It feels like time is moving extra fast these past few weeks, and I find myself blinking hard in disbelief every time I look at the calendar – mid-August!! How did we get here??
I have so much to share with you – a LOT is transpiring behind the scenes here at Dark Woods of grief, so expect a few more updates in the coming weeks.
For today I want to share with you two things:
1.) Thank you SO MUCH to those of you who filled our our Dark Woods Community Survey last month. Your feedback + perspective is so valuable to us and is already guiding some changes we are making for the fall. (More about that soon!) I will be announcing the survey draw winner next week!
2.) We’re so excited to welcome author & griever, Timothy Flynn, to join us this month as our community guest teacher for ‘Poetry and the Cycle of Grief’ – a 2 hour workshop on writing through your grieving process, Thursday, August 22, 5-7pm PST on Zoom.
Tim is a writer, teacher, and healer. A life changing crisis in his twenties lead him to seek healing from shamanic practices and his pre-Christian ancestral Irish traditions.
Tim eventually went on to receive an MA in Transformative Arts from JFK Universities Institute of Holistic Studies, and to teach for the Foundation for Shamanic Studies.
In 2018 his focus turned to supporting and caring for his two young children when his wife died after a long illness. Tim has extensive training in dance, martial arts, writing, shamanism, and somatic practices focused on personal healing.
He has trained at several Hospices as a caregiver as well as having studied the cultural evolution of Death & Dying practices in mainstream anglo culture for his thesis. He currently lives in Central Oregon with his children and an ever expanding family of animals.
Some testimonials from his former students:
”Tim is an absolutely generous, intelligent, kind, and knowledgeable soul. He presents and guides with expertise as well as takes good care of the participants.”
“He’s phenomenal: present, real, patient, knowledgeable, approachable, and kind. From the beginning I felt that I could trust Tim.”
”Fabulous…I’m not sure I could have had a better experience.”
”Tim is a passionate and knowledgeable teacher and his workshop was rich in information and experience.”
The cost for the 2 hour workshop is $37 USD, REGISTER HERE NOW as there are limited spots available, or join our Through the Dark Woods Membership Community, as Tim’s workshop is FREE FOR THROUGH THE DARK WOODS COMMUNITY MEMBERS!
Continue reading below to enjoy Tim’s profound writing on grief & loss in this guest blog piece entitled, “We All Grieve the Same.”
We All Grieve The Same
… it’s a therapy thing, and it’s bullshit.
“We all grieve differently.”
I don’t know who came up with that first. I suspect it was a therapist in the 1970’s. It’s a way of telling people who are really uncomfortable with their grief that nobody will make fun of them if they cry ugly. It’s probably been really helpful in getting men to admit they’re hurting.
I get it, it’s a therapy thing.
And it’s bullshit.
Grieving is like eating or crapping. It’s pretty much the same for all people. It involves feelings, sometimes overwhelming feelings that swallow us whole, but I think it’s more than that.
Grieving is also mending the place where all aspects of being human come together. That place (I don’t think we have a word for it in English) is harmed by significant loss.
Our lives, our spirits, every moment of being here is irrevocably changed. Imagine the subtle, invisible threads that make up every part of you reaching out for each other, tattered but still searching for a vital wholeness. Grief is what that process of reweaving feels like. Reweaving wants to happen regardless of what culture we live in, where or when we live.
So now you’re probably thinking, “OK yeah, he has a point, but everybody I know seems to deal with that process differently.”
That’s because we’re missing the other rail for our grief train in the West. It’s the rail human beings have had for eons. It’s called community.
When our ancestors were grieving, the ones that lived in tribes or small towns, do you think they said: “Him? Oh that’s Thag. He doesn’t grieve like the rest of us. He goes off to the fishing hole and sits by himself for a few years, then he’s OK.”
Nope. Someone saw that Thag wasn’t really grieving, grabbed him by the animal skin thong and pulled him over to the fire where everyone was wailing until he started to wail. Maybe there was alcohol or hallucinogens involved. Maybe dancing, gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair, whatever it took to get the grief moving.
In fact there are communities here in the US that have held onto their grief traditions. Many in the Hmong community still hold vigil, still have a tradition of supporting each other in grief.
The “Jazz Funerals” of New Orleans have this kind of medicine. Dancing, singing, music, and mourning are all part of these processions that announce a loss to the entire community. They draw the world in to witness and honor each passing.
For my ancestors the Keening Women held the power to move grief. A few older women who had typically suffered more loss than most in the village, showed up dressed head to toe in black. Sitting beside the deceased they might start rocking back and forth, moaning and then finally singing a song that sounded like all the agony of the world strained through splintered bone and broken glass. They began by singing the stories of their own losses, their sons and daughters who had died too soon — which back then were likely many in number. Their collective song would eventually dissolve into a wall of tears and sobbing that engulfed all who showed up. I suspect everyone showed up back then. If you didn’t come to mourn they’d likely come to get you.
The Catholic church put a stop to that way of grieving in Ireland around the 1950’s. It was too unseemly. That might be when people there began “grieving differently.”
When people “grieve differently” they’re just coping with the end of their grieving traditions differently. I first realized this when I was sitting in a Hospice support group after my wife died.
We all talked about what was going on in our lives, what we were struggling with. We didn’t grieve together, we talked about how awkward it was to feel grief in our culture. It was so strange to walk around in a world where grief was never visible, a world in which grief was unwelcomed.
