Grief is greatly alchemizing, especially with the polarizing desire to be good and the fear of being evil.
Grief is the living expression of death that keeps pulsing with the wildness of our life force energy. She is the eros that crashes through the walls of our hearts so that we can remember who we really are.
White culture is a culture of trauma, a Death Mother culture at its roots. It is set up on polarities, conditioning white people to believe that racism is wrong while simultaneously conditioning racism into the fabric of every single structure of society, down to the cells and stardust of our psyches.
It is shattering to realize how we have been gaslighted. How we have been made to believe a thing is bad. And that “bad thing” is living in all of us at the core of life, the world, and the reality we have been conditioned not to see.
This polarity seeks what is bad, what is good, who we can project good and evil onto, how we want to be perceived, and a deep fear of what might be lurking inside of us, as white people.
It’s difficult to know how to hold something within oneself that one has been taught to hate while being conditioned into being that exact thing. This builds shame; we must remember feeling that shame is not the same as being shamed. This revelation sheds light on shame, and that is where the light of healing must occur, not in our personas.
While racism and white narcissism live in the same intersection, so does the complex trauma that underlies all of American “culture” to begin with.
The myth of the Death Mother archetype is that of Athena, the daughter of the patriarch, cursing Medusa, the embodied feminine who was raped by a God, Poseidon, who got to go about his business.
This is a myth of the patriarchy—how we, as a culture, have been set up to hold and allow racism to exist in the first place.
We fear what has been cast into the cave without seeing that we, as white folks, are causing the harm. That cutting off the head of Medusa is causing others harm, but that is what we’ve been taught.
That is the Hero’s journey. To slay the dragon that makes us blind.
Much of Western psychology is white psychology that we have been using to weaponize ourselves so much we cannot see this.
If we do, it makes us fragile. It is incredibly disillusioning to awaken out of a coma and realize that we are not who we thought we were. The world doesn’t work the way we thought it did.
This is the entry point, initiation if you will, of the grief process. The maturation process. For us to be able to grow up, the bubble must burst. We need to see that and process the shock of it—our relationship to reality and society is dying.
We must follow this road into the polarities that live within us. Educate. Read. Watch movies. Listen.
Also, taking action involves doing the inner work of sitting inside the polarizing desire to be “good” (a narcissistic desire, whether covert or overt) and our deepest fear of being terrible people. We must face the reality of what this world is and is not—we must surrender how we benefited from it.
Grief is the only thing that can bring us through this incredible fire toward something that is more true than we have known before.
This grief is a necessity if we want to be more available to create something new.
I see this in myself. The grief of seeing my own unconscious racism and the desire to be good. The pull for validation and the pull to tell the truth, the fear of sharing my truth, and the unraveling of all the gaslighting that has formed me as a person. It has trained me that, in some way, this is acceptable in society, education, and relationships.
Grief is greatly alchemizing. Make time to grieve.
Learn what it is to grieve, what it is to be afraid of yourself, of death, and change.
What are you afraid to feel?
The things we have been trained to fear are precisely what we need to feel right now. This is how we remove our rootedness in Death Mother culture, find a way to plant ourselves in the nourishing mother, and show up with true hearts.
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AUTHOR: DR. NANDI HETENYI
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