Dear community, how are you doing? Are you navigating grief, like so many I have the honor of engaging with? How are you moving through it, honoring it and releasing it, or coming to a place of peace within it?
There is much to grieve in this time. Though the details vary for each of us, the themes are the same—we have been through hard times, together yet separate. Many of us have lost loved ones and have been unable to be with them in their passing or honor their passing in community. Many have suffered estrangement and separation for one reason or another. Many have lost work, had to close businesses, or missed formative experiences and social connection. We’ve endured the exhausting cycle of planning and then cancelling meaningful events. Many of us in medicine are grieving the suffering to which we are bearing witness, much of it now preventable. Some of us are also grieving the disorienting challenge of sifting through data to guide risk-benefit analyses in a biased and fraught intellectual space hostile to open, transparent inquiry.
Beyond the pandemic, many of us are attuned to other grievous realities: the frittering away of our precious window of opportunity to bend the climate change curve, the anguishing toxicity of partisan politics, the threats to our democracy, skyrocketing extinction rates and a destabilized relationship to place. All of this is layered over the pain and suffering that comes from racial and socioeconomic injustices, gender inequality, misogyny and the relentless ravages of our consumer culture, to say nothing of the suffering beyond our borders. Deep breath….
As I track these heavy realities, I am acutely aware of the need to move my grief and sorrow so that it doesn’t get stuck in my body, drag me down, or pull me into some eddy of self-limiting, self-soothing behavior. Performing grief rituals can help us honor our grief and experience a lightening of the load. Such rituals can be deeply personal and can be allied with the fathomless well of holding that nature offers.
Two powerful experiences in recent weeks helped move me through the heaviness and land in a lighter place. First, I remembered to take my birthday off from work this year. I awoke to a crystalline and sunny January day, a full 55 degrees warmer than the zero degrees it was in Minnesota on the day of my birth. I packed my backpack with a blanket, journal and some sacred objects for an altar, and hiked to a special grove of coast live oaks I know and love.
Spending the day in meditative ceremony, I dropped deep into the embodied, profoundly spiritual and grounding place of union with the divine benevolent wisdom animating everything. In meditation, in a place I know intimately, under trees with whom I have a personal relationship, I was held.
In this timeless place of communion, I experienced what might be described as “interbeing,” an illuminating term coined by the Buddhist monk and mindfulness teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, who passed on Jan. 22 at the ripe age of 95. There was no “me”; rather, I was woven into the great mystery, the interplay of light and shadow, the endless recycling of elements into different forms. The ruminative thought loops that often compound suffering, making us feel alone and sad, anxious and insecure, were gone. A visit from a hawk was an awe-inspiring, divinely feathery wonder. This sacred container, the embrace of the beloved natural world, was big enough to receive both my emotions and those I have sensed in the collective. I felt grief leave my body and melt into the earth, and felt wide open to the comforting connection with the divine. Not only, as Thich Nhat Hanh invites, did I feel my feet kissing the Earth; I felt the Earth kissing my feet back.
What is it that allowed me to experience this interconnected state of grace? Perhaps it was the angle of the light, the generosity of the oaks, the gentleness of the breeze. Yet the lover of science in me knows that it was very likely linked to the decreased activity in my brain’s so-called default mode network. This extensively interconnected part of the brain does many things, including becoming active as our mind wanders, revisiting the past, thinking about the future, amplifying our egoic sense of self and problem solving. This part of the brain is hyperactive in states of depression, anxiety and self-criticism. If you have ever been stuck in a negative mental cul de sac, your default mode network activity has played a role. It is taken offline by meditation, time in nature and experiences on psychedelics. As the distracting ruminative thought activity and ego story quietens, our sense of separation dissolves and an experience of oneness can emerge. We are fully present to awe and wonder, sometimes to a mystical sense of attunement.
Studies show that the more experienced one is with meditation, the quieter the default mode network becomes. The more attuned one is to nature, either by spending a long time in the wild or by developing a practice of dropping into communion, the more benefit one experiences. With psychedelics, the phrase “set and setting” is often invoked; dropping acid at a party, for example, yields a very different experience than does an intentional, facilitated journey held by a guide.
On my birthday, going to the special grove with the intention of doing healing work yielded a meditative communion with nature and the divine—a dissolution of ego, a releasing of grief, and the comfort of knowing I am connected to it all. On some level, it will all be okay.
Though communion with nature is healing, so is communion with our human nature, especially our capacity for loving, empathetic connection with each other. Last month I led a community grief ritual in the Commonweal Garden. Greeting, welcoming and embracing each other, regardless of immunization status, was healing in and of itself (and was contextualized with consent and an individualized risk-benefit consideration). Being in a circle of open-hearted people in a beautiful, natural setting, with a few agreements, gave us the safety to express the grief we’ve been holding, to shed tears and to be lovingly human. We created a ritual to mark the moment, and sent prayers and blessings from our shared field. It was just what we were needing, and we will do it again.
There will be many grief-inducing changes in our lifetime. And though change seems heightened now, it has always been a part of human experience, which is why community grief rituals have held such an important place in many places for so long. By holding each other in our grief, by developing the capacity to cry, even sob, we create channels for the energy to flow, to feel less alone in the overwhelming feelings, and to be drawn closer together. We can learn to be with our grief, perhaps holding it lightly, perhaps letting it fuel creativity and connection, loving-kindness and compassion.
Anna O’Malley, M.D., is the founder and director of Natura Institute for Ecology and Medicine, and an integrative family and community medicine physician at Coastal Health Alliance. To learn more about her work at Natura, visit www.naturainstitute.org.