Journal · The story behind the journey · Part three
The part I've never told.
Where the story turns — Upala's longing for something freer, the loss, and the course that grew from meeting grief in the body.
This is the third part of a longer story. It began with how the Authentic Singing Journey started, and went on to what came after — the journeys we made, and the way Upala moved. If you're just joining, those are the places to begin.
After the Inner Child and Magical Movement journeys, something had quietly grown around us: a real worldwide community. That's when we began the Songdance Circle — we returned to our old weekly rhythm and promised everyone a brand-new session every single week.
And we kept that promise. Thirty-minute dance flows, spoken stories set to music, meditations, visualisations, mantras — a whole stretch of wild, unhurried creation, most of it made while we were living in South Africa. We were even about to buy a house there. Everything was going well.
…Until — and this is the part I've never really told — something in Upala began to long for something else. Something even freer than anything we were making.
It was as if she wanted to dance and sound among the stars — a kind of freedom I'm not sure is possible here, on this earthly plane. Not that she wanted to die. Not at all. In her final months she began recording an album, and she still wanted to record a free dance ritual. But alongside that longing, something in her was simply tired.
So we stopped travelling and settled back in Belgium. Shortly after, the tumour returned — and an intense stretch of rapid decline followed.
And then she moved on.
What came after was, for me, a full stop. For a long while I wanted to stop Songdance altogether and do something — anything — else. It was often simply too painful.
But two dear friends, Daniela and Christopher, stayed close. Gently, patiently, they helped me turn something almost unbearable into something that could carry me back toward my purpose — and toward my own life-energy again. That's where The Grief Course was born: out of Daniela's decades of counselling grief, and my own experience of meeting grief in the body, through sound.
Grief is not the pain. It is the process that helps you move through it.
It's for anyone living through a big, irrevocable change — because where there is change, there is grief. Not to rush it, or to "heal" it away, but to be with it, and to let it move.
Her sound is still here.
With love,
Jacob