Even my life. I transformed the yuck of the past into teaching/helping others to get through the same yuck with the tools I was taught plus a great degree program. Trauma does change you forever. Great question to reflect. What needs to be done to get from the yuck to the growth?

I actually got an e-mail invitation to a “millionaires club” this morning that suggested I should be “ecstatic” and “transformational” all the time now that the economy is in trouble and if I send a check for……..they will show me how. OMG! I am blogging and writing about how to think about and have more money and your blog articulates the sound emotional core that I hope I can write about in terms of money, where there is so much hooey and BS being spread around.

As I take in the piece, I am thinking about how important it is to remain open, to mourn without fear of falling apart, to eschew self-protection, because it really doesn’t protect.

I think that is implicit in what you are saying….letting the real way people have loved us be present without fear that missing them will cause us to fall apart.

My favorite book after my mother died was “A Grief Observed” by CS Lewis. He condensed thousands of pages of anguished journaling into a slim book of 62 pages that recounted how his late-in-life 3-year marriage to a close friend dying of cancer completely upended his intellectualization of life and faith. I believe he said that that love was greater than all the writing he had devoted his life to, that all the writing of religious faith he so passionately did was nothing compared to loving an individual person…and yet at the end of the book he wrote of his acceptance that she was no longer here, that she had other work to do now. He was able to let go of her as she was and let something new be there in his heart.

Hewing to that openness is quite a project. Your post makes me realize that I have been slacking off. What a wonderful way you have of expressing yourself, both visually and with words.

Also a glimmer of hope that life will go on after a tragedy. Although it will be different, ultimately it may eventually be better in some ways.

Barbara is a New York Times Best Selling Author and in her book “I Could Do Anything if I Only Knew What it Was” she has an exercise she calls “Jet Clarity” to help you lock on to that resistance. Brilliant stuff.

You can find the book in any bookstore and I highly recommend it.
Rachel

This is a good place for me to say that just because you have “chaptered forward” doesn’t mean that experiences of past chapters are not with and of you. What you “make of” what’s happened in your past is what creates you as you chapter forward.

We’ll talk more about this in upcoming posts.
Rachel

My father died unexpectedly when I was 35.
His death was a devastating shock. A friend of my husband’s, someone I really didn’t know very well, sent me a card with a very simple, yet profound statement. He said, as hard as it is, the only way over the grief was through it.

It is so strange, but I think very much human nature, to think that if we ignore the grief we can just get over it and move on. Or that if we give into it, we won’t be able to handle it and it will shatter us. And yet, the only way to move on, is to really go in to it.

Even knowing this, I have so much resistence to giving in to the feelings. And, I am always surprised that when I do follow it to the depths of the well, there is an unexpected gift, that is the sweetness that comes in the surrender to life.
Patricia