DE-GRIEFING

Years ago I was in a sweat lodge in the capacity of an 'elder', holding the ones in the lodge as they moved through an initiation I had transitioned through a few years prior. For me, the heat, darkness and sanctity of sweat lodge allows so much to dislodge inside me, old stuck energies that get burned up in the fire. It's incredibly powerful work. That night, the lodge was packed and there was barely room to breathe. And it was really, really hot. As it progressed, I managed to fold myself into child's pose, my belly between my knees, my forehead to the earth. As the participants softened and opened, they began wailing, first one, then a few, then all of them. The energy was unbelievable - lifetimes of grief pouring like a tide that had been held back for eons. I did not wail as I was not in lodge to journey with them; I was there to assist in holding their journey. Suddenly I felt their collective grief like a swirling vortex of supercharged energy, tunneling right into the back of my heart, through my body and down into the earth. My first thought was fear, because the energy was HUGE and felt like it could tear me apart. And then I noticed it was simply moving through me as I grounded it into the dirt. It wasn't actually affecting me in any way. I was a channel for it to ground. That night changed my life, shifted my understanding of the human vessel, showed me what a body could hold and move. Since then, I allow grief to move through me whenever it comes. 

Grief encompasses a whole compliment of heavy emotions - rage, anguish, resentment, desolation, dejection, despair. These unexpressed emotions live inside all of us and are most often what we talk ourselves out of feeling, because we want to avoid pain and because of an underlying belief that these dark places will kill us. The part of us that fears death is the ego - the illusion of separation that many of us use as an operating system for our whole lifetime. Awakening is realizing that we are more than our ego with its false beliefs. We are more than our stories, our thoughts, our secrets, our weaknesses. We are multi-dimensional creator gods with abilities, proclivities and capacities beyond our imaging. When we begin to embody this understanding, absolutely everything about our lives change. A major component of this work is clearing our physical vessel of the gunk of lifetimes, like steam cleaning an engine. And grief is extremely viscous gunk that adversely affects our entire being. The good news is that we don't necessarily have to understand what we're clearing and releasing - we just have to be willing to lay on the ground and wail, allowing it to simply move through and out of us. And when we're done, we can literally get up, dust ourselves off and carry on as before. No need to build an alter to the grief, process or assign it any meaning. Only to keep moving forward, minus the grief.

Are you up for this work? Can allow yourself to let go of your grief? Can you know that it won't kill you? Are you safe enough within your own skin to hold yourself and let it go? I'm not talking about feeding it with stories about why you should be grieving - that's just drama. I'm talking about opening yourself, accessing wherever it lives in you and then screaming, breathing, crying it out. When we learn to do this, and when we soften (and strengthen) enough to hold the whole human story, we become channels for collective grief. It is bigger than we can imagine and yet it will not kill us if we allow it to simply move through the container of our bodies and into the earth. And we're not just in service to the feminine here because men carry this grief as well; on an archetypal level, the masculine is well aware of its role in the trauma writ large in the feminine story. And men have had plenty of trauma themselves, in the endless cycles of competition and war over resources, in lifetimes of strictly serving the ego.

The masculine and feminine, in their highest, divine expressions, yearn for balance because only in balance can they be fully expressed. One cannot be completely fulfilled without the balanced dance and interplay with the other, for truly they are two sides of a single coin. (Please note, I am not speaking strictly of 'couple' experiences, i.e. marriage. I am not saying "You are nothing without a man". I'm talking about the wholeness within the Self, where we are in a constant dance of our own masculine and feminine energies. I am talking about wholeness within all of our relationships, with fathers, mothers, siblings, friends, beloveds, partners.) When a woman can fully embody the fullness of her Divine Feminine energy, she invites the Divine Masculine to the party.

What is the Divine Feminine exactly? It is the eternal, unchanging Principle that is our connection to Source – to Love, Creation, Nature. She is the Mother, the embodiment of Love, the vessel of unification, the physical with the eternal. She is Kali, a fierce warrior who destroys illusions. She is the Magdalene, the compassionate healer. She is the Oracle, the seer, the keeper of Wisdom and Balance. She is the Lover and the Dancer, who engages Earth energies like Wonder and Magic, who delights in the pleasures of the senses. She is womb, water, flow, life, stillness, enjoyment. Joy. She is the initiator, always, as everything comes through the Feminine.

And so as women, it's time to initiate. It's time to do our clearing work, to release our grief, to build up our nervous systems so that we can hold - and live from - the bigger truth of what we are. No more playing small. We deserve the best of everything. And the world deserves the best of us.

