This past weekend has been an emotional rollercoaster for me and as I do everything wholeheartedly, I felt I needed to share about it in today's newsletter. (*Vulnerabiltiy alert)
“She is in a better place.” "Everything happens for a reason." “It is all part of God’s plan.” are some of the lines I heard from many of my well-meaning friends who attempted to comfort me when they found out that one of my friends had suddenly passed on.
All my inner child heard was “Your feelings don’t matter, “You’re not really spiritual if you are feeling upset”, and “Don’t wallow in the pain”.
This reminded me of a story. Many years ago, while doing teacher training for a personal growth seminar, one of the participants in our group was mugged and had her wallet stolen at lunch. She returned to the seminar distraught and shaken. As she was sharing her traumatic experience, the teacher just looked at her and said, “What did you do to create that?”
Rather than simply being present with what was in the moment and exhibiting compassion, he immediately went into what therapist John Welwood in his book Toward a Psychology of Awakening called Spiritual Bypass.
Yes, I do believe that there is a lesson in every challenge, however it is not always apparent in the moment, and I know that it is important for me to be conscious of what I am experiencing in my emotional and physical bodies.
When I don’t acknowledge the small and large losses, I tend to carry this energy into the future. Grieving is a necessary process that will lead to healing and a new level of understanding and joy. As I wrote in The Joy of Ritual, feelings are energy and can easily get stuck in the physical if not expressed.
As a gift to yourself and others, the next time you immediately go to:
*Believing that traumatic events must always have a silver lining
*Focusing on the spiritual and ignoring the emotional
*Shifting to the positive before you or the other person has had time to process the experience
Take a breath. Sometimes you just need a hug, a good cry, a kind word, or the space to simply grieve.
Until next time,
Barbara