An essay by Michael Stone

Grief

“There isn’t a meditator who hasn’t soaked their cushion with tears,” my Zen teacher, Enkyo Roshi, once said to me. I was in Manhattan at her temple on Broadway, after my son’s mother and I had split up. As I listened to the birds and traffic, facing a white wall, I tried to concen-trate on my breath. I only felt a ball of tension in my throat. I took a long inhale and the tears started to flow. When the bell rang I went to Roshi’s small white quarters and sat down and cried and cried. She just bowed. I bowed in return. I felt as though we were bowing to the tears, acknowledging the shared reality of sorrow, that my sorrow wasn’t just personal. And that as painful as the separation was, everything would be okay.

I left Roshi’s temple and walked to Washington Square Park, where I lay on the grass. Light fell through the shapes of the elm trees. I picked up a magazine and came across a speech Kansas Senator John James Ingalls gave in 1972, called “In Praise of Bluegrass:”

Grass is the forgiveness of nature—her constant benediction. Fields trampled with battle, saturated with blood, torn with rust of cannon, grow green again with grass, and carnage is forgotten. Streets abandoned by traffic become grass-grown like rural lands, and are obliterated. Forests decay, harvests perish, flowers vanish, but grass is immortal.

Lying there, exhausted from the loss of our partnership, I watched the tree branches barely moving against a wide-open sky. I cried. I thought about the ocean, then the salty water off the coast of Crete where we used to take our son just after he started walking.

If the vastness of the oceans shows us the shared depths of our grief, the power of the grass to grow and regrow shows us its future—the way forward of life after death.

Grief presents as sadness, lethargy, inactivity, withdrawal, rumination, slowness. Did the world always slump by like this? Have we always been like jellyfish, expanding and contracting our way around the aquarium tank? Grief is tears: ragged, belly-emptying tears; quiet, fat, rolling-unnoticed-down-the-cheek tears. Grief can also be an inability to cry, a stopping up.

Grief is loss. Grief is feeling loss acutely: deep sorrow, distress, recurring thoughts, images, memories, smells of what has been lost. Some of us grow up in, live in, move to, or serve in war-torn countries, where grief is as constant as the need for water and sustenance. Some of us bear the injustice of racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia on our bodies, feeling the daily grief of battle in countries otherwise free from it.

Grieving is yearning. Grieving is willing a reversal of the loss. Grief is a guilt that blankets itself over every memory: a desire for a do-over. A desire for substitution. Grief is anger, rage, destruction. Grief is a desire to put an end to everything. Grief is a desire to stanch the pain with action. Grief is something that each and every one of us will experience at some point in our lives. Grief has a deep respect for the passage of time, and grief has no respect for time at all.

Grief is oceanic. In The Year of Magical Thinking, tells the story of her husband’s death and her grief from it.1 His death is sudden and shocking—he has a cardiac arrest at the dinner table—and afterwards, she experiences a water-like phe-nomenon she refers to as “the vortex:” wherever she is, whatever she’s doing, she finds herself suddenly pulled out of the present moment, sucked into the depths of memory. “Grief, when it comes,” she writes, “is nothing we expect it to be... Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”

If grief is deep and imponderable, it is because love is deep and imponderable, too. The world presents us with opportunities for connection, and the flipside of these is the impermanence of opportunity: we may lose that which we love through death, divorce, or betrayal. We may find deep meaning in a system of belief, an ideal, a cause, an organization; and then grow disillusioned, eventually cleansing ourselves of it and grieving the loss of what seemed, for a moment, like our hope and salvation. The Buddha taught that at bottom, the more we love that which we lose, the more grief we feel. The world is living and dying, full of birth and loss, tragedy and change. It is “first truth” that runs like a tragic thread, through all of our lives.

1 Joan Didion. The Year of Magical Thinking, page 27.

In mindfulness circles we talk a lot about the mind and attention, but I’ve always translated mindfulness as love. When we give our attention to anything, for a sustained period, we begin to love that person or place. Following this logic, grief is love with nowhere to go. Love which has lost its object, wishing to go some-where, flows with urgent haste to the gates of grief. We arrive at grief through love; it is our love that carries us there.

