Here we are.
Another fall season is arriving in the air and in our bones.
It is a time that invites us in.
Into ourselves and into the dark crevices of our hearts.
A transitional season and liminal space that brings up trepidation in a lot of people.
Maybe it’s the ancestral memory of not being able to guarantee we will survive the winter.
A familiar feeling that’s being activated in new ways.
Today in our modern world, we are facing our own set of uncertain circumstances.
A collective grief lays over us like a smothering blanket as we try to emerge from the pandemic haze only to be met with more death, fear, and pain.
I think it’s fair to say that almost every human on this earth has experienced loss in one form or another over the past 2 1/2 years.
The uncertainty shows no sign of letting up.
There is a feeling of anticipatory grief that is in the air each fall season. And even thicker in these times of unknown.
Anticipatory grief is a term used in the death & dying space that describes how one may begin to grieve someone passing, prior to their death.
We know death is coming and we begin to anticipate the pain we will feel in the future.
A survival mechanism, perhaps? Maybe if we prepare now, it’ll hurt less later?
What’s interesting to me about that term is that it places the grief elsewhere.
When really we could just call it what it is - grief.
In the now. In the present.
But we have forgotten how to be with what is.
And the moment we are anticipating grief, it has already arrived.
And maybe the deeper truth is that it’s always been here.
It’s just easier to forget when the sun shines bright.
.
I caught myself anticipating grief as I approach some anniversaries. I was trying to schedule when it’d be convenient to feel sad and then got hit in the face with it.
I was once again reminded that grief doesn’t follow our schedule.
Instead, it follows a rhythm. The rhythm of nature.
We have the seasonal cycles to remind us and teach us that it doesn’t follow a neat timeline.
The trepidation and desire to push it to the future may come from the remembrance of those dead-of-winter moments. When you’re so cold and pale and everything is gray. Like all of life has been sucked out of everything. The space when you’re unsure if it’ll ever end.
Kind of like the pit of grief.
That feeling of ‘damn, is this ever going to go away?’
And the answer is no. Grief is part of our human experience.
And if it wasn’t? That’d be something to grieve about it.
But grief can move. It changes shape. It shifts in its own rhythm.
Just like the seasons.
Try as we might, we can’t force Spring to come. We can’t make the leaves fall.
But we can learn to let it come in and show us its message. Little by little.
And then the dead-of-winter moments aren’t quite as cold.
.
Recently, a very wise and dear friend of mine mentioned how she labels Autumn as the season of healing, and as I was contemplating the message coming through for this writing, I realized they are the same.
Grief is healing. Healing is grief.
It’s only when we resist the movement, we find stagnation and dis-ease.
Then, another wise and dear friend reminded me that Chinese Medicine refers to this time as the season of grief as well and how we can hold grief in the lungs.
So I ask myself & you,
Can we breathe into our grief?
Can we give it space?
Open the door to it, trepidation and all?
Maybe a little space and crisp air are all we need.
Nature takes care of the rest.
If you need support with creating a container for grief, here is one of my favorite guided meditations. It hits ya straight in the heart.
Sending you love,
Lisa Marie xx
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Of course, Lisa! Absolutely beautiful and brilliant. Healing is within grief as grief is within healing.