Grief Meditation: A Subterranean Pathway to “Higher Power” Consciousness
Tackling the question, “What is higher power?” in my allegorical saga, “The Spider and the Butterfly,” is facilitating uncharted poetic imagery. It is also encouraging further reflection on a mystifying experience in psychoanalysis many moons ago. The uncommon imagery can be found directly below this essay in Part IX (a & b) of the ongoing poetic allegory. (See Linked-In for the previous eight segments.) Actually, the poem captures pretty vividly most of the key mind-body-spirit components of the actual “mystical-like” experience. Presently, I want to explore some intriguing differences between the general notion of “Meditation” and my concept/model of “Grief Meditation.” As a means of illustration, this essay will examine the paradoxical notion of: 1) the self-labeled “Grief Meditation,” a nine-month process of lying on a couch, grieving deeply in a free associative state, and 2) when the timing was right, the unexpected insertion of meditation into the therapeutic regimen, which resulted in, 3) both “oceanic” and “out-of-body” experiences, that, ultimately illuminated my calling as an iconoclastic word artist and Psychohumorist” ?.
Meditation Defined and Elaborated
Let’s start with a general definition of “meditation” and some specific neurocognitive research health benefits. According to Psychology Today, “Meditation” is the practice of turning your attention to a single point of reference. It can involve focusing on the breath, on bodily sensations, or on a word or phrase known as a mantra. In other words, meditation means turning your attention away from distracting thoughts and focusing on the present moment. (Psychology Today).
The article, “Meditation Will Make You Smarter (and Happier),” by Robert Puff Ph.D. (posted Sep 2013), cited a UCLA study on meditation. “Researchers used high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI’s) to scan the brains of a group of subjects who were long-time meditators. They found that these individuals’ brains were larger than their non-meditating counterparts. Another study found that aging people who meditate regularly don’t lose their gray matter as fast as non-meditators. Apparently, the meditators’ brains have noticeably thicker tissue in the prefrontal cortex, which is the region of the brain responsible for attention and control.”
“Imagine the implications of these discoveries! Not only can meditation prevent brain cells from dying, which typically happens as we age, it can boost a person’s brain size in several crucial regions. Furthermore, researchers have concluded that meditation can actually make a person more intelligent. Evidence is also demonstrating that people who meditate regularly are able to focus more deeply and deal with stress better than non-meditators.
“Science is describing what long time meditators have known all along: A consistent meditative practice decreases stress and increases well-being.”
Meditation vs. Grief Meditation: Conceptual-Practical Complementarity
For me, “Grief Meditation” (GM) is the Yin to the Yang of “Meditation.” As mentioned earlier, “meditation means turning your attention away from distracting thoughts and focusing on the present moment” to reduce angst and achieve a more peaceful state. One shortcoming heard from many who have struggled with meditation is the inability to quiet one’s mind, to distract the ever racing, crisscrossing jumble of thoughts and feelings for that one-point reference meditative state. In addition to those with genuine ADD diagnoses, I suspect it’s often bottled up, repressed, or numbed emotions interfering with achieving a state of mind-body serenity.
Key Components of Grief Meditation
1. Grief Meditation as Alternative Quieting Path. Grief Meditation is an alternative path for quieting the brain as well as calming the heart: diving into those underlying and distracting painful, if not traumatic, thoughts, memories and emotions; it’s a cleansing process through deeper and deeper levels of grief work. First one floods the mind (head and heart) before attempting to achieve one-point focus. Opening the heart is as vital as quieting the brain for stress relief and stress resilience.
2. Grief Meditation as Ebb and Flow Process. GM begins by creating a quiet, private space for generating a free-associative state. It takes practice to quiet the mind enough to tune into your emotional memory channel. This tuning in allows charged memories and relevant painful feelings to percolate up from the recesses of your unconscious and subconscious, setting the stage for the subsequent grief work. And sustained grieving calms and clears a path for meditative access to deeper parts of the brain, to Jung’s higher Self.
3. Grief Meditation as Therapeutic Tool for Trauma. Grief Meditation of course is a vital therapeutic tool for dealing with lingering early trauma issues, chronic childhood taunting or bullying, the loss of significant others, career paths, or dreams, at any stage of life that have not been sufficiently grieved. It is needed for situations where stress has been denied, or allowed to build up and, finally, there’s a psychic implosion/burnout or eruption/burn up. Not surprisingly, GM is valuable when one has grown up in a “Don’t Talk, Don’t Trust, Don’t Feel” family environment.
