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Accompanying, Knowing, and Liberating Grief

The topic for this talk is grief, and maybe the talk can be titled Liberating Grief. What motivates this talk in large part is the one-year anniversary of many of us going into sheltering in place, and the dramatic way in which our whole world—99% of it—has been turned upside down, inside out, or radically changed by the pandemic. In marking this one-year anniversary, it feels important to acknowledge, make room for, and bring forth the grief that has been part of this year. Grief is not something that should be shied away from or be embarrassed about; it's actually a very important part of human beings and our human life, and it should be acknowledged, understood, and seen.

What is significant, I think, for many of us to recognize is that the griefs of the last year have been wide-ranging. Certainly, some of them are huge. Millions of people around the world have died; in the United States, well over 500,000 people have died directly from the disease and the illness. Then there are many who have been seriously sick, some with long-term effects—long-haulers whose symptoms continue for months and months, and maybe it will be for years. So there is a grief of the loss of so many things: loss of people, family members, and friends from death and sickness. Then there is the grief of just the loss of connections. People we have been regularly connected to are sheltering in place themselves, and there is not much communication. There is the grief of not being social in the same way we were before.

There are all these small griefs that go along with what we experience—of all the things we cannot do, or that we are used to doing and that we value doing, and all the small ways in which we have gotten energized and inspired about life and ready to go out and do it, which are not available. Some people find there is a slow, steady attrition of energy, of inspiration, of motivation, partly from the slow drip-by-drip of little griefs, sorrows, and sadness that go on.

Then there are the things that happen in our society: the challenges, the griefs, the sorrow, the sadness about politics, racial injustice, and economic injustice. Nowadays, we are aware of medical injustice, environmental injustice, violence, and hatred. The violence against Asian Americans is heartbreaking. The violence against Black Americans is heartbreaking. And the hatred that exists in our society, where people go around shooting each other—all these things together are forms of sadness and grief that can accumulate if they are not acknowledged, not known, and not liberated.

So there are three ways of being with grief: there is accompanying grief, there is knowing grief, and there is liberating grief. What I like about these words—accompanying, knowing, and liberating—is that grammatically they can both be a verb and an adjective. Accompanying grief means we are companions to it; we bring ourselves to be present for it and exist with it. But accompanying grief can also be the grief that accompanies us. It is a mutual relationship between you and your grief, and to feel and experience that mutuality is to really allow the accompanying to be full.

There is knowing grief, where we can know it, but there is also the grief that knows something. Grief is not just ignorant, dumb, or uninformed. Grief is something that is really well informed about something very important. What is it that grief knows? When we know grief, we are also learning what grief knows. Liberating grief means we can liberate the grief, perhaps, but there is also the idea that there is a grief that is liberating. How can something as painful and difficult as grief can be at times be liberating as well? To even say those words or suggest that idea can feel like a betrayal to the grief we have, or it could feel like an insult to the degree of pain we can experience in grief.

Grief is such an important topic for us, and I had this in mind that we could somehow do this talk together—not just me talking, but maybe those of you who have access to the chat, we can do this as teamwork.

Accompanying Grief

Grief is an ordinary part of human beings' lives. It is to be expected that we will have grief. It is not a mistake to have grief. If we are living, paying attention, caring about life and caring about things, there will be grief, there will be sorrow, there will be sadness. To spend time with that and allow ourselves to feel it, to trust it, to be with it—people who do mindfulness practices can really appreciate how valuable it is to be with all this. Partly because we start feeling that to not be with it is to not be with ourselves. As we learn to be really present for our experience, present in ourselves, and open up to all of who we are, there is a feeling of coming home to ourselves, feeling whole in ourselves, complete in ourselves with no part left out. In doing so, we become a refuge to ourselves. We become a place of support, a place of freedom, a place where we are allowed to be full and complete.

As soon as we have something like grief that is too painful for us, or too embarrassing for us, or something we want to push away, ignore, or repress, then we are dividing ourselves. We are no longer whole. We are no longer able to come back into our hearts and feel at home there. To accompany ourselves, to accompany the grief, is a means to learn to stay whole, learn to stay complete, or learn to be a refuge to ourselves, no matter how big and strong the pain is.

There is good reason why people want to avoid grief, and that is because it can be painful. Acute grief is searing; it is like everything is torn apart, the fabric of the world is torn apart, and it can be excruciating to feel some griefs. It is very painful, and so the idea of accompanying grief is to accompany our pain. If we do not do that, then the grief and the pain remains, but maybe it goes underground. It gets repressed or gets ignored, but it still operates. It is still there festering. If it has not really been dealt with fully, or with dignity or nobility, then it can come back in unexpected and maybe unhealthy ways, in terms of anger, or excessive fear, or being too closed and numb to what is going on.

