Grief and the resilience of the soul

This year of grief has been heavy and yet necessary too. I know that now.

The loss of Em has been hard to bear, but her passing cracked open my heart to all the other loss not yet processed.

The loss of those to death, my friend Marie, five years ago now and all the others who have passed since then.

The loss of those I love to emigration, the loss of the innocence of my children as their minds are now shaped by friends and media, the loss of time as I navigate the peri-menopause, knowing that my child bearing days would be difficult to bear.

The loss of my romantic relationship with Ewan and all the hopes and dreams that wound their way with this, and of all my ideas of how it might have been, as I accept reality as it is, instead.

The loss of my idea of hope the world might be too, love, harmony and peace, not war, destruction and online living.

I have also grieved for those I love still living, for to love is to lose and I have imagined their loss and felt the pain that this imaging causes.

I have trodden a wild edge with grief as I have come to understand and accept the reality that is our impermanence.

It feels almost an initiation, a rites of passage. I could have turned my back to it, closed my heart and carried on, but grief is something that comes to mess things up.

Life was never the same after Marie died. Her death sparked in me a deep fear that I couldn’t resolve at the time, but the shock was enough to make me consider the content and contentedness of my life and make the changes that were causing so much of the stress at the time. Had her death not gifted this, I might be dead myself by now.

Life has changed again since Em passed in ways I can’t yet distinguish. I have gained a family and the love this brings, and I have lost a dear friend who was very good at listening. I have found parts of myself I had forgotten. And I have deep dived to free my mind from some of its suffering.

In many ways, it is this that grief has changed - my mind and the way that it perceives the world. I was touched by Em’s essence and this has been working its way through me, upending everything I clung to for support in my life, none of it real.

I realised I had to turn deeper inwards, still.

The mind revolted initially, didn’t want to be tamed, wanted to keep running the show. And for a while I lost myself there, indulged in it, and in my emotional body, ran away with my thoughts, and my stories, let them distract me from my core, immersed in their noise. I forgot they are merely vibrations, like sound, that dissolve if we let them flow, emotions too.

And slowly, very slowly, as the thoughts eased, as the unresolved traumas and woundings healed, as my cracked heart, softened, I began to hear a whisper of something loving. It’s taken time. Yet out of the darkness has come more light.

I realise now, that life is changing all by itself. Not because I forced it, but because I started working with my mind, in a way that I had not worked previously.

I needed to deep clean it of the clutter that had accumulated while I was busy attending to material life.

The grief counselling helped, the Tantric practices too, being in nature, growing herbs, being on my mat, eating well, sitting in dolmens, walking by myself and playing with Em and my children.

I have needed all of this.

To be reminded, we are not our stories, we are not our wounding, we are not our trauma, we are not our thinking and ego mind.

Out of the ashes, something new is now arising.

A crystal I love broke this week, I lost a ring I have been wearing 17 years, and a necklace snapped in my bag.

I was okay with this.

Everything in our world is impermanent, including our body - that too, is changing.

Loss has danced me to a wild edge, and asked me to let go, again and again.

Yet something significant is entering the space, something that couldn’t enter until I’d cleared out the chaos from my head.

There is no going back, I know that now. Grief opens our heart, asks us to go deeper still, reminds us that there is a depth to our life not yet explored.

We have nothing to lose now.

We are wide open.

We can no longer push grief to the margins as our society encourages.

For we have lost and lived and yet still we are open to love.

This is grief’s gift.

If we can ride the intensity of our feelings, not push them aside, nor close down to them or disappear into the safe haven of our conditioned mind, disassociating, but hold steady, patiently, staying open to the vulnerability, then we can be positively changed by all of this.

Grief is an alchemical process.

This is where grief has taken me. From the initial heavy phase of profound shock, disbelief, despair, and the shattering of life as I knew it, through the agonising stage of emotional melting and washing, where my defences dissolved and old illusions, conditionings and expectations dropped away.

And now, finally, the gradual emergence of light, meaning, and a deeper sense of Self—not returning to who I was before, but carrying forward a changed, deeper capacity to love and live.

This process has been brutal at times. But it has been necessary too, to make peace with what has happened, heal old traumas and woundings, erase outdated and false stories, and let go of unhelpful conditionings, roles and identities.

This process hasn't erased the pain or make the loss "good," but it has helped to transform what has been a raw sorrow into a deep, enduring resilience of the soul. It is incredible the strength of soul.

I have recognised the resilience of my ancestor’s souls too, for me to be living this day, writing this to you. my Mum, my Dad, all of those who came before. We wouldn’t be here had they not also endured grief and come through the other side.

There is also a capacity for love that I didn’t know was possible, a quietness to mind that has been a long time coming, and a quiet acceptance of life as it unfolds, not controlling.

This is where grief finds me now.

Love Emma x