02 Apr Hugging Your Cactus and Regaining Your Balance

My last couple of blogs have been about remembering my mom, who I lost a little over two and a half months ago.  One thing that I have noticed is that I have been a little off ever since, even out of balance.  Being a soul care provider, someone who has often walked along side others during times of grief, I have seen this play out several times in others.  Yet this has been the first time I have personally experienced it in this way.  Last week a friend sent me an article that does a great job of explaining this phenomenon.  In this article, which a link is attached below, the writer experiences a nasty fall after the death of her beloved aunt.  Interestingly, she discovered that her sisters and mom all experienced similar falls around the same time.  This led her to investigate this further, which brought her into the research work of neuroscientist and psychologist Mary-Frances O’Connor and her book The Grieving Brain.  She was struck by O’Connor’s assertion, “after we lose someone, our brain undergoes a lengthy rewiring process that monopolizes our mental capacity and can be accompanied by brain fog.”[1]  O’Connor’s research has shown that things like falls, accidents, etc. can be attributed to this brain fog during the grieving process.  So that’s it, I can say that I am for sure in the middle of a period of this rewriting process or brain fog.  In the middle of this I have experienced a couple of falls of my own.  In one instance I was going down a set of concrete steps that I had gone down dozens of times, but I missed a step and landed hard on my heel, which greatly aggravated a heel spur that I was already battling.  Now some three weeks later I am still hobbling around.  But this also served as a reminder that some times my body is actually speaking for my soul.

Now what does this have to do with hugging your cactus and embracing the ugly parts of your soul?  One thing that I am finding that makes the grieving process so challenging is that facing grief means ultimately facing myself.  In losing someone as close to me as a mom, part of my brain’s rewriting process has been to face myself in relationship to person I have lost.  That process includes a lot of great memories and times where I feel like I honored my mom, but also plenty of times where my cactus got in the way.  Surely this explains why many people experience intensified guilt and shame as part of the grieving process.  Our relationships with those closest to us expose us at our very best and very worst.   After losing a loved one we reflect on such things and simply do not like some of what we see.  We realize that we are out of balance.  This then is an invitation to hug your cactus, to deny self and ego and to work though the journey of your own personal brokenness.  The ultimate goal of this journey is to learn to integrate the ugly with the healthy and the false or shadow sense of self with the true self. All of this to develop a more integrated and holistic sense of self and to have a life of new meaning.

              This could also be described as learning to regain your balance. In the grieving process this means to not focus so much on the shame of the past or even the anticipation of the future that you fail to live in the reality of the present. And when we lose our balance and stumble along the way, it could very well be that our body is talking for our soul. As the writer of the article realized, “I exhaled, remembering something O’Connor had written. If grief is a way of coaxing your brain to create new meaning in this physical world without our loved one, we must learn from all we have now — the present moment.”[2]  To hug your cactus, is to live fully in the present, embracing the ugly, but also celebrating the good parts of the soul.  It’s also giving yourself the grace and space to accept that you are a little, or maybe even a lot, out of balance and it’s going to take some time and intentional soul work to regain your balance.  But it is also to live in the hope that things can get better and that this imbalance from grief does not have to be a permanent reality.  For me personally this included experiencing the hope of the Resurrection in a whole new way this Easter.  

Here is a link to the article

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/03/28/1241316836/grief-accident-prone-loss-recovery-falls

And apparently there is a cactus balancing game!

[1] Lauren DePino, “Grief made me lose my balance. Here’s how I learned to walk forward again.” https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/03/28/1241316836/grief-accident-prone-loss-recovery-falls

[2] DePepino, “Grief made me lose my balance. Here’s how I learned to walk forward again.”