Grief's Sacred Threshold

Grief asks everything of us - body, mind, and spirit. It unravels who we thought we were and brings us face-to-face with life’s deepest mysteries. This talk explores grief not as something to overcome, but as a sacred threshold - a passage that invites humility, awe, and remembrance of our wholeness. You’ll be guided to see grief as a teacher that restores connection, softens separation, and reawakens reverence for life itself.

Every experience of grief is unique, and this is a space of no judgment - only gentle witnessing, truth, and belonging. Inspired by her own journey with grief, Tegan offers us words that may bring you a little closer to what you may be experiencing.

Transcript

Thank you for joining me here.

My name is Tegan Wilde and I'm going to take the next few moments to talk about,

Share and feel into the journey of grief.

This has come from my own lived experience.

I have journeyed the sudden loss of my father,

I have journeyed the loss of my best friend and dog,

And I've also journeyed the loss of my son.

And first I'm going to read something that I have written that kind of captures perhaps an alternative way or a deeper way of looking in grief that maybe you have felt into or heard before or maybe it might be new for you.

But knowing that,

You know,

If you come here via the meditations I've made or whether your journey in grief at the moment and looking for words that resonate with the experience that you're having right now,

I hope this is some of them.

So I'm going to read this and then I'm going to share a little bit more at the end about the takeaways from this.

So grief is the somatic,

Psychological and spiritual experience initiated by loss.

It is the system's attempt to process the collapse of what was once known,

The attachments,

The expectations,

The dreams and the identities that once shaped who we believed ourselves to be.

It carries us into the depth of perceived separateness,

To the edges of our humanness,

Where the ache of loss lives in the marrow of our bones,

Echoing through every breath.

And yet,

In this descent,

Grief offers something profound,

The invitation to return our awareness to what we have forgotten,

That there is a mystery much larger than ourselves,

One we are invited to bow before with humility and reverence.

At its essence,

Grief is not an enemy to be overcome,

But a movement of life reclaiming its wholeness.

It is the bridge between the seen and the unseen,

The personal and the collective.

It burns away the form,

So we might remember the formless,

And the whisper of truths that live beyond sight,

Felt only in moments of quiet.

When we allow grief to move through us,

It restores our capacity for awe,

Humility and reverence.

It reminds us that love was never bound by circumstance,

That connection was never truly broken,

And that freedom arises not from escaping life's cycles,

But from surrendering into them.

To grieve is to participate in the great rhythm of return,

A remembering of what it means to be alive,

Fully feeling,

And forever held within something vaster than ourselves.

Life continues to expand you beyond your current limits,

Revealing that what you are here for is far greater than your present self can yet know.

It makes sense to resist grief,

The intensity,

The unknown,

The surrender it asks of you is daunting,

And to fully let it in is to let go,

And that can be terrifying and simply feel like not an option.

Grief is like the family member nobody really wants to invite to Christmas,

Yet they carry the most precious truths,

The hidden wisdom wrapped in mystery.

When we meet it with openness and reverence for the depth it offers,

We discover that it is not a foe,

But a guide,

A teacher showing us how to feel,

To connect,

And to live more fully.

From this place,

Everything becomes an experience to be embraced,

Each moment a nuance of sensation and texture in the art of being human.

This experience of life continues to expand you past what your current self believes is possible,

It will continue to reveal the profound truth that there is beauty and joy embedded even in the depths of loss,

And it is the gateway of possibility.

