Ask Dr. Rick: How Do I Find Joy While Grieving?
On holding both the devastation and the tulips
Recently, in a live Q&A call within my Foundations of Well-Being course, a student asked:
“My 33-year-old nephew died in an avalanche two months ago. I’m trying to practice taking in the good, but I’m struggling. How does this fit with the pain and disorientation of grief? How do I stay in touch with the real pain while also tuning into the real good, without spiritual bypassing?”
There’s a moment in early grief when you catch yourself laughing at something, a joke, a dog doing something ridiculous, the absurdity of a typo, and then immediately feel guilty. How can I laugh when someone I love is gone?
Or you’re walking through the grocery store, hollowed out by loss, and you notice the tulips are beautiful. For three seconds, you feel something other than devastation. And then the grief crashes back in, twice as hard, as if to punish you for forgetting.
This is the impossible bind of grieving: How do you honor the reality of loss without drowning in it? How do you let in moments of beauty without betraying the person you’ve lost?
The question comes from someone whose nephew, young, vibrant, 33 years old, died suddenly in an avalanche. The grief is fresh, disorienting, total. And yet there are also teachings about “taking in the good,” about building inner resources, about not getting lost in the negative. So what to do?
Is taking in the good a form of spiritual bypassing, a way of avoiding the raw truth of pain? Or is there a way to be with the grief while also recognizing that life, somehow, continues to offer small moments of grace?
The Rhythm of Grief
Here’s the fundamental truth: Grief and goodness are not opposites. They coexist.
This isn’t about choosing one or the other. It’s not about “focusing on the positive” to escape the pain. That would be bypassing, and it would fail because grief doesn’t work that way. You can’t outrun it. You can’t think your way around it. It will find you in the cereal aisle, in the shower, in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon when you suddenly remember something they said, and the floor drops out from under you.
But the other truth is this: You can be devastated and notice the tulips. Both are real and both are true. Recognizing one does not negate the other.
In fact, this is the very practice grief asks of us: to hold the mosaic of reality without collapsing it into a single story.
There’s a rhythm to this. It’s a three-part process: “let be, let go, let in.”
In the rest of this article, you’ll discover:
How to honor your grief without being consumed by it
The practice of “letting go” without letting go of your love
A simple three-breath technique for holding both pain and beauty at once
Why taking in the good isn’t betrayal, it’s how your nervous system heals
