I'll See You Up The Mountain: Notes On Grief

As many of you who follow along with my adventures will already know, at the start of this year I lost my beautiful Irish horse, Bear. Following on from that day, I shared my experiences and thoughts in series of Facebook live sessions that spanned the course of a couple of weeks, which led me to conversations, understandings, and a level of awareness that I would never have gained if I had chosen to keep my feelings to myself.

This experience was overwhelming in the best possible way. People shared with me their stories of loss and their personal experiences of grief. But was I felt most acutely was the love. Love not only sent to me and my little Irish pony, but a love that was unifying, gratifying and uplifting.

I guess death is funny like that. It brings into sharp focus everything that’s important and allows the superfluous to simply drop away.

I thought to record a separate episode on grief and I’m sure I will still do this. But the live session captures an “in the moment” experience that is impossible to emulate from a different vantage point. So, in an effort to continue to send conversations on grief, loss and death out into the ether- conversations we are intrinsically terrible at in western society- I offer them to you now in the hope that they will land where they are supposed to, with whoever it is that needs to hear them.

The nature of the live recordings means that the audio is imperfect at times, but hopefully their value extends beyond that. Amongst other things we discuss:

- - The duality of experience: how grief and loss can co-exist with happiness and joy (and why it’s important to understand this)

- - The invitation of loss and hardship

- - Dealing with guilt within the loss

- - My personal experiences with loss and death

Much love to you all,

xx Jane