Honoring Your Wedding Vows

Being married again has given me lots to ponder these last two weeks. I am truly thrilled with my bride and the life we are building together. And I am reminded often that this never would have been possible if I had not fully let go of Deb. And that's what has me pondering recently.

Tonight's post is likely to be the strongest thing I have ever written, so I'll preface it by a word or two of warning. First off, if you are newly bereaved or within the first year, this post is not really meant for you, so you may want to give it a pass.

In fact, even if you're in year two or three, you may want to give it a pass. It really is that strong. I'm writing it specifically for that one person out there who truly wants to let go of their dead spouse, but something is holding them back.

So, if you continue to read this post despite my warnings and are appalled, hurt, or angered, then I'm sorry, this message wasn't meant for you. Please spare me the hate mail ;-) The one person out there for whom this is intended will recognize that it is for them. I don't mean to be so blunt, but it needs to be said, and I have yet to read this anywhere else. And please keep in mind that I'm not some shrink in an ivory tower — I have been where you are, and I can appreciate the kind of pain you are experiencing. I would relieve you of that pain. That is my motivation, nothing more.

Last chance to turn back!

---

Marriage is a curious thing. As I was mentioning in the epilogue to my story, I was more emotional while reciting my wedding vows than I had anticipated. The following simple words of traditional wedding vows have been dancing around in my head:

'to have and to hold
from this day forward;
for better, for worse,
for richer, for poorer,
in sickness and in health,
to love and to cherish,
till death us do part'

It is that last line that has me pondering.

Marriage is a contract. In that contract, we state what we will do, and the conditions under which we will perform.

I've been a contractor for well over 10 years now, so I'm quite familiar with the language used in contracts. Every time I sign a new one, I always pay close attention to the "exit clause." I want to know how much notice I have to give them, and how much notice they have to give me, and when I'll receive what is owed to me, and what restrictions are placed upon me at the end of the contract, like not working for a competitor for 12 months.

Most of the IT contracts I sign run into dozens of pages and use reams of legal jargon. So it must be the simple, compact, and concise nature of the vows above that has struck me. Such a contrast from most modern contracts!

You have probably already figured out where I'm going with this. At death, we are parted, and all our contractual obligations are dissolved. There are no restrictions placed upon us at the end of the contract. We no longer have our mate, we no longer hold them, and we are no longer obligated to love and cherish them.

Yes, I know that last line is anathema for just about everyone reading it. Relax — I'm not writing it for you.

I'm writing it for that one person (you know who you are) who wants to let go of your dead spouse and go on living, but you feel a deep sense of guilt about doing so. You feel that you will be going against your word, that you will be out of your integrity, and that you will be dishonoring your late mate.

You will not be doing any of these things.

What you essentially said in your marriage vows was, "I will do all these things while you are alive, but when you are no longer alive, I will no longer do these things."

You probably never thought about it like that before, did you?

Does that mean that the moment your spouse dies, you no longer love or cherish them? No! What it does mean is that you are no longer obligated to do so. You are now free to do so, but you don't have to do so anymore. You are now free from that bond, that responsibility.

In other words, any lingering guilt you feel about letting go and living your own life is without foundation. Think back to your vows, and ask yourself if you have fulfilled them.

Now that your spouse is dead, you have completed your marriage contract. You have fulfilled your obligations. You are now free to direct your attentions elsewhere.

You are free to live as you please.

Please do so.

Being Human

Do not search for the truth;
only cease to cherish opinions.

— Chien-chih Seng-ts'an, Third Zen Patriarch [606AD]

I'm half-way through Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, and I've been mulling over the above quote since I read it late this afternoon. For many years, the pursuit of truth has long been a passion of mine, but since I attended a free 10-day silent meditation course this past January, I have not been so interested in "the truth." I have, however, been interested in noticing my opinions and being aware of my limited perception of the world, so I smiled when I read the zen proverb today.

Ekhart has a number of interesting things to say in his book, several of which I think directly apply to widow/ers. I'll touch on one of them briefly tonight, and it will help to clarify my position on a philosophical point.

I like the way Ekhart explains that our task is to find the balance between human and being. Humans have form while beings are formless. So many people get caught up in the world of forms that they miss the spiritual side, the formless side. Yet forms are important: we need to eat, sleep, stay warm, and participate in various other activities in the material world. The world of forms cannot be ignored or marginalized. But it is not the only world.

The formless world of our being is the world beyond our thoughts, feelings, and emotions. It is in that world that we are. We are not our thoughts, we are not our feelings, we are not our emotions. There is a part of us beyond these three things, the part that observes the thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Cultivating awareness of our thoughts, feelings, and emotions will help us get in touch with who we are. Why would we want to do this? In my case, on day nine of my Vipassana meditation course, I discovered the Vic who has no problems. Problems are limited to the world of forms. Wouldn't you like to be free of your problems?

Because our spouse is dead, it is easy to get caught up in our story. "My life is ruined" is a story. "My spouse is dead" is a fact. But how can we state the fact without getting caught up in the story? The story is a collection of thoughts, feelings, and emotions. But we are not our stories. And our stories do not serve us well. They hold us back, keeping us caught up in the human part of our being. We need to let our stories go.

But don't get me wrong here — a major part of our grief work is expressing our story, getting it out there. We need to get the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of our bereavement out. That's why I am a big advocate of grief support groups, especially those run by people who have already suffered a loss themselves. Attending these meetings and sharing your story is a safe and appropriate way to grieve, one that won't alienate you from your friends and family.

But expressing our story is different from identifying with it. If you are still saying your life is ruined after a couple of years, you probably want to start examining why you have taken on this persona. What does it do for you? Does it replace a previous persona, the one you had when you were married, the story of the loving wife or husband, caregiver, lover, friend, companion? Has that story been replaced by this new story? Are you willing to entertain the idea that there is a you who has no story? Needs no story?

It would be easy for me to get caught up in my story. My wife died so young. We had so much left to do. Her slow death by cancer was agonizing to witness, and there was so little I could do to alleviate her pain or comfort her spirit. I was left alone to raise our 2 year old son. His life will never be the same, growing up in the world with no mommy. You get the idea.

