Rules For Managing Grief

I've mentioned before that I think Dr LaGrand writes excellent articles on grief and grieving. His most recent article is no exception. I personally have used every single rule, and I can vouch for how much of a difference they have made in my life. As you read them, make a conscious decision to start applying just one of the rules in your life today. That old adage about time healing all wounds only works when you actively do something with that time. Here's what to do:

7 Rules For Managing Grief and Loss

Grief and loss are inherent parts of life. No one gets off scott free from facing the emotional and physical pain of accepting the death of a loved one. Yet, all too frequently, we maximize our pain out of a lack of insight into the reality of major change and the common problems of adapting to life without the beloved.

Here are seven rules that will help in the challenge to deal with the inevitable changes to be faced and re-orienting to a new and different life.

1. Never allow thoughts to turn into actions without your full consent. Negative thoughts pervade most loss experiences. We tend to look back at what we lose and ahead to all the real and imaginary obstacles that have to be faced. This occurs in an atmosphere of fear and confusion which maximizes our concerns. Then a universal law takes effect: what we focus on expands. In this case, fear grows and the obstacles appear insurmountable. There is nothing wrong with being scared in facing the new and here is how you can deal with it.

Full consent always implies deliberation. Deliberation means reasoned dialogue and thinking. Frequently, get with those you trust to share all concerns and ask for feedback on your thoughts. Let the fear, guilt, or loneliness out. Not easy to do, but the results will be essential in making the right choices and defusing limiting beliefs and fears. Doing the right thing will take courage that you can muster with help from friends. Use them with humility.

2. Be open to new ideas, assumptions, and beliefs. Loss challenges our beliefs about life and death. Grief is a time when reevaluating the way we were taught that life is, usually has to be challenged. There is more to its mystery than our little version. For most, there is a lot to learn, especially in how to accept impermanence.

Big, life-changing events often cause us to examine our values and put things in perspective. Revising beliefs will also bring new meaning to loss and an easier reinvestment in life. In reality, loss is a great teacher of the importance of relationships, humility, and gratitude.

3. Allow failure to be viewed as a normal part of coping well. Accepting failure as a tool for learning always spawns success. Having been utilized for centuries, it is just as true for coping with loss as it has been with some of the greatest inventions.

Be aware that we are programmed early in life to expect immediate success or to feel we are not up to the task. Examining where we make mistakes, and taking action to rectify them, is the road to follow. See failure when grieving as a friend, as part of your education about loss and life.

4. Start reconnecting as soon as possible. Loss and the emotions that accompany it are strong forces of isolation. Isolation especially hinders your ability to adapt and accept the new conditions of existence. Everyone needs a variety of connections; they are surefire lifelines. Do this: strengthen connections to your faith, friends, work, and mission because it is critical to reinvesting in life and developing new routines.

New routines are an absolute must due to the absence of our loved one. Make these new routines into new habits, which is an important key to coping well.

5. Cultivate solitude on a regular basis. Take time out each day just for yourself. This is just as important as building your circle of interpersonal relationships. It is a positive state time leading to comfort, enhanced spirituality, and creative coping with your great loss.

Find a place where you enjoy being alone, a particular room in your home, an area in a park, at the beach, or some other natural setting. Give yourself permission to take a cry break or listen to soothing music. Take a walk by yourself. Meditate. Meditation will reduce your stress and raise your energy level. Give yourself a pep talk. Do what is best for you.

6. Trust your inner knowing. This resource is seldom consciously used. So listen to what your intuition and your body tell you about the choices to be made and the direction to travel. You have wisdom within, if you will take the time to be honest with yourself and listen. Then make yourself take that first difficult step in tackling whatever problem you have to face that day.

When discouraging thoughts start to build take action to stop the downward spiral by asking yourself "What do I need to do right now?" Listen to what comes up from your intuitive treasure, trust it, and reverse your direction. Keep repeating this new action.

7. Make the "D" word the cornerstone of your new life. Determination is a commitment you can make. Talk to yourself and say that you are going to prevail in this difficult adaptation. Write specific inspiring phrases on a 3 by 5 card that you can whip out and read when you start feeling the blues.

Then combine your self-coaching with getting up and moving into another room or going outside when things seem unmanageable. Consider calling a best friend or develop a method (create any affirmation) to interrupt the pattern of thoughts causing discouragement. With conscious determination you can redirect emotion.

