Grieving From A Meditators Perspective - 5min read

This is the kind of post I never thought I’d need to write anytime soon. I’m writing this because now is a time that so many are sharing my experience during these intense times and I hope it will bring a new perspective on how we view death and deal with the loss of a loved one (there is no correct way). I have known for a while what this technique can do for someone grieving, but I have never experienced it to this extent.

I lost my Dad, Marcus two weeks ago from a heart attack peacefully in his sleep. He was just 56 and my siblings and niece loved him dearly.

Sadness, grief and loss are what I felt very deeply during the days after, at the same time I had this sense of comfort and that comfort has been building more and more each day, which I can only attribute to meditation and work I had done over the years. I felt more connected to my dad, more so than when he was here in his physical body.

During these early days I have found meditation as the perfect canvas for me to express my grief, naturally you’re going to have lots of thoughts coming through of the person that’s left, I let those thoughts trickle in, I’m not pushing them away. With all things stress related in my life, I’m less affected, I’m aware that they happen, but I’m recovering much faster. 

Grief is a stress response, the main difference to everyday stress is that it lasts longer. When a loved one is alive we behave in a routine fashion and we may look back now and think we had taken that for granted. We often say we are grieving for someone, but we are actually grieving for ourselves, our loss of accessibility to the person that we loved, it’s our own loss that we are grieving. We are grieving the loss of a shared experience with the person that has left.  Depending on your belief system, that person could now be experiencing nothing or they could be experiencing pure bliss, personally I feel they return back to the pool of collective consciousness, where they can further support us as the rest of our own lives continue to play out.

You may feel anger towards the person who left, you may feel regret that you didn’t get to experience more with them, our inaccurate expectations, low adaptation energy at the time (we didn’t expect it to happen) and magnitude of the sheer circumstances of what’s happened. What if there was something we could have done, did we ignore the early signs? But what if it was always supposed to happen exactly like this? What if that persons death means more than we currently see? Perhaps their death spurs the people closest to them to make the most out of life and maybe they take a different role in supporting us.

I’ve had lots of lovely messages come in, but often those people feel helpless because they know they can’t do anything to help with grief or ease the pain of it, yes they can support you. But ultimately we have to go through this process on our own. Events like these can often push someone to seek knowledge and this can be a huge opportunity for gaining insight and perhaps even wisdom about the process of grief. Perhaps that person, after gaining knowledge can help other people in our society to go through the essential process of grief with more speed. (Yes, it is essential that we grieve, we need to feel the emotions and let it flow through us, easier said than done, I know!) Again, meditation has helped me feel into the emotion and not run from it and bottle it up.

When we meditate we are training the mind to happily leave the attachment of our everyday sensory experiences, not permanently, just for 20 minutes. Deep inner sense of stable self is lost because of the stimulating sensory experiences in the busy world around us, we never give ourselves the chance to go to this place outside of meditation. We dip into a connected, blissful state of consciousness and we get to experience unprecedented states of rest. In this restful state we start to let go of the back log of unprocessed stress and trauma. We begin to recharge and strengthen our adaptation energy, so when we are faced with new challenges and stressors we can process them more efficiently.

Thank you, Dad, thank you for the lessons you helped me learn so far and for the lessons you’ll help me learn in the future.

He lived for his children and his grandchild, we were his one constant.

I look forward to this new chapter with you.