Sacred Feminine Initiation: One Way of Understanding What Happens

Initiation is a very right brain, non-linear experience that can never be adequately named or described by a thousand left brain linear sentences. It came to me to simply share a dream that conveys what Sacred Feminine initiation is via images and metaphor. I had this dream about 1982 in the very early days of my exploration of the Feminine while I was in Jungian analysis around the time of my first volcanic Kundalini awakening. I was longing to experience what I named then as my creativity, and I see now I was desperate to experience and express my authentic Self. I did not know then that this almost unbearable longing was actually an experience of the Kundalini Shakti, the Sacred Feminine spiritual power that purifies, heals, and awakens us.

I wanted to know the deep Feminine even though I really had no idea what that was until I began to experience directly the power of the archetypal feminine energies in my self. I read the books and pamphlets of the early women writers who were students and colleagues of Jung, and I understood the feminine archetypes at an informational level. When I began to work with the archetypes of the Mother, the Amazon, the Lover, the Medial, and the Queen with myself and with other women in groups and individually, I was initiated into the mysteries of these archetypal energies. Initiation is a profound process of direct experience that teaches and transforms us, awakens us to the truth of who we are and what we are here for. These archetypal fires of initiation bring us en face with our identifications, conditioning, old stories, and unhealed wounds so that they can be healed, and we can live as the awakened beings that we are. Initiation transforms us and life as we know it. That’s the challenge and the gift.

We cannot begin to imagine that we know what we are asking for when we follow our longing for the Sacred Feminine. This is a journey of not knowing… I asked and was given this dream:

My five-year-old son is leading me to a mysterious cave in the side of a mountain. I have a sense we are in the southwest, maybe Utah. I follow him in, and soon I am walking into the cool, moist darkness alone. I can see clearly despite the absence of any light. Is it my own light that pierces this darkness? I walk the well-work path through this cave that twists and curves like a snake and spirals deeper into the luminous darkness. I walk slowly and carefully and come upon disintegrating corpses, skeletons, decomposing bodies, and emaciated, nearly-dead people chained to the walls. I am terrified, I cannot help them, and I don’t want to touch them or even get near any of them. They are repulsive to me. I hear them moaning and groaning, and the sounds of their chains and manacles clinking pierces my nervous system like electricity. The stench of decay, waste, and death is so revolting that I run as fast as I can, deeper into the cave. It never occurs to me to turn and run back out the way I came in.   

            Past the charnel ground, I immediately notice a significant shift in the energy and I become curious. I walk on a bit and I discover a number of small, flickering, candles in the recesses of the cold, gray stone walls. Obviously others had travelled this way before me and lit the devotional candles. There is a niche carved into the cave wall at eye-level, a small shrine with a statue of Mother Mary. She is about a foot tall and looks like so many statues of the Blessed Mother, standing there in a sky blue gown with her arms and hands extended, palms open and up in a gesture of giving, receiving, and welcoming. Her face is young and pretty and she exudes a kind of sweetness in her expression. What is unusual is that she wears a hand made white brocade cape around her shoulders. As I became ever more present to Mother Mary of this charnel ground, a great sense of peace fills me.  

I re-member and feel in my body and heart my long-forgotten childhood love of the Blessed Mother. I had forgotten about her as I moved from teens into my twenties and thirties. Waves of remembrance, humility, shame for abandoning Her, and gratitude sweep through me, and I fall to my knees before her in tears of love and the deep recognition and joy of reunion. I wake up.

This dream holds significance on both collective and personal levels. The collective significance is that the Divine Mother, Kundalini Shakti, can be found in all things and beings, anywhere and everywhere, including the charnel grounds and the darkest places on earth and within us. She hidden deep in a cave in the charnel grounds to  symbolize the exile of the Feminine—divine and human—by patriarchy, made explicit in our creation myth in Genesis where our Mother Goddess Eve is blamed, shamed, and exiled as the cause of original sin and the fall of man. In my dream, the Divine Mother is self-illuminating, her light emanates from within Her, as does ours, and as did mine when I entered the darkness of the cave. Sacred Feminine initiation leads us into the unknown shadows of our own being and brings us face to face with the luminous Divine Mother within. Once we feel the longing we go seeking, and it may take awhile before we realize that what we seek is what we are.

