Grief

I walked into my yoga class this morning with an unusual and irritating edginess. For an early Monday morning, after a restful weekend, I actually felt quite wound up .

Over the weekend my husband and I were not connecting as easily as I might have wanted. I felt that we were a bit like those magnets that have different and opposite poles that keep them from coming together no matter how hard you try.

I thought to myself as I rolled out my yoga mat, that it might just be the heat, or general life stressors that are affecting each of us differently.

I remember that he was talking on Saturday about his own distress about the shooting in El Paso. He was also talking about global warming. I can remember thinking to myself, as he was expressing his distress, that I honestly could not take in any more bad news. The world just seemed too full of bad news. I simply felt very little capacity to think of any more.

Because I chose not to relate to his conversation, I pushed him and his feelings away. Why? Because they really are my own. I was pushing my own distress away. The end result of my suppressing my own anxiety and sadness was that I was literally unable to connect with him. I could not connect in any meaningful way while I was shutting down inside.

My yoga teacher offered everyone in the class a sticker that was a gold star. She laughed about how her children got gold stars throughout school just well… because! We all got a gold star for just “showing up” to class. I felt a bit surprised, after this small act of kindness, that I started to cry.

She asked everyone to place their gold sticker in the upper corner of their yoga mat. She said something to the effect of, “No matter what you are feeling in these terrifying times, just give yourself a gold star for deciding to show up.” She then invited us to sing. I usually don’t sing in class because I am shy; but, this time I sang OM SHANTI out loud.

I cried some more.

I noticed that our normally packed yoga room wasn’t so full today. I thought about the various reasons that people might not show up for class: heat, vacations, battle fatigue?

I then began think about the shadow. From time to time someone will ask me in a phone consult if I work with the shadow. I find this question to be most interesting. “Why are they asking, ” I wonder. After all, I am a Jungian Analyst and we do have an eye, ear and nose for shadow.

While I tell people, “Of course, yes, I do work with the shadow”, I also wonder, privately to myself, what is this persons connection is to their own self love.

I don’t mean this in a new age kind of spiritual bypassing way; I mean that very often, shadow business comes out of a deep avoidance with ourselves and what makes us human. My personal experience in my office is that while there are cases where people might seemingly “love themselves” in a malignant and narcissistic way- most people don’t love themselves at all. They actually have too little regard for themselves. This hatred toward themselves is often a root cause for many destructive behaviors. This becomes a vicious cycle because destructive behaviors then increase a feeling of self hatred and around and around it goes.

This brings me back to my husband and the weekend shootings in Texas and Ohio.

It is my feeling that if we cannot humbly care enough about ourselves, how in the world can we care about others?

When we are afraid, we close up to protect ourselves. It takes courage to say, “I am actually worth looking into my own fears, anxieties, blame, selfishness, greed, pride, arrogance, power, self seeking, control, or worse- indifference.”

When my own spiritual tank is full, I feel humbled, open and often quite fragile. I consider this fragility to be a human strength. The open and vulnerable shakiness allows me to be even more receptive to others. I listen better and I am not so caught up in my own “bla, bla, bla.”

My husband was right. There was very good reason to feel overwhelmed with sadness. Because I was unable and unwilling to be touched by this despair, I was not available either to myself or to him. This means, I am not available to anyone. In Buddhism, this is called The Cocoon; it is a cozy, claustrophobic, ego/ignorant state complete with a “DO NOT DISTURB” sign.

When I began to cry in yoga, my heart immediately opened up. I felt more available. Honestly, I felt more human.

I know that we are tired of crying. I am. But a broken heart is the antidote to indifference and the insidious need to not be touched by pain. It takes courage to stay awake to the pain and suffering in ourselves and others.

Be broken open. Let your humanity spill out. Love yourself for showing up. Love yourself for being willing to look not only at our own shadow stuff, but the collective shadow business that is erupting everywhere. We too are a part of that dark shadow. I feel that we are part of that collective shadow because we are also a part of the collective light of awareness, consciousness and a willingness to confront it and show up in our own lives.

