Two Perspectives on Grieving

Grieving | Two roads, One destination

Loss knocks our world out from under us, sometimes in anguished degrees, other times with blinding suddenness. We can feel unmoored and disoriented. On some level, our trust in life is shaken or lost.

Whatever the circumstances of our loss, grieving has its own timeline. We can meet our grief as a healthy response to life and our relationship to the beings, places, and circumstances that are now missing from our lives.

Loss touches us physically, mentally and emotionally. It touches our relationships and even our perception of the world around us, not just with our hearts and minds, but with our eyes. So grieving loss is a complex, holistic process encompassing more than our intellect can navigate on its own. The sense and sensibility of body, heart and soul are no less logical in their own way, yet often much more potent than intellect alone.

Sometimes we benefit from support to grieve more fully and resiliently. Energy work and spiritual engagement offer two particularly generative, compassionate approaches to help us orient navigate loss and its effects.

Grieving | an energetic perspective

Grief is the slow recalibration of personal, family and other fields in response to loss. The whole system and related fields attune to catalytic changes arising from personal shifts. - Keith Parker, Field Dynamics

Energetics underlies every aspect of life from the cellular to the transcendent. Our awareness of loss can result in feelings of anxiety, sadness, confusion, anger, overwhelm, even physical pain and numbness all have an energetic basis beginning in our personal electromagnetic field and manifesting ultimately on the physical level where they are most visible to our perception.

Someone or something whose energy we shared intimately and gave our lives shape and nourishment has been pulled out of our personal field, leaving holes and other distortions that effect our ability to meet life wholeheartedly. The energetic patterns or templates of our lives need time to calm, clear, restore and reconfigure, releasing blocks and restoring flow to our energy system, allowing us to feel whole and stable again.

Physics tells us that the material world is simply a variety of energies vibrating slowly enough to be seen and felt. Therefore, changes in our energy system allow for changes on the material level, including perception, thought and behavior.

Over time the outward expression of our lives can come to reflect the changes in these underlying energetic relationships. We can develop a new relationship to those we have lost and even to life, new understanding and ways of being and doing, even a reconnection with joy, peace and trust in life.

Grieving | a spiritual perspective

Each of is a very particular expression of the OneRadiance or Source or Spirit. While the words "energy" and "Spirit" may be considered synonymous, at the human level this Spirit or Source energy is filtered through our unique body, mind, heart, and soul.

While spiritual life takes place at the foundational level of energy, our the more immediate interface happens at the level of the physical world we live in - the heart, soul and consciousness levels. Values, meaning and purpose orient our attention and shape our aspirations, behavior, and relationship with the Sacred interconnecting and interpenetrating Whole. In essence, spiritual life seeks greater awareness of our true nature - that we are not mind or body. We are the OneRadiance.

Loss removes something of value from our lives, relationships, understanding, abilities, time. With this comes the loss of connection, meaning and purpose that have anchored our relationship to life. Our own daily experience can seem an unfamiliar land governed by a language we don't know.

Regular spiritual practice and supportive care conversations can provide anchoring presence and space to process and integrate the loss with creativity and openness, to find new meaning and purpose, and serve Life with greater love and wisdom. Over time you will have a stronger foundation to build anew.

Grieving | a complementary perspective

Energy and spiritual work have much in common. Both approaches can bring expanded awareness, deeper connections and trust in life, and lead to insight, harmony, repatterining, and integration.

Indeed, each contains the seed of the other. Spiritual processes such as atonement, forgiveness, and acceptance often arise organically during energy work. Correspondingly, clearing, managing, and replenishing energy occur naturally in the spiritual context. Both can be highly evolutionary and transformative.

However, energy work is often catalytic in nature and spiritual work sustaining. Energy and spiritual work can be used together as complementary supports for more resilient grieving. This resilient grieving allows for complex thoughts and feelings to be experienced and let go while attending to and nurturing what remains in our lives.

Over time, we see life and create life from a new vantage point, one more potent, mature, gracious and inclusive.