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.