But what would this story get me? What would it accomplish? Maybe I could get some sympathy, the first time it is told to someone new. Probably not the second time, and good luck finding that new person to tell them a third time ;-) Or, I could use it as an excuse for not accomplishing more in my life. He loved her so much, and now he is struggling to simply survive. Look how devastated he is. How brave he is, facing life alone as a single dad. Or some other such claptrap.

Do I still tell my story? Yes, at the grief support group, as a way to show newly bereaved widow/ers that life does go on. Here's how I tell my story now:

Hi, my name is Vic, and my wife Deb died of cervical cancer two years ago at age 32. We were married for 12 and a half years, and I have a five year old son.

That story is not who I am. Those are some facts that are associated with me, with my past. Part of my healing from grief was telling a much more elaborate, personal version of that story, and then letting that story go.

Why am I sharing this with you now? Well, after my last post about biochemical processes, I didn't want to leave you with the impression that I am a behaviorist. I do not believe that we are simply a walking bucket of sloshing chemicals, bumbling about and reacting to our environment, and that bereavement is simply a matter of a scarcity of endorphins and dopamine. No, no, no ;-) But neither is bereavement a purely spiritual matter of losing one's soulmate, the loss of that spiritual being that understood us like no one else. Both aspects are important, both have their place. Finding the balance between the two is key to grief recovery.

Time To Say Goodbye

If at first you don't succeed, you're running about average.

-- M. H. Alderson

How is it that some widow/ers seem to move on fairly quickly after their spouse dies, and others are still deep in grief after several years? I have been asking myself this question for the last few days. I consider myself to be in the first group, but I know people who are in the second group.

I suspect that a big part of my healing was saying goodbye to Deb. No, I don't mean while she was alive. She said goodbye to me 16 months before she died, but I could never bring myself to say goodbye to her until she was dead. The last thing I did before leaving the hospital was kiss her lifeless forehead and say "goodbye."

But that's not what I'm talking about tonight. It took me a number of months to understand that our relationship continued after she was already dead. We are creatures of habit, and I had 14 years worth of habits that involved Deb. Simple things, like what groceries to buy. Complicated things, like deep-seated differences in our personalities. Mentally, I was still involving her in my life months after she was dead.

To me, letting go of your dead spouse means no longer involving them in your life. I needed help in accomplishing this, and I relied heavily on the excellent book The Grief Recovery Handbook. I describe how this book helped me in an early post titled Grief Work.

The main focus of that book is writing and then reading a goodbye letter to your dead spouse. A definitive letter. You are going to say goodbye, and it means goodbye. No longer will he or she be part of your active living. You will not defer to them again, solicit their opinion again, rely on them again. Goodbye means goodbye.

Is this hard to do? Absolutely! It cut me in half to read that final letter out loud. But it was necessary. It put a floor under my grief, a line in the sand. Here, and no further.

But the mind is a creature of habit. And we are addicted to the endorphins our brain generates when we engage our spouse in our day to day life. Over time, these habits have become ruts — familiar grooves through which our thoughts run. We need to break out of those thought patterns if we ever want to heal.

Changing habits, especially mental habits, can be very difficult. And it's not like we have ideal conditions to start from either. Most likely, we're mired in anguish and pain. But change those patterns we must. It is hard, and we will fail. Often. But we need to continue until the thought patterns have changed and we no longer include our dead spouse in our day to day lives.

I'm reminded of the poem "Autobiography In Five Short Chapters" by Portia Nelson:

I

I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I fall in.
I am lost ... I am helpless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes me forever to find a way out.

II

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I am in the same place
but, it isn't my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

III

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in ... it's a habit.
my eyes are open
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

IV

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

V

I walk down another street.

Walking down another street begins with saying goodbye. As you watch this video, ask yourself if now is the time for you to say goodbye as well.

No Problems In The Present Moment

I've written a number of posts now about a major tenet of ho'oponopono, namely that all our problems in life come from our memories. This should be very clear to see as we struggle through bereavement. If you open a newspaper from a neighboring city to the obituaries, I'm sure you can find an obit concerning someone you don't know. Do you feel overwhelming sadness about their death? No? Why? You probably feel overwhelming sadness concerning the death of your spouse. But what is the difference? They are both dead people. The difference is, you have no memories of the dead stranger, but you have tons of memories of your dead spouse.

I was reading part of The Sedona Method yesterday, and I found a great section that takes this concept to a whole new level. It also teaches a powerful life skill that I feel will help you immensely in your grief work.

[from pages 268-270]:

Exploration: There Are No Problems

...I'd like to share one of the most powerful perspectives that we've been exploring in Sedona Method Advanced Courses with you: There are no problems in the present moment. I saved this piece for now, because I know this may be hard for you to accept, but — what if all the supposed problems you have right now are only memories? I challenge you to explore this question for yourself and at least entertain the possibility. If you can even partially accept this notion, and work with it as best you can in the way outlined here, it will give you another powerful tool to transform your life radically for the better.

The reason that problems appear to persist through time is that, whenever they're not here, in this moment, we go looking for them. Yes, we actually seek our problems. We tend to filter our experiences based on the belief that we have a particular problem, unconsciously censoring anything from our awareness that doesn't support that belief, including the fact that the problem is not here NOW.

I have worked with this perspective in the background of my awareness for many years; however it has only been in the last few years that I have used it in our classes and retreats. One of the first times I shared this perspective with a group was at a Seven-day Retreat a few years ago. Henry came to the retreat wearing a leg brace and feeling a lot of pain due to torn ligaments in his knee. His doctors had told him that the pain would probably persist for about six months until all the ligaments healed. So, he was quite skeptical when I told him that even pain is a memory. Yes, there were sensations in the NOW, but the pain itself was only a memory. He was so skeptical, in fact, that he spent the next 24 hours trying to prove me wrong. He was certain that if he got completely present with the sensations he was experiencing, he would still feel pain.

The next day in class, Henry shared that he was more than a little shocked that, despite the fact he had doubted what I said, every time he looked for pain in the present, he couldn't find it. He went on to explain that not only could he not find pain in the present, but there was no more pain to be found period, and his swelling had gone down about 85 percent. He also no longer needed his leg brace to walk!

I invite you to challenge your long cherished problems by embracing at least the possibility that they are only memories and allowing yourself to be open to what you discover.

