HER UNIVERSE
'And as she surrendered herself to the darkness of night,
She became an apparition, with the beauty of her light.
Into the void, she sang a harrowing, angelic song,
To a world of pain where she no longer belonged.
And it echoed through a portal — to her universe.'
Her Universe: Grief and the infinite realm of the inner landscape
Within us all exists a vast universe, unbound by space, time, logic, or language. When we experience grief and we lose someone, something or some part of ourselves, we don’t simply 'move on', we journey through an internal exploration and reckoning that ultimately causes us to transform, 'who we are'. As something dies and detaches, something new begins to take shape, and as we process the unconscious and extreme pain of disconnected primitive attachments, a reconstruction begins to take place in the soul.
This inner world is a dark cosmos where fragments of memory, feeling, and unspoken knowing co-exist in the dark and vast landscape of the inner self. The ache of loss does not live in words alone; it echoes from places before language, ancient wells of attachment buried deep in the unconscious mind and body’s memory.
We carry implicit emotional blueprints from infancy, formed before the mind’s rational maps of self. These felt experiences are woven from our primitive and innate experiences, attachments formed in order to fulfil our deep human need to feel safe. These invisible threads form the galaxy of our nervous system, and our unspoken understanding of the world.
When we experience loss and process grief in the body and the mind, it reawakens experiences from our past, often living in our unconscious. These primal echoes serve as ghosts of old wounds that are re-ignited and re-lived. This is why grief can feel endless, infinite, and enter a dark void. We enter a space that cannot be defined by the rational mind, because it often is formulated in the felt sense and not through thoughts or words which we can understand or articulate. When we experience loss and begin the process of reconciling the inner landscape through grief, we do not simply experience the immediate, but rather the resonance of wounds carved long ago, old betrayals, fractured trust, the ache and necessity of painful survival itself.
Far from a concept, this experience is one of scientific reality. Neuroscience now affirms this mystery: the brain’s alarm systems light up not just in pain centres, but in areas tied to early memory and emotional regulation. Regions of the brain such as the amygdala, hippocampus, and cingulate cortex react in the experience. And our thinking brains often falter in these experiences, unable to reconcile the swirling internal storm. Words appear insufficient, crude and inarticulate to express our internal experience of pain.
In these times, creative expression can form a sacred language that helps us navigate that which cannot be understood in the rational mind. Here our feelings speak in colours, symbols, rhythms, calls, and movements that carry meaning far beyond speech. Through visual and auditory melody, the unconscious finds expression and begins to reveal to us what once lived in shadow. Through our subjective and creative expression we have the unique ability to reach within the unconscious mind and the body’s depths, where memories and emotions pulse beneath awareness to bridge the gap of coherence to the conscious self. If we are able to comprehend it, these aspects of our inner landscape, especially those linked to connection and loss, exist as a universe, form a dark, vast, and expansive plane that forever shifts and transforms.
In this space, grief is not simply an issue to be fixed, or a wound needing to be healed. It is a transformation of the self, a painful gateway into a new way of being, one that holds absence and presence, sorrow and love, destruction and creation, all at once. An internal universe where we hold not only what is lost, and simultaneously what the experience of the loss has created within us. This is true transformation and the human experience of conscious evolution.
The unconscious often communicates here in fragments, dreams, sensations, half-formed images that drift past, cosmic dust and energy that can obscure our viewpoint. Jung referred to these archetypes as mythic patterns that arise in our internal world to guide healing. Across time and culture, humans have always sought expression through ritual, story, and art to navigate the vast inner landscape of loss and renewal. They exist to help us heal.
When we step into this inner universe, we surrender to the heart’s inner knowing and the brilliance of human selves to move back and forth through our experience and memory to reconcile what has occurred, allowing us to transcend and evolve through the experience.
As the rational mind fails to comprehend and explain the emotional landscape, it surrenders to a slow unfolding and healing, often without clear answers or timelines. In the depths of grief, we release the need to 'make sense of it all', and instead turn toward presence and the quiet observation of the self. In doing so, we discover a strange and sacred beauty within the pain, and a truth we had not previously understood, that loss offers us a divine gift. An internal reconstruction and expansion of self, we do not merely 'survive', we transform in a profound way that was inaccessible to us before. Here, we witness both our darkness, and our light, within a universe of our own making.
