A grieving heart

I’ve learned a lot this year, since my friend Em passed. Her death affected me deeply, and caring for her children (when I can) has touched me deeply too.

Over the summer holidays, our little home school tribe of which Em was also a part, has joined me on the beach every Tuesday to support me in caring for the children and giving Em’s husband some much needed time to himself.

I’m not very good with groups, with a sun in Cancer and moon in Pisces I feel everything intensely, just like my children, my eldest especially, and unless I’m leading a group, I can get drained very quickly. But I have been so grateful of this wonderful group of mums supporting me and Em. It has been a joy for my boys too, to play with their friends - the girls on one paddle board and the boys on another - making happy memories together.

Em’s youngest is just over 14 months old now, a beautiful little soul who brings much joy to us all.

I still have to hold back the tears when he sleeps on me though, as I can’t let go of the thought that he should be asleep on his Mum’s heart instead, not mine. In the earlier days I would find it overwhelming, the grief all consuming, but now I can catch myself and am more accepting of this reality I am now living in.

In many ways that’s the shift I have had to make.

Death cracks open our heart to reveal all that has not yet been resolved within us and changes our life in ways we could never have imagined before.

I put on a brave face as many of you know, it’s what us Capricorn rising do so well, suppressing the emotional floods of the watery element of my Pisces and Cancer, moon and sun and keeping busy. But there is only so long one can keep grief at bay, as the heaviness becomes too heavy and the tiredness too great and it is not healthy to hold onto one’s emotions, I know this.

But we need space to grieve.

A homeopathic remedy to release grief began the process, and there was people and places which all served to churn up what needed processing, not just Em’s death, but all the other grief laying still heavy on my heart, the grief of the breakdown in my relationship with E, the grief of my brother living the other side of the world, the grief of my children growing older, the grief of my aging, the grief of broken dreams and time passing.

I didn’t realise how much grief my heart had been holding.

Sometimes I feel too sensitive for this world. I feel everything acutely.

I cried on the phone recently to the lady at the GSPCA as I asked what I could do to alleviate the suffering of a rabbit with myxomatosis I found literally on the doorstep. The awareness that the rabbit’s suffering was caused by us humans spreading the disease made me feel so sad.

I cried when I read about a mother having to inject her two year old son daily, following a Type One diabetes diagnosis, and the anguish she felt in hurting her son to keep him alive.

The world feels so unfair at times.

It feels especially unfair that a mother who loved her children so deeply could be taken from them too young. Two women that I have loved have been lost to their children and their children the same age as my own, and it still catches in my throat as I write those words, even though I have been writing them for months now over and over again.

Writing has saved me in many ways. My yoga practice and my students too, for I love to immerse in yoga and share as I teach. And Reiki, because by its very nature it heals. Nature has helped me too and Saints Valley has held me snug, the sea has cleansed me, while the buzzards have given me hope.

The grief counselling has played a role. But really, it’s the deep dive into Self and Tantric philosophy which has helped the most, coupled with the warm and gentle guidance of my shadow friend, and the love (I have felt so loved at times) of family, friends, students and clients.

I have realised that life is as it is. Always I have been trying to change things. This is a deep conditioning. Always I have made myself wrong, found fault, believed there is something wrong, to make things and other people right. This is a deep conditioning too.

My shadow friend gave me permission to let the change I seek, be not to change at all, not one bit.

I cannot tell you the freedom this has gifted.

It takes time though to truly embody these realisations, because until then, they’re just thoughts in our mind and they can easily pass by without us truly bringing them into our lives.

We are conditioned to forward thinking, planning, imagining, achieving, always seeking change, as if to say that being here right now is not OK.

I am acutely aware that there is no where else to be but here, and no other time to be here than now.

I hear people planning, especially with the new school year ahead, and I can’t help thinking how arrogant it is to assume we can control things to that extent, that our life stretches endlessly ahead - that we can plan and feel certain we will be alive then.

Talk of exams drives me quite mad. How did we get to this point in time when we can’t exist without qualifications to prove our worth. And yet so much is an illusion, a piece of paper to validate a moment in time when we applied thought to paper, to be forgotten soon.

It’s a game we play.

So much of life has become a game to play.

