Transformational Grief

by David Campbell, Vision Steward

Article written for the Albany Democrat-Herald Interfaith Column

June 2023

When I feel into my inner guidance as a leader of community and the leader of my own path of healing, I feel most in alignment with the softest parts of me when I start from a place of allowing individual and collective grief to be witnessed without judgement or agenda. By allowing grief to penetrate through me without resistance, to resonate in me without becoming me, and to fill me while not letting it own me, grief can propel me forwards on my path of transformation, healing, and growth.

Up until now, our collective relationship with grief incudes the energy of avoidance. We pretend it’s not there. We don’t let it in, and so the individual and collective healing experience after a loss feels incomplete.  If we allow grief at all, we have expected grief to be limited in its expression and have an expiration date. We have made a silent collective agreement to grieve alone or to “fix” grief before it makes someone else uncomfortable.

In the other extreme, grief can be allowed to become our identity. One can clutch onto grief like a searing coal and it moves us towards feelings of despair, fear, hatred or non-empowerment. The Buddha shared a parable about holding onto a hot coal. The tighter you hold it, the more it will burn you. And so it is with grief. To witness grief and to hold it with tenderness and gentleness allows grief to move through you. You can pick it up and set it down. You can let grief open your heart and transform you because you are the one who is creating your experience. Through transformative grief we can invite a rebirth of consciousness into that space beyond suffering. 

Grief that is a impetus for transcendence comes in and goes out like ocean waves. It is powerful, transformative, and ever changing.

Grief can pull us into the field of suffering by convincing us to believe the ideas of separateness are true, or it can unify us through allowing grief to be witnessed as simultaneously an individual and collective experience. By witnessing grief as a unifying experience, we move towards a path of healing rooted in empathy. Grief can help us know ourselves and give insight to where we have been and how we got to where we are in this moment. Grief illuminates spaces inside of us where there is room to let more light in.

Allowing grief to be witnessed as a beautiful part of the transformation process opens the possibility for what is becoming to come into our consciousness without fear.

Transformational grief can be a call to action. It can help us to dissolve cognitive dissonance and move past limiting beliefs held invisibly in place through previously unquestioned patterns of indoctrination.

Like a phoenix burning and rising in rebirth, like a caterpillar embracing its total liquification on its journey of becoming a butterfly, like the beautiful transformation of day becoming night at the moment of sunset, we can hold grief as a beautiful part of the cycle of transformation that allows us to know ourselves in newness.

And so I invite the individual and collective expression of transformative grief to be welcomed into the collective experience as it can serve as a light beaconing us forward on the path of unconditional love and interconnectedness.

Namaste. 

David Campbell,