Grief is the road to abundance and intimacy. When we grieve, when we humble ourselves, we open to community, we open to the vast bounty of the earth. When we lose control, when we get close to death and loss we open to interbeing, to receiving, to giving and to relationship.
We remember the value of life, we remember who and what we love and what is really important. We remember who we are and why we came here. Grief brings the death of the small self and surrender to life’s majesty.
When we learn to grieve together again, our grief may have the capacity to heal our culture and to embolden us to listen to even the most hard headed people. Our grief may embolden us to listen to the grief and pain of the ones we find to be the most difficult. Grief and regret are not things to be avoided, they are the music that cuts down to the core of our being, they are our praise for life in another form.
Just smiling and being positive won’t bring abundance by itself, abundance needs the fecund space of grief to fill it. The great treasure of life, comes when we allow grief, when we allow ourselves to receive, when we become vulnerable but powerful, when we give ourselves and allow ourselves to be filled. Then the emptiness created by grief allows a larger intraconnection field of life, the larger ecological self, a larger force of nature, to move through our body, to use our body for its expression.
Then it is not us acting, it is not us speaking, we experience ‘sacred laziness’, which is different from ordinary laziness in that it involves complete accountability. We experience non-trying, non action, the Gods move through our body and the wild animalistic speech of the ancient ones, the speech of the mountains and rivers flows through us.
We become a flow-through of the earth’s sentient dreaming intelligence. And everyone who hears us speak then will experience the trembling of the Gods, will weep heartfelt tears which will feed the spirits of the land and increase its bounty.
In our culture we can often see great cruelty meted out to the poor, the downtrodden, the oppressed and the homeless. Curiously, instead of lifting these people up and recognizing them for the great gifts and insights that they are bringing, we establish punitive measures which harm them even more.
What is the reason for this bizarre behaviour? We have projected onto the poor and onto minority groups and refugees our disavowed grief and regret, which we repress and don’t want to face. When we learn to come to grieve again as a collective, when we honour our tears, we will create a culture which includes and offers abundance to everyone, including minority groups and the oppressed.
Eventually, due to the river of our tears, entire empires will dissolve and new continents and new cultures will open up. Our grief will return to us like an errant part of our own soul, like a refugee fleeing to us from some distant warzone and our love will accompany it like a brother.
When grief is fully experienced there is total accountability, total Saturnian responsibility. We didn’t create all the troubles of our life, many of them pre-existed our lives or the formation of our adults selves, but we are accountable for how we respond to them. Not everything is our fault, but we are accountable for how we respond to it anyway.
Its easy to say: “Yes, its ok, whatever I do love or God is always there” or some other platitude. And there may be some truth to this, but grief remind us that things end, time happens in the mortal world, and actions have consequences. Unfashionable as it is, if we don’t surrender to the bounty of life, if we run from grief and thus from our real treasure all our life, it will have consequences.
One reason why people generate or ‘manifest’ lack in their lives is because their unconscious/superconscious dreaming ecological Self is trying to remind them of and draw them closer to grief. So one way to consciously bring more abundance, to align the unconscious and conscious, is to consciously bring more humility and grief in our life.
When we befriend death, regret and grief we befriend abundance. We may unconsciously fear that unless we push ourselves and live up to certain standard we will die or be abandoned, but in fact what needs to die is this small scarcity-based self. We may need to feel and process the difficult emotions and body experiences which underlie this scarcity based self.
We may fear abundance because we fear it will be difficult, another ‘task’, another standard we have to comply too, but the experience of abundance is often enormous ease, effortlessness, majesty, grief, trouble, gift and humility and it is this huge ease and humility that we both fear and deeply need and desire.
It is not that when we open to abundance there will be no problems or troubles. Within this abundance there will be troubled ground, there will be conflict. There is no escape from that, but we can draw upon the resources of community and of the earth to help us, we can tap into the medicine powers behind our problems and convert them into power.
I remember my dream that I dreamt at Monkton Wyld eco-community when the primordial all consuming witch, the great initiator Baba Yaga appeared to me and said:
‘If you don’t fuck me right now I will fuck you, then kill you and eat you.’
Then she turned into a beautiful woman.
Then she turned into a hideous demon with multiple mouths and eyes. I said: ‘I’m still going to fuck you even though you are a hideous demon.’
Then she turned into a rotting corpse. I said ‘I’m still going to fuck you even though you are a rotting corpse.’
Then she turned into a huge spiral galaxy and I said: ‘I’m still going to fuck you even though you are a galaxy.’
Then she turned into the entire universe. The entire universe was present in my room, immeasurable heavens, worlds without end were being created.
I said ‘I’m still going to fuck you even though you are the universe.’
What is this dream trying to say? Some of is best to remain a mystery and to gleam and glisten in the dark, but a large part of it is the message to adopt the attitude of becoming aroused by all experiences, by everything I have co-created with the universe, even the darkest and most terrifying and taboo parts. I was being told to remain steady with vast embodied presence in the face of everyone and everything.
Baba Yaga, the great initiator was telling me to ‘fuck the universe’ and to say ‘Yes’ to all life, to penetrate all problems and fears and find the medicine power and the gifts that live under them.
Just doing affirmations and ‘manifesting abundance’ won’t bring abundance by itself. To manifest abundance we need the space to process loss or sadness, to find the medicine power behind our fears and struggles. The space of grief allows a cornucopia of wild gardens, soul friendships, vast wealth shared and used for the good of all, heartful storytelling, animalistic bodies, open weeping and rivers of tears and uproarious celebration to flow through us.
Grief brings an opening to intimacy with wild rivers and moorland, coral reefs, sparrowhawks, bluebells, curlews, swaggering badgers, tumultuous waves of mallow, blackthorn blossom, sea beet, sweet briar, samphire, heather and rock rose.
Grief leads us down to the sea where deer and otter walk on the beach, where dolphins and great shoals of silver bass and basking sharks swim near the shore. Grief leads us to that miraculous shore where a hearthfire is burning and all our soul friends, all our spirit helpers, all those who we have healed and are alive and full because of us, and all those who have healed us, are gathered and waiting for us.
In the celebration, around the circle of fire, in the vast weeping, the flow of tears and the joy, we find community, reconnected to the circle of all life
jason hine 