To release the suffering caused by your perceptions, begin by thinking of a problem that you used to believe you had. (Notice that I have purposely phrased this sentence in the past tense.)

If you have a hard time accepting the problem as being from the past, allow yourself to include the last moment as part of the past. Most of us think of the past as at least yesterday, last year, or years ago. For the sake of understanding what I am suggesting, please view the past as anything that is not happening at this exact moment, including a second ago, or even a nanosecond ago.

Then, ask yourself this question: Could I allow myself to remember how I used to believe I had this problem?

The shift in consciousness that follows the question may make you laugh, it may make you tingle inside, or it may simply open the possibility in your awareness that, "Yes, even this is just a memory."

Next, ask yourself: Would I like to change that from the past?

If the answer is "yes," ask: Could I let go of wanting to change that from the past? Then let go as best you can.

Simply move on to the next step if the answer is "no."

The completion question in this series is: Could I let go of wanting to believe I have that problem again? Or: Could I let go of the expectation of having that problem happen again?

As always, just do your best to let go. If you find that you're still clinging to the memory of the problem in this moment, however, repeat the steps from the beginning until you can let go fully.

There are tons of excellent exercises in this book to help you let go of all your problems, anxieties, fears, and limitations. I highly, highly recommend it.

Not-So-Sacred Memories

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions
— Leonardo da Vinci

We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things; and, once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavor to erase them
— Goethe

I'm reading a fascinating book called Beyond The Conscious Mind that talks a good deal about memories. As I've described in several past posts about ho'oponopono, all our problems are caused by memories. So how do we resolve this fact with the Western mindset of memories being the source of our pleasure and the need to cling to the memories of our dead spouse? Over and over again, I see constant reminders that nothing is more important in our lives as widows and widowers than to honor their memory. As a result, those memories take on a kind of special, sacred status, and we the living are presumed to be duty-bound to be a kind of living Ark of the Covenant, carrying around these sacred memories of our deceased mate, housing them and safeguarding them.

Says who?

Again, let me be clear that I don't think we can erase the memories of our dead spouse — their essence permeates every cell in our bodies. What I do think we can do is let go of wanting to cling to those memories, and in doing so, we can heal and recover from our grief and focus instead on living in the present instead of the past. But if these memories of our past lives are sacred and we are to carry them around as a sort of living tombstone and memorial (after all, we knew them the best and are therefore the most qualified), isn't it paradoxical (if not sacreligious!) to suggest that we let go of these memories?

Tonight I just want to examine this idea about sacred memories of our dead spouse. This implies some unchanging quality to these memories, as though they have been cast in stone to be henceforth unchanged, forevermore.

As Thomas Blakeslee points out in Beyond The Conscious Mind, our memories do change over time. Each recall changes them in some way. One example he gives related to students being questioned immediately after the space shuttle Challenger exploded as to where they were and how they felt, and then a follow-up questionnaire 2 ½ years later. Consider the following [pp 77-78]:

NEXT DAY: I was in my religion class and some people walked in and started talking about [it]. I didn't know any of the details except that it had exploded and the schoolteacher's students has all been watching which I thought was so sad. Then after class I went to my room and watched the TV program talking about it and I got the details from that.
2 1/2 YEARS LATER: When I first heard about the explosion I was sitting in my freshman dorm room with my roommate and we were watching TV. It came on the news flash and we were both totally shocked. I was really upset and I went upstairs to talk to a friend of mine and then I called my parents.

Hard to believe these two accounts came from the same person! But was this just a one-off? No, in fact they were able to find 44 students who had filled out the original questionnaire, and all of them had substantially reworked their memories of the event.

In the next part of this article, I'll explain more about how these memories changed, as well as provide some shocking details about what our memories really consist of. I think it will become clear that the only thing we have to lose by being willing to let go of our memories is our pain.

Stickies

A major reason I stress meditation as a huge Grief Recovery Tool is because it worked wonders for me. In fact, learning Vipassana meditation was what really turned the road for me. Even though I did lots of grief work prior to that course, I date my "recovery graduation day" from the end of Vipassana. I think it is an experience everyone should try at least once.

Learning about this thought -> feeling -> reaction cycle is interesting in the meantime, and I believe you can still get some benefit from this approach even if you haven't yet learned how to meditate formally. Of course, without formal training, you will need some assistance in being mindful of where you are in the thought -> feeling -> reaction cycle. Elizabeth Bohorquez has written some great material to help get you started:

Getting Back on the Bicycle

Your mind will wander. That is a part of the process. Your work is to stay detached, out of the way. I like to use the image of a parade going by. You are the observer, standing on the curbside. You are not part of the parade. Whenever you find yourself involved in your thought processes ( the parade), return to the position of observer by bringing your attention back to your focus breath or ball. Your mind will continue to show you a thought, you will notice, returning then to the focus.

It's not uncommon to get lost in thoughts. This is because your mind is not well disciplined. In the future, you will begin to notice much earlier, allowing you to return to the focus. The process of breathing, noticing a thought & then returning to the focus is a full release cycle. Releasing is also called "letting go." If someone has ever told you to let something go, this is the actual process of doing just that.

There are three general classifications of what the mind will present to you. First are the thoughts. Some of these are presented in the form of pictures, others as sound bytes or inner mind audio tapes. They can be with or without video. There are many classifications of thoughts. Later on, in your work with your Inner Coach, you will be identifying some of your major thought areas, learning to work with them to profit you and your goals.

Your mind may also show you body communications. These are sensations representing body tension. The more stress, the more body tension. When practicing interactive awareness, place flowers on the body sensation, then open the flowers as you did earlier in your mental biofeedback work.

Next, return to your focus breath. Do not be tempted to stay in the sensation, nor to examine it. That is not the purpose of this practice. This is simply awareness of what is, providing you with an opportunity to observe your mind in action.

The third area includes the emotional states. In our work emotions will be viewed as images of children wearing tee shirts with their names on them. Identifying & separating emotions allows for easier release. If you are working with this image, notice that the children have crayons for coloring your experiences. Later on you will be identifying some of your most frequent emotions and their crayons.

...

Moments are very small fragments of time, each holding automatic mind programs in the form of thoughts & emotions. The emotions color the moments with their crayons. The body is also involved as it responds to whatever is passing through the moment.

