Welcome to the second class in this series of ten classes,
Grief,
Letting Go.
We'll begin as usual with a meditation.
Now we'll look at the second quadrant,
The emotional quadrant,
And look deeply into each of the natural emotions beginning with grief.
Grief is a natural response to life's losses.
It precipitates sadness,
Often expressed by our tears,
And eventually encourages us to share our stories with other people.
When we put grief into words,
It is a creative act,
A primary way to both say our truth about our losses out loud,
And to connect with others.
To feel and express the natural emotion of grief is like hauling up a bucket of water from a dark well into the sunlight.
Eventually we can use the water to nurture the growth of new life.
As we live,
We have inevitable losses,
So we respond to them.
We think,
We feel,
And we act.
We do not simply have life or do life,
We are life.
And built into this,
Of course,
Is death.
We are death,
Too.
We learn that all the stories of life come and go.
If we were not alive once,
We will be not alive again.
Because of this natural cycle,
We will have loss,
And thus we will experience grief.
As soon as we have entered the natural cycle of life,
We begin grieving.
We'll look at this again in Lesson 9.
Every day of life brings transition and loss.
Some are small and inconsequential,
Even to climb out of a warm,
Cozy bed in winter,
Or to leave one room to enter another,
Are losses.
We put one foot in front of the other and step forward,
Leaving behind our footprint where we used to stand.
When we shift our gaze from one object of sight to another,
It involves moving our eyes away from something,
Leaving something,
In order to fasten our gaze on the new object.
Life brings much larger losses,
Such as the end of a relationship,
The transition from a job,
The deterioration of health,
Aging,
Or the death of a friend or family member.
Whenever we begin to love,
We begin to grieve.
We grieve first because of the possibility of change when the grief is anticipatory.
Then the change happens,
Sometimes expected and sometimes shocking and unexpected.
Either way,
We learn that to have is to create the surety of not having,
Of losing,
And when we experience loss,
We grieve.
And to be human means we are bound to feel the natural emotion of grief.
Let's look at the purposes of grief.
Like each of the natural emotions,
Grief has a purpose,
And the purpose of grief is to learn to live with life's losses.
Another purpose of grief is to open our hearts to the losses of other people,
And thus to activate our compassion.
Some grief we feel and live with alone,
And eventually as part of the grieving process,
We can share it.
In the moment,
When we have the courage to walk through a door,
Sit down next to or across from other people,
And say out loud what our loss is,
The fact,
And how we feel,
The emotion itself,
We begin to heal.
Most of the time,
But not always,
It is helpful to express out loud what and how it happened.
Share the story.
Telling our story,
Even our felt experience of it,
Can be a major step into and through our grief towards healing.
While we heal,
To understand that grief has a purpose can be comforting.
When the grief is fierce and unrelenting,
Which it certainly can be,
To know that grief is purposeful,
That it has both meaning and use,
Is normalizing,
Humanizing,
And eventually healing.
I have had occasions to say to grieving families who feel overwhelmed by their grief,
No,
You're not crazy,
You are grieving.
Grief has its own process and timeline,
And,
Similar to the other natural emotions,
Grief seeks acknowledgement and expression.
At age 93,
My dad's health had been deteriorating for several months.
I received a phone call from my sister,
Saying he was fading and I should come down.
After a three-hour drive,
I was about fifteen minutes away when my sister called me in my car to say that dad had died.
When I got there,
The room was quiet.
Dad looked as though he were asleep.
Now his peace was forever.
I looked up and out the window at the harbor that he so deeply loved,
The harbor where he had kept his beloved catboat when he was a young man,
And later his little motorboats,
As his father had done before.
Out of the corner of my eye,
I saw something moving across the harbor and looked more closely,
Still holding my father's hand.
There,
In the channel heading out of the harbor,
Was the big black schooner,
The Tabor Boy.
All her sails,
Two jibs,
The mainsail and her topsails,
Were hoisted,
Unusual inside the harbor,
And she was gathering speed,
Headed out the entrance way into the bay.
My dad had sailed on the Tabor Boy to Bermuda once,
And he loved the old ship.
I felt dad's spirit,
Now free,
Sail along with the black schooner out of the harbor into open water to the ocean beyond.
I was sad.
I was grieving.
And I was comforted,
Too,
To see the black schooner sailing out of the harbor.
My dad's spirit was fine.
If the natural feeling of grief is not expressed for weeks and years,
It becomes distorted into blame,
Guilt,
And shame.
