Relinquish
Today’s Healing Reflection invites you to safely come NEAR your grief and move toward healing.
Not every death or loss carries the same pain, yet the pain must be acknowledged and processed. Ignoring or repressing the pain before adequate processing can lead to delayed grief reactions. This might look like bursts of unexpected anger, tears, or strong emotions when least expected. This also can turn into a type of physical or somatic manifestation of the grief. Remember, using tasks or stages to discuss grief and loss are merely a guide to help you understand how one might work through loss. Grief should not be task-oriented. These grieving steps or tasks do not occur in an orderly fashion. You may move through these grief stages or processes randomly and experience them multiple times.
I continue to explore the tasks of grieving introduced by the clinical psychologist, Therese Rando. Her focus is on bereavement, anticipatory grief, and traumatic loss. She introduced the Six “R” Model of Recognizing, Reacting, Remembering, Relinquishing, Readjusting, and Reinvesting.
In review, Recognizing involves acknowledging the death and beginning to make meaning of the event. Reacting refers to how you react to the separation or loss and experience the pain and find ways to express your feelings. This includes finding ways to mourn secondary losses. Remembering is re-feeling your experiences and memories of the person, not just remembering. Relinquishing is another task involved in the grief process. Relinquishing attachments and assumptions involves reworking attachments to the deceased and the old assumptive world.
Set an intention today to observe how your world has changed.
NOTICE
The definition of relinquish is to “voluntarily cease to keep or claim; (or) give up.” With any significant loss, your world as you have known it is now different. Perhaps a coffee shop now has new meaning because it is where you and the deceased often sat and shared good times together. This coffee shop may be a place you avoid at first, too many painful memories to face. Yet one day, you might find yourself finding comfort in that same coffee shop. This change may occur gradually and you are the only one who knows when you are ready to relinquish attachments and assumptions.
EMOTIONS
How are you feeling today? If your emotion were a color, what color would it be? Would it be a single color or multiple colors? Would it be vibrant and bright or faded and dark? Take a moment and acknowledge the emotion you are feeling. I encourage you to let go of any judgment about this emotion. Just be in this moment aware of how you feel.
ACTION
Today’s activity involves asking yourself what you might need to feel supported? What is one thing that you can do for yourself? If you enjoy being creative, draw a picture or write a poem about the qualities of this person. What did this person bring into your life that you might like to share with another as a way of honoring your loss?
REFLECT
Are you ready to give up and surrender an old attachment so that you can invite new possibilities into your world? What does it mean to accept your loss and relinquish? How can you do this in a way that feels like progress forward moving through your loss?
Note: The audio's background music ("Rings of Saturn") is provided by: https://www.purple-planet.com. Images provided by Canva.