Sadness and Grief

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Using Mindfulness Meditation to Ease Sadness

The purpose of mindfulness meditation is to simply watch and observe your own perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. This is done without judgement as to whether the perceptions are good or bad or whether the thoughts are right or wrong. When the mind wanders, one simply notices this wandering and watches as one watches everything else, taking a step back and listening to the world.

In my experience, moments of intense emotional pain are soothed by mindfulness meditation. Oddly, sometimes the pain doesn't go away, but how that pain is experienced changes in such a way that sadness is no longer saddening, anger is no longer angering, and anxiety is no longer scary. What ends up happening is, instead of perpetuating my sadness with further emotions focused on the sadness itself, my sadness dissipates naturally, just as a scraped knee stops bleeding and heals itself unless one fusses with it. In their book, Peaceful Mind, John R. McQuaid, PhD, and Paula E. Carmona, RN, MSN, show how to use mindfulness meditation in combination with other changes in how we interpret events in our lives to heal depression. As a graduate student in psychology studying the relationship between thought and emotion, I highly recommend this book to anyone who has ever felt very sad.

Finding Beauty in an Ugly Reality

I was sitting on the couch nursing my infant when a story came on the news. Researchers found high concentrations of a toxic flame retardant in the breast milk of mothers around the country. The chemical is suspected to have serious health effects on child development, and every woman in the study had high levels because of the ubiquity of the chemical in the environment and its persistent in the body.

I was deeply sad. I felt grief for a society that would let this happen, resentment for foolish decisions made by industries and government regulators, and angst for the future. Worse, this piece of environmental bad news was personal. More than my grief for society, I felt a deep grief for my son. And the thought that I was somehow hurting him with the most intimate act of love I could offer him created a piercing sorrow that struck me every time I held him that day. My milk, the sole source of his nourishment, had poison in it.

It's not a truth that is easy to accept or hold in your mind, because it is so awful, and you can't do anything about it, but it is an ugly truth. Within it, however, I found some element of beauty. With the news story, the research, and the advocacy, all showing that I was not the only one to find this disturbing, I realized how much most people care about the well being of children. Love is even more widespread than the flame retardant. Through environmental findings like this one, we are also learning how interconnected we are. We depend on each other for our survival, just like my baby depends on me.

A Light at the End of the Tunnel

Women who lose their husbands typically experience intense grief often accompanied by depression, social isolation, bodily pains, and poor eating habits. However, on average, this grief subsides within 3 years, according to a new study, and mental and physical health improves. Shortly after bereavement, one day might seem like ten years, but three years is not forever, even though it sometimes feels like grief will last that long.

How Things Are Supposed To Be

It's hard for me to accept that people die. And death is the biggest certainty in life, so the need to accept it is paramount. That doesn't change how I feel. No one seems to die at the end of their life. People always seem to die before their life is over. But of course that thinking is circular. They didn't have to die when they did. They really didn't. That makes it much harder to accept, which is perhaps why I'm having this trouble in the first place. A curable infection gone unnoticed, an overdose, a sudden stroke in mid-life, over too fast to get help. It barely does justice to say "what a shame." It's more than a shame, it's unacceptable.

But, I keep telling myself, people die. While it's hard to accept, it is also of some comfort. Because, I remind myself, it's not so much that they died but that they died too soon. They lost many years of life that they should have had, but we all waste time. I would be neurotic if I tried to waste no time at all. It's just the way things are. That, I can accept. Perhaps by finding something in the unacceptable that I can accept, I can find some peace. They lost their lives, but this happens to everyone. They lost time... this too happens to everyone to some degree. They're gone and I miss them, but things have happened as they will. It's not how things are supposed to be, but it's how they are.

Memories

The pain of loss is the price of memory. For five weeks, I spent most of every day around a puppy belonging to my grandmother. I never encountered such a loving, playful, cuddly dog. She insisted on sleeping in my room and woke me up every morning nuzzling my face. I took her for walks in interesting neighborhood parks, letting her meander around following her nose into bushes and mounds of clovers, a smellatorium, dog paradise. In the evening, she would jump on the couch and lie next to me with my arm around her. She followed me everywhere. After leaving town, I miss her so much that it hurts to remember. But it was worth it. I would not want to forget all of the love and joy she gave me just to get rid of the grief.

Endings Mirror

An end is only a beginning run in reverse. Imagine what you thought and felt immediately before and long before the beginning of a relationship... excitement, anticipation, hope, joy. If experiences, periods of time, can be thought of as symmetrical, maybe these emotions can follow an event as well as precede it. Fond memories are like dreams that have come true.