The standard conception of grief envisions a kind of linearity of stages. We imagine, says Didion, that our path will be a linear and progressive path of “healing.”2 We imagine that both grief and healing from grief will happen to us, pass through us. But walking through the landscape of grief can be far less predictable than that, and more involved. Mourning, on the other hand, is active. Isn’t mindfulness another word for mourning? If mindfulness is learning to be intimate with what’s in front of us, doesn’t that also mean we are learning to let it go at the same time? Can mindfulness and mourning become synonyms for one another?

“The mourning process,” Canadian psychotherapist Greg Mogenson says, “is the laboratory in which the images life has imposed upon the film of death are developed.”3 He writes that the images of the dead “populate the soul” like “photographs in the family album.”4 Everything and everyone who has died, and who we encounter as no longer there, are the negatives; grief is a sea of negatives, a loss in which the self is lost. We carry each negative with us until the weight of grief compels us to stay in the darkroom of mourning, processing the memories of our loved ones and placing them carefully in the pages of the family album. “By becoming absent an object becomes wholly psychological. By losing life it… becomes a subtle body, an imaginal object, an image, an angel.”5 Mourning may mark the end of a material relationship, but it also marks the be-ginning of an imaginal relationship. Mourning, according to Mogenson, can be generative, can be “soul-making.”6

Loss and impermanence allow us to value the love we have while we have it, even though it can feel like there is a hole in your body where your heart used to be. Loss can act like salt, intensifying the flavours of life.

Grief stakes its claim, and it cannot be spurned. But we do try to deny it and push it away, and this is how we get stuck. In fact, we can think of our “ego” as an agglomeration of all the defenses we’ve built up against the losses we

2 Joan Didion. The Year of Magical Thinking, page 189.3 Mogenson, Greeting the Angels, page 24.4 Mogenson, Greeting the Angels, page 24.5 Mogenson, Greeting the Angels, page 18.6 Mogenson, Greeting the Angels, page 21.

endure in life. Our ego is a protective system that erects barriers against the pain of loss and grief. Our ego is formed as we identify with and internalize things that we have lost, instead of letting them leave, so that our lost-objects become bricks in a defensive wall. Our ego absorbs them.

At an extreme, if we simply cannot bear our grief, or we refuse to, rage and destructiveness emerge. In Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild, for example, the protagonist loses her mother to cancer and is driven to destructiveness by grief: she assaults her body with alcohol and heroin; she destroys her loving, supportive marriage by bingeing on detached sex. In the end, Strayed finally heals when she chooses an active path of mourning: four years after her mother’s death, with her life as she’s known in it in tatters, she hikes the Pacific Crest Trail and works through her losses—as a literal journey. Only then can she see that it was not her grief, but her refusal to face her grief, that caused her self-destruc-tive spiral.

Sometimes what we have lost is not a person or a place, but rather an ideal, a God, a belief, or a value-system, and the residue of refusal manifests as enduring conviction. “In therapy,” writes Adam Phillips, “it is always an interesting question to ask someone in a state of conviction, What kind of person would you be if you no longer believed that?”7 A neurosis, or symptom, may result from our conviction to hold onto a lost ideal. Our refusal to give it up is a refusal to mourn the loss of our very way of life, or structure of life: the organizing principles through which we make sense of the world, the organizing principles that many of us see as immutable, like the solidity of the ground before an earthquake.

If we cannot accept that we have entered grief, its hills and deep lakes will be cloaked in fog. Instead of finding our way—instead of traversing the territory—we may try to build a small cabin to shield ourselves from the elements. If we do this, we are setting up camp, and some part of us will remain stuck in grief indefinitely, tainting the way that we see

7 Phillips, Adam. Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1993. Page 12.

the world. We must accept what this emotional environment has to offer, must find our way metre by metre, must choose to mourn our losses, if we are to un-derstand the layout of the territory, and one day find our way out of its bound-aries.

