Contemplating the death of those we love and feeling tremendous grief in the aftermath of so doing brings us face-to-face with what matters. It shows us what it means to be human is to be vulnerable, to suffer, and to risk love.

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

difficulties may arise when we use “normal life” to evade grief.

a certain sense, I suspect the bypassing of traumatic grief may be the greatest threat facing humankind today, responsible for immense suffering from addictions and abuse to social disconnection and perhaps even war. When we disconnect from our grief, we disconnect from ourselves. When we disconnect from ourselves, we disconnect from others and

There is a wide range of emotions associated with grief, not just sadness and despair. We may become aware of a feeling of loneliness, for example, and, rather than deny, distract from, or repress the feeling, we pause and stay with it because we see it. Seeing it, we are awake and self-aware even amid the ache and unease.

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.

An emotion-focused journal

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

The word selah (Hebrew: ) — “to pause, reflect, and feel meaning” — appears almost seventy times in the poetry of the Psalms. Grief by its nature is poetical, elegiac. And poetry, like grief, is subversive, unbridled, and disobedient. Poetry violates linguistic norms because it must. Poetry helps us feel. And when we allow ourselves to feel that