SOUL MEDICINE for mes of Grief

Transcription

1 SOUL MEDICINE for mes of Grief Helen Ba ler, M.Div, Specialist in Spiritual Care Contact: ext helen.ba Helen Ba ler, M.Div, Specialist in Spiritual Care

2 Dear Reader, I created this booklet as soul food for difficult mes when your heart needs some comfort and guidance. Grief can feel like being plunged into a dark wilderness in the middle of a storm. The losses and changes that cancer brings to you personally, or someone you love, can o en be like a wilderness in your heart. It can bring an invisible pain as you struggle with fear, despair, weariness of endlessly reaching for hope, faith, trust, peace. Some mes it can feel impossible to discover what these words even mean in light of what has happened, and you can find yourself in a despairing dark night of the soul experience. It takes me, support and lots of soul medicine for your heart and mind to heal from such a life altering experience. In many years of walking beside people living through the impact of profound losses I have learned to trust that hearts are wise and will guide us through our healing if we a une to their wisdom. There are some cri cal ingredients that can support your heart, such as wise friends who simply listen, nature with its meless healing medicine, selfcompassion and low expecta ons of yourself, and receiving the help and kindness from those who care about you. Most of all you need to allow your heart to have all the different feelings grief

3 Tears are a river that take you somewhere. Weeping creates a river around the boat that carries your soul-life. Tears li your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace new, someplace be er. - Clarissa Pinkola-Estes brings with it without judging those feelings or shu ng them down. The feelings are like the waves of the ocean washing the shore transforming fear, despair and hopelessness into wisdom, hope and inner peace, if not all the me, because we are but human... then at least for some moments at a me. Feelings cleanse, s r and make us aware of what is truly valuable and important but only when we can know we are supported and not alone. With caring support grief can green our lives with a deeper awareness of the true value of love, friendship, the present moment, beauty and inner peace and one day through the struggle and tears you will feel a sense of wholeness once again. May these poems and quotes from wise people who have lived through their own struggles in life, feed your heart and soul with comfort and wisdom and offer a reminder that you are not alone. - Helen Support is always available through Suppor ve Care which includes Social Work counsellors, and myself in Spiritual Care. Please feel free to ask for the kind of support you feel you need by calling: Suppor ve Care Services: Ext Spiritual Care, Helen Ba ler: Ext

4 Once someone asked a well-known Thai medita on master, In this world where everything changes, where nothing remains the same, where loss and grief are inherent in our very coming into existence, how can there be any happiness? How can we find security when we see that we can t count on anything being the way we want it to be? The teacher, looking compassionately at this fellow, held up a drinking glass which had been given to him earlier in the morning and said, You see this goblet? For me, this glass is already broken. I enjoy it, I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, some mes even reflec ng the sun in beau ful pa erns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on a shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and sha ers, I say, Of course. But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious. Every moment is just as it is and nothing need be otherwise. Grief is like a wound. Grief is a cut, a slash on our body. At first there is not feeling. We are numb. Then gradually we begin to hurt, to feel the pain. We have to tend the wound carefully to avoid infec on. Proper rest and a en on and me all help the healing process. Healing is a slow process. There will always be a scar. The scars of grief should be worn proudly because they are signs of how much we loved. Grief is like a maze. There are so many blind alleys. Where is the right passageway? Who is there to guide us safe conduct through this maze of feelings and emo ons? How can we find our way through? It feels so confusing. We feel lost and alone. Grief is like a stream. As we cross to the other side we go from stepping stone to stepping stone, o en afraid we will fall and get carried away in the turbulence of the rapids. Is there an image for your grief?

