Mindfulness for Prolonged Grief

by Sameet M Kumar

  If you find using this chart beneficial, I recommend that you keep a copy at hand and complete it every night or at regular intervals. I find it extremely helpful whenever I’m at an emotional impasse and can’t seem to move on. Many of my clients agree and use some form of this chart to help them sort out difficult feelings or identify what might be keeping them stuck in an unpleasant state.

  After you’ve used the chart in daily life for a while, take a look at the “Alternative Behavior” column. Are the alternatives you come up with similar to those you identified when you were completing the chart during mindfulness sessions, or do they differ? Does doing the chart in either context encourage you more or help you feel healthier than using it in the other? Do your alternatives tend to feel more inspiring, empowering, or helpful in one context or the other?

  Write the new behaviors in the “Alternative Behavior” column on a separate piece of paper or on index cards, and then post them somewhere you can see them regularly, like on your refrigerator door or bathroom mirror. Put them wherever they can provide inspiration and a gentle reminder that you do have choices in your behaviors. Remember, because of the interconnections between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, heeding these reminders can help you break free of thought patterns that may be holding you back. You can use your alternatives like affirmations, to remind you that you can have some control over your behavior, and also over your thoughts and feelings.

  Creativity and Healing

  When you develop the insight that comes from looking mindfully and clearly at the relationships between your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, you open the door to making important changes in your life. In my view, a word that encapsulates meaningful, intentional change during suffering is “creativity.” When you think of creativity, you may automatically think of painting, music, or sculpture. But you can bring creativity to just about any activity. Another way to think about creativity is that it’s what happens whenever you think outside the box—outside of your usual automatic assumptions or habitual tendencies. In that light, whenever you express your feelings in a way other than how you typically do, you’re being creative.

  Intensely painful stories often lie behind works of art. Many of the finest paintings and most moving pieces of music have come from deeply painful events in artists’ lives. If you analyze any of the top-forty popular music charts, you may be shocked at how many of the songs were composed around the time of a loved one’s illness or death. You undoubtedly know how powerful music can be in bringing up memories. This may explain why musicians often use their craft to cope with their own pain and suffering.

  That said, you don’t have to be an accomplished singer, musician, or painter to benefit from creativity. I find that any chance people have to express their feelings in new ways can be extremely helpful. In the field of brain science, this helps foster what’s called neuroplasticity, meaning the ability of the brain to form new connections between neurons. I believe that this is also intimately connected with healing. By making new connections between things that didn’t seem connected before, all of life’s experiences, including painful experiences, are integrated into a new coherent whole. This doesn’t mean difficult experiences become pleasant or easy; they’re just different and possibly a bit less painful or more manageable.

  A lot of scientists think that behaviors that promote neuroplasticity might help slow down the aging of the brain, creating conditions similar to the time when we experience the most significant brain growth, as children (Esiri and Chance 2012). I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that early childhood is also the time when people tend to be most creative. Our society seems to grant permission to draw, use finger paint, make collages, or play with clay primarily to children. But we grown-ups can also benefit from creative expression. In fact, we may need it even more than kids do!

  I believe that creativity and neuroplasticity also help facilitate resilience and recovery during some of the most difficult times in our lives. You can’t be a kid again, but you can help wake up your brain’s potential to be creative. I find that engaging in some extremely simple creative processes once in a while can be enough to help people feel rejuvenated, even if only temporarily, during the ups and downs and turmoil of prolonged grief. Think back to what you used to do as a child. Chances are, before the age of five, you spent a lot of time playing with clay or drawing; and, as you got older, you may have written short stories or poems, worked on jigsaw puzzles, or knitted. These activities helped your brain grow and adapt to your environment. There’s nothing to say that you can’t also use these creative modes of expression to help yourself now.

  practice: Cultivating Creativity in Your Life

  Creativity isn’t just about finger painting, although it certainly can be! There are many different ways to keep the brain youthful, fresh, and resilient. In the list below, you’ll find eighteen examples of ways to cultivate creativity. Any of them may help you see possibilities for being more creative in your journey with grief. As you read through these ideas, rank them in terms of how interesting or accessible they seem to you. For example, if attending a yoga class seems perfect, put a 1 next to that. If you find listening to different kinds of music to be the next most interesting thing, put a 2 next to that, and so on. Then, in the space next to each item, write about how you can practice that suggestion in your daily life. What kind of action plan do you need to put into place to make creativity happen?

