Never Mind

I have a little index card (folded at the bottom so it stands up) on my office desk with the following written on it:

Everything Is In Flow
I am letting go of all resistance to life

It has sat there in my peripheral vision for over two years. I didn't realize what a profound effect it was having until one of my co-workers recently said to me, "man, you are so Zen." I just smiled, mostly because I don't know a thing about Zen ;-)

But I did understand what he meant. It takes a lot to ruffle my feathers these days. Of course, now that my spouse is dead, my bar for life challenges has been raised substantially, so the little things (what we affectionately called chickenshit in the army ;-) don't really bother me anymore. But I'm finding more and more that the big things don't really bother me anymore either.

Perhaps you're familiar with the story of the farmer who experienced a variety of experiences that most of his neighbors were quick to label "good" or "bad:"

There is an ancient Chinese story of a farmer who owned an old horse that till his fields. One day, the horse escaped into the hills and when the farmer's neighbors sympathized with the old man over his bad luck, the farmer replied, “Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?”

A week later, the horse returned with a herd of horses from the hills and this time the neighbors congratulated the farmer on his good luck. His reply was, “Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?”

Then, when the farmer's son was attempting to tame one of the wild horses, he fell off its back and broke his leg. Everyone thought this very bad luck. Not the farmer, whose only reaction was, “Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?”

Some weeks later, the army marched into the village and conscripted every able-bodied youth they found there. When they saw the farmer's son with his broken leg, they let him off. Once again, the farmer's only reaction was, “Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?”

There are no misfortunes in life. There are only missed fortunes… missed only because we fail to recognise and appreciate them as they truly are… fortunes, experiences, learning opportunities, seeds of wisdom…

From our limited vantage point, it is often fruitless to attempt to figure out why something happened and unhelpful to label it as good or bad. I often find myself saying, "it is what it is." In bereavement, of course, we need to confront this issue head-on. Almost anyone would say that having your spouse die is bad, terrible, a catastrophe. Is that so? Death is what it is. Nobody gets out of this life alive.

I'm not asking you to logically accept this, right now or ever. I am suggesting that you not think about it. If there are some things in life that we are not destined to understand, why waste time thinking about them?

Ah, you say, but what about the pain? The agony of grief hurts beyond imagination and lasts far longer that what we think we can tolerate. Surely that is bad?

Is that so?

The pain we experience in bereavement is what it is. And that is the key — we need to experience it, fully and completely. Not run away from it, avoid it, bargain with it, or anesthetize it. We need to feel it, experience it, welcome it. A great question we can ask ourselves which comes from The Sedona Method:

Can you just allow whatever you are experiencing right now to be here?

There's a scene near the beginning of Lawrence of Arabia where Peter O'Toole lights a match and watches it burn down to his fingertips. When his co-worker tries it, he flings the match away and exclaims, "it bloody hurts!" To which the young Lawrence replies, "The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts." And despite having watched that film over ten times, I've never understood that quote until today ;-)

When we begin to accept that grief hurts, when we welcome the pain, we can fully experience bereavement, and we can begin to heal. And instead of asking ourselves why this terrible thing has happened to us, we can ponder this instead:

See the perfection where the seeming imperfection seems to be
-- Lester Levenson

And yes, that snapped me out the first time I read it too ;-)

The Body’s Power to Heal Itself

I read an interesting article a month or so ago called The Key to Natural Healing. One thing jumped out at me:

The Body’s Power to Heal Itself

Q: I find it hard to understand how pain points to the ultimate?

A: […] Another way to express this is to let the body be body. The body has an organic memory of health. You have the proof of this in the fact that when you cut your finger, it heals within a week. The body evidently knows precisely how to heal itself...

Understanding that the body has a built in blue print of perfect health and it will do all it can to heal itself, I feel, is a very reassuring fact. The human body has enormous intelligence which it has accumulated over centuries, it know exactly what to do and how to do it. Your job is mostly to listen to it, and assist it with it’s inbuilt healing capabilities.

When I read that, I was reminded that when our body heals a cut finger, it heals it just to the right amount and no more. There's an amazing process at work there, one that's not under our control. Yes, there are things we can do to help it along, like swab it with rubbing alcohol to kill the germs, but the healing is done for us. And when our finger is healed, we don't have to mentally address the body and tell it,"OK, good job, you can stop now." The body knows how to heal itself.

A similar process is at work when our spouse dies. The body knows how to grieve. And it will heal our grief to just the right amount and no more. This should offer us a great deal of hope. Pretty much every one of us has suffered a small cut somewhere on our bodies. And our body healed itself. You probably don't even remember the particulars about some of those cuts anymore, especially if they happened some years ago. Isn't it comforting to know that your body is busily at work healing itself from this grief wound as well? You know that your body can heal cuts, and you have the proof that the healing process works. This insight should help to alleviate some of our fears. Grief doesn't last forever.

Isn't it interesting that we feel pain when we are bereaved? We have no cut on our body, but it hurts like we've been attacked by a meat cleaver. I remember feeling like someone had buried a big hatchet in the middle of my chest and was busy wiggling it around. It hurt like hell.

Grief was devastating to me. Was it devastating to my body? No. Grief was devastating to my mind, and my mind caused the pain in my body. I needed to learn how to heal my mind. And when I learned how to heal my mind, the physical pain went away.

