Growing Through Grief: Power of Letting Go
By Angela Clement
Grief comes anytime we have to let go of something which will bring on a form of grief. If you think about it, life is always changing and therefore we are always letting some form of our lives go. As we grow up we give up our childhood to adulthood and everything it means to be a child. This change opens up new opportunities for us like the opportunity to go to school or to explore the world independently. Our children will one day leave home and we will retire from our work. We will need to let go of the way things were so we can start something new. This is the cycle of life. It happens in nature as we watch the trees lose their leaves to make way for new growth in the spring. It is a natural process.
When we lose a loved one it is truly difficult. We like to have control of our lives and when something happens that is completely out of our control we become resistant to it and this resistance makes us very unhappy. We are sad about unfulfilled expectations that we had for the future. We want things to go a certain way and then they don’t. Our loved ones are gone and we cannot bring them back. We know and understand this and yet we long for what we cannot have and we feel helpless because we cannot change it.
Since we cannot control certain things, and that is not going to change, it makes sense that we really only have one choice and that is to let go. Now just to clarify we are not letting go of our loved one. Our loved ones are with us in spirit always. We will always remember and love them. That love never ever dies. What we are letting go of is the resistance to what happened so we can alleviate the pain. It is in letting go and allowing a higher power to take over what we cannot control that we can start focusing on what we are able to control so that we can start to heal. We are using so much energy resisting something we cannot do anything about. If we let that go we would have room to start relaxing, healing and finding happiness. It’s not easy yet it is a natural process and when we get tired of the suffering we will do almost anything to feel better.
In order to let go we must first get really still. Sitting still is difficult when you have all this emotion that you don’t particularly want to feel that wants to come up and be acknowledged. Our mind gets going and suddenly we want to do something else. Being still is a practice. Start out by setting your timer for 3 minutes. Just sit and tune into your body to see how it feels. See what comes to mind in the stillness and then just allow whatever you feel. Listen to your body. Be kind to it. If you are tired, allow yourself more sleep. If you are angry, allow yourself to release that in a healthy way. If you are feeling sadness, allow yourself to cry. If you are feeling pain somewhere just put your hand on it for a few minutes and give it some love. Putting our thoughts down on paper can be really healing as well. Just a few minutes of tuning in stillness everyday can make a huge difference. Your body knows what you need if you take time to listen.
When we allow ourselves to let go of some of the emotion and the accompanying thoughts and judgment by being still we find there is room for us to breathe. We start to have more moments of joy come into those empty spaces we created by letting go. That is when we will start to feel the energy to be able to do more of the things that we love to do and we will start to get the momentum going towards healing and more joy in life. Sending you lots of love, peace and light. You are never alone.