By John Bell

Is there any end to grief? This is a question that has puzzled me for years. Why? I have done a ton of crying in my life, but first I had to overcome my early conditioning against crying. I began my emotional healing journey at age 27 through a peer counseling process. I was a fairly sensitive guy, but not able to feel my feelings, except rarely or secretly in movies. Once I started this peer counseling process, it took me two years to begin to recover my innate capacity to cry. Now I believe crying is natural to all humans, and which you can readily observe in most infants. What do they do when they get hurt or are confused or scared? They cry. Sadly, many people in many cultures mistake crying as a cause of suffering rather than the release of suffering, and so even with good intentions, they stop the children from crying, which helps shut down or severely limit our natural capacity to feel.

I was lucky to have found a way to open my tear ducts again, and over decades, in the safety of deep listening partnerships, I have done profound healing on layers of accumulated childhood hurts from being raised working class, Catholic, white, and male; from being a young person with alcoholic parents in a home with relentless money worries. As a result, I have eliminated or vastly diminished old patterns of isolation and insecurity that came with all those distressing elements. I am as free and as happy as I have ever been. And still I cry. I cry as hard as I ever have, and with even more frequency. 

So, it seems there must be other deep wells of grief that I haven’t drained. Because the freer I get the more joy I experience, but also the more I cry.  I’d like to suggest that there are two deep wells of grief beyond our personal stories.

The first stems from the reality that we are kin with everything, with each other, other species, the trees and bees, plants and the seas. We forget this kinship due to hurts and oppressions and traumas, but because of “an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny” as Dr King said, we are connected to all. So it may be that, as I/we cry our way out of our personal sources of grief, our natural connection to the rest of reality becomes clearer and more felt. Thus, our hearts break when we hear about a billion creatures perishing in the Australian wildfires, or when we learn of the coral reefs dying, or the innocent people in Israel and Gaza being killed, or beloved pets being swept away in hurricane flooding, or when we drive by a mountainside of clearcut stumps where a great forest once stood. We hurt with these hurts. I can think of my suffering as my suffering, but it is also collective suffering.  What hurts you hurts me. If my partner is not happy, then I am not happy. If my country is not happy, then I am not happy. For example, in the 1980s I worked with a social justice program called Children of War, where we brought young people to the U.S. from 21 war and conflict zones across the world. It was during the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. The young South Africans taught us a chant they used in the movement: “An injury to one is an injury to all. An injury to one is an injury to all.” So, we cry. And since collective suffering seems infinite, there may be no end of crying, of facing the immense grief of war, hunger, disease, climate catastrophe, persistent racism, the decline of democracy, loss of species, and on and on and on. There is an old adage that says that we feel grief because we love; that the grief comes from feeling the loss of what we love, the loss of right relations, the loss of connection.

Which brings me to the second deep, but related, well of grief that I haven’t heard mentioned in discussions of healing. I recently published a book called Unbroken Wholeness: Six Pathways to the Beloved Community. “Unbroken Wholeness” is one half of my touchstone quote, from quantum physicist David Bohm, who described reality as “unbroken wholeness in flowing movement.”  When I read that many decades ago, it seemed like a true perception.  Many wise teachers have said that we can’t know reality because we are embedded in it, but through things like mindfulness meditation, emotional healing, trauma recovery, and releasing our rigid attachment to views that cloud, shrink, distort, or shut down our thinking, we humans can discern ever closer understandings of reality. 

As I’ve tried to feel myself as part of “unbroken wholeness,” here’s the story that arises. Every person comes from elements in the energy flow of the universe. In a stream, the water has an energy that flows. From time to time a rock or log will cause the water to form an eddy or whirlpool that has a finite “existence” until conditions change to release the water back into the flowing movement of the stream. Likewise, we humans are made up of elements from the entire universe, which is sometimes called an energy force field, a quantum soup, a divine mystery, and so on. We inhabit a body for a short time during which we grow and learn and love and suffer and dream and create and eventually pass back into the mysterious cosmic energy flow.  The question for me is, could a source of grief be that something in this human form called John retains some vague inkling, intuition, some “knowing” beyond conscious thought that I come from unbroken wholeness, and that for reasons way beyond my human understanding, I am longing to return to, to be reconnected with a unitary oneness.  Occasionally, something in my life punctuates the forgetfulness, pokes through the highly conditioned conventional story of reality to remind me that I belong to something greater. And that this inner non-conceptual knowing of feeling separated from wholeness is a huge source of grief, a loss only dimly sensed but profound. 

This is tricky because even loss and grief are part of unbroken wholeness. I don’t have a belief in a separate individual consciousness that exists after what we call death. Maybe there is, but I’m not there at this moment. Maybe that desire for wholeness, for belonging, for reuniting could be just wanting to return to the womb. Or maybe it can be understood as what we are like without distress and hurt, and we sense and want that human wholeness. But…maybe it is bigger than that.

I welcome your thoughts and insights about this inquiry into the sources of grief.

• John Bell is a Buddhist Dharma Teacher who lives near Boston, MA, USA. He is a founding staff and former vice president of YouthBuild USA, an international non-profit that provides learning, earning, and leadership opportunities to young people from low-income backgrounds. He is an author, lifelong social justice activist, international trainer facilitator, father and grandfather.  His blog is www.beginwithin.info and email is jbellminder@gmail.com.(14) His latest book is “Unbroken Wholeness: Six Pathways to the Beloved Community” (available at Parallax Press here)