Aching Heart – February 20th

This is an invitation for you, and it might be here just when you need it – I offer this space  because it is the only way I know of in this crazy world to perhaps be able to carry on doing what needs to be done with grace and love.

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In essence, an Aching Heart day is a day to sit together, mourn together and see each other and ourselves in presence and in depth. It is a day that includes ritualistic grief and empowerment spaces alongside large and small group work and the aim is to allow ourselves some time and space to feel the pain and the aches that we carry, surrounded by a circle and knowing we are not alone.

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This day is not about “changing” or “getting rid of” our grief, for our pain is here, real and very much human and alive – I make no promises of it going anywhere.

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Requirements

No requirements needed apart from an openness to what is alive in the group and a willingness to feel and witness feelings.

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Date/Place/Time

20/02/2016 – Wien 1140 – 13:00-20:00

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Financial Contribution

This is a day I offer with no fixed cost because I believe the work of grief is deeply important for me, for us, and for the world around us and that comes after us.

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The only price involved is a small amount from 10 – 15 euros each to cover the cost of the room and the rest is whatever you are moved to contribute.

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Please contact me if you are moved to join:

Harry Edagr Kloser-Pitcher: harryedgarpitcher@yahoo.co.uk, 06769062973

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Requirements

In the face of this deeply painful world, to carry on with fullness requires grief.
In the face of our deeply tragic stories, to hold ourselves with love requires tears.
In the face of an elder-less culture, to initiate ourselves with depth requires community .
In the face of our death phobic culture, to sit with our dying requires vulnerability.

Expressed grief cuts through the madness of the world both without and within, leaving us naked and alive. Only true grief, to me, can do this, for true grief is pure, held, non-judgmental and shared by all.

To grieve is the most deeply human act we can undertake, because it allows new life to flow and brings our power to the world.

Only when I allow my heart to die and be broken open can I truly love fully.

(H.K.P) Harry Kloser Pitcher, Harry Edgar Pitcher

Get Courageous

Become a person. Make beauty out of grief. Become real people who might have untenable rotten
ideas, but who in the end grow into solid old people who are generous and unconniving, people who
know things and don’t just see everything as a business opportunity.

Be courageous, make your hate into
an art of love beyond your wants, and stop sending undigested grief in the form of sorrow frozen into hate
into the arms of the future. Hand over the world with some modicum of the possibility for peace.

(Martin Prechtel – The Smell of Rain on Dust)

The First Aching Heart

The Aching Heart – finally there is a name. A term that defines what I was missing for so long when I heard about movements encouraging CHANGE! How can change happen without grief? How can anything happen without grief?

I want to write about an experience I recently had – an experience where grief and tears seemed to be displaced and there should be nothing else other than celebration and joy.

Our daugther Rose was born 3 months ago at home, in to candle lit red colors, and to warm welcoming hands. Into a circle of people waiting for her, humming and comforting together with everything she needed. A magical moment.

And yet, two weeks later we went to see our cranio-sacral therapists to offer Rose a session, inviting her to go into her birth experience and express what she was not able to do whilst in the birth canal.

The therapists – a couple, alongside my husband and I, formed a circle around her. We held her with the intention of giving her the quality of the womb she had lived in for the last nine months. And she…. she allowed herself to go into the pain. She went through the final contractions a second time, expressing very soundly what was going on in her. How it was for her to bid goodbye to her monthers heartbeat. And we, we held her, witnessed her, gave her the space she needed.

We didn’t go with the intention of „fixing“ something. We wanted to offer her a room to express and to feel – to experience that it’s ok. That we are here, holding and forming a circle. Seeing this little being in pain took my breath away at times. And, in the end, I held her in my arms again like a newborn.

That quality of newborn-ness is often in me when I allow grief to expand without holding back.

(K.K.P)

What is an Aching Heart day??

This is something my wife has asked me as a question several times now, and I am still not absolutely sure how to answer her.

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I know that I can only begin from the place of wanting to walk towards, rather than away from, my grief – and I want to do it with and in the presence of my circle, my community, my village.

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I want it because when I have a chance to offer my grief and my pain, I find I always step more lightly afterwards with my self, my loves and my creations. Something has had the opportunity to be seen and held, witnessed and shared – and something in me is holding myself and the others in my world more tenderly, because I have just expressed love in my tears for the things I mourn and yet hold so dearly.

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So, in essence, an Aching Heart day is a day to sit together, mourn together and see each other and ourselves in presence and in depth. It is a day that might include ritualistic grief and empowerment spaces alongside large and small group work.

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It is a day that can include music and song, conversation and food, story-telling and woodland walking. It is a day to be held, without a goal of “I’m going to feel better”, though maybe with just a sense of “I would like to feel”.

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I want to offer these days, not because I want the pain to go away – our pain is there and it is shared and it is real and I make no promises of it going anywhere – but because it is the only way I know of in this crazy painful world to perhaps be able to carry on with grace and love in my heart.

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(H.K.P) Harry Edgar Kloser-Pitcher, Harry Edgar Pitcher

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The Aching Heart Wales – an experience

I think I began realizing I needed something different when I was listening to Stephen Jenkinson talk about the consequences of growing up in a grief-illiterate culture. I thought I understood grief – after all I had been studying Marshall Rosenberg’s work with NVC and getting in touch with my emotions – and grief is an emotion, right?? And then I heard Stephen talk about “Grief is not what you feel… grief is what you do…” – and this just messed with my whole nicely arranged picture of the way things are. So I wanted to get a much more intimate and personal experience. When I saw that Martin Prechtel had written a book all about grief – The Smell of Rain on Dust – I grabbed it and immediately began absorbing his stories of the role of grief in the indigenous Mayan culture he lived in for 10 years. As I read his stories there was a deepening sense of grief about the complete lack of grief in the culture I grew up in and I knew that this grief over the complete grief illiteracy of my culture needed an expression of some kind otherwise it would sit lodged in my body like food I couldn’t digest. When I saw Harry’s idea to have a day dedicated to grief I knew instantly that this was what I needed and I was certain that others would also know in their bodies that it was needed for them and for their families and for their cultures to rejuvinate and to heal.

It was an awkward and edgy thing to sit with a group of familiar people and yet not know what the day required of us. We knew one another from sharing spaces where the work we did was for our own personal healing and the focus of this day was asking something more of us – the benefits of this work was for those not present in the room. The grief we shared on this day was to weave us with all that we had lost, all that had ceased to be, and those things that were no longer as they had been. This wasn’t anything familiar to any of us and yet we set out to do the work together, supporting each other as best we could. After a while someone suggested that we might want to invite some of those not present into the room. This gave a real shift as some of us began to name the names of those we were present in our awareness and we shared some of the stories of how they were important to us.

One of the strongest feelings I have about the day together was how hearing the stories of those people entwined me with the life that had only been known privately before it was shared. At the end of the day I felt knitted together with those who came and a sense of the beauty of those people who had been named in the circle…

( Jason Stewart )

why i grieve

When I touch my grief I touch my love.
When I hold what I mourn I caress what I value.
When I uncover my pain I offer my soul.
When my village witnesses me I am human.

(H. Kloser-Pitcher)