Grieving from a Higher Perspective

Since I wrote to all of you last about my process of adapting to life without sweet Kate, I have recognized something I feel is a very important understanding about the emotional repercussions that can result from the death of a loved one.  I noticed it first in myself, but it also showed itself through distraught, commiserating, grief-soaked responses to the last Mesa News email and phone calls from people who were foundering on the shores of despair as they tried to extricate themselves from painful loss.  Several had lost multiple family members and/or close friends in short periods of time, but often relatively long amounts of time ago.  Some had lost satisfying jobs, treasured pets, relationships, and often their health.

Surely when those we love cross back over to Spirit it leaves a kind of energetic and emotional vacuum in our lives, but that void in and of itself may not be the true source of the bulk of our pain.  I have recognized that without the beautiful distraction of Kate in my life, grief over how I negatively and unconsciously felt about myself was frequently and vehemently boiling to the surface of my feelings unrestricted and unanswered.

Driven by ingrained 3rd Density (Mundane World) survival strategies learned from my parents that are now being rapidly rendered obsolete by the evolution of Creation, like obsessively assessing and comparing the relative “value” of things (ourselves included) and the way I had been dismissively treated early in life, it was largely old, molten grief and guilt, not new sorrow that I found filling my empty heart and empty hours.

Kate’s glowing presence in my life, our all-consuming schedule at The Mesa, and unconscious self-preservation mechanisms had mercifully allowed me to ignore or more or less bury pain that had accumulated within me for years.  With Kate gone and my work at a standstill, I had to chose; slide into depression, distract myself with endless doing, or stand my ground and face being.  Numbing myself was an option favored by many that I never considered.

Fortunately, what had changed for me in the time since my last great loss when my first wife died 22 yrs ago was my level of awareness; of my thoughts, behavior, familial programming, motivation, talents, higher energies, and spiritual nature.  With Kate’s loving help and through my desire to heal myself I had raised it from mere self-consciousness to greater observation and sensing of what swirled inside of me, leaving me no choice but to take responsibility for myself as I was in the moment.  Much as I wanted to, I honestly couldn’t blame most of the pain I felt on Kate’s passing directly, though it was clearly the trigger.

Gratefully, Kate and I had also been gifted with tools to help ourselves with this higher-sense endeavor in techniques like Guided Head Movement healing and Kinesiology (muscle testing).  Over time and with much patience, they allowed us to gradually rebalance a certain amount of our old trauma and lighten our emotional and psychological load, but I could no longer ignore that the bulk of my iceberg remained submerged.   In the past, the passage of a busy life handily kept the denser stuff out of my day-to-day awareness—all but the pain I learned to simply bear as part of living.  When my life suddenly came to a crashing pause with Kate’s passing, it hungrily rushed in to fill the empty space that had been created.

As I started to work through my old junk I had to face the fact that I really felt worse about being (with) myself than in being without Kate.  Just that insight alone was helpful.  Many revelations and healings quickly followed as I continued the exploratory morning “meetings” Kate and I customarily held (Roster: Me, my inner self, Healing Guides, coffee cup.) and allowed for emergency “interventions” whenever and wherever the pain cropped up.

I saw, for instance, that I had been treating myself just as my parents did; as a burden and a failure, even though I didn’t actually see or believe myself any longer to be.  It was tantamount to treating a cat like a dog or hearing person as deaf.  A friend helped me with a Guided Head Movement healing that popped off that emotional padlock.  The physical sensations during that healing were indicative of my deep unconscious self facing something fearful it had avoided since childhood.  In an instant the fright was gone and peace flooded in.

Days of quiet aloneness brought me to terms with the fact that I was silently and fairly continuously insulting myself, just as my parents did, but had learned to largely ignore it like the ringing in my ears.  This self-deprecation occasionally took the form of simply shaking my head when I looked at myself in the mirror.  (How insulting!)

I had always felt that I tended to be sensitive and “thin skinned” in my Piscean way.  The old advice from my childhood, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me,” came into my mind.  Much as I wanted that condition to be true for me, confoundingly words still deeply wounded me.  A single vague comment from even myself could put me into a maddening, rehashing tailspin for hours.  The humorous yet successful solution turned out to be using Guided Head Movement to raise my “immunity” to insults.  With that in place, the now ineffectual and pointless internal berating ceased.

As these and other things shifted for me I began to see my life situation as one of immense opportunity rather than gloom.  This change taking place in a few short weeks was well beyond the normal limits of “time healing all wounds” and a direct result of focused attention and introspection.  Following the Flow of Creation’s urging to rise to higher consciousness, I was able to move from traditional 3rd Density grief into dealing with loss from a higher path, just as I learned to do with Kate’s illness and eventual death.

I have come to understand that by clinging to the past and what we have lost, we can lose ourselves as well.  This does not have to be.  I had written to a friend that with Kate no longer in my life I felt like a “marble rolling around in a shoebox.”  I found myself smiling and added, “…and why couldn’t a marble enjoy that?”

About Brad Silberberg

Brad Silberberg, director of The Mesa Creative Arts Center in Burgettstown, PA (Pittsburgh area) is an artist, holistic healer, spiritual leader, and change agent.
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