Dealing with Grief Is an Internal Process
The cause of grief appears to be the loss of a loved one, the breakup of a marriage, the loss of a job, the loss of a friend, the loss of status, failure, loss of an opportunity, etc. But these external causes are just the triggers for grief. The real cause of grief lies deeper. It lies in the thinking.
My Experience with Grief
My mother died in a small plane crash in 2010. The accident devastated our whole family because not only did she die but my step-brother and his wife died with her.
My way to deal with my own grief has been to write down my thoughts and to question each one slowly and carefully using a simple method called The Work of Byron Katie (The Work). After my mom died, I did The Work every day for two months on her death. I wrote down every stressful thought that came up for me and I questioned it.
What I found was that when I questioned my thoughts my grief slowly lifted. After two months, I no longer felt grief at the thought of my mom’s death. I was left only feeling love for her. Since that time many years ago, my grief has not come back. I think of her often, but with love, no longer with sadness.
This Didn’t Happen By Magic
The shift from grief to the experience of love without sadness did not happen by chance. I was not one of the “lucky ones.” My relief came from a systematic questioning of my thinking.
This is what I offer to you on this website. Whatever you may be grieving, you will find support to question the thinking that causes grief. This is a very meditative process. But I think you will also find that it comes with a lot of laughter as well.
You Will Identify The Grief-Producing Thoughts You Are Thinking
This process of questioning your stressful thoughts is very personal. Each of us grieves differently, and each of us has different stressful thoughts to question. For me, a big one was “I need to figure it out.” When I questioned this thought, a large part of my grief fell away.
I had literally been trying to figure out how the accident happened so that I could somehow prevent it. When I saw this, I naturally began to let go.
You will learn how to identify the stressful thoughts that cause your grief. Yours will be different than mine. Here you can spend time learning what thoughts are stressing you. And you can learn how to support yourself to question these thoughts.
But What If I Don’t Have Any Grief? Will The Work Still Help Me?
We tend to think of grief as something that happens when someone dies, or when a big loss happens. But I like to think that every stressful experience, no matter how small, is a version of grief. These small twinges of sadness, even anger, are reactions to the fact that things didn’t go the way we wanted them to.
This is a small version of grief. And while we may get over it in a short amount of time, we can also take more time to look closely at it. I do The Work of Byron Katie as a regular practice, and what I discover from questioning my stressful thoughts about “small” incidents is equally powerful as what I discover from working “the big ones.”
In reality, there is very little difference between “big” and “small” versions of grief. As I have continued to do my work, I find that I am becoming more immune to grief. If you want to work on preventive maintenance by doing this work, I encourage you to join us. You can do The Work on the “grief” of not getting what you want in a relationship, at work, with money, with family, etc. Even losing a game, if stressful, can be a window into the mind. Join us, and let’s do The Work together.