Are you willing to let who or what is ready to die, die — with tenderness?
SARAH farrell 
the dark woods of grief and what my sister's dying reminded me about secondary losses, grief as a teacher and dying wise
My sister Debbie let go of her body and returned to spirit last Friday.
She was my everything.
I know you’re not supposed to have favourites, but my soul recognised hers
— and that kind of recognition is a rare, sacred, and other worldly gift.
Debbie was like a cat with 9 lives
- she nearly died after a TBI from a fall off her horse 18 years ago.
She lay in a coma for days.
I sat by her bedside, running healing energy on her broken brain
and body. She healed then.
Not this time.
She has been in liver failure since January.
Every day since that first seizure, and stroke has been a borrowed day.
(Debs, Bill and I in a happy place a few years ago.)
Anticipatory grief sways with optimism that she could recover.
I was a compatible match to give her some of my liver.
That day never arrived due to complications.
I will never see her in the flesh again.
In spirit she is always with me.
And it's tenderising in the longing....
Even though I am relieved she is not in pain
and grateful that she is with her beloved Bill again.
( I wrote a guide book "Until we Meet Again - how to carry your grief alongside your joy"
which may be useful if you find yourself deep in the long dark of grief. I wrote if specificaly
for people who are struggling with the death of a pet but everything in the book applies to
secondary losses and the death of human loved ones too.)
You can find it here:
Grief and gratitude are both sides of love.
There’s a particular stillness after someone you love leaves.
It’s not silence — it’s the sound of the universe catching its breath.
And theirs.
Grief is love with nowhere to go.
And I’ve been thinking a lot about that
— how grief reminds us of how deep we love.
That we get to choose to die wise.
That Death is not something to fear.
It’s the bridge. The teacher. The friend waiting at the threshold saying,
“You can let go now.”
And maybe that’s the hardest part
— letting go while staying alive.
Because free will is limited.
Most of life is written in the stars.
We don’t control what leaves, or when, including our own ending.
What we can control is how we meet it
— how we regulate the storm inside our own nervous system,
how we breathe through what we can’t change.
There are no bad choices.
Only opportunities to live eyes wide open until they aren't.
So why are we in such a rush to get there when we’re already here?
This — this moment, this breath, this heartbreak
— is the portal.
This is the free-will button:
the pleasure of being in a body inside a dream.
How awake and capable are you of being a bridge,
of waking up inside the dream and savouring every minute of it?
This is why I teach what I need most.
It’s what I promised to do when I arrived here.
My constant prayer:
How can I be more useful?
How can I listen more deeply,
How can I be still enough inside to be a clear channel for the divine?
How can I love more deeply?
How can You?
I am the light. The light I am.
You are the light.
I honor the light in you that meets me.
Thank you.
And I ask you :
— how can you bring your light to the dark places and spaces?
If you find yourself lamenting in the WHY?????
Pluto has stepped into Aquarius for the first time in 240 years,
Pluto is here to teach us that death comes to us all
and that it is not the end, but a rite of passage.
Now is the time to dissolve the old patterns
and let what needs to die, die an honorable death.
And to do that we have to go back to the burial grounds
— literal and metaphorical
— where we’ve buried emotions that our nervous system
didn’t have the capacity to process,and grieve at the time.
Now is the time to excavate those unresolved traumas,
buried truths and bring them into the light so they can
dissolve or transmute.
Pluto
This is very much the Chiron energy available to us right now
— the wounded-healer frequency.
We’re clearing the blocks we unconsciously created through
our judgments, belief systems, and old programming
that keep us trapped on the struggle bus.
These are ascension symptoms:
we feel like we’re healing, we get some light, some release
— and then another layer surfaces.
Back we go, into the burial grounds,
into the long dark to embrace the shadows,
to make the unconscious conscious
— to thank the people and situations that made you who you are
perhaps by not giving you what you needed as a child.
To bless them/it, release the story you are telling yourself,
give them/ it permission to return to the earth,
to nourish new life rady to be reborn,
and in so doing let the light in.
That is the process of evolution.
To remember that there is no beginning and no end.
The cycle of life and death, grief and gratitude
is the gift of Spirit having a human experience.
You are a boundless, timeless, limitless being.
Because grief needs a village.
It needs to move through us and with us.
Together.
That’s Aquarius
— that’s the flow, the water element, the being-human part.
This isn’t vulnerability marketing.
Real tenderness is unbeautiful.
And when loved ones leave, your friends betray you,
or abandon you by not dying on schedule —
sit on a bench and bless them.
This is medicine.
In a world unraveling, where so much familiar is falling away,
keep shining your light.
Love harder, hold gently, breathe deeper
If everything around you seems dark, look again:
you may be the light.
- Whatabandned, rejected, exiled parts of me are ready to be exhumed from my own burial grounds?
- Where am I resisting or fighting against what is ready to die?
- How can I meet endings with the same reverence I offer beginnings?
- What light am I being asked to bring to my own dark places?
With every breath, I honour love in all its forms — grief, gratitude, death, release,
rebirth and everything in between.
“I Am the Lungs.”
Because grief needs to be witnessed, moved,
and metabolised in a safe container of others —
and when it’s held gently that way,
it tenderised and transforms the breath that keeps us alive.
On October 21st, we have a New Moon at 28° Libra.
The New Moon is square Pluto and Jupiter so it is bound to push all our buttons,
prompting us to re-evaluate who we are,
and the role we want to play in this fast-changing reality.
This is a pressure test New Moon that raises a fundamental “identity” question:
what’s truly me, and what’s being shaped by forces outside my control?
Jupiter opposite Pluto will shake things up to set you free and its not always comfortable.
But it’s right in the heart of that upheaval that we get to the essence of things.
Be gentle with your sweet body and soul as you tend to what has been overlooked,
clarify what’s non-negotiable aka healthy boundaries,
and recognize what needs to change going forward.
Much love and gratitude
Categories: : anatomy of emotions, bodymind medicine, compassionate enquiry, trauma informed coaching, grief