In my previous post I shared my experience of how a flash of frustration and anger revealed threads of underlying grief in a spontaneous keening that sprang fourth from my body (you can read that whole post HERE).
What I didn’t realize at the time of practice or reflection or writing that post just how deep the grief runs.
Just how far and vast and wide.
I suppose there is a part of me that isn’t surprised.
I have really only started to reenter my body, bit by bit, learning to slow savour and feel my cells, my emotions, my whole being, 10 or maybe 12 or so years ago.
Sure, I’ve been studying nutrition, alternative healing, yoga, meditation, Eastern Healing modalities, Chinese Medicine, reiki, the Akasha, Ancestral Healing, journeying, intuitive healing since I was literally a child.
However, it wasn’t until my late twenties when I started the decent into my body for the very first time in my life.
Most of us live this way and we are never taught any other way.
One of my teachers, Emilie Conrad of Continuum Movement was known to say that she wanted to fully arrive here (in her body, in embodiment) before she left.
I fully agree with her sentiments and have slowly over the last 10-12 years, been savouring the decent into my flesh and bones.
One of the consequences of this I am now realizing, is that once we start to arrive, we start to feel, as if for the very first time.
One of the very first things that awakened was a deep healing in my body with my relationship with pleasure, my sensuality, and my sexuality. For the very first time, as I began to feel safe and at home in my body, my sensory system blossomed and bloomed.
This literally cured the chronic fatigue I was battling with at the time, and would fatefully set my destiny on an unexpected course.
That was to follow was to immigrate to a new country, “officially” change careers, closing my environmental protection work for the Park Service of British Columbia, and my homeland, to pursue a life in the tropics, teaching and practicing embodiment and healing through intuitive practices and craniosacral therapy.
The most recent unexpected consequence of calling my soul back into my body bit by bit has been sitting there, right in front of me, patiently awaiting for me to acknowledge it 39 years and 9 months later.
My lifetime of grief.
A couple of nights ago, it just hit me.
I have been struggling to fully recover from a cold that started almost 7 weeks ago and I have noticed that it has settled deep into my lungs and throat. Even though there is no obvious or severe “problem” there (no cough, etc.), this pronounced heaviness has been present since I first fell ill.
In fact, I noticed a pattern.
Whenever I do get a cold (which is rare) it tends to settle in a familiar heaviness in my lungs.
This spring, I unfortunately suffered major mold toxicity poisoning after a really traumatic and unexpected move from the home I’d created. Where did the symptoms settle?
Why, my lungs of course.
I knew consciously that it was related to grief, but somehow I had thought that perhaps as a practitioner that I was taking on the grief of others. I continued to pray to my guides for guidance and healing, and practice loving on my lungs and body, nourishing it well.
I had also been re-reading a book on Chinese Medicine, The Web That Has No Weaver, because I felt yet again called to read it again and something so simple just struck me.
In Chinese Medicine, all organs are interconnected in an ecosystem that, when in balance, we are in a state of health.
Each organ not only functions on a physiological level, but also an emotional, and psycho-spiritual level.
The lungs represent the season of autumn, and are responsible for both taking in vitality from our external world, but more importantly they help us to let go – just as the autumn leaves drop and prepare to be composted and returned to the earth.
The lungs are where we hold grief.
And oh, my gods and goddesses, I felt all of it – all at once.
I started with feeling the accumulation of grief of this whole year – it has been a big one as far as death and loss go.
Then I started looking at the last 5 years – holy shit! How deep does this go?!
Then I started to realize that for the first time in probably my whole life, the big T Traumas of my whole life finally started to unwind and thaw. The emotional freeze that had protected my psyche my whole life is over.
I can feel all the things.
This realization was both liberating and overwhelming.
Feeling for the very first time the loss (I really mean feeling with my whole flesh and bones human being) of my dad, 36 years after his passing (and at the same time that I turned 39 – the age he was at his death).
Feeling for the very first time the loss of family – or having an intimate relationship with family.
Having grown up without siblings, with a loving, but mentally unwell mother, without a father – feeling my familial isolation and disconnect from this intimacy that seems so common and abundant in the world around me – really feeling it for the first time.
I predict that there is a story to be shared around each of these experiences in the near future, but what I was called to write about today is family.
