The Gift of Grief
Surrendering to your sorrow has the power to heal the deepest of wounds.
~sobonfu somé
Holistic medicine provides a nature-based model for assessing the health not only of individuals but of whole systems. Its theories are metaphorical and therefore apply to the parts as well as to the whole. This means the whole (nature) affects the parts (human beings) and vice versa. Consequently, the integrity of the natural world depends on our collective sanity, just as we depend on nature for our well-being and survival.
A crucial yet underappreciated aspect of wellness is being emotionally integrated, which heavily influences our beliefs, choices, and actions. Emotional integration builds integrity through the transformational process of psychological death and rebirth (“dying through our pain”), modeled by the cycle of the seasons. We can therefore learn about renewing our inner nature from the cycles of outer nature. This is the cycle of regeneration we explored in Chapter 3 through the lens of Chinese medicine’s foundational Five Phase poetics. Each year, the cycle of death and rebirth repeats itself, reminding us of our promise for transforming pain and difficulty into joy and beauty. Autumn’s letting go (grief) into winter’s dissolution (death) is followed by spring’s resurgence (renewal) unto summer’s ease and flourishing (joy).
The more we model our psyches after nature, the more regenerative and able we are to fertilize the world with goodness, and this benefits us in return. By enacting this reciprocity of mutual care, we evolve ourselves while stewarding the climate. That we can injure the world so profoundly speaks to how comprehensively we can heal it. Ancient wisdom becomes common sense when we more fully become part of nature, so we can care for it rather than kill it.
Tending Wilderness
Grief work is a process of transformational emotional healing through which we profoundly engage with the cycle of the seasons from decline and death unto rebirth and flourishing. To remind, we have defined grief as how we feel the pain of current or future loss, while grief work is how we feel unprocessed historical pain from loss—especially our core love wounds from childhood.
Grief work is a bona fide initiation into greater integrity, as it uncovers our body-centered locus for courage and creativity, inspiration and care. These inner jewels enrich us and lead us to wiser outward action. They enable us to thrive in ways that revere the natural world because our newly-renewed hearts can care more about nature’s many gifts and the ways we can desist from injuring them. Refraining from harmful acts and doing less can be as sustainable as engaging positive acts and doing more. As we heal the personal hurts that have damaged the innocent “wilderness” of our hearts, we become more empathically equipped to address the wounds we inflict on the wilderness outside us—to the vulnerable forests and oceans, mountains and rivers. Just as our tender hearts have been at the behest of violent others who didn’t own and heal their pain, the voiceless and essentially defenseless natural world is vulnerable to the projections and displacements of our current unreckoned pain.
Our emotions are the heart of our inner wilderness. We must learn to live with our emotions, and to appropriately manage them while preserving the wisdom inherent to their wildness (Resource 3: Weber, “Wild Inside”). This is best achieved through what we could call “inner permaculture” 89 principles, as we work with our inner nature and refrain from dominating it as we have the wilderness outside us, which has led to the latter’s demise. Rewilding our inner lives—by way of clearing our pain and reviving our finer jewels of being human—fosters a fertile outer wilderness.
Inner activism fulfills its mission when emotional healing places us in a sustainable relationship with the world. This is to “become medicine for our times” by becoming the healing change we want to see in reality. Radical inner work, then, frees us to transform our relationship with the natural world we depend upon to thrive. Clearing enough of our emotional pain sets in motion the cycle of death and rebirth so that renewal can happen both inwardly and outwardly.
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Any body-centered, emotional healing worth its salt puts us on a path of paradox: working through dark and light. Such integration yields surprises and unbidden “miracles” that can’t be foreseen or linearly achieved. The magic we secretly seek is not in other dimensions, false hope, or the latest addiction craze; it’s buried within the pain of our very own hearts. The self-compassion to unearth and release it births new eyes to see, new breadth to feel, and new ways to connect.
A “selfish” healing focus on ourselves, when it leads to greater vitality, wisdom, and right action, can generously be passed on to others with a depth and breadth not previously possible. I describe this process as “selfishness done right becomes selflessness.” While those who have not done much inner work can reduce their carbon footprint, others who have embodied their grief and holy outrage seem more passionate about making sacrifices to not fly or drive, and generally consume less. I find this to be true for myself and among fellow climate activists whose hearts have been genuinely broken open by climate crisis.
The results of inner work are not only quantitative but qualitative. The deeper we go to heal, the more integrity we build and the more deeply we are able to touch others and infuse our actions with passion and meaning. While we may not always be able to measure these results, their impact is felt and substantively affects the world. When we don’t do this inner work, we remain too numb and closed, self-absorbed, and compromised by our hidden love wounds. The paradox of metaphorically dying to live more fully undoes the cruel irony of perpetuating death as a result of denying our own and the world’s pain. This inner-outer, Yin-Yang cooperation initiates us into treating the world more compassionately via both our actions and the love we share through them.
Healing through Heartache
During my mid-twenties, I intensely worked through the pain of my core love wounds via somatic psychotherapy. I felt into the places in my body that harbored pain from not being seen and regarded by my parents (in addition to all the good they provided). These body-centered experiences included a variety of images, stories, emotions, and sensations. Sometimes these inner landscapes felt like an empty void, other times like a dense black hole, or even just a hazy discomfort. My process was to make contact, get to know, and allow these places to express the feelings they never could. They did so primarily through poetry and journaling, and released their grief-hurt through my tears for the love they lacked. During this time, I remember feeling as though I was literally pregnant—that new life was gestating in my belly. Paradoxically, I also described myself as a “walking cemetery,” as I was dying to my old self and a newly integrated me was being born.
It’s not surprising that our knee-jerk responses to emotional pain mirror our reactions to physical pain, as our brains interpret both physical and emotional pain through the same neurocircuitry. This is why Tylenol can help ease a broken heart. 90 Thus, we react to the heartache of emotional pain as though it will literally kill us. We must learn to act counterintuitively when we hurt emotionally, to be with our heartache, instead of resisting it as we do physical pain. To this end, we can:
1. Notice when we are afraid of feeling a painful emotion (“primary emotion”).
2. Not give in to the fear by retreating from the original, primary emotion.
3. Allow ourselves to experience the primary emotion.
Even if you experience a primary emotion for five seconds, this is a start to build upon. For example, say you’re feeling sadness, and you notice you’re afraid to feel it. First, as step one, you can name the emotion and say to yourself, “I am feeling sad.” For step two, you can say, “Just allow the fear to go for now, you can come back to it later if you need to.” Then, as step three, allow yourself to feel the sadness. It’s important not to force yourself to feel the sadness. Just allow yourself to encounter whatever naturally comes, even if it’s only a taste of what you sense is inside, and even if it doesn’t come at all. Mindful practice makes progress.
When we embrace emotional pain and the grief that dissolves it, we affirm a faithful yes to the hidden gifts inside our ache. Acceptance allows us to become pain’s emissaries for healing. This paradoxical path generates inner richness by revealing our finer jewels of being human, among them our compassion and empathy, our courage and sense of belonging. When we don’t do this sacred work, we often try to mimic its inner rewards with addictions and surrogate outer riches: fame, too many things, and opulence. The result is we excessively perpetuate consumerism, rapacious capitalism, and thereby, ecocide.
Perhaps you know someone who worships money and things, and who is arrogant, unfulfilled, and constantly needing more to compensate for feeling empty inside. An example of such a person might be US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, evidenced in his shortsighted, heartless, and ultimately avoidant response when asked if Greta Thunberg’s demand for reducing fossil fuel investments would threaten US economic growth. His answer: “Is she the chief economist, or who is she? I’m confused … After she goes and studies economics in college she can come back and explain that to us.” 91
• Exercise •
Transformation Affirmation
Put down this book for a moment and reflect on the last time you successfully worked through a disagreement or argument with someone. Can you viscerally feel the refreshment and deep joy, the sense of wholeness, and renewed connection that resulted from compassionately working through that challenge? Take a few deep breaths to acknowledge this realization. Then, briefly journal about this experience; even a few lines is fine.
