Grief. A lost ritual, a spiritual practice. A most holy and sacred ground that as a society we have perhaps lost, or profaned. I am not sure which.

Perhaps we cannot grieve deaths because we do not understand life fully. That we are more than our physical and material selves and that part of what it means to be human is that to be human is also to be spirit, to have spirit, to live embodied in spirit and to realise part of us is bigger than what we think.

We have lost our connection to our souls need to grieve. Each of us need to grieve. It is both a healthy and necessary release. Cathartic. It takes a strong heart to hold the entirety of a difficult and strong emotion. To be embodied in the truth of what we are feeling in each moment, to not feel shame for the griefs that we feel. The darker emotions that rise within us. We cannot numb out the dark without also numbing out the light.

To create sacred space for grief, is to allow out heart to open up further to the light of truth, the light which reveals that life is also at times about death, endings and finishes. There are things that are finite, there are things which are infinite. Energy never dies, we have eternity in our hearts but some things are not eternal and it is in these moments that the angel of death has to be allowed in to sweep up the ashes of what cannot remain so that we can allow the energy of the new to come in. There is the corruptible and the incorruptible. Only in the incorruptible can we fully realise that grief that lies in the endings of that which is corruptible.

It isn’t just physical death that we need to grieve, but the loss of the small things, the endings of things, even the beginnings of things may need to be grieved.

Sometimes, perhaps we need to grieve the things we didn’t realise the need to grieve about. Parts of our repressed or suppressed selves, a life not fully lived and the realisation of such, a divorce or a betrayal, a childhood lost, a separation from one’s religion or a displacement from our motherland due to war or conflict. Grief isn’t limited, nor should it be.

When grief cannot be spoken or felt, it manifests itself in the shadows. We fall ill and have symptoms of anxiety and a deep loneliness erupts from our very being, a feeling of disconnection and shame. A loss of vitality. A feeling of despair and meaninglessness. Like a loss of identity we sink into the heavy mass of endings without beginnings, no cycle remains just bleak darkness, a hell that we lock ourselves in, the key being on the inside. Light cannot get in, beginnings cannot start, we cannot create. We loose our sense of purpose and direction.

Addictions arise to help us to deal with our unresolved grief. To numb the pain. We feel that if we allow ourselves to feel it fully that it will overtake us like a tidal force that may just drown us. Not realising that the tidal force is that transpersonal force which if allowed, will infect cleanse and renew our hearts, that compassion and mercy will be allowed in and we will be renewed.

Grief gets worse if not let out, perhaps building up and manifesting in strange ways. The need to express grief is human, it is to feel. The need to belong is also what it means to be human and to feel connected is what we are created for. The places we often connect the most are the most difficult parts of ourselves, the parts often denied in our current society. We are living in a society that is not quite sure what to do with the harder and heavier emotions. We instead fill ourselves with a toxic positivity and coping mechanisms, which in the end don’t really cut it. They only cut us off from stored and hidden energy, in the form of laying down that which we have to lay down. That which is no longer living, that which is dead.

To not let things go, is to let the burden slowly eat its way at our souls, we carry on as if we are ok, even when we are not. We live a less than authentic self, a part of us that operates on autopilot. We seize to live and we merely function, or rather we think we are functioning but in reality we are actually dysfunctioning. We are not grieving like we need to. We are carrying a heavy burden that is crushing our souls.

There is an epidemic of loneliness and depression, anxiety and unexpressed pain. There is a relationship and connection between aliveness and grief. When we express our grief we tap into potential energy. I’ve experienced it in my life, a sort of cathartic release that comes with a renewed energy and an increased vitality for life.

Being at the edge of sorrow can feel a little like the edge between life and death, meaning we feel our most alive when we reach into the depths of our death. It’s a divine balancing act and both sides of the scale are always full of life and death in equal measure. This is perhaps daunting and the more we tip the scale in the favour of life without the fertile soil of what is dead we face a tipping point and sometimes the release can be heavy and come to us in less that positive ways.

The things dead in us, the parts we need to burn off and allow to go back into the soil to nourish the life waiting to be born within our hearts. To allow the new life to be nourished with the tears of our pain and hurt. In physical death, the loss of a loved one.

To allow the ashes to be cast off to the winds that feed inspiration. To let go, so we can breathe, deeply. To let the ashes be scattered and wait for what historically has been called divine grace, that grace which turns those very ashes to beauty. We have to scatter them to the winds to allow them to be changed to beauty.

To let it out, is to let it go, to hollow ourselves out. It involves opening up to the new, to receive and our human hearts are essentially and organ of receiving. Our minds made to perceive what we have received and to stay open to that is to live a full life, spirited, creative and most importantly, connected to one another. We need each other, we are not solitary creatures.