In large doses, self-pity can be a poison—in our self-pity, we merge with the object lost, and the mourning process stalls. But in moderate doses, it can be essential sustenance on our journey. Days after her husband died, Joan Didion wrote four brief sentences: Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.8 Didi-on’s husband was dead, her daughter in critical condition at a nearby hospital. Didion wrote nothing else for almost six months, haunted by self-pity, and the question of self-pity. Later, reflecting on this period, she writes, “People in grief think a great deal about self-pity, we worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as ‘dwelling on it.’ We understand the aversion most of us have to ‘dwelling on it.’ Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation.”9

In this passage you can see how the words “failure” and “manage” are cor-porate or labour terms, terms that invoke efficiency, linearity, telos—economics. Whereas grief, elsewhere in Didion’s memoir, is depicted as related to the forc-es of nature: waves, the vortex, tectonic plates, earthquakes. Didion’s “failure to manage” passage at once acknowledges the self-indulgence and narcissism of self-pity, while subtly, through its language, revealing that our societal command to not dwell, to get over, to manage grief efficiently, is wholly unnatural.

Didion remembers a passage from D.H. Lawrence:

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Her response is acerbic: “This may be what Lawrence (or we) would prefer to believe about wild things, but consider those dolphins who refuse to eat after the death of a mate. Consider those geese who search for the lost mate until they themselves have urgent reasons, even an urgent need, to feel sorry for themselves... Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. The connections that made up their life... have all vanished.”10 Every “I” is a relation. Without the

8 Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking. Page ???.9 Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking. Page 192.10 Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking. Page 193.

other, we are lost. As we mourn the loss of the other, we also mourn ourselves.

Our culture has a strong preference for independence. Dependence, or co-de-pendence, are looked upon as poisons. They are poisons to which the grieving person draws near: when someone or something is lost, we feel through their absence the many rich ways in which we have depended upon them. Loss-es are irretrievable, grief is inconsolable, and people are irreplaceable. There is transformative medicine to be found in exploring the parts of ourselves that cannot live without the presence of someone or something else. Didion’s hus-band, for example, is not replaceable for her. Her book is as much a portrait of their love, their marriage, and their life together with their daughter Quintana, as it is a portrait of her grief when she loses this all. Didion’s relationship with her husband seemed quite unique—or, rather, we should say, it seems quite unique, since the book, through Didion’s insistence on keeping him alive, renders their relationship in present tense.

“Were we unusually dependent on one another?” Didion questions, “Or were we unusually lucky?”11 Didion and her husband were both writers, and except for a few weeks here and there when one of them was away for research, they were together all day, every day, for forty years. They wrote together, travelled together, ate together, were virtually inseparable. You might think, in this over-pathologized day and age, that inseparable is code for codependent. Didion’s book shows that all this talk of codependency and unusual dependence and pathological grief is perhaps a bit nauseating. When she asks, “were we unu-sually dependent, or were we unusually lucky,” Didion is referring to a passage she read in the Merck Manual when her husband died—a passage describing normal grief and pathological grief from a medical perspective. Pathological grief, according to the manual, results from “unusual dependency.”

Didion dismisses this diagnosis. By “unusual dependency,” she wonders, do they just mean “marriage,” “mother and child,” “husband and wife,” “nuclear fam-ily”?12 Her love was deep, bottomless even: so is her grief. She cannot find the upside in her loss or grief—though she considered herself, before her husband’s death, to be the type of person who always managed to find the silver lining.

If we fear dependence as a poison, we might wish for Didion to ‘recover’ from the depth of her grief as soon as possible, to re-commence living exactly as she had while her husband was alive, now without him. We have, after all, been warning about the risks of becoming too attached to the object of loss. But poisons are tricky. The notion of “recovery” is misleading, argues psychologist

11 Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, page 52.12 Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, page 54.

Rick Hanson, in that it implies that “grieving is a departure from some healthy baseline, and that the successful response to loss is a return to baseline. But in fact, we never do return to the original baseline, since we are always changing and developing.”13 Our interdependence with others means when someone or something we love dies, some part of us may need or want to die as well. We cling to the object we have lost, then, not by paying attention to our dependence, but by refusing this process of internal loss too.

