zenjones

So last week we read the “Experiencing Grief” by Stephen Levine. According to Levine, we don’t grieve only when we have lost someone (if only if were that simple, he says), but more or less constantly in our daily lives through our self-doubt, our “not-enoughness.”

This is all well and good, but some people didn’t buy it. Why “grief”? they asked? Grief is over loss, not angst. Why should we regard our fears and self-judgments specifically as grief?

I’ve been thinking about this. What goes on when I’m caught in some downer belief, like “I’m a loser”? Well, that belief carries with it a sense of doom and irrevocability. It seems like a permanent state. There’s also an underlying and unacknowledged sense of blame: if only circumstances had been different, I wouldn’t be such a loser.

If only my parents had been more understanding, I would be less neurotic. If only I’d gotten my mother’s wavy hair and my father’s lean face, instead of my father’s straight hair and my mother’s round face, I would be so much better looking! If only I’d had nicer elementary school teachers instead the judgmental harridans I got. And so on.

These more favorable circumstances never came to pass, of course, so I experience them as loss, permanent, irrevocable loss, like death. That’s why “grief.”

But it’s really an almost fake grief, because it’s totally dependent on my belief in the might-have-been world, which doesn’t exist, didn’t exist, and frankly we don’t know if it could have existed, really.  What I experience and feel is real enough, but what lies underneath is illusion. Levine writes, “Examining what we feel, not analyzing why, we discover the labyrinthine patterns of our grief and unfinished business, the skeletons of so many moments of life which became lost by the wayside. And the darkness of a thousand moments of helplessness and hopelessness is illuminated in a clear and merciful awareness.” Grief, as he puts it, is workable. I can see that now.

 If only I’d had this answer ready for people last Wednesday. :  )