A candid therapist of mine once called me the Meg Ryan of grief. You know that scene in the movie When Harry Met Sally, the one in the diner? Meg Ryan’s character, Sally, simulates a full-blown orgasm to prove to Harry that women can easily fake sexual climax if they so choose. The difference between Sally and me was that my grief wasn’t fabricated. It arrived in a tsunami of tears as I did the hard work of ending my first marriage and unraveling the ties that bound my ex-husband and me together.
The importance of grieving is only now beginning to get the recognition it deserves. In our distinctly American culture with its optimistic, can-do attitude, grief is mostly still a sign of weakness. Sadness of any kind, associated as it is with loss and losing, challenges our social identity, even calls into question our beliefs and actions as a nation.
One has only to think of the Vietnam War and our difficulty in acknowledging not only the lost lives but also the loss of the idea of ourselves as a country that always wins. It took nearly ten years before the installation of the Vietnam War memorial gave us a public place to grieve the bloodshed of that futile conflict.
As individuals, we also tend to avoid touching the deeper sadness of what might be dying in our lives. Maybe it is a relationship or a way of being in relationship that is dying. Maybe the death of a long-held dream is calling us to mourn. Perhaps a change in circumstance due to retirement or illness invites our grief. Aging itself certainly prompts a certain mourning of time passed and paths not taken, and of bodies no longer so limber. We may grieve when we become aware that no one and no thing can rescue us from our emotional pain. We all have reasons to grieve at one point or another.
There are also moments when we are called to grieve what cannot be changed, and to see that we did the best we could at the time given our situation and resources. For me, the death and destruction of so much life on the planet, be it climate collapse, species extinction, or Iraq, is one of these moments. At this global level, we are pressed to witness and mourn our relative powerlessness. The world needs our collective grief to mobilize wise action at this critical time.
Grief can be quiet, especially after the death of someone close to us. This soundless mourning often shows up in the body as a slowing down, a heaviness. It may come before the tears or after them, or simply in between. It may reflect an initial shock, a grappling with the mystery of the finite, or a time of integration after the deeper grieving has passed. But this isn’t the kind of grief I want to explore today.
If I was an apprentice at grief in my early 30’s, then I am a master now. I’ve easily put in my 10,000 hours of grieving at this point. And when I say grief, I don’t mean a passing sadness or a few tears. I mean consistent episodes of full-on heaving sobs, the kind of grief that leaves you rode hard and put up wet with piles of snotty tissues scattered around you. The grieving that wipes you out from the physical labor of giving birth to your authentic sadness and anger and all the feelings that grief can encapsulate. This is the grief that gives your core a workout from the depth of your crying.
“It rises on a salty geyser of tears, sometimes sung to the surface by a terrific moan, streaming down our cheeks until it moistens the soil where we stand, preparing us for new growth.”
—Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Finding Our Way Home
The reason I’ve become such a fan of this kind of deep emotive sadness is that it so reliably leads me to joy these days. It took me a while to pull up the buckets of tears filling that well of loss I was in. I cried … a lot. But over the years I discovered it was a cleansing, purifying process that inevitably led me to connect with the depths of my being. I found bliss in that renewed connection with Source and Self that had been blocked by all that stuck emotion. Being present to the grief fostered my connection with Presence itself, teaching me that eventually we are the wise witness who welcomes all experience with love and compassion.
We all get scared that the well is too deep for us to find the bottom and discover the joy and relaxation of our Being that is there. At first we may not be able to do this kind of grieving alone, which is part of what makes it so difficult for people to really get into their feelings. Messages like, ‘crying is for sissies’ or ‘stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about’ have taught us to repress our tears or to hide them from others.
We stop trusting that our authentic emotional response is there to help us and has something to teach us. Embedded in our willingness to be vulnerable is our authenticity and strength and sense of belonging. Writer and dreamworker Toko-pa Turner likes to call this vulnerabravery. Having a therapist or other safe and sage person witness our grief offers us a comforting presence in which to practice this courageous vulnerability. With time, we recognize that all emotions are temporary. When embraced and allowed, they always pass and our fear of them transforms into curiosity.
For me, grieving is paradoxically an act of deconstruction and an act of knitting together. In our grief, we dismantle old structures of self that no longer serve. For example, we might be grieving an old pattern of self-destruction through addiction or relationship choices. As we feel our pain about the hurt we have caused ourselves and perhaps others, the old armor of what Eckhart Tolle calls the painbody begins to soften and dissolve.
As this defense against our own tenderness falls away, we usually discover the wounded child within who holds our pain and our joy. Grieving helps us to integrate these split-off parts by knitting together elements of our being that have found refuge in the shadow or hidden side of our personality.
We have more access to our life energy, our authentic power. In shamanic terms, grieving allows us to retrieve parts of our power or soul that have been lost due to trauma, whether large or small. This retrieval expands our capacity to show up for our life because we have made more room for an embodiment of the love, joy, playfulness, and creativity in our hearts.
When I see someone trying to repress their tears in a therapy session, if the timing is right, I’ll sometimes playfully ask them if they were having an orgasm would they try to suppress it. Their usual response is laughter and a hearty “no!” So, it’s the same with tears, I’ll explain. Tears are our body’s natural response to emotional pain or intense joy. If all emotion is just energy in motion, let it flow. But we struggle to do so.
“To our culture, obsessed with productivity and perfection, the experience of grief, its sadness, anger, and feelings of loss, can feel like taking steps backward or being stuck in place. But that is an illusion. Grief is the great accelerator.”
—Bethany Webster, Discovering the Inner Mother
Facing our pain is hard work and we tend to judge it as either insignificant or overwhelming, either not worthy of crying over or too much to endure. Both judgments serve simply to repress our tears.
There was a period of several years in which I cried hard every day. Sometimes those tears came as a salty solution to wash out an old wound and allow it to heal cleanly. Sometimes they were tears of gratitude and joy for being able to experience life so intimately. To come to know myself and my belonging in the world so tenderly. I took to heart this beautiful quote from the yogic master, Kripalvanandji:
“Crying is one of the highest devotional songs. One who knows crying, knows spiritual practice. If you can cry with a pure heart, nothing else compares to such a prayer. Crying includes all the principles of yoga.”
If only we could see how beautiful we are when we open our hearts to the grief that is there. After a truly good cry, look in the mirror and you will see how clear your eyes look, how relaxed your face is (hint: those are the signs that it’s been a full cry). I’m lucky that I get to see that beauty and bravery every day in my work with others, along with the snotty tissues. My prayer for each of you is that you’ll allow whatever grieves you be a path to the ceaseless joy residing within you. So let those tears flow!
