Learning to stay

To let the soft animal of your body love what it loves is also to let it grieve what it grieves. Not to hurry it. Not to reason with it. Only to be with it.

There is so much we fear to feel. Yet sooner or later, we find ourselves at the threshold of places we would rather not enter.

We are remarkably inventive in the ways we avoid pain.

We fix.

We numb.

We refuse.

We keep pushing.

We reach for certainty.

Anything to avoid the descent into presence.

Perhaps grief asks only to be felt, inviting us to become spacious enough to accompany it. If we give permission, grief can move through us, altering us in quiet ways, making us more tender and ultimately reshaping the landscape of who we are.

Our first instinct is rarely to remain present. Something in us rushes to rescue, soothe, distract, or simply deny what is here. In my experience, it is often our resistance to grief, rather than grief itself, that creates a deeper suffering.

So often, parts of us step forward to protect us from what hurts. One fears we will be overwhelmed. Another believes nothing can help. One braces against the return of old ways of surviving. Another carries unbearable rage. Some keep us functioning because they fear everything will collapse if they stop.

Each is trying, in its own way, to protect us from what it believes we cannot survive. There are moments when their efforts are exactly what is needed. At other times, they lead us away from the simple, often difficult, act of remaining present. Not because they are wrong, but because, to these younger parts of us, pain itself can feel unbearable. And yet, even the part convinced it cannot bear what hurts has, somehow, been bearing it all along.

Beneath all our fear and all our efforts to protect ourselves, there remains an unwavering presence that can welcome all our grief and fears. A place where no feeling is too much. A place from which the essential nature of grief can begin to reveal itself.

It is from this place that we begin to meet life differently.

Not away from our protectors, nor straight into grief, but swaying between the two.

The protectors rise.

We attune.

They begin to soften.

We find ourselves in the company of grief.

This is the rhythm of healing.

Again and again we make this journey, learning where our presence is needed and where our efforts are simply protecting us from feeling. We keep moving between our protective parts and grief. Until, little by little, through calm, courage, curiosity, creativity, clarity and compassion, we learn how to meet what is here.

Not by forcing our protectors, but by allowing them to discover that there is something within us capable of staying present with everything they fear. This is how trust is slowly built. They no longer have to carry what once felt impossible alone. And in that trust, they begin to soften, making space for a deeper wisdom to emerge, and with it, the next right step.

This is a process that moves in its own timeline and cannot be hurried.

The path to this place is not found all at once, but slowly…

Through small experiments of trust.

Through the steady companionship of the living world.

Through the loving presence of another.

Through the wisdom of the body.

Through the breath that gradually finds a little more room.

Through dreams.

Through silence.

Through stories.

Through the meanings that emerge slowly.

Little by little, our own presence becomes somewhere we can rest.

Not because grief disappears, but because we come to discover that we are larger than we ever imagined.

To welcome grief, allowing it to be felt until a clearing emerges, is to enter into an intimacy with our vulnerability and the undercurrent of our lives. It is to trust that even grief belongs, and that somewhere beneath all our pain, there is already something within us spacious enough to be with it all.