Walking Side by Side with Grief for a Lifetime (Nachama Shahar)

We move through cycles of death and rebirth through the entirety of our lives. Walking side by side with grief doesn’t mean being condemned to a life without joy; it is to live with the bittersweet truth of impermanence. Depression can arise due to unexpressed, undigested grief. It is a holy time when things decay and break down. Sorrow is part of the Earth’s great cycles. It can connect us to the current of life and the source of comfort and solace. Somatic trauma work can put us in touch with grief that has been held in the body for many years. It is common in spiritual circles for dharma to be used as a shield to overlay grief. Francis Weller identified five gates of grief that can expand understanding of it. These are losing someone we love, places in ourselves that have not known love, sorrows of the world, what we expected but did not receive, and ancestral grief. It’s a holy thing to love what death can touch. We tend to avoid grief, but it puts us in contact with such deep feeling. When we grieve, we praise the one we loved and allow love to touch the core of our being. We can welcome back parts of ourselves we have dismissed. The “remedy” for grief is to feel it and allow it to move through us. Grief is always there because impermanence is always there. It opens us like nothing else. It can be a doorway to the embodied realization of our true nature, to seeing that we are inseparable from the universe and connected to the circuitry of love that flows through everything. Grief has a shattering quality which takes us beyond what we think we can handle and breaks down the reality we thought we knew. It can catapult us into the unitive state and awaken us to boundless love without conditions. Nachama Shahar (formerly Nachama Greenwald) is a physical therapist, editor, and musician who for 17 years was a member of the Shri blues band which performed Western Baul music.