Someone recently asked me how my work – my trainings – deal with the idea of grief and grieving. He is going through a very painful divorce, and is thinking of attending my training to be able to deal with it better. Yet there was still some scepticiscm about the idea. He was wondering whether the training was a forced approach to getting rid of the grief altogether, afraid that it would have a “build a bridge and just get over it” approach to it. That’s certainly not the case. Instead, it teaches you to do the counter intuitive and embrace thoughts and feelings so that you can have them instead of the other way around.

The purpose of unleashing your best is not to only have “positive” emotions, but rather to unleash ourselves from our relationship with them. One of the presuppositions this plays to is that emotions are just emotions. There are no negative or positive emotions. Instead, our relationship to experiencing emotions make them either negative or positive. Trying to deny, fight off, or struggle with emotions will only perpetuate their presence and that is not the purpose of having an emotion. They’re not meant to be suffered through or perpetuated without any resolve. Especially not for years on end, or sometimes even decades. They don’t have to overshadow other areas of our life.

Of course, with intense changes and transitions in our life, this is more challenging to accomplish than when everything stays the same. What I find is often the problem with grief about anything is that it’s not so much the pain of losing something we care about – whatever that loss may be. Rather, it’s the way we relate to the change itself, and a distorted sense of what it is that we actually lose.

When we say things like “People don’t change.”, it drives scientists crazy. Because change is literally the only constant in all of science. Energy, matter, it’s always changing. Morphing, merging, growing, dying. It’s the way people try not to change that’s unnatural. The way we cling to things that were, instead of letting them be the way they are. The way we cling to old memories instead of making new ones. The way we insist on believing, despite every scientific indication, that anything in this life is perfect. Change is constant. The way we experience change, that is up to us. It can feel like death, or it can feel like a second chance at life. If we open our fingers, loosen our grips, go with it, it can feel like pure adrenaline. Like at any moment, we can have another chance at life. Like at any moment, we can be born all over again. — Voiceover Grey’s Anatomy’s “With You I’m Born Again”

If the key isn’t to try and change our emotions about what we loose, then what is it? In my experience, the purpose of grief is to reach a state of acceptance. It took me many years to accept the loss of my father at a young age. It also took me a great many years to be able to share my truth about having an abortion, having been taught that this is a “wrong” thing to do. That, in a way, felt like a loss as well. But not just a physical loss. It felt like a loss of my sense of “this is how the world should work” and my sense of self esteem, of who I am. And it was that intangible loss that increased my pain. After many years of denial and struggle, I finally found a place where I could simply be with it. All around me I see people lose years of their lives because they can’t accept the cards life had dealt them. Either because it comes with a loss they can’t cope with. Or it goes against all they have learnt is “right” in life. What it taught me, is that with acceptance comes a sense of liberation. And what if that state of liberation could be reached far sooner, and with far less suffering, than we imagine possible?

In order to do that, it’s not the grief that we need to get a firm grip on. It’s the ability to accept and embrace change instead of trying to fight it. We need to separate the loss from our sense of identity, from our understanding of what’s right and wrong in the world, from thinking that it is pervasive and permanent. Fighting it only makes the grief and pain feel worse. We get stuck in it because we get stuck in wishing it wasn’t so. We will rack our brains determining how we can undo the reality of change. Sleepless nights, heavy hearts, denial, feelings of regret, over-responsibility, angst, guilt and panic. None of those are conducive to dealing with the rawness of emotions such as grief and loss.

An inevitable part of change is that while we say “hi” to one thing, we say “goodbye” to something else. When we can do that lovingly and we stop protesting the change, then we can respond to the new reality in a healthy way. A way in which we don’t try to avoid the pain that comes with it. One where the pain can be present without it stopping us from living our life.

The trainings I teach focus on actualising excellence. In order to do that, we need to learn how to deal with change, how to unleash ourselves from our inhibitions and limitations. As we master the art of transforming our relationship with change, and we become change embracers even in the face of pain, then life becomes richer and more colorful. We’ll let go of the idea that anything in this life is perfect, or that life will always abide by the “rules” through which we understand life. And we free ourselves up to experiencing life to its fullest. That’s where we can open our fingers, loosen our grips, and just go with it. Gloriously incomplete. Gloriously imperfect. Yet forever growing.

