Grief Counseling Self-Work

Our lives send us through ups and downs.

We expect that we will find a “key” that will unlock the mystery of perennial happiness, total clarity about what is going on, a firm and unending grasp upon the helm of our lives.

But inevitably, as night follows day, we find ourselves back in the pit of despair, longing, uncertainty, powerlessness, dread, discouragement and grief. That is when we need grief counseling self-work.

Rather than resist your dark cycle or judge yourself as “wrong” for your return to some form of grief, embrace it as yet another opportunity for making strides of progress toward your ultimate goal.

Be your own grief counselor by presuming that there is much to be gained by delving into your inner darkness. Examine the experience consciously. Anticipate a gift buried in its core.

To work your way down, into and through your greif is like burrowing through a tunnel that will take you to the other side, where the brighter light you seek awaits your arrival.

Your cycles of grief are not so much descents as they are like fields of emotional bog-fog that lie between where you are and where you want to go.

Make your way through them. Rather than regarding grief as a barrier or sign of failure, relate with it as an unavoidable swamp field that you need to trudge through to advance your liberation.

One of the lessons you will learn as your own grief counselor as you pay attention to your experience in the darkness is that the grieving that you are contending with is really nothing but a web of negative mental-emotional habits.

There is the emotional habit of feeling downtrodden, the habit of feeling like a victim, the habit of feeling discouraged, the habit of feeling insecure, inadequate, inferior, out-done.

There is the mental habit of interpreting grief as a sign of failure and the habit of comparing yourself to others which only leaves you feeling worse, and which distracts you from the work you need to do to progress along your own true path to victory.

There may be the habit of seeing yourself as being mistreated or taken advantage of at work, the habit of focusing only on what you have not accomplished (which can make you feel like a failure), a habit of seeing yourself as unworthy of love and respect.

As you examine the dark mental-emotional miasma that occupies this field of inner darkness, you gain wisdom and skill as your own grief counselor and you see how to disentangle yourself from it. But it acts like a sticky, clingy spider’s web. As you remove one strand, another sticks to you.

The common mistake we make is to presume this passing wave of emotional pain is permanent, that leads to further decline and this presumption causes us to resist it.

But to resist the grief-work is to turn and run from the dark passageway that we need to pass through in order to get to the bright treasure that awaits us on the other side.