Grieving Mindfully Quotes

“If you can understand grief as an extension of love, then you will see that there is nothing wrong with grieving. To deny the importance of grieving would be saying that there is something pathological about loving.”
― Sameet M. Kumar, Grieving Mindfully: A Compassionate and Spiritual Guide to Coping with Loss

“Even though it may be difficult to find meaning in the loss itself, you may still be able to find meaning in your grief—your response to the loss. For example, you may create meaning by advocating for change so that others won’t have to experience what you went through.”
― Sameet M. Kumar, Grieving Mindfully: A Compassionate and Spiritual Guide to Coping with Loss

“When you experience acute grief, it is the only thing that you can attend to. It demands all of your attention, and you know that it is grief that is being experienced. It may gradually lose its intensity, but it can still interfere with your ability to do everyday tasks. When you reexperience it, acute grief makes you feel like you have gone back to the days when the loss you suffered was new and completely overwhelming. A lot of the time, feelings of acute grief will remind you just how nonlinear emotions can be; they may not follow a logical or straightforward pattern and may arise as if from nowhere, or for no apparent reason. I have found that during the process of grieving many people repeatedly reexperience the same intense emotions. Sometimes, these reexperienced feelings, described as “acute grief,” can be more intense than they were the first time around. You probably first experienced acute grief at the moment of your loss. Acute grief is the ground zero of grief; it is the reference point of all of your other emotions.”
― Sameet M. Kumar, Grieving Mindfully: A Compassionate and Spiritual Guide to Coping with Loss

“When we assume that our suffering is stable and permanent, or when we have been suffering for a long time, we begin to engage in what psychologists call black-and-white, or all-or-nothing, thinking. This means we perceive the world through a dualistic eye, seeing things and situations as either all good or all bad. This type of thinking can easily lead you to generalize about your future based on how you feel now. The assumption is that life stinks and it won’t get better, and the resulting emotion is, understandably, depression.”
― Sameet M. Kumar, Grieving Mindfully: A Compassionate and Spiritual Guide to Coping with Loss

“Loss can happen in many ways. Someone we love might change and no longer want to see us.”
― Sameet M. Kumar, Grieving Mindfully: A Compassionate and Spiritual Guide to Coping with Loss

“The fact that a certain amount of time has gone by does not mean you should be feeling a certain way.”
― Sameet M. Kumar, Grieving Mindfully: A Compassionate and Spiritual Guide to Coping with Loss

“Grief is not an identity. What feels so solid and real as a grief reaction (or any other reaction) in any moment is merely a combination of powerful reactive habits of thinking, feeling, and physical sensations.”
― Sameet M. Kumar, Grieving Mindfully: A Compassionate and Spiritual Guide to Coping with Loss