How Meditation for Grief Works
Grief is a challenge that everyone experiences at some point in their lives. Even the most spiritual people have to contend with deep sadness and grief, and although meditation can help to ease and speed the process, there’s no downplaying the reality of painful emotions.
As we expand our consciousness to accept a full spectrum of emotions and experiences, we can meet loss in life with wisdom and allow grief from a holistic and resilient perspective. It is possible to experience grief without friction or suffering.
No matter what kind of loss you experience– from a lost opportunity, an ended relationship, or a loved one who has passed on– you can move through the emotions in a healthy way to more quickly get back to your normal state.
In this article, we’ll talk about meditation for grief and loss and the Vedic Worldview perspective on death, so you can widen your perspective and find the tools to best cope and heal.
Meditation for grief
One of the main functions of meditation is to turn our attention inward. When we can close our eyes and sit still, we have the opportunity to pull our attention away from distractions and address our inner world. This can be challenging in times of grief, and it is the most effective way to experience and move through the very real emotions that come with loss and change.
If you look on YouTube or on a meditation app, you’ll inevitably find a guided meditation for grief and healing. Though these kinds of meditations may feel soothing and help prompt the release of emotions, they cannot take your mind to a place beyond thought and sensation altogether.
Vedic Meditation uses a special sound vibration, called a Bija mantra, to effortlessly charm the mind to quieter and quieter states. The mediator has all kinds of thoughts come up during the meditation, which is okay.
Thoughts represent the release of stress from the body, and as the meditator remembers the mantra amidst their thoughts, the mantra guides their mind. As the thoughts become quieter and quieter and the mantra grows more subtle, the mind moves to a de-excited state. This state is deeply restful for the body.
Eventually, the mind transcends thought and emotion altogether to experience pure consciousness. In this place, there is nothing but the pure bliss of Being.
Vedic Meditation is a great option for those experiencing grief and sadness from loss, not only because the meditator can release stress from the body, but also because these brief experiences of pure Being provide respite from the immediate sensation of pain. When we experience pure consciousness regularly through meditation, we can broaden our perspective, so the grief feels less dire and more like a storm passing through.
Daily meditations for working through grief
Vedic Meditation has the unique ability to help the body release stress that is stored physically in our bodies. Grief and loss are stressful to the body, as are the strong emotions and distress that come with it. When we have a twice daily meditation practice for twenty minutes, we can clean out the extra stress buildup in our bodies and minds and ensure we’re not overtaxing ourselves while the grief passes through.
By helping our bodies to release stress, we become more resilient and able to feel emotional pain instead of resisting or avoiding it. We can then move through the stages of grief with openness and strength, without the risk of breaking down or despairing.
Start your Meditation Journey Today
ATTEND A FREE INTRO TALKThe Vedic Worldview on loss
Rather than providing a specific grief meditation or a guided meditation for grief, a Vedic Meditation practice is supportive of all experiences in life. A practice that can give us more adaptation energy as well as help us to experience the greater field of consciousness is one that leaves us more capable in any situation or set of emotions. In addition to the practical benefits of Vedic Meditation, the Vedic Worldview offers comfort to those experiencing grief as well.
According to the Vedic Worldview, all individuals are a part of a greater universal consciousness. This means that ‘death’ really just means that one individualized consciousness ‘dropped their body’ and returned into the whole.
As we know from our moments of transcendence in our meditation sessions, universal consciousness is blissful. There are no thoughts, cares, or worries. There is only complete satisfaction and unity. We can then be encouraged with a wider perspective on birth, life, and death as a part of a bigger story of one consciousness that everyone we know will one day happily return to.
Staying connected to this universal consciousness through meditation is what allows the Vedic Meditator to grieve quickly and without suffering. Emotions are real, and they need not stay for long or seem to take over our consciousness. They can instead process the grief with compassion, with spaciousness, and with greater ease.
Can we experience negative emotions as meditators?
There is a myth that highly spiritual or conscious people don’t experience negative emotions. Instead, they radiate contentment and positivity all the time, or they experience only a zen peacefulness and sort of absent acceptance continuously. As if being spiritual means rising above emotions, or rejecting them entirely in favor of one specific countenance.
This is a misguided approach to spirituality. As we expand our consciousness more and more, we have more space and greater perception of a wider and wider range of emotional experiences. We may not personally identify with them or get lost in them as much since we’re experiencing life from a greater perspective, but that doesn’t mean that our individuality is canceled out by universal consciousness.
Each person has an individual consciousness and access to universal consciousness all the time, and one does not cancel out the experience of the other. Rather, our expanding consciousness allows us to love more deeply and feel pain more potently, from a place of enjoying the whole human experience.
Vedic Meditation does help us to process emotions by giving us the time each day to release stress from the body and turn our attention inward. We get into the habit of noticing what’s going on inside and allowing our emotions rather than controlling or avoiding them. This new resilience lets us process grief quickly, and experience it with more ease and compassion as we better understand what death and endings represent.
Moving through grief quickly
Death, change, and endings all represent the inevitable evolution that is always at play. Even if the change seems hard and wrong to us in our immediate daily lives, we can know that the person who has passed on has moved into the next stage of their evolution quite blissfully. Even as we experience pain, we are evolving toward greater happiness as well.
When we see change and pain as a part of nature’s evolutionary process, we can feel less attached to the way things were and move through grief quickly. We can continue to forward evolution by being the greatest possible contribution that we can be, sharing our liveliness with others instead of getting stuck in grief or resisting it until it crashes in on us.
Vedic Meditation can be a key tool in moving through periods of change, loss, and uncomfortable evolution. As long as we are consistent and allow the emotions, the grief will pass frictionlessly and effortlessly. We’ll be left with greater empathy for others and a more expanded view of death and change.
In the Vedic Worldview, death is not something to dwell on or fear. Pain is not something to resist or fixate on, either. All sensations can be lightly held and healed through openness, feeling what there is to feel, and remembering that our evolution will keep expanding our happiness on the other side of the season of change.
Attend an Intro Talk to begin your meditation journey today.
