These Hands of Mine

A circle of remembering hands and holding hands

This hand of mine remembers holding my Granny's hand as she lay in her hospital bed in the old workhouse building and how she stroked mine and admired its brown, smooth skin. She might have been remembering her own hand, half a century earlier or even her mother’s and grandmother’s hands. A circle of remembering hands and holding hands.

These hands held my tiny children

These hands are the same hands that stroked my tiny boy's soft head and held his body close to mine. He weighed a little under eight pounds and my hands learned to protect him and support him as he leaned into my body sated with warm milk. Then, later, this hand protected my even tinier daughter to my body to share my warmth with her. And then, so blessed was I, these hands held a brother to them both.

Three little people and so beautiful, each of them in so many ways. The extraordinary way that they were completely themselves from the very start. Born, not created, but also so affected by all that happened around them. I weep to think that these hands did not always do enough to protect them.

These hands lifted them into the bath and out and wrapped them in towels and tucked them into their little cots and beds. These hands can change a baby’s nappy and popper them into their baby clothes instinctually, I was surprised to watch them do this so competently for my grandchildren.

These hands led them through the school gates

These hands pushed my children’s sturdy little backs as they shouted with laughter on the swings in the park. Comforted them when they cried. Folded piles and piles of clothes and picked up all the bricks and the books and the matchbox cars. Led them through the school gates and then let them go. They knew they didn’t want to go there. But I led them anyway. Everything said this was OK even though a big part of me knew it really was not. I shrivel inside to remember letting go of my youngest in tears and walking away from him, not really believing the reassurances of his teacher but following the expectations of society that says they must learn to leave their mothers when they are five.

This hand knew the warmth of his hand

This hand of mine knew the warmth of a teenage boy’s hand as we walked together through our village and I knew in those moments what a gift it was that he would hold his mother’s hand this way. Just walking together on our way home from a friend’s house under the stars.

These hands have done the most difficult tasks

This hand of mine held the phone to my ear as I heard his voice that night, only an hour or so before he died. This hand opened the door to the police and then both hands held my head in disbelief.

These hands, nineteen years after holding the first newborn boy, helped to carry the burgundy box of ashes home. They too weighed a little under eight pounds and carried incalculable sadness.

These hands helped to carry my father’s British racing green coffin and then sifted and sorted all the things from his lifetime.

And now these hands have more work to do

And now these hands have more work to do while they still can. These hands have learned to do so much. They have work to do in telling Sam’s story which is still so relevant. The thoughts come straight through to my fingers I find and I can watch the words appearing on the screen. The desperate need for kindness and compassion rather than judgement and exclusion for our children as they grow and learn. The ways that we are all involved in their growing and learning and how the most important thing that they need to know is that they are precious and loved and each a unique and valuable part of this world.

Holding shame with a compassionate heart

I see that I have not written for this blog for a very long time now. Despite there being a lot of life that has happened in those two years that brings up shame. Shame makes me want to hide away in case anyone sees how bad I am for this neglect of my own intentions.

Prickly and sticky shame

Shame is a prickly and hot feeling in my face and it’s the holding of my breath and a strong desire to disappear. It is sticky and really uncomfortable, and the strong temptation is to attempt to avoid it and not to admit to it.

It’s about survival and other people’s rules

In evolutionary terms shame serves an important survival purpose. If we are perceived as unacceptable to our community we run the risk of being excluded which, in some other times and places, would be life threatening. So the feeling of shame operates as an internal guide to when we are acting against the accepted norms of our community. The thing is that those norms are just other people’s rules that feel like they are concretely ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ and have the power to make us ‘good’ or ‘bad’. They often don’t even really matter but just feel as if they do.

Therapists don’t have to be ‘sorted’

As a therapist, the story I can tell myself is that I am supposed to be ‘sorted’, to have my life organised and perfectly balanced in terms of my physical and mental and spiritual wellbeing and my relationships. And further to that, it can feel as if I can’t let anyone see when it really isn’t. But that wouldn’t be real – I know this!

So even with comparatively small things we can feel as if we are completely bad and unacceptable but what’s actually happening is that we feel bad and are still inherently good, so we can feel the feelings and relate to them with compassion.

The mistakes I made as a mother deserve my compassion

And then I thought about the visceral shame I have sometimes felt when thinking back to the mistakes I made as a mother in the past. The times when I put myself and what I wanted ahead of my children, or failed them in some way. When a child dies, of course, this self-examination is relentless and frankly cruel. We can all find moments like this when we remember and some of them feel like enormous, devastating mistakes or moments of neglect. And all of these, whatever the size they seem to be, deserve our deep compassion. When they come into our consciousness and trigger shame we need to allow the shame feelings and sensations to call our attention, and then to stay with them with all the compassion we can muster until they dissolve.

Allowing your heart to open with compassion

What is really happening is this:  I am feeling bad right now and I can hold this with compassion.  I do this by remembering to breathe, paying attention to the places in my body where I experience this feeling and simply allowing the sensations to be what they are then allowing my heart to open to myself with compassion.

