Moving Through Grief that Stops You in Your Tracks

The Sacrifice of a Mother Goddess. The Loss of My Mom.

As July dissolved into August, I told the story of Tailtiu, the Irish goddess who is remembered for clearing the fields for agriculture, and who then promptly died of exhaustion.

I told different versions - one I wrote and read aloud on the KnotWork Storytelling podcast, and one I allowed to unfold with a storyteller’s surrender in my Lughnasa Writers’s Retreat.

Tailtiu’s story is one of those that benefits from - even demands - multiple iterations and retellings. One member of my Writers’ Knot community, (who is also an individual writing coaching client) has developed a triptych of narratives based on the goddess’s story. This writer is playing with narrative perspectives and working to heal family conflict thanks to this tale of Tailtiu’s and her radiant foster son, Lugh.

This week, I offered my Writers’ Knot community¹ this prompt:

Movement & Stillness

If you had to pick just one for the next five minutes, stillness or movement, which would it be?

(Allow for the paradox that you’re just sitting still writing, but that you’re busy moving fingers and thoughts onto the page - that you are always both, but, just for now, commit to the energy of one or the other.)

As with all the prompts I craft for my groups, this prompt comes from my own preoccupations of the moment, the stories I’m reading and telling, the events of the day, and the position of the stars. 

I only realized once I started to write into the prompt with the group that I asked everyone to explore this fertile paradox because I had just experienced a remarkable movement of healing energy and a long, brutal moment of stillness.

A Healing Crisis: A Story of Necessary Movement & Imposed Stillness

Last month, I experienced a powerful healing of old, old grief. 

It was the fourteenth anniversary of my mother’s death and I was at the Sacred Center Mystery School for a weekend advanced class. These soul siblings and our teacher, Eleanora Amendolara, have been together for well over a decade, and when we get together, we go deep. (We also laugh hysterically and eat a substantial amount of very dark chocolate.)

Though I’ve written a great deal about losing my mother (especially in The Sovereignty Knot: A Woman’s Way to Freedom, Power, Love, and Magic), I’ve walked around with an untouchable sort of pain for fourteen years.

I’ve avoided consistent yoga practice since my mom died, not just because I became a too-busy mom myself at nearly the same time, but because it didn’t feel safe to explore the darkness hidden somewhere between my hips and my lower spine.

But, fruits ripen in their own time, and pain is released when the conditions are right. I was strong enough and I had the support I needed to let the light in, and let the grief out.

And I did. And it was terrible before it was wonderful. And then it was terrible again. 

I found that my longtime nagging low back ache had blossomed during the time I lay at the center of that healing circle during that class. When the session was done, I could barely stand.

It got worse.

Within two days, I was stuck on my office floor groaning, weeping, and screaming as it took well over thirty minutes for me to get up from the position that was supposed to give my spine some relief.

That feeling of paralysis and fear, that sense that you might not be able to claim that next inch, that you might never be able to shift the weight from hands to knees to feet - it’s terrifying. And in those endless moments of paralysis, you swear, if you ever walk again, you will never take your rude good health for granted for a single blessed ambulatory moment.

Eventually, I did make it off the carpet, and I was able to wait it out for a few days until the new chiropractor could see me. It turned out that I had something of a miracle recovery - in decades of practice the doctor had never seen a bulging disc heal so quickly. But then, I had to get moving. My family and I were set to drive the fifteen hours to Prince Edward Island, the sacred-to-me place where my mother’s family spent their summers. It’s where I learned to walk, and where my mythic imagination learned to fly.

This story of movement and stillness, grief and physical pain feels like a Tailtiu story.

My mom died of a sudden, utterly unexpected heart attack at the age of sixty. She wasn’t an ultramarathoner, but she was a healthcare professional. She’d been an aerobics instructor. She knew enough and did enough of the things we’re supposed to do to outwit early death.

But, she didn’t know Tailtiu’s story. 

I’m not saying that she’d still be with us if she had studied up on her Irish mythology. What I am saying is that I can see the goddess’s patterns of over giving and self-sacrifice habit of sacrifice in my mother. For her family, for the patients in her care. Even for Saoirse, the head case of a Labrador who became Mom’s raven haired baby when her other daughters moved away from home.

I’ve been drawn to Tailtiu’s story because we all need to wake up to the chronic overwork and unconscious obsession with productivity that is slowly (or not so slowly) killing us all.

Tailtiu wouldn’t let herself be still, and so she died once that final push was done.

What if we could rewrite the story - for our mothers, our children, our ancestors, ourselves?

1. I’m reopening registration for the Writers’ Knot!

Learn more about this global community of writers and creatives and register to join us the second week of September! https://www.marisagoudy.com/writers-knot-community