I read this article in this months Ladies Home Journal and I had to share it with all of you. It is quite lengthy, but it gives insight of what we all are going through.
Nothing is more natural than grief, no emotion more common to our daily experience. Yet, we don't know what to do with our pain and we never have. We have been told to bury our feelings, to keep a stiff upper lip, to "get over it and get on with our lives". As a result, sorrow goes unattended and manifests itself in so many ways. It weakens the body and compartmentalizes the mind. We become one part love and three parts fear, two parts trust and five parts doubt. Some doors are locked and some flung wide open.
Unrecognized grief -- what I call unattended sorrow -- disturbs our sleep and infects our dreams; unable to find our way "home" at night, we feel lost all day long. Nightly conflicts wear out our days. Our intuition becomes inhibited. We trust ourselves less. We cannot feel the world around us as we once did, so we experience ourselves as unplugged. We are a bit withdrawn, a little numb at the fingertips. This quality of grief can slow our creativity and dumb us down. Some of us become compulsively busy, fearing that if we slow down for just a minute, we will be overtaken by sorrow. Our confidence that we can make life happen as we wish, our belief in unquestioned expectations, is wounded. Our uncertainty filters every perception. We live our lives as an afterthought.
Whether struggling to accept a sudden loss or still aching from a long ago death we need to have mercy on ourselves, to figure out how to move forward. We can no longer turn our back on distress and lingering disappointments. Doing so doesn't work . When we refuse to acknowledge our sorrow, we intensify our pain and close off parts of ourselves. Often our grief is calling out to us, as though it were a cry from a crib in the next room.
One of the great barriers to becoming whole again is doubt. Because we're powerless against our pain, we think we're stuck where we are and can't move in any direction. Attending to this sorrow isn't going to make it all vanish. But doing so begins to unearth the heart that has room for it all, instead of leaving those feelings in an unmarked grave.
Loss is the absence of something we were once attached to. Grief is the rope burns left behind, when that which we held is pulled beyond our grasp.
Acute grief is the immediacy of loss-- the inconceivable tragedy. It feels like a stabbing sensation in the body and mind. It slams shut the heart and leaves exposed only the rawest emotions.
There is a reason we feel so lost,when we lose someone. When we love someone, he becomes a mirror for our heart. That person reflects back to us the place within us that is love, the divine principle. When that mirror is shattered we may feel that love itself has shattered.
At first there is a great tearing away, a breaking away of every certainty. There remains the feeling that our loved one might walk through the door at any moment.
I know very few people who are not grieving at some level. Feelings of loss don't go away; they go deeper. Acute grief often becomes entangled with the loose ends of all sorts or previous traumas; loves betrayed, trusts broken, lies told and believed, opportunities lost, words spoken that can never be retrieved. Our grief becomes chronic, a persistent ache in the heart.
There is no magical cure for such grief. But no matter how long you have felt despondent, there are keys to locked doors, lights for dark hallways. There are maps to the center of our sorrow that can lead us toward healing.
The first step is to stop fleeing from your fears and try to understand them. I have found that a grief journal can open the conduit between the mind and the heart. We become open to unexpected and spontaneous guidance. The willingness to explore our suffering, to find what habitual paths it takes, moves the pen and finds the words. We continually find that the journal writes itself when given half a chance.
We hold grief in the belly, we store fear and disappointment, anger and guilt in our gut, creating a hard shield across the abdomen. It's by softening that shield that we heal ourselves; we can unburden the body and mind to find ourselves a bit lighter and the road ahead that much easier to travel.
Here's how to start healing: Sit quietly, close your eyes, and just pay attention to the sensations of your body. As you feel your belly rise and fall with each breath, relax your abdominal muscles and so soften the shield that is holding all your suffering inside. Each exhalation lets out a little bit of the pain. When you open your eyes, maintain this increased awareness. As you go about your day, notice at what points the sense of loss reasserts itself and you feel the need to tighten your belly again. This will teach you a great deal. Many people say they come back to their breathing practice dozens of times a day. Some start the morning with this exercise for 15 minutes or more and notice how it produces a deeply relieving release of stress.
Soon you will be ready to tap the resources of your heart; the trust that you can love again, forgive yourself and others, and settle unfinished business. Trust returns as slowly as a frightened child to a dark room. We have to overcome fantasies that life is somehow supposed to be in our control and that we are at fault when it is not. We must come to trust the process of healing enough to open our heart to the unknown -- to finally take that next step across the span that bridges the broken heart. To do so honors the relationship with lost loved ones.
We must acknowledge the unpredictable unfolding of life with a a sense of compassion for ourselves and for all other people who tremble at the brink of what comes next, whether it's tragedy or grace. And we must know that somehow our heart has room for it all
