Transforming Grief

"If you get grief wrong, you get a lot of things wrong.”

I heard these words spoken by Timothy Shriver, the nephew of assassinated American President John F. Kennedy, to Oprah Winfrey on her show Super Soul Sunday.

He went on to say:

If “you hide from a lot of pain. You hide from a lot of frustration.  And in my family, of all the gifts we had, that [grieving] wasn't one of them. We didn't really know how. I didn't feel like I learned to face grief and transform it. [And] if you don’t transform it, you transmit it.”

As someone who works with chronically suicidal individuals in her work and as someone who’s family members are being treated for advanced cancer and early Alzheimer’s, I agree with this statement whole-heartedly. 

And yet, I find it very difficult to practice.

I went to a yoga class about a month ago, and the instructor talked about the need to “digest” our emotions.  She then led us through a whole series of twists to empty out our intestines, stomachs and kidneys to aid in that “digestion.”

Afterward, I reflected on how necessary it is to practice emotional digestion, particularly in regard to grief. 

I am someone who, unfortunately, long ago learned to compartmentalize her emotions so well, that now even when I want to express them more visibly to the world, I cannot.  

Of course sometimes this poker face can have its advantages, but sometimes it can leave me vulnerable because emotions can get stuck inside of me- like grief for example.

If I don’t actively engage my grief in all her myriad of forms (unresolved grief, anticipatory grief, grief associated with losses of things, with losses of people, with losses of things and people I never had in the first place but wanted or needed) , then she will come back to bite me in the ass.  Or, more poetically as Timothy Shriver put it, if I don’t transform it, I transmit it.

In my spiritual journey, I have found four ways to engage my grief:

1.)    Travel,

2.)    Movement,

3.)    Moments to Pause, &

4.)    Some combination of #1, #2 & #3.

Travel.  This one was taught to me from a young age. 

Growing up travel was a means to an end for generating greater understanding and broadening perspective- both of which are necessary to transform grief.

Recently I was reminded of the importance of travel as a vehicle for processing grief when I watched Emilio Estevez’ movie The Way starring his father Martin Sheen.

In the film the main character, Martin Sheen, is an American who makes the decision to walk the Camino de Santiago through northern France and Spain as a pilgrimage to honor his son who tragically died while trying to walk the Camino himself.

It seemed the combination of travel and movement were the healing alchemy for the character’s grief.

What is helpful to remember too is that travel does not have to be international.  Buddhist teacher and author Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us in Peace is Every Step that

“when you need to slow down and come back to yourself [which I generally do when I am grieving], you do not need to rush home to your meditation cushion or to a meditation center in order to practice conscious breathing.”

Travel can include moving from the chair to the couch. From the living room to the kitchen. From your house to your yard. From your yard to the woods.  From the woods to the ocean.  However large or small, changing scenery can be a very effective means for processing grief.

(A cautionary note from experience on travel: make sure that your decision to travel is not a decision to run away or escape what requires your immediate attention.  Choose wise action).

Movement. This is another strategy from a young age, but this one was not taught, it was more intuitive.

When I was younger, like under the age of 10 and all the way through college, when I was upset about something I would turn up the music very loud and dance it out.  Nothing choreographed. No one watching. Just me in my room. Me in my body, and yet seemingly body-less in those moments of blissful flow.

I still use my body as a means to transform grief (and other emotions too), but unfortunately it is much more structured and contained.  Now, like my emotions, movement has become an inhibited, precise action, and yet it is still so powerful- particularly in yoga asana (poses).

My awareness of how yoga had become a means toward emotional transformation increased after reading how Buddhist teacher and author Jack Kornfield utilized movement and body-centered psychotherapy to address emotions and grief that had gotten stuck inside of him.  His story increased my level of faith in the practice of yoga and movement in general for “digesting” emotions, including the sticky and corrosive ones.

Moment to Pause.  I regret to say, I did not learn this strategy until much later in life.

The simple but difficult task of slowing down for the length of 3 long breaths several times a day can be a game-changer for transforming difficult emotions like grief.

We move throughout our days with so much urgency and obligation.  Our auto-pilot switch is turned on, and we find ourselves just going through the motions.

Leave work. Drive home. Make dinner. Wash dishes. Etc. Etc.

This is not to devalue these daily activities.

On the contrary, I truly believe there is enormous spiritual value in our day to day activities (a topic I may write about at another time).  But when we are grieving, in the context of a fast-paced working parents’ life, it can be difficult to find the time for those transformative emotional moments. 

This is why the moment to pause is such an elegant strategy. 

