Tiny Buddha

Tag: grief

  • The Most Compassionate Words and How They Heal

    The Most Compassionate Words and How They Heal

    “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.” ~Dalai Lama.

    It wasn’t until my mother died that I was able to feel her love and have that mother-daughter relationship that I’d been craving all my life. It was not until she died that I was able to learn, and truly feel, compassion—for her and for me.

    I’ve always known that compassion for others is a nice thing. We all know that. But it wasn’t until I truly felt it that I was able to create a deep sense of healing.

    My mum and I always had a strange relationship. Abused as a child and never able to reclaim her power, she was a tormented soul, and she was unable to be the mother she wanted to be. I was empathetic with this; I took it on and was unable to be the daughter I could be. It was like there was a wall between us, and we were unable to connect as a regular mother and daughter.

    I remembered all the times when her promises fell through. I remembered all the times when she yelled at me as a kid. I remembered all the times when she’d manipulate me in a big custody battle. I remembered some good times too, of course, but they were fleeting, and they passed all too quickly.

    I remembered when she told me she only had six months to live; she’d been struggling with self-inflicted cancers from having drank and smoked all her life in order to cope with the heavy weight on her shoulders.

    I remembered visiting her in palliative care and her seeming hopeful that she would be out of there soon, reunited with her dog.

    I remembered seeing her two weeks later, on her final night, and wondering what she was thinking, wondering what she was feeling with that final breath, knowing that relief was finally coming her way.

    The waves of grief hit me harder and harder, until, over a year later, I found myself crying for almost forty-eight hours straight.

    I felt for her never being able to live the life she could have lived. I felt for her trauma. There wasn’t much sadness of my own. I didn’t miss having a mother who was never present. All my feelings were for her.

    There were no words. The sadness I felt for her and what sadness I felt for myself had merged into a convoluted mess. My body was unable to process it all.

    One day, as I was remembering a difficult time, I decided to tune into myself as a child. All I really wanted was to be understood and acknowledged. So, addressing the child version of me, at that point in time, I said to her: I see you. I hear you. I feel you.

    And oh, the relief I felt!

    I repeated that phrase to myself as a child over and over until I felt my body soften.

    I see you. I hear you. I feel you.

    I felt okay. I was safe. I was seen. I was heard. I was understood. I could finally let go and breathe.

    But I realized, at that point in time, my mum also need to be seen, heard, and understood.

    So I gave to her what I gave to myself.

    I said to her: I see you. I hear you. I feel you.

    I repeated it over and over and over again until I felt her soften, let go, and finally be able to breathe. We both felt lighter and freer than we’d ever felt before. The sadness, the heaviness, the darkness—it simply melted away.

    I knew I was onto a good thing here, so I revisited various points in time, including my mum’s childhood when she was scared and traumatized, and including during her final days when she knew she was dying. I said to myself, and I said to my mum, this chant of compassion, which I found myself extending to the following:

    I see you.
    I hear you.
    I feel you.
    I honor you.
    I love you.
    Thank you.

    As I said each phrase, I meant each word with every cell of my body. I truly felt it.

    It was important to me to give love and to thank her and myself in those various points in time for the opportunity to expand my capacity for love and compassion.

    I found that when I am in a state of ever-expanding love and compassion, I am able to truly feel free. And for that, I am truly thankful.

    Extending our capacity for love and compassion toward ourselves, and those who have hurt us, also expands our capacity for love and compassion toward everyone and everything. I truly believe that if everyone were to proactively expand their capacity for love and compassion, the world would not only be a better place, but it would be the perfect place.

    I have found uses for this beyond grief, beyond our own healing, and beyond healing for other people. I have even found using this chant of compassion helpful in dealing with guilt from anything and everything—for people suffering road rage, for the cruelly treated caged animals in this world, for the injustices of our governments, even for the murderers, rapists, and terrorists, for they too are suffering deep within.

    I am now of the belief that the purpose of all hurt is to teach us love and compassion. For if we cannot grow from this, then there was no purpose for it. And if we can all grow from it, then humanity as a whole grows from it.

    I know I am particularly fortunate in my white middle class upbringing, and I know it may seem very easy for me to say that compassion makes the world go round, but I’ve also known great mental torment and grief. I have felt it with every cell of my body. And I know that this one simple practice has helped me to soften, and to free myself from the dissonance between my heart and my mind.

    If you are feeling loss, grief, hurt, or heartache, I encourage you to try this chant of compassion for yourself. Mean every word of it. Feel every word as you say it. Repeat it over and over, as often as you need, until you feel your body soften:

    I see you.
    I hear you.
    I feel you.
    I honor you.
    I love you.
    Thank you.

    Say it to yourself as you are feeling now. Say it to yourself in the past. Say it to people who are hurting you. Say it to people who have hurt you in the past.

    Feel yourself soften. Feel them soften. Allow yourself to expand your capacity for love and compassion. Give yourself this gift to set yourself free.

  • The Most Powerful Way to Help Someone Through Emotional Pain

    The Most Powerful Way to Help Someone Through Emotional Pain

    “When you can’t look on the bright side, I will sit with you in the dark.” ~Unknown

    I walked in for my monthly massage and immediately sensed something was off.

    A layer of desolation hung in the air like an invisible mist, ominous and untouchable, yet so thick I felt as though I could reach out and grab a handful in my fist, like wet cement, oozing out between my fingers.

    I’d been seeing the same masseuse once a month for three years, repeating the same routine each time. I wait in the hallway just outside her rented studio, a large walk-in closet size room in a building filled with hundreds of similar rooms, each rented to private individuals running their small passion businesses. Across from her, a wax studio. Down the hall, a hair salon.

    The building houses the manifested dreams of men and women who finally had enough of the daily nine-to-five grind, fired their bosses, and defiantly forged their way into their own businesses, renting space big enough for their hopes yet small enough for their start-up pockets.

    The appointment started unlike any other. When her door’s closed, it means she’s with another client, so I sit in the hallway, in one of the two wobbly wooden chairs the building provides for each tenant, and wait.

    When the door opens and the previous client leaves, we greet with hugs and smiles, expressing mutual joy in seeing each other again. As she closes the door, I take off my clothes and lie on the table face down, exchanging small talk about any happenings since we last saw one another.

    Except this time, on this fateful day, the door opened and I was greeted by an overwhelming sense of sorrow spilling out of the room with a vengeance, as if it had been trapped for decades.

    Standing in place of my masseuse friend was a lifeless, hollow shell of a person with empty zombie eyes. I hardly recognized her.

    Jen (not her real name) was clearly not her usual self.

    I’ve seen her in several bad moods throughout the years but this was beyond moods, and bad was too kind a word.

    Like me, Jen’s an introverted, sensitive soul, and neither of us have tolerance for inauthenticity or meaningless chit chat. We had long established that she didn’t have to be “on” around me, that she was allowed to take off her professional mask and I my client mask and we could simply be ourselves with each other, neither of us having to endure the torture of polite pleasantries if we didn’t feel like it.

    One of my pet peeves is society’s constant pressure and expectation to put on a happy face and pretend everything’s okay while inside things are desperately broken.

    So I said “hi” and walked in, neither expecting a return “hi” nor receiving one. She closed the door behind me and tears suddenly welled in my eyes as I undressed, as if sorrow no longer had the means to escape through the open door and found another way out by hitchhiking my tears.

    I wanted to respect the present moment, even though I didn’t understand it, so I stayed silent and lay on the table, face down, as I’d always done.

    Ten minutes in, between deep long strokes on my back, I heard a soft, almost inaudible, “I lost the girls.”

    Jen had been pregnant with twin girls. I remember the day she told me. She could barely wait for me to get through the door before blurting out, “I’m pregnant!” She and her husband had been trying to get pregnant for a while and finally, she was not only pregnant, she was pregnant with twins!

    And now, she wasn’t anymore.

    I sunk into the massage table as the enormity of what she said dropped into me. And then, I started to get up and tell her that she didn’t have to massage me. We could talk if she wanted, or she could take the extra hour to herself, I’d still pay her. She gently nudged my shoulder back down and said she needed to work; it kept her mind from self-destructing.

    She told me that her soul had been emptied along with her womb, and there was nothing left, let alone tears, inside her.

    I had enough tears for both of us so I told her I’d cry, for her, her girls, and her loss. For the next forty-five minutes, as she released my knots, I released tears, wails, and guttural sobs. It came and went in waves and I became acutely aware of the rhythm of her breathing as it converged with mine and became one.

    Between waves, there were moments of talking.

    Like with me, she had met many of her clients with the exciting news that she was pregnant, and like with me, she also had to tell them she was no longer pregnant. Client after client, spread out over weeks, she had to repeat the same story over and over until every client who knew had been caught up.

    It was a devastating loss for her, and one she had to retell to each client, all hearing it for the first time, all with similar questions and the same sympathetic side tilting heads in response.

    She said her days have been filled with well-intentioned but stale advice like “everything happens for a reason,” and “they’re in a better place now,” and “you’ll get pregnant again.”

    She told me each time she heard these statements, it felt like another jab in her weary stomach. She didn’t care about getting pregnant again, better places, or higher reasons. When a mother’s unborn babies have been ripped away from her, no reason could ever make it right.

    She wasn’t in the headspace to feel better or think of a brighter future, she simply wanted to be acknowledged for the pain she was going through now, but no one had remained with her in the pain. They had all tried to make her feel better, which only made her feel worse.

    In our own discomfort of feeling painful emotions, we try to help others not feel theirs. It’s difficult for us to see someone we love suffering, and naturally, our first impulse is to try to make it go away, whether it’s through reason, logic, distraction, faith or any other means.

    We feel helpless, so we desperately reach for what we know, what we’ve been taught, and what others have done to us in our own moments of suffering. We offer trite words that deep down we know won’t help but we hold onto the hope that they will anyway because we don’t know what else to say or do.

    The more powerful choice is to simply be with someone, accepting and embracing the painful moment as is, without trying to fix or make it better. It goes against our natural urge to want to help, but often, this present moment acceptance of the deep emotions flowing through a person is exactly what they need to help them move through it, in their own time.

    As powerful as it is to shine a light for someone who’s ready to emerge, it is equally powerful to sit with them in the darkness until they’re ready.  

    After the session, Jen told me she felt relief for the first time since it happened, as if a weight had been lifted from her. She hadn’t realized it, but with each client, friend, and loved one who tried to make her feel better, she felt a mounting sense of pressure to feel better, as if there was something even more wrong with her for not being able to.

    She hadn’t been conscious of the constant pressure until it was gone, in our session, when she was finally allowed to feel exactly as she’d been feeling and was fully accepted in her pain.

    Stepping out into the hallway and turning back for a long melting hug, I sensed the profound shift in her energy, vastly different from when I had walked in an hour ago. She was still wounded but there was an element of acceptance in her pain, a faint glow of light within the darkness.

    This sacred, healing light only comes as a result of fully embracing the darkness. It can’t be forced, manipulated, or pushed into existence.

    This is the true power of accepting our own deep pain and sitting with someone in the dark as they feel theirs.

  • What to Say (and Not to Say) to Someone Who’s Grieving

    What to Say (and Not to Say) to Someone Who’s Grieving

    “Remember that there is no magic wand that can take away the pain and grief. The best any of us can do is to be there and be supportive.” ~Marilyn Mendoza

    My mother, an articulate and highly accomplished writer, began to lose much of what she valued a few years ago. Her eyesight was compromised by macular degeneration, her hallmark youthful vigor was replaced with exhaustion, and many of her friends began to die. Finally, and cruelest of all, her memory began to go, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed.

    Her struggle and her suffering in the last two years of life were excruciating to watch, and I was helpless to stop what felt like an avalanche of cruel losses.

    Sometimes in that last year, she would call me several times a day with distress and confusion. When she finally died, after five ambulance trips to the hospital in six weeks, my first response was thankfulness that she was out of the struggle and, to my surprise, relief. I had been grieving the mother I had known for the last year of her life, and she had already been gone a long time.

    It would be another month before I found my grief, and I suspect that it will be there forever; but my immediate feeling was not sadness.

    People feel so many things at so many different times about the death of a loved one: loss, anger, devastation, confusion, guilt, and fear, to name a few. If we assume anything about how they are experiencing their loss, we can make them feel worse. Here are a few suggestions about how to reach out, starting with what not to do.

    Don’t assume you know what I am going through.

    I was surprised by how many people came up to me and said, “I know just what you’re going through.” Even worse, they would tell me, “This will be the saddest thing that will ever happen to you,” or “You won’t know who you are for years after this.”

    We all know that losing a mother is a major life event and it changes many things. What we don’t know is how. It is different for each person; we cannot overlay our own experience on someone else’s and assume it’s the same. For me, whose first feelings were that her death was that of a reprieve, it caused me to doubt the validity of my response.

    Don’t use religious clichés about this life or another. 

    Religious clichés such as “Jesus called her home,” “God needed another angel,” or “it’s in the hands of the Lord,” were infuriating. For one thing, my mother was not a Christian, nor am I. I love the Jesus story, but it doesn’t resonate for me as the only true story, and it sure doesn’t help me feel better about my mothers’ death.

    Don’t say “there is a reason for everything.” 

    Then the cards began to come filled with familiar clichés: the worst was “there is a reason for everything.”

    That feels to me like a way to do a “wrap up” on something that is fragile, personal, and unknown. How do you know there is “a reason for everything?” It insults grief by trying to dilute it into a rational cosmic plan.

    You cannot explain, rationalize, or sum up my loss in a tidy little cliché. My reaction to those messages was not to feel more comforted, but to feel more isolated.

    Don’t talk about her “passing.”

    Talking about people who have “passed” feels like minimizing what happened and avoiding the word “death.” It is a tough word, it is final and irreversible and filled with loss. But it is a true word. It is what we have to manage, and the hugeness of the word, death, in its finality and brutality is what allows us to find our necessary grief.

    There were people who said things that did comfort me.

    1. I wish I had the right words, just know I care.

    2. I don’t know how you feel, but I am here to help in any way I can.

    3. Would you like me to bring you some enchiladas on Tuesday?

    4. What was this like for you? I’d love to listen if you would like to talk about it.

    Here is the most important thing for you to know.

    Each of our relationships has a bubble around it. Within that bubble is the history of what we have shared. Grief is a part of the human experience, and we grieve not just for the person who has died, but also for the part of our history they take with them.

    Losing a mother is a major life change regardless of what the relationship was like. But we don’t know what that is like for anyone but ourselves. When we assume we do, we belittle their experience and lose a chance to know them better.

    Although we may intend to connect with the other person, sometimes the opposite happens and what we say makes them feel worse. When we invite them to share their own experience, we help to break down the isolating walls of loss and inspire a true connection.

  • How to Enjoy the Holidays When Grieving the Loss of a Loved One

    How to Enjoy the Holidays When Grieving the Loss of a Loved One

    This post contains an excerpt from GETTING GRIEF RIGHT: Finding Your Story of Love in the Sorrow of Loss, by Patrick O’Malley, PhD with Tim Madigan.

