Yielding to the Flow of Grief
A Call Towards Living Softer
Imagine that while driving your car, you approach a YIELD sign.
As you near the sign, you'd likely take your foot off the gas and start gently braking to reduce your speed, perhaps down to about 10 to 15 mph … of course, depending on visibility and traffic flow. Next, if there’s an intersection, you’d probably look to the left and right to see if any vehicles were coming. If you were merging onto a designated road or highway, you’d focus on the lane you were entering. Finally, if another car was approaching and had the right-of-way, you'd stop or slow down to let it pass and check to make sure everything was safe before proceeding.
Overall, YIELD signs help prevent collisions and ensure a smoother flow of traffic, especially at intersections or merging points. Their purpose is to remind us to slow down, survey the driving landscape, and proceed accordingly.
I wonder what it would look like if, as we grieved, we stopped trying to “fix” our grief and instead, yielded to it.
When my mom first died in December 2012, I did everything in my power to avoid grief altogether. I overworked myself, resulting in my receiving tons of accolades from colleagues, as well as attaining professional accomplishments. I also filled up my social calendar in an effort to "get back to normal." However, neither of those efforts worked for my good.
Roughly a year after my mom’s death, I began consistently meeting with a grief therapist who patiently walked with me through the process of grieving. Naturally, given my propensity towards all-or-none thinking, I swung the pendulum from one extreme, grief avoidance, to the other, “grief fixing.” Specifically, I determined in my heart that I would do everything I could to understand grief and all its nuances, as well as do my part to live better as a new griever. The result, a lot of doing, coupled with emotional, spiritual, and physical exhaustion.
Thankfully, with the help of my therapist at the time, I began to realize that greater effort didn’t result in grieving better. She encouraged me to relax into the pain of grief – in other words, yield to it.
Yielding, my friend, is an allowance. It's letting grief do what it does, in all its overwhelming splendor, as opposed to resisting it. Yielding opens the door to self-compassion throughout the grief journey. It allows the grieving heart to experience life after a loss in a gentler and softer way. And soft living is an incredible gift as you grieve.
Living softer, though seemingly paradoxical, offers those whose hearts are broken the stamina to continue walking through the arduous journey of grieving.
One of the harsh realities of grieving is that it’s a lifelong experience. Grieving isn’t something that goes away after six months, a year, or even ten years. In addition, there's no one-size-fits-all prescription to grieve the “right way." Finally, grief can’t be fixed.
We can, however, yield to grief.
Over the past 12 ½ years, I continue to be surprised that when I yield to the flow of grief, my life expands more alongside it.
Day by day, I drive through life and unexpectedly encounter grief – sometimes with a song on the radio, the smell of specific cologne, or a memory that pops up on social media. I observe grief in the atmosphere and instead of slamming on the gas to race the thoughts and emotions that suddenly arise away, I yield to it. Sometimes, tears well up in my eyes. Other times, I cry out to God in frustration. There are moments when laughter erupts. Whatever comes up, I simply yield. And after I’ve slowed my thoughts and emotions down and surveyed the landscape around me, I proceed accordingly … sometimes more slowly and sometimes, at my original pace.
Here’s your sign to YIELD today.
Take a few moments to think about the ways you’ve approached grief thus far. Are you trying to “fix” it? If so, extend self-compassion and grace, knowing that your attempts are 100% normal. Finally, consider what living softer as you grieve might look like.
In other words, how might you increasingly yield to grief?
xo, Mekel