Grief: The Great Transformer

Grief is a great transformer. Grief can crack open the hardest shell and force new life to pour through. This illustrates well the relationship that grief has to the new. It is both related to endings and beginnings. With grief, you experience the burning water of change that weeps for what was… and prepares you for what will be. It is an intense experience, as anyone who has experienced it will know. It is one that humans seek to limit in their lives, for it speaks to extreme changes, and humans often resist even small changes. Grief does not seek to gently persuade you through reason or through appealing to your mind. It is a bodily experience, a heaving out of the old, the frozen, the stagnant, the untrue… and purifying you with its fire for what comes next. It is this purifying flame that readies the soil for new seeds.

While this scares the human mind, be assured that not allowing this purge is far more dangerous to your energy. For when you do not surrender to this movement of energy, it gets locked within you, and you experience much pain and anguish, which continues to be attracted and cycled through you until you acknowledge it. The further you push it away the more subtly it operates from within you, causing you to self-sabotage, resist change, and live in fear of what’s to come. It is impossible to feel safe in life when you resist grief, because your mind will be constantly vigilant toward the next change – as if it could protect you against these natural and important markers in your life.

So while we know it is difficult to feel the fullness of your grief, depending on the circumstance at hand, we encourage you to not fight it. In fighting this feeling, you fight against your new life, your release, your purification, your understanding, and the potential for finding comfort in the changes that life inevitably brings.

Allow grief to transform you and know that this is its job. You are not meant to remain the same. Let the natural processes unfold, as you witness in all elements of nature: seasons changing, moons waxing and waning, mushrooms helping in the decay of wood and passed creatures… everything is taken care of, and grief is an agent of care sent by your soul’s wisdom to safeguard and shepherd you through change.

And so it is.