Now imagine engaging this resolution process in relation to your own pain. Imagine how life would be if you didn’t have this pain. Journal about how it might look and feel. Then imagine that the pain is gone and you have an increased sense of comfort in your own skin: more passion, meaning, belonging, and creativity. These are just some of the benefits of grief work. Finally, take a deep breath and affirm that relief can indeed come from being with and working through the pain of your past love wounds and/or present heartache.
In his book, When the Past is Present, Jungian psychotherapist and author David Richo alludes to the finer jewels of being human as they are excavated and nourished through the unconditional presence a therapist can offer. Dr. Richo writes, “Therapy affirms how each of our feelings or attitudes, no matter how negative, can evoke compassion and lead to transformation. We then joyfully realize how every negative experience has positive, growth-fostering potential, how every liability is a resource, how every shadow trait has a kernel of value, how every disturbance or mistake can deepen our spiritual consciousness … there is an energy of light frozen in our confusion, a luminosity we can release, if only we do not give up our mining.”92 Note, we can realize similar benefit when we affirm these qualities for ourselves through self-reflection and cathartic expression.
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When our hearts break, two primary paths emerge: we shut down our feelings, or we stay open through the pain. The first path is sometimes the best we can do. But shutting or closing down—whereby we disconnect from ourselves and become numb to our feelings—without opening up again when we are able, turns us into curmudgeons, denies our creativity and our ability to love and be loved, and dulls our vitality. Shutting down in the face of heartbreak without processing our pain buries our grief, often fueling addiction, ruthless ideologies, spiritual bypassing, and unnecessary suffering—all of which drive disconnection from our triangle of resilience relationships and, eventually, climate breakdown.
The second path breaks our hearts open—sometimes what feels like as wide as the world—and delivers the rewards of renewal. We heal through this heartbreak by grieving. Reconciled grief humbles and softens us, turns pain into compassion, and dissolves our fear of being with what’s difficult. It liberates our best humanity, the sustainable humanness many of us know can save ourselves and the world. Grief excavates and polishes our souls. It tips our balance into goodness by illuminating the clusters of darkness that, unrealized, keep our love hostage to our negative shadow.
This advent of light is the blessing of regeneration, a victory through psychological death that forges new life by honoring fertile darkness. It is a hero’s journey, a dark night of the soul, similar to the proverbial transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly. But before becoming a butterfly, the caterpillar dissolves into a black goo. This primordial state represents death and total dissolution, similar to how our psyches temporarily fall apart and dissolve when we die to our pain through grief work and rebirth our more brilliant selves from the fertile darkness of our old love wounds. Such regenerative dissolution uncovers and polishes our finer jewels of being human, creating the foundation from which to create a sane world. It is a holy struggle to prevent the ignored, and thereby infertile and lethal, darkness of our shadow from swallowing up all we love.
Seeking therapy for grieving our historical wounds, or our current grief, is not a weakness. Rather, it is one of the best forms of self-care, as important as going to the doctor to tend to a broken bone, or getting your teeth cleaned. I recommend working with a good depth psychotherapist, preferably one who has undertaken the journey and who is thus a living example possessing the wisdom and presence to shepherd you through the discovery and release of this stowaway heartache. Again, there is also much grief work we can do on our own via self-therapy, such as journaling, other expressive arts and self-inquiry, as well as in support groups and workshops, such as grief rituals.
Below is a self-guided grief work practice you can engage to help you contact and release emotional pain and increase your capacity for healing. It is adapted from The Nourish Practice, which doubles as a template for healing our core love wounds. Series II of the practice (Resource 7: Weber, “Nourish Practice Series II”) describes in more depth my healing journey via grief work and offers more detailed suggestions and context for undertaking the journey. You can also employ this practice for current grief.
Bear in mind, this exercise is just one example of many for how to engage. Grief work is a radically creative process, and there is no fixed prescription for how to proceed. This said, guidance and a template can both be helpful. What’s most important is to follow your intuition and engage all your faculties. Tune in to your body’s wisdom, the meaning it conveys, and where it guides you one step to the next.
Preparation
Before beginning this exercise, please read it through and see if the process seems comfortable or doable for you. If it doesn’t, ask an emotionally intelligent, trusted other, such as a psychotherapist, for support. If you are uncomfortable at any point during the exercise, feel free to stop and disengage.
Wait for a time when you are in a calm, relatively relaxed state and have at least twenty minutes to dedicate to the exercise. Then, gently close your eyes and take about ten relaxed breaths as deeply and as slowly as you can, pausing briefly in between breaths. While breathing, allow your awareness to sink down into your body, similarly to how you did during the Body Survey exercise in Chapter 2. Don’t focus on any single part of your body, but allow your awareness to be present to your whole body. Alternatively, you can prepare by doing The Nourish Practice (“Breathed by the Breath”) from Chapter 5, which unites all the above aspects: breath work, gentle awareness, deep body attunement, and relaxation.
Engagement
Allow yourself to become aware of any pain in your body, physical or emotional. It doesn’t matter if you know the cause or source of this pain, and it may or may not become evident even after you complete the exercise. If nowhere in your body speaks to you or you don’t know where to begin, consider feeling into places that are most likely to carry this kind of ache, such as your heart center, jaw, or belly. Let your intuition guide you. Areas that are chronically tight are usually good places to start.
Now, while feeling into the pain, allow your inner imagination to present to you, one at a time, two images that represent the general sense of this pain you carry inside. These are what we call your “hurting images.” For example, you might be presented with an image from the natural world, such as an animal or plant, or a meaningful object. Allow yourself to feel into your choice for hurting images for as long as it takes, even days. Once you’ve settled on your hurting images, close your eyes and settle on two images that represent your capacity to endure and/or heal the difficulty and pain; these are your “healing images.” These might present as a power animal, a tool or weapon, a person you admire, or another healing/protective force. Hurting and healing images can be anything at all.
The next step is to give the first hurting image a voice. Allow it to speak of the pain you carry. Try to let it speak through your voice and avoid intellectualizing the transmission. Transcribe what the image conveys through its voice, intention, and imagined gestures; be patient and don’t try to control it. You may want to hang out with, feel into, and get to know the image and what it might have to say before recording its message. When you have finished, take a break, if needed, and then do the same for the second hurting image.
Next, allow the first healing image to address any aspect of the hurt just expressed by either hurting image. You can do this in any form you like: the healing image can speak to the hurt, it can gesture to it, or it might perform an action or ritual to help heal the hurt. Allow yourself to sit with the healing image until it spontaneously expresses itself. Again, don’t force or judge it, and don’t think about it too much. Let your intuition guide you. Watch, feel, or write down what transpires. Next, do the same for the second healing image, letting it offer its healing balm, in any way it chooses, to whatever aspect of hurt was expressed by the hurting images. Address as much of the hurting images’ pain as you like.
When this process is complete, when both hurting images and healing images have expressed themselves, rest in the outcome. Let it be and take a break. You can continue this practice at any time. Sharing the experience with a friend, or writing about it, can help to bring more revelation, especially of nuanced messages you didn’t consciously recognize during the process.
Because images are symbolic and lend themselves to creativity, you might consider expressing your experience through art. For example, you could paint, sing, or dance your experience. You might also craft a poem from your revelations. You don’t have to produce “good” art for this to be effective. What’s important is to genuinely and vulnerably express your feelings by embodying in real time the healing experience that transpired. Just let it flow, giving yourself total freedom of expression that no one has to see … except you.
I find it especially helpful to recall the images and sensations that show up in my grief work because they poignantly remind me of essential aspects of my healing. Feeling the presence of these hurting and healing images in my body-mind keeps the process current and alive. To this day, I remember and call upon some of these image-forces. Commemorating the images and their meanings in a poem further helps keep them, and me, flowing and growing. Below is an example from my collection of grief-work poems, Nature of the Heart, inspired by an image of thorns. The poem helped me feel not only the way thorns can cut but also their use in coronation. This image also helped me to connect my own hurt and recovery with the natural world. If creating poetry appeals to you, I offer a “Healing Poem-Making” exercise in Chapter 11.
