Produkt

KlappentextAre you ready to discover what lies beyond the ordinary experience of grief?

Sacred Grief offers an intriguing exploration of the far-reaching ripple effect of our present-day opinions about surviving grief's emotional roller-coaster and the unnecessary suffering our judgments unconsciously promote. You'll find comfort in discovering that there's another dimension to this universal experience--a dimension that fosters trust, kindness and compassion, peacefully heals, and steadfastly moves you towards your soul's deepest desires and dreams.
Praise for Sacred Grief
'Because we will all have the experience, Sacred Grief is a compelling guide for everyone searching for the sweetness in life's great passages.'
--Gregg Braden, author, The Divine Matrix and The God Code
'Sacred Grief is a holy handbook for gleaning the gifts of the journey called grief.'
--Mary Manin Morrissey, Co-founder, Association for Global New Thought
'Sacred Grief is a welcome departure from the conventional advice about 'surviving' grief.'
--Jill Carroll, Ph.D., Executive Director, Boniuk Center for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance, Rice University
'I highly recommend this book to anyone that has experienced any type of loss in their lives and is willing to look at the loss through a different set of eyes. Tessman, in Sacred Grief, will lead the reader to a place of compassion for oneself, create a relationship with his/her own grief, and ultimately create a place of understanding and a healed soul.'
--Irene Watson, Managing Editor, Reader Views
SEL010000 Self-Help : Death, Grief, Bereavement
FAM014000 Family & Relationships : Death, Grief, Bereavement
SOC036000 Social Science : Death & Dying

Details

Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781615999569

ProduktartE-Book

EinbandartE-Book

FormatEPUB

Format HinweisKopierschutz: DRM, Lesegeräte: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet

Verlag

Loving Healing Press

Erscheinungsjahr2008

Erscheinungsdatum01.07.2008

Seiten160 Seiten

SpracheEnglisch

Dateigrösse866

Artikel-Nr.5509530

Rubriken

Genre9200

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe

Introduction

Going Beyond Survival: Exploring a New Dimension to Grief

Well, here it is-another book on grief. I suspect that´s one thought that may have crossed your mind when your eye caught the title of this book. Another thought might have been something like, Sacred? That´s interesting. I can´t imagine relating to grief as sacred. Finding that concept interesting indicates curiosity, and curiosity will make all the difference as you read on and explore further. Finding the concept unimaginable indicates no prior reference point to what a sacred relationship to grief might look like. That dimension or space of can´t imagine is the perfect place from which to create an experience full of endless possibilities and unexpected discoveries.

Unlike many of its predecessors, Sacred Grief is not about the grief process. Rather, it is about our relationship to grief. Most of us aren´t even aware that we actually have a relationship with grief, so how we typically relate to it is unconscious and automatic. We experience and move through the process via knee-jerk reactions to a vast array of emotions based on our opinions about what grief should and shouldn´t look like. These opinions ultimately become the essence, or context, of our relationship to grief and have a tremendous impact on the quality of our lives and our experience of life.

Exploring one´s relationship to grief is both interesting and intriguing because my personal experience, as well as my observations of others, has shown that there is a fine line between understanding the grief process and actually experiencing it. One side of this line can put us at the affect of our opinions, while the other side keeps us in the driver´s seat, alert and awake to how we relate to what´s happening and all the emotions fostered by the events and losses in our lives. When we willingly take our place as an observant driver, we give grief the chance to unfold at its own pace and do what it´s organically´ designed to do-help us heal and move forward with our lives.

Human beings experience all kinds of losses. The spectrum is vast: from losing a cherished possession or job, to the death of one´s life-long partner, spouse, or beloved parent or child. The issue here is not that one loss is more intense or life-altering than another because that´s frequently the case. The issue is that human beings tend to regard some losses as more sacred than others. Unfortunately, as with most experiences, our preference for pleasure over pain has us subconsciously label and categorize our losses, rather than consciously embrace them all, treating each loss with the dignity and respect it deserves as part of the unique tapestry of our lives.

There are literally thousands of books about the grief process, of which several have made a tremendous difference in dealing with my own grief. Many of these books talk about surviving the process, which I could relate to because when I turned to them for help and comfort, the essence or context of my grief was all about survival. However, ever since I allowed myself to go into what seemed like a huge abyss of grief associated with uprooting myself from one to community to another when I moved from Seattle to Houston in 2003, and then with the death of my father almost two years later, my experience of grief took on a completely different context. I shifted from relating to the process as something to survive, and began the journey of learning to relate to grief as something important to my livelihood and worthy of my attention.