All of the above can be worked on, one rule at a time. Remember what was said earlier: what you focus on expands. This not only holds true for fear and negative thoughts. It is just as powerful for visualizing yourself meeting and successfully negotiating a particular problem. It holds true for focusing on a positive memory or a gratitude memory. Those positive events will expand in importance and assist your transition.

Dr. LaGrand is a grief counselor and the author of eight books, the most recent, the popular Love Lives On: Learning from the Extraordinary Encounters of the Bereaved. He is known world-wide for his research on the Extraordinary Experiences of the bereaved (after-death communication phenomena) and is one of the founders of Hospice of the St. Lawrence Valley, Inc. His free monthly ezine website is http://www.extraordinarygriefexperiences.com

I'll just mention that I read a quote recently, attributed to Gene Simmons of Kiss fame. He talks about being "ruthless" with your thoughts. In reference to the first rule, I found I needed to make a conscious decision to no longer entertain certain thoughts about Deb and my past role as her husband. It has made, and continues to make, a big difference in my life. I hope it does in yours also.

Get Quiet

Tonight I have another post about dealing with change. Ariane de Bonvoisin explains that, to avoid getting lost along the journey we now find ourselves on, we need to "connect with the core of our being, the essence of who we are." I was originally going to post this about a week ago, but I felt strongly that I needed to post the short series on anxiety first.

I have often heard widow/ers express a fear about allowing themselves to grieve — that if they allow themselves to grieve fully, it will overwhelm them and they won't be able to stop. I learned from The Sedona Method that the opposite is true. When I tried to probe the bottom of my grief and despair, I found that it eluded me. I'll post more about that another time, but I wanted to put you at ease as we look tonight at getting in touch with the core of our being:

The First 30 Days

We all have things we turn to. Perhaps it's meditation, prayer, a belief in the law of attraction, or visualization. Or maybe it's a connection to nature, a certain type of calming music, or a creative outlet like writing or painting. Whatever it is, it will help you during times of change by allowing you to connect to who you really are.

Even during the most dramatic change, there is always a place within us that is calm, collected, and comfortable, that knows how to cope with change. This part of ourselves doesn't fluctuate when circumstances are changing all around us. For most of us, it's something we call our higher self, our soul, or our connection to the Divine or God.

During times of change, most of us crave understanding. We want to make sense of the seeming chaos around us. The place I'm speaking of, though, I call inner-standing. It's the part of you that is calm and wise, that accepts things as they are. That part of you is eternal, unchanging; it is whole and complete, and you can't get rid of it no matter how hard you try. Connecting to this inner place means aligning with the person you were before the change, during the change, and after the change. It's about remembering who you are.

Peace and Quiet

No matter what change or transition is going on, no matter what decision you need to make, find some time to be alone and silent. Often we are looking for more peace in our lives, but we don't do what we need to do to make it happen. So many times our higher self tries to give us answers or solutions, but with all our busyness, we can never stop to reflect. This is why meditation has become so popular in our culture today: Although you may think of meditation as passive, it is in fact an active way of creating time in the day to connect with the deeper part of yourself. Meditation stops your resistance to change by allowing you to find the relationship between the little you and the bigger you and to remind yourself that you are exactly where you need to be. When you get quiet you'll see that life knows what's happening.

There are many different forms of meditation, but at its core all meditation is the practice of taking a few minutes a day to stop and do absolutely nothing. No phone calls, e-mails, computers, talking, eating, television . . . nothing. Slow down the engine that runs your mind, and take time to focus on the engine that runs your body: When you simply acknowledge your breath - breathing in and out - you are tapping into your life force. Just allow everything to be exactly as it is. Sometimes, it feels good just to hang out in God's waiting room!

Isn't it extraordinary how much we fight the idea of being quiet? What are we afraid of? What's the worst that could happen? Who could come out and hurt us? What are we avoiding? There are few things more essential than taking five to ten minutes a day to find your center; it will help you handle anything going on in your life. Just be quiet. Nearly every religion encourages silence and solitude. Remember: whenever we lose something external during change, we always have the chance to regain an inner home.

In my case, I actually attended a free 10 day silent meditation course, and it absolutely helped me get in touch with the core of my being. I learned how to be totally at peace with Deb's death. And I learned valuable skills that I use every day. I highly recommend it.

Quieting The Self

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a few articles about how grieving is a feeling process not a thinking process. Tonight I'd like to revisit this concept a little bit and tie it in with a fascinating book called Beyond The Conscious Mind. The author, Thomas Blakeslee, describes a consciousness model in which a number of specialized modules in our brains are responsible for different aspects of our daily living. There's a module for driving a car, for example, and different modules for other physical activities, such as climbing the stairs. Our consciousness is made up of many of these different modules, but there's a central module which takes most of the limelight: the "self" module.

