“When the heart weeps for what it has lost, the spirit rejoices for what it has found.”
—Sufi saying
Grief is a taboo in our culture. It is something not yearned for, something that is rarely mentioned and we do not learn how to be in contact with it.
It is something that we prefer to bury on a collective level, rather than to face.
However, things don’t get buried, they just get transferred, whether it is in the timeline of our lives where they then show up in unexpected manner at some later point in time, or in a timeline of our family systems—to our children and grandchildren until someone who is sensitive and open enough to feel it comes along. Then the ache tends to arise again. This process can look inexplicable if we do not have resources or awareness to link it to the original event.
Sadness and grief are also profoundly misunderstood on a cultural level. They are seen as a burden, as something painful, as something that is not pleasurable and is to be avoided. That throbbing in our body that arises before the waves of grief that follow, is something we panically want to prevent at all costs, as a culture. So we run to distract ourselves, as soon as it touches us. We watch TV, numb it with food, we seek socializing at all costs, we seek adrenaline or try to dampen it with medications. Sometimes we can act in ways that are not in our best interest in an attempt not to feel it.
This is somewhat understandable, as it can be quite painful in its many forms. It can feel like an emptiness in our belly or a feeling of thorns in our lungs, or just vast overwhelming emptiness. It can ache to our bones causing us to feel like a big throbbing pile of soreness without an echo in the universe. It can seem like a heavy thick lump under the ribcage that we just carry around all the time, or it can weigh down our whole body like an invisible burden.
Most of the time these feelings and sensations are indeed not pleasurable. This is one of the reasons that we are culturally averse to grief. However, as Zen Buddhists and existentialist traditions know very well, such pain is an inevitable part of our human existence. As Martin Adams notes in his book An Existential Approach to Human Development, whereas at an earlier age deprivation is felt as incompleteness, with increased understanding of relationality it can be felt as a loss.
Namely, loss can and will inevitably occur in the course of our existence because of many things. It will come as relational loss when we lose someone dear to us or when someone who is close to us dies. It will come as loss of jobs, of social position, of health or appearance, often as we advance in age. It will come as a loss of social systems that we believed in. In more general or metaphysical form it can occur as a loss of illusion, of things that we believed to be, but that were, in the end, revealed to be our beliefs rather than reality.
It can also come as a grief of things that never happened. Of the childhood we never had, of lives planned but that never happened. It can be felt as a loss of directions that we took but they crumbled, or loss of a meaningful relationship that we craved but that never entirely unfolded.
Grief can also be related to our ancestors that lived in oppressive systems and there was nobody to speak for them. This can also be transferred to us as a voice that never got heard. It can manifest in situations we are drawn to and cannot rationally explain why. Lingering grief from previous generations will tend to move through the family tree, and it will shape events in the present, often without us consciously understanding what is happening.
These are all reasons to confront our grief.
One further reason is that it is in general not very well understood that grief brings with itself not only pain, but also a sweep. There exists little understanding of how that sweep, while sometimes overwhelming, simultaneously cleanses the thread of our being. It gently, yet fiercely, sweeps all the losses that we have encountered and all old things that we are ready to let go of, into a new thread in our body. It untangles old things until they are released in the wells of our tears. So that we can breathe again. And so that there is a little more space.
In order to mature and to process our pain, or to process what existentialism calls our givens—things that are unavoidable in our lives and that we cannot change—it is necessary to confront this grief.
Grief helps us to meet the reality of the situation and of the loss we endured. It cannot be emphasized enough that it is processing grief what brings us closer to the reality of situation—and to our more authentic selves.
Often it is hard to go through all of this, because the process can be intense. However, when this sadness comes, it helps to hold it gently. To sit with it, and to just be with it in the amount we can. This will already facilitate a change. Even if it is just a little bit.
If the grief threatens to overflow us, we find what helps us to stay grounded—walks in nature, trees, earth, things that bring us back to breathing.
And then, it is important to have patience with this process. To gently sit with it, and to let this sweeping run its course. If it feels too much, as it often can, it is thoughtful and wise to find someone who knows how to lead us through this process, an external guide, like a good therapist.
All the while, when it hurts and when we ache most deeply, we can hold in our awareness that this is a process of sweeping. That it is gentle, yet very powerful. And that eventually, when it subsides, it will help us to sink deeper into our bodies, and closer to ourselves.
This is the value of grief and it is crucial to remember this.
