practice: Metta, or Loving-Kindness, Meditation
Read through this entire exercise before you sit down to practice it. If you have a timer or alarm, you can set it to chime every five to ten minutes to alert you to switch to the next part of the meditation.
Sit down in a quiet place where you can practice undisturbed for twenty to forty minutes. Begin by taking a few mindful breaths. Close your eyes and visualize your body. Think of yourself, your mind, your body, and your heart. Think of the uniqueness that goes into being you, the sense of being you.
As you imagine yourself, inhale and silently say these words to yourself:
May I be free from suffering.
As you exhale, silently say these words to yourself:
May I be at peace.
Do this for five to ten minutes.
Now imagine someone you know, love, and cherish. This may be your deceased loved one, or it may be someone else you feel close to. Try to choose someone who loves you or who has exhibited love toward you in the past.
As you think of this person, inhale and silently extend the following wish to this loving person:
May you be free from suffering.
As you exhale, silently extend the following wish to this person:
May you be at peace.
Do this for five to ten minutes.
Now imagine someone who has harmed you or your loved ones, someone whom you would consider an enemy. As you imagine this person, inhale and silently extend the following wish to this difficult person:
May you be free from suffering.
As you exhale, silently extend the following wish to this person:
May you be at peace.
Do this for five to ten minutes.
Now imagine your family. Extend your imagination to your community, your town, your state, and the country, extending it in every direction around you. Try to extend it further, imagining the entire planet, with all of its living beings. As you hold this visualization, inhale and silently extend the following wish to all beings:
May you all be free from suffering.
As you exhale, silently extend the following wish to all beings:
May you all be at peace.
Do this for five to ten minutes.
To finish the practice, open your eyes slowly. Take three more mindful breaths. Wiggle your fingers and toes, stretch out any limbs that may feel tight, and get up slowly.
The Power of Loving-Kindness
I’ve been using this loving-kindness meditation to help people tap into their potential for compassion toward themselves and others for a long time. Several years ago, I was at a grief and bereavement conference and shared this exercise with participants. I didn’t know exactly who all the attendees at my workshop were. I just knew that loving-kindness is a huge umbrella that everyone can fit under.
After my session was over, a fairly large group of attendees gathered around to introduce themselves. Many of them looked serene and at peace, which was quite different from how they came into the session. Many of them had tears in their eyes but were smiling. They introduced themselves as members of the Compassionate Friends, a network of bereaved parents who have lost children. It turned out that the attendees for my seminar were primarily people who had lost their children to homicide—someone had murdered their children. This is the most intense pain I can think of, and perhaps similar to the pain that’s motivated you to read this book.
What these parents reported to me was that loving-kindness allowed them to feel closer to their children than they’d been able to for a long time. Sending loving-kindness to the murderer, something that completely defied logic, was actually liberating, allowing them to experience their memories of their children without the screen of hatred and anger at the murderer. Loving-kindness allowed them to feel a purer connection, one they didn’t even know they had been missing.
This wasn’t easy for them, and I doubt they would have attended the workshop had they known what we’d be doing. I probably wouldn’t have thought loving-kindness was appropriate had I known who my audience was. This experience is a reminder that, in the situations where compassion is extremely difficult and least expected, it’s often most powerful.
Although seemingly simple, loving-kindness meditation can have a transformative effect on your attitude. Loving-kindness can be one of the most powerful tools to help you through your grief—and any of life’s challenges and surprises. Practice this technique as often as you can. I like to practice it at least once a week in addition to my daily mindfulness practice.
I find that loving-kindness has an extremely calming feel. I also find that it helps me think very differently about a lot of my relationships and interactions with people. It helps me not take my pain and frustrations too seriously, or at least not feel like I’m drowning in them by myself. It’s amazing how focusing on sending other people good feelings can so easily help us feel soothed and less pain ourselves. I hope it has a similar healing effect for you as well.
Summary
One of the most challenging aspects of grief is losing a person who may have helped soothe you or who showed you the importance of closeness and togetherness. All too often, it’s easy to become isolated by the pain of grief or the lack of good support. Loving-kindness practice can help you soothe yourself and reconnect with the healing power of relationships. It can also help you emotionally process any unfinished business with your loved one.
As you continue to develop your ability to soothe yourself with loving-kindness, reading the next chapter will help you discover other ways you can take control of your emotional well-being. The goal of using mindfulness with prolonged grief is to help you feel like you matter again and can take back your life from the depths of intense emotional pain. I believe that mindfulness and compassion are an ancient, tried-and-true foundation for human resilience. In the next chapter, we’ll build on that foundation with some newer techniques from modern psychotherapy.
