Mindfulness for Prolonged Grief
Page 16
Again, the assumptions behind my approach are not to cross some imaginary finish line and be done with grief. Instead, I believe it is much more helpful and realistic to embrace the fact that the grief isn’t going away on its own anytime soon; you have to find a way to live with it and even grow in it. This creates a context for figuring out what you can do about it.
I believe that setting goals for yourself during prolonged grief and other difficult times in life can help you get a sense of direction and also find meaning, in the way that Frankl found so helpful. It can help you determine where you’re going and where you need to be. Like mountain climbers who set their sights on the peak they’re hoping to climb, setting goals for your grief can create rallying points that will give you a sense of direction in life. All of the techniques in this book are meant to help you create goals for enhanced well-being and become more disciplined in acting in accordance with your goals.
In addition, mindfulness practices can help settle some of the painful rumination and other mental noise you’re experiencing so you can devote more focus to the fullness and potential of each moment rather than being overwhelmed by pain. Mindfulness practices can also help alleviate some of the stress your body experiences due to grief.
practice: Assessing How Mindfulness Has Helped
In the following space, write about how your mindfulness practice and skills have helped you deal with your grief up to this point. Feel free to use a separate piece of paper if you need more space.
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
Now write about how you’d like mindfulness to continue to help you. What more would you like your mindfulness practice to do for you? What goals do you feel mindfulness can realistically help you achieve in the coming year or so?
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
In chapter 9, I described how grief can feel like a spiral staircase. Although it feels like you’re going in circles around certain dates on the calendar, when grief isn’t prolonged, there’s a general sense of upward growth, progress, or healing.
Prolonged grief can feel more like a maze, remaining much the same in its intensity as you travel paths that meander and go in different directions without much sense of progress or healing. The maze of prolonged grief can feel full of dead ends and false hopes. You may have a sense of stagnation in which grief has become an all-too-familiar and predictable part of your life. When you wake up in the morning during prolonged grief, you know exactly what you’re going to be doing that day: grieving and suffering.
Setting Goals in Grief
The techniques I’ll present in this final chapter are designed to help give you a sense of progress, advancement, and healing, and, most importantly, a sense of direction. The pain of grief is universal, even though each person’s experience of each loss is different. Every single one of us will grieve. You might as well use this pain to heal yourself and take control of your life again, step-by-step. For a lot of people, grief becomes a time of life when they build up a new identity and new sense of the world and their role in it. It can become—slowly, mindfully—a new beginning.
Psychologists call this post-traumatic growth. It is the ability to change or improve oneself in meaningful ways after horrible things happen. I love that phrase; it doesn’t sugarcoat anything and is direct about what it’s identifying. Post-traumatic growth is a counterbalance to post-traumatic stress. Both can exist in the same space; one doesn’t necessarily negate the other. Unfortunately, few people in our society have a vocabulary for conveying this difficult concept: although you may still be suffering, that doesn’t have to be all you’re doing. I believe growth after loss is an essential part of the grief journey and within your reach.
Rebuilding Yourself
Our emotional states tend to become the stories we tell ourselves daily about who we are and who we’re going to be. This mental chatter is constantly unfolding, and when you’re practicing mindfulness, you develop an acute sense of how powerful it is and how much of your experience is created and perpetuated by this nonstop barrage of thoughts.
When you start to become mindful of how emotions make your body feel, you may be more likely to change the story you’re telling yourself about yourself. This doesn’t necessarily mean you can turn your grief off just by telling yourself a different story about yourself. Instead, as the mental chatter starts to change as a result of meditation and mindfully taking care of yourself, you may find yourself grieving less intensely from time to time.
One particularly powerful way to set empowering goals for change is to create a particular type of drawing called a mandala. In Asia, mandalas are drawings, usually circular, that depict a particular spiritual teaching or that symbolically map out the residence of a god or deity. In traditional Indian medicine, different parts of the body are depicted with different mandalas that express the particular properties of those parts of the body.
Mandalas convey a sense of wholeness and integration and can powerfully capture complex thoughts, emotions, or behaviors. Psychologist Carl Jung used mandalas extensively with his patients, and the following exercise is based on his work (1972).
practice: Drawing Mandalas
In this exercise, you’ll draw images that come to your mind in response to various questions. Your drawings don’t have to be complicated, and you don’t have to be a great artist. Stick figures are fine. If you really can’t draw, you can write down what you see instead. When filling in the blanks in the sentences below, you may wish to use a separate piece of paper so you’ll have more room to write.
