This morning, from the moment I opened my eyes I felt totally out of sorts.

I realised very quickly that this was going to be one of my 2% days. What’s a 2% day you ask? It’s a day I have every so often (2% of the time) that I generally feel a little derailed by. A day where I feel a little flat or wobbly… a day of inner reflection, often accompanied by tears. It generally happens when I haven’t been addressing things in my life that I am not happy about.

Putting things aside or abandoning myself in some way in order to meet other external expectations or needs. Over the years I have grown to have very little tolerance for inner conflict, so if I leave something for too long, a 2% day comes along to remind me to check in with myself. The body is insanely intelligent when we know how to listen.

Though difficult to feel, I love my 2% days. I have come to realise that they are incredibly useful and necessary. In the past I used to try and override the feelings by trying to shift my mood or change my state using meditation or exercise, or alternatively I would override the feelings by eating chocolate or finding some other way to distract me from the discomfort I felt inside.

All of what is ‘not working’ comes to the surface for me.

When a 2% day hits, it means I’ve reached a threshold where something needs to change.

Today was one of those days.

When I feel like this I take myself to the ocean. The smell, the colours, the open space somehow meets the contraction I feel inside and helps me open to something that I have yet to see as a possibility. Today was an overcast day. The perfect accompaniment to the sombre mood I carried with me as I made my way down to the shore.

I walked slowly today, taking the time to drink in the smell of seaweed and ocean spray, allowing my nervous system to rest. A very different pace to my usual morning sprint.

30 minutes into my walk a woman approached me, she worked at the nursing home nearby and was looking for an elderly resident that had gone missing. I relayed that I had not seen anyone and genuinely wished her luck in finding him. Within seconds I was met with a surge of tears, spilling out with a force beyond my control.

I know this surge well, an unpredictable wave that engulfs my whole being. Grief. Her eyes met mine and I smiled alongside my tears, turned away and walked with my hand on my heart, and I let myself cry. Right there, in front of her, in front of people walking by, being witnessed by their eyes, the clouds, the shrub and the choppy sea.

The water mirroring the waves of emotion that were ebbing and flowing within me.

After having experienced many losses in my life, my mother, father, partner and father of my children, friends, family and the many, many losses I have had to reconcile with regards to how my own life has unfolded, what I wanted for myself, what I have had to let go of and what has not been possible.

I have come to know the depth of grief very well.

It is something that I have partnered with in this lifetime, not in a depressive way, but more like a friend that reminds me how precious each moment is, and how present I need to be to it if I am to meet life from the heart and receive its blessings. To me it is holy. It is real. It is an alchemical process that transmutes all the difficult things I have had to digest into compassion, kindness and a willingness to meet life honestly.

It has carved in me depths that know no ground. Depths that have made me the woman I am today.

Today I wept for the poor man that had lost his way, for his fragility, confusion and the parts of himself and his own life that he grieves as he faces the inevitable. I wept for his family who just want to find their Dad, and the swarms of elderly people in this western world who have been pushed out of society in their final years because they no longer have any ‘use’ in this ridiculous progress based, tech filled culture that we have created.

People who because of our collective habits of only valuing the fresh, shiny and new have nothing left but time in a nursing home waiting to die.

What about honouring the parts of a human being that become more beautiful because of ageing? The beauty of wisdom, surrender and opening to the truth of life beyond the rose coloured glasses of youth? I thought about my favourite aesthetic, Wabi Sabi, the Japanese reverence for the beauty of imperfection and that which is ephemeral and fades.

A crack on a vase, a rock weathered by the rain, paint peeling on a wall or the honouring of what is old and worn, and felt my heart break in recognition of the exquisite beauty I see in the ephemeral.

I recalled my father’s last years and how life in the nursing home robbed him of joy and hope, and opened my eyes to everything that is wrong with this world.

With my two young boys I would walk into his communal cottage every Sunday and bear witness to the well of grief that lived in the hearts of the people that surrounded him until his last days, people just like him who waited for their family to visit them once a week and spent the rest of their days living for the next moment they would once again see a familiar smile.

I cried for the shame I felt around my own inability to be present to my father’s needs at the time. I was so wrapped up in my own life and its demands that I was one of those family members that visited once a week. Ouch. I miss him. I wish I could hold his frail body once again in my arms. He longed so much for my love. He longed so much for love. We all do.

