Grief is like the ocean; it comes in waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.
— VICKI HARRISON
Freeing the heart entails learning to navigate the storms of life and the shipwrecks that can follow with skill, clarity, and kindness. Mindfulness and kindness are essential tools that build the life raft that brings you to shore. One of the core challenges we face, particularly as we age, is the tender arena of loss. It is impossible to go through life without losing things, people, and experiences that are precious to us. How we handle this loss determines how much we suffer. The Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye speaks of the inseparability of loss and heartfulness in her beautiful poem “Kindness.”
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.…
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
And you see the size of the cloth.
Sarah, a Canadian psychologist and single mother, attended a course I taught in the Rocky Mountains. She was motivated to come because a tornado of loss had ripped through her life, leaving her exhausted and washed up on the shore of despair. A year before, her only son, a competitive athlete and an avid heli-skier, had been left paralyzed from the neck down by a tragic skiing accident. Sarah felt as if her world had been stolen from her, which in some ways it had. She had to quit her job and move back in with her parents in Ontario so she could attend to her son full-time and care for his needs.
The silent nature retreat was an ideal place to simply let the river of tears flow. The blessing of a silent retreat provides a space to breathe, to feel whatever your heart is feeling. It allowed Sarah to bring awareness to the natural disorientation and disbelief that comes with upheaval. However, Sarah, like many people dealing with loss, wasn’t really allowing the process to flow.
She was filled with self-judgments. She didn’t think she was doing enough as a caregiver, and she didn’t understand why she felt so confused and lost. She thought she should be over her grief by now and moving on with her life, or at least moving on from her pain, and she was frustrated to still be coping with residual denial, anger, and disbelief, which are common stages of the grief process. In addition, Sarah felt guilty for resenting her son’s risky skiing behavior, which led to his accident. It was a classic case of increasing the suffering of tremendous loss by engaging in self-criticism and blame.
Sarah’s reaction was not unique. Many times we increase the burden of an already painful situation because of our own assumptions or judgments about how the process should go or how we should be handling it. These views not only shut us down but further close our heart and interfere with the organic unfolding of the grief process. Such reactions are normal, yet they obstruct our ability to heal. Sarah’s judgments — especially that she should be over her grief and moving on with her life — were definitely hampering her ability to grieve. Only by allowing the tears to flow can we eventually surface from that well of sorrow and pick up the threads of our newly emerging life.
So how did attending a meditation retreat help Sarah in such a difficult situation? Mindfulness can help us develop the capacity to radically meet the conditions of our life with clarity, nonreactivity, and warmhearted presence. It does not take away the pain of loss, but it helps us hold our suffering and avoid making it worse through resistance, blame, or judgment.
During Sarah’s retreat, she learned to hold and surrender into her loss, grief, and disorientation with a kind presence. She gave herself the gift of not needing to figure anything out, and instead let the waves of pain wash over her. This allowed the suffering to shift into a natural tender sadness over time. From this softened and surrendered place, a caring responsiveness arose for the pain she and her son had been through and for the overwhelming hardship of the situation. She realized she couldn’t leapfrog to this place but instead had to walk through the tender path of grieving.
By leaning into and opening to loss, we allow those cold winds to blow through us. As hard as those storms may be, fighting them compounds the torment. Ironically, as we surrender to their flow, this can often, as the Sufi poet Rumi suggests, “clear us out for some new delight.” As we move through the waves of heartache and are softened by their blows, such melting can open up new horizons; influenced by loss, we discover new possibilities we had never thought possible. Conversely, if we don’t open, we may stay entombed in a suspended state, as if frozen in ice. The tears of kind presence allow this precious melting to happen and for new life to emerge.
Michelle, a longtime meditation student, shared with me this beautiful description of how this process unfolds:
When I was forty-one years old, my twenty-one-year-old son died in an accident while he was away at college. That was twenty-two years ago, and I cannot say or write those words without an enormous wave of grief and sadness. But I don’t drown. I can let that wave wash over me. I can live my life with interest and even joy along with the great sadness. I have learned to do that, I believe, largely with the help of my meditation practice, turning toward, not away from, the tenderness of grief.
