“Grief is the medicine.” -Malkia Devich Cyril
Having worked with people for over 25 years to develop their sexuality from a holistic place, people often reach out to me as they are sorting through the rubble of a marriage or long-term relationship that has ended or transitioned in some way.
The makings of a profound rebirth are always there: a new freedom, opportunities to do things they could not do before, reimagining a dating life, exploring sex again, getting to know who they are without this relationship that defined them for a good long time.
If a person is determined, they will grow into something bigger and give themselves the things they did not have before. Or they might reignite things and parts of themselves they might have set aside for the relationship. They will claim their birthright for their life and their sexuality in a new way. If they stay the course, when they come through the grief and the loss, they will come home to themselves.
The homecoming is bittersweet. The void where something or someone else once was is palpable, and voids always seek to be filled. Fill them we will, either consciously with what is really important to us, or unconsciously, with things and people who can distract us from feeling what begs to be experienced and metabolized.
In those times, there is creative energy that will come online if we make space for it.
Sexual energy is the source of that creative energy, generative and expansive. It sometimes awakens with a wildness that demands expression.
The clearing out that makes room for all of who you are when another has gone can be magical, transformative, and powerful. Claiming your love for yourself after losing someone you love(d) to divorce, death or otherwise, is the ultimate act of self-possession, courage and self-determination. It will build in you a deeper kind of resilience. As you say goodbye, the opportunity to open to something bigger within you emerges.
There are so many ways sexuality and grief are intricately woven together, a tapestry of longing and desire, beauty and harsh conditions, self-expression and quietude, a battle cry and a prayer.
Grief for Our Little One & For Our Bodies
For many of us, there is grief in the loss of our innocence too early, in the things we were robbed of because of trauma, abuse, lack of education, or silence around sexuality. The shame we may have felt and internalized breeds its own kind of grief…a grief that is about the time and experiences we never got and can never recover.
[There are actually *some ways, cue roleplay lecturette…]
There is so much grief when our sexual and reproductive bodies are impacted through illness, surgeries, or pregnancies that derailed in some way. Grief bears its teeth when we feel the deep pain over the way our sexuality has been weaponized against us and how hard it is to let something generative and beautiful in when we are in that wounded place.
You can fight that grief. I have found myself fighting with my grief, mired in sadness.
You can surrender to grief and befriend it, and see what grows from whence it came.
Grief is a fierce teacher. Sometimes it bites. Sometimes it just sits there at the bottom of your gut, or your heart, quietly gnawing on you, sometimes almost imperceptible, til you finally notice the hole.
When I went through my divorce and the grief was so huge, at the gut of it, I found profound compassion and connection: I felt connected to every person who had ever lost a loved one, every mother who had lost a child, every grieving soul who was hurting, and that opened up in me enormous compassion for myself and for every being in this world. It changed me.
Losing my mother in the middle of witnessing a genocide that I feel largely helpless to stop has been a true double whammy. Watching the grief of thousands of people, of so many parents losing their precious children, of people losing their homes and entire families, has gutted me. I won’t turn away from that. I will not deny what I am seeing with my own eyes.
There is a slowing down and a quiet in the place of grief and loss, and simultaneously a quickening, as life continues to move around and in you, urging you forward to keep living, even as your system begs you to pause. As I witness the greatest tragedies of my lifetime, of this generation, the pull of life is in me too.
It is slower now, it is more subtle. It is quieter. And I am finding that I am emerging with an ever emboldened belief in the necessity and power of sexuality as our healing balm, our playground, our teacher, and our lifeblood.
In my reclusive retreat over the last three years, I have needed rest, a complete reset, a reckoning with our world and my place in it, and with meaning. I thought I might walk away from this deep, rich work around sexuality. Perhaps I have done enough and am meant to do something else now.
Yet, as I emerge, I am still holding the torch I have held for over 25 years, that lights the path to sexual liberation for all. My battlecry still wants to be heard and met, my dharma still clear. As I watch the genocides in Gaza, Sudan and Congo, and the ways that the body and sexuality are brutally weaponized, I know that if we all had a healthy relationship to sexuality — which includes gender — none of these wars would be happening.
I will believe in the power of this for my whole lifetime, even if at some point I choose to do other things. I have not yet reached that point, and that came with great thoughtfulness.
Sexuality is a Balm of Aliveness
All we have is this presence, this one body, this one magical life, this opportunity right here and right now to create something beautiful and worth living for. Sexuality is source energy for all of those creations.
Feel the aliveness in everything around you, the flutter of wings and the sway of trees. The warmth of sun and the dream that burns in you to come forth.
When that season comes, may you find your rebirth as you emerge out of your grief and loss, knowing nothing is ever fully lost, because it lives in you. Whatever this new season of autumn brings, whatever you are about to compost and gift to the earth, let yourself find quiet inside, and tenderness for the aches of your own grieving heart.
May my grief and your grief be one — one love, one energy, one movement towards liberation. May it turn colors and dry up like autumn leaves, reminding us of life’s ever spinning magical wheel.
On this equinox, may we join in the in-and-out breath of giving and receiving, opening and closing, dancing and resting, loving and being loved. May we come home to ourselves in those moments of emptying out and know that a rebirth is right around the corner, and that the grief is a gift.
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I am re-emerging, and will be announcing some new opportunities for this great deepening this fall. I will be teaching the deep work of holistic sexuality that has changed thousands of lives over so many years. If you think you might want to join me, or want to learn more, add yourself to my mailing list and you will be the first to know when I announce the newest, freshest makings of the Honey Hive.
