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How to Work with Grief

As you connect with the natural world you will notice that all creatures grieve. Animals such as elephants and gorillas show grief when they lose a parent, mate, or baby. When a bird loses its mate, you will hear it cry. A squirrel will cry for days when a raven takes her baby.  When a house plant dies, the health of the plant sitting right next to it might deteriorate and look stressed.

When we spend a lot of time in nature and connect back to the beauty this life has to offer us, we get attached to our favorite places, trees, plants, animals, birds, insects, and other nature beings. When we watch the changes occurring in nature through human destruction, weather changes, and environmental disasters we can experience a state of grief.

We are familiar with the grief process when we lose a friend or loved one. But some of us are in unfamiliar territory as we deal with the loss of nature beings that we have grown to love. And just like with loved ones we must allow the process of grief to be expressed.

Death is not an end; rather it is a transition into another realm of being.  And the experience of grief is important for our growth and evolution. Grief helps us to develop a deep inner well that we can expand from. 

When you feel your heart breaking, your heart is expanding. The expansion created helps you to be a greater vessel of love. And love is the greatest healing force. There is nothing like grief that can aid you in opening to a greater state of love.

When your heart expands you feel more compassion for the suffering of others. And with compassion, you hold the space for others to heal.

When you try to stop grief you attempt to stop growth. And when you look to nature life that does not continue to grow dies. The state of grief, no matter how bad it feels, is so filled with life. Grief helps to create more expansion in our inner world allowing a greater level of life force to flow through.

Grief creates a fertile state where new relationships, new opportunities can be created from.

The issue to look at and reflect on is how you can support yourself while you are grieving. It is not beneficial to repress grief altogether.

First you must acknowledge your feelings. When you acknowledge your sadness and emotional pain this creates energetic movement that leads to transformation. When you repress a feeling it continues to build inside. Even if you find some way to repress your feelings the energy of the feeling will start to create emotional and/or physical stress that could create a future illness. It is important to express the full range of your emotions.

You have to return to your job and your daily routines, but it is important to create time to grieve. Find friends and community who you can share your feelings with. Spend some alone time during the day where you can be with your feelings.

For many people it is important to have a loving community who can just be there to listen. In our culture many of us want to fix those we love when they are in need. With grief there is nothing to fix, and there is no way to take grief away from someone else. Just by being present, listening, and being a loving support helps tremendously.

It is important not to pity someone in a state of grief. Energetically pity is a heavy energy to burden. Imagine thousands of people pitying you if you are in a state of grief. Do you want to experience that kind of energy being sent to you?

Find ways to pamper yourself. Relax in a bath. Water is such a healing element. Release your pain into the water while asking the water to transmute your pain to energy that radiates love and light.

Physically lie on the earth or imagine yourself lying on the earth. Let your pain drain from you into the earth. Give thanks to mother earth for taking your pain and composting it into fertile organic matter that will create new growth. Reflect on how the earth takes the leaves that have died and fallen to the ground in autumn and uses it as compost to create rich and fertile soil.

You can also write down feelings you wish to let go of and burn them in the flames of a fire. In indigenous cultures fire is seen to be the element of transmutation and transformation.

Go outside and allow the wind to carry away your feelings of pain while you stay open to loving messages that you hear from the breezes.

Always give thanks to the element you are working with. This is a way to honor the elements which sustain your life. Decree that the energy you are releasing be transformed into love and light. In this way you feed the energy in the world with blessings that heal all in the web of life.

Most of all give yourself time to grieve. There is no timeframe when you “should” feel better. As you allow yourself to fully embrace your feelings time itself will bring you to a place of regeneration. Everything in life changes. And this includes your grief.

You can also perform a simple ceremony to honor the life that has moved on to the transcendent realms -the realm of spirit.

You can leave an offering by a tree that has died and give thanks for the beauty it shared on this great earth and wish it a good journey home. When you see an animal that has died you can lift your arms up giving thanks for this being’s life and wishing it a good journey home. You can do this after the death of any nature being you wish to honor. All living beings deserve to be honored when they die. You can also do this long distance as you hear about the death of many living beings during some kind of environmental event.

Some people feel deep grief when their favorite place in nature is destroyed through a climatic event, or if the land is sold, if one moves, or if a building project will prevent future visits. The spirit of the land is always available to you in your memory and through your meditations. You can still visit this place through your spiritual work. The spirit of this place is eternal.         

SandraIngerman.com