Mother Mary was the form in which I first experienced the Divine Feminine when I was six. I fell totally in love with her, probably because I didn’t live with my own mother and my grief and need for my mother were unmet. I turned to the Blessed Mother and had many conversations with her, wept in her lap many nights as a child while in bed. She was my consolation and refuge. I created shrines to Mother Mary in my room and outdoors, and at eight I started the Blessed Virgin Mary Club—a child-like foreshadowing of the Temple of the Sacred Feminine.

I was in my early thirties when I began my Jungian studies when I learned that there were goddesses in other cultures and traditions, and that there had been matriarchal cultures who worshipped a Mother Goddess long before patriarchy came on the scene. I didn’t understand that goddesses were archetypal energies that we can embody until I began studying Jung. I also did not know that the feminine archetypes were portals of spiritual initiation and awakening until I was actually invoking them with other women. Nothing in those early writings by the Jungian women suggested that archetypes were portals of psychological and spiritual initiation. It was a stunning discovery that changed my life and the lives of many other women in the Temple community.   

My dream suggests that it is our innate, child-like innocence and curiosity that leads us to awaken to our essential nature. In my dream this is represented by the sweet inner masculine of my five-year-old son joyfully leading me into the mysterious maw of the cave. Jung believed that the primal urge of all humans is a religious instinct. The word religion is derived from the Latin word, religare, ‘to bind back’, to go back to our roots, our source. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard people passionately say, “I want to go Home,” and they don’t mean to Kansas. It is natural for humans to want to know and seek their source and we have been doing so since the beginning of humanity on the planet. Home is at the other end of the yearning. When we direct our attention into the longing in our own heart, rather than ‘out there’ where we may attach it to some person or thing, we arrive Home, at the source of our longing, the source of our existence. All we have to do is turn toward our hearts.

The image of entering a dark cave is so feminine—it is like going back to the womb, to the source of our human life. The cave is also symbolic of the tomb, as it was for Jesus and those poor dying and dead souls in my dream, and it is the alchemical vessel of transformation. While in the underworld phase of initiation, we may feel as if we are dying—and we are in certain ways. Much is being released and much recovered and healed all at once. We are dying and being reborn with every breath. When alchemy is happening, unhealed wounds appear in order to be met and healed, old identities dissolve, and we find out that we are not who we thought we were. Our familiar reference points may disappear and our karma with certain people in our lives may be complete and those relationships over. We emerge into a new life and the way to that new life can be very arduous, with sacrifices to be made, old wounds to face, losses to grieve. This is the price of birthing a more authentic self. At a certain point in this creative process there is a paradigm shift from head to heart and we begin to see through the darkness, see that there are infinite possibilities held within this initiation and our lives, and we may start to feel excited about this. Eventually we come to know in our flesh and bones that the womb and the tomb are the same.

Embracing of this paradox of womb and tomb, or any other polarities that arise, brings us to the transcendent, the shrine of the Holy Mother within our own center. The presence of my boy child also shows the importance and the preciousness of the young, innocent, unconditioned masculine energy within us. The bright inner masculine, the animus, is an essential guide and helper on a woman’s initiatory journey. His function is to point the way, shine the light so that we can see where to step next, and enter with innocence, not knowing anything. I have noticed that the masculine has played a significant role in every major initiation I have been through. This is Divine Arrangement, not coincidence. The masculine and feminine energies within us come into right alignment. Initiation is not a journey that the egoic mind can grasp or enjoy. In fact, the egoic, thinking mind will be de-throned on this adventure of the soul, like the Wizard of Oz that it is. Jung wrote that a coup for the Self (aka the Divine) is always a defeat for the ego.

Women need to make friends with this inner masculine energy along the way, restore it to health and innocence if conditioning has corrupted it, and cultivate it to its maturity. Eventually we partner with him in an inner sacred marriage, the hieros gamos, which we experience as another shift of consciousness. Many shifts and expansions of consciousness happen as we follow the path of the Sacred Feminine.

 Again and again, we encounter our own shadow via the feminine archetypal invocations—the corpses, skeletons, and half-dead beings that are the unhealed, unloved, unknown, parts of ourselves. As we go, we become well-acquainted with our own fear and primal terror in all of its appearances and embodied sensations. We also encounter joy, bliss, ecstasy we have never known before. Our guides, angels, wise beings, ancestors, and totem animals accompany us and give us support, advice, wisdom and comfort that we can ask for. Under the protective, experienced wings of an initiatory elder, we can learn the tools and skillful means needed for every step of the journey. There are countless practices and ways to meet what is as it is, and even embrace it, no matter what it is. As we discover and welcome our shadow—what has long been hidden, not only in us, but also in our ancestral lineage—we become more of who we are meant to be and abide in who and what we truly are. Healing happens, soul retrievals and  ancestral healings occur, we discover our deepest gifts, and our boundlessly creative potential is free to fly. We are empowered to step into the world to Be that which we are here to Be and all that that implies.

