Day 23
Today is a day to honor your bravery. What have you done for yourself during your
grief that you may not realize is brave? Today give yourself credit where it is due.
—Excerpt from © 111 Days of Divine Intervention, A Mother’s Healing Journey
I turned to the page and written word long ago. I turned to the safety of its lined borders and open space. I turned to the invitation of possibility. Pages and words were my refuge and sanctuary. Books, and paper were places my heart could explore, my mind could imagine, and where I created a freedom where no one could tell me no.
Pages and words, journals and books are still my sanctuary. Still my refuge and expression made manifest.
Expressing my feelings was dangerous, dark territory. Pages of an empty journal offered safety. It took many years of writing my thoughts and feelings to get to the spaces inside me where freedom to think my own thoughts, feel my own feelings and live true to myself appeared.
Expressing freely takes courage. Having places or spaces inside to meet yourself in grief take courage. Grieving the losses in life contain so very much possibility to express, emote, feel, and heal. Grief is alive with opportunity to honor ourselves in the privacy of our own hearts and minds. Like the pages of my journal, or in the bones of a manuscript, or the completed pages of your story.
Grieving takes courage because the feelings are expansive and are not easily ignored. Yet there is a line in grief. An invisible place inside where you decide. Do I go into the dangerous territory of truth telling, allowing the molten emotional pain to erupt or do I stay behind that line of no return and stuff, suppress and deny my life force?
Truth telling to self is curative. It is medicine that soothes and heals. It may feel like jabs of fiery metal when in the early throes of loss, or eruption, but once the territory is entered, it offers up all kinds of healing you never would have dreamed of.
Even though it was hard to write anything in the early days after the death of my son, I held onto my journal, as if it were a magic book of secrets yet revealed. I held it close to my heart and slept with it near, just in case, or for when I was ready to enter its safety, and the expansiveness of the possibility of going through this time, it would not be far.
You needn’t have gone through such a loss as I, to give yourself over to the healing truths that your feelings wish for you to know.
Take out pen and paper, or journal. Set a timer for 10 minutes and write about the prompt above. Let the words take you to the doorway, opening it wide. Let your hand move across the page, through the threshold of fear and trepidation, across the line into griefs pull, and let it all remind you— YOU ARE BRAVE.
Or simply hold the journal, pen, paper and know it will always be there for you, when you are ready.
Love,
Mary
My Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you so much to those who have become paid subscribers. It helps more than you know!
Yes 👏