Mindfulness for Prolonged Grief

by Sameet M Kumar

  Even if you have to eat different kinds of food than what I’m recommending here, you should know that regular exercise is also considered to be part of the Mediterranean diet. We usually don’t think of activity as being part of a diet, but it is. While what you eat is important, what you do with the energy you put into your body in the form of food is also crucial. Eating a healthful diet will only get you so far if your lifestyle is sedentary. People living in the Mediterranean region after World War II didn’t go to the gym, but they did get a lot of exercise. Most people couldn’t afford cars, and even if they could, very little fuel was available. Therefore, most people had to walk or ride a bike to get anywhere. Like early monks, for these people physical activity was a necessity, not something they had to schedule.

  I believe that another key component of the Mediterranean diet is taking joy in preparing and eating meals. Since this diet doesn’t include processed food, all meals are made from scratch and created with a spirit of celebration and pride in locally grown ingredients and the crafting of the meal, no matter how simple or complex. In the Mediterranean region in the years immediately after the war, the ingredients for each meal were local and seasonal foods, often grown or harvested by the family or friends or neighbors. This created enthusiasm about the quality and care that went into tending the land, catching the fish, pressing the olive oil, and so on.

  In the following practice, which involves preparing a meal mindfully, you can experiment with the Mediterranean diet using ingredients that are usually easy to find. However, you can certainly extend this mindful approach to the preparation of any meal—hopefully one that’s healthful!

  practice: Preparing a Meal Mindfully

  Perhaps you’ve never cooked by yourself, or maybe you stopped cooking after your loved one died. In either case, and even if you do cook your meals, I encourage you to reclaim your kitchen by preparing wholesome meals mindfully. For the purposes of this practice, I’ve included a simple recipe that can help nourish your body and, when prepared mindfully, can also help you feel present, rather than stressed about cooking. Take as many mindful breaths as you need to while cooking; no one is grading this meal. Consider it a mental exercise for engaging in the process of nourishing your body. If you like, make it a social event by inviting someone over. Mindful cooking is the opposite of fast food; the process of preparing the meal is just as important as the act of eating and the quality of the food.

  Here are the ingredients you’ll need:

  1½ teaspoons salt

  6 to 8 ounces whole-grain spaghetti or other whole-grain pasta

  1 bunch fresh collard greens, kale, spinach, chard, or dandelion greens

  2 teaspoons olive oil

  1½ teaspoons finely chopped garlic

  3 tablespoons chopped fresh basil leaves, or 1 teaspoon dried basil

  1 (15-ounce) can chickpeas, lentils, or white beans, or 2 cups of cooked beans, rinsed and drained

  Before you start, take twenty-one mindful belly breaths in your kitchen. Be mindful that you will be nourishing your body with the wholesome food you’re about to prepare.

  Bring 2 quarts of water to a boil in a large pot over high heat. Add 1 teaspoon of the salt. Add the spaghetti and return to a boil. Lower the heat and cook, stirring occasionally, until the spaghetti is tender but still firm to the bite, usually 8 to 9 minutes. Drain well in a colander. Rinse under cold water for 10 seconds, then drain again.

  Meanwhile, wash the greens, then rinse them thoroughly. Notice the sensation of the water meeting the greens as you wash them. Trim away the tough stems. Be mindful as you cut the leaves into 1-inch strips. Try exhaling each time you cut.

  Clean and dry the pasta pot. Place it over medium-high heat. Once the pot is hot and completely dry, add the olive oil, and swirl the pot until the oil evenly coats the bottom. Add the garlic and stir once. Notice the sounds of cooking happening, such as the sound of garlic sizzling. Add the greens and the remaining ½ teaspoon of salt. While inhaling, stir once. As you exhale, stir again. Cook, stirring constantly, until the greens start to wilt.

  Stir in the basil. Notice how the smell of the meal changes. Add the chickpeas and stir until well mixed and heated through. Add the pasta and mix gently just until the greens are incorporated into the spaghetti.

  Transfer to a large serving bowl or plates. You may have enough for a few servings; the leftovers can be your convenience food. Now you can sit down to eat.

  With this prepared meal in front of you, notice your posture. Make any corrections necessary to maintain good posture. As you look at the completed meal, take three belly breaths.

  Before eating, observe the practice of eating with gratitude, thanking all who participated in bringing the meal to you and extending the benefits of the meal outward. Take your first bite mindfully, as in the mindful eating practice.

  practice: Cleaning Up Mindfully

  A necessary part of every meal is cleaning up afterward. If you haven’t been preparing meals regularly, cleaning up afterward may feel quite strange. Perhaps your loved one usually did the cleanup, or perhaps you did it together. There is also the awkward pain of cleaning up after one less person. Perhaps the act of washing dishes in some way emphasizes the absence of your loved one, just as cooking for one fewer person does.

  Approaching cleaning up mindfully can help neutralize some of this distress. You can do this practice as a continuation of the other mindful eating practices in this chapter, putting them all together for an extended experience of mindfulness before, during, and after your meal.

