Coping with Grief and Sadness: Mindfulness-based Strategies and Tools
Hi friend,
How are you? Maybe feeling sad this week as the road back to “normal” stretches longer?
Me, too.
Grief and sadness have become an on-going feature of daily life now.
I feel sad for my mom who should be celebrating her first month of retirement but is instead learning to sew face masks for her family. I feel sad for relatives who struggle with mental illness and are now spending even more time alone. I feel sad for friends who find themselves in hard situations: loneliness, financial insecurity, overwhelm.
I am also grieving. Grieving for folks with home lives that are unhealthy, unhappy, even dangerous. Grieving for children who miss their friends, and teachers who miss their students. Grieving for those have lost loved ones and didn’t get to mourn with community. Grieving for anyone who has had to die alone to keep others safe.
So much sadness and grief, yet this is only the short version of my list.
How about you? What’s on your list?
We can no longer pretend that happiness is the norm or default condition, and that all other emotions are just minor diversions. We are faced with the reality that the human experience is complicated, multifaceted, at times painful.
But is it hopeless?
Or can we create a world for ourselves where we greet even hard feelings— like grief and sadness—with kindness and equanimity?
It’s my experience that we can.
Here’s a short mindfulness practice for being with sadness and grief.
Find a comfortable position and take a moment to connect with how it feels to breath. If it feels safe and comfortable, you can close your eyes.
When you are ready, ask yourself: What in your life or in the world connects you with a feeling of grief or sadness right now? Take a moment to explore this question.
Then, ask yourself: Where in your body does this feeling show up most strongly? Check in with your head, your heart, your belly.
Wherever you experience the feeling most strongly, perhaps your heart or your belly, place a hand there. As you do this, imagine you are approaching this place gently, with care and compassion, perhaps as you would a small child feeling this emotion.
Keeping your hand placed, send a few caring words to this part of yourself. Maybe something like, “It’s okay to feel sad.”
Remind yourself that all people everywhere have this feeling at times. Take a moment to feel compassion for yourself and all those like you.
Notice how there is a part of you that feels sad, but there is also a part that is able to express compassion. Both of these are true at the same time. As you prepare to open your eyes, take a moment to be grateful for this capacity.
When you are ready, take a few deep, cleansing breaths. Open your eyes.
There are significant benefits to this short practice. It increases our emotional awareness, which is the foundation for emotional intelligence. It builds our muscle for compassion, because as we have more compassion for anyone—including ourselves—we have more compassion for everyone. It increases our resilience as we don’t experience the emotional and physical stress associated with repression of difficult emotions.
Let me tell you, too, how it’s helped me. I mentioned in my email back in January that I was dealing with some overwhelming and difficult feelings. Having the ability to comfort myself at this time facilitated a greater healing than I had ever been able to experience before. It was a self-healing that came from within, and it resulted in a deeper capacity to care for myself and others since.
Friend, I hope you can find a few minutes today to be with whatever difficult emotions you may be feeling and to express a bit of compassion.
If you want to share any reflections on how this goes, I’d love to hear them.
(Virtual) hugs,
Brandi
P.S. Interested in learning more? Check out these online offerings created to help all of us deal with the difficult emotions we all face in these challenging times. Since my last email newsletter in late March, I’ve collaborated with Ohio Parks and Recreation Association, Prevention Action Alliance, Americorps, and Cincinnati Museum Center to bring these tools and others into work communities who are struggling.
Want to add your organization to the list? You can reply to this email or reach out via the Contact page on my website.
Resources:
I have two keynote offerings and three new workshops specifically designed to build coping skills for difficult times like these. These online offerings are engaging, interactive, practical, and research-based.
Provide tools for your team members to:
Build skills for emotion regulation
Manage difficult emotions
Gain tools for coping with sadness, frustration, and anxiety
You can check out the full list of offerings here, and reach out via the Contact page to schedule.
Want more?