We’ve all experienced hurt, loss, and grief. For most of us, the journey to recovery can be long and arduous. Thankfully, meditation can help calm the mind and ease anxiety. Below is a meditation you can do to process your emotions and heal.
Coming to Terms with Grief: How to Heal Yourself
One of life’s most difficult challenges is dealing with grief, the feeling of sadness over the loss of someone or something significant. Although grief is normal, the pain can be overwhelming, and the sorrow so profound that it defies description. You wonder if you can ever heal yourself.
[Read more…] about Coming to Terms with Grief: How to Heal Yourself
Growing Through Grief: About My Father
My father was a Vietnam veteran who suffered from PTSD. A part of me always grieves for him, for how he suffered and how his illness affected our family. And a part of me will always grieve for the little girl whose father came back from war a stranger, and for the relationship we never got to have.
His illness took him away from me, from his family, from the man he was before. [Read more…] about Growing Through Grief: About My Father
How to Help Kids Deal with Grief
The loss of a loved one is a devastating event for both children and adults. Following a loss, it’s perfectly natural to experience emotional turmoil and a wave of different feelings. A major part of dealing with death is the grieving process that allows us to accept that a person has died.
Since children are diverse in nature there is no single way that every child will experience the grieving process. It is dependent on a variety of factors such as age of the child and the bond the child had with the recently departed. One thing’s for sure though, during this difficult phase children need solid support from their parents and other adults in their life.
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Here is some practical advice parents can take to help kids deal with grief. [Read more…] about How to Help Kids Deal with Grief
10 Ways to Remember Loved Ones Who’ve Passed Away
Easter is a Christian tradition celebrating the rising of Jesus Christ from the grave, and while this is still the core of the commemoration by many churches worldwide, the holiday has spread out to other festivities. Easter egg hunt, anyone?
It has also become a time for families to get together, much like other major holidays. And, usually, this is the time when loved ones who have passed away are missed most. [Read more…] about 10 Ways to Remember Loved Ones Who’ve Passed Away
10 Quotes on Grief and Healing
Grief can be a debilitating thing, and while everyone says time heals all wounds, those who suffer from the loss of a loved one knows that there is no formula for dealing with grief.
It can be that a month after the passing of a loved one, things seem okay. Then suddenly, a week (or month) later, the loss hits you hard once again. There are periods when it seems that the grieving process will never end.
It’s been a little over four months since my mom passed, but it’s only now that the grief is intensifying. It hits me at random times, but especially at night before going to bed. I didn’t think it would be this difficult, especially since we had been expecting it to happen for a year or so.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. As Meghan O’Rourke says, “I wasn’t prepared for the fact that grief is so unpredictable. It wasn’t just sadness, and it wasn’t linear. Somehow I’d thought that the first days would be the worst and then it would get steadily better – like getting over the flu. That’s not how it was.”
There are many ways people can deal with grief, but I’ve found that reading poems, quotes, and stories of how other people cope(d) with their loss help – even if temporarily.
Poems to Help with Grief and Loss
Today, I’d like to share some quotes that may help ease that pain and yearning when grief hits you hard.
Here are some quotes on grief and healing.
1. There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love. ~Washington Irving
2. You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp. ~ Anne Lamott
3. Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break. ~William Shakespeare, Macbeth
4. The five stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. ~Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
5. Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope. ~Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
