Tag Archives: GRIEF AND LOSS
Are you feeling dismayed, stressed, and helpless in the face of the current conflict and uncertainty? During this time when the world is experiencing the growing pains that accompany change, the need for compassion is greater than ever. One of the first things the teachers at the ashram taught us was the importance of the “flowering of the heart.” This is the first step on the spiritual path in order to really progress, they told us. And this applies to…..
The poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand already quite near its transformation.” I believe this is because when we are at a place where we think we can’t go on, we are at the point of surrender, where something greater than our own ego can take over. But why do we wait until everything has fallen apart and all our defenses are down before we surrender and allow Nature to…..
The temples we visited in India are infused with centuries of ritual—prayers, mantras, and fire ceremonies–performed by holy people. The power generated through continuous repetition of the rituals was palpable as we entered these sacred spaces. But we don’t have to go anywhere to access the benefit of ritual in our daily lives. Creating a personal altar is one way. Although our home altars have not been blessed by centuries of ceremonies, we can infuse them, on a daily basis,…..
My cousin Lynda died a few years ago after a short illness. We had been close throughout our childhoods and her early and unexpected death was a shock. I was working at hospice at the time, an experience that invited me to reflect on the impermanence of life and the importance of living here and now. And Lynda’s death was a profound wake-up call. It was one thing to work with clients at hospice, but when death hit close to…..
Sitting in the sand one Saturday at Mesa Lane Beach, looking out over the ocean, I reflected on my work at hospice. I thought about how some things—the heartbreaks, the losses, our deepest wounds—can’t always be faced or felt directly. Sometimes we need to get at them sideways through the cracks in our surface lives. But we need to access them one way or another in order to heal and grow. Otherwise, our unfelt pain traps our life energy, our…..
The path to truth, happiness, fulfillment, is not straightforward. Like a children’s scavenger hunt, the final treasure may be located right where we started, but the clues along the way lead us on a circuitous journey that ends where we began. When I worked at hospice, I sometimes brought the parents from my infant loss group to a labyrinth located in a beautiful natural setting in the foothills above town. Its circular path was created with stones, and the large…..
That November day back in 1963 began just like any other day. I was sitting at my desk in the back of Mr. Martin’s seventh grade Spanish class. It was still a time of innocence then—especially for someone like me growing up in a small town in a conservative family. My parents would dress up every Friday night for their square dance class—Mom in her full skirt and Dad…I don’t remember what he wore. But they both went out the…..
Once, while working at Hospice, I was assigned a client (I’ll call her Judy) who had been in the hospital for several days, having outlived the doctors’ expectations that she would die within a day or two. They were considering sending her to a long-term facility. Each day, after seeing my other hospice clients at my office, I would head over to the hospital to sit with Judy. She could barely speak at this point so we usually just sat…..
Working at hospice (as well as in my own experiences of loss) I saw that many of us who have suffered a major loss often begin asking the deeper questions about life and death. As we search for answers to why it happened, grapple with our beliefs about life and death and try to find meaning in our losses, new dimensions of life are revealed to us. Our broken heart can become an open heart. We can become more conscious,…..
By now 2019 is in full swing. Did you start the year full of good intentions? Maybe it’s time to reconnect with them and re-energize them. Here is an intention from a few years ago that may resonate, given the tension and conflict swirling around in the world today: It was the beginning of January. Sitting down at my desk in my office at hospice, trying to ease back into work mode after the two-week Christmas break, I turned on…..
