Dealing Mindfully with Grief and Loss

Episode 40 of the Secular Buddhism Podcast

Hello. You are listening to the Secular Buddhism Podcast, and this is episode number 40. I'm your host, Noah Rasheta, and today I'm talking about dealing mindfully with grief and loss.

Understanding Grief

Grieving is the process of coming to terms with loss in our lives. We may experience grief for a number of different reasons. It could be the loss of a loved one, the end of a relationship or friendship, or the loss of a job. Other significant life changes can also lead to grief, like moving to a new home or a new city, losing our deeply held convictions or beliefs, or experiencing a sudden change in our hopes and dreams.

Loss is something we seem to deal with from the moment we're born. I've seen firsthand the discomfort a newborn seems to endure at the loss of the comfort of the womb. And from that moment on, life can seem like a string of losses. While the scale and intensity of loss can vary greatly—say, losing a loved one compared to losing a material possession—in the end, the loss of anything can cause suffering. And it may require the process of grieving to help us adjust.

Before I jump into this topic, I want to remind you of a couple of things. First is the commonly shared quote by Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, that says, "Do not try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist. Use it to be a better whatever you already are." Regardless of which path you're on or how far you are along that path, mindfulness can help you to be a better whatever you already are.

Second, this podcast is made possible by the Foundation for Mindful Living, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose mission is to make the world a better place by teaching people to live more mindfully. If you get any value out of this podcast and if you're in a position to be able to, please consider becoming a monthly contributor. Just two dollars a month can make a big difference. One-time donations are also appreciated. You can make a donation by visiting secularbuddhism.com and clicking on the donate button at the top of the page.

I want to say thank you to everyone who donates monthly to the podcast, and to anyone who's made a one-time donation. Your donations are making a very big difference in my ability to share this content with the world—through workshops, through a mindfulness training program that I'm putting together, and several other resources that are in the works. All of this is being accomplished with your support, and thanks to your support. So thank you, very much.

Taking Time to Reflect

Now let's jump back into this week's topic. I want you to take a moment and think about some of the losses you've experienced in your own life. Perhaps this is the loss of a loved one, or the loss of a job, a meaningful friendship or relationship. This could be a material possession, something that was lost or stolen, something that broke. Think about that for a minute and see what comes to mind.

We all have losses. We've all experienced losses in the past. We may be experiencing loss now, or we will experience it in the future. And for the losses we experience in life, we need to grieve. Mindfulness practice can help us in this process to ensure that we grieve skillfully.

Grieving is the natural healing process of coming to terms with loss in our lives. You may be familiar with the concept of the five stages of grief, as proposed by the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Her model proposes that a series of emotions are experienced by people who are dealing with loss.

The Five Stages of Grief

Denial is the first stage. When you first learn of a loss, it may be normal to think, "Well, this can't be happening to me." You may feel shock or numbness. This is a temporary way to deal with the rush of an overwhelming emotion. It's kind of like a defense mechanism.

Anger is the next stage. As this reality sets in, you're faced with the pain of your loss. You may feel frustrated and helpless, and then these feelings can turn into anger. And that anger may be directed towards other people, towards a higher power, or towards life in general.

Then we have bargaining. This is the stage where you kind of dwell on what you could have done to prevent the loss. These are common thoughts like "if only" or "what if I had done this" or "if I had not done that." This is that stage where you may even try to strike a deal with a higher power.

Depression is the next stage. It's the sadness that sets in as you begin to understand the loss and its effect on your life. During this stage, signs of depression may include crying or sleep issues, decreased appetite, a sense of feeling overwhelmed, regretful, and lonely.

The final stage is acceptance. In this stage, you accept the reality of your loss. You realize it can't be changed, and although you can still feel sad, you're able to start moving forward with your life.

The Nonlinear Nature of Grief

Because these stages are often referred to as stages, people often mistake them as a linear progression—a series of steps you advance through from one to the next as you come to terms with your loss. But in my own experience, it can be misleading, even harmful, to assume that these stages are sequential or linear in any way.

While each of these emotions can be experienced throughout the grieving process, grief rarely seems to follow any specific order or timetable. We all seem to experience grief in different ways. While some of us may experience one or more of these specific emotions, they may not come in a specific order. It may be that we advance from one stage to another, only to come back again to where we were before.

This is kind of how I experienced it while dealing, about seven years ago, with the loss of trust and coping with betrayal and deception. I remember advancing through anger to what I thought was acceptance, only to come back to anger. And this was like a cycle that went on and on for months, even years. For a time, I genuinely thought I was crazy, because every time I would feel like it was finally past—all of the emotions behind me, at acceptance—it seemed like that should be the end of it. But then something would trigger a memory and I'd be back at square one.

