🍄🌀 The Attunement Newsletter 🌀🍄

Practices and insights for conscious living.

Sometimes reverent, sometimes rowdy. This newsletter is beholden to my whims and ever-changing interests.

^{Issue 26 - Read Time: 5 Minutes 17 Seconds}

All Work is Grief Work

At the end of the day, most of our struggles in life boil down to an inability to accept what is.

We want it to be differently so bad that we grasp onto the desired outcome, and we suffer.

We aren’t very good at recognizing the grasping hand. And when that process remains unconscious we grasp even when we don’t mean to.

I have noticed this pattern in my life and the lives of my clients and I want to get into this week.

We are going to cover:

1. The Stages of Grief

2. My Blockage

3. Grieving our Identities

The Stages of Grief

Many of you are probably familiar with these stages but I want to lay them out up top so we have a frame of reference.

The stages of grief, as studied and outlined by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, are:

1. Denial

2. Anger

3. Bargaining

4. Depression

5. Acceptance

And in 2020, David Kessler, along with Kubler-Ross, identified a sixth stage of grieving.

6. Meaning

These stages are super helpful in allowing us to orient our process. So before we go further, I invite you to pause for a moment and think about a pain point in your life right now.

Bring this pain point to mind and reflect on it from the lens of grief. If this pain point is in your life and causing distress because it is arrested, at what point are you stuck?

Are you angry about a relationship ending?

Are you depressed because you don’t have the life you think you deserve?

Are you in denial about the part you played in a recent conflict?

When you really get into it, you can start to see that you remain stuck until you reach acceptance.

My Blockage

I have noticed a tendency in my life. I often get stuck in bargaining. And the stuckness is subtle.

When I didn’t get into graduate school the first time I applied, I tried to internally bargain my way out of it by saying things like, “I won’t prioritize anything in my life over my education from here on out.”

or

“If I had taken the GRE more seriously and studied every day, I would have gotten in. I promise I will do that next time.”

These bargaining conversations led to me feeling shame because I did not follow through on them.

They were not authentic, so there was no life force behind the commitment. I did not have the willpower to force through an inauthentic desire.

But I wanted to continue to feel like I was in control, and bargaining with myself allowed me to preserve that illusion.

Bargaining also protected me from feeling depressed and let down from falling short of my goals. This is a key point: stuckness is ALWAYS a form of protection.

Unbeknownst to me, I had inadvertently kept myself from moving toward acceptance because I was afraid to face the depression phase of the experience.

Years passed, I got more experience, I reapplied to school, and I got in. At this point it was very easy to accept where my path took me.

But only because time had healed the wound. I was not conscious of the process until I could look backward with 20/20 hindsight.

Now, that is often the case. Most people report that the hard times in their life are the most growth-inducing. And with enough time, we almost always look back with gratitude for our trials and tribulations.

But I want to speed that process up. I want to make the shift conscious and I want to help you do the same.

Facilitating the Process of Grief

Before I get into the specifics of facilitating this process, I want to make it clear that I am not advocating spiritual or emotional bypassing in any way.

Facilitating grief is not about making it go away sooner. It is simply about making it CONSCIOUS and working with it intentionally.

When it remains unconscious, we don’t have the opportunity to work with it. And we stay stuck.

Okay, let’s talk about moving the experience through.

The first thing you have to do is to identify your current stage.

If you are trapped in a job that does not fulfill you, and something inside knows it, but you don’t want to acknowledge it, then you are in denial.

If you are working through childhood trauma and furious with the way your parents treated you, then you are in the anger phase.

If you look back on the last ten years and you never found any pursuit in your life that excites you and fuels you, then you might experience depression.

Once you identify the current stage, you can ask yourself these questions:

• How does staying in this stage protect me?

• What specifically am I protecting myself from by staying in this stage?

• What would I have to accept to move on from this stage to the next? (these are micro stages of acceptance in pursuit of the final stage)

• How does staying stuck feed my ego’s desire for security and control?

• What parts of my identity are dependent on staying in this stage?

• What is scary about letting those parts of my identity go?

Grieving Our Identities

Moving through grief in any of the psychospiritual realms requires a change in identity. And this is really tough.

It requires us to let go of who and what we thought we were and to drop into the reality of what we are.

When I did not get into graduate school, I had to release the expectations and identify as a graduate student in that chapter.

When the wilderness therapy program I worked for closed its doors, I had to let go of my identity as a wilderness guide.

When I left religion and began the process of deconditioning, I had to let go of my childhood identity and social roles.

Each one of these was painful in its own right. But I could not get to acceptance until I dropped the identification with.

A Final Note on Meaning

Grieving is a crucible. And through that crucible, we gather all of the necessary energy to transmute loss into meaning.

It is not a coincidence that grieving puts you in contact with denial, anger, sadness, bargaining, etc. In short, it is the totality of human experience.

And on the other side of totality is meaning. Because totality gives you access to all parts of you. And when all parts of you are at the table, it is easy to find meaning in life.

Want More Support?

If you feel like you want some extra support, here are some ways Attunement and I can help you:

1. Individual therapy or coaching with a provider at our clinic (In-Person or Virtual Offering)

2. How to Feel Your Feelings Course and Community (Virtual Offering)

3. October Desert Intensive located in central/southern UT (In-Person Offering)

Thank you!

I love that you are interested in exploring yourself in the pursuit of growth and expansion. 

And I love that you are diving deeper into the unconscious patterns that limit our capacity as a species to transcend this paradigm. 

You are becoming the change you want to see in the world and that is incredibly inspiring!

Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your journey ✨✨

With Love,

Christian