Processing our Grief

How to be Human Series

1×

0:00

-10:34

Processing our Grief

What does that actually look like?

Lara Foster

Mar 30, 2022

I’ve heard it said many times, “Process your grief so you don’t choke on your grief.” As quoted in Recapture the Rapture by Jamie Wheal, “Our ability to be of service is in direct proportion to our ability to digest our grief.”

Grief landing like the sadness of unsung songs, undreamt dreams, the letting go of all the knowns and unknowns in timelines of possibilities with people, places, and things that are forever lost or gone. There is No More. It is and Ending with a capital E.

“Grief arises when the loss is completely out of your hands, and you need to mourn,” says Karla McLaren in The Art of Empathy.

To allow ourselves to reach into and touch this type of grief, to allow it to overcome us takes a keen type of courage. Some of us don’t have a choice but to take this step. To allow the tears to flood and emotions to follow. Purging the static out of our bodies like noise keeping us stuck in timelines that no longer serve us, but that we weren’t ready to let go of.

Grief gives us new life. Grieving is a pathway to new possibilities. For one cannot see the lightness of day before forging the darkness of night.

The grievances/grief I’ve experienced in my life have come from several different places. The hope of a relationship that just isn’t really there. A dream of athletics that just doesn’t really fit my psyche. The death of a loved one…

I think it’s this last one that gets the most of us. So close to home that our hearts ache and break simultaneously over and over again. They were here, now they’re not. I still love them… and… all the questions that come in between.

For me, experiencing grief became a challenge. The wound festering so deep through my emotions and spiritual understanding of life itself that I really had no choice but to jump in, dive deep, and hope I’d find some respite, allies and air along the way.

…the absolute best thing I did was to give myself permission to FEEL.

Of all the things I did to explore grief as I was grieving the absolute best thing I did was to give myself permission to FEEL. As I was grieving, if I needed to cry, no matter where I was, I let myself. I was allowed to I was grieving. If I felt off and couldn’t attend an outing, I listened and stayed home. If I felt inspired by something, curious to learn or do more, I leaned IN.

Grief allowed me to allow my emotions and senses to start guiding me.

This world is coming up on 12 years, April 11th 2010, since the loss of my father, Lonnie Foster. The man who was flawed, but was willing to admit it. Who was able to see and to reach into the hearts of EVERYONE. The man who lived his own legacy that follows me like a shining star. “Leave it better than you found it.” Meaning people and places and things. “Assume the best in everyone.” I sometimes mess this one up especially when I’ve clearly been wronged. “Don’t judge anyone. You don’t know their story.” Tough in practice. Easier in surrender.

I don’t mean to make my dad out to be a Saint. He wasn’t. He left my mom and I because of his own undigested trauma and grief of life. And I believe it was ultimately this un-digestion that perhaps led to his death.

So HOW do we process our grief?

Simply. We FEEL. We SENSE deeply. All of it.

Now this is not a journey that’s meant to be taken alone. Sometimes it takes elders, and allies, friends, supporters and challengers to hold us, to encourage us, to witness us as we feel these new raw emotions. We’ll meet them as we walk the path.

We allow the sadness to come up. We say what we need to when we need to. We go where we need to go. We create when we need to create. We set our intentions genuinely in support of all of Life.

We stop playing games, manipulating others and bending them to our will. And start playing Games. The Infinite Game.

We become a process, flowing, like a river. Where no shame, no sadness, no anger or perturbation gets stuck. We become that which moves as we allow the moving to flow through us.

And this allowance, this ability to smile when we mean it to cry when we feel it, will go against everything we’ve ever been taught. To straighten up, to toughen up kid, to stop being so emotional…

Why would we ever want to negate our emotions and senses? They are a truer and deeper evidence of a fuller sensed clarity of reality than blanket words pointing to what we think we mean will ever be.

The more we allow ourselves to swim in this water, the more we help others digest their grief. A dance of reciprocation exchanging partners through right timing and right action. Sometimes it’s a hit and sometimes it’s a miss. Sometimes it’s a word, a smile, a synchronicity or convergence that helps us take our next step. To believe, understand and fully embody the radical hope that lives in these next steps without even seeing or knowing what they are.

Processed grief can become a joyful dance of connecting to those who know the sound of your real name, who you really are underneath the masks, the layers of conditioning and things we’ve learned to pretend to be.

When I hear my name called in this way, I step forward. I smile and breathe into my heart. I look deeply into another’s eyes and I let them remind me where I can come alive again.

Grief is a gift. A gift of deep soul surrendering remembering. Igniting the circuits again. Like Chevy Chase decorating his entire house with lights for Christmas and bringing the electrical cords together in slow motion. BING! Lights on! Choirs sing in harmony, we celebrate and congratulate one another. And, become grateful that we did not have to go up on the roof and check every single light bulb on every strand. (Reference: Christmas Vacation)

Sometimes the broken fuse that we need comes toward us. This one, here it is, feel this and then remember again.

Honestly, no matter how I word it, it’s not a comfortable process. I myself have even started to dull in my emotions a bit. 12 years later, the grief doesn’t hurt so much. Yes, I still miss my dad but I know he’s not coming back and I’ve accepted it. Working through the stages of grief that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D. outlines in On Death and Dying. I’ve become the person I need to be without him here. It was a grueling path and I earned every single step of that sh**.

Five Stages Of Grief - Understanding the Kubler-Ross Model — from https://www.psycom.net/depression.central.grief.html

But since the emotions are not so raw and present, I find myself slipping sometimes back into, “Fine, I’m fine.” “It’s all good.” “That’ll do.”

Really? Is it really fine? Is it really all good? Will that really do? I search my senses again. Allowing the depths of feeling to inform me.

If anything, I feel inclined to continue to process my own grief, like brushing my teeth, so that I can continue to connect to folks whose signature is beyond me. Every time I meet or get to know a new human who is doing their work I learn something profound. It’s like they give me a gift, and it is my hope they feel the same.

What I give? I’m not really sure. Other than knowing the more transparent I am with my emotions, my senses, the intuitions the more light connecting, choir singing moments there are in my life and when grief comes crawling, I am not alone, for they are with me and there’s something beautiful in that too.

We process our grief, for Love. Because grief IS Love. And WE are the river that connects them.