Spirituality, Therapy, and the Good Life

The very same holiday rituals that were filled with Joy during other years can become acutely painful when we’re grieving .  So much that warmed our spirits  during happier times now leave us cold, adding still more weight to hearts so heavy  that we may be exhausted from carrying them around.

I lovingly reach out to those of you who are hurting during these holidays to reassure you that as painful as they can be,  you can not only get through them, you can experience brief and beautiful moments of love,  awe, gratitude and perhaps even joy. In addition to the video above,  you may also find the following articles helpful.

How to Help Ourselves Through the Holidays

Meaningful Remembrance Ideas for Holiday Grief

During this difficult time of year when the absence of someone you love can feel so much more profound  than their presence did the year before,  and you have no choice but to grieve while the celebration goes on around you, I urge you to make every modest and healing decision that you possibly can. Decide to take in the love that still surrounds you even if only for a moment. Decide to touch someone else’s holiday in a modest but meaningful way. Decide to acknowledge the multitude of gifts that still grace your life – a beautiful sunset, a perfect snowflake,  the rich aroma of a scrumptious pie in the oven, the presence of light at the push of a button, a warm home, loving hearts,  unanticipated gifts of grace that are already on their way, and so much more….

I bless you.  I bless your magnificent, wounded, heavy, and yet still bravely beating heart……

It will get easier, I promise…….

Tammie

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“Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.”

Gail Sheehy

When my daughter, Kristen, was growing up she and I frequently visited used book stores.  One afternoon while I was completely absorbed in the stacks she tapped me on the shoulder and when I looked up, she handed me a book.  It was a copy of Gail Sheehy’s, Passages.  “Don’t you wish that you’d written this mom?” she asked.  “Why honey?”  “Because I see this book in every store we go to,  she must have sold a million of them!” she replied enthusiastically.

My little girl was right on both counts, the book had been a best seller (making Tom Butler Bowden’s list of 50 top psychology classics) and yes, actually, now that she’d mentioned it, I did wish that I’d written it.

Sheehy reassures us that once we reach our mid forties, it truly isn’t  “all downhill from there.”  In  fact, as we enter what Sheehy describes in her follow up book, “New Passages,”  as our second adulthood, we’re presented with a multitude of opportunities for self discovery, reinvention,  and “new and more meaningful ways to live.  involuntary losses can become the catalyst for voluntary changes in the practice of our lives, altering the efforts that we make to connect with others, the values we choose to make congruent with our actions, the habits we change to support better health, the responsibilities we accept for mentoring the next generation and civilizing our communities, country, and planet… The massive shift in the passage to second adulthood involves a transition from survival to mastery.”

During our second adulthood the world cries out for our wisdom as never before.

Following is an interview with Gail Shehy speaking with Diane Rehm about the life passages that we each face.

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Photographer: Allison Fowles

Benefit Your Body and Emotions with Mindful Practices

There is growing evidence for the benefits of mindfulness on our health and well-being, but what does it actually mean to be mindful and how can it help us achieve greater wellness? Put simply, mindfulness is where we focus on our thoughts, feelings and environment. We do not pass any judgment on these and concentrate on just the moment so that our thoughts do not drift to the past or future. This Buddhist concept allows us to have greater awareness of ourselves, take responsibility for our actions and bring about welcome changes.

Mechanisms for mindfulness

There are four main components of mindfulness. Firstly, attention regulation, where we concentrate on a given entity, allows us to maintain our focus on the present. Secondly, body awareness puts us more in tune with our body when we concentrate on aspects such as our breathing or other sensations. Then emotion regulation, where we avoid examining our feelings, lets us accept our reactions to situations. Finally, by changing our self-perspective we acknowledge that change is possible, facilitating us to take positive steps that enhance our well-being.

