Living in the Ashes (The Grief Edition Pt.3) [Pt. 7]

Los Angeles and its Phoenix Era

Feb 06, 2025

I explore science, spirituality, consciousness, the transpersonal, and more weird stuff in my book: Order here, or wherever books are sold.

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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, here, here, here, here, and here.

I had already written the title for this month’s newsletter before the wildfires erupted in Los Angeles last month — an eerie coincidence. Now, we’re all living in the ashes of what we’ve lost, both metaphorically and literally. They continue to sprinkle down on us.

Another strange synchronicity emerged from this event. I’ve been collaborating with Allison Paradise and Laura Garcia on launching a new project this year: The Phoenix Era — a healing and coaching collective dedicated to supporting people through challenging and transformative life experiences (stay tuned for more details). Then, in the midst of our planning, Laura lost her home to the Eaton fire the week of January 7^th. All three of us have lived through our own Phoenix Eras of burning transformation, but we never expected one of our personal lives to so literally reflect our work — sifting through ashes to find what can be salvaged and rebuilt. (**If you are able to help in any way, Laura’s GoFundMe is here. Deep gratitude to those who have already donated!**)

In this interview with our friend Dr. Amy Robbins (Amy, you are wonderful!), Laura shares how her dreams and premonitions eerily foreshadowed the fire weeks before they happened. Looking back at my dream journal, mine did, too. But today, I’m not going to write about how these ‘coincidences’ are less surprising when we accept that we are all interconnected by an underlying deeper reality.

No. Today, we focus on the ashes.

I’ve been writing about the Phoenix Era for a year — about those times in life when transformation grips you in its talons. When evolution calls. While some of the series has explored the self-transformation that comes when you flip a worldview, its essence applies to any life-altering event that requires deep psychological and emotional restructuring — whether it’s the loss of a loved one, a home, an identity, or era.

Every loss is like a brick dropped into your lap. Over time, they pile up, growing heavier, pressing down on you. For each of these life-altering events, along with the smaller ones we encounter daily, our psyches, bodies, and souls need to digest what has been lost. Yet, modern Western culture has deleted this fundamental human birthright. Instead, too many of us suppress our emotions and avoid processing our losses at all costs. More drinks, more games, more distraction, please!

This comes at a cost, though. “Unprocessed grief is depression,” says author and educator Martín Pretchel. At some point, your brick collection becomes maxed out and you can’t take in anymore! They’re heavy and you’re tired. So, you close yourself off to life, whispering, “No more, please.”

All the losses we have not mourned become the background grey of our lives. Like spilled ink, they spread to fill the space of our awareness, muting joy, dulling wonder. Any semblance of peace is also blotted out because that suppressed energy is not quiet. Oh, no. It hums in the background and waits for our defenses to momentarily fail, our guard to drop, our dam to break, so the unprocessed grief and sorrow can be freed at last.

When something does finally upend your world enough, the descent into the dark night begins. The familiar things you have come to rely on — your identity, beliefs, structures, safety, and certainty — all start to fall away in a chaotic deconstruction. The false you and all the hacks and strategies it’s built over the years to keep away the parts of yourself that feel uncomfortable emotions (like shame, grief, anger, envy, and sorrow), begin to fail. It’s unstoppable, uncontrollable, unrelenting. Your soul has had enough of your bullshit and demands to be heard in its entirety.

The descent might be out of your control, but what you do in the darkness is not.

This is where you live in the ashes. The phrase comes from a story in Francis Weller’s book The Wild Edge of Sorrow that describes an ancient Scandinavian practice for those dealing with loss. For a year, the person who suffered the loss would spend their days alongside continually burning fires in a communal longhouse. During this sacred season in the ashes, little was expected of the bereaved except to know the depths of their grief and loss. Their duty was to mourn, so they could return to the community renewed. They return as elders, capable of holding others in their pain with what they have encountered in the dark. I love this tradition so much for its humanity.

“Ash is the ultimate reduction, the bare soul, the last truth, all else dissolved.”
— James Hillman

Similarly, the Phoenix Era is a death and rebirth. It’s an initiation. A rite of passage. In the ashes is where the new you is forged. You may not have chosen this, but now that you’re here, what are you going to clear away? You might as well let down your defenses, metabolize your grief, and empty your sorrows. Let yourself be purified.

This is what was missing for me in thinking about getting through the Phoenix Era. Grief. Grief dissolves a lot of things and makes it easier to move into your new (true) self because it allows you to process, fully mourn, and let go of the old you — as well as the reasons behind why the old you had to create those hacks and strategies in the first place. It clarifies who you are.

This is the part that hurts. But this is what is being asked of us. For ourselves and for others.

