Healing

Healing Your Traumatized Heart: Seeking Safety, Understanding, and Peace (Part 1)
Someone you love has died a sudden, traumatic death. If you are in the early days of your grief journey, you are likely still feeling numbed by shock and disbelief. This is a normal and necessary step, for it is nature's way of protecting you from the full force of the loss all at once. MORE

Healing Your Traumatized Heart: Seeking Safety, Understanding, and Peace (Part 2)
In Part One, I introduced the concept of traumatic grief and its natural overlap with the condition known as PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. While you may not be suffering from full-blown PTSD, the nature of your loss is still traumatic and you are deserving of special care and attention, from yourself as well as others. MORE

Healing Your Grieving Body: Physical Practices for Mourners
This article is in your hands because you are in mourning. You have been "torn apart" and have some very special needs right now. Among these special needs is to nurture yourself in five important ways: physically; emotionally; cognitively; socially; and spiritually. While all of these areas are vitally important, this book focuses on practical ways to nurture yourself in the physical realm. MORE

The Spiritual Path to Healing: An Introduction
After the death of someone loved, you are "torn apart" and have some very unique needs. Among these needs is to nurture yourself in five important areas: physically, emotionally, cognitively, socially, and spiritually. In the coming months, this column will focus on nurturing yourself in the spiritual realm. MORE

The Spiritual Path to Healing: Mourning Ideas (Part 1)
Above all, mourning is a spiritual journey of the heart and soul. Grief and loss invite you to consider why people live, why people die, and what gives life meaning and purpose. These are the most spiritual questions we have language to form. MORE

The Spiritual Path to Healing: Mourning Ideas (Part 2)
Nurturing your spirit relates to caring for that part of yourself that is transcendent. Your spirit speaks to you with inner messages and invites you to surround yourself with positive regard. MORE

The Spiritual Path to Healing: Mourning Ideas (Part 3)
The mystery of grief invites you to honor the need for periods of silence and solitude. As you quiet yourself, you sustain an open heart and a gentle spirit. Mother Teresa often said, "The beginning of prayer is silence." MORE

The Spiritual Path to Healing: Mourning Ideas (Part 4)
Get in touch with the Creator by creating. Make something that expresses your feelings or honors the loss you are mourning. MORE

Healing Your Traumatized Heart: Seeking Safety, Understanding, and Peace (Part 1)
By Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

Someone you love has died a sudden, traumatic death.

If you are in the early days of your grief journey, you are likely still feeling numbed by shock and disbelief. This is a normal and necessary step, for it is nature's way of protecting you from the full force of the loss all at once. You will embrace the reality, in doses and over time, as you are ready. If you have journeyed longer and further into the wilderness of your grief, you may be struggling with profound anger, despair, and other emotions. These feelings, too, are normal and necessary. In fact, whatever you are feeling, and no matter where you are in your grief journey, your feelings are not right or wrong -- they simply are. Embracing them and expressing them are your tasks on the path that leads to healing.

You may have found that you are struggling with both the traumatic nature of the death and your grief over this overwhelming loss. For purposes of this article, trauma can be defined as an event of such intensity, brutality, or magnitude of horror that it would overwhelm any human being's capacity to cope. You have been traumatized, which is essentially a normal response to an extreme event.

Trauma: An injury; something hurtful. The wounding of your emotions, your spirit, your beliefs about yourself and the world, your will to live, your dignity, your sense of security.

Naturally, traumatized mourners often find themselves replaying and reconsidering over and over the circumstances of the death. This is both normal and necessary. Such replay helps you begin to acknowledge the reality of the death and integrate it into your life. It is as if your mind needs to devote time and energy to comprehending the circumstances of the death before it can move on to confronting the fact that someone you love has died and will never be present to you again.

Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is a term used to describe the psychological condition that survivors of sudden, violent death sometimes experience. People with PTSD often have nightmares or scary thoughts about the terrible experience they or their loved one went through. They try to stay away from anything that reminds them of the frightening experience. They often feel angry and are unable to care about or trust other people. They are often on the lookout for danger and get very upset when something happens without warning. Their anxiety level is continually high.

The more you learn about trauma and PTSD, the more you will have some sense of control at a time when you naturally feel out of control. Knowledge is one of the best antidotes to anxiety, fear and depression.

If you think you may be experiencing PTSD, talk to your family doctor or a compassionate grief counselor. You may need counseling and/or medication for a time to help you feel safer and cope with your day-to-day life. You will need to get help for your PTSD before you can deal with grief and mourning.

It may be helpful for you to know that your response to trauma and the potential onset of PTSD symptoms has more to do with the intensity and duration of the stressful event in your life than with your personality. Don't think you are "weak" because this traumatic event and its repercussions have overwhelmed your coping resources. Don't feel ashamed if you need professional help. Often it is in acknowledging our helplessness that we ultimately become helpful to ourselves.

