Part 1 of this series of articles on Reckoning with the Soul-Sickness of Our Time explores Troubled Times & the Wisdom Needed to Meet Them.
Part 2 details many of the common Symptoms and Setbacks of a Soul-Sick World.
Part 3 begins the journey toward healing the Soul-Sickness of our time by Nurturing Wholeness and Awakening to Inner Wisdom, noting that there’s an element of grief connected with coming a-wake.
Here in Part 4 of this series, I want to look at the importance of Heartbreak and Grief in Healing.
Making Room for Heartbreak and Grief
In a culture that constantly expects homogeneity and adherence to the status quo, there’s little room for brokenness. This includes heartbreak.
Many of us learned from a young age to “stop crying or you’ll be given something to cry about,” or to “suck it up” or “get over it.” We learned to disconnect from the realms of our emotions and bodily felt sense in favor of reason, logic and progress.
This is a sign of how deeply wounded, i.e. Soul-Sick, we are as a culture, unable to feel or allow for the discomfort of emotional pain.
Emotions are messengers of the Soul. Remember when we spoke of wisdom as crystalized suffering? If we don’t make room for pain or suffering, we also don’t make room for Wisdom or Soul.
There is deep Wisdom in our heartbreak, and the process of grieving is a necessary pathway to mine that Wisdom.
Grieving as a Process of Awakening
Grieving is a significant part of reckoning with Soul-Sickness. Through the process of grieving, we wrestle with and question what is, connect with deeper longing, learn more about what’s important to us, name what seems unjust, and sometimes even lose ourselves to find ourselves.
Depression is epidemic today, with rates among women growing the fastest, particularly around the timing of transitioning into adulthood and/or into the second half of life. These transitional times in our lives are potent moments of the Soul trying to get our attention, and unfortunately often being led toward Soul-Sickness via a culture that won’t allow space for Soul to communicate and express.
To be depressed is to be under pressure, to carry a heavy weight.
Could it be that depression is so rampant because we don’t allow space for grieving?
Could depression be our Soul’s way of trying to get our attention?
What if Soul is putting us under the kind of pressure that diamonds are made of?
I don’t pose these questions to minimize the painful realities of depression, especially in its severest forms. I’m simply bringing curiosity to what might be beneath this ever growing challenge, and whether there may even be a necessary component to it.
Might it be that there’s a diamond being formed within each of us as our Soul strives for our attention and refuses to be ignored?
Transitions Instigate Heartbreak and Grief
Transitions are a time between what was, or has died, and what is to come, or birth.
Transition includes the notion of the a-wake-ning we spoke of earlier. Transitions such as dying to our childhood in order to birth into responsible adults (often in ways that feel like we’re being suffocated), or dying to a life of dissatisfaction, unfulfillment or misalignment in early adulthood as the Soul tries to awaken us at midlife, can come with painful heartbreak.
Without space to allow for uncertainty and the inevitable grief that comes with a significant shift in our life, we cannot connect with Soul.
While it may be considered ‘normal’ to press on as usual, if it’s not in alignment with our Soul, our Soul will rebel until we pay attention, and choose to resist normal consciously.
What if our grief and heartbreak are a perfectly reasonable response to the pain of our experience and what we’re seeing in the world?
What would it look like to make room for grief and heartbreak?
To grieve or to be heartbroken is not at all the same as trying to change what is. Grieving is a process of being with uncertainty and discomfort in our Inner Wilderness, rather than habitually outsourcing our certainty and pain alleviation to the Outer Wilderness.
Finding Beauty in the Heartbreak and Grief
Our Soul is seeking beauty, creativity, and a fulfillment of its destiny.
Cultural expectations seem to completely contradict this striving, instead anesthetizing us to uphold the status quo.
Beauty is a capacity for reverence and awe. If we cannot find beauty in ourselves or in life, we cannot find love or wisdom.
Aesthetic is our appreciation for beauty, perceived by our senses. Beauty feeds our Souls. In a world that’s constantly anesthetizing through addiction, codependency and other perpetuators of emotional and sensual ignorance, is it any wonder our Souls are starving?
Heartbreak and grief can put us in touch with deeper compassion, reminding us of the heartbreak of others. Those who struggle to move through life without some form of anesthesia are also likely in deep pain. They too are heartbroken.
