Surviving Grief
and Loss
By Deborah Ferris
Introduction
Grief is a natural and normal feeling that we all experience when we lose someone or something that is dear to us. In fact, we experience grief as a result of various kinds of losses such as the death of a loved one, divorce or moving to a new home in a new city/town. We suffer from other losses too. We may grieve when we experience financial upheavals, job layoffs, retirement, ageing, death of a pet, illness that leads to loss of independence. Parents grieve the loss of a baby through miscarriage or still birth and victims of abuse grieve the loss of their innocence and trust.
When we don’t process our grief, feel our pain and move through it, earlier losses can accumulate making it even more difficult for us. The result can be that we find ourselves now grieving from an even “bigger” loss or another loss on top of others.
This article will provide you with some information that can help you with the loss that you are feeling. Much of the information provides examples that particularly apply to people who are experiencing grief through the loss of a loved one. However, the symptoms and the ways to survive grief around being laid off or fired from a job or from loss of independence due to ill health are the same.
If you are experiencing profound grief with depression and finding yourself unable to function day-to-day, you should seek professional help.
What are the symptoms
of grief?
When we are immersed in grief we may experience a range of feelings or sensations including:
- Numbness, shock
- Apathy/loss of aliveness
- Anger, resentment, rage
- Sadness and crying
- Sorrow
- Guilt (for surviving when our loved one has gone or for things left unsaid or undone)
- Worry
- Loneliness
- Fear
- Anxiety
- Confusion, trouble concentrating and focusing
- Physical sensations or states such as shaking, heart beating fast, sweating, tiredness, loss of appetite or overeating, insomnia
- Dreams in which loved one is alive or imagining seeing your loved one in familiar places following the death of someone close to you.
These sensations and feelings vary as we move through our grief. Initially we may feel shock, denial, anger and deep sorrow. Later on, the shock is gone but we may still feel anger, deep sorrow and some of the other symptoms listed.
How long does grief
last?
The feelings and sensations that accompany grief may ebb and flow as you move through your grief.
Grief is like a loop in which you may experience intense feelings after the initial shock or even an initial denial. However, there are breaks in the grieving process and the intensity weakens.
As you move through the loop of grief you will find times of relief and you will find yourself accepting the loss and beginning to reinvest in others as you start to move forward with your life. Depending on the nature of your grief, your personality, your faith, your relationship with the deceased (in cases of death of a loved one) and how you process your loss, you make take weeks, months or longer to really be able to feel good again in your life. It can take two to five years of mourning the loss of a significant relationship with varying amounts of time spent feeling the pain of the loss. This doesn’t mean that in that time period you don’t feel happy most of the time. It does mean that people experience sadness and sorrow especially at significant anniversary dates and at other times.
If you find that you continue to feel overwhelmed, depressed and unable to function, then you need to get more support for yourself. Some grief and losses continue to be with us for the rest of our lives but we are still okay. For example, if you are a parent that loses a child you may still feel deep sadness about this loss years later, yet you are able to lead a full, happy and satisfying life. You never forget the person and yet the focus of your life is on the positive, good memories that never leave you.
What can we do when
we are grieving? How can we get through our suffering?
There are many ways that we can help ourselves when someone close to us dies or we suffer a significant loss that shatters our normal life. Getting support from loved ones and looking after yourself are key to your recovery. Journal writing, meditation, body awareness and breathing can be very effective tools as well. In addition you may want to explore wholistic therapies like Reiki and Hypnosis to help you deal effectively with your grief.
1. Support
Get support from caring and nurturing friends and family members. You may also want to join a bereavement group or seek professional support from a therapist to help you to process your grief. Expressing and sharing your loss with someone who listens with empathy can help you to realize that you aren’t alone.
Getting help with baby sitting or someone to run errands can also be helpful if you need time for yourself. Learning new skills can also help to ease this time of sorrow especially when friends or family help you with learning the skills or help by encouraging you to make positive changes as you are ready.
2. Look after yourself
It’s important to live as balanced a life as you can at this time. You can help yourself to deal with your loss by eating healthy foods, getting some exercise and rest. If you are having trouble sleeping, you can use deep breathing and relaxation tapes or CDs to help. You may want to read books on grief so that you have a better understanding of how grief affects us and how you can work through your loss. Occasionally it’s healthy to take “time off” from grieving by taking a short vacation or a trip somewhere, doing something you enjoy.
3. Open your heart
Practice surrendering to the heart and feel the feelings of pain and sorrow as they arise rather than trying to control them. Imagine opening and softening your heart (the heart energy centre also called a chakra situated in the middle of your chest). As you do this, imagine opening the heart with tender mercy so that you can allow the feelings to arise and pass through. Have patience and compassion for yourself if your heart doesn’t open. Opening your heart can be part of a meditation practice.
Do this in a safe place where you feel comfortable and you have privacy or you may wish to do it with a friend or a professional therapist.
