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.

Time To Say Goodbye

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

-- M. H. Alderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I

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

II

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

III

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

IV

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

V

I walk down another street.

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

Grieving a Sudden Death

In my last post, I shared some Eastern wisdom from Sogyal Rinpoche's great book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. I really enjoyed reading it, if for no other reason than that it gave me an entirely new perspective on death. I find that Western grief books almost always tell you that grief is forever, that you will always be grieving to some degree. In the Eastern tradition, however, the approach to grief is noticeably different — we can learn to let go of our dead spouse and go on with living.

Tonight's post will be about grieving a sudden death. While Deb's death was far from sudden, I have now met a good number of widow/ers whose spouse did die suddenly. Sogyal shares some important grieving advice which will hopefully help you to heal more quickly:

[from pages 312-313]:

Facing loss alone in our society is very different. And all the usual feelings of grief are magnified intensely in the case of a sudden death, or a suicide. It reinforces the sense that the bereaved is powerless in any way to help their loved one who is gone. It is very important for survivors of sudden death to go and see the body, otherwise it can be difficult to realize that death has actually happened. If possible, people should sit quietly by the body, to say what they need to, express their love, and start to say goodbye.

If this is not possible, bring out a photo of the person who has just died and begin the process of saying goodbye, completing the relationship, and letting go. Encourage those who have suffered the sudden death of a loved one to do this, and it will help them to accept the new, searing reality of death. Tell them too of these ways I've been describing of helping a dead person, simple ways they too can use, instead of sitting hopelessly going over again and again the moment of death in silent frustration and self-recrimination.

In the case of a sudden death, the survivors may often experience wild and unfamiliar feelings of anger at what they see as the cause of the death. Help them express that anger, because if it is held inside, sooner or later it will plunge them into a chronic depression. Help them to let go of the anger and uncover the depths of pain that hide behind it. Then they can begin the painful but ultimately healing task of letting go.

It happens often too that someone is left after the death of a loved one feeling intense guilt, obsessively reviewing mistakes in the past relationship, or torturing themselves about what they might have done to prevent the death. Help them to talk about their feelings of guilt, however irrational and crazy they may seem. Slowly these feelings will diminish, and they will come to forgive themselves and go on with their lives.

I'll finish up tonight's post with another quick excerpt from the book, this time dealing with the perspective of grief as a gift. All too often we experience grief as some terrible emotion that we just want to get rid of at all costs. Perhaps the following perspective can help you change this desire to run away from grief. I healed a tremendous amount when I wanted to find out what lay on the other side of grief:

[from page 316]:

You may even come to feel mysteriously grateful toward your suffering, because it gives you such an opportunity of working through it and transforming it. Without it you would never have been able to discover that hidden in the nature and depths of suffering is a treasure of bliss. The times when you are suffering can be those when you are most open, and where you are extremely vulnerable can be where your greatest strength really lies.

Say to yourself then: "I am not going to run away from this suffering. I want to use it in the best and richest way I can, so that I can become more compassionate and more helpful to others." Suffering, after all, can teach us about compassion. If you suffer you will know how it is when others suffer. And if you are in a position to help others, it is through your suffering that you will find the understanding and compassion to do so.

So whatever you do, don't shut off your pain; accept your pain and remain vulnerable. However desperate you become, accept your pain as it is, because it is in fact trying to hand you a priceless gift: the chance of discovering, through spiritual practice, what lies behind sorrow. "Grief," Rumi wrote, "can be the garden of compassion." If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life's search for love and wisdom.

And don't we know, only too well, that protection from pain doesn't work, and that when we try to defend ourselves from suffering, we only suffer more and don't learn what we can from the experience? As Rilke wrote, the protected heart that is "never exposed to loss, innocent and secure, cannot know tenderness; only the won-back heart can ever be satisfied: free, through all it has given up, to rejoice in its mastery."

