An experience of death, grief & re-birth

I’m sitting here with so much to say and also feeling a bit mushy and unsure where the words will take me. 

The last few weeks have been a time of death and re-birth for me. 

Two weeks ago, nature, speaking to me through my body as she does, told me loud and clear that something very precious to me had to come to an end. 

While lots has unfolded in between which I’ll get into soon, this ending created the space for the most beautiful, unexpected re-birth. The ending created space for something far more rich and alive to be born. 

Because this is how nature operates, and we are nature. 

Creation happens, that creation is maintained for as long as it’s relevant, and when relevance starts to wane, the forces of destruction or dissolution come in, to sweep out the old and make space for the fresh and new. 

We see this cycle of creation - maintenance - destruction unfold in all aspects of life. In every form, every relationship, every role that we play, every habit we have, every dynamic that exists in our manifest reality. 

According to Vedic science, the only thing that is ever happening is evolution, and this means the only thing that is ever happening is progressive change. 

Staying exactly the same - stagnation - is counter to the evolutionary cycle of life and can only occur for so long before nature takes care of it. 

And - before I became aware of the re-birth that was occurring in my recent experience, there was me and the grief of the loss I was experiencing. 

The grief I experienced was immense. I’ve been really in it. I’d only known grief like this once before, when my dearly beloved grandfather died very unexpectedly at age 74, when I was 21. 

And what I only realised today as I sat to write, is that this recent death and re-birth experience happened in the week of the 13th anniversary since my grandfathers death. 

There are no coincidences, this is nature’s way of offering me an opportunity to complete an incomplete cycle. It’s my belief that we are all experiencing these cycles and co-incidences, all of the time. The only question is whether or not we are aware of what’s unfolding for our highest good, and therefore whether we allow the cycle to complete or resist it. 

To get back to my grandad, the love he and I shared traversed lifetimes. We had a uniquely familiar bond that I hadn’t yet experienced with anyone else at that time. A love that knew no limitations or boundaries. For all his flaws (as we all have), I couldn’t have loved him any more. We share a timeless love and his loss crushed me. I can still remember the exact feeling in my body, where I was, the sounds I heard, the way my body collapsed to the ground, when my Mum called to tell me he had died out on the golf course, doing what he loved. 

At the time, having recently started my postgraduate studies in psychotherapy and being in the grips of chronic anxiety, the grief overwhelmed me and I didn’t know what to do with it. In order to keep going, I unconsciously avoided, repressed and numbed a lot of what his death brought up for me. I felt that I needed to keep going, and so a lot of the grief got pushed down in my body. 

Where unbeknown to 34 year old me, much of it has still been living. 

And the beautiful, incredibly wise thing about the human body is that when we experience an emotion in the present (like grief, sadness or anger) we’re being gifted with the opportunity to go back into any prior experience of that emotion that lives on in the body. To complete the cycle. 

This means, through the process of feeling, allowing and releasing, we have the opportunity to free ourselves from the ways in which that unfelt emotion has been showing up, seeking expression, often through the form of unexplained symptoms in the body, anxiety, depression or lack of feeling of any kind. 

Today’s emotion, when really attended to, opens the door to unfelt, unexpressed emotion that’s been held for however long, shaping and colouring our life experiences from that past moment onward. 

In my experience, bridging the continuum between different experiences of the same emotion, tends to happen when we are having space held for us and being carefully attuned to. 

I became aware of the bridge between my current day grief and the grief surrounding my granddad’s passing in a recent session with my somatic therapist. While I know there’s a lot I have the capacity to process solo these days, the weight of some emotional processing tends to feel safer for the body to go into, in the presence of a deeply present and skilled witness. |

And this time, unlike when I was 21, I had the capacity and the support to really traverse the depths of my grief. It’s been so palpable, right on the surface that I really didn’t have a choice, actually. 

In the week following this recent death of sorts, the grief would come in a wave, the wave would engulf me for a while, and then it would pass. 

And my gosh, while the wave had me in it’s cycle, I felt SO ALIVE.

After decades of suppressing, numbing and avoiding emotion, to be so deeply in my emotions, feeling and processing them in real time, I can only describe as feeling entirely liberating. I felt free within the emotional wave. I felt strong in my softness. 

For me, this is “the work”, working. 

Having the capacity to stay present in a big experience. To give myself what I needed. To cancel what I needed to cancel. To cycle in and out of regulation without fear or self-judgement. An absence of the need to numb, suppress or create drama. An absence of overwhelm. 

Allowing, allowing, allowing. 

Where does this cycle leave me now?

Like I said at the start of this piece, I feel quite mushy. 

There’s a quality of feeling a bit like a newborn, tentatively feeling into who I’m becoming. 

There’s a lot about myself from before two weeks ago, that doesn’t feel like me anymore. 

I have a very compelled to prune, to cull, to clear out, to make space. 

There’s more of this re-birth to come and my role is to make myself available for it. 

So for now, that’s where I am. Continuing to land in the wisdom of this recent cycle and paying attention to what wants to emerge next.

Because all that we ever need to know about the future, is contained within the present moment. 

When we pay deep attention to how and what we feel in the present moment - what sensations are present in the body, what bids for connection are being made, where does it feel natural and charming to place our attention - we set ourselves up beautifully to be in communion with the cycles of life and death that continue to play out for us, in every moment. 

With all my love, 
Caroline x