Grieving Is as Natural and Life-Giving as Breathing

To grieve is to feel the flow of emotions as they arise within and pass through your heart and soul. It is allowing the flow of feelings to happen naturally. It is sitting with those feelings no matter how uncomfortable they may be. It is accepting those feelings just as they are and allowing them to bring their healing ingredients into our lives. Proper grieving means we give up our struggle to control our feelings. It means we allow tears to well-up in our eyes and flow down our cheeks. It means we fully breathe, feel and release each feeling on its terms-- not ours.

There are many reasons why we need to grieve. Life gives to us and it takes away from us. Sometimes life gives us surprises we aren’t prepared for-- a bad medical report, a pink slip, or a serious accident. And sometimes life takes away the very breath from our lungs through the loss of a loved one or the ability to participate in those things that we have always found to be life-giving.

Ultimately, life is beyond our control, and we must acknowledge this fact. Like Job, we need to grieve properly when bad things happen ti us or to our loved ones. And once we have fully grieved our loses, we need to accept what we cannot change. If we have lost our job, or our health or a loved one, we must accept that life has changed and we must change with life.

Many people become victims of life because they refuse to fully accept change. A spouse has died and we are unwilling to accept that he or she is truly gone. We refuse to release our grief and we pine endlessly for things to be just the way they were five, ten or twenty years ago. We cling tightly to the past and it becomes our cemetery for the living dead. We are paralyzed and unable to love forward and live life as God has intended-- and as our deceased spouse wants us to. No one who has entered the next phase of life wants those they love who are still here in this earthly phase to be miserable. They want those they’ve left behind to be filled with life, love and joy. They want us to move forward, accepting the changes that life has brought.

The same is true in relation to any loss. We have to let go and move forward. Some of us spend our entire lifetime grieving the loss we feel at never having had the perfect Mom or Dad. We refuse to let go and accept our parents just as they are: broken, emotionally unavailable and unequipped to be the perfect loving, embracing parent that we have always had our hearts set upon. We need to grieve the loss of our ideal and then let go of it and accept our parents just as they are instead of insisting that they somehow become what we want them to be. It will never happen.

If you feel like you have fully grieved by fully processing your feelings, but you are having trouble with acceptance of reality as it now is, then maybe you need to create your own releasing ceremony. We all have experienced funeral rituals. We know that they help us to cope with our loss and to let go. Think about creating your own little prayer-based ceremony for releasing someone from your expectations (a parent) or for accepting your passage from one phase of life (adult) to another (senior citizen).

Proper grieving leads us into acceptance of what we are powerless to change and the ability to let go of what we wanted that we cannot have. If you are stuck looking for comfort in the past, stop! And through acceptance, start looking for comfort in the reality of the present. It is the only reality you have. Accept it, by the grace of God, and move forward into the new mysteries of the Universe as they unfold before you.