"In today’s world, most of us carry grief and do not even know it. We have been trained at a very young age how not to feel. In the West we are often taught that to be good girls and boys we have to “suck it up.”
The consequences are that even with your most intimate and trustworthy friends you might feel like, “I am burdening them.” Crying in front of others is too often a forbidden fruit.
We learn to compartmentalize our grief because expressing it in an unwelcoming place will only lead to more grief.
We are taught that the people who are closest to us have no way of holding us when we fall apart.
Yet we are born fully knowing how to grieve. We cry naturally to feel better, to unburden ourselves and take a few pounds off our shoulders and souls.If there is a way for everyone to grieve openly, I believe it will also diminish the blaming and shaming that goes on between the races.
When you are in the presence of someone grieving you don’t see color anymore, it is a universal language.
We are all in pain. There is no need to blame others.Blame, shame, and guilt come from being unable to express our grief properly. How can we pretend to be happy, peaceful and loving when we have so much pain and grief?"
“Communal grieving offers something that we cannot get when we grieve by ourselves. Through acknowledgement, validation and witnessing, communal grieving allows us to experience a level of healing that is deeply and profoundly freeing. ”
Sobonfu Somé , one of my dear teacher now an ancestor