Is a gold star for just showing up enough? I don’t think so. I do think that we need reminders that we are all really doing the best that we can.

These times are dark and I don’t have any indication that things will change anytime soon. But my yoga teacher also read a quote about faith. The jist of the quote was that faith is the bird singing at the darkest part of dawn because it has faith that eventually the dawn or awakening is coming. The light and the dark go together. You cannot have one or the other. One actually informs the other. It is the light of awareness that can see the shadow. In my own experience in my office, it is this very light of awareness that softens people and allows them to cry. I am grateful that I could see my own shadow this morning on my yoga mat. May that awareness be a small drop in a bucket of collective change.

In fairy tales it is often weeping or tears that can break a spell.

Just as it is said that the Buddha was born from the tears of the great goddess Tara, the mother of compassion, we too can wake ourselves up from our own spell. Weeping in hard times does not make us weak. It allows us to maintain our humanity. Maintaining our humanity is crucial in these dark, confusing and terrifying times.

Weeping connects us to our own compassion and courage. Our tears may keep us safe from falling into the most dangerous of collective shadow: indifference.

“We need to look at the fragility of life. Illness and obstacles are a gateway to experiencing truth and reality and vulnerability. It takes courage and strength to do that, as well as gentleness and fearlessness.” – Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

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“Let’s do some living after we die..” The Rolling Stones

I have a friend, Sonia. When Sonia was pregnant she, already a very sensitive person, discovered that some very latent psychic abilities began to open up for her. Sonia began to be able to feel other people’s pain. When she felt this pain in her own body, she would then receive images of what, where and why this pain was there for the other person.

She explained to me that this was a brand new phenomenon that definitely coincided with this little being that was growing inside of her own body. Once her son was born, this brand new psychic ability continued to develop. “Well,” she said, “I guess that is is one of the incredible miracles in life.” “I can’t explain it anymore than I can explain the miracle of how a human being can actually grow in my womb, and that this human being will become a man one day.” Amazing, really.

I have another friend who recently witnessed the death of her elderly mother. She said to me, “I can’t explain it. I felt like being with her while she was dying was like witnessing someone being born. The struggle and pain was the same, the breathing was the same and the light, joy and infinite love filling up the room at her last breath felt exactly the same.” She said, “I think that death is just like birth. A miracle”

For me, something similar and horrible and very interesting happened in the last year. The horrible part was that my dear brother, Phillip, was diagnosed with a very rare cancer. I had hoped beyond hope that it could be treated and cured. This was not to be. I watched Phillip suffer as he went through his treatment. The cancer spread. Hope was gone. Phillip died within 7 months of his diagnosis.

I had experienced many, many loses in my lifetime. But this loss was the most devastating for me. Not only was Phillip young, only 48, but also, he was leaving a family behind. To my mind, he was just beginning to live.

Much like my friend Sonia, while Phillip was sick, a sleepy psychic ability began to awaken. While Sonia could feel the pain of another person, I was communicating with the dead.

In my healing work that I do with my patients, I was already able to “see” trauma of ancestors. For me, it is kind of like being able to look at a lit up family tree. I could see ancestor trauma, but this was different. Dead people began to talk to me.

One night while having dinner with my friend Lee, she told me of an old friend of hers whose husband recently committed suicide. I looked over Lee’s shoulder and said, “Ugh, he is right behind you and he wants to explain what happened to him.” I had never directly communicated with the deceased in this direct way before. More and more, if someone had a question about the death of someone close to them-that person showed up- to me, to relay their story.

It would not be unusual for me to wake up at 2:00 am with someone deceased standing next to my bed wanting to give me a message to their living loved ones.

It seemed like the oddest of things. Why when my own brother was dying was I being given a gift that could give comfort to others, while I, myself, remained in the deepest of despair about my own loss? It wasn’t that my brother wasn’t communicating with me after he passed, because he was, but I was not spared from the depths of grief that someone must experience as the price of loving someone so greatly. This was an initiation. I had to walk through it. This was one of the most disorienting and wrenching experiences that I have ever had to meet- this death of my brother.

