How Mysticism Can Help Us Make Sense of this Collective Grief

I once heard grief described as ‘love that has nowhere to go.’

From a somatic psychology perspective, this makes sense. Grief is often experienced as a sort of restless sadness—a longing for something permanently out-of-reach.

The past two weeks of boisterous uprising have affected us all. A collective outcry unfolds over the country like a weighted blanket—dense, heavy, and uncomfortable. But also healing, therapeutic. It forces us to stand still, to listen, to focus with presence.

Last week I noticed symptoms of depression wash over me; negative self-talk, frustration, a pulling inward. Retreating from connection to self and others as I ran toward the burning buildings of collective outrage.

It’s important to run toward the fire. It’s necessary if there’s any chance of putting it out.

But to retreat from everything else, in the process of fighting the fire, can quickly lead to loneliness and despair.

And this self-inflicted sort of loneliness can muddle a person’s perspective. I was interpreting my depressed feelings as a personal issue because I was using a go-to strategy for managing uncomfortable energy. When I feel dark energy enter my space, I often turn it on myself; down-talking my worth, my contribution, my success.

The mistake here is that I was personalizing an energy that wasn’t mine. It’s all of ours.

I was experiencing collective grief.

If you have been feeling particularly low, you might also be entangling Your strategies of coping with discomfort with this collective grief.

Maybe you, too, have patterns of negative self-talk when you start to feel uncomfortable. Maybe you’re also interpreting your overwhelm or frustration or irritability as personal to you. I’d like to invite you to consider that you are feeling the collective energy of grief, also. And like many of us, you don’t know how to process it. So you default to familiar strategies of coping with discomfort, whatever they may be.

If grief is love with nowhere to go, our collective love longs to reach out to those whose lives have been lost and those who still suffer. When we feel helpless to reach either, the love has nowhere to go. And so it roars, it cries, it rages.

Collective grief is especially powerful because it’s as potent as it is obscure. We can walk into it and not even know we’re there. I know on some level how to sit with my personal grief; to hold space for it, to use the archetype of my higher self to soothe it. But collective grief is so intangible—how can you hold space for something so enigmatic?

To take a deeper look, I turned to mysticism.

Mysticism, in layman terms, is the belief that all people are ‘one’ with divine love, or universal consciousness. It rejects the idea that an all-knowing consciousness exists outside of ourselves, and accepts that we each exist within the all-knowing consciousness. We are it. It is us.

Because of this, we can access divine love, or universal consciousness, at any time—this doesn’t mean we can induce mystical experiences at-will, but we can connect to this consciousness simply by experiencing presence (think: mindfulness).

As I explored this concept deeper, I began to theorize whether we could, actually, direct our ‘love’ somewhere specific. Perhaps by doing so, we can hold space for our grief in a way that gives us wings, rather than suffocates us.

So I created a journey. A journey is a mystic practice, but science has proven that there are clear physical and psychological effects of journeying. Not only does it relax the nervous system, in some cases releasing stored trauma in the body, but opens new neural pathways in the brain that support resilience.

I hope you won’t use this journey as a spiritual bypassing tool. I hope you don’t use it as a replacement for action, for the inner work required to truly empower your community. Rather, let this journey serve as a supplement. Let it strengthen your resolve and offer clarity so you can be a vision holder for the future we’re all building together.

Use this journey to process the collective grief you may be feeling:

Use it to help make sense of exactly what you’re grieving and then allow it to help you transmute that grief into love. Let that love lift you up as you continue to do your part to manifest a new global reality.

If you feel compelled to share your experience with this journey, please do.