A Journey Away From Grief.

Grief.

Grief of the person I used to be, grief around loss, grief that engulfs our hearts.

We will experience a number of heartaches (or maybe I should say devastating, heart shattering events) as we navigate our time on this Earth. The fear, pain and complete discomfort in having to relearn ourselves time and time again is something that we will all experience and within this, there is a journey that we all explore in one way or another.

During these big upheavals you might find yourself pausing, taking your time to feel into this gut wrenching pain and in doing so, you might choose to stay, to stay in the pain and call it home for a while. You might be called to make friends with the tendrils of fear that wrap around your heart with no real desire to pull yourself back. More often than not, we sit here for a while. A strange comfort can be found in the not doing, in the hiding and isolating.

You also might meet this pain head on, fighting, clawing, trying to get back to the person you were before the world got ripped out from beneath you. But the old version of you doesn’t feel like home, neither does the pain or anger that sits heavily on your chest, dictating every interaction and every experience. You may find yourself seeking a new version of yourself, only to be met with frustration because it seems so out of reach, buried beneath rage, sadness, lost hope.

Or maybe you start to take gentle, tentative steps towards this next version of you. A careful easing into new life where the trauma and grief still exist but they do not become you. There’s an exploration here with no expectations, a curiosity where you begin to explore what brings this version of you small joys. It’s never as easy as it sounds. In fact I think this is by far the most challenging because it draws the most energy from you. I spent hours racking my brain to find a slither of joy from the hobbies I used to indulge in and there was so much force and desperation to come back to myself that everything felt like a chore which is why curiosity and meeting yourself in the moment is so important.

I do believe that there is space and time for each one of these experiences, yes we may sit for longer in despair or anger, we may quickly meet the new part that has emerged from the pain, we may trudge slowly and painfully before we know where we are going. Whatever way your journey takes you, trust that you will meet yourself again through listening, through exploring, through curiosity.

There is a home here amongst the rubble of fear and loss. There is a soft becoming, a pull of a thread between who you were before the heartache changed you and who you are becoming.