Marie will facilitate this Monday, Oct. 26
Dear Thay, Dear friends,
Over the last six months, I’ve experienced more grief than ever before: from the grief about our planet and the people and animals living on it to the grief of having friends and family members die.
I noticed that how I grieved varied. Did I rush through it? Bury it? Give it time? The impact of my grieving process had a huge impact on how I felt during and “after” the grief (recognizing that there is no ‘after’ - the grief has softened and it is still there). Sometimes, I got in the way of my own experience (for example, feeling frightened to feel pain and then deciding to avoid it) and at others, I was able to care for the pain as well as for the parts that felt scared of it. Sometimes, I grieved alone and at others, I reached out to loved ones to share how I felt.
I became increasingly curious about the whole process of grief and started reading, watching and experimenting with new ways of understanding and being with grief.
In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller writes that “Every one of us must undertake an apprenticeship with sorrow. We must learn the art and craft of grief, discover the profound ways that it ripens and deepens us. While grief is an intense emotion, it is also a skill we develop through a prolonged walk with loss. Facing grief takes “the outrageous courage of the bodhi heart’, as Pema Codron calls it. It takes outrageous courage to face outrageous loss. This is precisely what we are being called to do. Any loss, whether deeply personal or one of those that swirl around us in the wider world, calls us to full-heartedness, for that is the meaning of courage. To honor our grief, to grant it space and time in our frantic world, is to fulfill a covenant with the soul - to welcome all that is, thereby granting room for our most authentic life.”
“...An apprenticeship with sorrow offers us the chance to build our capacity to stay present when the intense feelings of grief arise. Through meaningful rituals, a community of friends, some time in benevolent solitude and effective practices that help us stretch into our bigger selves, we are offered the opportunity to develop a living relationship with loss. We can recover a faith in grief that recognizes that grief is not here to take us hostage, but instead to reshape us in some fundamental way, to help us become our mature selves, capable of living in the creative tension between grief and gratitude. In so doing, our hearts are ripened and made available for the great work of loving our lives and this astonishing world.”
The book describes ways of developing these skills, many of which resonate with the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh. I’ve grouped them into two categories:
Community. Grief is an intensely interior process that can only be navigated in the presence of community… As my mentor said, ‘this is a solitary journey that we cannot do alone...’ Many of us have not been invited to speak of our sorrow, to take off a layer of our skin to expose a still more vulnerable self, let alone find someone with the dedication and patience to scrub us and risk experiencing the wild expression of our grief…. As we walk this path of grief, we need others to hold us, see us and acknowledge the truth of our experience, even when they cannot fully understand what we are feeling. Miriam Greenspan uses the term ‘intervulnernability’ to describe the need for this mutually held space. She describes ‘ when I say we are ‘intervulnerable’ I mean we suffer together, whether consciously or unconsciously.’ Martin Luther King Jr said that ‘we are all connected in an inescapable web of mutuality’... There is no way out, though we try to escape by armoring ourselves against pain and in the process, diminishing our lives and our consciousness. But in our intervunlerability is our salvation, because awareness of the mutuality of suffering impels us to search for ways to heal the whole, rather than encase ourselves in a bubble of denial and impossible individualism… A level of witnessing truly enables us to be seen.”
Silence and solitude “...invite us to pause, to slow down and to stop. They offer a holding space where we are able to do the necessary work of metabolizing sorrow. Here we are asked to hold an extended vigil with loss in the well of silence, slowly ripening our sorrow into something dense and gifting to the world. It is the place where our apprenticeship with sorrow and our ability to be truly alive is deepened.”
Along these lines, here is a wonderful video of Thay responding to the question: “how do I stay in the present moment, when what I feel is unbearable?” (with thanks to Brigitte for sharing it)
On Monday night, I invite you to join an exploration of how we hold grief and what helps us to metabolize it. Here are some questions to ponder:
Are you aware of when you feel grief? What helps/hinders this from happening?
When you feel grief, what do you do?
William Blake wrote “the greater the grief, the greater the joy.’ To what extent has this been your experience?
How has sangha and/or other communities supported your grieving process?
How might sangha better support your grieving process?
During one of our two sits, I will offer a guided meditation about the five “gates of grief” that can help us to connect more deeply with the world and our place in it. These are listed below so that you can recognize areas that might want your attention:
The first gate: everything we love, we will lose
The second gate: the places in us that have not known love (“...places wrapped in shame and banished to the farthest shores of our lives, living in utter despair”)
The third gate: the sorrows of the world
The fourth gate: what we expected and did not receive
The fifth gate: ancestral grief (...the grief we carry in our bodies from the sorrows experienced by our ancestors. Tending this undigested grief of our ancestors not only frees us to live our own lives, but also eases the ancestral suffering in the other world”.
I hope you will join us.
With thanks and a deep bow,
Marie