Peaceful Grief | Poshak Life blog
Share this post

In response to a prompt on the holy sparks we see in what was a dark experience of the past, I wrote this: “In what I have believed to be a dark experience from my past, I see the sparks of growing resilience, anger transformed to self-awareness, dejection transformed to acceptance, and expectation transformed into peaceful grief.”

A few people asked me what “peaceful grief” meant.

Peaceful grief, for me, has been about:

  • looking at my expectations straight in the eye,
  • validating whether the other can meet these expectations,
  • having compassion for the other’s capacity and needs,
  • recognising the futility of basing my happiness on another’s ability to meet my expectations,
  • having compassion for my own needs, and
  • releasing the other from that expectation.

In self-compassion, I acknowledge the pain of my need not being met. And I grieve for this loss in that relationship. I mourn till the resilience in me rises again.

An insight comes up – my needs can be met through other means.

Believing that there is only ever one door is the saddest loss of creativity and spontaneity.

I also hold the courage to revisit that need in that relationship at a later time.

Peaceful grief is the reclamation of the spontaneity in myself, a reclamation of my ability to live life in all its fullness.


Share this post

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

You may use these <abbr title="HyperText Markup Language">HTML</abbr> tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

*