Hello loved one,
A meager attempt at articulating my view on a challenging topic during these times…
I used to believe that if I could just bottle up my heart and pass it out to everyone we would all be free. But I cannot give you something you don’t already have. When I tried I almost died because I drained my life from this grave misunderstanding. I cannot take another’s pain, or I deny them of their healing. And if I cry another’s tears of grief I rob them of their gratitude for life and thus their freedom.
There is enough to grieve for lifetimes. Everyday we accumulate more because of war. But do not run that war through your body. You have your own to navigate, and believe me when I say that the cliche “Make Love Not War” is the way. Yet you can’t make Love until you know where, how and why the pain travels through you, and its function. Only then can you make medicine from the madness.
Every wound has a wisdom. It is not an oversimplification to say that the healing we need begins within. Where there is war anywhere inside of us there will be war outside. It is easier to take to the streets and fight than it is to stay close to home and do the work to unravel every action that perpetuates self hate, harm, boundary crossing of ourselves and those we love, co dependance and our addiction to overstimulation, fighting, sensationalism, revenge and pain.
Your work, your greatest weapon against the pain you see, is to claim your sovereignty and not accumulate more hate through your daily actions, the majority subconscious. You then become a beacon of peace and potential. Then your voice is an embodied instrument of truth that can make music in the streets if you so choose. Peace is your birthright
I have spent years at the altar of pain, running many forms of war discourse through my body. It felt cathartic to wail and flail at the atrocities, until I realized nothing was truly shifting in me and when I looked around I only saw the same. There was some cleansing from the awareness of why the pain of my own life, which is the first step, but never a brand new day. My energy was consumed by fighting rather than peace because that was my focus. It is a common mistake. We are programmed for it.
I am susceptible to being sucked in. Currently, I am navigating huge loss and challenge personally as well as a dear friend of mine whose baby boy was born Saturday evening with no breath and no heartbeat. My work is to stand vigil without assuming the story as my own, although it affects me. This can be deeply challenging to discern if there is any tendency towards victimhood in the personal psyche to navigate- which I have. It has taken a lot to unravel that codependency and how it shows up in latching onto dramas all around as my own to stay in that sensation- which is an addiction created to avoid something. Much to say about this.
My holy work in response to the attention grabbing mechanics of war politics and the non stop suffering we are all overly privy to, is to live as free as possible, in as much love and joy as possible alongside the awareness of the constant suffering in every corner. I make a daily attempt to choose my peace above anything that is happening in the world or else I am corroborating with the continuance of what I don’t want to see. It is a lot more challenging than one would think. There is a strong pull towards suffering with the masses, and a guilt in many for living a good life while others are facing incredible challenge. (of course a good life is highly subjective)
Never once when I have sat at the Ancestral altar have they asked me to grieve for their losses, their tragedies, their pain. They did not dream me for that and that is not the story I came to tell about my people. I did not come to sing about suffering and war, but why the suffering and war.
There is a difference between grieving with and grieving for. When we grieve our own lives we automatically enact interconnectedness and therefore we are grieving with and for all. This is not an act of turning a blind eye and wallowing in your own life oblivious to the interplay between your pain and the pain of the world. It is an ability to witness another’s pain and grief without the impulse to fix it because you have touched your own and understand the power of grief as a medicine. If you are feeling at all it is impossible to not be tuned in. But it is what and how we are feeling that matters if there is to be healing.
Death and loss are not tragedies. How and why the death and loss, especially in our current climate, can be. This is sticky. I don’t have an answer other than to write a discourse on sacred rage, which typically always begets grief. Just to bring awareness to the layers of feeling through the grief portal. It’s all ok and all messy.
A lot of powerful voices are speaking out right now about grieving for the children of the world as though they are your own rather than fighting, taking sides, hate, revenge. This is not an invitation to run their pain and grief through your body. It is an invitation for the mother (or father) inside of you to rise up. As they upwell you will inevitably meet the loss of your own living and inner children in all the forms, the loss of your own mother and father in all forms, the overall loss of Mother and Father in their highest form. Now we are getting to a medicine that can heal because you open the pathways of feeling to the deeper currents of truth behind the loss. Therefore, a real solution has a chance of emerging from the new found expanded perception by way of grief.
