This post was adapted from an invited dharma talk I gave at the Mindful Reflection Community at the Unitarian Universalist Church (Unity Temple) in Oak Park, Illinois, on August 8, 2017. To listen to the talk, which was recorded live, click here. 

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I begin with a brief excerpt from the story Emma’s Gift:

I thought I knew what it meant to lose someone, until a passionate and fiery 31-year-old Irish woman woke up next to me one morning with a pain in her abdomen that wouldn’t go away. Over the course of seven months, as the tumor gradually wore her down, the ground beneath me fell away one crumbling piece at a time, until there was nothing left but free fall.

For more than 20 years I’d worked with communities affected by armed conflict. I’d spent much of my professional life listening to stories of loss and grief. I’d sat with Guatemalan mothers still mourning sons and husbands “disappeared” by death squads 10 years earlier; listened to the anguish of Bosnian parents whose children were killed by snipers as they played in the streets of Sarajevo; and sat with Afghans widowed by rockets and made childless by shells rained down on their houses.

I had become intimately familiar with the heartbreak of war, and imagined myself something of an expert on the experience of loss. But like an art critic who has never picked up a paintbrush, I knew of it only from a distance. Reeling now, I understood how loss had always been an abstraction to me, a devastating experience seen through the lens of someone else’s pain. Now the pain was my own, I was the one being tossed about by waves of grief, looking frantically for solid ground where I might catch my breath and grasp the permanence of this experience, the foreverness of Emma’s absence. There would be no reunion with her. She was gone, and would always be gone. That fact was pure, and harsh, and startling in its intensity.

Two weeks after Emma’s death, I was back in Afghanistan, working again with my research team on a follow-up study of mental health in Kabul. It was strange to be there without Emma. I walked past the Chinese Dumpling-An, and remembered the nervousness and laughter of our first evening together. Long before sunrise, I was once again awakened by the Muezzin’s call to prayer, and sat quietly in meditation as grief moved through my body. The intensity of the pain frightened me, but I was reminded of a line in a poem by Robert Frost: “The only way out is through.” And so I leaned into the experience, letting the sadness rise until it gradually receded. I had to learn to trust the wisdom of my body.

How do we open up to that which needs to be seen, and held, and comforted? How do we do this without feeling overwhelmed? How do we do this when there may be a great fear of knowing our own experience, when there may be resistance to getting close to what we have doggedly sought to avoid, sometimes for years?

Ajahn Chah says this: “If you haven’t wept deeply, you haven’t begun to meditate.” But what if we encounter obstacles to weeping deeply? How can we safely and carefully move beyond those walls, or take them down one brick at a time?

I was frightened by the loss of Emma, by the intense grief it evoked. But I was even more frightened by older grief, older sadness, and memories of aloneness that her death stirred up. In fact, I knew more of loss than I realized when I wrote the story about losing Emma. But I had kept those early losses at bay, holding back memories and feelings as best I could, until I no longer even knew how much energy I was spending on staying distant from my own experience.

Focusing on my breath in meditation has often calmed me. I’ve had a meditation practice for years. It has often helped me to settle down, to become more aware of my feelings, and to feel more at ease in my own skin. It’s certainly helped me disengage from unhelpful circles of thought, and to notice my emotional reactions without needing to act on them.

But sometimes, the focus on my breath has felt like another form of avoidance, or aversion in Buddhist terms. I could focus intently on my breathing, and in that intense focus, I could avoid listening, genuinely listening, to what lay beneath: the fear and pain and rage I had split off, and persistently and skillfully remained unaware of—except for the tightness in my shoulders and face, the abiding sense of shame I could never explain or get rid of, the anxiety that so often made sleep elusive.

Emma’s death left me with an opportunity to work with what was trying to surface, with what needed my attention, and, most difficult, with my intense resistance to getting close to it.

My many books on mindfulness, the talks and workshops and retreats I attended, had not given me the tools to work with my powerful resistance, or to cultivate the kind of self-compassion that could help me get close to the grief, and fear, and shame I had carried around for so long. Metta, the traditional Buddhist phrases of Lovingkindness, simply didn’t do the trick for me, as they seemed to do for many others. What I needed was not so much words or phrases, as a kind of gentle attention. I needed to see, to create space—to cultivate a gentle listening, a compassionate awareness. But really, I had no idea how to go about doing that.

Mindfulness gave me the ability to sit quietly and stay present, to sit apart from yet present with my experience. But the work of Jon Kabat Zinn and others writing in the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) tradition didn’t give me the tools to engage with that internal resistance, with the protective part of me that kept me from knowing and seeing and holding that which needed to be known and seen and held. I needed to learn how to work with what psychologist and Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield calls Insistent Visitors, the powerful feelings that don’t simply rise and fall “like waves of the ocean,” but persist, doggedly, in need of something more than mere observation. Generic exhortations to accept without judgment all that arose, didn’t help when fear kept things from arising in the first place. I needed some new tools in my meditation practice.

To find those tools, I turned to psychologists working at the intersection of mindfulness and psychotherapy, and to experiential psychologists whose work offered tools for gently engaging with barriers to knowing and transforming the emotional impact of our difficult life experiences. People like Ricahrd Schwartz and his colleagues, who developed so-called “Parts Therapy” (Internal Systems Therapy); Jack Kornfield, who, in his book A Path with Heart, offers strategies for engaging with “insistent visitors”—the persistent thoughts and feelings that intrude into our meditation, seeking a gentle and healing sort of attention; Paul Gilbert, who has written so wonderfully about the transformative power of self-compassion, with tools anyone can use in their meditative work; and Tara Brach, who has written with wisdom and compassion about integrating mindfulness and compassion into what she calls Radical Self-Acceptance.

From these and other gifted teachers, I learned to sit as a compassionate, loving adult, a safe, nurturing and non-reactive parent, with the younger parts of myself who held fear, and shame, and old grief, and who needed, above all, to be seen and reassured. The breath remained an essential anchor to which I could return, but the deeper, transformative work called on other, more active techniques. Here are a few I’ve found helpful, and that clients I have worked with have also found useful. I should note that while none of these techniques needs to be used in the context of a meditation practice, that is how I have used them, both personally and with clients in my mindfulness-based psychotherapy practice. Meditation creates a calming, attentive state, in which these deeper, transformative techniques can be effectively used.