Receptive Feeling: Releasing Perceptions of What is Abnormal

By Rev. Dhyana Kluth

As I gaze out upon the snow falling upon the decaying leaves and the cemetery behind our back yard and prepare for ceremony tomorrow, I ponder upon the conundrum of grief in our culture. I won't explore why we fear it here but to be sure we do. My aim is less analytical than to offer you permission to loose the chains, to feel and express your divine being freely.

Whether we have suffered a sustained barrage of stressful stimuli over a long period of time or a sudden shock, you can be sure our bodies have experienced trauma.  Grief is the way we begin to heal our bodies, realign with our soul purpose and bring ourselves back into balance.

---

---

In this American culture we are expected to keep it together, to not fall apart. There is something wrong with even that language and description because not only are we not meant to contain energy but there is nothing about us that breaks when we grieve and howl with pain and release our tears. On the contrary, when we halt the flow of our grief, we stop the process of healing from trauma and stop the flow of our energy to give birth to new manifestations in our lives.

Even without directly being told we cannot grieve our pain and loss, in this culture, we grow up learning it. It becomes ingrained in our body systems that we must hold on and control and tame our wild nature.

---

---

If we run away from it,  it will chase us for our spirits are inextricably connected to our feeling bodies on this plane...

---

When I suffered my greatest loss, in that moment of awareness I let loose a great big wailing "Noooo-!" That could have gone on until I was spent but I almost immediately shut the lid on my voice because of a self conscious awareness which I allowed to alter the natural course of my energy. In that realization of seeing myself how others see me, aware their shock and the pain of identifying with my grief, of not wanting to feel that pain- I stopped myself =wrongly- for their sake. For had I allowed grieving to flow in that moment, had I allowed myself to very appropriately fall apart and collapse with the weight of my grief I wouldn't have needed to do it later, again and again, feeling weak at the knees only when I was alone and could be myself without worrying about how I would affect others with my grief.

This is not the case in every culture. Some still connect to the essence of ancient womb religions and matriarchal roots of public displays of grief being normal and inclusive. Long before Christianity and the patriarchal religions and governance, there were rituals readily available to us which allowed us to release and transmute our grief into joy.  We knew how to do this long, long, long ago and would passed it on down to our children. Now we are left alone to grieve by ourselves, struggling without compassion and community. We must support each other in loving nurturing communities and grieve together.  This is how we will learn to grieve again.

Ostracizing our deepest feelings of grief and pain creates a projection of our fearful relationship with these upon others as weakness and even insanity.  Do we really need to deal with worrying about feeling weak or crazy for feeling and acknowledging our pain while we are suffering? When we feel we heal. When we do this as a community, magical transmutation of grief will happen.

And we don't need to wait for the prerequisite funeral as a vehicle for our grief. We may release our sorrow anytime.  We are not a container to hoard energy.  In order to receive energy we must allow energy to be released, continually.  As we breath in and out, so our energy flows.  Keep letting energy flow.  If we put the lid on our pain we are also stopping ourselves from opening to ecstasy.

We are feeling beings by divine right. It is a gift we have been given as sentient beings in physical form to feel the exquisite pain of love and longing. Sorrow is a part of our journey which allows us to grow in unexpected ways. Our grief is our teacher. We need to listen and go where it takes us. 

If we run away from it, it will chase us for our spirits are inextricably connected to our feeling bodies on this plane for a reason. We chose what we want to learn and how. We need to be restored.  When we are in sacred union with the divine there is no fear of what is.  We reconnect to the endless flow of source energy when we release our tears into the well and drink from it.  

---

Merriam-Webster definition of receptive

1. able or inclined to receive; especially :  open and responsive to ideas, impressions, or suggestions
   
   
2. a of a sensory end organ :  fit to receive and transmit stimuli
   b :  sensory
   
   
3. of a female animal :  willing to copulate with a male <a receptive mare>

---

When we master our feelings we oppress them and turn them into slaves as we become the slave drivers. This is the method of the old patriarchal paradigm which we are shifting away from as the Earth returns to balance.  With every deeply felt inhalation and exhalation we are restoring the ebb and flow of the beautiful symmetry of life and the divine feminine energies. 

Our wild nature is normal. 

---