Unsatisfying Grief

"You need to fully experience grief." How many times have you read that? It makes you wonder if the authors have ever experienced a loss themselves. In the acuteness of loss, the pain can be overwhelming, and this at a time when we are doing our level best to minimize our suffering. Why would anyone want to experience agonizing pain to the fullest extent?

And yet, this is a necessary part of successful grieving. Despite how it may feel, grief is *not* all-powerful and all-encompassing. It does have boundaries and limits, and discovering these limits helps to put grief in perspective. It helps take the fear away. Fear of what? Going crazy, for one!

Of course, the day you decide to probe the depths of grief should not be one where you are already under a lot of stress. Not that the exercise will overwhelm you (in fact, just the opposite), but the mind will need a fair bit of support to even contemplate the prospect of going to the center of the pain.

Remember the first time you dove into a pool? I do. Well actually, I remember all the days I tried to dive and failed to gather the gumption ;-) I was scared. Scared of hurting myself, scared of losing control, scared of letting go. Looking back, the agony of anticipation was way worse than the actual dive itself. But it was one of those things that, until the deed was actually done, only the fear seemed real.

I got the following exercise from Happiness Is Free, and in a future post I'll quote the process in its entirety. For tonight, however, a quick synopsis will more than suffice.

First, take a number of steps to support yourself and reduce your stress. You can reread Feeling, Not Thinking II for some good ideas here. Next, get comfortable. When I did this exercise, I was sitting on my couch in my cozy, dimly-lit living room. Then, begin to go over some of the more troubling aspects of your spouse's death. You know, those thoughts that tend to really cut you up. The only difference is that this time you will try to push those wounding thoughts harder. As you're feeling and experiencing pain, ask yourself if you could go deeper into that pain. And deeper. Ask yourself if you could find the bottom of that pain, to go to the core of that pain. Give yourself permission to feel the full extent of the pain. The center of it. See if you can describe what the pain feels like at its most potent, most concentrated core.

The funny thing is that trying to intensify mental pain is a frustrating endeavor. No matter how you try to lock that pain down to isolate its core, you will find that the core eludes you. Or rather, the mind-blowing pain that you expect to find there doesn't exist. What you find there instead is a weird kind of peace.

Have you ever sat down and gorged yourself on your favorite snack food? Perhaps you didn't set out to gorge yourself. But that first bowl of ice cream just didn't do it for you. So you had another. And another. And a bit more. And just one more spoonful. And, well, there's just a little bit left, so there's no point in putting that back in the freezer. And now you just ate an entire box of ice cream!

Do you feel satisfied at the end of such a binge? Or did the pleasure escape you? Are you left with an empty ice cream container and an unsatisfied feeling (despite your full tummy)?

Probing grief can be the same way. Only it won't be pleasure eluding you, it will be pain. The crazy pain will elude you. You won't be able to find that place where the pain breaks you down. You will instead experience a similar unsatisfied feeling to that which you experienced when you snack-binged. But instead of a full tummy, you'll now find you've got grief in a bit of a box. That agonizing pain will no longer be a mysterious, awesome, scary force like an angry ocean. For now you've discovered just how shallow the pain of grief really is. And that knowledge can help you get through each day much easier than before.

The dread will have lost its sting.

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 ;-)

Withdrawal

I was recently asked to provide a source for a comment I made about how intense grief can be eerily similar to heroin withdrawal symptoms. As it turns out, I wrote about this back in November in a post titled A Bad Trip. I figured it wouldn't be too hard to find another good reference in Google, and sure enough, I found another neat resource in the form of one Susan Anderson, author of The Journey from Abandonment to Healing: Turn the End of a Relationship into the Beginning of a New Life.

She has a website called AbandonmentRecovery.com, and she explains a bit more about this physiological phenomenon:

WITHDRAWL - painful Withdrawal from your lost love.
The more time goes on, the more all of the needs your partner was meeting begin to impinge into your every Waking moment. You are in Writhing pain from being torn apart. You yearn, ache, and Wait for them to return. Love-withdrawal is just like Heroin withdrawal — each involves the body's opiate system and the same physical symptoms of intense craving. During Withdrawal, you are feeling the Wrenching pain of love-loss and separation — the Wasting, Weight loss, Wakefulness, Wishful thinking, and Waiting for them to return. You crave a love-fix to put you out of the WITHDRAWAL symptoms.

She also wrote a very good paper on Suffering the Death of a Loved One, and I'd like to quote a few more sections that help to explain these withdrawal symptoms a bit better.

As the Novocain wore off, the acute pain of loss began to break through, and we went into withdrawal. We were in painful withdrawal from our partner, just as if we were in withdrawal from Heroin (and it involves the body’s own opiates). We began craving and yearning for a love-fix we could not possibly get.

Week by week, our emotional needs – the ones that had been met by our partners – began to mount. We grew to miss them more and more. We missed having someone in the background, someone who cared, someone to care about, someone to come home to, someone to bring us that cup of coffee, someone who would know if we fell in the shower, someone to serve as a focus for our lives. As these deprivations reached critical mass, the intense grieving could become nearly unbearable.

Weeping:

We found ourselves weeping – a kind of crying specific to early bereavement, characterized by sighing and flowing tears, different from our usual crying . Our emotional brains were automatically scanning our memory banks (searching for the lost object) – an involuntary function of the brain which is part and parcel of our stress response to crisis – flooding us with scenes from all the way to the beginning of the relationship. Our coupled histories passing before our eyes in a blur of tears. We remembered them as they we (and as we were) when we first met them, the initial romance. These memories (along with the intense yearning and pining) caused us to fall in love with our partners all over again and want them more than ever before. We became walking memorials to them...