Promoting better health through mindfulness

When we are mindful we can achieve better physical health. It is certainly the case that when we are more mindful of what we eat this helps us to select healthier foods and exert portion control, aiding weight maintenance and weight loss. There is also evidence that mindful practices can help us manage pain better and create a stronger immune system. However, your mental wellness can improve as well. For instance, practicing mindfulness is a valuable therapy to manage stress, anxiety, low mood and post-traumatic stress disorder. It is also possible to boost memory, concentration and learning when we are more mindful. The benefits of mindfulness don’t end there though. Mindful practices can also promote stronger relationships and greater community spirit, as it makes us better at empathizing with others.

Appropriate use of mindful practices

All therapies have potential limitations and mindfulness is no exception. For example, when you are overly mindful this can make you hypersensitive to situations, such as your perception of pain. Equally, mindfulness may stifle creativity and stand in the way of learning new habits unconnected to conscious awareness. However, when you receive suitable instruction on this practice and understand when it is appropriate to use mindfulness, the benefits of this form of meditation far outweigh its potential drawbacks.

By Juliette Foster

Read Juliette’s Mindfulness guide here!

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“Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you…Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition.”                                                

                                        ~ Florida Scott-Maxwell ~

On a beautiful, light filled Thursday afternoon in August of 2010, I learned that my mother had lung cancer.  I remember standing stunned in the dooryard; the phone pressed tightly against my ear while my mother’s voice drifted in and out of focus.  I recall very little of what we said that day, only that I commanded myself to sound strong and in control and braced myself as best I could, knowing all too well that from the moment I heard the words,  lung cancer,  the world as I knew it was never going to be the same again.

I immediately arranged to fly to Florida and to take a leave of absence from my psychotherapy practice in Maine.  I stepped onto the plane as my mother’s frightened daughter, and disembarked as her primary caregiver.  Between August of 2010 and November of 2012 I would make frequent trips between Maine and Florida, doing my best to keep track of my mother’s treatments and medications, to comfort and keep her fed and clean when the chemotherapy and radiation proved too brutal, and prepare myself and my family for what became more and more inevitable.

Within three weeks after rejoining my family following my first four emotionally and physically exhausting months in Florida, Kevin, my sweet husband, the man whom had represented safety to me throughout my entire adulthood, fell apart.  Besieged by agonizing and unrelenting panic attacks for the first time in his life, he found himself one morning too weak and too ill to get out of bed.  He felt trapped by his pain, by his panic, and by his life.  He’d left the corporate world, and sacrificed his six-figure income in order to engage in more meaningful work, only to discover far greater dysfunction than he’d ever confronted in the corporate world.  He struggled for months attempting to accomplish the impossible until he collapsed, broken down and worn out by the sense of helplessness, anxiety and futility that he’d carried day after day.  Leaving his job and abandoning his career was an act of both desperation and courage. At fifty-two he found himself unemployed, his future uncertain, and our income pared down to one fifth of what it had been.

Two weeks after I returned to Florida to resume my caretaking duties, I received a phone call informing me that Kristen, my precious only child, had been hospitalized for post- partum psychosis.  She’d grown delusional, battling urges to put her fingers on the burner of her stove and observe how long it took them to burn to bone, and had been hiding in the closet with her children, certain that ‘they’ were coming to take one away.    When I learned of her illness, I immediately made arrangements to fly home, terrified for my daughter while devastated at the same time to be abandoning my cancer ridden mother.  I remember sitting stiffly on the plane, my jaw clenched and my stomach in knots, enduring alternating waves of guilt and fear.

After being placed on a waiting list for far longer than I would have believed possible under the circumstances, the treatment Kristen received was far from adequate.  For close to a year, she, her father, husband, and I stumbled through a ghastly twilight zone as diagnoses shifted and the number of heavy-duty psychotropic medications she was prescribed grew at an alarming rate.  I struggled to contain my mounting panic as my beautiful child drifted further and further away from her family, exiled by mental illness and the medication that was supposed to cure it.  And I, a seasoned mental health professional, could not bring her safely home to us.

Note: Continued in Part three

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