Grief is love and Other Portals of Expression With Ayurveda

My youngest surprised me with a visit home from college last month. Always the one to remind me of the sacred of hand made, I was presented with some lovely gifts. I am looking at one of them now, a 12x12 collage with hummingbirds, lace and three words:

Grief is Love

Grief is love..I have read it 1,000 times now. It is simple indeed, but twines through my heart and mind like bramble over a well worn fence. Grief is Love..Grief is Love. I say it, repeat it, let it take me into another world that helps me define what this mantra means to me.

Beauty has always captured my eye and my heart. I am drawn to expressions of beauty far and wide and working to create places of beauty, forms of beauty, images of beauty has been part of the work I have cultivated over the last decade ++. It is essential work for me. It feels like something that wells from deep inside-calling the deepest parts of who I am from what feels like many lifetimes. For me these expressions, these creations from images in photos to setting sacred space, poetry and piles of piles of flowers go so much deeper than what appears as the end result.

This is a process

For me, the process is intimately connected to the idea that Grief is an expression of love and that expression can be wild or refined, small or grand, colorful or quiet: all forms of beauty. Regardless of its quality, it is a distillation of the desire to create from places where pain, sadness and suffering rise. For me it feels like a calling from other worlds that show no interest in time or circumstance—only the felt sense that grief is a powerful force that can be channeled into something tangible that can live outside of our body.

There is an important understanding in Ayurveda that says expressions of grief, sadness and anger should be ripened and then expressed to move them from the internal depths to the external realms of being. This helps keep disease at bay and supports important digestion of emotions and feelings. In the invocation of the expression we get a chance to move the emotions and set them free. Grief can be tricky to move though…it can be sticky, heavy and holds on tight. Grief burrows deeply and can hide into the intimate depths—living quietly at times, taking space and doing its important work or surviving. Surviving like a living memorial inside us. But Ayurveda shares that holding onto such powerful emotions can cause a host of problems which, when left alone, can set forth great imbalance and even dis-ease. After all grief IS an expression of something important to us.

Love

I think Love has many expressions and flavors and movement helps with the flow of expression so moving grief when the time feels ripe can be very helpful. It can help support clearing stagnation, re-setting imbalance and serve as a living acknowledgement of its importance. By creating we are doing just that. We are invoking the grief, calling to it and asking it to shape shift to healing. We can give it form and feeling which may translate to an important honoring.

Join me in prayer piles of flowers, in intricate designs of leaves and twigs, in words swooning from your belly—in deep expressions that call from your heart towards creativity, towards healing and towards love.