I think out of all of the first time felt grief that has bubbled to the surface, the loss of family is the one that surprised me the most.
I think the reality of it hit me when I flew to Canada to attend my grandmother’s (my baba’s) funeral this summer.
Everyone in my family seemed shocked and surprised that I would come at all.
My baba and my grandfather (dëda – pronounced dyeah-duh) along with my mom, raised me.
I spent my childhood on their rural property, wandering around the garden, chasing butterflies, and digging up earthworms from the soil to feed the fish that swam in the stream that crossed their property.
I was bullied a lot in school, and elementary school in particular was a special kind of hell, but getting off of the bus at baba and dëda’s house meant an escape into heaven from my social hell.
Living abroad made regular visits to see baba and dëda in person over the years – plus a global pandemic – meant that I hadn’t seen either of my grandparents in person for some time. They are both dear to me and I always made a point in spending time with them and visiting with them as they aged and moved into an assisted living apartment whenever I could.
When I found out my baba passed in July, I of course immediately started making plans to travel so that I could be there for her funeral. Many dear friends and colleagues helped in all kinds of ways – from sending funds to help me bear the financial burden of the travel expenses, to driving 7 hours round trip and crossing international borders to pick me up from the airport. I am ever grateful for their love and support – they are the reason I made it!
Meanwhile, entering the dynamics of my family, I found myself feeling lost and adrift.
I found myself texting my family’s group chat trying to get a ride to the funeral (it is a very rural area with little to no public transportation and certainly no other way of getting to the funeral site without a vehicle), texting my mom, my aunties, and anyone I could think of to get there to no avail.
Perhaps the stress of planning such things, overwhelm, and/or the disbelief that I would even travel 2 days by bus, planes, and car to arrive at all? I will never really know – and I don’t blame or fault anyone in my family certainly.
But it left me with the tangible feeling of being a forgotten satellite, lost, adrift, and an unimportant part of what was clearly an important family matter.
I’m writing about this particular experience because in that moment, I realized something, with my newfound capacity to feel my feelings. I was grieving for many things, yes – my baba, my childhood safe haven, and much more – but also something I had never considered before.
The feeling of loss that comes from feeling abandoned by my blood family.
When I was a child, I could feel it too – I just never knew exactly what it was.
My cousins would come visit, we would play, and then they would return to their “real” families, and I would be alone again.
I appreciated and loved my solitude, however I also yearned for closeness, for others to gather up around me, no matter what, even if they didn’t like me in that moment, to know undoubtedly, that they would always love me, hold me, and support me.
The thing is that I didn’t even realize it was missing until now.
And more and more as the pivotal members of my family have left this earth – my auntie Laura, my baba – the lingering threads of connection are broken, sending me further and further adrift.
Not only did I never realize I longed for the closeness of family around me until just recently, but I ostensively denied this desire in my late teens and early twenties. One of the tricky and obtuse facets of our deepest real desires, is that we often conceal them to protect our psyche from the pain we experience in the not having of them.
We are such amazing, complex, and magical beings.
And they can be painful.
The loss can weigh on our hearts, breaking us into millions of pieces of grief.
And so here I sit, for the first time in my 39 years and 9 months of embodying my cellular earthy organism which is my body, feeling this loss – the loss of a whole lifetime – just now.
I am ever so grateful to and for my body for holding this massive load for so so long.
Perhaps better described as a lake – because that’s what I’ve been feeling in my lungs lately.
I’ve been feeling the dam of massively held grief waters, waiting for me to open up the gates and let it go.
I had a dream last night with a parakeet that flew into my hand then suddenly sank its talons into my flesh.
I knew that the only way the bird would release me if I were able to let go in my heart.
I heard a voice telling me “you are a shamanic shapeshifter; you know how to let go, so let gooooo with all of your heart and soul”.
And suddenly, eyes closed, trying not to panic through all of the pain, I felt it – the shift, running through my whole body – and she suddenly flew away.
She let me go.
I know this is just the beginning for me in this deep dance with grief.
But I am willing.
To let the doors open.
In ritual.
In ceremony.
It’s time to bury, burn, drum, sing, and rise up my inner ghost, to join the ancestors who are well in spirit.
Aho.