How to Heal from a Profound Experience
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On this particular day, sitting at the empty page of a free-writing session, I do not do what I normally do. Which is begin writing. Just begin, filling the page with words.
Instead, I scroll to the bottom of the document and choose a writing prompt from a list I’ve been keeping for a day like this. A day when I need a nudge.
Write about what it felt like to heal from a profound experience of loss or grief.
Hmmm, this prompt calls to me. I have immense respect for this author and writing coach, Anne LaMott. She is brilliant – her work revolutionary and embracing. And this writing prompt – both revolutionary and embracing – provokes and inspires me, like anything luscious in life.
How does it feel to heal from a profound experience of loss or grief?
First things first.
Is it possible “to heal,” as in “done and dusted, I can officially move on from this experience of profound loss and grief, once and for all?”
I am provoked.
Which means… I’m ready to write.
First, I’m going back to the start, as Coldplay’s Chris Martin once sang.
What is “a profound experience of loss or grief?” Yes, there is losing someone to death. That comes top of mind. There is the loss of a career, which may turn your world upside down, dangling identity by its scraggly toenails. There are relationship break-ups – business partners, lovers, friends. There is the loss of possessions, which is arguably not so profound, unless it is something with incredible symbolic value, like a wedding ring or a love note or great-grandma’s wool shawl.
And then, my darlings, there is life.
Which to me, is a profound experience of loss and grief. (And love and majesty and joy and adventure.)
Now hear here, before you run off from the page shunning me for adopting such a dark approach to life, let me explain. Let me debone this Thanksgiving turkey on the cutting board of this page before us.
Life is a profound experience. I think we can all agree on that.
Life is a profound overall experience full of infinite smaller experiences.
From falling in love to laying on a tropical beach to tucking into grandma’s Sunday lasagna to surviving your first sleepless night as a new parent to calling a tow truck in the rain to peeling chewing gum off your new leather boots, these experiences are life. They are what constitutes an existence – and none of them we can do without. No matter how many technicolor hackathons we attend.
In this day and age, there is S O M U C H T A L K about healing. Sometimes I wonder, when are we meant to do the living we’re healing from? And then I remember…
Everything is healing
Everything is living.
When we take a breath, we’re both sustaining our life (yes, I’m in it for another intake of oxygen!) and healing our cells from the stress they’re subjected to. Perhaps when we turn a light on our suffering with the intention of healing it – not holding onto it – we’re live through it. We feel it. We live with it. We heal it.
As Ted’s parents, now both nearing their 80s, spend more and more of their social time at funerals, waving goodbye to friends, colleagues, and family, my son and daughter puff up their chests and purport, “Mom, you know nothing about anything that makes real sense in the modern world.”
And so yes it’s true. The more you learn, the less you know.
Or easier put: the more you learn, the more there is to learn.
The more loss and grief I allow myself to witness, the more I heal.
The more I let life be life, however it decides it show up on any given day, the more I live in alignment with life.
The more I can be with my shadow, the more I am exposed to the light.
So how do we heal from a profound experience of loss or grief?
Perhaps by dropping the labels and saying hello to life, with all its essences. By loving ourselves through the entire spectrum of feelings. By being brave enough to feel them in the first place, and then kindly sitting with ourselves – perhaps breathing, perhaps talking, perhaps crying, perhaps staring off into space – when the waters are choppier.
By opening yourself to the magic that is in EVERYTHING AT ALL TIMES, even (and especially) the times that feel really fucking shitty.
Perhaps we heal from these profound experiences of loss or grief, which are natural and unavoidable parts of every single human life, by accepting them as such. Perhaps by accepting that loss and grief are the bedfellas of joy and success. They make quite the stunning duo.
When we lose our old ideas, we gain new ones.
When we grieve over the things that are leaving our lives, we clear out the space for new things to come on in.
When we profoundly shed the things that are done with us – be it an old identity or an expired relationship or a place that no longer makes sense – we open ourselves to the wild ride of a life lived alive.
And that, my dears, is a fear-inducing, love-engorging place to live.
So hear here.
How does it feel to heal?
It feels.
It really really feels.
About Sarah Snavely
Author, musician, podcaster, death doula and mental health survivor, I create at the crossroads of hope and action. Having called many continents and countries home, my American blood has Sweden to thank for the last 18 years of becoming. With a deep reverence to mental health and full-story truth telling, I share my experiences (lived and learned) in full-frontal fashion. At the tender perimenopausal age of 49, as I wave goodbye to the mortal tendencies of youth.
From being raised by an undiagnosed manic-depressive single mother with 3 younger brothers, to multiple rapes, to losing my youngest brother to suicide and father to a shut-down in all his hope centers and continued emotional abuse through the mother wound, I rise today – every day – with a single promise. No one shall suffer in silence. And nothing is too dark to be touched by the light.
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