Grief

Traditionally, autumn is the season associated with grief and earlier this month, Carol Ann led us in an exploration of this dark emotion.   Dark, not because it is ‘bad’ but because it is hidden.  We live in what has been called a ‘death-denying’ culture and when we deny death and loss, we lose the ability to grieve consciously.

Love is a seed planted deeply within us all, and grief is love in motion.  It is a movement of this implanted love instinct, perceiving and feeling the absence of something or someone that is beloved to us.  When we deny this movement, it gets stuck in us and we forget that under so many layers of undigested loss, lies a love that is waiting for us to set it free.

In this work, the enneagram can guide us on where we might be getting stuck.  The energies of 2, 4, 6 & 8 hold the soul quality of receptivity and are available to us all.  When the gift of these receptive forces are hidden from us, we repress our grief (2), we are overwhelmed by it and become lost (4), our fear keeps us from meeting it (6) and/or we armour ourselves against surrendering to it (8).

Growing in awareness of these automatic ways of protecting ourselves from feeling loss can help us to overcome them and open our hearts in new ways.   This allows us to stay with the emotion of grief until we can feel movement and a sense of ‘light’ in the darkness.

We are all invited into this alchemical work in the quiet of the inner soul, and as we do this work, light is carried out to the world in invisible ways, touching and infusing all.

This season, may we consciously tend our own seeds of grief, so that we may become bearers of much needed light in our world.

Carole