Four Years of Grieving Together
Yesterday was the four year anniversary of Mindful Erotic Grief.
Four years of touching into the collective thread of grief. Opening up energetically to each individual griever. Letting what is often loneliness or uncertainty we experience around our grief get a little softer; little less lonely.
As I was reflecting on the last four years, I realized I wanted to share a bit about why it came to be and what it means to me.
This gathering is based on a Mindful Erotic Practice, an exercise in being with our bodies created by my friend and colleague, captain snowdon. Offering the space to see what happens when we set aside time to be with our bodies and allow them to speak, move, teach us how to connect to our erotic selves.
Mindful Erotic Grief works much the same way.
What happens when you create a space of permission and care where folks can show up and learn to be with the complexities of their body and their grief?
The pain, the dissociation, the pleasure, the indifference, the sadness, the ecstasy.
What happens when they are in a place where they are encouraged to be at choice?
Permission is everything. It's saying I trust you and your inner knowing. And that allows the magic of transformation to come forth.
I am there. Holding the container, with as much safety and care and encouragement as I can, alongside my own grief and rage and fear.
But the beauty is that each person attending gets to explore and be with their grief in the way that is true to them. Put another way, each person gets to become more acquainted with the ways that their body wants to express and metabolize with relation to their grief.
And they have the permission to follow those threads and impulses.
There is no wrong way to do it. Truly.
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The foundation of this practice is firmly rooted in the truth that being more connected to our bodies (sensation/pleasure/orgasm!) and more able to grieve, fully feeling our losses is one of the ways we dismantle systems of oppression, where we pull more and more power back from structures and returning it to the collective body.
We don't know how to grieve and are often afraid to because, for many of us, the violence of settler colonialism has tried to bury and/or has destroyed the memory and ability for collective grief ritual because oppressors know that feeling our losses (the ongoing harm and oppression) especially together, robs them of power.
Yes, Mindful Erotic Grief is about grief for grief's sake. Because our losses and heartbreaks are worthy of being felt and honored and cared for.
AND
Each time a griever feels more of their loss, more in their body, and trusts their inner knowing more, the axis of power shifts just a little bit. And in a collective space, where I hold you and you hold me and together we learn to hold a little more, that ripples out into our families and communities and ecosystems. Rippling, weaving, growing.
I give you permission to grieve and so you give someone else permission to grieve. It's a beautiful subversive alchemy.
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Over the years I have been encouraged many times to change the name.
I've been told: "It's weird." "It's jargon." "People don't know what to expect." One attendee mentioned that they came because the title sounded a bit like AI word salad and they were intrigued. I laughed because it's truly word salad and there is also power in our words.
There is purposeful power in the words that I chose to name this gathering.
Mindful
Showing up on purpose. Showing up with intention and curiosity. Acknowledging that being with grief - with each other in our grief - is important. And powerful.
Erotic
This is the part that makes people squirmy. "Can grief be erotic?" "Why would you combine the two?" "It feels wrong to be sad and horny."
The answer is of course yes. Grief can be and IS erotic in the sense that we most often think of the word. Pleasure, sensuality, orgasm, release. We do not have to compartmentalize our human experience while we are grieving.
AND
Grief is erotic. Grieving is erotic. Grieving in community is erotic, in the ways that our dear queer ancestor Audre Lorde spoke of it in her essay Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power, wherein she names the purposeful suppression of the erotic as a source of information and a source of power in our lives. There are so many quotes I want to pull here, so I'll just share a few and encourage you to read it if you haven't already... and perhaps read it again with a lens on grieving as connection to the erotic and a revolutionary act.
"We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women."
"In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.
And yes, there is a hierarchy. There is a difference between painting a back fence and writing a poem, but only one of quantity. And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love."
One of my favorite parts of this essay (of which there are many) is where she names that the erotic gets to exist in everything. The life force creative energy, our moving toward yes, is just as important in adorning our gender expression, as it is in washing the dishes, as it is in a good fuck, as it is in listening to the chatter of the ravens outside our window.
As Audre writes, once we see and recognize the fears we have been instilled with, then we have the power to make a different choice.
Each time we gather for Mindful Erotic Grief I pose the question: Can pleasure be present here, if it wants to be? And with that question, we all get to practice and feel in our bodies (sometimes consciously for the first time) what choice feels like.
When we are practicing connecting to our embodied knowing, our intuition, the still small voice, our fuck yes! - we are in touch with our erotic selves.
And then everything can be erotic. If we want to it be.
Grief
When I first began trying to wade through my own grief, I came across a training with a now gone organization called Being Here, Human where I was taught by, and shared space with, cofounders Rachelle Bensoussan and Michelle Williams, as well as king yaa. One of the first things they taught me was to understand grief as a physiological process of the body, rather than an emotion. It is one of the most important things I share with people I work with because it shifts the way we show up to our grief and it makes clear the direct connection of the suppression of grief rituals and grieving as a tool of violence through settler colonialism. Remove people from their rituals and connection to their bodies and they will be more easy to oppress.
Because of this suppression there are so many things that we grieve that we don't know we are allowed to.
I often find myself naming to people for the first time, what you are experiencing is grief. Yes, that. And that too.
Any loss can and will be grieved. And because we have been so systemically separated from fully feeling our bodies, through religious doctrine, through trauma, through distraction, through oppression or whatever else, most of us don't understand the depth of losses that we have experienced, and in many cases, experience ongoing.
In a culture that is so grief phobic…
In a culture that forces us to minimize our sadness and pain and offers us little space to actually be with grief…
In a culture that has decided that prolonged grief is actually a disorder in the DSM-5…
Naming it grief.
GRIEF.
Yes, this is grief... feels vital.
If you haven't heard it before this moment, I want you to know that your grief is important and valid and welcome. Grief it not a dirty word. Reclaiming the fullness of it is honoring the fullness of our humanity.
So therein lies the power. Or at least the parts of it that I want to name here on the internet.
Mindful. Erotic. Grief.
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As with anything else, but especially with things that have been systematically withheld from us... it takes time to build capacity and learn the ways that we can support ourselves and one another in our grief.
Four years of offering space to those who need to grieve, are afraid to grieve, or haven't found a space that fits their particular griefs.
Four years of practicing showing up to collective losses and community losses, as well as my own heartbreaks.
Four years of attempting to meet ourselves and the horrors of collapse with a little more gentleness.
To everyone who has attended, attempted to attend, told friend, been inspired to give more space to your grief, thank you for expanding this web of grievers.
Each loss acknowledged matters.
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I look forward to continuing this practice, this naming, this revolution with you as long as we are here.
Thank you thank you thank you from the bottom of my broken and horny heart!
In love and rage and sadness and solidarity and pleasure,
Jess