In response to a prompt on the holy sparks we see in what was a dark experience of the past, I wrote this: “In what I have believed to be a dark experience from my past, I see the sparks of growing resilience, anger transformed to self-awareness, dejection transformed to acceptance, and expectation transformed into peaceful grief.”
A few people asked me what “peaceful grief” meant.
Peaceful grief, for me, has been about:
- looking at my expectations straight in the eye,
- validating whether the other can meet these expectations,
- having compassion for the other’s capacity and needs,
- recognising the futility of basing my happiness on another’s ability to meet my expectations,
- having compassion for my own needs, and
- releasing the other from that expectation.
In self-compassion, I acknowledge the pain of my need not being met. And I grieve for this loss in that relationship. I mourn till the resilience in me rises again.
An insight comes up – my needs can be met through other means.
Believing that there is only ever one door is the saddest loss of creativity and spontaneity.
I also hold the courage to revisit that need in that relationship at a later time.
Peaceful grief is the reclamation of the spontaneity in myself, a reclamation of my ability to live life in all its fullness.