You Don’t Have to be Fully Healed to Flourish.

Attitudes of transcendence can easily distort the necessity of grief and mourning, even denying the erotic nature of longing at the heart of navigating impermanence in this earthly existence.

This life is transient, which is both mournful and joyful. That is to say, filled with the presence of Eros, the divine life force energy of life itself—both longing for itself as much as living in union with itself.

Freedom from is a transcendent kind of freedom, which can perpetuate a wheel in motion where things need to be constantly cleared, healed, battled with, or overcome in some way. It requires a certain set of circumstances to maintain our wakefulness.

This kind of perceived freedom from our human experience comes at a cost—the cost of a sustainable, nourishing kind of desire, longing, love, wisdom, and utter aliveness that coexists with our pain and woundedness. It comes at a cost to her, the earth, our nourishing, nurturing, and holding mother upon whom we rely for our lives.

There is not a human who does not carry a deep wound, a wound of separation that, at its core, is both the great pain and the great cure. Such as the way enlightenment and suffering arise, merge, and move from the center of the same source.

Fully whole, they are inextricable—which is why the more awakened, “in-bodied” we truly are, the more deeply compassionate we are toward all of existence.

What we reject is where our freedom lives.

Either we are so identified with our wounded, earthly pain that we don’t believe that our light, pleasure, love, and flourishing nature are real and trustable (trauma). Or, we are so identified with being the light that we deny the pain and poignancy of living an earthly existence, so we close our hearts and lack empathy for others (trauma).

We have internalized our cultural parents, along with an indoctrination into commodified, colonialized spiritual growth, as well as the attitudes our families had toward the human condition and soul life; we can easily co-opt healing modalities as an unconscious way to parent ourselves the way we felt our wounds were treated.

Healing work is grief work. Most “pathologies” are certain grooves or patterns of unmetabolized grief expressing themselves in reaction to a culture that is unwell, which in itself is something we have yet to mourn, rather than simply trying to shine things that are broken.

When we make our unmet and unacknowledged pain wrong, we are creating more suffering for ourselves. Our seeking to escape it can cause more suffering and our ever-decreasing ability to be present and attuned with the feeling nature of what is.

There is another way. In drawing down our connection to the divine and rooting into the Mother, the earth, we heal our relationship with the loving source.

When we bring this powerful love into our human experience, it helps us heal.

We grieve.

Our bodies release the pain in the metabolic process of grieving.

We mourn.

Our souls create space to honor and acknowledge, to tell the stories that need to be heard, to let go of who we thought we were, to let the fires of life burn things down so that what is left, the bones, can be prayed over, danced over, and given new life to.

In all our grief and mourning, there is a deep love and a profound longing for that love.

To know that love.

To feel safe in that love.

To find ground in something we hadn’t realized we’d lost or had even found in the first place.

Our mourning may continue on in all our lives, for honoring what has come and gone makes our pain into a prayer to transform our earthly wounding into something beautiful—a life with even more richness, joy, connection, and meaning…impermanence and all.

Our inherent humanity is rich with longing and creative potential right alongside what there is to grieve, mourn, and let go of.

It’s all dancing together into an emergent field of aliveness in all of its textures, colors, flavors, and temperatures.

Why would we want to deny ourselves the sacred nature of this dance?

We’ve seen what happens to the earth when we disconnect in order to transcend ourselves.

Now, let’s see what happens to the earth when we come back.

Remember, the parts of you in the most pain were denied the most love when it was needed.

Love is the way.

Not further abandonment.

You don’t have to be fully healed, or have transcended your grief, in order to flourish.

More love.

Not less.

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