Musings On Mindfulness And Grief

And being in the present moment

Hello, all you lovely humans out there.

Do you ever find it hard to just “be”? I do. All the time.

Despite being a meditation (and yoga) teacher, which is ironic. It’s challenging for me to be in the present. Which is what mindfulness practice is all about - whether it comes from traditional/formal meditation, or something a little less structured, like through movement (yoga and running for me).

When I’m doing yoga, I’m in the present moment because I’m just focusing on the moving of my body and my breath. Maybe that’s what resonates with me about it, why I love it so much. Because I’m in the moment, not elsewhere.

That’s one of the reasons I gravitated towards it after my mom died at the end of 2015. I needed something to kind of help me step back, step away, from all the raw feelings.

I couldn’t meditate afterwards, because my mind just filled with thoughts and images of my mom after she had passed. It was too fresh, too raw. So the movement of yoga helped kind of clear my head of something other than the immediateness of grief.

And, probably this was a bad choice on my part, I stopped doing two things I loved when my mom passed. Writing and running.

Sometimes grief makes you do things that maybe aren’t the best for you, in the moment. Perhaps that’s just me, but somehow I don’t think so.

My dad made the mistake of throwing out a bunch of photos in the first few days after my mom died, which he now regrets.

I’ve since learned that you shouldn’t really make any changes in the first while (some say even the first year) of grief from losing a loved one, because you aren’t thinking clearly and you may end up doing something you regret. Like throwing out lots of memories in the form of photographs.

(Hard) lesson learned.

I’m sitting here on vacation with this view right now:

I’m looking out (when I look up from my computer screen that is) on the Pacific Ocean, through that gap in the bushes, on the Oregon coast. I’m trying to soak it all in.

The Oregon coast is our home away from home. We love it here and come here at least once (usually more) a year.

I can hear the sound of the crashing waves in the distance. A constant low hum. And I’m listening to all the little birds flying around outside - chickadees, sparrows, finches.

I’m sitting here and I’m trying to just ‘be’. I’m the type of person who always needs to be doing something. So this mindfulness thing, this present awareness, is a continuous practice.

I’m pausing here a moment from writing and looking out at the scenery.

I can see the waves, hear the waves. I can see little pink flowers on one of the large bushes. The sun is trying its hardest to come out (it’s very fickle on the coast). I can hear the clock in the kitchen near by ticking loudly.

I’m trying to just observe, without letting my thoughts barge in and disrupt the peace with their inanity.

But it’s hard, at least for me, to do it for any real length of time. I’m sure the same goes for most everyone.

And sometimes we don’t want to be in the present. Especially when life gets challenging. Like it does with grief and loss. We want to run away and hide from it.

I think that’s why I stopped running and writing after my mom died. Cutting those things off allowed me to just kind of withdraw, instead of put myself more out there in the world (physically with running, and emotionally with writing).

I started writing again when the pandemic started, back in 2020. I submitted a short fiction story to a writing contest. It was a twist on the Pandora’s Box fable. I wasn’t one of the winners, but that did kickstart my writing journey again after 5 years.

And I just started running again last year. 7 and a half years. Better late than never, they say.

So I’m slowly finding my way back to myself after the rug-pull of my mom’s death, and other family members since.

It’s nice. Putting the puzzle pieces back together, albeit maybe in a different configuration than before. Not entirely the same. Different. But still me.

Grief.

Loss.

Death.

It changes you. And I’ll be talking about it all on this weekend’s podcast which I’ll be releasing this Sunday.

Thanks for reading (and listening).

With gratitude.

And don’t forget to live with a dose of wonder!

Bonus product alert! Get an infographic summary of this article from my Ko-Fi shop here: https://ko-fi.com/s/1038ae18d1

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