As my group mates and I cycled through the tugging, craving, helpless feelings of withdrawal, we helped each other realize that we weren’t alone feeling this pain. We served as reality checks for one another – maybe we weren’t going crazy after all – our emotional excesses were an ordinary part of grief. We could see each other surviving through the worst of it and felt reassured that we too would make it through.

We cycled through withdrawal during all different timeframes. For some, this phase of active grieving was delayed for a long time. Several members remained in the numbing fog indefinitely. "I know I need to cry, but I feel detached and remote, like I’m not really here. Other people’s tears don’t seem real to me, but I know they mean something."

Waves of grief:

Grief proved to have a mind of its own – its own rhythm. It came in waves which washed over us and sometimes swallowed us whole, leaving us beached and dazed, sending us back into the numbing fog to start the cycle over again.

Any sudden realization of the loss – as if realizing it on a new level – could send us right back into shock, and then the acute pain of missing the person would break through the Novocain, and we would resume a new wave of active grieving. We might wake up in the middle of the night startled anew by the reality that our loved one was gone, and cycle from shock to withdrawal in a matter of minutes. In fact this is another cornerstone of grief: the sudden re-realization of the reality of the death...

Wakeful and worn out:

The physiological symptoms of withdrawal included continual wakefulness, anxious wrenching in our guts (even while some of our appetites (unfortunately) began to return ). We felt overwhelmed, on edge, and entirely exhausted. Beneath the surface, the emotional brain continued working overtime “searching for it's 'other half' and learning to recognize the loss. Our cortical brains were also busy on the conscious level trying to come to grips with this reality.

On the positive side, the acute grief of withdrawal motivated us to dig deeper, reach all the way down to our untapped resources. We panned for our grittiest reserves and came up with survival skills and hidden strengths that amazed us.

The entire paper is well worth reading if you have the time.

New Directions

In my recent Memories Are Not what They Seem post, I theorized that we feel pain in grief as a signal to change our thoughts, behaviors, and habits. I found the following great article on The Grief Blog which corroborates my theory, as well as gives some excellent advice on considering new roads to take on this journey. I think you will find it helpful:

Learn the Biggest Lesson Grief and Loss Offers

The death of a loved one and the grief that follows teach many lessons. Perhaps the most important one is that pain is the sign to take a new road in life. This is a double barrelled lesson. First, we often have to decide to do some things we have not thought of previously-or ever attempted before. And secondly, of equal importance, the key to advancement into our new world (that is, our adaptation to the loss) is the necessity to take action.

Accepting the new and taking action are crucial learnings; they are also difficult to embrace. New direction takes many forms in the grief process. Here are five to consider that others have had to deal with in their journey through grief. You too, may well have to deal with one or more of them.

1. Grief and loss frequently demands the development of new routines. In death, divorce, or loss of friendships survivors usually have to assume new responsibilities which may have belonged to their partner or friend who is no longer there. New routines, often difficult to institute, are significant coping responses to establish. The sooner the better, because they eventually help bring stability to a life that has changed through loss.

2. Grief and loss may say: change the way you perceive the world. Perceptions are the personal meaning we give to experience. Perhaps you may have to find new meanings. The world is no longer a totally happy place to be, but one in which pain must be accepted as part of the fabric of life. This is a very normal response, especially if this is the first time you have had to deal with a major loss.

3. Grief and loss sometimes implies the adoption of new beliefs. Beliefs affect every facet of your response to loss. One of the most critical new beliefs to ponder is that with most losses-if not all-the key message is take a different road, a new approach, or access in order to adapt and reinvest in life. This is a big stumbling block for many as we don't like to give up our old ways and do the distasteful.

One of the new considerations I suggest to most who are mourning the death of a loved one is that they are entering a new life, the next chapter. And, what does that mean you must do?

4. Grief and loss may point to the development of new relationships. Widows and widowers usually lose their connections to other couples in their social circle. Yet, everyone needs interpersonal relationships of the right type and number.

Deepening the relationships you already have by meeting more regularly with friends could be called for. Developing connections at your church or synagogue or with relatives that you do not regularly see is another avenue. What is clear is that such strong relationships promote health and longevity.

5. Grief and loss often results in the needed development of new skills and abilities. Sometimes certain skills are necessary in order to take a new job. At other times, it may be out of necessity: either learn how to fix the leak in the faucet or toilet tank or pay a hefty bill from the local plumber. Sometimes it's as simple as learning how to pump your own gas. Many times it's learning to do the taxes and manage financial records.

To summarize, don't ignore the biggest lesson grief and loss teaches: pain signals to take a new road or you stay longer in pain. Look for those who have dealt with the kind of loss you are experiencing or who are experts in helping the bereaved. Learn from their wisdom and experience regarding where you need to take action on your new road.

We all, at various times, have to do what we dislike doing. However, take comfort in the fact that the history of loss shows that mourners do adjust to their new path and are able to finally reinvest in life.

---

Dr. LaGrand is a grief counsellor 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

The Somatic-Emotional State of Grief

somatic

affecting or characteristic of the body as opposed to the mind or spirit

I've written before about why grief hurts, and specifically on why we feel such intense pain when our spouse dies. As I understand things, pain is a powerful way for our body to communicate with us. Of course, in the middle of bereavement, we just want the pain to stop! So we start looking for Grief Recovery Tools to find out how to stop the pain. My theory is that we feel pain until such time as we change all the habits related to our past life as a married person. Easier said than done...

