Hello and welcome to The Own Your Health podcast,
I'm Cyndi Lynne, and I can't wait to
help you step into your health power.
I come to you today in a little
bit of a different mindset, a little bit
of a different situation than I typically do.
As you can see from the title of the podcast, loss
and grief, this one's going to be a little tougher.
I think it was important to come and to share with
you, because I think it's all too easy for people to
broadcast and write from a place of having conquered all.
And when it comes to loss and grief, I think
the processing is probably the most important part into really
the most important part to actually coming out of a
situation, coming out of grief, having grown and healed.
And grief and loss can become chronic illness in bodies that
don't do this important work.
I lost my father.
It's two weeks ago now, and his death was
very sudden, in just moments and very unexpected.
I was blessed enough to have spent time on FaceTime
with him, just a few hours before that, planning his
trip here to the north to see me and my family.
And so it came as quite a shock when later
that same day, I found out that he had passed
very peacefully and very much in a way that he
would have chosen, in a blessed way that I think
many of us would choose if we could.
So I don't really have any magical words of wisdom
on how to manage this like we do so many
other issues that come up that can affect our health.
Instead, I want to share with you some of the
process and some of the words that I've turned to,
namely in a book called the Wild Edge of Sorrow.
It's rituals of renewal and the sacred work of grief.
And grief work is in fact very sacred.
It's written by Francis Weller, and I first
encountered this book several years ago when I
experienced a loss within a relationship.
It wasn't the loss of an individual, it was just a
real shift in a long time relationship that I had.
And I really felt that I needed to acknowledge
it and grieve it and mourn that loss in
a healthy way so that I didn't become bitter
or resentful, the thing that we talked about last episode.
And so I read this book when the
loss wasn't quite so acute and quite so large.
And then I've come back to it numerous times,
and each time I found more words, different words
that I needed to hear and more guidance.
And so without hesitation, I turn
to this work yet again.
So I just share a few of these passages with you
and hope that it's something that you can grab onto
when you need support, when you need to do the important
grief work, and just kind of acknowledge that there may
be grief from the past that you haven't done.
And so this book, even if you're not experiencing something right
now like I am, it'd be very helpful to you.
So I'll put a link in the show notes,
and in the meantime, I'd like to just share
some of the passages that I find most helpful.
So Francis Weller writes that he
wrote this book for a number of reasons, most notably
to restore soul to grief work and grief to soul work.
He says, I feel grief has
been colonized by the clinical, taken
hostage by diagnoses and pharmaceutical regimes.
For the most part, grief is not a problem to
be solved, not a condition to be medicated, but a
deep encounter with an essential experience of being human.
Grief becomes problematic when the conditions needed to
help us work with grief are absent.
For example, when we are forced to carry out our sorrow
in isolation, or when the time needed to fully metabolize the
nutrients of a particular loss is denied and we are pressured
to return to normal too soon. We are told to get
on with it and get over it.
The lack of courtesy and compassion surrounding
grief is astonishing, reflecting an underlying fear
and mistrust of this basic human experience.
We must restore the healing ground of grief.
We must find the courage, once
again, to walk its wild edge.
And these words I have highlighted in a couple that
are different colors, because it strikes me each time I
read this, this grief is not something to get over.
It's not something just to get through,
certainly not something to be medicated.
And I think if you have followed this
podcast for any amount of time, you probably
really recognize the words that he used in
terms of making grief very clinical, being taken
hostage by diagnoses and pharmaceutical regimes.
I've seen clients who, rather than working
through their grief, have been medicated so
that they don't feel anything.
And I know deep in my heart that grief is
something that you simply have to and get to, process
and work through, and grow from and learn from.
And so in reading this, again, reading these words, in finding
my own personal courage to sit and feel the feelings even
if I don't want to, to know that my body will take
them on in stages when I have the strength.
If you've experienced any loss like this, you know there
are times when you have a bit of escape almost
from grief, because there's tasks that need to be done.
There's people that need to be taken care of.
There's things that we simply must do the
putting one foot in front of the other.
And then a lot of people are surprised to find that,
that grief sneaks up on them, that all of a sudden,
for no apparent reason, they start crying or they're down.
This is because this grief needs this.
We need to have this experience, and we
can postpone it and we can delay it.
And certainly, you know, that's
not necessarily always negative.
We do need to put one foot in front of
the other and care for the people around, care
for each other. And whether that's preparing food or,
or changing a bed or any of those kinds
of things, those are the tasks that we do.
And the grief moves perhaps a bit to the background.
Then it come forward again and give us another opportunity
to do the growing and to do the learning.
Another passage that Weller writes is he
talks about entering the house of our
aloneness or the gravity of sorrow.
And I think this resonated because even though we
gathered together as a family and friends, we celebrated
the life of my father in a beautiful service.
This ultimate soul work you need to do yourself.
He writes that silence and solitude invite us
to pause, to slow down and stop.
How rare this is in a
culture that revels in continuous motion.
We live in a highly extroverted culture
in which everything is expressed and exposed
at all times of day and night.
This has led to a coarsening
of our language and dilution
in substance.
We are addicted to disclosure.
We need to learn the skill of restraint,
of holding close to the heart what needs
our utmost attention without thoughtful hesitation.
What precipitates out of our grief will not have had
the time to ripen into something worthy of utterance.
We are often too quick to reveal,
lacking subtlety in what we expose about ourselves.
Weller writes, we suffer from what I call premature revelation,
sharing too much, too soon, and with little regard
for the shyness of the soul.
I love that, the shyness of the soul.
That, in fact, is what I
was experiencing when I sat down today.
As frequently happens when something is acutely going
on around me, I feel compelled to share it.
In the past, when I've had multiple clients have
the same kind of questions or dealing with the
same issues, I thought this is what people need to hear.
And I felt the same way with this
because I know that every day people are
grieving and every day people experience loss.
But at the same time, I don't have my words for it.
I haven't done my work, my processing, my distilling,
my subtlety, and so would very much run the
risk of sharing too much, too soon in a
way that didn't even truly reflect what I'm feeling.
And that would shortchange you in terms
of the experience and relatability, because that's
something that's very important to me.
I share with you because I believe many
of you are experiencing the same things I
am and can hopefully learn from the experience.
So perhaps at some point in the future, I
will have my words, perhaps I'll write them.
That usually my journaling is part of
my processing of my thoughts and feelings.
But in the meantime, I'm very thankful that I was able
to share Francis Weller's words and that I can again revisit this
book because it is truly bone to the heart.
So until we're together next week, let's go out and
own every part of your health that you can.
