Mindfulness for Prolonged Grief Read online

  “Sameet Kumar’s Mindfulness and Prolonged Grief Workbook is a welcome and important resource for both those struggling to cope with prolonged grief themselves and for the helping professionals who are advising and supporting them.”

  —Sharon Salzberg, author of Real Happiness and Lovingkindness “Sameet Kumar has been working for many years as a psychologist and counselor in the field of dealing with this grief. In his wonderful new book Mindfulness and Prolonged Grief, he shares many of the approaches to inner healing that he has developed in his practice. In particular, he demonstrates how the ancient Buddhist methods of mindfulness meditation can be used to cure both body and mind when the overwhelming darkness of grief, depression, and hopelessness sets in. His book is both practical and immediate in its presentation, offering medical practitioners and patients alike a clear guide to a traditional healing technology that has worked for centuries, and is perhaps even more relevant today than ever before.”

  —Glenn Mullin, author of Living in the Face of Death and The Fourteen Dalai Lamas: A Sacred Legacy of Reincarnation

  Publisher’s Note

  This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services. If expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

  Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books

  Copyright © 2013 by Sameet M. Kumar

  New Harbinger Publications, Inc.

  5674 Shattuck Avenue

  Oakland, CA 94609

  www.newharbinger.com

  Cover design by Amy Shoup

  Text design by Michele Waters-Kermes

  Acquired by Catharine Meyers

  Edited by Jasmine Star

  All Rights Reserved

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kumar, Sameet M.

  Mindfulness for prolonged grief : a guide to healing after loss when depression, anxiety, and anger won’t go away / Sameet M. Kumar, PhD.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-60882-749-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60882-750-3 (pdf e-book) -- ISBN 978-1-60882-751-0 (epub) 1. Grief. 2. Loss (Psychology) 3. Meditation--Therapeutic use. 4. Grief--Religious aspects. I. Title.

  BF575.G7K863 2013

  155.9’37--dc23

  2013033444

  This book is dedicated to the universal capacity for love and to all those who work to increase the unconditional love we have for each other.

  Sarve mangalam. May all beings everywhere be happy.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1. Identifying Your Grief

  2. Mindfulness Meditation

  3. Mindfulness of the Body

  4. Sleeping Mindfully

  5. Mindfulness in Motion

  6. Mindful Sustenance

  7. Mindful Cleaning and Decluttering

  8. Transforming Pain

  9. Creative Action

  10. Mindful Resilience

  References

  Foreword

  Many years ago I had the opportunity to visit a very unusual monastery in Thailand. In virtually every room there were human skulls, skeletons, and pictures of dead bodies. Periodically the monks performed autopsies on local people who had died and donated their bodies to the monastery. They weren’t studying medicine, however. Instead, the monks performed autopsies to experience in a very real way that we are all made of flesh and blood, and that we all die. While I didn’t get to know the monks well, they clearly weren’t disturbed or depressed. Rather, they were smiling and energetic, seeming to go about their days fully engaged in the activity of the moment, appreciating life. The monks were practicing mindfulness—living each day richly, continually aware that life on earth is a finite series of fleeting moments.

  It is striking how most of us living in the developed world are surprised by death. We go about our lives thinking of reasons death happens to other people, not to us or our loved ones. So when it strikes close to home, we’re often overwhelmed. Sometimes our intense distress only lasts for a little while, but often enough, it lingers and can make it hard to go on living.

  In this book, Sameet Kumar shows how (even without becoming a Buddhist monk) anyone suffering from prolonged grief can use mindfulness practices, combined with techniques from modern scientific psychology, to reengage with life. While many mindfulness practices originally came from Buddhist traditions, they’ve been adapted over the past couple of decades by Western psychotherapists and researchers to successfully treat a wide range of psychological difficulties. The practices work by counteracting several natural tendencies of the human brain that were well suited to our survival millions of years ago on the African savanna but can make us quite unhappy today.

  We humans have a very effective emergency stress-response system that we share with all other mammals. When we sense danger, our heart rate and respiration rate increase, our blood pressure goes up, and our muscles tense, helping us get ready to either fight an enemy or flee from danger. Unlike other mammals, however, we also have a remarkable capacity to think—to review the past and anticipate the future, calculating how to maximize pleasurable experiences and avoid painful ones. In fact, this ability to think was a factor in our survival on the savanna, since we weren’t very fast or ferocious. So it’s not surprising that when we face danger today, our minds fill with frightened thoughts, imagining what may happen next and struggling to find a way to avoid pain or worse.