    It was spring 1980 when my wife, Nancy, and I received some of the best news of our lives—she was pregnant with our first child.

    On a Tuesday morning that September, we found ourselves sitting in her obstetrician’s office. Nancy, not due to deliver for three months, had been awakened the night before by a strange physical sensation.

    She had wanted to get checked out, just to be safe. But after the examination that morning, her doctor said we needed t0 get to the hospital. Labor had begun. I remember how Nancy’s voice trembled.

    “Can a baby this premature live?” she asked.

    “I don’t know,” the doctor said. “We will try to buy time. He will be a pipsqueak of a kid.”

    Thirty-six hours later, on September 3, 1980, Ryan Palmer O’Malley was born, weighing a little over two pounds. You couldn’t have imagined a more fragile looking creature. He had been far from ready to leave his mother’s womb, yet there he was.

    In the first few moments of his life, I was aware of the great risk of loving my son, but I was powerless to resist. From the first glimpse of Ryan, I knew he would have a place in my heart forever.

    His early life was a succession of seemingly endless days and nights. We hovered over the side of his crib in the hospital, looking down at our boy who was hooked up to all this noisy equipment. His life was measured in minutes and hours. On several terrifying occasions, Ryan stopped breathing, and his medical team would rush in to resuscitate.

    All this time, Nancy and I yearned to hold him, but his frailty and the equipment made that impossible. The most we could do was touch a tiny finger, rub a tiny arm.

    Instead of cooing, the sounds around my son were the mechanical beeping of intensive care machines. Instead of that wonderful new baby smell, there was the pungent scent of antiseptic soap we had to use to scrub up before seeing him. Despite not being able to hold him, despite all the machines between him and us, we loved him deeply.

    Early fall turned to Thanksgiving and then to Christmas. Our son gradually grew stronger. One day in January his doctor weaned him from the respirator. We could now hold him without the tangle of tubes and wires.

    On March 9, 1981, our seventh wedding anniversary, we were finally able to bring our baby home to hold him, bathe him, kiss him, dance with him, feed him, and rock him. He smiled for the first time in those days. Though he was still fragile and underweight, we allowed ourselves to start imagining Ryan’s future. No parents loved a son more.

    And then he was gone.

    On Saturday night, May 16, 1981, we were treating him for a cold but not particularly concerned. We had been through much worse. But early Sunday morning our precious son suddenly stopped breathing.

    I started CPR. Ryan’s doctor and an ambulance were at our house within minutes. His doctor administered a shot of adrenalin to his heart as the medical technicians continued CPR. Nancy and I silently prayed as we followed the speeding ambulance to the hospital.

    The next several hours are a series of snapshots forever imprinted in my mind.

    • His physician coming into the waiting room with tears in his eyes, saying, “I could not save him.”
    • Holding Ryan’s body
    • Returning home without him
    • The heartbreak of our family and friends as we broke the news of his death
    • The dream-like, adrenalin-fueled rituals of visitation and funeral
    • The faces of all those who filled the church
    • The sight of his tiny casket by the altar
    • Seeing construction workers removing their hard hats as the funeral procession drove by
    • Leaving the cemetery on that sunny spring day

    I have taken off work on the anniversary of Ryan’s death every year since that first year. I go to the cemetery to think about him and the years now behind me. Powerful feelings rise each time I see my son’s name on the grave marker: RYAN PALMER O’MALLEY. It grounds me in the hard reality—this really happened.

    In my experience as both a grief therapist and bereaved father, the holiday season can be one of the most difficult times of the year for those grieving.

    Many who have experienced the death of a loved one wish they could lie down for a nap on October 30 and awake again on January 2. This season can be challenging when the shadow of loss is present.

    The collision between the cultural expectations of happiness and the personal reality of grief can create stress, confusion, and an increase in emotional pain for those who mourn. The gatherings of family and friends during this season may shine a brighter light on the absence of the one who has died.

    If this is the first holiday season after the death of a loved one, there can often be a buildup of anxiety, anticipating how it will feel to be without the one who is gone. And, even if the loss occurred many years ago like mine, the holidays are always a reminder of what was and what might have been.

    Confusion, yearning, exhaustion, sorrow, and all the other feelings that come with grief are absolutely normal during this time. Difficult but normal. Painful but normal. Grief is not a psychological abnormality or an illness to cure. Grief is about love. We grieve because we loved. Holidays may be a strong emotional connection to special times of remembering that love.

    Here are eight ideas to help you enjoy the holidays while also honoring your loss.

    Both And 

    Enter into this season in a state of mind of “both and” rather than “either or.” Sorrow does not exclude all joy, and celebration does not eliminate all sorrow. Yet, it can be confusing to experience opposing emotions at the same time or feel your mood vacillate between light and dark.

    Joy may transition into sadness in the blink of an eye. Contentment may suddenly shift into yearning. Both experiences have value because both are part of your grief story.

    Be present to the moments of enjoyment, and at the same time, respect your feelings of loss.

    Sights, Sounds, and Scents

    Most who grieve prepare themselves emotionally for those significant moments during the holidays, such as sitting down for a holiday meal and attending parties; yet, some triggering experiences can occur when you least expect it.

    A sight, sound, or smell may zip right past your defenses and cause an intense surge of sorrow. And sometimes, that surge may happen in public. To this day, certain Christmas carols I hear while shopping elicits a sudden sense of melancholy because of the strong identification they have for me with the first and only holiday season my son was alive.

    We knew our loved one in a shared environment that is full of these sensory experiences that can provoke feelings of loss in an instant because of this connection created from past holiday seasons. This is perfectly normal and doesn’t mean that you’re going backward in your grief. Value these moments as important connections to the one who has died.

    Social Splitting

    The transition back into your work setting and your social groups after a loss can create a strain because you may have to act better than you feel in order to appear socially appropriate. This social splitting can be exhausting. Add to that the cultural expectation of being “up” for the holidays, and the exhaustion may be compounded.

    This type of fatigue is normal. Monitor your energy, and be willing to moderate your social engagements, if needed. To recharge yourself from the drain of social splitting, spend ample time with those with whom you can fully be yourself and who will support you without judgment.

    Approach and Avoid

    Our most basic nature is to approach pleasure and avoid pain. Our more evolved nature can approach pain if we know there is an ultimate benefit in doing so. Our natural resistance to the pain of grief can create more pain.

    Be intentional about scheduling time during this hectic season to approach your pain. Create rituals that represent the unique relationship you had to the one who died, such as listening to his or her favorite music or reading a favorite poem.

    Light a candle or ring a bell to mark this special time of remembering and reflecting. Visit the cemetery or mausoleum if that provides a connection for you.

    I’m grateful to our Japanese daughter-in-law who requests each holiday season that we participate in the Japanese custom of taking food to the gravesites where our son and other family members are buried. Her ritual has now become ours.

    Seek Heathy Distractions

    In a season fraught with overindulgences, be aware of the risk of numbing the feelings of loss through unhealthy escape behaviors. Also, know that it’s not possible to stay in the emotional intensity of grief without some relief, so give yourself permission to engage in healthy distractions.

    The key to a healthy distraction is a behavior that allows you to pause your feelings for a moment so that you may come back, and be truly present to them later. My ritual of watching comedy holiday movies has served me well through the years.

    Reach out to a trusted friend if you’re concerned about harmful escape behaviors during the holidays. Ask if you can be accountable to them for these behaviors and if they will participate with you in heathier activities that provide you with some respite from your grief.

    Tell Your Story 

    My professional training taught me that grief is a series of steps and stages to work through, which will lead to a conclusion called closure. My experience as a grieving dad did not at all match up with this psychological model.

    Through my own grief and by working with so many who mourn, I came to understand that grief is an ongoing narrative of love, not an emotional finish line to be crossed.

    Stories help us stay connected to those who have died and help us create meaning about what we have experienced. Finding a place for that story to be received is an important part of the grief journey.

    Tell the story of your loved one as it relates to the holiday season to someone who listens well. Or spend some time writing specific memories related to your loved one and the holidays.

    Acknowledge Someone Else’s Loss

    Those who grieve want their loss and their loved one remembered, so consider making contact with someone who is grieving, as well. It doesn’t matter how long ago that loss may have been. Offer the compassion to others you desire for yourself.

    Compassion literally means to suffer with and calls us to enter into the pain of another. Listen with gentle curiosity and an open heart. Consider making a donation to a cause that is relevant to the person who is grieving.

    Be Forgiving 

    Let self-compassion replace any self-criticism as you do your best to balance holiday enjoyment with your grief. Be forgiving of well-meaning others who may try to help you with your grief by “cheering you up.”

    How you measure what’s significant and what’s trivial may have changed as you grieve. Patience may be needed when you’re in the midst of others during the holidays who experience the trivial as significant.

    As you reflect on your loss, you may also benefit from reviewing your history with the loved one who has died, and offering and accepting forgiveness for the human flaws you each had that affected your relationship.

    Remember always, you grieve because you loved. May you have peace and light as you embrace your story of love and loss this holiday season.

    Adapted excerpt from GETTING GRIEF RIGHT: Finding Your Story of Love in the Sorrow of Loss, by Patrick O’Malley, PhD with Tim Madigan. Sounds True, July 2017. Reprinted with permission.

  • Grief Is Love with Nowhere to Go

    Grief Is Love with Nowhere to Go

  • How a 10-Day Silent Retreat Helped Heal My Grieving Heart

    How a 10-Day Silent Retreat Helped Heal My Grieving Heart

    “In a retreat situation, you are forced to come face to face with yourself, to see yourself in depth, to meet yourself.” ~Lama Zopa Rinpoche

    When I was at university, doing a ten-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat was considered a hardcore rite of passage only the toughest among us attempted. Those who lasted the distance referred to it as a “mind-blowing” and “life-changing” experience.

    “Think of how you feel after an orgasm,” a friend said when I considered finally doing a Vipassana meditation retreat to reconnect with myself after a decade in full time employment. “Imagine feeling for two months like you’ve just had the most powerful orgasm.”

    I couldn’t. I really couldn’t imagine how ten days of enforced intimacy with my own messy mind would result in two months of post-coital bliss. Nor could I imagine sitting still and keeping silent for ten days. Nor was I prepared to sacrifice half of my annual leave to find out.

    What finally got me to commit to the meditation cushion for a ten-day marathon of silence was a shattered heart. I needed a radical act of self-care.

    I had just spent two long years caring for my terminally ill husband. His funeral was followed three weeks later by the largest cyclone in Australia’s living memory. It made landfall within meters of my veranda, destroying an entire community. In the confusion that followed, I found things out about my husband that would have been best buried with him.

    I was shell-shocked, as if a bomb had detonated inside me and ripped my heart to shreds. A psychologist suggested happy pills. But I wasn’t interested in medicated happiness. I didn’t even want the post-coital bliss my friend had spoken of.

    I just wanted to feel whole again. The psychologist advised against a ten-day silent meditation retreat. It was too dangerous, she said. There wouldn’t be anybody there to catch me should I crash hard.

    But I knew that only I could pull myself up from the abyss. Avoiding my grief was not an option. I needed to confront my pain head on.

    Two months after my bereavement, I took myself off to an austere meditation center in Sri Lanka to follow the teachings of S. N. Goenka.

    Here is what I learned:

    Impermanence is the foundation of everything.

    When I showed up at my first ten-day silent meditation retreat, I had just witnessed the impermanence of everything, and it had left me devastated.

    Sitting in meditation for ten hours a day, continuously scanning my body, becoming aware of the rising and falling of my physical discomfort, I learned to accept that everything in life is constantly changing.

    In the afternoons, when the meditation hall turned into a sun-drenched hothouse, the physical discomfort of sitting still became almost unbearable. Resisting the urge to shift my legs or scratch my sweaty head taught me to become a detached observer.

    Every day a cool evening breeze would follow the intense afternoon heat. The tickling of my scalp, the tingling in my legs, the stiffness in my hips, all of it fell away as day turned into night and I stretched out on my rock hard mattress.

    By observing what was happening to my physical body, I learned to trust that emotional discomfort and pain rises and falls in the same way as physical pain does.

    Meditation teaches you how to become a detached observer.

    I learned to focus on my breath, to feel it rising and falling. I practiced watching my mind fill with dark clouds, like a lake with storm clouds reflected on it. I glimpsed brief moments of clarity as I allowed the clouds to drift by. I learned to label my emotions and set them free rather than stay attached to the pain.

    I learned to train my mind to be in control of those dark storm clouds that kept on brewing. They didn’t magically disappear as I sat in meditation ten hours each day. But I learned not to chase after them and become swept up in every little tempest that flared up.

    I learned to simply watch what was going on in my mind. It felt like watching a giant movie screen from the back row of a cinema.

    Meditation teaches us that we can control our emotional pain. By focusing on the breath, we are able to step back, assume the position of a witness, so that it doesn’t overwhelm us.

    It’s a lesson I’ve taken with me into everyday life. When a friend says something hurtful or when someone cuts me off in traffic, I know how not to be reactive.

    Meditation gives you a new perspective on who you are.

    As I sat and listened to the constant chatter in my head for ten days, I realized that our identities are a product of the stories we tell ourselves.

    Old stories from the past showed up. The tortured narrative of my dysfunctional family suddenly made sense. My parents had remained attached to the narrative of their suffering as deprived war children. Unable to craft new stories for themselves, this victim narrative defined them in adulthood.

    Sifting through the details of the aftermath of my husband’s death, trying to make sense of his unfaithfulness, I understood that I had been given the tools to rewrite that story.

    I couldn’t undo what had happened. I’d never be able to have another conversation with him to set the record straight. I couldn’t give our story a happy ending. But I had the tools to use what I had learned to craft a new narrative for myself.

    One stifling hot afternoon, focusing on the beads of sweat forming on my forehead, my focus became laser sharp.  I understood that if I didn’t want to live my life by the victim narrative, if I wanted to be in charge of myself again, if I didn’t want to turn into a bitter woman with a prematurely aged face, I needed to forgive those who had compounded my suffering.

    Writing to the women whom I had considered my worst enemies was profoundly liberating, both for me and them. We were able to make peace with ourselves and with my philandering husband.

    Suffering is an inevitable part of life.

    All of life is suffering. It’s one of the key principles of Buddhism. Human nature is imperfect as is the world we live in. The Pali word Dukkha means suffering, discontent, unsatisfactoriness. We all experience varying degrees of suffering all the time.

    Some of us had come to the retreat feeling stuck in life, stressed by our jobs, frustrated in our relationships, directionless and ready for some kind of transformation. I wasn’t the only who had brought a deep feeling of grief to the retreat.

    I was the only one who had lost a loved one, but grief has many faces. Some of us were grieving collapsed marriages or failed relationships. It made me aware that we will all experience deep sadness in our lives, not once, but many times. It made sense to learn how to deal with it.