Fall
About to fall
Through a bed of thorns
To the rest of my soul
I am afraid
To die
To the lie
As a child I learned
To hide
A bigger life
For little love.
Now I cannot
Live another day
Away, uncrowned.
Grief Work
The goal of emotional healing is the diametric opposite of perennial self-involvement and narcissism. Successful self-transformation via grief work frees our hearts so we can foster goodness toward others and the natural world. Not focusing on ourselves to heal results in more self-obsession (often while damaging others), greed, superficiality, and addictive consumerism. When we don’t prune and grow ourselves via this self-healing (think: a robust, well-tended orchard tree) this promotes rampant, unregulated overgrowth (think: an unchecked, spindly, and unfruitful tree). Such has been the rampant growth of climate chaos, fueled by unrestrained capitalism.
As I progressed through my grief work, my pain and its stories and expressions eventually coalesced into a distinct personality representing a younger version of myself, and this inner child had loads to express! I allowed him to express himself until there was no more pain left to share. When I emerged on the other side of this dark night of the soul, I found that I cared more for my triangle of resilience relationships. These relationships became closer, more meaningful, and deeper, and I was able to give more to them. I also discovered a passion for forging justice in the world, fueled by healing through my own pain from injustice. This translated into a new abundance of care for disadvantaged others and the voiceless Earth—an empathic, natural commitment to activism.
Inner-child work is another powerful way to get in touch with our core love wounds. The previous Healing Images exercise can inform and nicely segue with inner-child work. Emotional healing of this kind is not about finding logistical solutions (fixing) as much as about being heard (by our own witnessing presence and by trusted others), embodying and expressing backlogged emotions, discovering what really happened to us once ago by assembling an accurate and truthful narrative (story) of our pasts, and making choices in the present that support our newfound integrity.
To help you initiate or further your grief work, I offer an inner-child practice below. This is also adapted from Series II of The Nourish Practice. Notice, the preparation phase is the same as for the previous grief-work exercise. This is because both are somatically oriented, simultaneously engaging mind, body, and emotion for holistic benefit.
• Exercise •
Meeting Your Inner Child
Preparation
Before beginning this exercise, please read it through and see if the process seems comfortable or doable for you. If it doesn’t, ask an emotionally intelligent, trusted other such as a psychotherapist for support. If you are uncomfortable at any point during the exercise, feel free to stop and disengage.
Wait for a time when you are in a calm, relatively relaxed state and have at least twenty minutes to dedicate to the exercise. Then, gently close your eyes and take about ten relaxed breaths as deeply and as slowly as you can, pausing briefly in between breaths. While breathing, allow your awareness to sink down into your body, similarly to how you did during the Body Survey exercise in Chapter 2. Don’t focus on any single part of your body, but allow your awareness to be present to your whole body. Alternatively, you can prepare by doing The Nourish Practice (“Breathed by the Breath”) exercise from Chapter 5, which unites all the above aspects: breath work, gentle awareness, deep body attunement, and relaxation.
Engagement
Notice if there’s anywhere—physically, emotionally, or energetically—that has felt chronically pained, agitated, or separated from your awareness. Allow your awareness to rest on any place you feel this discomfort.
Then, connect with this part of yourself and see if there is a story attached to its ache. Maybe it’s a painful memory, story, or event from the past? Nothing has to be connected to this place, and it’s best not to force any memory, feeling, or image. If an image, memory, sensation, emotion—or any or all of these—arises, rest in this experience for a bit. Just as you waited for the hurting and healing images from the previous exercise to express themselves, be patient here too for any messages or meaning to be conveyed to your awareness.
As a general rule, the most meaningful images and messages—what I call “salient” material—are those that feel most impactful and powerful and register as important, even if they are tender and small. For instance, you might contact a sensation of sinking emptiness (perhaps corresponding with the image of a hole in the ground, for example), and it might help you get in touch with feeling how your energy has been sucked out of you. In contrast, you might contact a bold, empowered sensation (perhaps accompanied by the image of a glimmering diamond). The message of this sensation and attendant image might be to show you the intact facets of your diamond-like strength and resilience to withstand and heal from being hurt. Please note, an image need not be a thing of the world; it is a kind of qualia—an inward, subjective experience. Quale (plural) need not be visual, but can also occur via other sensory faculties. An inwardly experienced fragrance, melody, flavor, or tactile sensation, for example, could be equally salient as an image.
Remember, not all feelings, images, stories, and sensations are equally salient; explore those that strike you as significant. As you elaborate their message, verify if this message feels true by noticing if your body responds with more of a resonant yes or an ambivalent no. Don’t think about it too much! I call this somatic wisdom our body-truth. Pausing as needed to tune into your body-truth helps you stay on the path of what’s personally true for you. You also want to corroborate your body-truth with logistical truth. If your body-truth conveys something is true but logistically you know it’s impossible or highly unlikely, explore further to sort out what’s most likely true. For example, if your body-truth communicates that you were not heard by your father, but your logistical mind only remembers him listening attentively to you, you’ll have to reconcile this disparity via more exploration.
While working with these aspects of your inner child, notice any emotions you feel and name them. How did it feel to be you at that time in your history? How old were you? What were your facial expressions? What were you wearing? What were your surroundings? Who else was present? Rest in this awareness for a minute, or as long as needed.
For the next step you have a choice. Whichever option you choose, stay connected with the most salient aspect of any image, sensation, emotion, or story you’ve contacted. At any point—and most likely after you practice this for a time—you might have a palpable, integrated, mental-emotional sense of your inner child whom you can communicate with, listen to, be present with, and comfort.
Option 1: The first option is to simply continue resting in your inner experience and allow it to progress and unfold in your body and mind. For example, if you contact sadness with your inner child, allow yourself to embody this emotion and rest in it. You may also want to listen to anything your inner child has to “say” or “show” you. If a salient qualia arises, allow it to express itself to you; does it represent anything for you and does it have any message to share with you that is emblematic of your hurt and/or your recovery? Allow the image to express itself to you rather than trying to analyze it. If a story is most salient, let the story tell itself and unfold inside you as you pay attention to and learn from it.
Option 2: Another way to engage this process is to take out your journal and begin to elaborate on your experience. For example, if it’s anger you feel most strongly, give your anger a voice and let it speak. See if you can write from your anger as much as, or more than, you do about it. If an image is associated with your anger, expand upon what the image means to you, what it represents, what message it might have to share with you that is emblematic of your hurt and/or your recovery. If it’s a story that is most prominent, let the story tell itself as you transcribe it.
I find option 1 helpful for staying connected to my body’s immediate experience as it unfolds inside me. Option 2 I find most helpful for furthering my expression and reckoning of these inner experiences. Experiment and see what works for you. Options 1 and 2 work well together, and often occur simultaneously. After some practice, you might find yourself engaging them in tandem: writing from, or expressing, your inner experience from direct somatic awareness. I frequently pause during such expressive writing to breathe, to connect with my body-truth, and to keep my outward expression consistent with what’s unfolding inside me.
Each time you sit to practice, try to come to the practice anew, with a beginner’s mind, allowing space for what wants to express itself today, in this moment, and in its unique way. Some days you may need to rant about what happened to you that day, while other times you may be immediately immersed in the grief of heartbreak. Sometimes the two coincide: what triggers you today has historical origins. When this is the case, you get to see how the past influences your present experience. Alternatively, you can dance, draw, paint, sculpt, or sing your experience to mobilize and move through old pain. If you’ve identified and followed your body-truth, all paths eventually and ideally lead to:
1. Finding your way into foundational, underlying emotions.
2. Learning the true story of your past.
3. Helping you to release backlogged emotion.
4. Undoing limiting, or false, beliefs (see discussion and exercise just ahead).
5. Gaining wisdom for moving forward and making new choices.
For my own grief work, it was helpful to give my inner child a name. Actually, his name just came to me one day. Relating with my inner child by name made the process more intimate, real, and meaningful. Again, if you are at the point in your healing where the pained aspects of you develop a defined sense of self, you may want to connect with your inner child by name and let him or her express directly to you. Consider taking the process slowly at first and see what works for you.
