Making Space for Grief

By Ami Isett

Grief, what a strong and complex word! It says so much and yet so specifically little all at the same time. We can feel grief around change of any kind, loss of life, relationships, roles, stages in life, autonomy, mobility, career, health, age and so many more topics.

Loss, sorrow, distress, heartache, mourning, sadness and impending gloom are just a few of the words that come up for me when I think about grief. I also feel the sensations in my body of a kind of slumping, pulling away from and an empty heaviness inside. What do you think, feel and sense when you are in a state of grief? Do you have or make the room to feel it or do you tuck it away?

For me, grief gets suspended in the air and hovers over everything. It devours the light and creates a kind of melancholy that masks or prohibits flow and the rhythm of my life. I live in a different space, it is often incredibly powerful and robs me of being present and available to life itself. Does this make it bad? Well, uncomfortable that’s for sure, but it also tells me what I value most in my life, what I appreciate, want and need in this lifetime.

We often feel so completely alone in our grief. My grief at the present may not be yours, but we have “it” in common, it’s inevitable, universal, something we all share! What if our grief can be shared, to better connect us to each other, to our humanness? What if this in itself can help us heal, learn about and process our grief even better?

In this upcoming workshop, “Making Space for Grief”, my colleague Andrea Pollak and I invite you to join us to discover more about making the space you need to acknowledge and feel your grief. What would it look like if you had more time, permission to feel and less constraints around your grief? Come explore more with like-minded people in a safe place, in relationship and in the community of SoULL.

We’ll help you make room for it in your mind, body and spirit for a deeper understanding of grief itself so that you can heal in your own time and space.  Hope to see you there!   

With love ~ Ami                                                      

“Making Space for Grief”

Sunday, November 14th at 11am to 2pm ET on Zoom

Please click this link to register.

https://jeanne-denney.squarespace.com/events/2021/11/14/making-space-for-grief

This workshop is presented by SoULL https://www.soullcommunity.com/

Grief is Contagious

By Jeanne Denney

If you are bereaved, or grieving any loss, you probably feel funny wearing your sadness in public, or talking about it to friends for more than a month or two. Increasingly it isn’t seen as a welcome or even healthy process. Recently, at the end of a 5 week course on death education, I was asked by participants whether it was appropriate to cry at a funeral. I had to check twice to see if they were serious, “ Wait…A FUNERAL?!?!?” I asked “Has grief phobia really gotten that bad?” 

Helping people stay “up” and “not bringing others down” are apparently social mandates. Grieving people often isolate, as if they are carrying the ebola virus, yellow fever and bird flu all at once. When they do go into public places or socially engage, it is common for them to rehearse inauthentic behaviors to meet perceived requirements for cheerfulness, resilience, and optimism, something like putting on a face mask. Surely this is burdensome.

The phenomenon of grief phobia is not new and is clearly unfortunate for grievers, but I am writing about the other side of the problem: the loss for others who have no contact with grief. I am suggesting that the bereaved are a rare medicine rather than an infectious disease.

One way I know that shared grief is a medicine is because I facilitate therapy groups with ordinary people. Practicing body psychotherapy, it is clear that unacknowledged sadness works its way into the body and psyche. What has not openly been acknowledged or shared becomes “somaticized” (held in the tissues of the body). Healing processes most often require that we acknowledge, feel, and release emotions we have held in the body but have not fully accepted and experienced.

In The Other Side of Sadness, grief researcher and psychologist Dr. George Bonanno of Columbia University writes that sadness is one of the important emotions evolved to help us through grief and loss. His studies show that people in states of sadness have an inward focus which allows them to be more aware, alert, and in possession of greater wisdom than people who avoid it. Likely it is a door we walk through to gain real life and genuine joy.

If tears and active sadness are good for us, how do we find and release them? Watching people struggle sometimes for years to feel buried sadness, I know it isn’t so simple. That is why grievers are especially good medicine. Group dynamics routinely demonstrate the power of one person’s heartfelt sharing of grief on others. There are only a few responses we can have in the presence of another’s expressed pain: we can freeze or feel our own human sorrow. In a healthy group, one person’s tears beget others because truly felt grief really is contagious. 

I was fascinated to read the accounts of Malidoma Somé, an African Studies scholar and shaman, who writes about the way grief is handled in the Dagara tribe. Drumming, dancing, music, and grieving goes on for days during which everyone is allowed space to explore their losses as well as their relationship with the world of spirit. I have to wonder how many things would change if we had similar rites in our own culture.

It is hard for grievers to deal with our culture’s denial of loss and death. But in truth, we are all impoverished by this isolation and denial. The benefits of grieving in a collective are not just to the griever, they are to the community. Through them we find a portal through which we can enter the reality of our own primal losses, finding wisdom, truth, healing, and precious inwardness. Grieving in a collective is strangely memorable and bonds the community deeply. We are united and humbled by loss. It is a doorway that can lead to more true joy and connection. And, it seems, we need each other to pass through it.

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If you connected with this post, join us for SoULL’s online workshop Making Space for Grief led by Andrea Pollak and Ami Isett November 14th from 11:00 AM 2:00 PM. We will create space to acknowledge sorrow.

Header photo by Bastien Ruhland

The Birth and Purpose of SoULL: An Introduction

by Founder Jeanne Denney

There is almost nothing crazier than starting a transformational program or school. Starting SoULL (School of Unusual Life Learning) has been similar to leading a six month trek up a mountain, digging a well for the thirsty with a pick axe, or building a bridge for the stranded with twine. I feel a little some days like Orville or Wilbur. As in Wright. Except that there is only one of me. They had each other. The thought has come, “Why the bleep am I doing this?” You may be asking this too.

I know well the joys of helping others. I have been a therapist a good long time. It’s great work. But this is different. It comes from a deeper place. It comes in the night. It doesn’t leave you alone. It gives you insight and then expects you to do something with it. It says “Follow”. It says “Failure isn't real.” It says “Do it anyway”. If you explain that you are a contemplative person that doesn’t fit usual descriptions for “a leader” it doesn’t care. It says “Just do it”. Ugh. You can imagine the arguments. I explain that I have no interest in being a hero(ine). Maybe I can just…write an obscure book for a few people? Talk to friends? It says “Write emails. Invite. Create. Continue inviting.” I say “Do I have to?” It says “Yes.” So I am writing to you. Hey, I am just doing my job.

I admit that on some days there is a lot of “I don’t want to.” But truthfully, I have been given these unique and beautiful teachings because they truly need to be given. When I have given them, I have witnessed their deep effect on the hearts, souls, and bodies of students. I have come to know the power and the need for a life teaching that goes further than the pages of any book, beyond academics. The need for the creativity that comes from these ideas, for people to be empowered in learning together. I feel a responsibility. Further, a beautiful little community has grown around these teachings. Not so much around me. I am an ordinary enough human. But around what we are learning together. And that is really cool. There is a lot more to come.

I am not trying to start a movement or a religion or save the world or be famous in any small world within the world. But if the world is going to take its next awkward step toward sanity, it is going to be because people learned how to band together to learn a new language and create new solutions from new ideas. This is a start.

This work has called me into a different leadership, one that empowers others through deep connections with self and an exploration of true community. It may be calling you. If so, you probably need to answer that call. I am gratefully standing by. Just doing my job.