Five Steps For Moving Through Grief

I wanted to share with you how I think about the healing process after experiencing the death of my father when I was a teenager, and 2 of my brothers who died in their early 20s.  They were all devastating losses for me.  The first was a brain tumor resulting in watching my father’s mental and physical decline until death 9 months later.  The other two were sudden – Spencer fell off a cliff when hiking that we suspect was caused by a heart murmur, and my youngest brother, Andrew collapsed while jogging in my neighborhood during a time he lived with me and my family. I was there on the scene trying to give him CPR in the hope that he could make it. He was diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy after his death.

There is no easy death or grief process, but what I have learned is that there is a way to get to the other side- you have to be willing to move through the grief.  The one thing I’m sure of is that avoidance doesn’t work.

What does that mean to move through it? I see it as represented in a non-linear 5-part process.  These parts don't always come in a particular order and sometimes we circle back through parts of the process many times.  But in the end, these are keys to help us to move from grief to peace and be transformed in the process. 

Here is how I see it:

Allow: allow yourself to feel fully, allow authentic expression, allow yourself love and support from others, and allow yourself to not judge your feelings or process

Release: release the heaviness and pain, release painful thoughts, release the stuck energy

Open: keep an open heart, open to healing, forgiveness, and peace, open to trusting your inner guide to help you find the way through this

Seeing: seek to see light over darkness, be willing to see solutions, look for what choices you do have, be open to seeing meaning and learnings from this loss

Receiving: be receptive to healing, receive the gift of being present, receive new vision, receive the invitation to transform through your loss 

And I never want to leave out that underlying these keys - and what makes them work... is a fertile environment of love and compassion.  We cannot fail to be aided in our journey to healing if we seek love and compassion to surround us and flow through us.  When it feels like it is missing - when we are facing those moments of darkness where we cannot seem to access it, hold on, reach out for a hug, choose the most comforting thought, action or sensation you can find --and  know it will end at some point.  If life is nothing else, it is change.  Our tears never last forever, and we can bless them for the precious love and life they represent.