Weeping Buddha

Grief is the forbidden doorway to freedom few are encouraged to enter.

“Hello Shiv. As you know, I lost my husband to cancer a year ago. We were married for forty years. He was the most wonderful man and one of the kindest people you could ever meet. I remember you mentioned in one of your essays (or perhaps it was when we last spoke) grief is rarely about the other. It is about ourselves.

I have been meaning to ask you: How does grief show up in your life Shiv? And how do you meet it when it does?”

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I grieve everyday.

Grief to me is as integral a part of each ordinary day as joy is.

Without grief, there can be no real gratitude. Without grief, even love rings hollow.

Grief is the heart’s response to life’s impermanence.

One of my most profound shifts in perception occurred two years ago when I went through a prolonged period of depression following a job loss. Decades of forgotten and unprocessed grief bubbled to the surface and left me with no option but to face it. The grief of my unfinished relationship with my grandmother who passed twenty years ago… the grief of leaving dear school friends behind, each time my parents moved, never to see them again… the grief of having humiliated a friend in college so I could appear popular in front of my peers… all forms of grief from events in the past, significant and insignificant, that I had entirely forgotten effervesced to the surface like a dormant volcano reawakening.

I call this phase my heart awakening.

Resistance was futile. It flooded my senses and I was swept by this tsunami of grief, choking and spluttering, day after day. Eventually, I began to realize this wasn’t some anomalous event. It was a necessary process I was going through even though I hadn’t anticipated it and couldn’t quite understand its purpose.

A few months into this unraveling, my nervous system began to re-settle and I found my being pervaded with a sense of lightness that I hadn’t felt since childhood. I could feel wounds, that I had never known existed, beginning to heal. Yet, little did I know, that this grief for the unfinished business of the past was just the first stage - a preparation for an even deeper layer of loss I was about to encounter.

If the first wave of grief had been unexpected, the second shattered me. For it seemed utterly incomprehensible to my intellect.