I recently stumbled upon the following article which does a great job of explaining the mind-body connection to our habits, and it also gives some good advice on how to change those habits and our posture so that we can change the habitual patterns of our mind, and therefore reduce our pain:

Your somatic-emotional state at any given time is made up to a large extent, of a specific habitual recipe of biochemical and neuromuscular activities that you tend to perform without conscious awareness. Bringing awareness to and regaining a natural relaxed control over the activity of your entire system affords you the ability to positively affect your emotions, and your overall health and sense of well being - your somatic-emotional state. Your psychological state on the other hand is usually deemed to be mainly dependent on what takes place inside your head.

Many of us, over the course of time, lose the ability to fully communicate with our body, and we lose the ability to be fully aware of the communication of the body. It is the communication patterns of the body that lead to our emotional state, and our verbal communication patterns. When you limit your ability to communicate somatically and be aware of your somatic conversation, you also limit your ability to feel your emotions, communicate verbally, and be aware of your verbal conversation. Of course your overall state of health and well-being will be affected as well.

The greater your ability to be aware of and embody a full potential range of somatic communication, the greater your ability to communicate verbally and "understand" what you are feeling.

One of many possible ways to think about how we experience life is the following:

Body + Language = Emotional Experience

What we mean here is: The overall condition, usage, and awareness of one's body, plus the way in which one uses language to describe one's experience, go together to make up one's CURRENT emotional experience of self, another person, and or an event.

1. Change the condition, usage, and awareness of your body and you will change the way in which you use language to describe what has or is transpiring, which in turn will change your overall emotional experience of the issue being considered. The six somatic "avenues" that we find most accessible in changing the condition, use, and awareness of the body are,

1. Posture,


2. Balance and carriage of the neck and head,


3. Movement and Flexibility. (This includes muscular holding patterns and micro-muscular rocking movements),


4. Breath,


5. Facial Expressions,


6. Eye movements that occur when thinking about what you want to say, and what you feel.

These variables will be of primary importance in determining

1. One's emotional experience.


2. The language used to explain one's experience, and


3. One's ability to be solution oriented.

Each person systematically and habitually, orchestrates these variables depending on how they perceive the events and relationships they are dealing with. Making the "correct" changes to these variables will alter the way one perceives what is taking place, and the changes or solutions one believes they are capable of making.

2. Change the way in which you describe your experience, and you will affect and change the condition of your body, which in turn will change your overall emotional experience. We can describe events differently simply by changing the speed, rhythm, tone, volume, and pauses used in our description.

3. Changing one's emotional experience, will affect and change the condition of one's body, which in turn will affect and change the language one uses to describe one's experience. Emotion consists of language AND body - a system that is coherent at a deeper level. When the emotional state changes there is a concurrent change in the body, and in the use of language (including one's thought processes). If the way we use our body changes and there is no shift in our language usage/thinking, then the bodily changes we experience have not reached our emotions. In such cases long term change is unlikely. If our language usage/thinking changes and there is no matching bodily shift, then our new "ideas" are not having an emotional impact on us. Once again, in such an instance long term change is unlikely. When the emotions truly change, you will notice a change in the body AND in language.

I'd be interested to hear your comments.

Who Gets in Your Bucket?

Many times on our journey of grief, we run into people who want us to feel better, mostly so that they will feel better. We scare them. We are in more pain than they can imagine, and they think that platitudes or constant chiding will miraculously cure us of our grief. In the grief community, these folks are not-so-affectionately called "Don't Get It"s or DGIs for short. I like to call them the Clearly Clueless™. This kind of behavior is to be expected from strangers and acquaintances, and DGIs are simply part of the grief landscape. But what about when we get this behavior from close friends and family? Wouldn't it be helpful if we could print out a short article and have them read it? The following article by Doug Manning does a great job of explaining to DGIs why their reproaches are not at all helpful, as well as offering them a simple suggestion to truly help us:

Who Gets in Your Bucket?
— By Doug Manning

The best way I know to picture how we receive help from others in grief is to imagine you are holding a bucket. The size and color doesn't matter. The bucket represents the feelings bottled up inside of you when you are in pain. If you have suffered a loss, hold the bucket and think through how you feel right now. If you are reading this to learn more about helping others, then imagine what would be in your bucket if a loved one had died very recently. What is in your bucket?

Fear. Will I survive? What will happen to me now? Who will care for me? Who will be with me when I need someone near? Most likely your bucket is almost full just from the fear. But there is also:

Pain. It is amazing how much physical pain there is in grief. Your chest hurts, and you can't breathe. Sometimes the pain is so intense your body refuses to even move. There is enough pain to fill the bucket all by itself.

Sorrow. There is devastating sadness; overwhelming sorrow. A gaping hole has been bitten out of your heart and it bleeds inside your very soul. You cry buckets of tears and then cry some more.

Loneliness. There is no lonely like that felt when you are in a room full of people and totally alone at the same time. Loneliness alone can fill any bucket ever made.

I could go on, but that's enough to get the idea across, and hopefully get you started thinking through your own list. What is in your bucket?

Now picture someone like me approaching you and your bucket. I also have a bucket. My bucket is full of explanations. I am armed and ready to explain why your loved one had to die, how they are now better off and how you should feel.

