What Is Grief?

As I was getting ready for a QHHT session by communicating with my guides, I got an interesting, if ambiguous, message. One of the questions I ask first during my preparation is this: "Why is this client coming for a session?" The "why" of this question is not so much why the clients think they are coming, but rather what the higher purpose is from Spirit's point of view.

In this case, my guides said, "She needs a healing of the heart." When I asked what kind of healing, they answered, "A loss." I asked for further clarification, but all I got, no matter how many ways I phrased the question, was one word: "Child."

So many possibilities ran through my head. She lost a child. Or maybe she had a miscarriage, perhaps an abortion. Maybe she is unable to conceive a child? Or maybe she was traumatized as a child herself and the "inner" child needed a healing. Maybe she knew a child who had died, or whom she was unable to save? So many possibilities.

When she arrived for her session and we began to talk, another world of possibilities opened up. The first thing she said was, "I am so happy you offered me this appointment on this particular day because today was my mother's birthday; I lost her almost a year ago." The client saw this synchronicity as a sign her mother was watching over her, and also that the session was "meant to be." As for me, I immediately began to focus on the aspect of the "child" in my client who might be grieving the loss of her mother. Perhaps my guides were asking me to focus of this aspect of her healing?

The session continued, and as I got to know my client more and more, I realized that she was grieving from all the aspects I had seen as possibilities, and more: She had been repeatedly traumatized as a child by words and hands; she was raped at 11 years old and ended the pregnancy in a hospital; she was unable to conceive a child after this; she was grieving for the children she would never give birth to, she was greving as a daughter for her mother.

As I considered all aspects of the traumas she had undergone, I realized that it did not really matter what the particular "story" was for why she was grieving. All the reasons we have for grieving are, at some level, just stories that separate us from Source, or God. Whether we are grieving for something really HUGE, such as the loss of a child or a parent, a sibling, or whether we are simply grumpy about the weather, or a birthday present we did not receive, every single thing we get upset about or go into grief over, is not about what we think it is, is not about the thing itself. We actually have no idea whatsoever if the event which occurred is "good" or "bad." There is a line from "A Course in Miracles," which I did not fully internalize until now: "I am never upset for the reason I think." We think we are upset about certain, specific events, but what we are really upset about is the separation from Source/God. The bigger the story we have attached to the event, the deeper our grief at having allowed this circumstance to see ourselves as separate from Source/God.

This is true not only for feeling grief, but also for feeling anger, jealousy, hatred, injustice: any negative emotion or thought which diverts our attention away from our deepest connection to love and source. Illness and pain are often the most challenging of these "negatives." Our lives are made up of departures and returns, departures and returns...the remembering to return back to source as our home and haven is a daily challenge.

We humans fail to understand that the more passionately we show our caring about what we perceive as the way things should be, we ironically cut ourselves OFF from the very thing we believe we are running towards, alignment with Source. One of my favorite ideas from Paul Selig's "I Am The Word" is that "...God does not take, God gives." So even when we think Source/God is taking something away from us, it is, in fact, a gift of some kind. We simply do not know why at the time. Maybe we never will.

Some griefs are larger than others. Some take but a moment of awareness to navigate. Others, a lifetime. Sometimes it takes our physical deaths to make our way back. But one way or the other, every journey is a journey home to God; every stream is a passage back to the all-emcompassing ocean of perfect love that is Source. One tear or a million tears, we ride our stories home in a craft of our own design: one we build with each and every moment as we turn away from, or turn towards, home.