As I have mourned my Aunt these last few weeks, and heard of others who have lost beloved family members, I have been taken down the rabbit hole of my own grief once again. Each time I do this it is with new awareness. I take with me all of the realizations that have come into my consciousness as I am walking this path, living with my grief and helping others to be with their grief. What I found out this time is something I have always known, that we meet various aspects of our grief when we are ready, when we have done the work that will allow us to go deeper into the feelings that arise.
This is what happened. I was feeling a distinct need to write about Leah, my daughter. I was not feeling particularly sad. I could have easily ignored the feeling. It was not a strong feeling but it was persistent and had a quality that I have come to trust as my intuition wanting to speak. I began writing without knowing what I was going to write. And the dam broke open. I was taken to such a deep, raw grief. The feelings were familiar. They were so raw and real that I had always been afraid of expressing them because I thought I would go mad. As I wrote, tears streaming down my face, I knew that I could not have faced these feelings before now. I needed to do the work I have done up until this moment so these particular feelings could come bursting through. I needed to recognize my intuition and trust it. I needed to know that I could hold all of my feelings, even if, as I was writing them, I did not want to. After I completed my writing, I was spent and felt completely empty. I just allowed myself to be there.

What I want you to know about this experience is this; it was not comfortable. I did not like it when it was happening but I knew it was a part of my journey and initiation. This is a part of the conversation that I want to change, not just around grief but about any experience that is uncomfortable. I was lamenting to one of my mentors recently about a different uncomfortable experience and she asked me this question,

“Who said Divine arrangement is always comfortable?”

Michael Brown in The Presence Process says, “… we need to get better at feeling rather than trying to feel better.”

What this means to me is that all feelings are valid. All feelings want to be met exactly as they arise. Yes, they may be uncomfortable, but moving through them and feeling them exactly as they are allows them to shift and to give us new awareness. This is what I mean when I talk about initiation and a grief journey. It is really our life journey and grief is a part of it. Each day we are given opportunities to face a little part of death. Each day a part of us dies. For example, an idea we had doesn’t work out; someone we think of as a friend does something hurtful; or a story that we told ourselves our entire life no longer serves us. Each of these daily deaths provides us with opportunities to grieve parts of our lives that have changed. These situations give us a chance to hone our grief skills. They allow us to practice so that when a big grief comes along we already have a context for our own process and a starting point. You already know how to be with uncomfortable feelings because you have gotten better at actually feeling.
Take a minute to ask yourself now,

How good am I at feeling?

When I am uncomfortable, how can I be with my feelings without pushing them away?

What ways of being with feelings have I discovered that works for me?

You will know when you find your way. You will feel a deep resonance with your inner self. The more time you spend asking yourself these sacred questions, the more familiar you will get with the way your Soul speaks to you. Your Soul is your intuition, your connection to God and the Divine. Getting better at feeling is one way to move through the muck that sometimes makes you feel stuck. It is a way to move you closer to living from your genius and being your fully expressed self.