People avoid grieving. It makes sense - it is the most soulful pain I have ever experienced. No one wants to feel that longing, that agony of losing love. It can feel like a tormentor, a cruelty, an injustice that has no place in our lives.

Grief is our common humanity yearning for completeness. For wholeness.

Grief can be a holy experience too, a sacred beautiful space where all that is present is the desire to love and be loved.

What I have learned from the painful flood of grief is that it passes. That there is a sunrise of astonishing growth and strength after our darkest hours. That in those hours we somehow build a capacity and strength we didn’t know we possessed. I learned that grief transforms us, our view of the world, and offers expansion.

I have also learned that our emotional strength comes from our ability to feel and express our vulnerability. This same vulnerability that invited pain into our lives is the same aspect that allows grief to move through us.

It is in the moving-through that we gain strength. Remember when you had to train for something physically? Initially, you might have felt exhausted, or even defeated. You might have wanted to give up, or you might have limited yourself with your thoughts, like “I can’t do this”, or “this is not possible”. And you kept at it, and suddenly the impossible becomes possible. I remember feeling defeated after my knee surgery and thinking, “Well, I just can’t walk far anymore”, “I will never be the peron I used to be”. Then, I kept at it, kept walking, and was surprised when I walked/hiked 3 miles with a friend last summer. I was much stronger than I thought.

And so are you. Much stronger than you think.