What is grief really

Grief is a strange emotion that weighs so much but can be easily ignored.

Unacknowledged grief can lead to depression, and this has been my journey; one that I’ve now passed beyond since I recognised the sadness I had carried for so long. We usually only attribute grief to death and grief is so much more – abandonment, loss, disappointment, frustration and of course childhood and adult traumas are all forms of grief.

I always believed that grief was a sad time following the death of someone I loved, and to get over it, I had to learn how to push through it to get to the other side.

But I’ve learned there is no other side, and there is no pushing through it. Rather, there is absorption, adjustment and finally acceptance. Grief is something you endure. It is not a job or a task that you someday complete and then are able to move on from.

Grief is an element of who we are, an alteration of our very being that becomes a new way of how we see ourselves. Grief eventually becomes a new definition of self and that new definition results in compassion and enlightenment.

Acknowledging grief allows us to grow and become wiser and stronger and learn more of who we are.

Grief is the process; it is not the end game.

Blessed be