ALL WORK IS MOTHER WORK

Equinox Blessings Beloveds! As September draws to a close, I find myself counting my blessings, offering gratitude for the ever-present abundance that is my life and allowing myself to feel more deeply than ever before. I write this from an airplane on my way home from Hawaii where my beloved and I just completed a five day workshop on Sacred Relationship and Sexuality that has opened me in ways I cannot yet fathom. And always in perfect timing as the prevailing energies now through the end of the year are all about Relationship, so we will be deeply supported as we integrate and expand on the work.

The work was largely about embodying archetypes and how the Divine Masculine and Feminine work together to form wholeness and balance in Relationship. We just passed the Fall Equinox, a balance point in Earth’s yearly journey around the sun, when day and night are of equal length, offering us an archetypal moment to feel our own still point of balance. Do we hang out in the light, forsaking darkness? Do we shun our own darkness out of shame or fear? Do we allow ourselves to be the full spectrum? As humans we are all of it and to function fully we must have understanding or at least knowledge of our dark side, otherwise when it comes online – as it always will - we’ll go unconscious. Or we’ll subvert, pervert, mask or whatever else we habitually do to avoid owning it.

What does that look like in the real world?

Say as a child I was not noticed or praised. Part of the feminine ‘package’ is the inherent desire to be noticed and praised and so when I did not receive it, I subverted the desire and made it mean I’m not worthy of notice or praise. This makes me angry and sad. Forty years later, when I buy a new dress to wear to my husband’s work event and also get my hair done and he doesn’t notice, what do I do? If I’m not in touch with my dark side, I likely won’t understand my subverted anger and feelings of unworthiness. So I’ll project the energy of that unmet need onto my husband, making it his fault and getting angry at him for not noticing my efforts. And I’ll add it to my ever-expanding list of ‘Ways That He Fails Me’ which is a non-reality that literally cuts away at the lifeblood of my marriage. Or, if I’m aware of my darkness around how my unmet childhood needs created this habitual patterning, instead of getting angry and blaming him when he doesn’t notice, I may go to him with my hand on my heart and show him my sadness around that. And, if I’m really hip to my needs and his functionality, I might go to him before he even has a chance to notice me and dance around him saying, “Do you like my new dress and hair as much as I do?!” If I’m bringing the fullness of my feminine energy to this dance, he will most definitely shower me with appreciation and praise. And if not, I am wise enough to ask him for it, saying, “I’m really feeling the need to be noticed and praised right now.”

Understanding our darkness begins with the Feminine. At our inception, as our bodies formed inside our mothers, her electromagnetic field imprinted upon our developing field. There is no way this can be avoided. And so whatever our mother was feeling – fear, grief, anger, overwhelm – was hardwired into us. This is the basis of our ‘mother issues’ and we all have them. And then, whatever our mother felt about our father was also hardwired and became the basis of our father issues. In normal human functionality, we either assimilate or reject our parental patterning. Assimilation means despite our best efforts, we wind up sounding and acting exactly like our mothers, which can create feelings of disassociation and self-loathing. And if we reject our mother, we use all our energy to do the opposite, which also creates tension and self-loathing because ultimately we know we are not free to be ourselves. We will marry our fathers or his opposite because of this imprinting. Only when we release ourselves from this habitual wheel of assimilation/rejection can we become liberated to who we truly are, so that we can make choices and design our lives from the creative pulse of desire that flows through us. Only then can we truly deliver what we came here to be.

And so we do our mother work. The good news is we don’t have to go back and understand our mothers! We can work multidimensionally, outside of time and space and literally reprogram our developing selves in utero. We can bathe our electromagnetic field in utero with what is also (eternally) present: Oneness, Absolute Love, Peace, Joy, Clarity, Purpose. We can tap into all the good that also flows through our ancestral line, through all of human consciousness. We can enliven the part of our field wherein we remember who we are and why we came.

There are various ways of doing this - find someone in your area who facilitates this kind of work. I do - and it can be done remotely over the phone. And if you're in the Los Angeles area, come to my monthly Women's Circle where we regularly dive deep into our darkest natures as well as amplify our brightest selves.

As the world spins faster and crazier, it is imperative that we become the calm at the eye of the storm. We must have the wherewithal to hold a high frequency within our fields, no matter what. We can never fix or heal others; we heal ourselves and our wholeness becomes a lighthouse for others to find theirs, so that we all can live from our highest selves. Doesn't that sound like heaven?

(If you would like more information or a referral to a facilitator, I can be reached at jaclyng@gelbgroup.com)