The medicine hidden within the poison of dependence is the possibility of self-renewal after a shattering loss. Grief is a process that we move through, and we needn’t emerge the same as we were before we en-tered. Grieving the parts of ourselves that lived inside a loved one, we can open new ground within ourselves for becoming something else. The deeper the grief, the deeper its capacity to be transformative. This is a way to make medicine out of the poison. Dependence remains poisonous for only as long as we cannot bear to look at it, and refrain from including it in our mourning.

In Asian iconography, one of the deities of compassion is Avalokitesh-vara. Sometimes depicted as male and sometimes female, Avalokite-shvara means, in Sanskrit, “one who looks down into the depths of the world.” In China and Japan, Avalokiteshvara became Kuanyin, or Kanon, “one who hears the sound of the world,” or “one who listens to the cries of the world.” In Tibet, Avalokiteshvara became Jänräsig, for jän (eye), rä (continuity) and sig (to look): one who always looks upon all beings with the eye of compassion.

In 2012 I traveled to Kyoto to visit Zen monasteries as well as the area near Fukushima, where a devastating tsunami had, the previous year, killed thousands. I made a pilgrimage to Sanjūsangen-dō, an enormous wooden temple built in 1164. I arrived in the early evening, and asked the security guard to sneak me in because the temple was about to close for the night. It was April, and there were blooming cherry trees at the gates.

13 Rick Hanson, Coping with Loss. Page 3. http://media.rickhanson.net/home/files/Grieving1.pdf

Inside Sanjūsangen-dō, there are a thousand statues of Kanon made from cypress trees and covered in fading gold leaf. These temple stat-ues are life-sized and set in tiers, all facing the same direction. I walked past Kanon’s thousand faces, all of whom are listening to the cries of the world.

In many iterations of Kanon, she is depicted doing her best to stand on a lotus leaf as it rocks on the swells of the ocean. It is said that she is like you and me, standing up as best she can, as waves of grief, im-permanence, loss, and joy swell beneath her. Kanon carries with her a downward-turned vase, into which she cries; when her vase is full she takes her collected tears and pours them back into the salty ocean, where they mix with everyone else’s tears. We all share the same tears, she seems to be saying, and maybe our tears of joy and sorrow are not, ultimately, personal. We collect our tears on our own for a time, convinced of our uniqueness, or solitude, in tragedy and happiness, but eventually we gain clarity. We see our lives against the background of all lives, human and animal, and we send our tears to commingle in a vast, shared ocean.

The more intimate we become with what we feel, the less personal it becomes. The closer we get to our breathing, the less possessive we are—the less I see “my breath,” the more I feel “my breath” as “breath-ing.” Even though our sadness seems so personal, the closer we get to it, the more we are able to see in our individual sadness the shared sadness of all life, interconnected and subject to birth, change, loss and death. Nothing ever stays the same: we may feel like our lives are a single story heading towards a conclusion, but our shared reality is a web of uncertain, changeable narratives—no simple three-act struc-ture, not even a set beginning or end. In grief, we feel as though we walk alone. When our personal and particular grief opens a window, even for a moment, onto the universal truth of impermanence, of life and loss, then through our grief, we walk with all the world.

Eventually, we will find our way out of grief. We cannot rush. The path is difficult to trace, and it may feel like we are not making any forward motion at all. Yet the only way out is through it—we must stay with the

path. Grief asks us to feel, and feel fully, even illogically.

