Meeting Grief And Loss With An Open heart

Hi,

Find a comfortable place to sit or lie,

Giving yourself all the support you need with blankets or cushions.

If you need to pause this recording to set yourself up,

Go ahead and do that.

And when you find yourself sitting or lying in a comfortable place,

Just notice your contact points.

So these are the places where your body is really making contact with the floor or the chair.

And without forcing anything,

Just feel as if those contact points are like a leaf on wet ground and they just make the gentlest of imprint.

Welcome to meeting grief and loss with an open heart.

Grief is a hard emotion and yet meeting it with our own hearts can allow it to transform into a quality of presence,

Even a quality of beauty.

If you can,

Bring your hands over where you find your heart to be.

As you touch this area of your heart,

You'll probably feel the sensations of your clothing or your skin in your hand.

Notice how alive and awake your hand is.

And then also notice you can feel your skin receiving the touch of your hand.

It's a curious thing.

Your hand can receive the skin of your chest,

The bone of your chest,

But also the skin and bone can receive the touch of your hand.

With that touch,

Almost likely comes some warmth,

Some pressure.

You can adjust how you're touching yourself to kind of optimize what your body feels,

How it feels it in a really receiving,

Beneficial way.

And if you go a little deeper beyond the skin,

The muscle,

The bone,

You can find almost as if your hand sinks through all the other tissue until it comes into contact with your heart,

And your heart itself,

And feel the warmth and the comfort of your hand.

So still switching back and forth,

Feeling your heart comforted by your hand.

Feeling your hand hold your heart,

And if you're in a position where you can do this,

You can kind of tip forward or to the side so that it's almost as if your heart were like a water balloon or a little puppy,

A little hamster or kitty,

A precious animal,

Really what it is.

It's your precious heart.

And that precious heart tips into the cup of your hand.

Your hands can hold it gently and lovingly.

And you could feel your heart rest in the support and the comfort of being held by your own hand.

It's very similar to how your contact points are feeling against the floor,

The chair,

Those places of floor and chair,

Like giving way and holding your body and now your own hands are holding your own heart.

You can breathe as you do this,

And as you breathe,

You may feel a difference in your heart.

You feel like it's moving slightly even as you're copying it and holding it.

And this is because your heart rests right on your diaphragm and as your diaphragm and your breath move,

So your heart is rocked.

Your heart is,

Has a rhythm generated by your breath and your diaphragm.

If you're ready or you desire to,

And please follow your own desire.

These are just suggestions.

It's always best to follow the wisdom of your own body.

If you have desire to,

You can feel that gentle,

Breathing,

Warm animal of your heart is being gently placed back into your chest with your hand.

If you're sitting,

That may make you come sit up in a more straight position.

If you're tipped to a side and you're lying on your back,

It may bring you back onto your back.

So you've just held your heart in your hand and now you're using your hand to bring your heart back into your core,

The core of yourself.

But your heart still sits on that diaphragm and it's rising and falling on the diaphragm,

Almost like the diaphragm's a little boogie board or surfboard,

A gentle bay,

And your heart is just resting on it.

If you feel like your breath could be softer or deeper,

Focus on your exhalation a little here.

You can even make a little sigh or sound or hum a little.

At the end of your exhalation.

And with that,

Your inhalation should become a little softer,

A little more natural,

A little bit more gentle.

And you can continue.

Just feel as if your heart is being gently rocked on the waves of your breath without you having to do anything at all.

If you'd like to,

You can keep your hands on your heart,

Knowing that around your heart,

In front of your heart,

Is a pericardium kind of container for your heart that maybe you can feel a little bit more aware of when your own hands touch your heart.

So your heart is always contained,

Held by your pericardium,

Supported and rocked by your diaphragm.

And it really sits deep inside your chest,

Also supported and contained by your lungs.

Those two gently massaging your heart as you breathe.

If there are any other places in your body where you're noticing tension,

You can also let those go by feeling that you're settling further into your imprint.

You can feel your tongue relax on the floor of your mouth,

Your eyes,

And your sockets.

You can feel the back of your brain soften and widen.

So that right now you don't need to control anything.

You're just listening to my voice,

Offering suggestions and seeing if those suggestions have resonance with you feeling connection to your heart,

Ease inside of your system.

The best way I know to meet the difficulty of having grief and loss is to create ease in the body so that when those feelings of grief and loss arise,

They don't take us over.

