Mourning – Detachment – In your dreams you hurt. You feel such shuddering emptiness and loss it’s a physical relief to wake up and find your dream wasn’t real. Lots of people fear such sadness is some kind of prophecy. It’s enough to make a person fear going to sleep.

We Need to Mourn – Sadness is not allowed in a society where perfect strangers feel comfortable demanding you to “smile.” Look at all these Instagram feeds with everybody grinning away because they’re having so much FUN and their lives are so PERFECT they never wake up shuddering with sadness. Except they are human too, so we know that they DO. They’re just better at covering it up than we seem to be. (And some people, admittedly are just plain shallower.) This inevitably means we have a lot of mourning to catch up on. We didn’t get to go through our process of bargaining and acceptance so all that’s left is denial and depression. Not only that, the “causes” of your lost mourning seem so inconsequential to our “adult” selves. “So your pet died when you were five, everybody says. Your parents got a divorce. You moved five times. Get over it, already!” Accept the power and significance of your own feelings.

Challenge – Time to feel compassion for yourself. Ask the question, why are you dreaming these things now? Sometimes something going on in our lives reminds of that past unhealed hurt. Sometimes our collective unconscious is feeling other people’s suffering. It’s OK to think about that sadness, especially if it makes us feel closer to other people. Everyone has these lost, wrecked treasures submerged in their lives. Celebrate the fact that you are able to feel so deeply in a world where others are forced to punish themselves, take risks and drugs in order to “feel something.”

Danger – Cultivate detachment. Let go of the toxic elements in your life. Go “no-contact” on toxic people. Read up on sadism, the better to understand the people out there enjoying your suffering. Buddhists recommend surveying your thoughts and feelings from a distance, as in hypnotherapy, then setting them free. This is not dissociation. Dissociation is more like floating through life with all our systems repressed, feeling numb. Dissociation is not good. It’s not that you don’t care, it’s that you can use that pool of tears to respond more intensely to life, to art, to music, and to each other.

Opportunity – Resilience is our most powerful survival trait. This means that after blight, we can flourish more strongly, just the way pruned plants will. It’s not necessary to explore all the caverns of your being, but it will make you stronger. Once again, choose a buddy and a guide. Think about the “hero’s journey” story you respond to most deeply. How would you explain your hero’s journey to someone else? Feel free to use metaphors, after all, when we were children we did feel our world to be populated by monsters and the supernatural.

Meditation –

#Haiku: Detachment

In the last phase of grief
bless your wrestling angel –
grow scar tissue wings