In my grief work, I wanted to learn what grief had to show me, and I only wanted to learn it once! Over time, I was able to look at grief as a friend and companion; an experience to be embraced, not a torment to be endured.

Grief Experienced Dissolves

Tonight's post will be a little different in that it is geared both towards the bereaved and people who wish to help the bereaved. One of the most popular articles on this blog is How To Help A New Widow Or Widower, so I'd like to expand on that article a bit with some help from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. I find that Sogyal Rinpoche has some very compassionate things to say to widows and widowers, and I feel it is important to share bereavement tips from an Eastern tradition. So, without further ado:

[from pages 311-312]:

A person who is going through bereavement for the first time may simply be shattered by the array of disturbing feelings, of intense sadness, anger, denial, withdrawal, and guilt that they suddenly find are playing havoc inside them. Helping those who have just gone through the loss of someone close to them will call for all your patience and sensitivity. You will need to spend time with them and to let them talk, to listen silently without judgment as they recall their most private memories, or go over again and again the details of the death. Above all, you will need simply to be there with them as they experience what is probably the fiercest sadness and pain of their entire lives. Make sure you make yourself available to them at all times, even when they don't seem to need it. Carol, a widow, was interviewed for a video series on death one year after her husband had died. "When you look back on the last year," she was asked, "who would you say had helped you the most?" She said: "The people who kept calling and coming by, even though I said 'no.'"

People who are grieving go through a kind of death. Just like a person who is actually dying, they need to know that the disturbing emotions they are feeling are natural. They need to know too that the process of mourning is a long and often tortuous one, where grief returns again and again in cycles. Their shock and numbness and disbelief will fade, and will be replaced by a deep and at times desperate awareness of the immensity of their loss, which itself will settle eventually into a state of recovery and balance. Tell them that this is a pattern that will repeat itself over and over again, month after month, and that all their unbearable feelings and fears, of being unable to function as a human being any more, are normal. Tell them that although it may take one year or two, their grief will definitely reach an end and be transformed into acceptance.

As Judy Tatelbaum says:

Grief is a wound that needs attention in order to heal. To work through and complete grief means to face our feelings openly and honestly, to express and release our feelings fully and to tolerate and accept our feelings for however long it takes for the wound to heal. We fear that once acknowledged grief will bowl us over. The truth is that grief experienced does dissolve. Grief unexpressed is grief that lasts indefinitely.

But so often, tragically, friends and family of the bereaved person expect them to be "back to normal" after a few months. This only intensifies their bewilderment and isolation as their grief continues, and sometimes even deepens.

In my next post, I'll share some of Sogyal's advice for people who have experienced sudden death.

I'll just reiterate how important it is to find a local bereavement support group and attend regularly. Such a group is probably your best bet for finding people who will listen "silently without judgment" as you go over your memories and details of the death.

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.

Moving Toward Grief

The Western world is not a culture where grieving is well understood, let alone tolerated. I've heard of bereaved people going back to work 3 days after losing their spouse to be greeted by their boss saying, "well, you've had three days off, so you should be well over your grief by now." How people go back to work after 3 days is beyond me! I took a month off, and I probably should have taken more time. Ah well. Should-a, could-a, would-a, didn't-a!

It turns out that our modern culture of "get over grief fast" has very ancient roots, dating back to the Stoics. It is a myth that does not serve us well at all. Dr Alan D. Wolfelt talks about this bad advice in his book, Understanding Grief. He explains that grief is a collection of feelings that we need to experience, not a handicap that we must overcome.

When I became a widower, I did not know how to grieve, nor did I feel that I needed to. Deb had been sick with terminal cancer for 16 months before she died, and I felt I had done all my grieving during that time. What I found was that this myth of needing to get over grief fast helped me prolong my initial mourning by about 5 months. It wasn't until I started crying everywhere that I bothered learning what grief was and how to experience it.

