- John M. Schneider, Ph.D.
(download as a .pdf - here)

Life is eternal,
and love is immortal
and death is only a horizon;
and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.
-Rossiter Raymond¹

During a week long intensive course on restorative justice, held during a steamy June in a medieval castle -cathedral surrounded by New York City, I witnessed on videotape a sacred, intimate interchange between two human beings that was as loving an experience as I have ever seen. Nothing about it was sexual. There was no physical contact, only hands touching bulletproof glass that separated the two as they parted after over four hours. They would only see each other one more time-as he apologized to each of the victims of his double homicide moments before his execution.

Prior to witnessing on videotape only a hour of the four hours, I could not have imagined that two human beings, on their very best day of their lives, could share with the depth, honesty, forgiveness and loving care that these two did. How extraordinary it was to see the mother of one of the murdered girls take her wounds to the man who had killed her daughter-and for both to then find healing and restoration.

This seemingly miraculous interchange happened because of careful preparation and deep introspection. It resulted from the vision of a spiritual man steeped in the philosophy of restorative justice. It came in spite of the cynicism, doubts, obstacles and the presence of a system of retributive justice that demanded the murderer pay for his crimes with his life; in spite of every family member of the victims considering her crazy or disloyal to even meeting this "monster" in the first place. Being a monster, he had no right to any relief of conscience, no responsibility or accountability other than paying with his own death.  This was aid and comfort to the enemy. He deserved to die, and his death was the only justice they could feel. How could she do this?

Did the depth of this experience happen because she pulled her punches, denied the destruction of lives physically, emotionally and spiritually that had happened? No. Did it happen because he apologized and asked for forgiveness? No. Did it change any outcome? He still died two weeks later. She was even further distanced from her family, able subsequently to realize all of its dysfunctions that had accrued over the previous twelve years of hell following the murder.

But the lives of both had been transformed. Strapped to the gurney, straining to face individually every one of the victims of his horrendous crime, he apologized. One of them, the boyfriend who had been severely injured in the attack, had asserted many times there was no way he would ever forgive this monster, was eager for his death, even questioned his sincerity. He burst into tears, placed his hand on the window and said, "I forgive you." These were the last words Jonathan, the condemned man heard uttered as he turned, signaled the execution to begin by starting to sing "Silent Night". He never finished the third line of the first stanza.

Life was no piece of cake for Paula afterwards. The intimacy of those moments were not matched anywhere in her life save with the mediator, David Doefler, and those who walked with her through that time. Still, she had a sense of peace that could not have come any other way. She could now grieve his death as well as that of her daughter. She could grieve all the broken lives in her family. Love replaced hate. Forgiveness was more than an expectation from her religion; it was now a reality forged in the most challenging of life circumstances.

Both Paula and Jonathon had expanded their consciousness of the possibilities in human interchange. A deeply loving exchange had happened between two people bound together by the despicable acts of one of them requiring the stretching of every emotion, the grace of their common religion, the holding of hope for them by David, who believed them capable of creating this sacred experience of conciliation. 

Just watching this event also expanded my consciousness. It was an act of love I had never considered possible before.  There were moments in watching it that I felt embarrassed to be there while something so personal was taking place. I have been stretched in my consciousness before; indeed, if I had not been I would not have been there this day, would not have participated or felt the rightness of this training in restorative justice, would not have been open to facing my own shadow that had led me to be so destructive in injuring my own children in the process of divorcing their mom.

Even so, my universe expanded with this experience. There was reason for optimism in a world crazed by 9/11 terrors, by rewarded corporate greed, by preemptive wars, by collapsing health care and justice systems. The world was not going to change. My personal life was not going to require any less effort to keep it alive and vibrant.

But the potential for any human encounter to be redemptive, loving, forgiving had increased dramatically for me. The belief in the ability of the human spirit to revive after being broken was affirmed. I could once again see that holding hope for others in the darkest of times even if it only was rewarded one time was worth all of what was necessary on my part to make that happen.

 

Paula and Jonathan, a portion of whose story appeared on the TV program 48 Hours several years ago, transformed their consciousness and that of many witnessing their process of grieving. They provide but one example of how restorative justice can expand the options we have to find the best of who we are in the most profound of life challenges.

This represents just one way that consciousness can be transformed. Few are as powerful, although it clearly came about as the result of a long arduous process of grieving what no longer was, what remained or could be restored, and creating new possibilities from it. To me, that is the essential way consciousness is transformed-through a process of grieving. This chapter reflects how I view the grieving process and the changing paradigms that result from facing life's changes. 

