Clearing the Ashes *[Pt. 8]*
Grieving as a hack
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This is a continuation of the series I’ve been writing about The Phoenix Era (what I renamed the Dark Night of the Soul). Read previous posts here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.
Last time I talked about using the time in the darkness of the Phoenix Era — the period I called living in the ashes — to clear out some of your baggage. This begins to bring light into the darkness. Today, I write about one method I used to do this.
In Persian culture, our new year begins at the Spring equinox. This time of year brings many traditions and rituals for us that symbolically sweep out the old year and invite in the new one. One of my favorite traditions is called “khoone takoonee,” which literally translates as “shaking of the house.” Essentially, it’s spring cleaning. You review your belongings, space, and life to decide what has served you and can be released, and what can remain to serve you again. You know, it’s getting rid of the old stuff to make room for the new stuff. On new year day, or Nowruz as we call it, you are even supposed to wear all new clothing (one of my favorite traditions).
In this seasonal time of endings and new beginnings, I’m thinking about a video my friend Dr. Amy Robbins posted a while ago. In the video, she talks about the idea that if we grieved more losses in our lives (e.g. eras, identities, dreams, innocence, old dynamics, etc), then we wouldn’t fear the grief of death as much. The idea is that we would build up our grief muscles, or our capacity to withstand the intense feelings of loss. What an idea! To practice grief, which — I know, I know — sounds truly awful. But hear me out! It’s already there in our rituals – an understanding that to make room for the new, we must review and let go of the old. Yet, we don’t really do that enough for our emotional lives, do we? In our emotional lives, we just throw the old, ugly clothes we don’t want into an overflowing closet that we dare not open, lest it all comes crashing down on us — like Monica’s closet from Friends.
Obviously, the amount of pain and the magnitude of the effect on your life will be much greater with death (usually), but you’d at least be familiar with the process of grief. Psychotherapist Francis Weller calls this the “apprenticeship with sorrow.” It’s the art and craft of grief. Grieving is a verb, after all.
Ugh, who wants an apprenticeship with sorrow?! No one. But as I wrote last time, ignoring or suppressing our losses comes at a heavy price — they don’t disappear, they accumulate.
Each unprocessed sorrow adds another brick to the load we carry, until eventually, the weight becomes too much for our body and soul to bear. Worse, it cuts us off from our intuition and our connection to something greater.
What ends up happening is that we cut off that part of ourselves that feels the sharp pain of loss, maybe because we dislike the way it makes us feel vulnerable. Or the way it makes us feel like we need someone else to support us. Or how it makes us feel so out of control. Whatever the reason, that piece of our consciousness gets made an outcast. Becomes an uninvited guest. An exile. So what?
When you don’t make room in your psyche and life for your own grief and loss, not only do you lose the amount of joy you can let in, but you also have no space to hold anyone else’s grief — and that’s how we end up in a society riddled with anxiety and depression where very few people know how to adequately hold someone else’s pain (which, incidentally, compounds the grief, anxiety, and depression!). The unprocessed pain also clouds your internal space, cutting off your connection to yourself, the Universe, the field of consciousness, or whatever you want to call that something greater, making it difficult to find your way to solutions, creativity, and connection. And lastly, all the unprocessed emotions take up space where new things could be coming in, contributing to you feeling ‘stuck.’
So, let’s say we take this idea seriously, as a service to yourself and others. The equinoxes are a great time for this since they are times of transition. They are voids between the old and the new. It’s a beneficial time to clear space internally for new things to come in — new feelings, experiences, perspectives.
Back to Amy’s video — after watching it, I made a list of things in my life that I know I didn’t previously consider as losses (but do with the wisdom of hindsight) and most definitely did not grieve in any way, shape, or form. It was a very, very long list because I used to be a masterful emotion-suppressor. Some obvious things made the list, like the end of college and grad school, but also little daily things from other eras of my life. Dynamics that have changed. Things left unsaid. The different phases of growing up, including the before-after divide of losing someone you love, which propels you into maturity in many ways (you will never be the same again). New beginnings, even if they are happy, usually come with some sad endings, and since I used to gloss over those, they also got added to the list.
Hack #1: I framed the activity as active retrospective grieving and clearing for myself. Not like, “Let me get rid of this garbage that’s weighing me down” kind of way (which feels like a chore), but rather, “I have never properly thanked or honored all these moments and events in my life and I want to do that now, and kindly send them off” kind of way. Framing it as “grieving” worked for me because (1) I’m not afraid of the word grief anymore, and (2) it helped me more easily access the emotions and understand that I am processing them, not throwing them away, and also not sitting in the sad emotions.
Hack #2: In the deep emotional work I’ve done over the past few years, I’ve noticed that grief, sadness, or hurt are usually underneath anger. What that means: in the middle of releasing anger, one of these sad emotions suddenly breaks through, dissolving the anger — clearly showing you that anger was just protecting sadness, which is the true emotional root. So, I added to the list some of the things that have angered me in the past, wondering if I could shortcut anger and go straight to grief/sadness, thereby more quickly resolving some of these unresolved emotions (I mean, seriously, this all takes SO MUCH TIME — can I catch a break!?). I’m happy to report that for some issues, the shortcut worked! But for issues where I repressed the grief/sadness, they were inaccessible to me – meaning that I couldn’t conjure up the emotion in order to fully feel it and release it. So, in those cases, I had to go through the anger. Oh well.
Then, I grabbed a box of tissues and set aside time each day to fully feel all the emotions for something on the list. Was it pleasant? Obviously not. Do I wish I was doing anything else? Absolutely. BUT, I did feel 1000 times lighter each time I did it! And clarity and understanding and creativity started to flow in so much more easily! There was so much unprocessed sadness. I was continually surprised by how much certain things meant to me and how sad their losses made me feel – that’s how closed off I had become. Bit by bit, I’ve been healing my heart in this way. Reclaiming my exiles. I don’t want to live an unbalanced life anymore and this is what’s required.
Healing isn’t linear, though. I see this internal work sort of like Jenga. Some things get resolved, pieces move around, and suddenly some issue you weren’t even aware of is now top priority. The reshuffling causes inner tension, conflict, and chaos (as I’ve written about before). It is often overwhelming, and that is why (as I wrote last time) expansion into the new you requires contraction for healing – no need to dump your chaos on other people!
Why go through all this? Because through the chaos comes moments of absolute peace and calm, that grow longer and longer as you resolve all these hitchhiking unresolved emotions. Don’t we all deserve some peace and calm? Yes.
If you also want to drop that baggage that keeps you fragmented and foggy, I’m dropping a few prompts below for the exercise. You just have to set aside 10 minutes to write nonstop. If you do try it, don’t forget to thank yourself afterward. This is hard work and you’re brave for doing it! And please accept my thanks (and drop a heart in the comments, if you feel called) for lightening the collective load of unexpressed grief and sorrow.
Grief ritual: A few prompts to help you explore your feelings of loss:*
“I remember…”
“I miss…”
“I long…”
“I had hoped…”
“I dreamt…”
“Thank you for….”
“Now that you are gone….”
This practice will surely transform poignant impressions into liberating insights, through consistent and deliberate implementation. 🙏🏾💎
🤍