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THOUGHTS ON GRIEF…
Not a single person will go through his/her life without the experience of grief at some point. If you searched, it would not be possible to find a single house anywhere, in which death has not occurred, be it human life or animal life. This simple statement is a key point to solving grief. The fact that it is actually universal by nature, means that grief as such is not something to which we can really claim exclusive ownership rights, and this fact opens up to a whole new perspective.
We may feel… my grief….my sorrow….my pain…. where as, in fact, we could be saying, our grief… our sorrow… our pain, from a collective point of view. Immediately this gives us a degree of relief knowing it is shared by so many others, we are not alone in sorrow. The pain we have is the pain of all. This can help in the process of moving through grief skillfully. It takes away the sting of hopelessness and isolation.
Another thought is related to where we chose to focus when someone dies. We often trap ourselves in feelings of loss. This has the tendency to feed negative thoughts and increase their power, and therefore increase the pain. What if we were to focus on the opposite? Say, if we instead rejoiced in the goodness we had with the person who passed away. If we loved someone, then how can we say we have lost? The fact is, that through this person we gained; love happiness, closeness etc. Is that a loss?
One fact is: love is a state of mind. Therefore when someone dies, it does not equal losing love, our mind is always with us. At all times we have the opportunity to cultivate love. As well as that, if we send someone off with a feeling of love and release that being into the universe, then we offer the greatest gift of all, love with freedom, and love without chains. So we have here the opportunity to transcend our boundaries of dependency and neediness. At the same time, we can cherish our happy memories without the pain.
Ok, so what we do experience in relation to the death of a loved one is a major change in our life, and this change we need to deal with skillfully of course. As in any time of great change we are likely to feel ungrounded and lost for a while until we have become adapted to the new situation. So we need to feel the grief and not suppress it. We also need to take some measures so as to release it skillfully and not wallow in it or hold on to it. For that would only deteriorate our health. We don’t deny our pain, but we acknowledge it and move on with time. Being kind to ourselves at such time is a must. Accepting assistance from others is an aid to our life, not a cause of defeat or sign of lack of strength. In fact it will help us to restore our balance when we see how much love is really still around us.
Grief can be related to many other life situations besides death. A newly married couple may, in spite of their love, feel a kind of grief from lack of personal freedom and from the general change in their living conditions. Grief may arise on the ending of a relationship. It may arise when moving from one place to another. We can be grieving for things we never obtained, or from situations we attained, but later lost.
So from point of view of our health and well being, we can apply awareness of how the energies of grief affect us and establish unhealthy patterns in the physical, emotional, mental etc. As the emotion arises we observe and follow the wave of energy as in travel on its path. Then suddenly we have all this understanding and realisation of what it does to us. And now, by applying an antidote like peaceful meditation, we can halt the energy and prevent it from becoming manifest. If we don’t meditate, we could just try to relax our body and mind, as this would also help us to control the negative energy. But whatever we do, we need to help ourselves by applying these kinds of Inner Medicines. The time of grief is individual from person to person, but through kindness and love and wisdom we can shorten the process.
The nature of life is that of change and impermanence, and nothing will remain as it is forever. Therefore, an acceptance of this simple fact is a profound realisation, which can carry us forward skillfully and minimize the heart aches we may have during times of difficult changes.
MAY PEACE PREVAIL
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