Is it just a crazy dream?

Like two sides of the same coin, every life ends in death and death can bring new life in its wake. Death is always a part of life. Our lives are much more fragile than we would like to admit.  It is easy to forget this fact in our current busy life. There has been a lot of death around me recently.  It’s easy to forget that people can leave us at any moment. There may not be a chance to say hello again, or to start a new story with a person. There comes a time when they are gone and you are left with sorrow and questions. 

There are so many emotions that come up when someone dies. The closer that person is to you, the more intense those feelings can be. You can’t avoid it, you can’t ignore it, you have to ride it out. People turn towards their friends and family to support and process the experience of grief. People turn towards faith and prayer. People take comfort in feeling the presence of something bigger than all of us, faith in God, or the Universe whatever you want to call it. A skill that can be helpful regardless of your religious or spiritual beliefs is the practice of meditation and mindfulness. Mindfulness, when used with prayer and other spiritual frameworks cultivates a deeper understanding of ourselves and our experience on this planet.

Grief is a time when I find the practice of mindfulness most helpful but also challenging. Mindfulness is an opportunity to fully experience feelings, which can be intense. However, by taking in that experience, one can move to place where you can be with your feelings without being overcome by them. Joan Halifax, a Zen Abbot who writes extensively on death and dying recommends repeating the statement,  “May I accept my sadness knowing that I am not my sadness." This goes along with the deep understanding that absolutely everything we are experiencing is temporary. It may feel very intense and long lasting right now, but it will pass. Just like everything before this moment.

There are many articles about grief and it’s various stages (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance). I like to think of them more as states, and not stages. The word “stages” implies a sequence, a pattern, but for a grieving person there is no pattern. They can experience all of those states in one day, moving back and forth from Anger to Depression, from acceptance to denial, or any other sequence; around and around we go. The word state implies a feeling, or a way of being. Using Meditation and mindfulness assists with all of the states of grief.

For me, one of the more difficult parts of grief is the anger. Buddhist Monk, Thich Nhat Hanh tells us the following in his discussion of "Loosening the Knots of Anger":

Mindfulness does not fight anger or despair. Mindfulness is there in order to recognize. To be mindful of something is to recognize that something is there in the present moment. Mindfulness is the capacity of being aware of what is going on in the present moment. “Breathing in, I know that anger has manifested in me; breathing out, I smile towards my anger.” This is not an act of suppression or of fighting. It is an act of recognizing. Once we recognize our anger, we embrace it with a lot of awareness, a lot of tenderness.

When it is cold in your room, you turn on the heater, and the heater begins to send out waves of hot air. The cold air doesn’t have to leave the room for the room to become warm. The cold air is embraced by the hot air and becomes warm—there’s no fighting at all between them.

We practice taking care of our anger in the same way. Mindfulness recognizes anger, is aware of its presence, accepts and allows it to be there. Mindfulness is like a big brother who does not suppress his younger brother’s suffering. He simply says, “Dear brother, I’m here for you.” You take your younger brother in your arms and you comfort him. This is exactly our practice.

This is exactly my challenge right now. Taking my anger and sadness into my arms, not judging or ignoring. But experiencing those feelings for what they are, and becoming a conscious observer of my thoughts. So that I can ride the waves of grief until one day it will be easier.