We never know when we might go down the snake.

Or when our life will end.

One day Em was alive and then the next she wasn’t.

It’s taken 133,950 words to make some sense of this.

To accept that that was how it was always meant to be, from a soulful level at least.

To go to Richmond beach and not feel a tug in my heart, knowing that this was where she took her last breath.

To be able to see her son smile his Mum’s smile to me and not feel the tears collect in the corners of my eyes.

To accept that through fate or karma, I was brought into a situation which has changed my life - not because I sought change, but because life changed and I was wrapped up in it. I made a choice. I said yes. I showed up.

And now I hold her son close to my heart.

And sometimes I cry when I am alone in Saints Valley, a place that has held me so beautifully since Em passed, a space that allows me my greatest vulnerability.

And yet I delight too, when I hear the sparrow hawk.

Death cracked my open and I care less about certain stuff.

I find joy where I didn’t know joy existed before.

I don’t know how long I’m here, life can be too short.

And I’d be lying if I said life is one big joy, it isn’t. The Buddha knew this, the ancient yogis too - life is one of suffering. But I have made a choice to choose joy. I didn’t know that I had that choice until my heart got cracked open.

For so long my programming told me to look for the negative, to find fault within myself, to take on too much responsibility, let life way heavily on me.

I’m swimming to the surface again after a deep dive to the bottom of the sea bed, to look for the pearl of light to show me a way.

There is an anxiety I am still working through, because life feels more impermanent than it has done before. I have to fight the thoughts that creep in at times, that cause me to worry if my children are late home, if I can’t see them on the rocks, if my youngest dives into the sea without protecting his neck and head.

There is a fragility to life.

That to love means we must prepare for loss. But loss is painful and this can stop us loving.

That the line we tread between the two is precarious, scary.

That many choose not to love as deeply as they might, because the pain of loss is too painful to bear. And yet in not loving as deeply as they might, they lose a certain depth to their experience of life and heart instead.

Loss opens our heart and changes our life in ways that words alone cannot explain. Those who have been touched by death will understand.

I tried to go back to how life was lived before Em died. To organise my life into neat boxes of time. To tell myself a story about how it should be lived, as if she too was still alive and all of this had been a horrible dream.

And then the powers that be reminded me that we don’t get to control it as much as we might think.

That there isn’t always a tomorrow.

And to let go of the fear conditioning that keeps me stuck in more of the same, that no longer serves me or the world we are living in.

That life is full of ups and downs, war and peace, harmony and disharmony, order and chaos, clarity and confusion, calm and conflict, positive and negative.

That the way to unstick ourselves, find greater inner peace, less turmoil, is just to accept the world as it is. To accept ourselves as we are. To accept death as much as life. To let things be. To trust that everything happens for a reason. That there is a higher purpose to all of it.

Death cracked my heart open and yet took me deeper in.

I had to let go of my mind’s way of thinking, of being. My ego fought to hold on. And I grieved this too, as it let go into the unknown.

I still don’t know. But that’s OK. Because the dragon flies have been flitting into my life again. And the sparrow hawk talks from high up in Saints Valley, and the sun is rising farther south, I saw the moon setting today behind Fort Grey, and there is such aliveness to my body when I finish my practice, and the dance of my feet on the earth, which holds me beautifully, gently, and my boys, Em’s boy, her girls, all the many children in my life, their souls, they bring such joy, and my students and clients and my family, I never realised quite how rich life can be, with the simplicity of living without knowing, with a heart cracked open by grief and sorrow.

Had my heart not been cracked open, I may never have known. The joy in living so close to an edge. Of not seeking change. But of letting life change me without insisting that life be lived a certain way, not overriding intuition nor denying the dance of the soul, because of other’s opinions.

Nor making myself wrong to allow others their righteous view (it scares me how easily we can drop into ‘fault mentality’ and how quickly others can assume they have the right to tell us how to live and the choices we should make), because death teaches me that life is too short.

Death also teaches me that we are not on control.

But really, what death teaches me the most, is to love with all my heart and soul.

To allow death and grief to clear me out.

So that I may also live with love as the guide in my life.

And when my time comes and I am asked, I can say, “Yes, I loved well” and die peacefully.

Love Emma x