Every beginning of the new year brings up mixed feelings for me. I have a sense of anticipation and curiosity about what will fill the blank pages of the coming year. Yet, each January marks the anniversary of my brother’s unexpected passing, and it is always a month laced with grief. This year was nine years since we lost him back in 2016, and it felt particularly hard on my heart.
Grief tends to operate on its own accord, and I’ve found I cannot predict how I’ll feel from year to year. Grief’s nuances have ranged from insistent, painful feelings to an aching bittersweet nostalgia to subtle undertones of sadness. Something I am continually learning is that grief is an evolving concept. No matter how well I understand its landscape, it shapeshifts and teaches me new things about its nature.
While there is no right or wrong way to process our losses and grieve, I have found that there are perspectives that can help us grasp grief’s strange alchemy so that we feel better equipped to work with loss. The following are four helpful and healing concepts for navigating grief:
1. Our experience of grief evolves over time.
Grief can take on new facets and depth as time passes. It can be dynamic, characterized by change and movement. This is part of what makes grief so complex: our grief can shift throughout our timeline and take on new layers.
As our relationship to ourselves and the world around us changes, our relationship to grief may change. New griefs intersect with the old. Collective trauma taps into our personal losses, and we find ourselves grieving on both a global and individual level. We might feel like we’ve processed a loss only to find ourselves circling back to that wound when a new experience taps into it.
It helps to remember that grief is both a process and a relationship. It is fluid, adaptive, subject to change, and constantly redefining itself in relation to the dynamics around us. This is normal and valid, and we can work with it by remaining nonjudgmental and compassionate toward our grief and allowing it to guide us through these shifts.
2. Grief and loss can take many forms.
Endings happen in various ways, including literal and symbolic. We can grieve the loss of a loved one, a relationship, a beloved animal companion, an ending to a meaningful experience, or a season in life that has passed. We might grieve the death of an old identity or the person we were before grief entered our lives.
We can feel anticipatory grief for something yet to happen when we foresee an expected ending. Sometimes, our grief might not feel well-formed, and we have a hard time pinpointing the origin of our feelings, but we recognize grief’s presence, nonetheless. Some griefs are not always easily recognizable or validated by others, but the grief is there all the same.
Loss can take thousands of forms. We go through many soul cycles; life is a continual dance of transformation and learning to let go. When we recognize and acknowledge the feelings of grief that will come up as a natural part of our soul growth, we feel better equipped to find compassionate acceptance for our process.
3. Grief teaches us how to make peace with paradoxical experiences.
We grieve because we have loved, and our heartbreaks and aches are a testament to our hearts’ ability to attach to and fully invest in something or someone we hold close. It is a strange paradox to feel so much pain because we care deeply, yet part of our spiritual work is to work with the paradoxes of the human journey and find harmony among disparate parts.
We are here to experience sorrow and joy, shadow and light, and what it means to be both human and spiritual. It can be comforting to remember that two experiences can be true simultaneously, even if they seem contradictory. Our emotions are complex and intertwined, and it’s important to honor and make room for all of them.
Our inner work isn’t to judge our emotional processes or deem one feeling state better than another. Instead, we are here to learn to accept our contradictions with compassion and hold space for the fullness of our experience. This is how we learn to make peace with ourselves and move towards wholeness.
4. Grief is an invitation to deeper self-love and honoring our needs.
Times of grief offer us an opportunity for radical self-compassion. Loss cracks us open, which creates space. In that space, we are invited to work through our grief, self-examine, and reflect on our path. This process brings us to a precipice of self when we realize we cannot return to the way things were, yet we aren’t sure how to move forward.
Healing takes patience, gentleness, and time. However, we can work with this process by learning to listen to our inner voice and honor our needs. Permitting ourselves not to know, gifting ourselves the space to sit with our process, and trusting that healing will come in its own time is an act of self-love.
There is no shortcutting grief when it enters our lives, but we aren’t meant to fast forward through the experiences that help us grow as souls. We are meant to partake in life, make meaning, and learn to transform pain into love. We are meant to authentically be our unvarnished selves and hold compassionate space for our whole selves.
When the third week of January passed this year, I felt a sense of relief. Another anniversary had come and gone, and I’d made it through, a little raw and vulnerable from working through all the complicated feelings that arose, a little wiser and changed from bearing witness to myself and honoring my experience of grief. Underneath all of that was a guidepost that continues to be my compass in grief—
We are not here to remain the same and keep our hearts intact. We are here to engage with our grief, search for its hidden light, and keep breaking our hearts awake.