A Mindful Approach to Grief

So the mindfulness approach to grief and loss is not about trying to get through one stage to advance to the next, or to try to rush through all of them. It's not about hurrying to get to acceptance and healing. It's about applying acceptance to whatever stage we're in, and to whatever the overall process of grief is bringing us.

Through mindfulness, we focus on removing any obstacles that might impede us from experiencing whatever the process of grief may have in store for us. Mindfulness is helpful during the grieving process because it allows us to acknowledge the universality of loss, and it helps us to accept the inevitability of loss as a part of life. At one point or another, we will all face the loss of everything we hold dear, and sometimes this happens when we're not ready and not expecting it.

It's resisting those losses that can cause us to suffer beyond the pain that is already typical with loss. We know that all things are impermanent. We live in a world where ultimately everything that we hold dear will have to be relinquished. And Thich Nhat Hanh on this topic says, "It's not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they're not."

The Story of Kissagotami

This reminds me of a story from the Buddhist tradition. There was a woman named Kissagotami, and she had married young and gave birth to a son. One day the baby got sick and then died soon after. Kissagotami loved her son, and she just refused to believe that her son was dead. She carried his body around the village asking if there was anyone who could bring him back to life.

The villagers saw this, and they saw he was already dead and that there was nothing that could be done. So they advised her to just accept his death and make the arrangements for the funeral. But with grief, she fell upon her knees and clutched her son's body close to hers and kept uttering for him to wake up. At this point, a village elder took pity on her and suggested she go consult with the Buddha. "Kissagotami," he said, "we can't help you. You need to go talk to the Buddha. Maybe he can do something to bring your son back to life."

Kissagotami was excited hearing that, and she immediately went to the Buddha's residence and pleaded for him to help her, to bring her son back to life. And the Buddha said, "Well, Kissagotami, I do have a way to bring your son back to life." She asked, "What is it going to take? What do I have to do? I'll do anything."

And the Buddha essentially said, "If that's the case, if you'll do anything, then here's what you need to do. Bring me a mustard seed taken from a house where no one residing in the house had ever lost a family member. And then you bring that seed back to me, and I'll bring your son back to life."

Having faith in that promise, Kissagotami took off and ran from house to house in the village trying to find this mustard seed. At the first house she found a young woman who said, "Yeah, I have a mustard seed." But then when she asked her if she had ever lost a family member, the young woman said, "Yeah, my grandmother died a few months ago." So she thanked her and ran to the next house, realizing that wasn't going to work.

At the next house, she found someone whose husband had died a few years ago. At the next house, someone who had lost an uncle. At the next house, someone who had lost an aunt or a cousin. This process kept going. She kept going from house to house, and she kept finding the same answer: every household had someone who had lost a family member at some point.

By the time Kissagotami finally realized this truth, it became clear that there's no one in the world who's never lost a family member. So she now understood that death is inevitable, and it's a natural part of life. This acceptance allowed her to start working with her grief and to bury her son.

The story of Kissagotami reminds us that loss is a universal experience. The Buddha's lesson for Kissagotami allowed her to understand that her refusal to acknowledge the inevitability of loss was only adding to her pain. I feel a special sympathy for her. As a parent myself, I've tried to imagine how difficult it would be to have to deal with the loss of one of my own kids.

Preparing for the Inevitable

If we know that loss and death are inevitable, why not begin to prepare for the inevitable now? Why is there a cultural tendency to avoid even the thought of death, or even the thought of losing the things that matter to us? By remembering that all things are continually changing, we can avoid developing unhealthy attachments that may cause us to suffer.

Speaking of these attachments, just this past weekend we were cleaning out our storage unit, and I took a trailer load full of stuff to a donation center. It was interesting to see certain possessions and to realize that at one point these things felt valuable to me or meaningful to me, and here I was at another time in my life just giving them away.

In the process of emptying all these plastic storage totes, one of them was labeled "Noah's Helicopter Stuff." As some of you may recall from past podcast episodes, there was a time in my life when I was in flight school training to be a helicopter pilot. It was a childhood dream that I had. Unfortunately, the school I went to back in 2008 filed for bankruptcy.

The school had a business model where students would pay up front for all of the training, and then they would train you over the course of six to eight months or twelve months. But it was running like a Ponzi scheme. Now, none of us noticed that at the beginning. But they would have you pay up front, and then they would use that money to keep recruiting more students. That's kind of how the company ran. That lasted about ten years before the company finally went under.

