The Sacred Art of Grief - Understanding the Grieving Process by eshaestar

The sacred art of grief Understanding the Grieving Process E S H A E S T A R

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The Sacred Art of Grief Accept > Integrate > Heal = The Pathway to Freedom

Life to the fullest includes our grief stories.

Can you accept grief as part of your life? Whether you or someone you know has lost a loved one, job, relationship, pet, friendship, health, etc., whatever it may be, grief has touched your life and will continue to. It is my belief, that the difference in the quality of life we live is directly correlated to how we learn to accept and deal with our grief. This approach changes everything in our world and the quality of life we experience. Freedom is the quality of life that we are after.

Avoiding Grief vs. Accepting Grief

The Problem: Avoidance Grieving The current way many of us process grief in today's busy society is to: (a) Stuff it down to process later or not at all (b) Pretend and act like nothing is wrong (c) Unconsciously exhibit unhealthy behaviors that keep us stuck in repetitive cycles of discontentment, depression, and being held back from the life we desire.

Consequences of Avoiding our grief stories:

The Solution: The Sacred Art of Grief - The Pathway to Freedom The solution proposed, is a three-step model that ultimately leads to freedom:

This pathway allows us to build emotional and mental resiliency that guides us to integrate unhealed traumas that results in grief. This integration is a pathway towards wholeness and healing, towards a healthy thriving life, one that cannot occur if we choose to bypass our grief experiences. In a world where suicide rates, depression, opioid addictions, and anxiety have all dominated our national news, it’s becoming imperative that our grief work will play a central role to our overall healing process. Grief like love, is a teacher, a teacher to respect rather than be fearful of as it prepares us to embrace the inevitable, death and letting go.

Benefits of Accepting our grief stories:

Understanding the grief process: Avoidance vs. Acceptance

The Grief MandalaTM A Self- Assessment Tool for Grief Through our Grief Mandala we’ve created a clear way for everyone to access their grief by simply checking in with the seven leaves to see where they are in their healing process.

1. Am I being present with my grief? 2. Am I exhibiting compassion on the road to healing? 3. Am I present (embodied) in my body to feel my grief? 4. Have I created connection and support with others in my grief journey? 5. How am I choosing to express my grief? Am I seeking out self-care? 6. How am I integrating grief into my life? Am I learning how to cope in healthy ways? 7. Do I feel more liberated and freer as a result of doing my inner grief work?

How we can help: Choose one of the 5 Pathways to Healing.

The Esha Estar website provides several resources and approaches to walking the new path with grief for you or a loved one. As we advance as an organization these resources in the coming months, we will be launching a web and mobile app with new features like music and art from artists around the world in our community, languages for additional countries, and so much more, etc. In 2022, we will offer certified grief doula training programs so practitioners across the healing spectrum can offer mind, body, spirit assistance to our grieving communities. The arrival of Covid-19/Pandemic have left our nation and the world in a state of a grief crisis, as reported by the New York Times opinion article, titled "The Grief Crisis Is Coming." It’s our intention to assist humanity in her healing one soul at a time in a way that brings compassion, love, and kindness to the grief and healing process. The 5 pathways give us an opportunity to enter that space and befriend the healing process guiding us ultimately to a place of inner freedom and peace. We approach our most vulnerable self compassionately and begin there on the journey. From death we experience loss. From loss we experience grief. From grief we seek out guidance. From guidance we begin to curate a way forward towards a healthy new life through positive self-care.

Basis for the Model Over the past two decades my personal evolution from a bachelor’s in biology, to a master’s degree in Education to certified Yoga Teacher and Bodyworker, to certified Spiritual Director, to Shamanic training in Wisconsin and Peru, along with my personal experiences of grief has led me to who I am today, Esha Estar, Grief Shaman. The integration of my own personal grief experience resulting from sexual abuse before the age of 10, the tragic loss of my father to homicide at the age of 10, three months after arriving to America, the loss of my mother six years ago to diabetic complications, and finally the very sudden and unexpected loss of my husband 4 years ago, has led me to intimately connect with and be passionate about this work to assist others in their own grief journey. Healing and thriving are possible. In my one-on-one and group training work with clients, I have witnessed firsthand how unprocessed grief has stolen the lives of many, leading them to have physical issues, mental and emotional breakdowns, spiritual disconnection, anxiety, fear, and a deep sense of being in survival mode. Simply put, the individual often feels frustrated in their personal development journey and fails to thrive fully. Many clinical psychologists and doctors agree that unprocessed traumas can create unhealthy imbalances if left unhealed. In the summer of 2021, a groundbreaking documentary movie, The Wisdom of Trauma by Dr. Gabor Mate, along with many leading mental health leaders, shed a global spotlight on this issue. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to my regular clients, I served as a spiritual guide and intuitive healer for many accomplished mental health therapists and health practitioners who were experiencing mental and emotional burnout, to learn to accept, integrate, and heal on their grief journey. To see where they began, and the thriving lives they are leading now is a shining testament to when we choose to enter a sacred relationship with our grief, we are choosing a life of more joy, love, and openness rather than a life of increasing suffering, constriction, and stagnation. I believe the choice is ours. As much as we would like to escape the uncomfortable emotions of grief, we must turn a new page in our evolution in how we process and approach our fear to feeling grief. We must learn to befriend it for the sake of our communities, nation, and the world.

The following books I have read all allude to the long-lasting benefits of embracing the uncomfortable that enters our lives: • • • •

When Things Fall Apart – Pema Chodron Untethered Soul – Michael Singer The Book of Joy – Dalai Lama and Bishop Desmond Tutu The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying – Sogyal Rinpoche