4. Writing
If you have lost a loved one, you can write letters and talk to the person who has passed on. This is an important way for you to say what was left unsaid. Usually a couple of pages are about the right length.
Writing in a journal when you are feeling the feelings can also help to open the way between the mind and the heart. This can lead to insights and guidance from your own inner wisdom. Forgiveness is also important. You may feel abandoned. Forgive your loved one for leaving you if you feel bereft and forgive yourself for any anger and guilt that may arise. If you have loss a job, you need to work through the anger and sadness that you feel towards the employer or boss and you can choose forgiveness for your sake so you can move forward with your life to finding a better job in a better situation.
5. Blessings & Body awareness
Know that love is never lost. According to Stephen Levine in his book Unattended Sorrow, Recovering from Loss, our loved ones live in our marrow. They are a part of us. They are in our thoughts and memories and we never lose these.
In the early or even later stages of grief you may want to send blessings to your departed loved one directly from your heart to their’s.
You can visualize yourself saying goodbye or even say it out loud and as you do this you wish them well on their journey. Tell your loved one you love them and will miss them. Conversations can continue as you wish them well. Your love is always within you.
If you have lost a job or are grieving over a loss of independence because of a serious illness, you can ask God/the Divine/the Creator to help you to move through this grieving. At some point you do need to say goodbye to the past and accept where you are at currently and out of that acceptance you can find a new way of being and acting that will help you to move on.
You can imagine softening the pain that you feel about your loss. Notice where you carry the pain and sorrow in your body – is it a hardness in your belly?; a tightness in your jaw?; a contraction around your breath?; a tightness in the neck?; a stiffness in the back? Soften the belly, soften the eyes, the mind and continue to soften the chest. Allow yourself to release where you have been holding in or holding back. To let go of the tension of the body and to allow it to relax can be very helpful in letting the pain flow through.
Honour your loved ones
As well you can honour your loved one beyond the usual memorial or funeral service. You may wish to donate funds or establish special tributes in your loved one’s name whether it is a tree planting ceremony, money for a scholarship or contributing to a worthwhile cause or changing legislation. There are many ways that you can honour the life of the one who has passed on.
If you have recently become separated or divorced, you can acknowledge this new state and place that you are in through a special ceremony or gathering with friends and loved ones. By marking the occasion you help yourself to take another step forward into your new life.
If you have moved to a new home in a
You can also celebrate and cleanse your new home. You may use incense, sage or sweet grass to purify your new home as well as the usual cleaning that takes place when you move to a new place. You might even invite your new neighbours over for a party as a celebration of your being in a new residence.
It is important to say goodbye to your old home and to
respect any sad feelings about the move such as being apart from family or
friends. You have left behind the
familiar and now you are starting somewhere new. Sometimes we move to new places not because
we want to but because of other members of our family or our jobs take us to a
new home and
6. Practice loving-kindness
Send loving-kindness into those parts of yourself abandoned to hopelessness and fear. Imagine flooding and surrounding the area with a soothing kindness. Send love to yourself even though you are in pain. Loving kindness is a nonjudgmental state of clarity and love that accesses the heart and calms the mind. It’s important not to judge yourself and where you are at with your grief. Others might say things or do things that feel judgmental. Most people find it hard to be present with someone who is suffering from grief and just want them to be able to move through it as quickly as possible. It’s important to give yourself permission to continue to allow the feelings to surface so that your grief can be processed.
Make peace with your sorrow. Encourage yourself toward forgiveness and gratitude.
7. Practice Breathing
Breathe in love into the heart in the centre of your chest and breathe out sorrow. Continue this breath work for 10 minutes or longer. Slow and deep breathing can clear the blockages. Keep breathing through the layers of fear and disappointment that block the entrance to the heart.
8. Tapping
Also while breathing into the centre of your chest, into your heart chakra, you can tap lightly there in the centre. Tapping helps to shed the armouring, the defenses we put up so we won’t feel hurt. You can also massage gently and make small circles in the centre of your heart chakra. And while doing this you can process or remember love and loss and this will help you to integrate your loss. Meet your pain with love.
Spaciousness, mercy, and patience all help to release the grief and pain. You can develop these qualities through a daily meditation practice.
9. Singing and Chanting
By opening your throat through singing and/or chanting, you help to open yourself, your body and your mind and to reinforce your spirit. The sound vibrations help to heal and bring peace.
Tibetan monks and First Nations people have been known to spend hours chanting or singing. The sound of the voice raised in healing chants reverberates through the body/mind/spirit as does the sound of drums, bells or crystal singing bowls.
10. Meditate and reflect on:
Who am I now that I’ve suffered this loss? When we lose someone through death or we lose our youth through ageing or we feel a loss of self because we feel we are not good enough in some way, then we find ourselves searching for some meaning as we try to make sense of what has happened to us.
