I have been holding you close to my heart and sending so much love and healing energy out to you this week. I know you are feeling everything so intensely, a gift and a curse to all you hsp’s and empaths out there doing your work in the world. Please tread gently on your soft animal body, compassion fatigue is getting to us all and the only way we are going to save our asses, I believe is to find spaces of healthy, co-regulation so we can work with our grief and the unprocessed collective grief that is crying out to get our attention.
Our broken hearts have the ability to remind us of what it is we love—and rather than closing down and going paralytic or into passivity, or to spiritually bypass with “looking on the bright side” or “staying positive”what if we can come together in LOVE to do the hard things, something that Pema Chodron called “the outrageous courage of the bodhi heart” that somehow carrying our grief alongside our gratitude is the only way through these dark days. Amongst the oldest peoples it has been said that grief and gratitude are but two sides of Love, and are so intertwined that if we suppress our grief for too long, we also lose our ability to love fully. What if by softening our hearts and truly feeling each other’s pain we shatter the denial and the illusion of heroic responses that actually generates a truer, more full-hearted version of courage? I am asking for more of that, a place of ritual, of storytelling that heals our loneliness and brings us back to the Soul, a belonging where we can use the medicine that grief offers.
As many of you know I have been pouring my grief and gratitude into a book about Death, Dying and the `grieving process for animal lovers whose companions are dying or have died. It has been a painful and cathartic process that has brought about so much joy as I worked through my own unprocessed grief. No surprise it felt like I was dying every day that I wrote and wanted to be done with it. Like grief, it took its own time, and it is not done with me yet. I want to thank all of you who were brave enough to offer to be early readers and give me some feedback as to how useful it is to you or someone else who is grieving. In a death phobic culture where we have been told that grief is not welcome and to make it a private affair, it is not surprising we have an epidemic of loneliness that makes us feel separate and stuck in a nightmare of longing for touch and deep right relationship.
While death and grief remind us that in the end, we all lose what we love and that we get to keep nothing, it also reminds us of how precious a thing it is to be alive and that as much horror, trauma and separation there is, there is also equal amounts of great beauty, love and connection. Even though like me you may feel alone in your solitude we are never truly alone. One just has to step outside to know just how connected we are to the water that flows through our taps, the heat from the sun, our relations with the trees and the plants, the birds and squirrels that visit, when perhaps you may go through the day without being with another person. Where I am right now, house sitting on my own, those little squirrels come and sit near me eating away at the acorns dropping from the trees, relishing in the harvest, grateful to be able to stock up for the coming winter months. The birds are singing, a gorgeous fox comes to lie on the lawn and 2 big black spiders greeted me yesterday from the bottom of the toilet bowl. I scooped them out and put them back into the garden, thanking them for the message I needed to hear around balancing my yin with my yang, and to keep speaking my truth with a soft heart and find new ways to build systems with the divine feminine.
If Spider has visited you this week, I would love to know what your message was. That pair of spiders wanted me to share in the 8 energy that when we do not get caught up in the web of the illusion of the physical world, we co create heaven on earth. The web that Spider weaves also represents the wheel of life. A life that does not include any alternatives or solutions to the problems we face. It is typical of humanity to get caught up in the polarity of good and evil, without realizing that we can change it at any time. If we are not decisive enough about changing our lots in life. We may end up being consumed, trapped in the web of our own creation of fear and limitations.
Spider Medicine represents the female energy of the creative force that weaves the beautiful designs of life. As her web has hundreds of intricate patterns which catch the morning dew, tell Spider how beautiful she is, thank her for reminding you of the stories you are telling and how you can use your psychic capacities to contribute to the collective web of life.
It is in these moments of seeing the beauty that surrounds us, that our grief turns into delight, awe and gratitude. As the one who dreams awake, the nightmares that haunt us, the non-human species and unseen threats like the “plague” that evoke fear in us, that are a call from your Soul, your psyche trying to get you back into right relations with the parts not welcomed or honoured, rejected and denied. When we act out of complex, shame, judgement, separateness rather than conscience, empathy and collaboration, it’s difficult to grieve.
I know speaking and apprenticing with death and grief may not be as “fun” as working with the cool law of abundance “love and light” kids on the block. I am all for the love and the light as much as I am for the shadow and trauma. It’s fine to get your arms around hope and positive thinking and love. But it’s harder to get our arms around despair, hopelessness, fear, panic, dread, despair, grief and death. I believe death and grief work is the only way to end the unnecessary suffering so that as we get skilled at carrying our dead, giving grief a sound, it gives way to more joy, our expansive love for all that is.
If we are going to do the hard things we have to stop collapsing, shrinking, disappearing into learned helplessness and expand. To look up at the stars and know we are part of this enormous cosmos and play our part in living well so that we can die well. That’s the bigness that all of us are being asked to, to achieve is they cannot get through this, you know, shrunken. Not only to become big enough as to feel into the tendrils of all of our relationships, all of our kinship that weaves across everything in that embrace. I am immense. That doesn’t mean it’s not difficult. It’s certainly incredibly weighty right now.
The only way to heal is to feel more,t grieve openly, to get intimate with life and all its beauty and it’s sorrows.–Grief offers that if we are willing to live well, with beauty and love attached then it is not just despair. The growing cynicism we see everywhere in society is a symptom of untouched sorrow where the heart cramps and turns bitter in our grievances.
When we deny grief it becomes dangerous to others – compressed grief becomes explosive rage and violence and we don’t have to look further than these dark days to see it in the military, in gun violence, in our youth stabbing and killing each other to see how much work we need to do to heal generations worth of, unmetabolized grief.
True healthy anger is a vulnerability to speak to truth about something injured and violated that we want to love and protect. It serves the greater good. We need to get in touch with our rage in order to grieve well. let us use that as a holy act of protest and a sign that our soul is awake and ready to do what needs to be done.
None of us chooses pain and heartbreak and death voluntarily but it is our constant companion every day and night of our life. We don’t choose any of it but we can use them to reshape us into something beautiful.
I hope you choose to let grief in and welcome it’s medicine.
I will be speaking more to this on the Awakening Summit in a few weeks and have a very special new offering to help you to use your grief and your love in a good way. I hope you will come and join me on the call.
Also, my dear friend Judy Anderson has a new podcast where I spoke about my love for animals and how to keep them happy, healthy and vital for longer.
You can subscribe for FREE and listen tomorrow here.
and as always trust you are loved, that you matter and that together we are creating a new, sustainable future.
I love you
Sarah-Jane
PS: If you would like personal attention and support in healing and how to use your grief as a catalyst to more joy, I have a few openings next week for private sessions – 60 minutes, my heart and abilities on your most pressing desires for just $197. You can BOOK here.
P.P.S. Every week I offer a new video on my youtube channel to support you on your healing journey – if you haven’t already please subscribe to my channel and share it so that I can reach more people. This week you can listen to the guided meditation to help you calm anxiety and release your grief, especially helpful if you are feeling overwhelmed right now.
I also have a video about avoidant attachment and avoidant anxiety which is relevant to these dark days.I will be making a series on pet grief and how to deepen your connection with your pet in spirit, to accompany my upcoming book.if you have anything specific you would like me to address in a video please let me know.