© Sheila Foster 2015

A Condensed Herstory of the Temenos Center and the Temple of the Sacred Feminine ~ Part 1

          June 12, I am heading into a deep dive writing retreat for ten days. In thinking about what I want to work on in the writing retreat, this writing about the beginnings of Temenos Center  spontaneously emerged. I am also in deep listening for guidance about the upcoming Temple for September 2015- May 2016. The emergent theme and holding vessel for that temenos of Sacred Feminine Initiation is "Divine Arrangement: Being With What Is, As It Is, Whatever It Is." {What else is there??!!}

            I was cleaning out my file cabinet and found a hefty cache of colorful old flyers from the early days of the Temenos Center. Temenos means "sacred space" in Greek, and refers to a particular place within the ancient healing temples.  In The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (1983), Barbara Walker writes that a parcel of property was a temenos, "land belonging to the moon," i.e., to woman.  I have since come to understand that a temenos is an actual alchemical vessel where polarities come together in the alchemical fire of transformation, heaven and earth meet, the spiritual fire burns away whatever limits our consciousness of who and what we truly are—Love—and the archetypal energies dance wildly and intensely toward the inner Sacred Marriage, the realization of the Great Heart, and the birth of the realization that we are Love.  

           I think the Hindu Goddess Kali is the Queen of this cauldron, for she is both the destroyer of what is not truth and the midwife of Absolute Truth.  She lifts the veils, allows them to burn so we can truly see what is as it is, beyond limited consciousness. The temenos is where we learn to carry the fire and not get burned—a koan instruction I was given by an African shaman in a ‘big dream’ three weeks or so prior to my first initiatory Kundalini awakening in 1982.

            When I found this unexpected treasure of old flyers, I was in utter delight as I read and re-membered the events and the many women who have spent time in the temenos as far back as 1983. That is when I was guided to give the name ‘Temenos Center’ to what I thought at the time was just the name of my business. I apparently didn’t read the fine print as I did not know that I was signing on for the stewardship of an alchemical vessel and a women’s mystery school. While I had read about these things existing in ancient times, I had no idea that they existed here and now in our times or that this was the destiny of the Temenos Center and my path in the world.

           The drawing above is the logo that I was guided to use on the first lavender flyers I sent out announcing the Temenos Center and its upcoming offerings. The image was drawn by a male friend from a beautiful smokey gray metal Art Deco sculpture that was gifted to me by a woman friend in celebration of the emergence of the Temenos Center in Bethesda, Maryland. I saw this beautiful, strong-bodied, dark goddess as a symbol of the courageous Amazon within us, with her shield, her un-guarded body, and her clarion, calling to women to come and discover the Sacred Feminine within. Over these 32 years, she has certainly fulfilled her purpose even though her image has not appeared in print for a long time. It is significant that she has emerged from the shadows with her clarion to call once again, as I am feeling the Call to reach new women, as well as women who have been in the temple in past years, for this upcoming Temple. 

             To continue reading, please click HERE      

Ambiguous Losses: A Path of the Heart

What are ambiguous losses & how do we live a full life with them?

 We all have experienced ambiguous losses in our lives and there is healing in naming them, even to ourselves alone. Simply living a human life in a body is full of ambiguous losses. When we inquire, we find we have experienced more ambiguous losses than we realized and can see where the flow of life force in us may have been paralyzed or at least diminished. Awareness of these losses as ambiguous begins a shift of consciousness and a change of heart.

The pain of ambiguous loss is that we feel no closure, nothing feels final or complete. There is no certificate of death, no acknowledgement of the ongoing pain of the loss, and no certainty that the beloved will ever come back, that health will return, or that life will ever be good, happy, or that we will survive the trauma. Life as we knew it is over. This ongoing ambiguity is highly stressful and even debilitating.  Resilience is needed but often declines over time if the loss is not addressed. The grief process is frozen and without closure, and at the same time always present as a ghost in the field, an oozing wound, or a stone in the heart, perhaps easily triggered in unexpected moments and situations.  The functioning of many individuals and whole families is to varying degrees paralyzed.  Many with such losses grieve in solitude or the grief may be cut off, put on hold as there is no acknowledgement that something huge has happened and is continuing with no end in sight, no rituals or communal grieving. 