Inner-child work is sacred, potent work. Following a few guidelines can help you feel safe, positively engaged, and keep your practice vital:
1. Engage only as long as you are comfortable.
2. For intense experiences, practice titration, healthy denial, and self-care to recharge (as discussed in Chapter 3) and help you pace yourself and integrate the work.
3. If you feel overwhelmed, seek support from a therapist or friend, as you see fit.
4. Lack of appetite, sleep disturbances, feeling less happy, and decreased energy can be temporary side effects of grief work. If they become problematic for you, consider giving yourself a break and/or seek professional support.
Unwinding Limiting Beliefs
Examining and unwinding any limiting, false beliefs acquired as a result of past wounding is also part of grief work, and instrumental for liberating ourselves. Consider an example: When our opinion is constantly shut down—as children or as adults—we can develop both an emotional and a mental wound. The emotional hurt we feel from being shut down creates a somatic wound. The mental component, in the form of a limiting (or false) belief, might be that I believe my opinion is worthless, that I am a bad or stupid person, or that I can’t trust myself. We clear the emotional wound by expressing our backlogged emotion and we heal any limiting beliefs by noticing and dismissing the false belief, affirming our worth, and then acting from our worth.
• Exercise •
Healing Limiting Beliefs
The Nourish Practice, as described in anxiety Tip 20 in Chapter 5, can be adapted to help heal both our emotional and cognitive wounds. Let’s work with the wound of low self-esteem or self-worth. In addition to allowing yourself to be “breathed by the breath,” you can simultaneously imagine and feel yourself being breathed by pure love. You say, “I allow myself to be breathed by love” or “I allow myself to be breathed by pure goodness.” You consolidate your healing of these wounds by acting as though you matter, by acting in ways that are opposite to your false beliefs. This might mean expressing your opinion to others, taking action that matters, or sharing unique gifts with the world. As you act differently, your doubts and wounds will often flare up! This might scare or dissuade you from forging forward. If this happens, it’s important to take deep breaths, recognize what’s happening, continue to love yourself, dismiss limiting beliefs, and continue to act in accord with your worth.
As you exert your self-worth, you want to be careful to do so appropriately. When this energy has been repressed, it can want to make up for being hidden for so long. Until you more fully integrate your worth, you can come across as too forceful or inappropriately egoic. Whoops! Forgive and be gentle with yourself and make any amends as you come back into balance and find your stride. With practice, and after going overboard by excessively repressing or expressing, you naturally fall into a healthier balance. Paradoxically, once you are confident in your self-worth, you may not feel a burning need to always express and exert yourself.
Fulfillment from Fracture
Through the process of grief work, numb and empty places inside me were nonmaterially filled by working through their pain. Psychotherapist David Richo describes this as doing the inner footwork to address our wounds, then letting grace effect healing and integration. I unconditionally abided my pain. I didn’t fill or numb these fractured, aching places with things, pursuits, drugs, or surrogate pleasures. The result was psycho-spiritual fulfillment via the liberation of my finer jewels of being human. With a richer inner life, I found I was able to thrive outwardly with less—less busyness, less distraction, less consumption. In fact, I was happier with less because it freed up time for more meaningful pursuits. “Outer simplicity for inner richness” is my motto. For me, this is one way the inner activism of grief work has led to outer activism, minimalism, and a reduced carbon footprint.
To clear my backlogged pain, I also practiced receiving loving attention beyond what I felt capable of accepting. I learned how to let more love in. I remember one therapy session in particular where we didn’t speak a word, as I merely sat in front of my therapist, allowing her to appreciate me unconditionally through attuned presence and eye contact. I would turn away when I couldn’t let any more in, and then turn back to meet her attention when I felt I could accept more. As a result of this practice, and grief work generally, I have been able to feel and give substantially more love to myself and others, including the Earth. By cultivating what I call the “love we already have in hand”—the degree to which we currently embody our finer jewels of being human—and employing it to unconditionally abide our pain, we generate more of these psycho-spiritual resources, which eventually translates to building and protecting more outer resources.
I undertook the bulk of my grief work with my therapist, and in between visits with her I journaled profusely. Journaling creates a kind of “otherness,” as different aspects of our psyche communicate with our unconditional, witnessing self. It is a great way both to initiate and to see through the process of grief work. Often, merely sitting with my feelings (see option 1 of the Meeting Your Inner Child exercise), in addition to journaling and poem-making (see option 2), was enough to process my pain.
Grief work, my own self-care, and the attuned presence of others fertilized the barren ditches inside me, allowing them to blossom with richness. When we restore our inner ecosystems through symbolic death (being transformed by our pain) and rebirth (the largely effortless, graceful flourishing that results), we naturally extend the resulting richness and care to others. We create a nourishing, positive feedback loop between ourselves and the world. This is the heart of climate cure.
While we can’t heal all the pain in our hearts, any clearing of pain can translate to a greater capacity to care for and heal the world, especially when combined with our second and third triangle of resilience relationships. I want to make clear that this is not an either-or dynamic; we can heal climate disruption even though we are wounded and not our fullest selves. In other words, we can do good while we heal, and the more we heal, the more good we can do. Especially because climate crisis is now so dire, it’s important we act as effectively and as wisely as we can while we heal through our triangle of resilience relationships. We heal these relationships with the love we already have in hand, which liberates more of our capacity to care, thus increasing the amount of love we have in hand.
Fixing vs. Being with Pain
While being initiated to the dark night of my soul via grief work, a good friend and mentor turned me on to Matthew Fox’s book on radical happiness, Original Blessing. In the following quote, which I’ve held close for decades, Reverend Fox explains that by letting pain be pain (radical surrender to what is) we become pain’s emissaries instead of its victims (holding on to and perpetuating suffering): “It is one thing to empty. It is quite another to be emptied. Pain does this. It empties us if we allow it to … What we must ultimately do is let go of pain. Ideally, by entering into it we become able to breathe so much freedom from within the pain that the deepest letting go can truly occur. For this to happen, the naming of the pain, the letting it be pain for a while, is essential … But if we fail to let pain be pain … the pain will haunt us in nightmarish ways. We will become pain’s victims instead of the healers we might become.” 93
Fox’s description of pain as that which empties us is akin to what I mean when I say, “We don’t grieve; grief does us.” In this sacralized void we find fulfillment in emptiness—or better, clearing—in the place where grief dissolved our pain, thus making grief work an embodied spiritual path (Resource 2: Weber, “Embodied Spirituality”). This hidden path or back door to a sense of the divine yields a special kind of heart-light by way of blessed, fertile darkness. It is not popular in a capitalistic, modern culture conditioned on external accolades and façades. Yet, the path Fox illuminates is absolutely necessary if we are to transform ourselves and change our climate fate. I allude to this “back door to divinity” in a poem by the same name, excerpted here from my collection Rebearth:
I know that beneath the winding
Miles of solid bone protecting
The center of our bodies
Flows a river rich enough
To resuscitate our arteries
And transform our eyes
Once we have slipped
Through our heart-crack
To infinity, the back door
To divinity.
Emotional healing into spiritual initiation is paradoxical. Similar to poetry, it’s not linear and literal, as physical healing is. To heal physical injury, we combat and repair it. But to heal most emotional pain we must accept and embrace it. Unfortunately, we often apply a linear strategy to heartbreak, trying to fix it when what is required is to hold, acknowledge, and accept ourselves exactly as we are. Unconditional regard for others and ourselves has the paradoxical result of easing our pain. Our pain transforms us and subsides as we surrender to and feel it.
While we can transform the bulk of our pain, some of it is never wholly resolved. We learn to carry it. It’s our capacity to be with loss, to accept and embrace it, that makes such carrying possible. We learn to carry the ache as we would adjust to living with a limp, or as we must tenderly hold sentiments we aren’t, or weren’t, able to express to a loved one. While these perpetually “undelivered packages” impart a burden, they also confer unexpected gifts. The pain we carry becomes a portal through which our callings find us and our compassion and empathy connect with humanity and the rest of creation that also suffers. This heart connection inspires our loving actions.
