While the Buddha taught us that we should not cling to people, places, or experiences, it seems equally true that part of our human nature is to bond with other living beings. When we are bonding, we often move through a natural grieving process when there is a separation and the relationships ends or changes significantly.
The Buddha used the image of a primary and secondary arrow to describe the relationship between primary pain and a secondary suffering. Another way to talk about this distinction, in relationship to our emotional life, is to talk about primary emotional pain (such as grief when experiencing loss), and secondary emotional reactivity (such as when we get angry about a loss rather than experience the actual sadness).
While secondary emotional reactions such as anger or indifference can serve a protective function (such as when primary grieve and loss is too overwhelming), these secondary emotional reactions often become habitual and prevents us from moving through the necessary grieving process which involves a gradual and gentle experiencing of the primary sadness associated with losing something/someone of importance to use. Like any other human experience, sadness is like an experiential wave with a beginning, middle and end. The experience of sadness, in connection with loss, serves the function of honoring what was important to us while allowing us to gradually release and let go of the treasured bond we had. While secondary responses, in the short term, protects us from directly experiencing painful feelings, the resistance actually prolongs the emotional suffering in the long term. The challenge is to move through the process neither leaning too far into the grieving process, (“drowning” in it), nor too far away from it (numbing out from it).
The GOODBYE skills is a set of intentional steps we can take to move from the secondary arrow - the suffering level, to the first arrow - the pain level. The skills can be used as a conscious way of moving through an ending process with someone or something we have formed an emotional bond with. Each step has a reflection and a little practice.
G for Generosity
The Buddha taught us that one of the antidotes to suffering, related to holding on too tightly, is generosity. When we are experiencing loss, it often feels like something is brutally being ripped away from us leaving us with a loss of control and a sense of powerlessness. Although we may on an intellectual level understand that things, people, and situations change, we often count on good things to last on an emotional level. When we practice generosity in connection to loss, we come into active alignment with the reality of impermanence. There is a necessary letting go process involved with grieving and when we set an intention to move through this letting go with a spirit of generosity, we practice freely “giving away” what we held onto and counted on for our wellbeing.
Generosity practice
• Orient yourself to the space you are in
• Sit in a comfortable position, make adjustments as needed
• Connect with a resource (inner or outer - something that brings a sense of safety and ease)
• Bring to mind the “preciousness” of the connection
• If available, connect with gratitude for everything to has offered to you
• Imagine that what was learned in the connection is a “gift” that will continue to nurture you
• You can experiment with opening your palms both receiving and passing on the “gift”
O for open to primary emotion
As we engage in this process of actively letting go it may initially trigger secondary emotional reactions such as anger, intellectualization, or numbing out. However, if we can gently and patiently breath through these protective layers, we may discover the deeper layers of somatic release as our heart quivers, tears are released, and we give form and voice to our sadness. In the process we often switch back and forth between primary grief and secondary protection. This is a normal process and serves to protect us from overwhelm. We can learn a lot from watching children grieve; they naturally move in and out of deep sadness in one moment - play and laughter in another moment.
• Open to emotion practice
• Orient yourself to the space you are in
• Sit in a comfortable position, make adjustments as needed
• Connect with a resource (inner or outer - something that brings a sense of safety and ease)
• Bring to mind feelings about the ending process
• See if you can feel the emotion in your body (maybe heat, pulsing, tension, contraction etc)
• Are there any urges to act?.....can you name the emotion?
• See if you can simply feel and breath with the emotion like a wave moving through you
• Relaxing if you can around the emotion, making space for it to have its own life...
O for opposite action to emotion
With grief and loss often comes secondary protective behavioral responses where we either lean too far into the goodbye process or lean too far away from the grieving process. When we lean too far in, we may spend all our time repeating memories of what has been lost, it’s importance to us and our fears of how we will cope without the loved one. We are having a hard time letting go and although we may be feeling sad and in despair, on a deeper level we may be resisting the change of the relationship. The sadness and the anxious rumination we experience may keep us in an alert and unsettled state of mind. When we, on the contrary, lean too far away we often seek to bypass the pain associated with letting go by dissociating from our emotions. We may engage in an apparently wise and rational thought process where we remind ourselves that we already knew it was going to end and that we therefore do not need to feel sad or upset. Every time we come into contact with sadness and grieve we quickly turn our minds towards various distractions that helps us keep the illusion of being untouched by the loss. While our nervous system may seem calm, we may also be in a flat and numbed-out state. Closing down to difficult emotions, also tends to shut down states of joy and aliveness.