Dr Wolfelt has some very good advice on how to counter this popular notion of grief. In my experience, it wasn't until I followed this kind of advice and faced my grief head-on that I began to heal. Read on:

[from pages 11-12]:

Myth #3: Move away from grief, not toward it.

Our Society often encourages prematurely moving away from grief instead of toward it. The result is that too many bereaved people either grieve in isolation or attempt to run away from their grief through various means.

During ancient times, stoic philosophers encouraged their followers not to mourn, believing that self-control was the appropriate response to sorrow. Today, well-intentioned, but uninformed, relatives and friends still carry on this longheld tradition. While the outward expression of grief is a requirement for healing, to overcome society's powerful message which encourages repression can be difficult.

As a counselor, I am often asked, "How long should grief last?" This question directly relates to our culture's impatience with grief and the desire to move people away from the experience of mourning. Shortly after the death, for example, the bereaved are expected to "be back to normal."

Bereaved persons who continue to express grief outwardly are often viewed as "weak," "crazy," or "self-pitying." The subtle message is "shape up and get on with life." The reality is disturbing: far too many people view grief as something to be overcome rather than experienced.

These messages, unfortunately, encourage you to repress thoughts and feelings surrounding the death. By doing so, you may refuse to cry. And refusing to allow tears, suffering in silence, and "being strong" are often considered admirable behaviors. Many people have internalized society's message that mourning should be done quietly, quickly. and efficiently. Don't let this happen to you.

After the death of someone loved, you also may respond to the question "How are you?" with the benign response "Im fine." In essence, though, you are saying to the world, "I'm not mourning." Friends, family and co-workers may encourage this stance. Why? Because they don't want to talk about the death. So if you demonstrate an absence of mourning behavior, it tends to be more socially acceptable.

This collaborative pretense about mourning, however, does not meet your needs as a bereaved person. When your grief is ignored or minimized, you will feel further isolated in your journey. Ultimately. you will experience the onset of the "Am I going crazy?" syndrome. To mask or move away from your grief creates anxiety, confusion, and depression. If you receive little or no social recognition related to your pain, you will probably begin to fear that your thoughts and feelings are abnormal.

Remember — society will often encourage you to prematurely move away from your grief. You must continually remind yourself that leaning toward the pain will facilitate the eventual healing.

Once I started acutely grieving at around six months out, I was acutely aware of society's disapproval and wish that I would be over my grief. However, I knew that I needed to grieve, and if the world wasn't going to support me, at least I could support myself. And when I wished that society would be more supportive of me, I kept in mind a quote attributed by Ghandi:

Be the change you want to see in the world.

Stay In The Classroom

In my last post, I talked about the need to get quiet and spend time with ourselves. For months after Deb died, after my son was sleeping, I would just sit quietly with myself on the couch and listen to my body and what it was trying to tell me. You might want to read my article on Focusing To Heal to understand what I'm talking about. And yes, pain is a signal that your body wants your attention! We do well to heed such strong signals. We need to listen, not run away or drown them out.

Tonight I'd like to give some of Guy Finley's perspective from his wonderful book, The Secret of Letting Go. He explains the necessity of sitting with our unhappiness and learning what it has to teach us. After I was several months into bereavement and was feeling terrible, I knew that life was trying to teach me something. I wanted to learn the lesson! And I didn't want to take months and months to learn it.

[from pages 99-102]:

Nothing keeps us more aware of a problem than our struggle to forget it. Listen to what truth is trying to tell you about your strengths instead of listening to your weakness tell you where to hide. The most powerful force in the world for real self-rescue is your own awakened state. Mechanical and unconscious self-defeating behaviors are no match for this higher self-awareness because its strength comes from inner light. Light always cancels darkness. Only what is wrong with you wants you to forget what is wrong with you. What is right with you knows that the only thing that is wrong with you is that you don't know what is wrong — and that is why you stay pained.

Whenever we bury any unhappiness, we also put out of sight the cause of it. Each crisis is trying to teach us that there is a lesson within it if only we will stay in the classroom. Here is a glimpse of the freedom that awaits you if you will dare to remember yourself when everything in you wants to forget and run away.

