If you are experiencing grief, you may have an ache at the center of your chest. Why? Since the heart center is at the breastbone (the focus of tenderness) the ache at the center of the chest is the grief point.

Using guided meditations, you can open up the grief point…you can loosen and lighten the grip of distress and disturbing emotions…you can release the pain in order to live with it and accept it.

Have you noticed that when you want your deceased beloved and the more you want him/her and focus on that wanting, the more there is hollowness in the pit of your stomach because you can’t have what you want? –There is a feeling within you of disappointment and sickness and grief (the pangs of grief). This is because you want the situation to be something other than it is—you don’t want to accept the change…you don’t want to accept the loss. You may also have a ton of “what if’s” and “if only’s” and a gamut of other agonizing thoughts, feelings, fantasies and imaginings going around and around in your mind causing you intense grief and sadness. You may even be trying to suppress your feelings and painful thoughts, only to feel increasingly worse later on and manifest all kinds of illnesses.

As a grieving person having mindfulness (also called ‘satipatthana’– having a thorough or deep awareness of something, or seeing it with wisdom; ‘Sati’ meaning ‘awareness’ or ‘remembering’, and ‘patthana’ meaning ‘keeping present’) you can more effectively acknowledge the reality of loss, allow the pain of grief to reveal without further complication, process it…and find relief by overcoming the effects of grief.

Mindfulness is like having a guard at the door of your senses—within mindfulness grief and sorrow are mental states that can be eased.

The theme behind mindfulness is to honestly relate with whatever comes up as it arises and to go to the center of the pain. And the aim is to perceive and acknowledge the reality of the pain in the “here and now” in order to get a different perspective about it, accept it (surrender to it), and eventually have it pass. This is one way of “working through” the pain of grief.

(Some modern psychotherapies and supportive grief counseling techniques use elements of mindfulness.)

In my upcoming Blog posts I’ll talk more about mindfulness, suggest some tools for developing it, and share a guided meditation for survivors.

Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend
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