The weird thing about the self module is that it is not related to physical activities. It also doesn't have direct access to any of the other modules that do pertain to physical activities. You can prove this to yourself by asking yourself to describe any physical task that you perform automatically, like riding a bike. How exactly do you balance on two wheels? Try to describe how you shift your body weight around to keep upright. If you're like me, about the only way I can begin to describe such a task is by imitating the posture of riding a bike and trying to describe what I'm feeling. My self module has no direct access to my "bike riding" module and therefore can't explain exactly which muscle groups move in exactly what way. Those details are known only to the bike riding module. The self module can really only guess.

Why is this important to know when grieving? We have a tendency, men especially, to intellectualize our grief. We imagine that if we just think long and hard enough about our dead spouse, that somehow the pain will go away. But we miss the forest for the trees by doing this. Here's a clue: pain is something we feel, it is not something we think! And there's lots of physical pain in grief, as you're well aware. We have to feel our way through grief, not think our way through.

So this brings us back to our conscious mind, and why we would want to quiet our self module. Our self module is the thinking module. But, as we already know, it doesn't have access to the physical modules — it can only guess at what is going on in there. And grieving is something we do physically, not something we do mentally. So, if we think really, really hard about grieving, about the only thing our self module is accomplishing is some guesswork as to what our physical activity modules are doing and why they hurt. Thinking about grief is not a help — it is a hindrance. We need to learn how to quiet the thinking self module and let the other feeling, physical modules feel their way through this desert of grief.

OK, so how do we quiet the self? I'll let Thomas Blakeslee explain:

[from pages 62-3 of Beyond The Conscious Mind]:

If you try hard to quiet your mind and think about nothing you will find that there is always something — a noise, a breeze, a memory image, or a random thought. The problem is, the effort not to think always engages your self module. Willpower is the domain of the self, so the harder you try not to think, the less chance you have of succeeding. There is a way to quiet the self module, but it does not involve willpower: If you do any task that firmly engages another module of thought, the self module will instantly fall silent.

Skill activities that require concentration, such as art, music, sports, dancing, or nonroutine work, can put you in a flow state where the self module is quiet and time seems to stand still. When you have been in a flow state for an extended period of time and your self module reasserts itself, you may feel that there is a time gap in your memory where you don't even know what happened. You may look at the clock and remark about how time flies. The activities that will make this happen always require skills in which the self module is not proficient. This guarantees that the self module will lose the competition for control. While the gap in consciousness is noticeable after such extended periods, normal day-to-day existence contains occasional brief bursts of self-consciousness.

Since the self module is often nagging us with what we should do, it can feel quite refreshing to have this nagging silenced for extended periods...

One reason people develop hobbies is that they can quiet the nagging self module by putting themselves in a pleasant flow state for extended periods of time. The quieting of the self module and living in a continual flow state are common goals in Eastern religions. Meditation is a regular exercise directed at quieting the self. It could be very useful for Westerners, but it is often made very difficult by our strong habit of using self-control to accomplish things. When we try to use willpower, it engages the self module, which defeats the whole purpose of meditation. Learning to accomplish things by letting go takes a lot of practice, but the payoff is considerable.

... And that nicely explains why I, as a widower, attended a free 10-day silent meditation course ;-)

The Heartbeat Of Death

It has now been several months since I finished reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, but I found it to be a very, very interesting read, full of amazing insights from a very different perspective than my Western mind produces. I'm currently reviewing some of the pages I had tabbed for further reading, and I'd like to share one of these with you tonight.

Before I do, I'll just explain that this passage will likely make a lot more sense if you have had at least a little bit of exposure to Eastern / Buddhist thought. And just to clarify, I'm not a Buddhist, nor do I play one on this blog ;-) I did get a healthy dose of Buddhist thought when I attended a free 10-day Vipassana meditation course this past winter, and it was that (amazing!) experience that prompted me to pick up The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.

I last wrote about a silver lining to grief back in March, but I want to take that concept many steps further tonight. If you are past the first year of grieving, this may give you a suitable foundation upon which to build your new life. I know for me this perspective colours everything regarding how I live my life now.

