I have a new coaching client that I’m thoroughly enjoying working with. (Truthfully, I love ALL of my clients!)
She hired me because of my expertise at the intersection of adoption, reunion, rituals and resilience.
She’s a midwestern based birthmom who relinquished her daughter to adoption in the 1970s and they’ve been in reunion for a year.
She’s experiencing BIG feelings about this journey, and it helps to talk with someone who’s been through it.
My client already has a therapist, but she had heard me speak about the power of navigating reunions with grace on a podcast and she knew I had something to offer her.
During a recent session, we were talking about the both/and of reunion.
There can be so much joy, delight, happiness and discovery that occurs and it feels like you’re on this incredible high!
But it can also take you to the depths of the darkness. Feeling the intensity of the separation. Reliving scenes from the past. Pain and rage and almost incapacitating grief is often part of the reckoning.
I shared with her a practice that I had done years ago when I was parsing through my own dark night of the soul and recommended she try it.
I call it the River of Grief Exercise.
It’s writing, but with a twist.
I told her to write every day about her grief but with some structure in place.
For me, that was 15 minutes.
For her, she decided on one page per day.
The idea is that you dip into your River of Grief for a little while each day, tending to it, honoring it, processing it…but not so much that you can’t function for the day.
You create space in your life for tears and emotions to be revealed so that you don’t have to stifle them throughout your daily life.
The visual I had when doing the work was that I was canoeing on a river and each night I would set up camp along the riverbank. Then each morning, I would put my canoe in the flowing water and head downstream for a little while. Then when I was done, I’d pull my canoe up to shore again and we’d wait there until the next day when we returned to the water for 15 minutes. When I got to the end of the river, that’s when I knew my process was complete.
Then, at the end of the process (for me, it was about 6 weeks), you can do something to acknowledge the completion.
You could:
- Place the journal on an altar that you create to honor your grief and light a candle.
- Read the entire grief journal from beginning to end.
- Highlight sections of your writing that feel particularly powerful, poignant or worthy of using as writing prompts to dig even deeper at a later date.
- Ask a trusted loved one to witness you as you read part of (or all of) your grief story.
- Burn the whole journal and release the energy to be transmuted.
- Bury it in the back of your closet (with all your other journals!) to be discovered in the future when you’re ready to revisit some of the topics.
- Take it to your coach or therapist and discuss the themes and ah-has that were revealed.
My client wrote me just a week after beginning the practice:
“I’ve been writing a page a day as a grief journal and I’m finding it very beneficial. Uncovering some ‘hidden’ feelings, ideas that have been covered, buried, unspoken over many years. It feels freeing and like I’m releasing heaviness. Thank you for this excellent exercise.”
I can’t wait to hear about her progress during our next coaching session!
If you’re curious about what a coaching session might uncover for you (a River of Grief suggested exercise or something else), click here.