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Grief Class part 2:On practicing with grief

given by Reizan Bob Penny
Food Coop Connection Building
February 06, 2010

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Shuso Reizan Bob Penny offers a class on practicing with grief in Zen practice and life. See class 1 for information about books and resources.

Steven Levine – “when we are in grief we are no longer blind to our blindness”

Between the numbness we often seek to keep so that we can simply move through our days unaffected, and the blindingly bright awareness that on rare occasions shows us that we still possess the ability to be fully open and vulnerable, able to meet each change and loss with complete dignity and healing, there seems to lie a pretty wide gap. And in that gap there are places where feelings coalesce into what seems like rigid and solid states – things we call fear, anger, or despair.

When grief comes up strongly in our lives these rigid feelings are often sharply accentuated. We feel our pain, our anger, our despair acutely. They seem to engulf us as if from nowhere and it often feels as though just the prospect of going on with our daily lives is fraught with a new inertia. Mostly we seem to choose to avoid the difficulty of managing the feelings. We move usually towards the numb end of the spectrum, imagining that in doing so we have resolved the feelings, or at least cleverly sidestepped them so that they will not affect us.

And yet sometimes grief is so acute that even this numbing seems impossible to achieve. Once I lost a long term relationship. It seems now in hindsight that it was for the best that it ended, but of course this was not what I was telling myself about it at the time. For about four months I woke up each morning and the very first thing that would happen, as the reality of waking life coalesced back into my mind and sleep departed, was a crushing sense of loss, and I would wake up crying. Coming from sleep there was little I could do to avoid this. It simply happened each morning before I was awake enough to have any other reaction.

It was soon apparent to me that the intensity of emotion I was feeling really didn’t have to do fully with just this one person. As the reality of how the relationship actually had not been working seeped into my mind I began to see events of the previous number of years in a completely new light. In moving through this process I now see that the early morning emotional outbursts were a gift. I would not have felt the depth of the sadness in another way as directly as I could coming from the vulnerable threshold of sleep. Being somewhat not in control of the process then it just kept happening, and as this went on I could see the quality of the emotions I felt shift.

There was an expansion of space around it all, almost a forgetting of what the pain was all about, just an intense awareness of the sensation itself out of any context. Eventually it simply transformed, like clouds moving up the rising currents of air along a huge mountain, a new level was reached, and cumulous simply transforming into cirrus, or into vapor when some invisible threshold was finally reached. Now nothing like this kind of morning visitation of feelings happens to me anymore, but how the shift happened I really can’t say.

But the process of going through the shift is something that did seem quite evident. There was a full exploration of the feelings, at first solid and overwhelming, but increasingly familiar and, because they were unavoidable, accompanied by a sense of surrender. This I believe is a critical shift, where grief brings emotions into such sharp and painful relief that avoidance and numbing out are impossible. We might believe that we would want to avoid this kind of thing if at all possible, but that is clearly not an option anymore.

And so surrender becomes our new mode of dealing with the feelings. There were many times when some people in my life during this period of time would wonder if perhaps I should try to find some way to let go of such intensity of feelings, search out a way to “move on.” From my perspective at the time this all seemed like a potentially good notion, but since it simply was not possible, not really an option. Grief had me in it’s clutches, and riding it through was the only way to go.

Now I see the whole time period as something I’m glad to have gone through. I know that something changed in me. Change was unavoidable. In deep grief the same protections, judgments, and resistances we have to our lives and the world become highlighted and painfully evident. If we are someone with anger to feel then we feel that anger intensely. If we are someone with despair to feel then the feeling becomes crushing and overwhelming.

But the feelings themselves are not new. Instead grief shows us our same old selves, but in a new stark and vulnerable light. For me, in losing a relationship rather than experiencing a death, it was easier to see this as true. I could not mourn over the loss of a life and have that existential level of denial, and bargaining that flirts with the borderline of everything we don’t know about death.

Here the other person had left, and by all reports was doing just fine. I was the one going through the whole process. It was easy to see that there was no traction to be gained in wishing her to be having a similar process – some sort of just parity of emotions. In breakups the central reality is that the relationship has disconnected – that it is clear that separate and completely different emotional processes are simply part of the territory. Where you once worked out difficulty together, now you were alone.

So grief seems to be inseparable from the whole set of emotions connected to it – fear, despair, anger. As you go into it it actually feels as those these clunky labels don’t really serve any more. Along the continuum from grief to gratitude there is no discernable seam or transition point. But anger becomes an energy without an object, despair becomes a field of unknown depth or dimension, fear becomes a pervasive awareness of danger without anything indicating what to be afraid of. The energy of the emotions themselves becomes the primary guide. The feelings come strongly without bidding, and the process is automatic.

Now, in the process of grieving, we see what we did not see before. We see our fears, our judgments, and our self pity with complete clarity. Our usual blindness is revealed, our usual avoidance techniques lose their ability to distract us, and we come easily to understand how our grief is not isolated and singular, but is instead a pervasive part of our lives and of the world around us. We see the background grief of our life – the homesickness we always have for just this present moment, just the moment right here that we can never seem to fully be with and in.

Often part of what causes so much pain is the sense that we never really had what it is we have lost. We both become more accepting of the fact that we can never really possess anything, and at the same time we appreciate so much more any connection we do seem to possess. And if grief is weathered through we begin to find a new sense of what life means to us. We have lost something or someone, and everything that remains, which at first all seemed grey and completely unable to fill the void of our loss, becomes now seen with far more appreciation. Our continual sense of separateness gets derailed by grief, which encourages us, and even demands us, to become more open to our lives and connections in the present.

In this way grief is a gift, but a gift which must be unpackaged and assembled. It doesn’t come to us ready made. It is something we each need to work with it in whatever form it presents itself. However different it may seem than another’s grief, however different it may seem that anything else we would prefer to be experiencing, the form grief comes to us in is the only form we have to work with. And it may be, we might find as we go along, somehow the perfect form just for us after all. This is the wisdom that our emotions can present.

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