Grieve Like Your Life Depends on it

We see a cultural resistance to grief and grieving of epidemic proportions. 

When you read the news about the Middle East, what do you do next? Do you acknowledge and feel your feelings all the way through, or do you do something…anything else? 

When you find out that the tides didn’t go your way (with your last project/initiative, promotion or funding opportunity, deal with a client, or intimate relationship), do you acknowledge and feel your feelings all the way through, or do you do something…anything else?

When you discover that your child is failing out of school, experimenting with drugs, or severely depressed, do you acknowledge and feel your feelings all the way through, or do you do something…anything else?

Grief is the process of honoring and letting go of a vision that is no longer to be: a more peaceful middle east, a completed project or deal you could taste and smell, a relationship that you thought was unshakable, a teenager who wouldn’t struggle so. 

When reality parts ways with our vision and we don’t allow ourselves to feel heartbreak—deep in our bones, in every crevice and cell— we then (falsely) believe that we’re isolated, disconnected, and disempowered. When we believe it, we act as if it’s true, and it becomes our reality.

However we choose to numb or distract ourselves from feeling heartbreak provides (very) temporary relief, and keeps us from inhabiting aliveness. Without aliveness, we have no clean fuel to be the change (within ourselves, our family, our organization, our communities, or the world). Hence the title…

Grieve like your life depends on it. 

Because it does. 

Life (generously) gives us opportunities everyday to let our hearts break open. What will you do—and and how will you be—the next time life graces you with a chance to grieve?

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Going Deeper with Grief

• For more on grief check out Jim’s Grief and Grieving Meditation 
• Keep up the learning with Erica’s post on Grief and Impact ‍
• For a poetic deep dive with a shaman, read Martin Prechtel’s The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise.