Remembering John

 Remembering John

My twin died 42 years ago today. John and I were two months short of turning 27. 

My brother had lost hope of ever finding love. On Friday, January 27th, 1978, he checked into a motel not many miles from where he lived outside of Detroit. He'd been spending weekends with our mother and lived the rest of the week in a halfway house for people struggling with depression. John had paid for three nights of lodging and spent that last weekend alone in his motel room consuming vodka and Valium, calling the suicide crisis line off and on, and writing increasingly incoherent poetry. He hadn't been dead long when the hotel staff found his body that Monday morning after he did not check out.

This is one of the poems that John left, which is about his experience of not being loved by our mother...

If Only

I love to be loved.

I need to be loved.

And I am angry when I am not loved.

And when I am angry, I am not loved.

If only I weren’t angry

about not being loved,

maybe I could find

the love that I need.

— John Strong

3/25/51 — 1/30/78

*****

It is the saddest thing when we humans are isolated and live our lives feeling cut off from love. This experience of hunger for love — and its many qualities of tenderness and touch, kindness and compassion, intimacy and connection, safety and trust — is tragically epidemic in our culture. Depression and despair, addictions and abuse, shame and fear, anger and violence, and so much more is incredibly common. So many of us, as I did for many years, lock the truth of our grief away so deeply in our hearts that the many layers of sorrow and loss remain unknown to others and even to ourselves. And we cannot truly befriend ourselves as long as there is no safe container to hold us as we engage in opening to what it is that we carry in our hearts and souls.

When my brother died, I did not cry for three days. And then it was only when I was back in Michigan with my closest friend, who held me. After I wept deeply for half an hour, I stuffed everything back away for the next five years. It took that long before I sought support and began the long journey back into my body and my heart.

John never found his way through and out.

But I have. And everything that I embody today — the depths of my ever growing capacity for compassion, tenderness, kindness, and love — is not just for me, my children, my loved ones, and all beings and the planet I cherish, but also for John. I carry John in my heart. 

And this ancestral pain which had been carried generation after generation after generation has finally found a container in me to be held, healed, and transformed. And now the trajectory for myself and my children and all the generations to come has radically shifted. Even our mother, who for nearly her entire life had been unable to love, has experienced a partial awakening beginning when she was 87. 

THIS IS THE POWER OF LOVE.

*****

Just today in my therapy session I was reflecting on life before, on my brother, and all that I experienced and didn't know back then. And I just held my younger self and my brother and our parents with so much tenderness, compassion, and love. We were all starved for love back then.

But no more. No more.

And I smile as I imagine my brother smiling at all the wondrous and amazing transformations that have happened since those days decades ago when I last saw John on the psychiatric ward of Cottage Hospital in Grosse Pointe and he told me, "I know I need to get away from Mom, and I know I can't." And I knew, those eight months before his death, that I would return to Oregon and that I would never see my brother again.

Sometimes the things that are our worst nightmares, with deep love and tender and wise support, end up becoming the portals through which our hearts are broken open and everything, absolutely everything changes. I never would have known this 42 years ago right now when I first learned that John was dead. It just felt like I was dying.

*****

Over the years, there has indeed been a death for me, but a very different one than the one for my brother. I've been learning how to recognize and understand and gradually let go of the obstacles which have been blocking my heart's capacity to know love. The old harmful belief systems, the ocean of unwept tears, the shame and secrecy, the image management and pretense, the relentless judging of me or you, the bone deep rage and resentments, the addictions and plethora of other distractions that led me away from my heart and yours — all this and more has been dying away over the past 37 years of my gradual awakening.

And it is so true that every time we allow our hearts to break open, more space is cleared for love. It's when our hearts get blocked — with ungrieved losses and betrayals, buried trauma and abuse, denied fears and shame, addictions and distractions of all sorts, a relentless inner critic and endless projections, unknown generational carried pain, and more — that we can get dangerously stuck. And the longer we're stuck, the greater the risks that we will live without ever truly knowing love.

And this is so sad, so sad. Because love is what we are. At least this has certainly been what I have learned and experienced. 

*****

Today I'm not only able to remember my brother's suffering, but also his moments where he felt alive and free. Sailing on his first little red sailboat on Orchard Lake in Michigan were among the happy times for John. And me.

 

And today I carry my twin with me. John will always be part of who I am. And his life and death will always be something which has pushed me to do the heart-work he wasn't able to do when he was alive, and to do it for both of us.

This amazing journey of healing and awakening has also brought me to this place where I am committed to living my life, as best as I can, with the commitment to Do No Harm. And this path has guided me to the soulful conscious engagement of working to alleviate suffering within myself, our family, our community, our world. Today I get to do all this and more. 

Miracles and Grace truly happen.

I have learned so much from my brother's life and death on this heart path I've been profoundly blessed with traveling. I have learned that even in our greatest sorrows, there is some gift waiting to be claimed. This comes with opening to the spiritual process of transforming pain and suffering into something radically different. And with this has come the greatest teaching — to never underestimate the power of love. 

Love is who we are.

*****

A Prayer

 

May we be at peace.

May our hearts remain open.

May we know the beauty of our own true nature.

May we be healed. 

❤❤❤

With heartfelt blessings to us all,

Molly

 

Francis Weller: The Secret To Being Fully Alive

Opening our hearts to grief and gratitude is a spiritual practice that I have found to be an extraordinary gift. It is not easy to be human and to live with our eyes and hearts open. Among my ongoing prayers is that we humans may increasingly find the support, courage, commitment, and wisdom we need to grow into the wholeness of who we are and our great capacity for love, kindness, and generosity. Our world will be healed and transformed as we heal and transform ourselves. With heartfelt blessings to all... ❤ Molly

Grief Keeps the Heart Flexible, Fluid, 

and Open to Others 

The work of the mature human being is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other, and to be stretched large by these two things.
 
Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life-force.... It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness. Grief is alive, wild, untamed and cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive and still. We move in jangled, unsettled, and riotous ways when grief takes hold of us. It is truly an emotion that rises from the soul.

Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.

I am not suggesting that we live a life preoccupied with sorrow. I am saying that our refusal to welcome the sorrows that come to us, our inability to move through these experiences with true presence and conscious awareness, condemns us to a life shadowed by grief. Welcoming everything that comes to us is the challenge. This is the secret to being fully alive.

When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and re-arises in us as symptoms. So many of us are depressed, anxious, and lonely. We struggle with addictions and find ourselves moving at a breathless pace, trying to keep up with the machinery of culture.

Herein begins the slow, insidious process of carving up the self to fit into the world of adults. We become convinced that our joy, sadness, needs, sensuality, and so forth are the cause of our unacceptability, and we are more than willing to cleave off portions of our psychic life for the sake of inclusion, even if it is provisional. We become convinced, on some basic level, that these pieces of who we are, are not good enough—that they are, in fact, shameful—and we banish them to the farther shore of our awareness in hopes of never hearing from them again. They become our outcast brothers and sisters.

Shame ruptures our connection with life and with our soul. It is, indeed, a sickness of the soul. When feelings of shame arise, we pull back from the world, avoiding contact that could cause or risk exposure. The last thing we want in times of excruciating self-consciousness is to be seen. We find ourselves avoiding the gaze of others, we become silent and withdrawn, all in hopes of slipping under the radar. I remember sharing with the audience that the goal of the shame-bound person was to get from birth to death without ever being an echo on the radar of life. My tombstone was going to read “Safe at Last.” Gershon Kaufman, one of the most important writers on shame, has said that shame leaves us feeling “unspeakably and irreparably defective.” It is unspeakable because we do not want anyone to know how we feel inside. We fear it is irreparable because we think it is not something we have done wrong—it is simply who we are. We cannot remove the stain from our core. We search and search for the defect, hoping that that, once found, it can be exorcised like some grotesque demon. But it lingers, remaining there our entire lives, anxious that it will be seen and simultaneously longing to be seen and touched with compassion. 

At the core of this grief is our longing to belong. This longing is wired into us by necessity. It assures our safety and our ability to extend out into the world with confidence. This feeling of belonging is rooted in the village and, at times, in extended families. It was in this setting that we emerged as a species. It was in this setting that what we require to become fully human was established. Jean Liedloff writes, "the design of each individual was a reflection of the experience it expected to encounter." We are designed to receive touch, to hear sounds and words entering our ears that soothe and comfort. We are shaped for closeness and for intimacy with our surroundings. Our profound feelings of lacking something are not reflection of personal failure, but the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect. Liedloff concludes, "what was once man's confident expectations for suitable treatment and surroundings is now so frustrated that a person often thinks himself lucky if he is not actually homeless or in pain. But even as he is saying, 'I am all right,' there is in him a sense of loss, a longing for something he cannot name, a feeling of being off-center, of missing something. Asked point blank, he will seldom deny it.”

In the absence of this depth of community, the safe container is difficult to find. By default, we become the container ourselves, and when this happens, we cannot drop into the well of grief in which we can fully let go of the sorrows we carry. We recycle our grief, moving into it and then pulling it back into our bodies unreleased. Frequently in my practice patients tell me that they often cry in private. I ask them whether, at some point in this process, they ever allow their grief to be witnessed and shared with others. There is usually a quick retort of “No, I couldn’t do that. I don’t want to be a burden to anyone else.” When I push it a little further and ask them how it would feel if a friend came to them with his or her sorrows and pain, they respond that they would feel honored to sit with their friend and offer support. This disconnection between what we would offer others and what we feel we can ask for is extreme. We need to recover our right to ask for help in grief, otherwise it will continue to recycle perpetually. Grief has never been private; it has always been communal. Subconsciously, we are awaiting the presence of others, before we can feel safe enough to drop to our knees on the holy ground of sorrow.

It is important to look into the shadows of our lives and to see who lives there, tattered, withered, hungry, and alone. Bringing these parts of soul back to the table is a central element of our work. Ending their exile means releasing the contempt we hold for these parts of who we are. It means welcoming the full range of our being and restoring our wholeness. Until then, we will continue to carry a feeling of worthlessness and brokenness. 

To die before we die means that we must become radically honest with ourselves. We must shed the skins that do not foster aliveness. One man, while participating in the first weekend of the Men of Spirit initiation, suddenly realized how conscripted and narrow his life was. At that moment, he jumped out of his chair and flung it across the room in disgust. He clearly saw that he had unwittingly made an agreement to live small and to consistently tell himself what a good life he was living. This realization broke him open to the great well of grief he was carrying in his heart from all the times he had abandoned himself for the sake of fitting in and getting approval. 

The collective denial of our underlying emotional life has contributed to an array of troubles and symptoms. What is often diagnosed as depression is actually low-grade chronic grief locked into the psyche, complete with the ancillary ingredients of shame and despair. Martín Prechtel calls this the gray-sky culture, one in which we do not choose to live an exuberant life, filled with the wonder of the world and the beauty of day-to-day existence, one in which we do not welcome the sorrow that comes with the inevitable losses that accompany us on our walk here. This refusal to enter the depths has shrunk the visible horizon for many of us, dimmed our participation in the joys and sorrows of the world. We suffer from what I call premature death—we turn away from life and are ambivalent toward the world, neither in it nor out of it, lacking a commitment to fully say yes to life.

David Whyte offers a beautiful poem on the ways we are invited to welcome back the outcast parts of our being. This stanza from “Coleman’s Bed” is filled with self-compassion. Be taught now, among the trees and rocks, how the discarded is woven into shelter, learn the way things hidden and unspoken slowly proclaim their voice in the world. Find that inward symmetry to all outward appearances, apprentice yourself to yourself, begin to welcome back all you sent away, be a new annunciation, make yourself a door through which to be hospitable, even to the stranger in you. 

*****

I’m not sure how or when I began my apprenticeship with sorrow. I do know that it was my gateway back into the breathing and animate world. It was through the dark waters of grief that I came to touch my unlived life. . . . There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive. Through this, I have come to have a lasting faith in grief.

Still, the ground beneath me felt unsteady, as though at any moment it could shake and easily take me to the ground. I stumbled upon what Zen priest and author Susan Murphy calls the koan of the earth. How do we answer the riddle of our times? How do we sift through the shards of our broken culture, our fragmented psyches, and come once again into “our original undividedness and the freedom it bestows, right there in the suffocating fear itself.” This was the question at the heart of my despair, ripening in the vessel of my sorrow. What felt different this time was the interior experience of the grief and despair. It was not centered on personal losses—my history, wounds, losses, failures, and disappointments. It was arising from the greater pulse of the earth itself, winding its way through sidewalks and grocery lists, traffic snarls and utility bills. Somewhere in all the demands of modern life, the intimate link between earth and psyche was being reestablished or, more accurately, remembered. The conditioned fantasy of the segregated self was being dismantled, and I was being reunited, through the unexpected grace of fear, despair, and grief, with the body of the earth.

Imagine the feeling of relief that would flood our whole being if we knew that when we were in the grip of sorrow or illness, our village would respond to our need. This would not be out of pity, but out of a realization that every one of us will take our turn at being ill, and we will need one another. The indigenous thought is when one of us is ill, all of us are ill. Taking this thought a little further, we see that healing is a matter, in great part, of having our, connections to the community and the cosmos restored. This truth has been acknowledged in many studies. Our immune response is strengthened when we feel our connection with community. By regularly renewing the bonds of belonging, we support our ability to remain healthy and whole.

Psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan uses the term intervulnerability to describe the need for this mutually held space. When asked about this idea in an interview, she replied, When I say we are “intervulnerable,” I mean we suffer together, whether consciously or unconsciously. Albert Einstein called the idea of a separate self an “optical delusion of consciousness.” Martin Luther King Jr. said that we are all connected in an “inescapable web of mutuality.” There’s no way out, though we try to escape by armoring ourselves against pain and in the process diminishing our lives and our consciousness. But in our intervulnerability is our salvation, because awareness of the mutuality of suffering impels us to search for ways to heal the whole, rather than encase ourselves in a bubble of denial and impossible individualism. At this point in history, it seems that we will either destroy ourselves or find a way to build a sustainable life together.  

To alter the amnesia of our times, we must be willing to look into the face of the loss and keep it nearby. In this way, we may be able to honor the losses and live our lives as carriers of their unfinished stories. This is an ancient thought - how we tend the dead is as important as how we tend the living. 

Silence is a practice of emptying, of letting go. It is a process of hollowing ourselves out so we can open to what is emerging. Our work is to make ourselves receptive. The organ of receiving is the human heart, and it is here that we feel the deep ache of loss, the bittersweet reminders of all that we loved, the piercing artifacts of betrayal, and the sheer truth of impermanence. Love and loss, as we know so well, forever entwined. 

My grief says that I dared to love, that I allowed another to enter the very core of my being and find a home in my heart. Grief is akin to praise; it is how the soul recounts the depth to which someone has touched our lives. To love is to accept the rites of grief.

Coming to trust the darkness takes time and often involves many visits to this land. Our arrival here is rarely a chosen thing. We are thrown into the darkness or are carried there on the back of a blue mood. What we make of this visit is up to us. Recalling that the darkness is also a dwelling place of the sacred allows us to find value in the descent. In this place of lightlessness, we develop a second sight. 

It is challenging to honor the descent in a culture that primary values the ascent. We like things rising—stock markets, the GDP, profit margins. We get anxious when things go down. Even within psychology, there is a premise that is biased toward improvement, always getting better, rising above our troubles. We hold dear concepts like progress and integration. These are fine in and of themselves, but it is not the way psyche works. Psyche, we must remember, was shaped by and is rooted in the foundations of nature. As such, psyche also experiences times of decay and death, of stopping, regression, and being still. Much happens in these times that deepen the soul. When all we are shown is the imagery of ascent, we are left to interpret the times of descent as pathological; we feel that we are somehow failing. As poet and author Robert Bly wryly noted, “How can we get a look at the cinders side of things when the society is determined to create a world of shopping malls and entertainment complexes in which we are made to believe that there is no death, disfigurement, illness, insanity, lethargy, or misery? Disneyland means ‘no ashes.’ ”

Another facet of our aversion to grief is fear. Hundreds of times in my practice as a therapist, I have heard how fearful people are of dropping into the well of grief. The most frequent comment is “If I go there, I’ll never return.” What I found myself saying one day was rather surprising. “If you don’t go there, you’ll never return.” It seems that our wholesale abandonment of this core emotion has cost us dearly, pressed us toward the surface of our lives. We live superficial lives and feel the gnawing ache of something missing. If we are to return to the richly textured life of soul and to participation with the soul of the world, we must pass through the intense region of grief and sorrow. 

Deep in our bones lies an intuition that we arrive here carrying a bundle of gifts to offer to the community. Over time, these gifts are meant to be seen, developed, and called into the village at times of need. To feel valued for the gifts with which we are born affirms our worth and dignity. In a sense, it is a form of spiritual employment - simply being who we are confirms our place in the village. That is one of the fundamental understanding about gifts: we can only offer them by being ourselves fully. Gifts are a consequence of authenticity; when we are being true to our natures, the gifts can emerge. 

Teacher and grief specialist Stephen Jenkinson says, “Hold your sorrow to a degree of eloquence, whereby everyone around you will be fed by your efforts to do so.” Becoming skillful at digesting our grief makes us a source of reassurance and stability for the wider community. 

This beautiful poem by Rashani Réa, “The Unbroken,” offers us a glimpse into what we may find nestled inside our deepest sorrows:
There is a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken, a shatteredness out of which blooms the unshatterable. There is a sorrow beyond all grief which leads to joy and a fragility out of whose depths emerges strength. There is a hollow space too vast for words through which we pass with each loss, out of whose darkness we are sanctified into being. There is a cry deeper than all sound whose serrated edges cut the heart as we break open to the place inside which is unbreakable and whole, while learning to sing. 

My daily practice is to wake and immediately bring my attention to this thought: “I am one day closer to my death. So how will I live this day? How will I greet those I meet? How will I bring soul to each moment? I do not want to waste this day.

― Francis Weller

Quotes taken from The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of 

Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief 

https://www.francisweller.net/