We have to learn to come to the dark side of our hearts willingly, realising that in this darkness is a beauty of lightness that cannot easily be defined. In this place we develop a second sight, a spiritually embodied sight, a heart of true light where we fall into empathy and we are moved to compassion knowing that each of us had to traverse this difficult land at some time or other. That we are all subject to grief and loss, pain and despair. That reclaiming the sacredness is what is missing.

Perhaps religion as we know it has been a denial of the sacredness of the shadowed aspects of our selves. Paradoxically, our true spiritual essence. Instead we have had a religion that has been devoid of the power of true spirituality and instead offered up a counterfeit spirituality which has been an escapism from the reality of our physical impermanence, and a misunderstanding of the eternal spirit, paradoxically only found in what we are most afraid of. Death. Religion has been the antithesis of spirituality in many ways because of its denial of the very things which would bring us life. Which would bring us energy. The need to let go and to move on. Grief.

Remembering we are living beings and that what is not alive anymore has to be let go. It hurts but it is true.

I think of the story of Mary grieving Jesus at the tomb in the story. I look at it through the eyes of metaphor, demystified and demythologised. A living truth that can be applied to the living now.

The ‘resurrection story’ was perhaps more metaphysical than we have realised. A story about grief. About the doorway to eternity, a story about the infinite and the finite. To me, the story shows through her grief and her love, the christ walked her through the darkest assuage of all, that of grief and loss, and when she arrived at the end, the rebirth of that which was always true and alive, the grace of spirit and being was there where it had been all along. In her heart. A lost place of spirit, a realm forgotten long ago. Or hidden long ago with those who had lost their capacity to understand the sacredness of death and grief.

She understood, that deep in the heart was a place that contained the force of love which was a force stronger than death itself. Her love walked her through it, the grace in the deepest depths of her heart. The force of love walks us through the darkest hours of our life, even death itself.

We need to realise the importance of grace too, that grace has been lost and it is that grace we feel in the throes of grief which allows us to move through it until we re emerge out of the other end, as if born a new. A true rebirth, a cycle of life and death that continues energetically on into the realms of eternity. Endings are hard to understand, suffering seems unjust, life seems strange and unfair at times. We do not always understand why.

Grief needs more definition in our society, as does life and death, corruptibility and incorruptibility, spirituality and religion. Death in the physical realm is a border, it is a border that is hard to define, but it is necessary to do so. It is a place, a doorway that we all need to cross at some point. We feel it. We know it will meet us one day, none of us know when. A border in which we cross over into a place unknown. Grief has been that which religions, the world over, have tried to understand. It goes hand in hand with the subject of birth and rebirth and the metaphorical resurrections. A doorway. We don’t know the beginning or the end, until we realise that it is in each of us. That, in spirit, there is no beginning or end.

We experience many births deaths and rebirths in our lives, small ones and big ones over and over. Little ones perhaps prepare us for the bigger ones. Wisdom resides therein. Wisdom and grief walk together. Compassion and fragility go hand in hand too. We experience mini resurrections of lost parts, and rebirths that infuse our being with new energy, new direction and creativity. We realise that what we have doesn’t last forever, but it will continue to change through metamorphosis and that ultimately, as humans, we have little control over time and unforeseen circumstances. We never truly have the big picture, we cannot.

If we don’t grieve, our only option is to close our hearts. It is to die a different kind of death. It is to die whilst we are still alive and to become rigid. To lose our connection and our spirit. It is to stagnate. To cease to flow. That is a true death. Meaning, that in nature decay still equates to life. Not separate but part of the cycle so the energy that is our essential selves can continue to evolve and to grow. To ignore the wisdom in decay, in the corruptible, is to truly die.

It is to loose heart and loose our minds too, only to be handed over to dangerous ideals and mechanistic thinking. At its core a denial, a denial of the eternal spirit in each of us. It is to attempt to prevent the wisdom in decay. It is like ignoring the waxing and waning of the moon, the elephant in the room.

We move with the machinery of a spiritless culture at a breathless pace. Not realising that we have lost something, but we have a feeling we are lost, then, in this place. No amount of money or commodity will satisfy us deeply, because the soul is no longer a container, it is closed and our minds are insatiable. We build graven images to immortalise things that are fossilised and gone, we are stuck as a society, a dam is waiting to burst. A collective cathartic release that will come with a change in understanding, a religion that will no longer string us along in the denial of the inevitable but it will instead help support us in our grief. It will do like the ancient religions of Egypt and the Celts. Helping us through the doorways as we move through that border which is hard to define. It will have an understanding of the eternity in each of our hearts whilst treating with honour and fragility the finite temporality of our human existence.

We will seize to be turned into commodities, or to turn ourselves into commodities. The mindset of the world we live in will seize to be a graceless and merciless place. It will seize to be a society which doesn’t facilitate our primary needs, our very human needs, and then feeds us with secondary needs, and deny our freedom. Which to me doesn’t mean doing what I want, it means living my life in accordance with my hearts purpose knowing that I am here for a brief time, like a breath. Realising that between our first breath of life, to our last breath at our moment of physical death, we live in what is essentially a pause, an elongated moment between what comes in, and then what goes out again. None of us know how long that pause between breaths will be, all we know is that it is a most sacred pause.

