MINDFUL GRIEF means mourning and letting go of the past without expectation, fear, censure, blame, shame, control, and so forth. Without such mindful grief, neither past nor person can be laid to rest. When we grieve mindfully, we mourn every one of the disappointments, insults, and betrayals of the now irrevocably lost past. We mourn any abuse—physical, sexual, emotional. We mourn for how our parents just did not want us, did not love us, or could not get past their own needs long enough to see us as the lovable beings we were and allow our unique self-emergence. We mourn every way they said no to the gift we sought to give them: full visibility of our true self, not the self we had to manufacture to please or protect them. We mourn all the times they saw how scared, forlorn, and sad we were and yet did not respond, relent, or apologize. We mourn because even now, after all these years, they still have not
admitted their abuse or lack of compassion.
We mourn because we were hurt by those who loved us: “Look at how I was wounded in the house of those who loved me” (Zech. 13:6).
Grief’s favorite position is piggyback. If I am abandoned in the present and allow myself to grieve the abandonment, all the old abandonments of the past, which have been waiting their turn, jump onto my grieving shoulders. Also included in the piggybacking are the griefs of the human collective, what Virgil calls “the tears in things.” These are the givens of relationship: the sense of something missing, the fugitive intimacies, the inevitable endings. We carry sensitivities to all those in our hearts, and our personal griefs evoke them. What a way to find out we are not alone! We carry the heritage of the archetypal past and enrich it continually with our personal experience.
Step One: Allowing Ourselves to Know or Remember
To show what good came from my experience I have to tell of things that were not so good.
—DANTE, The Inferno
"Though the haunting memory of past events always remains in our psyche, it is not always easily retrieved. A feeling or intuition about something that happened (traces of the memory) is enough to begin the process of grief work. Remembering any one way in which our needs were not met is sufficient. If no specific memory arises, then a feeling of sadness is enough."
"Having remembered a cause of grief, we can then discuss it with someone we trust. “You do surely bar the door upon your liberty if you deny your griefs to your friends,” as Rosencrantz tells Hamlet."
"Memories are selections from the past. Thus, our goal is not so much to reconstruct memory but to restructure our overall sense of the past to fit our changing needs. Mark Twain quipped, “The older I get, the more clearly do I remember what never happened.”
Step Two: Allowing Ourselves to Feel
"The feelings specific to grief are sadness, anger, hurt, and fear (even terror). In mindful grief, we become the landing strip that allows any feeling to arrive. Some crash, some land softly. Some harm us, but none harm us in a lasting way. We remain as they taxi away or as their wreckage is cleared away. We can trust that we will survive; we were built for this task."
"Surprisingly, denial plays a role in healthy grieving. For an addict, denial provides a way of not facing the reality. But for people working through childhood grief, denial provides a healthy way of letting in the pain little by little, so we can handle it safely. It is normal to avoid the full onslaught of a loss and its implications. The terrifying grief is the one that does not permit that slowed-down intake of information—for example, the sudden news of a loved one’s death—but leaves us powerless, defenseless, unshielded in face of unalterable and irreversible information about a loss."
"According to Greek mythology, wine originated as the tears of Dionysus, who was weeping for his dead lover, Ampelos. So joy will ultimately come from grief. Letting go of fear and anger in grief is a powerful way of finding serenity and adult freedom. The Baghavad Gita says: “What is at first a cup of sorrow, becomes at last, immortal wine.”
Step Three: A Chance to Replay It
"The third step toward the healing of memories is to replay in memory the original abusive speech or action, but this time to speak up and interrupt it. In this psychodrama, you place yourself mentally in the original setting and hear or see what was said or done to you. Then you proclaim your power and say no to the abuse. Do this vocally or as a dramatic action, with someone watching and listening. You can also do it in writing, drawing, dance, movement, clay modeling, or any other expressive medium. Do not attempt to change the abuser in your memory-drama, only yourself. Having said no to abuse, you are now no longer the victim of the scene but its hero. You have added a new ending to the original memory, and whenever it arises in the future, you will remember it with the new ending."
"All this may seem useless because we cannot change the past. But the past that we cannot change is the historical past. We can change the past that we carry inside ourselves: We carry a fact (unchangeable), but we also carry its impact on us (very changeable). When we allow the original memory to become a mere fact, the charge is gone from it, and it ceases to hurt. Now when we recall the past, we also recall how we healed old pain. This reconstructed memory leads to serenity and resolution, just as the memory of a hurt becomes more bearable, even uplifting, when the person who hurt us apologizes."
Step Four: Dropping Expectation
"The fourth step in the healing of memories is dropping any expectation that some other person will give you all you missed in childhood."
Step Five: Thanking As a Practice
"The fifth step in the healing of memories is to thank your inner Self (and/or higher power) that you survived whatever pain, abuse, or lack of need fulfillment you suffered in your childhood and that made you stronger."
"Compose an affirmation of thanks that what happened to you is what it took to make you the strong person you are now. You are thankful not for the pain you suffered in the past but for your power to handle pain now. “It took just such evil and painful things for the great emancipation to occur,” Nietzsche said. He is also the one who said that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger."
"My greatest joy is in the realization that I can still love. That capacity remained intact despite all the blows. That the love made it through means that I made it through."
Step Six: The Grace of Forgiveness
"Forgiveness is a happening, not really a step. We cannot plan for it or will it. It is automatic compassion for and absolution of those who have hurt us. It means letting go of blame and anger while still acknowledging accountability. This is why it can arrive only after anger."
Step Seven: Healing Rituals
"A ritual enacts a newfound consciousness, making its deepest reality proximate and palpable. It sanctifies the place we are in and the things we feel by consecrating them to something higher than the transitory. Design a ritual that takes into account the rituals of childhood but then expands on them. Find a gesture that enacts your intention and your accomplishment in the grief work you have completed. Find a way to show thanks for the spiritual gifts you have received. Rituals enlist our bodies. The hand and the eye have an ancient wisdom that works better than the mind in the process of integration."
Step Eight: Self-Parenting and Reconnecting
"To say we have truly completed our grief work, we need to achieve not only catharsis of feelings but also self-nurturance and fearless intimacy with others. The pains of grieving are the labor pains from the adult self being born. To grieve is to pay attention to the weeping, frightened part of ourselves and to console it. When we do this, we parent ourselves, and we show the vulnerability that leads to healthy relating. As Saint Gregory of Nyssa wrote in the fourth century: “We are, in a sense, our own parents, and we give birth to ourselves by our own free choice of what is good.”
"Self-parenting means granting the five A’s to ourselves: We pay attention to our pain and to our inner resources for healing. We pay attention to how our past has interfered in our relationships and how it has helped us find ourselves. We practice self-acceptance, embracing all our talents, virtues, failings, and inadequacies. We feel appreciation for our journey and the steps and missteps we have taken on it. We appreciate our parents and our partners for their contributions to our character, for better or worse. We love ourselves as we are and feel respect and compassion for our past selves and openness to our future. We allow ourselves to live in accord with our deepest needs, values, and wishes. No one can stop us; no one ever could."
If you are interested in this book, you can email me (kh.nebulishvili@gmail.com) and I'll send the PDF version of this book :)
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