Cleaning out a closet upstairs in the spring of 2021, I found my old office laundry bag. I held it in my fingers and noticed the stretched out tie at the top, the worn out side pocket. For seven years I would tote home this bag each day, literally on my back, filled with the soiled laundry from each healing session given at my brick and mortar acupuncture and healing arts practice.
Turning it over in my hands at that moment, I felt an immediate return to who I was during that span of time, the heaviness of the weight on my back as I struggled downstairs to carry it down along with my purse and a reusable lunch tote... My eyes filled with tears at the realization of how each day, I would carry away the emotional baggage on my own shoulders for those who I treated each day, to be laundered and cleaned away every night.
Shedding the tears that showed up in that moment, and had from time-to-time over the past year, I released what had been built and lost, but what I was finally ready to let go of, too...
and threw the old bag in the trash.
Like many other small biz owners doing their best to survive the pandemic, I was forced to close my office for good in May of 2020. It took the better part of a year for me to recover from this particular leg of the journey with grief as my co-pilot.
As the saying goes, "where there is deep grief, there is great love".
Sometimes the depths of our journey with grief can surprise us when we realize how deeply we have loved someone or something. When sudden loss shows up, plunging us into its stark, cold, unforgiving depths...
grief fills our chest
like a cloud
clinging there just over our heart.
And it can get stuck there. Locked in place.
Until it's time to relase its hold,
but serving to shield it... us, too.
If we're honest.
In Chinese Medicine grief is viewed as an ailment of the Metal element. Metal symbolism includes the blade and autumn--it cuts us off, severs ties, signifies that something has come to an end. It also governs the emotion of grief via the Lungs and Large Intestine.
Energetically, grief yokes the Heart and Lungs. We feel the shock of loss at the Heart center. We feel the immensity of love and the loss of that love via grief, which serves as an emotional and thus energetic bridge, to the Lungs and Large Intestine organs that assist us in letting go.
Breathe out.
The stuckness of grief moves when it becomes a verb.
Grief doesn't let go... until we do.
Held grief thus alchemizes, becomes
Grieving.
Activated by the neighboring Heart's fire, triggering our tears, our sobs, our sadness, our ruminating on the memories... until we've stained every cheek, run out of Kleenex and exhausted ourselves from the massive outpouring of love that's come to its energetic conclusion in the physical form... the end.
Yes. Just like that. The end. The end.