Keep in mind that every moment is valuable. You already know that you can only catch a small number of them. Later on you will learn how to program your subconscious mind for waking up to genres of thoughts of your choosing. For now the goal is simply to practice waking up & releasing.

It helps to set some triggers to help you wake up, just like little alarm clocks. Sticky notes work well for this. No one else needs to know what you are doing. It's not necessary to write anything on them. You already know what they are for. When I'm working to improve this skill for myself, I place a sticky note just to the right on my telephone, one in the car, one on left wall in my office. At home I like the bathroom mirror, the refrigerator, the head of my bed. Move the notes occasionally so that your automatic pilot doesn't set up a program to ignore them.

Each time you notice a sticky note, check the moment. Pay attention to your thought processes, noticing the type of thought, the emotional states & crayons that are being utilized. Next, scan your body, noticing the stressors present, gently placing flowers on the bigger areas. This entire exercise takes less than thirty seconds, but provides tremendous benefits, immediate & in the future.

You are building awareness about who you are, your automatic program, your emotional terrain & what crayons you allow to color your life without deciding if they work for you or not.

Elizabeth Bohorquez, RN, C.Ht is a Clinical Medical Hypnotherapist, who works in the area of loss & healing. Her websites offer many articles & discussion on the subject, as well as complimentary mp3 downloads.

Everybody Hurts

In some of my recent correspondence, I've been telling people that I've incorporated grieving into my daily living. By that, I mean grief in a much wider context than my status as a widower. Going back to my 29 January post about Letting Go Emotionally, we can get a good idea about what grief is in the context of our dead spouse — the loosening or defusing of the emotional energy we have tied up with our lost loved one. Therèse Rando says grief is withdrawing emotional energy and investment from someone we love. I would also add that grief is the process of changing all our habits from our old, married life: thought habits, feeling habits, physical habits, mental habits, emotional habits, sexual habits, spiritual habits.

What I've discovered, though, is that there is a much wider context to grief. I'm now noticing references to grief concerning getting older (grieving the loss of youth), illness (grieving the loss of health), the empty nest (grieving the loss of parenting), and community (grieving the loss of an era). The grief principle remains the same in each case, namely changing our habits to free up our emotional energy and investment in these concepts.

I'm discovering more and more that our emotional energy is not so much tied up with these concepts per se, but rather with accumulated memories we have related to these concepts. The more accumulated memories we have acquired, the heavier the emotional investment and the stronger the emotional energy. And a subtle process occurs somewhere along the way — we come to believe that we are those memories.

This struck me today when I was reading the following from an interview on BeliefNet:

Do you feel like you're reinventing yourself for a second life?

Reinvention doesn't really say it for me. Nature doesn't reinvent itself every spring. It does what it does. God invents you. As you get older, the spiritual opportunity is to drop that which is false and to reclaim your true self. T.S. Eliot in "Four Quartets" says, "You're always going home. You're going back home." So, it's not so much that you're going forward, you're coming full circle. You are dropping this artificial self that accumulated -- the burdens, the disappointments, the fears, the falsehoods.

What are these accumulated burdens, disappointments, fears, and falsehoods? Memories. Nothing but memories. And we are not our memories. We are something much more than our memories.

I've been thinking of a bus-stop as a good analogy to living life from our memories. Picture yourself sitting peacefully at a bus-stop on a pleasant summer day. Suddenly, a bus screams up to the curb and slows, not stops. Without thinking, you jump on the bus and it careens around the corner, headed off to goodness knows where. You don't know the route exactly, although you have likely ridden this bus many times in the past. You probably don't even know the number of this bus, nor can you clearly articulate what possessed you to climb aboard. After an exhausting journey, you get booted unceremoniously to the curb, only to have another bus pull up, which you dutifully board, again oblivious as to what number it is or what route it will take. And why do we do this? Habit. And some of us get quite skilled at this on-off bus syndrome to the point where we can jump buses mid-stream. And we wonder why we are tired all the time!

As I continue to study alternative healing methods, a similar methodology emerges. The trick seems to be to notice the bus (a memory) pull up, but consciously refuse to board (don't replay that memory). Simply let the bus come and let the bus go. Remain peacefully at the bus-stop. Whether the technique is reciting a mantra, focusing on breathing and recognizing the impermanence, using the Theater of the Mind, or the Ho'oponopono technique of reciting, "I love you; I'm sorry; please forgive me; thank you," each technique seems to serve to occupy the mind long enough to distract it so that the bus can drive away.

I was reminded of this when I read this blog entry yesterday:

Everybody hurts.

You know, there's one little saying I carry very close to my heart:

"Everyone's having a rough time. Don't give them any more grief."

And isn't that just the truth?

We all get down. I mean, sometimes really down.

Down as in wanting the earth's crust to open up and swallow what little pride we have left.

Yes, indeed. Everybody hurts.

However we can always take solice in the idea that everything passes.

Today we hurt. Tomorrow we smile.

In the words of Hercule Poirot, (that oh-so-famous self-help guru), "Now, it is cloudy. In the morning, the sun shines. Such is life, madame."

I hadn't watched the R.E.M. video for this song before, but I was quite interested to see all the subtitles representing people's thoughts as they are stuck in traffic. Notice how many of those thoughts are related to memories:



I'll close with another part of the interview I quoted above:

When the mirror is no longer telling you what you thought you would like to hear and the culture is no longer telling you what you thought you would like to hear, sometimes that's when you finally have ears for what God wants to say to you. That's when you hear him say things sweeter than the mirror ever told you and sweeter than the culture ever told you. That's when you finally realize that you are loved, and you finally realize you are enough.

To Live Is To Die

As I continue to tweak this Grief Recovery Tools blog to make it easier to find in the search engines, I often find myself re-reading my posts from when I first started writing. Today I was re-reading my post entitled "My Experience With Despair," and it struck me that I had written that grief is for life. I was struck for several reasons.

Firstly, I no longer believe that we have to live with unending pain for the rest of our lives. Certainly, that can be a choice for those who decide to become professional widow/ers, and 25 years can easily go by with little relief from that pain. I do remember that when I wrote that blog entry, a part of me was still against "settling" for a life of grief. At some level, it was unacceptable to me to settle. Probably, this was because I had made it a goal early on to reach the stage where I was totally at peace with Deb's death, and living with pain precludes being at peace. So, I continued to search for that peace. Since attending a free Vipassana Meditation course, I believe I have found that peace that I was seeking. The Vipassana website promises that "Life becomes characterized by increased awareness, non-delusion, self-control and peace," and I have certainly found that to be true.

