You are not the grief

To promote my upcoming workshop Then & Now: Yoga for Grief I have been sharing posts, reels, stories on FB and Insta the past few weeks. Simple graphics and words - mostly ones my friend Monica has written as she is very eloquent. The posts are sometimes re-shared by her or other people I have tagged. Social media posting isn't a job I like but I know it does help promote workshops and classes I teach.

When I post I don't often think too much about who sees it, just hope it will be well received by whoever does happen to see it float by and that they will be interested. But if not well received or of interest, perhaps just ignored. I never think too much about it but I suppose it could hit someone the wrong way. Unavoidable on the internet. Someone, somewhere, is always ticked off.

It happened. A negative response to my posting (I know one negative response, so what). It was a message sent directly to me from someone I know (thus I am pretty certain it wasn't a positive vibe):

"You are the grief."

WTH does that mean? I am the grief? Makes no sense! It got right up into my head and I started to ruminate. This is a workshop to alleviate grief! To help others! How can that not be evident! Outrage! Retort immediately and ferociously! Engage the writer in a war of words! Or just ignore it? Block them? Share it with malice and cause a bigger mess? Then broadcast to the world how incorrect that statement is! How wronged I am.

Taking a deep breath I thought about it. What does it mean? Why do I even care? Let it go! Could it be a lesson and I need to own it? Sure I can feel my own grief and yeah, sometimes even cause grief. Lord, maybe I am the grief??? I wrote on a post-it:

You are the grief.

Then I thought about the workshop, took another deep breath, thought about what I can offer the attendees, what I hope to do for them:

You hold the grief.

Remembering this, my hope to offer something useful to grievers, something they might need and find useful enough to return to, and I wrote:

You can let go of the grief.

And I realized what matters to me, and hopefully to those I will meet in my workshop, is this:

You are not the grief.

You are not the grief.

Messenger - none of us is our grief.

I am not the grief, you are not the grief.

I can hold the grief, I can hold it for you.

I can let go of the grief, I can let it go for you.

I can let it go. Let it go.

I can let go. Let go.

Go.