I think it was about the 11-month mark after Deb died, when the pain was at its most intense, that I decided that whatever lesson I was learning through this ordeal, I intended to learn it! I wanted to make sure that all this suffering and anguish I was going through was not in vain. Over the ensuing months, I learned that Deb's death had forced dozens of major changes on my life all at once, but the reality is that change is relentless, ever-present, and ongoing. The sooner we can come to grips with this fact, the sooner we can come to embrace it. It is this embrace of change that helps me to thrive as a healed widower, and it is my hope that you too will thrive again in your new life of your choosing.

[from page 33 of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying]

THE HEARTBEAT OF DEATH

There would be no chance at all of getting to know death if it happened only once. But fortunately, life is nothing but a continuing dance of birth and death, a dance of change. Every time I hear the rush of a mountain stream, or the waves crashing on the shore, or my own heartbeat, I hear the sound of impermanence. These changes, these small deaths, are our living links with death. They are death's pulse, death's heartbeat, prompting us to let go of all the things we cling to.

So let us then work with these changes now, in life: that is the real way to prepare for death. Life may be full of pain, suffering, and difficulty, but all of these are opportunities handed to us to help us move toward an emotional acceptance of death. It is only when we believe things to be permanent that we shut off the possibility of learning from change.

If we shut off this possibility, we become closed, and we become grasping. Grasping is the source of all our problems. Since impermanence to us spells anguish, we grasp on to things desperately, even though all things change. We are terrified of letting go, terrified, in fact, of living at all, since learning to live is learning to let go. And this is the tragedy and the irony of our struggle to hold on: not only is it impossible, but it brings us the very pain we are seeking to avoid.

Feeling, Not Thinking

For the last month, I've been pondering the answers to two questions I was recently asked about grieving. The first one came as a result of a woman reading my blog posting about What We Can Learn From Grief and wondering how we can get out of the way mentally and let our body grieve. The second question was asked by a relatively new widow: how does one facilitate the grieving process?

I believe the answers to these two questions are related, so I'm going to attempt to answer them both simultaneously. First, let's start with the premise that grief is primarily a feeling process, not a thinking process. Why is this important? There's a big tendency here in the West, especially for men, to intellectualize grief. We can think about our grief all we want, but we're not likely to heal much that way.

OK, fine. I need to feel in order to heal. But what does that mean in practice?

I was very lucky as an early widower to be aware of a healing process called Focusing. The best book I found on the subject is called The Power of Focusing: A Practical Guide to Emotional Self-Healing. As a man, I found this technique to be very helpful as it taught me how to listen to what my body was trying to tell me. I highly recommend it.

I read recently that the primary purpose of our neo cortex is to produce thoughts, which lead in turn to movement. When I attended a Vipassana meditation course, this was elaborated on a bit as follows:

• First, a thought comes to our mind


• This thought produces a feeling or sensation somewhere in our body


• Due to this feeling, we react in some way

Can you see how intellectualizing grief is counter-productive? I don't know about you, but when I was in the throes of grief, I had more feelings than I knew what to do with! I certainly didn't need to have thoughts generating even more feelings. Instead, I needed a way to work with the feelings I already had. And I needed my brain to be quiet.

What I learned through 100 consecutive hours of silent Vipassana meditation was how to allow a thought to come to mind, feel the sensation, but not react to it in any way. This not reacting included not generating additional, related thoughts and perpetuating the cycle. By the end of the course, a thought could come up and pass away, and I felt no need to follow it or react to it. As a result of not being needed, my mind grew very quiet. I guess it didn't like being ignored ;-) With this quieting of my mind came a deep and healing peace. I finally met the real me, that guy who doesn't have any problems.

It was right after I came back from Vipassana that I learned about a Hawaiian healing method called ho'oponopono. It says that any problem we experience in our life comes as a result of a memory. The solution? Let go of the memory. I have written a fair bit about this method and how it has helped me.

In my next post, I'll explain more about how we can help our body heal from grief.

Contrasting Opinions About Grief

Pain becomes bearable when we are able to trust that it won't last forever, not when we pretend that it doesn't exist.
-- Alla Bozarth-Campbell

I've started reading an excellent book called "Understanding Grief" by Alan D. Wolfelt. While it does make many, many excellent points and is well worth your time to read, I couldn't help but notice the sharp contrast in opinion between Eastern grief approaches. Consider the following from the Preface (pg vii):

Perhaps my most important learning about grief is simply that grief is not something we as human beings "get over." Instead, it is something we "live with."

I have read many Western authors that suggest the same thing, that grief is something we incorporate into our lives, like learning to live with diabetes or the loss of a limb. And I have met many widows and widowers who have done an admirable job of incorporating their loss into their lives.