My grandmother also passed a few days before my brother’s “would be” birthday. I was not sad at her passing. She was nearly 101. I felt relief that she would be with my brother on his “birthday.”

As I am a Buddhist, my Buddhist friends would inquire, “How is it that you are talking to dead people? Don’t they take a rebirth?” All that I can say is that I have NO idea! I have some thoughts- some of those thoughts are far too complicated for the purpose of this blog, but, I know what I know. I know that speaking to the person is exactly the same as speaking to a person who is “here.” {If this is hardly palatable for you, I want you to know that I was going to give a talk about all of this at a National Conference for Jungian Analysts in Santa Fe, but, my brother died two weeks before the conference. I cancelled. Honestly, I was relieved. I felt like he did me a favor. His timing was impeccable.}

I joined a grief group to support my bereavement process. (http://www.ourhouse-grief.org). I felt like a lunatic. How was it that I was helping people resolve their grief by communicating with the dead and yet I couldn’t feel any relief myself? There were/are 8 people in my grief support group. We all feel the same. Our experience of losing someone we love is mirrored in each other’s anguish, bewilderment, isolation, anger, disorientation, lowered immune systems and incredible fatigue. We each share the suffering of the “new normal” that the group feels surrounding the loss of our loved one. Week by week we walk each other through letting go of our “social mask” of “I’m fine, thank you, ” and share what is behind the mask. I have never appreciated the power of group consciousness and collective Basic Goodness as much as I have with the experience of this particular group. We are not different from each other at all. But, I have discovered that grief is some kind of “dirty secret” that no one wants to discuss. It’s no wonder that our culture has become so violent. We are not allowed to feel pain, especially the pain connected to loss.

One meeting in my group, a man said that he had a dream with his deceased mother in it. He asked me if I had dreamt about my brother? “Only dreams that indicate that I am in trauma over his death, nothing else,” I said.

Finally, after about 8 months I had a dream. In the dream I am at a “Grateful Dead” concert with my brother. (He always did have the best sense of humor!) In the dream I realize that I am not dreaming- where I am with him IS real. I am really with him. I say, “Where ARE YOU?? Are you OK? What happens at death? Tell me!” He looks at me nonchalantly and says, “You see that room with the light coming out of it over there? I am there. I am just over there in that other room. It is exactly like before, but another room. I am in that room with others, with Grammy, and I am just pretty busy in there. I am happy.”

I woke up.

I felt better.

I knew that when the dead communicate with me that they are stepping out from this “other room”- that they are with us all along. Besides, which dream is really real? This dream life or that one? Perhaps neither or both.

I am not the only one who communicates with the dead. Most people, if they are honest, will talk about experiences that feel as if the deceased love one is sending them a message somehow: a certain song that plays in the car when you need it most that is significant to the loved one and their relationship with you, a message written in the sand or on the sidewalk or a wall, an object found that symbolizes the loved one, some random text or email that finally finds it way to you after the deceased sent it years ago, a breeze that caresses your cheek out of nowhere, a butterfly that lingers longer than expected and then almost lands right on your nose, something that someone says innocently that is only something the deceased used to say to you. Or, just a certain feeling that comes over your body and into your heart-a knowing that they are fine and you will be ok.

So, you see, you don’t have to be Theresa Caputo (The Long Island Psychic) to receive messages from the dead. You only have to be receptive.

Someone recently gave me an article about the Russian physicist Yury Kronn. The article is about the subtle energy that fills 96% of our existence but cannot be seen or measured. It says, “We live in a 4% world. That’s the world we can see, build, measure, and organize. Then there’s the 96% that we don’t see, but that determines everything…..” Then it says, “Welcome to your new reality.”

If we only use 4% of our perception, then this means that the room my brother is in is a part of the other 96%. Shamans and other investigators of the mind have already known this from the beginning of time. I, for one, am grateful to know about it, to see it, and to hear from the “subtle energies” that reside there. Regardless, the devastation of loss is very real. If we weren’t meant to feel it, we wouldn’t. Grief takes time.

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Working With Our Collective Shadow

Speaking To The Dead