    Life had just dealt me an overdose of suffering as if to hammer home this important point. Sitting with my physical and emotional pain for ten seemingly interminable days forced me to make friends with it.

    I was able to put it into a new perspective. I hadn’t died, I hadn’t lost a limb, I had no permanent battle scars. My adopted hometown would recover, the ravaged landscape would heal, and so would I.

    I realized that being able to hold my husband in death, to comfort him on the journey through his terminal illness, had been a chance for deep transformation. I understood that we are in charge of how we respond to suffering.

    Suffering arises from attachment.

    Burying my husband and sorting through the debris after a category five cyclone had shredded my hometown to bits, I had glimpsed how suffering is linked to attachment. Sitting on my meditation cushion for ten days, I grasped the core of the Second Noble Truth that all suffering arises from attachment.

    We are all driven by our desires and cravings. Our unhappiness is a result of our tendency to cling to or grasp at what is unattainable. We become attached to material things; we want to hold onto happiness; we chase after pleasure and we are in denial about the impermanence of everything.

    As expected, I didn’t explode in multiple orgasms, nor did I crash into the bottom of the abyss, both of which would have been a form of attachment.

    On the last day of the retreat, when we were at last released from our vow of silence, everybody was experiencing some kind of high. Something fundamental had shifted for all of us.

    Endless chatter quickly replaced our noble silence. Having sat side by side, experiencing the full rainbow of emotions, we were keen to share our experiences.

    A small group gathered around a self-confessed retreat junkie, who glowed like a 3D postcard version of the Buddha, sitting in full lotus pose for most of the retreat. He had made it his life’s purpose, he explained, to go from retreat to retreat so that he could stay permanently within that blissed out sate.

    I was tempted to quote one of our teachers that it’s just as dangerous to get attached to bliss as it is to get attached to pain and suffering. The aim of meditation is to let go of any form of attachment. But I bit my tongue, because I knew that he would need to find that out for himself.

    Meditation is a personal self-care tool we all have access to.

    Of course the ten-day meditation retreat didn’t magically cure my pain. It took many more weeks, months in fact, on the meditation cushion to heal my heart. But with every retreat I was inching a little further away from the abyss.

    Six years on, I have found love again. My house has been repaired and my garden has grown back into a lush jungle. Life continues to ebb and flow, oscillating between moments of happiness and suffering.

    You don’t have to be at your personal rock bottom to experience the life-changing benefits of a silent meditation retreat. What I learned has stayed with me. Meditation remains my personal self-care tool that allows me to negotiate the inevitable ups and downs of life, from the trivial to the tough stuff.

  • To Be AND Not to Be: Honoring a Life Lost to Suicide

    To Be AND Not to Be: Honoring a Life Lost to Suicide

    “To be, or not to be—that is the question.” ~William Shakespeare

    This Sunday marks one year since my friend took his own life. It both is and isn’t a big deal. It is in the sense that we like to commemorate things: one-year-old, one year at a new job, one year since 9-11, one year sober.

    It isn’t in the sense that my to-do list that day includes “thaw and marinate chicken.”

    When a person takes his own life, it creates a cosmic shift in the universe.

    It also doesn’t.

    The first few days after a person takes his own life are the weirdest. He was here. Now he’s not.

    The disappearance of a human being is beyond comprehension. A whole human vanishes. Six feet one inch tall. One hundred and sixty pounds. Blue eyes. Salty blonde hair. Brilliant veterinarian. Father of two young daughters. Husband. Son. Friend.

    Perhaps the coroner has determined that the cause of death was self-inflicted gunshot wound. But it is equally as believable that he took a last minute trip. He had to go unexpectedly, but he will be back. He is out running errands. His flight was delayed.

    But as time passes and the person doesn’t come walking up the drive and through the door, his favorite hat bee-bopping up and down with steady gait in the yard, deep sadness swells around the supernatural weirdness of it all. The sadness makes it difficult to breath, at times. It is life altering and universe shifting. It is monumental.

    Except that it isn’t. No matter how deep our grief, schools continue to meet. Clients continue to call. Crimes continue to be committed. Babies continue to be born. Cars still need oil changes.

    Neighbors still drive out of their driveways in the mornings. They still look carefully before exiting their driveways into the street. They still stop to check their mail, which keeps coming by the way, even when someone we love is suddenly gone.

    Just as our own serious injuries may frantically send us to the ER, once we are sitting in the waiting area, we look around and realize we are merely one of many. Death is plain.

    The ordinariness of it all can make it seem like our person didn’t mean very much. Sometimes it feels like he never even existed.

    Except that he did. His half-used soap bar remains in the shower. His razor sits on the counter with tiny hairs embedded in its blades. His cell phone rests on the nightstand with three unread text messages. His bills sit an unopened still-life on the kitchen counter. His half eaten banana slowly turns brown.

    His stuff suggests he was real. That he was here despite his sudden disappearance.

    As his loved ones tasked with cleaning up what he left behind begin to eradicate the trail he left of his final days, when the soap has cracked and the fruit has become rotten, it can feel as though all evidence of his existence has vanished.

    Still, even if every shred of evidence of a person’s existence is lit on fire and turned to ash, our memories, or experiences, and our love for people who disappear will live on. Those memories, intangible ghosts in our minds that cannot be touched, seen, or proven, both are and aren’t real.

    For me, the best space within which to honor those we have lost is to live in the in-between, a place where they both did and did not exist. Where they both did and did not die. Where their loss both is and is not extraordinary.

    This Sunday, I plan to commemorate the day by getting what is and is not meaningful: a tattoo. The experience will and will not be important. It will be important in the sense that I am getting a semi-colon tattoo to represent mental illness and suicide awareness in honor of my dear friend. It isn’t in the sense that millions of people get tattoos every day.

    This Sunday, I will be sad. The sadness that comes with suicide doesn’t ever truly disappear. Because it is always there, I suppose the sadness left over after a person takes his own life both is and isn’t important. It is in the sense that it lives down low beneath the joy, laughter, excitement, and other emotions that continue to be felt despite the life altering loss.

    But it isn’t all that extraordinary either. Sadness is not exclusive to me. And despite my sadness, this Sunday will be regular. We will laugh when it makes sense to laugh. We will watch our usual TV shows. We will wash laundry for the week. We will return emails. We will grade papers.

    When someone we love dies, we swear we will never take our lives for granted. Every moment will count; every day will be lived fully. Similarly, we swear we will never take for granted our friends, our spouses, our children. We will keep our eyes on the big picture. We won’t sweat the small stuff. We will stop drinking, stop smoking, stop yelling, start meditating.

    Except when we don’t. And that is okay. Because although we aim to see the death of our loved ones as a monumental turning point in our lives—one that will push us to live our best life—the fact also remains that life is ordinary. Death is common. Our health will fail one way or another. We will yell again. We will take things for granted.

    Because the finite nature of our capacity for understanding pushes us into the realm of “either/or,” we believe that we either appreciate our lives, or we don’t. We are either happy or we are sad. We are either healthy or we are sick. We are either alive or we are dead.

    I suspect that, if we could hear the voices of ghosts, they’d tell us that our finite view causes us much suffering. That Hamlet’s contemplation of his own being when he asks “to be or not to be?” is the wrong question with no real answer. For even when one takes his own life, he does not cease “to be.”

    After all, my friend is gone, but his memory lives on. I can see his sweet spirit in the eyes of his children. I can feel his love for nature as the wind blows through the leaves of trees, dancing alive. He is here, and he is not. His ashes will return to the earthen ground from which he came. Perhaps he will become part of a cloud, a stream. Perhaps his remains will enrich the earth that grows the tea we drink.

    The sooner we accept that the universe is infinite and that our capacity to understand is finite (despite whatever technological advances we believe humans have made), the sooner we will find the peace that can only come from living outside of the duality of either/or.

    For me, I accept that my dear friend died because he took his own life. I also accept that he did not die.

    This sort of wild, fantastical thinking is not the kind one might see in popular culture movies depicting communication with the deceased in the afterlife. It is the kind of thinking that arises from acceptance of the infinitesimal universe that is beyond our own finite understanding. Once we accept this truth, the spirit of those we have lost is freed beyond the grave.

  • Love Hurts: Buddhist Advice for the Heartbroken – Interview and Book Giveaway

    Love Hurts: Buddhist Advice for the Heartbroken – Interview and Book Giveaway

    Note – The winners for this giveaway have been chosen. They are:

    • Jennifer Moore Hardesty
    • Margie Lynn
    • Dr. Mac
    • Ryan
    • RB
    • Justme
    • Rogério Cardoso
    • Fernanda Garza
    • Benjamin E. Nichols
    • Terri Cross

    When you’re dealing with heartbreak, it can feel like the pain will never go away.

    You may know, intellectually, that everything heals with time, but in that moment, when you’re suffering, it’s hard to hold onto hope.

    Like all humans, I’ve experienced my fair share of loss, and I’ve felt scared, depressed, alone, betrayed, rejected, regretful, and angry—with other people, with myself, and with the world.

    Losing someone or something that has become a part of your identity can feel like losing a limb, and how do you go on when you’ve lost a part of yourself?

    I’ve learned that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to that question. There’s no magic solution that helps us grow, let go, and move on. There are, however, lots of things we can do to help ourselves when struggling with the many nuanced emotions that come up when we’re grieving a painful loss.

    Tiny Buddha contributor Lodro Rinzler has tackled these varied challenges in his new book, Love Hurts: Buddhist Advice for the Heartbroken. 

    This “short and compact first-aid kit for a broken heart” offers simple, practical wisdom to help you take good care of yourself and work through your pain. 

    With chapters that offer advice based on what you’re feeling, Love Hurts may just what you need to get through your hardest days and find a light at the end of the tunnel.

    I’m grateful that Lodro took the time to answer some questions about his book, and also that he’s provided ten free copies for Tiny Buddha readers.

    The Giveaway

    To enter to win one of ten free copies of Love Hurts: Buddhist Advice for the Heartbroken:

    • Leave a comment below (you don’t need to write anything specific—“count me in” is sufficient)
    • For an extra entry, share this interview on one of your social media pages and post a second comment with the link

    You can enter until midnight PST on Sunday, March 19th.

    The Interview 

    1. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what inspired you to write this book.

    I’m a meditation teacher and author. I grew up in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition, started meditating at the age of six, and have been teaching meditation for the last sixteen years under the guidance of my teacher, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. I’ve written six books on the topic and co-founded the network of meditation studios known as MNDFL.

    On an outer level, I wrote this book because I work with a lot of people who are suffering from heartbreak and I wanted to talk to them directly, knowing that I couldn’t sit down and have tea with everyone.

    On an inner level, for a man in his thirties I have known a lot of heartbreak. Yes, the romantic kind, but also from too many people who have died, many around my age, and from every day reading the news and my heart breaking anew, seeing how many people are perpetuating horror and terror on others due to discrimination.

    On a secret level I wrote this because I needed to understand how heartbreak works, and writing is how I process information. That’s why I birthed this book.

    2. Your book isn’t just for people who are healing from a breakup or divorce; you define heartbreak in much broader terms. Who is this book for?

    It’s for humans. We all experience heartbreak. It might be personal, such as a breakup, sure, but it might also stem from job loss, the death of a loved one, or just not feeling like we’re living up to our potential. It might also be more societal, in reaction to hatred playing across the news.

    It’s odd because in some sense, I’m constantly rooting against my own book; I don’t want people to need a book on heartbreak—I want them to feel happy—but so many of us are experiencing heartbreak right now so I’m glad it’s available as a resource.

    3. I love how you sectioned the book based on what readers may be feeling or experiencing. What made you decide to write the book this way?

    When you’re heartbroken, you can’t sit down and read a ten-step plan for healing; heartbreak is messier than that.

    It’s this simple term that encapsulates so many strong emotions, including anger, despair, frustration, loneliness, and more. The underlying emotions of heartbreak—despite what caused it—are all too similar, so I knew I could address those, even though I could never dream of all the scenarios that might spark heartbreak.

    In that sense it’s a bit like a choose-your-own adventure book, where you can read about whatever you’re dealing with on that particular day.

    4. The section heading that most jumped out at me reads “If you feel like you have no right to be heartbroken.” Why do you think some of us feel this way, and why is this not true?

    So many of us feel ashamed of our heartbreak. When I would meet with people to hear their heartbreak stories, people were so shy at first. They would come in and think they would be talking to me about their last big relationship.

    I would ask the question, “What is your experience of heartbreak” and the flood gates would open. They would then start talking about their dead cat, or their high school sweetheart from decades before, and at some point note that they felt totally confused as to why they were heartbroken about this thing that was ages ago or, based on societal standards, “not a big deal” but it was their honest experience.

    Whatever breaks your heart, breaks your heart. It’s quite simple. The last thing we need to do when we feel heartbroken is judge ourselves for feeling that way.

    5. What, in your experience, are the most important things we can do to take care of ourselves when dealing with heartbreak?

    Even the simplest of self-care acts make a big difference when we’re struck down by heartbreak. I recommend:

    • getting more sleep than you think you need
    • eating well, or at least eating (we often forget to when we’re depressed)
    • meditating
    • exercising in whatever way makes sense to you

    6. How does meditation help us cope with our losses and heal?

    There are many types of meditation out there. To get going, I often recommend mindfulness, where we are bringing our full mind to one thing such as the breath.

    There have been a lot of studies done in recent years about this form of meditation. It’s proven what the Buddhists have known for 2600 years: Doing it for even short periods every day increases focus and resilience and leads to a better memory and reduced stress.

    While I appreciate science backing up the practicality of meditation, here’s what it has done for me:

    It has helped me show up fully for every aspect of my life.

    It has helped me wake up to where I get stuck and shut down my heart.

    It has helped me be more present with simple activity in my daily schedule.

    It has helped me get to know, befriend, and ultimately love myself.

    Having established that foundation of love inwardly, I have been able to be kinder, more compassionate, and loving toward others. When I am with friends or on a date with my spouse, I am there, fully. When I am in a painful situation, going through a break up or holding my father’s hand as he died, I am there, fully. It has allowed me to be present with the wide variety of pleasures and pains that life brings.

    Meditation has been an incredible gift to me, particularly when it comes to showing up for my own and others’ heartbreak.

    I’ve discovered that the main way to move through heartbreak is to look directly at it and not flinch. To stay with our discomfort is the best way to move through our discomfort. For me, the best way to learn to stay with all the difficult emotions that come up around heartbreak is meditation.

    7. What do you think is the biggest mistakes most of us make when healing from heartbreak?

    Whenever I would meet with people about this topic, I would ask them how they take care of themselves in the midst of heartbreak. Indubitably, every single person would answer by saying, “Well, the thing I do that I know I shouldn’t is…” and then they would fill in the blank. “I over-eat sweet foods.” “I reach for a bottle of alcohol.” “I go online and find someone to hook up with.”

    When strong emotions come up, we don’t necessarily want to look at them; we want to run away from them and act out in a similarly harmful and habitual way. When you feel like that, I recommend taking a breath, coming back into your body, and seeing if you can stay with the energy of the emotion itself, as opposed to the storylines around it.

