Task #1: Realization of Loss

Realizing What’s Lost

The Use of Mindfulness in Working with Grief

NOTE: It is important to keep a few things in mind as you proceed with the practices that follow.

Your experience of grief is not like anyone else’s.
You will experience grief in your own time, at your own speed.
There are many ways we work through our grief. None of these ways are the only way.
The methods described here may be easier to follow if practiced with one or more other people.
The practices can open up experiences that need to be shared with someone else, someone who can be a witness of your experiencer.
You can return to any one of the practices at any time.

Guided practice CD’s will be available shortly. For additional information, email your request.

Grief As Spiritual Practice

Task #1: Realization of loss

There’s the knock at the door, the envelope in the mail, the ringing of the phone… something foreboding is about to be known. You can feel it in your body before the words are spoken or read.

Your head is spinning and the ground drops from beneath you. There is a wild beast inside you that claws the walls of your chest to escape but can’t; you want to wake up to a different reality than the one you are living.

Spend 15 – 20 min minimum twice a day with this exercise, whether you feel you need it or not. In time, you may wish to increase the time to 30 or 45 min. As you practice you will soon learn that the practice is a refuge; a safe haven. At first it will be difficult. The challenge will be to spend 15 minutes doing the practice when the mind and body are in total rebellion. Don’t worry, the mind and body will get the message: “This is a place of sanity.”

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I once had a black cat that craves attention. I had a meditation loft at the time, where I meditated in the mornings and evenings. The black cat thought this was her loft, and that I had come there for her benefit. When I began to meditate, Cassandra would begin purring, nudging my hands with her nose, kneading my body, exploring the darkness underneath my meditation shawl. The more I may try to push her away the more persistent she would become. But when I let her be and continued with my meditation, Cassandra would very soon settle down, curl up between my legs, and leave me alone. Cassandra is my metaphor for the activity of the mind and the thoughts and discomforts we think must be given our attention.

To learn about Mindfulness and the Task of Grief,

please click the links below.

Breathing in, I know that I’m breathing in.
Breathing out, I know that I’m breathing out.
Breathing in, I know the experience of breathing in.
Breathing out, I know the experience of breathing out.
Breathing in, I know the experience of my whole body.
Breathing out, I know the experience of my whole body.
Breathing in, I calm my whole body.
Breathing out, I calm my whole body.

If you feel you need additional information or have questions about the application of

Mindfulness practice to Grief as a Spiritual Practice, please email Dr. Thornton with your question.

Every effort will be made to respond within 24 hrs.

mbi@patrickthornton.net

If you feel you need immediate help, please call your local help line or 911 for assistance.

Mindfulness of the Body

Because your body is the very first level of awareness, it is in the body that the realization of loss is first known and understood. But the pain of the loss can be so intense that the natural reflex is to attempt getting out of your own body. And that’s what many try to do with drugs, alcohol, sex, risk-taking behavior, over eating, spending, over working and more. However, none of these methods will bring healing. Healing can only come by answering Pain’s question, “what am I here to teach you?” The very first step in “grief as spiritual practice” is to learn how to stay present with your experience, to allow it to be exactly what it is, and to know your experience can be trusted, and that it will be your friend and teacher.

Here is the practice that will begin this spiritual journey. Creating a space that is safe and relatively free of distraction, and sitting in a posture where you can stay awake and attentive, bring your attention to the experience of your breath, the simple and exquisite movement of the air into and out of the diaphragm of your body. Then, when you’ve breathing begins to settle, proceed with the following practice:

Your first realization of loss is experienced in your body. Forget about all you’ve read, forget about the stages of grief, about denial and anger and bargaining. What’s happening doesn’t have words for it; it fills the air you breath and chokes any words or thoughts that could make sense of anything. Birds may as well be swimming and fish flying for all the sense anything makes.

This is the face-to-face reality of loss! There is no time for thought or platitudes or philosophical truth.

These are profoundly painful, often total-body experiences of involuntary

“The Web Woven In The Dark” Sea Ranch, CA

eruption: your head swims, you can’t get air, and your chest pounds so hard it feels like your ears will explode. People are talking to you but they’re just moving mouths, they don’t make any sense at all; they look at you as if you’re mad or dense or not paying attention — all of it is true.

These experiences can continue for days or weeks, being triggered by some lifetime memory—a smell, a song, a certain casting of the light at dawn or evening, the absence of another’s breath on the pillow beside yours, some innocent statement made out of care that evokes a reminder of the length and breadth of what has been taken from you.

This “realization of loss” is not an intellectual exercise; it’s a bodily experience. How, in the midst of such pain, can you even continue?