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December 29, 2020 Kris Moon

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Grief + Gratitude

December 19, 2020 Kris Moon

minnab grief and gratitude.png

When I saw writer and therapist Minaa B. share these words yesterday, I knew I wanted to share them with you.

It felt supportive to read on a day that was full of mixed emotions as some celebrated Thanksgiving, some celebrated a Day of Mourning and others perhaps, like us, celebrated both. It felt healing to read during a year that has asked us to feel so much.

For me, as a transracial, international adoptee, Thanksgiving was the weekend I arrived at O'hare International Airport from Seoul, Korea. I was several months older than my child is now.

Grief & gratitude have been at the epicenter of my adoption trauma. It's taken me years to unpack this. I first wrote about my difficult relationship with these 2 emotions, which I now understand has been a difficult relationship with my humanity, after I reunited with birth family in 2012. This was during the "eat, pray, love" chapter of my life when I deep dived into the traditional Indian Eight-Limbed Path of Yoga.

It was through Yoga, which means to unite or merge, that I first experienced integration, or the process of unification of parts into a whole. I remember the inner peace I felt after decades of separating parts of myself that I'd internalized were wrong or bad.

Reverend Keith C. Griffith explains, "Adoption loss is the only trauma in the world where the victims are expected by the whole of society to be grateful."

Growing up, I experienced this as an invalidation of my deep grief and trauma, which never allowed me to heal. Instead, I took on the role of grateful adoptee.

The truth was, and is, I am grateful for my life, my privilege. But because I wasn't allowed to also grieve, my gratitude always felt incomplete. I felt incomplete. It was again through the healing art of Yoga that I first reunited with my wholeness.

Since reuniting with my native birth place and family, I've uncovered many more layers of loss. This year of racialized trauma awareness reopened old wounds that I'm just starting to have the language to understand. This year, I also started to work with a somatic practitioner who blends poly vagal theory and Internal Family Systems. While I've been experiencing new layers of grief, I've also been experiencing new layers of healing.

Now there's also a common teaching in many spiritual traditions that learning and evolution is not linear. That our journeys here as souls in human bodies spiral.

I both know this teaching and forget this teaching.

In forgetting this teaching, I've spent a lot of time feeling so much shame for the pain I've been feeling. I've hid a lot of myself away over these years. If you follow me on Instagram or have been joining the Sunday classes, you may already know that I've started to share more of these hidden parts of myself.

I've wanted to share more with this community, but tbh, I've struggled with being my whole self here. I've been carrying a story that I can't be both a healer and healing, that I can't be a teacher who doesn't know it all, and I've questioned what value is there in showing my struggle?

I'm in another transformational time in my life. Unlike last time when the story ended with a beautiful reunion filled with love and light, this transformation is raw and messy, and the wisdom has come from the dark. There have been many other periods of growth and healing and learning along the way, cuz, you know, that whole spiral thing again.

But this time, I want to be real and honest about all of it.

I think that the dominant culture that thrives off of binaries (good or bad, right or wrong, either/or) is deeply dehumanizing. And while the world we live in is not all shit, if we aren't willing to let people's pain be seen and acknowledged, then we won't have the opportunity to heal.

To be super clear, our current dominant culture and systems built on white supremacy ideology do not only traumatize brown and black bodies, it traumatizes white bodies, too. For more on that, please consider reading My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Menakem.

So while there is so much more I want to share with you, for now, I want to let you know I'm offering my last community class of 2020 on Sunday at 3:30pm eastern. Per usual, the class will be recorded and sent out by Monday morning. If you feel called to be together in this way, register for the class here.

As I continue to let go of the linear path, embrace my full humanity, choose to be with my evolution, and commit to personal and collective healing, I'm not sure what the path forward will look like.

I do know I need to take time to integrate all that this year has taught me and let emerge what wants to be. I also know that I want more me and more you. I want whatever we practice or share to be more honest and more collaborative. I want there to be more questions than answers. And I want the space we share to be a place where we each get to be both the student and teacher.

I wonder whose spiritual and healing journeys will continue to intertwine with mine. I wonder what we can learn and create together. And I wonder what's possible when we divest in dehumanizing ways of relating and invest in being whole humans together.

Finally, I want to express deep gratitude for the ways your presence here has supported me throughout these years. If you feel called to drop a line, I always love to hear from you.

With grief & gratitude,
Kris Moon (she/they)