“OH MY GOD, I’M NOT ALONE. I ACTUALLY HAVE SUPPORT.”
This is what a woman told me she just kept saying to herself during the first session of Grieve & Glow last week (shared with permission).
Sometimes we just need a place to cry.
In our first session of Grieve & Glow, I introduce a concept that we’ll practice over and over again throughout the entire program. It’s the simple act of witnessing one another in our dark emotions, our pain, our loss, our tears.
Often our initial reaction to a woman being upset is to try make it better, to wipe tears, to say “everythings going to be okay”. This is our training and its well intended but it leaves both you and the upset person with this unspoken goal to push everything down. It can leave the person feeling like their feelings aren’t welcomed, like they need to apologize for their tears or like they need to be alone so they wont make anyone else upset.
In reality, there is nothing more potent than witnessing a woman in the depth of her rupture and telling her that she’s right in her emotions and that she’s right exactly where she’s at. This is the untraining.
Intuitively we know how to do this. But society has told us vulnerability is a sign of weakness, that our emotions will be used against us later. And that’s how we’ve created such shame around dark emotions.
So this practice is the undoing. It’s subtle, but it’s actually a reallllly big deal. Because by doing this for another woman, you’re going to find it easier to do it for yourself. Often when we can hold space for others it allows us to flex a muscle that then shows us how to hold space for ourselves.
This is precisely someone’s “why” for signing up for Grieve & Glow. To practice being seen and witnessed in her grief. To nurture sisterhood wounds. Brave, huh? You see, the more we can practice this act of reclamation, the more we can fully show up as ourselves in this world and that’s priceless.