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After an unexpected walk through the underworld

In March, I was on top of the world, high on the impact of our work spreading stories of hope and healing. I was sitting on at least three interviews waiting to be released, and scheduling more. The first to schedule would be an interview with Siobhan, a friend of MaryLou’s who was a “grief pilgrim,” a word I’d never heard but was immediately compelled by.

But then in April, I entered the underworld. My truck’s head gaskets blew up, alongside my savings. My cat, beloved companion and familiar for 15 years, declined rapidly. My closest human relationship, one that I’d cultivated with devotion regardless of how it may not ‘be serving me,’ as we new-agers love to say, was dissolving, painfully and with finality. I entered a chronic freeze state, unable to make decisions, unable to move, pinned many days to a couch smoking hand rolled cigarettes, or lying in the grass begging the rays of the sun to feed me their energy.

Bart died, and I buried him. My beloved went silent. I recovered my truck, “fixed,” but now not running due to another problem. Rock bottom had an even deeper subterranean layer, and I clawed at its borders not knowing which way was up, but demanding an out, a return to my old self in the full bloom of spring.

A beloved friend encouraged me to give my grief permission to be felt. She exhorted me to stop downgrading my grief as not worthy of expression, as if my heartbreaks were too minor to be the root of sleeplessness, loss of appetite, and a total incapacity to so much as do the dishes or send an email.

I began to fully feel my grief, and as is often the case, grief brought up more grief, undigested hurts from losses long since passed. I fell in love with my grief, I recognized its presence as a companion, a partner, a lover. When I felt alone, like no one could relate or understand, I still had my grief, which is another way of saying I still had my love. The loss hurt so much only because the love that gave birth to it was a pure, clear channel of the eternal heart of God that beats in my own chest. While we at times separate ourselves from the feeling of connection to God (Source, the Universe, whatever you want to call it, I call it God), nevertheless it never separates itself from us.

And so with time, prayer, and the support and witness of sisters, I started eating again. I washed my hair. I turned my attention to helping others. The healing spiral danced forward and back. And when I finally opened the emails I’d avoided for two months, who did I find, but Siobhan Asgharzadeh, the grief pilgrim, ready to record an episode all about walking the sacred path of loss. Divine timing directs me to publish this episode first, before those episodes that were recorded all the way back in winter. They’ll make it out, for sure, but we begin again in the place that is most alive for me right now: the Death Portal.

As is always the case with How I Healed, I promise this episode will be full of levity and laughter alongside depth and tears. I say this about every one of our episodes, but I think it’s our juiciest yet. I hope you will tune in, share this medicine with those for whom it is most needed, and if you have a story of healing outside the dominant medical paradigm, please get in touch!