    8. What has helped you let go of anger and forgive after being hurt or rejected?

    In my own experience, one thing that helps me when I am suffering is simply to be heard, to be witnessed. When we sit one-on-one in the presence of each other we experience one another in a very human and honest way.

    Sometimes the best way to see ourselves through our heartbreak is to be with our heartbreak, and being with other people who can hold the space for that really helps.

    9. What is the main message you hope people take from this book?

    That you will heal. It may take more time than you would want it to take—and that’s the nature of heartbreak—but even the seemingly devastating emotions that come with this experience are impermanent and that is extremely good news. Because when you do heal, you will love again.

    You can learn more about Love Hurts: Buddhist Advice for the Heartbroken on Amazon here.

    FTC Disclosure: I receive complimentary books for reviews and interviews on tinybuddha.com, but I am not compensated for writing or obligated to write anything specific. I am an Amazon affiliate, meaning I earn a percentage of all books purchased through the links I provide on this site. 

  • How Losing My Father Helped Me Become A Happier (and Better) Person

    How Losing My Father Helped Me Become A Happier (and Better) Person

    “In every loss there is a gain, as in every gain there is a loss, and with each ending comes a new beginning.” ~Buddhist Proverb

    Four years ago, on a typically cold and overcast day in upstate NY, I found myself scurrying around preparing for a two-week trip to Kenya and Tanzania, which left the next day.

    My father, a strong and soft-spoken sixty-two year old, had aspired to experience the great plains and animals of east Africa since childhood, and was deeply proud that he was able to pay for me to accompany him on his bucket-list adventure.

    Though I had been looking forward to the trip for months, I felt stressed, as I hadn’t yet packed and was struggling to ensure that everything was in place at work and at my new home before venturing off to seek adventure.

    After tying up loose ends with my boss and direct reports, I hurried home to double-check that my new sump pump was working before finally turning my attention to packing. At this point I was rushing, as I was trying to beat traffic en route to my uncle’s house, where I was staying in preparation for an early flight.

    I packed as fast and as thoroughly as I could and, as I finished, received a phone call from my girlfriend (now wife).

    “Babe… have you talked to your mom? I think something’s wrong.”

    Kerrin informed me that she had received two vague texts indicating something happened, though she wasn’t able to get a hold of my mother to get details. I thought nothing of it, but decided to check-in with my parents just to be sure.

    I tried calling my father, who always picked-up his phone, and got his voicemail twice before trying my mother, whose line was busy. On my third try, I got through and asked her what was going on.

    “Honey, there’s no easy way to say this. Your father just died.”

    She explained that he had passed out in the shower, that she had found him in a pool of blood, and that neither she, nor a team of paramedics, were able to resuscitate him. We later found out it was a heart attack.

    That night, after shedding many tears and conversing with a few family members, something profound happened: I experienced a deep feeling of gratitude for having had such a great father, a feeling that trumped my grief in a way I never could have imagined.     

    In the days to come, I found myself dealing with powerful emotions in highly constructive ways (a personal first). I also focused on celebrating my father’s fabulous life rather than cursing his untimely death, as my family hosted two wakes, a funeral, and two separate receptions that were surprisingly celebratory in nature.

    Though everyone was grieving the sudden loss of a healthy and happy family man, the ceremonies were peppered with a sense of gratitude and hopefulness that were inspiring.

    As strange as it sounds, no singular experience in my life has shaped or informed my ever-optimistic outlook more than my father dying. The experience completely reoriented my worldview and helped me appreciate the importance of gratitude, mindfulness, and my own emotional capacity at deeper levels.

    Interestingly enough, it also set me on a path toward balancing some of my worst tendencies—particularly impatience, self-doubt, and the need to always be “right”—and endowed me with more gratitude, more present-moment awareness, and a more Zen-like appreciation for life’s ups and downs.

    Here are a few takeaways from my loss and resulting growth, which have helped me become a happier, all around better human being. Perhaps something from my experience will help you become happier too.

    Mindfulness: More Than Just Meditation

    I still remember how busy I felt that day, and how insignificant each detail of my work, home, and packed suitcase came to be minutes later when I learned my father had passed.

    Like many, I’ve long struggled with managing my own inner-dialogue and negative self-talk, and would all too often let those negative scripts run unchecked.

    Going through the loss of my father forced me to live in the moment for the weeks and months to come, as it required me to be strong, supportive, and empathetic for the hundreds of people who were shocked and mourning the loss of Big Ed.

    Although I still don’t meditate as much as I could (something I’m working on), I’ve found that being more mindful has helped me stay sharper in meetings, more time consciousness, and even more focused and effective in my work.

    More importantly, though, it’s helped me feel happier. So many of us rush through our days, stressing out about getting everything done. But it’s impossible to be happy when we’re not fully present because you have to live in the moment to enjoy it.

    To cultivate a greater sense of mindfulness, all I did was start paying attention to my thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. I eventually added meditative practices to reinforce my present-state focus.

    I’ve also taken the time to integrate a minimum of one mindfulness practice into my daily routine. Sometimes, it’s as simple as repeating a single word or phrase while working out, or actively listening to a podcast on my drive home; redirecting my focus to the author’s voice every time my mind wanders.

    This simple trick has helped me become more aware and accepting of my thoughts, feelings, and emotional triggers, and less reactionary. It’s also helped me become less hurried and more conscious of the activities I say “yes” to, while cultivating a deeper appreciation for life’s little moments.

    Never Stop Growing: Your Abilities Are Not Fixed  

    Right before my father died, I had hit a wall both professionally and personally. At the time, I was managing a team of eight people on two separate job sites—a great gig given my field and age.

    My staff and I had worked really hard the previous two years to build out our programs, services, and resources, though I started to feel our efforts weren’t being replicated elsewhere in the organization. I felt slightly resentful, and had a hard time selling my staff on working hard and continually improving, as our efforts seemed to go unnoticed and underappreciated.

    On a personal level, I felt that I was running myself ragged. In addition to our busy work schedules, my wife and I were fostering dogs, volunteering in different capacities, and regularly commuting between upstate NY and Long Island to attend family functions.

    Despite how busy I was, I stopped growing personally and professionally, and found myself becoming more quick-tempered and close-minded. I was angry, frustrated, and depressed at work, and unknowingly developed a fixed mindset—thinking that my intelligence, abilities, and even station in life were stagnant rather than fluid.

    When my father died, every good deed I’d ever done, and then some, were repaid in the form of countless hugs, flower arrangements, meals, warm messages, and unexpected visits from people I hadn’t talked to in years. The support was incredible. It helped me detach me from my own self-pity, get out of my own head, and resolve to live a fuller and happier life.

    I began challenging and bettering myself in every aspect of my life. I started eating healthier, drinking less, and working out with a new vigor. I also resolved to be a more emotionally available friend and romantic partner, and completely changed my attitude on the job, knowing that my staff and I could improve.

    Six months later, Kerrin and I eloped in Hawaii and I received an offer from one of the best college’s in the country—direct bi-products of my new attitude and outlook.

    I’ve learned that no matter what is happening in life, we always have room to grow. And I’ve learned to ask those around me how I can get better—as an employee, a husband, father, and friend. This practice has helped make me become more self-aware and humble, while strengthening relationships with those closest to me.

    Gratitude: Practice May Not Make Perfect, But It Does a Lot of Good

    While I certainly wouldn’t characterize myself as “ungrateful” prior to my father’s death, the experience of losing him reinforced the importance of appreciating what you have while you have it.

    The night he died, I was hit with a wave of emotions and the deep sense of loss you’d expect from a surprise death. The feeling of immense gratitude came shortly thereafter, though, and helped carry me through the challenges of the weeks and months ahead, while putting me on a trajectory toward cultivating a deeper appreciation for everything positive in my life.

    Since then, I’ve made gratitude a daily practice. Every day, I find and name a few specific things or memories I’m thankful for.

    I’ve found that practicing gratitude during challenging times has helped me build my resiliency because no matter what happens, I can find things to take solace in. I now see happiness as something I control rather than a byproduct of life circumstances.

    Regardless of what’s going on in life, we can always name a few things we’re grateful for. If starting a gratitude journal is too blasé for you, do what my wife and I did and start your own “Jar of Awesome.”

    Every few days, write down one or two specific memories that you’re grateful for and place them in the jar. In just a few weeks, the jar will be filled. When you’re feeling down, pull out a few memories, read through them, and see how you feel. I’d be surprised if it didn’t help you reframe whatever setback you’re experiencing.

    Comfort with Your Own Emotions

    I used to be really uncomfortable with my emotions, and had a really hard time showing vulnerability. Going through the experience of having my best friends, former neighbors, and family members watch me cry in a semi-public setting humbled me, and set me on a path to being more aware of and comfortable with my own emotional range.

    What I realize now is that there’s strength in showing vulnerability. I’ve also learned that mindfully acknowledging and embracing my emotions has made me a much happier person.

    Four years removed from that experience, I default to hugs over handshakes, warm smiles to cautious head nods, and vulnerability to apprehension. In doing so, I’ve forged deeper bonds with friends and family members and have created more meaningful relationships with many of my colleagues.

    —

    I still think about my father every day. As much as I miss him, though, I’m deeply grateful for the time I had with him, and appreciative of the personal growth I’ve experienced as a byproduct of his death. I like the current day version of myself better than any previous iteration, and have him to thank for it.

  • Surviving Loss: You Always Have Choice

    Surviving Loss: You Always Have Choice

    “I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.” ~Stephen Covey

    One ordinary night after an ordinary day of work and family, I went to bed a mother, wife, teacher, writer-person.

    I remember falling asleep between sentences exchanged with my husband after an evening spent with just the two of us on our patio, something we rarely seemed to find the time to do in our busy lives. We promised each other that we’d make a concerted effort to have more of these “dates.”

    The next morning, on what was supposed to be another ordinary day, I got out of bed and found my husband collapsed on the living room floor.

    Our three young children slept in the nearby bedrooms as the 911 operator guided me through chest compressions.

    Our babies, ages six, three, and one, slept as the firemen wheeled their father out of our home. They were sleeping when my parents rushed over so I could follow the ambulance to the hospital. I imagine they were still asleep when I was told by a doctor that there was “nothing they could do.”

    The moment I officially became a thirty-four-year-old widow.

    Widow.

    It’s a word that sticks to your tongue, something you want to knock on wood to prevent. It makes people avoid eye contact with you. It undermines your entire identity, forcing you into a new existence filled with the brutal realities of a life you didn’t sign up for and would never want.

    Yesterday I was me. Today I am somebody else. I felt like a child protesting sleep before nap time. I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna.

    Maybe it wasn’t real. If I didn’t look at it, it might go away. 

    Except it wouldn’t.

    I never contemplated this scenario as an option and I wasn’t prepared for the devastation. I don’t know if advanced warning would have helped, but something about the unexpectedness felt like even more of an injustice.

    In a moment, my life was ripped in half and I felt a total loss of control of body and mind. I didn’t recognize myself. My brain felt like it was floating away and I couldn’t remember details.

    I couldn’t sleep or eat.

    But the pain I will never forget: a deep, searing kind that transcended anything physical.

    There are practical matters to consider when one becomes a widow. Decisions nobody wants to think about, particularly when you are numb with grief. I found myself immediately bombarded with choices.

    Mortuary choices. Funeral service choices. Financial choices. Parenting choices. Even stupid, little choices, like where to buy gas after having a husband who took care of that chore for the last ten years.

    Humans generally dislike hard choices. Inconvenient choices. Sad choices. Uncomfortable choices. Confrontational choices. Too-many-choices.

    When you are used to making decisions with another person, you might feel nervous and unsteady venturing out into the world alone. I remembered that once upon a time I lived alone and made decisions by myself, but now I felt out of practice.

    I questioned my skills and capability. The grief made me forgetful, emotional, angry, sad, empty, and scared.

    I frequently questioned my reality. I wondered if everything was always just a mirage in my head. Perhaps I was never married. It had to be a dream, or maybe a cruel trick, and now the rug was pulled out from beneath my feet.

    In the days after my husband passed away, my six year old was moping around the house. I knew in my gut what choice I had to make. For him. For me. For all of us.

    On a whim I grabbed a pen and paper and scribbled this down:

    We have two choices: 1) Lay down and crumble, or 2) Get up, do great things, and make Daddy proud.

    I circled the second choice. My son listened as I explained. He hung on to my every word and facial expression.

    I knew I had to channel everything inside of me to convey to him that we would be okay, even if I wasn’t convinced of it myself. I knew I had to lead.

    We didn’t choose this path.

    But this was our life now and we still have a lot of good years left to live.

    Nobody prepares us for the sludge in life, but this is exactly what being human is about: the good, the bad, the painful, the happy, the sad, the everything-in-between.

    We can choose to sit down and surrender to our current circumstances, or we can get up, dust ourselves off, hold our heads up high and move forward.

    It will hurt.

    We’ll feel wobbly at first.

    But we can do it. We are capable. We are strong. We still have a lot of love inside of our hearts to do great things.

    The only other option was not an option for us.

    People often say that good things can happen out of the bad. I’m here to tell you that it is true.

    In the horror of it all, buried in the pain and the raw emotion, there was something magical and enlightening about loss. It exposed a side of life that I never previously experienced. It’s a strange, curious feeling that shocks you to the core and simultaneously makes you realize that there is still so much more to learn and discover about life. It can’t be over yet.

    Your perspective will change. Everything about your thinking will forever change.

    This is good and bad.

    You will mourn the loss of your innocence and the days of naivety, but in return you will discover that you have newfound empathy, an ability to feel other people’s pain deep in your bones. You become sensitive to everyone else’s losses: the person going through a divorce, the couple who lost a baby, the child in a dysfunctional home, the person struggling to fight cancer.

    You know what suffering feels like. You’ve walked through hell and your calloused feet are stronger because of it.

    Nobody escapes this life without suffering, and now it is your turn. Tomorrow it might be someone else’s. But the universe doesn’t keep score, so you shouldn’t either. Acknowledging that you can’t control everything is part of your liberation process. It isn’t personal. It just is.

    When life doesn’t go as planned, we must hold on to the knowledge and hope that we still have choices, and that we are strong enough to make them.

    There is always Plan B. Plan C. Plan D.

    I don’t claim to have all of the answers, but this is what I’ve learned about making choices and how to navigate through difficult times.

    Invest in Your Health

    The temptation is out there to drown your sorrows in unhealthy habits that temporarily make you feel good. A quick fix always sounds great, but you’re in this for the long haul. There are no quick fixes to help you rebuild the rest of your life.

    Sleep may feel impossible. Or maybe you’re sleeping too much. Exercise may not be a priority. You might eat horribly.

    Choosing healthier habits—working out, getting enough sleep, eating well, and staying away from substance abuse—will promote good health. If your body isn’t well, it will permeate all aspects of your life in a negative and destructive way.