There is a controversial item in the Response to Loss Inventory I developed to measure grief as a transformative process: I would not want my loss reversed if it meant giving up all my growth from it. Before grieving individuals arrive at the point in their grief that this item is one they can agree and resonate with, they are frequently confused and outraged by it: How dare you imply that I would not give up everything and anything to get back what I have lost?  And yet that same individual, having transformed their consciousness, can later find the truth in that statement-that life is a matter of profiting from experiences, not one of bargaining to regain the past.

So much of what constitutes wisdom is a matter of understanding new paradigms that make sense of life experiences. To note a few:

There is a Hasidic saying that we perceive things not as they are, but as we are. In the Buddhist tradition, if one is afraid, one should pray to for ways to embrace that fear as soon as possible. Christ said we should forgive seven times seventy. It can be difficult to readily accept and apply such wisdom, but life provides many opportunities to do so. In the process we discover who we are, the necessity of facing our fears, what it takes to forgive and restore. In the process, we transcend limits and transform our own consciousness. The process of that transformation is what I call grief.

I will attempt to integrate my personal process with the development of a theoretical framework exploring how consciousness can be profoundly influenced by change and the resulting process of grieving. At eighteen, my father's death confronted me with the limits of my perception of the world as a benign, loving place that would reward me if I were good enough. In graduate school I encountered ethical conflicts involving inhumane treatment at a school for retarded women that forced me to face the choice between confronting injustice and risking that I might not become a professional psychologist. After the suicide of a therapy client a few years later, I experienced the worst fear of a professional therapist  - finding the extent and the limits of responsibility for the death of someone in my care. Soon after, I had two near-death experiences that confronted me with my own fears of dying.

In the five years that followed, I relentlessly pursued living life more fully, but in so doing, created unbridgeable gulfs with people I loved. In losing them, I discovered there were things worse than death: loneliness, emptiness and not being able to forgive or be forgiven. If my life were to have meaning, I had to use my gifts and discover my fullness to heal the wounds I help create. My consciousness had to expand beyond the petty preoccupation with my own ego and my own personal growth. It had to find a place for reconciliation, restoration and forgiveness.

The way I perceive things was changed with each event. My connections and my self-concept were also transformed. My consciousness of the transformative power of loss and grief began with this personal journey that continues to unfold.

The capacity to integrate the most powerful and challenging of life experiences is an important factor in the capacity to transform the nature of consciousness. In this article, I will explore how change and grief affect the transformative capacity to expand consciousness and to integrate mind, body and spirit. 

Consciousness involves an awareness of the self and the ways people connect. Humans are unique in the ability to comprehend that consciousness is rooted in life's realities and its miracles, in being and in becoming, in uniqueness and in relationships. Such complexity creates paradoxes-ones that sometimes aid in transcending ego boundaries and sometimes help integrate the resources of mind, body and spirit as healing forces that permit larger, encompassing realities.

We begin life from an unconscious or assumptive level-for the sake of survival, parents teach children cautions, routines, rituals and assumptions by rote.  We don't need to learn by experience not to touch a hot stove or not to run in front of cars. These dictums are meant to remain unexamined or unquestioned, and generally remain so, unless an unexpected loss occurs: of something or someone considered essential to one's identity, humanity, survival, mission or attachments. Grieving is a process of bringing to conscious awareness the indispensable "givens" to existence and meaning. "I could not live without . . ." is a statement reflecting the belief in indispensability. Once lost, it defies both imagination and integrity to be able to go on as well as to challenge the vitality of that belief.

Facing loss and experiencing grief can result in profound transformation. In my view, grieving consists of a discerning and awakening. The discerning involves determining what was lost and what remains. The "awakenings" involve opening to new possibilities that result from the loss. These new levels and expanding forms of consciousness are possible by letting go of old beliefs and paradigms that fail to explain loss or permit healing and growth.  The end result of grieving, I believe, is greater perceptivity of and openness to an ever broader possible range of conscious paradigms. We become conscious of being unique as well as being a part of a larger whole, separate and more deeply connected, aware of limits, connections and possibilities. How else could one explain Paula and Jonathan's encounter?

How does this come about? It begins with facing the fears generated by those early teachings about survival. Facing one's fears requires finding the courage to fully examine their depth, immutability and breadth. Change can be even more profound and rapid among those whose ways of life and attachments are most radically altered. It is as Bruno Bettelheim noted in his provocative essay about assumptions Jewish families made that proved costly for escape during the Holocaust in The Ignored Lessons of Anne Frank:

These people realized that when a world goes to pieces and inhumanity reigns supreme, man cannot go on living his private life as he was wont to do, and would like to do; he cannot, as the loving head of a family, keep the family living together peacefully, undisturbed by the surrounding world, nor even can he continue to take pride in his profession or possessions, when either will deprive him of humanity, if not also of his life. In such times, one must radically re-evaluate all of what one has done, believed in, and stood for in order to know how to act.

