Moving through Transits
Lately, I have been waking up with a deep intense joy for life and its myriad of dances that I get to experience in this one lifetime. Despite all the tragic events I have lived through, the gift of joy is presenting itself very unexpectedly now. The strange thing is, I’m not in a relationship with another, I’m not making six figures, my business isn’t booming, I have plantar fasciitis, my body isn’t a size four or a six, I have one child with a genetic disorder and another who suffers from anxiety and depression. From the sounds of it, I should not be joyful at all and yet I am. Let me tell you why.
Recently, it dawned on me that grief has been a big reason as to why I am feeling this way. It’s funny that we hear the word grief, and we want to either move on to a different topic or run for the hills. We are afraid to acknowledge that so much of our sadness is related to some kind of unprocessed grief and the truth is, if we don’t acknowledge those griefs, it also makes it hard for joy to make an appearance in our lives. Grief can be a powerful degreaser in our lives, bringing up all the shelved experiences we rejected, abandoned, or denied. Yet, all it takes is one powerful event to bring those neatly stacked boxes down.
Opening ourselves to feeling our hearts fully is nothing to be terrified of and it is also terrifying to feel such depth of pain and emotion. It is both. We avoid grief because it reminds us of this temporariness of our situation as human beings, that none of us are getting out of this alive. We avoid grief because it’s a reminder that we are not in control. We avoid grief because it makes us feel so small and powerless. We avoid grief because it shows us how very vulnerable, we are. All these things are true. We are not in control, we are powerless in the face of changes that will come regardless of how hard we try to avoid them, and we are so very vulnerable living in an organic body that is prone to accident, illness, disease, aging, and death.
We can no more avoid experiencing grief than we can avoid stopping the sun from rising and setting. It is out of our control. The invitation for us as human beings isn’t too stiff arm our human experiences of loss and trauma but to come closer to it and become fully embodied beings that know the privilege of feeling at the depth of the heart. To feel so deeply is a gift. Not too long-ago women were shamed for feeling deeply, they were said to be in a fit of “hysteria.” What we don’t realize is when we don’t give ourselves permission to feel, we become congested, full to the point of breaking, the energy that needs expression has nowhere to go but in. We bubble like a pressure cooker until we explode. We have become so busy with work and other things, that connecting to how we feel goes to the bottom of our list, our emotional body is no longer priority. Why feeling has been given such a bad name or low priority in our lives is beyond me. It is our compass that regulates our nervous system and points us in the direction that places us in alignment with truth. To feel is to understand the enormity of what it means to be a human being. If we can’t do that, then how can we understand each other compassionately? Feeling is essential.
On August 2, I arrive at six years since my husband Hassell suddenly died. And as I look back at the years that have passed, I am met with a wild cornucopia of experiences. I see so many experiences that I was afraid of, that brought me to my knees, that made me shed years of tears, that made me sad, angry, fearful, lonely, broken-hearted, and yes grateful. It is true that I experienced an incredible amount of deep grief that left me breathless and desiring to die at one point, but I also felt the most alive, the most present in my life.
Aliveness isn’t just about feeling good, it’s also about feeling our pain. Think about all the times you’ve been in pain and how very present you were to that pain. You were fully alive to feel it because the pain wouldn’t allow you to be anywhere else but there with it. Experiencing our pain can be a gift, it brings us into this present moment to feel and connect to our bodies and heart. Everyone approaches pain and grief differently and it will be up to each of us to choose how we want to navigate these stories of our lives. My grief story has produced many things in my life but what sits at the center is the joy I feel about being alive for even the tiniest thing. I’ve come to understand that life is a symphony with different instruments all playing together. Take one away and the symphony sounds different. Each one supports the other and gives a robust lived experience.
Being alive as a human means that I’m present not just for the joys but also for the griefs that will come. It’s made me realize that joy has nothing to do with accumulating, rather, it’s about being present for what is and giving myself the space to be so fully embodied in these experiences as a human. This unexpected joy is a testament to that, that living isn’t about acquiring, but about allowing, accepting, and saying yes to the deeply moving transits in my life and dancing with it all to the best of ability. Life after all isn’t about “this or,” but “this and.” It is feeling the yin and expressing it through the yang.
These last six years have taught me how to hold space for all my life and to always embrace each experience as a sacred embodiment of the Divine moving through me. I smile as I write this as I sit on my deck listening to the birdsong flowing through the air, the sound of the bullfrog in the stream below telling me his joy of having water to sit in, it is the hum of life happening in small and big ways. I’m here for these transits, they are exporting me to new and different dimensions throughout my life and I’m here for that full journey. True joy cannot be outsourced or dependent on some external factor. Rather, it is a gift that is given when we learn to invite our transits to help us dance the wild dance of the cosmos.
Esha Estar