I have recently been back with the wonderful team at the Forest Holme Hospice in Poole, supporting a recording for their forthcoming podcast series, Life & Loss. I was invited to explore with them how mindfulness can support our relationship with loss and with the grieving process, whether we are experiencing a life changing illness or facing end of life ourselves, or as witnesses when we feel we are helpless bystanders to the suffering of those we love.
Loss and grief is something we are too often uncomfortable discussing and it seems to be human nature, at least here in the Western World, to avoid conversation with regards to loss and we are often reluctant to discuss our grief. We seem to seek to bury our heads in the sand helplessly against an aspect of reality that will inevitably come knocking on the door of our lives one way or another.
It is worth noting that loss and grief are not limited to the passing of a loved one but can apply to any significant changing of a chapter of our lives. We might, for example, experience a sense of loss and go through a grieving process if our family experiences divorce, a child leaves home on the journey to adulthood and independence, if we lose our ability to provide for ourselves or our families through unemployment, if we can no longer do the activities which brought us joy in life. A sense of loss and grief can arise when there is a seismic shift in our understanding of the world around us. This is perhaps exemplified by the recent Covid-19 pandemic through which our sense of safety in our health was threatened along with the ability of many people to continue life as they used to, whether in terms of work, education or social activities.
In response to loss and our corresponding loss of elements of the certainty in our lives we may respond with a variety of emotional states which may come and go seemingly at random and totally without our ability to exert control. We might primarily experience, anger, sadness & numbness but this is certainly not the exhaustive list. When we experience loss, in whatever form, there is a tendency to wish for things to “go back to the way they were…”, to a world view we understood, where we had a map which helped us navigate well enough through the journey of our lives. Loss forces us to recreate our maps or models of the world, we need to come to terms with significant absences in our lives and the possibilities of having to forge new relationships of sorts, both of can leave us feeling deeply unsettled and shaken. Our maps of the world and the people who compose them also help us to self-regulate, our ability to calm and sooth ourselves is directly linked to the key relationships in our lives. If we lose someone close to us, either through illness, betrayal or separation it will have a profound impact on our relationship with ourselves and how we feel about our place in the world around us.
Processing our grief in order to move on to the next stage of our lives as best we can requires us to work through the turbulent sea of feelings and emotions which is often the last thing we want to do (because it is massively uncomfortable) and there is also immense pressure from the world around us to simply “get on” with our lives regardless of whether we are ready to or not. And of course there will be obligations that we have in the world that are not able to stop with us until we are ready but it is worth being aware of the time that it can take us to process these states in order that we might have more compassion and empathy for ourselves and for others wrestling with grief.
Practicing mindfulness through grief can help us to develop the necessary attention to ourselves and to others and can allow us to roll with the emotional rollercoaster of the experience without adding the weight of additional unnecessary judgement for our difficulty in balancing our feelings. It can also teach us the value of simply sitting with the uncomfortable feelings which we are so prone to push away or to bury and this can allow us to process them in a healthy way, allowing anger to be present, allowing sadness to be felt, accepting periods of numbness for what they are. Critically mindfulness can help us to avoid adding suffering to the objective pain of the experience, by helping us to avoid identifying with the layers of scared, angry, lonely, judgemental thoughts that plague us when we are at our most vulnerable.
So, this is the theme I would like to invite us to explore this week and if you are able to please join me at the Retro Cave café on Ashley Road in Poole, Thursday 14th March at 6pm where we can discuss this topic and the practical tools which might help us to help ourselves and those we care about navigate this challenging life journey.
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