Grief is an invitation to live fully
Most everyone I‘ve interacted with over the last couple of years has experienced grief, even if they couldn’t name it that at the moment. Grief is something many of us spend time trying to avoid or ward off. If you’ve tried this yourself, you likely know how grief tends to snowball and catch up with you in ways that knock you down.
To be human is to hold the gift of grief that is love.
Grief is not linear nor limited to a timeline. Grief, instead, is to be befriended so that it becomes a part of us, not something we move beyond.
Grief is experienced when what we love is lost to us. Disappointment or not getting what you wanted is different than grief.
This month, I want to cultivate space for grief and for feeling grateful for what is typically taboo to talk about in our modern hustle culture.
Grief is a given when someone you love passes away. Organizations and institutions acknowledge this with time off, albeit way too little. We have set up a false idea that grief needs just a few days and then you can snap back to normal. We, as a modern society, have also made it taboo because it is inconvenient to capitalism and it is often accompanied with BIG emotions.
Yet, there are catalysts to grief that come without a clear sense of closure or place to lay down our grieving. Rather these are disenfranchised griefs, meaning a type of grief often not recognized or acknowledged more broadly.
Shining a light on these types is important because grief, when unexpressed, builds up and will make you feel less alive and whole. Unexpressed and unwitnessed grief can impact your resilience and capacity to integrate that grief so that you can move into embodied action.
Some examples of disenfranchised grief:
Leaving a job, whether healthy or not
Leaving a relationship, whether healthy or not
Realizing you were the cause of some pain or loss due to old patterns
Realizing the job or career you have isn’t what you thought it would be
Realizing you have to change your relationship to work in order to survive
Being hit with new parenting stages when kid(s) ages and developmentally shift
Reaching midlife, period
Experiencing the pre/menopause/post and the physical, emotional, and mental rewiring
Watching your parents age, especially when they become ill or experience memory loss
Yearning for belonging and feeling emptiness without genuine community and acceptance
Feeling all the climate and ecological grief, including regular extreme weather events
Watching and reading about all the constant violence and death close to home and around the world
Tapping into the communal and ancestral grief over the state of the world
Phew, fuck. It’s a lot.
Take a moment and breathe.
It is common for us to rush through or move away from these by intellectualizing or compartmentalizing this grief.
Let’s try something else instead.
Breathe in deep and let it out, long and slow. Repeat a few times.
What are you feeling right now?
What are you noticing in your body?
Honor that - accept it in and let it be and move through and with you.
Now because I know you’re aching to analyze and reflect:
Which examples of disenfranchised grief felt particularly on target for you?
Do you feel your own version of any or many of these?
What in your life right now is calling for your attention to its grief?
Share with me - respond to this email and allow me to hold and witness your grief.
There’s a lot to grieve. And we are in a system and society that shuns grieving and feeling all the feels for the state of humanity and Earth, let alone your own personal ones.
P.S. On November 29 from 11-12pm MT, I'll be hosting a free workshop called More Than Your Career: Grieving What Is and Finding Wholeness. Register here.