When it did, thousands of students across the country, including myself, were out of flight training and out of the money that we had paid for it. So it was a really difficult time. It was one of my dreams. There was a dream that was shattered. There was suffering being experienced. I was dealing with the grief and the loss of what seemed to be my life plan, my career choice.

Fast forward now almost ten years later, here I am at this donation center looking at this tote. I open it and it had all of my flight gear. I had my headset, all of my books, my flight computer, the little device that snaps to your leg that holds the maps of where you're flying. It had everything. Everything that I used for flying.

It was interesting to just look at this for a moment, to think about how important these items were to me at one point, and here I was donating this entire tote away, hoping that it would be of use to someone. There was a tinge of sadness there with it, but I thought it was interesting that I had held on to these items for almost ten years. I thought about attachment to things and how attachment can cause us to suffer.

Coping with Loss Through Mindfulness

So how does mindfulness help us to cope with the loss of things that we've become attached to? Well, it's similar to how we deal with any other emotion through mindfulness. With an emotion like anger or sadness, we simply acknowledge the emotion, we accept it, and then we let it go when it's time to go. There's no need to have fear or aversion towards the grieving process. We can be open to whatever grief brings and allow ourselves to be fully with that experience.

Remember, like I mentioned before, there's no set timeframe for this grieving process. It just has to happen on its own. An important benefit of mindfulness during the grieving process is that it helps to keep us anchored in the present moment. Because the present moment is the only place where we can fully feel the pain of loss.

When we're dealing with loss, it's common to find ourselves experiencing anxiety about the future. With the loss of a spouse or the loss of a job, we have legitimate concerns about how we're going to get by. Other losses, like the end of a relationship or divorce, may cause us to have concerns about our self-worth or fear about ever finding meaningful love again.

I remember with my story about the helicopter flight school. I had significant fears about what I was going to do next. This was the career I had chosen. Now how was I going to pay back the money I had lost? It was almost seventy thousand dollars that the school had taken from us. And that's money I still pay every month in student loans—loans that I'll be paying for the rest of my life for something I never got.

But at the time, a lot of my fear and anxiety was anchored in the future. What's going to happen now? How am I going to do this? How am I going to pay that back? What am I going to do for a job? The point is that almost any kind of loss will cause us to wonder how we're going to fill the void of what we've lost. These are valid concerns, and they need to be addressed. But we do need to know that spending too much time with our concerns about the future can get in the way of the grieving process itself, which requires us to momentarily set aside these concerns and instead just be completely aware of our experience in the present moment.

This is where mindfulness meditation can be an incredible tool for coping with loss. It provides us with the opportunity to attend to whatever experience we're having in that present moment. And fully experiencing what we find in the present moment is an essential step for learning to think and act wisely.

Self-Compassion and Grieving

Another topic that relates to this is something I brought up a few podcasts back. I talked about the art of self-compassion and how self-compassion can play an important role in the grieving process. It allows us to accept compassion not only from ourselves but also from others.

Sometimes when we're going through difficult things, we need compassion, but we struggle to allow others to give us that compassion because we don't feel worthy of it, or we feel that accepting compassion is a sign of weakness. This is why we can work with self-compassion. Compassion is one of the greatest things we can receive while we're experiencing grief.

In part, I think it's because compassion reminds us of the universality of our suffering. Like Kissagotami, we can be reminded that we are not alone in our experience of loss and suffering. And this, in turn, I think eases or minimizes our sense of suffering. So dealing with our own suffering can be the catalyst for learning to develop compassion for others.

I imagine that Kissagotami, at that point, after what she had gone through with the loss of her son, was able to feel compassion from that moment on for anyone else who was going to experience that same type of loss.

I remember feeling the same thing with my flight school experience. I thought, "Well, now I know what it's like to be robbed of a dream." And any time I've encountered this with anyone else in their life, when life throws a curve ball at them that sends them in a new direction, I feel compassion for them because I know what that's like. Same with my other experiences in life with feeling betrayed or deceived. I can empathize with people who have gone through that because I know what it's like.

So I think our suffering allows us to develop compassion for others. And it can also be a reminder of how life truly is like a game of Tetris, like I talk about all the time. We only have the illusion of control, and yet we simply never know what piece is going to show up next. I think experiencing loss and suffering can be disillusioning in the sense that it helps us to get rid of the illusion that we even had control, or the illusion that there's permanence in any of this.

Moving Forward Skillfully

If you practice developing skillful means with life's everyday challenges, it will allow you to react more skillfully when losses come to you, as we all know they inevitably will. And remember, loss and suffering is not personal. You're not being singled out. It's just that you're experiencing life.