But many of you are traumatized without having full-blown PTSD. You may have anxiety and anger. You may think about the circumstances of the death a lot. You may be in great pain. But if you are still able to function in your daily life and interact lovingly with others, you may not have the actual disorder called PTSD. Still, you are traumatized and in need of special care and consideration, both from yourself and from others.

Psychic numbing or acute aftershock: diminished or absent capacity to feel; a form of heightened shock that should be perceived as a healthy response to overwhelming stress. Provides insulation from self and the outside world. This is a normal response to an abnormal event.

The traumatic nature of the death and your thoughts and feelings about it will color every aspect of your grief. It is part of your grief. But it is not the totality of your grief. Other factors that contribute to your grief include the nature of the relationship you had with the person who died, your unique personality, your religious and cultural backgrounds, your gender, your age, your previous experiences with loss, as well as others. Your grief is a complicated blend of thoughts and emotions, most of which stem from your love for the person who died. Over time you will come to find that your grief is as much or more about the life than it is about the death.

Know this: If you are able to muster the courage to actively mourn, you will heal. And you will eventually love and live again. Remember, you are not alone, and there are no rewards for speed. Millions of others have not only survived the traumatic death of a loved one, they've chosen to truly live. Find ways to reach out to these people. Find ways to share your experience. Find ways to make connections.

In Part Two of this article, I will present several ideas to help you mourn and journey toward healing. In the meantime, God bless you. I hope we meet one day.

Copyright 2007, Center for Loss and Life Transition

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Healing Your Traumatized Heart: Seeking Safety, Understanding, and Peace (Part 2)
By Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

In Part One, I introduced the concept of traumatic grief and its natural overlap with the condition known as PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. While you may not be suffering from full-blown PTSD, the nature of your loss is still traumatic and you are deserving of special care and attention, from yourself as well as others.

I also said that if you are able to muster the courage to actively mourn, you will eventually integrate this profound loss into your life, all the time realizing you have been forever transformed and changed by it. And, honoring your need to mourn will eventually allow you to love and live again.

This article presents several self-care suggestions for the early weeks and months of your grief. In later articles I will share additional mourning tips and self-care principles.

Seek safety and comfort

After a traumatic experience, it's natural to feel vulnerable, unsafe and anxious. Your nervous system is telling your brain that the world isn't a safe place right now. Something violent has happened and, you naturally think, it could happen again.

To overcome your trauma, you must locate yourself among people and in places that make you feel safe. If this means moving in with a friend or relative temporarily, that's OK. If this means avoiding certain places or people, that's OK, too.

What calms and comforts you? Taking a walk? Cuddling with someone you love? Hugging your pet? Relaxing in the tub? Yoga or meditation or prayer? Identify activities that soothe you and turn to them when your anxiety is high.

You will not be able to mourn if you feel unsafe or overly anxious. Seek safety and comfort first, and then you can begin to slowly embrace your grief.

Allow for numbness

Feelings of shock, numbness and disbelief are nature's way of temporarily protecting us from the full reality of a sudden, violent death. They help us survive our early grief. We often think, "I will wake up and this will not have happened." Mourning can feel like being in a dream. Your emotions simply need time to catch up with what your mind has been told.

Trauma loss often goes beyond what we consider "normal" shock. In fact, you may experience what is called "psychic numbing" — the deadening or shutting off of emotions. Your sense that "this isn't happening to me" may persist for months, sometimes even years. Don't set rigid expectations for yourself and your ability to function "normally" in the world around you.

Think of shock and numbness as a bandage that your psyche has placed over your wound. The bandage protects the wound until it has become less open and raw. Only after healing has begun and a scab forms is the bandage removed and the wound openly exposed to the world.

Consider yourself in "emotional intensive care"

Something catastrophic has happened in your life. Something assaulting to the very core of your being. Something excruciatingly painful. Your spirit has been deeply injured. Just as your body cannot be expected to recover immediately from a brutal attack, neither can your psyche.

Imagine that you've suffered a severe physical injury and are in your hospital's intensive care unit. Your friends and family surround you with their presence and love. The medical staff attends to you constantly. Your body rests and recovers.

This is the kind of care you need and deserve right now. The blow you have suffered is no less devastating than this imagined physical injury. Allow others to take care of you. Ask for their help. Give yourself as much resting time as possible. Take time off work. Let household chores slide. In the early weeks and months after the death, don't expect — indeed, don't try — to carry on with your normal routine.

Be aware that your grief affects your body, heart, mind, social self, and spirit

Grief is physically demanding. This is especially true with traumatic grief. Your body responds to the stress of the encounter and the immune system can weaken. You may be more susceptible to illness and physical discomforts. You may also feel lethargic, weak or highly fatigued. You may not be sleeping well and you may have no appetite. Your stomach may hurt. Your chest may ache.

