Mindfulness As A Support In Times Of Grief & Loss

Welcome everyone.

It's good to see you and happy Sunday.

Tonight's talk is titled Mindfulness as a Support in Times of Grief.

And this week I have really just been aware that many people have been talking about the grief.

Grief in many different forms which we'll get to.

But I thought it might be useful and I hope it is useful tonight to spend some time talking about grief.

And this week a number of you I know saw the post that I reposted by Sharon Salzberg that said,

Very simply,

We cannot avoid pain,

But we can transform our response to it.

And when I read it,

I thought that's so true,

Isn't it?

Both parts of it.

It is impossible to avoid pain in this lifetime.

And we do have a choice in the way we respond to it.

And that's one of the beautiful gifts of mindfulness.

As long as we're in these human bodies,

We'll experience the natural ups and downs of life.

Pain and pleasure,

Gain and loss,

Praise and blame,

And fame and insignificance.

It's funny,

When I was younger,

I used to think if I just got psychologically healthy enough,

I would be able to avoid the difficult member of each of those pairs.

The loss,

The pain,

The blame,

And the feelings of insignificance.

But it never quite worked out that way for me.

And finally,

I met a really wonderful teacher in my 30s who imparted some very simplistic wisdom.

She explained to me with a great deal of love and gentleness that there was absolutely no avoiding these states.

They simply are a part of being human.

And Sharon reminds us of this in the post that she also reminds us that we have a choice of how we respond to the pain and blame and loss and feelings of insignificance that do go hand in hand with being human.

I'm so aware,

As I am sure we all are,

That as this pandemic continues,

More and more people are suffering all kinds of losses.

From the loss of a sense of freedom to go where one wants,

The loss of human physical contact,

The loss of financial well-being,

The loss of health,

And for at least,

I think,

Over 90,

000 people now in our country alone,

The loss of life.

I was having coffee recently with a dear friend and she had sadly recently experienced the death of her own mother and she was sharing a bit about her acute grief process.

She said after her mother passed away that the immediate experience that arose within her was,

No,

This shouldn't have happened.

I don't want this.

Why did this happen?

But as a long-term mindfulness practitioner,

She said she really noticed all of this arising,

This emotional protest arising.

And she was able to see it for what it was,

This refusal to accept that her mom was gone.

And as she noticed this over those first few days,

She could pull this aversive reaction apart from just the sheer sadness.

And she said as she began to do this,

She actually witnessed the transformation of the felt sensations in her body.

In the protest,

The pushing away from the truth of her mom's death,

The grief felt sharp,

Jagged,

And harsh.

But slowly over those first few days as she moved from,

No,

This shouldn't have happened to,

Yes,

This has happened.

She said she felt the grief itself soften,

Which I just thought was so beautiful.

The edges around the heart space became smooth and the grief itself began to flow again.

And with this transformation,

The grief became a reflection of her love for her mom,

Not a more complicated mixture of demands that life be different than it is.

And I share this with you really to emphasize that when mindfulness is a part of the response to pain and loss,

We're able to see all the parts of the experience we're having.

We are able to tease apart the body sensations,

The heartbreak,

The queasy feeling in our gut,

The lump in our throat,

The heat in our face.

We're able to see the specific emotions that are arising and also witness the thoughts and the stories that are being told and created in real time.

You know,

With mindfulness,

We actually can hear the inner protest,

The inner no.

We feel the clenching in our gut and the tightness in our throat,

The jagged edges around the heart space.

And with strong enough mindfulness,

We're not fooled by the thoughts and the stories that arise.

You know,

The ones like my life will never,

Ever be the same.

I won't possibly be able to endure this.

This shouldn't have happened.

And the one that I think we all get caught by the why me.

All of these extra add ons that turn pain and loss into personal suffering.

And without mindfulness,

As these thoughts and stories take shape,

We tend to feel more and more isolated,

Separate from all the other billions of humans who have also suffered loss,

Who have had pain,

Both emotional and physical.

We start to feel that separation instead of that collective humanness that actually often provides us some bit of relief to know that this is a natural part of human existence.

But it doesn't have to be like that.

It doesn't have to be that we get lost in the confusion.

We can find our way back out,

Back to the truth of the moment,

The actual loss itself.

You know,

As the Taoists say,

10,

000 joys and 10,

000 sorrows.

Another way of saying that life always contains both pain and pleasure,

Gain and loss.

I often look at grief as this just powerful combination of pain and loss coupled together.

Over the years,

Through my own mindfulness practice and walking this Buddhist Eightfold Path,

There have been countless opportunities to practice seeing and being with my response to the painful aspects of my life,

To the deaths,

The losses and the aspects that tend to lead to heartbreak.

And through these years,

It's been helpful for me to come up with a way to meet these experiences,

To bring some consciousness to this time that can just take our breath away.