Yet life is not simply facing the hardest and most difficult of circumstances in order to discard basic assumptions. One could adopt a stance that such suffering is inevitable and simply wait passively for those moments to occur. In my doctoral dissertation many years ago (Schneider, 1968), I studied the kind of activities people preferred to engage in, depending on how they perceived their ability to control their world. Those who believed in an internal locus of control preferred to engage in activities that involved skill. Those who had an external locus of control, who believed that fate, luck or outside forces were more powerful preferred activities involving chance. It reinforces the notion that we engage in self-fulfilling prophecies, seeing the world the way we expect it to be.  It is frequently the case, in my experience with grief, that people can and often do shift from an external control base to a more internal one with successful grieving. We can take more control of our lives, even when objectively we have less.

Not that I am particularly gifted in these matters, but I have learned that I was capable of survival, destructiveness and could still make choices to reach beyond them. Out of each experience eventually came a choice to encounter whatever the consequences of that experience would be. When I chose to face my fears, they diminished and I became more focused. Instead of being anxious about death, for example, I discovered that I feared the possibility of being trapped in an unresponsive, demented or pain-racked body; Instead of being paralyzed by guilt for being destructive, I found ways to restore, make restitution and forgive. In focusing on the past, I also discovered I feared that my life would remain incomplete, my good-byes unspoken, my regrets unaddressed. Nietzsche once noted that someone "who has a why for life can endure almost any how." I feared living a life without meaning; I feared that nothing lay beyond my material existence in this lifetime. In short, I feared not living fully more than I feared dying.

Confronting one's fears, or not, affects the way life in general is perceived and lived. If my worst fears could be faced, could I not then address the other things that frightened me? If forgiveness could occur between two former enemies, people divided by being victim and offender, need I avoid any situation or person, any challenge?  Need I restrict the ways and means of being conscious of self and the world?

Nietzsche also wryly suggested that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Another piece of wisdom I can only sometimes appreciate! Perhaps the worst things that happen can also be the greatest sources for awakening-from tragedy and betrayal, from loss and dying, transformed to love, grace, and a fuller sense of one's own humanity.

Maturity and growing older can provide choices about life and death. It is not the developmental process alone that transforms thinking and ways of being. It is also the life experiences which result from encountering change. The secure beliefs of one age become the grief of the next when the predictability of assumptions once valid is lost. Grieving provides one way to awaken to perspectives never previously imagined, to new more inclusive and optimistic assumptions not driven by the need for survival.

Though my personal life has been void of physical violence, there are emotional and intellectual equivalents especially found in academic and health care settings. I have also witnessed the incredible growth, courage and compassion that can result for those who have dealt with such abuse. Programs like David Doefler's and Jon Wilson's restorative justice mediation between offenders and victims of violent crimes or Margaret MacAbee's Victim Intervention Project in St. Paul working from day one with the families of homicides, as well as Marc Levin's work with political torture victims in Denmark have all challenged me to transform my consciousness.

What is remarkable about encounters with people with the most profound losses is often their vitality, their humor, and their joy in living. Many live lives more fully because of what they have encountered. They appreciate each moment because they have been to the brink of existence, where at any moment life could have ended, By having lost literally anything of value, including their old selves, they often appreciate anything that has beauty, meaning and love in it.

Clearly this is not the only way or by any stretch of the imagination the dominant result of encounters with violence or other radical loss. Revenge, perpetual posttraumatic stress disorders are by far the more common outcomes. As is true with any life force or change, the potential for creation and destruction both exist. It is by understanding the Nelson Mandela's and Martin Luther Kings of the world that we can increase the potential for the creative outcomes. It is by understanding and validating grief that consciousness can open to the creative possibilities of any change.

Marc Levin, in his work with political torture victims, often is privy to the actual events in their lives that were most traumatic. He has heard the horrendous stories of inflicting pain and the even worse ones of forcing these people to witness the torture and killing of family and loved ones. What amazes Marc is the optimism, compassion and empathy of many of these individuals. "I've heard many times these torture victims say that what kept them going was the belief that their life had meaning-that they were meant to make something of this, to not give in, to even feel compassion for those who tortured them." Marc has shared. "Because they have been at the edge of existence, believing at various times that life was about to end in a matter of moments before a firing squad-they can live as if this moment is the most precious one they have. Having survived, survival has lost its controlling power in their lives."

