To honour our grief, to grant it space and time in our frantic world, is to fulfil a covenant with soul—to welcome all that is, thereby granting room for our most authentic life.
― Francis WellerGrief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.
― Francis Weller - Wild Edge of Sorrow
We all know that we will experience losses, big and small, throughout our lives.
When we try not to feel it, it can go beneath the surface and surreptitiously run our lives. We might subtly tell ourselves that it’s not safe to feel, or we’d rather just be happy, or other people couldn’t cope with our grief, perhaps that we shouldn’t still be feeling old griefs.
But it IS safe to feel our grief, and it’s vital to include it in order to live our full rich lives. This weekend is to support this natural need more and more simply and authentically.
Two years ago we danced for a weekend, exploring grief and how to let it move through us and even enrich our lives.
This is an ongoing possibility to keep opening around what feels difficult and including it in our lives. It's happening anyway, sorrow and grief.
The good news is that it's a healthy response to our losses and far better than trying to control what can't be controlled - our feelings.
This year we're going to keep strengthening our innate capacity to let grief do it's work in us and we're also going to make space for the Love that we feel. The other side of the same inescapable coin. Each time, the first time or the hundredth, that we turn to love and loss, the more we can open to life itself.
It can be hard to be alive to anything in a body that is asleep, so we will gently wake our bodies, and dance our hearts awake too. Our imaginations will step up and our intuition will deepen…. We can do this alone, but oh! It is so much healthier to do it together.
It is the mark of the mature adult to be able to carry these two truths simultaneously. Life is hard, filled with loss and suffering. Life is glorious, stunning, and incomparable. To deny either truth is to live in some fantasy of the ideal or to be crushed by the weight of pain. Instead, both are true, and it requires a familiarity with both sorrow and joy to fully encompass the full range of being human.
― Francis Weller