Naming and honoring ambiguous losses provides a container and makes it possible to come into a new and different relationship with the losses. The loss remains, the grief continues to be accessible and may rise up fully at times, and yet it is possible to come into a new relationship with it in such a way that we can still be happy, still have a good life.

·         Is there someone in your life who is physically present, but not really present? Does it seem that they are there, but not there?

·         Have you somehow lost, and are you missing and grieving a beloved child, family member, or friend who has physically disappeared from your life, for reasons known or unknown, and yet you still feel that their psychological/soul presence remains with you – that they are not there, yet intensely there?

·         Have you immigrated to this country leaving family and friends behind, not knowing when or if you will see those beloveds or your homeland again?

·         Do you dread the holidays, certain birthdays or anniversaries, and are you relieved when they are over?

·         Have you somehow lost your capacity to live fully, work, and enjoy life due to physical or mental health issues, aging, accident, or trauma?

·         Are you feeling the losses associated with aging?

There is more information on ambiguous loss at www.templeofthesacredfeminine.com

~~

I have experienced a lifetime full of ambiguous losses, though I did not know that term for them. This naming has created a container for me and I see that it makes a difference to others when they name and feel a container for their own ambiguous losses.  I have learned how to negotiate the territory of ambiguous loss and live without closure one day at a time since I was a very small child. Ambiguous losses have been my Teacher, my Sat Guru, in my healing and awakening process.  I keep meeting and embracing them as they arise.

I have come to see and feel Divine Arrangement is ever-present, even in our deepest losses, and Grace continues to provide us with enough courage, resilience, and opportunities to keep working with these losses and harvesting the jewels among the shards if we are willing to turn toward the ambiguity.  We have the spiritual help to come into new relationship with our ambiguous losses and give them a visible place in our hearts and lives.

Pauline Boss, the author of Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief, coined the term when she was working with the wives of men missing in action during the Viet Nam war. Having a name for these losses creates a container and reminds us that they are real even though they go unseen and unacknowledged by others, and even by ourselves.

"With ambiguous loss there is no closure;

the challenge is to learn how to live with the ambiguity."