Feeling safe and supported by others who can be with us as we are and not try to fix our sadness is the best way I know to allow grief to unfold. The attitude I eventually adopted while passing through my core grief work was to accept the possibility that my intense grief could continue for the rest of my life. I figured I would learn to carry it. Thankfully it hasn’t, but this disposition was my way to allow that grief cycle to have its way with me without meddling in its genius. Since that time, grief has resurfaced numerous times, but in milder and different form.
Receiving Grief
In Chinese medicine, the seasons of spring and summer are Yang seasons, represented by the white paisley of the Yin-Yang symbol. In contrast, the seasons of autumn and winter are Yin seasons, represented by the black paisley (Figure 1). Grief corresponds with autumn, and what is called the “Po,” or “corporeal soul”—referring to our physical, embodied self—and the moon cycle.
These poetic associations correlate with my experience of emotional transformation through grief work being the most Yin-building and “grounding” practice available. This said, mind-body practices such as hatha yoga, meditation, tai chi, and other holistic energetic practices are invaluable to prepare us for body-centered emotional work (Resource 2: Weber, “Beyond Yoga”). These practices ground us in our bodies, sensitize our nervous systems, and focus our attention for the next level of body-mind integration by way of grief work. Mind-body practices are also invaluable for managing the stress of climate crisis. The late Jungian psychologist and grief advocate Marion Woodman concurs, with a dash of humor: “Continuing to do pioneering sacred work in a world as crazy and painful as ours without constantly grounding yourself in a sacred practice would be like running into a forest fire dressed only in a paper tutu.” 94
We highly value personal, individual achievement and “more doing” in the West. This is part of our excess Yang derangement. Grief is the antithesis of doing and achieving; it is a fallow Yin time for undoing, corresponding with allowing the earth to rejuvenate during the fallow, compost and humus-generating period of autumn. No wonder we are a grief-starved, and therefore pain-burdened, society. Grief is a sacred Yin practice that flows in the compassionate company of others and by our own abiding presence. Grief is not something we do but an experience we receive and accommodate by letting it be, feeling it, and allowing it change us—grief does us. It is not something we willfully achieve any more than sleeping is. We merely create the conditions for both to unfold. Once we try to fall asleep, we fail. Similarly, we must surrender to grief. If we employ a doing, fix-it, goal-oriented approach to grief, we are bound to fail because we will get in grief’s way of working on, humbling, and healing us. Grief is a transformative process that ebbs and flows of its own accord when we remain emotionally honest (naming and feeling our true feelings). We may imagine it’s done with us only to have it to revisit when we least expect it. We must remain open to grief if we want to remain true and vital.
When we don’t allow the more-than-human-world to decline and restore itself through fallow times, we burn it out. The soil becomes arid and infertile, and the nourishment we derive from it less fulfilling and nutritious. Notice that the globe is currently besieged by forest fires, melting glaciers and permafrost, severe drought, and warming oceans. These events evidence excessive and destructive collective Yang-heating coupled with deficient Yin-cooling energies. This trend can be traced, at least in part, to our failure to grieve, a dynamic we will continue to unpack.
Unresolved Loss
We feel pain when we lose something, either physical or intangible, such as a home, our sense of self, or love from another. Grief allows us to release our pain as we love ourselves back into wholeness, even if we have to continue carrying some of the pain. Grief is the great inner gardener, the most soul-building of the emotions.
An inability to receive grief in the face of significant loss causes our pain to backlog inside us. This repression, as we discussed in Chapter 3, creates a pressure that eventually erupts from us in unsustainable ways, such as rage and violence. In her essay “Embracing Grief,” African healer and workshop leader Sobonfu Somé describes how this Yin-Yang dynamic played out when she was a teenager. Her inability to release overwhelming grief when her grandmother died filled her with anger and rage.95
Deep grief feels like we are dying. Yet, when we do not die to our grief, part of us dies as a result, and it is this deadness we employ to kill what we love. We explore these dynamics further along in this chapter as projection and displacement of our pain. In contrast, embracing our sadness softens our hearts and engenders compassion, allowing us to connect with others. Grief and love are two sides of the same coin, the medallion of wholehearted, Yin-Yang loving. In Jewish tradition, for example, it’s incumbent on us to find joy in life. Yet, it’s considered a greater mitzvah (good deed) to attend a funeral and grieve with mourners than it is to attend a wedding, a usually joyous occasion. The crucial work of grieving clears our hearts from the burden of loss, the sting of pain, and the brunt of violation, renewing our sense of fulfillment and belonging.
In a discussion about healing old love wounds, a friend once said to me that life is too short to spend the time and energy to work through such heartaches. I replied that life is too short not to. Broken-open love shows up not just for good times, but especially for tough times. Grief allows us to continue to love others, and our planet, when they are ailing. In this sense, our capacity to grieve is lifesaving. Tolerance for grief—an altogether appropriate emotion in the midst of climate crisis—allows us to remain close to the problem and minister to it. Honoring grief allows us to be cracked open and transformed by it. This is the work of wounded healers, and now is our time to shine this Yin-light.
In When the Past is Present, David Richo discusses the importance of grief work and how unmourned losses are not truly in the past, but in fact significantly influence our lives in the present, especially intimate relationships. The ungrieved pain of loss compromises us in the same way chronic infection saps our vitality, or a cyber-virus sabotages the efficiency of a computer. As antibiotic herbs and prescription medications clear biological infection and anti-malware software helps rid our laptops of bugs, grief is our psyche’s way of clearing the emotional “infections” that stymie our hearts—and our capacity to more deeply care.
The genius of grief work is also akin to beneficial soil bacteria. Both work unseen to convert seemingly fruitless overaccumulations into vitality. Soil bacteria break down “useless” organic matter into nourishing fertilizer and promote the life cycle. Like beneficial soil bacteria, grief is the great catalyst of decomposition in the Yin phase for Yang regeneration, the vital link between death and life, allowing what has expired to be upcycled and rebirthed. This excerpt of my poem “Secret Maker of Gardens” from the collection Rebearth communicates these hidden processes of regeneration common to both grief and the soil.
Lie down with your pain,
Your grief, confusion, and despair.
It will make you the fertile ground
You fear falling into.
But you must trust it more
Than what you see,
For the aura around your smarting heart
Knows other than the compost
At your soles.
Invest in this hidden world
So you may one day be the roots
For its fruits in action,
Your body its passions
For decent progress.
Lie down with the soil’s equivalent,
Your own body of woes.
Nourish it with the ever-present glow
From deep within your chest,
O, secret maker of gardens.
Both the dark ways of the soil and our dark emotions pertain to the sacred feminine Yin. Both have been stigmatized and desecrated by those in power for millennia, and both are essential to the fertility of our inner and outer worlds. Through grief we reconnect with our inner earth, as soil bacteria revive the outer Earth. Reclaiming and nourishing these sacred Yin domains of inner and outer ground are facets for radical sanity, our collective triangle of resilience relationships, and comprehensive climate cure.
• Exercise •
Dark Soil Meditation
Next time you feel sadness or deep grief, as your heart breaks open and allows your awareness to sink deeper into the dark recesses of your body, imagine yourself sinking into the Earth, into the darkness of its soil. As you imagine, or vicariously feel the soil’s bacteria breaking down “useless” organic matter, rest in the awareness of grief breaking down your burdensome pain, simply by allowing yourself to feel the pain of loss.