Who are we when we have lost one of our main roles in life, the loss of work or the loss of a job? Who are we when we lose our partner through separation or divorce? Who are we when our parents are lost to us through death? We may question who we are when we have significant monetary and financial losses or collapses or when we lose the possibility of ever giving birth to our own child, never being able to be a parent of that child. Our losses bring with them loss of our expectations, hopes and dreams. Any significant loss causes us to question the meaning of our life and where we are going in life.
As you reflect and meditate, just continue observing the various labels you have or the roles you play in your life and watch the states of loss you experience until you come to the true essence of who you really are. This is your essential or authentic self, the part of you that will never leave you. This part of you is always alive and vibrant. Once you peel back the layers of being a employee/employer, mother/father, sister/brother, woman/man, rich/poor and so on then you find the real you.
The observer part of us helps us to find the inner, essential self and the opening of the heart draws us into peace and deep love. Having compassion, an active form of wisdom, for yourself helps you to open the heart. Imagine that a greater Presence loves you with a limitlessness that goes beyond any boundary.
This Presence forgives you for every insensitive or unkind action you have ever done. You can develop this tenderness and mercy for yourself and others through practicing daily meditation.
Sitting in meditation for 20 minutes every day helps to still the busy mind and it can be helpful in accessing emotions that are hidden below the surface. These emotions can then be released safely.
Prayer can also help in times of deep anguish and sorrow. It can help to give over your burden of grief to a greater power. For those with faith, they find that praying helps them to open the channels of communication between God (the Divine) and that they find peace, love and stillness through their prayers.
Prayer can also bring about answers to the questions we may have regarding how we are meant to lead our life without a loved one or perhaps how we might go in a new direction if we have lost our source of employment and finances.
When we pray, we need to pray with a sense of thankfulness and gratitude that we can give over our problems, our grief and losses and that we appreciate the wonders of prayer. It has been documented and researched that prayer can help bring about healing for those who are sick and certainly many believe that prayer can bring about healing from grief.
11. Walking in Nature
Walking and being present with yourself and the world around you helps you to feel alive. As you are walking, bring awareness to your body and to its aliveness (feeling the energy, the sensations flowing, pulsing and tingling through you). This too can help to open the heart.
When walking in nature you can sense the majesty of the trees, flowers and animals that beautify your world. This majesty connects us to the aliveness and stillness within us. Looking at a flower, sunlight dappling on a stream or watching a bird fly across the blue sky brings us into this moment right now and causes us to slow down and be present. When we are in the now, this present moment, we are not lost in our thoughts about the past or the future. This can lead to your heart expanding and opening so you can feel the feelings and go into the well of love that abides there. Instead of holding back the pain, it can be released and healing can take place.
12. Body-based
therapies
Massage, Reiki and other body-based therapies can also help us to process our loss and to clear mental/emotional and physical blockages and hurts.
These treatments go beyond just pampering as they can provide us with a therapeutic way of relaxing and releasing the knots of grief whether physical or emotional.
Reiki, for example, is an ancient, hands-on healing art, that causes us to relax deeply and to heal at all levels of our being, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. It is a complimentary and wholistic practice that works well with conventional western medicine, hypnosis, massage and psychotherapy. As Reiki flows through the chakras or energy centres within us, it helps to balance and harmonize our bodies and minds.
Conclusion:
To move through your grief you need to connect with your support community (friends, families, neighbours, co-workers, as well as professionals if needed) and take care of yourself physically as well as mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
It is of course vital that you connect with your heart so that you can process your grief, to allow the sorrow to flow through. You can help yourself to open the heart through meditation, prayer, walking in nature, tapping the body especially the heart centre, chanting/singing and writing. Being with friends and family can also help to ease the burden of sorrow. Allow the feelings, the tears to flow through you so you can heal and as you heal you will be able to begin your life anew.
You can also help yourself to process your loss by experiencing healing through Reiki, Hypnotherapy and Psychotherapy. Trained professionals in these areas can help you to heal and move through the grief process.
While some losses such as the loss of health or the death of a child can result in our leading very different lives then we imagined, we can still celebrate the life that we have. We never forget the past situation or the permanent loss of a loved one but we can still lead a life of love, joy and gratitude.
This article was
written by Deborah Ferris who has been practicing meditation since 1989. It was through her practice of Vipassna
Meditation that she re-experienced the opening of the heart and the healing
energy of Reiki.
Deborah has been
helping clients to grow, learn and heal since 1996. Her business, Healing Connection, offers you
support and encouragement so you can connect with your inner self to make the
changes you need and want to make whether that is relaxation or changing habits
and behaviours or processing losses that are stopping you from leading the life
you want to lead. She also offers
meditation and personal growth workshops.
Deborah has always
enjoyed writing as a way to express what she sees and feels so others can
benefit in this sharing. She has written
everything from political speeches to feature articles to news releases and to
poems.
Certified
Hypnotherapist, Psychotherapist & Reiki Master
Healing
Connection (519) 688-9282
Tillsonburg
Website: www.healingconnection.ca
‘Connect to your
subconscious for a change’