Loss and the natural grief that accompanies it can be one of life’s primary transformational experiences.  In this session, Roy Remer explores how the pain and poignancy of loss can also teach us lessons which may be of benefit to others in our community. The session includes short meditations, opportunities for inner reflection, and guided exercises. 

This session was run on May 23, 2020, as part of Reimagine: Life, Loss, & Love, a Worldwide Virtual Festival on embracing life, facing death, and loving fully, during COVID-19.

In this session, Mary Doane discusses how to use mindfulness to explore and process our experience of grief, allowing us to accept more and suffer less. This session was run on May 19, 2020.

In this session, Roy Remer discusses how to use mindfulness and compassion to meet the experience of grief, and ways to process grief-related emotions in a non-judgemental way. This session was held on May 7, 2020.

In this session, Roy Remer presents mindful approaches and practices to support professional caregivers in processing feelings of anxiety, fear, doubt, and grief that arise from their own losses and the losses of those around them. This session was run on April 24, 2020.

By Alistair Shanks

We are living in a time of disappearances. For the most part, we have been stripped of our distractions, our busyness, our schedules, and plans as we shelter in place. We are being forced to reorder our activities, our needs, our lives.

We are in a state of continual waiting,  a perpetual state of uncertainty. Like a dream, we are at the mercy of an alien, inimical force, invisible and unpredictable. The world has come to a standstill. Construction sites are silent, cranes still, businesses dark, the streets empty.

We are grieving the loss of normalcy, a sense of safety and order; everything has been upended. Nothing is normal. Leaving home feels risky, a trip to the grocery store dangerous. People have lost jobs, businesses, livelihoods. People are dying alone in isolated units surrounded not by family and loved ones but by medical teams clad in protective gear.

While also grieving the loss of a sense of connection to others — friends, families, our broader social networks, work colleagues — new opportunities arise to connect in different ways, to offer small kindnesses. There are the friendly smiles and knowing nods as I pass masked people on the street, the greetings of strangers who would normally go by unnoticed. A woman offers a bottle of hand sanitizer to a homeless man outside a Safeway. Many people recognize that we are in this together, that we are all struggling to adjust to this new normal.

Our separation has only made more obvious our dependence on one another, our interconnection. We breathe the same air, share the same sidewalks and streets, depend on invisible supply chains to provide our food, our medications, our consumer goods. We are interdependent in every way, a fact that is easily lost in the daily tumult of overbooked lives.

In the midst of this pandemic, the cycles of life go on unperturbed. It is still spring and trees and flowers continue to bloom, only to disappear in their own time. The days become longer. In the absence of human activity, nature offers signs of reasserting itself: wild boar on the streets of Barcelona, mountain goats taking over a town in Wales, whales in Mediterranean shipping lanes, baby turtles in Brazil surviving in higher numbers due to deserted beaches.

And there is the fear, the vulnerability. We are all vulnerable, for once unable to distance ourselves from the world’s tragedies. It is no longer just an image of suffering on our TV screen. It is here and we are not in control, our lives moving in an arc out to the horizon, a line of disappearances. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

I often point out to our volunteers that a lot of what we do as we sit with those suffering near the end of life is to also sit with our own sense of helplessness. We are simply witnesses to the pain and struggles of our fellow human beings. Our volunteers learn to be with discomfort, with uncertainty, helplessness, the unknown. In many cases, it is all we can do and it is no small thing. I have seen the impact of a single steady, mindful presence transform a room.

What can we do with our helplessness? In this time of upheaval, we have been shorn of our assumptions, our certainties. In our helplessness the only sane, rational response, as ever, is love. Maybe our task is, as the poet David Whyte writes, “To love and to witness love in the face of possible loss, and to find the mystery of love’s promise in the shadow of that loss.”

We all need self-care in times like this. Zen Caregiving Project volunteers are trained to practice self-compassion, to acknowledge doubts and difficulties, and hold them with tenderness and care. As Jack Kornfield has said, “In this moment we can sit quietly, take a deep breath, and acknowledge our fear and apprehension, our uncertainty and helplessness…and hold all these feelings with a compassionate heart.”

We can embrace our interdependence. We can turn to the person next to us and ask, “What is your experience? What is it like for you? How are you doing?”

And listen.
Listen deeply.

The Five Invitations

A website and book authored by Frank Ostaseski, the co-founder of the Zen Hospice Project. Based on Frank’s own experience of working in hospice care, he offers a unique, comforting, and practical wisdom on how to work and live alongside grief in your life.

Grief.com

A website created by David Kessler, one of the world’s foremost expert on grief and loss. It provides free resources on loss and grief, connections to grief groups and an overview of the Five stages of Grief.

Grieving Mindfully

In this book, the psychologist and Buddhist Sameet M. Kumar offers an alternative approach to grief: accepting and feeling it, and then using it as opportunity for growth and finding meaning. 

Help Guide: Grief and Loss

A page with advice on grief and loss and how to navigate it. This guide also offers links to other useful information in the “resources” section.

Wild Edge of Sorrow

In this book The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, psychotherapist Francis Weller provides an essential guide for navigating the deep waters of sorrow and loss in a lyrical yet practical handbook.

Kara

A non-profit that offers a wealth of resources and services to support children, teens, families, and adults in the grieving process.

The Dinner Party

A collective of men and women in their 20’s – 30’s who’ve been touched by a significant loss who host dinner parties to share a meal and discuss loss, grief, death & dying.

Breathing Wind Podcast

Breathing Wind is a podcast about grief, parent loss, change, and healing. Founded by Sarah Davis, this podcast began as a collection of stories highlighting the shared experience of losing parents at a young(er) age. Season Two’s focus is on healing.

Facing our own death, or that of a friend or family member, often elicits powerful emotions. To support us through this process Zen Caregiving Project have created a list of webinars, blogs, articles and websites that focus on death, dying and grief.

We hope these resources are helpful and encourage you to share them with anyone you feel may benefit from them.

Exploring Death and Dying

Want to talk about death? You’re not alone. This page lists a number of organizations and websites that explore death from all angles, and encourage discussion around loss and death.

Grief Support Resources

Coping with grief can be painful and challenging. Here we provide some resources and links to other organizations that can support you in your grieving process.

A List to Reduce Work for Your Next-of-Kin

In this blog, Donna Woodward, a hospice volunteer, shares a useful checklist and templates to help us get our affairs in order before we die, reducing work for those who survive us.

Five approaches for caregivers to work with loss and grief

A blog by Zen Caregiving Project sharing mindfulness and compassion-based approaches to managing loss and grief.

Webinar on Working Mindfully with Grief

In this ZCP webinar we explore ways that mindfulness can help us truly experience the grief that is present for us, allowing us to accept more and suffer less.

Caregiver Corner: Working with Loss

This recording for Caring Across Generation’s Caregiver Corner shares techniques and practices for managing losses, big and small.

Podcast on Dying and Death in the Zen Tradition On Shapes of Grief

In this podcast, our Executive Director, Roy Remer, speaks about death and dying in the Zen tradition.

Explaining the Bathing Ritual

The bathing ritual, in which a body is bathed after the person has died, has been a part of Zen Caregiving Project’s rituals since it was founded. This blog explains its significance as a grief ritual.