The sense I make of this comes from the research on people's grief. As Margaret MacAbee (2000) has noted, those who have experienced violent crimes or other forms of traumatization have lost their capacity to cope in the usual ways. "The usual rules of social conduct didn't work for them," she has noted. "They've had to make up their own." This was a finding that Linda White (1995) also found in her study of parents of murdered children. Psychological hardiness, a concept of Salvatore Maddi and Susan Kobasa was related to these parent's capacity to integrate their loss into the fabric of their lives through forgiveness, letting go of the comfort and predictability of their feelings and of being willing to move forward and give meaning to their losses-not to their ways of holding on to or escaping from the realities of their loss. Coping is a way to perpetuate survival-and these parents no longer consider survival at any cost a worthwhile pursuit.

On the other side, more difficult to embrace is the transformative potential for those who have been perpetrators of inhumanity and injustice. While some of them clearly fall out of the range of experiencing a sense of loss in what they have done (professionals now tend to call them "attachment disordered" or sociopaths), There are many who've engage in violence out of fear and their own traumatizations in the past. David Doefler, who trains mediators between victims and offenders has observed that perhaps 80 percent of those behind bars are "but for the grace of god" like he rest of us save a significant defining moment that many have tremendous remorse and grief for.  David co-facilitates "horse whisperer" training experience with wild mustangs -animals he claims have a natural affinity to human beings in spite of having been traumatized by them. "These animals are very much like most of those in prison," David observes: "they will be loving and gentle when they are respected and validated, and violent when they don't feel safe."

In his mediator training, David provides the opportunity for forgiveness to take place between victim and offender. "People have to be well progressed in their grief before this is even possible" David notes. By embracing the concept of "restorative justice"-that justice comes from fully appreciating that harm was done and healing is the "just" outcome-victim and offender share how the violent event has affected them, listen and hear all the way through the remorse, pain and grief that has resulted. The natural outcome for many, David believes, is forgiveness and the capacity to transcend the chasm between victim and offender. It creates a new inclusive, intimate level of consciousness that did not exist before.

Theologian Christian Staffa is doing a remarkably similar piece of work in Berlin, this time two generations removed from the event. He mediates the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and of Gestapo officers, encouraging them to be in contact with their grandparents as well as each other. As a part of their own healing and restoration, they have begun to help those who visit the concentration camps process their experiences.

What knowledge of such programs has done for me is to increase my awareness of the necessity of embracing our own personal shadow of destructive potential. It is there, often easy to avoid if life has all the amenities and no one points out the little acts that are destructive, cruel or self-serving. Part of the transformation of consciousness that is necessary for grieving is to embrace both the potential and the reality of our destructiveness. The deepest empathy can only come from identification with the losses involved in the life experiences of others-including those that were self-determined and destructive.

To find deeper meaning one must consciously embrace all aspects of reality, both the suffering and the ecstasy, and everything in between. There are Buddhist tenets that highlight this clearly, called "The Five Remembrances":

The Five Remembrances

1. I am of the nature to change. There is no way to avoid change.
2. I am of the nature to get sick. There is no way to avoid getting sick.
3. I am of the nature to get old. There is no way to avoid getting old.
4. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to avoid death.
5. All that I love and everyone who is dear to me are of the nature to change. There is no way to avoid being separated from them.

What I understand from these principles is that loss and suffering are inseparable parts of life.  What makes a difference is another deep truth I have come to know: When suffering is validated, healing can result. It is in the journey through pain and into healing that renewed possibilities for love and joy are created. It is the need to fully grieve the losses that precedes the joy of reconnection to a meaningful existence. Effective grieving embraces and consciously addresses these Five Remembrances  

Life As A Series of Awakenings

My personal journey has determined my opening to awareness of these remembrances.  During the late 1970s and the early 1980s I had several "awakenings" which became opportunities to leave traditional clinical psychology and its emphasis on the diagnosis and treatment of pathology and to empower others and experience myself more fully. After learning about the psychoneuroimmunological work of Carl and Stephanie Simonton², Jeanne Achterberg and Frank Lawlis³, I realized my ways of viewing my life and my work were too restrictive and did not emphasize enough healing and restorative capacities. In the twenty years since then, I have explored with my colleagues how imagery reflects and is influenced by what happens on other levels of self, including responses within the immune system ^4,5. I have witnessed people with life threatening conditions utilize imagery as a healing force that restored some to full lives and some to fullness in their deaths. Imagery has opened my imagination to possibilities I could not have dreamed before.

