Run run” our mind says. From the pain. From the darkness. “Run run.” Yet here we are, amid the High Holy Days, a time of awe, a time for teshuvah, for returning. Returning home. How can we return when we feel so weighed down with pain? When we have lost a loved one or had any loss? How can we return to emptiness? What are we returning to?
In grieving, we are taken on a journey and are ultimately steered back towards ourselves, feeling the pain of a lost loved one and allowing it to show us a path to return to ourselves and transform.
Hiding and running from our pain invites it to persist. The idea of feeling such profound pain can leave us feeling shattered and drained just at the thought. At the same time, this is the avenue to bring us to the present. In feeling our pain in the present, we release the shackles of it to our past and engage with what is here and now, aligning us to our truer experience of the pain. We return to ourselves, expanding ourselves.
This can begin with “sitting by our side”, which can appear as being compassionate towards ourselves, pausing, connecting with where we are and how we feel. We acknowledge what we did not say or do and what we inadvertently did, with feelings of regret. And we consider what we could have said or done instead.
Sitting by our side lifts us from being stuck in judgement, allowing for greater clarity to seep in with how things were and we become able to make greater peace with ourselves and our situation. We plug into the present tense, a paradoxical shift connecting us to that which is beyond our personal pain. We view the past from our present, rather than live our present as if we are stuck in the past. This is an empowering step and releases us from the sorrow of our beliefs and frees us to see things more as they are. This may still feel painful, yet in the truer alignment of our pain it is felt with less burden.
The crack that loosens our beliefs of "what should have been” can feel like brokenness, a not-knowing, an untethering. Yet this may be the very means that allows the light of hope to penetrate through, transforming us. With this shattering then shedding of what we believe should have been, we reduce our suffering from having held on to it and become more able to receive what is there for us in the present.
We may find ourselves on a journey, a journey of meaning and purpose. The very thoughts and feelings that we were so attached to begin to look different as we feel a greater distance from them, having carved a wider lens to view from.
We return to ourselves in a more expansive space and connect to greater awareness. Thus, in this truer experience of our pain, we connect to the blueprint of our lives, becoming ready to welcome comfort for our pain. The relationship we have with our loved one evolves, uniting us with the flow of unbound love. We may not find them externally, yet we find them within ourselves. We return to them and they return to us. A “re-turn” – having looked away, we then turn back to them and to ourselves.
Miri Sagir is a volunteer counsellor at the Jewish Bereavement Counselling Service. The Jewish Bereavement Counselling Service offers one-to-one confidential bereavement counselling by professionally trained counsellors and support groups.
Contact 0208 951 3881, enquiries@jbcs.org.uk, jbcs.org.uk
Registered charity 1047473