  Of course, you may not be able to do all of the items listed, but reviewing the list may give you a sense of the different approaches that can foster creativity in the healing process:

  ____ Take a different route to frequent destinations. ______________________

  ____ Move the furniture around in one room of your house or apartment. ___________

  ____ Learn a language. ___________

  ____ Practice or learn to play a musical instrument. ___________

  ____ Attend a yoga class. ___________

  ____ Attend a dance class. ___________

  ____ Attend an acting class. ___________

  ____ Write poetry. ___________

  ____ Begin an online blog. ___________

  ____ Learn to draw or paint. ___________

  ____ Make a drawing or painting. ___________

  ____ Do sculpture or woodworking. ___________

  ____ Plant flowers or plants or work in a garden. ___________

  ____ Learn a new recipe. ___________

  ____ Explore a local area you’ve never been to before. ___________

  ____ Read about something you used to be interested in many years ago. ___________

  ____ Listen to different kinds of music. ___________

  ____ Spend time in nature. ___________

  ____ Other: ___________

  ____ Other: ___________

  For many people, engaging in new, creative activities is facilitated by signing up for and attending an adult education class. These are usually held in local high schools, places of worship, and community colleges. Plus, in addition to helping you learn new skills, such as playing an instrument, ballroom dancing, or painting with watercolors, taking a class gives you an opportunity to meet new people.

  If meeting new people sounds intimidating, just remember that you don’t have to talk to anyone right away. However, when you do talk to classmates, you won’t have to force the conversation—everyone is in the same class working on the same thing. And chances are, everyone is at a fairly similar skill level. You may also find that some of your classmates are also grieving, and that, like you, they are trying their best to be creative in the company of others.

  If you prefer to do things on your own, creative activities—or simply applying creativity to the activities you already do—can give you a new way to spend your time. You may have spent so much time in the cocoon of your grief that your life feels stalled. Being more creative can give you the mental and emotional energy to process your grief a little differently and perhaps more dir
ectly. Personally, whenever I take out my colored pencils and drawing paper during a difficult time in my life, I feel as though I’ve made a new friend just because of the novelty of being creative.

  Summary

  Sometimes grief comes from something so horrifying or traumatic that it seems impossible to meet it directly. In this situation, grief only very gradually becomes part of who you are. The pain can be so intense that it feels like it completely takes over your life and eclipses any meaningful growth that could come from your grief. Some of the insights that mindfulness can provide will help you generate alternatives to the path that your pain dictates. The practices in this chapter can help you develop more awareness of patterns of thoughts and feelings that may be serving as barriers to new behaviors, opening the door to finding alternative ways to manage your grief and other difficult emotions.

  The next chapter, which is the last, will help you practice techniques that can help you target areas for growth in your journey with grief. This may sound strange. You may wonder how the intense pain of grief can possibly lead to anything like growth. Yet this is the challenge that confronts us all. The presence of intense emotional pain doesn’t mean life pauses until you feel better; it certainly didn’t ask for your permission before you experienced your loss. Therefore, you have to find ways to grow as you grieve, no matter how extensive or limited that growth may feel. Your life is still yours to live.

  Chapter 10

  Mindful Resilience

  Grief can be unpredictable. Like many distressing parts of life, grief can feel like it has a path of its own. You can feel lost, disempowered, and overwhelmed by normal daily tasks.

  Hopefully this book has helped you find some tools to manage the stress of grief and take some healthy control of your life. You’ve been exposed to many ideas and techniques that can help you chart a holistic path toward better mental and physical health. You’ve learned and practiced mindfulness meditation and worked to improve your sleep, diet, and exercise. You’ve practiced skills to help you be more compassionate with yourself and others, and you’ve explored creative ways to approach your loss. You’ve also grown more intimate with how your mind works and how you can turn this insight into behavioral change.

  All of the strategies and exercises in this book are intended to give you more of a voice in your grief, rather than being a victim of your loss. Bad things will happen in your life, and in everyone’s life. That’s a given. Nobody and no workbook can change that. But even though bad things have happened and may continue to happen, you can change your path in life. As you’ve learned in this book, some small but extremely significant steps can help you take control of parts of your life again.

  Taking Charge

  The mindful path through prolonged grief is about deliberately living as best as you can under profoundly painful circumstances. You may have found it impossible to “move on” or “get over it” as others may have suggested you should. With prolonged grief, that kind of advice is rarely helpful. A more realistic approach—and one that respects your individuality and the unique nature of your loss—is applying mindfulness to your experience and to taking charge of your life despite the lingering pain of grief. The mindful path through prolonged grief is about the process of living as fully as you can with the circumstances life has handed you. Your grief may not go away completely. But as it becomes part of who you are over time, you can make more decisions about who and how you want to be.

  A New Perspective

  Finding a new perspective is one of the biggest challenges in grief—and in any hardship you may suffer in life. We are conditioned to believe that bad things are all bad and good things are all good. It’s difficult to comprehend that bad things can come from good, or that good things can come from bad. However, your pain and suffering have come from something good: loving someone. And from your pain, something meaningful and healing can emerge.

