Grieving Mindfully: A Compassionate and Spiritual Guide to Coping with Loss
Sameet M. Kumar
Language: English
Pages: 175
ISBN: B00BN0L7YY
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Grief is a personal journey, never the same for any two people and as unique as your life and your relationships. Although loss is an inevitable part of life, how you approach this fact can make the difference between meaningless pain and the manifestation of understanding and wisdom. This book describes a mindful approach to dealing with grief that can help you make that difference.
By walking this mindful path, you will discover that you are capable of transforming and healing the grief you carry and finding the spiritual and emotional resilience you need to move through this challenging time. These mindfulness practices, explained here in simple and practical language, will help you bear your time of grief. But they will do more than that, too. They will guide you to a life more fully lived, with more meaning. These simple practices will help you experience what richness comes from asking deeper questions about loss and about life.
helpful in clarifying this misconception: You try to block thoughts and yet they are not blocked— first one unblocked thought arises, then a second—let them arise. When they arise, send them wherever they go and stand guard. Since there is no place for them to go, they have returned, like a crow who has taken off from a ship. Rest like the movements of swells at sea. (Harding and Thrangu 2002) What Kongtrul Rinpoche is asking us to do is to be open to our experience, and to expect that we
participants had lost their loved ones relatively recently. He had never attended the group because he felt that his sadness was normal. What motivated him to come after nearly a year was that his sadness had returned, just when he thought it was all over. He found solace in knowing that everyone else in the group also had ups and downs. One member of the group, who had lost his wife to suicide more than a year ago, explained to Jackson that grief is like that: wrought with countless ups and
churches and cathedrals created labyrinths on their grounds as places of pilgrimage. The labyrinth was intended to embody the pilgrimage to the Holy Land, which was too far for most Europeans to travel at that time. Labyrinths were also used by Native Americans to represent spiritual quests. A labyrinth is a complex, winding path, often circular in shape, that you walk. The path usually leads you to a wider, open area in the center that may contain a small garden or a bench for contemplation and
The Buddha’s realization that suffering was an inherent part of our existence was not just an intellectual concept; it was a profound emotional event. We were not meant to only feel good; distress is also an integral part of all of our lives. Grief and love are intertwined: feeling the emotional intensity of grief means you can also feel love. So what do you do with pain as intense as acute grief? You certainly can’t run from it, at least not permanently, nor can you dwell in your pain
or any other profession that brings you into contact with death and suffering on a daily basis, a personal loss can seem particularly overwhelming. When we experience a personal loss, the scars from our previous losses can open up again. However, each of our losses can also teach us how to cope better with suffering. To better understand the cumulative grief you may be feeling, take some time now to list on a piece of paper some of the more painful losses you have suffered in your life. Those