And it's a fourfold process and I think of it as letting it in,

Letting it be,

Letting it go and growing.

And there are many ways to turn toward pain and loss,

Toward grief,

To learn to be with it,

To witness it,

To hold it.

And this is just one,

But I thought I would share it with you tonight and perhaps you would find it useful as well.

So the first step is let it in.

Don't push it away.

Whenever something is unpleasant,

Our natural human tendency is to push it away before we even know it.

It's like a reflex.

Letting it in requires the pause and the willingness to see and feel what's arising that is unpleasant.

And it's here in letting it in that we say yes,

It's already here.

So instead of that,

No,

That protest,

We simply say yes.

And we make the choice not to chase what is pleasant as a way to move away from what is painful.

So we don't start looking for the quickest distraction,

The easiest fix,

But we make that mindful,

Loving choice to let the pain in.

And the next step is to let it be.

As we maintain recognition of its presence,

We make this conscious choice to stay with it,

Just as it is.

We gently resist trying to change it.

And instead,

We continue to meet it where it is,

Where it is in the body.

And we get to know it through the body sensations first,

And then we can begin to check in with the mind.

But we stay with the body.

We stay with the heart.

Even when it feels like our breath is being taken away.

We try,

If we can,

To go a little deeper and stay a little longer.

There can also be a good bit of stillness here.

Not always,

But there certainly can be.

I once read an interview with Leonard Cohen,

And I remember this so well,

It struck me.

He said best he could tell that the depression he had felt recurrently through his life had been there because he touched those feelings deeply,

But not deeply enough.

That there is this place we get where we touch the pain,

But then we simultaneously hold a bit of aversion to it.

In this place,

We're nowhere.

We're hanging out in partial awareness and partial aversion.

But with mindfulness,

We can see this too.

And when we experience this,

Notice the aversion,

We can try and open up just a little bit more to what's actually arising and letting it be.

As we become more mindful in our lives,

We also began to differentiate between the stories and the thoughts that the mind creates and the emotions and body sensations that are typically felt within the body.

This is a big awakening for us on this path of mindfulness,

That place where we really actually recognize that there is a difference between what's arising in the mind in the form of thoughts or mental activity and what's arising in the body.

And as we can separate out these two,

We begin to have the ability to turn toward the mind to see what it's up to.

What beliefs correspond to this particular pain in the body?

What thoughts are arising as a result of this pain?

And how much of what is arising belongs in the past?

In this process of letting it be,

This investigation is not a harsh investigation.

It's not an interrogation.

It's a gentle,

Soft,

Not pressuring to get anywhere,

But opening to see what's actually here.

And then we move into letting it go.

As we see for ourself the ability to stay with it,

To begin to see the pain,

The grief for what it is,

To see any old patterns that are connected or old thoughts.

We began to experience the grief as not as scary as we thought it was when we so quickly ran from it.

We see that it's not necessary to maintain a constricted body and a closed off heart.

And this letting go first relates to the body.

We take a breath and we allow a long exhale.

We relax the shoulders and we open the heart space.

We release the gut and through the body we begin to create more spaciousness around the grief,

Around the pain.

And this letting go is not trying to change the experience.

It's just a natural shifting and changing that we experience during our willingness to stay as the pain naturally shifts and changes because everything does.

We just shift and change with it.

And as I said before,

Perhaps we become more aware of the space around the pain,

The aspects of the body and the aspects of life that aren't consumed by the pain or loss.

So we gradually and gently began to let all parts of life back in.

And through this letting it in,

Letting it be and letting it go,

We grow.

Again,

Not because we're trying and striving to get somewhere,

But because growth is a natural consequence of meeting and embracing ourselves fully.

So as the painful experience is known and met and released,

We pay attention to what remains or what's new.

Perhaps it is felt as an absence of something,

A spaciousness,

Or perhaps there's a new sense of connection to yourself or to someone else or even back to the world at large.

Perhaps there are new thoughts arising that are more loving and more caring.

In fact,

The biggest gift I believe we receive from staying with our own heart in the midst of pain,

Loss,

Grief,

Is the greater development of the compassionate heart.

So I want to end tonight with a poem by Ellen Bass,

And it's titled The Thing Is.

The thing is to love life,

To love it even when you have no stomach for it.

And everything you've held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands.

Your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you,

It's tropical heat thickening the air.

Heavy as water,

More fit for gills than lungs.

When grief weights you down like your own flesh,

Only more of it,

An obesity of grief.

You think,

How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face between your palms,

A plain face,

No charming smile,

No violet eyes.

And you say,

Yes,

I will take you.

I will love you again.

So I think I will end there and just invite us into a few minutes of sitting quietly,

Allowing this to be digested and just noticing if there's anything that's arising as you sit quietly that perhaps needs your attention,

Or that you would like to bring into our community discussion.

Thank you for your attention.