Hello Dear friends
As the bright light of Summer slowly wanes, Mother Nature in all her immense wisdom teaches us about endings. She shows us that “nothing gold can stay”, as Robert Frost so eloquently stated. The sacred cycles of nature elucidate that everything is fleeting and will at some point, cease to exist in the form that we once knew.
The natural response to loss and endings is grief, no matter what form or intensity that grief takes as expression. In our culture, we perceive what grief ‘should’ or ‘should not’ look like in subtle ways, like how our family respond to loss, how people on television grieve or what is dictated to us as socially appropriate behavior in our religion. In order to feel included in our family, community or religion, we take on these grief ‘rules’ so to speak and on a subconscious level, internalize them as the correct and ‘normal’ response to loss.
In working with my clients and from my own personal experience, I have found that these ‘grief rules’ can obscure our natural response to loss. If our grief expression looks different to what we are subconsciously holding on to as the ‘normal’ response, judgement can arise. We can hold ourselves in contempt for not grieving the ‘right’ way, or in a way that is consistent with our family or community.
I feel that each person’s expression of grief is completely unique, and it will ebb and flow and may look different from one moment to the next. When I found my husband dead on the couch, a couple of months after our second miscarriage, my response was shock and numbness for a long time. I barely cried, and at times couldn’t feel anything at all. Then came the rage. I called it white rage because it was the most intense, powerful and terrifying thing I’d ever felt in my body. I felt at times it would destroy me.
At times, I judged myself for not grieving in the way that I thought I ‘should’ have. I remember thinking I should have cried more, and I wondered why I never cried in public. I was subtly punishing myself for a picture of grief I had in my head. Rather than just allowing myself to express the natural out-picturing of all I had loved and lost. Deep healing came for me when I could see more clearly my subconsciously held grief rules and let them go.
My next workshop, Grief Myths, on October 26th at Kinfolk Yoga Studio, looks into how societal and cultural expectations can shape our grief expression and obscure our natural response to loss. We explore our own subconsciously held ideas and expectations around what grief ‘should’ look like and we dive into how we can nurture ourselves with radical kindness and acceptance through all times of loss and transition. We explore gentle movement, yoga, journaling, creative inquiry and create our own blessing bag, to inspire ideas for daily rituals of self-care while grieving. For more information or to register, email info@jemmaskye.com.
Blessings,
Jemma
Greif Myths Workshop Details
Saturday Oct 26th, 2019
11.30 – 3.30
$65
Kinfolk Yoga Studio
204 W. Main St, Ste 104
Grass Valley, CA 95945
Please register via info@jemmaskye.com
Nothing Gold Can Stay
By Robert Frost
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