4. Grief Meditation’s Relevance for a TNT, 24/7 World. Grief Meditation seems especially relevant in a 24/7, TNT – Times-Numbers-Technology – Driven and Distracted World, a world of constant upgrading and reorganizing. And, of course, this means the challenge of dealing with loss of control and predictability; forever coping with uncertainty and adapting to change. Combined with trying to “do more with less” …remember, burnout is less a sign of failure and more that you gave yourself away! And mourning loss is a vital part of recovery regarding a sense of lost identity and finding one’s true voice.
5. Grief Meditation’s Healing and Harmonizing Experience. And finally, whether hours, days, weeks, or months, such emotional immersion – recalling the trials or traumas, the flood of tears, an empathetic ear – helps clean out old wounds. This process of purposefully surrendering to the pain, whimpering or wailing, crying out or howling freely, breaks down defensive walls. Defenses don’t have to work so hard blocking or numbing feelings; new energy is being freed. The shadow side is no longer so unimaginable or frightening. Having access to your unconscious and emotional memories means being able to psychological integrate the conscious self with your subterranean mind and dreamscape. This strengthens all kinds of cognitive functioning – from use of intuition and blending divergent and convergent thinking to paradoxical conceptualization, metaphoric imagery, and holistic synthesis.
Grief Purification: Mystifying Moment, Healing Splits, and Envisioning Wholeness
Eventually, both healing wounds and a state of psychic harmony can be achieved through the percolation, reliving, and embracing of painful memories – what I call grief purification. The simultaneous engagement of past-present-future prepares the mind-body/heart-soul for more than a one-point frame of reference. Based on personal experience, if the critical grief work has been sufficiently engaged, there’s a readiness for an uncommon meditative experience. Let me explain. After the symbolic nine months of continuous grieving in 3 times/week psychoanalysis, one day, very uncharacteristically, I had nothing to say. My Psychiatry Resident made his greatest intervention: “Don’t say anything.” Initially puzzled, not having been a meditator, I simply lay quietly, my mind went blank…for thirty seconds. Then, suddenly…All I can say is the meditative state can quickly morph into a mystical-like unfolding: the one-point now may spread to a sense of cosmic consciousness (what pioneering psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, would call the greater Self): one feels connected to an all-encompassing universe.
Out-of-Body Potential
There’s also potential for an “out-of-body” experience – whether dream-like or hallucinatory in nature. (Personally, just not into astral or soul travel). I soon understood that a dream-like image of myself looking down from the ceiling while I lay upon the couch captured the critical and shame-based divisions within. And while I had carried around these divisions (and feelings of guilt and humiliation) for decades, this unprecedented moment was reflective of growth; it was also a spur for further healing. For the first time, I perceived myself as a holistic human being, composed of strengths and weaknesses or vulnerabilities, admirable qualities and defects. I did not have to deny my complex, double-edged nature. It was possible to accept who I was at this juncture in my life, still knowing that much head work, heart work, and homework remained. Reducing the warring, “good vs. bad” splits in personality helps close the psychic chasm. I had my first taste of an integrated sense of Self. And I wanted more.
From the Mystical to the Mandala Moments
In fact, hours later, reflecting on both the psychic harmony and curious wonderment, I began to unconsciously create a Mandala, one of Jung’s symbols of psychic integration and “Higher Self” awareness. (The Mandala, as noted in the poem notes below, is also a tool for generating deep meditative states.) And perhaps the most important consequence of the Grief Meditation process and mystical-like moment: breaking down decades of denial. I no longer could dismiss the presence of an energy, a consciousness, but even more so, a creative unconsciousness that I felt compelled to explore and express…I had my life’s calling! And it is this same meditative, trance-like state, plumbing the depths of my shadow world, that I return to over and over again in both my speaking, but especially in my creative writing.
Closing Summary:
A synergistic model of therapeutic healing, for realizing profounder levels of consciousness, and holistic integration has been presented: combining deep-seated grief work with properly timed meditation. Grief Meditation (GM) certainly encourages working through painful memories. But it also creates a readiness for both focus and flow. Extended free associative grieving leading to a state of quiet and calm, when combined with purposefully surrendering to a meditative state, has the potential for an unfolding experience of cosmic consciousness. One feels connected to everything. An out-of-body, dream-like experience, may well signal that interior psychic splits are being acknowledged and healing has begun. And, such a startling experience may reveal a sense of one’s calling: to explore and express the heretofore unconscious or subterranean psychic world within. And this state of focus and flow, mourning and mania, of having your conscious and unconscious worlds battle and dance with each other is a foundation for “Touched with Fire”-like ** creativity. Grief Meditation is a therapeutic model that encourages the creative synthesis of chaos and calm.
