Meditate Your Way Through Grief

I have never been much on meditating. A few times in my life I’ve tried it but never made it a consistent practice. Several months before my only son Brady died of suicide at age 16, I had started doing it again on the advice of a self-improvement book I read. Each morning I would sit quietly for two minutes and concentrate on my breath.

I found this brief mindfulness meditation helped me to focus. It showed up in that I was better at following through and fending off distractions. I started noticing that after meditating in the morning, at the end of the day I was more likely to have checked off all my to-dos. That concrete positive finding, plus the fact that two minutes is easy to do, helped me make it a regular practice.

After Brady died Oct. 2, 2016, I was doing well to walk in a straight line, and meditation as well as most other things fell by the wayside. After a few weeks, as I slowly resumed regular daily activities, I started meditating again. And again, I found it helped me get things done, which was important because life kept on going on while I was lost in grief limbo.

I also seemed to notice that this little bit of meditation was easing the crushing symptoms of grief I was experiencing. The idea made some sense. Perhaps meditating helped me focus on the present, I figured. Thinking about the past could be what was upsetting me. So, to the extent I stayed in the present, I’d feel less grief. Could be.

Notta Lotta Research into Grief and Meditation

As is my nature, I looked for research on meditation and grief. I found hardly any. That seemed odd. Many studies have examined the effectiveness of meditation and mindfulness-based therapy on all sorts of conditions, including depression, stress, anxiety and eating disorders. Why not grief?

The lack of research into grief and meditation is especially strange because bereavement is more common than the other conditions that have been examined with regard to meditation. And meditation works pretty well, it appears. A 2013 analysis of 209 studies of meditation’s effectiveness on a variety of mental disorders, covering altogether more than 12,000 patients, found it was as effective as cognitive behavioral therapy and drug-based interventions. It worked especially well on anxiety, depression, and stress. These, of course, are issues many grieving people have. But there was almost nothing on meditation as a bereavement coping strategy.

In fact, I found just one report that specifically looked at meditation and grief. This was a 2016 study of women in rural India who had experienced stillbirth. That’s pretty far removed from a Texas father struggling with his son’s suicide, of course. But to the extent grief is grief, it could be helpful, it seemed. Plus, it was all I could find.

This was just a pilot study, which apparently is what researchers do when they don’t have the money to do a big study with a lot of subjects. This one involved only 22 bereaved mothers. Perhaps the researchers will get a big grant and be able to study a larger number of grievers.

It would be great to learn more, because this study suggested there are worthwhile benefits. The women studied were showing high levels of grief when assessed. Checking in with them a year after they’d been coached in mindfulness-based techniques, the researchers found “sustained, significant reductions” in grief symptoms. Personally, I would love a significant, sustained reduction in the crappy feelings I have. So I was encouraged.

One question that the researchers didn’t seem to address was whether the improvement was more than you might expect from simple passage of time. A year is a fair amount of time in the grieving process, and it’s possible the women would have felt that much better without the mindfulness intervention. However, it’s worth noting that meditation and other mindfulness practices don’t cost anything, don’t take much time and don’t have negative side effects, unlike therapy and drugs. So why not give it a try?

Based on a description provided by the researchers, the mindfulness work these women did was more complicated than mine. They were instructed to sit and meditate, focusing on their breath, for five to 10  minutes a day. That’s not much longer than my two-minute drill. But they also did daily yoga and gratitude practice, tried to identify at least one pleasant event that had occurred that day and a few other things. Still, all told this is not a lot of work, so if it helps it seems like it could be a useful practice.

A Dozen Mindfulness Practices For Grievers

One scholarly study published in 2012 delves in considerable depth into this topic. It doesn’t supply any new evidence, particularly, but it does describe a detailed mindfulness-based therapy. If you are thinking about applying meditation and mindfulness to your own grief journey, this paper might be worth a read. I especially like the following list of 12 mindfulness strategies for grievers (I may be violating copyright by cutting-and-pasting these here, but it’s in a good cause):

1. Spend at least 15 min daily in meditation, prayer, or quiet time just being.
2. Allocate at least 20 min a day of exercise within your abilities.
3. Practice laughter. Every day, try to find humor in something, even if it seems insignificant. Smile. Smile at others, smile at yourself. Just smile.
4. Surround yourself with caring others — family, friends, and work colleagues. Seek the company of others who are compassionate and kind.
5. Get 20 min of sunshine every day.
6. Observe and truly experience nature. Notice the sky when walking to your car. Listen to the sounds of birds. Pay attention to the trees, smell blossoming flowers, hear the buzzing bees, and watch ants as they work.
7. Experience gratitude daily for even the simple things in life that are easily taken for granted: good health, family, running water, your home, and food.
8. Think positive thoughts whenever you can. Notice any negative self-talk, and see if you can counter them with positive thoughts.
9. Show compassion, actively, toward others. Look for even small opportunities to help. Open doors, offer to aid someone carrying groceries, really listen to someone else’s story. Actively, every day, seek to show kindness. And volunteer for a good cause at least 1 day per month.
10. Support your brain: Eat a healthy diet and eliminate junk and fast foods.
11. Express your love and affection for your mate, children, friends, and/or family. Take the time to say ‘‘please’’ and ‘‘thank you.’’ Tell others how much they mean to you. Give and accept praise.
12. Give yourself permission to experience self-compassion and self-love. Practice forgiveness, especially to yourself, and be your own best friend.

This goes well beyond what I think of as mindfulness. And it certainly involves a lot more than two minutes of meditation. But I think all the suggestions are valid and many have significant support from the available research on bereavement grief coping strategies. I hope to describe the evidence on some of them, including humor and gratitude, in future Grieve Well posts.

To sum up, based on my personal experience and limited empirical evidence, meditation and mindfulness could be helpful to people struggling with bereavement. You may be able to get a little benefit from a couple of minutes of meditation daily. You could do all or part of the full menu described by the mindfulness-based therapy and hope for a major boost.

I hope this examination of meditation and mindfulness and bereavement grief has helped you develop some ideas for your own coping strategies. As always, I’m not trying to tell anybody what to do or what not to do. I’m trying to give people reliable information they can use to make their own decisions. Your mileage may vary.

Please do comment, like, share and follow Grieve Well. Digital communications is all about interactivity. I promise I won’t sell your email address or send you more than an occasional notice about a new post. So sign up and refer your friends. It helps me to help others, and I could use some help these days. I am sorry for the loss that brought you to these pages, and hope you get some peace today.