Until then, my opinion of grief was that it was inconvenient, overwhelming, and something to be managed or controlled. Grief certainly can be all of that and more. But in retrospect, what was missing for me was an unwillingness to consider that every moment during this unpredictable and frequently uncomfortable healing process, no matter how it occurred or felt, was sacred. Mostly how I related to what I was going through was as an adversary-like a child relates to naps. Grieving was a have to, and by no means was it a choice or entered into willingly, recognizing it as a natural part of my life. My response was more like I don´t wanna! In fact, I can remember saying to others, whenever I was going through a difficult time, I hate being sad!

The truth of the matter is that for as long as I related to my grief in the not-so-friendly way I just described, I either suppressed or indulged it. I detached from it or was overwhelmed by it. Most of the time I was unwilling to just let it be and the emotional and physical impact over the course of 30 years was significant. Weight gain, weight loss, hair loss, insomnia, increased drinking, unresolved depression, dissociation, anxiety, physical exhaustion caused by a ferocious need to keep busy with anything that would distract me from dealing with whatever was happening, and relationships based primarily on my desire to escape the discomfort of pain, anxiety, and fear.

It would be naïve of me to think that I´m the only person on this planet to experience what I just described. In fact, that´s exactly why I decided to write Sacred Grief. I am fairly confident that there are hundreds of thousands of people in the same boat, and it´s sinking or anchored in a dark, undetected storm that doesn´t ever seem to lift.

Although I have studied psychology, sociology, ontology and served in various volunteer roles for organizations dealing with death, dying, and grief, I am not certified as an educated expert on grief. However, what makes me the perfect person to explore Sacred Grief´s ideas and concepts is that in addition to the knowledge I´ve gained as a scholar and volunteer, I am an ordinary person, perhaps just like you, who has experienced many losses and much grief. These losses varied in their circumstances, depth of pain, and duration. They encompassed early pregnancy, marriage, divorce, parenting, recovery from alcoholism, geographic moves, long periods of unemployment, deaths of friends, family members, and pets, and more recently the death of my father. So what I do know or, more accurately, what I have learned over time is that there are many different ways that I can relate to grief, and ultimately I am the one who gets to choose and create that relationship.

We actually do this all the time with everyone and everything. We have words or labels for the people in our lives-mother, father, sister, brother, daughter, son, friend, boss, neighbor-and we relate to or behave within that relationship based on that label. We relate to our mothers very differently than we relate to a female neighbor. Yet, take away the names or labels, and in actuality they´re both just women. Without the words or labels, we might relate to them in a more similar fashion.

It´s the same with our physical bodies. If you think about your heart and lungs, the primary organs that keep us alive and functioning, it´s absolutely logical and essential that we respect and take care of these organs because our lives literally depend on them. When they aren´t functioning properly, we are forced to seek out medical advice and assistance because we can´t live without them. No oxygen, no breathing. No breathing, no life. No blood, no immune system. No immune system, no life. I´m being facetious here, but hear me out on this. If the grief process has also been organically designed as a means for us to heal and return us to an ultimate state of well-being (and I assert that, indeed, it is), it would make sense to give grief the same degree of respect and attention that we give our heart and lungs.

As far as I know, mankind may have invented the word grief´ but we didn´t invent the experience of grief. We see it in nature when animals experience the loss of a mate or offspring from either death or separation. They don´t have language or words to describe what´s occurring, nor do they have opinions about grief. They just experience it and then get on with life-sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly. They don´t question what´s happening and they inherently trust the experience as much as any other moment in their natural lives.

It would follow that the process is the same for human beings.

However, instead of relating to grief as an organ and natural component to the body´s exquisite machinery, we let our judgments set the stage, or context, for an adversarial relationship to grief and the consequential self-induced suffering. I don´t think this behavior is intentional. I just think it´s human. But as human beings who have the capacity to observe and be aware of our actions and inner dialogue, we have several choices when it comes to grief: resist it, indulge it, or choose the middle way-honor it, be awake to it, and allow it to run its course naturally with grace, beauty, and purpose.

Sacred Grief is about the middle way. The book explores consciously choosing the context for our grief and examines what´s possible if we declare sacred as that context. From this perception, we wouldn´t want to miss out on a single moment and we might relate to our grief in the same way we do our hearts and lungs-as an integral part of our life energy and existence.

Sacred Grief is not a how-to book. In fact, it probably won´t take you long to realize that each...
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Tessmann, Leslee

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