A Dance of Grace, Gratitude, & A Goodbye
Final thoughts on acceptance, learning to be grateful for everything, letting go, and new beginnings on Substack and elsewhere
Aloha & Hello Dear Readers,
This is the last post here at I Am The Dance. If you’d like to continue to read my writing, you will find links at the end of this newsletter to my new website and my new Substack where you can subscribe. I intentionally planned this last post for this day because…
Today is Valentine’s Day. However you choose to celebrate the holiday or not, may you feel loved and may you let others know you love them.
Today, two years ago, I signed divorce papers. It wasn’t the worst day of my life. It was the second worst day.
Today, four years ago, was one of the best and most bittersweet of days as it was the last public Beach Dance I held with my beloved community on Maui. It was the best because….well, you had to have been there. 😉 It was bittersweet because I was hiding a deep grief underneath all the outpouring of love.
Today, like every day, is an opportunity to love and be loved. Isn’t that the truth? Will you let this truth live in you? If not every day, perhaps just for today?
Before reading this missive (it is a bit lengthy), I encourage you to watch the video first before reading. I think, no…I know that what is expressed in this newsletter will make a lot more sense that way. Here is what my friend, Nic Askew (the filmmaker and creator of Soul Biographies) suggests on how best to watch.
Start with Nothing. No-thing. No act on your part. For this moment in time set down your requirement to compare, to understand, to make sense of, to know where this is going, to translate, to seek value, to add value, to fix anything at all. Let the experience of each film subject find you, not you them. Like the experience of extraordinary music that finds you and fills you without need to have anything done to it.
Witnessing is not an act on your part.
Let it. Simply let it.
Do not attempt if distracted. View full screen. Use headphones.
Notice what finds you. Not what you find. What finds you. This is the other way around.
With Nic’s permission, I edited the original film from thirty-five minutes to thirteen. I imagine there will come a time when the entire film will be available for viewing, but that time is not now, not here.
Before I say anything else, thank you for watching this film. Thank you for seeing and hearing me. I’ve shared it with you because if this is the last of my writing you’ll read, I want you to see and hear me as I am now which is more courageous, vulnerable, and honest than I’ve ever been in my life.
Grief has a way of changing one’s identity and re-orienting how one sees themselves, others, and the world. For a very long time, I resisted what was taking place within me because as I said in the video, “I really liked who I was before the unraveling occurred.” As it turns out, accepting, forgiving, and loving this ‘new’ me has been one of the most excruciating elements in my grieving process. This four year sojourn of sorrow tending to my heart and soul has utterly transformed me.
When has grief changed you and your life?
How did you tend to (or how are you tending) your heart and soul’s needs and longings?
How is your heart today?
I ask you these questions because I’m genuinely curious about your answers. I ask these questions because they’re the kind of questions I believe we should be asking ourselves and each other and really listening to the answers so that we might connect in kind, caring, and meaningful ways more often with one another. We humans aren’t just hurting from our own individual grief, but collective ones as well. We need each other. And our world is in dire need of us increasing our willingness and capacity to be able to grieve together so we can heal together.
I’ve spent a lot of time alone these last four years and while I believe the best medicine for one’s wounds comes from within, a lot of healing happens in communion and connection with others. To really be present with other human beings takes practice. To grace someone with our presence, especially when they’re going through a tender-hearted time, is perhaps one of the greatest gifts we could offer another. That sounds like such an easy thing to do, doesn’t it? But I imagine you, like me, know it’s not.
Here are just a few ways I’ve practiced -
♥️ Listening deeply
♥️ Paying attention
♥️ Being curious
♥️ Staying open
♥️ Acknowledging the pain
♥️ Honoring the person
♥️ Making the time
♥️ Being patient
♥️ Being generous
♥️ Being loving
I am grateful to the people in my life who have offered me all those things mentioned above and more during this long, tender-hearted time of mine. I am grateful I turned toward my crowd of sorrows more often than away from them. Oh…there have been plenty of times when I’ve tried to numb them out or run from them, but neither of those things offered real solace. Hangovers and jet lag, yes. Healing and acceptance, hell no. I always returned to flinging the door open so that grief and all the other hard-to-bear guests could be fully embodied, expressed, and experienced.
I can now ‘be with’ grief (my own and others’) in ways I haven’t been able to be with in the past. Does this mean I’m no longer grieving? Absolutely not. I’ve learned that grief isn’t a problem to ‘fix’, ‘get over’ or ‘move on from.’ It’s a human experience to fully embrace, gain insight from, and move with for as long as I shall live. I’ll be welcoming grief through my door for the rest of my days because I have finally accepted a truth I have never wanted to face and it is this - everything I love, I will lose.