One way to regulate secondary emotional responses is to do the exact opposite to the behavioral impulse associated with the emotion. If we are drowning in grief and spending all our time thinking, talking, and ruminating about our loss, we may actively practice letting go by turning our minds and attention to other parts of your life. We may reach out to friends, go for nature walks, or watch funny movies to disengage from the hyper focus on grief. When the grieving becomes too tight and contracted, it has a hard time moving through your nervous system and the result is feeling too sucked in and paralyzed by overwhelming grief. On the contrary, If we tend to dissociate and numb out with various distractions, we may try to gently turn our minds towards the connection and reflect on what it meant to us and try to tune in to the embodied experience of the bond. We may initially experience layers of numbness, inner emptiness, and restlessness as we move towards the felt sense of loss. However, over time we may develop the inner capacity to deeply honor the preciousness of what was there so that we stay open and fluid in new connections.
Opposite action practice
• Orient yourself to the space you are in
• Sit in a comfortable position, make adjustments as needed
• Connect with a resource (inner or outer - something that brings a sense of safety and ease)
• Can you identify an emotion and an urge to act a certain way?
• Feel into your center, see if you can connect with your inner wisdom/intuition
• Ask yourself?....is it wise to act on my urge? Is this helpful overall? Will it help me move through my letting go process? Will I regret my actions later?
• If you decide to do opposite, identify the opposite action to your urge....do it fully....engage your body in the opposite
D for decide to participate
There are so many things that are out of our control when an important relationship ends or changes. As mentioned, there is often a sense of disempowerment and helplessness. When we decide to participate, it is another way of actively stepping into the good bye process and influencing the conditions that we can influence. We may have specific things we wanna make sure to say or to do. Specific people we wanna draw support from or self-care activities we wanna engage in. We may wanna see the person we are saying good bye to as much as possible or we may on the contrary need to shield ourselves from too much contact. The important thing with deciding to participate is not the specifics of how we participate, but that we come out of powerlessness and become active participants in the good bye process. Deciding to participate often invites us to deeply reflect on our needs and to try to enter the good bye process as fully as we can so that we have as few regrets as possible afterwards.
Decide to participate writing practice
• Ask yourself how you would like to participate?
• What do you need to say or do to feel more at peace?
• What concrete steps do you need to take?
• Who can help? Who can you ask?
• How can you take care of yourself in this?
B for be authentic
Some of the biggest regrets we have are often around not having shared our deeper feelings and thoughts with the person we are separating from. When we set the intention to practice authenticity, we seek to stay connected to our own feelings, thoughts and needs in the good bye process, and to verbalize as much as feels appropriate in the process. This often opens up to a level of inner and outer intimacy which helps us stay fully connected in the unfolding good bye process.
Be authentic practice
• Orient yourself to the space you are in
• Sit in a comfortable position, make adjustments as needed
• Connect with a resource (inner or outer - something that brings a sense of safety and ease)
• First connect with “unfiltered” inner voice
• What do you wanna say (good and bad)?
• What do you wanna ask?
• What do you need to hear from the other person?
• Second, connect with inner wisdom/inner intuition
• Which parts do you wanna bring into conversation with the other person?
• Which parts can you process within yourself or with another person?
• How can you have the conversation in a way that is both authentic and non-harming?
Y for your own importance
When we have experienced a special bond with someone it often feels as though the “specialness” is somehow in the other person and will be lost when the connection changes or ends. However, the specialness arose out of the meeting of two people and our own contribution to the bond was equally important. When we set the intention to remember our own importance we seek to actively reflect on our own contribution to the bond and all the conditions that were present in the creation of the special bond. Thereby we can deepen the understanding of our own contribution and this gives us a reference point for what is important for us in bonding with others and how we can actively participate in that.
Your own importance writing practice
• Reflect on your own good qualities and what you bring into relationships?
• How are you contributing to this relationship and to other important relationships?
• What are you learning about deep connections?
• How would you like to receive and express connection with others?
• What do you want to bring into other connections?
E for equanimity
Moving through a big loss has the potential of opening us up to equanimity and deep compassion. We are faced, head on, with the reality of impermanence and the fact that all relationships, no matter how precious, will come to an end at some point. The only way to not suffer extensively, is to open up to the reality of impermanence, fully breathing with it, fully opening to it, fully harmonizing with it. Taking in the unreliable fluid nature of human connection also opens us up to a deeper sense of preciousness and a deeper sense of fragility. After an important loss we may initially need time to mourn the loss and to turn inwards. When we are ready to connect again we may find that we value our connections in a deeper way, we may feel a deeper sense of gratitude in our relationships, we may feel called to fully honor them and take care of them to the best of our ability.
Equanimity practice
• Connect with a resource (inner or outer - something that brings a sense of safety and ease)
• Open palms facing upwards in a receiving position
• Feel your sit bones and the centerline of your body
• While connecting with breathing, opening your heart to the magnitude of everything you have experienced
• Perhaps silently saying..”it is what is is, I can open to this, I can be with this....this is the reality of life”...feel yourself fully taking it, fully breathing with it
• Feel the potential wisdom in the loss....what has it taught you?..how have you grown?
