Dear Friends,

Here is the first in a series of Shock, Trauma, and Grief.

Trauma and Grief

I took way too many certification courses and CE’s in trauma – I say way too many because techniques for resolution can be difficult and lengthy. But when I learned about David Feinstein’s brilliant Energy Psychology and its’ efficacy, I was majorly hooked. That is another topic for an E-letter sometime.

Today I am writing about the cycles of what can happen to us on a global scale with this pandemic. There can be no denying that it has been traumatic.

But what does not often get recognized is the cycle of grief as one of the parts of trauma. Most of us have heard about the cycles of grief from Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross from her seminal work on death and dying.
When I first learned about COVID 19 I was happy to join with those who coo’ed “we are all in this together” and we were all so in love, like people on the streets of New York right after 9/11.
But after 90 days the gooey stuff turns to snarling and snapping. Then it levels off. Then it gets a little smarmy again. Then the cycle repeats.

IT’S ALL GRIEF.

One of my greatest teachers in the 90’s was Stephen Levine. He says this about grief:
“Most of us picture grief as a momentous sadness, but it is much subtler than that. Everyone has grief. Everyone seems to have some sort of unbalanced tally sheet with life – some unfinished business. Each of us has an incompleteness with the past, with ourselves, a fatiguing self-consciousness – the predominant theme of the unfinished symphony of the mind’s yearning. Our grief manifests as self-judgment, fear, guilt, anger, and blame. In this response is our insistent merciless with ourselves and with a world that we hardly let in. Our grief is our fear of loss, our fear of the unknown, our fear of death, our fear of what is coming around the next unknown corner…”

There is a resolution to this. There is an answer. We can work with our grief in ways unimagined and open our hearts in hell. In this way we heal the Heart of us all.

That will be in the next E Letter. And it will follow very soon.
Love, Gopita