Saying Goodbye

I never got to say goodbye to my aunt. I was living far away when she died, and I had no means of attending her funeral. Sometimes it's even difficult for me to believe that she is gone. As time goes by, and my life changes and special events come and go, I feel a pang of grief and a yearning for the ability to share things with her, knowing she would be involved if she were alive. Mostly, I feel sad when I want to tell her something and realize I can't. But there is a way that I can. I'm learning now to write letters as a part of my healing processes, even if they can never be delivered. Finding some way to say goodbye, even if she can't hear me, at least helps to give me a sense of resolution.

Surrendering to Grief

Grief is one of the few emotional conditions with a well-defined course, a natural path with a true and inevitable completion. Grief doesn't need to be healed, because grief is itself the healing process. With this in mind, an acceptance of the suffering inevitable in such great losses as divorce and bereavement is possible, and the knowledge that peace is certain to develop brings comfort, even if it takes longer than I think I can bear. I surrender to grief, knowing it will guide me and bring me through to a softer and warmer place.

Death as Separation, a Bad Metaphor

The death of a loved one, in feeling their presence slip away into nothingness, is a separation. But what is it when a person is with me but the knowledge that their conscious mind is present in the room? What if they're asleep? I can still feel their presence, watching them lie quietly, still, and peacefully, dreaming. We say a loved one has "gone" or "passed away," but these metaphors are lacking something. I consider what it is that is "with me" when my loved one is "around." I know who this person is. I know her. I know him. I feel for this person. Experiences of this person are imprinted in my mind. Communication is secondary. Although it is a pleasant expression of my connection and something I crave, what I "have" of a person cannot be taken away and cannot die.

Couples can separate even while continuing to live together, in each other's presence. One can abandon another without ever leaving the room. When a loved one travels far away, they are physically disconnected but mentally and emotionally and spiritually present. We miss them, miss talking with them and seeing them, but we're not apart in the deepest sense.

Death is not separation, not like abandonment or a lack of love. It is quiet, because I can't hear my loved one speak, dark, because I can't see them, and numb, because I can't feel them or hold them... but they are still there.

Island, by Langston Hughes

Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:

I see the island
Still ahead somehow.

I see the island
And its sands are fair:

Wave of sorrow,
Take me there.

Loss Itself

Sometimes, it is not the actual value of my loss I mourn but simply the experience of losing anything at all. The perception of loss is often blind to objective measures. Occasionally, I find myself evaluating the world according to strange factors. For example, the intensity of my response to a separation is influenced by the circumstances of that separation. Did I get to say goodbye? Who made the decision to leave? Did I think I would see that person again or was it a clean break? Depending on these variables, I might feel I lost a great deal, or I might think I did not lose much at all.

Reconnecting

For me, sadness is easy to get lost in. I have to make a conscious effort to break out of this self-perpetuating state. It helps to go somewhere, anywhere, and engage in some activity, especially with other people. Anything that helps me to reconnect with the world around me helps me to snap out of sadness.

The Sense of Loss

Sometimes the absence of a thing causes no pain, while the loss of it may. Like a child who fails to notice a toy until another child tries to take it, the sense of loss is not so simply tied to what I have and what I do not have. It also operates the other way. Losing a thing is as painful when I only thought I had it as when I truly did.

Tools for Mourning

When I feel sad from a loss, lighting a candle helps me focus on the moment and vent my grief through fixation on something existentially inspiring. The flame of the candle symbolizes what I lost and the pain it created. Lighting the candle gives me a sense of control over the sources of my sadness. Watching the flame is a way of creating inner silence, a ritual centered on the glowing substance that, like time and life, is both incomprehensibly renewed and finite.

Looking Back on the Future

I feel sad when I remember the way I used to imagine the future. Now the future is here, and things are not the way I hoped they would be. I think I pictured my life sort of like a movie... I expected a happy ending to all the bad events and hard times, and I expected it to be as good as the bad was bad. So, when I recall those expectations, I feel disappointed. I feel a loss. But at the same time, different things have changed. I see improvements in places I never expected or even thought about. I feel wiser, more patient, and more tolerant. Many of the good things in my life are internal, such as deep lessons and better values, like knowing what is worth working for. So, there are happy endings, but they are different and better.

Patience for Hope

Most of the time, when I feel hopeless, I do believe that things will get better eventually, but I don't want to wait that long. I experience more hope when I realize that often patience is the only thing I need.

Copyright © 1998 by Lisa Lindeman. All rights reserved. No part of this website may be reproduced without the permission of the author or appropriate citation.

Last modified on: 08/08/06