  Cleaning up after a meal can become a mindful exercise simply by bringing awareness to your breath and posture while you clear the table, wash dishes, and deal with garbage. Begin by taking three mindful breaths after you finish your meal. Then walk your dishes over to the sink. Take a deep belly breath as you reach for the faucet. As you exhale, turn the faucet on. Notice the water and your breath both being released. Try to maintain belly breathing as you wash all of the dishes.

  You might also repeat mindful phrases to yourself, for example, “As I clean these dishes which held my meal, may my mind also become cleansed and renewed” or “May the nourishment of this meal allow me to practice wisdom and compassion toward myself and others.”

  If you turn your awareness to belly breathing and the physical process of cleaning up, this often automatic task can become part of a deliberate mindful meditation on sustenance, compassion, and health.

  Summary

  In my personal and clinical experience, when people eat more mindfully in tandem with a sitting mindfulness practice and regular exercise, they become more attuned to how both healthful and unhealthful foods affect their body. Your mind and body will both feel different after you eat an apple than after you eat a doughnut or candy bar. Being more mindfully aware of how your food choices affect you is another important step toward well-being and taking care of yourself during prolonged grief—and beyond.

  I hope the practices in this chapter, and throughout this book, can help you transition away from doing activities in the foggy autopilot of emotional pain and toward deliberate, conscious awareness and taking charge of your life. To that end, the next chapter explores how you can bring mindfulness to routine, day-to-day chores.

  Chapter 7

  Mindful Cleaning and Decluttering

  At this point, you’ve practiced mindfulness as a sitting meditation and also as a vehicle for facilitating more healthful sleep, regular exercise routines, and healthier eating habits. The goal behind this rigorous and comprehensive approach to mindfulness is to help you feel more empowered and to experience greater well-being, even if you still have times of intense emotional pain. Hopefully these painful times are becoming less frequent and intense, and also less exhausting.

  The more you practice mindfulness meditation, the more your brain is likely to become sensitive to the needs of your body, which will help you establish a healthy lifestyle that prioritizes physical and emotional well-
being. By engaging in the healthful practices you’ve been exploring, you’re likely to experience a steady but significant improvement in how you’re feeling. By nurturing your mind with meditation and your body with adequate sleep, movement, and nutrition, you may begin to experience a more unified mind-body relationship based on wellness and rejuvenation. This is going to start feeling a world apart from the sluggishness and heaviness of grief.

  Doing Chores Mindfully

  Mindfulness can also be practiced during everyday chores, transforming mundane and sometimes tedious tasks into opportunities to experience well-being, peace, and compassion for your weary mind. Take, for example, the practice of cleaning up mindfully in the previous chapter. Once you have a steady sitting practice and are engaged in other wellness-based activities, you can begin to transform tasks you’ve been doing automatically for a long time into additional vehicles for mindfulness practice.

  Monastic Traditions

  For many thousands of years, mindfulness was practiced primarily by monks and nuns in Buddhist societies. They lived in monasteries of all sizes—some the size of large universities, and others single small buildings no bigger than a typical American home. Many years ago, I visited Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. A few miles outside of the city is the large Drepung Monastery. In its heyday, before the Chinese invaded in the 1950s, this large monastic university housed up to ten thousand monks. Walking through the alleyways and large kitchens of the monastery was like walking through the streets of a medieval town. The monk who was showing me around said that in the old days, all of the necessary functions of the monastery were carried out by fellow monks. From cooks to repairmen and even to police, all were monks engaged in Buddhist study and practice in some capacity, many of them raised at the monastery since childhood.

  Every morning before dawn, monks charged with preparing breakfast would rise to light fires under giant kettles for Tibetan salted butter tea and large pans for roasting barley flour, called tsampa, for hot cereal to warm up in the chill of mornings at the twelve-thousand-foot altitude of the monastery. Other monks were charged with cleaning the pots and pans and the dishes of the others—up to ten thousand monks! To guard against conflict or monks oversleeping, police monks armed with large whips performed rounds, keeping order and making sure the rules of the monastery were being followed.

  Of course, not all monks were meditation masters. However, I like to think that for some of the monks assigned to the necessary chores of the monastery, everyday tasks became part of their meditation practice. In every monastic tradition, tasks required to keep large gatherings of people neat and orderly were colored with the practice of meditation and prayer. This was also evident in the Christian monastic traditions of Europe and North Africa, where the earliest church fathers practiced in austerity amid bleak surroundings, their monastic communities maintained by fellow monks and seekers.

  Training with Ordinary Chores

  The Tibetan Buddhist tradition that I’m familiar with is filled with stories of sages who go to great lengths to meet famous spiritual masters only to be told to do menial labor before learning anything else. The story of the famous Tibetan saint Milarepa, whose teacher, Marpa Lotsawa, required him to build, knock down, and rebuild a tower several times, stands out. By now, you may not be surprised to learn that at the heart of Milarepa’s life was a deep sorrow and profound grief from losing his father at an early age and the circumstances that followed.

