What if grief is the natural order of things, a way of loving life anyway?

Below is a collection of links to posts on grief.  This is another post which will be put at the top of the page in the archives navigation menus. I will add to it when new posts on grief are added to the Beyond Meds.

Grief need not be pathologized even if it takes a long time. I would also like to suggest an idea for consideration. Much of what is labeled psychiatric disease is grief that has never been expressed or properly felt, or validated. If we have unexplored trauma, then it’s likely we have unexplored grief too. Some of us need to begin a grieving process that never started in order to heal. Some of us have a life-time of grief that needs to be allowed and experienced. We can choose to challenge our culture’s fear of grief and the dark emotions and begin to heal and turn it around.

I introduce the subject with a lovely and thoughtful quote by Stephen Jenkinson who has quickly become a favorite source of inspiration.

From a young age we see around us that grief is mostly an affliction, a misery that intrudes into the life we deserve, a rupture of the natural order of things, a trauma that we need coping and management and five stages and twelve steps to get over.

Here’s the revolution: What if grief is a skill, in the same way that love is a skill, something that must be learned and cultivated and taught? What if grief is the natural order of things, a way of loving life anyway? Grief and the love of life are twins, natural human skills that can be learned first by being on the receiving end and feeling worthy of them, later by practicing them when you run short of understanding. In a time like ours, grieving is a subversive act. — Stephen Jenkinson, from Way of Grief

Grief collection from Beyond Meds:

• Grief is the human angel in the world

• Living after loss: the Adventure of Grief

• Turning grief into a profitable disease

• Grief: a love story

• And sometimes, when the heart fully opens, it breaks with grief first…

• Grief to become just another form of depression? another disorder for the DSM5 (and alternative ways of thinking about that pain)

• Quotes taken from the book: “healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear and despair”

• Bereavement and grief to be pathologized and “aggressively treated” in the new DSM

• Grief: It’s complicated

• Grieving and praising life are twins

• there is no such thing as a monolithic state called depression

• How to be in the darkness

• The pain of heartbreak and mourning

• “The cure for pain is in the pain.” My experience tells me that this is true

• Transforming Despair

• Healing through the dark emotions

Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life-force. It is riddled with energy, an acknowledgment of the erotic coupling with another soul, whether human, animal, plant or ecosystem. It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness. Grief is alive, wild, untamed and cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive and still. We move in jangled, unsettled and riotous ways when grief takes hold of us. It is truly an emotion that rises from soul. – by Francis Weller, from Entering the Healing Ground: Grief, Ritual and the Soul of the World

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