Learning to Reframe: Grief

How many bridges have you crossed?

If you look back and find a key moment of change: that is a bridge. And if you look back from that bridge, you will most likely find a moment of grief.

Grief is actually the bridge you have to cross to get to any moment of transformation. In other words -- it falls into action, and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You can grieve a bad relationship. You can grieve the loss of your tiny last apartment. On holidays, you can grieve the loss of family members not with you. You can grieve the ponytail it took you 5 years to grow, as you send it in to Locks of Love.

In these ways...grief is GOOD. It means you LEFT the bad relationship and these feelings are the detox you needed. It means you loved your little home, and the times you had there. It means you had treasured relationships with your family member and special memories you can hold onto.

We can grieve things we never knew we cherished, which teaches us about what is truly meaningful in our lives. We can grieve through enlightenment as we come to know and love our true selves while undergoing therapy, or overcoming an illness. And we can grieve a year like 2020 in what it has taken from us while preparing to cross the bridge to the other side of new hope in 2021.

The challenge of seeing positivity in grief is that you are often too close to the source of what caused it, to look forward to the retrospection you will get once you reach the other side of that bridge. Which is okay. That is to be expected.

But if, once you are safely across, you can take a moment to look back, to see what you have survived, identify what of it was good, and carry that with you as you move forward on your path... you will be able to fill your life with the fruit of grief: its lessons, happy memories, and good intentions, to move you forward into what comes next.