The Deep Healing in Loss

My life seems to be filled with cancer lately. I have been diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer, and I have a couple of friends who are also working with cancer. Needless to say, it is very intense, not only for those with cancer, but also their families and friends who walk the journey alongside them. Yes, it is a fierce process, but I also experience it as a benevolent process.     

When we are caught in our struggling minds, as many people are, we don’t want to face the thought of loss, whether it is the loss of a relationship, a loved one, our health or even our life. So what do we do? We hold on, hold on, hold on, and then it becomes an extremely difficult journey. We have become lost in the illusion that life is solid, and peace will come when we can make it the way we want it to be. In this blindness, we don’t see loss, which includes death and dying, as a healing process. And this is our suffering.   

The truth is that in life, everything flows. Light waves flow, sound waves flow, day flows into night, winter into spring, mountains appear and then they disappear. We are part of that flow as we arrive in this life and then pass away. When something like a cancerous tumor is growing in the body or when we are experiencing memory loss, or it looks like we may be evicted, or our child is sick, it is really scary for the mind, so we tighten down into resistance. But we are not this resistant mind. We are so much more than that. We are the space that the struggling mind is happening in, and we can learn how to stay open around deep challenges rather than tightening and resisting.  

We have all taken on so many stories of fear and judgment that cut us off from life. But the loss process can actually break a lot of these veils. As we see through our veils, and discover again how to be with life, right here, right now, exactly as it is appearing, we begin to recognize that everything is Love. Eben Alexander, author of Proof of Heaven, experienced this truth when he woke up from a coma after a near-death experience and the first thing he said is “All is well.” Through his own experience of being opened for a few days beyond this limited mind/body system, Eben reports that when our time comes to step out of this body, we will see and experience Love because “Love is, without a doubt, the basis of everything.”     

This is why I love Stephen Levine’s book, Meetings at the Edge. It is filled with transcripts of conversations he had with people who were in the dying process, as well as with their loved ones who were experiencing loss. When you read this book, you will discover that the dying/loss process can become one of the most magical times in your whole life because as you see through your struggling self, you become open and spacious enough to become one with the field of Love that you truly are.  

One of the most important gifts we can give to ourselves as we journey down the path of life is to discover how to relate to the struggling self rather than from it. This is the ability to say, “Fear is here.” rather than “I am afraid.” This is one of the core ways we can dissolve our clouds of struggle, especially when life is very difficult. This allows us to come back home to this moment without laying a story of struggle over the top of it. If this interests you, it is explored in depth in my book What’s in the Way IS the Way. 

It is also very helpful to come up with a mantra to use when struggle starts to take over. At this point in my life, there are two mantras that help me relax back into the flow of life: “Love is. All is well,” and “Let go. Let life.” When I say one of these mantras on the rhythm of my breath, it wakes up spaciousness again. Gift yourself by creating your own mantra with words that naturally calm you. 

There are times, especially lately when the side effects of chemo are intense, that bringing my attention back to my breath and saying my mantra doesn’t open things up. When this happens, I find that physically moving can help to move the reactions through. I may take a short walk or just stand up and stretch if I only have a few minutes. Moving our bodies actually moves the energy of resistance that cuts us off from life.   

There is a cracking open that happens when there is any deep loss in life, and as you go toward it and then let go, you will experience a field of okayness, peace and clarity that has always been here! You will then see through the idea that you will be healed someday. That idea is just the storyteller saying that you or your life need to be different to know the peace you long for. True healing is discovering that there is nothing you need to fix or change in order to know the healing you long for. For deep healing is already and always here.