Now, earlier in this podcast I mentioned that if we know that loss and death are inevitable, why not begin to prepare for the inevitable now? How do we prepare to deal with the loss of everything? Well, I have a guided meditation that I want to share with you today in this podcast episode. I'm also going to set this aside as a recording that can be listened to as the next podcast episode. It will just be the guided meditation, so that you can listen to it again from time to time without having to listen to this whole episode and skip to the end to listen to this guided meditation.

So why don't you take a couple of minutes right now and just follow along with this exercise? This can be a powerful technique for learning to think and ponder on the nature of impermanence.

A Guided Meditation on Impermanence

This is a guided meditation on impermanence.

This is an ordinary moment. If you can, close your eyes and just focus on the sensation of breathing. Try to become aware of the breath—the in-breath and the out-breath. And just become aware of this ordinary process that seems so natural that we rarely even think of it. And yet it's this process of breathing that keeps us alive throughout the ordinary moments of our day.

And now imagine next to you a large platform. You're standing next to this large platform or a stage, and it's empty. There's nothing on it. And now I want you to imagine your favorite possessions—this could be your computer, your watch, your smartphone, maybe it's a TV or your car. Just imagine all of your favorite stuff. And now imagine them being placed on this platform, on this stage, one at a time. And when they get placed there, they simply disappear. Everything that gets placed on the stage dissolves and just disappears.

Just imagine yourself for a moment seeing all of your stuff, one by one, being placed there, and then it's gone. And how does that feel? Knowing all of your stuff is now gone. And now I want you to imagine all of your friends. All of your coworkers, people that you know. Just imagine their voices. They're all talking to each other and sharing their stories. And as they do this, they're all slowly stepping onto that stage in single file, one by one. And as they do, they disappear, one by one, until they're all gone.

And after that, I want you to imagine your family—your parents, siblings, children. I want you to imagine their voices. I want you to envision their smiles and feel the love that you have for each one of them. Just imagine them all stepping onto that stage, each disappearing one at a time.

And notice how now you're standing there next to that stage and you're all alone. How does it feel now to know your friends and family, they're all gone? They've all stepped on that stage. And now I want you to picture the room where you are, or the space where you are. Your bed, your books, all of your other possessions. All of them are on that stage now, and they all disappear. And you continue to scale back. Picture your neighborhood. Picture your yard. The feeling of the sun on your face and the feeling of the wind on your skin. Rain. Everything. Everything you see. It's all on that stage and it all disappears.

And now, as you stand there, I want you to imagine your memories, your feelings. All the knowledge that you've gained from the books that you've read and the school classes that you've attended. Every word you've ever heard. Your entire vocabulary. Every song you've ever listened to. Every sound you've ever heard. All being put on that stage, and it's all disappearing.

And as each of these things goes, one by one, now there's just you. And it's just you standing there. And now you walk onto that stage. And you slowly disappear. And then the stage is the only thing that's there, and then the stage disappears. And now that's it. There's nothing. There's nothing left. There's just the awareness of emptiness. The emptiness of all that is.

And I want you to notice what you feel as you become aware of this emptiness. Death will come in an ordinary moment just like this one.

Now bring your awareness back to where you are—the room that you're in, the space where you are. Open your eyes if you had them closed. I want you to just look around for a moment and notice how wonderful it is to just be alive.

This is a simple guided meditation practice that can serve as a reminder that death will come in an ordinary moment, a moment just like this one. But for now, this ordinary moment is anything but ordinary. Because this is an extraordinary moment of being alive. And this is the nature of impermanence. Things are continually changing. One thing ends and another thing starts. But in the end, it's all impermanent. And what there is, is emptiness.

I want you to think about that. Just enjoy the feeling of how great it is to just be here, with everything just the way that it is. With the bank account just the way that it is. The friendships just the way that they are. The student loans that you have just the way that they are. Everything just the way that it is. And how good that can feel.

This is the meditation on impermanence.

Closing

If you enjoyed this podcast episode, please feel free to share it with others. Write a review or give it a rating on iTunes. If you're new to Buddhism or interested in learning more, remember that you can listen to the first five episodes of this podcast in order, as they serve as a summary of some of the key concepts taught in Buddhist thinking.

You can also check out my book Secular Buddhism: Eastern Thought for Western Minds. It's available on Amazon, Kindle, iTunes, and Audible. For more information and links, you can visit secularbuddhism.com.

That's all I have for now, but I look forward to recording another podcast episode soon. Until next time.

For more about the Secular Buddhism podcast and Noah Rasheta's work, visit SecularBuddhism.com