ST Healing Love-IntoBalance October2022 - Flipbook - Page 22
Seeing and Owning
Our Abundance
• What are you grieving?
• What sorrows are you holding
onto that are asking for a
proper burial?
• What fears may keep you
from fully allowing yourself to
grieve what has been lost?
• What are 3 small steps you
can take to increasingly
accept and even ritualize grief
in your life?
• What sparks joy from
the inside?
• What do you truly appreciate
and love about yourself?
• Do you notice yourself
finding it difficult to accept
affirmation, appreciation,
support? Why is that?
• What are 3 small steps you
can take to accept, embrace
being seen, loved, honored
by others?
Grieving happens at different levels:
personal
societal
Personal Internal Work of Grieving and
Accepting Ourselves
Our parents and caregivers taught us much of what we
have learned about grief and grieving by role modeling
for us what’s acceptable and what’s not. We observed
how they dealt with loss. In watching them grow old.
In dealing with their dying and their death. In dealing
with abuses they’ve endured. Perhaps in responding
to our own abuse by our parents or others who say they
love us.
We are all on our own paths to accept our own
shortcomings, our mistakes, our trespasses.
Remembering the times we’ve been harmed or caused
harm to others. Recalling the times we have shied from
responsibility, or failed to step up or in when others have
needed us to. The times we have said “yes,” when we
really wanted to, and in our actions ultimately saying “no.”
The times we have lied. Covered up or blurred our truth
and kept those more complex or uncomfortable aspects
of truths to ourselves.
We grieve our internalized oppression - recognizing
how we’ve been indoctrinated
to believe we are not enough,
never enough. Told in explicit
and subliminal ways that we are
not worthy. Inferior. Deserving
of our oppression. And through
this continuum, grieve the loss
of power we were robbed of
knowing we have.
Until we learn to do otherwise, we process personal loss and harm
inadequately, alone by ourselves. When we get past denying it, we become
angry, disillusioned, vengeful, or depressed - or all of the above. Too often
some of us get stuck there. In some ways, it becomes easier to be angry or
vengeful (at others or ourselves), because we’ve convinced ourselves that the
loss, the grief, is too much to bear.
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Healing Love: Into Balance | A Brown Paper
communal