The pain of the world is a call for Love, a call for courage. Will you turn or shy away from a breaking Heart, or grief and loss in its myriad forms? Will you? Will you? Or will you find the courage, patience and compassion to bear witness and listen? Deeply listen….

This is a story about Love and for those who truly want to Love deeper. There is a much deeper message here and so relevant for our time now, and why the Black Rose teachings have come forth. Grief and loss can become a Heart opener and change maker for all of us when unspoken grief speaks….

In the shadow of the recent Grenfell Tower fire in London, this post is in respect for those in trauma who have lost everything, or anyone who may be carrying unspoken grief and sorrow within themselves from past and present, which may also have been triggered by this event.

There is a root somewhere within all of us waiting patiently to be witnessed. So Love’s message from the Black Rose is this:

Grief must have a voice – it needs to be heard

All of our 3D stuff is being released and there cannot be fear in the New. That means to be Love we must embrace it in all it’s myriad forms.

Now is the time for unspoken grief to be witnessed and heard so we can reclaim our voices and speak our truth. We all have an opportunity to break our silence and step up now by releasing this old energy of unspoken grief that has been projected out into the world as fear for thousands of years and has blocked the personal and collective from moving forward.

I have spoken often on the personal and collective shadow and Dark Night of the Soul that holds the uncompleted grief work and avoidance of pain and unprocessed grief that we all carry that has not been heard for aeons…..

And it’s time we brought grief and loss out from the shadows, put it in it’s rightful place and give it a voice. For grief is a natural response to a deep loss. We need to start telling the truth and stop saying we are fine when we are not.

There are many faces of grief and unresolved emotional trauma from the past or within everyday events that can limit our ability to reach our full potential and life purpose.

Unspoken grief can leave us feeling silenced and invisible. The purpose of this message is to highlight the awareness of underlying unspoken and unprocessed grief that shapes all of our lives in its many forms, and find new ways to support ourselves and others without fearing grief when it comes and avoiding or running away from it.

In the mass outpouring of grief and sadness after the Grenfell Tower fire that turned to anger and rage against the authorities, I will not label the survivors and misplaced people looking for loved ones as victims – for they are all in their own way change makers for all of us.

Sons and Daughters of Change

And what we will see unfold in the aftermath of this inferno will be transformational. If we are truly listening, through expressing their their own grief, pain and vulnerability, they are showing the way for others. Grief is nothing to be ashamed of or feared, it is a natural response to loss. Humanity just chooses to see grief another way.

As we move into this Solstice week, transformation will be happening on many levels. We all have the potential to be change makers. Yet the good things we are capable of doing, our hidden talents and gifts, even our unused strengths go untapped and unrecognised for many.

Yes, the world as we have known it appears to be falling apart. We are all being called to rise up now in our power, so if we have not done so already, it is time to acknowledge and release all our unresolved or unspoken grief that has been avoided or unrecognised and prevented us from moving into our power and potential.

Unresolved traumas and unspoken grief can influence and limit our ability to reach the potential of our life’s purpose and personal evolution. The adult who was not seen, listened to and silenced as a child, becomes the adult who cannot see or hear him/herself.

Over the next few months we will have a decision to make as to whether we will take a leap into the unknown and bless the world and humanity with those gifts locked away inside of us, or deprive the world of them.

So…what has grief got to do with it anyway?

A lot actually….

In a disenfranchised society that we live in, grief is so misunderstood. It can often be looked upon, as is illness, a problem to get rid of or be solved. Grief in our current model is seen as ”stages of grief we go through” after the death of a loved one, which implies there is an end date to grief. Oftentimes it is seen as a weakness of character, or “darkness” we do not want to own within ourselves. So we avoid it and it gets thrown out of our conscious awareness to wreak havoc in our bodies.

Let the Tears come….

Whatever we may think of the media coverage of the Grenfell Tower fire, they too are providing a platform for an outpouring of grief to be voiced and an outlet for those grieving for their tears of grief and loss to be witnessed around the world.

In their own personal devastation of grief and loss, their beautiful breaking Hearts are holding up a mirror of Light to show us all where grief and loss is within ourselves unrecognised. Grief whether unacknowledged, unprocessed, or unspoken, when out in the open holds a dignity and Grace to it.

Loss comes in many forms and many of us carry the burden of grief and loss within our Hearts without knowing it. Grief is a Heart breaker…

it is also a Heart opener and change maker too.