Grief and loss for anything meaningful in our lives tear through us — cutting, ripping, and crushing what we thought we knew. They activate old unhealed wounds, compounding the pain in magnitudes. Let it. If you don’t, it will be back to be heard again later in your life but compounded even more. Saying it again: it costs us greatly to ignore our losses.

To emerge from the Phoenix Era ready to fly, it’s necessary to truly touch the depths of your darkness. The freefall of despair. The corners of being alive where your knees buckle and the floor seems to disappear beneath you. “The soul wants us to stop and witness what is here,” says Weller. Otherwise, you may emerge anew but without the ability to soar because you haven’t dropped enough bricks. (I will write about methods for this soon)

Listen, I get it. Transformation is hard. Believe me, I know. I was deep in my own Phoenix Era questioning and rebuilding my beliefs and behaviors, when someone I love with all my heart suddenly passed away six months ago. There simply are no words that can express the magnitude of the largest loss of my life. It is the sharpest pain by leaps and bounds. I was sitting in that vivid grief last month when my hometown caught on fire and I watched friends’ homes burn, my favorite hiking trails scorched, and beloved landmarks wiped off the map — all while sitting next to my ‘go’ bag in case I had to evacuate, too. When I finally ventured outside during the fires, the sight of my car dusted in ash knocked the wind out of me — a stark, silent reminder of the one I lost, now reduced to ashes, too. Death all around me.

At times, it has felt like I’m being ripped apart from within, pulled in every direction while sinking in quicksand made of shattered glass. But what is there to protest? It won’t bring any of it back. I’ll still be standing here in the ashes of what once was and no longer is. I’ve learned that it’s better to let the losses work their magic on me. (but I’ve also told my higher self that she’s a total psycho, so I guess there’s still some protest in me)

The Phoenix Era (or life) doesn’t do this just to be cruel, though. It undoes us to remake us. To go into the depth of sorrow shows us what we are made of. Picking up those bricks of loss that you’ve collected and throwing them out one by one builds muscle, or resilience. And with that resilience comes the confidence to do it again and again.

Sometimes, we might have to sit in the ashes until we can find the strength to rise again, renewed. And that’s okay. I certainly have. In the same way that we don’t demand the trees to immediately regrow their green leaves, we can offer ourselves the same grace. Our feelings matter. Our losses matter. Our transformation matters.

You see, we’ve been fed a very confusing narrative that “holding it together” is what we should consider strength. In truth, it takes cosmic strength to fully feel the pain of it all. Of life, love and loss. No really — every single thing that you love, you will lose. To fully accept that and still face each day with wonder, gratitude, and awe is the challenge. To fall to your knees but to get back up again — in the presence of a loving community that can hold you in your grief and vulnerability — now that takes strength. (See Laura’s interview for a real-life example of holding both gratitude for life and grief for her loss – and vulnerability for sharing her story and accepting help from others!).

“It takes outrageous courage to face outrageous loss.”
– Francis Weller

Martín Prechtel says, “The point of grief is to care for each other.” Over the past month in LA, as my city and others have united to support those who have lost everything, and those who risked their lives to protect the city, I’ve felt, for the first time in years, the sparks of determination — of strength — to not just rise, but launch. This had been dead for so long that it caught me off guard and had me thinking, “This is what I needed to ignite me?!”

I love you, Los Angeles.❤️ (©Cedric Letsch)

Wait, there’s another thing that’s given me strength. It's from having people reach out to me over the past 6 months from different eras of my life to check on me and lend their support. My heart is filled to the brim with love, hope, and fire once more. It has meant more to me than I can ever put into words. Now, I get it. We aren’t meant to do any of this alone. Connection feeds resilience. Sometimes we carry others, and sometimes we let ourselves be carried.

Because Western culture has rejected the cycles of nature, we too reject the cyclical nature of our being. But I’ll drop this reminder here: in fire-prone environments, the seeds of some plants require fire to break their dormancy and germinate. Likewise, we sometimes require trial by fire to evolve. Our work, then, is to make peace with the cycles of life, nature, the Universe. To be flexible and flow. To let ourselves burn to regrow. Deconstruct and reconstruct. Die and be reborn.

This is why self-transformation is not self-indulgent and it’s not self-help, as the West likes to call it. It opens the capability within us to not only show up for ourselves and others with the purest of hearts and intentions, but to also drop into their laps to weep when we need to. This expansion requires contraction. So, you live in those ashes if you need to. The more you empty, the lighter you’ll be. We’ll all be here waiting to cheer you on when you’re ready to soar.

Sending so much love to my fellow Angelenos.

(…and some Ram Dass for comfort)