Chapter 9
Creative Action
The mind craves permanence and predictability. It doesn’t seem to particularly care about how you feel; it just wants to maintain the status quo, whether you’re feeling happy, sad, angry, or well. When you suffer from grief or any other type of emotional pain for a lengthy period of time, it’s all too easy to start feeling like you’re stuck in a rut.
After a while, emotional pain becomes routine. This is a big part of what makes change so difficult. The pain has its own momentum, and the mind can easily get carried away down the road to persistent suffering. You begin to expect it, to assume that this is how you’ll continue to feel because this is how you’ve been feeling. The pain doesn’t seem like something that’s happening to you anymore; it just feels like it’s who you are. Grief and suffering can become your identity, rather than something you’re enduring.
As a result, you’re likely to act in ways that are consistent with how you feel and who you think you are. In this way, your pain can create deep-rooted assumptions that guide your behavior, and over time, how you feel can become who you are. As you know, time seems to go by more quickly the older you get. Before you know it, months, maybe even years, have gone by, and how you feel doesn’t seem to have changed much. What has happened instead, unfortunately, is that this sense of the pain being who you are has solidified.
The Spiral Staircase of Grief
The spiral staircase is a metaphor I use to describe the natural ups and downs of grief that everyone experiences, hopefully with an upward momentum toward growth, integration, and expansion of identity. This is the natural course of grief, with the time frame varying widely from person to person.
The spiral staircase metaphor also captures the experience that grief can become much more intense around certain dates or times of the year. Typically, this occurs around holidays, birthdays, death dates, and the dates of other milestone events. I’ve found that, for many people, the anticipation of these milestones is harder than the actual date of
the milestone event. This cyclical rhythm of grief during the calendar year is natural and normal when you understand it this way. The birth of a grandchild, a school graduation, or even the purchase of a new car—anything that can be considered a big deal or an important event—can inflame the suffering that grief can bring.
The pattern of prolonged grief is often quite different. Rather than being characterized by ups and downs, in prolonged grief your emotions may seem to hover around a very low emotional point, with more subdued ups and downs hovering around a lower emotional baseline. In essence, your grief remains at roughly the same level, spinning aimlessly rather than gradually rising and leading to growth. The result is a persistent, unrelenting blanket of emotional pain in the form of depression, anger, anxiety, or other unpleasant emotional states. This can have a huge influence on how you live your life, the decisions you make, and your expectations regarding your future.
Understanding the Links
Decades of research and clinical work in psychology have shown that behaviors are often guided by thoughts and feelings. How you think and feel will almost always directly influence how you behave and your choices about how to spend your time.
We also know that behaviors can, in turn, influence thoughts and feelings. So after painful emotions have persisted for a while, you can easily get stuck in a cycle in which negative thoughts generate negative feelings that guide behaviors that feed into more negative thoughts that lead to more negative feelings, and so on. Over time, these relationships between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can become firmly entrenched. You may tell and retell yourself a narrative about who you are, how you’re feeling, and how you’re supposed to act to stay consistent with the script your mind is running nonstop. This is how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can hover around a low emotional state for months or sometimes years on end if you don’t make a deliberate and mindful effort to change them.
Challenging Assumptions
This relationship between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors is universal. It’s not inherently either good or bad; it’s just a pattern that we humans have. If you’re prone to having underlying thoughts and assumptions that generate positive feelings, you’re more likely to act in positive, compassionate ways. However, when you go through hard times in your life, such as the loss of a loved one, you may have underlying assumptions and thoughts that frequently generate distressing feelings and behaviors. Furthermore, the relationship between your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors may be preventing you from seeing alternative ways of being, even if you can’t change what happened to you or other circumstances in your life.
I’ve seen this with patients hundreds of times. Solutions that might help them cope with difficult emotions and painful chapters in life can seem fairly obvious to outside observers but remain untried or perhaps even unimaginable to those distressed by grief. This isn’t because the outside observers are smarter or because these patients are deficient in some way. We all tend to see things in a limited way that’s consistent with our expectations of who we are, how we think the world operates, and what we expect from others.
These tendencies can cloud your judgment and impair your ability to transition from entrenched distress to well-being. We all tend to have certain expectations and assumptions about ourselves, the world, and others. These assumptions aren’t always bad for us. Sometimes they help promote healthy behaviors and wholesome choices. Ultimately, assumptions exist because they’re extremely efficient for the mind, just like that sense of control and permanence it craves.
