Grief

My soul friend, Em, passed suddenly and unexpectedly on 8 December in a tragic accident at Vazon, aged 39. One minute she was alive, one minute she was gone. Her last text message, two days before she passed, still sits in my messages, her last email sits in my inbox similarly. She was there. Then she wasn’t.

I felt her the next day, her essence, and I knew with absolutely certainty that she was blissfully free and in utter peace. It was quite something. I also had a sense of her essential nature, of our essential nature, of the freedom that comes when we are not laden by human roles and ego identities. I could feel her as a soul cheer leader, cheering us on, knowing that we are all this essential nature, here on Planet Earth, having an experience to realise more of our soul, of consciousness.

I felt touched by her essential nature which held me high for those first few days, knowing, deeply knowing, and taking extreme comfort from the fact she was - is - at peace.

However Em leaves behind two girls, the same age as my boys, both Reiki Masters, and a 5 month old at that time and as I stepped in to do what I could to try, desperately try, to ease their pain, I held my own shock and grief deeply inside.

This wasn’t the first time I had lost someone dear to me. My friend, Marie, died over 4 years ago now, at the age of 41, leaving behind children also the same age as my own boys. He death was from cancer and while we knew that she was dying, it still shocked me deeply to my core, the notion that one minute someone is alive and breathing and the next dead. I still have her final message in my inbox too, again two days before she passed. Marie’s death not only shook me to my core, but to the very foundations of my life.

I felt Marie too, the day after her passing, as I walked down Saints Hill. I saw her in the clouds, laughing with utter joy, at peace, blissful, no longer riddled with the pain of cancer, no longer in deep fear about what lay ahead and the immense pain she felt knowing she was leaving her boys, only 8 and 4 at that time.

Marie’s passing led me to deep dive into a healing journey to uncover the separation anxiety that had been triggered by her death, due to experiences in childhood, and to question every aspect of my life, now more aware of the preciousness of life and the determined to make the most of the time that I have here. This ultimately led to the break down in my and Ewan’s romantic relationship as we both appreciated that this wasn't nourishing or fulfilling us and we would be living an inauthentic life to pretend otherwise. As uncomfortable as it was, I am always grateful to Marie for her gift of a truer life.

Similarly with Em, there have been so many gifts she has gifted me in her passing and beyond. My life has been changed in ways I could never have imagined. I have immersed myself as much as I can in her children, while learning that I can never make right what feels so wrong, and yet recognising that this is how it was always meant to be, is meant to be, for all of their souls, that we all signed up for this before incarnation for some reason or another that we may never - in our human mind - understand.

Life suddenly became one of moments. Understandably Em’s husband couldn’t live any other way and as I fell into step to try to help, my life was also following suit - what is needed today? This was huge for me, always the planner, always organising, and the boys always needing to know what is happening next.

We, all of us, sitting in Em’s living room, began noticing the passing weather, the changing seasons, the sunrises and sunsets, the being inside together, with the pain of this gaping hole that was the loss of their precious mum and my boys already friends with the girls, suddenly spending a lot more time with them, playing board games, playing tag between rain showers in the garden, their lives changed too. Inevitably Eben’s separation anxiety escalated and we are managing this as best we can.

I would catch myself, still catch myself, is Em really gone? How can she have gone. She lived for her children. We were frequently in touch. I could trust Em entirely and our conversations were always deep, meaningful and nourishing, she never judged, was always able to find the perspective needed to offer support and insight. I miss her dearly. Every time Bodhi, now 8 months, smiles, I see Em. Her half read books sit on the table. What was it all for. All these hopes and dreams. And then we’re gone. Food still in the fridge. Clothes in the washing. One minute there’s breath and then there’s none.

Then mid January my best friend in the UK, Han, her precious brother, Rupert, died suddenly in his sleep aged 51 from heart failure. Our mums were best friends at university and we have grown up together as families. It was a huge shock on top of an existing shock. I saw a photo of his peaceful dead body, this weeks after I had seen Em’s body to say my final goodbye. I’d only seen a dead body once before, when my Gran died. It seemed more easeful then though, she was in her eighties, I had checked her chakras with my pendulum minutes before she died and they were all perfectly balanced, that was her gift. It also felt like her time.

