Walking Through Times of Grief

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It has been several years since my initial experience with grief and loss and though many people told me that time would heal, it didn’t make each day easier. Although time heals, it takes a commitment to wake up each day and to make it through to the next day even when your mind, body, and spirit are crushed. At some point this process of living in the face of grief becomes easier, and you find yourself feeling joy and contentment again, even with the pain that is there. It’s like learning how to walk all over again, but this time with a broken leg. Although the leg is broken, over time, you begin to love yourself for it and to dance with it anyway. You once knew how to live and what you thought life was about, but now it is as if a veil is torn and you see clearly. Life was never about any of those things, about the job you wanted or all the stress and anxieties that you were plagued with. Life was about loving fully and deeply, in the present moment, being attuned to the gifts of now.

Often times when people experience suffering, they become hardened or embittered by it. It can be hard to understand suffering and to live through it once you experience how deep it can go. It is as if you are being asked to walk through a flame and all you wish to do is to retreat backward toward comfort again and how things once were.

But you must persist. Persist and hold on to this feeling of goodness, this faith that things will be okay, even if you don’t quite understand them right now. Hold on to this because if you look outside at the beauty of the trees and flowers and grass in between the sidewalk cracks, you’ll see that the very nature of life is for there to be growth after storms, that there is a force within you that is meant not only to survive but to flourish and thrive. You must surrender to this process and force that is within you to help you grow and become whole again. Life is what it is — it was never meant to be totally within your control.

So walk through the flames and know that you will come out the other side of them. Learn to live again, to climb your second mountain when you’ve already climbed your first, only this time, understand it was never anything in this world or anyone that could help you find this feeling of wholeness. It was within you all along and walking through grief and its flames is what helped you see that you would not be burned, but that you would emerge closer to your spirit and all you are fully meant to be: loving, compassionate, wise. and filled with a quiet joy that remains and carries you through no matter what life brings. This is my greatest wish for you, that your pain would be used as the very soil through which your greatest peace, fulfillment, and love would come.

Blessings to you

Eleora

If you enjoyed this post, please share it with someone who you think might also find it helpful in navigating loss. You might also find my book, Grieving the Loss of a Love: How to Embrace Grief to Find True Hope and Healing After a Divorce, Breakup, or Death helpful to read or to pass along to others. Thank you for reading!

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