To accompany all this is to accompany the ways we go numb, to accompany also the ways we get angry, the ways we feel helpless and hopeless—to just accompany ourselves in the pain. I did that this last week to some degree for me personally. It was a very touching experience, a time for me where I moved my mother into a memory care home. I think the most poignant part of it was walking across the parking lot of the memory care place to bring her to the door. Because of COVID, we could not come in; someone comes out, receives her, and accompanies her in while I stay behind. Here I was, walking across the parking lot, very acutely aware of what was painful for me over 60 years ago. That was one of the earliest memories I have of my mother: her accompanying me when I was about four years old across a school playground. I was holding her hand, and I was crying because I was going to the first day of school in a foreign country, in a language I did not speak. In Geneva, they spoke French, and I did not speak French. I was going to a Catholic kindergarten that was run by nuns. She was walking me across, I was holding her hand, I was crying. And now, over 60 years later, the roles were reversed. Her memory was not such that she quite understood what was going on, but I did. That came back, and I made space for it.

After I took her there, I went for a long walk in the hills around here just to accompany my grief, to accompany my sadness over what was going on. The richness of it was partly the leftover of a certain pain; it is the memory of the pain from over 60 years ago that speaks to a principle that sometimes our griefs are previous griefs. Even more so, if the griefs are unresolved or have been pushed down or ignored, they get reawakened with new griefs. The new griefs can be much more acute because of the legacy of griefs that we have had.

To accompany grief is to accompany pain. For people who do mindfulness practice, we begin discovering that there is a difference between pain and suffering. This makes a world of difference, and this is really what the heart of Buddhist practice is about. If we can see that difference, then we can maybe learn to let go of the suffering, and then learn with nobility and compassion to accompany the pain that is part of human life. The suffering is when we contract around the pain, when we close the heart around the pain, when we cover over the pain, when we resist the pain, when we are afraid of the pain. All these other ways that we contract and get wrapped up in it is the suffering, but the pain does not have to be. That is what we are liberating in Buddhist practice: all that complicated reactivity to the pain. Just to live with the pain, make space for it, be open to it, be a refuge for the pain, help the pain feel safe in us—and to learn that art, to learn that ability to accompany our pain.

It begins by recognizing what the pain is, naming it so that we can see what has been going on. For this pandemic, in marking this anniversary, there have been big griefs—big things to grieve—and small things to grieve. All these tiny incidental things that some people say shouldn't count, that they shouldn't be dealing with, but the accumulation of all these small little things and losses over this year add up to a lot. One of the lessons of grief is to never discount any grief. Never feel that because other people's grief is so much bigger, mine shouldn't count. Every grief counts. Every grief is something to accompany, to know, and to liberate, because if we don't do that, then slowly, incrementally we begin closing down or pushing under, and the vitality, the fullness of being here is going to be diminished.

If you are willing, maybe you could write in the chat one, two, or three words of what you have grieved this last year that has to do with this pandemic. It would be nice to have some names associated to these different kinds of griefs. What have you grieved over this last year?

Grieving hugs. Lost hugs. The absence of intimacy and physical contact with people. Not seeing a grandson. Going to school and seeing my friends. Not being able to see my parents. Death of 20 clients. Loss of relationships. I can't read them all, but: community. Lost, distorted social connection. Sad many past griefs have resurfaced. Being in class with my students. Isolation. Nourishing human touch. Family visits. Not being with grandchildren. Loss of grandmother. Sitting in community. Connecting with many friends. Dying. High school son's loss of his senior year. No hugs. Loss of the world and freedom as it was. Being alone so much. Missed celebrations. Loss of sense of safety. Our cat that died this year after 15 years as our companion—these losses of pets can be a huge, huge grief. Loss of a closest friend. Not being in Sangha^[1] with distant relatives. Moments even of freedom from fear. Not attending a dear friend's father's funeral. Illness. Political corruption. PTSD. Dad's funeral. I have not seen my daughter and grandchildren for more than a year. Loss of truth and compassion from leadership. Music jams. Lost my ability to understand my loved ones. Changing friendships.

Thank you all for writing all those things; it is a big deal. These are the things to accompany, these are things to name and to be with. Sometimes it is helpful to have support and accompaniment. That is sometimes having friends you can talk to about the griefs we have, not to fix, not to solve, but just to have companionship in the grief. Some griefs are so difficult to be our own companion to, that having someone else who can support us in that process is important. There are grief counselors, for example, and they are useful in many ways, but one way is that they know how to be companions and be present. So it is easier for us to then be our own companions for our grief because we have someone who really knows how to do it and can do it with care, compassion, and acceptance. Then learning how to be willing, learning how to be comfortable—if that is the right word—with feeling pain, learning how to be open to feeling pain, learning the wisdom of being with pain. The more we love something that we have lost, that love does not go away, and that something is precious.