There's enough of something else,

A kind of resilience that helps us meet grief.

Grief can surprise us.

Certainly it can make us cry or tremble.

Meeting grief can make us moan or shake.

It could laugh.

It could make us feel strangely grateful.

So as we go through this little process,

This little exercise of meeting grief with this resilient animal of your own heart,

Please accept whatever comes up.

When we can accept the depth of our sorrows,

The depth of our feelings,

We can also feel a deep presence of life.

I can only say that it's by really meeting and living with this deep presence of life that grief becomes bearable and things of beauty,

Meaning can arise from that grief.

So just continue to feel your breath and your heart.

If the rest of this embodiment doesn't have resonance for you or you don't feel it's right just now,

You can just stay.

It's touching your heart,

Feeling your heart be touched,

Feeling your heart be rocked by your breath.

If you're ready to move on,

You can bring to mind something that brings you grief.

You may notice that as soon as you feel that grief,

Certain things happen in your experience.

You may feel a sense of discouragement or pain.

You may feel your throat tighten.

You may feel a shakiness.

I'm offering some suggestions,

Your experiences,

Your own.

And in this moment,

Just accept those feelings,

Those tightenings,

Those holdings.

And at the same time,

Find your heart and your breath and see as you reside in your heart and your breath.

Can you not only let those feelings,

Whatever they are,

Wherever they are in your body,

Not only can you let them be,

But can you invite them to even intensify just slightly,

Slightly,

Slightly.

So we're not going to make them intensify.

But we're going to see if tightness in your throat or butterflies in your stomach want to even get a little bit more tight or shimmery or shaky.

And if they do,

If they get a little bit more tired or shimmery or shaky,

They'll stop again.

And when they stop again,

Just let them go.

And feel your breath,

Feel your heart.

So when we have a great loss,

A great sorrow,

We often get overwhelmed.

We might disassociate and shut down.

We might feel like we're not even in our bodies.

We might have intense panic and want to flee.

We might pound our chest and moan and groan and cry.

We might pound the floor.

We might just get angry.

And very soon,

The intensity of those feelings subside,

Either because we've processed them or because they're really not appropriate.

We fight with them.

But their echoes remain within us and create kind of a locked up-ness in our bodies,

A detachment from our own warm animal self.

So this is just an experiment for yourself with your breath,

With your heart,

As you bring to mind a grief,

A sorrow,

A pain.

And you notice that right away,

You might want to just shut it down,

Prevent yourself from feeling it,

Push it away.

And instead of that,

For the most visceral experience of it,

You can find a kind of contraction,

Constriction,

Or emptiness in your own body.

And see if you can let that follow on a pathway of becoming even a little bit more constricted,

A little bit more amplified,

Just because it wants to go back and visit the intensity of the original pathway that was laid down.

You don't force it.

If it's not there,

It's not there.

You're just noticing if there's a little bit of a build up and intensity and it will stop moving again.

But it will stop moving not because you're stopping it,

But because it's stopped itself.

The intensity of the experience of grief and loss doesn't last forever.

And if we don't let it cycle through our system,

It will tend to hang up.

This after you've let it go,

You have a little bit more breath.

You feel a little softer in your own body if your heart feels a little kinder towards yourself.

Of course,

As you go into these little traces of finding the pathway of these original griefs and sorrows,

You may have some tears with that.

You may have an insight.

You may have a feeling that you want to move or shake or dance or sing.

Just let yourself follow what you feel is your body's desire at expression to move with this grief as this grief knowing that you're not this grief.

You're living in your breath,

Your heart.

And as your breath and your heart meet the grief,

It can let go.

Help you soften.

Help you feel more alive.

Help you feel like there's more depth in life.

Trust this.

Trust this feeling of more depth in life.

Grief can really be a doorway into feeling more radically alive.

Some people do say that grief is what gives us deep love and deep meaning in life.

And I'm not sure,

But I do know that for myself and for others who have touched me with their experience,

Grief is often a profound door,

Deep,

Deep presence and aliveness.

Take your time to touch in.

You don't have to rush anything.

You don't have to do anything.

Just very gentle acceptance of how much that grief as a tightening,

As an emptiness,

As a gasping wants to become more intense,

Allowing it to become just a bit more intense,

Letting it go.

Exiting your body,

Inhabiting your breath,

Feeling for more of you and your wholeness,

Knowing that accepting loss takes time.

Rejection into and out of grief becomes a rhythm that anchors us in life.