The more we practice staying with the emotions that we think may overcome us, the more we trust our ability to fully inhabit grief.

I’d learned how to be a student, a beginner, how to set aside my own beliefs to help others. I’d learned about patience and the power of silence.

trinity of self-awareness: learning, adapting, and trusting intuition.

Whatever we decide to do in response to our feeling of loneliness, however, it is done with conscious intention rather than unexamined impulse.

We needn’t eschew grief to be happy, and we needn’t decry happiness in order to feel grief. This is a trap of the dualistic mind, and it is life-limiting rather than life-affirming.

We may discern that the easy path isn’t always the right path. And everyone and everything can become our teacher. Children and strangers teach us. Animals teach us. When we are truly awake, even an ordinary moment teaches us something. Grieving itself is a learning process.

Biochemically, crying may actually act as a stress-relief valve.

Whatever comes, we let it be as it is. When we do this, we come to see, in this moment or the next, our emotions always moving.

We can simply — or complicatedly — let it be.