Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief

We come to appreciate that this immense present grief is here because of another period in time when we were together with them.

difficulties may arise when we use “normal life” to evade grief.

trinity of self-awareness: learning, adapting, and trusting intuition.

We may discern that the easy path isn’t always the right path. And everyone and everything can become our teacher. Children and strangers teach us. Animals teach us. When we are truly awake, even an ordinary moment teaches us something. Grieving itself is a learning process.

Grief calls for us to give ourselves back to it. To remember. To reclaim. To re-grieve. And for all those things, even when they sting, I am thankful.

The more we practice staying with the emotions that we think may overcome us, the more we trust our ability to fully inhabit grief.

An emotion-focused journal

Fully inhabiting painful feelings helps us adjust to and accommodate them. They become more familiar and, while they may not abate, they lose some of their power over us.

There is a wide range of emotions associated with grief, not just sadness and despair. We may become aware of a feeling of loneliness, for example, and, rather than deny, distract from, or repress the feeling, we pause and stay with it because we see it. Seeing it, we are awake and self-aware even amid the ache and unease.