I am also well equipped with new ways to look at your loss. In politics they call that "spin doctoring," but most human beings seem to know this skill by instinct.

I have almost a bucketful of comforting words and encouraging sayings. I can also quote vast amounts of scriptures. I seem to favor the ones that tell you not to grieve.

So we face each other armed with full buckets. The problem is, I don't want to get into your bucket. Yours is scary. If I get in there, you might start crying and I may not be able to make you stop. You might ask me something I could not answer. There is too much intimacy in your bucket. I want to stand at a safe distance and pour what is in my bucket into yours. I want the things in my bucket to wash over your pain like some magic salve to take away your pain and dry your tears. I have this vision of my words being like cool water to a dry tongue, soothing and curing as it flows.

But your bucket is full. There is no room for anything that is in my bucket. Your needs are calling so loudly there is no way you could hear anything I say. Your pain is far too intense to be cooled by any verbal salve, no matter how profound.

The only way I can help you is to get into your bucket, to try to feel your pain, to accept your feelings as they are and make every effort to understand. I cannot really know how you feel. I cannot actually understand your pain or how your mind is working under the stress, but I can stand with you through the journey. I can allow you to feel what you feel and learn to be comfortable doing so. That is called, "Getting into your bucket."

I was speaking on "Guilt and Anger in Grief " to a conference of grieving parents. I asked the group what they felt guilty about. I will never forget one mother who said, "All the way to the hospital, my son begged me to turn back. He did not want the transplant. He was afraid. I would not turn back, and he died."

I asked her how many times someone had told her that her son would have died anyway. She said, "Hundreds." When I asked her if that had helped her in any way she said, "No."

I asked her how many times she had been told that she was acting out of love and doing the right thing. She gave the same two responses. "Many times" and "No, it did not help."

I asked her how many times she had been told that God had taken her son for some reason, and she gave the same responses--"Many" and "No help."

I asked how many times someone had told her that it had been four years since her son's death and it was time to "Put that behind you and get on with your life." This time she responded with great anger that she had heard that from many well-meaning people, including family members, and that it not only did not help, it added to her pain and made her angry.

What I was really asking her is, "How many people have tried to pour their buckets into yours?"

I then said, "Would it help if I hugged you and said 'that must really hurt'?"

She said, "That would help a great deal. That would really help."

Why would that help? Because I was offering to get into her bucket with her and to be in her pain, instead of trying to salve over her pain with words and explanations.

If you are in pain, find someone who will get into your bucket. Most of the time these folks are found in grief groups or among friends who have been there. It is not normal procedure. It is hard to swallow our fears and climb into your bucket.

If you are reading this to find ways to help others in grief, then lay aside your explanations and your words of comfort. Forget all of the instructions and directions you think will help, and learn to say, "That must really hurt." I think that is the most healing combination of words in the English language. They really mean, "May I feel along with you as you walk through your pain?" "May I get into your bucket?"

Survival Breakdown

I've always had an interest in human psychology and why we as humans do what we do. Once I became a widower, this interest only intensified. Grieving is not a uniquely human experience by any means, but it is certainly one of the most intense, if not the most intense, human experience. As the intensity of my grieving picked up, I started consuming books about psychology and grief. I wanted to know: Why do we grieve? Why pain? What is the purpose of grieving? How long will this go on? My thought process at the time was, if I can understand why I am going through this living hell, then I can find the Grief Recovery Tools I need to help get me out.

While I was in Tampa last month, we talked about the three primary drivers of all human action:

1. Survival


2. Reproduction


3. Survival of our offspring

These three desires fuel all our thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Now that our spouse is dead, we have had to confront our primary drive, Survival, and acknowledge that no, we don't all survive, and, more to the point, this drive for survival will ultimately end in failure. Yet we are still driven to survive. It's like that joke — Despite the high cost of living, it remains popular ;-)

I have previously mentioned The Sedona Method, a super-important book that I feel strongly every widow/er should have in their Grief Recovery Toolbox. This book will lead you through the maze of your emotions and help you to release them all. Big promise, yes, and it certainly delivers.


The Sedona Method further breaks down our primary drive for survival into three primary desires:

1. Wanting Approval


2. Wanting Control


3. Wanting Security

It probably helps if you are able to visualize these three and understand their significance. In the book, they use a tree diagram that they call "the imaginary tree of limitation." Here's how they describe it [pp 181-183]:

The Anatomy of an Imaginary Tree of Limitation

Imagine that you are lost amid a dense forest of imaginary limitation. What's the anatomy of these trees? At the subtlest level, they are made up of atoms, which, in our world, we call "thoughts." Moving toward a little more density and structure, the leaves on this imaginary tree represent your individual feelings. The branches represent the nine emotional states. The trunk and the roots spreading out laterally from the bottom of the trunk represent wanting approval and wanting to control, as well as their opposites. The taproot, growing straight downward into the soil, represents wanting security and its opposite. Lastly, the soil represents wanting to be separate and its opposite, wanting to be one. (See illustration)

If we wanted to fell these imaginary trees of limitation and clear a path through this imaginary forest by releasing, there are several ways we might go about it. We could let go of one atom at a time by working to change our thinking. But that would take a long time. We could be even more active and proceed by plucking off individual leaves (feelings). But leaves tend to grow back. Or we could start pruning the branches (the nine emotional states). If you've ever pruned a tree, however, you know that branches often come back healthier than before. We would only start making significant progress once we began chopping at the trunk and lateral roots (the wanting approval and wanting to control). Of course, many trees have grown back from stumps even after some of their roots were removed.

