““The wound is the place where the light enters you.””
This morning, I chose to do a meditation on grief, and I was not expecting what happened next.
I sometimes use the Calm app to meditate if I’m not in the mood to sit in complete silence. It’s a wonderful app that is a great way to explore meditation if you’ve never done it before, don’t know where to begin, or like me, want to be guided through it sometimes. I felt like there was something I needed to let go. As I scanned the options, I found a meditation on grief. I clicked, sat back, and closed my eyes. As Tamara, one of the creators of Calm, whose soothing voice always resonates with me, began to speak about grief, tears began rolling down my face. Thoughts of love lost throughout my life, whether the death of loved ones, the ending of romantic relationships, loss of colleagues when laid off, my youth, my expectations, all stepped forward. The feeling of loss was palpable, and all at once and in harmony, my mind, heart, and soul began to reconcile the grief. Instead of feeling empty like I thought a process like this might feel, I felt filled up and whole. A sense of warmth poured over me as the tears continued to flow.
There is beauty in grief. To me, it feels like grief and peace are only one small step apart from each other. I often think of sadness and grief as our compass, confirming we are on track to living a good life. Even though losing love in any form hurts like hell, we are where we are meant to be. Grief informs us by highlighting what is important to us, what we care about. An inverted relationship exists between grief and love. If we didn’t love deeply, we would be numb to grief. Grief isn’t something to avoid but something to embrace. If we allow ourselves to fall back into grief, it will not let us crash to the ground, but rather, it will wrap its warm, loving arms around us and let us perch there in our pain. It’s like the loving arms of a mother or someone that always makes us feel safe to be who we are with all of our warts and scars. There are no rumblings of what we “should” do, but instead, there is stillness and silence and space. Space to be… human… broken… sad… love.
We spend most of our lives trying to avoid it or ignore it. We fight against it and point our fingers at it with our masks of anger so that nobody sees what we are really feeling beneath it. What is beneath our anger is a heart shattered into a million little pieces, disappointed in the outcome of our heart’s desires.
If we can see how we attempt to hide from grief and allow her space to be present, we will find true beauty in what she has to offer us: a moment of surrender to life. A moment to recognize how much we wanted what is now lost. A moment to relish in the love that we felt. A moment to cherish the desires that we carry in our hearts.
Grief teaches us to recognize those we are grateful for in our lives. If we didn’t grieve, we might not fully embrace those we love to the fullest. We might take them for granted if we didn’t know grief sometime in our past. She reminds us to hold on loosely to whom we love and cherish every moment we are graced with them.
Those we have loved that travel through our lives no matter how brief or long never leave us. They are weaved into our hearts, forever. We can pretend to hate them or never think about them, which we sometimes attempt to do. Or we can extend our warm, loving arms around their memory for spending a moment in time with us, taking the lessons we needed to learn and allow them to rest there, forever.
Be well! Sending love.
Along the road
I walked a mile with Pleasure;
She chatted all the way;
But left me none the wiser
For all she had to say.
I walked a mile with Sorrow,
And ne’er a word said she;
But, oh! The things I learned from her,
When sorrow walked with me.
- Robert Browning Hamilton