Love has many faces or frequencies.  Every day or two, I’ll write on one aspect of this magic, or a ‘frequency’ of what we call love.  Grief is a very tender and at times painful expression of love.  It will be experienced as we ‘believe’ it to be…some feel it as pain; others as a sweet and tender softening.  With a client yesterday, she experienced it as a pain that she wanted to stop.  For her, it was unbearable and lead her to feel inadequate and that something was terribly wrong with her.  When we explored the felt sense about her grief it began to morph into a sweet and tender medicine for her soul.  Her breakthrough happened when she surrendered into the sensations rather than resist.  Her breakthrough came when she realized that her grief was natural and an expression of her love for those whom she lost and for her own grief of her lost childhood.  The ‘pain’ grief had become a block to trust and letting others in; her tender love-grief became a doorway into accepting and embracing her own essence.   I urge you to explore your grief, to know what it’s message is; to know it’s textures and colors; to share it with others.  As a former teacher told me, ‘Ed, there is an obligation to grieve’.  I offer a poem by one of my favorite poets.

The Well of Grief

Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief

turning downward through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe

will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,

nor find in the darkness glimmering
the small round coins
thrown by those who wished for something else.

– David Whyte
from Where Many Rivers Meet
©2007 Many Rivers Press