Grief As Enlightenment - A Sacred Journey

"Enlightenment is ineffable.

The closest we can come to that state of being is

 when we are living in truth and living in love."

Sasha B. 

One of my favorite yoga teachers recently spoke the above words that landed deeply. It had never occurred to me until that moment that deep, real, raw grief is enlightenment. When we live in raw grief, we live in truth. When we grieve deeply, we are living in love. It is only because of the depth of that love that we grieve at all. Authentic grief, therefore, is enlightenment, though it rarely feels like it.

The circumstances of my son Graham’s death led me into ritual, calling me to honor his life, his death, and my own grief. We created sacred acts of remembrance: dedicating Memorial Benches, planting a tree in his honor and nourishing it with his liquid cremains, began cycling thirty miles for each of his thirty years across thirty-eight days—the number of days he remained in the lake until we found him. I don’t know that I would have embraced ritual so fully had things been different. But these rituals offered me meaning, truth, witness, expansion, and inspiration. Out of that inspiration came Mindful Metamorphoses and A Sacred Journey With Grief Retreat.

With the wisdom and nourishment of the jungle, we will lay out the truth of our grief just as the egg is laid on the leaf in first stage of metamorphosis. We enter our grief.

As the egg hatches into a small caterpillar in its second stage, devoted to nourishment and shedding its skin as it outgrows each layer, so too will we engage with our grief and all-encompassing emotions—releasing what is ready to be shed and learning to live with the new identity that inevitably follows the loss of a loved one or the loss of a dream. We will embrace emotions and build capacity for regulating them.

As the caterpillar enters the chrysalis—a stage of stillness on the outside but profound activity within—so too are we invited into this resting yet transformative time. Here we surrender to grief, loosening our resistance and allowing ourselves to be held by the mystery of change. In this cocoon of becoming, we begin to reframe life’s meaning; to discover ways our loved ones, or our dreams, remain with us, and to welcome the subtle signs of their presence. We may notice shifts in our spirituality, in our sense of what is real and possible. Most of all, we offer ourselves compassion and grace as we, too, are remade.

By honoring what is and resting within the protective shell we need, we create space for the unseen inner rearranging, much like the caterpillar inside its chrysalis. At emergence, the butterfly’s wings are small and crumpled, gradually filling and strengthening as blood flows through them. Once dry, the butterfly rises into the air, turning its attention to the ongoing work of sustaining life through nourishment.