By Ogun Holder | Source 

Learn how grief and decolonization can lead to deeper spirituality and more fulfilling relationships.

Grief is our response to loss. It is natural, unpredictable, emotional, embodied, and life-altering. It can be overwhelming or manageable, paralyzing or liberating, and everything in between.

Navigating grief is an exercise in acceptance, surrender, and vulnerability. It is not something to be healed but a journey of healing in which the best maps and guides will never help us find our destination. There is no destination—only the journey.

During the first few years after my wife’s death in 2015, I believed grief was an opponent to be understood and conquered, like a boxer nimbly moving in the ring across from me, always evading my attempts to land an impactful blow—any blow, really—and slipping past my defenses to pummel me in ways and at times I didn’t see coming.

It was only after being repeatedly knocked down and out, after reaching physical and emotional exhaustion, after countless failed attempts to distract and numb myself—with alcohol, sex, relationships, retail therapy, and spiritual and emotional bypassing—that I finally surrendered to grief. It was only then that grief extended its hand to help me up and opened its arms to embrace me. Together we walked away from the ring, side by side, combatants turned compatriots. I had misunderstood the assignment.

The Lesson of Grief: Impermanence

My grief wasn’t only for my wife. Over the next 10 years, I lost two aunts, an uncle, two grandparents, a best friend, and my father. All these deaths changed my relationship with relationships, especially the romantic and intimate ones.

I fell in love again—more than once, actually—but in a different way. I initially thought I just didn’t care as deeply about these partners because they were not my wife. Some of them, to be honest, were a better match for me than my wife had been—at least for the person I was becoming. But there was still an unnamed detachment—a part of me that I unconsciously held back. I believed I simply did not want to feel such deep and intense pain again, so I didn’t love as fully as I had in the past.

I would eventually realize what was actually happening: Grief was guiding me to a more expansive understanding and practice of nonattachment. It’s possible I might have gotten there without all the death and grieving—I believe all have the potential to do so—but sometimes we’re given a catalyst that we didn’t know we needed.

We arrive at and live from a state of nonattachment when we embrace impermanence; when we make peace with the knowing that we could lose everything we know and love, including our own life. The Buddha said, “You only lose what you cling to.”

We could infer from his words that when we no longer hold on to anything—when we no longer possess it, no longer fixate on a desired outcome—we won’t feel the sting of loss when it’s gone. It sounds lovely on paper. It feels both inspirational and aspirational and, to be honest, absolutely inhuman and impossible. Sometimes I wonder whether the Buddha actually had friends after saying things like that. (Probably not.) The truth is, it’s all of the above. And like grief, it’s more about practice, not perfection.

Capitalism Within Relationships

While I was grieving and deepening my mindfulness practices, I was also working to decolonize myself from internalized, unconscious traits of oppressive ideologies such as capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. While patriarchy’s influence on how I navigated intimate relationships was fairly obvious, I was surprised to uncover how much late-stage capitalism impacted them as well. It teaches us that life is defined by acquisition; that there is always more to gain, to hoard; that simply having enough is considered failure; that our worthiness is directly proportional to how much we have accumulated, how fast we’ve accumulated it, and how much power we can wield with it. All lies.

I realized I had been viewing my partners through the lenses of possession and transaction, with seemingly innocuous and normalized language reflecting as much: This is my spouse/girlfriend/partner—they belong to me; they owe me, and only me, certain intimacies.

The hierarchical and transactional values of capitalism kept showing up. Who is the boss in the relationship? Should I have more authority because I make more money? Am I keeping track of who does what and how much more or less? Is my partner a high-value individual (a problematic social media dating/relationship parameter mostly centered around financial success)? How much is my sense of worth related to my partner/relationship?

Of course, it’s important to be in an equitable relationship with agreements that honor the desires of all involved, along with a method of accountability and communication that’s more inviting than hostile. (I like and use the RADAR format). But it’s different when we keep score to exert control or from fear the relationship will end. Fear can lead us to acquiesce or reduce our fullness to fit into a manageable and non-threatening facsimile.

Love Without Attachment

When you hold someone you love in your arms as they gasp their final breath, impermanence stops being an abstract concept. It becomes a reality felt in every fiber of your being, so deeply intertwined with your essential self that you don’t know how to make sense of it. Over time, however, if you let it inform and transform you, you come to understand how much—and why—you grasp onto others: fear of loneliness; fear that you are broken and unlovable; fear of dying alone; fear of death itself.

If you are truly patient, you might discover that you don’t need to hold so tightly; that loving and being loved will never fully allay those fears. You might learn to love with an increasingly looser grip, until all you are holding is the space for love to bloom—or to wither—content in knowing that it, and they, were never yours to keep.

To love without attachment does not mean loving without commitment, or compassion, or kindness, or vulnerability. To love without attachment invites us into connection without control; into authenticity without anxiety; into being the fullness of who we are without fear of rejection; into knowing that love cannot exist without loss—and that love and loss both open our hearts wider than we thought possible. To love without attachment is freedom.