GRIEF

This is what happened when I started to recover my health. When MY energy started to flood

back into my body, when my body started to heal itself, and I could feel it healing, I started to feel.

Emotions that I hadn't felt for years started coming to the forefront, with grief being the strongest

of all.  I remember being in the produce section of the grocery store, and yes, by this time I had regained enough of my health to be able to do the grocery shopping, and being overwhelmed by grief.

It permeated my entire being and I felt the strongest urge to run out of the store. I don't know where it came from, I don't know what I was grieving for,...and I learned that it doesn't matter...but what was vitally important to my health was to FEEL my emotions, and then find a constructive way to act on them... I learned to gain a huge respect for the role of my emotions... and to nurture them and care for them in a way I never really had. And probably because I grew up in a house where emotions were not important or honored or understood. They were to be repressed. I had no idea how vitally important it was to attend to and respond to how I was feeling, and how vitally important it was to my health.

This sounds almost silly. An emotion is a call to action. Except when there's grief. Grief is the only emotion that you can't do anything about. But it's important to grieve. It's important to feel the emotion, to let it run over you and through you and around you...and it's  a physical process...when you grieve,

your body needs to grieve.  And then it's done. You can go on, your body has alerted you to feel...

so however long it takes, and in my case it was only a few days..and then the heavy, grieving feeling was 

gone... so now, when I'm feeling grief, and in this case it's saying goodbye to my daughter next week

as she leaves home for college... I have to allow myself to feel it. My old self would push it aside, get busy, distract myself from how I was feeling, focus on the task at hand, and get over it. But then I would get sick...because repressing your feelings puts your body on high alert...it causes stress, but unconscious stress...the kind you don't know you have...but your body does...and then, guess what, you get sick...

Before I got sick I thought I had a good handle on myself, on how I was feeling. I considered myself to be spiritually in tune. I had gone to therapy, practiced yoga, meditated for years, so I thought I was self-aware...I thought I knew myself really well...and I did. But I also repressed my emotions. I didn't know what to do with them, and I didn't understand their proper role...which is simply that they are feed back, and a call to action-they require attending to...and since I was unknowingly repressing emotions rather than using them as the call to action that they are...then my physical body had to send symptoms, very distressing symptoms, very debilitating symptoms, in order to get my attention and to take action.. because repressed emotions can cause physical distress...they send your body into a high stress state-but you don't realize it.. you feel fine...you're not aware that anything at all is the matter, except for the fact that you can barely get out of bed and walk across the room, and THAT is a huge problem!

So now I'm grieving. My daughter is leaving home and going to school, and I'm sad. I will miss her. I am letting myself grieve.