It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand

by Megan Devine

Grief is not an enlightenment program for a select few. No one needs intense, life-changing loss to become who they are “meant” to be. The universe is not causal in that way: you need to become something, so life gives you this horrible experience in order to make it happen. On the contrary: life is call-and-response. Things happen, and we absorb and adapt. We respond to what we experience, and that is neither good nor bad. It simply is. The path forward is integration, not betterment.

Reexamine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul. WALT WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass

So much of what we now call spiritual bypass is the age-old split between the head and the heart—trying to surpass being human by becoming more intellectual. We do this because being human hurts. It hurts because we love. Because we are connected to those around us, and it’s painful when they die. It hurts when we lose what we love. Being a spiritually minded person makes you more open to pain and suffering and hardship—which are all parts of love.

We often think of grief as primarily emotional, but grief is a full-body, full-mind experience. You’re not just missing the one you’ve lost; your entire physiological system is reacting, too.

Fear thoughts create a brain response, which creates a body response, which conditions your thoughts to come up with more fears, which starts the cycle again.

Remember that anxiety is a brain-based, nervous system response to imagined danger. It’s not logical; it’s biological.

“You create your own reality” is so patently untrue, and so cruel to the grieving heart. Many of us already feel responsible for what’s happened, both the death of someone we love, and the fact that we somehow aren’t doing our grief “well enough.”

Personally, I believe in what the mystics call “holy outrage”—the anger that fuels truth telling. It’s the anger that points out injustice and silencing, not just to make a scene, but because it knows what true community might be. Holy outrage means telling the truth, no matter who gets offended by the telling. And equally important, it means doing so in the service of more love, more support, more kinship, and true connection.