Letting Go and Grieving Yourself

One of the most difficult parts of life’s journey for many people is letting go. Whether we are grieving a deceased loved one, a rejection from family, the unexplained ghosting of a friend, or an uncoupling, grief is one of the most difficult emotions to be present with. Yet, allowing ourselves to feel grief is to allow ourselves to let go and open to love.

Grief and love are two sides of the same coin. The deeper we love, the deeper we grieve. But the deeper we can learn to be present with grief, the deeper we can learn to be present with love.

Initially, letting go involves letting go of the other, releasing attachments, and allowing anger to create new boundaries, compassion to bring forgiveness, and acceptance of a new reality. We have to learn to find glimmers of joy in life again, whether it is the blooming of a tulip in spring, or the smell of pine in the winter. We learn to meet our needs in new ways, whether we meet them ourselves, or ask our communities and loved ones to support us.

The next stage of grieving, involves grieving ourselves and who we were in relationship to another. Each relationship is unique and brings out certain parts of ourselves, as we see ourselves reflected in another’s perception. Thus, clinging to loss, can be a way of clinging to our concept of self because it is terrifying to feel untethered in our identity.

Yet the reality is, “as human beings we are as impermanent as everything else is. Every cell in the body is continuously changing” (Chödrön, p.31). We are not meant to be still. We are meant to breath and age and love and eventually die, then from my personal views, be reborn.

As children, if our basic needs our met we easily embrace growth. It is easy to let ourselves change and flow when we feel safe and secure. In childhood trauma, developmental stages are often left unfinished or stagnate around the time the trauma occurred because there was not safety to grow or secure caretakers to lean on. As adults we are responsible for creating safety and security ourselves, for meeting our basic needs. This responsibility is left on individuals in our culture, instead of on the collective; that makes letting go and trusting so much harder. This reality cannot go unacknowledged. Yet it is often not the lack of external safety that hold us back from change, but a lack of inner security.

Lack of internal security prevents us from allowing ourselves to flow with the breath of life.

Untethered: By Casey Dunne

I feel lost

not because I need you

but because I don’t know

anything.

I don’t know truth

anymore

            as if I ever did

and I don’t know if I can trust

my intuition.

Refusing to grieve ourselves, to let the old version of us go holds us back from coming into deeper love for ourselves. “We cling to a fixed idea of who we are and it cripples us. Nothing and no one is fixed” (Chödrön, p.31). So how do we let go of ourselves? How do we learn to trust the new version of ourselves while we are still becoming them?

Just as we grieve another, we must practice releasing attachments to old ways of being, honoring the wisdom of our emotions, and leaning into what feels good, what feels right in the body and soul. Grieving ourselves involves trusting in something more than the mind, where those old neural pathways live. It involves trusting our intuition again, our inner body knowing and with that our ability to hear and meet our own needs.

The beauty in rebirth is that we have choice. We have choice in what neural pathways we let fall away and which ones we choose to nourish and create more connection to. Notice all the beautiful parts of who you were and choose to honor them, notice the parts of yourself that no longer serve you in the present and choose to let them go with compassion, and forgiveness if needed.

To grieve yourself is to love yourself.

Who do you want to be? What feels good in your body? What in life brings you glimmers of joy, of pleasure, love and hope? Lean into that, then lean deeper.

References

Chödrön, P. (2008). The Pocket Pema Chodron. Shambhala Publications.