While working, while driving, while cooking, we can almost always find the time to pause for the length of 3 long breaths.

Try it now with me.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

There. We did it.

By taking time to intentionally breathe several times a day we do not allow our grief to settle into our bones.

As Buddhist teacher and author Pema Chodron beautifully writes in Comfortable With Uncertainty,

“Practice means not continuing to strengthen the habitual patterns that keep us trapped; doing anything we can to shake up and ventilate our self justification and blame. We do our best to stay with the strong energy without acting out or repressing. In so doing, our habits become more porous.”

In other words, the moment to pause switches the automatic pilot switch off—again and again and again—even, or especially, during times of grief.

A helpful tip: if you try this strategy, try to approach it with tenderness.  As you might engage a shy animal or child, try a compassionate stance toward yourself as you take in each breath and release it.  This means, lean in with kindness and support as you engage with your pain without clinging to it or pushing it away.

Do you have any of your own strategies for transforming grief that you can share with me?

Manifesting Joy During Despair

In two days my mother will have her second surgery this year.  The goal is to try to remove more of the cancer that has spread in her body.  It will be a longer and more invasive surgery this time, and the recovery time will be lengthier as well.  The current treatment plan is to begin chemotherapy 3 weeks post-surgery.

All of these facts terrifies my mother.

It is against this backdrop that I brought her to the beach this past weekend.

At first, she was in no mood for it.  Understandably. 

Eventually though, without too much arm twisting, she agreed and climbed in my truck for the 1 hour drive to the Atlantic Ocean; this was after I threw in the promise of a seafood meal and time with her 2 year-old granddaughter which might have helped.

We spent the next 4 hours mindfully feeding our senses by watching my daughter play in the sand, listening to the waves crash against the shoreline, riding bikes along the nearby salt marsh, and eating yummy scallops and french fries.  And there was joy.

Here are some of the photographs I took that day…

Within about 10 minutes of our drive home though, my mother began to worry out loud again about the surgery.  She began to express concerns about the VNA who would be coming to her house. About the 5-6 months of chemotherapy and radiation following the surgery…Etc. Etc.

As I listened quietly to her speak, I tried to remember German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke’s (1875-1926) famous words that have helped me in so many other difficult situations:

What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.  Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.

I think memorable quotations can be like great works of music or art in that at any given moment, we can draw some different meaning from the offering that enhances our life in some new way. 

This past weekend, Rilke’s words reminded me that it is vital to intentionally bring in moments of joy and happiness--as well as future aspirations--during times of great turmoil.  In fact, I think it is as necessary to our soul as air is to our lungs.

So I’m glad my mother decided to join my daughter and me for a day at the beach this past weekend.

I know it did not solve all her problems. I know it did not take away her pain.  But perhaps when we nourish the soul with activities and people that we love at the most unlikely of times, it does full-fill an unarticulated need that can be a catalyst for a life worth living even with the inevitable pain and suffering that accompanies it.

Housing a Soul, Part VI: The Spiritual Task of Parenting

Becoming Free: Removing the Scaffolding

I was recently talking with a friend of mine who I have known since we were 10 years-old.  We were discussing the approaching of our big 4-0 birthday, and we both agreed how, now, we are much more comfortable in our own skin than we ever were in our early 30’s, 20’s, and especially our teens.

Similar to the process snakes go through when they shed their skin because their more youthful skin no longer serves them, it strikes me as analogous to the process a person goes through when they let go of their false self or ego.

It seems so ironic that we parents might take such special care to help nourish and protect a soul with a sturdy and stable ego, only to have the whole thing come down one day for the soul, or True Self, to live freely.

But honestly, as someone who remains herself in the process of letting go of false self and ego, it feels pretty damn good to keep shedding all this skin as I move closer and closer to my true self. 

To borrow my friend’s language, which tends to be more colorful than my own, it makes me believe my 40’s will be as “epic” as she predicts.

To me, this unexpected paradoxical element in the arc of the development of Self is fascinating.

To put it simply, the bottom line is: if all goes well, if all the hard-won construction is complete on the house ego or false self and the soul or True Self is well nourished and protected, the next step is a spiritual practice in nonattachment to let the whole thing go. 

What had been so carefully and thoughtfully constructed to house the jewel, as Franciscan priest and author Richard Rorh calls the True Self or soul in his book Immortal Diamond: The Search for our True Self, becomes obsolete. 

I think of this process as similar to the process of making a mandala. 

The creation of a mandala is a meditation of sorts that is made by monastics.  In the process, monks and nuns work for many days straight for up to 10 hours a day to create intricate and creative designs out of colored grains of sand that in any other context would be considered works of art.

