Insights for April 2014
Waves crash on the beach by Margaret Gervais
More insights about on grief have crossed my desk this month and have been helpful. These are excerpts from The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, by Stephen Grosz.
"Closure is delusive – it is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief.I’ve long thought that Kübler-Ross was wrong. The “psychological stages” of dying and grieving are wholly different. For the person who dies there is an end, but this is not so for the person who grieves. The person who mourns goes on living and for as long as he lives there is always the possibility of feeling grief.
Each of use mourns differently, but in general the initial shock and fear triggered by death does diminish with time. Through the work of mourning, we gradually feel better, though some heartache remains. Holidays and anniversaries are notoriously difficult. Grief can ebb and then, without warning, resurge. The loss of a child, a loss through suicide – these losses, and many others, can and do cause enduring sorrow.
“Grief Lit” – a burgeoning sub-genre of “Recovery Lit” offering many titles, and the message is: your grief is something that can be fixed. You can recover. You can have closure.
My experience is that closure is an extraordinary compelling fantasy of mourning. It is the fiction that we can love, lose, suffer and do something to permanently end our sorrow. We want to believe we can reach closure because grief can surprise and disorder us – even years after out loss.” The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, Stephen Grosz
"Idleness allows time for the mind to wander to places never before imagined and to return transformed.Doing nothing is essential for thinking to occur. Many of the most important thoughts are unintentional—they can be neither solicited nor cajoled but have a rhythm of their own, creeping up, arriving, and leaving when we least expect them. It is important to cultivate the lassitude of mind that clears a place for the arrival of what cannot be anticipated. Idleness allows time for the mind to wander to places never before imagined and to return transformed." Mark C. Taylor, "Idleness Waiting Grace" via Tricycle: The Buddhist Review
I know I have been sharing more about loss these days, but I believe that information arises when it needs to arise. Read this beautiful article by Henry Shukman, about finding the hidden remedies in our troubled selves
"Perhaps we all carry an immemorial wound, an infinite loss, a self-exile we perpetrate on ourselves. It turns us into isolated entities stalking the earth in search of what we think we need—the temporary stays against ennui, despair, loss, and terror. But sooner or later, the wound can carry us toward its own remedy, if we only let it. It seems too much to hope that right in the heart of our troubled selves there might actually be the healing we seek. But if suffering and awakening form a single weather-system, as many a wise person has come to know, then when storms come, perhaps we can accept them with less dread and aversion, and more trust, and even hope." Henry Shukman, http://www.tricycle.com/feature/beautiful-storm
Insights on 4.23.2014, the day of the Cardinal Grand Cross: "I feel the vast emptiness and know I am alone.
Let your fears die a lonely death.Fear cannot exist in the emptiness or the void.
I am in the vortex of the moment.
Equanimity erases barriers and borders, leading the way to oneness.
Be solace in the nothingness.
Ascension is alignment and unity.The power from within emanates out.
We are all alone and also all one." Margaret Gervais, April 23, 2014
"Although all phenomena are going through the various appearances of birth, abiding, changing, and dying, the true person doesn’t become a victim of sadness, happiness, love, or hate. She lives in awareness as an ordinary person, whether standing, walking, lying down, or sitting." Thich Nhat Hanh, “Simply Stop” Tricycle: The Buddhist Review
This is what occurs with meditation practice:"We’ve lived our lives with negative images of ourselves, from childhood on, and we’ve built upon those images, and built upon them, and they became very heavy weights. These thoughts about us are a part of our ego, and they’re manifested through our roles of child or husband, wife, breadwinner, all of those roles. They’re built upon the thoughts of, “I’m not truthful” or “I’m not likable”, “I’m not good” – all of those negative images. Once you identify with your soul you start to taste the love in your true self, in your spiritual heart and it’s different than all of the loves you’ve ever had. It’s just different; it’s unconditional love." Ram Dass, Love Serve Remember
"Sit under your own tree of enlightenment." Jack Kornfield
"Be present for your humanity." Jack Kornfield
"The breath becomes a mirror. You show up and so things show up." (meditation practice) Jack Kornfield