In our society we associate grief with someone dying and have never been taught how to handle loss or approach grief in a loving way. So it’s been shoved into the shadows as messy emotions that someday we’ll “get over” if we just drop our attachment to them. It’s time we stopped avoiding it, started talking about it openly, and give it a voice so that it can take it’s rightful place in our lives.

Even though over the years in my working profession I had been skilled in emotional work, illness and the losses it brought with it revealed to me a totally different world than the one I had known. Nothing of what I knew could be applied to when my life started to fall apart, and I had to surrender to one gut wrenching loss at a time.

When Grief speaks

When we give ourselves permission to grieve, the devastating fires of loss can clear the way for a profound capacity for love, compassion, appreciation and understanding at a level that we have never experienced before.

I gave my unspoken grief a voice to speak when I wrote about “The Importance of Healing Core Wounds” back in 2013. That blog, ahead of it’s time, was a love letter to my self for the emotional processing of unprocessed and unacknowledged grief. Those words were sent back to my neglected wounded inner child so she could be witnessed and heard, and reclaim her voice.

It was also a Love letter to give others permission to cry too. I cried for all the un-cried tears that contributed to my pain, and I cried for the unshed tears of humanity.

Many of us carry a deep sorrow that may have no clear source. It is my truth that  my unspoken grief and unshed tears contributed to the onset of rheumatoid arthritis in my body. And it is my truth on every level of my being that all illness and Heart wounds have an element of unexpressed, unspoken grief and unshed tears within them.

My own journey in healing core wounds revealed a childhood where it was be seen and not heard. It was not safe to speak my truth, because speaking up led to a telling off or punishment of some kind. This pain created a belief that led to me shutting my voice down and developing throat issues in adult life. It went back further….

Unspoken grief of the Feminine

Particularly for women, to reclaim our voice and find the courage to speak our truth, healing imprints of the “Witch Wound” and persecution of the feminine is one of our biggest unresolved wounds and unspoken grief we carry through our female lineage.

Wise women, midwives and herbalists were burnt or hung, and as women we still carry that feminine wound of fear of being found out. We had to shut up and be small because it was not safe to speak out. If we spoke we would have been stoned or put to death so we kept silent and became invisible, cast into the shadows and forgotten.

The scar of these religious wars from the male patriarchy remains within us as a terrifying shadow which prevents our voice from rising up and being heard and still carries unresolved wounds and un-forgiveness around religion. It is our responsibility to grieve for all our losses and give them a voice so we can reclaim and take back what was lost and rise as the awakened, empowered Feminine.

It was in that fire of the “Witch Wound” I found my core wound of injustice – shared in the importance of healing core wounds and how I had carried that imprint into this lifetime to be healed. In allowing that unprocessed grief to speak, I reclaimed my voice. What healing work I had done for myself was done for my own lineage down the feminine line too.

Many of the lessons I have learned regarding grief and loss come through personal experience and from a counselling background. I was forced to meet grief and loss on my journey with illness, and it was the best inner work I have done. I was exposed and naked to all that I had lost and was hidden, yet by giving it a voice, it pulled the plug and released the blocked and dark energy of the past down the timeline.

What I share here in doing our own grief work is not intended to be used for medical diagnosis or treatment, and is not intended to replace a one-to-one relationship with a qualified health care professional. Always seek the advice of a physician or other qualified health care professional regarding any mental or physical health condition or treatment.

Grief, loss and Love

Grief opens the Heart to what Love is. Whilst there are many kinds of loss and each has its own kind of grief and each person responds to grief and loss in their own way, I also feel we all need to learn how to meet grief and loss of any kind and face up to the reality of it. It is a part of living whether we like it or not and has to be included and embraced on our journey to Love and wholeness.

If the truth be known, avoiding someone, or avoiding listening to someone who is grieving or crying, or not looking at grief for what it is and judging others for it, can also be a way for us to avoid facing our own unprocessed or unrecognised grief and pain of our losses which have been hidden away in the shadows.

So how can we meet grief and loss…and tears, in a world that doesn’t understand their powerful impact? There are many shades of grief and those that mourn their loss, want their stories of grief to be heard.

Grief is not only just about bereavement and the loss of a loved one. There are many kinds of losses we may experience that do not always command the respect from others. There are also many life situations that can cause difficult change and loss that can and do go unrecognised. Those losses need to be acknowledged because….