    Strive for balance, reflect regularly, and readjust when it seems you are going astray. Staying healthy will help make the mental agony of loss a little easier to overcome.

    Avoid Isolation

    It is vital to maintain connections with the people who love you. Even when you don’t feel like seeing anyone, it’s important not to isolate yourself. Your friends and family will form a chain of love around you in the early days of loss and help you get through the rough patches.

    Sometimes they won’t know what to say. Actually, most of the time they won’t know what to say. Forgive them. Know that they have good intentions.

    Everyone is bumbling their way through this experience. Most people want to help, they just might not know where to start. Don’t build walls around yourself. Let them in. You won’t regret it.

    This doesn’t mean you become a doormat. It is important for your mental health to establish boundaries with people, particularly with family who can have a tendency to become too comfortable with us and inadvertently cause us pain. You must enforce these boundaries, even when it feels uncomfortable.

    Express your feelings and don’t apologize for them. Most people in your life will not understand firsthand what you are going through. They won’t even know when they have crossed the line. They may even blame you for getting upset.

    People are not perfect, so don’t hold on to their mistakes and don’t hold it against them. It will only drive you crazy. Forgive soon and often. Also, you will learn who your closest allies are, who you can trust with your innermost feelings, and who you can lean on. These people will play a tremendous part in your healing process.

    Figure Out What You Love

    Our passion is what keeps us afloat day in and day out. Doing what you love will help your sanity during the most tumultuous times. It is imperative that you remember or discover what makes you happy.

    For me, it’s writing fiction. Creating characters and getting lost in story worlds is my escape. It’s what nourishes my soul on my most painful of days. I also enjoy traveling, music, exercise, reading, and staying busy in my community.

    You must determine your own personal interests. Make a list. Go out and do them. Do not let the loss define you. You are so much more than that. You get to define yourself. You make those choices.

    Make Time for Yourself

    I’m now an only parent of three young children. Time is a rare commodity, but it’s not extinct. I have to actively pursue it and I’ve become skilled at scheduling and time management. I share with others that if I can have a full-time job, remain active in my community, parent my children without a spouse, and still find time to write and do the things that I love, then they can too. We all can.

    I don’t have any superpowers. I figured out how to make time. I used my choices to prioritize. I make mistakes and I adjust. I make more mistakes and I adjust again.

    Banish “I can’t” from your thoughts and vocabulary. Eliminate “I don’t have time.”

    Choose to make time for yourself. Even a little bit of time will help. Sometimes I have to get creative about making it happen, but I am committed to loving myself.

    Stay Busy

    Don’t stay home and allow yourself drown in sorrow. One of the worst things to do in the midst of surviving loss is to have time to twiddle your thumbs and wallow in self-pity. There will be a time and a place for the wallowing, but you don’t want it to consume your life. You don’t want to get stuck there.

    Acknowledge the feeling, make space for it, feel it, and then move on.

    Being a young widow with small children is both a curse and a stroke of luck. Children don’t have time for wallowing. They still need to eat, be changed, entertained, and cared for every single day. There is no such thing as taking a break from those responsibilities. It is what kept me going during my toughest times.

    If you don’t have this in your life, then you’ll need to create the “busy-ness.” An object in motion stays in motion. Keeping your mind occupied is healthy and important.

    Forgive Yourself Soon and Often

    You’re going to have good days and bad days. I have great weeks when I feel like I’m on top of the world and doing an amazing job. The next week I might feel like a hysterical mess. The waves come and go. That’s what they do. Ebb and flow. It’s normal.

    Allow yourself time to cope with the bad days. Recognize the negative feelings and understand that they are only visitors in your mind. Temporary visitors. They will go away.

    When the bad thoughts visit, take a bubble bath. Splurge on nice sheets and comfy slippers or whatever little comforts you want to indulge in. Read something fun instead of tackling work. Give yourself permission to relax.

    Ride out the bad wave and wake up the next morning with a fresh start.

    Forgive yourself. This is the most important advice I can give you. On some days you may feel your loss morph into a three-headed monster in your head. You’ll hate yourself. You’ll hate the universe. You’ll hate the person you lost and you’ll start feeling hate backing you into a corner. That’s when you have to push it back. Acknowledge it in the room, compartmentalize, and then choose to not let it consume you. It will be a struggle.

    I often ask myself at the end of a day: Did I do my best? Did I do everything I could’ve done?

    If the answer is yes, then that’s it. Nothing else I could’ve done.

    If the answer is no, then I make a concerted effort to do a little bit better tomorrow.

    But in that moment, it’s okay to pause. Reset. Take a break to do something happy. There are many more chapters left in your story.

    At the end of the day, everyone has to go through their experience of surviving loss in their own way. Life doesn’t always go as planned, but that doesn’t mean your life is over. You get to choose what is next. That is your power. Remember, you are not alone.

  • Meeting Grief with Mindfulness: How Embracing Pain Opens the Door to Joy

    Meeting Grief with Mindfulness: How Embracing Pain Opens the Door to Joy

    North of Blue Girl

    “We shake with joy, we shake with grief.  What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.” ~Mary Oliver

    Mindfulness is a way of relating to our experience that opens us to the totality of it—that is, we learn to embrace it all, the joy and the heartache. But some experiences are harder to be with.

    It’s difficult to be with physical or emotional pain, and we often retreat to the mind in search of distractions. But when we are able to fully be with our experience, something that feels like magic happens.

    It was a Thursday morning at 5am when I received news of my mother’s illness. She was septic and in the ICU at her local hospital.

    I knew that sepsis was serious, but also that it’s treatable, especially for someone her age (sixty-nine). So after speaking with my aunt, who was with her, I went about my day.

    I nagged my kids to put on their shoes, as per usual, then got them off to school and ate breakfast. I had a lot to do that day. I also had plans to help a friend move some boxes to her new apartment. The thought of my mom in the hospital accompanied me like a curious stranger throughout my morning.

    It was an odd day in late April. The sun was out, but it was colder than what is usual for that time of year.

    I was standing outside near my car as my friend and her husband hauled some of their boxes up to the stairs to their new apartment. The quality of the air caught my attention—it was so clean—and I wandered over to a small field between two houses.

    Standing there, I thought of my mom and the gravity of her situation. It saturated my body, and mind and seemed to demand my full attention, as if imploring me to stay and be it.

    For a moment everything fell silent. Looking out at the field, it sparkled from tiny flakes of snow that had touched its surface and liquefied. There were a few goats munching contentedly on grass.

    I breathed in deep. I felt my feet on the ground and the breath entering and leaving my body. My eyes filled with tears and there was a deep knowing about the seriousness of my mother’s condition, despite overwhelming belief from others that she would get through it.

    “I feel like this is it,” I cried to my husband the following day.

    The evening before, her cardiologist had come bounding into her room while I was on the phone with my aunt. We had been weighing whether and when I should travel there, but we’d decided to wait a couple of days to see how the infection responded to treatment.

    When her doctor came in he was nothing but optimistic. “Her heart is strong!” he bellowed, loud enough for me to hear through the phone. Despite his unwavering optimism, something was off. She was almost completely unresponsive, despite her stable vital signs.

    “Your mom always seems to get better,” was my husband’s response. And he was right. She’d had poor health for many, many years. Nothing terminal, but a lot of chronic, autoimmune conditions.

    “I think she’s going to be fine,” he said.

    “I don’t know. This time feels different.” I said.

    I booked a ticket to the US to leave a day later. The plan was to stay one night with my dad, then pick up my little brother in Chicago, and together we would make the six-plus hour journey down to El Paso, TX, where my mom had been living for the past two years to be closer to her sister.

    The morning after arriving in Chicago, as I was organizing myself to leave to pick up my brother, my aunt sent a text asking me to call her immediately. My mom had gone into cardiac arrest. “They’ve been trying to resuscitate her for the past twenty minutes,” she said “Do we keep trying?”

    Suddenly I was there, standing in my body inside of that moment I had so feared as a child. Not only was I facing the death of my mother, but I had been given the gavel to make the decision to release her from life. It wasn’t a difficult decision, just utterly heartbreaking. I could hear every sound in the room, including the sound of my own heart beating powerfully.

    “Let her go,” I managed to say.

    I hung up the phone, told my dad she was gone, and went outside to fall apart.

    A few minutes later, my aunt called back. They’d managed to bring her back, though it wouldn’t be for long. Their hope was to keep her alive long enough for us to say goodbye. So my aunt had both my brother and I talk into each of her ears from two different phones.

    We could hear each other speaking as we told her the last things we would ever wish her to know. The hissing and beeping sounds of the ventilator and heart monitor played in the background.

    “Mom, I promise you, Aaron will never be alone,” I cried. (She had always worried so much about him.) “I am and will always be his family. I love you and I will miss you, and I promise that my children will know you. Please know that you can go now, if you need to. We will be okay.”

    “Mom,” my brother cried, “Thank you for making me the man that I am today. Man, I’m going to miss you so much. I love you, mom.”

    She was gone, but our trip to Texas was still ahead of us. I must have cried in every shop, restaurant, airport check-in, airport terminal, and bathroom we went that day.  

    At the airport in Chicago, while waiting to board our flight to Atlanta, I studied a woman sitting across from me. She was sitting perched at the edge of her seat, holding an iPad. Her hands were older and painted with liver spots and wrinkles that revealed their character.

    They reminded me of my mom’s hands, which were always adorned with mismatched rings of turquoise and fake gold. I had even taken a picture of her hands once so that I would always remember their contours.

    I imagined this woman as my mother—the version of her that was alive and healthy and traveling to see me in Switzerland, which is something that in my eight years here she would never do.

    I held onto my brother and cried. In silent moments, I thought of her and I thought of the difficult life she had lived, and I cried. I faced the truth, and I cried.

    Grief is such an urgent and forceful energy. It’s immediate and demanding when it arrives. In fact, it is so powerful a human emotion that some cultures have rituals around grief that enable them to confront and express it, and the storm within our bodies and minds that it stirs up. 

    The truth is, grief is the word that we use to describe the indescribable, visceral heartbreak we feel in the face of loss. The pain of that loss is so big that it demands expression.

    “How about unabashedly bawling your eyes out. How about grieving it all one at a time.” These are lyrics from a song that speaks to this experience. “Thank you, India,” by Alanis Morrisette.

    The questions in the song are rhetorical invitations to consider what it might be like if we were to embrace it all—the pain, the sadness, the love, the joy, the grief. All of it. Without the evaluation of our experience, without our thoughts adding layers of guilt, shame, or embarrassment when the urge arises to express it. Despite the thoughts that tell us that to be strong means to not break down.

    The truth is that a powerful emotion, when embraced, is the stuff of magic.

    And yet there’s really nothing magical about it. It goes something like this: The energy of an emotion begins to build within us and we have a choice: meet it at the door and engage with it, or turn our backs to it. Turning our backs doesn’t make it go away.  

    When we can meet grief at the door with mindfulness, the grief is allowed its full expression. We experience the emotion just as it is. Our bodies become animated by it; our chest rises and falls, our eyes fill with salty tears that soak the clothing we’re wearing. Like a wave it rises and rises, only to fall away again.

    The thing is, our body is actually calmed by the expression of grief, if we allow it. And the calm that follows is like a return to the flow of life and has the quality of magic, but it is also a real physiological phenomenon.

    Some people turn grief away at the door, while others invite it in to make itself at home in our lives. Our ability to work with grief mindfully means to simultaneously meet the powerful force of grief when it arrives, and let it move through us, unimpeded by the thoughts that would turn it into a story about our sadness.

    Behind each wave of grief that I met with mindfulness was this vast space that opened up around my experience; and beyond the grief was this sense of joy and gratitude for this precious life.

    In the end, the infection broke my mother’s heart. For a woman who could “never be loved enough,” this was not insignificant. Her death was painful due to the numerous medical interventions they’d attempted to save her in the last days of her life. She suffered a lot, both mentally and physically, in her life and in her death.

    There were, in fact, many truths about that experience that were very painful to be with. So many moments during that trip that brought me to my knees. I was between devastation and celebration, anger and frustration, and utter acceptance over the events of my mother’s life and death. But all of these truths I held at once in the presence of mindfulness.

    The wide open space of experience that mindfulness made possible taught me how inadequate any definition of what she was to me seemed.

    Stories that had told of both the good and bad aspects of being in relationship with a person were turned on their heads, and the good and bad seemed to blend into something much more nebulous and value-free. A rich tapestry of a life lived on this planet and all that comes with that experience.

    Some months later, grief still comes to the door now and again seeking expression. It follows an image, or accompanies a song. I meet it with mindfulness and allow it what it needs. And once it has passed through me, it’s no longer blocking the doorway. I can see out to where joy is still standing.

  • Coping with Suicide Loss: 9 Lessons for Hope and Healing

    Coping with Suicide Loss: 9 Lessons for Hope and Healing

    Man watching the sunset

    “It takes courage to endure the sharp pains of self-discovery rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives.” ~Marianne Williamson

    “That boy is one in a million, Jill. He’s one in a million.”

    These were my grandfather’s words to my mum about my brother, Mitch, when he was just a kid. He really was one in a million—a light that shone so bright as a child and early teen, only to then fade into shadows of desperation and defeat as he grew into adulthood.

    No one really knows what’s going on in someone else’s mind, especially when a person refuses to let you in. Mitch never let anyone in. On October 1st, 2002 he decided to leave at the age of twenty-six. We were one short on our team now. Our family puzzle was missing a vital piece.

    That night, I woke up around 1am to my mum sitting at my bedside in her robe. She sobbed and said, “He was such a troubled, troubled soul.” Right then I knew what had happened.

    I held my mum in an embrace that never wanted to end. And as the tsunami of shock and fear crashed over me, I prayed that this was all some bad nightmare I’d wake up from.

    At the time, I thought my world had ended. Little did I know, it had just begun.

    In the beginning after Mitch took his life, I wanted to run and hide. I couldn’t shake the shame and guilt. The societal and cultural stigma attached to suicide as a horrible, selfish act stuck to me like glue.

    I felt like our family had caught some bad disease and any one of us could be next. Like we had the suicide gene and it was only a matter of time another family member or I chose to go against the “normalcy” of a life lived.

    Even though the past eight years of Mitch’s life were shrouded in depression, the guilt of not doing enough kept replaying in my mind.

    I’d imagine saving the day and bursting into the hotel room where he spent his final hours and convincing him there was another way. Grief whispered to me, there had to be another way for him to be happy. I didn’t realize at the time that the only person that can heal you is you.

    Then there was the anger. I couldn’t look myself in the mirror. The bathroom became a torture chamber.

    However, in the midst of my grief something else happened. I felt a closer connection to my own energy at the core of my being. I believe this was due in part to the loss of the physical relationship with Mitch; organically, I switched gears to reconnect on a different level.

    Feeling broken after such a loss, funnily enough, cracked open a channel within me that lay dormant and ignored.