If you would like to learn more about or participate in a Grief Meditation workshop, just e-holler. Until then, enjoy Part IX (a & b) of the Spider and the Butterfly. MG
** The title of renowned psychologist and expert on manic depression, Kaye Redfield Jamison’s book about how certain individuals with various degrees of bipolarity or intense mood swings often produce uncommon, blazing creativity. A key driving force is having to grapple with and make sense of the dynamic and disruptive, seemingly contradictory states – energy, flow of ideas, etc. – of mania and melancholia.
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The Spider and the Butterfly: Not Necessarily Just a Children’s Story
Contemplation of…Connection with “Higher Power” – Part IX (a & b)
Mr. Spider has begun to use the 12-Step program to honestly acknowledge his codependency/character defects. However, Part IX reveals he still is having doubts about discovering, let alone declaring, his own voice. And then there is the enigmatic question: what is the concept of “higher power?” Attending meetings and working the program has sharpened his spider intuition: Mr. S believes he needs additional help in grieving a lost childhood and more confidently stepping into adulthood. It’s time to confront unhealthy alliances on the family web-front. He seeks out a non-traditional healing source: Phoenix Meditation. Will a spider soul rise again?
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The Spider and the Butterfly: Not Necessarily Just a Children’s Story
Contemplating “Higher Power” – Part IX (a)
Making 12-Step progress, but
No cause yet to rejoice.
Mr. S still on the fence…
Settling for convenience
Re: Mother Nature’s iron choice:
The law of subservience
Or set free one’s wild voice?
Can he break the sound barrier?
The family code of silence
Ever clogging one’s life-blood.
Time for another fiery flood…
Will it take a “higher” presence?
In fact, what is this higher power?
A staple of the 12-Step trope **:
Some holy spirit force above?
“Can’t take my neurons off you” blissful love?
Or, flowing beard that makes you cower?
(One can only pray and hope.)
That starry night panorama
On a dark deserted Greek Isle beach?
Hypnotic pulsing just outside your reach
Shooting stars add to the drama
Surely, this is brilliant “higher” theater.
Perhaps, Nature plus uncertainty? **
Why humanize the mystery
Beyond collective wisdom of the group:
A humble, heart-expanding loop
That heals wounded identity.
Then, too, Jungian psychology: **
The deep brain’s unconscious geometry **
A kaleidoscopic sanctuary…when suddenly…
A holistic Self ** touches the entirety:
A soulful moment for eternity.
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** trope: a literary “trope” is the use of figurative language, via word, phrase or an image, for artistic effect such as using a figure of speech. The word trope has also come to be used for describing commonly recurring literary and rhetorical devices, motifs, or clichés in creative works. (Wikipedia)
** Nature plus uncertainty: acclaimed 20th c. English novelist, John Fowles, wrote a brief treatise, Aristos, about his foundational philosophy. For Fowles, the concept of God equaled “Nature plus mystery”; he did not need to speculate on the mystery, believing that some element of this ultimate enigma will always be unknowable
** Jungian psychology: Carl Gustav Jung, (born July 26, 1875, Kesswil, Switzerland—died June 6, 1961, Küsnacht), Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist who founded analytic psychology, in some aspects a response to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of the extraverted and the introverted personality, archetypes, and the collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, literature, and related fields. (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
** holistic Self: The Self, according to Jung, is realized as the product of individuation, which in his view is the process of integrating one's personality. The Self is one of the Jungian archetypes, signifying the unification of consciousness and unconsciousness in a person, and representing the psyche as a whole. What distinguishes Jungian psychology is the idea that there are two centers of the personality. The ego is the center of consciousness, whereas the Self is the center of the total personality, which includes consciousness, the unconscious, and the ego.
For Jung, the Self is symbolized by the circle (especially when divided in four quadrants), the square, or the mandala (Wikipedia). Mandala, a Sanskrit term meaning “magic circle,” is an image often involving a center point, the aforementioned quadrants, and unfolding layers or petals. The mandala is often used as a tool for meditation, for reaching deeper levels of consciousness.
** The deep brain’s…geometry: I believe it was the 20th c. English poet, philosopher, lay theologian, and acclaimed man of letters, G.K. Chesterton, who said, approximately, “At the deepest, most spiritual recesses of the brain one finds a pattern of geometry.” For Jung, his discovery of geometrical mandala imagery across races and cultures suggests a universal presence in the human “collective unconscious.”
