lilla

You may not know this, but most people have been shaken to their core. More than once. And each time this happens there is a deep freeze effect in the breathing diaphragm, muscles, and breath. This freeze causes us to think critically about what frightened us and why, often in lieu of feeling the response to the event. So, processing mentally can be a first step to healing, but is just that, only a first step. We must include the body to heal our heart.
When something happens in our life that elicits a feeling of sadness for example, and we are not comfortable with this emotion, then the effort to keep it from expressing causes a state of depression. This massive effort then creates a ripple of stress throughout the whole body. So, where does one begin?
Years ago, eighteen to be exact, I had a cat named Lilla. She was only a year old when I found out that her liver was failing. I was naïve about spending money to save her life and so I paid for surgery and procedures to save her little life, but to no avail. My little Lilla had no positive prognosis, and I was sent home to be with her in the time she had left.
I decided to clear my calendar for a week so that I could have time to mourn her impending death. The sadness I felt was enormous, and frankly a bit confusing, so this seemed like an interesting remedy. It started with mourning her loss and then immediately the sadness for the divorce I was going through at that time, and with each day that passed there many more un-felt losses from years past. They were very personal at first, and after these cleared there were the losses that I felt for family, humanity, women, the earth, and it just kept going. At this point I realized that I was in a relationship with sadness, not that which caused the sadness. So, I dropped all the stories and felt fully, awareness and sensation, rather than feeling and thinking about these stories which only seemed to make the stories bigger and more powerful.
Sadness experienced is felt as a series of sensations in the body, so I allowed the tears, tension, warmth, and heaviness with gentle and spacious welcoming. ‘Turning toward’ I called it, a neck down exploration into the depths of sadness. After seven days of surrendering to the stored-up tank of grief, I woke up and realized that I felt empty and complete. My dear Lilla passed that day and I could grieve her with sadness and joy in my heart, a true state of remembrance.
Upon reflection I also realized that my body knows exactly how to grieve. It was my mind filled with the myths of feeling that blocked this very natural process. Myths like if I feel I will be depressed, or unable to work, or lazy. But it is quite the opposite. Upon feeling, that is letting emotion, or energy-in-motion, move, I felt relief and peace. In fact, when sadness rose what I could feel best is how my body had learned to shut the grief down. A tight jaw and belly, legs pulling in, and breath held were what I could focus on to relax the effort of shutting down. From there the body is fine.
Later I learned that when an emotion moves through the body in this way, it takes 90 seconds, one minute and a half, and it is complete. No emotional hangovers, or processing needed. And I could sense that in allowing this movement there were other messages to be recognized. For example, sadness is intertwined with love, anger is mixed with need, and fear can be coupled with compassion. Living from the body as the energetic constellation and system that it is naturally allows for integration and expansion - if allowed.
I am so grateful to Lilla for the lessons of letting go. She gave me the opportunity for a life changing experience that I still share with people when helping them learn how to feel and integrate loss.