Grief may touch our lives in profound ways and if we are willing to be both gentle and courageous with ourselves and explore it, we can discover our own healing and what it has to teach us.
Rumi
Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror up to where you’re bravely working…
Jalâl al-Dîn Rûmî
As a child I could often feel the pain of others in my heart. It made me angry to be alive in such an anguished world. I couldn’t stay open to the suffering I saw around me, or to the pain within. It took me years to allow my heart its vulnerability. The grief had torn me open but I hadn’t known what to do with the pain…
Grief can have a quality of profound healing because we are forced to a depth of feeling that is usually below the threshold of awareness. Though many of our motivations come from this level of fear, of loss, yet we don’t know where these volitions originate. We simply find ourselves lost in action, in anger or fear, pushing away others, grasping at what we imagined to be our safety, constantly guarding our heart.
This tearing open of the heart leaves us exposed to that which has caused us and our loved ones the pain of imagined separateness so often before. This experience of discovery that grief leads us to is, for some, like going below ground level to look at the roots of a tree whose branches and twigs, leaves and flowers were all you thought were meaningful.
It is the tree of life, of your life…
Stephen Levine
Who Dies?
Your pain
is the breaking of the shell
that encloses your understanding.