I cried for the dreams I had that never eventuated for reasons beyond my control, for the life that my children missed out on after their father died, and for the mammoth changes forced upon me through the pandemic.

Life is unpredictable. Life is beautiful. Life is rewarding. Life can be hard. Life is all manner of things.

Francis Weller says that the work of a human being is to carry grief in one hand, and gratitude in the other. A tender balancing of two polarities. He also says that grief is not an emotion, but rather a skill. One that we must all cultivate.

As I have come to walk hand-in-hand with grief, I have come to recognise its voice, trust the waves that it brings, and listen to the wisdom that lives beneath what is often a tumultuous surface.

There is always an opening of some sort, a deepening, a new insight, a part of my heart that I have yet to feel, a widening of my heart’s ability to hold compassion for others, for this planet and for my own tender self. The etymology of the word grief comes from gravitas, gravity, something that takes us down. Down into the depths of our humanity.

When we are able to allow this dive, to meet ourselves in these waters, we are then able to meet others in the depths of their humanity too. We can only ever meet someone to the degree that we have met ourselves, and the most meaningful and lasting connections happen in such depths.

I walked hand in hand with gratitude and grief this morning, feeling blessed to breathe in the ocean air and bear witness to the glory of the sea and the beauty that surrounds, whilst allowing the waters of my feeling life to meet the edge of the shore. Joy and sorrow entangled in love. And in the depths of my sorrow I acknowledged the pain of what is not working in my life, and what needed to change.

I don’t necessarily have answers or a direct path ahead, but I am aware now that I am living in the liminal space between what was, what can be no longer, and what will be. A pivot point that has me swimming in the all too familiar unknown.

As uncomfortable as it is, I am no longer denying the truth that there are some parts of my life that I’m not happy with. Now that I have felt and acknowledged this, there is potential for change.

It has taken years of lived experience, practice and willingness to grow the skill, emotional capacity and inner-trust to allow grief in its fullness to reside in my internal world, alongside all the magic and joy that makes life the exquisite journey that it is. I have worked with grief much like an alchemist.

In my contemplative practice I have sat with grief as it expressed its snakelike form, wrapping itself around my insides, carving rivers in my internal world. In trauma therapy I have felt the grief I had locked away, direct its tender gaze out to meet the eyes that are now willing to see. I have sometimes shut down, not ready to feel, and other times opened to its waters and allowed it to flow.

I have let it bring me to my knees, and then re-birth me anew. In my studio I have moulded and sculpted my grief into shapes made from porcelain and clay. I have burnt my sorrow into piles of ash and used charred remains to create work that is new. I have learned to allow and embrace these cycles of death and rebirth.

I believe that growing our capacity to ‘be with’ our grief, allowing it to be an alchemist in our lives, is a skill we need to cultivate if we are to meet life from a place that is real, and nurture lives rich with meaning and connection.

Behind the instagram and facebook reels, behind the highly posed and styled photos are people that have the same kind of internal life as you and I. Just like me, they suffer too.

Most people think that to show what lives beneath the surface is a sign of weakness.

‘Toxic Positivity’ culture has made expressing what is real and true a sign of ‘negativity’ or ’negative energy’. Our world is built on the message to ‘be strong and soldier on’, but the truth is that this just prolongs the pain, keeping deep healing and its ensuing growth at bay and perpetuating isolation over connection.

What is being asked of us is to allow ourselves to break open, to recognise the level of love that lives in our heart and allow it to be felt, grief after all is love with nowhere to go. The depth to which we allow grief, is the depth to which we can experience love. I believe that this level of vulnerability is what we individually and collectively need to feel, in order to deeply heal.

When we keep grief at bay, and compensate through whatever means we have adopted to suppress and deny the very real existence of our humanity, we hold back what I have come to know as the times where the most potent growth happens. It is in this space between what is lost and what is longed for, that we experience the kind of growth that deepens our roots, expands our edges and creates a ground for a way of being that sees us meet our lives and receive the world with more honesty, wide open eyes and a tender open heart.

The world needs more of that.

Within grief’s intelligence is the very essence life itself.

Love.

Maraya x

If you are needing support in your own journey, reach out for a free 30 minute connection call. I’d love to connect with you.