathing is affected, impacting on our emotional experience getting shallower and we become more shallow as people, as our bandwidth for life is reduced. Grief metabolised, does the opposite. It opens us up to our own latent depths to live more fully, to love more fully. Grief allows the heart to stay open to love and a heart that stays open loves big.
Unattended grief is like weights. They drag us down in the body and mood. Depression is depress-ion. ‘We are pulled down below the threshold of life and into the world of death’. To attend to our griefs lightens our burdens, frees us up from the depress-ions, the weights, the burdens. The rucksack of rocks we are so used to dragging around with us that we hardly notice, becomes lighter.
Praise lifts up our hearts and spirits. To praise is to react to just how beautiful a tree, or bird, or sunset, or friend is, just how much we are enriched by the experience of them. Grieving is just like praise, ‘it is how the soul recounts the depth to which someone has touched our lives’. Grieving the loss of someone involves praising them. ‘There is a fierce beauty in making friends with loss’.
Angels are messengers from the Divine Presence and grief is called a ‘dark angel’. Yes, there is a darkness in it but, attended to, metabolised, it is a messenger from beyond ourselves, from a wider place in life.
We are so committed to our defended hearts, however we may want to dress this up with our baubles and tinsel to wow ourselves and others. We insist on staying where we are, inside of ourselves, justifying and protecting our current state of existence. Yet grief work is an invitation to move on to a new place within ourselves, or, more accurately, to recover a truer place within ourselves. Grief says “Listen! Listen to what your heart is telling you”. The heat of grief is calling us back to our deep self, to the very original and unique roots of our life.
Change involves a change of shape inside. That’s what the word transform means – to change the form of something, even ourselves. Grief is like a rough initiation to this newer shape. It is the place of radical change. We talk about thresholds in life and grief is essential to navigating them. Thresholds are full of loss in order to gain. There are things we need to leave behind, let die, because they no longer fit, or work, or serve, or have life in them. There are thresholds forced on us when we are the victim of someone else’s choices, or our health fails. Things we once doted on need shedding, shriving, leaving behind, dissolving, being less certain about, uprooting and winnowing.
We are not meant to go back, we often can’t go back, but rather we need to settle into a new shape, to a place of deep change. To become more who we truly are; more deeply human. There is a light in the very dark night of the soul that shines a light on the new shape of who we can and are becoming.
When I had treatment for skin cancer, I had two 6-inch scars either side of my neck and the surgeon told me I had to massage those scars with oil every day, to soften them. Often our old pains quickly scar over with thick, hard skin. This is our new defence and protection. But grief subtly massages the hardness into something more generous, elastic, and responsive to the life your soul is inviting you to live.
Unattended grief often solidifies us into the world of ‘us vs other’, ‘either/good vs bad’, ‘in vs out’. It diminishes us. A hardness develops. Whereas, attended grief moves us on into the maturer world of much greater space within ourselves to contain more complexity, paradox and not-knowing, where we learn to hold things in tension. And not or. Bitter and sweet, beautiful and painful, all held in the very same moment. Even the things we once avoided, we can now make a space for, like Rumi’s poem The Guest House[2], where every strange and new emotion is welcomed at your door as a guest to get to know and include.
Attending to grief is not a solo journey. We need guides, we need friends, we need elders, we need surgeons of the soul at times. We need people who understand this journey and will help us contain the emotions that arise, by their containing of us.
Grief, if attended to, takes us to the very core of ourselves, sometimes to the very ‘tear in our psychic foundation’, that may well have sat in the darkness for decades, leaving us unsure of our fundamental worth, eating away at our very faith in life itself, years of dammed up tears and defended against love itself.
Grief invites us down to that chamber, patiently, in its own time, but gently urging us on, because in that place where grief is touched at that profound level there is a reconnecting to life itself, to love, even to a Presence beyond our own presence, to grace, to a place where ‘some piece of our soul can now come home’.
[1] All of this article relies on direct explicit or implicit quotes from Weller about the benefits of the grief work and to Weller be all the thanks.