How to Use Grief for Growth

In a former episode titled “How to deal with grief”, I spoke about some strategies you can use to overcome the negative aspects of grief. But in this one, I go even further, and show you all about its positive side. Because sometimes, grief can cause the biggest positive transformations in your life, you just have to learn how to use it wisely.

Before I go into the explanation, I want to make it clear that I’m not suggesting that you should be happy about losing a loved one, and neither should you look forward to death. But death happens anyway, whether we want it or not, and when it happens, we should look for the opportunity to learn from it. It’s not selfish either, because the technique I’m about to show you requires tremendous empathy and compassion.

In the other episode about grief, I suggested you to just sit with death. Instead of denying, avoiding or explaining it away, face the reality, feel the pain, and fully accept the fact. The only way to transmute grief is to go through grief, and then leave it behind.

Grief is like a dark pit that you find yourself falling into. It’s so deep that you can’t even see its bottom, but you’re afraid that if you reach it, you may even die. The deeper you fall, the more pain you feel, so it’s natural that you want to get out as soon as you can. But if you climb out too early, before reaching the bottom, the feeling of grief will never leave you alone.

You may put a lid on this pit, but it will always be there, a deep wound hidden in the depths of your heart. By bypassing your painful feelings, you’ll only be worse by time, and you’ll never get over it anyway. By trying to just forget your emotions, you’ll never grow from the experience, and you’ll never learn the lessons that death could teach you.

While the darkness may seem all-encompassing at first, you shouldn’t be afraid. At first, you won’t see the positive side of grief, you won’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, or in this case, at the bottom of the pit. But once you reach it, once your pain becomes total, once you immerse yourself in the feeling without any resistance, your grief will be transmuted into wisdom, and you’ll emerge on the other side stronger than ever.

When a loved one dies, be it your parent, your child, your spouse or anybody else, he or she has one more lesson to teach you. They may have taught you many things in life, but this is the most important one, about life itself: it’s the lesson of death. It’s that all lives, no matter how important or unimportant they seem, end with death.

We normally try to avoid the dead body of our loved one. Unlike in older times, in today’s society there’s an abnormal paranoia around the topic of death. However, to practice this method as effectively as possible, I ask you to sit with the corpse and make sure to be alone without anybody disturbing you.

I want you to feel empathy and compassion towards the deceased. Imagine yourself in his or her shoes. What can it be like to die? What can it be like to be dead? In contrast to that, how does it feel to be alive? Don’t rely on your ideas and beliefs, focus on the feeling itself! Feel the emptiness of the dead body, and feel death in your own body!

No matter how repulsed you may be, you’ll be in the same situation very soon. You are in fact looking at your future self, you are sharing the same destiny. It’s only that the other met his destiny sooner than you, but the very same thing is waiting for you, it’s only a question of time. It’s not a question of if, it’S just a question of when. You are not beyond death, and you will also die.

Say in yourself: “Me too”. Not in the sense that you also wish to die, but in the sense that this too is your fate. Me too, me too. Make this your mantra, your inner reminder, your memento mori. Being near someone you love and lost is the biggest opportunity, but not the only one. Whenever you meet death in any shape or form, recite this mantra, and not just automatically, but consciously and emotionally.

Nowadays, even scientists are starting to discover that sometimes, but not always, grief can bring about positive transformation. They call it posttraumatic growth after loss, as opposed to posttraumatic stress disorder, which signals a negative effect. It’s actually a more common response than PTSD, and they define it as a positive psychological change experienced as a result of the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances.

The researchers have even outlined the 5 major domains of posttraumatic growth: greater appreciation of life and/or changed sense of priorities; more intimate, deeper, or warmer relationships with others; a sense of increased or discovered personal strength; openness to new possibilities in life; and last but not least spiritual growth.

So even if you’ve been avoiding death so far, the loss of a loved one is the second best opportunity to face it. The very best is when you’re about to die, that’s even more direct. But you shouldn’t wait so long, because then you won’t have enough time left to truly live.

If you decide to take this route, and want to transform your grief into growth, please continue with my video about death awareness. And in the meantime, always remember the motto: Me too.

If you want to know more about death from a spiritual but down to earth perspective, you should read my book: The Power of Death. Click on the link below, and get it now! I’m deadly serious.

Memento Mori!