Secondly, however, I was struck by the idea that grief is, in fact, for life. No, I'm not contradicting myself ;-) Grief is a healing process of letting go, and in that sense, we are grieving all the time. As humans, we like to live with this illusion that things can stay the same for long periods of time. The reality is that nothing stays the same for even one second. Everything is always changing. Even when we drill down to the atomic level of existence, we find that atoms are changing at the rate of billions of times per second. In fact, we use this principle to define what a second is.

So, this whole notion of stasis is really just a mental construct at a very high level of abstraction from reality. As the saying goes, "There's nothing as constant as change." The notion that I was married to Deb for 12.5 years exists only in my head. The Deb who died was not the same Deb whom I married, nor am I the same man today who I was on my wedding day. I'm not even the same guy who woke up this morning. Every cell in my body has regenerated trillions and trillions of times just in the last hour. Thus, when I talk about "me" in reference to my body and collected memories, there is in fact no such entity. It is an illusion.

So, while we constantly use these illusory terms to describe how long "we" have owned our house, car, dog, job, etc, at some deep level we are aware that these things are always in flux, always changing. And the determining factor between those people who appear to be always happy and those who appear to be always unhappy is often how they react to change.

Take the instance of a car breaking down. One person can be very upset because they remembered their car as working fine, and now they have a negative reaction to this new change in the status of their car. Another person can laugh it off, accepting the change and letting go of the idea that the car was working fine a while ago. Same scenario, two different people, two different reactions.

My friend Gary Scott tells of an instance he saw in northern Ecuador where a man who was walking down the street was passed by a truck and drenched in water from a resulting puddle splash. After the shock had worn off, the Ecuadorian started smiling and let out a big belly laugh. To me, this suggests a highly evolved perspective on change. Would you expect to see a similar reaction here in North America? I think not. North Americans tend to have rather negative reactions to events such as puddle splashes.

So how does all this relate to grief? Am I suggesting that we can get to the point where we can laugh off the death of our spouse? Hardly. However, I do believe we can begin to recognize that everything we hold dear is constantly changing, and that in fact we are not holding "things" dearly, but rather we are holding our memories of those things dearly. And, as we learned from Ho'oponopono, memories are the causes of all our problems.

What we need to learn to do is to let go of our memories, and, in a sense, grieve for those memories. As we develop this habit, we can become more aware of, and appreciate, life as it is, not as we wish it was. And with this new awareness, we can begin to find that peace we are seeking.

Memories III

In parts one and two of this series, I explained a different approach to looking at the memories of our departed loved one. In our culture of acquiring things, it can be difficult to accept that letting go of memories could be at all beneficial. I am coming more and more to think that this letting go of memories is essential to experiencing real peace, and it is a Grief Recovery Tool no bereaved person should be without.

I'm reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. It gives some good insight into how we should view our thoughts and memories [pg 74]:

We often wonder what to do about negativity or certain troubling emotions. In the spaciousness of meditation, you can view your thoughts and emotions with a totally unbiased attitude. When your attitude changes, then the whole atmosphere of your mind changes, even the very nature of your thoughts and emotions. When you become more agreeable, then they do; if you have no difficulty with them, they will have no difficulty with you either.

So whatever thoughts and emotions arise, allow them to rise and settle, like the waves in the ocean. Whatever you find yourself thinking, let that thought rise and settle, without any constraint. Don't grasp at it, feed it, or indulge it; don't cling to it and don't try to solidify it. Neither follow thoughts nor invite them; be like the ocean looking at its own waves, or the sky gazing down on the clouds that pass through it.

You will soon find that thoughts are like the wind; they come and go. The secret is not to "think" about thoughts, but to allow them to flow through the mind, while keeping your mind free of afterthoughts.

In my case, I experienced this firsthand over the span of 10 days on my Vipassana meditation course. Meditation really helped me to recognize the impermanence of my thoughts and memories. And, knowing of their impermanence, it became easier to let them go.

So, what do Vipassana and Ho'oponopono have in common? They both break the last link in the thought -> feeling -> reaction chain. Once we can arrive at the place where thoughts and memories are accepted as being the ephemeral entities that they are, it then becomes an almost foregone-conclusion to let them go. Once we have let them go, we can begin to experience the deep lasting peace that lies just behind our thoughts and memories.

How can we apply this to our everyday life as widow/ers? A big part of grief, especially that first year, is bringing up all our memories about our dead spouse and re-examining them, thereby changing those memories. However, this can be an exhausting process. We often feel compelled to passively experience these memories over and over, such as the circumstances surrounding a violent or traumatic death. Just as reframing our memories as they play out in the Theater of our mind can greatly reduce our stress, so too can learning how to break the cycle of thought -> feel -> react. Whether you use meditation or ho'oponopono or some other method, I strongly feel that learning how to actively manage our thoughts and memories is the real secret to riding the grief recovery road to its conclusion.

Memories II

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
— William Shakespeare, As You Like It

In my last post about memories, I wrote about why cleaning or "erasing" our memories about our departed spouse might be a good thing. One method you can use to clean your memories comes from Hawaii and is called Ho'oponopono (pronounced ho-o-pono-pono). Here's a better explanation from their website:

Ho'oponopono is really very simple. For the ancient Hawaiians, all problems begin as thought. But having a thought is not the problem. So what's the problem? The problem is that all our thoughts are imbued with painful memories, memories of persons, places, or things.

The intellect working alone can't solve these problems, because the intellect only manages. Managing things is no way to solve problems. You want to let them go! When you do Ho'oponopono, what happens is that the Divinity takes the painful thought and neutralizes or purifies it. You don't purify the person, place, or thing. You neutralize the energy you associate with that person, place or thing. So the first stage of Ho'oponopono is the purification of that energy.

Now something wonderful happens. Not only does that energy get neutralized; it also gets released, so there's a brand new slate. Buddhists call it the Void. The final step is that you allow the Divinity to come in and fill the void with light.

