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

We needn’t eschew grief to be happy, and we needn’t decry happiness in order to feel grief. This is a trap of the dualistic mind, and it is life-limiting rather than life-affirming.

Biochemically, crying may actually act as a stress-relief valve.

We own this pain, even on days when we wish it weren’t so. We needn’t give it away or allow anything, or anyone, to pilfer it. Through the grief and the love we can hold our heads high — even in tears, even shattered. What’s ours is ours — and rightfully.

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.

He said that we cannot chase happiness and expect that we will attain it. Happiness can only arise as a byproduct of a life devoted to the service of others — a view that undermines the very foundation upon which the happiness-peddlers have built their platform.

Whatever comes, we let it be as it is. When we do this, we come to see, in this moment or the next, our emotions always moving.

a certain sense, I suspect the bypassing of traumatic grief may be the greatest threat facing humankind today, responsible for immense suffering from addictions and abuse to social disconnection and perhaps even war. When we disconnect from our grief, we disconnect from ourselves. When we disconnect from ourselves, we disconnect from others and fro

assert that being happy does not mean we do not feel pain or grief or sadness — successively or, often, simultaneously. Sorrow and contentment, grief and beauty, longing and surrender coexist in the realm of sameness.

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