                                                                                                            ~Pauline Boss

~~~

I am offering a day of ceremony in Maryland March 21, 2015, so that, if you are called, you can inquire and name your ambiguous losses and have them witnessed and honored in the safe container of community.  We will work with some practices you can continue to use for meeting these losses, including clearing the ancestral field.  The ‘stretcher from Grace’ will be standing by.

Where you may feel a deep hole in your heart or emptiness because of your ambiguous loss, I can tell you that the emptiness isn’t truly empty—there is Divine Presence and Divine Arrangement within it, awaiting your attention.  My work with the deepest ambiguous losses continuously reveals this to me and to others. I have found that ambiguous losses offer us a path into the Heart and a portal to Grace.   

For full info, go to:  http://www.templeofthesacredfeminine.com/articles/2015AMBIGUOUS_LOSSMarch.pdf 

~~

I suggest you read Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief by Pauline Boss

Mother's Day 2014 - Mother Initiations

Today is Mother's Day. It is always a day of mixed emotions for me. My mother is no longer living. She died when I was 35, that would be 31 years ago. I was born when she was 35. I am the mother of two children, a son who is 43 and a daughter who is 40.

We all have mothers and grandmothers, known or unknown, some still in bodies, others not. They are ever-present in our cells, and in our hearts, in one way or another, just as our own children are, whether still alive or not. 

These women brought us from the Mystery, carried us in their bodies, went through what they went through to bring us through. They were the portals for us to be here now, to come from the nothingness to being human women. Some days we are grateful for that, and some days we are not so happy about it. So it goes... Mothers are important Teachers for us all through our lives, even long after they have passed back into formlessness.  We have soul agreements with them and they brought us in just in time to participate in these most extraordinary times now unfolding.  We are here for some reason in these crucial, incendiary times where consciousness is rapidly shifting.

The Great Mother lives through each of us in both similar as well as unique ways and She lives in our Mothers as well. We are all Mothers in some way, whether we have borne children, lost children, or not. We extend our mother-love to kids, animals, plants, friends, beloveds of all kinds.  We give birth to our creations and we tend to what is newly born, helpless, tender, and vulnerable, as well as to the preciousness in others and, hopefully, our own preciousness. We can also mother the young ones within us who did not feel mothered. 

We all experience spiritual pregnancy at some point, often more than once in our lifetimes. Longing for something deep and truth-full that is not of this world, something unknown that grows in the darkness of our heart-wombs is a sign of this pregnancy. We come to realize that we are carrying some precious manifestation of the Mystery, the Holy Child in some form, and it takes time and tenderness, waiting and laboring for its birth. We do our part and She does Hers in these co-created initiations into Her mysteries, the mysteries of being spirit in a human body. We may feel very alone with this at times, and I know through my own direct experience that She is always with us, whether we can feel Her or not.

I feel a deep gratitude to and for our physical mothers. We have been through the initiation process that we experienced as our own gestation and birth, for her and for us, so that template of initiation is woven into our cells, our nervous systems, our bodies, not just for birthing babies but for birthing life, art, creations of all kinds, particularly consciousness. We are here to birth consciousness through all of our creations.  The process of initiation now is to re-member and learn the practices for how to go through that imprinted process again and again as Life (aka The Mystery) offers us powerful initiations in order to birth increasingly awakened consciousness. The Call is to awaken to our Essential Nature as the Mystery incarnate as you and me, to realize and give forth the unique Gifts each of us is here to contribute to the planetary awakening.

  

I feel deeply that being a mother is a very difficult Karma. For me, it may be the most difficult karma of this lifetime, all things considered. Unlike many initiations, i don't know if they ever stop in the Mother neighborhood.  We don’t stop being mothers when the kids go off to college or grow up and get jobs and have families of their own. The mother initiations continue, they come and go as life does. I feel my kids have been, and continue to be my fiercest gurus.

We can never do mothering perfectly and many of us hope that we can or wish that we did. The love we feel for our children is beyond words, and yet so is the heartbreak at times. Some losses and griefs are small and some overwhelming, beyond anything we think we can survive.  Who knew it would be this way when we first looked into those precious little faces and those tiny fingers wrapped around ours? 

The more awake I am the more I can see where I was not present or made choices then that would be so very different now with what I know now. I hear mothers say this all the time, and we grieve what we didn’t know then.  At the same time I know that I and other mothers didn't know what we didn't know back then, even if 'then' was 40 years or five minutes ago. I am feeling in this moment how much pain and grief around motherhood so many women feel for so many reasons, as well as the sense of loss in women who grieve not having  had children, and women who have lost children in one way or another.  It is a huge, timeless, collective grief that we all share in some way. Our own mothers and grandmothers most likely felt it in some ways, too. It comes with the territory, I think. Any time we love we are guaranteed that there will be heartbreak of one sort or another. Loving deeply is risky business.