The emotional toll of grief is complex and painful. You may feel many different feelings, and those feelings can shift and blur over time.

Your abilities to think, reason, and remember will likely be affected by your traumatic grief, as well, especially in the early weeks and months.

Bereavement also naturally results in social discomfort. Friends and family may withdraw from you, leaving you isolated and unsupported.

You may ask yourself, "Why go on living?" "Will my life have meaning now?" "Where is God in this?" Spiritual questions such as these are natural and necessary but also draining.

Basically, your grief may affect every aspect of your life. Nothing may feel "normal" right now. If this is true for you, don't be alarmed. Just trust that in time, you will find peace and comfort again.

Until next time, remember above all to practice self-compassion. Care for yourself "with passion" and seek out others who will help care for you and listen to you without judgment.

Copyright 2007, Center for Loss and Life Transition

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Healing Your Grieving Body: Physical Practices for Mourners
By Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

"And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief." — C.S. Lewis

This article is in your hands because you are in mourning. You have been "torn apart" and have some very special needs right now. Among these special needs is to nurture yourself in five important ways: physically; emotionally; cognitively; socially; and spiritually. While all of these areas are vitally important, this book focuses on practical ways to nurture yourself in the physical realm.

When you are in mourning, you usually feel under-rested and overwhelmed. Your body is probably letting you know it feels distress. You may feel you have no strength left for your own basic needs, let alone the needs of others. Actually, one literal definition of the word "grievous" is "causing physical suffering." Yes, right now your body is telling you it has, just like your heart, been "torn apart" and has some special needs!

Your body is so very wise. It will try to slow you down and invite you to authentically mourn the losses that touch your life. The emotions of grief are often experienced as bodily-felt energies. We mourn life losses from the inside out. In our experience as a physician and grief counselor, it is only when we care for ourselves physically that we can integrate our losses emotionally and spiritually. Allow us to introduce you to how your body attempts to slow you down and prepare you to mourn your life losses.

Among the most common physical responses to loss are trouble sleeping and low energy. It is so common we even have a fancy term for it-the "lethargy of grief." You are probably finding that your normal sleep patterns have been thrown off. Perhaps you are having difficulty getting to sleep, but even more commonly, you may wake up early in the morning and have trouble getting back to sleep. During your grief journey your body needs more rest than usual. You may also find yourself getting tired more quickly-sometimes even at the start of the day.

Sleeping normally after a loss would be unusual. If you think about it, sleep is the primary way in which we release control. When you experience a life loss, you feel a great loss of control. At a subconscious level, you may not want to lose any more control by sleeping. So sleep problems are very natural in the face of life losses.

Muscle aches and pains, shortness of breath, feelings of emptiness in your stomach, tightness in your throat or chest, digestive problems, sensitivity to noise, heart palpitations, queasiness, nausea, headaches, increased allergy symptoms, changes in appetite, weight loss or gain, agitation, and generalized tension-these are all ways your body may react to losses that you encounter in life.

The stress of grief can suppress your immune system and make you more vulnerable to physical problems. If you have a chronic existing health challenge, it may become worse. Right now you may not feel in control of how your body is responding. Your body is communicating with you about the special needs it has right now. Befriending and mindfully giving attention to your physical symptoms will allow you to discover your body's native intelligence.

Yet, it can be difficult to slow down and care for your body when you are surrounded by common societal messages that tell us to be strong in the face of grief. Have you had anyone tell you things like, "Keep busy," "Carry on," or "You need to put the past in the past"? These and other similar messages often discourage you from practicing physical self-care, which, by contrast, is needed because it invites you to suspend. In actuality, when you are in mourning, you need to slow down, to turn inward, to embrace feelings of loss, and to seek and accept support. No, it is not always easy to care for your physical being in a mourning-avoidant culture. Without doubt, physical self-care takes time, mindfulness, and discernment.

You must realize that physical self-care is vitally important to you right now or you probably would not have picked up this book. As you know, your body is the house you live in. Just as your house requires care and maintenance to protect you from outside elements, your body requires that you honor it and be kind and gentle to it. The quality of your life ahead depends on how you care for your body today. The lethargy of grief you are probably experiencing is a natural mechanism intended to slow you down and encourage you to care for your body.

To practice physical self-care doesn't mean you are feeling sorry for yourself; rather it means you are allowing yourself to have courage to pay attention to your special needs. For it is in physically nurturing yourself that you can eventually allow yourself the time and loving attention you need to journey through your grief to discover a fullness of living and loving again. That is why we encourage anyone who is in the midst of grief to put "nurture my physical self" right at the top of the daily to-do list.

