Grief
I love the Femme! Emotional Tour™️. Through participating in live Femme! Experiences and becoming a a Femme! Teacher, I’ve noticed how my relationship with different emotions has shifted.
Over the last 5 years and especially since mid 2020, Grief has been claiming my attention. So much global Grief that has been connecting me to my own unexpressed pain. It reminded me of my Femme! journey.
At my first Femme! Experience, I connected to JOY so easily. The music, the space, the knowing that I could move however my body wanted to move and I wouldn’t be judged for my dancing style. Already THAT was worth the price of admission!
GRIEF... The next stop on the Emotional Tour™️. I remember squatting on the floor, arms wrapped around my torso, closed off and frozen. I tried so hard to access grief. It should have been easy as my dad had died about 18 months earlier. Nothing. Nothing. Still nothing. I followed the suggestion to breathe more deeply, to move my body even if it was only slightly. There! There was a trace of it. Like catching the scent of a single rose on the breeze, then it was gone.
The third stop on the Emotional Tour was RAGE... well that was laughable for the most part. Stamping my feet, trying the “fake it ‘til you make it” approach. There was so little energy in it that, if I’d been balancing a full to the brim glass of water on my head, I might not have spilled a drop. Until someone offered me one of the bats. I remember shrugging as I took the bat, not expecting anything and then, as I began to pound the couch with the bat... “FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU. FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUUUUUU!” for what seemed to have been a small eternity as I “awoke”, wondered “what the actual..?” I felt clearer, cleaner, more in my body... and a little bemused. That experience alone had me say yes and sign up to do the Teacher Training. At that time in my life, before having the lovely, lovely (and potty-mouthed (yeah, you know who you are!)) American friends that I have now, I rarely ever had a cuss word cross my lips. The occasional “Oh SUGAR!” said with feeling.
But what of Grief, I hear you ask? Well, I’d have thought that rage would be the inaccessible one, I’d suppressed it for so long I was used to feeling sad. It was just like that, right? Nope, it wasn’t and nope it isn’t.
I realise that I’ve feared Grief. Feared that it’d pull me into a bottomless well of despair that I couldn’t escape. Feared that I’d cry for so long that I would no longer be able to function in the world.
I’m so glad to have a different perspective of Grief, now. To know that something or someone was important to me. An opportunity “...to find meaning in and recover from grave situations.”*
Femme! has helped me to connect to bite sized pieces of Grief, manageable amounts to move through and out of my body, out of my cells at each Femme! Experience.
Bernadette Pleasant‘s Grief Ritual calls have been a potent monthly opportunity to move and meditate, visualise and verbalise, wail and be witnessed. Through these calls I learned that there are 6 types of Grief: 1. Everything we love, we’ll lose. 2. What we expected but didn’t receive. 3. Sorrow for the world and we don’t know how to help because it feels so huge. 4. Parts of us that haven’t been loved. Unexpressed parts. Parts rejected. 5. Ancestral grief, stored in the bones and tissues. 6. Grief that remains unnamed.
Dan Newby, his books and his Emotion Centered Coaching course have also helped me to become more curious about my emotions. What if emotions are, as per the title of one of his books, “The Unopened Gift”?
So, whilst I get there’s a way to go with pockets of Grief that I haven’t yet accessed, I feel more hopeful, more curious, more engaged with all emotions. If Grief hasn’t collapsed me, maybe I can enjoy what it has to teach me.
Guest Blog post by Heather “Hev” Drummond
