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Grief Class part 1:On practicing with grief

given by Reizan Bob Penny
Red Cedar Dharma Hall
January 30, 2010

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Shuso Reizan Bob Penny offers a class on practicing with grief in Zen practice and life.

The class 'On Grief' will be an opportunity for sangha members to share and reflect, in a supportive environment, their own processes of grief in their lives and how practice can play a role in the grieving process. Everyone has had periods of time when grief over the loss of a loved one has been profoundly felt. Grief can also manifest around many other types of loss and change. Buddhist teaching shows that all things are passing away and that nothing is beyond this truth. How can our practice help in times of grief? What can we learn about the grieving process and how we, and others in support roles in our lives, often relate to it? Participants are encouraged to share any resources they have come across in their lives that may be of aid to others in the class.

The books for the grief class, which provided much of the background information for the talks were 'Healing Through the Dark Emotions' by Miriam Greenspan (Shambala) and 'The Five Ways We Grieve' by Susan Berger (Trumpeter-Shambala). Lecture number two owes much inspiration from the chapter 'Exploring Grief' in the book 'Healing Into Death and Life' by Steven Levine. Lecture 5 was given as a talk during the final retreat of the 2010 practice period.

I came to the topic of grief for these classes out of my own experiences in life. When thinking of potential class topics I left myself open to whatever seemed to come up as the most pressing concern I could share out of my own life. I suppose it could have been a number of things, but this was what came up. I guess it presented itself because I routinely continue to have many recurring thoughts about some friends of mine who passed away a number of years ago. Sometimes at sesshins I find myself dominated by these thoughts. So I know that there is an active grieving process going on for me around that.

Story – the necessity of grief work for me, 16 deaths, ptsd, anxiety disorder-startle response, crying. Loss of work, inconsistency of life. Zazen – deep settling with a better acceptance of events

It was only after I had decided on the topic that it seemed that we as a sangha began this fall experiencing many losses, and so it turns out that this topic is perhaps especially important for a number of people right now. I realize in fact that the topic may be quite raw for some. I am aware that it will be quite possible that some strong feelings will come up for some people during the class, or perhaps not during the class, but at some other time because of what came up in class. I’m not intending the class to be a therapy group, because I don’t feel qualified to approach it in that way. But I do want emotions to be welcome here. I want this class to be a safe place where, if something strong comes up, we collectively can hold that and helpfully be witnesses and support for that emotion.

So, we are here to explore grief, and so what is grief in it’s basic sense. Grief is an emotion and also an emotional process that comes from the experience of loss. The type of loss that triggers grief can come in many forms, and the intensity of grief can be mild or severe in relationship to the loss. It can also be mild or severe with no seeming regard to the scope of the loss as well. The truest thing to say about grief may be that it is individual to each person. Grief can often strike us as surprising because it can come up strongly and suddenly. And to be attentive to and to honor the more minor griefs of our lives may actually be of aid to understanding and healing the larger griefs. Because grief is perhaps a continuum, a constant emotional factor that we experience and re experience throughout life, as it rises and then submerges above or below a level of awareness in our daily lives. It seems that this is because grief has as much to do with ourselves in relationship to our losses as it does to the things and people we have lost. In other words the attitude we bring to losses is as important to consider as the fact of the loss itself.

I think that one of the things that can trip us up most about grief is the attitude we bring to it, and we may not have a very clear understanding of what this attitude is but it’s simply what we bring to it. But it’s something we map over a feeling that is coming up inside of us and we give ourselves a message about that feeling. Like we may give ourselves a judgmental message like “I need to just get it together”. Or because grief is perhaps a pervasive emotion that we mostly keep at bay in our live when it it does break the surface it may seem like a disturbance that we feel we need to quell.

When we experience a loss our lives fracture. What we once knew is now no more. A part of us remains with the past, with how things were, and also with the path or trajectory of life that the past suggested we may have before the loss, however different it may be than the path our lives has taken after the loss. So we experience grief about the loss itself – the person or thing itself that is now gone, and also about everything the loss represents – the potential for how things would perhaps have been if the loss had not occurred. Husband/wife example. So grief plays out like ripples in a pond. So you go forward in life in a different role than you had anticipated but remembering the role you had anticipated, and experiencing the difference between the two, and that difference is part of that sense of grief. A part of what we define as ourselves is now gone and there is a rupture in our self-conception, and this rupture is experiences as a sorrowful pain.

All that we have lost, and the potential that the losses represented, the absence of those things constitutes a sort of shadow self – the unrealized self, the part of ourselves that is torn, missing, and incomplete. It is sort of an unrealized self. So our conglomerated sense of “me” contains these ruptures and shadows. We might say we have unfinished business, or that we are living in the past. It is important to recognize how we relate to this part of ourselves. Do we even have a connection to this part of ourselves that we recognize, or do these things ride below the surface. And if we do recognize aspects of our grief, how do we hold that – with some honor and dignity for what we are experiencing and for what we have lost, or with some form of judgment about or denial of the intensity of the feelings or the importance of the loss.