    It was an odd feeling, and one I didn’t welcome because of my inner resistance to change. At the time, I preferred to remain stuck in suffering, but the invitation was there.

    The better part of my twenties was awfully confusing because I allowed myself to wallow in pain. As a result, I lacked intimacy in relationships, I was financially dependent, I lacked commitment to my career, and I lost my old zest for life.

    However, the beauty of confusion is that it allowed me to seek the answers I was looking for. The key was to ask the right questions.

    The right questions led me to lean into my pain head on, address it, and acknowledge the energetic essence within me rising to the surface. Asking the right questions led me to a shift in thinking and helped me learn some valuable lessons.

    At the end of the day I had a choice to make: Was I willing to genuinely look inside? Did I wish to grow from the experience? Did Mitch want me to carry the weight of his loss upon my shoulders until my dying day? Did I want to swim in the continuity of life or sink in my own sorrow?

    Along your own path to healing after suicide loss or personal crisis, these nine suggestions might help.

    1. Be willing to change your concept of yourself.

    This means changing what you believe to be true about your outer and inner self-concept. It means letting go of the old stories, beliefs, thoughts, and patterns that don’t serve you and keep you stuck in the past.

    For me, the old stories, beliefs, and thoughts centered around suicide loss being my eternal crutch to bear, something that was going to forever limit my capacity to find joy in anything I did. I told myself I didn’t have the power to heal my life—that included being successful in whatever I placed my attention on.

    When you redefine what you are capable of on the outside and when you reconnect to your higher power on the inside, you begin to unlock what is authentically you.

    When you honor what is authentically you, void of all past luggage and conditioning, you unlock a greater love within. A connection that self-heals and plants you in the present with gratitude in your heart—that includes the life you have lost. By honoring you, you honor them. There is no separation.

    2. Be willing to externalize your grief.

    Your grief has intelligence. Let it tell you know it knows. Vomit it all up, don’t wretch. Open the latch and let the dam spill over. Sometimes when all the tears are cried there is no room for anything else except a smile and laughter. There is strength in vulnerability and healing in releasing. Talk, cry, write, shout, exercise, and help others.

    3. Be willing to go within.

    This lovely world of ours is a mirror. Your outer state is a reflection of your inner state. Self-healing and self-love start with connecting to your inner source, your higher power.

    Meditate. Meditation will create a clear, open channel between the heart and the mind allowing for them to work in synchrony. Anxiety, addiction, and obsession over your loss will slowly melt away because you are grounded in the loop of life. Where there is grief, there is also relief.

    You don’t have to be spiritual or religious. If you are a skeptic and don’t buy into what ancient traditions and great masters have known for thousands of years, and you rely on scientific fact, then look no further to what the world’s leading neuroscientists and physicists are saying.

    There is an underlying intelligence that binds this whole place together. You are not separate from anything else that exists on this planet. You are made of the same stuff! To think you are any different is the height of arrogance. To tap into its power, sit with it in silence. Join with it.

    In terms of healing after a loss, consistent meditation, day and night, is one of the most powerful practices, if not the most powerful, for self-healing and overall well-being. I have witnessed dramatic shifts in awareness within myself with consistent meditation after loss.

    I have come to recognize that I am not the thoughts in my head. I have become more aware of my own thoughts, as opposed to becoming attached to them.

    Thoughts are neither good nor bad, but the moment I place an emotional attachment to them, that’s when they become problematic. With practice, I’ve learned to step back behind the negative chatter and catch myself buying into thoughts that are rooted in the past. By no means am I master of this, but I am far better than I used to be.

    4. Be willing to process and clear the pain.

    Again, you have a choice. I’d suggest being brave and honest. A whole new world awaits you when you are willing to do the work.

    That is, be willing to externalize your grief, to self-inquire, and feel to heal. To face your hurt head on instead of ignoring it for years. That, I can tell you now, will come back to bite you at some stage.

    You can run, but you can’t hide; sooner or later your hurt will spill out into your relationships, finances, family, health, or career. The wiser choice is to work with it, not against it.

    When you are willing to process the guilt, shame, blame, anger, depression, isolation, and loneliness, you begin to unlock your authentic self. You strip away the layers to your greatness.

    The opportunity to view yourself and this world through a new lens is available to you. You will begin to see that with grief there is also relief. You may not witness it straight away, but life has a way of balancing itself out. It’s always the end of life that gives life a chance. This greatest loss of yours can become your greatest gift. My life is proof of that.

    5. Be willing to see your life beyond your loss.

    A question that needs to be asked after we have grieved our loss: Now that this has happened to us, what are we going to do about it?

    Am I going to use this loss to grow, learn, share, give, create, and love more? It’s up to you. I’ve chosen not to do these things in the past and it led to a depressive state. Swim with life as it continues on and grows or sink in the past that doesn’t exist?

    There is something great for you in the horizon. This loss is your trigger, your catalyst to peel back the layers and discover what music dances in your heart.

    6. Be willing to accept the value of challenge.

    What if life’s greatest challenges and voids were windows into living your most inspired, creative, and authentic self?

    In the words of Dr. John Demartini, “Your greatest voids create your highest values. And your highest values lead you to feel grateful for the synchronous balance in life—both pain and pleasure, challenge and support—that brings you closer to fulfilling what is most meaningful.”

    There is potential value in every situation. Grief is not exempt of this. Grief is a part of life, and to exclude the balance of death leaves us in this lop-sided view of the world.

    Today we constantly seek pleasure, we seek support, and we desire acceptance. The trouble is that grief leaves us with deep pain and with a perceived greater challenge, and if you have experienced a suicide loss, the challenge cuts deep within a family context. In our case, a family of six becoming five felt like a gaping hole deeper than the Grand Canyon.

    I now look at the sadness of losing my brother as the most instructive thing that has ever happened to me. His death didn’t have to remain in the way of my life, but more so, on the way to unlocking how I wanted to live my life and what I wanted to share and contribute.

    Mitch taught me that my time here is limited and to go after what really makes me happy. To find my joy and share it with the world. His death was a reminder to have fun and not take it too seriously. No one knows what’s going to happen tomorrow, so you might as well enjoy the moment—all that we have! For this, I can’t thank him enough.

    I have no doubts he is celebrating with me. I know this because for him to not want me to seek the benefits, opportunities, and inspiring lessons in his passing would be to deny the significance and meaning I have found through the life he lived, and in his passing.

    7. Be willing to generate energy.

    You have to generate it in order for you to have it!

    That’s why in these times of challenge you need to remember to do the things that you love. For me, I needed to swim in the ocean daily, go on long bush walks, hang out with friends even when I didn’t feel like leaving the house, and set aside time to write whatever it was they wanted to spill onto the page.

    You must endeavor to feed yourself joy. Things you love to do and things you loved to do with your loved one that’s passed.

    Don’t become the stale water in the pond. Seek to sit in that rubber tube and flow with the current of the river.

    8. Be willing to forgive yourself and your loved one.

    Their death is not your fault. It’s very easy to blame yourself and others around you. We should have done more! How did I not see the signs? I can’t live with myself—what kind of mother/father am I?

    Hold up! Drop it. Have some compassion for yourself. You did what you could with the awareness you had at the time. It was their choice to go—an end to their own pain and suffering they unfortunately could see no way out of.

    As you forgive others, you begin to forgive yourself. When you stop focusing on their choice to go, you will stop punishing yourself for your own.

    To quote Marianne Williamson, “Forgiveness releases the past to divine correction and the future to new possibilities. Whatever it was that happened to you, it is over. It happened in the past; in the present, it does not exist unless you bring it with you. Nothing anyone has ever done to you has permanent effects, unless you hold on to it permanently.”

    9. Be willing to surrender.

    Here’s a simple equation: Open mind = open heart = living authentically you.

    When you absorb and take action on the other eight lessons, you will become more open to something much bigger than you could have imagined for your life after your loss. You must be willing to give up your attachments to the outcome of your life after suicide loss.

    I does get better. There is light at the end of the tunnel. You will be okay. In fact you will be better than okay. But you must keep moving. This loss has left a giant scar, but scars tell stories. Make this scar the catalyst for you to know and love yourself more than you have ever have before. In the words of Anita Moorjani, “Love yourself like your life depends on it, because it does!”

    There is hope and there is happiness. Life isn’t the same without them, but that’s okay. You’re here now and it’s up to you what you want to do with the precious time you have been gifted.

  • Why We Shouldn’t Rush or Feel Guilty About Emotional Pain

    Why We Shouldn’t Rush or Feel Guilty About Emotional Pain

    Deppresive Man

    “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche

    In July 2012, a conversation changed my life.

    Prior to this, I had been struggling to right myself after a difficult loss. Several months had passed, yet I continued to revisit the same sad, angry place again and again. I believed the presence of these difficult emotions meant I was “doing it all wrong.”

    I thought, if I could figure out why these feelings were so persistent, I could make them vanish altogether. To assist in the quest, I enlisted the help of a spiritual mentor.

    I very carefully explained to him that, despite reading books, exercising, spending time with loved ones, eating good food, working, and indulging my passions and hobbies, the daily waves of sadness were still so strong it seemed as if I would drown in their undertow.

    “If I am doing all of the ‘right’ things,” I implored, “why am I still feeling this way?” If I had the answer to this question, surely I could be free of all of this nonsense and get my life back to normal (or something close to that).

    With the kindest eyes and gentlest smile, the man explained to me that the problem wasn’t anger, sadness, or loneliness—these were normal, healthy reactions to loss. The real issue was my erroneous belief that pain could be controlled with logic.

    What the…what now?

    Instinctively, I wanted to resist his rendition of my predicament. First, because my life’s work up until that point had been helping others “make sense” of their suffering. So, if pain could not be controlled, how could I help console those seeking pain relief?

    Secondly, my shame filter translated his gentle statement into, “What’s up, control freak?!”

    Shame does not allow for kind discourse.

    Once my resistance subsided, I realized the guru was right: False ideology was preferable to being with sadness, anger, and loneliness, the end date of which could not be predicted or scheduled. Further, I just plain old didn’t like how I had been humbled by loss.

    As the words left my mentor’s lips, something inside of me shifted. I did not feel angry, sad, or scared. A little annoyed, yes—sort of like a child being invited to part with her favorite blankie.

    The predominant feeling in that moment was relief.

    Once fully felt and accepted, the guru explained, emotional states will naturally dissipate over time. The determination to find out “why” was an unnecessary resistance to a tide that simply needed to ebb and flow on its own course. Thus far, swimming against the current did was doing little more than making my arms tired.

    I set a conscious intention that day: to do my best to let the waves of grief carry me wherever I was meant to go.

    It wasn’t all sunshine, rainbows, and Oprah Winfrey moments after that. In fact, it pretty much sucked for a while. But, after two or three months of swimming with the current, I felt more confident in my ability to survive the tide.

    Anyone who has lived or loved has been privy to emotions that seem to come and go without explanation. I believe we cannot control how we feel, but we can control how we choose to respond to these feelings when we have them.

    Healing resides in how we choose to respond to pain.

    Here are some things to keep in mind the next time the waters feel turbulent:

    1. Feelings do not have brains.

    Logic cannot “fix” feelings because feelings are not broken. Sometimes we are lucky enough to see a clear path between our heads and our hearts. For example, when someone says something hurtful, we understand why we may feel angry or hurt.

    There will also be times when feelings don’t make sense. They don’t need to. Whether your feelings have a logical explanation or not, recognize them as valid and trust that, when given permission to exist, they will eventually pass. (I promise they will.)

    2. The presence of pain is not an indication of failure.

    There will be times when pain persists, even though we are doing all of the “right things.” This does not mean that you have failed at anything. It just means you may need more time (see #3).

    Failure is the voice of shame. Shame simply heaps suffering on top of preexisting pain. No one deserves this, including you, so try to talk to yourself as you would a beloved friend when shame surfaces.

    3. There is no timeline for things that cannot be scheduled or controlled.

    Give yourself time and take as much of it as you need.

    4. Instead of fixating on why, ask what and how.

    Shift your attention away from why and ask yourself what’s happening in the present moment and how you feel about it. Loving acknowledgement is the first step toward acceptance.

    More often than not, “why” is a signpost for the inner child who falsely believes pain should not be part of life. Your feelings are a testament to your aliveness. The next time you hear yourself asking “why” you feel the way you do, I invite you to breathe, lean back, and let the tide carry you wherever you were meant to go.

  • How to Speak to Someone About an Unspeakable Loss

    How to Speak to Someone About an Unspeakable Loss

    “It’s not about saying the right things. It’s about doing the right things.” ~Unknown

    Years ago, my family and I moved to a bucolic little town in New Zealand, where we were immediately swept up into a group of ex-pats and locals. We felt deeply connected to this community by the time I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy in the local hospital.

    When our son was three months old, a doctor heard a heart murmur. Twenty-four hours later, he died.

    In the days and weeks that followed, I wandered in my own fog of grief as I went about the necessary tasks of ordinary life: shopping for food, taking our other kids to school, doing the usual mounds of laundry.

    Meanwhile, my new friends kept their distance. I saw them take great care to avoid me: to cross the street, switch supermarket aisles, literally do an about-face when they saw me coming.

    Invitations stopped coming. The phone went silent. My grief was marked by a deeper isolation than I’d ever known.

    Later, many of these people apologized. They told me they were terribly sad and distressed about what had happened, but hadn’t known what to say. My loss was so enormous that words seemed inadequate, even pitiful.

    They said nothing, out of fear that they would say the wrong thing.

    This sort of experience repeats itself in many different forms: a friend gets dumped by the love of her life, a colleague is given notice at a job he’s held for two decades, or a loved one receives the dreaded news that she has inoperable cancer.

    What can you say?

    While it’s not an easy question to answer, one thing is certain: It’s worse to say nothing than to say the wrong thing. Here are five ways to respond helpfully to people who have suffered an enormous loss.

    1. Manage your own feelings first.

    When we learn that disaster has befallen a loved one, we initially feel shock. Our heart rate increases, our thoughts either speed up or slow down, and we may experience nausea or dizziness.

    The anxiety we feel is real and personal. Our instinct, though, is to ignore it, find ways to numb it or minimize it. That’s a mistake.

    If we address our own anxiety first, we’ll be in a much stronger position to respond well to the person most directly affected. Do the things you know how to do to manage stress. A walk in the woods, some meditation or yoga, or talking to a trusted friend can help.

    Make sure your own body and emotions are regulated before you turn to the person in grief.

    2. Now focus on the other person.

    Remember that the isolation they feel is almost as painful as the shock and the sadness of the loss itself. If you avoid them because you don’t know what to say, this avoidance serves only your needs.

    Our friends and other loved ones need our comfort, support, and involvement during times of sorrow.

    Although there isn’t a right thing to say, there are some things to never say. They include the current favorite, “Everything happens for a reason,” or “I know just how you feel.” How do you know there’s a reason, and what difference would it make to a grieving person, anyway? And you don’t know how they feel—only they do.

