Not feeling like oneself is an insufficient, or tepid descriptor for what many people feel when in a state of grief. Unraveled. Unhinged. Cracked open. These are better descriptors. We are cracked, and in moments of utter giving up, light and insight slip in. These words, however, fail to capture what happens on the days when moving to a new planet seems the reasonable plan of action. I can write this to you, as I know I am not alone in grief. Even Sophocles had words for this state, when he wrote that, “grief teaches the steadiest minds to waver.”
Grief is designed, then, to jiggle us apart thought by thought. I once fell in love with a man who was dying, and during this painful experience, I still recall how nothing could undo the shock I felt at not being able to control the universe. How could this good man – so young – die? I am in this state again now, after losing an incredibly potent and loving relationship that I thought would last. Yet this time, paralleled with the quality of despair that wades through me like a dark river, I notice varieties in my present moment experience; I even notice joy. My intuition is that this change could be the result of my meditation practice.
The last time I lost a relationship I was willing to commit my full life toward, eleven years ago, I was living in Nicaragua amidst 13 other aid-workers, one of whom was a teenager who was having an affair with my partner. Needless to say, our break up became more public than either he or I would have liked. To get away from our crumbling environment, I got on a bus headed south, thinking to land in Costa Rica.
For three weeks, I let life take me where she might. My bus completed its route at a nondescript brown lake hours from Costa Rica. Perhaps I’d missed a crucial stop. When the driver looked at me and the sagging, drunk man left on the bus and motioned us to the door, I picked up my woven backpack with a sudden realization that I wasn’t in control of my life and that I didn’t care.
A thin farmer with a small, silver boat offered to row me across the lake. Given that there was nothing other than our bus, which was now driving in the opposite direction, on our side of the lake, I nodded, feeling the wicked edge of risk I was taking as a foreign, white woman traveling alone. Maybe I wanted to see how far I could go – at what point I would put up a fight. I got safely to the other side. There, a heavily muscled man in a Yankees cap offered me a ride in his pick up truck. My partner had often shared his fantasy of saying yes to everything in life for one day to see what would happen. If we literally had no fight in us, wouldn’t everything, finally, turn out well? In our conversations, I’d argued against his powerful, fantastic ideal, picturing myself in a cave with an enormously rotund, gap toothed, drunken pirate and an immediate need for the word No.
I nodded and lifted myself into his flatbed. He dropped me off at a dirty hostel an hour down the road, where I sat on a gravel-laden beach until my skin took on the quality of a lobster’s shell. Days after this, a pickpocket nabbed my wallet in a bus station, and I laughed in a bus driver’s face two hours later when we each simultaneously realized I was broke. Playing with life so loosely struck me as hilarious. I was promptly let out. With utter grace, I alighted in a town lit with a string of hostels. Through a further moment of grace, I was able to beg my way into a room, and was thus able to resume sitting on a hot black sand beach and letting tears spill down my sunburned face. It was not so much that I hoped, or even thought I could, expire on the beach. It was that moving my limbs felt like too much of an effort.
I was so held during this blue, unmovable time in my twenties, yet I was also so taken by my sadness that I was unable to see grace breathing beside my grief. I was unable to feel myself being held. I could only categorize this time as something close to death. Joyce Carol Oates writes beautifully about grief when she states, “Profound losses leave us paralyzed and mute, unable really to comprehend them, still less to speak coherently about them.”1
Lately, my body spills tears at random times throughout the day, when I feel the inner restructuring of a reality I haven’t chosen. Sometimes, the tears burst from me; other times, they spill softly, on occasion, they course down my face, as if to make room for a waterfall. I do not know what will happen. I cannot figure out how, or whether, life will unfold according to the terrain of my dreams. Yet this time, alongside the deep fall apart, I see blessing. I feel how this process is breaking me down to crack the next shell of my growth, to cultivate me into a new form. Perhaps most important, I consciously experience moments that are not grief. Even inside of this dark, my thoughts and emotions diverge.
At the recent Wake Up Festival in Estes Park, Jack Kornfield suggested that if we look closely at our experience, we see that we don’t live in the emotive experience we’re most attached to all the time. Rather, our emotive experience changes rapidly from moment to moment. Thus, I am not grieving 24 hours a day (and even wasn’t when I was cooking my skin in defeat on that beach.) To illustrate this point, I will share a few minutes of my experience while assisting a yoga class yesterday.
I am so upset. How could he do this to us? Upset, upset, upset
That yoga student is pregnant. When will I be pregnant? Sad, sad, sad
I wanted to have his baby! Desperate, desperate, desperate.
That pregnant student might need help with this pose. Desire to help, helping, helping
She looks better now. Gratified, gratified, gratified.
More core work. I can’t do adjustments when we do core work. Bored. Bored. Bored.
What if he’s already been with someone else? Anger, Anger, Anger, Revolt, Revolt, Revolt.
I love him so much! Sad, sad, sad, grief, grief, grief. A few tears slip out
That man’s hip looks crunched. Desire to help. Helping, helping
Did I do that right? Nervous, nervous.
I don’t know; he looks better now. Feel good, good, good.
In paying close attention to my experience, I feel moments of joy alongside this dark. I see a child’s smile in the line at the grocery store, and though it only lasts for a moment, I feel joy. I catch a whiff of a gardenia in someone’s garden, and I am awed by the potency of this living world. Through meditation practice, I am able to allow these moments more than I was able to in years past. I am present to a part of me that is not this grief. I notice that I deny the good moments less. The dark moments may still be dark. But in allowing them to have their own life and pace, I notice that they do not last as long.
I write these words to share how my practice has shifted my experience of grief, in the hopes that this sharing might be of service. Every person’s grief experiences are personal – and though I have a smidgen more present moment awareness than I had in the past – I can speak only of now, and not even of my own tomorrow. As Meghan O’Rourke states, “loss isn’t science; it’s a human reckoning.”2
Meditation Practice
I learned this practice from a Theravaddin teacher in Bali, and have used it often when I meditate. Find a comfortable place to sit in a cross-legged, or half lotus position, preferably with your sit bones lifted above your knees. Use a meditation cushion, a few thick pillows, or a chair (in which case your feet can rest side by side on the earth). Set a timer for 15-45 minutes, depending on what feels good to you. If you have a bell, or a singing bowl, I suggest starting your practice with sound. The sound of a bell works well to bring the mind into the attention of a new moment.
Bring your attention to the top of your head. Feel this part of you. Repeat these two words in succession: “Anicca”, (pronounced uh-ni-cha) which is the Pali word for impermanence, and “Gentleness.” Or you might try “Anicca,” and “Loving kindness”. Feel what works. Feel that the top of your head is impermanent. Move your awareness to your forehead. Repeat Anicca. Allow that your thoughts are impermanent. Your memories are impermanent. Your ability to make thinking happen is impermanent. Allow gentleness. Notice your impermanence with gentleness. Move your awareness to your third eye, then to your eyes and temples, repeating these words clearly and silently. Move your awareness slowly down the front surface of your body, pausing often, repeating the words. Let each word take a full breath. Breathe the words into you. When you notice that your thoughts have taken you somewhere, gently bring yourself back. Begin again at the part of the body that you recall last focusing your attention on. Once your move through the front surface of your body, draw your awareness up the soles of your feet and through your back body from the heels all the way to the back of the head, repeating this set of words. End at the top of the head. If time permits, repeat the process.
1“Why We Write About Grief,” Joyce Carol Oates and Meghan O’Rourke, New York Times, Feb 26, 2011
2 New York Times, Feb 26, 2011
Originally published on www.integralchicks.com
