Grief, Loss, and Praise: Healing Through Community

oracle-of-destiny-journal-grief-loss-praise

Grief is what we feel when we experience a loss of some kind. It can be a person, a job, a relationship, the inner dream of what we thought we would experience.

In Shamanistic cultures, it is believed that if one's ancestors were unable to properly grieve, then that grief becomes a "ghost" attached to the next generation, and the next, and eventually the burden of grieving that loss falls to us. As a shamanic practitioner, I understand the truth of this. I have done a lot of work with my ancestral grief and much of my own.

Unattended grief of generations manifests physically as illness or dis-ease. I believe that my cancer (2010-2016) was a result of generations of ancestral grief added to my own lifetime of grief and shame.

My family were stoic Scots and Germans. My father occasionally played certain emotional classical music pieces in order to be able to weep but otherwise claimed he was very happy in his life. He died alone. My mother drowned her grief with alcohol. She died of cancer and organ failure after living several years in a state of dementia, probably Alzheimer's. I am certain that neither of them received healthy modeling from their parents, my grandparents, on grieving.

According to shaman Martin Prechtel, the flip side of grief is praise. Or, they go hand in hand. (See his YouTube videos Grief and Praise 1-3 — very powerful) If you grieve the loss of something, then you are praising it at the same time. By your grief you show how important that thing (or person, relationship, pet, life dream, etc) was to you, to the universe.

Praise is essential. It is the acknowledgement of how important something is to us. It is the acknowledgement of that thing's essential beauty. It is the acknowledgement that that thing is important to the universe.

We cannot safely and properly grieve alone.

We used to dwell in villages, tribes, communities that could help hold an individual while they broke down and grieved.

Irish wakes, professional wailers at Chinese funerals, African villages where the entire village stops and beats drums, sings songs, feasts until dawn — all are examples of how grief works in community.

Instead, many of us walk around with ghosts attached to us, because our ancestors did not grieve and we do not grieve. These ghosts become a heavy burden. We carry the burden alone because we have lost our villages, our communities.

The ghost attachments also keep us from properly praising. How can we acknowledge the beauty and sacredness of life when all we feel is the heaviness of loss?

I feel a loss because I was not praised as a child for being myself. I was a free spirit, a being who could see between worlds, a person who dwelled in dreamtime. I expressed my emotions deeply and dramatically. Most children are like this.

Instead of being praised for those spirit-given qualities, I was punished. Praise came when I was obedient, quiet, and academic. I am sure that my parents were only doing the best they knew how. Likely their own blithe spirits had been crushed as children also, and they also were made to fit into molds carved by their parents, who were only themselves doing the best they knew how.

You can see how ancestral grief is with most all of us.

We also carry a collective grief, the loss of the collective of what we came here to be together. As humans we are not showing up in the way we intended.

No wonder there is so much depression (lack of expression of grief and praise) among so many people. No wonder so many people seek, as my mother did, to blunt the sharpness of their burdens with alcohol or pain killers or other mood-altering substances. No wonder so many people are sick in spirit and body.

So how do we heal this? How can we grieve our losses and praise our lives?

We each have the gift of acknowledging the loss of community that we feel. Together, we can mourn that loss because it is a collective loss. We all feel it. We all now feel how we are designed to live — in a community that is mutually supportive.

One of the powerful gifts that has come from global events of the past several years is the re-formation of such mutually supportive communities.

Now that you know what you have lost you can seek to create it. Now that you know what you have lost you can praise it for its importance to you. Now that you know what you have lost you can grieve it, together with all of us, and lift that burden from your children and children’s children.

I’ve spent the past ten days in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, far from my present home in the northeast but closer, much closer, to my true spiritual home, and during this time one of my specific goals was to immerse myself into a deeper connection with Nature. Though my home is in a semi-rural area, affording me an opportunity to frequently bike through rolling hills amid cornfields and farmhouses, I really don’t feel all that connected with the nature element of it usually. Perhaps it’s because I don’t connect energetically with the space, or resist a deeper connection; perhaps it’s the human element in a long-inhabited space that has overwritten the elements of nature, but in any case I felt a huge difference in my little cabin in the forest, a short walk from the beach, easily moving into a space of love and appreciation for Nature and my place within it. I spent several hours roaming the trails through the forest, meandering along the beach, and standing in the rain under the trees at night.

And then I upped the ante considerably and spent some time in a different forest last night.

I entered the forest under a nearly-full moon, bright on a cloudless night, and instantly I felt a different sort of welcoming, an embrace, an invitation. Through connecting with the trees who are themselves all connected and always aware of that connection to one another, to the earth, and to All That Is, I could reach back into time and feel roots tapping into the dawning of human consciousness on the planet with such primordial innocence that it took my breath away.

At the same time I was aware of every possibility that continues to stretch before us in time: possibilities for each one of us and all the myriad possibilities available at any given moment, every choice, every road taken and not taken, and I felt vast, knowing that I was a part of everything that ever has been and everything still yet to come. I was as tall as the trees and as bright as the moon, and I turned my face toward her, accepting the spotlight, fully acknowledging my completeness and perfection.

To say this was a joyous and magical experience doesn’t quite do it justice.

But it served as a wonderful reminder, one that I will take back to my home with me and one that I offer you now, that our connection with Nature is an essential of simply being human. It’s part of us, and to deny it is to deny part of Self.

Afterwards, I channeled this:

There is of course value in connecting with animals, trees, and other elements of what you consider to be “nature”. These elements, are of course, part of your home, part of your world, and are as such connected to you, to humans, in a very intimate way. You share space. You share air. You share resources. Not only that, but you share in the creation of your world, the global creation of the reality you know as life on the physical plane. And because of that, there is an undying connection between you as a human and ALL of the so-called “natural” elements of Nature.

Some of you feel this connection more deeply, more emotionally, than others. Some feel a return, when confronted with Nature, especially in her most raw state, to that innocent and childlike state of simply Being, existing, that lies dormant within all of you. And as such, you feel it deeply when one of nature’s children, one element of the intricate tapestry that is constantly being woven and re-created, moves through natural transition into another state. There is, for you, a deep sense of loss, as there is the recognition not only of the timelessness of transformation and the cycles of life on the planet, but also of the transference of human-type connection to an element of nature. You can mostly only experience connection with nature by transferring those feelings to a more human perspective, and when loss of an element of nature, such as a pet or tree, occurs, there is transference to the human state of grief.

We have mentioned the energetic connections between you and your pets and we wish to elaborate. Again, not only is there a very real symbolic connection here (discovery of Self, of Love, of perspective: these things were gained through and with your interaction), but also there HAVE in most cases indeed been some past-life associations. Though most animals live lives in mainly hive-type soul arrangements, there is a constancy of energy that can flow generation after generation through one individual animal to another, and even of course crossing boundaries of species. There has been for many of you, then, a common thread through many lifetimes of connection with various elements of nature, and it is this thread, now running through you and the pets you love, that has touched this present lifetime.

The lessons from connection to Nature are many and varied and often depend on the individual, but regardless of perspective there is ALWAYS growth opportunity through human connection with Nature. After all, it is your home. It is your LIFE. To deny Nature is denying an aspect of Self, and to fully EMBRACE Nature, to ACCEPT it in all its splendor, ugliness, and beauty, is a HUGE step in actually accepting your Self.