There are times in life when everyone faces the loss of a loved one through death and this loss becomes a source of deep pain and sorrow. How can we overcome the feeling of grief?
The first remedy is the knowledge that absolutely everything that happens in life and in the universe, happens according to the Will of God. The Ultimate arbitrator of individual life on earth is the Supreme, the Divine, the Lawgiver. Each of us has an allotted time on earth. There is an ancient belief that each individual is born with an allotted number of breaths and when that number has been reached, the life energy retreats and the soul returns to the unmanifest state from which it came when it was born. Life and death are merely stages everyone must pass through in their timeless journey of manifestation, transformation and evolution.
The Nature of Life and Death
In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna explains the nature of life and death to Arjuna who is faced with the agonizing plight of having to kill his relatives in battle in order to protect his kingdom from the evil doers.
Lord Krishna says:
“You grieve for those for whom there should be no grief, yet speak as do the wise. Wise men grieve neither for the dead nor the living. There never was a time when I was not, nor you, nor these rulers of men. Nor will there ever be a time when all of us shall cease to be. As the dweller in this body passes into childhood, youth and age, so also does he pass into another body. This does not bewilder the wise.
These bodies are known to have an end; the dweller in the body is eternal, imperishable, infinite. Therefore, O Bharata, fight!
He is never born, nor does he ever die; nor once having been, does he cease to be. Unborn, eternal, everlasting, ancient, he is not slain when the body is slain.
As a man casting off worn-out garments takes other new ones, so the dweller in the body casting off worn-out bodies takes others that are new. Weapons cannot cleave him, nor fire burn him; water cannot wet him, nor wind dry him away. He is uncleavable; he cannot be burned; he cannot be wetted, nor yet can he be dried. He is eternal, all-pervading, stable, immovable, ever the same.”
Lord Krishna has imparted to Arjuna, on the battlefield of life, the knowledge of the immortality of the soul. He teaches him that although our bodies have a beginning and an end, the dweller in the body, the soul, is eternal, immortal and untouched by the ever-changing vagaries and vicissitudes of the perishable world.
Eternal Life Energy
When someone we love dies, we feel an emptiness; there is a void where once that person stood. Something precious is missing from our life. But if we understand that the life energy expressed by that person will never be entirely erased, we can recover from our loss. The person we loved will remain a part of our inner world forever. We can only pray that their life journey will continue to unfold into higher dimensions as they evolve from birth to future birth. We can send them our undiminishable love from wherever we are and they will receive it wherever they are.
As Paulo Coelho has said:
“Never. We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us; they don’t disappear from our lives. We are merely in different rooms.”
We are ever in communion with those we have deeply loved and our love nourishes their soul and keeps the link alive through many lifetimes. We meet them again in different forms and the journey together continues. We never really lose anyone we have deeply loved.
As Helen Keller has said:
“What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes a part of us.”
Grief can also be a way of healing and a cleansing of the pain that sorrow brings. As we accept the pain of separation, it can purge us and can also bring us closer to God. When we bow to the Supreme and surrender to the situation, we become capable of embracing a new vision of the ultimate reality of life, that ultimate reality is the immortality of the soul.
Healing From Pain
As Leo Tolstoy has said:
“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”
Healing occurs when we surrender to the Will of God, knowing that everything that happens, happens for the best. Although we may not comprehend the reason at present, we may be able to understand it much later in life. Life is a process of renewal, resurgence and resurrection. Healing occurs when we flow with the current of our lives with calmness, courage and conviction.
