Grief and Loss Support Group (Free, Mondays 6:00-7:30pm)

Dear Grief Group Participants:  Great news! Golden Willow Retreat Center sponsors these groups on Zoom. Please go to goldenwillowretreat.org for the link and password.

Honoring all types of grief and loss, the group offers a place to explore the grieving process within a supportive community. This free, ongoing, open-to-the-adult-community group is being offered every Monday evening from 6:00-7:30 p.m. Must be 15 years or older. Drop-ins welcome. Please email mj@mjspiritmed.com for more information.

Our grief group is designed to support you in navigating your experience of grief. No loss is disqualifying. Loss of loved ones due to trauma, illness or natural causes, partnership separations, job changes, trauma or wounding, fallings-out with friends or family, illness or injury, passing of a pet, natural disasters, loss of a job, etc., etc.– there’s no comparison in grief. All humans experience grief of many different kinds throughout the life span. We are here to help you explore what your loss means to you, at your own pace and as your own process dictates.

Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross pioneered Western society’s languaging for the grief process through her extensive research on death and dying. She named the so-called “Stages of Grief” that most of us are now familiar with, namely Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. I don’t think that the import of this breakthrough in our ability to talk about and name our grief experiences can be overstated. Even Dr. Kubler-Ross said at the end that they weren’t stages at all, and they certainly weren’t linear. But it gave us a wonderful footing from which to venture forth to explore our own terrain.

Dr. Ted Wiard of Golden Willow Retreat Center in Arroyo Hondo, NM (near Taos) was cast into his own extensive and deep grieving process some years ago. Through his experience he found, as you might as well, that Dr. Kubler-Ross’s words did not adequately describe his experience. He named his own six “stages;” for him, the following list better captured his process:

Insulation

Protest

Connecting The Dots

Surrender

Acknowledgment

Relocation

We explore these terms in some depth each week at our meetings. Again, you may find either set of these words more relevant to your experience, some combination of them, or none at all. You may have entirely different words, or there may not be words. It’s just a place to start. Also, we might experience these “stages” linearly, but more often than not we cycle around, through, and all over at unpredictable intervals. I prefer to call them “facets” of grief, and we might find that we can and often do experience several of these facets at once. Our grief might seem to come in torrential waves, pinning us to the sand floor for some time before permitting us a gasp of air, only to overtake us again and again. Over time, many report experiencing longer stretches between the waves, and eventually being taken under for shorter and shorter periods. With loving support, we can improve our skills at navigating these currents as we learn to incorporate grief into our lives and our ways of being. Ideally, we learn to befriend our grief- a fundamental and universal emotional and energetic process that is essential to our well-being and leads to growth, deepened compassion, renewal and rejuvenation.

Further reading suggestions:

Witnessing Ted, by Carol Poteat and Ted Wiard

The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise, Martin Prechtel

Consolations, David Whyte

This YouTube Video  that challenges our taught responses to cheer up someone in grief

Per the Group’s request, David Whyte’s essay titled, “Anger” is posted here:

ANGER is the deepest form of care, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger points toward the purest form of compassion, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.

What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.

Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability; anger too often finds its voice strangely, through our incoherence and through our inability to speak, but anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics: a daughter, a house, a family, an enterprise, a land or a colleague.

Anger turns to violence and violent speech when the mind refuses to countenance the vulnerability of the body in its love for all these outer things – we are often abused or have been abused by those who love us but have no vehicle to carry its understanding, who have no outer emblems of their inner care or even their own wanting to be wanted. Lacking any outer vehicle for the expression of this inner rawness they are simply overwhelmed by the elemental nature of love’s vulnerability. In their helplessness they turn their violence on the very people who are the outer representation of this inner lack of control.

But anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here, it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete and absolute mirror-opposite of its true internal essence.

…

Excerpted from ‘ANGER’ From CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
© 2014 David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

And, from Adyashanti:

“Sooner or later we will all experience the tragic quality of life. Perhaps this quality of life is brought to us through illness, or the death of a loved one, or losing a job, or an unexpected accident, or having your heart broken. But we will all experience this tragic quality of life in both small and overwhelmingly large ways over the span of our lives. Whether we want to face it or not, life, with all of its beauty, joy, and majesty, also has a tragic element to it. This is exactly what the Buddha saw, and it inspired his entire spiritual search.

At the very heart and core of our being, there exists an overwhelming yes to existence. This yes is discovered by those who have the courage to open their hearts to the totality of life. This yes is not a return to the innocence of youth, for there is no going back, only forward. This yes is found only by embracing the reality of sorrow and going beyond it. It is the courage to love in spite of all the reasons to not love. By embracing the tragic quality of life we come upon a depth of love that can love “in spite of” this tragic quality. Even though your heart may be broken a thousand times, this unlimited love reaches across the multitude of sorrows of life and always triumphs. It triumphs by directly facing tragedy, by relenting to its fierce grace, and embracing it in spite of the reflex to protect ourselves.

In the end, we will either retreat into self-protection, or acknowledge the reality of sorrow and love anyway. Such love not only transcends life and death, it is also made manifest in life and death. You give yourself to life out of love, and it is to love more fiercely that you walk through the fires of sorrow that forge the heart into boundless affection.” – Adyashanti