At first I blamed it on jet lag since I’d flown across the country to attend a three-day workshop for professional speakers. I was having trouble taking readable notes and coming up with answers to the questions posed by the instructor. The time difference usually works in my favor going east to west, but not that morning. I asked for, and was given, a different chair hoping that would decrease my discomfort and help eliminate the foggy gulf that seemed to exist between my fellow workshop participants and myself.
The night before I’d spent a glorious evening with a group of amazingly creative women teaching some principles of self-care from my new book Stillpoint, and ways to embody them. I loved witnessing the women as they stepped courageously into their spontaneity and told their stories in transforming ways. Admittedly however, the after-glow from our evening together had made it more difficult for me to get to sleep.
Fortunately I awakened the next morning with a sharp clarity about what was going on with me, and what I needed to do to fix it. I realized I had been experiencing the return of a time traveling emotion, a grief reaction I’d had in the past was reappearing in the present, this time connected to a loss I hadn’t clearly realized or owned.
As an expert on grief and loss I often say that grief is not a one –time event that you “get over” nor are the feelings of grief reserved for the situations when a loved one dies. Land mines are everywhere, and likely to be triggered unexpectedly, by seemingly unrelated losses or unaccepted realities. Both times when life called me out to accompany my children on their journeys with death-defying diseases, my first response was anger and a “This can’t be so!” A friend offered me the best advice – “Find a way to say yes to it!” I came to understand that accepting a reality does not mean liking it, but the road to healing requires a firm Yes.
Becoming an expert on grief and loss was not what I wanted to be when I grew up. This situation, and most all the others leading up to it, chose me. As I’m around other professional speakers I see other roads I might rather have traveled, many less difficult than the one I’m on. After all, people are not eager to learn more about grief, that’s why it’s so lonely going through it.
Lying in bed that morning I felt gratitude that I had discovered the need to say yes again, this time to the path my life has put me on, for the strong curiosity about the grieving process that lead me to want to speak and write about what works and what doesn’t, what’s true about what we’ve been taught and what’s false. And yes again to the wish I’ve had that my messages in all their forms will lessen the suffering that too often accompanies grieving people, families, years and communities in our culture.
As I headed back to the second day of the workshop I felt lighter, having said yes to the path that has chosen me. I thought about what Adrienne Maree Brown wrote about time traveling emotions, “The more I learn to feel, the less time it takes a time-traveling emotion to catch me, years instead of decades, hours instead of months, seconds instead of weeks.”
Sheila