I do not intend to join their ranks. Why?

Let's contrast the above advice with that of an Eastern, Buddhist approach to grief. Right up front, let me be clear that I am not Buddhist and have no intention of becoming a Buddhist. I love eating tasty, grilled animals, and besides, my karma ran over my dogma ;-) However, the ideas in this tradition about how to grieve certainly got my attention. Let's look at the following article I found on The Grief Blog:

Understanding Grief

When we cry for a loved one that has died, either we cry for ourselves or we cry for humanity, never for our loved one. Many will not agree with this, but it is true. The tears are more often than not an expression of our own fear of not having our loved one with us any longer to keep us company, and the subconscious realization that all of us will come to this in time; none will be excused. Therefore, grief has everything to do with us, and nothing to do with the one who has died. This is the true understanding of grief, and when we understand in this way, grief will be less burdensome.

These times of grief are when profound questions should come up in our hearts, questions that we shouldn't run out and get answered by this person or that book too quickly. These are questions that we should gulp down deep inside and allow to simmer for awhile so that we can really feel the suffering that all humanity goes through. To believe that life is happiness flies in the face of many wise people:

John 12:25. "He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal." The Buddha's first Noble Truth: "Life is Suffering,"

Life is conflict, but life is only in conflict with ourselves. It is ourselves that feel the grief, and it is ourselves that worry and fear. Without the burden of "self," none of these things could touch us, and we would be free. Without the burden of self, no grief would be experienced, only love, and grief is not love. Grief is resistance to change, wanting things to remain our way, but since change is inevitable and what existence is all about, our resistance to change is doomed to failure.

Only a deep understanding of these things can bring us freedom from the burdens of grief. Grief is simply a misunderstanding of ourselves and of our loved ones. Life on earth is seen as a wonderful thing by those of us who are still not free, but those who understand see life as a mere transition, a place of change where the next horizon is nothing less than amazing.

Therefore, we need not cry for the departed. They are fine. We need only to look at ourselves and how we perpetuate the emotions and feelings that cause so much pain. There is a way to end all if this and the way is through understanding at the deepest levels of our hearts.

Copyright © E. Raymond Rock 2007. All rights reserved

E. Raymond Rock of Fort Myers, Florida is co founder and principal teacher at the Southwest Florida Insight Center (http://www.SouthwestFloridaInsightCenter.com). His twenty-eight years of meditation experience has taken him across four continents, including two stopovers in Thailand where he practiced in the remote northeast forests as an ordained Theravada Buddhist monk. His book, A Year to Enlightenment (Career Press/New Page Books) is now available at major bookstores and online retailers (http://www.AYearToEnlightenment.com).

The difference is striking, yes? Before I close off this post, I also want to be clear that I don't believe one opinion is right and the other is wrong. I'm finding more and more that labels like "right" and "wrong" hold less and less meaning for me. It is what it is. In the end, I care more about results than dogma. For me, it was by attending a free Vipassana meditation course and truly experiencing an Eastern approach to healing that my grief pain went away.

Your mileage may vary ;-)

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.

The Practice of Mindfulness

I kind of fell into meditation as a Grief Recovery Tool, and rather late in the game at that. Certainly, it was not suggested to me in any of the typical grief books that I read, nor do I recall hearing about meditation at my monthly grief support meetings. I attended my free Vipassana course more as a personal development thing, not specifically for grief recovery. Since then, and especially after receiving the amazing benefits of meditating, I have been wondering how far into bereavement one should be before learning some simple meditation techniques. I'm thinking more and more that, had I attended Vipassana earlier, my grief recovery timeframe would have been significantly shortened.

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I've been reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. It explains very clearly the benefits of being completely open to fully experiencing grief, especially within a meditation framework [pp61-2]:

Meditation is bringing the mind back home, and this is first achieved through the practice of mindfulness.

Once an old woman came to Buddha and asked him how to meditate. He told her to remain aware of every movement of her hands as she drew the water from the well, knowing that if she did, she would soon find herself in that state of alert and spacious calm that is meditation.

The practice of mindfulness, of bringing the scattered mind home, and so of bringing the different aspects of our being into focus, is called "Peacefully Remaining" or "Calm Abiding." "Peacefully Remaining" accomplishes three things. First, all the fragmented aspects of ourselves, which have been at war, settle and dissolve and become friends. In that settling we begin to understand ourselves more, and sometimes even have glimpses of the radiance of our fundamental nature.