It didn’t feel like Em’s time, or Rupert’s time. The suddenness, the unexpected nature, it tore at the foundation of life again and touched me deeply. Not least the pain for those left suffering, but questioning, that split second that we have life that then becomes death, like a switch being turned off, who makes that choice, is it fate, or the consequences of all the moments that led to this. I was stuck by the effort of life. All the endless thinking and worrying and fretting, all the anxiety and stressing and working, all of the hardness of living. And yet the joy - is there joy? This also struck me deeply.

The boys’ homeopath gave me a remedy for grief because I had been holding on tightly, trying to be strong, and was physically heavy with sadness. It clung to me, wouldn't leave me, like a wet towel that hasn’t been spun. Every morning, in the rain, the cold, the wind, I visited Saints; I tried to drop the heaviness in the sea but it was still there each time I left and walked back up the steep hill.

The birds flittered and sang, the trees clitter clattered, sometimes the wind howled blowing me back off the beach and the waterfall sprayed water back up the hill, the waves sometimes so huge I had to be so very present to enter the sea, the streaks of sun, the soothing sound of pebbles being washed with the tide, a robin (a sign, Em you’re there, thank you), these little moments, this being present in a way I never had before, to maintain sanity, to hold it all together, to take comfort, to find meaning, to make sense.

I threw myself deeper into practice, every moment that wasn’t with the boys, the girls or working, was spent on my mat moving my body, chanting, meditating, breathing, resting. Any social life I may have had stopped, no playdates, no catch ups, I didn’t have the capacity for anyone else’s stuff. And there were lots of people who wanted to meet, to make sense of Em’s passing, because I had insight, but I had to leave them with their pain and confusion, to manage my own. I immersed in Tantric philosophy, to make greater sense, free my mind, find peace and Shen too.

The remedy set in and out poured the grief, endless tears, every day, it leaked from my pores, on my mat, driving the car, walking up Saints Hill, about to teach a class, putting the boys to bed, watching a film; years of repressed grief. I had never known anything quite like it. Old memories surfaced of events in my past that had laid buried, that I hadn’t processed, grieved, cried, let go of, and I wondered when it might end, and yet grief also became then a friend, something I grew to know, to accept, and to feel so acutely in my clients now too, increasingly recognising how much we hold onto our grief, and now I could hold it and help those clients release it too - another gift.

The patterns become clearer, the busy-ness to not feel, the throwing oneself into work to not think and yet this all being OK, all part of the process, not good or bad, just the way it has to be, because if it was meant to be different it would be. I realised how much our suffering comes from wanting reality to be different from how it is, of wanting ourselves to be different from who we are, of the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our experiences, but how these catch us in old patterns, in more of the same.

I realised the freedom of living without our narrative, without defining ourselves, without labels which burden us with expectation of how we should be, as a mother or a healer, a teacher or a daughter. How those very words, ‘mother’, ‘yoga teacher’, ‘healer’ become ladened with expectation and high standards which can lay heavy on us, causing us to compromise authenticity in the drive to live up to the conditioning of the mind and all the endless expectation of others, of society and our ego too.

We have to be so careful with words. As a writer this is difficult. But I am conscious how they get in the way of our deeper self. How we have been taught from birth to use language to experience and perceive the world. but we have to be careful because for the most part we deny our own direct experience to fall into line, to be organised by what other people think or opinion. How many children are fortunate to receive validation of their own experience, versus the experience of others which is conditioned into them. How refreshing to see life as it is instead, without all of this - our stories, our narratives, our programming - clouding our experience.

