by Kathleen McKee
A few years ago I attended an online grief workshop by a colleague friend of mine, Noor Alexander. I was curious what my trusted friend would share about this mysterious process and how it could benefit me to actively grieve something that I lost, or that humanity is losing. I am always pushing down the loss of bigger trees from neighborhoods that slowly get less shaded and planted with bushes and ornamentals. The math in my head tell me X fewer trees equal 5X fewer squirrels, birds and insects. The irony of the most popular videos on social media being about animals, especially rescuing them, is not lost on me. I grieve the lost connection to natural rhythms our society has suffered due to increased work schedules, increased attraction to online life and increased sense of danger at being outside in certain neighborhoods where there is gunfire heard every day and night.
Marshall Rosenberg says, “Mourning is very important to do for sorrow, sadness, loss. Hours, days, weeks, years, whatever it takes. Let my feelings tell me when I’m through mourning.” And wisdom says it is important to allow the mourning, the grieving. In life-connected mourning, I attend to the feelings by being with them, letting them flow through my body. It is an honoring of them, respecting them.
In Noor’s workshop I felt my feelings of sadness, disappointment and deep frustration at how systems are set up that control the world’s resources; that assign no economic cost or value to wildlife or the places they inhabit when building new developments. It is cheaper to bulldoze a square mile for new houses than to build each house with the existing natural landscape that would allow for some wildlife corridors of forest and field.
I felt the twisting and burning in my chest and stomach. We were invited to breathe into the areas that we felt the grief. I did this. It felt soothing to attend to those areas that were subsisting in the background, unattended. I was visiting a part of myself I chose to push away and have no space for. We journaled for five minutes. I was able to connect thoughts to the body sensations, and attend to both. Until now, I was trying to be desensitized to my grief and get through each day. Because the “lack of trees” is everywhere I go. I felt some relief in just being full-faced with this grief as it is in my body. Doing that helped my body relax and breathe better.
I implemented some RAIN practice with my grief, learned from Tara Brach. An internal self-compassion practice of Recognizing the war within myself, Allowing the feelings to be there, Investigating how they were living in my body, what sensations was I experiencing, and finally nurturing myself with kind words and acknowledgement that this IS sad, this IS frustrating, and I DO value all the living beings of the ecosystems out there, and they deserve a space to live their fullest lives.
Joanna Macy developed the “Work that Reconnects,” a framework and methodology that in the face of overwhelming social and ecological crises, helps people transform despair and apathy into constructive, collaborative action. She calls the series of collapses of ecosystems on our earth, “The Great Unraveling.” In a podcast interview from Plum Village in November 2021, she said, that after she invited a group of faculty to share with each other a moment when they experienced the crisis of the planet, “they were suddenly so full of laughter and so full of creativity and initiative.”
Expression and griefwork can free our systems to come out of complacency, wallowing, heaviness, self-protection, and life-alienating thinking. This can rear it’s head in so many areas of our lives including self-care and our relationships.
At the end of Noor’s workshop, I felt different. I felt more open, more empowered, lighter and optimistic. I have a quote from my notes on the workshop: “There is so much to grieve in feeling in our modern world with ecosystem loss, isolation, wars. To be fully human today requires grieving…”
And for me grieving with others added value. Being witnessed, or sharing in the place of grief has it’s own healing quality.
I looked for some resources that might help someone right now. Here are some links to resources for griefwork.
Video: Dealing with Loss: Coming Back to Life with Kristin Masters
Video: NVC-based Meditation w/ Yoram Mosenzon: Celebration and Mourning