Task #3: Adjusting to Emptiness

The Use of Mindfulness in Working with Grief

Adjusting to Emptiness

Sometimes the mind

can be very busy

If you found in the previous practices that your mind kept wand-ering, congratulation! You’re human. We call this a “practice” for good reason.

Each time your mind wanders off and you bring it back, you are developing concentrate. This is a major accomp-lishment. Especially at a time of loss and grief when the mind is most distractible.

So each time the mind wanders off and you be-come aware that you’ve been lost, stop, bring your attention gently back to the breath, and resume your practice without judging yourself.

Grief As Spiritual Practice

Task #3: Adjusting to Emptiness

(Separating the imagined from the real)

There is a well known saying that nature hates a void and always tries to fill a vacuum. You experience your life now as if there is an enormous black hole in your universe. This black hole is a matter of the heart.

I’ve listened to the experience of my wife, my daughter, and to other women as well. With few exceptions, what most remains in their memory is not the agony of birthing a child, but the wonder of new beginnings. Every new beginning is preceded by a loss, and every loss is painful. I have also learned of the importance of breathing into this pain.

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The following is a story that is attributed to both Zen and Taoist sources. It is a fine representation of how little we truly know about the next moment.

A farmer’s horse ran off, and try as he might, the farmer could not catch him. His neighbor, seeing witnessing the farmer’s loss, rushed to his side and said, “How bad for you! Now you’ve no horse to haul your wood!”

The farmer looked at the dust in the distance and said, “I don’t know if it’s bad… or if it’s good.”

The next day, the horse came back with a mate, a beautiful wild mare it had found in the fields. When the neighbor saw two horses in the farmer’s stall, he said, “How good for you! You must be glad!”

Once again the farmer said, “I don’t know if it’s good…or if it’s bad.”

The next day, the farmer’s only son decided to tame the new wild mare. The horse threw the boy and stepped on his legs in many places. The farmer rushed into the field, and as he lifted the broken boy, the neighbor saw what had happened. The neighbor ran to the farmer and said, “Oh, how bad for you! Now you have no one to help you in the field. Your sorrow is understood.”

The farmer looked up with tears in his eyes and said once again, “I don’t know if it’s bad…or if it’s good.”

In time, the country went to war. All the able-bodied youths were conscripted. The farmer, with his arm around his limping boy, and the neighbor stood along the road as row upon row of young men marched off to the battlefield. The neighbor wiped a tear from his eye as he waved goodbye to his own two sons, who walked away with sturdy stride. He turned to the farmer and said, “Say it! How good for you. Your son is home. You must be glad!”

Again, the farmer sighed, “I don’t know if it’s good…or if it’s bad.”

Mindfulness of Mental Activity

By working with Mindfulness and the First Task of the Grief Process you will have learned how to stay present with the experience of the body, and to bring a calm to whatever that experience might be. In the Second Task you learned how to pay attention to the feelings that arise and how to calm your feelings and clarify your perceptions.

By working with Mindfulness and the Third Task, you will learn how to pay attention to the activity of the mind and to be free from those thoughts that disrupt your peace of mind

Begin as you did with the previous practice. Find a quiet place where you can be alone and uninterrupted for the period you’ve set aside for practice. Preferably 15 to 20 minutes or more. Sitting in a comfortable position, bring your attention to the breath, calming the mind and body. The instructions for working with this third task are that you train yourself in this way:

Breathing in, I am sensitive to the activity of the mind.
Breathing out, I am sensitive to the activity of the mind.
Breathing in, I gladden the mind.
Breathing out, I gladden the mind.
Breathing in, I steady the mind.
Breathing out, I steady the mind.
Breathing in, I liberate (or free) the mind.
Breathing out, I liberate (or free) the mind

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Does the mind have sensation? No. But the mind does have activity, and we can experience that. We can know the experience of getting into our stories. We can know the experience of worry. We can know the experience of obsessive thinking. So as a meditative practice we cultivate the capacity for just paying attention to the activity of the mind.

To “gladden” the mind may also be a difficult concept to understand. One way to think of it in terms of “cheering the mind up.” Imagine that you’ve just awakened from a bad dream. You then realize that it was only a dream. What is your experience at that moment of realization? Relief? Gladness? If you find yourself worrying or making up some frightening story about something that may or may not happen, at that moment when you realize, “Oh, this is just my story,” it’s as if you’re were waking up from a dream. Another way in which the mind can be gladdened is by realizing that you have arrived at a point in your practice where you are actually able to witness the activity of your own mind rather than being lost in it.

To steady the mind is to bring yourself back from whatever journey your thoughts have taken you on, returning to the breath, and releasing the story line. That can be a moment of liberation.

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As with the first and second exercise, work with this practice daily, creating a time and place throughout the day when you can spend at least 15 or 20 minutes with this exercise.

You will find you have more control over your relationship with your thoughts and the decisions you make. The object is not to do away with or distract yourself from negative thinking. You don’t chose to have negative thoughts any more than you know what your next thought that will be. The object is to be aware of your thoughts, observe them, test them to see if they are true.

To learn about Mindfulness and the Task of Grief,

please click the links below.

The landscape of your life now feels like foreign terrain that no longer matches the map you carry in your mind. What was familiar is now strange, things that used to stay put now move around in the dark. A familiar smell, a sound, a casting of the sunlight through the window at a certain time of day, a splinter in time and the past and present merge to throw you off balance. Reality is slippery. Your mind gropes in the dark trying to fill the rip in time with what was once there. Instead, you only have the illusive images and memories of what you once shared. The remnants of the past that you saved and planned for together are now reduced to photographs, a pair of empty shoes, a coat on a hanger, an unopened gift, a box in the attic or the garage gathering dust. Things become overshadowed by the discovery of the hidden side of who you thought you knew.

Where did everything go? What can you believe? What is there to trust? Who will take part in your intimate memories of a shared past? Who will hold you?

Your questions are endless, and your mind never stops.

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Adjusting to the emptiness may never take place. It may just be an idea, a concept dreamt up by some researcher or the insight of a Zen student who never answered the other question: “empty of what?” You may find that “emptiness” is actually a thing that you will carry around with you in the background as your trusted teacher, friend and companion.

I’m not a woman, I’m a father, and a grandfather. Yet, I’ve attended home births and

“Morning Light”