Knowing Grief

The second step of this three-step process is knowing grief. Really getting to know, what is this grief? What is this pain? Being willing to really attend to it. Because there is a tendency sometimes when we are in a situation where we are in a lot of pain and hurt and feeling of betrayal, to get angry and push things away and be hostile. That is natural enough; it is a way of avoiding sometimes the pain. But to really get to know the pain—because the way in which we love something to that degree, our beautiful capacity for love, our beautiful capacity for something good is there buried in the pain. It is found together with the pain; pain isn't all necessarily bad.

To really get to know grief and know pain, to know that part of the grief that is suffering as opposed to pain, to be able to make that distinction between the contractions we have and the resistance, the shoulds and the shouldn'ts: "I shouldn't be feeling grief, I should be over it by now, I'm supposed to go through grief perfectly, I'm supposed to resolve my grief, I'm supposed to heal my grief." I don't know if we're supposed to heal grief. Some people heal grief, but I don't know if we're supposed to or required always to resolve grief. Some of us are never healed in the sense that the pain never goes away, but we can make more space for it. It is part of our deep humanity to feel the pain of living life. Real freedom can coexist with pain. Freedom does not coexist with suffering. Suffering is the loss of freedom. So just keep opening the heart and allow it to be broken, allow it to have space for the pain that we feel.

Sometimes grief can be so strong that any words about it, like the words I'm using today, can feel impossible and too difficult to listen to, and it doesn't make any sense. Occasionally, we have to reach rock bottom for something to finally give out. It just seems so impossible, and to really accompany, really know how impossible it is and stay there with it is part of what this mindfulness practice teaches: to be with pain, to be with it all.

Now just remembering some of the things that I was thinking about... I've grieved in my life anticipated futures that won't happen because my friend died. We grieve what happened in the past, we grieve what didn't happen in the past, what should have happened in the past. So there are all these layers and layers of grief that we can feel.

This knowing grief in Vipassana^[2] practice has a lot to do with the direct experience in the moment, which is to feel it in your body. What is the manifestation of grief here and now in the body? What parts of the body are touched, and moved, and ache with grief? If we can find and identify how it is physically here and now, then that becomes a place, the very location where we begin opening up to it. We open the heart, we open the mind, we open attention and see how big the awareness could be so we can hold that place and be with it. Sometimes it is not located in the body; it just seems overwhelming. But sometimes when it is located in the body, it has a location to be close with, intimate with, to touch, or to connect to.

So maybe here on the chat again, would some of you be willing to write how and where in the body do you experience grief?

There are wonderful bodies that carry so much. I have difficulty swallowing. Stomach and chest. Digestion. Mostly in the heart, upper chest, throat. Right below the heart. My face, throat, chest. Tightening of my chest. My heart aches. Heart and lungs. My heart area in my chest. Upper chest and throat. Right behind the sternum. Throat. Absolutely in the chest and throat. Eyes and forehead. Breath in the smile. Less easy to turn up the ankle. Up around my eyes, I squint a lot. Torso, upper neck, hot, teary eyes. Tightness of belly. Broken heart in the chest and heart like a vacuum in my heart. Breath tightens, tightness in the brain. Jaw tightens. Shoulders. Headache from angry thoughts. Brain, core of my being, center of my body. Water flowing out—yeah, lots of tears. Headache, lower back. In the voice. Darkness in the head and the entire being.

Thank you for all that. So many ways it manifests in the body. These are the places that we bring our compassion and care. These are the places we hold. These are places where you want to bring a sense of safety. To do mindfulness is to bring a sense of safety to these places in the body that ache and hurt and are contracted and tight. There is a way to trust feeling it, sensing it, and being with it. It can be very, very hard.

One of the things that makes grief particularly difficult is when we feel helpless or hopeless with our grief. A sense of helplessness for some people, especially if it is chronic, is really debilitating. The ability to accompany, to know, to feel and connect, to make space for, and to hold in the body is a way that starts overcoming this feeling of helplessness. We can help ourselves; there is hope for ourselves through this practice of mindfulness. We have something we can do. We might be helpless in terms of bringing back those who are dead or gone, but it does not leave us as a helpless person. We can engage with agency, with a sense of purpose.

It is a profound thing to learn the ability to hold our pain and not add layers of suffering on top of it. There is no shame in adding suffering on top of our pain, because sometimes what we need to accompany, what we need to open to, is a clear seeing, knowing, and experiencing of those layers of reactivity we have. Without that, we don't have a hope of really experiencing what Charlie Brown called 'good grief'. Good grief is the grief that is simple, unentangled. We don't have all these layers of shoulds and shouldn'ts on top of it: "It should be different," "We should be over it right now," or "I don't deserve to be grieving because other people's grief is so much more."

