Episode 08: Honor Grief

Good morning everyone, and welcome to NF Learning Lab, where together, we access our innate, iNtuitive wisdom as unique and self-valuing women, and share who we are becoming in a safe, sensitive community.

Last week, we took a peek into the bottom half of the You Are Here Map, and the constantly renewing experience of ‘becoming’ that happens there. We saw how when we choose to enter that ‘becoming’ world, in some area of life, we give ourselves a break from the closed system of obsessive ‘doing’ in the top half of the map. We saw that our beacon for moving forward in the land of ‘becoming’ is the light of self-reflection which helps us to release old concepts of self and make way for new ones?

Today, we explore how when we navigate through the bottom half of the map in a mood of curiosity and self-honoring, we open ourselves to the possibility of eventually coming back around to the ‘doing’ world, but without the ADDICTION to ‘doing’ that so pervades the Sensing culture in which we live. When we see it through the light of self-reflection, ‘doing’ becomes a choice, rather than an obsession. But how do we get there?

Well, our first step is to navigate Quadrant 3 on the lower right side of the You Are Here Map. Any time we experience an ending of some kind, and dip down into the Dis’es, the old, closed-system of ‘doing’ we learned in our Sensing culture is pried open. At first, this feels daunting, which is one reason why the Dis’es show up, but as we move through our troubling reactions, we eventually come upon an important key for opening up whatever new systems of transformation await us at the bottom of the map.

That key is grief. Letting go of the past always brings in some level of grief, but with grief comes a powerful choice point that most of us do not know about. We can choose to let grief over take us, in which case our Dis’es might throw us down a rabbit hole into chronic depression. We might become victims of our own most disheartening emotions, and because we don’t know of any other option, we might use our grief to convince ourselves, once again, that we must be wrong or bad, because we are weighed down by heavy feelings. Certainly, if we were right or good, we wouldn’t deserve to feel so awful.

But, we have another choice! Our alternative to staying stuck in depressing grief, is to change how we think about grief itself. We can see it as a conscious, self-honoring, energetic process that can serve as a powerful cleansing agent … one that releases the heavy, negative influence that comes with our Dis’es. In other words, we can choose to grieve consciously. We can think of our difficult emotions as the ashes of whatever destructive fire has created the change taking place, and we can imagine that those ashes are resting in a hearth that cradles the essential fire of our being. Most importantly, we can think of our tears as washing that hearth clean, so that a new fire can be set, the fire of our ever-more enlightened future. Let’s move on to our journal prompts to learn more.