Taking care of your physical self during this naturally vulnerable time in your life is essentially about personal guardianship. It means accepting personal responsibility for your own special health needs as part of your need to self-nurture. We are honored to provide you some information that we believe can and will help you in this endeavor, but just as your body is yours, so is the responsibility you have to care for it.

Right now your "divine spark" — that which gives your life meaning and purpose — may feel like it has been muted or even turned completely off. In large part, our hope is that this book helps your "physical switch" stay on, even if part of you wants to keep it in the off position. You see, we believe if we can help you take care of your physical body, over time and with no rewards for speed, your spirit, your "life force" or divine spark, can be re-ignited, and you can find renewed meaning and even joy in your life.

So, self-care is about being reminded to care for your body with the right actions, right living, and right thinking. You will practice self-care when you believe that you deserve it and when you love yourself enough to carry it out. The presence of daily, thoughtful care of your grieving body is a clear reflection of your holiness, and a lack of self-care represents an internal disregard for your being. So, as difficult as it may be for you right now, caring for your body is vital to your temporary surviving and your longer-term thriving.

Copyright 2007, Center for Loss and Life Transition

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The Spiritual Path to Healing: An Introduction
By Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

After the death of someone loved, you are "torn apart" and have some very unique needs. Among these needs is to nurture yourself in five important areas: physically, emotionally, cognitively, socially, and spiritually. In the coming months, this column will focus on nurturing yourself in the spiritual realm.

When someone we love dies, it is like a deep hole implodes inside of us. It's as if the hole penetrates us and leaves us gasping for air. I have always said we mourn life losses from the inside out. In my experience, it is only when we are spiritually nurtured (inside and outside) that we discover the courage to mourn openly and honestly.

To integrate spiritual practices into your life demands a reminder that:

• Spirituality invites you to slow down and turn inward.
• Spirituality invites you to feel deeply and to believe passionately.
• Spirituality invites you to get to know your authentic self.
• Spirituality invites you to celebrate diversity.
• Spirituality invites you to be open to the mystery.

To practice spiritual self-care doesn't mean you are feeling sorry for yourself. Rather, it means you are allowing yourself to have the courage to pay attention to your special needs. For it is in spiritually nurturing ourselves, in allowing ourselves the time and loving attention we need to journey through our grief, that we find meaning in our continued living. That is why, if I could, I would encourage all of us when we are in the midst of grief to put down "Nurture my spirit" first on our daily to-do lists.

The Mosaic World We Live In

Perhaps you have noticed that our world has gotten much smaller religiously in the last fifty years. Eastern religions and spiritual practices arrived in the United States and Canada a little more than 150 years ago. Then, in the 1960s, we saw books, lectures, and workshops from folks like Thich Nhat Hanh and Ram Dass, who invited us Westerners to explore Eastern spiritual practices. This influx of Eastern traditions and practices created new life to spirituality in North America.

While our differences still define us, our potential to borrow meaningful spiritual practices from each other unites us. The great equalizer — death — invites us to be enriched by learning from each other.

As you read this article, while I encourage you to nurture yourself spiritually, I recognize that spirituality and religiosity are not synonymous. In some people's lives they overlap completely; their religious life is their spiritual life. Other people have a rich spiritual life with few or no ties to an organized religion. Obviously, each of us needs to define our own spirituality in the depths of our own hearts and minds. The paths we choose will be our own discovered through self-examination, reflection, and spiritual transformation.

My Personal Journey and the "Switch"

When grief and loss have touched my life, I have discovered that my own personal source of spirituality anchors me, allowing me to put my life into perspective. For me, spirituality involves a sense of connection to all things in nature, God, and the world at large.

Someone with some wisdom once observed, "Spirituality is like a switch. Everybody has one; it's just that not everyone has it turned on." Sometimes, experiences of grief and loss can turn off our switch. We are human and sometimes our switches feel stuck, or worse yet, nonexistent. Our "divine spark" — that which gives life meaning and purpose — feels like it has been muted.

My switch is turned on when I live from a desire to see a loving God in the everyday. In the midst of grief, I can still befriend hope, and the most ordinary moment can feed my soul. Spirituality is anchored in faith, which is expecting goodness even in the worst of times. It is not about fear, which is expecting the worst even in the best of times.

Spirituality reminds you to understand that you can and will integrate losses into your life, see the goodness in others, and know that there are many pathways to Heaven.

The Openness of a Child

If you have doubt about your capacity to connect with God and the world around you, try to approach the world with the openness of a child. Embrace the pleasure that comes from the simple sights, smells, and sounds that greet your senses.

I truly believe that acknowledging your heart is broken is the beginning of your healing. As you experience the pain of your loss — gently opening, acknowledging and allowing — the suffering it has wrought diminishes but never completely vanishes. In fact, the resistance to the pain can potentially be more painful than the pain itself. As difficult as it is, we must relinquish ourselves to the pain of grief. As Helen Keller said, "The only way to the other side is through."

