A part of yourself is stuck in a moment when you grieve. Being stuck may not be grief but because you don’t realize you need to grieve. Grief is not exclusively about the physical death of a person. But can fit in many other categories. Certain grief can take years or months to work through others may take a simple moment of acknowledgment of grieve and feelings of loss.
My first experience of grief, from a physical death, was at 9 years old when my mother miscarried. I mourned for years, wondering what this sister would have been. When my own daughter died I came face-to-face with death. In this, I discovered that each of us develops our own manner of grieving. We grieve for a variety of reasons.
As we age we form relationships with many ideas, our loved ones, friends, things, ideas, and our sense of higher being. The loss of any relationship can cause us to mourn. Grieving is not a linear process where a person can say well this is what happens at first and this is the way you handle it.
What I have learned is that we loop in and out of different stages. Grief, for the most part, is about our identity. My grief as a nine-year-old was the loss of my identity as a sister to this unborn child. My daughter’s demise faced me with the loss of my title as a mother to her. It has been 30 years since she passed and there are still moments I must handle the grief. Personal identity is built out of relationships to everything around us. In the Prosperos we learn to build our identity on a singular concept as Truth, in the image or likeness of Truth.
In this past year, I have seen many of my friends fall into depression and grief over the election. The election was a sense of loss. What many felt was a loss of freedom, sanity, and humanity. All of these faced us with our identity as American Citizens. I found myself deeply troubled with the ideas of what I felt the American Citizenry had become. In short, I had lost my identity as an American national. This left me with a need to acknowledge the grief of the lost.
In using The Prosperos Class Releasing the Hidden Splendour I find that an incident must be relooked at many times in different settings. This is because an occurrence that adds to our identity permeates the whole of our unconscious mind. Hidden in corners grief raises its head in many ways. This is the same with a memory that needs to be relooked. When you release feelings, and emotions around a memory or grief it is simply that place in time you were stuck. You may find many other hidden places (in unconscious mind and life) where you are stuck.
In releasing any memory or grief you formulate a void. This void can be filled with many different ideas, but definitely relates directly to your identity. Therefore it is important that it be filled with the understanding that the Truth of you, that which is so about you rather than an old idea of attachment or pain.
Grief can crowd your heart; eat up your energy, and peace. Grief, like other emotions, plays a definite purpose in life. It gives you a chance to relook at what you value and how you define yourself. It, like all life, can be the stage for great growth. It can, if you allow it, to pull you from life’s illusion into a state of freedom. You can gain a freedom from being caught in a material world trying to give meaning to things and incidents that have no meaning.
Grief is an opportunity to embrace the spiritual side of all life. The very essence of existence can be explored. Like all life, by embracing the emotion we become aware of our nature and relationship to life in an existential manner.
Grief can come from many different areas of life, the loss of a dream, infertility, divorce, job loss, retirement, friendship, pet, or something like the loss of a memorabilia of a loved one who has passed. No one can define for you what you can grieve about. However, in my experience is it all about how we define ourselves and what void the loss seems to have left.
After my daughter died I had trouble leaving the hospital. I thought someone was playing a very bad trick on me. I kept feeling her in my arms and smelling her. This was a kind of denial, a protection until my mind could accept the grief and loss of identity I was feeling. It takes a while for the mist of denial to give away to the light of acceptance. Like all pain and hurt until we accept the responsibility for our emotions and feelings we cannot resolve the pain and move forward. We remain stuck in that moment of time. And each time we recall it the pain returns to a certain degree.
Comprehend: To get out of the loop and move forward (get unstuck) you must embrace your emotions. Embrace the idea that your heart is broken even if no one else understands, embrace the pain as yours coming from you.
Acknowledge: Grief does not have a timetable. When you recall a memory you may find a time many years ago that you needed to grieve and never did. Conscious grief begins when you recognize you need to grieve. Grief can fall into something that happened or didn’t happen and either way, you were/are left with a heaviness of spirit and heart.
Embrace: You must embrace the loss, anger, sadness, bitterness, resilience, compassion and other feelings you encountered during your loss. You become in touch with your grief when you make space for the feelings brought into your life by the loss. There is no way to move through grief unless you make contact with the feelings. You must fully feel the emotions as you embrace that one moment in time that brought you to this place.
Emotionally you must pick up the grief, feel its weight in your hands, your heart, and life. See how it is keeping you trapped. Your spirit or existence is immovable in that moment. Either you embrace the emotions and the weight and effect on your life or you will stay encased in the shell of pain and misguided sense of self.
Move: The grief and memories we harbor of pain and loss can begin to feel as if they are natural and part of our identity. Grief and the pain can become comforting in its familiarity. Releasing grief and the familiarity and moving toward something less predictable and less predictable can be scary.
You must move through the outer fringe and reach for the epicenter, the belly of where your grief lies. When you reach that center of the memory, the pain, and hurt attached to the grief and you embrace it and allow it to be released it becomes a spectacular event. The feeling of wholeness, totality, and connection to all life returns to your beingness. Your spirit returns to reside with you, as you.
Releasing grief takes five steps: You must 1. Recall the incident identifying all of the players in your grief. 2.Relive the emotions and incident. Go beyond the outer edges delve into the belly of incident and grief. Feel all the emotions, allow you to see how you’re stuck at that moment and the effect on your life. 3. Respond to others in the scene to the emotions, saying what you could not say at the time. Feel what you would not allow your self to feel. 4. Release your self from the anger, pain, hurt. Release all those who shared that moment with you. See that person, place or thing is simply mind unfolding unable to react differently at that moment. 5. Re-file the memory, the pain, and hurt from sorrow to joy. You give up or givef-for the old identity of self-built on things and emotions of pain and hurt for a new identity based on Truth. You release all those who participated in the scene. You will understand that the essence of all life remains and has always been. We may loose the physical appearance but our spirit has always been and remains. Allow your True Identity to shine forth, Truth, consciousness conscious of consciousness.
The Prosperos offers classes and mentoring to help you through this process of emotional and spiritual growth. This path is taught in the seminar called Releasing the Hidden Splendour.
