On Grief
Deep grief is one of the universal human experiences that no one can evade. Call it depression or even winter of the soul. It’s a pain of the soul that endures over some time.
And yet, as painful as it is, grief allows the soul to purge and reanimate, and bring forth new life and possibilities.
Winter of the Soul
“Sven, you’ve got your Icelandic sweater on today,” the nonagenarian lawyer quipped, stopping at my table before getting his coffee and newspaper.
“Frank, I hate the cold, sometimes,” I responded. “There’s a reason I don’t live in Minnesota, anymore.”
He smiled and walked.
I can recall being in my twenties, during seminary years, and the first time hearing the phrase, ‘winter of the soul.’ It hit me, right away, as both fully explanatory and so deep. Just the phrase, alone, feels the heaviness it bespeaks.
One of the universal human experiences that no one can evade is the experience of deep grief. Call it depression, if you like. The pain of the soul that endures over a period of time is one of the grand inevitabilities of life.
Perhaps it slams into you when that loved one dies or seeps in when the work you’ve been at for so long no longer inspires. Perhaps it comes from a lifetime of loneliness or the departure of a lover. Maybe the loss of one’s people or one’s geography of choice ushers in the winter of the soul. Or possibly, surreptitiously, the slow roast from the inside that spreads through one’s bones from the debilitating beliefs one was taught as a child.
Winter is here.
And, it pulls the soul down. It pulls us down into the depths, down into the solitude we’ve struggled so hard to run from, overpowering our most titan efforts to stay busy or run.
Grieving
Winter of the soul is grieving. It means to ‘feel loss.’ Something is gone and the thought of it causes an affective, or feeling response. That feeling becomes a winter of the soul as it takes over one’s life, no longer possibly avoided or overpowered. It just takes over. Despite moments or hours of respite or distraction, the soul has been swallowed into grieving the loss, simultaneously placing a weight on one’s chest and searing the insides. A malaise sets in and darkens.
I believe this is good. The soul calling us down is never a curse. It’s very easy to treat it as if it is a curse because it doesn’t feel good. But it is like the most brutal workout in the gym – the conduit to your highest and most powerful self, to that inner motor finally slowing down.
Grief Allows the Soul to Release & Reanimate
This is why, as a side note, that I as a former pastor was never a fan of the move that got made culturally in turning funerals into ‘celebrations of life.’ I’m all for celebrating life. But, what got lost was the ritualized opportunity and expectation to grieve – the safe space, so to speak, to do what the soul naturally desires to do when loss is incurred. Jump right to the celebration part and the soul’s need to purge pain gets skipped and, resultingly, embedded inside rather than disgorged. And so, rather than having any shot at healing, those touched by the death now bear another unhealed wound, and quite unnecessarily so.
The soul needs to go down. The winter needs to come. It needs to come frequently in life, just as the earth’s gravitation spins and tilts us to winter every year. Just as the soil needs to lay fallow, so also the soul. For winter is a time of purging the toxins and replenishing the dirt with new life vitamins. Far from a curse, grieving is the soul’s blessed opportunity to release and reanimate.
New life springs from the death, the loss, the grieving, the purging.
Creation is invariably preceded by destruction
One of the ugliest, most brutal truths of life is that things must die for things to live.
This includes friendships, places, health, relationships, families, careers, paths, purposes, and powers. The passing of each one is the vehicle offering transport to the next iteration, state, place, power, plan, or plane.
The grief is the loss of that old form that we so desperately do not wish to let go of. We cling to the mast of the very old wooden schooner ship, even as it slowly slips into the ocean from the hole in the hull, and as the remainder burns from the fire that started on it, and the whole thing reeks because it was carrying manure. We so cling to old forms because they are known, even if they have greatly decayed.
The winter of the soul is the inner realization that the mast and the surety of the ship – whatever that ship represented – are slipping from our grasp, no matter how tightly we cling and hope it will float. The gods of life and death beckon us to let go so that we can be led to higher ground. But because we so fear the depths of the ocean, we do not jump into the dark waters. But the dark waters are our fate, as the ship slowly sinks. For they are the medium that holds us as we move to the next phase of life.
We only drown from the icy waters when we allow the winter to take over without ever learning how to tread water, not to mention swim.
>> See Healing From Depression And Avoiding Suicide
Words are the Way for flushing grief
It is when we finally accept or at the very least engage the winter that we give the loss and pain an egress point. We have to be willing to go into the very pain we fear, allow ourselves to feel it and even cultivate it, so that we may also flush ever more and more of it.
