I could say that my very first impression of being alive was an awareness of grief. It's a large and scary experience to find yourself in, when you're about three, and trying to make sense of the world. Although my mother and I were not close as two people, or even mother and son, we were close spirits, and her grief at her father's early death, though not discussed, hung in the air, an unspoken balloon of fear and anguish, that delicately refused to do more than merely touch surfaces of silence before moving away.
She grieved her father's early death, she grieved her brother's death, she was badly homesick for her Swiss homeland and I would guess that she also grieved for each baby that had died in her hospital. But she seldom wept, she simply became ever more severe in speaking of the love of her Lord and Saviour, whose death she also grieved.
It gets worse. Every forty-eight hours, at one or another Christian evangelical meeting, I encountered deep grief in others, concerning the suffering and death of Jesus on their behalf, their own sinfulness, and the desperation we face as we must make that awful choice between eternal life and eternal loss, hell, death and damnation.
I was a scared child who learned to control my fear, and created layers of confidence. I survived the fear, but in the end it outwitted me.I waited for some months for my heart to stop, but it didn't. I survived that, too. We're wired to live, not to die, but in the end all of us die.
Living stands for something we don't quite grasp.
I had to learn that my very sophisticated thinking, and to put it simply, I am among the world's most educated, means absolutely nothing when it comes to working out grief.
What sort of feeling is grief? I have a strange contrbution to make: it's what angels try to impart to us when we aren't listening or don't want to listen. We are not going to go to heaven: we're there, we're present to heaven, as well as to earth, we are "a little less than the angels", we have not learnt to calm our intensities and reflect passages of heaven that we walk, knowingly and unknowingly. Our bodies are of this planet, our awareness is of this planet, and for the sake of simplicity, heaven. By "heaven" I refer to the rest of the knowing cosmos.
There is something that my body knows, but really, it won't easily go into words or stories. We have some sacred stories for which some have lived, some have died, and some have killed. These sacred sstories are still warring with each other. It's time to say that something about them doesn't work. At my most needy point, when I wasn't sure of anything but death, failure and ultimate disappointment, the feelings of which were utterly breaking, I searched for my most holy words, and found them to be "the Spirit of Christ".
There I learnt that the Spirit of Christ is wild, and touches us in our most primituve state of awareness. The Spirit of Christ has to do with where we come from but, unhappily, where we have not gone. Our cognitive efforts are noble but not sufficient. We need to go the other way, and state our helplessness before pretending our heroism. If grief is an important signifier of humility, and it is, joy is the way beyond grief. I have a ridiculous confession to make: when I learnt this one, it was because I heard the muse while I was listening to Goldfish performing "Moon Walkaway". There was such a prepostorous joy to this utterly peripheral, inane, going-about shout of drama declaring local yet cosmic freedom, that I had to agree, because something in my cells grasped that movement is better than logic.
Not everyone else has had that luxury of knowingness.
Grief is a symptom of baffled awareness. True, loss and missingness are not easy. But that deep cellular posing as cerebral intensity has more to say than we think, or feel.
Everyone experiences grief, and we would try to be kind, and prevent our children from this. First, the hamster dies, and parents explain something, before we get to grandma, grandpa or closer.
Truth is, who knows what to explain?
Biofocusing is about getting real about living. And most truly of all, living is about living in the here and now and living eternally, infinitely, joyfully, adventurously and gratefully.
Careful science, severe religion and self-conservation have little to do with living.
Biofocusing is pleased to announce the first event of the Grief Workshop. Here are the details:
Healing begins with consciousness and the will to move beyond an emotional given. All the thinking in the world will not help us until we have decided that we are going to do something, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem.
Let's see you there! And those in other countries, your interest is appreciated vey much.
She grieved her father's early death, she grieved her brother's death, she was badly homesick for her Swiss homeland and I would guess that she also grieved for each baby that had died in her hospital. But she seldom wept, she simply became ever more severe in speaking of the love of her Lord and Saviour, whose death she also grieved.
It gets worse. Every forty-eight hours, at one or another Christian evangelical meeting, I encountered deep grief in others, concerning the suffering and death of Jesus on their behalf, their own sinfulness, and the desperation we face as we must make that awful choice between eternal life and eternal loss, hell, death and damnation.
I was a scared child who learned to control my fear, and created layers of confidence. I survived the fear, but in the end it outwitted me.I waited for some months for my heart to stop, but it didn't. I survived that, too. We're wired to live, not to die, but in the end all of us die.
Living stands for something we don't quite grasp.
I had to learn that my very sophisticated thinking, and to put it simply, I am among the world's most educated, means absolutely nothing when it comes to working out grief.
What sort of feeling is grief? I have a strange contrbution to make: it's what angels try to impart to us when we aren't listening or don't want to listen. We are not going to go to heaven: we're there, we're present to heaven, as well as to earth, we are "a little less than the angels", we have not learnt to calm our intensities and reflect passages of heaven that we walk, knowingly and unknowingly. Our bodies are of this planet, our awareness is of this planet, and for the sake of simplicity, heaven. By "heaven" I refer to the rest of the knowing cosmos.
There is something that my body knows, but really, it won't easily go into words or stories. We have some sacred stories for which some have lived, some have died, and some have killed. These sacred sstories are still warring with each other. It's time to say that something about them doesn't work. At my most needy point, when I wasn't sure of anything but death, failure and ultimate disappointment, the feelings of which were utterly breaking, I searched for my most holy words, and found them to be "the Spirit of Christ".
There I learnt that the Spirit of Christ is wild, and touches us in our most primituve state of awareness. The Spirit of Christ has to do with where we come from but, unhappily, where we have not gone. Our cognitive efforts are noble but not sufficient. We need to go the other way, and state our helplessness before pretending our heroism. If grief is an important signifier of humility, and it is, joy is the way beyond grief. I have a ridiculous confession to make: when I learnt this one, it was because I heard the muse while I was listening to Goldfish performing "Moon Walkaway". There was such a prepostorous joy to this utterly peripheral, inane, going-about shout of drama declaring local yet cosmic freedom, that I had to agree, because something in my cells grasped that movement is better than logic.
Not everyone else has had that luxury of knowingness.
Grief is a symptom of baffled awareness. True, loss and missingness are not easy. But that deep cellular posing as cerebral intensity has more to say than we think, or feel.
Everyone experiences grief, and we would try to be kind, and prevent our children from this. First, the hamster dies, and parents explain something, before we get to grandma, grandpa or closer.
Truth is, who knows what to explain?
Biofocusing is about getting real about living. And most truly of all, living is about living in the here and now and living eternally, infinitely, joyfully, adventurously and gratefully.
Careful science, severe religion and self-conservation have little to do with living.
Biofocusing is pleased to announce the first event of the Grief Workshop. Here are the details:
Healing begins with consciousness and the will to move beyond an emotional given. All the thinking in the world will not help us until we have decided that we are going to do something, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem.
Let's see you there! And those in other countries, your interest is appreciated vey much.