Yet, going through the pain of loss is not in and of itself the goal in our grief journey. Instead, it is rediscovering life in ways that give us reason to get our feet out of bed and to make life matter. I'm certain you realize that the death of someone precious to you is not something you will ever "overcome" or "let go of." The death of someone we have given love to and received love from doesn't call out to be "resolved" or "explained," but to be experienced.

In the months to come, I will share with you a number of spiritual practices that may help you heal your grieving heart. I grew up in a traditional faith community; I watched and learned from a variety of people whose "switches" appeared to be in the on position. I have come to appreciate what some might term more "traditional" practices, as well as some "non-traditional" practices. I have observed the simple yet lovely ways different people connect with the Divine. I have tried to integrate into my daily life those practices that seem to really connect for me.

As you explore the practices in search of those that might be helpful to you in your grief journey, ask yourself: what broadens my perspective and deepens my faith? What brings me some peace and calms my fears? What deepens my connection with other people, to God, to the world, and to my essential self?

Copyright 2007, Center for Loss and Life Transition

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The Spiritual Path to Healing: Mourning Ideas (Part 1)
By Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

EXPRESS YOUR SPIRITUALITY

• Above all, mourning is a spiritual journey of the heart and soul. Grief and loss invite you to consider why people live, why people die, and what gives life meaning and purpose. These are the most spiritual questions we have language to form.
• You can discover spiritual understanding in many ways and through many practices: prayer, worship, and meditation among them. You can nurture your spirituality in many places: nature, church, temple, mosque, monastery, retreat center, kitchen table among them. No one can "give" you spirituality from the outside in. Even when you gain spiritual understanding from a specific faith tradition, the understanding is yours alone, discovered through self-examination, reflection and spiritual transformation.
• Mourning invites you down a spiritual path at once similar to that of others yet simultaneously your own. The reality that you have picked up this book shows that you are seeking to deepen your life with the Divine Mystery. Sometimes this happens within a faith tradition through its scriptures, community of believers and teachers. Other times a book is just what you need to support and gently guide you in ways that bring comfort and hope.

CARPE DIEM: If you attend a place of worship, visit it today, either for services or an informal time of prayer and solitude. If you don't have a place of worship, perhaps you have a friend who seems spiritually grounded. Ask her how she learned to nurture her spirituality. Sometimes, someone else's ideas and practices provide just what you need to stimulate your own spiritual self-care.

NAME YOUR GRATITUDE & COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS

• When you are faced with loss, it can be difficult to feel a sense of gratitude in your life, yet gratitude prepares you for the blessings that are yet to come.
• Many blessings may have already companioned you since your grief journey began. Somehow, and with grace, you have survived. Looking back, you may recognize the many supportive gestures, big and small, you were offered along the way.
• When you fill your life with gratitude, you invoke a self-fulfilling prophecy. What you expect to happen can happen. For example, if you don't expect anyone to support you in your grief, they often don't. By contrast, if you anticipate support and nurturance, you will indeed find it.
• Think of all you have to be thankful for. This is not to deny you your overwhelming loss and the need to mourn. However, you are being self-compassionate when you consider the things that make your life worth living, too. Reflect on your possibilities for joy and love each day. Honor those possibilities and have gratitude for them. Be grateful for your physical health and your beautiful spirit. Be grateful for your family and friends and the concern of strangers. Above all, be grateful for this very moment. When you are grateful, you prepare the way for inner peace.

CARPE DIEM: Start keeping a gratitude journal. Each night before you go to bed, recount your blessings from the day. At first you may find this challenging, but as you continue this daily practice, it will get easier and more joyful.

VISIT THE GREAT OUTDOORS

• During times of grief and loss, many people find it restorative and energizing to spend time in nature. Returning to the natural world encourages you to discover what is essential both within you and the world around you.
• As a human being, you are a part of the natural world, and you are interdependent with it. As many naturalists would remind you, a close relationship with nature grounds your psyche and soul in the spiritual certainty of your roots. If you lose touch with nature's rhythms, you lose touch with your deepest self, with what some would call "the ground of your being."
• If you allow yourself to befriend nature, you will discover that its timeless beauty is renewing and healing. Observe how children respect and honor the spirit of nature and its beauty because they understand it instinctively. Flowers, birds, bugs and butterflies often bring enthusiastic cries of recognition in children. You too can approach nature with the openness of a child. Take pleasure in the sounds, sights, and smells that fill your senses.
• Look up at the sky filled with beautiful clouds or twinkling stars. Stand barefoot in cool grass. Play in the snow. Taste sweet strawberries from the field. Feel the wind and sun on your skin. It doesn't matter if you are in a garden or a park, in the mountains or beside the ocean. Mother Nature will sooth your soul and refresh your spirit.

