Guidance For The Grieving

Hello,

My name is Karishdina O'Loughlin.

I'm a Chinese face reader and meditation creator.

I don't know where to particularly start this,

So I'm just going to say that the guidance I'm giving to you is adapted from a face reading I gave last year to one of my clients.

The advice that I give in these readings is heavily nature based and nature influenced,

As Chinese face reading is based on Chinese medicine,

Which in turn is based on 3000 or 2000 years worth of observations from nature.

The point of all my work is to remind people of nature and encourage them to return to it.

Whether that's the nature of their personality through from judgment or to nature herself.

This is why you can currently hear birdsong in the background.

This guidance that I'm giving is more suited to people who are at least a year or two into the grieving process,

Rather than those in the doldrums right at the beginning.

However if you are right at the beginning and your intuition is still telling you to proceed,

Then please listen to it.

Now that this introduction is out of the way,

Thank you so much for choosing this track.

I hope it will provide some solace and comfort to you as you move throughout your process.

Let's begin.

Experiencing a loss,

A death,

Is nothing new to human history and understanding.

What I'm about to say may appear rude,

But you are not the first to grieve and you will not be the last either.

Throughout the years that we have existed as a species,

This terrible pain is unfortunately timeless.

You have companions of course in the present across the world,

But you also have them in the 18th century,

I've suffered as you do now,

And even companions in the 1400s and then even earlier in the dark ages,

All the way back to the Roman Empire and further back Egyptian,

Ancient Greek,

And how many people can exist in 3000 or more years.

You and I do not have names for these people,

But we know them because of our shared grieving experiences out of time.

We have friends in them,

In humanity as a collective.

To feel alone and grieving is false,

For there has always been and will always be a friend.

If we are lonely and grieving then we must connect to humanity.

If it feels like hope is too much or people are too much,

Then we must connect to the human experience or to humanity.

For this will always be and has always been an important threshold in someone's life.

And the thing about life is how beautiful it is.

We're all born into this mystery,

Into this walking,

Talking flesh suit for a finite time.

In this finite time we then experience wars,

Cultural shifts,

Movements and at the time of recording this,

Viruses,

Self-isolation,

That we will never be able to explain to younger generations or older.

The time is now and then this flesh suit of ours expires.

And if we are to believe in reincarnation we rest,

Choose another life and then off we go again.

In this flesh suit we can experience all kinds of pleasure and beauty on this earth.

We can experience the pleasure of touch,

The pleasure of art.

One of my favourite sensations is biting in a baby tomato and having it just explode in my mouth.

I also like touching luxurious fabric and clothes.

I like how the wind ruffles through my hair.

I like the pleasure of birdsong and seagulls.

This pleasure and beauty is made poignant because it is so transitory.

The impermanence of these pleasures encourages enjoyment.

Our bodies give us so much and then they expire.

Our soul does not and the memories don't either.

I'm now going to read you something that was put to paper.

A rather papyrus.

Here it is.

The lives of mortal men are like the generations of leaves.

Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth.

Now the living timber bursts with the new buds and spring comes round again.

And so it is with men.

As one generation comes to life,

Another dies away.

That's from the Iliad by Homer.

It's one of the oldest Czechs and Western canon which dates to the 8th century BC.

If death has happened to us,

That the older generation has expired before us,

Then some part of our grief is about being closer to the top of the tree.

That we are somehow closer in the terrifying responsibility of guiding the younger generation.

And that the history we've experienced in our own lifetime is now further behind.

When we experience the death of an elder,

We realise it's the end of an era.

For me,

When both my grandmothers died several years ago,

Their past,

The living history of the Second World War in the early 20th century,

Was even more inaccessible.

Or more inaccessible than it once was because I could not speak to a living mouthpiece of that time.

If death has happened to us,

That the younger generation have expired before us,

Or that our elder was still young,

Then we cannot help but feel angry,

Righteous even.

Or that we linger on this earth without them.

The only response that I can say to this anger,

If this applies to you,

Is that death is not a punishment but a natural consequence.

It happens just like the rain and the weather.

Grief is another stage of life to be surpassed and live through,

Like our first break up our first kiss,

First mortgage,

First house.

We surpass them but also revisit them in memory and then feel them once more.

It's just that death,

With the expiration of the flesh suit,

Removes the opportunity to create more memories.

So,

Can you be grateful that these memories and sensations can always be visited?

And with the question that I have for you,

For the person in question,

Well the person you are grieving,

Is can you honour and respect the breadth of their life,

No matter how long or short it was?

Can you take pride in the times you had together?

Once we see how this person has enriched and impacted our lives positively,

We rather that they had lived and we had lost them,

Rather for them to have never existed.

Excuse me,

I just need to take a breather.

Your life was in some way moulded by their presence.

Maybe every Wednesday you called,

You made a phone call to them,

Maybe if you've experienced the loss of a child,

If that's who you're thinking of as you're listening to me.

You cared for their well being,

You fed or washed them and regardless if this was a child that you're thinking of or not,

Perhaps you had a week in your activity you had together.

Whatever it was,

Some part of your routine was in their life.

In grief we're learning to fill an absence,

Especially when it comes to our daily routine.

We're learning to fill a hole that has been left by this person.

In Chinese medicine,

Grief and loss is an opportunity for refinement.

Death orientates our lives because we realise that our time is finite.

Death and grief,

If used properly,

Can help us refocus on what is truly meaningful,

Truly important to do while we are still able to do.

Grief can be an opportunity for refinement.

If we review from our loss,

We can level up spiritually to become even more connected with the sacred and the divine and overall direction for our lives.

Chinese medicine places grief in the same category as the divine.

The image in nature that the five elements relates to grief is that of the trees in late autumn losing their leaves.

I didn't realise this at the time that I was giving the reading but this is exactly the imagery that Homer uses.

As it so often happens,

Ancient cultures do corroborate.

Anyway back to the trees.

The art of grieving then is the art of slowly letting go.

Life still has so much to offer you.

To enjoy it,

To be joyful about living is the true gift of letting go and surrendering.

I want to end with this quote by the Buddhist monk,

Whose name I will probably say wrong but he's very famous so hopefully you understand me.

His thick nyat nyat han.

Apologies to him.

This is the quote.

The day my mother died I wrote in my journal.

A serious misfortune of my life has arrived.

I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother.

But one night in the highlands of Vietnam I was sleeping in the hut in my hermitage.

I dreamed of my mother.

I saw myself sitting with her and we were having a wonderful talk.

She looked young and beautiful,

Her hair flowing down.

It was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her as if she had never died.

When I woke up it was about two in the morning and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother.

The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear.

I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea.

It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me.

I opened the door and went outside.

The entire hillside was bathed in moonlight.

It was a hill covered with tea plants and my hut was set behind the temple halfway up.

Walking slowly in the moonlight through the rows of tea plants I noticed my mother was still with me.

She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often.

Each time my feet touched the earth I knew my mother was there with me.

I knew this body was not mine but a living continuation of my mother and my father and my grandparents.

And great grandparents of all my ancestors.

Those feet that I saw as my feet were actually our feet.

Together my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil.

From that moment on the idea that I had lost my mother no longer existed.

All I had to do was look at the palm of my hand,

Feel the breeze on my face or the earth underneath my feet to remember that my mother is always with me,

Available at any time.

That's from his book No Death No Fear.

And this is where I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

I'm going to leave you now with the birdsong to think and what we've just discussed.

Or to just simply enjoy the sound of life.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for sharing your time and your energy with me.

I hope I'll see you soon.

Goodbye.

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