So that has been my latest musings,

I have been journeying grief through the initiation of motherhood as my son Tully died at the end of his birth and it's just cracked me open and from what reflecting back even now eight months in is that one thing comes to mind is that those initial stages of grief are they are so big sometimes I parallel it to the the niceties or more of the joyous feeling of when you first fall in love it's all consuming it's all you can think about it's all you want to do it's it's like that but the opposite but it is that all consuming it just engulfs you and I really believe that I know in a lot of in the culture that I am in in Australia not being attached to a specific say religion although I would call myself spiritual that the grief is so big mentally physically emotionally spiritually that I don't think I could have done it by myself I could barely breathe and it was in those times that my community came and they breathed for me they walked for me they talked for me because there's something in this experience it's too much for the individual it it pulls the thread of this this reverence of this what feels like a slap in the face like this is this is the experience you're having birth life death are you really here and present with it for the grander picture and sometimes yeah it could just be so big that that's when our community needs to come in and care for us as our system is literally being torn apart you know I talk in my meditations that every cell is going through a storm and to think of all the cells in your body doing that at the same time that it is so important for us to be supported and come together as a community it's kind of like when you if you're walking somewhere and you fall over and you bang your knee often the first thing you'll do or with a pain point on your body is you'll put your hands on it something of support will go to something of pain it's it's like it's instinctual and I think that that thread in people gets tugged as well it's instinctual I need to go be with that person I mean obviously it has nuances to it depending on your relationship dynamics and etc etc but in general there's a we need to go and be with that person and it's often a very physical thing and I think that sometimes in current society we don't have that because we don't feel comfortable saying I'm grieving I'm you know especially if depending on your relationship with vulnerability really and the kind of support that you've had in different times in your life but to be able to say I I'm hurting I am grieving and allow people to support you in that often people are uncomfortable in that process so what happens we push it down and like any form of emotion we get the grief and we push it down and it's like sure it kind of works for a little while we might distract ourselves with alcohol other people other relationships new hobbies just anything to distract but it's it's there as an undercurrent but we make it to be the villain which I get because it is very painful and it's not even painful it's overwhelming and there is a part of it like most journeys and rites of passages that a part of that is you have to surrender into not knowing how long it's going to last not long knowing if it's going to get more intense that surrender of I am lost I am at the complete mercy of this experience because to let go of what you once were what you once had like I said the idea of attachment to let go of that you have to come before you move into this place of more context of attachments or different just a different version of you you have to let go of the old one and I think that that is what grief invites us a lot of the time I know that's what it invited of me I am I am no longer that woman before and I thought that when my father died it was very sudden and I no longer you know it highlights the attachments to me of what if one we no longer in person could we repair our relationship but it was this invitation to connect with him in a different way and I like lost the role not the role but like of being a daughter to a you know to my father I think it's inviting in a way it's kind of like who am I without these labels because these labels are and they mean I often believe they have to be used as post-its they're not like drilled into the wall it's like I am a mother I am a partner I am a daughter I am a sister and it's like yes and there's so much more going on and you're so much more than all those things but those things sometimes can bring a lot of joy they can also bring a lot of pain but is this this dance of how we relate to people in life I think grief invites us to go there is way more than you can see and I know you're not going to come to me so I'm going to go to you and I think that's when grief does that in its waves people will say that they feel waves of grief and I've even noticed in my experience I can feel it coming and it feels similar to when there's reports of tsunamis all the birds and animals and insects will leave an area before any human has picked up that there is a tsunami coming or they see the wave and my nervous system is now quite attuned to it and I can feel it coming and of course there's that moment of daunting there's that moment of time of like I need to get to a safe place and that might be with myself or I might need to let someone know that that something's happening and that I need to attend to it especially at those beginning times but it can be fickle it can it comes out of nowhere it might be a little ripple sometimes and it might be a whole tsunami other times but I then use the tools that I have of breath of touch of asking my partner to invite me to take a breath with him it's these small grounding things when I know it's coming because I know I can't run away from it and it'll come and at some point I'll try and keep my head above and some points it will just do what it wants with me and that it's a very humbling and scary experience but it seems to be one that is universal I believe that all people grieve all people are to have a place at the table for grief to come because it's not just sadness or anger or negativity it is those things and also when you go through that it's gifted me so far with reverence and awe of what this experience is and what what else is happening beyond the scene the scene of like I can see the sun I can see the moon I can see you know this microphone in front of me how am I relating things to all with all of my senses and that's what my dad and then my son has now gifted me as well it's like a that deeper deeper connection deeper awareness I find it hard now sometimes to get caught up in things because something bigger has shown me that there's there are not more important things but there is a lot more than getting up going to work coming home and looking forward to your weekends and then it's up to me to choose how I want to relate to that but it is it is a physical experience it is a mental experience it is an emotional experience and I believe it to be a spiritual experience and that's so encompassing and I think what is sad is that we've put a lot of shame around it as well that I think it's because it takes you to such a vulnerable place and in general we tend not to trust our neighbours these days so to walk around because I know sometimes I don't know when grief is going to want my attention so at the beginning I didn't want to go too far because I knew that something would happen and I wouldn't feel safe I wouldn't be able to have the space that I needed and I tuned into that at the time and now as time goes past I can go out a little bit further but it still comes in unexpected things but it's my relationship to it how do I listen to it a lot of the time I push it away I still try to do that because I'm like oh not now not like this or I just don't want to I don't I feel uncomfortable I don't want to feel it and yet when I turn towards it and I embrace it it's so beautiful when I put on a song and I cry my heart out or I punch pillows or I'm just with my body or I light a candle and incense and sit there when I stop and listen to it it actually grounds me more it actually when I go into the wind and I let it throw me around when I get dunked under that water and let it move my body around and trust that this is moving something in me to have a richer deeper more connected version of life I think that's what I want to invite people to think about grief to give it a place at the table to sit with it to listen to it because it holds so much wisdom that we have lost or that we have simply forgotten and it's knocking on the door saying do you remember me do you remember so that's my my two cents on grief at the moment I would love to hear what yours are if you have any comments or you have any questions and I also invite you I have done some grief meditations I've done a love letter grief I've done a a meditation for women who grieve their babies and this is big stuff and then does need to be treated with care and compassion and kindness but also that truth that like I will sit here with you in this because you are not alone and although it feels like a deeply deeply alone experience it is but then also that paradox of we are both connected and disconnected like I'm having my own experience I don't mean disconnected I'm having my own experience as an individual yet we are deeply connected in this collective of the human experience of how our cells affect each other of how we ride these waves and I know that grief has an insane ripple effect I know that my son has affected people he's never met who I've never met and that's powerful so what what what do we do with that how do we tune into it how do we listen to it hmm thank you for being here with me and I look forward to sharing more stories or experiences with you in the future until next time