Mourning Well: Why We Need to Express Our Grief Outside Ourselves
It’s almost Mother’s Day, and I’ve been thinking about how this holiday brings up both gratitude and grief for so many of us.
Gratitude for all the good mothering we’ve received from family members, friends and mentors.
Grief for all we needed—but did not receive—as children, and may still struggle to find.
Grief for all our beloveds who have graduated this life for the next.
Gratitude for our children and our other projects or creations—or Grief that we were not able to bring forth our own children or creations as we wanted.
Grief when our children or creations struggle and falter, and especially when our children graduate this life ahead of us.
To celebrate our gratitude without acknowledging our grief seems inauthentic and false.
But healing after a loss can be difficult. Grief can be difficult.
How do we access to our ability to transform grief… in a way that allows us to move through uncomfortable emotions and embrace our lives?
Mourning, the active outward expression of grief, can help us metabolize grief and transform our experience of the process.
One of the most important ways to bring our grief up and out of hiding is to create a grief altar on a horizontal surface in your home. Lay down an altar cloth (a scarf or lovely fabric) that represents your willingness to hold space for your losses. On it, place items (photos, cards, images) that represent what you are grieving. You may want to add a votive or pillar candle that brings in the fire element gift of purification. You may want to add a vase of lovely flowers in fresh water (the water element offers the gift of cleansing). Spend time at your altar daily. Allow yourself to notice where in your body you actually FEEL the loss, the sadness, the anger, the tangled web of your own grief. Some days you may weep, some days you may need to dance furiously to angry music, some days you may need to rock back and forth.
In “The Six Needs of Mourning,” a book by Alan Wolfelt, Ph.D., other ways of mourning, or expressing grief outside ourselves, are described as essential to the healing process. “Crying, sharing stories, putting together photo albums, journaling, and other actions” should be part of the healing process, he says.
I recommend you keep a grief journal and record the emotions flowing through you. Refrain from identifying with the emotion of the moment. Rather than saying “I am angry” or “I am sad” consider the various emotions of your own grief process the same way you would the weather: “Yesterday, there was anger… today there is a sadness and emptiness.” We are affected by the weather but we do not confuse ourselves (our identities) with the weather.
Dr. Wolfelt says there are six steps, or “needs,” of mourning that help us move forward after loss. These are our ability to:
Acknowledge the reality of the loss
Embrace and integrate the pain of the loss
Remember the loss (the beloved one who died, or the job or relationship that is gone)
Develop a new self-identity
Search for meaning
Receive ongoing support from others
Your altar can help with the first 5 of those steps.
We can all agree that the quality of support we receive as we journey along the sacred path of grief is vitally important. Mourning well, and expressing our grief in community, makes change possible. We can release and transform the ways we have been holding on to our grief. Experienced facilitators, proven modalities, and a conscious community within a safe space can give us the support and courage we need.
Please reach out to me if you’d like to go on a waiting list for my next in-person Hearts Broken Open grief retreat. In our “sudden community,” each person will bring their grief about their own loss. Perhaps you are grieving a deeply personal loss, or a family loss. Perhaps you are also grieving one or more of our collective losses: the loss of civil discourse, the loss of democracies around the world, the losses to all of us that result from climate change, and from economic and social injustice.
On a Hearts Broken Open journey, should you choose to join us, we’ll use creative tools to expand our personal and collective capacity to metabolize grief. Breathwork, movement, journaling, alter items, and sharing (to the extent you are comfortable) will transform your experience. At the end of the day, you’ll feel cleaner, clearer and more current in your emotional life.
Mourning as an expression of grief outwardly honors all that we have loved so deeply. May you find yourself in the company of others who have the capacity to understand and accompany your grief journey, and support you as you heal.
May your Grief and Gratitude be fully expressed, thus becoming part of the Love and Compassion with which you fill yourself and serve others.
Melody Magdalene