Sunday, November 22, 2015

Can We Rise Out of Our Grief?


Can we outgrow our grief? Or asked in another way, can we rise out of our grief? Certain aspects of grief may stay with us for the rest of our life, changing only in quantity and quality—hopefully in diminished ways. Finding temporary comfort is one thing; but can grief from bereavements—especially the major ones—be forever healed? This and many other questions will be explored from different perspectives, as informed by my own personal bereavement and mediumistic experiences. 
Rather than outgrow our grief, can we rise out of our grief?

These personal experiences have led me to a particular understanding that grief is a form of energy that I can consciously feel and so can also be consciously transformed—or evolved—into new and higher-vibrating feelings of spiritual evolution, which could also be called “rising.” The Risen with whom I interact offer their own particular definition of “rising,” which I discern as “transmutation”—a clumsy word that seems to make them slightly grimace but also smile that it will do for now. They most ardently do agree with my declaration that we must consciously allow the grief to be felt so it can unfold and rise to the next higher vibration of feeling, which could eventually reach the vibration of a Risen Loved One, and may allow us to connect with them in some way—if that is what we truly want. I must add that sometimes we may not want to connect with certain people, and this is important to have an understanding about as well, as guided by our feelings. This last idea is also acceptably adequate to the Risen, and so there is a chapter on that subject.
We must consciously allow the grief to be felt so it can unfold and rise to the next higher vibration of feeling that will eventually reach the vibration of the Risen Loved One.

The extraordinary yet crucial aspect about this earthly unfolding is that the transformation does not happen as a matter of course, as in the way Nature moves from one season to the next. Nature transitions without any conscious awareness, but the higher transformation of grief doesn’t happen naturally. Human grief can only transform supranaturally—above and beyond Nature. Nature does not choose this kind of transformation for us and so we must choose it for ourselves. If we don’t make this choice and follow through with it, we’ll have only journeyed in a self-repeating circle—and not necessarily even completely. This might very well be one of the uncomfortable, counter-intuitive ideas cautioned about earlier.

[Excerpted from A Risen Companion to Grief (in press)]