We all adopted a certain set of attitudes towards the grief and the grieving process, and weather we are much aware of this or not it is a critical part of how we relate to grief as it comes and goes in our lives. One of the things that happens when we experience a huge loss is that a big emotion comes up and we say to ourselves “how did this happen for this huge emotion to come up.” The most helpful thing for me to recognize is this idea of a continual flow of the grieving process. That it’s not something that just comes up and then we try to get it put aside so that we can be away from it and be happy again, but that there is a continual flow of grief and loss, it happens at different levels. We are constantly dealing with loss, the passing away of things, and then sometime that hits us stronger. . Even the passing away of our lives in the most simple sense is an occasion for grief. Who has not looked back with a wistful emotion over the previous year perhaps and recognized that those times are gone, we are older now, and we will never be in that place or time again.

As we experience new losses how does the way we have or have not worked with our past grief effect the way we experience new grief. Do we have a typical pattern we each come to this process with, or have learned to use to deal with these feelings. How do we relate to the raw feelings themselves, the emotionally hot sensations, the palpable sense of weight and gravity that grief brings. Do we recognize if our personal grief is connected in any way to some larger collective grief, a shared perception of loss that is concerned with the world we all share – in society or as part of the community of nature.

Exploring grief involves touching on all of these areas, because grief is a pervasive emotion. What we feel concerning one loss in our lives brings up connected feeling for other losses. Sometimes witnessing a loss of someone else’s, or experiencing a minor loss can bring up a flood of feeling connected to some greater loss that until now we haven’t been able to feel much about. Working with grief is not about simply addressing the feeling surrounding particular and isolated losses, as if to dispel a headache or get over the flu. Working with grief is about attending to the whole process of grief as a current of emotion in our lives – to recognize the ever present arising and passing away of all things with a sympathetic heart, and to work like a trail maintenance crew, keeping the pathway clear and well traveled.

Now each of us is coming to this class with our own particular losses. Some of us may be here thinking of one loss in particular, perhaps something recent and raw. Others may be here with a whole collection of losses, no one of which seems fully more present than any of the others. Some may have losses in your past that you feel you our beyond and do not feel that you bring any particularly charged emotion to the situation now. And some may feel that life, to this point, has left you relatively unscathed, without great losses to be mourned, and your primary issue with grief is that you haven’t experienced much of it, you feel inexperienced, and you are worried for how it will be when it does come. But, although it may seem as though we are each coming from different directions, we all have a relationship to grief – an established way in which we each approach loss and the emotions that accompany it.

No one here should feel pressured to reveal anything that you do not feel comfortable sharing. We will be doing significant moments of sharing during the class in small groups to help lessen the sense that our grief is being revealed publicly. One common aspect of the grieving process is a difficulty about speaking about our loss to anyone. We feel that our loss is unspeakable and too heavy to be shared, that if we were to share it then everything, our whole lives, might fall apart. Sometimes there’s that feeling that “I don’t want to let anyone this out, I don’t want to get into it, because it’s just going to make things worse.” Another thing can just the opposite, a feeling that I need to tell everyone, even in the most inappropriate situation. So sharing or not sharing and the dynamic of sharing is really important for the grieving process. So here we will try to have sharing happen in a safe and controlled way, to experience sharing in a way that feels healing. So we should respect that and there are no expectations about what should be shared. Others style of grieving may lead them to feel compelled to share, to even have to be vigilant about how they are publicly, to understand that the emotion is raw for others to hear.

But sharing grief is a very important part of process of grieving. Grief that is shared has the opportunity to flow onward, and grief that is kept inside can sometimes fester. At the same time, it is often in the quietest moments when some subtle shift happens where grief finds a level of resolution that any amount of public sharing could not provide. Sometime we might not recognize a healing thought and we just jump back into how we usually avoid or numb our feelings. Grief is not a linear process, and first and foremost we should have respect for whatever process our grief presents. Sometimes a new grief emerges within us in a very different way than past griefs have, and we are surprise by something new and unfamiliar. At other times grief seems to pile up, one on the next, all with the same texture, and the texture is becoming heavier with each new loss.

One way to get a handle on what our own grieving process looks like is to examine the beliefs we hold about grief in our lives. What patterns of thoughts and behaviors do we have today because of our own legacy of grief? We are going to start by considering a couple of questions together in small groups. When exploring these questions we will need to think about ourselves based upon the evidence of what we observe ourselves doing and feeling when we grieve, and so we may need to remember back to some certain time. This can help bring focus to what we are sharing.

Bringing up a focal loss out of your life, a signature loss.

I think of grief as….

What my grief says about me is…

If I fully experienced my grief I would…

What I’d most like to do with my grief is….

Positive affirmations

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