Liberating Grief

Finally, there is liberating grief. This is what I have been saying all along: liberating the grief not by getting rid of it, not by no longer having grief, but liberating it from all the suffering on top of it. Liberating it from all the reactivity, all the judgments, all the angers, all the pushing away, the resistance, all the ways in which we divide ourselves by shutting out part of who we are because it is too painful to be with. To liberate is to become whole. To liberate is to leave no part left out. All of who we are is allowed to be there, not because we are justifying, celebrating, or condoning it necessarily, but so that we can open up and have it all be part of the whole.

The whole is always greater than the parts, and grief is one of the parts. It can feel like it is the whole thing when it is really intense, but it is always a piece, a part of the whole. To make room for it, hold it, and be with it might mean that the liberated person might cry, because the pure simplicity of the pain brings along tears. Tears are not a sign of being unliberated; they might be a sign that we are actually beginning to liberate ourselves. That is where the liberation happens.

I love the idea that it is possible to cry in meditation, because there is something about the meditation posture where we never collapse, we never sink, we never give up. We never succumb to it, but we stay simple, relaxed, upright. Upright, and let the tears flow. So there is not the self-pity or the giving up; there is freedom in just crying. There is freedom, there is liberation found in that sometimes. Liberating our grief without needing it to go away so that we can go through our life continuing to experience the griefs that will come. There is no final freedom from grief and sadness, but to go through life and be free in the midst of it is to allow ourselves to feel it—the vitality, the fullness of life with the grief and with the joys, and with the love and with all that is here.

This is not resolving grief in terms of it going away. Grief has its own life. Liberating our grief is to be generous to our grief so the grief can have its freedom, the grief can do what it needs to do. And to learn to trust the heart. The heart knows what to do with grief. If we have liberated it, if we know it, accompany it, and get out of its way—if we have liberated our grief from ourselves—our hearts know what to do. Sometimes we have to be patient; it takes time.

Some of you maybe have had some experience of grief liberated in the way I describe here. How does it feel? How do you know that grief has been liberated? How is that experienced in you? How is it experienced in your body? What is it like to have grief maybe even still present, but you really feel it has been liberated?

“There can be a purity to the feeling of grief and strong emotion. Maybe that's part of the liberation.” Yes. Part of what it feels like for me is a willingness. The liberation of grief comes along with a willingness to grieve, a willingness to have pain. “Breaking away and lifting of weight.” “I feel like I'm cared for and safe.” “When I let it go, I felt more here and connected to others.” “Compassion.” “Sense in grief emerging.” “Sense of peace.” “Feeling joy along with the sorrow.” “Getting in touch with the raw emotion and being with it.” “Forgiveness.” “There is truth in the deep sorrow and grief.” “Lifted weight of grief.” “More love and accompanying grief.” “Relaxation and gratitude.” “I feel lighter, it feels cleansing.” “Forgiveness.” “More peace and openness.” “Acceptance of experience, at peace with it.” “Putting down a large rock.” “Grief from childhood became compassion for my parents.” “Heart opens and I cry more with the connection.” “Grief is a necessary part of moving on from the loss.” “Feeling the joy right next to it.”

Great, thank you for all this very much. “Feeling the love behind and inside of grief, and feeling grateful for such love.” “Relief.” “The heart knows what to do with grief when it has been liberated; I will always carry this incredibly wise statement, thank you.” Oh, it's a quote. Thank you.

Reflections

Accompanying our grief, knowing our grief, and liberating grief. Three different ways of being with grief. At different times, different ones are appropriate. It is a profound part of our human life, and it has been a very significant part of this last year. As we begin the second year of COVID, with whatever changes might be coming, to acknowledge a little bit what happened this last year, and to have spent time really accompanying, knowing, and liberating this grief, hopefully will let us go into this new world, this new year, more capable, more willing, more wise in how to continue to meet the griefs that will come one way or the other.

We will still have griefs. Even when the pandemic is over, we will have griefs; this is part of human life. There is no liberation without being liberated in relationship to our grief as well. We are grieving beings just as much as we are loving beings, compassionate beings, forgiving beings. We are also beings that can experience pain. So thank you very much for this.

I am aware that grief is a huge well, an abyss of pain sometimes, very difficult, and bringing it up today and evoking it this way might be very hard for some of you. I encourage you to spend some time today caring for yourself if that is the case. Maybe talk to friends, go for walks. If you have no one to talk to, journal about it, write about it so you give it some expression. But do take care of yourself. If this talk was particularly difficult, maybe in a few days listen to it again. There might be something moving and bubbling inside of you from it. But I wish you well, and I offer you this talk with a lot of desire and care and compassion for your welfare and happiness, and for all of us as we go forward together in this next year. May all of us support each other in this process. Thank you all very much.