    3. Admit that you don’t know what to say.

    That’s a good start. Try something simple that breaks the ice and starts a conversation, or at least sends a message to the other person that they’re not alone.

    “I’m so sorry you’re going through this. I wish I could say the perfect thing, but I know there’s nothing to fix it. I just wanted you to know I care and am here with you.”

    4. Listen.

    If the person is willing to talk, listen. It’s the single most vital thing you can do.

    Listen to their story without interrupting. Don’t turn the conversation back to you with statements like, “I know what you’re going through—my dog died last year.”

    Don’t tell them what they will, or should, feel. Simply acknowledge their pain and listen to what it’s like for them.

    We all have different styles of managing shock and distress. Some people are angry, while others seem numb. Still others turn to gallows humor. Your job is not to correct them but to give them space to be the way they need to be.

    5. Rather than saying, ”Let me know if I can do anything,” offer to do something practical and specific.

    Taking on an ordinary task is often most helpful. Offer to shop for groceries, run errands, drive the kids somewhere, or to cook a meal or two. Ask if you can call tomorrow, or if they want to be left alone for a few days.

    When Survey Monkey’s CEO Dave Goldberg died suddenly, his wife, Sheryl Sandberg, wrote the following:

    When I am asked, “How are you?” I stop myself from shouting, “My husband died a month ago, how do you think I am?” When I hear “How are you today?” I realize the person knows that the best I can do right now is to get through each day.

    Today, as I recall the loss of my own infant son, I think about the one person who did truly comfort me. She arrived at my house with a bottle of fine brandy and said, “This is everyone’s worst nightmare. I am so, so sorry this has happened.”

    Then we sat on the lawn and she poured me a drink as she listened to every horrible detail.

    As I look back now, I still feel how much her gesture helped me cope through those early days of pain. She didn’t try to fix me or try to make sense of what happened. She didn’t even try to comfort me. The comfort she gave came through her being in it with me.

    You can’t fix what happened, but you can sit with someone, side by side, so they don’t feel quite so alone. That requires only intention, a willingness to feel awkward, and an open, listening heart. It’s the one gift that can make a difference.

  • 10 Lessons My Mother’s Death Taught Me About Healing and Happiness

    10 Lessons My Mother’s Death Taught Me About Healing and Happiness

    “Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.” ~Joan Didion

    This spring marked ten years since I lost my mother. One ordinary Thursday, she didn’t show up to work, and my family spent a blur of days frantically hanging missing person fliers, driving all over New England, and hoping against reason for a happy outcome.

    My mother was prone to frequent mood swings, but she also talked to my two older brothers and me multiple times a day, and going off the grid was completely out of character. How does someone just vanish? And why?

    Forty days is a long time to brood over worst-case scenarios: murder, kidnap, dissociative fugue cycled through my addled mind. I gave in to despair but always managed to buoy myself up with hope. My mom was my best friend, and at twenty years old, I needed her too much to lose her. She simply had to come home.

    Six weeks later, my brother called. Right up front he said he loved me—a sure sign bad news was coming. There was no way to say what he had to say next, so he just spat it out like sour milk: our mother’s body had been found.

    A diver checking moorings in a cold New England harbor had spotted something white on the ocean floor. That white whale was our mom’s station wagon. She had driven off the end of a pier. We didn’t say the word suicide, but we both thought it, failed to comprehend it.

    It’s been ten years since that terrible spring. Much of it still doesn’t make sense to me, but a decade has softened the rawness of my grief and allowed moments of lightness to find their way back into my life, the way sunrise creeps around the edges of a drawn window shade.

    Losing someone to suicide makes you certain you’ll never see another sunrise, much less appreciate one. It isn’t true. I’m thirty years old now and my life is bigger, scarier, and more fulfilling than I ever could have imagined. Grief helped get me here.

    Grief is not something you can hack. There is no listicle that can reassemble your busted heart. But I have found that grieving can make your life richer in unexpected ways. Here are ten truths the biggest loss of my life has taught me:

    1. Dying is really about living.

    At my mother’s memorial, I resented everyone who said some version of that old platitude, “Time heals all wounds.” Experience has taught me that time doesn’t offer a linear healing process so much as a slowly shifting perspective.

    In the first raw months and years of grieving, I pushed away family and friends, afraid that they would leave too. With time, though, I’ve forged close relationships and learned to trust again. Grief wants you to go it alone, but we need others to light the way through that dark tunnel.

    2. No one will fill that void.

    I have a mom-shaped hole in my heart. Turns out it’s not a fatal condition, but it is a primal spot that no one will ever fill. For a long time, I worried that with the closest relationship in my life suddenly severed, I would never feel whole again. Who would ever understand me in all the ways my mother did?

    These days I have strong female role models in my life, but I harbor no illusions that any of them will take my mom’s place. I’ve slowly been able to let go of the guilt that I was replacing or dishonoring her by making room for others. Healing is not an act of substituting, but of expanding, despite the holes we carry.

    3. Be easy on yourself. 

    In the months after losing my mother, I was clumsy, forgetful and foggy. I can’t recall any of the college classes I took during that time. Part of my grieving process entailed beating myself up for what I could not control, and my brain fog felt like yet another failure.

    In time, the fog lifted and my memories returned. I’ve come to see this as my mind going into survival mode with its own coping mechanisms.

    Being kind to myself has never been my strong suit, and grief likes to make guilt its sidekick. Meditation, yoga, and journaling are three practices that help remind me that kindness is more powerful than listening to my inner saboteur.

    4. Use whatever works. 

    I’m not a Buddhist, but I find the concept of letting go and not clinging to anything too tightly to be powerful.

    I don’t read self-help, but I found solace in Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking.

    I’m not religious, but I found my voice in a campus support group run by a chaplain.

    I hadn’t played soccer since I was a kid, but I joined an adult recreational league and found that I could live completely in the moment while chasing a ball around a field.

    There isn’t a one-size-fits-all grieving method. Much of it comes down to flailing around until you find what works. Death is always unexpected; so too are the ways we heal.

    5. Gratitude wins.

    We always feel that we lost a loved one too soon. My mom gave me twenty good years. Of course I would’ve liked more time, but self-pity and gratitude are flipsides of the same coin; choosing the latter will serve you in positive ways, while the former gives you absolutely nothing.

    6. Choose to thrive.

    My mom and I share similar temperaments. After her death, I worried I was also destined for an unhappy outcome. This is one of the many tricks that grief plays: it makes you think you don’t deserve happiness.

    It’s easier to self-destruct than it is to practice self-care. I initially coped through alcohol and other destructive methods, but I knew this was only clouding my grieving process. I had to face the pain directly, and write my way through it. So I wrote a book.

    Everyone has their own constructive coping mechanisms, and choosing those, even when it’s hard, is worth it in the long run. My mother may not have been able to find happiness in her own life, but I know she would want that for me. No one is going to water you like a plant—you have to choose to thrive.

    7. Time heals, but on its own timeline.

    “Time heals all wounds” is something I heard a lot at my mother’s memorial service. Here’s what I wish I had known: grief time does not operate like normal time. In the first year, the present was obscured entirely by the past. Grieving demanded that I revisit every detail leading up to losing my mom.

    As I slowly started to find effective coping mechanisms, I began to feel more rooted in the present. My mood did not have to be determined by the hurts of the past.

    There will always be good days and bad. This is the bargain we sign on for as humans. Once we make it through the worst days, we gain a heightened sense of appreciation for the small moments of joy to be found in normal days. Healing comes over time, but only if we’re willing to do the work of grieving.

    8. Let your loss highlight your gains.

    I’ve lived in New York City for eight years now, but it still shocks me that I’ve built a life that I love here. It’s a gift I attribute to my mom. She was always supportive of my stubborn desire to pursue a career as a writer. After she died, the only thing that made sense to me was to write about the experience.

    This led me to grad school in New York, a place I had never even considered living before. It feels like home now. I wish I could share it with my mom, but it was her belief in me that got me here. I lost my mom, but I found a home, good friends, a career I love and the perspective to appreciate it all.

    9. Heartbreak is a sign of progress.

    In the first years after the big loss, I assumed romance was dead to me. Why would I allow someone else to break my heart? Luckily I got past this fear to the point where I was able to experience a long and loving relationship.

    That relationship eventually imploded, but I did not, which strikes me as a sign of progress. Grief makes us better equipped to weather the other life losses that are sure to come. This is not pessimism. This is optimism that the rewards of love always trump its risks.

    10. Grief makes us beginners.

    Death is the only universal, and grieving makes beginners out of all of us. Yet grief affects us all in different ways. There is no instruction manual on how best to cope.

    There is only time, day by day and sometimes minute by minute, to feel what works, and to cast aside what does not. In the ten years I’ve learned to live without my mother, I’ve tried to see my grieving process as an evolutionary one. Loss has enriched my life in challenging, unexpected, and maybe even beautiful ways.

  • The Good News About Feeling Bad (And How to Get Through It)

    The Good News About Feeling Bad (And How to Get Through It)

    “To honor and accept one’s shadow is a profound spiritual discipline. It’s whole-making and thus holy and the most important experience of a lifetime.” ~Robert Johnson

    There’s nothing worse than having a bad day (or week or years…)

    Or when emotions take over and carry us away.

    Or when our relationships bring challenges.

    Or when we endure great loss.

    Or when we wish that just once when things started getting good, they stayed that way.

    But difficult times are really offerings that show us what no longer serves us. And once they’re cleared, they no longer have power over us.

    No one, including myself, wants to feel bad. After decades of trying to overcome depression and anxiety, one day, I finally stopped trying to fix myself. I then came to the amazing realization that there’s really no problem with me.

    This is what set me free:

    Several years ago, my parents both died of cancer, I had many miscarriages, my husband and I divorced, and my dog of sixteen years had to be put down.

    It was intensely difficult, and I fell apart. I hardly recognized myself. At the same time, even in my darkest hour, I knew in my gut that I would somehow get through it.

    In the midst of my mid-life crises, wondering when and how I would get over the debilitating, soul-crushing loss, I trusted myself not completely, but enough. 

    During that time, I made a new friend whose father had recently passed. I invited him over for a bowl of my famous Italian chicken sausage lentil soup.

    He was angry and confused. He was in shock. I picked up my soup in the palms of my hands and said to him, “Grief is a big bowl to hold.”

    At any given time, without knowing why or how, grief can overcome us in a number of aching expressions.

    We get super pissed off. Or we want to hide. Or we push away those we love, and wall off. We want to numb the pain. Or cover it up.

    Seemingly insignificant annoyances trigger us. Perhaps a token, memory, or random happenstance wells us up.

    We all mourn in different ways, wanting more than anything for it all to end. And we sometimes pretend that it’s over when it’s not.

    Someone once told me that there is grief and frozen grief.

    Frozen grief is grief that got stuck like water passing from a liquid to a solid state—a cohesion of molecules holding together, resisting separation. Like a Coke in a freezer, it can burst.

    Warmth and equilibrium are what’s needed to nurture it. But there’s not a single temperature that can be considered to be the melting point of water.

    I read once that after suffering a great loss, it takes two years to heal—or at least have a sense that the trauma is now of the past, even if not “over.”

    At two years, I was doing better but I still wasn’t great. I worried then I was frozen.

    Cheryl Strayed wrote in Brave Enough:

    “When you recognize that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows, but because of them, that you would not have chosen the things that happen in your life, but you are grateful for them, that you will hold the empty bowls eternally in your hands, but you also have the capacity to fill them? The word for that is healing.”

    Cheryl Strayed knew about the bowl too.

    It took four years, and then one day, I saw the clouds disperse and the sun rise. I was frustrated it wasn’t two. It was four. But that’s how long it took me.

    In the grand scheme of things I can look back now and see all that I learned and how I grew. In my most broken hideous moments the most magical thing happened.

    I came to love my big, beautiful, messy self. I came to accept her like nothing else.

    As much as I missed my mother and father, the husband I loved, the babies I didn’t have, and the dog that replaced them, I came to a place of loving myself like my own parent, my own spouse, and my own child.

    I was all that was left. And if that was it, then by God I was going to love her.

    And what did loving myself really mean?

    It meant accepting myself enough to allow myself to be a mess.

    To not apologize 100 times for every single mistake, or kill myself over them.

    To humbly say to others and myself, this is it.

    And then, somehow, I started to accept others like myself. They got to be messes too. And my heart opened. And I could love again. And I let love into my big, beautiful bowl of lentil soup.

    Here are some tools to help you love yourself as you feel all that you’re feeling—the good and the bad.

    1. Accept feelings without judgment.

    Use this question:

    What if it didn’t matter if I felt ________ or not?

    Then, fill in the blank with whatever you’re judging yourself for. Give yourself permission to feel whatever it is.

    Let it be, without doing anything with it or trying to make sense of it, while holding a loving container for yourself and the people around it.

    2. When an emotion is carrying you away, identify the feeling by narrowing it down to one of these:

    • Anger
    • Fear
    • Sadness/Grief
    • Joy/Loving

    Our feelings are layered. Underneath anger is fear, under fear is sadness, and under sadness is our heart, where our joy and loving lies. 

    This formula can guide you in uncovering each of your emotional experiences to come to your heart more quickly.

    For example, after my mother died I was angry. I didn’t know why I felt so angry until I cleared through the layers.

    I discovered I was mad that she left me. But the anger wouldn’t have subsided until I identified the fear underneath it: I was terrified of living life without my mom, and I was shutting down my vulnerable feelings to protect myself.

    Of course, under the fear was tremendous sadness that she was gone. In order to heal, I needed to feel the tears rather than suppress them with anger and fear.

    Once I could touch the tender, fragile parts inside, my tears had permission to flow out whenever necessary.

    When my tears emptied, the sadness lifted and was replaced with enormous love, compassion, and gratitude for my mom. When I thought about her it didn’t come with pain anymore. I think of her now only with happiness and joy.

    3. Realize that spirals both descend and ascend.

    When we hit a particularly difficult downward spiral, we have the opportunity to focus on raising our frequency.

    In these times, I meditate more. I choose not to fuel the negativity by talking too much about it with friends. I clean up my diet. I go to yoga—whatever I can do to make a positive adjustment toward self-loving and self-care.

    I find something to ground me. It could be as easy as taking the garbage out (literally!), jumping into a creative project that fulfills me, or taking a walk in the sunshine—anything to find the scent of the roses.

    4. Know that after good experiences, “bad” things will happen.

    After expansion, we always contract. And that means nothing about us.

    Life brings us lemons so that we can discover how to go deeper and closer to our true selves. Once we’ve hit one level, there’s always another.

    We can have some good days where everything is great, and then WHOA, something steps in that challenges us to grow.

    I’ve come to accept that I will eventually lose momentum after being in the flow.

    The good news about feeling bad is that when we get thrown off course, each letdown strengthens our spirit when we find our way out.

    “Downtimes” are our ally. Without “bad,” “good” wouldn’t exist, and just like life, we learn to roll with it. What’s most important is how we acknowledge and validate our being human as truly enough.

