Some of you may know that my husband, Rick, died at home the end of April, 2023 from cancer. We had been married 45 years. Initially I was relieved that he was no longer in pain. I was exhausted and numb to my feelings. The numbness stayed with me for several weeks and then the feelings began to surface as I allowed the sadness and grief in. Being launched into liminal space or the dark night of the soul is highly uncomfortable. I wake up every day with the realization that Rick is gone—no longer in his physical body to touch or hug. Everything in the house reminds me that he’s no longer here. There is a feeling that this is not real that there’s been some mistake. It’s so hard to take in. Grief comes in waves and I feel as if I’m grieving so much more than Rick’s death. It feels as if this life and lifetimes of grief is moving through me to be healed. Yet, within all the sadness I feel the overall plan and perfection of the Divine Mother guiding and comforting me.
If we allow grief to move through us, letting go resisting the process, we begin to feel the transformative power of grief. Grief magnifies all feelings. On my heroine’s journey I’ve spent many years dissolving: judgments, shame, blame, criticisms, feelings of unworthiness and anger in order to love myself free to embrace my Soul Self. The grief process brings to the surface everything that is still hidden within the shadow held by our inner child. Stuff I thought I’d dissolved is showing up in different forms to be healed at a deeper level to clear out everything unlike love. The sadness does not permit bypassing the emotions or shoving them down into the shadow to continue to fester. Therefore I embrace the sadness—knowing that doing anything else prolongs the heaviness and keeps me stuck. Moments of beauty appear unexpectedly and I surrender to the moment. These moments illuminate the darkness of grief.
Metaphors always help me understand the spiritual awakening process. The metaphor that kept coming up for me was Jonah swallowed by a whale. Only I realized that the patriarchal version of this story did not feel right to me. Jonah felt that God was punishing him. I felt myself swallowed by the Divine Mother’s Cosmic Whale floating in her ocean of love. Yes it’s uncomfortable and sometimes scary being in the belly of the whale, but it’s not punishment. Within the whale’s stomach are many people experiencing grief. I’m not alone. We form a bond. There are people struggling and resisting because they’ve had so much trauma and loss they can barely function. There are people full of kindness and love—joining in understanding to allow the grief to move through. Understanding and compassion comes welling up for myself and everyone in this dark night of the soul within the belly of the whale.
In his-story Jonah gets spit up on a strange land and is not very happy about it. I know the Divine Mother’s whale will not spit me up. She will open her mouth and I will gently swim out when I’m ready to leave and live again in this chaotic, divisive world. What I’m learning in the liminal space of the whale’s belly is transforming me to be the energy of love that has compassion for everyone desperately holding on to the old patriarchal power-over paradigm and those still asleep to their divine being. This grief process is cleaning me out so I can awaken joyfully to the divine within—so I can let my light shine to join illuminating the world into the divinely human New Earth.