We have to learn to have compassion for ourselves and support each other in that, in being kind to ourselves.   We could only do what we did in any given moment. We also have to consider that these souls who are our children came to us for exactly what we had to give or not give.  We were and we are fulfilling our soul agreements and these agreements may not be or look like what our thinking minds and loving mother-hearts like or want or wish they would be. Somehow the love we have for our children can bear far more than we can imagine. Both of my children have been fierce gurus teaching me to open to what is, and be with what is, and keep my heart wide open. What a challenge to what I think I can do and what I think my heart can bear.  Every day i am at the beginning with this. This is my central practice, it is the fire I must keep burning no matter what. My limitless love for my children keeps my feet to this fire of staying open and willing to be with what is, whatever it is. This teaching has infiltrated all of my life and for that I am deeply grateful.

Our kids have their own karma and we are totally helpless in the face of that.  The most difficult thing for me has been facing and feeling my helplessness with respect to my kids, witnessing their trials and tribulations, their broken hearts, and their suffering. It’s built into the mother love to want to help, to make the pain go away, to protect our children from harm or heartbreak—and we cannot do it. We are not able do it, nor is it for us to do past a certain age. I have learned from teacher Byron Katie that there is my business, my kids’ business, and god’s/goddess’s business. Learning where those boundaries are makes a huge difference in having healthy relationships. And it is not always easy as a mother.

  

As a mother, I can also say that I feel the ineffable joy in seeing them flourish, come forth with their own unique radiance and their gifts. I weep every time my son sings, whether in my living room, or listening to a recording, or seeing him be his brilliance in a film. My heart breaks open, I weep with love beyond measure.  It is the same when I feel the fullness and radiance of my daughter’s love and presence, my heart breaks open with joy for her birth and the incomprehensible Mystery that she embodies. 

So, may your Mother's day be a precious reminder of who She is, who your Mother is (embodied or not), who you are, and how much love your children have awakened in you! 

I bow to all Mothers, and the Mother of All. Jai Jai MA!!

Love Dissolves Everything

          My older sister, Jane, 77, died late Saturday night, June 8, and was taken off all life support June 11^th.  The last ten days since she went to the hospital have been full of grace and miracles. The attachment between us was brutally severed when I was three and she was fifteen, and I was sent to live with relatives.  I have felt in my body that she and I were very bonded up until that time—yet I have no cognitive memories of those times with her—no memory at all until I was six. I have looked at photos over the years and could feel nothing, other than numb, in relation to her.

          We were never able to be close these 62 since I was sent away, never able to be 'real' sisters, and, despite years of my own therapy and inner work, I yearned, but was never able to cross that chasm of pain and grief, despite numerous attempts. Jane was as frozen as I was.

Jane, Me, Our Mother

 

When she was in the hospital, we spoke every day, sometimes only for 5 minutes, as she was so ill and weak she could not hold the phone at times. In those tiny windows of contact throughout the week, miracles happened: the love that was always there, unable to be expressed for 62 years, was finally spoken, and all the years of pain and separation fell away. The unshed tears and grief of 62 years broke through in a wash of grace, a baptism of Love.

Since Jane passed, I have had beautiful contact with her soul, and more healing has happened between the three-year-old me and the fifteen-year-old Jane. At one point after she transitioned, I saw her with her arms extended, reaching for me. When I opened to that, I realized it was the fifteen-year-old Jane and the three-year-old me she was reaching for.  The three-year-old me climbed right up into her lap. I am still in awe that this life-long heartbreak we shared but could never speak about, could and did dissolve in a moment. Everything fell away and there was just the Love.

I knew when that healing of our younger selves occurred, that the life support she was on would be removed and she could fully release into her spirit birth, even though I had nothing to do with that decision and that had not been the plan. I could feel that Jane was complete, as am I.  I promised her that I would stay in contact with her, and I still feel very much with her as she makes her passage to be reunited with her son who died seventeen years ago after a motorcycle accident, her husband, and our mother.  I have seen and felt them with her and her Light is radiant. All the suffering of a lifetime appears to have dissolved into the Love. She left behind a 55-year-old daughter, who misses her deeply, and a best friend she had for 60 years, and me.

Thank you so much for your loving presence in reading this. My heart is burning with love.... and more love...

Ambiguous Loss and Unresolved Grief

Spring has arrived here in Colorado, at least for this week, and there are several books and events in this newsletter focused on grief. These are the fruits of winter’s darkness and en-wombment.

I have been thinking and writing a lot lately about ambiguous losses and the devastating circumstances surrounding such losses.  Patricia Boss, the woman who coined the term ambiguous losse, is author of Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. I was so grateful to learn that this kind of grief has been recognized and named, as I have lived with numerous ambiguous losses and grief all through my life and I have worked with many in my practice who also know ambiguous loss intimately. I found that ambiguous losses often go unrecognized by family, friends, community, and helping professionals, and even by those experiencing it. Once recognized, I know from my own experience, that much healing can happen, even in the face of the lack of resolution and closure.

The most excruciating losses of my own life have not been the deaths of people or pets that I have loved, where there was a clear sense of finality and closure, but the ambiguous losses, the losses filled with confusion, fear, helplessness, and lack of finality. These losses and their accompanying unresolved grief are often suffered in silence and confusion and carried alone.

