The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. We explored what it is like to be a grieving body.  Bringing loving awareness can help us attune to grief’s suffering. Consistent loving attention can help us to integrate our body’s response to loss.  We slowly develop new experience while navigating the myriad changes of life after loss.

We drew from Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor’s latest book:  The Grieving Body: How the Stress of Loss Can Be an Opportunity for Healing.  The book explores the toll that loss takes on our bodies.  Caring for our bodies can help us to resources ourselves.  Feeling both the protest and despair of loss can make grief a learning process.  We can find meaning through  loving awareness and kindness.  You an hear Tricycle Magazine’s helpful discussion with Mary-Frances at:  The Slow Upward Spiral Through Grief.

We heard Rosemerry Whatola Trommer’s poem, Safety Net.  The poem affirms the collective safety net we weave through acts of kindness and support.  While it feels like the world is falling apart, practicing loving awareness can help us to cultivate the inner resources that help us engage the world with kindness.

Guided Reflection

Last week we contemplated our inner strengths:  clarity of mind, openness of heart, being peace.  We can respond to the troubles of our time by not giving up.  We persevere with acts of loving kindness.  We remember we are not alone.  This week’s events challenged me to hold feelings of grief along with compassion.  There are so many examples of suffering in the world.  And, we ourselves, our friends and family also suffer.

We experience loss, we grieve, because we love.  We feel these experiences in our bodies because we are relational beings.  We are born, develop and grow in relationship.  It was in relationship with a dear friend that I learned of the beautiful blessings practice I can do before drifting off to sleep.  I can savor the many ways I experience blessing in a single day.  I can recall having had the sleep I needed.  The nagging ache in my back has lessened.  The friends and family members I connected.  

One of my blessings has been discovering Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor’s latest book:  The Grieving Body: How the Stress of Loss Can Be an Opportunity for Healing  The book explores the impact of loss on our bodies.  The book is helping me to understand why I feel such fatigue after reading the news.  And also the languishing, lack of appetite and sleep disruption I experienced after my father and then my mother died.  Grieving takes time.  Healing takes time.  Grief is not an illness.  It  is a time of suffering.  It is a time of profound change.  In a sense we lose the life we knew.  We lose part of ourselves.  We are challenged to learn about ourselves and the world.  We seek meaning and purpose.  What makes life worth living?  

Our bodies experience the stress of loss over and over again.  With every loss the world changes.  Our bodies physiological responses to these stresses take time and caring attention to take in.  We need time to learn how to live in our new world that has been profoundly changed by loss.  Here  is how Mary-Frances describes what can happen when we can recognize our body’s response to grief:

. . .  it helps us to remember to care for our body and, for those around us who are bereaved, to really think about their body . . .  The body will help us to have those resources so that we can have waves of grief and not be overwhelmed by them.   . . . Can we care for the body as we’re going through this process? And that means compassion. . . . How can we be compassionate for this body that’s absorbing a blow?

Mary-Frances suggests that we can reduce the demands of the world and also increase our inner resources.  We can engage in activities that restore our sense of calm.  This might look like being in nature or sitting in meditation. Mary-Frances encourages us to learn how to move between the stress of loss and the stress of restoration.  I think this means bringing mindfulness into the activities of daily life.  

We can support each other in developing this kind of resilience.   There may be moments of despair in which we borrow hope from one another.   Our time together is so precious.  We create the space in which mindfulness and loving awareness can arise.  It is an act of kindness to offer loving awareness to ourselves and to each other.  We might realize how all can be held in kindness as Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer describes in her poem the, Safety Net

This morning I woke
thinking of all the people I love
and all the people they love
and how big the net
of lovers. It felt so clear,
all those invisible ties
interwoven like silken threads
strong enough to make a mesh
that for thousands of years
has been woven and rewoven
to catch us all.
Sometimes we go on
as if we forget
about it. Believing only
in the fall. But the net
is just as real. Every day,
with every small kindness,
with every generous act,
we strengthen it. Notice,
even now, how
as the whole world
seems to be falling, it
is there for us as we
walk the day’s tightrope,
how every tie matters.

The net is real.  Every day, with every small kindness, with every generous act, we strengthen it.  Yes it feels like the whole world seems to be falling.  If we are still walking the day’s tightrope – the world is still here.  We are here today because our ties matter.  

Let’s spend this time together nurturing a peaceful letting be.   We can offer ourselves loving awareness. Adjust your posture as you need to feel Earth’s support.  Let Earth nourish a posture of peaceful letting be.  Can you gentle your breathing?   Allow it the freedom to be as easy or as full as it is.  You might explore very gently drawing in a bit more or a bit less.  Can you find relaxation in the letting the out-breath go?  You might rest your awareness on this easeful breathing.  A peaceful letting be.   

Let awareness lightly touch areas of the body. And then invite these areas to relax.  Across the brow and behind the brow,  around the eyes.  Inside ears, nose and throat.  You might notice this loving awareness as a gentle weightless light.  Like the air, it can pervade everything.  Touching areas across the upper back, shoulders, arms and hands.  Relaxing and letting go.  This breath one of the many in the net of interbeing.  

Notice the gently expanding and releasing around the upper chest and belly.   Open to receive and release each breath freely.  Feel the freedom of letting whatever arises be in this space of loving awareness.  Gently moving awareness along the length of your spine.  Perhaps sensing the sparkly aliveness of nervous tissue as self and world engage one another.  Feel the pelvis, hips, legs and feet resting on Earth’s body.  Sense the Earth’s aliveness.  Receive the breath given so freely. Given without expectation or force.  Given in peace.  

If you find peace, can you find a sense of loving kindness within?  There may be a sense of tenderness toward this body – a sensitive physical body – a body that grieves the blows of the world.  You might reflect on what it means to have a grieving body.  What does it mean to be grieving body?  How does it feel?  You might notice a sense of compassion surfacing.   There may be a shift in perspective – the way you hold yourself.  An impulse to care might arise.  

Let this loving awareness be as effortless as possible.  Let whatever tenderness or kindness be just as it is.  Let it rest in the space of loving awareness.  Let everything be held in those invisible ties interwoven over many years.  Woven and rewoven to hold us all.