Where there is sadness or sorrow, there is unprocessed and unspoken grief

For example, if we avoid getting close to people, consciously or unconsciously, unresolved grief from childhood trauma or emotional loss is at the root of any fear we may have about new relationships.

Grief and loss has a way of catching us unawares and if we care to look deeply within, it touches all of us. In its wider context grief and loss can relate to everyday experiences that we can struggle to cope with – it also has a way of triggering unresolved grief from the past when we see others grieving. Each of us has our own experience of it and it can be triggered and manifest in many different ways.

The many Faces of Grief

Whether we lose something of value, someone we love, or lose the way things used to be in our lives, loss can turn our lives and our world the way we knew it upside down.

Grief recognised or unrecognised, shapes our lives and presents itself in these places too:

Disasters, bereavement, illness, disability, accident, injury, broken friendships, end of a romantic relationship, loss of self, loss of safety, a family break up, divorce, moving home, a home destroyed by fire, violence, bullying, being a victim of crime and even sexual abuse.

There is also having a big disappointment, a child going into care, miscarriages, conflict, betrayal, abandonment (including the abandonment of projects that don’t work out), death of a pet, someone in prison, addictions, unexpressed hurt, a boyfriend/girlfriend that dumped us because they needed to move on….

Then there are things like road-rage, mild depression, the job we never took, the move we never made and so we stuff the losses and pretend they never happened to protect ourselves from getting hurt further.

So we make the decision that it’s not worth getting close to anyone, or we may try to get close but only on our terms and only if we are in control.

Grief can be terrifying and scary, yet grief work at one level can include becoming untied – untied from fear and from the old world. Grief often feels like fear because it can leave us reeling in uncertainty. And as we see what’s unfolding in the aftermath of the tower fire, we are seeing the truth being revealed and a breaking away from the old system.

It may be hard to comprehend or witness the unbearable burden of loss those people carry in what must seem the most harrowing, distressing and what could be one of the worst possible experiences to live through.

And as yet we do not know the mental impact of the traumatic stress, trauma and grief this will have on the fire fighters that attended this blazing inferno who saw and heard things on a scale they have probably not seen before.

Many may have unprocessed and possibly unrecognised grief themselves hidden behind the mask and badge of their uniform – and this applies also to those of all the emergency medical services and law enforcement officers that had to attend.

The negative effects of stress and trauma on the human spirit can take its toll. Grief unprocessed can lead to heart attacks, emotional problems, mental illness, suicide, addictions, and divorce – and even disabling physical and chronic illness. Lack of awareness or compassion from friends, family, the general public and Government can all add to the anxiety.

In what ever way grief shows up, grief and bereavement can sometimes push us into the hardest and oftentimes unanswerable question of all – why?

Projecting anger, judgement or blame on someone or something whilst in the throws of grief has been a natural part of grieving in its current model. Yet what someone may want is to be witnessed and heard, and validated that the grief they feel is real.

Grief is a journey, and the kindest thing we can do is listen. For in doing so, it confirms the depth of a person’s grief and loss. It’s important that those who are grieving feel loved by friends, family and community – if they are fortunate enough to have any.

Grief that has no resolution

There is also grief that has no resolution. I speak of grief associated with illness, disease or injury when they come, where losses can be infinite, multiple, permanent and difficult to resolve. A note for “healers” and their clients too –individuals with illness where a cure may not be possible at this time, may not be aware that their client could also be carrying unresolved or unprocessed grief for their losses that these events brought.

Grief cannot be got rid of…it can only be carried. With a recovery from illness or a cure from cancer there is an end whereby someone can perhaps go back to leading a normal life. Living with an incurable disease there may be no end and losses will continue and need to be acknowledged – until death brings an end.

The reality of grief and loss for me was that when that life altering illness manifested, all that I had worked for and the life and retirement I had wanted…disappeared. Rather than escape and run away from it, I met my illness and grief knowing it is all a part of the journey of Love.

Failing to recognise that expressions of anger, frustration, depression, denial or guilt, or a person talking about there limitations with illness, are all expressions of grief unheard which can leave that person feeling rejected, abandoned – invisible, unseen and unheard.