Freeing Grief
If we sense our grief is stuck, we can gently nudge or indirectly encourage its flow, as we might push a boulder to get it rolling on its own. We can begin by allowing the possibility of grief, by facing our losses and acknowledging how much we care. We can distract ourselves less and spend more time paying attention to how we feel, or in the company of those with whom we feel safe to embody our sadness. We can also stimulate our grief through empathy by watching a sad movie and letting ourselves feel what a grieving character feels. Or, we can spend time in person with others who are grieving; empathy for them can unlock our own hearts. If all else fails, notice the beauty of the woods, the stream, the wildlife around you, or those you love, vis-à-vis the science presented in Appendix I. Once we free our hearts, even more empathy is made available to us, allowing us to connect with others’ grief still more, resulting in a positive feedback loop of connection and care.
Sometimes grief brings tears, sometimes not. Feeling sorrow and allowing mourning, however it chooses to express itself, is what’s key. If we sense we are holding backlogged tears, we can try to “fake it till we make it.” Efforts to cry can stimulate an organic crying spell—as the metaphorical boulder rolls on its own. If tears come, we can let go and can see if the grief continues to flow as we surrender to it.
Do you sense you hold significant ungrieved loss inside you? Does it feel stuck and separate from you? Which of the strategies mentioned just above do you feel could help let your grief flow? Write them down in order of strongest to weakest resonance. How might you incorporate these remedies into your life to aid your grieving process? List these ways alongside each strategy you have written down. Can you think of any other ways not mentioned here to help contact any unprocessed grief you might be holding onto? Also jot these down and, if ready, create a plan to enact them.
Grief takes us down into our bodies and sets the stage for something truly new to take root in us. While the grief work we engage to substantially clear our childhood love wounds is finite, grief itself is a lifelong experience, ebbing and flowing through ongoing joys and sorrows, comings and goings, good fortune and loss. Grief is slow in its work of dissolution, bringing us down when we least expect it. Meandering in and out of our lives, grief joins the future, present and past in a spiral of one becoming. In this way, it is an antidote to linear, outward progress and overdevelopment, busyness and acquisition, control and ownership—the many perpetrators of climate crisis—and therefore a hidden cure for our destruction of the world.
When we have passed through grief work, we might find ourselves more fulfilled and content with modest, wholesome pleasures. This translates to a reduced carbon footprint. Yet, because climate grief is ongoing, we may find ourselves in a constant state of mild to intense grief. This is normal and to be expected, for when the Earth hurts, so do we (or so we should if we are paying attention). Grief’s gift is to help us empathize with the Earth vis-à-vis our own pain. I call this honest, embodied relationship with the collapsing state of the world “the spirituality of a broken-open heart.” From this place of intellectual and emotional honesty we have a better chance to address climate crisis at its root. Joanna Macy supports this emotional honesty when she writes, “The sorrow, grief, and rage you feel is a measure of your humanity and your evolutionary maturity. As your heart breaks open, there will be room for the world to heal.”96
Encountering climate crisis, we may find wide-ranging expressions of grief as we navigate and integrate experiences of destruction and pollution, suffering and extinction. It’s imperative we feel and express this pain, especially with the support of others, for which working through our personal grief prepares us invaluably. Grief circles and rituals can also be helpful.
Removing Our Mask
I call unresolved pain or trauma “encrustations around our hearts.” When we don’t grieve this pain, we unwittingly build a compensatory persona around our hurt—an alter ego of sorts. Some call this a “false personality.” This façade was included in Jung’s concept of the persona, which he described as “a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual.” 97
For Jung, individuation by way of integration involved deconstructing the persona to reveal the shadow within our often pained and messy inner lives. This deconstruction, or degrowth, of our false persona (whose external corollary is economic and consumerist degrowth) includes transforming what we have been injured by—by what we essentially are not. Via grief work, we deconstruct what has encrusted our hearts and enslaved our minds. This uncovers our brilliance and natural kindness, as we simultaneously undo what causes us to hurt others.
When we do not dismantle our persona, we perpetuate the pain and shadow beliefs beneath it. Letting down our guard, therefore, is crucial for grief work. This can be scary at first because it exposes our old love wounds, the adverse childhood and adult experiences we have defended against our whole lives. Yet this initial act of vulnerability—which is easier to initiate with another’s caring support—can bolster our authenticity and integrity.
Projection and Displacement
Deep-seated emotional pain can feel inert or immovable, like a lump, ache, or void inside us. Yet our pain is anything but inactive. It is akin to a metaphorical cancer or radioactive blockage whose outwardly projecting “gamma rays” attack, injure, and violate others, including the Earth. Like the pain of a tumor, this pain grows when left untreated.
Limiting beliefs, self-sabotaging habits, and knee-jerk emotional reactivity resulting from unresolved or backlogged emotional pain cause us and others more hurt, unnecessarily increasing and prolonging suffering. Without the tools or support to reckon with our pain, our suffering metastasizes to others as we displace it onto the world. We project the logistical dynamics of our pain and displace its emotional charge onto others. We transmit what we don’t transform.
Consider an example: let’s say I perceive you to be selfish or irresponsible. If I am projecting, it means I in fact am the selfish and irresponsible one, unconsciously assigning to you what I cannot accept about myself (of course, sometimes both are true). If I deliver my judgment with attack and aggression, or simply act violently toward you as a result of projecting my beliefs, this is an example of displacing my repressed emotion onto you. The more repressed and in denial we are, the more we project and displace and the more violent the delivery and our acting out.
The adage “hurt people hurt others” refers to this transmittal—or projection and displacement—of our unconscious hurt onto others. Carl Jung is famous for recognizing the pernicious dynamic of projection, which his protégé, Marion Woodman, describes this way: “Because we reject our own humanity, we reject what Jung calls the shadow side; we’ve pushed that down into the unconscious, and the minute we do that, we start projecting it out onto someone else so that someone else has to carry our so-called darkness.” 98 People, pets, and the Earth all qualify as “someone else,” and have all suffered our projections and violent, displaced pain. Through grief work, we can replace our pain-body’s projected and displaced toxic emissions with comprehensively caring emanations from our finer jewels of being human.
Hurt people hurt others communicates the same message as the adage: If you don’t heal what hurt you, you’ll bleed on those who didn’t cut you. If you’ve been treated violently, perhaps you’ve noticed yourself lash out at someone or something uninvolved in that violation. Conversely, if you’ve been graced by kindness, you love others as an extension of being treated well. Both lashing out from pain and reaching out in compassion are examples of displacing what’s inside us onto others; one is malicious, the other compassionate.
Spreading more unintended violence than care is at the core of our war on each other and on nature. In a wonderful essay discussing these dynamics, Eric Garza proposes that when trauma causes us to disconnect from the world, we also dissociate from nurturing relationships that make us humane. “Could human beings engage in wars against other human beings without the ability to ‘other’ them …” he asks.99 By extension, we can also ponder: could human beings engage in wars against nature without the ability to “other” it?
The self-care of grief work to free our hearts radically shifts the paradigm of hurt people hurt others to healed people heal others. This grants us the deep-down care and motivation to make relatively small sacrifices now, and engage with and mitigate climate crisis for any degree of a livable future.
Hurt People Hurt Others
Solid science supports the dynamic of hurt people hurting others, of getting them “to carry our darkness.” Several years ago, Kaiser Permanente teamed up with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to conduct one of the largest studies of childhood abuse and neglect as it relates to health and well-being later in life. It is called the “CDC-Kaiser ACE Study.”100
An Adverse Childhood Experience, known as an “ACE,” is defined as a developmental trauma “beyond the typical, everyday challenges of growing up.” 101 Evidence shows those with a history of overt abuse and neglect are at risk for delinquency and violent criminal behavior.102 Both parental neglect (a form of passive abuse) and overt abuse create love wounds, or lasting trauma to our figurative hearts.103 Out of this pain, we cause pain to others. When we are neglected, we learn to neglect others. We extend this violence not only to humans close to us but to another intimate: the Earth. In contrast, embodied love and healing through these hurts via grief work generate empathy and care for ourselves and others.
