Saturday, March 14, 2015

The Death of a Loved One Just.. Overcome It...!!


Losing a loved one can be a highly charged and very traumatic time. Though coping with loss can be a deeply personal experience, there are a few basic and universal steps to the bereavement and grief process. Knowing these steps can help you to work through your grief over the loss of a loved one.



Allow the feelings

Coping with the loss of a loved one brings up almost every emotion imaginable. There are times when more than one emotion seems to take hold at once, and you may feel as if you're “going crazy.” It's natural to feel this way, as it's normal to experience a number of different feelings.

Gently remind yourself in your time of bereavement and grief that your feelings are yours, and they are well within the norm. It's important to your process to understand that there is no "right" or "wrong" when it comes to your feelings about losing a loved one.



Gather support

While there may be times as you are coping with loss when you'll wish to be alone, it's important to gather a support group around you for those times when you might need them. Friends, family, a Minister or Rabbi and perhaps even a therapist are all people who can and should be accessed during your grief process. These individuals can be accessed for emotional support as well as physical needs, if required. The death of a loved one often leaves a large hole in the life of the survivor that can be, at least temporarily, occupied by a support team.



Allow the grieving process

Bereavement and grief is a process. It's important to know that every person has their own way of coping with loss. You cannot put a time limit on your grief. You must allow yourself to experience the stages of grief as they come up.

Author Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, in her book, On Death and Dying, outlined five stages of grief. Each stage is unique and is not necessarily experienced in order. Stages may also be revisited. These stages are:

Denial: Your experience is incomprehensible, initially. You find it impossible to believe the loss of your loved one is real, and you may be numb from the experience.

Anger: As the truth of the situation begins to take hold, it's normal to feel anger and rage. This anger may be directed at yourself, the loved one for leaving you, doctors for not healing your loved one or even at God.

Bargaining: It's not unusual for survivors to cope with loss by trying to negotiate, usually with their Higher Power. Don't be surprised if you find yourself trying to make an “if only” deal with God.

Depression: The overwhelming sadness you feel is normal, and in most cases will not last forever. It's common to feel as if life will never be the same.

Acceptance: While this final stage of bereavement and grief is called “acceptance,” this refers to coming to terms with the finality of the loss and moving forward with your life. It does not mean that, from time to time, you may not revisit some of the stages listed above, but rather that the pain of your loss will become more manageable.



Embrace life

While the pain of your loss is real and must be felt, there will come a time when you must begin to live your own life again. By working through overcoming the death of a loved one, you will come to a place of accepting the death as a reality. You will find yourself able to move forward and embrace your life without your loved one by your side.

Your process through bereavement and grief are your own. Everyone responds differently to coping with loss. Above all, be kind to yourself and know that you will wake one day and find the pain is less, and life can go on.

wired:gaiam.com


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Monday, January 19, 2015

There Is No U In Love






Stop searching for love. It wants nothing to do with you.

Love is where you are not. It would bomb as a pick up line, but it’s a concept of love worth pondering.

They are the words of Jiddu Krishnamurti, a spiritual teacher who traveled the world in the twentieth century extolling the merits of self-inquiry.

At first the statement comes across like one of those if-a-tree-falls-in-the-woods Zen mind-benders. But spend a few moments with it and it may dissolve into a valuable insight.

Tug on the word ‘you’ and the statement begins to unravel. You, as in ego. Krishnamurti was saying that love can only exist when the ego is not around to muck things up.

Few of us would object to such a selfless concept of love. Similar observations by acknowledged subject matter experts like St. Paul and Kahlil Gibran lift our lips into hopeful smiles during wedding ceremonies. In those moments of stillness we contemplate the endlessness of human possibility, but only seconds later we are contemplating the endless flow of free beer at the reception. It’s as if such grand visions of love are too hot to hold, or perhaps too unattainable to sustain our attention.

And anyway, who are St. Paul or Kahlil Gibran to lecture anyone about love? The dudes weren’t even married.



For better or worse, we view love as an easily acquired treasure. This is because we define it as a feeling, rather than as the shared experience Krishnamurti hints at. We can’t wait to report the news of our surging feelings to friends after a third date with our latest admirer. And three dates later we want to throw open the window and broadcast our feelings to the world. Something inside us has been switched on, and it’s a marvelous feeling that’s hard to describe. Eventually we all find the same word for it—love.

But is a feeling that any randy seventh grader can experience really what the world needs more of?

If this is love, it is not of the selfless variety. It is all about us, and hooray for that. But feelings come and go, even the rapturous ones, making this kind of love as easy to fall out of as it is to fall into. Is this ephemeral quality evidence of love’s sublime mystery? Or is love, the feeling, too flimsy a structure to stand on its own?

Divorced from feeling, love loses its conventional charm. When it’s not being rented out for wedding ceremonies, the concept of love as a shared state of being is considered the property of ascetics like Gandhi and Mother Teresa. Far from romantic, it is a state in which the ego loses its grip and one’s identity merges with those around them. It is love without a speck of self-gratification; in the absence of ego, there is no self seeking any reward.

Love exists, according to Krishnamurti, because we no longer do.

As inspiring as this selfless model of love might be, who needs it? The old model works just fine. That is, until it breaks down, which it does most of the time when you consider the hefty divorce rate and then guess at the number of burned out marriages. Add to this the legions of lovers meeting similar fates outside the borders of marriage and we have what might be termed an epidemic if it were a contagious disease. And yet somehow none of this dissuades us from hopping aboard the same rickety jalopy for another perilous ride.

A more abiding state of love awaits those disillusioned by one too many hapless joyrides. We need not shave our heads or abandon all earthly pleasures to enter this transcendent state, but we must discard the notion that love is a self-fulfilling venture. Love and ego cannot coexist. Like light and shadow, they cancel each other out.

For love to appear, you must disappear. You must give yourself so completely that no trace of you remains. Love arises in the space created by your absence.



Reference : highexistence.com