CARPE DIEM: Today, reflect on your relationship with the natural world. Go for a walk or hike and invite the Divine to come along. Allow nature to sustain you and bring you peace.

GO TO EXILE

• Choosing to spend time alone is an essential self-nurturing spiritual practice. It affords you the opportunity to be unaffected by other's wants and needs.
• It is impossible to really know yourself if you never take time to withdraw from the demands of daily living. Alone time does not mean you are being selfish. Instead, you will experience rest and renewal in ways you otherwise would not. A lack of alone time produces heightened confusion and a muting of your life force.
• Getting away from it all can become your refuge. So much of modern life invites you to keep busy: e-mail, cell phones, satellite TV, all competing for your attention. Yet, when you have special mourning needs, the last thing you need is distraction. Remember, this time of exile is not only for you. As you rest and renew, you can also better meet the needs of those who depend on you. Your human spirit is naturally compassionate, and once you feel restored, your instinct to be kind and generous to those around you will be revitalized.
• Even Jesus went to exile. He modeled the simple spiritual practice of rest and alone time as a natural, nourishing, and valuable companion to times of busyness. Jesus would sometimes send people away, disappear without warning or explanation, and retreat to a place of rest. If Jesus went to exile, so can you!
• Within your exiled time and space will evolve the insights and blessings that come to the surface only in stillness and with time. Schedule alone time on a regular basis. Don't shut out your family and friends altogether, but do answer the call for contemplative solitude.

CARPE DIEM: Schedule one hour of solitude into your day today.

Copyright 2007, Center for Loss and Life Transition

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The Spiritual Path to Healing: Mourning Ideas (Part 2)
By Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

NURTURE YOUR SPIRIT

• Nurturing your spirit relates to caring for that part of yourself that is transcendent. Your spirit speaks to you with inner messages and invites you to surround yourself with positive regard.
• You can care for your spirit in ways ranging from inspirational reading to listening to or playing music, being with those you feel support from, walking in the woods, strolling on the beach, or spending time in the company of wise people of any spiritual path.
• Nurturing your spirit means giving attention to your underlying beliefs and values. It also means being non-judgmental as you observe and appreciate people who have a different faith or spiritual outlook than you do. You can expand your own spiritual journey by going beyond your comfort zone and trying one of the practices in this book that you would not normally participate in.

CARPE DIEM: Look over the spiritual practices in this article series and select one to participate in that you might not naturally be drawn toward. Try it out and be open to how it expands your capacity to nurture your spirit.

SET ASIDE TIME EACH DAY FOR SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

• You get up every morning. You brush your teeth. You shower. You eat breakfast. Perhaps you read the newspaper or check your e-mail. You say hello to your family or coworkers or neighbors.
• Every day you engage in rituals of self-care. You take care of your body. You take care of your brain. You probably take care of your social self, at least to some degree. But how do you make sure you are caring for your emotional self and your spiritual self each and every day?
• Your spirit needs feeding just as much as your body does. Set aside time to feed it each day.
• What will you do with your spiritual time? You decide! Perhaps you have a favorite spiritual practice, such as yoga or meditation. Maybe you could use your daily time to try different ideas in this book.

CARPE DIEM: You know that you're supposed to exercise your body for 30 minutes a day. Start exercising your spirit for 30 minutes a day, too. Begin today.

SEEK OUT A SPIRITUAL ADVISOR

• Many of us flounder in our spirituality, especially in the early weeks and months after the death of someone loved.
• Grief brings about a normal and necessary search for meaning. Why are we here? Why do the people we love have to die? What is the purpose of life? These are the most spiritually profound questions we have language to form.
• To assist you in your search for meaning and to provide you with spiritual mentoring, seek out the help of someone whom you find to be spiritually advanced or grounded.
• This person might be a member of the clergy or someone with formal religious or spiritual training, but it also might be someone who simply seems to connect well with the spiritual realm.

CARPE DIEM: Right now, make a list of three local people you look up to spiritually. Try to identify someone with whom you can meet in person periodically. Call him or her today and extend an invitation to meet for coffee.

REACH OUT TO OTHERS FOR HELP

• Perhaps the most compassionate thing you can do for yourself at this difficult time is to reach out for help from others.
• Think of it this way: Grieving may be the hardest work you have ever done. And hard work is less burdensome when others lend a hand. Life's greatest challenges-getting through school, raising children, pursuing a career are in many ways team efforts. So it should be with mourning.
• Sharing your pain with others won't make it disappear, but it will, over time, make it more bearable.
• Reaching out for help also connects you to other people and strengthens the bonds of love that make life seem worth living again. But just like gardens, good friends must be cultivated. True friends are blessings during overwhelming times such as this. If you have some, give thanks!
• When Bill Cosby's son Ennis was murdered, Mr. Cosby reached out to other families who were that day also confronted with the murder of their children. He was not alone and you aren't either.

