Grief and Growth

I think of grief as an everyday thing. A way to pass experience through our beings. A method for discovering continuity in chaos. A right-sizing sensory ceremony for all that we cannot control. Yes, there are bigger deaths, or ones closer in, that fill us with the grief of an ocean. But there are also drip drop losses. Bit by bit changes that carry us along the riverbed. I want to stay in the flow. I don’t want to hold change out in the future, bound in dread. I find that what I anticipate is often made of the unprocessed past. How I digest what has been determines what space there is for what is coming. In May, I offered four weeks of prompts to support presence with the minutia of personal change (which is relational change) (which is cultural change). First week prompt available here Second week here. Third week. Fourth week.

“I was startled at first by your practice; it’s the sort of thing I might usually run from, but by the same measure it is absolutely the thing I need. I feel like a disembodied brain walking around half the time, a disembodied brain sitting on top of at least two generations of trauma and my own lifetime of unacknowledged grief. Thank you. You are a beautiful teacher and presence and leader.”

Frances, after the Grief and Grounding series, winter 2020