About Grief: How to Deal With Grief and With Loss Part 1

In life we deal with many losses--Big losses such as fights with loved ones, separations and divorces, job losses, illnesses, and deaths. Then there are the small losses, such as loss of a friend, loss of a material object, even loss of hair. (A big loss, I suppose, in our youth-obsessed culture...) It's easy to get caught up in our own drama and let ourselves succumb to negative victim thinking.

Many of us feel aggravation and doubt about what is going on in human "civilization." We're all reeling—-consciously or unconsciously—-from the recent economic and ecological catastrophes in our country. In addition to an economic nosedive, Big Oil's negligence has resulted in an oil spill of epic proportions. Whether we like it or not, the oil spill is chipping away at our emotional and physical reserves.

Obviously, our suffering is nothing compared to what the many multigenerational fishing and shrimping families are living with at the moment. They are experiencing loss of income and livelihood. Still, while they are suffering, they are the people who are out there shoveling oily sand into heavy buckets and scrubbing the oiled birds with Dawn dishwashing liquid. These men and women are handling loss well since they are trying to control or at least minimize the catastrophe facing them.

If they can pull through such tragedy, then we can do the same in our lives. And if we can somehow get a handle on our grief, our sadness, our anger, and all those mixed emotions we feel (or repress), then we can help create some peace in our lives.

As we reflect on what we have lost—-individually and collectively—-I would like to suggest that we see LOSS as not a bad thing or something to be avoided, but rather as a CATALYST FOR GROWTH. After all, how many of us are willing to learn any kind of life lesson when things are absolutely peachy???

I recently lost an important friendship. It was painful, and my small emotional loss combined with the larger losses from the oil spill is enough to make your spirits drop. Yet I know that this personal loss was necessary to move my life along, just as the environmental loss is essential to helping us evolve into better stewards of our environment. Loss doesn't strip us of everything. In reality, it removes what is keeping our lives stationary. Loss is Letting Ourselves Surrender Stagnancy!

Of course we can't control when someone dies, nor can we control any of the losses our physical bodies endure, though we can help prevent them through sound nutrition, exercise, and stress reduction. When our physical bodies reach the highest form of stagnation and the body can no longer operate, the soul/spirit/essence must change forms.

We are energy, and according to a fundamental law of physics, energy is neither lost nor gained; it simply changes form. We can see loss as a way of changing form in our lives in which our bodies release stagnation and embrace flow; this is the natural cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

I invite you to sit back, take a deep breath, and realize that to move forward you must first accept your loss. Then, in the second part of this article, you;ll discover how to take focused action and get through whatever loss you are currently experiencing.

Remember, we can reframe loss as Letting Ourselves Surrender Stagnancy and realize that somewhere, in the depths of that experience, is an opportunity for regeneration, restructuring, and rebirth. Every ending is a beginning. We can grow through our experiences if we are open to learning what the universe has to teach us.