If we are unable to observe and truly listen to someone who seems to be crying after the death of a loved one, or talking about their illness a lot, particularly chronic ongoing illnesses, or someone losing their job and financial income including other expressions of loss, then maybe it is we who has not recognised they are in a grieving process and need their story to be heard. Many have had to retreat from their social networks and doing things they loved and enjoyed, which can then lead to poor or inadequate support from others.

Oftentimes, someone just wants someone to listen and to try to understand and be considerate to what they are going through.  But it doesn’t end there. Provide a haven for them to feel safe, to vent or cry, where they will not be judged for having those feelings.

Grief is a part of Love

Whilst this post is to highlight our own unspoken grief, there is no set formula for experiencing loss and there is no right way to grieve, for people have different ways of coping with grief. We cannot have grief without Love, and we cannot have Love without grief.

This is not about becoming bereavement counsellors because grief can be very complex. But if we choose to be present with someone’s grief  we are just playing the supporting role as a witness – not a fixer upper to get rid of what ails them or fix something that is not fixable.

Can we Love grief when it arises in ourselves or others? If someone is continually telling their story to us, be aware that there may be an element of grief to it. If we could only be present for them or ourselves without trying to take their pain away, offer solutions, or try and fix something we would see that all is ok….just the way it is.

There is no time limit on the processing of unacknowledged feelings or unresolved grief – whether that is through bereavement, a loss of some kind, or acknowledging the losses and unspoken grief of our wounded inner child. We must never under estimate the power of acknowledgement of our feelings.

We don’t need new tools or healing modalities to fix or “get out of” grief or pain, for it is all part of our human experience. To offer support or be supported is to have the courage to stand in the fires of grief. For the true path of Love is the path of bearing witness to ourselves or another. That, and our time, is the greatest gift we can give to anyone.

I have had to bear witness to myself and survive a pain that cannot be fixed. Being brave to me is staying in my own Heart and being able to wake up each day and face the physical challenges it may bring. Being brave is allowing pain in whatever way it presents to unfurl like a Rose – and give it the space and attention it needs.

It is a story of Love to embrace and integrate my own pain of loss and witness my unspoken grief to speak so that I could create a new story.

Through the alchemy of loss I go out into the world to be Love in the only way I know how. For it was in my unprocessed grief that a deeper Truth was revealed….I now bloom as a Black Rose to share a deeper message about our personal and collective shadow of unspoken grief and the Dark Night of the Soul.

That may sound really arrogant to some, yet these Love letters…the blog articles that I have shared with you since 2012….are also an expression of Love and gratitude to myself. To the person I was before the onset of illness and the wounded inner child who was not able to grieve for her losses, so that I may support others and they may support me in the best way we can and create a new attitude towards grief and loss, to remove the fear and stigma around it and not see it as something not to talk about.

That is the message I share. I believe the current model we have for grief and loss in the personal and collective shadow and Dark Night of the Soul at some level no longer works.

At a time in my life when I needed love and support the most it was not there because I did not know how to get my needs met and there was no being of human form at the time who could see and witness me. I felt so alone, abandoned and misunderstood.

We can feel helpless in the face of another’s pain. That is why the Temple of the Black Rose was co-created and brought forth to reach people who want to Love deeper and who may find this type of work useful and to get comfortable with uncomfortable feelings so they too can help others. It is a sacred vessel not just for pain and unspoken grief to be witnessed and heard, but a community where we can support one another in our vulnerability and future times of need.

Whether through Skype, email, or a Temple gathering, when unspoken grief speaks, change happens.

This is my “gift” to the world.

Because I want to co-create a different way for us all to support one another.

I also know of the pain of what it is to judged, dismissed and misunderstood, so I will not avoid the reality of pain in the world and brush it under the carpet. It’s partly why I have turned away from New Age spiritual fluff because grief is a natural human response to pain and loss and not something to be “healed” got rid of or transformed.

Here in the Well of Grief within the Temple of the Black Rose, grief of any kind and other expressions of pain or discomfort are allowed……

There is a lot of work to be done around giving everyone a voice to be seen and heard, in validating the pain and unspoken grief we carry in our Hearts and our bodies.

Grief and loss, illness too, are just an expression of Love in a world that does not understand it. If you hear the pain of unspoken grief in yourself, have you the courage to be witnessed and allow your grief to speak? If so, I would be delighted to hear from you.

In the meantime, if you resonate with this message or know of anyone who may benefit from the deeper message, please feel free to share the link above with your network and friends.

In Love, Grace and Service,

Linda