Tara Brach tells a story of a woman who was completely overwhelmed with shame after her daughter told her what had happened to her as a child while her mother was caught up in drinking. A monk held the mother’s hand and drew a circle on her palm telling her that is the shame. The he held her hand gently in his warm hand, enclosing it with love and compassion. He told her that the holding is what you must do from your compassionate heart for yourself whenever you feel the shame in your body.

Hold your shame close like a mother holding her precious child and ask:
'My love, do you need to be healed today?'
And listen, listen carefully, listen from the depths of your soul now; listen to his or her timeless response as it emerges out of the thundering silence of meditation:
'Not healed, today, mother; only held.”' Jeff Foster 

Spiritual Practice as a Support for Profound Loss

In this blog post I want to explore the concept of a personal ‘spiritual practice’ as a support for the grieving process. I will attempt to describe what this means to me and what activities I think of as being helpful spiritual practices for me as I grieve the loss of my eldest child.

What do I mean by ‘spiritual’?

So what do I mean by ‘spiritual’? I have a strong sense of the presence of something that lies outside and beyond the material world of things and the everyday activities of being human as a member of society and the various communities I feel I belong to. This ‘something’ that I think of as the ‘spiritual’ is intangible and mysterious and I don’t exactly experience it directly but things happen that sort of indicate or ‘point to’ its existence. I can feel awestruck or suddenly connected to the ‘something’ that seems to unite everything at the same time as feeling deeply personal and familiar. I know that many would call this ‘God’ or ‘Allah’ or another name.

For me, spiritual does not imply religious, but does include the concepts of love, acceptance and connection that perhaps all religions have in their origins behind the superimposed dogma and required beliefs. Certainly, when called upon to state my ‘religion’ I choose ‘spiritual but not religious.’ as the closest definition of my position.

Rainbows and other everyday spiritual experiences

When my son died rainbows appeared. This was so unexpected and yet immediately meaningful. Witnessing a rainbow, for me, is now a spiritual experience and that means that witnessing that beautiful ephemeral spectrum of coloured light takes me closer to what lies beyond the ordinary. This also seems to me to take me closer to the essence of shared consciousness that unites us all, whether we are still living out a human existence or not, and thus closer to my son. I think of this realm as sort of all-encompassing ‘love’.

Other experiences that can take me closer to ‘what is’ are sunsets and moon risings and flocks of geese and bumblebees alighting on lavender blossoms. Babies smiling and gurgling. Looking up into the sky through a tangle of lofty tree branches. Listening to waves crashing onto the shore. Certain forms of music, especially piano music from Muse to Beethoven.

What do I mean by a spiritual practice?

So a ‘spiritual practice’ then means an action or activity or a set or series of actions or activities that I engage with, perhaps regularly, perhaps sporadically or occasionally, that aim to encourage feeling connected with this ‘all that is’. This could be a lot of different things and might be something that others also practice or something individual and personal.

So having defined the words I guess I have made this sound much more complicated than it needs to be. For my family and friends, sharing the moments when we see rainbows is a form of spiritual practice for us that supports us in our grief.

Here are two of the other spiritual practices I have found helpful in taking me closer to a connection with ‘what is’ beyond the everyday and ordinary as I live with profound loss.

The Tara Chant

During my psychotherapy training I was introduced to the concept of a bodhisattva as an enlightened being who is committed to resolving all the suffering in the world. Green Tara is a bodhisattva and she is usually depicted as sitting in a meditative pose with one leg extended so that she is always ready to step forward in compassionate action to resolve any suffering that she becomes aware of.

There is a recording here of Deva Premal singing the Tara Chant.

“Tara is the mother of all the Buddhas. When you practice Tara you come closer to her, and can feel her motherly love; you feel you are well-loved and nurtured by the most beautiful mother of all Buddhas.
”

— Tara in the Palm of your Hand, Venerable Zasep Rinpoche.

For me, to chant the Green Tara chant brings a sense of support and compassion towards my own suffering and others’ suffering. I like to do this by listening to this recording and singing along. This brings me a sense of not being alone but being connected with all that is beyond the everyday world and importantly not feeling powerless in the face of suffering because Tara is always there ready to accompany me.

Christmas food preparation as a spiritual practice

I used to love the October half-term holiday when I was a teacher. I would use some of the time to make mincemeat, Christmas cake and puddings and sloe gin all ready for Christmas. When Sam died this became something too painful to even think about doing as it brought with it memories of my children’s childhood years and family times. After a number of years I made the conscious decision to do this anyway and to allow the feelings of loss and sadness to be there alongside the other memories whilst measuring, chopping and slicing and filling the Kilner jars. In a sense this activity that my mother did with me as a child and her mother before her brings me into a feeling of connection with the archetypal love of all mothers and the inevitable love and pain that parenting entails. Thus I understand this to be a form of spiritual practice for me too as something that takes me closer to the realms of whatever it might be that connects and includes us all.