The Buddha used the image of a primary and secondary arrow to describe the relationship between primary pain and a secondary suffering. Another way to talk about this distinction, in relationship to our emotional life, is to talk about primary emotional pain (such as grief when experiencing loss), and secondary emotional reactivity (such as when we get angry about a loss rather than experience the actual sadness).
While secondary emotional reactions such as anger or indifference can serve a protective function (such as when primary grieve and loss is too overwhelming), these secondary emotional reactions often become habitual and prevents us from moving through the necessary grieving process which involves a gradual and gentle experiencing of the primary sadness associated with losing something/someone of importance to use. Like any other human experience, sadness is like an experiential wave with a beginning, middle and end. The experience of sadness, in connection with loss, serves the function of honoring what was important to us while allowing us to gradually release and let go of the treasured bond we had. While secondary responses, in the short term, protects us from directly experiencing painful feelings, the resistance actually prolongs the emotional suffering in the long term. The challenge is to move through the process neither leaning too far into the grieving process, (“drowning” in it), nor too far away from it (numbing out from it).
The GOODBYE skills is a set of intentional steps we can take to move from the secondary arrow - the suffering level, to the first arrow - the pain level. The skills can be used as a conscious way of moving through an ending process with someone or something we have formed an emotional bond with. Each step has a reflection and a little practice.
G for Generosity
The Buddha taught us that one of the antidotes to suffering, related to holding on too tightly, is generosity. When we are experiencing loss, it often feels like something is brutally being ripped away from us leaving us with a loss of control and a sense of powerlessness. Although we may on an intellectual level understand that things, people, and situations change, we often count on good things to last on an emotional level. When we practice generosity in connection to loss, we come into active alignment with the reality of impermanence. There is a necessary letting go process involved with grieving and when we set an intention to move through this letting go with a spirit of generosity, we practice freely “giving away” what we held onto and counted on for our wellbeing.
Generosity practice
• Orient yourself to the space you are in
• Sit in a comfortable position, make adjustments as needed
• Connect with a resource (inner or outer - something that brings a sense of safety and ease)
• Bring to mind the “preciousness” of the connection
• If available, connect with gratitude for everything to has offered to you
• Imagine that what was learned in the connection is a “gift” that will continue to nurture you
• You can experiment with opening your palms both receiving and passing on the “gift”
O for open to primary emotion
As we engage in this process of actively letting go it may initially trigger secondary emotional reactions such as anger, intellectualization, or numbing out. However, if we can gently and patiently breath through these protective layers, we may discover the deeper layers of somatic release as our heart quivers, tears are released, and we give form and voice to our sadness. In the process we often switch back and forth between primary grief and secondary protection. This is a normal process and serves to protect us from overwhelm. We can learn a lot from watching children grieve; they naturally move in and out of deep sadness in one moment - play and laughter in another moment.
• Open to emotion practice
• Orient yourself to the space you are in
• Sit in a comfortable position, make adjustments as needed
• Connect with a resource (inner or outer - something that brings a sense of safety and ease)
• Bring to mind feelings about the ending process
• See if you can feel the emotion in your body (maybe heat, pulsing, tension, contraction etc)
• Are there any urges to act?.....can you name the emotion?
• See if you can simply feel and breath with the emotion like a wave moving through you
• Relaxing if you can around the emotion, making space for it to have its own life...
O for opposite action to emotion
With grief and loss often comes secondary protective behavioral responses where we either lean too far into the goodbye process or lean too far away from the grieving process. When we lean too far in, we may spend all our time repeating memories of what has been lost, it’s importance to us and our fears of how we will cope without the loved one. We are having a hard time letting go and although we may be feeling sad and in despair, on a deeper level we may be resisting the change of the relationship. The sadness and the anxious rumination we experience may keep us in an alert and unsettled state of mind. When we, on the contrary, lean too far away we often seek to bypass the pain associated with letting go by dissociating from our emotions. We may engage in an apparently wise and rational thought process where we remind ourselves that we already knew it was going to end and that we therefore do not need to feel sad or upset. Every time we come into contact with sadness and grieve we quickly turn our minds towards various distractions that helps us keep the illusion of being untouched by the loss. While our nervous system may seem calm, we may also be in a flat and numbed-out state. Closing down to difficult emotions, also tends to shut down states of joy and aliveness.