There is not much certainty of eliminating this imaginary tree until we set about severing its taproot: wanting security and its opposite, wanting death. Now remember, in the forest of limitation where you're lost, every tree is imaginary. All limitation is imaginary.

At any point in this process, you can get a glimpse of what lies beyond the trees, the background of perfection and infinity that supports yet is unaffected by the forest. So, allow for the possibility as you use the Sedona Method that big chunks of the forest itself can fall away. Often, when you least expect it, you'll let go of big chunks of your imaginary limitation quite spontaneously. This will happen more and more frequently as you release at the level of the four basic wants.

The entire book is The guide for releasing and letting go of your emotions. Now that I am re-reading it, I can see how well it dovetails with Vipassana meditation and Eastern Thought in general. Why my interest in Eastern Thought? Simple: in the West, all advice to the bereaved is, "learn to live with your pain — it will be with you for the rest of your life." In the East, the advice is different: "Learn to let go of all your emotions, needs, and desires, and experience real peace."

It should be clear which advice I chose. You do not have to feel this pain forever. You can let it go. And it is easier than you think.

Memories

The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them.
— Friedrich Nietzsche

Memories. Now that our spouse is gone, memories are all we have of them. Never again will they laugh with us, cry with us, or comfort us. No new memories will be created with them. A big part of our grief is learning just how to come to terms with this awful reality. How does one come to terms with this? "How" questions are excellent Grief Recovery Tools and will guide you where you need to go.

As I mentioned in my last post about unbelievable healing, I'm reading Joe Vitale's Zero Limits. Before I share some of the startling insights in the book, be warned that they will likely go against everything you have ever learned about life and relationships here in the West. To say they are controversial, especially in the context of grieving, is an understatement.

It is important to recognize that life in Western civilization is one of acquisition. More money, a bigger house, faster car, prettier wife, smarter kids. A deep undercurrent of grasping greed pervades the newspapers, radio, and television. Your friends and neighbors likely chat about the newest thing they have bought or acquired.

And then one day, your spouse dies. You have lost your spouse, which makes you, by definition, a loser. People don't like to be around losers. If it could happen to you, it could happen to them. And life is just about what you can get, right? He who dies with the most toys wins?

You no longer have your spouse, but you do have your memories of your past life together with him or her. And no one can take those away from you! Whole industries have sprung up to help you memorialize your departed mate. Everything from the traditional tombstone to photo memory books, memorial websites, and charitable donations in their name. You can name buildings, awards, and children after him or her. Make a shrine in your house, hang pictures of them on your walls. Listen to the music they used to listen to. Keep their clothing so you can catch a bit of their smell to trigger the memories.

And then, as the years go by, you notice the memories beginning to fade. How can this be? So much has already been stolen from you! The life you should have had, together with your loved one, snatched away. And now the precious memories are beginning to recede. Their impermanent nature can no longer be ignored. Where is the fairness in all this?

I realize this is going to be a bit too much of a stretch at this point, but try to take the perspective, just for a moment, of looking directly opposite the view that receding memories is a bad thing. Dare to accept, just for a moment, that the day could come where this might not be a bad thing. It might even be a good thing.

Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len, the therapist who cured the ward of criminally insane patients in Hawaii, says that every problem in our life, every one, is because of our memories. The majority of our thoughts are tied up thinking about our memories. The solution? Let them go [pg 31]:

"When you erase something from your computer, where does it go?" he asked the room.
"To the recycle bin," someone shouted out.
"Exactly," Dr. Hew Len said. "It's still on your computer, but it's out of sight. Your memories are like that. They are still in you, just out of sight. What you want to do is erase them completely and permanently."
I found this fascinating, but I had no idea what it meant or where it was going. Why would I want memories permanently deleted?
"You have two ways to live your life," Dr. Hew Len explained. "From memory or from inspiration. Memories are old programs replaying. Inspiration is the Divine giving you a message.You want to come from inspiration. The only way to hear the Divine and receive inspiration is to clean all memories. The only thing you have to do is clean."
Dr. Hew Len spent a lot of time explaining how the Divine is our zero state — it's where we have zero limits. No memories. No identity. Nothing but the Divine.

You were warned ;-) Before I go on, let me be clear: the essence of your dead spouse has been infused into every cell in your body. They are now a part of you. I talked about this in my early post about some photos I found of Deb in my basement. If the above passage has made you angry, anxious, or afraid, realize that you have literally hundreds of thousands to millions of memories of your loved one. All those memories are recorded in your body somewhere. If you aren't interested in this kind of healing, rest assured that it will take a very long time for all those memories to fade, and there's lots you can do to hang on to those memories if you choose to do so.

If the idea of all your problems stemming from your memories has resonated with you, though, I'll close here with the simple method Dr. Hew Len uses to "clean" his memories. He simply repeats four simple phrases:

"I love you."
"I'm sorry."
"Please forgive me."
"Thank you."

As an experiment, try repeating the four phrases every time a memory of your departed loved one surfaces and causes you pain. In my next post, I'll explain how, due to my Vipassana meditation training, I could immediately see the wisdom of this point of view, and I'll go into a bit more depth as to how I spent 10 days cleaning my memories without ever being aware that I was doing so. All I know is that I am more at peace now than I have ever been in my entire life.

