Everything changes, nothing lasts forever. Seasons come and go, people we love will die (we will too), the landscape of our life shifts and changes like the tides of the ocean. Grief is our natural response to impermanence and change. It is healthy. It is normal.

Grief is love. It is the reflection of an open heart; interconnected and caring and loving in the world. It is our aliveness.

Initiation is movement from one mode of consciousness to another. As the landscape of our life changes, ideally so does our level and mode of awareness and consciousness. We allow life to grow us, shape us and evolve us. From one stage of development to the next, from one moment of spiritual expansion to the next.

Many cultures who move more closely with the earth's natural cycles understand this, which is why there are initiations, rites of passage after hardship, challenges and trials.  This Western culture fears death, turns death into a corporate affair and we've built so many walls of illusion to protect ourselves from any proper rites of initiation.

Grief has become trapped. This way of actually living well, of expanding the capacity of our heart for more and more love, to move towards allowing MORE life to come in, to be more connected to the divine, ourselves and each other. This grief offers the opportunity to live even better so we can die well. Death teaches us about life every single day that death gives us another day here.

This is not meant to be morbid. This is truth. Love speaks in the language of truth. Every transition, every loss, every disappointment, every single challenge, obstacle, trial and difficulty is an initiation into deeper aspects of yourself, your own power and an opportunity to embody even more of your soul. So many of struggles people face, like depression and addiction, perfectionism, shame, fear, insecurity are all symptoms of trapped grief, unmetabolized responses to the flow of life and love that is trying to evolve us. It gets stuck in our bodies and we identify with it, it weighs us down, ages us, we project it onto relationships or things around us....our hearts become confused.

Reclaiming the initiatory power and healing potential residing in grief is to take back our own emotional power and remember who we are, what is important to us and how we want to truly, truly live so that we can come to the end of our life with gratitude rather than regrets. The initiation of grief is an initiation into the power of love. It is the capacity of your heart to hold more and more of the divine and to open even more to life in appreciation for the miracle it truly is.

Then, we learn we have nothing to lose but the chance to experience the freedom waiting in our hearts.

Make time for your heart, your dear, precious heart.

Cultivate this devotion to laying flowers at the ground of your heart, to listen to the whispers and prayers and longings and guidance.

Rumi wrote that the divine is in the longing, in the prayer and in the whispers. What if that greater than yourself that you seek is sitting upon a garden throne in the center of your heart just waiting for you?

​This is an ancient chamber that is your own, a space that no one, absolutely no one can ever enter or know the way you can. It cannot be harmed or touched, but only forgotten. Make time to sit and cultivate the patience of mind to learn how to be in service to your heart, to honor the truth of your heart and the truth of the stories your body wishes to share with you in order to close chapters on the past. Here, the past can resolve itself. Here, in these spaces of listening and honoring, there is a love that we all deeply long for even if we aren't sure what it is or know for sure that it exists. It does. It opens in that in-between space. In between your heaven and your earth. Allow yourself be deeply moved by the awe inspiring beauty of the vastness that is you.
​

If we are not careful, before we know it, resistance can become a way of being and moving through the world. It can become a way of life that in and of itself blocks you from engaging with all that is possible within yourself. Resistance is a form of fear. Fear of what? Fear of life force energy, a fear of life. We often experience resistance at moments of growth, moments where life is propelling us in the direction of our highest growth, in the creative process, anytime we have transformed ourselves into a new level of life.

It happens in the in-between spaces, in the gap or void where the alchemy of transformation is possible. The opposite of resistance is letting go and surrendering, often to trusting the universe or some power that is greater than our small human beings can comprehend. The opposite of resistance is trust; it is relaxing. It is feeling.

Resistance takes so many forms. Perfectionism. Addiction. Procrastination. Spiritual escape into “bliss.” Chronic lateness. Feeling like we know everything already. Seeking a magical solution. Difficulty receiving. Anxiety. Depression. Creative blocks. Staying stuck. Self-criticism. Avoidance. And on and on.

Resistance protects us from life. It protects us from the truth. It also protects us from grief and feeling. What I notice is that beneath a lot of resistance is a range of emotions and feelings. Energy. Makes sense since resistance is often a way of blocking out life and the energy of life. Life force energy is creative, sexual, emotional, symbolic, love, clear and always oriented towards pulling us closer and closer to our wholeness.
​

Shame is pain inside the heart; a deep hurt that feels like you aren't good enough, aren't worthy in some way, that something is deeply wrong, that you are deeply flawed or somehow missed the memo on humanning well. It's this emptiness that feels bottomless and disconnected.

It IS the soul wound.

Shame has taken up residence in the center of your original heartbreak, at the core of who you are. There are a million reasons we all experience soul wounding and soul loss. It's been said that this is such an endemic at this time.

It's this undefinable yet very alive experience that is constantly running in the background of our subconscious. It is the emptiness that our consumer culture thrives on. We live in a shame culture. A trauma culture. A money culture. These things are so intimately wound up together culturally, our nervous systems cannot quite tell it all apart. As long as it feels like there is never enough or that you aren't enough, you will continue to seek outside of yourself for an experience of wholeness that money cannot buy.

This is the place where wanting more and more becomes the addiction wearing the costume of perfection and abundance and attacking ones core self like a construction project in the hopes that personal enlightenment will bring all the things we've been promised. It just doesn't work this way. It's all perpetuating itself and making most of us feel crazy and desperate. So much so, we are then distracted by what is happening in the world and people are hurting other people. Aren't we perhaps the only species that turns on itself (each other and ourselves)?

This is one of the most important things to me that needs to change. I often wonder what the world would be like if no one ever felt like there was something wrong with them. If we want to change our culture or heal our planet, we simply must start to talk about this soul wound, this sense that somehow being human is bad, that we are flawed, that we need to try to attain some state of divine perfection to transcend it.

Yes, being human is fragile and painful at times, scary even. But, shame is NOT a natural part of our programming. No thing in nature experiences shame or thinks that there is something wrong with it. It is NOT normal to feel this way about ourselves. It is not the natural frequency of our soul.

Fear is afraid of fear because it is protecting something. It's become unsafe to feel fear, which is a little strange and funny at the same time. It seems really important to not throw the baby out with the bath water, which means that it feels vital to the health of our collective hearts to find a different way to navigate and understand our innately emotional experiences that naturally arise in the course of living life as a human being. I am reminded of that really old paradigm saying that children should be seen and not heard. I hate that saying, but I believe that this still pervades our collective unconscious as we have inherited and internalized these models of the patriarchy, which we use as inner models for relating to ourselves. This is our soul wound.

Children need to be heard in order to feel deeply seen. We, as adults, are absolutely no different. When we dismiss our fears as all the same, as "fear-based thinking" (which arises out of the body holding on to fear, which is real in the body) we try to rationalize away or use mind strategies to attack the body for trying to tell it's story. This is in fact not seeing or hearing the core of ourselves. In a sense, it is putting salt in the soul wound.

Our body stores every single experience we have ever had and, if uncomfortable, we try to get rid of it without understanding it. This is not healing or loving. Healing is creating a space of love for the meaning and understanding to arise. It is only in that meaning and understanding that what is needed informs how to transform this energy into wisdom and love. This is self-love. It is hard to understand this if we have never felt emotionally loved or held, which is more common than you think. Emotional neglect is far more common than the patriarchy and media and marketing and most people would like you to know. We think the way we treat ourselves and others emotionally is normal and health. Normal is not always healthy. (Like encouraging people to put themselves out and share their voice, and then tear them down when they do and accuse them of having too much fear based thinking to really put themselves out there....)