One way to regulate secondary emotional responses is to do the exact opposite to the behavioral impulse associated with the emotion. If we are drowning in grief and spending all our time thinking, talking, and ruminating about our loss, we may actively practice letting go by turning our minds and attention to other parts of your life. We may reach out to friends, go for nature walks, or watch funny movies to disengage from the hyper focus on grief. When the grieving becomes too tight and contracted, it has a hard time moving through your nervous system and the result is feeling too sucked in and paralyzed by overwhelming grief. On the contrary, If we tend to dissociate and numb out with various distractions, we may try to gently turn our minds towards the connection and reflect on what it meant to us and try to tune in to the embodied experience of the bond. We may initially experience layers of numbness, inner emptiness, and restlessness as we move towards the felt sense of loss. However, over time we may develop the inner capacity to deeply honor the preciousness of what was there so that we stay open and fluid in new connections.
Opposite action practice
• Orient yourself to the space you are in
• Sit in a comfortable position, make adjustments as needed
• Connect with a resource (inner or outer - something that brings a sense of safety and ease)
• Can you identify an emotion and an urge to act a certain way?
• Feel into your center, see if you can connect with your inner wisdom/intuition
• Ask yourself?....is it wise to act on my urge? Is this helpful overall? Will it help me move through my letting go process? Will I regret my actions later?
• If you decide to do opposite, identify the opposite action to your urge....do it fully....engage your body in the opposite
D for decide to participate
There are so many things that are out of our control when an important relationship ends or changes. As mentioned, there is often a sense of disempowerment and helplessness. When we decide to participate, it is another way of actively stepping into the good bye process and influencing the conditions that we can influence. We may have specific things we wanna make sure to say or to do. Specific people we wanna draw support from or self-care activities we wanna engage in. We may wanna see the person we are saying good bye to as much as possible or we may on the contrary need to shield ourselves from too much contact. The important thing with deciding to participate is not the specifics of how we participate, but that we come out of powerlessness and become active participants in the good bye process. Deciding to participate often invites us to deeply reflect on our needs and to try to enter the good bye process as fully as we can so that we have as few regrets as possible afterwards.
Decide to participate writing practice
• Ask yourself how you would like to participate?
• What do you need to say or do to feel more at peace?
• What concrete steps do you need to take?
• Who can help? Who can you ask?
• How can you take care of yourself in this?
B for be authentic
Some of the biggest regrets we have are often around not having shared our deeper feelings and thoughts with the person we are separating from. When we set the intention to practice authenticity, we seek to stay connected to our own feelings, thoughts and needs in the good bye process, and to verbalize as much as feels appropriate in the process. This often opens up to a level of inner and outer intimacy which helps us stay fully connected in the unfolding good bye process.
Be authentic practice
• Orient yourself to the space you are in
• Sit in a comfortable position, make adjustments as needed
• Connect with a resource (inner or outer - something that brings a sense of safety and ease)
• First connect with “unfiltered” inner voice
• What do you wanna say (good and bad)?
• What do you wanna ask?
• What do you need to hear from the other person?
• Second, connect with inner wisdom/inner intuition
• Which parts do you wanna bring into conversation with the other person?
• Which parts can you process within yourself or with another person?
• How can you have the conversation in a way that is both authentic and non-harming?
Y for your own importance
When we have experienced a special bond with someone it often feels as though the “specialness” is somehow in the other person and will be lost when the connection changes or ends. However, the specialness arose out of the meeting of two people and our own contribution to the bond was equally important. When we set the intention to remember our own importance we seek to actively reflect on our own contribution to the bond and all the conditions that were present in the creation of the special bond. Thereby we can deepen the understanding of our own contribution and this gives us a reference point for what is important for us in bonding with others and how we can actively participate in that.
Your own importance writing practice
• Reflect on your own good qualities and what you bring into relationships?
• How are you contributing to this relationship and to other important relationships?
• What are you learning about deep connections?
• How would you like to receive and express connection with others?
• What do you want to bring into other connections?
E for equanimity
Moving through a big loss has the potential of opening us up to equanimity and deep compassion. We are faced, head on, with the reality of impermanence and the fact that all relationships, no matter how precious, will come to an end at some point. The only way to not suffer extensively, is to open up to the reality of impermanence, fully breathing with it, fully opening to it, fully harmonizing with it. Taking in the unreliable fluid nature of human connection also opens us up to a deeper sense of preciousness and a deeper sense of fragility. After an important loss we may initially need time to mourn the loss and to turn inwards. When we are ready to connect again we may find that we value our connections in a deeper way, we may feel a deeper sense of gratitude in our relationships, we may feel called to fully honor them and take care of them to the best of our ability.
Equanimity practice
• Connect with a resource (inner or outer - something that brings a sense of safety and ease)
• Open palms facing upwards in a receiving position
• Feel your sit bones and the centerline of your body
• While connecting with breathing, opening your heart to the magnitude of everything you have experienced
• Perhaps silently saying..”it is what is is, I can open to this, I can be with this....this is the reality of life”...feel yourself fully taking it, fully breathing with it
• Feel the potential wisdom in the loss....what has it taught you?..how have you grown?