  Even though you’re suffering in your grief, you may grow from it. You can take charge of where and how you grow and what you need to do to make your journey one of growth.

  Our minds usually prefer the simplicity of black-and-white thinking. You may idolize your deceased loved one because of this—something bad took your loved one away from you, and this injustice may amplify your sense of how undeserving your loved one was of what happened. It might seem as though your loved one was perfect, but unless people are very small children or babies when they die, it’s usually possible to recall at least a couple of things that were unpleasant or annoying about them. This is how we all are and how all of our lives are. There are no simple answers; no one and nothing is all good or all bad.

  Grief is no different. The emotions of grief can feel absolutely crushing and suffocating. You may have gotten used to your eyes being puffy first thing in the morning, your shoulders and jaw being tense and tight, your stomach feeling tied up in knots, or your joints being achy. These physical symptoms are all related to the stress of grief, and you can try to improve them. Grief may feel like a heaviness in your body and an altered state of consciousness in your mind, like a painful fog that just doesn’t lift on some days. But something good can come out of that fog.

  The Mindfulness Trajectory

  Traditionally, one of the goals of mindfulness practice is to develop equanimity: an even-keeled disposition that can ride out the tumultuous waves of life’s tough times. Mindfulness isn’t a negation of life’s ups and downs. It doesn’t mean becoming numb, unfeeling, or boring. Rather, the hope is that mindfulness practitioners become more compassionate toward themselves and everyone around them and better able to embrace life’s unpredictable ups and downs.

  From its origins, mindfulness has been seen as the foundation stone for all spiritual growth and development. The Buddha, who was the first to openly teach mindfulness, said that our desires are constant and unceasing, and also that suffering is part of the natural order of our existence. You don’t choose to be in pain; it finds you. But the Buddha also taught that practicing mindfulness can transform our experience of pain. In addition, it allows you to be present for any growth or meaningful changes that your pain and your grief may bring. Through the practice of mindfulness, something other than pain may emerge from your grief.

  Working with Difficult Feelings

  One of the most common yet most awkward emotions I’ve heard about from people who are grieving is feeling guilty for being relieved, sometimes even grateful, that their loved one is no longer suffering. Many people seem to feel that they should never feel good about something so bad. Yet this kind of relief is common, especially if a loved one experienced tremendous pain and suffering in the final weeks and months of life, or if the caregiving burden on the now-grieving loved one was exhausting and unsustainable.

  Another feeling that can stand in the way of healing is the guilt you may feel about experiencing something fun, pleasant, or pleasurable after your loss, even months later, like a type of survivor guilt. Your mind may be telling you, How dare you enjoy life when your loved one isn’t here to share this with you! Part of you might feel guilty because pleasant experiences seem to negate the memory of your loved one, contradicting the immensity of your loss.

  Another common experience I’ve noted among people who have experienced trauma and intense loss is being ashamed about feeling abandoned by their spiritual beliefs and by God. If you feel this way, I encourage you to read about the experiences of others who have felt the same way. I always draw comfort from the writing of Viktor Frankl, who survived a World War II concentration camp and wrote a fantastic book called Man’s Search for Meaning (1984). What’s fascinating about Frankl’s insights is that they are universally appreciated by clergy and atheists alike. He had a unique ability to speak to that gray area between faith and doubt, and his book may help you sort out some of your spiritual concerns without advocating one approach over another. What Frankl addresses is something even deeper than suffering: meaning.

  Guidelines for Healing
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br />   Just as suffering is part of your life, so is healing. It seems that no one needs to make any effort to suffer. But healing takes deliberate effort, discipline, and practice. You aren’t born knowing how to bounce back from tragedy and loss. You have to teach yourself. Part of how you can do so is by sitting with complicated feelings that feel contradictory, paradoxical, and unexpected. Some of these feelings, and some of the thoughts about these feelings, can get extremely complex. They often stand in the way of the growth that can happen after a loss.

  However, just as your grief may serve as an emotional mausoleum, honoring your loved one, so can your healing. You don’t need to hold yourself back from letting growth in a positive direction come from something so painful and distressing. Even though you’re grieving, life keeps moving, and by now you may have some ideas of how you can deepen your awareness of what is happening to you and around you.

  Loss is something that happens to you, but grief becomes something you do. You don’t need to seek out this kind of suffering, but you do need to be an active participant in your grief. By practicing mindfulness as a way to navigate prolonged grief, hopefully you’ve learned that you can play an active role in your grief. The exercises in this book can continue to show you the steps you need to take to feel increasingly empowered in your grief and also help you see how far you’ve come. Grief often creates a filter of emotional pain that makes it hard, if not impossible, to see any sort of change or growth. Your emotions may have been so intense for so long that you don’t have a sense of where you can take your grief or where your grief has taken you.