Apparently, Franz Kafka first uttered this truth in different words, but one of my teachers and fellow grief tenders, Francis Weller also named it in his beautiful book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, which I highly recommend!
When you love deeply, you will grieve deeply. Love and grief. They are twin flames. They are beautiful and brutal dance partners. They are mirrors for one another - each reflecting a truth of what it is to be human.
Here’s a truth from me, a truth of being a human named Lila…
I’ve tried to keep what I’ve thought to be one of the ‘most liked’ parts of me alive through my writing, here on this Substack and in my previous newsletter, as well as in my journal at times. She’s the optimistic, playful, inspiring one. She’s also the one who has tried oh-so hard to hang on, stay calm and carry on, be positive and try her best to be polite so that eventually, “she’ll be right.” She’s that part of me I mentioned in the video I really liked. She’s real and true, but damn, she’s tired.
Too many sleepless nights with mean voices visiting at 2am, too many margaritas or martinis or mai tais or (yeah, you get the picture) to turn down the pain volume, too many attempts to try and make sense of it all when it just doesn’t, too many moments spent wondering and wishing when it does no good, too many days gone by not really living because that part of me wanted so much to stay.
For the last four months, my life force, my writing, and my new work I’ll be offering has been not-so-quietly asking me to let go again. I want to live the last three or four decades of my life (if I’m lucky) loving my life as much if not more than I did the first five decades. The part of me who, ever since I was a young girl, wanted the end of the story to be “and they lived happily ever after,” needs to say goodbye so that a new story with a different ending can begin.
This new story begins in a field. I’d love for you to join me there sometime. This particular field is not an actual physical place with sunflowers. (Although wouldn’t it be lovely to meet in person in a field like the one in the photo above and just hang out together for a while?) This place Rumi is referring to is a non-judgmental space of mutual curiosity, compassion, care, and companionship. This space is where two or more people can gather to spend time ‘being with’ each other, sharing whatever is on their minds and in their hearts knowing they will be accepted.
Is it possible to accept and be grateful for everything that is our lives? I believe it is and I also believe it’s a fucking hard thing to do for most humans. But hey, I’m willing to practice accepting and being grateful for all of it for the rest of my days because whenever it is that my life here on this Earth comes to an end, I want to feel I did my best as a human being before I utterly transform again.
If you’d like to continue reading my writing and listening to music (monthly playlists will be a new element), here is where you can subscribe to my new Substack, Salt Water Alchemy.
If you’d like to know more about embodied and expressive grief work, here is my new website (which is evolving just like me) where you can find out when the first Field will be held as well as other experiences and services I am offering.
This last post might be a goodbye for you and I. If that’s true, I want to thank you for having been a subscriber to I Am The Dance. For those of you who were a part of the Beach Dance community, whether you danced with me only once or you danced every Sunday, I thank you from the depths of my heart. May you know that the dance we created together was one of the peak experiences of my life.
May we all continue to dance and remember we are not the dancers, we are the dance. May this song remind you of that.
With love, grace, and gratitude…
Lila
I watched and read your post for the better part of an hour, maybe more. It brought questions and memories and moments of quiet contemplation after I stopped. Then I found myself wondering whether you were falling even deeper into the loss of yourself in these past years. I began to feel worried about where this path of discovering your "unraveled" self was taking you. Thankfully, I remembered this video was made quite a while ago when you had fallen deeper into despair, finding the darkness almost safer than the light. But now, I believe you have found a brighter, if not lighter, way to honor yourselves by bringing curiosity and awe into creating something new. I was relieved by my recollection and encouraged by the idea that your new self is emerging, yet not to the exclusion of your previous self. Together, they are being rewoven into a beautiful new life experience, no longer continuing to unravel. xo
Thank you for this post! I had to do it in 2 - first the deeply moving video. Then a lot of journaling. Then later, the post. In answer to your questions - my heart is very bitter and angry right now because of those things you just mentioned. I'm going through another round of people being incapable of being near me during this onslaught time unless I plaster on a fake smile and lie when they ask me, "What have you been doing since *DATE?*" Incapable is hard enough, and I totally get it, but some of them need to swat me on the nose for daring to speak about my experience and my grief, so that's how my heart is doing. Pausing grief work for stringent boundary and self-defense work. As for when, there are too many to list, and what I do to tend? All the things. Journal, cry, dance, punching bag, woods walks, humor, meditation, art, writing, sleep, read... Every once in awhile I get to connect with people who help, rather than harm or simply sprint. And that is true bliss.