I see how hard we make life because of trying to be so ‘perfect’, while knowing that perfect doesn’t exist. How much of a hard time we might give ourselves for not making the ‘right’ choices. How we stick ourselves in the past, heavy with shame and guilt and regret and how pointless, utterly pointless this is, to keep torturing ourselves now for what we didn’t know then. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. But the journey of the soul is one of gradual awakening, of realising that NOW, we can do things differently, but back then, back then we didn’t know better - and if we did, we would have done it differently.

I can see so clearly how easily it is to set ourselves freer, to let go of self-judgement, and the judgement of others - what right have we to judge other until we have lived in their shoes - and generally all we are doing when we judge, is popping ourselves on a pedestal and trying to maintain our world view, because challenging our world view (as we discovered during the pandemic) is scary, because what if the world could be perceived differently, what if our idea of ‘the truth’ is not so true after all. Of letting go of the perpetuating of our idea of who we are and how life is lived because of what has happened previously, rather than just meeting the moment - ourselves - exactly as it is - as we are.

I began to realise that joy is ever present, and yet presents in glimpses, in moments, and that to grasp for joy, removes joy, for it is a spontaneous experience. The threads of sunlight, the drops of rain hanging from the leaves, the exquisite smell of blossoming gorse, the taste of a fresh chai with homemade milk, the temperature of the bathwater just ever so right, it these moments, not some Disney happy ever after that we try to buy or emulate or make so, such is our conditioning.

Death teaches us life if we let it. Because so many are living as if death doesn’t exist. As Christopher Wallis, a Tantric scholar and practitioner so cleverly commented, in the West we are obsessed, utterly obsessed about hiding death, as if it doesn’t exist, as if one day we won’t die and many live this way, abusing their bodies, putting off making changes today because there is always tomorrow. Or is there. Because there is one certainty in our life - that we will die. There will be one moment, where we take our final inhalation and our final exhalation. A moment when the body is alive with breath, the other, a body dead, no more breath.

The Shramanas, the ancient seekers of which the Buddha was one, were interested in mortality, not to become experts in death per se, but to become increasingly curious about life, about living well. This threads through to yoga, which is a spiritual practice to stabilise the mind so that we can have absolute clarity about who we truly are - to realise the Self. But it is also a practice to live well, so that when death comes, death is accepted. Because acceptance and being truly in the moment (not tainted by the past or imaging a future) is key to living well.

I have noticed that so many are living to die, and many more are already dead to themselves, living lives for others, caring too much what others think, stuck in loveless relationships, rushing from one commitment to the next, being what everyone else wants and needs them to be, so that they have no idea who they are beyond these demands and expectations placed on them, from parameters, children, society, caregivers, friends, culture, tradition, religion.

Two women who had been clients last year passed towards the end of January, one 36 who had bravely navigated as journey with cancer and another, aged 50, whose life had been impacted by complications during surgery. This compounded my grief, but helped me to realise that we have to live. These ladies were trying to live well despite their various health conditions, and I learned to see the positive from them both.

And this really is where grief has taken me. Not to gratitude for the sake of gratitude, but to working with my mind to weed out the negativity and unhelpful stories and narratives that keep me stuck so that I may see more clearly the joy that is offered to us through our aliveness, in this moment.

It strikes me how the breath, how gravity, how the love of the universe is gifted so freely. How all we need to do is get out of our way to receive and then pass that love and joy into others, by just being and living well - not through obligation or duty, but because of the aliveness we feel, our connection, our essence nature, and our part of the wholeness of life.

The Toltecs use death as their advisor - what would you do differently today if you knew you might die tomorrow?

But really, the question, this one precious and fragile life you have been gifted, are you allowing it - life - to flow through you?

My friend, Han, through the death of Rupert, watched how the many flowers she and her mum were gifted began to droop, reflecting their own drooping energy in the weeks after the death of someone dearly loved. I saw this too with Em’s passing as the Christmas tree and flowers also died, reflecting the deadness we all felt at that time. Han has recently set up her own tea china company and has the idea of how people might send a tea set to those who have lost loved ones so that they can drink tea and think of them often. Read more here.

We have one precious life. You will not live forever.

Love Emma x