Heart Space: On loss and gratitude

In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful 

Hi friends, 

Whenever a very well-meaning person told me to be grateful for *fill in the blank* thing in my life in the aftermath of losing my dad, I felt so angry and frustrated. I was already exerting so much mental and emotional energy on feeling grateful, and I didn’t want or need anyone to tell me to be grateful, especially as though gratitude was the antidote to my grief. It was not. The antidote to my grief was much more nuanced.

And yet, gratitude helped me throughout my journey, so I wanted to share a bit about my thoughts on feeling grateful while experiencing loss, and other major life difficulties (heartbreak, failure, uncertainty, etc.).

In the past few years, I experienced how gratitude is healing when it is felt, not simply intellectually understood. I think it’s a common experience to make a list of things to be grateful for without it affecting our emotional state at all. We know we should be grateful for so many things in our life. Intellectually, we are grateful, but we can’t feel it. It is as though gratitude cannot pierce through our bulletproof vest of frustration, dissatisfaction, anger, pain, or pure apathy. 

I wanted to feel grateful, so I practiced seeing, naming, and spending time with my gratitude. Sometimes, I imagined life if certain things disappeared, like my ability to walk. Sometimes, I imagined how life would be if I went through worse than I had. Sometimes, I remembered what I had and imagined light spreading throughout my body bringing warmth to it. Sometimes, I simply sat outside and tried to take in on how the trees, the grass, and the flowers were keeping me alive by converting CO2 into oxygen. Other times, I repeated quotes or words to myself, such as, ‘Alhumdulillah’ (All praise belongs to God).   

All of these efforts, and many more, sustained overtime helped me feel grateful. You might wonder: why is this healing when gratitude, on its own, cannot cure the pain of loss? 

For me, one beautiful consequence of feeling grateful was that I felt emotionally held. I felt as though we (my family and I) were being taken care of. We are being watched out for. As though, I didn’t need to carry the weight of all my problems and my family’s problems on my shoulders because the world was carrying us too - friends, family, strangers, nature, etc. All of these felt like gifts from God holding us and reminding us that we are not alone. 

Practicing feeling grateful also helped me feel more grateful for myself, which gave me more and more of my energy back. It gave me belief in myself, my strength, and God’s plan. It gave me a sense of grounded confidence.

But, again, gratitude doesn’t cure pain. So how did gratitude help me actually move through the painful feelings that come with different types of loss: anger, resentment, sadness, guilt, emptiness, frustration, bitterness, rage, shame, etc? 

Well first, we need to know what happens to these difficult emotions. For me, growing up these difficult feelings were so strong that I used to numb them and lock them away. Soon, it became an unconscious response of my mind and body that I have worked really hard to break. Alternatively, we can feel these emotions coursing through us, and we start taking these emotions out on everyone around us by lashing out in anger, frustration, etc. I’m deeply afraid of hurting others because I’m hurting, which I find is incredibly too common, especially in stressful work environments. 

I needed a healthier way to feel my emotions, and when I was trying to figure this out, gratitude helped me go and stay on this journey. For me, gratitude gave me the energy to feel these emotions, not negate or dismiss them, and process all the chaos within myself. Sometimes what we are feeling on the surface is actually a secondary emotion. There is something deeper, something hidden beneath, something more expansive and massive that needs to be let out, worked through, or simply shown care.

This was (actually still is!) a painful process, and gratitude kept me afloat by bringing me back to goodness, love, empathy, and optimism. For example, gratitude for my friends helped me turn to them for support and guidance instead of isolating myself completely. Gratitude for my body propelled me to take care of it and nourish it, so I didn’t burn myself out. Gratitude for my family reminded me that I am receiving so much love and care, even as I am giving. 

Lastly, gratitude for the difficulties themselves reminded me that there can be love and mercy, even within the difficulty. There’s so much to share here, so I will likely write about gratitude and difficulty again. 

To touch on being grateful for some of our difficulties, I am including an incredible excerpt from “The Eighth Letter” in Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. I hope these speak to your heart as they spoke to mine. 

Love, 

Sana

P.S. One of my favorite ways to go deeper into my emotions and understand the chaos within me is journaling. I miss journaling with others. I’m excited to have this opportunity again (as mentioned in my last newsletter). If you’re interested in hearing about my group journaling sessions over Zoom, take a look and sign up through this Google form: Journaling Circles.

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Words - Written by others

The Eighth Letter

“The only sad experiences which are dangerous and bad are those that one reveals to people in order to drown them out. Like illnesses treated superficially and incompetently, they retreat and, after a short pause, break out even more intensely. They gather together within the self and our life. They are life unlived, ridiculed, and scorned. 

Were it possible, we might look beyond the reach of our knowing and yet a bit further into the past across the farmsteads of our ancestors. Then perhaps we would endure our griefs with even greater trust than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unfamiliar. Our feelings become mute in timid shyness. Everything within us steps back; a silence ensues, and something new, known to no one, stands in the center and is silent. 

I believe that nearly all our griefs are moments of tension. We perceive them as crippling because we no longer hear signs of life from our estranged emotions. We are alone with the strange thing that has stepped into our presence. For a moment everything intimate and familiar has been taken from us. We stand in the midst of a transition, where we cannot remain standing. 

And this is the reason the sadness passes: the something new within us, the thing that has joined us, has entered our heart and has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer there either - it is already in the blood…. 

Therefore it is so important to be alone and observant when one is sad. The seemingly uneventful moment, when our future really enters in, is very much closer to reality than that other loud and fortuitous point in time, when it happens as if coming from the outside. The quieter and the more patient, the more open we are when we are sad, the more resolutely does that something new enter into us, the deeper it is absorbed in us, the more certain we are to secure it, and the more certain it is to become our personal destiny….

Surely, it is possible that we shall gradually learn to recognize that what we call fate emerges from human beings; it does not enter into them from the outside. It is only because so many did not absorb their destinies while they lived in them, did not transform them into themselves, that they did not recognize what emerged from them….

Why should we not encounter difficulties? . . . 

You must not be frightened ... when a sadness arises within you of such magnitude as you have never experienced or when a restlessness overshadows all you do, like light and the shadow of clouds gliding over your hand. You must believe that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand. It shall not let you fall. 

Why should you want to exclude any anxiety, any grief, any melancholy from your life, since you do not know what it is that these conditions are accomplishing in you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where everything comes from and where it is headed?

You do know that you are in a period of transition and wish for nothing as much as to transform yourself. If some aspect of your life is not well, then consider the illness to be the means for an organism to free itself from something foreign in it. In that case you must help it to be ill and to have its whole illness, to let it break out. That is the course of its progress. 

So much is happening within you at present… You need to be as patient as someone ill and as optimistic as someone recuperating, for perhaps you are both. And more: You are also the physician who must watch over yourself. But in the course of every illness there are many days in which the physician can do nothing but wait. And that, above all, to the extent that you are your physician, you must do it now. 

Do not scrutinize yourself too closely. Do not draw conclusions too quickly from that which is happening to you. Just allow it to happen. Otherwise, you might easily begin to look with blame (that is, morally speaking) upon your past. . . 

Do you recall, from your childhood,, how very much this life of yours has longed for greatness? I see it now, how from the vantage point of greatness it longs for even greater greatness. That is why it does not let up being difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow. 

If I were to tell you one more thing, it would be this: Do not believe that the one who seeks to comfort you lives without difficulty the simple and humble words that sometimes help you. His life contains much grief and sadness and he remains far behind you. Were it not so, he would not have found these words.”

- Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke