How Can Our Grief Nourish Us?

Grief and Consuming the Lion:

I was on a call with a partner organization this week, and the topic of grief came up. Running a small group on that theme recently, they experienced how many people carry griefs they cannot get beyond.

I found myself asking a very spiritual director type question: “I wonder what would happen if we ask, how can our grief nourish us?”

The word nourish might be a stumbling block for some:  more palatable to have said, “where might God be in our grief?” Or “what hidden gift might there be in this grief for us?” But palatability is not so much the point, as is consumption, digestion, metabolism, and nourishment—in short, real incorporation in its highest sense.

Let me explain: I can quote Rumi’s “Guest House” all day long, and model myself after the Good Samaritan, helping those in need—and yet still, contemplatively, I may be unwilling to do the inner work that corresponds to that which moves me in Rumi’s poetry and to that which inspires me in the Good Samaritan toward justice.

We have as contemplatives the opportunities to take the highest aim, North Star, or either/or scenario, and apply it to our inner practice.

Of our two choices, one is to say that there are parts of ourselves, of others, and of this world, that we will not consider part of wholeness. However 'just' this view may at times appear to us, to choose this route of selective exclusion is to live in dualism and the struggle for good over evil. This is, as we say in the South, a long row to hoe, because to be sure the unitive ground of the Kingdom of Heaven is not the fruition of good weeding…

The alternative is to start with wholeness. But woe to him that chooses this path, for he must eat the lion, as the Gospel of Thomas says, and as we'll explore below, because wholeness is more than just neighborly acceptance.

To keep with farming metaphors, we can say good fences make good neighbors, that with these boundaries in place I accept my neighbor. But there are no boundaries in wholeness, there is interconnectedness, inter-being. Not, “love your neighbor as [you love] yourself”—but “love them as yourself:”  your being, your worth, your wholeness is in them.

In Logion 7 in the Gospel of Thomas it’s written:  “Blessed is the lion which the man eats, and the lion will become man; and cursed is the man whom the lion eats…”

It is easy to furrow one’s brows over the riddle this phrase seems to suggest. But put simply, when we wish to increase our being, to become fully human (call it what you like: to follow Christ, to accept our full inheritance from God, to awaken our Buddha nature) we no longer get to pick and choose the morsels that suit us:  “I think I will just have a salad” is no longer an option. We must eat lions, eat grief, eat anger. And me must eat them consciously.

The reverse is to be consumed by the lion, or the grief. And we all know what it feels like to be so consumed: we loose all contemplative agency.

The key to consuming any challenging part of ourselves, and so to be nourished, is to do so consciously. And to do so, some bit of remove is needed:  you cannot eat what you are [identified with]. Picture the dog and his tail. Even that bit of remove may be all we need:  enough to say “this grief, this anger, this shame, it is not me, it is part of me.”

Of a sudden, “me,” becomes bigger, somewhat separate, and therefor capable of some agency in respect to my tail, my part, my shame or anger or grief.

Typically at this point, we act against that part of us. Having gained some space from it, and some agency, we would like to separate it further, make it ‘not us’ altogether. The contemplative, radically, does the opposite:  she consumes it; fully tastes it, appreciates it; licks her lips—licks the blood off her paws even, because truly, she has become the lion.

Putting this into practice:

The Welcoming Prayer Practice, which has come out of the Centering Prayer community is a great formal practice for this. Cynthia—whose teaching I linked to there—is carful to point out that it is not so much a prayer as a practice: something you have to do manually.

Anyone who has experienced this practice is knows its merit—and, I expect, would be on friendlier terms with my use of ‘nourishment’ in this reflection.

Often we have conflated the emotion housed within our body and being with the outer situation to which it is related. The outer situation is not what we are accepting in this practice, but the inner emotion. When it has been accepted, you feel it in your body:  a release, a warmth, a charge, an new energy.

See, we had been draining ourselves doubly by not incorporating the emotion. We lost energy keeping it at bay, at we lost its energy—which is the great, and almost secret gift of this practice:  that there is no inner experience that cannot increase our being by its acceptance.

In addition to the Welcoming Prayer Practice, there is what I like to call The Sipping Practice.

This can be done on the fly, and whereas the welcoming prayer is appropriate when one is already identified and trapped by ones emotions, the Sipping Practice is for that initial moment of noticing our for-or-against reaction. While the Welcoming Prayer is a remedy for the sick, the Sipping Practice is a prophylactic.

Simply put, when you notice a like or dislike—for example, I notice a judgement, and feel my chest constrict—I ‘freeze this’ for a just second, just long enough to make a substance of it, and then I draw it in. I particularly find it helpful to image inhaling a cigarette (if that has some pleasant or nostalgic quality for you). We are finding this sharp edge where pleasant and good for us meets what seems foreign and harmful. And we bring that sharp edge where they join into our being. Just as one might inhale smoke—but just a sip, just a little draw.

We increase our being in this way it, and if we are attuned in our body and feeling centers, we can notice its incorporation, its nourishment.

It is, in its most basic sense, like the spy who trains himself on small doses of poison, so that when the real dose is administered he is unharmed. But more importantly, for the practitioner, it detoxifies the world. For it is a practice in tasting and making part of oneself the darker realms of existence—and so transubstantiating them.

Jesus, it is understood in some traditions, descended to hell—the devil meanwhile thought he had conquered Jesus with death, but Lo! Hell was no threat to His being. A similar story exists for the Buddha…

These ‘realms,’ such as hell, of course may be found on any of our city streets, in the physical and psychological experience in the destitute. Just as they may be found within us. Call it Heaven, Hell, Hungry Ghost Realm, World 96, World 192 … to attempt to conquer them is to become trapped by them. To be nourished by them conquers warfare altogether. Then we truly become peace makers. Then we too become the bread of life.