Author, psychologist, and trauma specialist Dr. Karyl McBride shines a light on this traumatic “chain of custody”: “Ignoring or neglecting a child’s needs can create many symptoms and ultimately mental health problems, which then can affect the rest of his or her life. How, for example, can a child grow up knowing how to provide empathy and nurturing if they were never taught? If children are loved and treated well, they don’t grow up wanting to hurt others; they grow up wanting to help and respect others, and with the ability to provide empathy.” 104
Childhood emotional wounds are developmental traumas that need not be as extreme as the adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) of sexual abuse, chronic and violent humiliation and shaming, or physical violence. The gradations in trauma severity are sometimes referred to as large “T” and small “t” trauma. ACE traumas are generally of the large “T” variety, while milder traumas, that include many of our developmental love wounds, are small “t.” Importantly, small “t” traumas are still significant. In her article “Different Types of Trauma,” psychologist Dr. Elyssa Barbash writes: “A person does not have to undergo an overtly distressing event for it to affect them. An accumulation of smaller ‘everyday’ or less pronounced events can still be traumatic, but in the small ‘t’ form.” 105
Barbash cites a few examples of small “t” traumas: conflict with significant others and children, infidelity, legal trouble, and conflict at work. Developmental and relational small “t” traumas—or significant love wounds—also include not being acknowledged for our opinion or genuine feelings, being shamed for our perceived shortcomings and failures, being ignored or yelled at when we need help, not being supported in our aspirations and exuberance, not having our creative gifts recognized and supported, or being covertly co-opted to bear our parents’ pain and stress. Some may even feel these injuries as large “T” traumas.
Each of us has a unique perception and experience of hurt in response to adverse experiences. Pain sustained by emotional injuries, and widely variant individual responses to similar wounds, are difficult to quantify. I might sustain more hurt by being yelled at than someone else, for example. When these love wounds accumulate unaddressed, their traumatic impact grows, creating a backlog of pain-pressure, as we recently explored. This backlogged pain can manifest as isolation and an inability to connect meaningfully with others and to care for them. It can also show up as rage, sociopathy, addiction, and cutthroat avarice. When we don’t receive love and healing to quench our basic emotional needs, we may collapse into apathy and depression, turn to various addictions to numb the pain, or aggressively try to get (take, steal, coerce, possess) this love by violating others.
Marriage and family therapist Neil Rosenthal speaks to the dynamics of displacing emotional pain in his article “Relationships: Hurt People Hurt Others.” He writes, “Hurt people tend to mistreat or act harshly toward others—especially those close to them—because those are the people they feel the safest and most secure around.” 106 We hurt those closest to us because those familiar to us remind us of those that are familial. Since the beginning of our evolution, nothing has been more familiar and familial to us than the Earth and our fellow humans.
In my own work with patients, I’ve observed those who don’t take care of their body, heart, and mind tend not to take care of the body of the Earth. Many cigarette smokers who recklessly pollute their own bodies seem to think nothing of polluting the street with butts. Smokers also report that smoking helps to numb their feelings. A healthy diet, exercise, and not excessively polluting our own bodies (all when we have the privilege to choose not to) seem to correlate with caring more about the body of the Earth and other human beings. Self-neglect and self-loathing can foster apathy, resulting in unnecessary pollution. Extreme self-hate, as a result of harboring too much pain, can become a death wish for ourselves and others. Grief and grief work help dissolve this burden.
Journalist and co-author with Donald Trump of The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, who had extensive personal contact with the president, writes, “Beneath his bluff exterior, I always sensed a hurt, incredibly vulnerable little boy who just wanted to be loved.” 107 When such love wounds are coupled with far-reaching power, global neglect and ecocide can result. This is evidenced in the president’s corruption, which extends beyond dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency, opening national heritage sites to fracking and logging, building large carbon footprint walls while destroying sacred indigenous lands, and enabling other despots like Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil to plunder the Amazon rainforest.
If Schwartz is right, these love-wound dynamics describe a deterioration of self-esteem and integrity, the breakdown of supportive interpersonal relations, a pernicious division between self and environment, and crimes against humanity and the Earth. Herein lies our climate change crisis, perpetuated by generational emotional trauma and deteriorating intimacy with the Earth and human community—our triangle of resilience relationships in decay.
We therefore must become compassion, not just try to muster it. We effect this by liberating care from our pain, especially via grief work. Otherwise, we can’t truly be the change. Until we do this inner work, we will ultimately create too much destruction, no matter what palliative fixes for climate crisis we invent. Our developmental love wounds are not our fault, but they are our sacred responsibility—our opportunity—to heal. This way we pay love, not malice, forward.
Eco-Grief
Personal grief work prepares us for grieving environmental loss, what is known as eco-grief. The reverse is also true: grieving the demise of nature can help us grieve our personal losses. In fact, either can catalyze the other, as personal and environmental loss intertwine in our hearts. We engage with the destruction of what we love by allowing our hearts to break, sharing our sorrow with others, allowing the poignancy that results, and when ready, mobilizing ourselves with a greater love and fiercer resolve gained from the process. With greater resiliency and more of our finer jewels available to us as a result of grief work, we are more psycho-emotionally resilient to face turbulent times. Our sadness, outrage, despair, and fear are all on our side when it comes to climate cure. The same emotions we encounter through personal grief work can help us face, endure, and engage with healing (through) climate crisis.
Because climate crisis originates inside us and is not separate from us, “fighting” it misses the mark. We are therefore destined to fall short if we try only to fix it. In contrast, when we embrace and work to heal the crisis, we cease to objectify and demonize nature; acknowledge our involvement in the damage; invoke regenerative solutions rather than palliative Band-Aids; and encourage acceptance, understanding, and cooperative relationships for comprehensive cure. We must engage the inner work (Yin) to heal its root causes and follow through with the outer action (Yang) of climate activism to change its course.
Because our climate is an ongoing, unmitigated disaster projected to worsen until further notice, we can practice carrying its hurt as we persist in its crucible of heartbreak. Again, this is best undertaken together and why gathering in community to grapple with loss is so important. Yet, most of us walk around feeling alone, and the conversations—much less an openly-acknowledged communal carrying of the crisis—scarcely happen. Climate breakdown is a global, communal issue for which holding its pain together is the needed, commensurate response. The climate change discussion and support group I created has gone a long way toward filling this need (Resource 5: “Climate Change Café”). Meeting together in person helps us “hold” and heal through the impact of the crisis in a way none of us could alone.
Doing Without
Grief schools us in doing without by temporarily stripping us of vitality, cherished beliefs, productivity, and progress. Sojourns through psychic minimalism train us to do without material excesses. In this radical simplicity, we learn not only to survive, but to experience more of our humble humanness. Grief primes us for sustainability in all facets of life because we experience that with less we can truly fare better. This is core inner activism for the outer activism of degrowth—divesting from the consumerist heat engine driving climate crisis (Resource 2: Weber, “Lockdown”).
While the great philosopher Nietzsche believed that all pain is birth pain, some pain is less remunerative and can feel overwhelming and insurmountable. The heartache of climate crisis is a prime example. In light of this ongoing breakdown, I find my own baseline of happiness to be lower than it used to be. Amid the devastation of our world, I am more melancholy and irritable in the face of our predicament. Opportunities to grieve give me relief.
Recently I’ve been grieving my previous life, the more carefree and exhilarating years on my farm in Hawaii prior to climate crisis thundering onto the public stage. Simultaneously, I’ve been grieving the promising and secure future I was expecting. I also grieve for my nieces, whom I madly love, in light of the precarious future they inherit. It’s not possible for me to remain in denial about climate crisis—honestly apprehending what is takes priority over pursuing perpetual happiness that can’t accommodate distressing news. While this honesty is tougher to bear, it breeds integrity and the kind of tough-love, minimalism-engendering climate sanity we need.
We can’t deny the bulk of our pain and difficulty if we want to live and love as fully as possible for the long term. Paradoxically, reconnecting with our care involves feeling some pain and making sacrifices. Remaining honest and feeling our grief helps us process pain as it rises, a practice of emotional housecleaning I call “keeping our hearts clean.” This way, we don’t hoard transformable pain inside us, and this inner freedom helps us stay vitally engaged with climate action. In climate crisis, I grieve to stay afloat while doing what I can to move the chains.
