By Deborah Morris Coryell (who heads something call The Shiva Foundation in San Luis Obispo -- www.goodgrief.org) This is one of the books I got from BookBuyers. Not finished with it yet. But every time I come back to these two pages, I am struck again.. Bear with me. It's long, but I hope you will find it worthwhile. pp 42-43
Healing our grief means continuing to love in the face of loss. The face of loss -- what we see -- is that someone or something is gone. The heart of loss teaches us that nothing -- no thing -- we have every known can be lost. What we have known we have taken into ourselves in such a way that it has become part of the very fabric of our being. It is part of who we are, and as long as we are alive we have the capacity to continue to love even that which is longer a part of our daily reality. This means that we will need to "change our minds" about many notions that we have had about loss: That what we can no longer "see" is gone. That what we can no longer touch doesn't continue to live. That if there is no response, the relationship is over.
Close your eyes and see that which you can no longer touch, that which is gone from your presence. Reach inside of you to the feeling of touching, hearing, smelling, being with your experience of what you believed was lost.
Remember.
We are haunted by societal fears that we should not continue to stay connected with what is gone, what is past, what has been lost. We are warned that there is a pitfall here, a caveat, symbolized by Dickens' Miss Havisham: be wary of that part of us that might want to live in the past. The challenge is to bring the past along with us in such a way that we haven't lost anything. We don't ignore the challenge because of the pitfall. Truth to tell, we could not forget our past if we wanted to. What we choose to leave in the past, we can. What we choose to continue loving, we can. We are asked to give new form to what was contained in an earlier relationship. Our grief becomes the container for what we feel we have lost, and in the process of grieving we come into some new wholeness. We create a way to incorporate, literally to take into our bodies, that which has become formless. Like the caterpillar, we go into a cocoon to a safe place so that the old self can dissolve and a new self can be created.
Like the art of losing, this metamorphosis is not automatic. It does not happen simply in the course of time. Rather, it is a self-conscious act. Grieving is a path to self-realization because in the process of grieving we acknowledge that which we choose not to lose. In the art of losing we can choose who we will be. We break but we break open so that we can include more of life, more of love. We get bigger in order to carry with us what we choose to continue loving.
