Grief -- the long haul
When we are a little further down the grief path — this may be months or years of calendar time — the focus shifts from surviving to acknowledging other aspects of life and thinking about the future. You may still be trying to make sense of this new life, you may feel a desire to start putting pieces together.
The opportunity here is to ask:
Who was I before this loss?
Who am I now as a result?
Grief is a learning process.
We have to gather — re-collect — the pieces of ourselves and create a new identity.
In my Underworld travels, I talked and cried about my losses until I couldn’t talk or cry anymore. Yet there was still something I hadn’t accessed, a place in me that I longed to touch.
I committed to exercise (group fitness classes, strangely), and that helped my depression.
I continued therapy, which was probably a literal life-saver.
I journaled multiple times a day — this was incredibly therapeutic for me.
And still…. This place I couldn’t reach.
Something in my gut told me to get out of my thinking brain and access my feeling brain.
That’s when I set my skepticism aside and started to explore interacting with my grief creatively.
What does that mean? Sometimes it means collage, sometimes it’s a writing exercise, other times it’s a metaphor.
And what I found was a treasure trove. I met parts of myself that I’d buried. Insight and connections came to me without struggle. I was able to breathe easier than I had in over a year.
This is not to say that stepping toward my grief in this way was easy or comfortable. No. There were often tears, but they were different than the tears of anguish and separation from myself.. They were the tears of a river running through me.
Working outside of the box of our usual grief paradigm helped me bring many ostracized parts of myself back home. I was still living with loss, but I felt more fortified and steady as I faced what came.
This is a possibility I want to offer to you, too.
Get curious about your grief. What does it want to tell you? What signs or symbols continually come up for you? Could you create a totem, a ceremony, an altar for your grief?
As a Creative Grief Advocate, I support people in their Underworld tour. From making meaning to creating symbols, clients find solace in putting all of their parts back together. “No part left out,” as the poet Izumi Shikibu wrote.
If you are interested in support for your own process, send me a note.
Michelle Marlahan
Where Self Care becomes Soul Care
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