To do Ho'oponopono, you don't have to know what the problem or error is. All you have to do is notice any problem you are experiencing physically, mentally, emotionally, whatever. Once you notice, your responsibility is to immediately begin to clean, to say, "I'm sorry. Please forgive me."

The whole article is a very interesting read and well worth your time if any of this sounds the slightest bit interesting.

In the first part of this Memories article, I promised I would explain a bit more about how, due to my Vipassana meditation course, I could immediately see the wisdom behind Ho'oponopono, even if I did think it was a little weird. OK, a lot weird ;-) I've taken an extra day to really give this memories concept a lot of thought, and I think I've come up with a good analogy to help explain things a bit better.

As I explained in detail last month, my Vipassana training made me aware of the tight interactions between my thoughts and my bodily sensations. And more than that — it made me aware of the previously-unconscious pattern of events that had been driving me my entire life:

Thought -> Feeling -> Reaction

As I became more adept at meditating, it became easier and easier to break the last step in the chain. I learned how to replace reacting with observing. I became aware of my mind postulating a thought and immediately feeling a sensation somewhere in my body. For example, if the thought pertained to how I was going to achieve a financial goal, I could right away feel not only my brow furrowing, but I could feel every single brow-furrowing muscle tense as the beginnings of worry and anxiety set in. The difference now was that instead of reacting by probing my mind for even more thoughts and possible solutions and setting off an entire chain of thoughts -> feelings -> reactions, I simply recognized the impermanent nature of both the thought and the feeling. I wasn't thinking or feeling anxious moments before. Why then should I become a slave to my thoughts and start to worry just because I had a thought?


By understanding the pattern of thought, feeling, reaction, I could mentally utter "anicca," and right away I could feel my facial muscles relax, my worry evaporated, and I found myself smiling. I was now observing my life objectively instead of reacting subjectively. It was like suddenly being aware that the huge drama I had been watching for years was just a big puppet show. Only now I recognized myself as the marionette and my thoughts as the puppeteer. And now I knew how to cut the strings :-)

For the last month, it has been absolutely amazing to literally snip the strings before any new dramas can even begin. I no longer feel like I'm being driven against my will to think negatively or blindly react to people or events. Instead, I just smile, say "anicca," and laugh as the problem vaporizes. There was no problem before I thought about it, and after I break the thought -> feeling -> reaction cycle, the problem returns to the void from whence it came. I can just be, I don't have to do anything! It has changed my life.

In my next post, I'll close off this short series by pointing out the similarities between Vipassana and Ho'oponopono, and I'll give some concrete examples of how these methods can help in dealing with bereavement.

Oh yeah: anicca is my new cussword ;-)

Unbelievable Healing

I'm reading a phenomenal book by Joe Vitale called Zero Limits. In my quest for better and better Grief Recovery Tools, I'm always on the lookout for unusual healing techniques. When the following description came into my inbox, I was more than a little intrigued:

Two years ago, I heard about a therapist in Hawaii who cured a complete ward of criminally insane patients--without ever seeing any of them. The psychologist would study an inmate's chart and then look within himself to see how he created that person's illness. As he improved himself, the patient improved.

When I first heard this story, I thought it was an urban legend. How could anyone heal anyone else by healing himself? How could even the best self-improvement master cure the criminally insane?

It didn't make any sense. It wasn't logical, so I dismissed the story.

However, I heard it again a year later. I heard that the therapist had used a Hawaiian healing process called ho 'oponopono. I had never heard of it, yet I couldn't let it leave my mind. If the story was at all true, I had to know more.

I had always understood "total responsibility" to mean that I am responsible for what I think and do. Beyond that, it's out of my hands. I think that most people think of total responsibility that way. We're responsible for what we do, not what anyone else does. The Hawaiian therapist who healed those mentally ill people would teach me an advanced new perspective about total responsibility.

His name is Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len. We probably spent an hour talking on our first phone call. I asked him to tell me the complete story of his work as a therapist. He explained that he worked at Hawaii State Hospital for four years. That ward where they kept the criminally insane was dangerous. Psychologists quit on a monthly basis. The staff called in sick a lot or simply quit. People would walk through that ward with their backs against the wall, afraid of being attacked by patients. It was not a pleasant place to live, work, or visit.

Dr. Len told me that he never saw patients. He agreed to have an office and to review their files. While he looked at those files, he would work on himself. As he worked on himself, patients began to heal.

"After a few months, patients that had to be shackled were being allowed to walk freely," he told me. "Others who had to be heavily medicated were getting off their medications. And those who had no chance of ever being released were being freed."

I was in awe.

"Not only that," he went on, "but the staff began to enjoy coming to work. Absenteeism and turnover disappeared. We ended up with more staff than we needed because patients were being released, and all the staff was showing up to work. Today, that ward is closed."

This is where I had to ask the million dollar question: "What were you doing within yourself that caused those people to change?"

"I was simply healing the part of me that created them," he said.

I didn't understand.

Dr. Len explained that total responsibility for your life means that everything in your life — simply because it is in your life — is your responsibility. In a literal sense the entire world is your creation.

Whew. This is tough to swallow. Being responsible for what I say or do is one thing. Being responsible for what everyone in my life says or does is quite another. Yet, the truth is this: if you take complete responsibility for your life, then everything you see, hear, taste, touch, or in any way experience is your responsibility because it is in your life.

This means that terrorist activity, the president, the economy — anything you experience and don't like — is up for you to heal. They don't exist, in a manner of speaking, except as projections from inside you. The problem isn't with them, it's with you, and to change them, you have to change you.

I know this is tough to grasp, let alone accept or actually live. Blame is far easier than total responsibility, but as I spoke with Dr. Len, I began to realize that healing for him and in ho 'oponopono means loving yourself. If you want to improve your life, you have to heal your life. If you want to cure anyone — even a mentally ill criminal — you do it by healing you.

I asked Dr. Len how he went about healing himself. What was he doing, exactly, when he looked at those patients' files?

"I just kept saying, 'I'm sorry' and 'I love you' over and over again," he explained.

That's it?

That's it.

Turns out that loving yourself is the greatest way to improve yourself, and as you improve yourself, your improve your world. Let me give you a quick example of how this works: one day, someone sent me an email that upset me. In the past I would have handled it by working on my emotional hot buttons or by trying to reason with the person who sent the nasty message. This time, I decided to try Dr. Len's method. I kept silently saying, "I'm sorry" and "I love you," I didn't say it to anyone in particular. I was simply evoking the spirit of love to heal within me what was creating the outer circumstance.