CARPE DIEM: Call a close friend who may have distanced himself from you since the death and tell him how much you need him right now. Suggest specific ways he can help.

TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOURSELF

• Good self-care is nurturing and necessary for mourners, yet it's something many of us completely overlook.
• Try very hard to eat well and get adequate rest. Lay your body down 2-3 times a day for 20-30 minutes, even if you don't sleep. I know you probably don't care very much about eating well right now, and you may be sleeping poorly. But taking care of yourself is truly one way to fuel healing and to begin to embrace life again.
• Listen to what your body tells you. "Get some rest," it says. "But I don't have time," you reply. "I have things to do." "OK, then, I'll get sick so you HAVE to rest," your body says. And it will get sick if that's what it takes to get its needs met!
• Drink at least 5-6 glasses of water each day. Dehydration can compound feelings of fatigue and disorientation.
• Exercise not only provides you with more energy, it can give you focused thinking time. Take a 20-minute walk every day. Or, if that seems too much, a five-minute walk. But don't over-exercise, because your body needs extra rest, as well.
• Now more than ever, you need to allow time for you.

CARPE DIEM: Are you taking a multi-vitamin? If not, now is probably a good time to start. In part, you can think of it as a spiritual self-care vitamin!

Copyright 2007, Center for Loss and Life Transition

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The Spiritual Path to Healing: Mourning Ideas (Part 3)
By Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

SIT IN SILENCE AND SOLITUDE

• The mystery of grief invites you to honor the need for periods of silence and solitude. As you quiet yourself, you sustain an open heart and a gentle spirit. Mother Teresa often said, "The beginning of prayer is silence."
• You may not have access to a cloistered monastery, a walk in the woods, or a stroll on the beach, but you do have the capacity to quiet yourself. Consciously hush yourself and place trust in the peace you help initiate. As you sit with silence, you acknowledge that you value the need to suspend, slow down, and turn inward as part of the grief journey. Giving attention to the instinct to mourn from the inside out requires that you befriend silence and respect how vital it is to your healing journey.
• Many of the symptoms of grief are invitations to the need for silence as solitude. Disorganization, confusion, searching and yearning and the lethargy of grief try to slow you down and invite a need for you to savor silence. Yes, astutely observed, "For many afflictions, silence is the best remedy."
• Silence contains the ingredients that can bring some peace in the midst of the wilderness. The forces of grief weigh heavy on your heart. Silence serves to lift up your heart and create much-needed space to give attention to your grief. Being in silence helps restore our energy and inspires courage to explore how you are forever transformed by your grief.

CARPE DIEM: Today, be silent for a while, silent with yourself and with God. For many people, this is a difficult spiritual practice, but one that is well worth the effort.

WRITE A POEM

• Poetry is the music of language. It is sound and imagery and rhythm delivered in little packets.
• Poetry compresses great meaning into a few carefully chosen words, and as such, it can be very emotional and spiritual.
• You can write a poem if you try. It doesn't need to follow any particular rules. It doesn't need to rhyme or have a certain meter. It can be and say anything you'd like.
• An elegy is a poem that remembers someone who has died. Perhaps you would like to write an elegy in memory of someone you love and miss very much.

CARPE DIEM: Write a poem to God today that expresses what you're thinking and feeling right now.

SPEND TIME IN "THIN PLACES"

• In the Celtic tradition, "thin places" are spots where the separation between the physical world and the spiritual world seem tenuous. They are places where the veil between Heaven and earth, between the holy and the everyday, are so thin that when we are near them, we intuitively sense the timeless, boundless spiritual world.
• There is a Celtic saying that heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in the thin places that distance is even smaller.
• Thin places are usually outdoors, often where water and land meet or land and sky come together. You might find thin places on a riverbank, a beach, or a mountaintop.
• Go to a thin place to pray, to walk, or to simply sit in the presence of the holy.

CARPE DIEM: Your thin places are anywhere that fills you with awe and a sense of wonder. They are spots that refresh your spirit and make you feel closer to God. Go to a thin place today and sit in contemplative silence.

JUST BE

• You may have heard it said that there is no past, there is no future, and there is only this moment.
• In The Power of Now, Eckhart Tollé encourages us to truly be present in the current moment. "Life is now," he writes. "There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be... Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now."
• The challenge is that it is really hard to live in the moment. Our minds constantly revisit the past and think forward to the future. Our egos dwell on what was and what will be.
• Tollé and others believe that your mind is different from your spirit. Your mind is the house of the ego; your soul is the house of the spirit. Your spirit-your essence-can observe the egoic antics of the mind. Your ego is earthbound; your spirit is timeless.
• The next time your mind takes you away from the present and into worry and fear, allow your spirit to watch your mind and smile at its earthly obsessions.

