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5 Things I am grateful for today:  1) my loving yoga students, who presented me with a check for donation to my favorite animal charity  2) the swimming pool at the Shangri La Hotel 3)  my writing  4) my Voluspa gardenia candles  5) love in all it’s various incarnations

The 7 stages of grief:  1) shock & denial 2) pain & guilt 3) bargaining & anger 4) reflection & loneliness 5) the upward turn 6) reconstruction 7) acceptance

Grief: Stage 4.

I knew it was coming, so one could argue that I should have been better prepared. I suddenly found myself (a life loving, joy seeking, extrovert) in the most difficult phase of all…….

The ominous…… ‘reflection & loneliness’.  Anyone who has suffered a loss of any kind, will understand this phase.  It is the time when the phone stops ringing, the texts stop pinging, and you have to go out and buy your OWN pinkberry.  This is the time of deafening quiet and absolute aloneness.  The point where friends have to continue on with their own lives & schedules, and society in general feels like you should get on with it, and get over it.  The emotional support is still there of course, but you are left…………… Alone.

Loneliness.  To be blunt….. it sucks.  It attempts to steal our strength by hurling us into a powerless & needy phase, where we feel agonizingly alone, and therefore search OUTSIDE ourselves for comfort and acceptance.  Of course, this search will always turn up barren because we can only ever truly find these things WITHIN.  But this does not stop loneliness.  In our weak & vulnerable state of grief, loneliness is able to convince us that what we REALLY want is external acceptance.  To be hugged and held and kissed and loved.  Loneliness assures us that we NEED to be wanted.  It induces in our hearts an insatiable craving for external attention and appreciation.  In our sadness, we believe (momentarily) that if we can only convince someone…. ANYone to need us and want us and hold us and hug us, that we will somehow be validated.  We will somehow be miraculously healed.  The fatal flaw in this plan, is that we cannot seek this validation from others.  We must find it in ourselves.

This of course is much easier said than done, for very often it is easier to find love from others, than to truly seek it within…. But the kind of love you will find in loneliness is fleeting and superficial.  Real ‘Self Love’ can be deeply elusive.  Many people unknowingly mask their lack of ‘Self Love’ with over-confidence or narcissism, thus creating a façade which robs them of the ability to truly turn their gaze inward.  They build up walls which grow tall and strong around their hearts.

Instead, I’ve decided to convert this stage of loneliness to one of resolute introspection.  I will use this time ‘alone’ to grow and to learn…. to cultivate and honor my gifts.  I will vigilantly remind myself that in knowing my OWN worth, I will attract the TRUE kind of Love…….. when the time is right.

Reflection: It is during this precarious phase of grief that I believe we ourselves determine the destiny of our recovery.  Though…. Destiny may be a careless use of vernacular, since the recovery ACTUALLY rests on the foundation of ‘free will’.   It is in this stage that a choice is made.  We can either seek escape, or…. We can transform.  We can either create a pretense of faux positivity to cover up and deny our pain, or we can seek our authentic joy. We can chose to push the grief and anger way, way, WAY, into the recesses of our heart, and cover it with all the other layers of emotional grime & guck we’ve buried down there, or…. We can make a much more difficult choice.  A choice that can be as frightening and unyielding….. as it is enigmatic and labyrinthine.  We can choose to take an honest look inward and confront our sorrow and our demons head on.

In order to reveal our true radiance, we must expose & confront our melancholy.

Goethe said “to die and so to grow’”.  The Yogis speak of savasana…. A death of the old, to allow for a rebirth of the new.   In her book  ‘BROKEN OPEN: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow’, Elizabeth Lesser also speaks beautifully on this subject.

She says:  “Now I know that when we only show our light side to the World, our shadow grows restless, sucking into itself much of our energy and passion.  In order to release my trapped energy and awaken my best qualities, I had to engage with my ‘shadow’.  I had to be broken open so fully that my whole self was laid out before me to own and to forgive and to love.”

AMEN Sister!

So here I am.  Right smack in the middle of the dreaded Stage 4.  Confronting my melancholy.  So today, for my “blissful” activity, I plan to hang out here for awhile.  To own it.  To meditate on it.  To practice yoga through it.  I’m not going to hope and pray for Stage 5 to hurry and show up already.  I’m going to learn to change Stage 4 from the negatives of ‘lonliness and reflection’ to the positives of ‘solitude and transformation’.

Namaste