Sitting shivah: healing through the dark emotions

A number of friends and acquaintances have mentioned recently to me that they are both reading my blog and experiencing effects of losing someone close. I am greatly supported by the sympathy and compassion, as well as by the interest in my doings here, and I want to give a little back.

A couple of years ago I picked up a copy of this Shambhala book, "Healing through the Dark Emotions", by Miriam Greenspan. I read the book cover to cover from the perspective of someone who is straining through changes in my marriage relationship that require mourning from what is no longer to be in the relationship. I found it quite helpful -- exercise 31 introduced me to prayer in a way that I continue to practice today -- but also I found it affecting and poetic, full of insight from her personal experiences and from her therapy cases, and also liberal with quotes from the great sages of all wisdom traditions.

The most compelling reason for me to look at this book for personal help is stated in her preface: "This book will argue that our emotional illiteracy as a species has less to do with our inability to subdue negative emotions than it does with our inability to authentically and mindfully feel them. What looks like a problem with emotional control actually has its source in a widespread ignorance about how to tolerate painful emotional energies and use these energies for emotional, spiritual, and social transformation."

I've picked the book off my shelf again in just the last week. The reading has new messages for me because my perspective has changed to the dramatic experience of losing Kim, my companion of 30 years. Now I have the finality that was unknown to me in the changes of our relationship when I first read the book. Then, in my approach the subject matter, there was always an unspoken possibility of changes in the relationship with Kim; now that is only historical.

I'd like to quote more than a couple of paragraphs from the chapter "From Grief to Gratitude"...

Grief is a psychospiritual process. As the conventional ego begins to give way, the spirit can do griefwork. Griefwork is not a return to the pre-loss status quo. People do not get "back to normal" after a child dies, or after any profound loss. Grief is an opportunity not for "resolution," as in the popular parlance, but for transformation: a wholly new awareness of reality, self, beloved, and world.

Death unseats the dominance of the conventional self that psychologists call the ego. The ego falls apart, awash in feelings of sorrow, anguish, despair. These painful states alternate with periods of emptiness, numbness, lifelessness, paralysis. Everything seems an effort. A stack of dishes in the sink can be utterly defeating. At the same time, there is a perceived discrepancy between the ego's pain and the seeming indifference of the universe. The ego screams its "NO!" in to the void.

Many in mourning ask: How is it that the world can go on turning, just as it did before, that people go about their business in precisely the same way, that the mail comes and sun shines, and everyone looks pretty much the same, when in fact life, as it has been lived, has been destroyed?

This question is asked from the strikingly narcissistic point of view of the conventional self, based on its "normal" distortion of reality: the illusion of being the center of the universe. The world turns as it did before precisely because the conventional ego is not at the center of it! Loss, particularly sudden or unexpected death, shatters the ego's normal grandiosity, its center-stage illusion of control.

This subversion of the normal ego creates on opening for a transformed sense of self to emerge. In the alchemy of grief, the shattered ego's surrender to the inescapable reality of death ushers in a wider perspective--a larger self that can accept death, not as punishment, but as part of the circle of life. While the ego suffers, in T.S. Eliot's words, "like a patient etherized upon a table," this larger self grows, and with it, an awe before the mysteries that lie at the heart of existence, an ability to live fully in the present moment, and a gratitude for all things that are born and die.

Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.
Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.
--William Blake, Proverbs of Hell

Author Mirian Greenspan has a website with quotes from the book. I don't think the site gets much tending, it has not changed over the years I've seen it. There are excerpts from almost all the chapters, and other information. It seems unlikely you could walk into a book store and find this book, although it is still in print and available on-line. If you have looked at other books on this topic because of a strong personal need, I highly recommend that you give this volume a review too.

May we never be separated from the Great Joy of Appreciation devoid of suffering.