It is difficult to surrender to the internal death process that is inherent in grief if we have not developed a conscious connection to a loving source of life.

Grief is not only about what has been lost or what never was.

She also pulls us directly into a crossroads of self where old parts of us that have been attached to what was lost and identified with the way things were must dissolve into the fire of aliveness to serve our personal resurrection and loving revelations.

If we have not been rooted into a nourishing and loving sense of life, it’s quite common for our mother wound and feelings of separation from love to arise when we experience grief—whether it’s the loss of a loved one, a divorce or breakup, an illness, a move, job loss, recovering from addiction, releasing codependent patterns, or any of the multitude of ways we constantly experience loss and change as humans.

Much of the structure that informs us of the ways to grieve and how to honor, care for, and love ourselves in the midst of grief has been repressed and denied in a culture that values the oppression of the human soul.

Grief is the first emotion we experience when we are born—becoming separate from the oneness of the nourishing womb of Mother, where our mind and being absorb so much as we begin to form.

Our wails are for the mother.

The early years of life serve as deep mirrors of how we learn about ourselves and how our mind develops.

Our nervous systems are bathed in what is consciously and unconsciously felt in our environment through the felt sense of the body.

We learn about our emotions and how to be with them, suppress them, deny them, or love and nurture them, through what was mirrored to us as children and what we observed around us.

If we have no sense of love, safety, and nurturing attached to our early experiences of grief and growing pains, our internal encounters through the spiral of grief may not feel loving (or a place we know how to love ourselves), which can make the process more painful than it needs to be.

We cannot escape pain entirely, but with love and compassion, there is a certain level of freedom we can find within it.

Grief is painful, messy, and so very much a part of being human. It’s a tremendous catalyst of psychospiritual integration and healing.

There may be ways to immediately ease the grief and feel like we’ve got the lesson and moved on, but sometimes these tools serve to suppress or repress (bypass) what we find intolerable, unlovable, and too much to make sense of on a somatic level.

What did you learn about grief growing up?

What ways was grief honored or not honored growing up?

These are great reflections to start off with, because the answers to them may inform the deeper relationship and mother wound that arises when you experience grief.

This is the entry point for loving and healing…not your grief.

Grief is never a problem—it is, in fact, what heals you to open to more love, life, and joy itself.

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