We are a society that devours itself, a loop of pain, a hell, not a pause of sacred expression within spacetime. We have for too long worshiped at the feet of a dead religious idol. A fossil of commoditising the sacred, the sacredness of the now, of spacetime, of a dimension we can exist in so we may create in and tell the truth of eternity. We ignore the spirit and essentially offer up no release. We have ignored the finite, in an attempt to grasp with our material arms the infinite. To attempt to control and explain that which to us is sometimes uncontrollable and unexplainable.

Imagine the feeling of relief that would flood our whole being if we knew that when we were in the grip of sorrow or illness, our village would respond to our need. This would not be out of pity, but out of a realization that every one of us will take our turn at being ill, and we will need one another. The indigenous thought is when one of us is ill, all of us are ill. Taking this thought a little further, we see that healing is a matter, in great part, of having our, connections to the community and the cosmos restored. This truth has been acknowledged in many studies. Our immune response is strengthened when we feel our connection with community. By regularly renewing the bonds of belonging, we support our ability to remain healthy and whole.

(Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief)

Grief is a scary place to walk, it feels a little off the beaten track, off the map of our shared current mindset. I feel like it is something I want to access, urgently.

I feel personally that I need to grieve my oldest son moving into his teens and I have to let go of the little boy he was and to allow him to move into his next phase. To give him permission to move into the next part of his life, a new chapter and a new beginning. This feels like a grief to me as a mother.

I also have to grieve that fact that my life as I knew it before is well and truly over. Four years ago my husband and I left our religion, we couldn’t stay there and at the same time grow and change. It was a choice between growth or being a sort of holy heretic. To become a stagnant idol versus a living and feeling human being.

Now, I grieve the fact that although there are perhaps many family and friends that would like us to return to the belief system (Jehovahs Witnesses) we are not coming back. It is over for us. We will never come back and we now stand at the threshold of a new beginning and a completely new adventure.

Our life from before has ended. We take with us our beautiful memories, but we say goodbye to what was and move into the new chapter.

I grieve and say goodbye to old friends and family. Unable at this moment in time to extend themselves to where we are now. Unable to understand the finite, the human, we cannot hold ourselves back for them, or for a future hope of some place that will never come instead choosing to waste precious and beautiful moments, not storing up the treasures in their hearts.

I grieve the loss of old coping mechanisms that kept the world a safer and calculable place, but that slowly stifled my ability to be truly alive.

I grieve that I can no longer hide in naïveté and ignorance.

I grieve the loss of innocence and the desperate fight to attempt to return to it, to find again the voice of my hearts most soulful expression which I lost when I started censoring myself.

I grieve the loss of my childhood home which has now been sold.

I grieve the loss of my ideals which I can no longer hide behind.

I grieve the loss of loved ones who have moved on and away, although now I understand life a little more, I know its not an ending in the sense I thought it was.

These are a few things that make my heart stir and churn. I’ll allow myself to meditate on it, with all of this acknowledgement comes an expansive feeling of joy, a sacred place opens up. With the grief comes an appreciation of the moment. It wakes me up from any complacent slumber of the present perhaps slipping away from me as I get lost in ideals. Gratitude comes in and I realise that I can train my heart to see joy in even the littlest and simplest of things. I can fully be here, now. I can appreciate the beauty that is my children.

Grief is a doorway, but that leads to gratitude, and gratitude leads to the present moment and in the present moment, where only direct perception remains is the seed of eternity. We see if we are blessed through the door and to the other side releasing the loop. We see for the first time the alpha and the omega. Like Mary at the tomb. She saw through the door so clearly, she was able to see the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end and in that moment she was reborn, knowing that there was an infinite part of her that existed within the body of corruptibility and it was from this place she chose to exist after. She learnt to fly, through the denials and the lies. She moved into life. Truly.

There may be times in life when there is seemingly nothing at all to be grateful of, but there is always something.

I can look close, closer and zoom in until I find it. We only have to experience it once and it will stay with us.

I can sit with the uncomfortable grief until I break through to the other end and I feel it, I feel forgiveness, mercy, compassion and a sort of beauty that only the scales of grief and joy can reveal.

It is the beauty of reality itself I think. That despite pain and suffering, if we can push through there is always life and joy. That if we are brave and courageous enough, that reality will always prevail as being good. It will always prevail as being eternal and true, that there is more to life than what we can perceive. That ultimately whatever evils befall us, the good always wins, beauty always prevails and that there is a doorway through grief that leads to somewhere grand. Religions have explained or attempted to talk about it, but the reality is, the talking about it is over. That if we are courageous enough we can experience it.

To truly live, is to trust, to let go. Perhaps this is our greatest grief.