This flushing comes not just through the sweet physical release of exercise, yoga, breathwork, or even rest. The flush of the deepest emotion demands words – spoken, sung, or written. There is an unnamed and immense catharsis that comes from the ongoing assigning of words to experiences, particularly when it comes to grief. Hence, counseling, therapy, journaling, songwriting, singing/listening to lyrics, letter-writing, and talking repeatedly with trusted loved ones all have the power to bring great release and relief. It is our natural instinct to talk about our problems as if we innately know that doing so just plain feeeels good.
>> See The Soul Disciplines and Keeping Your Spirit on Track
But, to deliberately institute it as a technique for healing, as a means for swimming, is to give direction to the winter of the soul, rather than suffering it as a seemingly insufferable, overwhelming, and unending fate. It is to engage in a belief system – i.e., that there is hope the pain will pass if I do this work, and if I face this scary beast of pain that dwells inside. When you have hope something will work in bringing a much better feeling, you engage the path and, perhaps, do so diligently.
To take command of the grieving process, rather than simply be buffeted and pounded by it, is to believe in new life after it. Otherwise, why even bother?
Thus, as an instrument of transformation, your transformation, the winter of the soul must be welcomed and engaged with these tools for swimming. Must. It’s not optional, not if you desire to live again.
So, what are you grieving?
Is it
That medical diagnosis
Failure
Death of a parent or sibling
Departure of a lover
The passing of a beloved pet
Children who’ve left the nest
Accelerated physical decay as you know you are slipping toward death
The slow fade of someone you care about
Emotional memories of past happiness, past loves, past places
Immense career frustration
The onset of overpowering childhood memories
Death of a dream
Financial loss or ruin
Death of a child
The state of the world/society
The mere passing of time, itself
What is your affliction pulling you down into the winter of the soul?
May I encourage you to hold on to let go?
Welcome the yuck feelings from deep inside, even as you ongoingly offer them an egress point through your use of words in writing, therapy, and listening to music/lyrics that speak to your soul.
Repeatedly go back into the feelings and name them.
Write about them. Cry them. Rage them. Love them. Feeeel it all and give it all words.
Let the soul grieve. Let it do what it is calling you to do. Do not fight the winter. For, the winter will come, whether you welcome it or kick and scream against it. And the degree to which the winter of the soul serves you is determined by the degree to which you allow it all to come up and facilitate its exit.
Up Jumps Springtime
And winter ends. When engaged and facilitated, for as long as winter demands, the winter does give birth to something new. The crocuses do come in replenished soil. New birth, new life, new nutrients, new growth, new forms, new joys, new peace…new…arrives.
If not engaged and facilitated, the winter becomes the long winter into the death of the soul. For “he not busy being born is, in fact, busy dying,” as Bob Dylan warned.
It’s a brutal, ugly experience to engage the grief, the winter, and to do so daily or weekly, actively and deliberately. It is to believe in the hope of spring of the soul. It is to believe that the winter of the soul with all its concomitant neuroses and ticks ends and also that the winter brings gems of wisdom, cascading waterfalls of new insight, as well as powers that can only come from the solitude of the dark forest in deep winter.
Do you believe in springtime?
Or do you believe that winter is a permanent season of the soul?
For, it’s ultimately not about actions but belief systems. What do you believe, even if only because the alternative is too scary?
When do you finally willfully and deliberately engage the grief that you’ve either been running from or been fully consumed by but failing to give an egress point? How bad does it have to get before you go into the very thing you fear most – the dark waters of the soul?
Wanna heal? Do the work.
-- Sven Erlandson, MDiv, Is The Author Of Seven Books, Including 'Badass Jesus: The Serious Athlete And A Life Of Noble Purpose' And 'I Steal Wives: A Serial Adulterer Reveals The REAL Reasons More And More Happily Married Women Are Cheating.' He Has Been Called The Father Of The Spiritual But Not Religious Movement After His Seminal Book 'Spiritual But Not Religious' Came Out 15 Years Ago, Long Before The Phrase Became Part Of Common Parlance And Even Longer Before The Movement Hit Critical Mass. He Is Former Military, Clergy, And NCAA Head Coach For Strength And Conditioning; And Has A Global Counseling/Consulting Practice with offices In NYC, NJ, And Stamford, CT: BadassCounseling.com