  Milarepa was born into a wealthy family. When he was a child, his father died and his aunt and uncle stole all of his father’s estate, leaving young Milarepa and his mother destitute. At the urging of his mother, Milarepa learned sorcery to avenge their losses. He used his power to cause giant hailstorms that collapsed a house on top of his aunt and uncle during a celebration and ruined the crops of everyone in the village who had mistreated his mother and himself. Dozens were killed outright, and many more were displaced by the famine that followed.

  Filled with remorse, Milarepa eventually went to find Marpa, the legendary translator of Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into Tibetan. Before Marpa would teach him anything, he commanded Milarepa to build a large tower. Milarepa obliged. Finding this tower unsatisfactory, Marpa then asked him to tear it down and build a new one. Milarepa obliged. Then Marpa did the same thing again. Marpa approved the third and final version, but to Milarepa it seemed as though there was still no spiritual teaching bestowed upon him.

  Frustrated by his lack of progress, Milarepa asked Marpa’s wife for help. She forged a letter of introduction to another teacher for him, but Milarepa soon returned to Marpa, realizing that anything he learned under deceptive circumstances would be fruitless. Eventually, Marpa relented and taught Milarepa meditation techniques and wisdom that eventually led to his enlightenment.

  Of course, this story is a bit melodramatic, and takes place a thousand years ago in the mountains and plains of Tibet. Still, there is wisdom in it. Before Milarepa could experience spiritual growth, he had to first engage in menial tasks such as construction, painting, and cleanup. The transformative potential of meditation practice wasn’t presented to him on a silver platter. In fact, it began under the guise of hard physical labor. He literally had to build his practice with brick and mortar. It is humbling to think of one of the most famous and revered Tibetan saints doing anything but sitting in the cave retreat of his later years, singing the songs and poems he’s famous for. Yet there he was, baking bricks, mixing mortar, hauling stones, sawing planks, and laying tile.

  The point of this story is to illuminate how we often have preconceived notions of what spiritual growth looks like. Perhaps, like a lot of people, you think that mindfulness is only supposed to take place on a meditation cushion, maybe in some peaceful retreat in an exotic location. You may assume that peace of mind and spiritual growth exist at another place far removed from the realities of the pain of your everyday life. Many people I’ve met over the years make this mistake, thinking their meditation practice is separate from their everyday life, particularly mundane, day-to-day tasks.

  Milarepa’s story teaches us that menial tasks are not only an essential part of our lives, but also form the foundation of our spiritual growth. Sometimes ordinary tasks teach us extraordinary things—if we are mindful enough to pay attention. The renowned Chinese Zen master Xu Yun spoke of spending countless hours meditating only to have an enlightenment experience when some hot tea accidentally spilled on his hand during a meal. Of course, all of that meditating may have primed him to have an enlightenment experience, but it was the normal activities of everyday life—like drinking tea—that provided the opportunity for his bliss.

  What the stories of Milarepa and Master Xu Yun teach is that meditation is part of the chores and tasks you do every day, not separate from them. It’s tempting to fall into dualistic thinking about what is meditative and what isn’t. People often think that mindfulness is a practice to engage in only during meditation, and then they can get up and do whatever else they need to do however they want. However, Milarepa and Master Xu Yun show how mindfulness can be mixed into all of our activities, not just sitting practice. Your pain has found a way to creep into the ordinary tasks of your life. Why not allow mindfulness to do the same?

  Hopefully the exercises in the previous chapter helped you develop moments of cooking mindfully, eating mindfully, and cleaning up mindfully. If so, you’ve already learned that tasks you usually do automatically can be very centering.

  In the same way, sweeping, vacuuming, cleaning, and organizing can also be transformed into mindfulness exercises that contribute to your well-being. With mindful awareness, virtually any action can provide a meaningful opportunity for wellness. This approach to accomplishing tasks is practiced at many meditation retreat centers. However, you don’t have to travel a great distance or spend a lot of money for an extended retreat to do everyday chores mindfully. You can start in your own home, right where you are.

  practice: Sweeping Mindfully<
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  A common household chore is sweeping the floor. At your home, this may be indoors or outside on a deck, balcony, or steps. Sweeping mindfully has a long history in the Buddhist tradition, probably since it needs to be done often in the dusty environments in which so many Buddhist monasteries are located.

  To sweep mindfully, begin by standing with your broom.

  Check your posture: Is your back erect but not too tight? Are you holding the broom handle comfortably and at an angle that won’t cause pain later?

  Now take some belly breaths. I like to start chores with three mindful breaths, pausing briefly after each inhalation and exhalation.

  Look down at the ground you’re about to sweep. Think of the ground as a living being that will be overjoyed at being cleaned up, like a puppy after a bath.

  Position the broom on the floor away from your body and hold it steady. As you inhale, bring the broom toward your body, sweeping up dirt along the way.

  As you exhale, lift the broom and move it away from your body, finding the next spot to clean.

  As you inhale, put the broom on the floor and draw it back close to you, observing the cleaner surface it leaves behind.

  Repeat this process until you’ve swept up what you need to, inhaling as you bring the broom close to your body, and exhaling as you move the broom away again.