Within an hour I got an e-mail from the same person. He apologized for his previous message. Keep in mind that I didn't take any outward action to get that apology. I didn't even write him back. Yet, by saying "I love you," I somehow healed within me what was creating him.

I later attended a ho 'oponopono workshop run by Dr. Len. He's now 70 years old, considered a grandfatherly shaman, and is somewhat reclusive. He praised my book, The Attractor Factor. He told me that as I improve myself, my book's vibration will raise, and everyone will feel it when they read it. In short, as I improve, my readers will improve.

"What about the books that are already sold and out there?" I asked.

"They aren't out there," he explained, once again blowing my mind with his mystic wisdom. "They are still in you."

In short, there is no out there.

It would take a whole book to explain this advanced technique with the depth it deserves. Suffice it to say that whenever you want to improve anything in your life, there's only one place to look: inside you.

"When you look, do it with love."

When I had finished reading that, I just knew I had to read the whole book. The insights I'm getting are incredibly helpful. You can get a bit more info from the Zero Limits website More to follow...

Stressed!

When the heart weeps for what it has lost, the spirit laughs for what it has found.
— Sufi Proverb

As a widow/er, to say that you're familiar with stress is something of an understatement. More likely, you feel it before you've even opened your eyes, and, like a strong wind on a bitterly cold February morning, it cuts through you like a knife all day long until you can finally doze off for those few fitful hours of troubled sleep. But have you ever thought about stress? Why it exists? And wouldn't it be nice if there was a Grief Recovery Tool that would evaporate all that stress forever?

A poignant example from my own life: about 5 ½ months after Deb died, I was in the last days of what many call the Denial stage of grief. Not denial that she was dead, but denial that my old way of life was finished as well. I had thought that the majority of my grieving had occurred throughout Deb's long illness, and I was determined to get on with my life and do all the things I still wanted to do. I still wanted a family, and I wanted to live internationally. So in the first few weeks of September, I was trying to begin a new relationship while simultaneously putting my house up on the market so that I could move with my son to Central America. And right about this time, all those lovely brain opiates the mind excretes during the shock phase were finally starting to dissipate.

Life started getting real ugly, real fast. I knew, just knew, that the relationship I was trying to start was totally the wrong thing to be doing right now. And I knew that moving to Central America right now was also a boneheaded thing to do. Because of my stubbornness, though, I plowed recklessly forward. And my body fought back. Me, a person with normally low blood pressure, could feel my blood pressure rising. Still I persisted. And the next day, I thought I was soon going to have a heart attack. So, I made the very difficult decision to drop all my plans. I broke off my fledgling relationship, and I called my realtor and told her to forget listing my house. And I dropped all my other plans as well. I did not want to wind up in the hospital. I didn't know what was going to replace my plans, but life was right there with the solution. The last of the shock drugs wore off, and I was plunged headlong into the despair phase of grief which was to last for many months. I needed to heal. What I didn't understand, going into acute grief, was that I would heal so much else in me that was broken.

So it was with some humour that I recently read what Guy Finley has to say about stress in his book The Secret of Letting Go [pg 114]:

Stress exists because we insist! It's really that simple. It is our mistaken belief that we must push life in the direction we choose that keeps us in a strained and unhappy relationship with it. Our wish to have power over life comes from this wrong relationship with life. Reality has its own effortless course, and we can either embrace its way or struggle endlessly with our own. We do not need power to flow. In other words, why push when we can learn to ride?

Looking back on my early days of grief, I can of course now see clearly the folly of my persistence. And I also recognize that the moment I simply let go of wanting to continue with my old life, that stress immediately evaporated. I never had to go to the doctor to have my blood pressure evaluated. It returned to normal that day. And something deep within me knew that would happen as soon as I let go. I just had to decide that what life had to offer was more important than what I wanted to happen.

So, I share this intimate part of my history with you in the hope that it will save you much pain and suffering. It took me many, many months before I could start applying this same principle to other areas of my grieving, probably because I wasn't consciously aware that this was a powerful tool that I could use at any time. Since I've started applying this multiple times a day, I have never been so happy and at peace. I wish the same for you also.

Letting Go Emotionally

One of the more difficult aspects of grieving in the first 6-12 months is figuring out how to grieve. We know we are supposed to do it, we feel terrible, and it can be a huge struggle to get out of bed in the morning. Life seems meaningless, and yet we're supposed to get some energy and do this thing called "grieve." What the heck is that? How does one go about it? What is the point? Why the effort?

For me, I think it was about month thirteen that I was reading How To Go On Living When Someone You Love Dies. I talked a little bit about this in my post about letting go. Around this time, I was beginning to understand that my emotional energy was still largely caught up in thoughts about Deb, and that I had no emotional energy for anything else. In her book, Therèse Rando explains that this is a normal result of having invested so much of my emotional energy into my marriage for so many years. Now that Deb was dead, that emotional energy had nowhere to go, and it was chewing me up inside.

It was helpful for me to read the following [pp 230-232]:

You also have to change your emotional attachment to and investment in your loved one to reflect the reality that, despite your intense wishes to the contrary, he is dead and will no longer be able to interact with you as he did in the past. No matter how much you need him, nor how much you are determined that things in your life will not change, the fact of the matter is that your loved one no longer can give you what he did previously. He will no longer be able to return your emotional investment in him. As a result, over time you are going to have to change your emotional investment in him to accommodate this fact.

This is not a betrayal. It does not mean that you no longer love the deceased or that you will forget him. The relationship is altered, to be sure, but it always will exist in a special place in your heart and in your mind. What it does mean is that you modify your ongoing emotional investment in and attachment to him as a living person who can return your investment-you must let go of being connected to him as if he were still alive. The emotional energy that went into your relationship with him gradually must be detached from him, since he can no longer return it, and in time it must be channeled elsewhere where it can be returned for your emotional satisfaction.

...

