A Time in the Ashes
Can Grief Liberate us from our Life Scripts and our Culture of Separation?
I’m delighted to share good news with you: My peer-reviewed journal article has been published in the International Journal of Integrative Psychotherapy. It’s called “A Time in the Ashes” and it’s subtitled “How Grief can liberate us from life script and our culture of separation”.
If you’d like to read the full article, you can find it here: https://www.integrative-journal.com/index.php/ijip/article/view/345), but….
If you’re like me and you don’t have time to read all 19 pages, here are three enticing quotes for you…
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“Said another way, I explore grief, sorrow, suffering, and loss, explaining how, of all the many things that arrive with the power to liberate us from our separation (a separation from ourselves and others), of all the things that come with the promise of bringing us together and reconnecting us (intra-psychically and interpersonally), there may be no force more powerful than grief. Grief is an experience free from pretense, raw in its genuineness and vulnerability. And, as such, as much as grief brings with it suffering, it also arrives with a promise, a promise to bring us home, home to our shared humanity, home to each other.”
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“In the marketplace culture, each of us are told to survive on our own. We are told that to survive we must collect our own individual pile of wealth and protect it from “them.” This is the only allowed pathway to security. And we must collect this wealth by working, perhaps working tirelessly and endlessly... But this is also a betrayal of our natural, relational self. Each of us are built to thrive in community, places where our security comes from our ability to depend on each other (and not on our ability to create our own financial wealth). This is why, so often, we find ourselves exhausted and isolated in this culture. We have been denied what our nature longs for: The comfort of one another.”
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“When grief arrives at our doorstep, we are called upon to go through a time in the ashes. Ash is all that remains when the fire of loss has burnt through our lives. Ash is all that remains of the life we once knew, of objects of love we once cherished. Even our very thoughts and our familiar actions have been reduced to ash… In a culture that favors the hurried, our grief asks us to find the people around us ready to sit and honor the needs of our soul, those who will support us in taking our time in the ashes… nothing connects us more than compassion in response to this grief. This compassion summons our presence, calls out our ability to genuinely show up, and creates an experience of truly being here together.”
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It is my sincere hope that, in reading this, you have found something of value and perhaps even a few ounces of comfort. I would welcome your thoughts and your feedback, and I encourage you sharing any experiences this may have brought to mind.
Thank you!