  When we suffer a loss, this survival system can go into overdrive, disrupting our sleep and concentration and making us feel tense, anxious, or depressed. Our emergency response apparatus is kept on high alert by the upsetting thoughts that pass through our minds as we review past losses and anticipate future pain. Modern scientific research demonstrates that mindfulness practices can help us step out of the stream of thoughts passing through our minds and bring our attention back to what is actually happening in the present moment—the taste of our food, the sensations of the wind, the look of the sky, the feeling of a hug from a friend. By training the mind and brain in this way, we learn to take our negative thoughts more lightly, react to them with less distress, and become more engaged in our lives in the here and now.

  Of course, even as we learn to be less trapped in negative thinking, our painful feelings usually don’t go away entirely. Practicing mindfulness can also help us deal more effectively with the difficult emotions that still arise. Instead of trying to distract ourselves (which can lead to unfulfilling habits such as watching too much TV, eating excessively, shopping unnecessarily, or abusing drugs or alcohol), we discover how to ride waves of painful emotion, allowing them to come and go. We learn to appreciate that by being with rather than resisting our painful feelings, they actually become much easier to bear. In fact, we find that they pass more quickly once we can allow ourselves to feel them more fully.

  Mindfulness practices also help us see that not only painful feelings, but all experiences, are constantly changing. As we learn to pay attention to what is happening in the present, we notice that no two moments are alike. Rather, we become aware of a continuous flow of changing events—a sensation in the body, followed by a thought, an emotional reaction to that thought, and then a new experience in the body. We begin to see directly that the contents of our awareness, as well as everything around us, are in constant flux. And as this becomes clearer to us, it becomes easier to come
to peace with our losses.

  While the journey through grief isn’t easy, this book provides a helpful map and guide. Drawing on many years of experience working with people struggling with loss, as well as many years of mindfulness practice, Sameet Kumar will show you a path through your distress. He clearly explains the many forms grief can take and how you can develop a personal mindfulness practice to work with the challenges that arise when dealing with loss. Bit by bit, this book can help you move through your grief and, like the monks I met in Thailand, engage fully in each moment of a rich and meaningful life.

  —Ronald D. Siegel, PsyD Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychology Harvard Medical School Author of The Mindfulness Solution: Everyday Practices for Everyday Problems

  Acknowledgments

  What I am teaching here has been made possible by the guidance, inspiration, and instruction of everyone who has taught me so much. To my meditation teachers, loving doorways into the infinite—Sri Das Gupta, Sri Shastriji, Swami Muktananda, Swami Nityananda, Lama Norlha Rinpoche, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama XIV of Tibet—my heartfelt thanks and gratitude. I am also grateful to those who have taught me the art of helping: Ralph Quinn, PhD; Mishael M. Caspi; Jennifer Denning, LMFT; Raoul Birnbaum, PhD; Stephen Levine; Frank Ostaseski; Roshi Joan Halifax; MAPS; and Noel Q. King, PhD. Special thanks to the memory of Peter Goldsmith, PhD, who taught me how to treasure the opportunity to train others to do what we do. You are missed every day.

  Thanks to two authors who have been essential forces in my life: Ray Bradbury, who died while I was writing this book, reminding me that it was he who taught me the power of the written word in grown-up books, and Joseph Conrad, for proving you don’t have to learn English as a first language to become an author.

  A special thanks to my wife and best friend, Christina, and to our two sons, Javier Amrit and Miguel Anand, who have been my guiding lights, support, playdates, and best friends. Many thanks also to our families in south Florida and around the world, for friendship, support, and fun.

  I always like to thank the artists who inspire my writing. The list is by no means exhaustive, but those who deserve particular attention are Bob Marley and the Wailers, Alex Grey, Tool, Parliament-Funkadelic, the Grateful Dead, Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Party, Joe Rogan, and Louis C.K. And a very special thanks to Adam Yauch, who sadly also passed away while this was being written.

  I would like to thank Christopher McDougall, Scott Jurek, and Rich Roll, whose writings inspired the plant-powered, minimalist running without which this book and my best moods would have been much more elusive. And to Micah True, aka Caballo Blanco, whose spirit continues to inspire me.

  And as always, thank you to the staff at New Harbinger Publications for their continued support and trust, and to Jasmine Star for magnificent editing.

  Introduction

  Even though life is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.

  —Helen Keller

  If you are feeling stuck in the pain of your grief, this book is for you.

  The truth is, no matter how close we feel to another person or another being, all of our relationships are temporary. It has always been this way. It will always be this way.

  How can we be born with such a vulnerability?

  If you look deeper, what we are all born with is the potential to love and be loved. This universal and beautiful truth is at the root of our vulnerability.

  The seed of grief is usually love. Without love, you wouldn’t suffer so much from the loss of someone you care about. When you think of grief as an extension of love, you might feel a little bit better about your suffering.

  But grief can still hurt, and it hurts everyone differently.

