My midlife had hardly arrived when tragedy first hit in my life. At 32 my youngest and closest sister was killed in a freaky car accident. Poof, she was gone! She was only 26. I didn’t know how to grieve, much less feel my pain that had shut down my body in shock and overwhelm. Even as I witnessed my father passionately cry and yell in his pain, I still sent my feelings deep down inside of me because I couldn’t dare feel that pain. I couldn’t seem to cry or feel anything. This is what happens when we are in shock and fearful of our pain. But now, I am so grateful that I got to see my Dad’s courage and ability to feel his feelings publicly and openly. He has been an important role model for me to courageously learn how to allow my feelings to be real in my life.
How do we learn to face change with an attitude of curiosity and wonder?
The dilemma in our lives is how to get from this fearful, sometimes overwelming place, to courageously find grounding and self-compassion to be able to turn towards our pain rather than pushing it away and/or denying it’s there. Each painful event like this tragic death of my beloved sister, and all of those difficult events you have faced in your life so far — these are all opportunities to learn how to rebirth yourself through deeply feeling your pain and learning how to grieve. Because your rebirth is on the other side. This has been my life’s work to help all of us, including me, stay in the darkness a bit longer to develop the capacity to get closer to our pain. To not be fearful but curious.
Personal Rebirth comes from learning how to embrace change of all kinds, dark and painful and beautifully joyful, with curiosity and openness. Rebirthing happens when we have completed some of our grieving and our internal system is beginning to show signs of shifting. We remain curious about what’s happening inside of us. It is often referred to as a stage of the grief cycle as I have listed it in my Companion Workbook to A Midlife Voyage to Transformation as the Grief/Rebirth Cycle. This is because it indicates where you are in your grieving, not that you are done, but that some of your wholeness is coming back and it’s time to notice what’s shifting. So Rebirthing is an awakening to something new arising as a result of the deep healing from your grief journey. But you can easily miss it without the tools of mindfulness and self-compassion, or the ability to stay connected to yourself during the wild ride of grieving. We cannot abandon ourselves at any stage of the Grief Journey or we will not complete it.
How do we know when we are experiencing a personal Rebirth? You will feel a greater sense of awareness or groundedness, a new, wider perspective on life, or a deep sense of purpose. It feels like you are more truly your authentic self. You will want to engage more of this new sense of yourself with energy into your life. Maybe you will want to expand your connections in the world. I experienced this and write about it in my memoir, A Midlife Voyage to Transformation, when I choose to climb Mt. Killimanjaro after processing through the grief of two divorces and more. I felt more alive than I had ever felt in my life and more open and expanded ready to see life from a new perspective. I received a call or a clarity that I must work to help women in the world and this launched my life’s work forward in a big way. I felt my capacity to feel compassion for myself and others grow deeply
The most powerful contemporary change-agent, resiliency advocate, and teacher of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth is Joanna Macy. I learned about her “Spiral” or Practice of Active Hope in her Work that Reconnects (WTR)outlined first in her book Active Hope. Her Spiral Practice has 4 stages that flow into each other sequentially: 1) Coming from Gratitude 2) Honoring our Pain for the World 3)Seeing with New Eyes 4) Going Forth. The third stage “Seeing with New Eyes” is the rebirthing stage because it refers to a “transformational shift that happens when we find a different way of looking at ourselves and the world.” (79) Joanna Macy created this Practice Model from looking at the natural world’s cycles and realizing that our major flaw in our current culture is that we have separated ourselves from the natural cycles of life.
This separation and belief of our superiority is causing the destruction of our environment and our safety. When we do not acknowledge our feelings of pain for the world as we are treating it now, we cannot heal it. We are cut off from our feelings and our ability to also find new and creative solutions through our feelings and creativity. This is a systems perspective that acknowledges a “blocked response” in our human bodies because we are not processing our pain. This greatly aligns with trauma theory and gives us a new perspective about how we can heal ourselves and this world. We must start with Gratitude or love, to calm our nervous systems so that we can be grounded and open to face our pain. Then the alchemy will flow out of our pain into rebirth and new ways to live and nourish life by joining with all living beings in this cycle.
Sharon Salzberg in Real Happiness says, “The path to true happiness is one of integrating and fully accepting all aspects of our experience.” This means both the darkness and the light. Sharon teaches mindfulness and how mindfulness helps us find this new attitude towards change especially in her new book, Real Change. I have a sense that Sharon was sharing the same concepts as Joanna Macy only applying them to our own personal healing through mindfulness. Happiness is rebirthing ourselves over and over again, seeing and using the tools of curiosity and openness to see the path as it appears in our lives.
According to my model outlined in my books, we use the tools of IFS or another somatic embodied process, to personally heal our own pain. By learning how to turn towards our Internal System, we begin to meet and befriend our parts that have been hidden and hurt, shamed or pushed away earlier in our lives. These are the parts that we turn towards to allow grief to be felt and processed in our bodies. This is what happens in Stage 3: Deep Diving. We are ready to feel and explore our most hurting parts slowly and safely. Happiness or rebirth can only happen when we free our system from the pain that is stuck inside and learn how to move it through our bodies and into a new form. The new form is the Rebirthing of new energies, life-giving and heart-opening.
Are you ready to let go of the heaviness of past sorrows and feel more alive? How do you know that you have grieved enough or that you can allow the joy and pleasures of life to come through you again? It’s unclear to many of us how to know the grief journey when it appears or how it’s supposed to flow or end. This is where mindfulness is key. We pay attention and stay connected to ourselves throughout our cycles of life, death and rebirth.
What if we feel more alive and free during our grief journey and joy appears along the way? This may be an indication that you are opening up to more of your wholeness— all of your feelings or longings that might have been covered up along the way. You might be nurturing your healthy parts while you are curious towards the ones that are in pain. This brings more capacity and self-compassion to hold your pain. This might be the uniqueness of your Grief Journey and possibly the final stage of grieving that I call Rebirthing. It doesn’t mean your grieving is over…it just means you are processing some of your deep grief and it is doing it’s work on you.
Can you open up to this new place within you, this New Authentic You, with curiosity and learn how to remain more open to the changes in your life as they unfold?