It’s only when these assumptions get in the way of living your life fully that they become problematic and promote suffering. Psychologist Jeffrey Young (Young and Klosko 1994) refers to assumptions that guide our behavior as schemas. They are like templates through which we see the world. Prolonged grief may trigger old, maladaptive schemas that feed off of other painful chapters in your life. For example, if you have an underlying schema that says you’re unlovable, you may feel isolated and assume that it’s useless to even try to be around other people, even people who might genuinely care for you or want to help you. If your schema is that no one can understand you, it’s likely that you won’t even bother to seek understanding or even companionship. Your mind may view behaviors that contradict schemas as a useless waste of time, thereby perpetuating your assumptions and further entrenching them.
The goal of working to develop greater clarity and insight into the relationship between your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors is to help you create a healthy schema that can become as firmly entrenched as the tendencies that are creating so much suffering for you. Mindfulness can help you become more aware of what your mind is chattering about and reveal your underlying assumptions so you can work through them. This clarity can empower you to choose active behaviors that allow you to take a more participatory role in your grief.
In the absence of this awareness, you may have a hard time engaging in behaviors that can change how you feel and perhaps help you feel better. Instead, underlying thoughts and feelings will continue to serve as barriers to taking action, whether that means deciding to declutter your home, telephoning a friend or family member who seems to care but stopped leaving messages when you didn’t return calls, or going out to dinner with a new friend or acquaintance for the first time.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
The branch of psychology called cognitive behavioral therapy has pioneered in helping people with a variety of problems by working with the relationships between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. I believe that mindfulness meditation and treatments based on mindfulness all qualify as types of cognitive behavioral therapy. Like cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness-based techniques rely on developing insight into how you think so you can break away from ways of thinking that don’t serve you well or improve your life. Indeed, there is an ancient school of Buddhist psychology, called abhidharma, that explores the relationship between our underlying assumptions about reality and our behaviors.
At this point in working with this book, hopefully you have developed a somewhat regular mindfulness meditation practice and have been able to make some beneficial changes in your lifestyle, such as improving your sleep, diet, and level of activity. And ideally, in working with the previous chapter, you’ve developed a more compassionate attitude toward yourself and others. My goal in introducing mindfulness-based skills in this sequence is to help you become well acquainted with how mindfulness can transform major aspects of your life.
Most of the people I meet in my psychotherapy practice find it easier to gain deeper therapeutic insights once they’ve developed better ways of coping with their stress and pain. At this point in the book, you can now use the mindfulness skills you’ve learned and practiced to take a deeper look into how your mind works so you can generate more creative ways of living with prolonged grief.
practice: Tracking Assumptions and Generating Alternative Behaviors
One of the main tools I present in this chapter is a type of worksheet used by cognitive behavioral therapists to help clients develop better insight into their thoughts and feelings and how their behaviors can change once they’ve identified their underlying assumptions about life. The following chart is based on one that was devised by one of the founding fathers of cognitive behavioral therapy, Aaron Beck (Beck et al. 1979). I’d like to ask that you use this chart with your next five mindfulness sessions.
At the conclusion of these meditation sessions, think back to some of the thoughts and feelings you experienced during the session. Most people find it easier to identify a feeling and then trace the underlying thought, rather than trying to capture the thought first. So reflect on the feelings you experienced during the session, especially the unpleasant ones. Then use your mindful awareness to trace the thought that led to that feeling. (You may not have even realized you were having that thought.) Typically, these thoughts are associated with events that happened to you during the day or further back in t
he past. Record those events as well. Then identify what you normally do when you have these kinds of thoughts and feelings (behavior), and how you’d like to respond instead (alternative behavior).
As you’ll see below, I also recommend using this approach with thoughts and feelings that come up in everyday life. A printable version of this chart is available for download at www.newharbinger.com/27497; with it, you can track thoughts and feelings anywhere and anytime. Here’s a sample to help you see how to fill out the chart.
Once you have some experience in tracking feelings and thoughts during your mindfulness practice, you can take the next step, which tends to be harder: tracking feelings in everyday life. For the next several weeks, use this chart to track some of the painful thoughts and feelings that arise, especially those that tend to arise frequently or that lead to behaviors that cause problems in your life.
Go ahead and start using the chart to track your feelings during different times of the day on different days. This type of tracking is at the heart of cognitive behavioral therapy. Much of what you’ve learned in this book has prepared you to engage in this tracking. As you’ve been reading and doing the practices, you’ve been developing nonjudgmental insight into your thoughts and feelings so that you can take more control over your behavior, hopefully helping you feel better in the process. Seeing your thought patterns on paper can give you a sense of what’s driving your behavior and preventing you from engaging in preferable alternatives.
Mindfulness for Prolonged Grief Page 14