There is no story today. Just more thoughts and ideas about grief and how it clings to us. Just more words about finding our way when we experience loss.
It has been my experience that when we can find our way to seeing grief as a form of gratitude we are well on our way to understanding what Frank Ostaseki means when he says ‘pain is inevitable but suffering is optional.’
When explored and accepted as a necessary and vital part of our human condition, grief can then also be explored, expressed and accepted as a unique and sacred form of gratitude.
That sentence, boiled down, says, grief is gratitude. That's a tough concept to swallow when we are initially assaulted by a loss in our lives. In my work with those in the acuity of grief, I am very open that if we work together I will be working to help them make friends with their grief. Not with whatever it was that caused the grief but once the assault has occurred, it will forever be a piece of their backstory. It will always be something to carry. So it makes sense to me that finding a way to befriend the grief and learn to carry it in a way that does not interfere with the ability to experience joy is the right thing to strive for. Ignoring it or trying to get over it, looking for a way to leave it behind, never really seems to work very well. Because it is part of who we are once it comes.
Pain occurs when something treasured, goes away. Pain is immediate and acute when someone we love, dies. Pain occurs when something or someone we have formed an emotional attachment to, no longer behaves or exists in the way they did when our attachment formed. But suffering occurs when we stay attached to the pain. And most of the time, we stay attached by being in resistance to it. We are often completely unaware of that connection; that pushing something away actually keeps it more present.
There are many spiritual and religious practices that teach non-attachment. In my own life and in my work life especially, I often talk of not being attached to outcome; but I have never totally bought into the idea of absolute non-attachment.
I rather enjoy the feeling of emotional attachment. I like the way it feels to have things and people in my life that I treasure.
And I like the way it feels to be treasured. And I know, because I treasure something or someone, that when they are no more, I will experience pain.
The pain of grief is sometimes felt deeply and sometimes felt less deeply. An easy way to put it is to say the depth of the grief will be equal to the depth of the love for the thing that has gone away. So when a child, a parent, a partner or a beloved pet dies, we might experience profound and almost frightening grief. The enormity of it can feel like too much. The initial response can often feel like numbness because if we were to truly feel the full impact of the loss all at once, it might take us out. So, we shut down, we curl up and we sleep.
Mourning our grief, giving in to the emotions surrounding whatever has happened, is something that requires us to lean into the razor’s edge of pain we know awaits us and it is something we can learn to acquire a comfort level with as we continue to live our lives, partly due to the fact that life will always bring us opportunities to practice.
The connection between losing something we love and experiencing pain can make some people harden their hearts. It can make us not want to give in to loving anything because we learn that if that thing goes away we suffer in ways we think we can not handle. Most of us are not taught how to mourn losses or even that giving expression to the pain of loss is how we process it, how we move through it, how we assimilate it into who we now are in ways that do not interfere with us living fully and knowing joy. Our losses become part of our story, part of who we are. If we do not honor our losses, if we do not allow for the emotions to be felt and shared and expressed, then we carry them in destructive and burdensome ways. Grief does not go away. So doesn't it make sense to look at healthy ways the pain can be spoken about, felt, cried over and befriended?
Doesn't it make sense that this topic is one that could be an important piece of how we can make the world better? Clearly, it makes sense to me or I wouldn't be making all these podcasts about grief and loss and how we can love ourselves and one another through the losses in our lives thus creating healthier happier human beings.
Living in a constant state of anything, in my opinion is unrealistic for most people.. There are far too many balls in the air in most of our lives; the juggling act of the various hats we wear.
I sometimes say, when I am in the midst of a particularly tricky day, "....the bowling balls are in the air and someone or some situation just poured baby oil all over them".
But, if I were to strive for any continuous state of being, it would be to strive for a constant state of gratitude. A constant state of yes and thank you would mean a constant state of no resistance. And no resistance means eliminating one of the greatest sources of pain in our lives.
It isn’t an easy thing to achieve. The moment I think I’m there, a bowling ball hits me on the head. And I can almost always identify that it was a result of being in resistance to something. Or I was simply just not paying attention. But when I do get the two by four up the side of my head, understanding the connection between suffering and resistance has made it much easier for me to set things right much more quickly.
No resistance. Less suffering. An easy idea to articulate but a more difficult one to assimilate as a way of being. The people who have invited me into their grief have helped me come to see and trust that pain and beauty co-exist, that the gems hidden in the losses of life are worth risking love for. That in the end, it really does boil down to that one emotion of love.
So, it’s a process. It’s a life. I’m living my life and I’m writing down, on occasion, these little epiphanies I have along the way.
One day, I too, will no longer be. I will cross through the veil that all of us eventually cross through and there will be no more of me living this life; the one I know now, the one I am leaning into and sharing with you.
For now, for this brief little bit of time, I’m having a glorious time discovering those thin onion skin layers of awareness around living in a place of contentment; a place of welcomed cohesiveness with my heart ~ not as an organ that pumps and pushes blood (although I am deeply grateful to it for that as well) but as a center of my being human. It only takes knowing that feeling once to know when I fall away from it and that is all it takes to get back.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for taking the time to listen.
This is SJ and I hope you will join me again WTVGT