Mary Paffard Yoga

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November Update - The Beauty of Sorrow

Mary Paffard

“To speak of sorrow
works upon it
moves it from its
crouched place barring
the way to and from the soul's hall.”  - Denise Levertov

Contents

Online Yoga continues 11/1 - 11/30…
4 Saturday mornings: 9-10.15; November 4, 11, 18 (pre-recorded) and 25
3 Wednesday mornings: Meditation 7.00, Vinyasa 7.30, 8.30 Basics: November 1, 8 and 22
PLUS A Gentle Restorative Oriented Practice on 11/10 5-6pm
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Photo: Eric Prouzet

Costa Brava, Catalunya


SORROW

As children scurry to gather their Halloween costumes, and we start moving into the darkest time of the year, and soon the “falling back” of our clocks (Nov 5), we are also moving into the time of Samhain, the Gaelic festival that celebrated the end of harvest season and the beginning of the winter time of year. Like the Day of the Dead in Mexico, it is a time when the world both celebrates and turns inwards. Samhain was considered a liminal time when the veil between life and death, between the living and the spirit world is at its thinnest.

As we reckon with the dark without, we touch into the dark within. In this culture we are not skilled at dealing with sorrow or grief; we run from it and either numb ourselves with stimulus, or deny its existence, rather than listening to its power and indeed its beauty. As I prepare for our online Samhain weekend, I am once again touched by the work of Frances Weller, who has made his life work, opening us to our grief. By ignoring our sorrow, we live in narrow bands of human emotion that limit our access to the magic of awe, enchantment and joy. In my recent Buddhist Ecology Chaplaincy training, I was taken aback at the amount of time we were scheduled to spend exploring grief. It seemed indulgent – “Can’t we talk about fear and rage?” And it was humbling to realise that I too, have surrendered to the cultural model of “stuff it and move on”. When we had an opportunity in one of our groups to talk about something that touches into grief, I remember hardly being able to open my mouth as I ventured to speak about an interchange with my young granddaughter about a school shooting. Tears, and wails, that were not just mine, were allowed to pour. Each loss or grief we open to can often unravel years of oppressing the pain. I am sure you too can think of the deaths of pets or friends that have brought to life many, many other passings and losses.

As a psychotherapist, Weller observed the importance of attending to individual sorrows but more and more, he has seen that what many of us are suffering from is not just the wail of grief from our personal stories, but the collective grief around climate, around extinction loss, around violence – community based or global, disease and on and on. He has attempted like others in the field to use, as older wiser traditions have always done, ritual to help us see our sorrow as part of our humanity, our connectedness and in this way honor its beauty and wisdom, a deep soul wisdom we would be wise not to ignore.

These rituals can be very simple, and in our BEC training we were encouraged to use the natural world as vehicles and oracles to listen to our sorrows and in some ways bring them into the light for healing or hearing. They can also be more complex – the ritual of protest can be a way of collective grieving. In Naomi Klein’s book Doppleganger, the author describes what it was like to be in the state of shock and mourning following the discovery in Canada in 2021 of the graveyards of children taken from First Nation peoples. That Spring orange flags and shirts with the words EVERY CHILD MATTERS were everywhere and a very unusual ritual was initiated by a local trucker. A convoy of around 400 trucks decorated with messages of love, orange shirts and flags, drove to these former schools and paid their respects and then left. I never heard about this quiet convoy, did you? Only the noisy one many months later that held the capital in stasis protesting anti covid measures.

Weller also talks about the importance of silence and solitude and the power of any kind of practice to find some kind of ground. Apparently, there is an Inuit tradition which involves simply sitting together quietly and waiting for something creative to arise. In this way we learn “to see in the dark”.

Grief comes from the same route as Gravitas, from Gravas or heavy. In some ways, we need to let the weight of that sorrow pull us into the dark and the unknown. We develop skill in welcoming whatever comes at Rumi’s famous door, and we bear witness without fixing, figuring out. Rarely is it about resolution, it’s much more about cultivating spaciousness in which these weights can fall. As yogis we can cultivate that spaciousness and avoid our spiritual bypassing that only wants our being and body to feel fabulous no matter what! We have the tools to find that quiet and silence, and the power of poetry to touch into the alchemical emotional realm. This time of year, this time on our planet, requires us to use all these tools and magic to support each other.

Lissa Rankin wrote a powerful blog recently about finding her spiritual tools inadequate to face the realities we are dealing with currently. Sending thoughts and prayers/meditating for peace wasn’t enough. She also included in her blog, this extraordinary piece from Valarie Kaur, a Sikh American, civil rights lawyer and activist.

“Valarie Kaur asks, “Is this the darkness of the tomb or the darkness of the womb?” She suggests that humanizing people who are hard for us to understand is hard, but it’s like the labor of birth, and it requires us to breathe- and then push.

I appreciate and agree with Valarie Kaur’s response to the atrocities:

“I believe our most powerful response to the horror in Israel and Palestine is to refuse to surrender our humanity. This is demanding labor. But once your eyes are open — you can never again explain away the deaths of children again, like so many are doing right now. And so: I stand with the Palestinian people. I stand against the brutal occupation of Palestine and the ongoing subjugation, assaults, and killings of Palestinian people. I stand against the ongoing antisemitic violence and persecution of Jews, past and present, including the vicious antisemitic attacks right now in the United States. I have been mourning with Jewish friends who have family in Israel hiding in bomb shelters. And I have been mourning with Palestinian friends whose family in Gaza have no shelters to hide in at all. My mourning transcends political agendas. Your mourning can too. This is not about equivalency. The time has come to center the human cost of the conflict above all. Can we stretch our hearts beyond what was previously imaginable? We must if there is to be a world.”

Join others where you can, join us at Samhain if you wish, take care of yourselves

Let’s breathe and then push….

M

Interested in Weller? https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/478/the-geography-of-sorrow