by Brenna Fitzgerald writer, editor, coach, and host of Creative Recovery podcast
Grief is a process that may involve conflicting emotions and can often feel uncomfortable and confusing. It’s natural to want to close down, shut off, and stop this unpredictable flow, especially in a society that expects grieving to happen in a certain linear timeframe and pathologizes anything outside of that.
I recently listened to an interview with grieving expert David Kessler, author of Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. He talked about the desire grieving individuals may feel to make the grief smaller in some way and offered an insightful alternative perspective to this reaction. “Rather than make the grief smaller,” he said, “we need to make ourselves bigger. Grief is love, and we don’t want it to get smaller.” He calls for a transformation of the traumatic wound into the cherished wound.
Indeed, research on grief supports Kessler’s emphasize on the importance of making space for grieving in all its forms. In his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, psychotherapist Francis Weller writes, “if we ignore the fire, our internal life feels cold and the grief in our container congeals. Offering our attention, affection, and love, on the other hand, feeds the fire, and the gradual work of transmuting grief into gold can commence.”
My own early struggles with depression and an eating disorder as a teenager offered a gateway into investigating grief. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time, so consumed by my own suffering and unprocessed loss. It was not until I had undergone years of therapy in various forms from cognitive therapy to meditation and mindfulness practices to restorative yoga and creative writing that a deeper understanding of my inner world awakened. I realized that my depression and eating disorder were manifestations of stuck energy—of grief—from having experienced trauma in my early years and not having had the tools to process it. I began to realize the importance of practices, and especially practices of creative expression, to help move the complex energies stirred by my losses.
As Weller writes, “we are a menagerie of moods, emotions, thoughts, and selves. For the most part, we keep the unsavory brothers and sisters on the outskirts of town. Practice, however, invites these voices into the mix, recognizing in them an essential element in our well-being. We are asked to welcome the weak and vulnerable parts of ourselves in times of grieving….” I love his perspective and the emphasis on practice as an invitation into such a compassionate view of our grief.
It is through this lens that I created my upcoming workshop “Recovering Your Creative Spirit in Grief.” Grief can cause you to feel stuck, uninspired, and unfulfilled. This impacts your ability to express conflicting emotions in creative ways. In this workshop we will explore the feeling of being stuck and how it affects our inner life and outer expression. Through written reflection, group discussion, mind-body practices, and intuitive collage I will guide participants into a deeper understanding of their own blocks. Together we will create a safe and supportive container for each person to begin the process of shifting from stuck to unstuck. My intention is to facilitate awareness of and curiosity around the needs and desires of your creative spirit and to share tools and practices to help you sustain a nourishing and fulfilling engagement in life well beyond the workshop.
David Kessler says that “each person’s grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed.” Research on grief conducted by Robert A. Neimeyer, a psychology professor at the University of Memphis and a clinician, points to this same insight of the need for connection in healing. Great strength, resiliency, and compassion emerge when we can be present to our own self-expression and the self-expression of others, whether in the form of sharing stories around a fire or making collage on zoom.
This workshop is an opportunity for us to come together in community and offer space for one another’s stuck energy to flow in creative ways. May the practices we play with help you connect to a much larger sense of yourself and the world—a self that can hold, in love, the pain of your loss. As one of my favorite writers and thinkers, Audre Lorde, says: “These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling.” I look forward to sharing healing creative space with you at “Recovering your Creative Spirit in Grief” offered virtually through Hospicare on March 3, 2022, from 6:30-8:00 p.m. May we all exceed the limits of our own self-image and awaken to the expansive being within—our inner creator.
EVENT INFORMATION
Recovering Your Creative Spirit in Grief
March 03, 6:30 – 8:00 pm via Zoom
To participate in this event, REGISTER HERE by February 28th.
To learn about other events offered by Hospicare & Palliative Care Services, visit the events calendar on our website.