Opening to Grief
Sometimes life breaks you in so many places you don’t even know where or how to begin picking yourself up again. Just two weeks ago it happened again, when one of my closest friends, Nate Olk, died very suddenly.
Even though we lived on different continents, Nate was one of my closest friends. We were in touch 2-3 times a week, usually through long and meandering voice messages back and forth over WhatsApp; our ADHD minds worked in similar ways. Throughout our twenty-five years of friendship ran the common theme of exploration: nature, music, travel, and consciousness through the use of entheogens.
On Thursday, May 21st, Nate went for a float in a sensory deprivation tank. He never came out.
In the days leading up to his death, Nate and I had been in touch on a daily basis. That morning I woke up to several messages from him, to which I replied. At the time, what I did not know was that Nate had just passed away.
Later that day, I received an email from a close mutual friend of ours from whom I had not heard from in years. The message simply said: “Call me. It’s about Nate.” Immediately, I recognized the feeling: it was the same sense I had when I received a text from my Mom to call her before she broke the news to me that my father had died in a car accident.
When I spoke to my friend Graham, he explained calmly and clearly what had happened to Nate. But the words echoed in my mind with a sort of surreal quality to them: “Nate passed away.” At the time, I was aware that I was in shock and numb to my emotions. It wasn’t even that I was fighting feelings of sadness off. I just didn’t feel them yet. It didn’t register. When you lose someone suddenly, you have a sense of the terrain of that trauma the second time around, even though the loss is always different and unique to that particular relationship.
It took a few hours before reality started to settle in, but when it finally did, the grief was overwhelming. By the next morning people were already posting tributes to Nate on Facebook. I scrolled through those tributes sobbing, still in shock at how his beautiful life had unraveled so quickly. I posted my own tribute to Nate expressing how I felt--I was heartbroken and devastated--and what I valued so much about him--his kindness, generosity, and sense of humor, to name just a few qualities.
Perhaps most poignantly, Nate mirrored my own insatiable sense of curiosity, an openness to new experiences, and a willingness to push boundaries. This sense of openness guided us throughout our many adventures.
It’s in particularly difficult moments in life such as these, when the fruits of having a regular meditation practice, and in training oneself in The Dharma, the teachings of The Buddha, really become apparent. For as soon as I felt the grief and the sadness start to surface, I knew instantly what I had to do: I had to open to the grief.
Difficult emotions can be like young children: they demand our careful attention. If we listen to what they have to teach us, they will eventually move on, and we will grow in the process. Yet if we resist, the suffering persists, albeit in more subtle and subconscious ways.
Like other strong emotions, grief is accompanied by thoughts and images that form stories in the mind. With mindfulness, I could step back and notice the thoughts, and in that moment of recognition, awareness was no longer unconsciously identified with the story. Attention could drop into my body and simply open to whatever was arising. Emotions have an energy to them: fear, anger, grief, they need to move through us.
It’s important to allow our body-mind to open to the intensity of the emotion; welcome whatever arises to the surface of consciousness, meeting it with curiosity, care, and compassion.
With time and practice, meditation allows us to realize how much of life is outside of our control.
We learn that the path is largely about letting go.
The more we can surrender to our experience, the less we suffer and the more joy, freedom, and peace pervades our lives.
Those first few days in the wake of Nate’s passing, I completely surrendered to grief. In fact, I would say that I grieved proactively. If I noticed that my mind was subtly trying to turn away from the unpleasant thought of his passing, I noticed that aversion. If I didn’t want to open Facebook and to be reminded of the photos that made me upset, I would consciously open social media, go to his profile page, and make myself read the tributes to him again. I cried. A lot. I would listen to music that commemorated him, but also made me sad, and made me cry.
I allowed the grief to move through me again and again and again until I had no more tears left to shed or until I just felt so tired that I dropped into a space of silence.
From that silence, a question leapt up: “Grief, what do you have to teach me?”
Becoming intimate with grief: it’s an invitation that few of us want to accept. Yet what we resist persists. What we shove in the back of our minds only gets stuffed into our subconscious and comes to rule us by other means. As Carl Jung warned: “Until you make the unconscious, conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
From another perspective, grief is a process that is necessary for our evolution; grief is a portal that allows us to open to grace: “For truly it is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest to all of us.” - Meister Ekhart
By the fourth day after Nate’s passing, there was a noticeable shift in my mood. I could feel the acceptance of Nate’s passing sink down another level in my body and mind, and a voice whispered in my head: “he’s gone.” But the voice had a different tone this time, it was not a gasp of grief but more a quiet sigh of equanimity.
Equanimity is a very important quality of the mind that we cultivate in mindfulness meditation. It’s one of the four immeasurable qualities of the heart, along with loving-kindness, compassion, and appreciative joy. Equanimity refers to a sense of spaciousness within the body-mind. It’s a quality of non-reactivity that arises when we begin to see with clarity the truth of our own direct, moment to moment experience.
