Dear Friends,

Here is Part II on a series about Trauma and Grief. Yipeeeee!!

XO Gopita

Trauma and Grief II

I read something very moving in today’s Los Angeles Times (Sunday, March 14, 2021), Op Ed, Andrew Solomon, “How Long Will the Melancholy Last”?
I have extrapolated from one of the quotes which left me somewhat dumbfounded:

“…Collective trauma affects both the group mentality and that of individuals…we have learned that liberties that appear immutable can be constrained, that freedom of movement is conditional, that scourges can sweep across an unsuspecting world completely out of the blue, that what seems mundane today may be impossible next month. It will take decades to outgrow these qualms, and, of course, by then there will presumably be other crises, now neither anticipated nor imaginable, that will channel anxieties we haven’t yet conceived.”

Walking through my living room this past week the television happened to be on, and I heard Biden say that all Americans would be vaccinated by May 1 and that the “end was in sight.”
Something profound happened to my body. I started to tremble, and I felt this, well, release. It started at my head and neck and moved to my feet. I literally fell to the floor weeping. I wept and wept and wept and wept, trying not to give my crying a story, to let it tear through me, to know that it had been long held somatically. Eventually, I wrung myself out and went back to work.

We have been holding against this pain for so long. We have not necessarily known it was there, but once it starts to let go of us, just a little, it may announce itself to us. It is like waiting to go on vacation, staving off illness because Mommy and Daddy told us we couldn’t go if we had a cold, then having a wonderful time, only to let down and get really sick once we returned. The organism was safe enough to discharge what it had been holding and what had been pent up.
Our globe – our sweet, sweet planet – is energetically going to change again. Hopefully. The Weltanschauung, the big picture, will shift and discard this hard plaque we have had to adopt to survive the pandemic. What magnificent organisms we are, in mind, body and spirit.
So, I remind myself, and indeed remind us all, to get back to a rigor and a discipline of meditation, meditation and more meditation!
Open the throat chakra through sound. Chant. If you have never chanted, learn how to do it now. Chant in an ancient language. If you cannot do that, then sing. If you cannot carry a tune, sing anyway. If you have no one to sing for, sing for God. If you don’t believe in God, then sing for the earth, the sky, the ground. SING AND CHANT.

Pay attention to what is happening to you in the moment. The bandied about word “mindfulness” can come into play here. You will be naturally mindful if you are meditating for an hour a day. YOU DO HAVE THE TIME. Don’t kid yourself. You DO HAVE THE TIME. You cannot afford NOT to have the time.

But even more than these two techniques for grief and anxiety, please use SOFT BELLY. If you don’t know about SOFT BELLY, then please see my videos on my YouTube channel on Satsang and Soft Belly. www.youTube.com/southernfriedspirituality I think I look and act sort of smarmy, but detach from that and listen to the information. It is good.

Meditation
Chanting
Soft Belly

Work with grief and trauma and watch it transform itself into something else. From crisis comes opportunity.
More about that later.

Love, Gopita