We’ve prepared blank sheets that you can use to complete this exercise; download them at www.newharbinger.com/27497. You’ll also need a pen or pencil or, if you’d like to do this more elaborately, paint, colored pencils, or crayons.
Begin by placing the first sheet in front of you; then, practice mindfulness meditation for five minutes.
After meditating, fill in the blank in this sentence:
“I feel like my grief has been ______.”
Next, allow your mind to visualize an image that captures the phrase you wrote. Try to remember the first image that comes to mind.
Draw that first image inside the circle on the sheet of paper. Title this drawing “Past” in the space provided.
Next, practice mindfulness meditation for another five minutes.
After meditating, fill in the blank in this sentence:
“Today, I feel like my grief is ______.”
Next, allow your mind to visualize an image that captures the phrase you wrote. Try to remember the first image that comes to mind.
Draw that first image inside the circle on a second sheet of paper. Title this drawing “Present.”
Next, practice mindfulness for another five minutes.
After meditating, fill in the blank in this sentence:
“I would like my grief to change how I live my life by ______.”
Next, allow your mind to visualize an image that captures the phrase you wrote. Try to remember the first image that comes to mind.
Draw that final image inside the circle on the third sheet of paper. Title this drawing “Future.”
Take a look at all three mandalas. Is there a theme or underlying pattern that emerges in these drawings? Are your answers similar to your goals for your mindfulness practice? Do you see any progression, a direction
of growth, or hope emerging from the journey through past, present, and future? If you find that the path isn’t quite what you’d like it to be, try it again a little later on. You can do this exercise as many times as you like. You may wish to do it monthly or even weekly to help envision and record your goals for your journey with grief.
I recommend that you keep the mandala titled “Future” in a place where you’ll see it regularly so it can serve as an affirmation and reminder of where you want to go. It can give you encouragement and hope in dark times. One day you may find that it speaks to you in a way you didn’t anticipate.
This mandala depicting your future can remind you of your goals through your grieving process. Just as counting the breath in each mindfulness session helps focus the mind and track the practice, setting goals for your journey with grief can help you track your progress and growth. The circumstances of the loss you suffered may never be explainable, but your grief can be meaningful.
Dedication of Merits
Traditionally, all Buddhist meditation practices and exercises were meant to be dedicated toward the welfare of all beings. This kind of compassion, called dedication of merits, has a wonderful effect on people who practice it in the midst of intense suffering. Practicing this can help you remember that you’re connected to others, and that your suffering in grief is all too common and has been felt by billions of people over the course of human history.
Likewise, the potential for healing through grief has also been felt by just as many. In dedicating the merits of your mindfulness practice, you connect with the universal nature of suffering, but also the universal right to be healed from suffering.
For many meditators, setting compassionate goals seems like an obvious choice. After all, when you begin to practice nonjudgmental awareness of your own mind with a compassionate intent, it feels more natural to pass compassion on to others. In addition, compassion is good for you. In the midst of pain and suffering, thinking of the welfare of others can actually help you feel better by reducing your distress and boosting your immune system function (Pace et al. 2009).
practice: Finding Hidden Treasures
This practice will help you explore what you may have experienced in your grief aside from the obvious pain. The focus isn’t on your pain and distress. Those are obvious, and as you know, you don’t have to work at feeling the pain and suffering of grief. What generally does require some work is seeing the silver linings in grief, however small or faint they may be.
Let me be clear: This exercise is not about assuming good things have happened because of the loss you’ve suffered, or being glad you suffered in this way. This exercise is about finding out what you’ve learned about life and your abilities as a consequence of your grief.
This may be the first time you’ve done something like this, coaxing your mind to see something other than the pain and suffering you’ve experienced. This may be difficult for you to do. But without deliberate effort, it will be difficult to see anything but pain and suffering, even though there’s usually more going on. This exercise can help you orient yourself and your mind toward post-traumatic growth.
I’ll give you some examples of the silver linings people have shared with me in my clinical work. Perhaps some of them will sound familiar to you and help you get a sense of the silver linings you may have experienced as well. People have told me that they feel a deeper sense of how precious life, love, and relationships are. They’ve told me that they’ve received help and comfort from unexpected places, forging new friendships even as older ones disappoint and fade away. They’ve also said that they feel motivated to make sure that what they’ve experienced doesn’t happen to others and therefore become advocates for social or legal changes or greater awareness of diseases or risk factors. Many people go on to form or lead support groups, reaching out to others who have suffered losses similar to their own.