I Don't Understand, and I Don't Need To

The truest view of life has always seemed to me to be that which shows that we are here not to enjoy, but to learn.
— Frederick William Robertson

I can't say enough good things about Guy Finley's book, The Secret of Letting Go. I just finished reading it tonight, and it contains a ton of deep insights into why we hurt and how to let go of that pain. As far as Grief Recovery Tools go, this is one tool you'll want in your toolbox.

Not that this book is an easy read, mind you — far from it. This is a book you'll want to read, highlight, digest, and contemplate. And then read it again. He ends the book with a short exercise written by his mentor, Vernon Howard. I think it will likely be the most helpful for those of you who are feeling the pangs of grief most acutely. It may help to take some of the pressure off. And I think it will really help widowers. We tend to intellectualize our grief.

[From pages 271-273]:

When you begin to see that you have created your world in your own image, it will shock you. Here is a special exercise for you for when you are pained. I can't tell you what a marvelous change this exercise will make in your life.

From this point on, every time you feel some hurt or inner agony, instead of thinking about the pain, which you now do, you will do something else. Instead of directing your attention toward that sadness or disappointment, you are going to think about something else.

You are going to think, "I don't understand the pain."

Just think, "There is a darkness there. Something is lashing at me, and it hurts." But you are not going to get a false pleasure from the pain. You are going to go to the right department and say, "I don't understand the pain." THAT'S IT!

Then you never ever have to think another thought about the misery you are experiencing. You are through. You have done your part. THIS IS THE WAY OUT.

God Himself has just come to your rescue. This is what is authentically religious. Truth says, "Don't think about and swim around in the suffering." Simply sit back in your chair, relax, and say, "I don't understand the anguish that is terrorizing my system."

If you don't understand it, there is nothing YOU can do, is there? Then do nothing.

When we complain and cry and moan and groan and think, "How did I get into this mess?" etc., nothing will change. With this exercise, you are putting yourself in an entirely different department, and you will receive the products that that department has ready for you.

Do you want the product of not having to make worried decisions all day long? Just say, "I don't understand this crisis or that heartache that just came up." AND STOP. GO THROUGH YOUR WHOLE DAY NOT UNDERSTANDING IT.

It is our spurious understanding that gets us into the sorry inner mess in the first place. Don't be afraid to have no intelligence of your own. God is willing to make the grand, magnificent substitute for you. God gives you his life in exchange for your life.

The majority of men and women sell their souls all day long in exchange for false, fleeting feelings of self-control. When you have true self-command, you never have to look for it or ever explain its absence to yourself.

If you are willing to say, "I don't understand anything at all about my life," your false self along with its false understanding will fall away; in its place will be the insight from Heaven itself. That insight from a very High Place is all you need for this world and the next world. Go ahead and dare to let go.

VERNON HOWARD

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.

Why Grief Hurts II

In my last post, I briefly described some of John Bowlby's work as a behaviorist and began to explain my theory as to why grief hurts. In this post, I'll conclude my theory and solicit your comments.

Has anyone ever asked you when you're going to "move on" with your life? For most widow/ers, this suggestion often serves to infuriate the griever and reinforce a sense of helplessness. And where do people get off making such comments anyway?

Let's take their perspective for a moment, by way of a storm analogy. If a hurricane or tornado rips your house apart, you can't safely stay there anymore. If a friend happened to stop by several weeks later and found you glumly skulking about the ruins of your home, the "when do you plan to move on?" question would certainly be merited.

Much as we like to believe in free will and freedom of choice, reality shows that we are creatures of habit. The majority of our life is spent on autopilot. How much of your morning is thoroughly routinized? Do you think much about how you brush your teeth? Eat breakfast? Dress? Go to work? Habits are shortcuts -- patterns so ingrained that we no longer have to think about them.

We run on hundreds, if not thousands, of habits every day. When we were married, hundreds of these habits involved interaction with our spouse. We saw something and thought right away, gee, s/he would love that. Our boss said something to us, and we couldn't wait to get home to share it with our mate.

Now that our spouse is gone, the well-meaning friend comes by some months later and sees, not a house devastated by storms, but a creature of habit with tons of broken shortcuts. The ruined walls, trashed furniture, gaping holes in the roof, these are our old ways of mentally dealing with the world. Of course they want us to "move on." Think of how you would react to seeing someone living in physical ruins. In grief, we haunt the mental ruins of our old life, and this behaviour is blatantly apparent to our friends and relatives.

As I explained in my previous post, we are not so different from our ancestors of 50 thousand years ago. Back then, the loss of our spouse could very easily prove fatal to us, and even today as explained by Bowlby. So, it is my belief that our body is very aware of our predicament and purposefully misfires our nervous system every time we try to rely on our old habits.

What happens when we injure ourselves physically? Do we brush our teeth the same? Dress the same? Eat the same? Go to work the same? No, our physical habits adapt and change to our new injured circumstances. Likewise, I believe that our body causes us physical pain so that we are forced to change our mental habits. Grief hurts so bad and so intensely that it is physically impossible for us to live our old life. We have no choice but to change.

Does this make sense? I very rarely feel the physical pain associated with grief anymore, and I believe it is because I have completely changed all my mental thought habits related to my old married life. And I notice that when I do feel the pain of grief, I can feel my mind trying to run in the familiar groove of an old thought pattern that is no longer relevant to my new life as a single parent.

