As I was shopping yesterday, the store was filled by the loud cries of an unhappy toddler; I couldn’t see why she was so distressed, but her sobs were filled with passion and unyielding. She was inconsolable it seemed. Her cries were so constant that I wondered how she was actually managing to breathe through her sobs. After several minutes, her crying stopped, and as her mother pushed her to the aisle to check-out, I could see that she was clutching a new toy; the diversion needed to break her emotional pattern.
As I watched this unfold, it triggered the thought that many times this is exactly how we feel when we experience grief…inconsolable…caught up in the sheer wave of emotions, feeling our loss and locked into an emotional pattern that we ourselves can’t easily break. Like the little child, we need a “diversion” to interrupt our outpouring.
When our world has been turned upside down and our emotional grounding moved off center, many times we don’t even know how to respond because we are “inexperienced” about the emotion of grief. Our other emotions, e.g., love, joy, anger, are usually pretty well-developed through simply living our daily lives. We exercise these emotional muscles on a regular basis through our relationship with others. We’ve learned how to cope.
But this isn’t so true of the emotion of grief. Of course we have all felt some components of grief—sadness, loss, hurt—since we were babies, and have developed some coping mechanisms as a result. But until you’ve experienced the loss of a loved one, you probably haven’t felt the full emotional spectrum that is grief. Nor do we have an innate coping tool as to know how to deal with the complex array of emotions we may feel.
Sometimes when we’re caught up in this wave of emotions, seemingly inconsolable and not knowing how to cope, we can press the “PAUSE” button.
Using the guided meditations in The Grief Interlude Series can help you do that. It offers a way to step out of your grieving and step into a place of rest…just for a while. It allows you the opportunity to “break the circuit”, to catch your breath, and to gain some time to restore. To help you regain your footing, to find your center and to focus on the emotion that will help you make your way through the grief: love.
Sharon Clark