By consciously staying with the awareness of your unhappiness, whatever it may be, you will discover one day to your grateful amazement that the pains and aches of this life aren't in you. That is correct. All of our unhappiness lies hidden in our ideas about who we are and how life should treat us.

The lesson of any painful emotional collision isn't in the crash itself, even though this is what we want to believe. With this convenient answer all we have to do, psychologically speaking, is blame the other driver, get a new car, and drive a different road. This kind of thinking only keeps us crashing with life. What each collision is trying to teach us is that the only thing wrong in our life is our current driver, who says he knows the way home when he obviously does not.

How to Change the Life You're Giving Yourself

We meet life, with all of its complex relationships, through what we know. Each daily event, with its dozens of unsuspected twists and turns, challenges us to come up with our best answers. Once our most suitable answer is at hand, We launch it and ourselves into action and watch to see what happens. With each situation, this challenge and response process is repeated over and over again until the condition resolves itself for us, either favorably or not.

The point being made here is that at any given moment we always do what we know. This may seem very obvious, but with closer examination, especially in light of the fact we wish to elevate ourselves and what we are getting from this life, we will discover something very astounding. Read the next three sentences very carefully. I have separated this trio of important ideas for ease of reading, but they are very much connected to each other. Each higher idea leads to the next one, and when they are absorbed all together, they will tell you a great secret.

Before you can get anything different from this life, you must first do something different.

Before you can do anything different with your life, you must first know something different.

Before you can know anything different, you must first suspect and then confirm that it is your present level of understanding that has brought you what you now wish you could change.

Now let's reverse the order of these right ideas so that we can see how they work from the other way around.

Until you know something different, you cannot do anything different.

Until you do something different, you will not get anything different.

And until you really get something different from your life, you cannot know what you have missed and how much more there is to understand.

Here's the point: trying to change what you get from life without first changing what you know about life is like putting on dry clothes over wet ones and then wondering why you keep shivering. You must stop trying to change what you are getting for yourself and go to work on changing what you are giving to yourself.

It is vital for you to realize that life has not held back its riches from you. The truth be known, which it will be, you have been held back from real life by a false nature that thinks life is meant to be suffered through, and that all there is to insulate it from a harsh world is what it can win and possess for itself. While there is no denying our world is becoming more and more cruel, there is also no denying that we are the world. Neither our individual world nor the global one can change until the connection between what we experience and who we are is no longer denied. This is why we must have a new knowledge. Spiritual knowledge isn't something mysterious or out of this world. In fact, spiritual understanding is the most important and practical knowledge a person can possess. It is ultimately what we know about ourselves, about who we really are, that determines the quality of our life.

The truth is, we cannot separate our answers from our actions and our actions from their results. They may appear to be individual in their operation because they often occur at different times, but they are really one thing. Intellectually we already know this important concept, but its deep significance hasn't yet become clear. We touched on this earlier. Let's look once more at the old adage, "As ye sow, so shall ye reap." Here again we can see yet a new significance in this New Testament teaching. What you sow is seed or, in this metaphor, your knowledge. What you reap is the crop, or your results. This spiritual knowledge shows us the great importance of reconsidering what we think we know. Life is trying to reach us and teach us, through our experience of it, that we need new and true answers. These higher answers serve as a special kind of personal shelter that effortlessly keeps out what is harmful and keeps in what is healthy and life-giving. That is its nature.

To elaborate on what Guy has explained, we need to expose ourselves to many different perspectives on grief and grieving. As we learn more, we can do more and become more. We can heal the pain and thrive again. But it starts with different perspectives. And here's a perspective that will likely hit you right between the eyes:

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

When I first read that a couple of weeks after Deb died, I wanted to strangle Lester! "Seeming imperfection?" Hello??? But that perspective opened something up inside me and paved the way for the long road to my recovery.