Day 14 Practice: Grief
“When we grieve, we allow ourselves to feel the truth of our pain, the measure of betrayal or tragedy in our life. By our willingness to mourn, we slowly acknowledge, integrate and accept the truth of our losses. Sometimes the best way to let go is simply to grieve. Releasing the grief we carry can be a long, tear-filled process. Yet it follows the natural intelligence of the body and heart. Trust it, trust the unfolding.”
At first this may seem like an unlikely practice for our 15 days together. Why would we ever want to practice grief? We typically avoid, distract, or ignore feeling anything so unpleasant as grief but the truth is none of us are fortunate enough to avoid this universal experience. Grief with no fixed expiration date, is an inescapable truth of our human condition. And to learn how to deal with grief, we must be willing to grieve: to feel it, hurt/break/cry from it, learn from it, and of course to heal from it. Grief isn't easy, in fact it’s the worst but it's a necessity for us all. When we have the courage to be with our grief/ work with our grief, our hearts soften and open. To grieve is a prerequisite to deepen our compassion. When love meets grief, compassion is created. So, you can say grief and love occur in tandem. For all of us who love, grief is inevitable.
And maybe we just pause for a moment, to consider how much grief we've encountered over the last few years as a collective, as a society? The tremendous amount of loss, change, and uncertainty we’ve experienced in the recent past doesn't even considering our own personal experiences with loss: the loss of loved ones, relationships changes, health changes, changes in job or financial stability, and so on. The impermanence of life can often be too much.
So, we practice being with our sadness and heartache. We sit with it, feel it, and work with it rather than avoid. We honor our grief and broken heartedness so that we can transform it into love and meaning. With the courage to grieve, we discover the deep and immense love that grief reveals. And there can be no time frame for this work, there is no user manual in how to get it right. It is a process of patience and compassion, of hurting and healing, and of grieving and loving.
And through time, courage, patience, and perspective, we can create compassion for our heartache. We can create spaciousness to find meaning in our difficult experience, meaning in our loss and sorrows. This practice is not easy, it is painful, but this is our work, our journey in being human, in loving, and in healing. May we live full and meaningful lives not in spite of grief but because of it.
“Embrace your grief, for there your soul will grow.”
“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. we think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and then they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
“The love not informed by our grief is not a mature love.”
“When we learn to be with grief, to surrender to it, we then find we can do something with it.”
“To embrace suffering culminates in greater empathy, the capacity to feel what it is like for the other to suffer, which is the ground for unsentimental compassion and love.”
“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
“The healing from the pain is in the pain.”
“But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer. ”
“Grief is the response to a broken bond of belonging.”
“Our loss is precious to us because it can wake us up to love and loving action.”
“Beneath anger, grief; beneath grief, love. Beyond that, the clear blue sky.”
“Pain is a plea for presence, a call for compassion. ”
There is a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken,
a shatteredness out of which blooms the unshatterable.
There is a sorrow beyond all grief which leads to joy
and a fragility out of whose depths emerges strength.
There is a hollow space too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness we are sanctioned into being.
There is a cry deeper than all sound whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open to the place inside which is unbreakable and whole,
while learning to sing.