The grieving process with a death, however difficult, where the finality is evident, happens in stages and we eventually evolve to a place where we come into a new relationship with the death and with the deceased. There is recognition by self and others and support from others to grieve and then  move into a new life without our loved one. Most of the time, this does not happen with ambiguous losses and unresolved grief. For those facing this kind of loss, life becomes radically different or comes to a standstill, sometimes for many years. We find ourselves on the precipice of the unknown, not knowing what to expect, perhaps crazed with fear and fighting the worst, most horrible thoughts and feeling of helplessness, and caught in both hope and despair. 

There are two types of ambiguous loss:
The first involves the loss of a loved one who is physically alive but has some condition that makes them unavailable to us, and eventually to themselves, emotionally, mentally, and unable to make relational contact. They are physically present, yet not there as they used to be, not able to function as they did in their lives. As time goes on, their level of functioning in day-to-day life diminishes and we witness them gradually or rapidly leave us before they finally leave us in death.

This type of ambiguous loss includes conditions such as dementia, ALS, Alzheimers, mental illness, PTSD, addictions, work-aholism, chronic pain, brain injuries, as well as other traumas to brain, mind, body, and soul. While our loved one’s physical body is still present, the person we knew becomes inaccessible, no longer there in ways they used to be, and increasingly incapable of relational contact.
Spouses, children, family, and friends of people with these conditions usually experience some combination of increased stress, fear, phases of hope and hopelessness, despair, anger, depression, as well as the deep heartbreak and grief of losing their beloved. Whether the loss of functioning and contact is gradual and happens over the course of years, or it is from a sudden, unexpected trauma, it is devastating to us.

It can also be frightening, confusing, as well as emotionally exhausting to witness and experience people we love go through these radical changes of personality, functioning, and suffering, especially when it comes to the time when family can no longer manage the care and our loved ones needs 24-hour help. Knowing our loved one is leaving home to go into the care of others is a death itself, and launches yet another leg of this painful grief journey. Physical death may come as a relief, both for our loved one and ourselves, as it brings a sense of finality that allows for a deep outbreath and the knowledge that this very painful chapter is closing and some new way of life can begin. As family and perhaps the primary care-givers for awhile, we need to ask for and receive help for our loved on and for ourselves. Fortunately we live in a time when there are support groups, books, healers, professional helpers, and spiritual advisors who recognize and understand what it is like for those of us dealing with this kind of ongoing ambiguous loss and its attendant grief. 

The other kind of ambiguous loss arises when one or more loved ones are physically gone and unavailable to us for reasons known or unknown, yet their psychological presence is still here with us. There is great ambiguity about whether or not they will return, perhaps where they are or why they left, and we may not even know whether or not they are even still alive.

It is beyond devastating when people we love disappear from our lives and there are no answers or evidence explaining what happened or why, or what the outcome will be. Their whereabouts may be known or not, but there may be little or no communication. They are gone, but not really. They are in some ways dead to us, but not dead. They live in our hearts, yet we cannot put our arms around them. They are part of our family, but not. There’s an empty chair at the table and often a heavy pall of sadness and grief hanging in the family field during holidays and special family occasions. There’s no body or ashes, no ritual or funeral, no memorial or burial. There’s nothing but our broken hearts, grief, memories, and whatever items we have that were given to us or belonged to our loved one. They live and walk with us on a daily basis in some parallel reality, where sometimes we can sense their presence, and often there is nothing but pain and suffering. When our loved one is gone for a long time, for years, we don't know what to say when a new person in our lives asks a normal question like, "Are you married?" or "How many children do you have?" Simple questions no longer have simple answers.      

With this kind of ambiguous loss, we are caught between hope and despair, perhaps doing everything we can think of to understand what has happened, to get information, clarity, and resolution—but it doesn’t come. We feel crazy at times as it is all so surreal, we cannot understand how this could have happened to us, to our family. On the nights we don’t sleep, we sift through the questions and make up stories with answers that, by sunrise, are meaningless. It doesn’t matter if the stories are true or not, our beloved is gone, inaccessible, perhaps for reasons we do not know—and yet they are constantly in our presence.  We feel lost, forsaken by god/goddess, and we pull in, our lives become smaller and focused on this terrible loss which we cannot fathom or even speak about. We live with an undercurrent of waiting: for some news, for their return, something to be different than it is. We may go into high action in our looking for help, for answers, for something that will bring our beloved back. 

Endless questions arise: Will there ever be a reunion with our loved one?  Can we, or do we have a right to be happy again or feel joy? How do we put this out of our thoughts for awhile and have a life, even for a few days? Why did this  happen to us? What is really happening here?  Are they okay? Are they alive? Have they lost their minds? Where are they? How will I survive this? Do I want to go on living? How can I go on living with this? Did I do something wrong to cause them to go, and if so what? How can I change or heal this with them, or with myself? Can I forgive them? Can I forgive myself?  What do I do at 2AM when the terrifying questions that begin with “What if….?” Am I being punished for something I did? On and on, these thoughts can grind us down to the bones emotionally, mentally and physically, and turn our lives into a living hell--on top of the excruciating  loss and endless grief that is always the undercurrent of life in these situations.

