Grief Is Initiation

Written by:

Dr. Nandi Hetenyi

 Sacred_Alchemy on Instagram

Everything changes, nothing lasts forever. Seasons come and go, people we love will die (we will too), the landscape of our life shifts and changes like the tides of the ocean. Grief is our natural response to impermanence and change. It is healthy. It is normal.

Grief is love. It is the reflection of an open heart; interconnected and caring and loving in the world. It is our aliveness.

Initiation is movement from one mode of consciousness to another. As the landscape of our life changes, ideally so does our level and mode of awareness and consciousness. We allow life to grow us, shape us and evolve us. From one stage of development to the next, from one moment of spiritual expansion to the next.

Many cultures who move more closely with the earth’s natural cycles understand this, which is why there are initiations, rites of passage after hardship, challenges and trials. This Western culture fears death, turns death into a corporate affair and we’ve built so many walls of illusion to protect ourselves from any proper rites of initiation.

Grief has become trapped. This way of actually living well, of expanding the capacity of our heart for more and more love, to move towards allowing MORE life to come in, to be more connected to the divine, ourselves and each other. This grief offers the opportunity to live even better so we can die well. Death teaches us about life every single day that death gives us another day here.

This is not meant to be morbid. This is truth. Love speaks in the language of truth. Every transition, every loss, every disappointment, every single challenge, obstacle, trial and difficulty is an initiation into deeper aspects of yourself, your own power and an opportunity to embody even more of your soul. So many of struggles people face, like depression and addiction, perfectionism, shame, fear, insecurity are all symptoms of trapped grief, unmetabolized responses to the flow of life and love that is trying to evolve us. It gets stuck in our bodies and we identify with it, it weighs us down, ages us, we project it onto relationships or things around us….our hearts become confused.

Reclaiming the initiatory power and healing potential residing in grief is to take back our own emotional power and remember who we are, what is important to us and how we want to truly, truly live so that we can come to the end of our life with gratitude rather than regrets. The initiation of grief is an initiation into the power of love. It is the capacity of your heart to hold more and more of the divine and to open even more to life in appreciation for the miracle it truly is.

Then, we learn we have nothing to lose but the chance to experience the freedom waiting in our hearts.

~ By Dr. Nandi Hetenyi  ~  Sacred Alchemy Healing

I envision a world where we feel comfortable in our own skins and are happy about being human.
A world where everyone loves and values themselves as a part of the whole,
where self-loathing is an oddity rather than the usual,
and the soul’s truth is valued as a gift from the divine in service of our highest good. 
Please contact me if this resonates and you’d like to know more. 
~ By Dr. Nandi Hetenyi