Griefs second rail was gone and we didn’t even realize it.
We just thought “this must be what grief is like, feeling displaced.” Inevitably someone said “it feels like the whole world should stop because they died, but it didn’t.”
What they didn’t realize is that for most of human history the world did stop. The tribe or village did put away their farming tools and hunting bows, put on their special clothing and made their way to the place where those who were closest to the deceased lived. There they gathered, letting the world stop for a time, so the work of grieving could begin.
We can pin the loss of communal grieving on a number of suspects, my first pick is colonialism. Invading and colonizing lands doesn’t really work if you stop to feel all the suffering you’re creating and the losses you’re experiencing. You need to be productive, get moving so that we can develop and grow an economy. Progress has little use for grief. Currently, in my state of Oregon, it’s recommended that workers have 3 days of paid bereavement leave.
That would cover the following losses:
A spouse, child, foster child, step-child, grandchild, sibling, a parent or grandparent.
Progress gives us three days paid leave for the death of a child.
Then there is trauma. Not small, individual trauma, but global trauma. There comes a time, when millions of us have died in wars, in planned extermination, that it is simply impossible to grieve. The fabric of our being will not be rewoven.
Grieving itself is broken. Individuals may survive for many years, they may even function basically well as people, but they will not be whole so long as they are alive.
You can experience a very clear expression of this frozen state watching the interview of a barber in the movie Shoah, which focuses on the the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. Decades after the war ended he tells the story of working as a barber at the death camp Treblinka, one of many men responsible for giving men, women and children a haircut just before they were marched off and murdered in gas chambers. People from his own town, the wives and children of friends passed through his chair. In telling his story, something he had obviously been unable to grieve due to its overwhelming magnitude, he suddenly stops.
“Go on…you have to tell the story.”
“No, I can’t do it…leave me alone. Please.”
He eventually regains control of that shattered place within himself, pushing the feelings away, and continues to share the unimaginable horror of his daily work beneath the lethal eye of the SS officers. But it is clear that the magnitude of loss he has witnessed is just too great for him to touch for more than a few moments.
Religious anit-grief enforcement. With all of this trauma and the momentum of colonialism, it’s easy for religion to step in and brush away the presence of a cohesive community response to grief. Those deep, powerful feelings can appear to refute the vision of the divine many religions convey. The great currents of grief that can run through people and communities can be challenging to the centralized authority of church leaders. Better to isolate and condition peoples grief to somehow be in accord with religious perspective. I don’t personally feel that grief lays in opposition to spirituality, quite to the contrary. But deeply emotional grief can appear to be threatening to the status quo.
If you find yourself grieving and feeling lost, now you know why.
The only medicine for the loss of community is community. Unfortunately community can be hard to come by when you’re in the midst of a great loss. People like Josea Tamira Crossley (Dark Woods of Grief) and others are working to develop a grief-wise culture that starts to mend some of these fundamental fissures in the West. That re-weaving will take time not measured in years but in generations.
I take comfort in the memory of my ancestors who grieved well. I do not know their names, but I believe their traditions, the muscle of grief they had so well developed, lays dormant somewhere in me.
I call on its memory when my young daughter, now 11, cries over the loss of her Mother or the death of one of her pets. She grieves the way my ancestors grieved, without shame or restraint.
She allows herself to be completely overwhelmed by her feelings. Because I have not backed away from her grief she has come to expect that someone will always be there to witness her grief, to share in it in some small way.
She knows that her grief is good for her heart, it makes her stronger, because I tell her that as she wails herself to sleep on days where she remembers her losses.
Perhaps she will be one of those beloved people who lead the way in developing a tradition that can truly answer the call of grief, and offer much needed mending to our world.
– July 16th, Timothy Flynn
Journal prompt & practice for August:
Early August is traditionally the time when earth-based cultures would begin celebrations of Harvest-time, as the first crops began to ripen. It is also a time of descent and slowing down – now we are over a month away from the peak of summer. In Traditional Chinese Medicine this time is known as “Earth Season,” a time of slowing down, pausing and regenerating the body + nervous system before the work of the fall harvest.
When we are grieving, and really always, it is important to find time to slow down, reflect and feel our feelings.
If we don’t give ourselves the space to feel our grief, we lose track of the ability to feel anything.
We lose our ability to feel joy and connection, and it can be very difficult or impossible to feel a connection with our beloved dead, because to feel them, we have to be able to FEEL OURSELVES.
It’s a seemingly weird paradox that we have to let ourselves grieve that our beloved dead are no longer in a body that we can hug, in order to be able to feel their Spirit.
Slowing down and feeling is critical to maintain a connection with ourselves, each other and especially our beloved dead.
This practice is designed to help you slow down and feel, but in a contained way so it doesn’t become overwhelming.
Choose 1-2 of the prompts below & you will set a timer for 5 minutes. Begin writing when the timer starts, and stop when the timer stops. Pause, breathe, & feel what is happening in your body. Breathe, feel, and put on your favourite music and dance/move/shake your body for another 5 minutes.
PROMPTS:
Choose one of the following journal prompts:
I remember…
What I’m grateful for is…
I miss…
I love…
What my body is telling me is…
______________________________________________
Great work. Pause, breathe, & feel what is happening in your body. Breathe, feel, and put on your favourite music and dance/move/shake your body for another 5 minutes.
And then…don’t forget to stop and smell the roses…