5 Picturing Grief From Grief s Courageous Journey by Sandi Caplin, Gordon Lang Some people find it helpful to create an image of how they are feeling. Here are some examples that might help you create a picture of your grief. Grief is like a jigsaw puzzle. Some mes we feel like we have it all together. Then an accident happens. Our life falls apart. We try to put the pieces back together, but they don t fit any more. Our values, priori es, and outlook all have changed radically. We feel overwhelmed. We don t know where to begin. If our only spiritual prac ce were to live as though we were already dead, rela ng to all we meet, to all we do, as though it were our final moments in the world, what me would there be for old games or falsehoods or posturing? If we lived our life as though we were already dead, as though our children were already dead, how much me would there be for self-protec on and the re-crea on of ancient mirages? Only love would be appropriate, only truth. - Stephen Levine, Who Dies? Grief is like a broken heart. Who can mend it? Grief is like waves pounding on the seashore. At first the waves come piled one upon the other, tumbling in confusion. Gradually they slow down. At first grief seems to knock us down every minute. Gradually there s more me between waves. We s ll get knocked down from me to me. Some mes we can see the wave coming (such as Christmas, a birthday, or a par cular season of the year), and we can brace ourselves for it. O en the an cipa on is worse than the reality of the actual wave. You see this goblet? For me, this glass is already broken.

6 The Unbroken There we may drown If we let fear Hold us within its grip and shake us Side to side, And leave us flailing, torn, disoriented. There is a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken a sha eredness out of which blooms the unsha erable. There is a sorrow beyond all grief which leads to joy and a fragility out of whose depths emerges strength. There is a hollow space too vast for words through which we pass with each loss, out of whose darkness we are sanc oned into being. There is a cry deeper than all sound whose serrated edges cut the heart as we break open to the place inside which is unbreakable and whole and learning to sing. But if we rest there In the trough, Are silent, Being with The low part of the wave, Keeping Our energy and No cing the shape of things, The flow. Then me alone Will bring us to another Place Where we can see Horizon, see the land again, Regain our sense Of where We are, And where we need to swim. Judy Brown The Sea Accepts All Rivers by Rashani Rea in her book, Beyond Brokenness

7 Trough From One Na ve Life by Richard Wagamese "Nothing is ever truly lost. Everything exists on energy, invisible and eternal. The highest form that energy takes is feeling. The heart has no ques ons and the head has no answers. Our heads tell us to believe in finali es, endings, but nothing is ever truly lost. There is a trough in waves, A low spot Where horizon disappears And only sky And water Are our company. And there we lose our way Unless We rest, knowing the wave will bring us To its crest again. Take this place with you. Breathe it into you. Someday you'll unwrap it and see it like it was, perfectly, truly. On that day, you'll see that there are no vanishing points. You can see forever from those hills, and you will never be lonely.

8 From Just Stay: A Couple s Last Journey Together by Jennifer Fazakerley, Helen Butlin-Ba ler and Grace Bradish... September 11, from Helen to Jen Hi Jen, As you think about the grief ahead remember that your mind can only imagine the loneliness as a black hole. Your mind cannot know that when you are standing keening in your kitchen, a bird will come and feed near your window and you'll suddenly feel comforted by something greater than the grief. It cannot know that when you are breathing one breath at a me with a knife in your heart, a friend will call and you will receive just enough comfort to take you to the next day. It cannot know that there in the pain that the sign you need desperately that you can make it through the blackness of the feelings arrives and shows you that you are being supported by something much vaster than the fear. It cannot know that when March and April feel like u er despair and the hole opens up and swallows you, that in that darkness a subtle illumina on begins to be no ced and you realize that the abyss is in fact also the fount of life from which everything flows, and you would have missed that illumina on, the fer lity of the dark pain, had you had any energy to run away from it and band aid it with all the things you used to in the lesser griefs. Your grief will shape you, mold you, take into a descent right to the belly of life and there, you may discover that it is in fact a womb of rebirth. There is no way out, only through. It s the eye of the needle. The only task: stay with every feeling, stay with every breath, reach for comfort when you need it, don't try to do it alone. Keen much and o en as the waves hit, sleep lots, keep ea ng, watch for the green shoots and then watch for survivor's guilt as you begin to have moments of feeling alive again and know that life encompasses you, encompasses death, encompasses Rob and this will be the grand canyon of your life, etched by the grief into something incredible and beau ful that people say, 'how come you're so (fill in the blank). Your grief will take you places you cannot even imagine right now but what your imagina on will always miss in the reaching forward into the future and wondering about it is the incredible forces of life that show up right inside the heart of darkness.