Second, the practice of mindfulness defuses our negativity, aggression, and turbulent emotions, which may have been gathering power over many lifetimes. Rather than suppressing emotions or indulging in them, here it is important to view them, and your thoughts, and whatever arises with an acceptance and generosity that are as open and spacious as possible. Tibetan masters say that this wise generosity has the flavor of boundless space, so warm and cozy that you feel enveloped and protected by it, as if by a blanket of sunlight.

Gradually, as you remain open and mindful, and use one of the techniques that I will explain later to focus your mind more and more, your negativity will slowly be defused; you begin to feel well in your being, or as the French say, être bien dans sa peau (well in your own skin). From this comes release and a profound ease. I think of this practice as the most effective form of therapy and self-healing.

Third, this practice unveils and reveals your essential Good Heart, because it dissolves and removes the unkindness or the harm in you. Only when we have removed the harm in ourselves do we become truly useful to others. Through the practice, then, by slowly removing the unkindness and harm from ourselves, we allow our true Good Heart, the fundamental goodness and kindness that are our real nature, to shine out and become the warm climate in which our true being flowers.

You will see now why I call meditation the true practice of peace, the true practice of nonaggression and nonviolence, and the real and greatest disarmament.

Because a major goal of mine early on in my bereavement was to be at peace with Deb's death, you can see how I have been attracted to the mindfulness aspect of meditation. I wish for you the same deep peace that I have experienced. I believe that meditation should be investigated for grief recovery before the shock phase has fully worn off.

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 ;-)

Vipassana Meditation III

In my last post, I gave a day-by-day account of my Vipassana meditation course. Now that I've been back almost a week, I'm in good stead to talk a bit more about what I've taken away from the course and how it continues to impact my daily life.

First off, the course was not a Buddhist course, even though it originates from that tradition. So while I did eat only vegetarian meals while I was there (which were excellent by the way), the first place I stopped after the course was over was Burger King for a Double whopper ;-) I did have to go without caffeine through the whole course, and that is something I have continued. I did have a half-cup a few days after the course was over, but I am enjoying my first taste of caffeine-free living after about 18 years of daily coffee intake.

Of much more interest is how this impacted me as a widower. My personality is such that normally I'm always living in the near-future, with frequent jaunts to the past. I had read a great deal about how to live in the present, but that never really meant much to me. Sure, I understood intellectually about paying attention to the five senses, but it is a totally different thing to do nothing but pay attention to one's breath and skin sensations for 10 hours a day for 10 days. I get it now. And I have been making good use of this new faculty over the past week. It has proven to be very helpful.

Of deeper significance is the aspect of impermanence (Pali: anicca). I have lost track of the many times this week that I have been impacted by events in some way and I have simply stopped and observed the impermanence aspect of life. My first inclination is no longer to react mentally to thoughts and events. I am now trained to observe rather than react. Sure, my mind still begins to race and lead me down a bunch of different paths. But now, I can quiet my mind by simply observing the instantaneous change in my breathing and notice the biochemical sensations that begin in my body. And I find myself repeating, "things rise up and they pass away." Absolutely nothing here on this planet is permanent, yet I tended to get attached to them. That tendency is lessening every day now.

I also am really glad that I was able to get really close to "me." Not the guy who always has 5 projects on the go, people to call, books to read, places to go. The guy who breathes. That guy. The guy who can just be, nothing more. There's been a lot of stuff I have been cramming into my life, and I'd built up a fair bit of angst at trying to get it all done. That is dissolving now, albeit slowly. I'm still working out what I want to have in my life from my pre-Vipassana days. It is kind of fun to be starting over, at least as far as prioritizing my days.

And lastly, I'm viewing much more of life as one big experiment, and things that happen to me as other, smaller experiments. This view of life from the position of the observer has added a real sense of balance to my life that was not there before.

OK, enough theory, here's an example. I remember my son was talking about his mom earlier this week, and my mind shifted into high gear about what his life would be like if Deb was still here. Within a few seconds, I was observing how my breathing had changed and how my body was reacting to my thoughts. I could feel a tightness and heaviness in my gut as my body made real the mental aspects of loss. And yet I was now no longer simply reacting; rather, I was observing this instance of the mind-body phenomenon at work. I noted that I had been feeling fine, then my son spoke, ideas began to flood my mind, my breathing pattern changed, and muscles started tensing in my body. And I observed that this phenomenon had risen up, and I knew that it would pass away. And it did, soon enough. I kept the balance of my mind, and my gut tension eased and I continued to enjoy the day with my son. The days when I would have been thrown for a loop and miserable for hours are well behind me now.

