Energy and Will - Part 3
April 3, 2025
Many human emotions take energy, but one of the most severely draining is grief. Mourning and grief upset our emotional equilibrium while draining precious energy from our minds, hearts, and bodies. Grief can be compared to a significant physical injury. For example, we may lose the functioning of a limb or an organ. Or the insult may cause us to be unable to think clearly. But it is our responsibility to learn to operate without that function. Things can’t continue as before the injury because we can’t do what we usually do. So, we must compensate for the lost functioning so that we can move in the world.
Compensation for loss of physical function calls for re-wiring our body, mind, and emotions. It takes energy to learn new patterns of behavior and new thoughts that direct that behavior. It takes energy to repair the tissue and cells. After we expend such energy, we need rest. Similarly, grief is the reaction to having a psychological mainstay amputated from our being. The more significant our loss is, the more severe our grief, and the more we must compensate. Grief also demands that our soul rests. Grief demands our time.
Living in grief, we experience everything differently from the way we experienced it before the loss. Our world is colored and distorted according to our level of shock, disorientation, sadness, guilt, anger, and confusion. It’s like we are learning to live in a new world, and like babies who spend most of their waking hours learning about their new world, we get exhausted. We run out of gas more frequently and find that we can’t go on as we did before the loss.
Whenever we need the person, animal, or state of being we lost, a new wave of incapability, disfigurement, and despair comes over us. The wound may even “bleed.” We may weep, scream, cry, wail, put our fists through the wall, or shut down. Whatever we do, it drains us of who we are and, at the same time, calls us to be something more than we were.
To regain the energy lost to grief, we must accept that we are works in progress who are being re-created. We are in the process of reconstruction, so we must change our expectations of ourselves. Grief is a state in which we experience the complete range of our emotions, rest, and regenerate. We have no idea how long it will take or who we shall be as we unfold.
Self-inquiry: What’s it like to know that after you grieve, you may not be who you are now?
Dear God,
I pray for all of us in grief. Amen
