THE BITTER TRUTH - Befriending Grief & Moving through Loss
Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.
—Oscar Wilde
I s it possible that grief is not just wretched ache? To experience anything more than destruction in grief, what is asked of us?
Moving through loss is to not bypass the transformation it has in store for us. But to move through it, we first have to let it in. We have to feel it. Once we allow it to settle in us — to seemingly occupy every cell of our body — grief leaves us when it’s ready. So, in reality, we let grief occupy us, leaving us changed to the degree we allow it to do its work.
At the center of grief is a strange sweetness, the tenderness of what we loved. So afraid we are of feeling wretched pain, we push our sadness away. This is a learned behavior, as we want to protect ourselves from what hurts. Yet, we can unlearn it and move counter-intuitively, and wisely, into our longing and heartache.
This is not easy. We can feel like an outcast, since most are preoccupied with having fun and being productive. Grief is unhappy and leaves us unproductive, or less so. Its production is elsewhere, internal, deep in the soul. So, a yes to grief is a yes to soulfulness, depth, belonging, and wisdom.
Moving away from what hurts our heart is also encouraged by a consumer-happy, discomfort-averse society, as well as through our knee-jerk motion away from pain. When we don’t occupy our pain, we relegate ourselves to numbness and superficiality. When we don’t heal our pain—through occupying, being with, and fully feeling our grief—we hurt others. Unmetabolized grief also stunts our passion, sense of purpose, and our capacity to love.
Erroneously, we think that resisting emotional distress and pain will protect us, just as we might fend off tiredness, an unruly person, or the common cold. Yet, with emotions, we must work paradoxically. We must cultivate an uncommon courage, an inner resilience, to meet them on their own terms. We don’t transform them; they change us in their own time according to how fully we let them work on us. This requires a wide-open heart that allows itself to hurt as much as it did to love.
Grief cannot transform us when we move away from it. This said, neither can we force ourselves to get close to our pain. We can, however, recognize our movement away, and this simple noticing can help us get closer to it.
We can note our resistance and the split that occurs from denying sorrow. If we resist it, let us just notice this and be curious about our resistance. Let us also notice what the results of the resistance are, and then, perhaps, organically, we might naturally, unexpectedly, find more compassion and interest to get closer, by receiving sadness.
It takes a lot of energy, a lot of rigidity in body and mind to resist the torrents precipitated by loss. Alas, however, grief is non-linear. We can feel stuck, angry, caught in obsessive thoughts, holding on, squirming, fighting to be well. Alas, grief foils each of these attempts, to lead us back to love and a greater wholeness, though the path be wretched!
Paradoxically, each “obstacle” we throw in grief’s way can also help us metabolize it. Each can be a healthy form of denial, allowing us to titrate the loss. Let us not fight too hard resisting or accepting the pain. Each tampers with grief’s delicate yet powerful genius.
GRIEF IS LOVE
Grief is the other side of feel-good love, the sinking Yin for the jubilant Yang. Just as there is a droplet of Yin within Yang, so the sweetness in our grief reveals the essence of love’s goodness. This hard-won ambrosia is squeezed from us by the contraction, the downward compressing, the obliteration of grief.
We cannot, however, get to this greater love only by focusing on literal love. We must allow this love to arise paradoxically — the Yin of loss and sorrow eventually begetting the Yang of joy and exuberance. We use our unconditional love to allow ourselves to long, to cry, to heave, to rage, to squirm, to shake, and falter. And in the midst of all of this we can also soothe ourselves, nurture ourselves, breathe into our pain and help ease it. We don’t do this to get rid of pain, but to allow it. While this seems to enhance the pain, in the long run it lessens pain’s power. This is how we get through grief. This is how we find some regulation and healing in the midst of chaos. This is how we help manage the ravages of loss.
Grief grows our love by distilling the essence of our sorrow, which emerges on the lip of our hearts as strange beauty. In the end — and all along if we feel deeply and carefully notice — there is but only the thinnest veil, a semi-permeable membrane of sorts, between grief and love. The more we can grieve the deeper our love, and the more we love, the deeper our grief.
While in love, we might have overlooked our fortune merely to have loved, and been loved. So grief returns love to us in new form, in the darkness of what was once light for us, and so helps to complete love, our full, wild, and unpredictable humanness. Ironically, and in a paradox of love, grief’s darkness illuminates what we missed and couldn’t let in while we had what we wanted.
Let us consider, then, even gently muster, the courage to accept the strange beauty that comes to fill us in devastation, to remind us of our love and what we loved. Grief is the natural reaction to loss. It celebrates — in the seeming harshest of ways — what we loved and helps us process its absence. Maybe today we can accept a droplet more than what we thought we could yesterday. This way we allow the seed formed in the compression of our grief, the light of our love buried at the heart of sorrow, to form, to be watered with our holy tears, and to sprout some new life when its time is right, when the season turns.
