How can we heal from the loss of a loved one?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
A parent or a family member who is close to us. Yeah.
That’s where a spiritual worldview can help us. That is, each of us is a spiritual being. We have horizontal connection with others and we all have a vertical connection with the ultimate reality.
So, during our life journey, there are some people with whom we are connected horizontally for some time. Now, these relationships, many of them can be very deep and meaningful for us, invaluable for us, but they end. Although the connection ends at the physical level, it does not have to end at the spiritual level.
So, we are connected with the ultimate reality. We can connect with prayer, meditation. So, meditation is where, broadly speaking, we hear and receive.
We connect with the ultimate reality through hearing and reception, where we could say the ultimate reality speaks to us. And prayer is where we speak to the ultimate reality. So, we may not have that connection with the other person right now, but we always have the connection with the ultimate reality.
And that ultimate reality is always connected with others. One of the basic insights in the bhakti traditions is that the divine resides in the hearts of every one of us. The divine is our closest companion.
And wherever we may go, we are spiritual beings and we go, we continue to live after death. Death is like a coma, not a full stop, not a period in our life journey. It is just we go and we go to another level of existence after death.
So, where that other person is, now we cannot connect with them directly, but we can connect through the ultimate reality. So, we could make some plan that maybe we will do something spiritual and offer the benefit of that to them. Maybe some special meditation, some special reading a spiritual text or something like that.
And if we do that, that connection will still be there. So, that is with respect to see basically when we have a sense of loss, there are three aspects to it. One is that we cannot do anything for that person.
Second is that person is not there to do anything for us. They guided us, they comforted us, they loved us and they are no longer there for us. So, now how do we deal with that? So, first I talked about is we feel we can’t do anything for them, then directly, then we find out something which we can do spiritually and dedicate it to them.
And if you feel that they are not able to do anything for that, what they were doing for us, we don’t have it in our life. Yes, that is true. Somebody whom we have cared for and who has cared for us, their loss will create a hole in our heart, a sense of emptiness in our heart.
And that is just natural. However, or simultaneously rather, we understand that every one of us, now whatever love and care we give each other, it can be very deep and genuine, but it is not just we offering love and care to each other. It is the ultimate offering us love and care through that person.
One of the most intimate acts of love is say a mother offering her breast milk to a baby, is nourishing her with her own body directly. And yet, that mother doesn’t do anything special to produce milk in her breasts when the baby is born. It is by the arrangement of the ultimate reality that the infant comes from the womb and by the arrangement of that reality, milk comes from the mother’s breast.
So whatever love anyone offers to us, it is ultimately that ultimate offering to us through that person. So if we intensify our connection with the ultimate, does not let that particular connection’s emptiness will go away, is that we will still regard and respect that connection which we had, but that overall sense of emptiness which we had, that can be filled. And the third aspect is that we all need some amount of closure to any relationship.
When there is a loss, at the time of death, there is physical closure, but we all need emotional closure. So we have to see what we can do. Maybe if there’s something which we wanted to speak to that person, we didn’t get time to speak.
Maybe we wanted to appreciate them for what they did. We wanted to apologize for something that we did, we didn’t do. So we have to find a way to get that closure.
One way could be that we write it down and offer our hearts, emotions, and in a sense of spiritual affection to them, not their spiritual connection. Through the ultimate, we can have that connection. So we can have a connection and then bring about that closure.
So closure may take some time, and each of us has to find out how it will work. Grieving is a process. Just like if I have a physical wound, say if my hand gets fractured, then there is a phase when I need to keep my hand stationary.
We put in a sling, and that’s what is required for healing. So similarly, when we lose someone, it is painful, and we need healing. So sometimes we may need some space to just be alone, to be with our thoughts and to recover.
And after some time, say maybe a fortnight or something, the doctor will say, now you start moving your hand, take out the sling. So similarly, we all will go through just as what is required for physical healing, sometimes some withdrawal and inactivity, and then later, gradual re-engagement and activity. So similarly, we have to go through a similar process for our emotional healing.
So sometimes we need to maybe withdraw and just process our memories, process our thoughts, gain some inner emotional handle over ourselves, and then maybe re-engage, connect with some other people who also knew them, share some thoughts, memories, and gradually bring a closure. That’s when the hand starts operating again. So that healing process is something which we need to find out how we can best go through ourselves.
And because each one of us is an individual, see, your mind is different from my mind. The dynamic of your relationship with that, with someone is different from the dynamic of my relationship. So we have to ask ourselves to go about it emotionally.
But we process our own emotions internally, and then we process those emotions by connecting with others who love them. When we do these two things, first the hand has linked, and then get the hand out and start new, and gradually healing can happen. Thank you for the question.
Any other questions? Is it important to, like one can be an ageist? If a person is simply materialistic, then