Shamans Walk In The Valleys Of Grief To Understand The Joy Of The Mountaintops

Delia Quigley over on Care2.com has a great look at what greif is:

We want the security of knowing that life will hold the pattern we create, the niche we carve out for ourselves in whatever space we can claim as our own. When we lose what we love, our pattern is changed forever, and we descend into grief. This time of grieving invites us to be still, to sit quietly and allow the process to unfold. We might think that some kind of action needs to take place, some moving on from the sadness; in fact, it is in giving time to your grief that it becomes a transformative experience.

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When we lose someone or something we love, we are faced with the space that person held and we fill it with grief and longing. Grieving is the emotional healing our mind needs to recover from loss. If we are unable to grieve our losses, we have difficulty moving on. We forfeit some of our emotional flexibility. Our psyches develop hard spots, which may manifest themselves in habitual anger, irritability, anxiety, depression, or addiction.

The Shaman's Cave looks at what grief is in shamanic terms:

Within sadness, the sense of loss, the sense of grief, there is a larger context served up to the sensitive eye and that is one of scale and balance which we as human beings rarely stop to take in, because the grandeur of it is too much for our understanding. Grief represents pain, trauma, hurt on basic levels that normal human beings will do almost anything to avoid, but shamans court it at its core in order to understand a much larger construct. Shamans understand loss on a scale much the same as they understand love, they move within the heart of tears in order to know the joy on the other side. As human beings it is our unfortunate lot to walk in the deepest valleys if we are ever to understand the magnificence of the view from the mountaintop. Shamans go into that valley, reach the valley floor and start digging. Pain can heal.

Looking at how we handle issues surrounding grief/sadness, etc., brings us a better understanding of what motivates us; what touches our energy in ways that free us from the boundaries of normal understanding, to plumb even greater depths beyond this worldview we have created. The issue arises then, how can you use the normal feelings of sadness, grief and depression to actually move yourself to a larger understanding in shamanic terms?

There is a roll call of emotion in all this, shamans first seeks to understand what they actually own and what they do not. They accomplish this by stalking themselves with a brutal ruthlessness. The recap is part of that stalking process, but it is only one small part. It brings clarity and breaks ties. The actual movement to a place where we exist apart from the old selves (which we come to understand were not our own creation,) is the next step, and for that you must move through the perceptual barriers of awareness. Understanding the normal processes of grief/depression is the first step, learning what is and what is not yours is the second, altering that internal landscape at will is the third. There's a fourth, but we won't go there yet. Grief leavens our lives in one form or another and with work, can help us maintain balance between the extremes we must face in the process of becoming something other than what we were. The object is not to do away with grief, the object is to balance it within ourselves in ways that serve us and allow us to continue growing.

The post has alot more on the greiving process including the importance of crying in releasing the energy. Please check it out.

GriefHealing.com has alot of resources on grief including this article on the grief process.

Image from maryn0503 on flickr