By Ruth Rosselson
People come to meditation and mindfulness for different reasons. Some come to it because of stress, others because of depression or illness. I came to mindfulness and meditation because I wanted to learn how to live with the pain, flare ups and fatigue of my palindromic rheumatism. It is now nearly 7 years since I enrolled on the Breathworks course in Manchester about using mindfulness and meditation to live with pain and illness.
Although I found mindfulness useful, I often struggled with the meditation and even though I did a second course with Breathworks a year later, my meditation practice remained relatively sporadic. Although I was convinced by the benefits of meditation, I still didn’t manage to establish a regular practice. I intellectually knew that it was useful and I also experienced positive effects whenever I did meditate. Two years ago, I even paid for my parents to do an introduction to meditation/mindfulness event with Headspace in London, as I had really loved Andy from Headspace’s workshop. Yet I still wasn’t managing to maintain a daily, regular practice for prolonged periods of time.
Until February.
In February, I wrote a blog post about having come to the realisation that I needed to really prioritise my mindfulness practice and that in order to do that, I needed to make a space to meditate every day. I remembered my original meditation teacher’s advice: “You don’t have to like it, you just have to do it”. And so I did. I did it every day. Come rain or shine. Happy or sad. In pain or well. Tired or full of energy. I meditated. Mostly, I worked my way through the Headspace programme, through ‘Take 20’, ‘Discovery’, the ‘Mind’ series, Heart series part 1 and am now part-way through Heart series part 2. If I didn’t have time to do a Headspace meditation – or wanted a change from the Headspace programme – I did another meditation instead. A mindfulness of breathing meditation. Or a “Just Be” meditation . And gradually I started to feel like things were changing and shifting. I was becoming less judgmental – of others, but also of myself. I was finding it easier to connect with people. I was more patient. I was getting more pleasure from seeing others happy or enjoying themselves. I felt calmer. Sometimes I felt happier. Sometimes I was more present than I might have been otherwise. If nothing else, I had twenty minutes of peace during a busy and hectic day. I began to try and slow down and tried to work out ways of making my life slightly less hectic.
And then, ten days ago, something terrible happened. One of my close friends died. I didn’t expect it and I was away from home at the time. And it was really only then that I realised the power of mindfulness and that I was truly integrating what I had learned on my journey so far. Hard, though it was, I continued to meditate. I decided that the meditation I was doing at that point – Headspace Heart series part 2 – was just too challenging and too traumatic for me at that time. So, I did ‘Just Be’ instead. In the early days after my friend died, Just Being meant just focusing on my breath and letting whatever was happening to happen. What was happening with me right then was mostly a feeling of deep sadness and lots of tears. There was a freedom in this. My friend had died. I was sad. It is sad. And so I allowed myself to feel sad and I cried.
As the days passed, I realised the value of compassion. Away from my friends and family, I needed to show myself compassion and to allow myself to feel and to be with things as they were. And so I did. Looking ahead was too overwhelming and too daunting. Even taking things one day at a time was – IS – too hard for me during this difficult period. And so I was as mindful as I could be, just taking things one moment at a time. Because of my mindfulness practice, I knew that although it was painful and sad and so so awful, not every moment was full of those things. I was able to accept them as they were, and was neither frightened nor resisting the sadness or pain.
There are lots of awful feelings and thoughts that come up when someone dies so young and so unexpectedly and there is a natural urge to search for answers. But my mindfulness practice has allowed me to be okay with the fact that there are going to be many questions that can never be answered.
In the first few days after I heard about my friend, I had an awful lot of anxious thoughts, unpleasant thoughts, thoughts of guilt and thoughts of terror of bad things happening to myself or to my other friends too. My mindfulness practice allowed me to acknowledge those thoughts (without pushing them away or denying them) and to let them go – without following the trains of thoughts and without letting them consume me. Because I had been meditating so regularly and had been practising this on a daily basis, this was not as challenging as it might once have been.
There are also lots of physical symptoms going on with my grief too – a physical feeling of anxiety, a shortness of breath, a feeling of tightness, and a feeling of nausea too. But instead of resisting them, worrying about them or even trying to sort them out, my mindfulness practice is allowing me to let them be as they are. As my mind is not preoccupied with trying to sort them out or worried about why they are happening, they are not escalating. I know that they will pass.
A relative told me that she didn’t feel that she needed meditation because she was happy with her life and with who she is. She saw it as a way out of depression or stress or pain and she wasn’t depressed, stressed or ill. I struggled to find a response that I felt happy with. One analogy I’ve come up with since that conversation was that, in this particular case, my mindfulness and meditation practice has served as a ‘mental’ insurance. My regular practice has enabled me to employ the tool when I need it most. And because meditation takes time and is cumulative, it’s not something (in my case, anyway) that can just be brought in at the times it’s needed and left when it is not. But it’s more than that too.
Meditation might help depression, stress and anxiety but it’s not a ‘positive thinking’ tool that pretends everything is fine when it isn’t. It’s a way of being able to be with things as they are, in pain or in grief. It’s a way of being able to experience those inevitable parts of life, without your brain running away with its thoughts and making things worse, or pushing them away and resisting them. It’s a way of being happy when we are happy, and to be fully present with our happiness, without holding onto that feeling too tightly because we fear the alternative. And that’s where true peace lives.
In memory of my wonderful friend. You will be much missed.
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Thank you so much for this blog, Ruth, which must have been painful to write. I hope it will help other bereaved readers as much it has helped me. You have really shown how mindfulness is about being with whatever is happening, good or bad, happy or sad.
Ruth, this came at the time as I was experiencing the same kind of thing. I have used mindfulness to be able to hold my children’s grief too, as the friend who died was their idol. Letting sadness be is difficult for them. Mindfulness allowed me to hold this. It seems we have both benefited and been able to move through the process on day at a time.
A very moving and helpful piece, thanks for sharing. It has inspired me to keep up my practice.
Thank you for sharing this has been very useful for me and helped me to see the value of mindfulness in the grieving process. I volunteer as a bereavement support worker and have often thought mindfulness would be of great comfort for those who seek support, your blog is a wonderful example.
This as helped me. My grief is not for a person it’s for my dog. He died unexpectedly in my arms. He was my little boy I’m deverstated I keep crying. Things come into my mind way did god let him die.
Allow your grief to be. XX