Distorted means that it becomes outsized and toxic.
Now,
It must be said that sometimes we are victimized,
But the whole point of recognizing the distortions of natural emotions is not to remain stuck as a victim.
Yes,
When we feel victimized,
We want to find other people to blame.
It seems as if what happened to us,
The loss,
Is someone else's fault.
We want to blame the other person,
The drunken driver,
The doctor who diagnosed us with cancer,
Or the cancer disease itself.
Sometimes we blame ourselves.
We should have done something differently,
Protected our loved one,
Or simply treated him better,
Or told her we loved her.
With knowledge of this process,
We can be alerted when the distortions of blame,
Guilt,
And victimization show up.
Yes,
There is blame and responsibility.
Yet all the screaming and ranting when we blame a perpetrator,
While cathartic,
Never takes away the grief.
Our acts of blame possibly can increase vulnerability and violence.
Safety is paramount.
We can increase the likelihood of more violence or hurt,
Or take actions that might produce additional grief for others or for ourselves.
After blame comes the responsibility to regain control over what we can,
And then we can work with our grief.
Another distortion of grief is guilt.
We might feel guilty for all we meant to do for a sick friend,
But somehow never quite got around to doing it.
We can feel guilty for feeling less,
Or more,
Grief than is acceptable to our friends and family,
Or to ourselves.
Having regrets can bring guilt.
But this guilt is a distortion of grief.
When we are feeling guilty,
We can ask what we might be angry about.
Guilt can hide anger,
So when we look more deeply into what we are feeling guilty about,
We may find anger with its clarity and energy.
And we'll see that in another lesson.
The key to healing grief is to return to feeling the natural emotion and give it acknowledgement and expression.
Another distortion of grief is shame,
Perhaps the trickiest to work with.
Shame is subtle and pervasive.
We can be ashamed of what we are feeling.
We expect,
Or we think others expect,
Different feelings than the ones we have.
To move beyond shame,
We must remember that we have a right to our natural emotions.
Our emotions help us accept and live with our losses.
We can remember that our emotions have purposes.
There is no reason to be ashamed of a human quality that is native to human beings.
Take a good look at your shame.
We may be able to see it for what it is,
A wounded ego desperately trying to salvage itself at our expense.
It is helpful to say the simple truth out loud.
I am sad.
We can then recall the gratitude we feel for being able to acknowledge and express our natural emotions.
This ageless wisdom is expressed by this quotation from the Gnostic Gospels.
If you bring forth what is within you,
What you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you,
What you do not bring forth will destroy you.
We sometimes hesitate to bring things forth because it's hard.
Grief is hard.
What that word hard means is that I feel a lot.
A lot of sadness,
A lot of grief.
When we say life is hard or difficult,
What we are saying is that life is full of feelings,
Grief and all our natural emotions.
A healing strategy is to become aware of these distorted feelings and by accepting their existence,
We can move them into the present to express them.
Indeed,
The present is the only place that healing can happen.
We can review and even revisit the past,
But we cannot change it.
At the other end of the spectrum,
We can plan the future but not live there.
The present moment is what we have to work with,
To move our grief out of the distorted feelings of blame,
Guilt,
Shame and victimization.
Then we can experience them in the present,
Appreciate their purpose and externalize them,
Express them out into the world.
As we express the natural emotion of grief,
We are expressing our spirit.
We'll close this class with a spiritual practice called Lamentation.
Allow yourself a shroud of space,
Probably best late at night in the dark.
Find a comfortable and private space.
Center yourself by remembering that the earth supports you below and the heavens are open to you above.
Give yourself permission to lament,
To bring forward in your awareness the natural feelings of your loss and grief.
Let yourself feel how much and how deeply you feel what once was yours and now is no longer yours in physical form.
The coming and the going,
The having and the not having,
The possessing and the losing,
All the letting go.
Your body will guide you from initially sensing the foggy mists of sadness,
The tremors,
The changes brought by feelings waking up,
Then moving into expression.
Tears may come.
If you sense the feelings are building too much,
You can slow and quiet your breath.
Your grief will move and flow naturally like a stream finding its way through a meadow.
Here and now,
Let your grief come up and out,
Quietly,
Then with some sound.
Feel the wave build and then eventually recede.
Allow yourself the ensuing calmness and peace.
Thank you.
I'll meet you next time for Lesson 3,
Anger,
Dark Night of the Soul.