THE SEASONS OF LOVE
Just as spring can be felt before winter passes, so in the depths of grief and its changing of us, eventually unbidden joy percolates from deep in our core, rewarding us with an inner vitality of sovereignty that will serve us through more challenging times to come. But again, we can’t enter grief looking for joy. It doesn’t work like that. It’s not linear, it’s transformational, meaning we go black and promise-less, forsaken, before daylight might peek into our heart again.
In grief, we don’t know if daylight will ever find us again. In one sense, then, it’s silly for me to talk about the bright side of grief. So, forget about the bright side for now; tuck it into a small corner in the back of your brain, or in a crevice behind the small bone of your lower leg, or in a dusty corner of your deep heart. From there, let it merely be a silent encouragement to persist, one moment, one day to the next, through the corridors of darkness and to muster the unconditional self-love also needed to fully embrace the moments of sorrow.
When we grasp for the light in our dark emotions, we block the light. This does not mean that we give up on taking care of ourselves and attempting to enjoy life, to some degree. It does mean, however, that we don’t try to hide or escape grief and its horrid visitation by smothering it with positivity. Instead, our positivity can give us respite, breathing room, to continue the journey of being transformed. Eventually, we might receive the light with open arms.
We can lend the light of our compassion, our deepest abiding and self-care, to our ache, to the welcoming and hosting of grief. This is how our light grows more light from darkness, how the seeds and fruit of a tree correspond directly to the integrity of its roots and the deep dark soil in which it grows. This poem distills the process:
REST OF LONGING
Trust those places
with no way out,
the dark corridors
of your longing.
In fact, entrust them more
than you give to daylight
which disappears
with fall of night.
Only hidden light who waits for you
in shadows can reveal the invisible
passage from darkness
that leaves nothing
Behind.
When we deny the energy of what is now and today, we halt the turning of the seasons. The more we can embrace what is moment to moment, day to day, we fuel the natural cycle of life, death, and rebirth — the rebirth from grief’s death. This natural cycle, then, turns in us too, in our body and in our psyche, to the extent that we can accept all that is horrifying and beautiful inside and around us, that breaks and miraculously restructures us. For only in breakdown can we be rebuilt, cleansed, and remade into something we cannot see today . . . just as a sapling cannot imagine what it will look like in a month or a year, or tomorrow.
YIN & YANG
Without goodness there is no pain. And without pain, there is no goodness. Yin and Yang, always in tandem. Let us be careful, then, not to judge our sorrow, our losses, our shortcomings, our failures. We are not failures for them, not less than, but merely perfectly imperfect human beings doing the best we can with what we’ve been handed by evolution and our experience, especially our upbringing.
We are all uniquely twisted trees, beautiful in our own right, trying to be upright in the ways we can, while embracing our gnarly curves, scars, and knots. All of us bear the wounds of the past and our gentle yet fierce task is the courage to bear witness to and embody all that pleases and pains us, while seeking and embodying the love we can.
From the uncommon courage to endure and welcome our grief is born an indescribable, unbidden wisdom and resilience, an emanation from our core that manifests in our presence, our compassion, our care. This is our praise, this is our death resurrected not of our own will, but by our willingness to feel the dissolve, the compression, the awful chaos and torment of loss. This rebirth can’t be planned or grasped, muscled or manufactured. It is created and delivered by paradox, by forgetting the light, feeling forsaken, cast out of grace. And yet, grace is never closer than our pain, whose by-product is the soft-glow of having been through hell and survived.
Your religion, your prized gurus, the wisdom of the ages, the poems and promises of this article, your plans for productivity, your affirmations, your ideas of enlightenment, your superfoods, and your strong body — none of these will protect you from the seeming meaninglessness absurdity of embodying loss. Yet, they all can help carry you through.
Let us have faith in the night, even as we kick and scream and wish it would end. Let us have faith in what fails us, even as we try to hang on, and on. Let us trust in the dissolution of what we love as it naturally slips away, as horrifying as it feels. As Rumi says, “Anything you lose comes back around in another form.”
Let us also save what we can, work hard to mend and compromise. Trying to rescue what we might lose is crucial; it’s also crucial to let go when this is the obvious course of our predicament, when it’s what is asked of us.
RADICAL ACCEPTANCE
I f our partner is leaving us, or has left, this is what is. If we lose a parent, a child, a pet or job, this is what is. As we age and lose our youth and vigor, this is unstoppable. We also lose our belongings, our hope, our dreams, our friends, our will to live sometimes. And through these losses our hearts can become more potent. Over time, as we see how we get through losing connections and attachments we think we can’t live without, we gain a little more faith and trust with endings, with comings and goings. This can help us let go a little more easily, though it’s never easy moving through heartbreak.