These spiritual practices help me not to feel alone in my loss

In my experience there are many different things that could be helpful grief-related spiritual practices for me. I realise that it could be argued that grieving in any form is a spiritual practice but I suspect this is not true when we feel alone in our grief. Maybe the most helpful practices are those that support us not to grieve in isolation but in connection with other beings and with what lies beyond the ordinary and everyday. Some of the hardest times to live with profound loss are the times when we feel that we carry this alone. For me, my personal forms of spiritual practice, help me to know that this is not true.

The radical self-care practice of consulting your inner compass

Inside yourself you have a simple compass that has just two directions on it— "OK for me" and "not OK for me" This is your inner voice and you need to consult it in order to set your boundaries.

Babies are in touch with their inner compass

When you were a baby you knew when things were OK for you and when they were you smiled and gurgled and connected with your primary caregivers. You also knew when things weren't OK for you and when they weren't you screamed to let your caregiver know that things weren't OK. At that stage your carer would investigate to see how they could restore you back to a state of being OK again. Until the next time, your temperature, the state of your nappy, your hunger or your sense of safety crossed the threshold from OK to not OK. Knowing when that threshold is being crossed is about having a boundary. As a baby, screaming is about communicating that boundary to others.

Other people appreciate knowing where our boundaries are

So you had clear boundaries as a baby and you didn't hesitate to communicate them to everyone around you. In fact your carers appreciated your clarity in doing so, as long as they were able to give you what you needed. They often got a lot of satisfaction from doing this - from protecting you from things that weren't OK and giving you what was OK.

I appreciate it when other people can tell me what is OK and not OK for them and don’t just leave it to me to guess. For example, if I am going out to eat with someone and I want to go to a fish restaurant I would so much prefer to know ahead of time that they are allergic to fish.

Sadly, our ability to let people know what is OK for us is often compromised by the time we grow up.

As we get older we start to look outside ourselves to find out what is OK and not OK

As you got older you may have learned not to trust your inner certainty about what was OK or not OK but to put this aside to please other people and fit in with what was OK for them rather than yourself. You learned to have your attention outside yourself rather than inwards to work out what was OK to do, to say, to ask for and what was OK to offer to other people.

If you didn't like eating vegetables, or you liked running on the pavement, or you enjoyed painting on the walls you learned that it mattered more to know what other people thought about these things. People still enjoyed giving you what you felt was OK but only if it matched with their ideas of what was healthy, safe or otherwise good for you...and for them.

You also learned that it wasn't always a good idea to let other people know what was OK or not OK for you. Maybe you really didn't like your birthday gift from your aunt and learned that you had to pretend to like it and thank her profusely. Maybe it really wasn't OK for you to spend time with those children next door but your parents needed you to spend time with them.

It doesn’t serve us well to lose contact with what is OK to us

Over and over again we learned, as children to override our own preferences, likes and needs for the sake of other people. This is a big part of living alongside other people, which is important for all of us but doesn't serve us well if we lose contact with what matters to us.

So by the time we become adults our inner compass of OK and not OK is consulted less and less. Other people and societal rules tell us what to do with our time, what our values should be and what we want from life. We lose our confidence in even knowing what is OK for us and we often don't know how to communicate this to others or whether it's actually all right to do so.

We discount our inner voices, override our inner voices and eventually we lose contact with our inner voices. Instead of consulting that inner compass we try to make ourselves OK by putting all our energy into making other people OK, by numbing the feelings of distress with substances or mindless activities, by trying harder and harder to 'succeed' or make money. We put ourselves under huge stresses because we mistakenly believe that there is no other option but to carry on. Even if we are aware of an inner voice that is saying "This isn't OK for me." we tell ourselves that we can't do anything about it. But maybe we can.

Sometimes it takes a very significant event to wake us up.

I woke up to the need for boundaries when I lost my son but it wasn't instantaneous. My waking up has taken many years but the clear catalyst was that terrible night when I was told he had taken his own life.

I was in a relationship that wasn't OK for me. I was in a job that wasn't OK for me. I was in a financial situation that wasn't OK for me. I drank more wine than was right for me. I smoked and that wasn't right for me. I spent time with some people who weren't right for me doing things that weren't OK for me. I could go on. Whilst I had been just about managing all these aspects of my life up to that point I now had profound grief and deep trauma to manage too and I couldn't manage all of those things at once. I knew that if I was to learn how to live with this profound loss that I needed to relearn to consult my inner compass.

I worked hard to tune back into my inner compass

So slowly, inexorably, over the years I changed a lot of things. I learned how to tune into my inner compass of OK/not OK and I developed the ability to listen to the 'Yes' and 'No' from inside myself. I don't always succeed in doing this and I always know when I have crossed my own boundaries, perhaps by agreeing to something that goes against my values or compromises my energy levels. I end up feeling overwhelmed and distressed.

Other people haven't always appreciated what I do or don't do, what is right for me and what isn’t, especially when they were used to something different and whilst I have compassion for how they feel I can't allow that to change my direction. For me, being aware of my "OK for me" versus "Not OK for me." inner compass and voice, or, in other words, having boundaries and allowing them to inform what I do is a radical practice of self-care.