As the United States remembered 9/11 last week, I was reminded that none of us are immune from grief.
You have no doubt experienced sorrow and loss.
Perhaps your life looks nothing like what you had hoped for at one point. Maybe you have lost someone important to your heart through death, divorce or other circumstances. Deep loss is felt by our bodies, minds, and souls. It is not a trivial experience. No matter what the cause, you have probably grieved deeply, and most likely you will again.
Over the years, I have facilitated various grief workshops for people who have recently lost a loved one–husband, child, sibling or parent. The most profound of those workshops was a group of teens who had all recently lost a parent.
What was different about my group of teens? Once they crossed over the barrier of being vulnerable with the group, they did things that helped their process that so many adults refuse to do:
- They felt their grief as a real-time, present moment experience. (My adult groups spent considerably more time focused on re-living moments of past grief, rather than identifying how they felt at the current moment.)
- They had no goal to achieve in the process, they simply processed what they were feeling. (My adults participants usually measured and re-measured their progress by random, unconscious beliefs about where they should be in their process. This often colored what they shared with judgment about themselves, or pretense about where they were–rather than open, really vulnerable sharing.)
- They knew they spent most of their time running from their pain and were honest about it. (Participants in other groups often took weeks or months to acknowledge their coping mechanisms so they could assess what was working and what was making things worse.)
These are gifts given unknowingly from my group of teens that anyone can embody. What things still bring up feelings of grief for you?
Use the following steps based on the wisdom from my teens to help you move from feeling stuck in this grief to finding your inner transformation and resilliance. You might want to journal your answers.
- Do you re-live this event in your mind frequently? Can you identify the difference between how you initially felt about this situation and how you feel NOW? Take a moment to describe this situation from your perspective today. Anytime you notice your story going into how it felt “then,” cross it off and resume writing from the perspective of how it feels today. It is a good idea to do things that ground you in the current moment while doing this exercise. You might write for awhile, then go for a walk outside before continuing. Other things that can help keep you grounded in today are exercising, contact with water (washing your hands or feet, swimming, taking a shower, foot bath in epsom salts), walking barefoot on the earth, and digging in the earth (weeding, planting).
- What judgments do you have about how you have handled grieving this situation, especially verses other people? Write them down. Be specific. You might start with sentences like, “I should have…,” “By now…,” “Other people…” Once you have exhuasted your litany of self-condemnations, rewrite each one beginning with the statement, “It’s OK that I…” Then find a nice place to walk where you can have a destination goal of at least 100 feet. As you walk that distance take each step deliberately and state “It is OK that I…” Do this as many times as you need to until you feel a release of judgment from each item.
- Identify (with scathing honesty!) all the ways you have ignored and run from feeling your feelings around this situation. Write them down. Which ones of these are serving you and which ones are just keeping you tied to your grief? Make conscious choices as to which behaviors and actions you plan to continue and which you want to cease. Call your best friend and tell her what you have discovered and ask her to help keep you accountable to your new goals. Create new behaviors that help you feel your feelings and release them, rather than cover over them. Here are a few suggestions:
- Commit to feeling fully the grief when it comes. If it is convenient, go into the shower and cry until you feel complete, go into a private room and turn on music loud to cover your sobs, or climb into bed and rock yourself in a fetal position.
- Take long walks in nature regularly to reconnect to yourself and let go of the outside world
- Journal everytime your emotions get triggered. Give all your feelings voice–whether good, bad, or ugly–not just the socially acceptable ones. Let your hurting inner-self really express the depth of how she feels. By ackowledging, not hiding, how you feel you take away these emotions power over you sand they can no longer control you.
- Forgive yourself. You are usually encouraged to forgive others who have hurt you in order to heal from grief. While that is an important element, the more often ignored and more important step is to forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for the choices you made that helped create this circumstance, or for not taking care of yourself sooner, or for handling your grief in a way that has kept you stuck. Whatever it is, forgive yourself over and over for it until you have set yourself free.
No one is immune from painful experiences that trigger feelings of sorrow and grief. It is part of our human condition. Yet, how we approach our grief can determine how long we carry its weight around our necks.
As the Buddha is oft-quoted as saying,
“Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.”
