Unacknowledged Grief, Addiction & Mental Illness

In my experience there seems a force equivalent to a solar wind of unacknowledged grief running through many mental illnesses, especially addiction, depression and anxiety to name a few.

The universal experience we undergo on this planet is loss and closely-related grief, and as I've spent most of my life running from this emotional pain, I think the running in various forms is also the developing of a wide range of dysfunction and disease, like addictions, anxiety disorders and depression just to name a few.

As we try to distance ourselves from reality, that reality being an ocean of grief, and like a fish swimming in that ocean, forgetting it is surrounded by water, we naturally hide everything from that grief, like burying a box of treasure in the backyard where no one can steal it . We think loss unnatural or wrong, as if death is wrong somehow. As a child, when encountering death, what adults actually allow you to process the experience? That's absurd, right? The thought is a child can't handle it. We're taught early to be normal and not dwell on the negative, right? So we're taught early on(whether overtly or not) to find ways to hide from the single most universal experience of all beings on this planet--that of experiencing loss, pain and grief.

Perhaps we all believe on some level these emotions will weaken us, make us vulnerable, take us away from normal, functional, productive life. So then, why would the Creator put us in this world-- mostly as a cruel joke, where we spend so much time and energy avoiding the unavoidable grief, running around like rodents on a treadmill, so that we're not even alive?

If you've ever felt the intensity of that emotional pain even for a fleeting second, you can understand why anyone would run from it. Yet that grief is so universal maybe it is actually the entire reason for us being here, the spiritual or energetic (much better word) reality that this grief will break us into a million pieces and isn't wrong but right, and that is actually what is supposed to happen, because by being broken apart we connect with all beings on this planet and recognizes our oneness to them while having the opportunity to lose our egos that mostly torture us in the process. Doesn't every religion preach and teach that? We come here not to come and go as the same entity, but to be changed, and this experience of loss will do just that. Reminds me what I've heard my teacher, Susun Weed say, "whatever is, is right."

Otherwise, as we seek to distance ourselves from the grief and loss, we also cut ourselves off from all other emotions, like joy and even bliss, because to feel something you need to feel everything. The disease and dysfunction is really a strangling or twisting into knots the flow of energy throughout our bodies, until I'm sure at a certain point our physicality is altered by this dysfunction to the point where the disease becomes (structurally) real and ingrained into our physiology, like the way an addiction changes your brain structure and function, for example.

We think we need to cut out the illness, like a mass of cancer to be removed surgically, when maybe what we really need to do is use all this experience as a force for healing, healing not being defined solely by removing the problem, but by some new realm of existence.

And when normal life becomes so unmanageable that literally it cracks apart and we're sick, really sick, everything stops anyway. There is no more normal. We're ill, but maybe we're also healthy at the same time. The illness is there to get our attention like nothing else could to stop us.

Might swimming in that ocean of grief be the medicine that can heal us, by opening us up, breaking us apart and connecting us to something greater?

What does that frontier life look like? Where are completely transformed, quite literally, into different beings, and we acknowledge the debt and the grief and also our connection to all living beings, sharing in this samsara, if you will, and transformation. 

Existing in this sea of grief and debt is an opportunity for growth, a portal into a radically transformed life--the one we came here to experience.