When we access our own grief, we access compassion for ourselves. This awakens the ability to see ourselves clearly and we can begin to differentiate our truth from an overlay of scarring events and circumstances. Authentic compassion can only come by way of having touched the places that hurt inside of us with the same grace we would give someone else. And if you believe you have nothing to grieve from your life than you have shut yourself off from Love and I am sorry. Fear will block grief and therefore the regeneration within can not begin.
If you can’t feel the screeching fear that sears deep into your bones, what its function is, why it exists, how deeply afraid of loving and being free it is, and touch every moment of your life that your insides have been at war against love, and for good reason likely, we have no hope at a different future for the children of the Earth. Trust me if you can, you will not manifest more fear by feeling your fear. War is a response to avoiding the fear, and our reactions to fear, NOT to feeling it and witnessing it from a place of presence. Fear is only a powerful feeling and when manipulated can control a whole planet of people.
Nothing heals if we do not feel, grieve and let go of what we are holding. But the grief process is so misunderstood. It is not a wallowing in victimhood, depression and sadness forever- these are actually symptoms of repressed grief. Even the tears of grief are chemically different, they actually clean out the wallowing, transform the story and release the victim. This is why ceremonial grief rituals remain a centerpiece in many indigenous cultures; it is to ensure that the gates of renewal stay open and the true story stay alive alongside the inevitables of life.
Grieving is a direct link to how much we trust life. It’s an essential element of alchemy, regeneration and rebirth. Grief is Love’s twin flame. Grief comes straight from the heart. It is an accessory to Love’s mysterious interplay between mortal and immortal. It gives permission for things to die and join the omnipotent cycle of Life and makes meaning of the goodbye so it is easier to make space for the new.
There is nothing to save when nothing dies. We learn this through our initiations, plant medicine AND GRIEVING. When we act from a place of saving we deny the wisdom that is needed for the resurrection of a new day. When we are motivated to save something it is generally driven by a fear that we have not addressed, rarely is it motivated by true love. The actual “saving”, the solution, the redemptions you seek all live in loving, being, letting go and grieving the inevitable losses believing that you are free. It’s a bit of a trickster. “You want to save me"?"- says the Earth. “Then love yourself”. Or you can keep fighting and repeating history.
YOU ARE THE MEDICINE FOR THESE TIMES when you lay down the sword pointed at your own life and instead lay down and die into the many arms inside of you fighting for your Love, your feeling and your grieving.
You can let go. You can make a mosaic from the mess. You are intricately imprinted with every bit of intelligence as the tree that lovingly, and sometimes by a gale, lets go of every leaf.
You can rise from the ash and leap from the ledge. Your wings have not been clipped. They have been tucked away and protected by a supreme intelligence until you could be trusted to read the wind- which requires listening to a different system.
You can recreate, from this moment, a whole new life. That is the contract between you and Love. There is no punishment system, no regrets for what you have and have not done in Her eyes. That lie was implanted in your head by a hand with a closed fist.
You can be fresh born into a new form from your tears. And now you have some wisdom and have learned some lessons, so what are you going to do in this moment “with your one wild and precious life?”- and this one, and this one. Not tomorrow, not a five year plan. Breathe and you begin again and all of life around you will follow.
Love is at the center. You are that center of your life, everything awaiting your instruction by way of your perceptions.
I wrote in my journal today:
When every moment of my life is devoted to beauty and love it matters not what I do. I can relax and let go of all of those ideas of achievement because my entire life becomes a grand work of art - seen throughout time.
Weaving behind the scenes is not futile. Staying in my lane is a power move. There is nowhere I am not seen by my Creator and my Ancestors. I do not need to prove my devotion to peace by drinking the poison. I am unconditionally supported here, with one condition. Breathe. Now I am a vessel of healing.
Thank you for being here.
Shira Starfire
On Grief and Letting Go