But the kicker comes in the last moments of the mandala meditation when the same monks and nuns who labored for days in concentrated skill and effort sweep away the entire mandala to nothing.  It is the ultimate practice of what is thought of in Buddhist Psychology as nonattachment.

I think of this as exactly what the caregiver must do for the child, adolescent and young adult, or more accurately I suppose, what the child, adolescent or young adult must do for themselves.

If the house of ego was well constructed and renovated, with  the same mindful attention as in the trimming of a bonsai tree, it will one day fade away to allow the True Self or jewel to shimmer in the sunlight for all to see.  The soul no longer requires a house for protection because it is now savvy to the ways of the world and can skillfully navigate pain and harm.

So the question is, who do we know who has successfully made it through this comprehensive developmental process?

Well, some of the famous people we all might know from a distance.  Names that come to my mind are Dr. Maya Angelou, Sylvia Boorstein, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Thich Nhat Hanh, among many others. 

These individuals looked confident and competent.  They seemed to walk with their heads up with integrity, but not superiority.  These individuals gave the impression of greatness and humility. They appeared to have an ease about them, and were quick to laugh out loud and smile. These souls were often seen surrounded by others because people were drawn to their calm and graceful way of walking through the world.

I think each of these individuals was (or is) able to be so skillful in the art of living because s/he has allowed her/his false self or ego to fall away so that their naked soul or True Self can be viewed by all.  This ability is such a courageous act because it leaves the Self so vulnerable and yet so exquisite because we get to see the breathtaking jewel inside.

To come full circle, it's like the classic children’s story we all know of The Velveteen Rabbit; the story of a stuffed animal bunny who transforms into a real rabbit. 

The story begins with the stuffed toy bunny learning from the old toy rocking horse what it means to be real.  The old rocking horse says:

“Real isn’t how you are made…It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

Then the stuffed bunny asks,

“Does it hurt?” 

And the rocking horse replies,

“Sometimes.” But adds, “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

The stuffed bunny is wary though, and wants to know if the process is sudden or gradual. How does it unfold? And the rocking horse explains:

“It doesn’t happen all at once…You become. It is a long time.  That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges…Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.  But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand…But once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”

It’s just like that isn’t it?  Moving from a False Self to True Self.  Moving from a life where you walk the world with your shell of ego, to a life where your soul is exposed and yet you don’t feel helpless or in danger.  Where the False Self of a stuffed bunny can fall away and, as if by the magic of a fairy, the True Self of the actual rabbit can emerge.  Beautiful. 

I like that the author of the Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams, knew it was in part the process of being loved hard through a caregiver’s validating mindful attention that allows for this magnificent unfolding to take place. 

This progression is the quintessential caterpillar in the chrysalis who emerges as a butterfly.

As parents, we can never underestimate the value and necessity for our work in being the holding environment just like the chrysalis.  Though unquestionably a daunting task, the piece of development in which we parents help the child soul become real because, in part, of our share played in the artistry of a well-constructed ego, however temporary it maybe, is critical to a development that will help the soul manage the dings and dents that are inevitable in the process of this emergence. 

As in the story of The Velveteen Rabbit, it is the validation, mindfulness, life skills teaching, and modeling of how to manage stress, distress, and emotions that comes from caregivers that allows for the house of ego to be built, and consequently let go of, so that one unique soul can follow god’s will for it on this earth. 

May it be so for all of us.

Housing a Soul, Part V: The Spiritual Task of Parenting

Following Our Ancestors’ Blueprint- Or Not

As a parent, one frequently looks to previous generations for guidance on how to do such important work as nourish and protect the soul of a child.  It can get tricky though, if you are unsure if those past models are reliable or valid to begin with.

Many years ago, before I was even thinking about the spiritual tasks of parenting, I went to a conference where the main speaker led an icebreaker in which conference participants were asked to introduce themselves by telling the group who their role model was. 

Some participants said familiar famous names like Maya Angelou and Mahatma Gandhi, but most named people in their family.  Mothers. Grandmothers. Great-grandmothers. And Aunties- literally generations of (mostly female) role models.

I was one of the participants who named a famous-somebody, but I remember being bothered by that.  I secretly wished I was able to call one of my ancestors a role model.

Fast forward to about 6 months ago when I learned about a Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience named Rachel Yehuda who’s research focuses on new evidence that the stress and trauma experienced by one generation can be transmitted through DNA to the next, and something called epigenetics says that it might be possible for genes to actually be turned on and off.

