If We Don't Do This, We Lose Twice
Centering Aliveness in a World Full of Loss
Hello my grieving friends,
Did that greeting make you think, how did she know I’m a griever? Or maybe, am I allowed to grieve?
Given 100% of us experience losses, multiple times in our lives, the answer to that is “hell yes, we’re allowed to grieve.” And in these times of increasing individual and collective grief, wow is that true now more than ever.
“Hello my grieving friends” were the exact words I cheerfully uttered from the stage, greeting the 1,000 plus audience members attending End Well last November. I went on to ask them…
I’m curious though. In your grief, do you ever stumble upon joy and feel immediately guilty? I did for sure the first time I laughed out loud after my young husband died. And if you’ve survived cancer like me, or some other devastating illness, you too might find it challenging to be amazed by the sunlight rising at dawn, when the long dark shadow of that disease still lingers.
It can seem that the world is a relentless force, taking from us all that we hold precious.
Because, it is. AND It’s the same force that gives us what’s precious too.
As a social worker, grief guide and activist, I’ve spent a career railing against our culture’s use of toxic positivity to deny our pain, and felt enraged by the grief illiteracy causing us all so much harm. Yet here I am, as I did on the End Well stage, inviting you to focus on the vitality of living.
How DARE I do that?
It was actually in a conversation on my podcast, Grief is a Sneaky Bitch, that I discovered that’s what I’ve been doing all along. My guest Cecile Surasky, a mother whose teenage son died after unknowingly ingesting a lethal substance, shared that before his death, she used to think that the continuum that matters most in this life is moving from sadness to happiness.
But what Cecilie learned after the worst thing happened to her, is that the most important path we can take in this life is navigating from numbness to aliveness.
Aliveness then, exists on the far end of the spectrum from numbness. Aliveness reminds us that we all hold within us the full spectrum of emotions, From anguish and rage to astonishment and wonder, and that to attend to all of them, offers us a renewed vitality we’re so desperately longing for.
And that’s why I’m on a mission to help us center aliveness in a world full of loss, or as poet Jack Gilbert so eloquently asked of us in his poem, A Brief for the Defense, “we must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.”
Sadly, our culture rewards actions that lead to deadness instead of aliveness. We’ve become skilled and practiced at avoiding, controlling, dissociating, and distracting. Don’t be mistaken, aliveness is NOT a synonym for happiness. It doesn’t require you to always be cheerful, positive, or grateful. Centering aliveness does not require you to jump out of airplanes or scale high peaks either, I promise!
Aliveness just means we don’t get to order our emotions a la carte.
The way to feel into our aliveness, though counterintuitive and certainly countercultural, is to feel e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. To build our capacity to welcome, hold, and metabolize our individual and collective grief, we must be present to what animates us too. The musculature, the strength and flexibility required to attend to our sorrow is the same that allows us to engage with hope, feel connected, and nurture our soul.
I’m not asking you to choose between bearing witness to grief or being actively astonished by the beauty of this world. It’s NOT either/or, it’s both/and. When I invite my clients to be with their grief, yes, I’m serving as a safe container and witness as they find the courage to turn towards their losses. And I help them learn to see themselves as a companion to their sorrow, rather than being their sorrow.
AND, I remind them in equal measure, if we don’t allow delight to dazzle our senses, if amazement doesn’t make us breathless from time to time, if the story we tell ourselves and one another only includes the hardness and depravity of this world, then we lose twice.
I know how challenging it can be to center aliveness in our daily lives. It was so important to me, that I had it tattooed on my right forearm as a reminder-with the black band representing honoring the dead while the ampersand and blooming flowers remind me to also focus on the beauty of living.
And for the skeptics among you, in recent years researchers, like Dacher Keltner at UC Berkeley,
have validated that to invite wonder and awe into our daily lives, even and especially when the gravity of grief is weighing us down, is actually good for us. Good for our physical, cognitive, emotional, relational, and spiritual well-being.
Centering aliveness is also a healing and generous act. Because when we choose a reverent approach to the expansiveness of our own lives, we’re invited to engage with the world and one another with more empathy, generosity, altruism, and compassion.
And then in January 2023, I was given another chance to practice centering aliveness. These chances are what I call Another Fucking Growth Opportunity (Yep, that’s the inspiration for this Substack. More to come on the origin story of AFGO in the coming weeks).
Just 10 days before the manuscript for my first book was due to my publisher, and one month before I was scheduled to take the TEDx stage, I was diagnosed with Triple Positive Breast Cancer. If you’ve received similar news you understand, the call was devastating and shocking.
For me, this call came after more than a year of being misdiagnosed. And that fact cracked open a deep well of pain and rage that had been closed off. Unearthing the complex grief from more than a decade ago when my husband Eric was also misdiagnosed and mistreated for more than a year. A year of hell during which he changed as a husband, a father, a person. A year that we had to compress into only 2.5 weeks between getting the call that he had a grapefruit sized brain tumor all along to him dying in my arms at the age of 44.
So yeah, my diagnosis was a total AFGO.
And it was a reminder of how much new grief triggers old grief.
I knew immediately that I needed to give myself permission to lean into my rage, sorrow, and grief. And I absolutely did that. And, that I would need to practice my joy detective skills too. “Let it all happen, the terror and the beauty”, as Rilke said.