  Although the transitory nature of relationships is a universal truth, every relationship is different, so each grief is different. Some people seem to fulfill the popular notions of grief. They seem to move on effortlessly, get over it quickly. They may have tried to help you by telling you to do the same.

  For you, grief might not feel so easy. For you, grief may seem like being endlessly adrift on a small boat in a massive sea, vulnerable, alone, and without direction. Your feelings may have gotten more intense over time rather than subsiding. You may find that the pain of loss is as intense today as it was many months ago, maybe even years ago. You may feel like you’re missing something that other people have or that other people just can’t understand what you’ve experienced. You may feel exhausted, broken, and paralyzed by your feelings.

  But what you are feeling isn’t unusual, and you’re not the only one struggling. Grief has been with us humans since day one, and it takes on many forms. Grief isn’t always about death, but the language we use to address grief assumes that. Grief can also follow any massive change to any relationship. Divorce, unemployment, illness, disability, trauma, relocation, migration, and other changes can trigger grief. Prolonged grief has long been part of these experiences for many people. What has changed over time is our scientific understanding of grief and our awareness of tools that can help with grief. Grief has more to offer you than pain and suffering. That is what this book is about.

  I wrote this book to help you grow in your grief and to give you tools to help you grow from your grief. As you look back on your life, like me you may find that a lot of your most meaningful growth has emerged from your darkest moments. Times of great change hold great potential, but only if you can harness their energy well.

  This book will teach you some of what is known about grief and, more importantly, what you can do about it using current knowledge about how to facilitate ways of healing. I offer a comprehensive approach that will utilize your mind and body to help you feel better.

  The first step in this approach is learning mindfulness meditation. The purpose of laying a foundation in regular mindfulness meditation practice is quite simple: mindfulness is one of the most consistent and powerful ways to deal effectively with very intense and turbulent emotions and ruminations. If you aren’t able to find a way to tolerate emotional intensity, you may instead distract yourself from your loss with unhelpful ways of coping that lead nowhere.

  Mindfulness can help you immensely, and for that reason it is the basis of the approach this book uses. However, mindfulness is something to be careful with if you are intensely depressed. If you find that mindfulness meditation practice makes you feel worse, by all means don’t keep doing it. The same goes for any of the exercises in this book. Try everything you possibly can, but use what helps you when you practice it as suggested.

  Why do I think this book will help you and why should you believe me?

  For two reasons: First and foremost, the techniques I present here are based on research that tells us most people will benefit from them. Second, I have tested this approach on thousands of my patients and have found the techniques to be tremendously helpful, no matter how simple they may sound. For the past several years I’ve helped people going through cancer adjust to living with their disease until they are in remission. However, the bulk of what I’ve focused on in my professional life is helping those who don’t survive their illness and their grieving loved ones after they have died.

  Research by others and my own clinical and personal experience therefore tells me that a mindfulness-based approach to well-being is one of the best ways to cope with prolonged grief. You can expect to feel better if you engage in the practices as described and understand the rationale for doing so.

  Ultimately, all of us who work in mental health strive to facilitate resilience in our patients. The word “resilience” might carry a hidden meaning for you that doesn’t feel right. It might sound as though being resilient means walking away from your loss as if nothing happened. Part of you knows this is impossible, and you’re absolutely right. Your life will never be the same again. Resilience doesn’t mean going back; no one can travel back in time, and the nature of life is that it is always changing, always presenting us with different potential t
rajectories.

  For you, one of those trajectories is healing from prolonged grief, and I believe that mindfulness can help.

  I recommend reading through the book in the order in which it’s written. The first chapter explains what we know about grief and other mood disorders that people tend to suffer from after the loss of a loved one. The rest of the book then presents instructions on mindfulness meditation, along with comprehensive guidance addressing many other areas of life that can benefit from a mindfulness-based approach.

  You may already know by now that grief is a full-time job. It fills all the empty spaces you may have in your day and continues late into the night. Your healing also has to be a full-time job. It may seem like the approaches I advocate, such as meditation and exercise, take up a lot of time, but I assure you it is probably less time than that eaten up by the sluggish heaviness of grief and the distracted mind it brings.

  Once you start practicing mindfulness meditation, I recommend that you maintain a daily routine around your meditation practice as you continue reading the book. There are charts in this book to help you keep track of your practice. We’ve made copies of these charts available for download at www.newharbinger.com/27497 in case you need more or are using an electronic version of this book. (See back of book for more information.)

  My approach to therapy is to make sure that clients don’t need to keep seeing me. This book is no different. Keep the book around as long as you need in order to start a helpful routine that you can maintain on your own. It will help you make informed decisions about what routines can help transform your grief. Once you know these routines, refer back to the book as needed in order to make sure you’re doing things properly. But the point is for you to maintain what works for you on your own.