Michael channel, Shepherd Hoodwin, recently posted the following about grief at the Michael teachings discussion list:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MichaelTeachings/
His wise thoughts were so universally applicable that I’m sharing them here. - David Gregg
—
As big a fan as I am of growing through joy rather than pain, as Michael
puts it, each of us will experience the death of loved ones, and it will
hurt like hell (unless we die first, in which case others will hurt like
hell). And there can be much growth from the experience. Hey, I didn’t make
the rules. I just work here.
Lest some assume that grieving is merely emotional indulgence, a human
foible: there is a real energetic component to it. In any relationship, an
energetic bond develops. When someone close to us dies, that bond is ripped,
and we have to reconfigure that connection: it’s no longer body/soul to
body/soul–it’s now body/soul to just soul. This adjustment is basically
what grieving is. It’s a natural process, but many things can stand in its
way. In dealing with them, we grow. We’re discussing grieving physical death
here, but grieving, say, the death of a relationship or any other loss
involves a similar upheaval and reconfiguration.
Brandon Bays, the author of “The Journey,” believes that grieving can be
completed in a week if one feels it fully, staying in and processing the
experience. Some cultures have traditions of public wailing and other
physical manifestations of grief; that is much healthier than our culture’s
belief in holding it all together, and moves people through the stages of
grief far more quickly. However, that may not be entirely necessary–it is
awareness that moves energy and brings healing; physicalizing it may just
make awareness more tangible. The point is to learn to be with our feelings
rather than trying to override them with what we think we should feel; to be
authentic; to try to bring all parts of Self onto the same page in a
compassionate way. When grieving is “clean,” without complications such as
guilt, regret, unfinished business, etc., it can burn intensely and even
sweetly, and then be done. However, being human, there often *are*
complications, and we need to deal with them if we are to complete our
grieving.
My mother died when I was eight. It was devastating, the defining event of
my life. I’ve worked a great deal on healing and letting go, but the tear in
the fabric of my soul isn’t even now entirely healed (although it’s close).
A movie depicting the death of a mother or something that reminds me of that
can still quickly get me sobbing, which actually feels good to me, although
I prefer to do it in private. Before she died, she recorded herself singing
a lullaby–an amazing gift; for years, I could not hear it without sobbing,
but now I can, which tells me that I’ve healed a lot. I had a vivid vision
of her five months after she died (I think Michael was with her), and I’ve
had free communication with her for over twenty years. I’ve had the
intellectual understanding that the soul is eternal since my teens. All
that’s enormously helpful, but our “inner child” isn’t instantly healed no
matter what we know; it’s on its own clock.
What has delayed a full healing are all the related issues that the entire
experience brought up for me. Experiencing her death in this way was a
karmic payback for me, so it was especially charged. Beyond the obvious
trauma of losing a parent, it brought up the unresolved inner conflicts from
the past life when I formed the karma (and was tortured and murdered by the
Church–I hate it when that happens). In addition, my parents had just
divorced, and my brothers and I went to live with my father and a
prototypical “wicked witch” step-mother who didn’t want us. (She used to say
to me, “I’ll get you, my pretty! and your little dog, too!” The funny thing
was, it was *her* dog. I didn’t even like dogs. At least, she thought I was
pretty.)
Had I just been dealing with her death, I probably would have grieved and
then been able to move on much more quickly. Clearly, this experience for me
was the impetus for a great deal of growth, something no personality would
deliberately sign up for, but, obviously, essence looks at it differently.
And if it could have been different, it would have been; we all mostly make
the choices we know how to make at the time. In any case, I sought healing
early on in this life, which led me to where I am now. Had I not been broken
in that past life and re-broken by my mother’s death, I would not have had
the need to plumb the depths to fix the breaks.
This is simplistic, but we can chart a repeating pattern over all our
lifetimes:
1) We start out whole (at least insofar as the surface our soul is showing
in that lifetime, the aspect of self we’re dealing with).
2) We encounter a stress we are not equipped to handle, which “blows our
circuits” and breaks us.
3) We seek the understanding and experiences that will equip us to handle
something similar in the future.
4) We gradually heal, becoming stronger and more evolved.
5) We are whole at a more sophisticated level.
6) Repeat.
If you know someone who seems pretty happy and untroubled, she is probably
at step 1 or 5. The rest of us are in between. It’s a mistake to assume that
someone who is a mess is less evolved that someone who is in equilibrium.
It’s just different places in the repeating cycle.