Of course, this is just one instance, and there have been other moments this past week when simply observing was not enough. In those cases, I could begin a few minutes of Anapana meditation and simply observe my breath. It immediately caused my mind to slow down and it was like I was reinforcing to my mind, "you are a great tool, but you are not the driver of my life. We're not going down that road today." And I observed that my mind relaxed. This whole process took maybe three minutes, and I didn't have to close my eyes or go into some kind of trance or anything. Just a simple observation of my breath as I was walking, nothing more. How very practical. How very handy. How very helpful.

So, Vipassana has made a lasting impression on me and given me some very valuable skills, ones that I use daily. It has positively impacted many areas of my life. I'm not only better as a single man, but I'm also a better consultant, friend, and father. My sense of well-being has increased a great deal, and I am more at peace. Was all this worth 10 days cut off from the outside world? You bet.

If any of these past few posts has intrigued you, I highly recommend you check out the Vipassana website and consider attending a course yourself. It is free, and it is a great way to spend some time getting to know the person who doesn't have any problems - the real you. You'll be glad you did.

Vipassana Meditation II

In my last post, I explained a little bit about what Vipassana meditation is, as well as what some of the day-to-day experience is like when you take a 10-day course. Today I'll go into more depth and share some of the benefits I received (and continue to receive) from this experience.

First, I'll start out by stating that I don't consider myself to be a mystic by any stretch of the imagination. Skeptic, sure :-) But, I have an open mind, and I rely a great deal on personal references. If my friend Jerry said this would be a worthwhile endeavour, well, that was good enough for me.

The course began innocuously enough. After a light vegetarian evening meal (the only supper of the whole course), we (all 50 of us) trooped up the stairs to the meditation hall to our assigned square cushions on our respective side (males on left, females on right). After hearing some chanting in a foreign language (Pali), we were given our instructions: direct our attention to the triangular area bounded by our nasal passages and the top of our upper lip, and simply observe our breathing. If we felt our mind drift, gently bring our attention back to observing our breath through our nose. We did this for about 45 minutes, then off to bed. 4 a.m. comes early you know.

Before I knew it, I was hearing the wakeup chime at a little after four. We all made our way back to the meditation hall to begin our first meditation sitting of the day — for two hours. What were we to do? Observe our breath through our nose, and refocus anytime we noticed our mind drift. We practiced this for 10 hours on Day 1. On Day two, we were to be making sure that our minds were drifting for a max of 5 minutes, preferably much less. We were to do this for another 10 hours. I remember thinking in the late afternoon of day two, "gee, I hope I didn't waste 10 days of my life here. This is kind of silly." I wasn't thinking that by day 4.

After 3½ days of observing our nasal breathing (called Anapana meditation), we were now ready to begin learning Vipassana meditation. I did notice that my mind was quite a bit sharper and more aware, and I could catch myself drifting within about 10-15 seconds. I would need every bit of that concentration and awareness in the coming days.

Vipassana meditation consists of observing sensations on the body. At first, we were to direct our conscious awareness to a small patch of skin, say, 2-3 inches square, and simply observe the sensations there. It could be the atmosphere, itching, tingling, throbbing, electricity, clothing, any sensation at all. We just needed to focus our attention on this sensation, whatever it was. We were to observe it objectively, with equanimity, and understand the impermanence (Pali: anicca) of what we were experiencing. After several seconds of sensing whatever was in this area, we were to shift our "square of focus" over a few inches and sense what was there. We were to continue doing this, from head to toe, until we had covered our entire body. Once that was done, we were to start over, from head to toe. For 10 hours.

Oh, and starting on Day 4, there were 3 hour-long sessions of "Strong Determination" in which we were not to change our posture. No major movement, which meant no opening of our eyes, no moving our arms, hands, legs, or feet. I decided to make every session one of strong determination, so this caused me some additional discomfort, which turned slowly into pain. It can be quite painful to sit still for hours on end every day.

On day 6, we were to move back up the body once we reached our toes instead of starting over again at the head. I was kind of cheating a bit on day 6, splitting my focus between what I was sensing, and working through a bunch of planning I had for various projects I was working on. My clarity of mind was incredible, and I was quickly solving numerous issues which had previously stumped me. I remember walking around outside on one of our short breaks with a huge smile on my face, thinking "this was so worth coming here!" In two days, I had done about 6 months of work in my head.

