Sleep Fast

"And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness." ~C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed~

It's funny how you can grieve yourself.

I write. I blog. I express. So, I can chart my progress and the progress of the people I serve om year to year. I see changes. Evolutions. The most marked changes include grief. As one of my teachers tell me, "We spend our lives experiencing, surviving, and learning to recover from painful relationships." Doesn't matter if those relationships are with other people, work, lifestyles, or with ourselves.

I spend a good deal of time with grief in my work.

I work in a field where I deal with grief and trauma all the time—traditional medicine. In fact, when I was apprenticing with Elders, mentors, and teachers to learn my practice, I was told that I would see people in various stages of grief all the time. It's extraordinarily difficult to work with people who literally have to open their hearts, minds, and emotions to allow us to work with them and on their bodies. As a bodyworker, an energy worker, a light worker, a yungcak-a practitioner of the human being, we are tasked with working in compassionate acceptance of ourselves and others.

Every single teacher I have had—and myself—have experienced great traumas and heartbreak at one time or another ourselves. I asked, "Why do those of us who do this life's work experience so much pain? Why do we have to hurt so much?" My teachers have all resoundingly responded and given me approximately the same answer. "We must come from a place of experience to help Our People."

As a woman who has experienced life through two paths: the Western path, and the traditional path, I can tell you that neither are easy to navigate. The Western side tells you to "buck up," "shake it off," or "get over it" when you go through something difficult. My traditional side says I must quietly observe it and work through it as it affects my spirit. I must call on others to help me if I can't deal with something on my own...

You see, I have been taught that my life is a spiritual practice. So, I had gone about my days practicing that which I had been taught. Everything is a teaching. Everyone a teacher to us. We withhold judgment. And we begin to have evolutions of consciousness through this sometimes painful growth. We have a word in my language to describe it. Roughly translated, it means we become aware of our own place in the Universe, and we see the relationships that support that place. This awakening of consciousness, this look through the Eye of The Universe, changes us. We cannot go back to who we were, even just a second before.

It's funny. Many of the teachings about who we are as human beings are very similar to those I've seen in other spiritual and medicine traditions. I've studied a lot of them because I have a very diverse patient population. I've studied them because no single spiritual or medicine traditions have all the answers. Sometimes I pick up the thread of where one tradition leaves off, on a thread from another place in the world to complete the narrative.

Recently, I discovered that I was going through another very painful transformation. It took me a while to figure it out because I have been grieving. I lost someone who meant the world to me. Not in death. But in another type of loss. Heartbreak. And just as C.S. Lewis described above, I feel like my life has been in this limbo...this waiting. This empty void of uncomfortable suspense. Waiting to be reborn. Impatient. In pain. In discomfort. Holding my breath. Grasping to hang onto what I lost.

Here's where the grief sets in...I didn't want anything to change. I didn't want to lose him. I was happy. Glow in the dark happy. Happier and in love like I had never experienced in my life. And it changed one cold Sunday in February of last year. I was helpless to change anything because I wasn't the only one whose life changed. It was completely out of our control.

I was reading The Buddhist View on Death and Rebirth recently. The Venerable Thich Nguyen Tang said,

"At a certain moment, the world seems suddenly so empty and the sense of desperation appears to be eternity. The greater the element of grief and personal loss one tends to feel sorry for oneself."

I cried. That was it. THAT was what I was feeling.

I knew what I had to do. I had to treat myself as one of my patients...I had to go through a grief protocol. I didn't want to do it. That meant I had to let go that which didn't serve me anymore. I had to let go of my attachment to him...

There are times we have to do this within our lives, in varying degrees. It's never easy. Never. Whether you're a child letting go of a much loved security item, a parent seeing your child leave you to go to school for the first time, saying goodbye to your loved ones as they pass, ending a job or relationship you love...it's much the same. It's painful at first. Sometimes it's so painful you can't breathe. You can't stop crying. It physically hurts. You can't sleep. You try things to make it go away. To try to soothe, numb, or forget. Sometimes it works. Temporarily. Slowly, it gets better. I won't say it heals, because I don't think we ever really or truly get over loss. But, it gets easier. Its like you give up little threads. You burnish the rough spots until they don't chafe, scrape or bleed quite so much.

We have to strip the fear from our hearts and souls and let others hold us bare, in our vulnerability when we do this. It's incredibly powerful. It's terrifying. It can be just as painful as the loss itself. But, we have to do it. Some part of us knows we have to do it. The danger lies in us trying to hang on too hard. We become stagnant. We endanger ourselves and our spirits. But, as I tell my patients all the time: Grief is a process. There is no timeline. There are switchbacks—you can have great days, weeks, months, or years...but, it can hit you afresh. Unexpectedly. Painful as the first day. It can last for a while again. When you realize the time that's gone by. Birthdays. Anniversaries. Graduations. When you see people get married. When you bury someone else. Or, if you are like me...when you drive by them occasionally or see that they have been looking at your profile. Or read your blog. Or text you to say hello and that they miss you. Or when you wish they would.

Time stretches out then, and you hope you sleep fast so your mind won't fill with dreams of what you grieve in waking hours. Because it may seem like the sweetest dream. But, it feels like a nightmare to experience the grief after.

So, if it's you that's experiencing grief right now, be kind to yourself. Practice that which feeds your spirit. Rest your body. Refrain from the things that mask the pain. Treat what you're going through with compassionate acceptance. Aware and accepting of your feelings, but not attached to them. Allow the feelings to flow through you like water through a garden hose. Just be the vessel. If you need help addressing the grief, ask for help. Ask for what you want. If you just need to be held. If you just need someone to listen, tell them "Listen to me. Don't judge. I don't want advice. I don' t want you to DO anything. Just hear me." But, don't let fear or desperation to rule you. Sometimes it's best to leave the emptiness empty. If you need to fill it with anything, fill that space with love.

Or, just sleep fast...