Today is the close of the Mexico celebration – Día de Muertos
– the day of the dead – a celebration of life and immortality and honouring loved ones who have passed. Only a heart-beat ago was Halloween – or the celtic Samhain – a celebration of the thinning of the veil between the world of the dead and the world of the living. Despite the celebrations being very different there are some curious overlaps.
While at Halloween we have forgotten many of the old traditions through a rush of garish costumes and high of sugar. The aulde tradition of Samhain was like Día de Muertos
in the sense of honouring and remembering loved ones who have passed.
Did you know it was an old celtic tradition to lay an extra place (or two) at your dinner table on Halloween night to invite loved ones past to visit and dine with you? In Mexico the tradition is even grander – to create a ritual altar in your home called an ofrenda
to welcome the dead home with food, gifts and marigold petals to guide them.
This is a time of year to honour and remember the dead – and to allow yourself space and time to grieve. From Halloween right up to Remembrance Day on 11th November we breathe a sigh of relief at the permission being given to remember those who have died.
Grief is too often seen as a dirty word – UK culture has made it almost to be an admission of failure to admit grief. You can all have time off to deal with the death of a close relative – but after the funeral its time for you to pack up your tissues, put away your sadness and pull yourself together. Is it the old ‘stiff upper lip’ in times of sadness Victorianism of us Brits? Or are we just out of touch with how to grieve?
Grief affects us at all times of our life and not just through death. We grieve the death of a long-term relationship, we grieve in times of anger towards illness affecting us and our loved ones. We grieve in times of change.
If we constantly sweep our feelings under the carpet we bottle our grief rather than letting it run its course, its course to change and shape our lives with sadness but ultimately with joy. Now you may not ever truly get over the death of a loved one, particularly a child – but you can learn to embrace life in all its beauty and honour and connect with your grief rather than hide away from it.
The brilliant Mo Gawdat from Google invented an equation for happiness to deal with the unexpected death of his son – and has many wise words to teach us on the quest for happiness and joy in among the sadness of so many moments.
“You know how there are five stages of grief? We started with acceptance. My wife at the time made an insightful comment when they asked to do an autopsy on our son’s body: “Will it bring Ali back?” The realisation that nothing we could do, including crying in our rooms for the next 17 years, would ever bring him back… we started from there.
“I then went through a rollercoaster. But I would sometimes imagine talking to Ali and if you knew him, his first reaction would be: “Papa I’ve already died, there’s nothing you can do about it, so what are you going to make out of it?” When I started going through this dialogue it made me realise that this can be for a reason, for good can come out of it.
“Finding Happiness is very much like staying fit. First you understand that happiness is a choice, that you can actually achieve it and that there is a method to make it happen. Happiness is not a coincidence, it is not given to you by life, it’s entirely our responsibility.”
Wise and brilliant words from Mo - thank you. What I love about meditation, it is teaches us to sit with our grief, with our fears and with our pain, to realise how strong we are. To realise while uncomfortable, it doesn’t stay uncomfortable all of the time and the quiet space unfurls the knot of tension, releases the pain and enables us to open again to love and joy.
What I love about mindfulness is how it teaches us to embrace life in all its fullness of sadness and joy. Helping us to find the moments of pure love and happiness in between the darkness, to welcome and recognise them all. From this place you can then work at the happiness and notice how a little effort brings us to a place of wholeness.
Our Day to Remember Retreat this November
is a day when we honour the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – with a focus on acceptance and using mindfulness and meditation to bring us to a place of release, recalibration and happiness.
A gentle meditation you may like to do at home is to write a letter to a loved one who has died. Imagine what you would say to them. Imagine what you would ask them. Imagine their reply. Write whatever you want and need to say. Talk it in your mind or out loud if helpful but write and free the words, free the anger, free the sadness, free the bargaining and negotiation between you and this loved one, free the weight of grief and find acceptance. Find a safe place to burn this letter and watch it transform into something new – taking the energy, anger and depression in your words and turning them into ash and smoke and giving the molecules a new lease of life.
You can also do this with the end of a relationship – write a letter to say all the things you hold your-self back from saying in real-life. Write a letter that acknowledges the anger and sadness and bargaining and remembers the joy you had in your relationship, holds true to those moments of pure happiness and then lets them go too – for they are in the past and the only moment we have is now. Burning your letters can help to add to this feeling of release and letting go. This is a letter not to be read by the person - but to help you to move on.
If this article stirs emotions in you and you feel you need more support, be open to exploring speaking to a trained counsellor or joining a bereavement group. To find out how a mindfulness meditation course can help you speak to Judy at BalanceTime.
Thanks to the brilliant photo by Cristian Newman
on Unsplash