It is okay if these feelings feel confusing, counter-intuitive, or even counter-cul-tural. The backdrop of grief is a dark place. Dark places are best navigated by methods different than places that are light. In his poem “To Know the Dark,” Wendell Berry gives us encouragement:

To go into the dark with a light is to know the light To know the dark, go dark, go without sight And find that dark, too, blooms and sings And is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Walking well through grief can open you to truths about life and its imperma-nence that are essential and unavoidable, even if learning them first-hand is unbearable. Continue feeling into the dark feelings, and sooner or later, the exit from grief will be in sight. The only way to get stuck—in depression, in self-de-struction, in rage against others—is by shying away from the walk you are on. In any case, grief burns no matter what. I imagine a house on fire in a big empty field, and slowly the grasses are ablaze too. The trick is to keep space around that burning house, so it can burn itself up without taking its setting with it. Once you find your way out of grief, it will cease to be your total surroundings. There is grief that never leaves you entirely—your time in grief may make an imprint upon your heart that you carry with you always. At any moment, some-thing may remind you of your loss and transport you suddenly, if briefly, back within its borders. The weather is unpredictable there, and these brief returns may be no exception. All symptoms of grief are another way of saying “come back,” or “come home.” I experienced something like this recently.

Three days before a scheduled event in Athens, I went to a friend’s home in a treed neighbourhood in the north end of the city. I unpacked my bags and then went for a walk in a park with clay-coloured paths and benches under trees. I had a flash of being in a similar park in Athens, eight years earlier, when my older son was only three years old. His mother and I were still together at that time. She and I were each holding one of his arms, swinging him up on the benches, benches exactly the same as the ones I was walking beside when my memory interceded. My son jumped down from the benches, kicking up a dust storm, and we each took an arm and swung him up onto the next bench. Jump, swing, jump, swing. Laughing. The smell of eucalyptus. A butterfly. Athens dress and long arms and we’d just returned from two lazy weeks on Crete.

Suddenly, pulled from the memory, my heart dropped. I hadn’t been on speak-ing terms with my son’s mother, we’d been arguing for several years, and this

old memory, a sweet and loving scene from our past, came bursting in. I wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t used to feeling warm feelings towards her. I took a deep breath in, and my eyes welled up. I could see us again as a family in the slanted summer light, happy, watching our son jump with both his arms flailing in the air. He landed and reached out for both of us. These fossils reassert themselves. The second time the memory came, I opened to it without being frozen by my current upset about the way my relationship with her had turned sour. We may leave grief the first time with a set and set-tled story about our loss. It may have been part of our personal trail map, the way we managed to get through. But sometimes when the old stories have no use anymore, they need to melt away. These brief return visits to grief arrive to help us release these last little pieces we have been holding on to.

We can’t help but arrange events into patterns, though with time, we need to make room for other viewpoints. We all, eventually, lose what we love. All of us lose people and places and meaning. We try and find something to fill the hole, something with a similar shape. Maybe that’s why we fall in love. New people fill the gap of the people we’ve lost. But the whole replacement project never re-ally works. We go forward, we heal, but may always feel grief in corners of the heart, in images at night as we fall asleep, in landscapes we shared with people passed.

The way we got through the cold weather of grief the first time was by staying in motion, by mourning, by not getting stuck in attachment to the object of our loss. The same wisdom applies to our return visits. The story itself, over time, can come to stand in for the lost object and become a focus of attachment. To stay warm, to avoid getting stuck again in grief, we need to allow for movement in our relationship to what we have lost. As we let the frost melt, and the bitterness of the loss becomes less sharp, it can reveal more of the initial love beneath it—love, the extent of which is equaled by our grief. The more distance we have from the loss, the more we have seen that we are able to carry on and build new things and be happy still, the more we can remember the person for the sweetness they brought us and not only for the ache of absence. The fami-ly photo album, in time, becomes not a catalogue of things dead, but a living richness, a storehouse of the many things we have felt and known. Grief is the mirror of love. These are gifts given to those who soulfully take on the walk; who enter, traverse, and pass through the exit gates of grief.

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AboutMichael StoneShôken Michael Stone is a renowned Yoga teacher, Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist. He brings together traditional practices and lineages with the insights of western psychol-ogy, philosophy and medicine. He is the voice of a new generation of practitioners articulating a spiritual practice that focuses both on per-sonal healing and social awakening. He teaches internationally and lives with his family in B.C.

M I C H A E L S T O N E T E A C H I N G . C O M