Healing Through Climate Trauma
Almost half the children in the United States have experienced at least one childhood trauma (ACE) and “nearly a third of United States youth aged twelve to seventeen have experienced two or more types of childhood adversity that are likely to affect their physical and mental health as adults.” 108 Added to small “t” traumas, this amounts to a collective tsunami of trauma and potential for displacing our hurt.
Generational trauma is a process by which love wounds are passed down from one generation to the next via the dynamic hurt people hurt others. Because untended, generational love wounds result in mistreating others, they are a primary, invisible cause of climate crisis. Grief work to help heal our childhood love pain is therefore a core and sorely missing modern-day initiation rite into responsible adulthood, a process I call sacred permission, discussed further in Chapter 8. As we unearth and grow our finer jewels of being human—as the results of grief work—we treat others (social justice) and the Earth (environmental justice) more compassionately, and are less likely to unduly contribute to climate disruption.
We cannot ultimately separate our personal and collective pain from the Earth’s suffering, nor the Earth’s desecration from our personal woes. We’re killing the planet because we’ve tried to kill, rather than heal, our personal pain—the same abuses projected and displaced among familials and familiars, generation to generation.
When we make peace with our deeper hearts, with this “ground zero” inside us, we make peace with difficult reality and can begin to comprehensively heal our physical bodies and their corollary, the body of the Earth. Such inner practice confers a fortitude to face other difficult emotions, such as those that arise in the face of climate change, that are often buried beneath the surface of our lives. The next chapter will help you to further identify and express these hidden, shadow dynamics of your heart to become a more potent, wounded healer as medicine for our times.
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Without reckoning with our personal traumas, we will have a tough time facing what Colorado psychotherapist Benjamin White describes as “the greatest trauma on the grandest scale.” 109 Ongoing climate trauma is arguably more ominous and overwhelming than many of our personal traumas. How can we hold disturbing climate science news and cope with the real-life impacts of climate disaster if our hearts are already too burdened with unresolved personal trauma?
Climate crisis appears to be distinct from our thoughts and emotions. But in reality, it is a result of our collective inner and relational crises. Climate cure lies at the intersection of inner healing and transforming the outer world. Yet many of us—like sponges saturated from personal trauma—can’t absorb enough of the severity of climate crisis to mobilize enough for it. We must, to a greater degree, resolve our personal hearts to contend more effectively with climate crisis and its traumatic effects. For this, broad-spectrum emotional intelligence is essential. It’s crucial to clear our hearts as much as we can so we have both the space for, and the resiliency to tend to, climate crisis and its grand-scale, exponential effects.
Many of us may unconsciously cower from climate awareness to defend against both the present devastating climate news and our own unresolved, personal traumas that climate crisis triggers in us. The corollary, of course, is we can begin to face either or both personal and climate trauma to initiate healing—a holistic transformation that is at once personal, interpersonal, and inter-ecological. “Thus the knowledge of an ever-present, ever-growing threat to the biosphere is serving as a kind of universal catalyst to bring the unresolved trauma buried in every individual, culture and society to the surface,” writes Matthew Green in his insightful article, “Extinction Rebellion: Inside the New Climate Resistance.” 110
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As our climate predicament worsens, grief may be harder to come by. And while I agree that curtailing our grief might be necessary at times, there are several problems with this approach. One, it presumes we have control over grief. Two, it fails to recognize that avoiding or suppressing grief makes us toxic to ourselves and others. Three, it doesn’t appreciate that grief is a portal to deeper love and community, and for many, a path to activism. Four, avoiding grief sows anger and violence. Finally, a grief-denying perspective doesn’t appreciate the deep grounding and Earth-connection that grief bestows, essential for wise climate warriorhood and treating the Earth with care by allowing it to lay fallow, as we wisely “do without” through our own cycles of grief.
Being transformed by grief occurs in both the short- and long-term. As conditions worsen, the window for benefiting from longer-term grief initiation may close. We would then be forced to acutely, and less comprehensively, address climate crisis. This juncture would mark an unfortunate (and ironically, sad) lost opportunity for inside-out climate cure, which is why grief work and other triangle of resilience work is desperately needed now.
• Exercise •
Chapter 6 Journaling
Please also refer to the additional in-text exercises for this chapter.
Take out your journal or notepad, place it in front of you, and write out your responses to the following prompts.
1. List the five most significant personal losses and/or traumas you have experienced. On a scale from zero to ten, with ten being the greatest, how alive are these losses for you today? Have you given yourself time to grieve them, to feel your sadness and longing for them?
2. Gently close your eyes and allow an honest answer to surface to the following inquiry: Do you notice yourself acting out on others—people, the natural world, or things—as a result of your own frustrations, anger, or helplessness? List the ways you do this and what you think the underlying causes of these actions might be. Would you like to resolve any of these underlying causes, and how capable do you feel doing so? How willing are you to seek support—via therapy, a support group, self-therapy and personal resolve—to convert this displacement of pain into compassionate service?
3. What is the mask you wear that you don’t want anyone to know you are wearing? What is underneath it? What do you imagine would happen if you let go of this mask and exposed your true self? Note: Our psyche has its own way of creating what we need to evolve once we’re aware of it, and especially if we work with it.
4. What are the ways you distract yourself from healing your heart? Name up to three addictions—mild, medium, or severe—you engage in and rate them on a scale from zero to ten for how much they detract from what your heart of hearts would like to be doing. What changes would you like to make in your choices?
5. Which difficult emotions—sadness, anxiety, guilt or remorse, fear, anger, helplessness, hopelessness, for example—do you experience most frequently? Distress Tolerance action: Allow yourself to feel these emotions in your body and to be with them without trying to fix them. Make a time each day to sit with these feelings. For each emotion, do this for five seconds once a day. Try increasing by five seconds each subsequent time. Feel free to disengage at any point if you feel too uncomfortable.
6. What aspect(s) of grief or grief work described in this chapter spoke most saliently to you? Why do you think this is so? How do you think this information and/or your resulting realizations can benefit you? If you are unsure of the answer to any of these questions, can you commit to sitting with these questions and seeking outside support to explore them if you need it?
89. In essence, permaculture is a regenerative design system for restoring the land and local ecosystem while producing food and a thriving habitat for humans.
90. Fogel, “Emotional and Physical Pain Activate Similar Brain Regions.”
91. Taft, “Treasury Secretary Just Stated Obvious About Teen Environmental Oracle Greta Thunberg & the Left Is Melting Down.”
92. Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds that Sabotage our Relationship, 12.
93. Fox, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality Presented in Four Paths, Twenty-Six Themes, and Two Questions, 94.
94. Woodman, “Essay: Why is True Equality Taking so Long?”
95. Somé, “Embracing Grief: Surrendering to Your Sorrow Has the Power to Heal the Deepest of Wounds.”
96. Macy, Greening of the Self, 5.
97. “the persona,” http://psikoloji.fisek.com, http://psikoloji.fisek.com.tr/jung/persona.htm.
98. Horváth, “Marion Woodman: Holding the Tension of the Opposites.”
99. Garza, “Awakening to the Traumacene.”
100. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “About the CDC-Kaiser ACE Study.”
101. Nakazawa, “7 Ways Childhood Adversity Changes a Child’s Brain.”
102. Watson, Child Neglect: Literature Review; The National Academies Press, Understanding Child Abuse and Neglect.
103. Systemic racism and living in an ecocidal society inflicts similar trauma.
104. McBride, “The Long-Term Impact of Neglectful Parents.”
105. Barbash, “Different Types of Trauma: Small ‘t’ versus Large ‘T’.”
106. Rosenthal, “Relationships: Hurt People Hurt Others.”
107. Schwartz, “I Wrote ‘The Art of the Deal’ with Trump. His Self-Sabotage is Rooted in his Past.”
108. Stevens, “Nearly 35 Million U.S. Children Have Experienced One or More Types of Childhood Trauma.”
109. White, “States of Emergency: Trauma and Climate Change.”
110. Green, “Extinction Rebellion: Inside the New Resistance.”