What we begin to see is the truth of impermanence: everything is always changing. In fact, there is nothing stable to hold onto. We start to see how the mind grasps after experience and tries to make things permanent. We see how the mind clings to what’s pleasant and pushes away what’s unpleasant.
With experience, we begin to see how deeply unpleasant this kind of emotional reactivity is: always chasing after what’s pleasant and resisting what’s unpleasant. Learning to take this backward step and witness our experience without judgment, but with curiosity and love and compassion, this is what allows us to cultivate the quality of equanimity in our body-mind.
Equanimity is what allows us to surf the ups and downs of life with much more ease and grace, even in the face of the most turbulent times. It’s a turning towards truth: while we don’t have the power to change what’s outside of our control, we can choose how to relate differently to our experience.
There are all sorts of methods for cultivating equanimity in the face of difficulty and they come from a wide variety of disciplines. Why not leverage many of these techniques, including fields such as positive psychology or schools of thought such as Stoicism? Many of these methods get involved with the contents of our thoughts and work on strategies such as how to reframe our thinking in a more positive light. Buddhism offers these sorts of practices as well
However, from the perspective of mindfulness, when we’re caught in thought loops that keep the mind running around in circles, like a dog chasing its tail, it can be helpful to step back and recognize what’s happening without judgment. At certain points, you recognize that you’re not going to escape a prison of thought with more thoughts.
A common and effective antidote to so many of our mental afflictions is allowing our attention to rest on bodily sensations. We spend so much of our lives from the neck up which is where our mental problems percolate. Allowing ourselves to “be in our bodies” is very important for a number of reasons, one of which being that emotions are not simply stored in the head. Emotions are stored in our bodies and need to be felt and opened to, not only thought about or conceptualized.
The truth is that our minds can make a problem out of anything.
They tend to make a problem out of experiences (emotions, sensations) that the mind labels as negative, such as grief. But change, loss, death is only a problem from the perspective of the mind. Grief is unpleasant. It’s deeply unpleasant. But while the ego does not like unpleasant experiences, they are only a problem from the perspective of the ego.
The quality of attention is critical. Observing the truth of our moment to moment experience without judgment is what allows us to view the reality of what’s happening much more clearly. When we do so, we can see that as everything arises, everything passes away. As we start to pay attention with an attitude of non-judgment, we know this is simply how things are.
Life is like this: to be born is to receive a death sentence. From one perspective, to be born is to be given the precious opportunity to love, to grow, to connect, to create, to make meaning. All of these things are true. Humans also have the unique privilege of human consciousness as well as the burden: we are aware of our own mortality. Most of us spend most of our lives trying not to think about death; however, there is a cost to this avoidance. When we encounter the inevitable sorrows of life we suffer much more greatly.
We need to honor our grief by being with it.
It’s important to make the distinction that although grief is unpleasant, grief it is not a problem. Grief is just grief. It’s actually a process for breaking us down in order to build something new. Who we think we are needs to die in order for something new to be born, and that often includes our relationships to those we love most.
There’s a profound sense of freedom and peace and joy that comes from aligning ourselves with the truth of impermanence: everything arises, everything passes away. Humans are no exception. You, I, we--are no exception.
There’s a sense of immense relief in acceptance, in conceding to oneself “this is just how things are.”
This is where true freedom is to be found: in being with things just as they are. On a subtle level, our ego wants freedom from grief; the ego wants all pleasure and no pain. It’s the feeling underneath the emotion that says “I don’t want to be feeling this right now.” So we need to tease this out: we need to separate out the raw emotion of grief from our resistance to grief. We need to open to grief in order to receive the grace that grief can offer us: trading in the life we had and still long for, for the one we now have.
This moment, just this, is everything. Truly, it is all there is. There’s really nothing left for us to do but to face it fully.
Previously, I used the phrase “working with grief” but now that language just feels like another way that the mind wants to constantly make a problem out of life. So instead of working with grief, just try being with grief. Opening to grief is the first step. Then allow the grief to just be there. We become intimate with it. We listen to what it has to teach us. Then when it’s done teaching us it eventually goes away.
With each passing day, I realize this is what wisdom is pointing us towards again and again: letting go. Letting go of our preferences for how we think things should be or should not be, letting go of our opinions about what’s fair and what’s not fair, letting go of our judgments about who is right and who is wrong. Letting go of the constant need to try to control or manipulate circumstances to conform to our preferences.
Instead of resistance: surrendering, allowing, opening.
Surrendering to the truth of how things are: everything arises, everything passes away.
Allowing ourselves to be with whatever arises--not making a problem out of our emotions or clinging to them--and watching them pass away, as they inevitably will.
Opening to equanimity. Opening to grace. Opening to the love that transforms it all.