In this article I want to talk about grieving. I’m deliberately using the word grieving as a process rather than grief, which sounds sort of like a static noun, a thing. A noun just sits there. A process moves, and it can flow, or it can get stuck.
What Did You Expect?
There’s a story, probably a true story, from the early life of the Buddha. I’m paraphrasing. Ananda came to the Buddha and said that a dear friend of theirs, a very senior teacher in their gathering, Sariputta, had died. Ananda was very sad about this. And the Buddha essentially said to him, Ananda, what did you expect? I’ve taught about impermanence since the day you walked in the door. The Buddha was not angry. He wasn’t scolding Ananda, but he was bringing a little tough love. That may not be everybody’s cup of tea.
Then he continued. He said, Ananda, everything that’s subject to arising is subject to passing away. You cannot rely on it. It will change. What you can rely on is your own practice, what you do yourself in your practice.
I think what the Buddha said is true. In this life there will be losses, and knowing that fact helps us bear them. It doesn’t change them, but it allows us to bring wisdom.
Unavoidably, we will be dealing with the consequences of illness, aging, death, loss, and inheriting the results of our actions. We live exposed in a golden wind, and one of the things we are exposed to is the losses of others, or losses of things, opportunities, doors closing.
Grieving Is Normal
Some people have written to me about the Buddha’s reply, saying, come on, Rick, that’s a little hardcore. Is there more? I think that’s fair. So I want to talk about practicing with grieving, practicing with loss, in addition to the more cognitively oriented tough love that the Buddha was offering there.
The first thing I want to say is that grieving is normal. Given that we are all exposed to the golden wind, we will all face losses. Sadness is normal. I’ve cried really deeply at the loss of a beloved cat, for example. It’s normal and it’s not a problem. In fact, if we suppress our sorrow, it gets kind of worse. It gets tangled up, a little rancid, pushed down there in the shadows. It’s really important to allow a natural flow.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross talked about responses to death and dying, involving shock, bargaining, outrage, despair, and serenity. Maybe not always in a one-by-one sequence, but certainly as rooms in the house of grief. Those are all really normal.
What happens, though, when you feel stuck in it, or it’s there and it’s pretty unpleasant? How can we practice with grief and grieving and loss in ways that build on the great wisdom of our teacher the Buddha? I have a few suggestions.
Watch for Rumination
The first suggestion is to pay attention to the habit of rumination across the board, because the tendency toward rumination keeps drawing us back into grieving that doesn’t feel like it’s flowing. That’s the kind of grieving I’m talking about, stuck grieving.
Here’s an image that may be a little exotic, from complex systems theory. They talk about strange attractors, or basins of attraction. Imagine a rubber sheet that represents all the possible states of being. In that rubber sheet are various divots, or basins. Some of them are very deep, some are shallow. Some are very small, some are very broad. Where your attention is in any moment, what you experience in any moment, has to do with the basins of attraction that your mind stream is moving through. That’s kind of a metaphor. If people are stuck in grief, it’s as if they’re stuck in a basin of grieving, and it’s easy to fall back into it.
What predisposes us to get stuck in various basins, of grieving or anxiety or anger or grievances against others, is our general predisposition toward rumination. If you are increasingly less likely to ruminate, you’re less drawn into the meta-basin of rumination, and then you’re less likely to be drawn into particular forms of stuckness. This is a very powerful principle.
One thing you can do is be aware of the somatic markers of ruminating. What does it feel like to drop into a certain kind of reverie, or to loop through an interaction with someone, or to be stuck in shame and remorse and guilt about something? What’s it like in your body? As soon as you’re aware of what that’s like in your body, you can help to change your bodily condition. You can think about something else. You can do something else. You can move out of that broad tendency toward rumination.
It’s useful to think about things again and again. It’s normal to give grieving its due, to give loss its due. The question is, am I getting stuck in it? Or even, am I just getting drawn back into thinking about that, and it’s not helpful anymore? It’s just pain.
I have a dear friend who lost his son at age 19 to cancer many years ago. I’ve known him a long, long time. I was in graduate school at the time, and I was kind of big for my britches. I thought, I really know something about clinical psychology. I said to my friend, if you want to talk about the loss of your son, I’d just be happy to talk with you about that sometime. My friend looked at me, and he likes me and we’re still friends. He said, well, Rick, I did that therapy stuff. Every time I think about him, I cry and I feel terrible and it doesn’t change. It doesn’t process. It’s always horrible whenever I get in contact with it. So I don’t deliberately go looking for it. If it comes up, it comes, but I don’t go looking for it. And that’s what we’re talking about here.
Tuning into the state of your body, mindfulness of internal sensations, will snap you out of the default mode network activations that are the neurological basis for rumination. Coming into the present, what’s it like right here, right now, will snap you out of rumination, which is very much typically grounded in mental time travel about the past or the future. These are various ways to reduce the habit of rumination.
In its way, rumination is like a cozy warm blanket. What you are ruminating about doesn’t feel good, but the rumination itself is like a nice cozy blanket. Sorry, not good for you. It pulls you out of the present, pulls you into your own mind, and traps you in some basin of suffering.