These kinds of ambiguous losses are many and varied and may include children or adults sent away from their mothers, families, or their countries for reasons they don’t know or understand, including adopted children, as well as kids sent to relatives or orphanages. Women who have given their babies up for whatever reason often feel the devastating emptiness of having a child, but not.  Children feel ambiguous loss when a parent literally disappears with little or no explanation or goodbye, and does not, or cannot maintain contact, regardless of reasons: physical or mental illness, accident, alcoholism or other addictions, institutionalization. Children who suffer the death of a parent or sibling where they were too young to understand what was happening also grow up with this deep sense of loss and confusion about their own part in what happened. In these cases, the parents often disappear into their own grief, so it is a double or triple abandonment for the child.

Ambiguous loss and unresolved grief are suffered by spouses and families of people who have gone to war, are missing in action or political prisoners, victims of natural disasters, or just gone for reasons unknown suffer terribly, especially when they cannot get the truth from the powers that be. Ambiguous loss also occurs in those lost or separated from home and family, whether by their choice or not. Included here are people who are prisoners, institutionalized in one way or another, on active military duty,  have a physical or mental disorder that keeps them away from family under circumstance that they cannot control. 

Holocaust survivors and their descendants, as well as people who are born into families where there has been a lineage of genocide or other unknown losses over many generations, such as those from Indigenous communities, may end up carrying a heavy load of ambiguous grief for losses of people they never knew existed. The pain and suffering of these ancestral losses stay in the family field until they are somehow acknowledged, felt, and given a place in the family field. This frequently shows up in family constellations.

Immigrants who have left their homeland and their families to go live in another country often feel ambiguous loss, not knowing when, or if, they will ever again see their families or homeland again. Likewise, those left behind feel the same unresolved grief. People go missing under various circumstances, children are kidnapped and their families don’t know if they are alive or dead. This happens to families and friends of people lost in natural and man-made disasters where the bodies are not found or not identifiable.

Sudden, unexpected or untimely deaths, including suicides, can lead to a sense of ambiguous loss. Even when the body of the deceased is present and there is no doubt about the finality, there may be so many unanswered questions, guilt, anguish, and confusion about the situation that the loss has much ambiguity and grief remains unresolved for years.  We can also experience ambiguous loss when a beloved pet disappears and we wait and hope and keep looking for our sweet animal companion, not knowing if we will find them or their body or nothing at all.     

In so many ways, these are the cruelest, most painful ambiguous losses in our lives because there are often no answers and no closure. Our beloveds are gone physically but very real, alive, and living in our hearts, present to us psychologically and emotionally. They are kind of like ghosts that continue to haunt us and our lives fall into limbo, at least for a time. The empty chair at the table, the last journals they wrote in, the bedroom that has remained the way they left it, their clothes in the closet, are constant reminders and we may not be able, or want to change  things or give them up for a very long time--if we ever do. We may run screaming in all directions at once looking for answers, help, someone who knows something, or could do something, or tell us what to do because doing nothing feels impossible.  

Unlike the finality of death, there are no rituals or rites of completion. There are no sympathy cards and condolences may only come from family and friends at the beginnig of such a horrific journey. What makes it even harder is that there is little or no ongoing recognition or understanding of our ongoing pain by others, even by family and close friends who know what has happened. After awhile, especially after many years of this ongoing loss and incessant grief, there are fewer people we can share this with and our sense of isolation grows. Others do not always realize how deep and ongoing the pain is, how much grief there is every day or on holidays or birthdays. Life goes on for everyone around us while those suffering with unresolved grief and continual ambiguity are living in a parallel reality, somewhere between the past and future. The present is unbearable, at least until we get some help and learn to live with unknown day by day. We don't know whether to continue to hope for our loved one’s return or do we give up hope, and we often don't know what to do when we have done everything possible and now have to face that there is nothing we can do?

I want to say there is hope, perhaps not for reunion with our beloved on the physical/emotional level, but hope for coming into a new and different relationship with this person on the inner levels, with the situtation, with ourselves and our heartbreak, and with the sacred dimension of what this is. It is possible to not only survive, but to thrive, even with the hearbreak of this terrible loss and ambiguity when we learn how to take into the realms of spiritual initiation and practice. These heartbreaks are major teachers and teachings. In my next writing I will share how I have worked with ambiguous loss in my own life and with others.

 

 

 

 

 

Oceans

I have a feeling that my boat

has struck, down there in the depths,

against a great thing.

And nothing

Happens! Nothing… Silence…Waves…

--Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,

And are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

~Juan Ramon Jimenez