Asked and Answered: Your Questions about Grief, Intuition, Reconciliation, Soul Communities

More questions from the birthday project!

Maggie Ann asks: My question is along these lines: What brought about the shift in your spiritual ideology? As it has shifted how have you reconciled it to those close to you who still follow your previous belief system?

Church stopped working for me. First sermons became meaningless. Then worship music stopped meaning anything. Prayer bottomed out — I felt like I was just worrying and pleading all the time.
Then…I fell in love with art. Jesus became more real to me – a real person with passions and errors and compulsion. I started seeing wisdom in other people’s belief system. People-who-were-not-Christians acted more Jesus-y than a lot of the Christian I knew. Loved lived in a thousand places.

(My NaNoWriMo project is a book about how this shift happens, how to survive it, and what to do next. Keep your fingers crossed!)

I don’t know if I’ve really “reconciled” with people from my former religious world. If you make this kind of post-religious leap, reconcilation may not be the goal so much as…um…peacekeeping? It’s more like we’ve made a pact to not debate each other. My general practice is to try and hold more than one truth in the same open palm. This is a key tenent of postmodernity. I don’t always manage to do this well, but it’s a goal of mine. I may not like what people who are close to me believe–or how they try to force those beliefs onto others–but I can give them space in this world to have their beliefs which differ from mine. I can even see the beauty in the old belief system when it works for the people I love (“praxis” again). When it doesn’t work, and people still feel obligated to force themselves into it—that makes me sad. I feel a lot of sorrow, and sometimes anger around this.

Jen P asks: Do you distinguish God (in you internal experience anyway) from your own intuition and if so, how?

Honestly, not really. I see my intuitive voice as the voice of the Spirit, who I like to call The Muse. Since I’ve been practicing trusting my intuitive wisdom more, I’ve learned to distinguish the energy of intuition from the energy of impulsiveness and/or panic. Initially these all felt the same to me. Intuitive knowledge has a lower, deeper hum to it. It feels more grounded – like a really solid tree pose in yoga. Panic or impulsiveness that is not rooted in wisdom feels more frantic and desperate. Intuition is compelling, not desperate.

Jennifer (a former Monkfisher) asks: What is your spiritual community like where you are now – are you finding soul friend?

I would say it’s in development. I don’t think the church we pop in and out of will ever be our main spiritual community. It’s sweet and the pastor is great, but we are only kind of clicking there. I like the liturgy and the ambience — except for the giant crucifix. The little Dreamboarding Circle that’s forming in our living room is quite nice, and I can see some soul friendships forming there. A lot of my community – spiritual and otherwise—is on line these days, which I’m not accustomed to, but I’m enjoying it right now. I’m kind of enjoying the solitude right now.

MotherHenna asks: When a grief comes, how does it affect you? Has your ability to process and integrate grief and joy, love and loss been affected/shifted by a) being an expat and/or b) you changing spiritual beliefs? If you could teach someone else anything about the experience of grief, what would that lesson be?

I love how Kara sandwhiches the questions about living abroad and changing spiritual beliefs between two questions about grief. She’s really been paying attention! (Thanks Mother Henna!)

Grief comes in waves. You can’t just sit down and process it all out, then move on. It comes and goes, flares suddenly, then slips away. It’s tricksy, that grief.

Grief affects me in a strong physical way. I get a lot of tension on the soft palate of my mouth and in my throat. Because of this I’ve been known to describe grief as “ a wolf at my throat.” I have to swallow a lot. My chest feels heavy and I have certain sensation sort of under my ribs at my diaphragm that I can’t quite explain. Emotionally, I get very quiet and very sad. Physcially I tend to hold my body small and still. When I’m grieving I often find myself sobbing –a very primal sobbing. This especially hits me late at night. I often get frozen creatively when I am grieving. Usually I just have to pay attention to grief, give it my tithe of tears, and wait for it to pass.

I’m more present to both grief and joy now that I live abroad. There are less distractions here, and less obligations, so both grief and joy loom larger. I don’t know that the change in my spiritual beliefs have effective my experience of grief or joy in particular. Anger though, that’s another story…

The graduate school I attended was very attentive to grief. I learned a lot there about paying attention and giving grief its due, because grieving and mourning are so important to the healing process. The two things I most often teach people about grief are:

1) it comes in waves not stages. Just as you can’t know when a rouge wave might knock you off your feet at the beach, nor can you know when grief will swell. Pay attention when it comes. Let is receed when it’s done.

2) In regards to grief that is associated with a death, I often tell people that you never ‘get over’ a loss like the death of a loved one (or other kinds of death.) A loss creates a hole in the ground. In time, the soil starts to erode back in and the edges soften, but you never ‘get over it.’ Instead you learn to live a new way, with this space as one part of your life’s whole.

Next set of Q’s with thier A’s: life goals and other quirks…

Tagged as: Grief/Mourning, Soultribes