The new paradigm of “growing through joy” rather than pain is becoming more
real to some of us, but most of us have rarely known how to choose that thus
far. Even today, I initiate many of my most interesting inner explorations
because I’m searching for a truth to set me free from a pain or discomfort.
If things are okay, I am more likely to just go about my life (which is
fine, too–we need time to regroup).
Nancy M. mentioned wallowing in grief. My mother’s mother was an obvious
example of that. She cried every day for ten years after my mother’s death,
but never got any closer to healing. As a teen, she had starved through WWI
in Warsaw and saw people dying in the streets. Then, she lost most of her
family, including her beloved only sibling, in the Holocaust. She had
already lost some of her sanity and could not bear the loss of her only
daughter, who was supposed to live the perfect life that had been denied
her. That was obviously a very difficult life, for anyone but especially for
a delicate mature artisan. It’s sobering to realize how many people in the
world even today live lives this painful or worse. I don’t believe that the
fact that others have it worse invalidates one’s own pain, but it does add a
perspective. Here I am writing this post, and there are billions of people
in the world who don’t even have high-speed internet access.
With my grandmother, there was a disconnect to her grief; it didn’t come
from the depths of her heart, but more from a weeping sore on the surface.
She had a chief feature (obstacle) of martyrdom, and much self-pity. In
martyrdom, you give yourself brownie points for having suffered, so there
isn’t much incentive to let go of your suffering.
I knew that I didn’t want to wallow–I was aware that the goal of healing
was to let go–yet that didn’t entirely stop me from doing it. I still do my
fair share of wallowing, as well as mulling and over-thinking. A few weeks
ago, an acupuncturist I see once in a while told me that he could tell from
my demeanor that I think too much. Interestingly, I’d just been thinking
about that a lot.
Anyway, about twenty years ago, after a good amount of therapeutic deep
emotional release, I was working with a new practitioner and started again
sobbing when we got to the mother stuff. I had always thought that that was
a good sign, indicating that I was going deep and releasing. However, the
practitioner stopped me and said that I was on a tape loop, going over the
same territory–I needed to go deeper and really let go; otherwise, it was
just emotional masturbation. I don’t know how he knew that, but it was an
important insight for me.
Why was I still holding on? I didn’t get much attention as a child (and, God
knows, I’m a sage-cast sage with a sage essence twin and sage overleaves);
was this a way to get attention in the form of sympathy? Did I get brownie
points for having endured a miserable childhood? Did I feel that I needed to
hold onto my mother because no one else loved me and no one ever would? Did
I get a payoff from feeling sorry for myself? Could I excuse my failures and
self-involvement because of my losses? All of the above, to some extent.
The bond between parent and child is necessarily the most powerful one,
because without that energetic connection, children will not survive. When
parents lose a child, it’s understandable that they often feel guilty, since
parents are responsible for their children before they come of age at what
Michael calls the “third internal monad.” With all troubling experiences,
it’s worthwhile to explore what we might have done differently, what
mistakes may have been made. However, usually, objectively speaking, the
death of a child is not the parents’ fault. Even if a death was
theoretically preventable (”I never should have let her go to that movie.”)
it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to be perfect and to anticipate and
prevent every possible freak occurrence. Yet people often cling to blaming
themselves when a loved one dies because it seems better than facing the
powerlessness of being a human: that there are some awful things that happen
that we simply cannot control. When we are able to let go of trying to
control the universe, we take a key step towards acceptance and surrender.
People often get angry at God when painful things happen. I clearly remember
thinking after my mother died that God must not exist, because a loving God
would never let such a thing occur. I assumed that this was an original
thought. Now, it’s obvious that I was reading from the same script as
billions of others have before and since. It reveals a childish lack of
understanding of how life works. How is God supposed to stop “bad” things
from happening without shutting down free will? And how would we grow into
co-creators if we didn’t experience the results of our choices, the most
notable being karma? I later spoke with a lovely Christian Scientist who’d
been my mother’s friend. She said, “God is like the sun. People can choose
to close the blinds.” A simple thought, but very helpful.
For me, it has been indispensable to know that each of us is eternal; that
my mother and other loved ones are still present, albeit without a body;
that death is not the end. Many of those who believe that death is the end
must have to close down a lot to cope with this world. This knowledge
doesn’t eliminate grieving, but it does eventually make letting go easier.
Anything that stands in the way of our letting go, in any facet of life, is
an important area of growth for us. The fact that holding on keeps us
miserable and out of the present moment is an incentive to find our way to
letting go, which may be the most difficult thing to do that there is.
Letting go without giving up is the beginning of joy.
All the best,
Shepherd Hoodwin