Anticipation of potential loss is another facet of this terrain that we have to learn to work with. The dread of losing the people we love can cause unnecessary suffering and keep us frozen, so we don’t fully embrace the present moment. This happened with Maddie, a woman in her early forties from Oakland, California. Maddie had already known a fair amount of loss. She had lost a baby in childbirth, and when she was eight years old, she had lost her father in a car accident. However, she had a strong bond with her husband, whom she had married young and who was her rock through losing their son.
Maddie would often lie awake in the middle of the night in fear of what might become of her life partner. His family had a history of heart disease. She worried about all the stress he went through at his law firm. If he reported feeling pains in his chest, she would panic. Her worst nightmare was the thought of losing him. She decided to work with me to help relieve her anxiety and insomnia, and she expected me to help her be less attached, to let go. I instead shifted her in a different direction.
In a guided meditation, I asked Maddie to allow her anxiety and worry about her husband to surface, so she would feel the fullness of those emotions in her body. Mindfulness helps us acknowledge our experience and find a spacious capacity to hold even challenging emotions. This is the first step in working skillfully with anything, rather than avoiding it or being caught up in a stressful contention. Once she was able to find some steadiness simply being with those feelings, I then, to her surprise, directed her to feel the ocean of love that lay underneath the surface ripples of fear.
In meditation, Maddie found it easy to access the deep love she felt for her partner. The fear of losing that wealth of love was the cause of her duress. I invited her to really bathe in that love that flowed from her heart. As that quality pervaded her mind and body, she noticed her anxiety abating until she was able to rest in the sweetness of their connection and the power of her own kind heart. I then asked her to inquire about the source of that love. Certainly she received love from her partner, but the origin of her loving experience was coming from the depth of her own being.
Often the thought of losing someone we love feeds the fear that we will lose the essence of love itself. The more we realize that love is the nature of our own heart, the more we realize we cannot be separated from it. Such realization does not take away the sadness that comes when we lose loved ones, but we see that loss neither diminishes our capacity to love nor prevents access to that beautiful quality of openhearted connection.
As Maddie bathed in the depth of her love for her husband, she realized this was the doorway to diffusing her fear of losing him. The next, equally important step was turning that love toward herself, toward her own feelings of fear and panic. Once we access the kindness in our own hearts, we can focus that caring attention on the scared parts of ourselves. In Maddie’s case, the young child who lost a parent still lived within her, and that same anxiety was feeding her fears about losing her husband.
Maddie realized, as we all can, that healing comes when we tenderly embrace the scared, anxious parts that lie within us. Our nervous system settles, our breathing slows, our thoughts stop racing, and we find some ease in the present moment. It is a way we practice not abandoning ourselves. When we can hold ourselves with a loving mindful presence, we have the capacity to endure anything.
• PRACTICE •
Find a comfortable meditation posture and close your eyes. Settle your attention on your breath, breathing naturally and gently. Then shift your focus to feel or sense your heart area in the center of your chest. Feel the breath there. Then take some moments to reflect on someone or something you have lost. This could be a loved one or even a pet. It could be an experience, such as the loss of a good friendship. Take time to feel into both your love of that person or experience and the loss connected to that.
Finding peace in the midst of loss centers on whether we can hold ourselves with loving presence as we navigate the tender pain. As you feel the pangs of loss and grief, allow yourself to open to the rawness of that experience. Can you feel it in your heart or elsewhere in the body? Do thoughts, images, and memories arise with it? Without getting caught up in memories or carried away by thoughts, keep experiencing any waves of feeling that arise.
If possible, hold yourself with the kind attention you would offer a dear friend who is going through a difficult time. Particularly if the loss feels strong, try placing a hand over your heart as a gesture of self-love and soothing. Take some slower breaths and maintain a warm, friendly attitude toward yourself and your tender feelings. If you need to reduce the intensity of feeling, know that you can shift your attention away at any time, focusing on something more neutral like sounds or looking around the room you are in. You may also whisper to yourself that this too will pass. Remind yourself that the essence of your heart is love and that you always have the power to access this kindheartedness, as it is your nature.
At the end of this practice, shift your attention to something neutral in your experience, like the breath. Sense your connection to the earth through the contact of your body with the floor or the chair. Take a few minutes to allow your focus to shift until you feel ready to end the meditation. At the same time, know that feelings of tenderness or sadness may linger after the reflection is done. That is natural, so continue to hold whatever arises with tenderness and kindness.
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