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The Spider and the Butterfly: Not Necessarily Just a Children’s Story
Connecting to “Higher Power” – Part IX (b)
So, Mr. S seeks out a greater vision
On “A Healing-Revealing SELF” retreat
Trying Phoenix Meditation:
Grief to Reborn Soul Connection…
To inner weave the bitter and the sweet!
The spider shares family history:
Don’t Talk, Don’t Trust, Don’t Feel
Caught in the web conspiracy
Mind-numbing codependency…
Triangles most unreal!
The guru guide has him lie prone:
“Gaze on the psychic mirrors.
Now, let your conscious mind be still
Dare to release controlling will; step-by-step…
Cross the threshold of your terrors!”
Nine months of meditative waves
A clearing slowly being carved
Look…a “back to the future” path
By a silent spring of pain and wrath, but
An inner child no longer starved!
Nurse a head and heart with feelings…
Wailing walls crack from the human flood
Of nighttime sweats, nameless fears
A river rages: lost child tears…
A soul purified through sweat and blood.
A brain washed; pride abashed
Rocked by quakes along the psychic shelf…
Then one strange day, nothing to say
All thoughts simply slip away
Yet through the mist, as if by stealth
Revealed for Mr. S: The Arc of Higher Self! **
The connective sense was “oceanic”
Embracing east and west, north and south.
Then, an “out of body” mystery
Hallucination or brain chemistry?
While entranced upon the couch.
Was our Mr. S merely dreaming
A spectral spider on the ceiling?
Or, was it HIM...Higher Integrity Meditation?
Turning down the volume, calming the confusion
A chance to mend the psychic splitting. **
But even more…he must believe
An unknown creature lies within.
And though a web he may not weave
His deep truth…his nature’s calling:
Mr. S will forever seek and spin!
The paradox of “higher power”
Found in the deep underground disguise:
When mist spirals to the mystical
Wild howl of the archetypal **…
Now, a reborn spider on the rise!
Closing Question
And the final trial:
Can Mr. S go home again?
To reassert his place
In web-time and space:
Challenging a fierce Queen’s reign
With newfound “higher power” grace
To help ‘lil b fly apace
And Zen…
No matter what…no loss of face!
Alas, time to lay down the proverbial pen
At life’s existential juncture: from now till then…
The burning quest of Part Ten!
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** Higher Self: The Self, according to Jung, is realized as the product of individuation, which in his view is the process of integrating one's personality. The Self is one of the Jungian archetypes, signifying the unification of consciousness and unconsciousness in a person, and representing the psyche as a whole.
** psychic splitting: splitting (also called black-and-white thinking or all-or-nothing thinking) is the failure in a person's thinking to bring together the dichotomy of both positive and negative qualities of the self and others into a cohesive, realistic whole. It is a common defense mechanism. The individual tends to think in extremes (i.e., an individual's actions and motivations are all good or all bad with no middle ground). Splitting contributes to unstable relationships and intense emotional experiences. Splitting is common during adolescence, but is regarded as transient. Splitting has been noted especially with persons diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. (Wikipedia)
** archetypal: In literature, an “archetype” is a typical character, an action, or a situation that seems to represent universal patterns of human nature. Carl Jung argued that the root of an archetype is in the “collective unconscious” of mankind. The phrase “collective unconscious” refers to experiences shared by a race or culture. Such experiences include such things as love, religion, death, birth, life, struggle, and survival. These experiences exist in the subconscious of every individual, and are re-created in literary works, or in other forms of art, e.g. the mandala. (Literary Devices).
? Mark Gorkin 2018
Shrink Rap ? Productions
Mark Gorkin, MSW, LICSW, "The Stress Doc" ?, a nationally acclaimed speaker, writer, and "Psychohumorist" ?, is a founding partner and Stress Resilience and Trauma Debriefing Consultant for the Nepali Diaspora Behavioral Health & Wellness Initiative. Current Leadership Coach/Training Consultant for the international Embry-Riddle Aeronautics University at the Daytona, FL headquarters. A former Stress and Violence Prevention Consultant for the US Postal Service, he has led numerous Pre-Deployment Stress Resilience-Humor-Team Building Retreats for the US Army. Presently Mark does Critical Incident Debriefing for organizational/corporate clients of Business Health Services. The Doc is the author of Practice Safe Stress, The Four Faces of Anger, and Preserving Human Touch in a High-Tech World. Mark’s award-winning, USA Today Online "HotSite" – www.stressdoc.com – was called a "workplace resource" by National Public Radio (NPR). For more info, email: [email protected].