The River of Buried Grief
Several years ago I picked up a book about parenting mindfully, surprised to see it at a large shopping-club store. I flipped to the table of contents, noticed a chapter called The River of Buried Grief, and promptly burst into tears – much to my surprise! It turned out that the river was fairly close to the surface.
Over the years of doing awareness work and talking to others about their experiences, it’s become much more clear to me that a major obstacle to being present for many of us is the amount of strong and painful emotion we hold within us that we don’t want to acknowledge or feel. Some of the most common, I’ve found, are grief, longing, and fear.
To use grief as one example: most of us have experienced challenges and tragedies, large and small. Living is complex and busy, and we don’t usually have the time, ability or even the inclination to work through our feelings about what happens in life. At a subconscious level, we might fear that there is so much grief accumulated that if we let it in, we will fall apart and cease to function. We may feel that it will break us into a million pieces that can’t be put back together again.
At the other end, there can be so much beauty that it feels hard to open enough to fully take it in. Longing, fear and other emotions can also be hard to feel. There is such an intensity when we are in contact with life as it actually is, that we don’t know how to handle the energy of it. So, we learn to avert from it and just keep moving, hoping it doesn’t catch up with us.
“As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat until I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop.”
Orleana Price in The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
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