CARPE DIEM: Attend to the now. Drop everything and just be for five minutes. When your monkey mind starts to chatter, silence it by repeating the mantra om.

Copyright 2007, Center for Loss and Life Transition

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The Spiritual Path to Healing: Mourning Ideas (Part 4)
By Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

CREATE

• Get in touch with the Creator by creating. Make something that expresses your feelings or honors the loss you are mourning.
• Is there a creative activity that you find you lose yourself in that you get so involved in that you lose all track of time and place and you become immersed in your creative process? If so, that's the kind of activity you want to do now.
• Write. Paint. Sew. Scrapbook. Knit. Garden. Cook. Play an instrument. Decorate. Organize. All of these activities are forms of creation. Pick one that moves you.

CARPE DIEM: Make something today.

PRAY WITH PRAYER BEADS

• Prayer beads are used in a number of faith traditions, including Islam, Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Baha'i.
• The person who is praying fingers the beads as he prays, and uses the pattern and number of the beads to keep track of which prayers and how many he has offered up.
• The repetitive motion of fingering the beads calms the mind and soothes the soul as the words of the prayer or the chant send your spiritual intentions into the beyond.
• If you do not strictly follow a specific religious doctrine, you may be interested in trying prayer beads as part of your spiritual practice. In his book Simply Pray, universalist minister Erik Walker Wikstrom suggests a modern prayer that uses a set of 28 beads. The practice includes centering and entering-in prayers, breath prayers, and prayers of Naming, Knowing, Listening and Loving. "Prayer beads are mobile alters," says Wikstrom.

CARPE DIEM: If you don't already have prayer beads, stop by a bead shop today and learn about buying or making a prayer strand.

FORGIVE

• You may be harboring some spiteful feelings about the death of someone loved. Perhaps you are angry at a medical caregiver. Maybe you're upset at friends and family who haven't been there for you in your time of need. Maybe you are mad at the person who died.
• Forgiveness is an act of surrender. If you surrender your resentment, you are freeing yourself of a very heavy load. You are surrendering your human feelings of judgment to the only One who is truly in a position to judge. Don't go to your own grave angry.
• Forgive. Write letters of forgiveness if this will help you unburden yourself, even if you never send the letters.
• And while you're at it, don't forget to forgive yourself. Self-recrimination is negative energy. If you did something wrong, acknowledge, apologize, and forgive.
• This Idea calls to mind this poem by William Arthur Ward, an American pastor and teacher:
  • Before you speak, listen.
    Before you write, think.
    Before you spend, earn.
    Before you invest, investigate.
    Before you criticize, wait.
    Before you pray, forgive.
    Before you quit, try.
    Before you retire, save.
    Before you die, give.

CARPE DIEM: Today, call or stop by to visit someone you've been holding a grudge against. Tell this person you've missed her company and would like to catch up.

USE A SINGING BOWL

• Singing bowls are used as part of Eastern spiritual traditions as part of the meditation and prayer rituals. While they are made and used throughout Asia, the best-known types are from the Himalayas and are often called Tibetan singing bowls.
• Made of bronze and other metals, the bowls range in size from very small to very large. They "sing" when the user rubs a wooden mallet around the rim. Good quality bowls produce a harmonic tone.
• Place the bowl on a surface in front of you and strike the rim lightly with the mallet. Listen to the bell tone. Now try rubbing the mallet in a circular motion around the bowl's rim. Can you make it sing?
• Some singing bowl practitioners recommend that you lie down and place the bowl on your chest. This brings the sound close to your ears but also allows you to feel the vibrations throughout your body.
• The singing bowl's tone may help you relax and focus during meditation. It is also thought that the physical vibrations of the sound waves massage your body's cells and organs and release energy blockages.

CARPE DIEM: Place a photo of a person you mourn in the singing bowl. As the bowl sings, imagine that the sound is carrying your loving thoughts to the person who died. See if you can hear back what the person might say to you.

ALLOW YOURSELF TO RECEIVE

• Many of us are better at giving than receiving. Yet, there is a reciprocal relationship between the two. In order to receive, we must give. And in order to give, we must receive.
• Select a supportive friend to assist you with the following. Sit across from your friend. Be silent for two to three minutes, then have your friend tell you something they admire or appreciate about you. Be receptive.
• Take in what your friend shares with an open heart. Notice where you are uncomfortable or find yourself wanting to discount what your friend says.
• Breathe deeply for a minute as you continue to open yourself to this gift of receiving. Sit with it until you can fully accept this verbal gift. Show your gratitude by nonverbally saying thank you.

CARPE DIEM: Carry out the same process outlined above for your friend. Then repeat the process, going to a deeper level of truth. Observe how your connection and bond with your friend increases. As you learn to receive and give, the separation between giver and receiver disappears.

Copyright 2007, Center for Loss and Life Transition

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