As I faced a frightening future, one that included the pain and agony of surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and immunotherapy, I questioned how I could possibly be in search of delight? Where could I find beauty in all of this? Friends, I so desperately wanted to be dazzled, but I also really didn’t want to face the world. I didn’t know how I could.
And then I did what I ask other people to do. I did what the research told me to do. I did what my body and intuition told me to do. For starters, I dared to ask for and receive help.
You might be thinking, Duh, revolutionary, Lisa. I know. But how many of us have practiced that muscle? That’s what I thought!
So I committed to saying yes to all offers of help. And I was awed and inspired by the moral beauty of others. I had podcast fans I’d never met knitting me caps to cover my bald head and sending poetry to my inbox, to acquaintances and friends who flew across the country to be with me when they shaved my head, and when I sat for hours in the chemo chair, hands and feet submerged in ice.
I also prioritized putting myself in the way of beauty, as Cheryl Strayed instructs us. So, I made a plan to be with the vista I love the most, the ocean. I made my way to the Pacific to meditate before each of my 12 weekly chemotherapy sessions. I knew intellectually it would be good for me, and yet I was deeply surprised at how being able to find any beauty at all, opened the door to hope.
And still, as my body became increasingly disfigured, I was tempted to retreat further into isolation.
Knowing collective effervescence was a path to aliveness, I muscled up the courage to arrive on the mat at my local yoga studio a few times a week. The risk of arriving vulnerably was absolutely worth the reward as strangers became neighbors and friends. I felt love and found belonging.
And I Also Paused. Part of centering aliveness is remembering we’re human beings not human doings. It’s about giving ourselves the chance to be still. But that feels nearly impossible for most of us, doesn’t it? And so when the days came that I wasn’t physically capable of leaving the house, When the chemo brain meant all I could do was spend hours staring at the wall …I let myself. I let myself stare at the wall for hours. I was a human JUST being.
You don’t have to wait for AFGO to start practicing aliveness.
Friends, you don’t have to wait for a cancer diagnosis or the death of a loved one to center aliveness. So here are 7 daily rituals to choose from. These are some practices that will help you move along the continuum away from numbness, as you build the musculature of aliveness.
#1 Seek Community: One of the best ways to soften the hard edges of our hearts is to gather in sacred communities. To be present to the sweet delight of being heard and held and celebrated.
#2 Bring Intention to Your Attention: Mindfulness helps us get better at differentiating the story we’re telling ourselves from what’s actually happening in this moment - which might just include a state of ease, or even a feeling of joy.
#3 Beauty and Wonder Walks: Be on the hunt for beauty in a variety of forms. It might include beauty that’s fallen to the ground, or that includes the color blue, or has rough textures.
#4 Find yourself in nature: Beyond putting our lives in perspective, and reminding us of our interconnectedness, when we see fields lay fallow, we’re shown that rest is a part of being alive too.
#5 Be an amateur photographer: Be on the lookout for images that inspire you or touch your heart or expand your mind. Snap a picture or take a video, then share it with someone else so they get to experience awe too.
#6 Deliver delight to others: Offer a specific compliment to a friend or join me in my weekly practice of giving flowers to a stranger. As Maya Angelou invited us, “be a rainbow in somebody else’s cloud”.
And finally,
#7 Tell Yourself a Story of Aliveness - Words make worlds. So, find a set of grounding words that bring your attention to the sacredness of this life each day.
I closed this talk at End Well by inviting the audience to repeat after me, and I’d like to invite you to do the same. “May I see love. May I feel love. May I radiate love. May I receive love.”
You can do it here, imagining my voice and saying it back to the screen or you can click here to watch me guide you through it by watching the talk.
May delight dazzle your senses this week!
Love,
Lisa
Up Next Week:
Words Make Worlds: My reflections on what I’ve learned about the stories we tell ourselves and how they shape not just what we see as possible or impossible, but also impacts how we experience our lives.
Resources and Requests:
PODCASTS:
Grief is a Sneaky Bitch Podcast: In the latest episode, Consolee Nishimwe and Barbara Becker joined me for a powerful conversation. Consolee is an extraordinary woman. She is a speaker, author, and human rights advocate. AND she is a survivor of the Rwandan genocide and in our conversation she offers one of THE most powerful examples of reframing I’ve ever heard. Talk about how words make worlds. I highly recommend you listen to this powerful episode.
Grief and Light Podcast: I’m so happy when I get a chance to be interviewed by a skilled podcast host and Nina Rodriguez is just that. I hope you’ll listen to our beautiful conversation.
Hidden Brain Podcast, A fascinating conversation with Sociologist Allison Pugh on the concept of Connective Labor.
Grief is a Sneaky Bitch Podcast: If you listen to the show, if you love the show, please consider leaving a 5-star rating and writing a review. I would be forever grateful.
EVENTS:
Sold Out/Full: While my online and in-person workshops and groups are full, I do have an opening for 1 more individual grief support client to start this month. You can learn more here.
Moving Into The Light: My amazing friend and former podcast guest, J’Aime Morrison of Mourning Surf is joining forces with the Grief Collective to create a beautiful surfing and grief retreat in Ireland this summer during the Summer Solstice. It should be magical. Check it out here.
BOOKS:
This includes my book, Grief is a Sneaky Bitch: An Uncensored Guide to Navigating Loss.If you’ve read and loved my book, please consider leaving a 5-Star rating and writing a review on GoodReads
Absolutely gorgeous piece, Lisa.
Thank you for sharing your story and your insights with us Lisa ❤️