When a person experiences significant loss, it’s natural to want to offer comfort and relieve their pain.
But according to Jack Kornfield, PhD, it’s crucial not to rush past difficult emotions in the healing process. In fact, as Jack explains, it’s important to learn how to honor and acknowledge grief.
Jack reveals more in the video below, and illustrates responses that can help people express grief and begin to heal from it.
Take a look – it’s just about five minutes.
What strategies have you used in your life, or your work with patients, to deal with grief and loss? Please share your experience in the comment section below.
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I totally agree with Jack Kornfield. Having grown up with European parents, not American – shut it off, don’t talk about it (during 50’s and 60’s) types, I have experienced the all all consuming support of people who allowed me to, dare I say, wallow in and completely feel my grief with their quiet support or presence, do I could go through it and then move on. I think it is very important for healing, to fully feel and experience one’s grief, not matter how ugly, in order to be totally ‘done’ with it so you CAN move on.
Thank you for your video.
Video helped me rethink my pain and I liked the comment that I was not alone SO many other people are coping with grief at this moment. My lovely kind husband died 8 months ago and I cry each day and I want it to stop as it is so physically tiring. Not at the stage where I can accept that he will never return to me. Think that maybe Mindfulness is the way forward ?
How Mindfulness Can Help Us Work through Grief. First I’d like to acknowledge Jack Kornfield’s (PhdD) video discussion on Mindfullness and grief. Thank you for this insight. I myself am (and have been for many years) on the healing journey of childhood and adult traumatic experiences. I never thought though to give myself permission to grieve, that it’s actually important to allow the grief to come out, to heal and clense me, u til I accepted Christ into my life. Only recently with the help of a psychologist, I’ve become more comfterble with saying to myself that it’s ok to be angry because anger is a natural human emotion and reaction to events in our lives that have and could threaten our very existance. Yet I’m aware that to grieve naturally isn’t really accepted in our western society. It’s my personal and also social experinces that have led me to this conclusion, that it’s ok to grieve for a certain amount of time but any longer than said time people begin to become extremely uncomfterable with our grief and these people who once supported us in our grieving now want us to just “get over it”, “move on”, “no use walowing in self pity” etc….As a person of the Christian Faith God, himself shows me that grieving is important in the healing process. You can see in the Psalms the anguish and despair the Psalmists wrote/sang about. Connecting with peoples faith, of whichever faith the person follows is a good tool amongst others in the Psych tool bag, that can assist in the healing process. Just like some people refer to as the wholistic approach to health care. Thank you for this article.
Sincerely
Claudia Koelndorfer
NSW, Australia.
This is some interesting thoughts on grief. I can see how it might be more harmful to try and rush yourself through the grieving process. My grandpa just passed away a little while ago, so I will have to remember this.
Excellent video. As a person living with a mental health condition, I really wish we would allow men to express the full range of emotions they are feeling. Stifling these emotions is just leading them down the path that feels like suicide is their only way out. I am very curious about Buddhist meditation, and this concept of holding your negative emotions inside yourself, almost like a little child, until you gain insight. I think this is very much in line with what Jack Kornfield, PhD is saying.
We need to have permission in our western culture for things like meditation. I love his concept of expressing grief through dance and other ways as well. For me, writing has always been very cathartic. Now, being a blogger for a mental health website committed to ending the stigma is heaven. Thanks for sharing.
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When my husband died, after a wonderful, happy marriage of 62 years, I was at a loss. I think the best piece of advice that I received was from a Buddhist monk who told me when I felt self pity, I should think of doing something for someone else. That was such simple advice. He said, “Think of these three things: 1 – everyone dies, 2 – be grateful for your happy life, 3 – do good for others”
Four years later, I am doing so well. I often think of my many joyous memories with my husband and I also volunteer in my community and often write notes and make calls to others who are suffering.
I even have a new love in my life. And I think this is what my husband would want for me!
I have been available to listen to grieving friends,co-workers & patients about their loved ones.
Thanks for so much for the video.
After 4 years of watching my mother deteriorate, suffer, losing her ability to move and speak – her care was given lovingly – but was all consuming. After she passed I felt a sense of unbelief, of numbness and exhaustion. It has been 2 1/2 years since her passing. I have felt that I gradually found a place of acceptance of life, of loss, and have observed myself more throughout this process. It has helped me to view life more as a journey with nothing stationary. I have let go of expectations and go more with what is and have stopped clinging to an unrealistic vision. The one thing I have learned is that life is forever moving and I must be flexible and move with it. You cannot rush grief it is also moving… moving through many stages and forms. Thank you for your video – it would have been helpful to me in the early stages of my grief. and was still helpful now. My grief is still there – but is rather like an old friend now…. that visits once in awhile. I look at it, I reflect and I move forward.
The Glass House Shelter Project, a grassroots organization that brings college courses into homeless shelters, operates on the premise that words heal, that telling our stories is transformative, that, in short, bibliotherapy works! Dealing with any kind of loss is difficult and can leave us feeling isolated. Writing our stories down helps us transcend them, move beyond the role of victim and into a place of coping and strength. This is because stories connect us to each other, allow us to say “Me, too!” in a way that brings us back, makes us present. Sometimes we don’t know what we’re dealing with until we see it on the page in front of us; naming our grief, the tentacles of it, the complexities of what we are mourning, is the first step.
this was most imformative. i had forgotten most of it due to recent loss of my mate. i thank you very much.