When the season faithfully turns, as all seasons pleasant and unpleasant do, so let us trust we will make it through another autumn and winter. We know there is spring and summer buried inside us, and to welcome them, we must welcome their predecessors in this moment and in the next moment. Accepting what is now, as wholly as we can, with all its torment and contradiction, is to turn the wheel of the seasons. Resisting what is now is to halt the cycle. This is a fire walk of radical acceptance, to blaze our feet on what hurts, and endure it, to the point where pain transforms into strange beauty.
“What is to give light must endure burning.”
—Victor Frankl
Without the death and compost of the dark seasons, there is no nourishment for the lighter seasons. Without courage for the fire, there is no holy burning. A mighty tree cannot grow in soil that has denied the decay and death of its predecessors through autumn and winter, when the leaves and branches die and fall to be turned into black loam to nourish what we appreciate in the above-ground beauty of any tree.
Can we look more closely and appreciate the fuller reality? Can we see that the branches, leaves, and fruits — what we easily love — require what is dark, hidden, messy, and stinky? Can we remember that what is not seen — the roots and nutrients in the soil — feed what we love? Grief too, is what works in that darkness, on our roots, in the unseen, invisibly digesting our pain like microorganisms in the soil. It makes us more than what we appear, creating what is great and beautiful in us.
A FAITHLESS FAITH
I n Chinese medicine, autumn corresponds with grief and the bitter flavor, with letting go and decay. In autumn we begin our journey into the unknown, into the bleakness that has no vision, perhaps only a sliver of faith. In winter we dissolve further into that bleakness, and our hope and faith may desert us altogether. Only in this deserting can another kind of faith arise, one that has no reason or mustered hope, but seems imperceptibly supported by the mere fumes of our will to survive.
The compression of grief is like the concentrated magic of an acorn for the mighty oak. Like the acorn, our invisible vision and blueprint for something grander are hidden in what we could never imagine in our smallness, in our pain, in our despair. So, we trust in that sense of faith when the husk of mustered faith falls away.
Grief also corresponds with the Lungs in Chinese medicine and the hours of 3–5 am. Between these hours, the circulation of bodily energy is thought to peak in the Lung system, which can exacerbate cough and stimulate our grief. This is one explanation for why we wake between these hours while grieving or when sick with a cough.
Grief itself breaks the shell of our apparent diminishment, after it compresses us. Then, there is nowhere to go but up. In my experience, we are then carried up unbidden, almost as effortlessly as we were plummeted to our depths. This transmutation results from the humble strength of our vulnerability to endure brokenness.
Perhaps our most courageous prayer during loss is to take heart, great heart. To what extent can we welcome, moment to moment, what is here now and appears on the horizon as our calling, and not fight it? And if we fight it, to eventually not fight holding on so tightly? We can also fight our resistance some, take a risk, and see what happens. Sooner or later something gives and we are shown the way forward, or moved forward.
Again, in our grief we must forget all this wisdom, for it can take us away from giving ourselves to the crucible of the moment, and the next. In grief, we allow ourselves to cry, to feel helpless, and we ask others to accept us as we are, to hold us and to offer us comfort. Simply having our experience contained, held in a nurturing and accepting container, and witnessed by another, helps with everything I’ve shared here.
May this writing help you endure, not so much wish and hope. For, clinging to hope when we feel it lacking can prevent a truer hope from finding us in the places we least expect. Grief is its own cure, marinades us in its own juices, as vinegar is made, as a caterpillar dissolves into black primordial liquid in order to take new form it can’t yet imagine. In this vein, I share with you another poem from Nature of the Heart and a farewell, for now…
ALCHEMY
Like vinegar of
expectant grapes
the heart draws inward
to the quiet chambers
of restoration
waiting in darkness
for resurrection
by the thirst of its own juices
spilled by life’s sacred accident
aching with a now growing
hopefulness that comes
with enduring grief’s deliverance
from bitter days, waiting to ripen
elegantly sour, painfully sweet,
wisely aged, strangely blessed
ready again to taste the world
anew.
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Jack Adam Weber, M.A., L.Ac. is a holistic medicine physician, award-winning author, somatic therapist, and long-time practitioner and teacher of integrative body-mind practices. He graduated top of his medical class and has been seeing patients for over two decades. Jack is passionately dedicated to psychological depth work and successfully passed through comprehensive, body-centered (somatic) emotional transformation work, which informs the personal growth and trauma work he passionately teaches and shares with others. Learn more at jackadamweber.com
