Sale! Herbal Support for Grief
Hello beauties!
As I write from the stage behind our community’s common building, the creek below is flowing strong, the apple trees are bursting pink, and the Siskiyou Mountains above me are capped in white. The air is cool, the sun is warm, and I am drinking an iced chai-cocoa. I believe this is called Becca Heaven.
And, yet, even as I sit in joy within all this explosive beauty, grief is present here, too.
Twenty-some years ago I published an essay in a literary journal for the first time. It was called On Beauty, and it grappled in part with what grief-tender Francis Weller calls the “first gate of grief”—Everything We Love We Will Lose. I wrote about autumn and how the crimson trees may be especially beautiful because their radiance is so short-lived each season. There’s something about beauty and love and all those other full-cup feelings that can feel both so delicious and so painful at the same time. And that achingly sweet feeling has something to do with the knowledge of how fleeting they can be.
Over the past thirty years of accompanying myself and friends through losses both small and profound, I have discovered again and again that the culture I was born into is super awkward with grief. Afraid to touch it in ourselves and others. Eager to avoid it at all costs. But the truth is, if we don’t tend to our grief, it’s still there anyway. Like all of our abandoned parts, it longs to be seen, felt, and cared for. And when it’s not, it will try to get our attention in other ways—like through despondency, rage, addictions, or physical symptoms that make no sense.
When my dad died when I was 19, I had no idea how to grieve. I felt numb, instead. Exhausted for “no good reason.” Unwilling to go to the therapist my mom offered to pay for because I was so scared of what I might feel. But by cutting off my sadness, I also cut off my natural effervescence, my easy joy. It took time, and long desert hikes eventually coaxed my spirit back to life, but it wasn’t until I experienced a series of heartbreaks in my late thirties that I was able to grieve all the unmourned losses that had accumulated by then. This time, rather than gripping the edge of the grief portal in fear and resistance, I allowed myself to travel through it. Sadness and hurt came and went as it needed to over the course of a winter, and there was something surprisingly delicious about letting it.
And on the other side of it I discovered a love so big I’ve dedicated my life to sharing it.
Grief is an inevitable consequence of our love. It just is. I’m sure you’ve had your (un)fair share of yours, and perhaps you are in it right now. It’s certainly all around us, and it seems quite a bit extra right now, not that you need a reminder. But perhaps you could use an invitation to allow your grief to take up space within, beside, and around you. Maybe it’s helpful to receive permission to feel the weight of grief, the depth of loss. If so, you might try sharing a cup of tea with it or taking it on a walk.
But first, tap into your most expansive self by leaning into any source of love and beauty that fills you up. Get grounded by feeling into your connection with the earth beneath your body, the support that is literally always there for you.
Take some long, slow breaths while imagining that you are creating a warm and welcoming space for grief. Then invite it in. Notice where you sense it in your body, and offer the sensation your warm wise-adult presence. Let it know you’re right here with it and that there’s nothing to fix. Nothing that needs to be done but rub its back, offer it a sip of tea, and allow it to unfold freely. If it wants you to move or wail or sing or grow still, follow its lead. And if it gets too intense, thank it for showing up, let it know you’ll come back later, and shift your attention back to your breath, the earth, and something beautiful in your space.
When working with grief, you may also call upon some herbal allies for support. Motherwort and Hawthorn are two of my favorite herbs for heartache. Motherwort is a heart tonic with a bitter flavor that helps the body get grounded and activates the vagus nerve to help us move out of fight-or-flight and into a calming presence.
Hawthorn is also a heart tonic and has a delicious, sweet flavor. It has an opening quality that relieves anxiety and can soften and soothe a grieving heart. They both can be taken daily, particularly during emotionally challenging times, and we have a blend of the two called Ticker Tonic on sale for 20% off now through May 1st. Together, they can help us do what Francis Weller calls the “work of the mature person”. That is, “to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them.”
I long to be stretched large. And so, as I sip the last of my iced chai-cocoa while pink petals fly through the air, I’m allowing myself to sink deep into the dreaminess of this fleeting moment alongside my sadness that this exquisite beauty will soon turn dry, brown, and smokey. If falling in love with this world, this season, this flowering apple tree, and every person I care about means that I will inevitably feel the deep pain of their loss, I’m going to go ahead and keep loving it all as hard as I can anyway. Because by the time I die, I hope to be stretched so wide that there’s nothing I can’t hold.
In love and beauty, Bex