I'm interested to hear what you, the reader, have to say about this. Whether this resonates well with you, or you think I'm right out to lunch, I'd appreciate it if you would click "Post A Comment" and let me know your thoughts. Thanks!

Why Grief Hurts

Let me begin with a bold statement: Humans have not evolved for tens of thousands of years. That is merely my opinion, seeing as I wasn't here 65 thousand years ago to compare ;-) My reason for stating this pertains to why we as humans behave in the ways that we do, and that while we may live in the modern world, the roots of our behaviors in many cases extend back thousands and thousands of years. It is not like we grew a second head some years back as a way to adapt to modern life. Nor are we likely to do so anytime soon. I believe our behaviours have changed little in the last 50 thousand years or so.

Have you ever asked yourself why grief hurts? I'm not talking about the obvious answers here. Obviously we grieve for the loss of our loved one, and I'm not suggesting otherwise. But why does it hurt so much? Pain is a biological response. It is an interesting question, yes? I mean, of all the possible bodily sensations, why does our body feel pain, as opposed to say tingling or numbness or heat or cold? Why pain?

I'm halfway through John Bowlby's monumental work, Attachment and Loss. It is not light reading by any means, written as it is for a professional audience, not Joe Blow on the street. It was recommended to me by a speaker at my monthly grief support group over a year ago. The author's approach is from the perspective of grief as a behavior.

In volume two of this three-volume book, Separation: Anxiety and Anger, he explains one property of pain [pg 171]:

Another special property of pain is, of course, its power to promote learning. Countless experiments demonstrate how rapidly and firmly an animal learns to recognize a situation in which it has experienced pain and to respond thenceforth by avoiding it. After such learning, an animal no longer relies on the hazardous proximal clue of pain but comes instead to use some distal clue that gives time and space in which it can take precautions. The advance look-outs are alerted to identify and beware of a new clue.

Even though physical pain may be more highly correlated with potential danger than are some of the other natural clues, it is not infallible. For example, medical attention may be painful but is usually not dangerous; whereas a truly dangerous condition, such as internal haemorrhage, may be accompanied by no pain. That is but one example of a serious danger that is either without natural clues or heralded by faint ones only.

If we accept this view, it would seem that the pain we experience when we grieve is an avoidance signal that is telling us to change our behavior. Somehow, our body knows that we are in danger of some kind. And it is not infallible — this bodily signal could be a mistake.

A few pages on, Bowlby speculates on a possible cause of this signal [pg 175]:

It is perhaps easy to understand that for a young child or an old person to be alone is a risk. But, it may be protested, that can hardly be true also for a healthy adult. Reflection, however, strongly suggests that it is.

It seems very probable that, were comparative figures available, it would be found that even for healthy men and women in Western countries there are many situations in which risk of injury or death is greater when a person is alone than when in company. Walking in city streets at night is a case in point. It is not for nothing that in certain areas policemen patrol in pairs. Those who take part in active sports, moreover, are aware that to be alone carries added risk. Whether climbing mountains, swimming, exploring caves, or sailing the seas, to be alone is hazardous, sometimes because in detecting danger two heads are better than one, sometimes because an injury that would present no problem to a pair can prove fatal to a singleton.

Now, if our body was simply recognizing that we are now alone and sending us constant pain signals as an avoidance reminder, it would seem that the remedy would be to run out and become attached to someone new. From what I have read, however, getting involved with another person immediately following the death of a spouse does not cause the pain to end — it may instead delay the pain or suppress it. Something else seems to be at play here.

Is being alone truly a great danger? Bowlby continues [pg 186]:

Even when a definition of real danger is agreed, however, there remain great difficulties for each of us in assessing it. For example, for an individual to calculate accurately when and in what degree he and his interests are endangered requires him to have a comprehensive knowledge of the world about him and to be able reliably to predict results. How many of us are qualified in these respects? It is easy to talk of real danger, but very difficult to estimate it.

It is indeed easy to forget that what is held to be publicly and permanently real is never more than some schematic representation of the world that happens to be favoured by a particular social group at a particular time in history. To some people during some periods to be afraid of ghosts is realistic. To other people during other periods to be afraid of germs is realistic. In matters of reality we all stand in danger of being arrogantly parochial.

That, however, is not to assert that everything is subjective, that there is no reality. The difficulty in using reality as a criterion lies, not in there being no reality, but in our imperfect capacity to comprehend it. That a child has an imperfect capacity to comprehend what is or may be truly dangerous is usually taken for granted. That the capacity of an adult is greater often by only a small margin tends to be forgotten.

What I have learned from The Power of Focusing: A Practical Guide to Emotional Self-Healing and other books is that, while we may not be able to mentally perceive our environment with any great degree of accuracy, our body, conversely, is very good at determining reality. Intelligence is not localized to the brain; rather, our entire body is intelligent.

In my next post, I'll conclude this brief theory of mine and explain that, in my opinion, our body does accurately perceive a real and present danger as a result of our loss, that the pain is in fact warranted, and that changing our behaviour can and does result in the lessening and eventual cessation of our pain. Stay tuned.

Learning From Pain

I'll shortly begin a series of posts on my theory of grief. Tonight, however, I'll post a short excerpt from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet. It may help to understand pain from the perspective I touched on in my post about pain being a gift. I hope you enjoy this passage as much as I do:

Pain

And a woman spoke, saying, "Tell us of Pain."

And he said:

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;

And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.

And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen.

It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity:

For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,

And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.