Now I am someone who is frequently found awe-struck with what learning and understanding is rapidly unfolding in regards to our biology and particularly our neurobiology (even if I only understand about .01% of it), but this information touched me in a more meaningful way.

I began to consider how Dr. Yehuda’s scientific research findings and spiritual traditions like Buddhism may hold the same wisdom.

A common belief in many Buddhist traditions is rebirth or reincarnation which occurs in a cycle called samsara.  This cycle is said to end only when an individual attains enlightenment, and it is karma, intentional actions that lead to future consequences, which perpetuates the cycle.

Might these two ideas over-lap?  Are these divisions between soul, mind and brain/biology as distinctive as we’d previously imagined them to be? 

If not, where does that leave me? What about my DNA? What about my personal karma and ancestral karma?  Am I, and in turn my children, essentially biogically and karmically screwed?

Or, could I use my ancestors as role models in the sense that I will learn from their mistakes.  I will intentionally (which is a necessary component for karma) stand on the shoulders of my ancestors in the sense that I will gain wisdom through their unhappy experiences.  From this, I could make new and different choices that would nourish and protect the souls of my children; thereby potentially affecting future DNA and the cycle of rebirth, samsara.

What do you think? Are you still with me?

Now, let’s rewind.  I’m back at the conference many years ago.  The main speaker asks each participant to introduce herself by sharing one of her role models…I answer, “my paternal grandmother.”

Much wisdom, and therefore meaning, could be gained through empathic examination and understanding of her life that could be helpful for me in my own spiritual and parenting journey- would that not be the definition of a role model?

So who was she?

My paternal grandmother, who’s name I also took as a pseudonym for this blog, got pregnant and married (in that order) during World War II.  Her husband was at war in Europe for the first year and change of their marriage, and was not there when their first (of 6!) child was born. 

When my grandfather returned from the war, my grandmother quickly got pregnant with her second child, and soon after the decision was made to move several hundred miles away from her family, whom she had continued to live with while my grandfather was at war, to a house in New England nearby my grandfather’s family.

Unfortunately, the “house” my grandfather moved his young family to was not much. 

It was an old farm house with no plumbing and no electricity, and my grandmother initially decided to high-tail it right back to her parents’ house with her 4 year-old son (my father) and 2 year-old daughter until my grandfather could get his "house" in order. 

It wasn’t long before my grandfather came to get her though, and she went with him back to the farmhouse.

My grandmother went on to have 4 more children, and my grandfather never really got his “house” in order.  Though by all accounts a likable guy, due to frequently changing jobs, inability to keep money in the bank, and being known for his infidelities, it’s safe to say my grandfather was not known for his dependability or resilience, and his literal house and figurative house (his ego) was full of cracks and unfinished parts that were so poorly constructed they were weak at best, but arguably dangerous- an ego structure made of cards.

But my grandmother didn’t know that in the beginning- couldn’t have known that.  As the story went for an uneducated, unemployed, pregnant woman in the 1940’s, when you got pregnant, you got married, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Regrettably, I was never able to meet this grandmother.  She died of cancer in her 50's a year before I was born.

Some days I wish I could tap my magic wand and give my grandmother a re-do similar to the character of George Monroe in the 2001 movie Life as a House. 

Like my grandfather, George Monroe, played by Kevin Kline in the movie, inherited a dilapidated house from his father, both figuratively and literally, that the movie character continued to live in.  

In the film, the house is a perfect metaphor for the construction of ego with emphasis on the important role of intentional parenting as one of its major themes throughout the film. 

However in the movie, unlike in my grandfather’s own life, when the movie character’s life implodes after being fired from his job and learning he has cancer, he does decide to tear down the original “house” to the bare bones and rebuild from ground up in order to create and pass-on a worthy “house” to his only child.  The movie character understood that it is never too late to start rebuilding.

But maybe for some, rebuilding does not happen until a future generation comes along.  A generation that looks at some of the ancestral blueprints and decides there are necessary structural changes to be made.

I think this is where gratitude comes in.

Austrian born, Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast, who has a great Ted-Talk called “Want to be Happy? Be Grateful,” says that to experience gratitude we do not have to be grateful for hardship or painful events.  But, and this is a big but, we can experience gratitude in every moment due to the opportunity for growth, learning and wisdom that is available to us in every moment.

In this way, my grandmother is one of my role models, and I have gratitude for her and her life.  She is one of many ancestors whose life experience will guide me as I make decisions that will build and shape the home that will house the souls of my own children.  And for that I am grateful.

This blog entry is the 5^th in a 6 Part Series.

To be concluded…