Patience and Pearls, reflections on yesterdays blog, "Grief can be orgasmic – it brings us back into the flow of life again

Just re-reading yesterday's post.
I see that I have been talking about finding those pearls at the bottom of the sea for a long time now. I love the way that the post puts into words everything I had come through and was doing, even though I had not not considered it was grief.

I had been looking into self love, and that began a downward path, that felt like only chaos.
Not understanding then but liberating now, I can allow myself patience with it all.
I had always thought that maybe the one thing I was here to do was to learn patience.
I had great difficulty with it. Also it is an act of going within, it is to nurture the feminine side, Yin, which we all have but which is negated by society which values and calls only for action, Yang.

We begin to swim the dark, shadowy waterways of our psyche – like a rebel mermaid, searching for the pearls hidden within our most traumatic experiences, willing to finally go to the places with ‘do not enter’ signs.

Allowing ourselves to grieve is the greatest act of self-love, it creates fluidity, lightness, movement – it allows us to let go of the pain fully, by feeling it fully.

It is also gives us permission to be fully authentic and to include all of ourselves in our expression, rather than cutting out or splitting off parts of ourselves.

Grieving was always known as a feminine art – it was a much valued and honored process. A person never grieved alone. They grieved in a tribe, in a village, in a community. One person’s grief belonged to everyone. 

Grief invites us into a feminine state of being, to be still, to listen, to rest, to nurture ourselves, to be with the simplicity of life, day by day. To move into a pace of slowness, interiority, gestation, introspection, embracing, and softness. To allow ourselves the gift of failing, giving in, dropping out, descending within. 

Yet often it is difficult to find the space and time for this, because we have been conditioned personally and collectively to be afraid of this feminine dimension of being – where we meet and immerse in our most innermost feelings and self. Where we experience true soul catharsis and transform from our inner roots.

Instead we live in a world that encourages us to ‘put on a brave face’ – that values strength, doing, getting back to work, activity, the ability to overcome or suppress difficult feelings, to toughen up, get hard, to overcome and ‘beat’ grief.