  • We Have a Right to Grieve Losses Big and Small

    We Have a Right to Grieve Losses Big and Small

    Deppresive Man

    “Wisdom is nothing more than healed pain.” ~Robert Gary Lee

    It felt like I was being crushed by the weight of the world.

    “Impossible,” I thought.

    It’s impossible that people actually suffer this kind of pain and survive to tell the tale.

    When I thought about it, my stomach contracted as if I’d taken a blow to the gut. I’d gasp for breath and try to find some air through the tears and in between sobs.

    So this is what grief felt like.

    Now I understood why denial is the first stage of grief. How could you endure this kind of agony if you had to face the force of its full frontal attack?

    I felt sick and exhausted. I lay down and, although I expected never to find enough peace to sleep again, I quickly drifted off into a place where there was no more pain.

    When you think of grief, you think about a great loss.

    A death of a loved one, news of your terminal illness, and the loss of your home from the violent winds of a tornado are all acceptable events to grieve about.

    We can understand how any of the above can bring a person to their knees. We expect people to grieve over these losses.

    What we refuse to understand is the grief we feel over the smaller losses. (more…)

  • How to Move from Grief to Relief After Losing a Loved One

    How to Move from Grief to Relief After Losing a Loved One

    Man at the cemetary

    “When a person is born we rejoice, and when they’re married we jubilate, but when they die we try to pretend nothing has happened.” ~Margaret Mead

    It was five years ago this month that my father passed away from cancer. About four months before his death, his oncologist gave him a bleak diagnosis, telling him to get his affairs in order because he could die at any time.

    Our entire family was dumbstruck. Here was a man who appeared to be strong and generally healthy.

    He was a youthful sixty-eight years old. Just months into his retirement after a long and impactful career in social work, this was my dad’s time to enjoy the pleasures of post-retirement life, not brace for a devastatingly premature death.

    Summoning every bit of optimism resident in my being, I refused to accept he would fall to cancer.

    I knew the power of a healthy diet, exercise, and other holistic modalities in extending the longevity of cancer patients. I would do whatever it took for my father to survive.

    I spent hundreds at Whole Foods in a single visit, buying up the most potent anti-cancer foods and supplements.

    I researched every type of cancer therapy under the sun.

    I encouraged my father to modify his diet, follow a juicing regimen, and consult with credible and proven holistic healers of every stripe.

    Despite my best efforts, I had hit a wall. Sure, my father expressed appreciation for my care and concern, but he held no desire to change his lifestyle or pursue any alternative therapies.

    Pursuing these things might have helped reverse his illness; or they might have done very little. What was certain is that he had resigned himself to the notion that death was upon him.

    And so for months my family and I were left to watch the vitality of a man we held so dear steadily drain away. Adding to the horror of the situation were the rounds of chemotherapy my father underwent at the recommendation of his physician, who claimed it would alleviate his suffering.

    To my untrained eye, the chemotherapy succeeded only in withering my dad’s physical vessel down to an ashen shell of what it once was.

    But I made sure to hold it together.

    I don’t believe I cried more than a few times in the months leading up to my dad’s passing. I simply didn’t allow myself to feel the cascade of negative emotions churning below the surface.

    I had to be practical, I thought, so that I could support my mother and the rest of my family during an extremely challenging time. I had to power through it.

    And steady I remained, right up until my dad took his last breath in the hospice facility on that warm spring afternoon.

    The bewildering mix of grief, pain, shock, and relief in the wake of losing a loved one who has been suffering profoundly will touch everyone differently. I wept mightily that evening. Surrounded by family and friends, I felt able to emote and let the tears flow, at least for a day. What a relief.

    My willingness to acknowledge my pain quickly changed, however. The long list of responsibilities that fell on my mother in the immediate aftermath of my father’s death were formidable.

    I made it my priority to do whatever I could to unburden her and once again, I chose to prioritize fulfilling obligations over feelings my feelings.

    I made it through the funeral, the flood of calls and the many financial, legal, and practical considerations that accompany the death of a relative. I helped pick up the pieces. But as the months wore on I continued to deny myself the opportunity to process the emotional impact of losing my dad.

    I wasn’t in denial about my father dying, I was in denial about the way I felt about it.

    Feeling for Answers

    Two years later I found myself in the office of a friend who happens to be a fellow hypnotherapist. I confided in her that, for more than a year, I had been struggling with a strange case of debilitating chronic stomach pain. She offered to help me unearth subconscious patterns that might have been contributing to the pain.

    During my session, I came to discover that the stomach issue I was experiencing was directly linked to unexpressed grief and shame around my father’s passing.

    I discovered that not only did I fail to move through the grief of the event, but part of me felt deeply guilty about letting my dad slip away when I believed I could have saved him. With my friend’s help, I was guided to release the underlying emotional discord feeding my physical ailment. The pain vanished overnight and never returned.

    It was eye-opening. Though I intellectually knew there existed a profound connection between our emotional states and physical health, it was still hard to believe that my months of acute discomfort were the manifestation of bottled up emotion. I had learned a big lesson.

    Open Up to Your Pain

    From an early age we are conditioned to ignore our negative emotions. This is especially the case when we endure difficult circumstances, such as family sickness and death. We choose to push away our feelings in order to “just get through it.”

    The trouble is that in suppressing our emotions we’re not getting through anything, but rather forcing these emotional patterns deep into the recesses of the subconscious mind. This unexpressed pain that brews below the surface is at the root of much of our anxiety and many types of illness.

    When it comes to any sort of emotional pain, it’s crucial for us to understand that negative feelings serve us. They are wonderful indicators of the truth of our being and show us what is wanted and unwanted. But we don’t have to hang on to the anger, sadness, and powerlessness forever.

    We transcend our negative emotions by being present with them. Being tuned into the truth of your feelings doesn’t mean you will be a trainwreck and incapable of dealing with the real world; it actually sets you on the path of wholeness and peace.

    We strive to put on a front so that the world sees us as kind, capable, and strong. This often means that we denying our emotional pain. It takes great courage to admit to our vulnerabilities and embrace our authentic feelings, but it is a required stop on the way to freedom and relief.

    I challenge you to pick something in your life that you’ve been holding back from feeling and choose to express your pain in a safe and conscious way. Pull down the facades and give yourself permission to not be okay. It’s time to free yourself.

  • How to Help a Friend Through Grief

    How to Help a Friend Through Grief

    Comforting Friend

    “Grief is like the ocean; it comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.” ~Vicki Harrison

    I’m no stranger to grief. When I was twenty-three I lost my mum, and then eight years later I lost my second daughter, Grace, when she was only one day old.

    Soon after Grace died, my husband and I saw a grief counselor. He said something about other people’s reactions to grief that turned out to be one of the truest statements anyone has ever made to me.

    He said, “There will be at least one friend you never hear from again because they don’t know what to say. At least one person will tell you not to worry because you can have another baby. And there will be one shining star—someone who you didn’t consider to be that close a friend—who will be there for you more forcefully and consistently than anyone else.”

    All three of his predictions came true.

    If you have a friend who is grieving, I know you will want to be their shining star. Grief is awkward and difficult; it’s something we tend to shy away from if we can help it. If you have never experienced grief, you may be at a loss to know what to say or do.

    You Don’t Need to Say the Right Thing

    In fact, you don’t need to say anything at all. You just need to be there.

    It may not feel like much, but your physical presence alone is a comfort—a hug, a hand to squeeze, a presence in the room. These are all important crutches when someone is navigating grief. Remember that you can’t fix this; all you can do is open your arms and open your heart.

    There were a few friends I never heard from again after I lost Grace, as the counselor predicted. It seemed so unfair to lose friends at the same time as losing my baby. I wish they had known that I didn’t expect them to say anything profound or heal my pain, but I did expect them to stick around.

    Try to Steer Clear of Platitudes

    The discomfort and awkwardness outsiders often feel toward grief has given rise to many platitudes over the years. Personally, I would steer clear from saying, “Everything happens for a reason,” or, “It is God’s will.” Even someone with the strongest faith will find that hard to swallow.

    Many platitudes are focused on trying to make the griever focus on the future and move on. While the intent is admirable, I just didn’t want to hear that time is a healer and how all would be fine. My grief is a burden I carry with me every day, and while it is true that I have learned to bear the weight of it (most of the time), I will never “get over it.”

    Try to consider your friend’s beliefs and values before offering words that you feel may be of comfort. Someone said to me, “Grace and your mum are up there watching over you,” which is a statement that just doesn’t match my beliefs, however much I wish it did.

    Instead, I felt slightly annoyed and then guilty for feeling annoyed, because I knew how well-intentioned my friend’s statement was.

    Remember Anniversaries

    Try to remember anniversaries such as the birthday of the person who died and the anniversary of the date of their death. Sending a card or even just a text on the day will let your friend know that you are remembering too.

    I have a friend who always writes Grace’s name on our Christmas card. This means so much to me at a time of year when Grace’s absence from our family is even more keenly felt.

    Celebrate Together

    Celebrating the life of the person your friend has lost can be as simple as reminiscing and talking about them. You could ask to look at photos and other mementos with your friend or help put together a life book.

    Don’t be afraid to mention the person they lost. You may think it kinder to steer clear of the subject, but trust me; your friend will want to talk. Memories are all that remain after a loss, and talking about the person who died really does help to keep them alive.

    If your friend is fundraising in memory of their loved one, you could offer to help. My husband and I carried out a lot of fundraising after Grace died, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the wonderful friends who helped out at and supported our events.

    Always Remember

    Deep loss causes lasting changes—I know I’m not the same person I used to be. Your friend may seem fine one day and angry or depressed the next. It’s all part of grief’s rhythm, which is eternal and has no logic or pattern.

    Vicki Harrison’s quote above really sums up what it is like to live after loss. So don’t take it personally if your friend seems distant or has no wish to socialize at times. He or she is just learning to swim.

    I can bear the load at times; other times I simply can’t. One of the consequences of my loss is that I have unintentionally become more introverted. Some days I just need to stay in a safe bubble with my little family, because letting the rest of the world in is too difficult.

    It’s easy to remember the profound effect grief has on your friend shortly after the loss, but much tougher to keep this in mind months, years, and decades after. I don’t believe that time is a healer; instead, it seems to be an adapter. With much difficulty, I am learning to adapt to life without my loved ones.

    The rawness may be dulled with time, but the emotions and sorrow are not. I know it can’t be easy for the friend of a griever, but if you can remember and be there for the long term, you will be the shining star your friend so desperately needs.

    Friendship vector via Shutterstock

  • There’s No Expiration Date on Grief (So Don’t Rush Your Pain)

    There’s No Expiration Date on Grief (So Don’t Rush Your Pain)

    Woman Sitting Alone

    “They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite.” ~Cassandra Clare

    I lost my father to a heart attack when I was sixteen. I went to school on the morning of April 14, 2008 having a dad and went home that night not having one. I soon found myself dealing with an unfamiliar cocktail of emotions, pain so overwhelming that I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

    Every time I thought I was pulling myself together, I’d notice his belt buckle sitting on the dresser, or a pair of his socks on the floor, and suddenly the haphazard stitches I’d been sewing myself up with would tear open with heart-wrenching sobs.

    I lost the ability to make simple decisions like what takeout restaurant to order from or what to watch on TV. Nothing made sense that week.

    Dad had been my best friend, though not in the sense that he tried to act my age or allowed me to get away with things. On the contrary, my father was quite strict, always pushing me to be a better person.

    He was my best friend in that I could go to him with any worry and receive honest, unbiased advice. He forced me to see the good in myself instead of dwelling on the negative. I could cry in front of him knowing that he didn’t feel awkward or want to avoid me like dad characters on TV sitcoms.

    On the day of his death I had to accept that I could rely on no one but myself. That in and of itself seemed challenging, but now I had the added burden of everyone else depending on me. I was the shoulder that my mother and younger sister cried on.

    As the oldest child I became second in command under Mom. She relied on me for help with planning funeral details and making sure papers were in order. I didn’t mind the new role because it was empowering, as though by helping Mom I was giving back to Dad for everything he’d done for me.

    My greatest character flaw has always been focusing on the future instead of remaining grounded in the present. Not surprisingly, my father’s death and my long-term response to grief were no different.

    I cried for the entire week after he died. I cried along with everyone else at the funeral. Surely that’s all that grieving was supposed to be, right?

    When the funeral was over and the house was devoid of mourners, I picked my life up from where I was before his death.

    I avoided living in the “now” because the present was too painful, yet simultaneously tried to convince the rest of the world that I was a strong woman dealing with her pain. I stayed focused on getting into college and doing all of the things I knew my father would have wanted for me.

    This worked well until my senior year of college. I was on the Dean’s List, I had just gotten accepted into graduate school, and graduation was right around the corner.

    Then my boyfriend proposed.

    Except, I never expected that he would propose with my mother’s engagement ring, the same ring my father bought and proposed with. There was now a reminder of my father glimmering on my finger every day that I couldn’t ignore.

    Despite it being one of the happiest moments of my life, my engagement caused all of the sadness I’d buried to start bubbling up to the surface with such vigor that it felt like the day of his death all over again. I couldn’t run home and tell Dad the happy news. He wasn’t going to be able to walk me down the aisle.

    I realized how much I had been lying to myself. I hadn’t finished grieving because I hadn’t started grieving in the first place. I had been so focused on taking on the role of adult of the house that I didn’t give myself the chance to feel angry, resentful, or depressed, or to find the acceptance I really needed in order to move on.

    During the funeral people approached me to say that things would become easier in time. In truth, I don’t think this is ever the case. I have decided that grief never ends; we just find different ways of working with it in our lives.

    At twenty-four, I pretend to be a stoic and emotionless professional woman, but discussing my father with people still melts me like butter. I think about him and write about him more now than I did seven years ago, and that’s okay. There are no time limits for grief other than the ones we force on ourselves.

    If I could talk to my sixteen-year-old self, I’d tell her she shouldn’t feel guilty for her sadness. She’s entitled to grieve however she wants, for however long she wants. More importantly, I’d tell her that it’s important to take the time to sort out those feelings instead of hiding from them or putting other people first.

    I admit that certain memories of Dad still trigger a twinge of heartache. I will always feel emptiness in my life without him here. But I am aware of how much of him still lives with me—in my smile, my hobbies, and in the shared memories of people in my life who had the honor of knowing him.

    The key to grieving is not to try to stop it as quickly as possible. Grief cannot be shut off at will, despite how long I spent trying to convince myself otherwise. What matters is that we acknowledge that we are in pain and try to find the goodness in our life despite it.

    I used to look down at my engagement ring and feel numbed by sadness, both for the past and for the things that can never be. But with a new mindfulness I can look at my ring, this gift from my father, and know for certain that I’m allowed to move on and find the same happiness that my parents had.

    My father’s never going to disappear from my life; he’s just talking in ways that require careful listening.

    Woman sitting alone image via Shutterstock