By day 8, we were now alternating our body sensing from the piecemeal approach to one of full body sweeps, and back to piecemeal. I was also in quite a bit of physical pain from sitting still for over a week. What I observed, though, is that each pain seemed to be tied somehow to various thoughts and issues I carried around with me. If I stayed focused on any one painful area long enough, a particular memory from my past would surface, and I could observe it objectively and let it go. And that pain would change as well, sometimes disappearing entirely.

Day 8 was also when I was in so much physical pain that at one point I thought I would throw up. My right knee and calf was in agony. Nobody held a gun to my head telling me I couldn't move, yet I felt compelled to continue sitting still and to work with the pain, not try to avoid it. I dealt with many memories of Deb's illness and death on day 8, and by the end of the day, the sharp pain had dulled to a strong ache, and I felt so much better about Deb's death. It was like I was finally able to see things completely objectively, like it happened to someone else.

Day 8 also marked the end of any breaks. From the moment we were awake until the moment we drifted off to sleep, we were to be focusing on our body sensations and aware of what we were experiencing there. Day 9, we were now to be sensing inside our bodies as well as outside. Lots more past events to deal with using this technique, but I felt very comfortable with the whole process. It actually felt very good to finally have a structured way to deal with all my past experiences.

Day 10 was a "shock absorber" day. The vow of silence was lifted at about 10 am, and the meditation schedule was cut in half. We could now mingle with the women on the course, and we could share our experiences with each other. It was nice to finally get to know some of these people I had been furtively observing while the course was going on. They actually had personalities :-) They weren't just shuffling zombies after all.

By 06:30 a.m. on day 11, the course was over. We stayed on a bit more for breakfast and cleanup of the facility, and then we were driving back home. So much to think about and reflect on during that drive. It was a fitting end to be physically journeying back home after such a long, tough, and rewarding mental journey.

Next post, I'll finish up this short series with my thoughts and observations about the course and what made the most impression on me.

Vipassana Meditation

I've just experienced a remarkable 10-day long Vipassana meditation course. What is Vipassana? I'll let their website explain:

Vipassana, which means to see things as they really are, is one of India's most ancient techniques of meditation. It was rediscovered by Gotama Buddha more than 2500 years ago and was taught by him as a universal remedy for universal ills, i.e., an Art Of Living.

This non-sectarian technique aims for the total eradication of mental impurities and the resultant highest happiness of full liberation. Healing, not merely the curing of diseases, but the essential healing of human suffering, is its purpose.

Vipassana is a way of self-transformation through self-observation. It focuses on the deep interconnection between mind and body, which can be experienced directly by disciplined attention to the physical sensations that form the life of the body, and that continuously interconnect and condition the life of the mind. It is this observation-based, self-exploratory journey to the common root of mind and body that dissolves mental impurity, resulting in a balanced mind full of love and compassion.

The scientific laws that operate one's thoughts, feelings, judgements and sensations become clear. Through direct experience, the nature of how one grows or regresses, how one produces suffering or frees oneself from suffering is understood. Life becomes characterized by increased awareness, non-delusion, self-control and peace.

It should be clear, then, why I as a widower was interested in attending. I wanted to undergo the mental healing promised by this technique.

I first heard about this course from a friend I made while I was in Ecuador last year. He really didn't say much about it, other than that it was 10 days of total silence, that it was challenging, and that it was very worthwhile. He seemed to have gotten a lot out of it, and he recommended that I look more into it. Ever since then, I have been trying to fit it into my schedule. It just so happened that the past week and a half was a good fit for me.

And what a week and a half that was! First off, I wouldn't consider myself a morning person. If I can drag myself into the office by about 10 a.m., I consider that a good day ;-) Also, I really needed caffeine to get myself going, and stay going. And I know just about every vegetarian joke out there ;-) My favourite: "I didn't fight my way to the top of the food chain to eat vegetables." So I really wasn't sure how I'd do getting up at 4 a.m. every day, no caffeine, and only two vegetarian meals a day.

Well, I quickly adapted to the new schedule, and my break with caffeine actually occurred 4 days before the course began — I knew the course would be challenging enough without going through caffeine withdrawal simultaneously. And the food quality was excellent, even if it was just breakfast and lunch. They did allow new students (those on the course for the first time) to eat some fruit at around 5 p.m., so I'd have a banana and orange and some milk to take the edge off. I did lose weight though &mdash about 4-5 pounds, nothing major.

Did I experience that promised mental healing? Yes, and much, much more. I'll explain fully in my next post...