The most crucial task in grief is this change in relationship with the person who died. It is the untying of the ties that bind you to your lost loved one. Again, it must be stressed that this does not mean that the deceased is forgotten or not loved. Rather, it means that the emotional energy that you had invested in the deceased is readjusted to allow you to direct it towards others who can reciprocate it in an ongoing fashion for your emotional satisfaction.

...

It is not an easy task to withdraw emotional energy and investment from someone you love. It takes a great deal of time and effort. It means that all of your ties to that person-your needs for and your feelings, thoughts, memories, hopes, expectations, and dreams about that person and your relationship with him-all must be brought up and revived [emphasis mine]. Then each one must be reviewed and felt. In this way the emotional charge is loosened or defused. You may still have the thought and memory of each one, but the emotional feeling accompanying it lessens in intensity. Gradually, over time, you do not feel the accompanying feelings any more, or at least not the way you did when they were intense and vibrant, kept alive by the ongoing, reciprocal relationship you had with your loved one before death.

After reading this, I finally felt like someone had finally adequately explained to me just what the heck I was supposed to be doing with my time in grief. I remember feeling like a key had turned in a lock somehow, that the door to a grief framework had finally been opened. I didn't look forward to the remaining grief work to be done, but I knew that once I walked through that door, I would be one step closer to that peace I was searching for.

How to Let Go

Letting go. Sounds simple, doesn't it? You can't read a book about grieving without tripping over this admonishment at least once. Isn't letting go the whole purpose of the funeral? I mean, she's already six feet under — how much further do I need to let her go? Eight feet? Ten?

Of course, we're not talking about physically letting go, although for those of us who still sleep curled up with their loved one's favourite sweater or robe, the understanding is certainly that, at some point, this physical reminder will need to be released. Part of the reason we feel so terrible in the first place is because of this physical separation, and our cold-turkey withdrawal symptoms do dissipate in time.

No, when reading or hearing about "letting go," we understand that there's a lot of mental, emotional, and spiritual releasing that we need to do. But are any of us so well-versed in managing our emotions that we can get on with the necessary releasing unaided?

Especially for us guys, if you ask us how we feel, you'll likely encounter a similar response to that which you'd receive if you had asked us about our preference for chartreuse or fuschia — huh? Guys aren't supposed to have feelings; we think, not feel, right? If we as widowers are a bit more in touch with our feminine side, we still probably don't understand why we feel as we do. And widows don't seem to be any better equipped to release all these deep emotions either. If anything, the data suggests it takes women longer to release their dead spouse than it does for men.

So, where do we go from here?

A major tool in my grief recovery toolbox is The Sedona Method, a book I can't speak highly enough of. It is also available as a course in audio and video formats. The subtitle says it all: "Your Key to Lasting Happiness, Success, Peace and Emotional Well-Being." Peace and emotional well-being — that is something I homed in on. To me, I desperately needed that key to unlocking these two elements so totally lacking from my life.

Peace and emotional well-being. Two concepts totally antithetical to grief, yet the very objects of our desire. How can a book promise on the front cover to deliver the very essence of what we seek?

The Sedona Method is not light reading. I'm still reading it a year and a half after I bought it, and I have found it to be immensely helpful, not just in unraveling my grief, but in every aspect of my life. It has helped me to understand what motivates me, why I feel what I feel, and how to let those feelings go.

A critical turning point for me was understanding that I am not my emotions. I had always felt as one with my emotions, that they were a part of my identity. The very notion of letting go of my emotions seemed to suggest that I give up a fundamental part of being me. The following excerpt from The Sedona Method [pp 36-7] illustrates how I was able to let go of this idea:

Let me explain by asking you to participate in a simple exercise. Pick up a pen, a pencil, or some small object that you would be willing to drop without giving it a second thought. Now, hold it in front of you and really grip it tightly. Pretend this is one of your limiting feelings and that your hand represents your gut or your consciousness. If you held the object long enough, this would start to feel uncomfortable yet familiar.

Now, open your hand and roll the object around in it. Notice that you are the one holding on to it; it is not attached to your hand. The same is true with your feelings, too. Your feelings are as attached to you as this object is attached to your hand.

We hold on to our feelings and forget that we are holding on to them. As I stated in the Introduction, it's even in our language. When we feel angry or sad, we don't usually say, "I feel angry," or, "I feel sad." We say, "I am angry, or, "I am sad." Without realizing it, we are misidentifying that we are the feeling. Often, we believe a feeling is holding on to us. This is not true... we are always in control and just don't know it.

Now, let the object go.

What happened? You let go of the object, and it dropped to the floor. Was that hard? Of course not. That's what we mean when we say "let go."

You can do the same thing with any emotion — choose to let it go.

Now, there's obviously a lot more to the method than this simple example, and there's a reason the book is 415 pages. However, if the passage above gave you even a glimmer of hope, please do yourself a favour and grab a copy as soon as you can. You'll be very glad you did.

Letting Go

As my grief journey progressed, I came to realize that the end, the destination if you like, of this journey was to be at peace. Asking questions like "why did my wife die at 32 years of age, leaving me with a 2-year old son?" resulted in nothing but more fruitless questions. But we, as humans, are questioning beings. The secret seemed to lie in changing the nature of the questions — rather than "why?" I started asking "how" questions. How could I be at peace with her sickness and death? How could I be OK with everything that had happened? How could I get on with the business of living? How could I heal?

And an even more powerful line of questioning began with "what." In the throes of the waves of grief that washed over me, I clung like a shipwrecked survivor to a single powerful plank: "What could I do right now to help me be more at peace?" The answer to that question lay more often than not in the simple things: listen to peaceful music; light a candle; sit quietly on the couch; light some incense or smell some essential oils; get into some comfortable clothes. Asking what I could do at this moment to be at peace almost always led me to my 5 senses, and I did find some solace there. I had read that it is important for grievers to live in the present, and focusing on my five senses helped to ground myself in the present, if only for a moment. I was glad that I had found some readily-accessible shelter from the storms lashing at me. I took that shelter until I could venture out a little further down the road.

I have learned much from reading books about grieving, and one I highly recommend is called How To Go On Living When Someone You Love Dies. It was in reading this book that I finally understood what grieving is: the freeing up of the emotional energy associated with my past life as a married person. All that emotional investment had to be let go and released so that I could get on with life. The tricky part, especially for a guy, was twofold: one, how did I get a handle on my emotions, and two, how did I release them?