You may feel grateful for new relationships. You might simply be grateful for some of the techniques you’ve learned in this book. You might feel grateful for being more present to fully experience the beauty of different aspects of nature, such as sunsets or the night sky. Perhaps you’ve found a new hobby, a new routine, or a new approach to life that feels soothing and helpful.
Even if none of these examples seems to match your experience, they can give you a sense of what post-traumatic growth looks like. This growth doesn’t have to be the type that grabs headlines. Post-traumatic growth is often very private but powerfully transformative. Just as grief is unique and different for each of us, growth after loss is also unique. No two people will ever experience the exact same trajectory. The things you’re grateful for will be unique to you and need not be dramatic or earthshaking to outside observers.
To help you get started with this way of thinking about life after loss, complete the following sentences. You may wish to use a separate piece of paper so you’ll have more room to write.
My grief has taught me that life is about ______.
The most helpful thing I’ve done in my grief is ______.
The person most helpful to me in my grief has been ______.
practice: Setting Goals for the Coming Year
As you near the end of this book, I hope it has helped you, even if only just a bit. Take a moment to think back to how you were feeling when you started reading this book. How were things different?
Next, give some thought to what you’re doing differently now. Then write down five things that you’re glad you’re doing differently. Perhaps some of these things stem from the practices you learned in this book or came about as a consequence of doing some of the exercises in the book. Perhaps some of them seem to be unrelated to the book. No matter how they seem to have originated, write these five things down in the following space:
______.
______.
______.
______.
______.
Now write down five things you’d like to do differently in the coming year. Some or all of these may be the same as the items in the previous list. That’s fine. Write them down anyway to help you remember and follow through on your insight:
______.
______.
______.
______.
______.
This is what mindfulness in prolonged grief looks like: being aware of not just the pain of grief (that doesn’t take any effort) but also of experiences other than pain. With mindfulness, you know that your grief is still there but that it can change, as all things do, and that you can change as well. Impermanence applies not just to death but to life, and also to the pain of grief. Mindfulness in prolonged grief is about being as connected to your life’s potential as you are to life’s pain and taking deliberate, mindful steps to manifest and experience that potential, even if only for a moment.
practice: Charting Your Course
I’ve presented a lot of different practices in this book. Are there some that you’ve stuck with or found more rewarding than others? To help you remember everything you’ve learned, here’s a list of all of the practices in the book:
Blue Sky Visualization
Belly Breathing
Using Cues for Belly Breathing
Mindfulness Meditation
Progressive Muscle Relaxation
Passive Muscle Relaxation
Variations of Body Scans
Improving Sleep Hygiene
Mindful Sleep Induction
Lucid Dreaming
Keeping a Dream Journal
Moving Meditation
Eating with Gratitude
Eating Mindfully
Preparing a Meal Mindfully
Cleaning Up Mindfully
Sweeping Mindfully
Vacuuming and Decluttering Mindfully
Exploring Your Relationship to Your Loved One’s Belongings
Exploring Whether Keeping Your Loved One’s Things Is Problematic
Mindfully Considering Your Loved One’s Possessions
> Awakening Compassion
Engaging in Random Acts of Kindness
Metta, or Loving-Kindness, Meditation
Tracking Assumptions and Generating Alternative Behaviors
Cultivating Creativity in Your Life
Assessing How Mindfulness Has Helped
Drawing Mandalas
Finding Hidden Treasures
Setting Goals for the Coming Year
In the space below, list the practices you’ve found most helpful, arranging them from most to least helpful:
______
______
______
______
______
______
______
______
Next, make a note of when you last did each of the most helpful practices:
______
______
______
______
______
______
______
______
In the following space, list which practices you’d like to do more often:
______
______
______
______
______
______
______
______
Devote some thought to how you can ensure that you do these practices more often, and then write your ideas in the following space:
______
______
______
______
______
______
______
______
The Way Forward
The mindful path through prolonged grief invites you to participate in your grief so you can build the best life you can, given what you’ve experienced. Grief has a purpose: it lets us know how powerful love is. When you lose a loved one, you are brought into sharp, merciless contact with how powerful relationships can be. What mindfulness teaches us is that awareness of each moment helps us understand our potential for living and loving despite this suffering.
The practices in this book are meant to help you become an active participant in your own life. Even though you’ve suffered, your life remains precious. Mindfulness can deepen your awareness of the precious potential each moment holds.