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” Confucius

“Tom never wants to play with me ever again!” She got into the car, visibly upset about something. I was picking her up for a sleepover and when I asked my niece what was up, this was her response. I smiled softly and thought she was a bit young to have “man problems” at four years old, so I asked about this rather extreme conclusion: “How do you know?” She explained with quite a bit of frustration in her voice that he always got asked by her best friend first and that he therefore – obviously! – didn’t want to play with her. “Have you asked him,” I inquired. She looked up at me with big eyes as if the thought itself was too preposterous to even contemplate: “No!” “Ahh, so you don’t really know for sure that he doesn’t want to play with you, that he would say no if you asked.” If subtitled, her non-verbal communication would have read “Are you our of your mind?!”, she said: “No, I don’t know that, but he could!” This, to her, was reason enough not to ask.

The toxicity of her thinking threw me off for a moment, but I knew I had to do something to steer this little girl’s mind in a more empowering direction. Without creating the expectation of a fairytale ending of course. So I told her that it was in fact possible for him to say no. And that it would probably hurt a bit if he did, but that we would figure out a solution for it if it ever came to that.

About a month-and-a-half later I found out quite by chance that Tom had come over for a play date. She was sitting next to me when her mom told me about it. I gently nudged my niece and said: “Tom came over to play with you, how neat!” She shrugged and said matter-of-factly: “Yeah, I just asked.” Once again, I softly smiled.

Just imagine if my niece had never asked. He may never have come over to play. In any case, it would have been completely outside of her control whether or not he did. If he hadn’t, in all likelihood she would have felt justified in her belief. And I’m sure that if you look at your own life, you’ll recognise situations in which you reacted in a very similar way my niece did. Perhaps in relationships, or in pursuing a new career, deciding to go back to college.

I recently read in a book called “Stumbling on Happiness” that research shows that people regret inactions more than actions. Strange how that works, though, because beforehand that sense of regret for not acting is not nearly as prominent as our sense of fear of moving forward may be. According to the writer, the ironic reason for this is that we do not realise that our psychological immune systems can rationalize an excess of courage more easily than an excess of cowardice. So instead of hedging our bets, we should really be blundering forward.

Cringe! “Blundering forward? Are you kidding me?!” If that’s your response when you think of moving forward on something important to you, then I’m sure you aren’t alone! Our society is filled with clichés that warn us to keep safe, to not to go out on a limb. Our fear of failure and quest for perfection can cause paralysis and inertia. The “imminent danger” that we see in our mind’s eye can eventually even make sure the bells of our inner voice stop resonating altogether. Yet as we then convince ourselves we’re safe from what could happen if we blunder forward, we really are making the biggest blunder of our all: Missing out on life and all that it has to offer.

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.” Gilda Radner

As in the quote, many of us have to learn that the hard way. Some may never learn it at all. In helping my niece work through her cognitive distortions, I hoped to help make her life simpler. Not by letting her believe that “bad” things don’t happen, but by helping her discover that she has the ability to cope, and beyond that, to give her a sense of self confidence that will hopefully turn into the freedom to pursue her heart’s desire.

Life. It can be so simple. But like Confucius once wrote, we insist on making it complicated. It struck me that even kids at a very young age can think strategically to avoid the risk of pain: “If I ask, he could say no…and therefore I won’t ask.”  As human beings we have a remarkable gift of experiencing something in our heads before we actually experience it. But apparently we need to learn how to use this skill properly and to our advantage. Rather than feeling hopeless about painful experiences we project into our future, we need to realise that these events may not actually occur. And if they do, they may not be as painful or hopeless as we think they will be. Or…they may be painful for a little while, and then after that we will be absolutely fine. How about projecting that into your future and experiencing your sense of resilience, your ability to bounce back? How does that change your ability to act?

Would you like to let go of the need to strategise and take charge of the things you can control so that you can shift course and be happier? Perhaps all it takes is for you to look for the wide open spaces rather than what is closed off. And then take it one step at a time. If something doesn’t go as planned, you’ll probably feel just fine. Perhaps not right away. But soon. And for the rest of your life.