A Holiday Message for Those Who Grieve
How Feeling Your Emotions Can Lead to Gifts of Awareness and Guidance
A whole human being is capable of a wide range of emotions. Emotions, even the “bad” ones, can be a powerful ally in our healing journey.
This may be a difficult message to hear at this busy and - for many - stressful time of year. Even so, I want to take a moment to talk to those of you who may be grieving.
What I want to share with you, from my heart to yours: you are not broken.
In a world celebrating noise, numbing out, and endless entertainment and distraction, it’s easy to feel tremendously out of place when you have these “troublesome” feelings arise. But you are not a misfit for feeling what you feel. Indeed, the more you allow yourself to feel, the more inner peace you’ll find on the other side.
Holy Days, Wholeness, and the Journey of Integration
When you look into the etymology of the word “holy”, you find its roots going back to the concept of wholeness. There are similar roots to words like health and healing.
So it might make sense to some of you to hit the pause button for a few moments at this busy time of year, to observe how you have opportunities right now to help yourself heal, and how it can be that even some of your most painful memories and emotions may be gifts of healing, leading to even more gifts of awareness and guidance - if you let yourself feel those feelings instead of pushing them away.
It is not only "OK" to feel, it is crucial to feel your emotions no matter how challenging they may be. And if you can look beyond the circus-like atmosphere of our current cultural tendencies, this time of year seems to be almost designed to help trigger in us some of our darkest fears and deepest anxieties.
Why? Is nature cruel? Is the Universe punishing you?
No, quite the contrary. Our DNA and ancestral memory is deeply aware of this time of transition from longer and longer nights to longer days.
Yes, our ancestors had to fight to survive in some of the harshest conditions imaginable, but I suspect they had a much deeper understanding of survival than we give them credit for today.
To survive means more than merely keeping your physical body alive. You must come through the coldest, darkest times of your life with your soul intact.
Life energy brings us into being. It carries us forward through life. Heals our bodies and stimulates our minds and imaginations. Life energy wants to flow into this world and grow. A physical body may hold onto a thread of life while the soul is away, but there is little room for life energy to really flow and grow in these circumstances.
It "wants" you to be alive, feel everything there is to feel, so that you can then move forward to feel ever more.
For all of these reasons, it is important to know that it is OK to grieve. It is not a sign of being broken, or wrong.
Despite what many seemingly well-intentioned influencers might have you believe (ex. “you’re blocking abundance with your negative thinking”), you are not blocking ANYTHING when you feel things - even feelings that others may deem to be "negative".
From my perspective, one thing that will block life energy is falling into the toxic positivity trap of believing that anything judged to be negative is bad for you and bad for others... because what happens then? You're always on the lookout for negative thoughts or emotions, always trying to reframe things, or simply denying that you even have these thoughts or emotions within you.
As an empath highly sensitive to flow of energy, to my eyes, this very much looks like a dog chasing its tail. It rarely works, and even when it does, you've simply caught up with your own behind and chomped down on a part of yourself.
This can all be tricky territory... because it taps into the dimension of time, which some say is not "real". Everything is NOW, they'll say, which in some ways, I agree with.
Another way this can get tricky is to observe the role that memory plays in all of this. So more to come on both of these topics.
For now, if you get bogged down here with thoughts about time or memory, just understand that regardless of what your mind thinks is the source of your emotions, if they are showing up now, they are present for one reason or another... you don't have to really know the how or why in order to simply feel them, and allow them to move through you.
The Many Sources of Grief
Don't feel guilt or shame over still having feelings about those who have moved on. Understand too that grief is about more than death. It can be about change as well.
For example, my ex father-in-law used to say "divorce is like a death without a funeral". I have to admit, I didn't fully understand his comment until I experienced it myself. And to top it off, my divorce began in the same year I attended the funerals of both of my parents. So I could definitely understand the comparison after that.
Yes, divorce is the death of the marriage, and likewise, all great change is in some ways the death of something that once was.
And it is human and OK to feel grief even over changes that are inherently positive. Maybe you get a better job, happily retire, get married to your soul mate... all of these can be both very positive experiences and yet, at times, result in pangs of grief for the way your life used to be.
Missing a Shared Reality
And then there's a whole other kind of grief that I never even understood before these last few years.
The world itself seems to have shifted and changed in some really profound ways. I know some who feel that exact same way, very deep in their souls. I know others who have no idea what I am talking about. This whole dynamic is in itself very disturbing at times.
This grief I am speaking about here is not specifically about the changes happening so much as it is about longing for a time when we all seemed to experience the same objective reality.
Not to be overly dramatic about it, but imagine you're in a hot war zone. Everyone around you knows it. You can openly share the experiences. Talk about them. When you are processing the events of the day, so are your neighbors and family members. So you are not alone with these tremendous and disruptive changes.
Now contrast that to being in a quiet war - where you and some others that you know can clearly "see and hear" the weapons going off. You can see and feel the damage being done. And yet, somehow, others that you interact with on a daily basis pretend nothing at all unusual is happening. Nothing is changing from their point of view, because they just keep overlooking the damage being done, because their minds cannot connect it to the weapons, because to them, the weapons are invisible and silent.
For some (many?) of you reading this, this last kind of grief may sound foreign and strange or even outright nonsensical. But please understand, even if this is the case for you - it is likely that you have someone in your family or circle of loved ones who might read these same words and know exactly what I am speaking about.
I don't bring this up to further divide us, but rather to help us all understand the varying levels and kinds of emotions we may be processing at this time of year, whether we're doing that consciously or maybe not so much.
It Is Human To Feel
Feeling our emotions is how we process them.
If you think about it, most painful feelings are connected to something that was once very precious to you. In this way, even very painful and so-called "negative" emotions are actually pointers to, reminders of something that was once very precious and beautiful to you.
Your mind doesn't have to always work out the dissonance of these two experiences - the beauty and preciousness at one point in time versus the tremendous pain of its loss. Your soul, however, is very much capable of holding both experiences in their fullness.
If it helps, you might then think of this processing of your painful emotions as a way of transferring everything over to your soul. It may hurt you to say goodbye to someone or something, but your soul lives outside of time, so is not hurt by the loss because it can experience both "simultaneously", so to speak, both the havingness of the relationship or the experience and the loss of it.
So to anyone reading this message this holiday season - or anytime really - please know, you're not bad or broken or wrong to be feeling any of your feelings.
Compartmentalizing, suppressing, denying, pushing them away - this is worse than simply hitting the pause button because unprocessed energies collect a tax on you day in and day out, whether you are aware of it or not.
Know too that emotions are not stupid or irrational. Why is it assumed that emotions should be measured against the metric of intelligence or rationality in the first place?
Better to say that they are non-rational. Neither rational nor irrational.
And as such, emotions fall into a whole slew of forms of awareness that are non-rational - like intuition, precognitive dreams, inspiration, imagination, etc...
All of these forms of awareness offer the gift of GUIDANCE.
So if you encounter periods of time when you find yourself experiencing emotions you’d rather just avoid altogether, know you have a choice.
If you can, process them when they first come up. Do what you can to feel the feelings, in your body, and look for creative, non-destructive, and non-hurtful ways to get the feelings OUT of your body.
If it helps, use the visual of handing them off to your soul, or grounding them into the Earth. If you are really afraid of the feelings, maybe it would help to visualize yourself hurtling them into the center of the sun to be burned up and recycled into something more beneficial.
Feel, process, exhale, let go.
Then simply be open to receiving the gifts that might start to show up in the hours, days, and weeks ahead!