I remember being a young child playing on the living room floor when my father and his buddies came home from hunting. They started drinking at the kitchen bar, and after a time a couple of them got louder and more aggressive in their speech. I felt anxious, almost holding my breath as I watched and listened. I remember looking up at them thinking, “Where are they?”
I realized later in my life that I’ve always felt uneasy, even unsafe, around a lack of presence.
That little girl in me could feel ‘something else’ showing up in the drunken anesthesia I was witnessing, and I was clear it could not be trusted.
I indulged in various forms of anesthetizing myself in my early adulthood as well, longing for relief from my own heartbreak. I could feel the moment I was ‘not myself,’ and while it might’ve felt good to escape for a bit, something in me longed to be recognized, and I kept pushing it away. This only increased the pain and suffering, and the inability to trust myself. Not only would I feel a hangover later, but I would feel that Soul-Sick sense of bereavement without any understanding of why.
My Soul was heartbroken over my choices to anesthetize and disconnect from the beauty of life.
For a while, I felt angry at the world, wishing there was more presence and less pressure to conform to ‘the way things are done.’ Eventually, in sitting with my heartbreak and grieving the ways I’d denied my Soul, and the ways I saw Soul being denied in the world, I found compassion. I found a way to feel safer in my own embodied knowing because I was finally willing to be with the heartbreak I’d been running from, and properly grieve it.
I’m still grieving, and learning to grieve better.
I’m learning to forgive myself and others for pain caused. I’m striving to allow the heartbreak of others, in whatever form it may take, even if in the form of anesthesia, while also allowing for my own heartbreak. I’m striving to not make either ‘wrong.’
I’m doing my best to realize that my heartbreak often comes before any judgment or prejudice that I spoke of in Part 2 of this article, Symptoms & Setbacks of a Soul-Sick World, and remember that if I’m willing to sit with my heartbreak and allow for the heartbreak of others, my judgments soften. I connect more holistically with my conscience and allow us to be heartbroken together, doing my best not to push back against whatever comes at me via the heartbreak of another.
I’m trying…and allowing for heartbreak and grief is not easy.
Reconnecting to the Cycle of Life through Heartbreak and Grief
Our entrained resistance to heartbreak perpetuates a fear of death, which in turn perpetuates a stuckness that prevents the Soul’s evolution. For us to evolve, we must be able to allow for and even honor death. Death is part of the Cycle of Life.
If we long to rebirth ourselves into a second half of life that feels much more meaningful and purposeful than the first half, we must be willing to grieve and let go of what’s been.
Our heartbreak and the process of grieving softens the hard-heartedness we’ve been conditioned into. Heartbreak brings us closer to Soul, and teaches us to bend without breaking, to expand without bursting, and to love without resisting.
Heartbreak humanizes our pain, and even the symptoms of Soul-Sickness, in a world that seems bent on dehumanizing and ‘othering.’ It allows us to build compassion and to feel gratitude for the trials and the wisdom crystallized by them, which in turn connects us to our Soul and the Soul of the World.
Grieving is a healthy response that can show us our responsibility in the world, and mitigate the reactivity that negates responsibility. It helps us to practice the Sacred Feminine art of surrender, and understand that we’re not in control of everything. The practice of grieving mitigates the temptation toward the self-importance and hyper-independence we spoke of earlier in Part 2.
We tend to be very good at naming problems as we see them in the world. Yet there’s little willingness to make the sacrifices required to address them.
To sacrifice is ‘to make holy,’ to bring the Divine into our lives, to allow for holistic conscience to guide our path forward. Sacrifice requires us to let go of old ways of doing and seeing things, and open our hearts to new possibilities, perhaps catalyzed by the awakening that heartbreak and grief can offer.
Many fear that sacrificing anything is threatening, yet it’s essential to the Cycle of Life. Perhaps if we made more room for tending our heartbreak and grieving, we’d feel less victimized by life and more able to let go of what’s no longer beneficial, face the challenges we’re presented with, and create a life of Soul fulfillment and possibility.
What then? How can we find this new possibility and bring it into the world? This is where Part 5 of our series, Finding and Sharing Solace as a Remedy to Soul-Sickness, will take us.
