Understanding Grief

What is Grief?

We all have grief. It is part of life and part of being human. Grief is a response to loss. It is deep heartbreak, and it feels like deep sadness or sorrow. Grief is painful, but if we allow ourselves to grieve, it also creates an opening.

What are the Gifts of Grief?

Grief has the power to deepen our intimacy with each other and with life itself. When we grieve together and allow ourselves to fully feel our grief, it connects us all, and enables us to tune into to what really matters.

The different levels of Grief

The levels at which we grieve depend on the loss or losses we are experiencing. We usually initially feel our personal grief as "my grief". If we choose to, we can go further and shift into a sense of "our grief" as we include the pain of others close to us. We may then further shift into "our collective grief" as we tune into our collective suffering, and allow the feeling of that to move us. This wider connection brings not only more grief, but also more love, compassion and connection as we expand our circle of compassion to include everyone who has grief. When we connect with all three of these, grief is completely out in the open. Grief is not something to get over, but something to get fully into.

Grief Phobia

Our culture today tends to be grief phobic. A few tears are OK as long as they don't become too loud or messy. Being strong and stoic in the face of grief is often seen as a virtue. However, there are huge costs to not grieving.

What are the costs of not grieving?

• Unexpressed grief that we hold in our bodies can cause illness
• Unexpressed grief that is held in our culture keeps us separate from each other.
• Unattended, grief isolates us and has us feel alone .
• We are left unaware of the interconnectedness of all that is.
• Unexpressed grief deprives us of the joy of connection with each other.
• It deprives us of the ability to show empathy to others in heartbreak.
• It means we feel uncomfortable and powerless in the presence of others' grief.
• It causes us to turn away from our own pain, often leading to reliance on painkillers, tranquillisers, drugs or alcohol.
• It means that we use our energy to resist having to be vulnerable, making it even harder to access our grief.
• Not displaying our grief causes emotional numbness and disconnection from our authentic selves.
• It causes us to feel depressed when things end or change.
• It means we tend to become aggressive when we begin to feel shame or sadness. We tend to project our grief onto others 

In this state, what happens?

When we do show sorrow, we feel ashamed, because we associate sorrow with weakness.

Opening to Grief

Opening to our grief is profoundly life changing. Even if it is only in as far as it enables us to deepen into our shared humanity. Grief also enables us to become fully present to the losses and endings in our lives physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. It deepens who we are, and has us become more whole, more alive and present.

*(This article is inspired by the book "Bringing your Shadow out of the Dark" by Robert Augustus Masters)

In her book "On death and dying", Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Swiss-American psychiatrist and pioneer in near death studies, discussed her theory of the 5 stages of grief, and provided a framework to normalise the process. These 5 stages that we move through as we grieve are:

Denial, Anger, Depression, Bargaining and Acceptance