About the same time, I became involved in helping initiate a hospice program in my community.  The most important factor in the success of hospice care, I discovered, was the acknowledgment and validation of the need to grieve what no longer is, which involves much more than facing death. My mother was instrumental in teaching me that awareness:

My mother, at 83, developed cancer. A year and a half later, the cancer became an extremely painful inoperable mass near her kidney and liver. I had just moved to Denmark when I dreamed of her calling me to return. Ironically, I had moved to a foreign land to help develop pain management programs for people with cancer, while back home my mother was struggling with pain uncontrolled by reluctant, frightened and ignorant physicians at one of the country's leading cancer treatment centers.  I had to return and embrace the reality of her suffering.

I spent the last six weeks of her life teaching her to use imagery to transport herself to Lake Michigan beaches and sunsets-a distraction that allowed her to be turned in bed without screaming in pain. She aroused herself in the middle of the night from a ten-day long drug-induced coma to insist on effective pain control and on going home to die. Her last three days were conscious, pain-free and accompanied by many friends sharing stories from their past, singing songs and partaking in blessed rituals at her bedside. Her last breath came as the sun rose one beautiful summer morning, just as her beloved cardinals began their morning song at her window.

There have been times when someone or something has come along at the precise moment I needed them. In the years following my father's death, a college professor, whose office was my father's old college dorm room, took me under his wing and got me into graduate school; another championed my cause when I made that ethical stand against inhumane treatment. There were friends who knew my pain and witnessed my process, who have validated the fullness of what I have experienced. Prayers have frequently been answered in ways I hadn't initially appreciated but which eventually empowered my capacity to respond. A spiritually beautiful woman became my life partner. I have and cherish a healing community.

As a result, I find new awareness expanding who I am and what I am about. The study of loss and change and the transformative potential of grief have become central to my professional career. No single influence has determined my path or solely defined my thinking. There have been times when I awakened to new possibilities. There are also times when I fall asleep.

As powerful as transcendent moments have been, so, too, are the existential realities that I must face and, hopefully, transform once again. These existential realities involve love and loneliness, meaning and emptiness, hope and despair, joy and suffering.  I have come to believe that the transcendent experiences of life are meaningless without also facing and holding these existential issues.

Now in my middle adult years, I have lived longer than most of the men in my family. Along with an awakening to my connections to the past, I have found my affiliations now have expanded well beyond family, local community, profession or nation. I define myself in terms of healing, energy, ecology and community-all of which are transgenerational and transpersonal in nature.

 Many times I draw comfort from Anne Morrow Lindbergh's notion of how suffering can lead to better understanding of the transformative process:

I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught then all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable. ⁶

Any life of life's encounters, especially those involving suffering, must be undergone consciously in order to transcend the suffering itself. By experiencing suffering's effect on mind, body and spirit, the outcome can be healing and a source of new awareness. 

 Cultural Beliefs about Loss, Grief and Transformative Potential

It is a peculiarly unique belief in past century that people have "options" when it comes to loss, grief, death and dying.  These alternatives generally involve one of two forms of selective consciousness; one involving an emphasis on the survival capacity of human nature; the second on the freedom from responsibility that comes from seeing oneself as a victim. People use this selectivity of awareness to pose alternatives to experiencing loss and grief.

Survival as a Part of Loss and Grief

One option is to deny the need to grieve, that is, to restrict the awareness of significant change to an unconscious or preconscious level. The goal of such denial is survival-the belief being that facing the loss would destroy the individual. The price of this "denial," however, is to increase our detachment from potentially deep experiences in the moment. Some shallow meaning may be derived from life, but deeper awareness and learning eludes us. At its worst, we destroy others in order to survive ourselves.

In primitive cultures even today, defective infants are left to die. Communities, countries and neighbors fight over territory and resources deemed essential to survival.  Governments and religions carefully control and sanction some kinds of violence in order to preserve a greater good or to define a "just war." Individuals may not do the same, even though internal as well as external provocations can lead them to violence as well.

Survival may insist on attempting to skip over the guilt and suffering and focus only on the "positive" aspects of a loss, as though "getting over it" without going through it is a mark of strength. The immediate benefit of such selective consciousness is a sense of triumph, a "getting away with", a conquering of what "lesser beings" fall prey to. As I've repeatedly learned from my personal and professional experiences, the result of such an optimistic view can be shallowness and insensitivity, and the tendency to avoid others who cannot or do not "choose" to avoid suffering.  It is also the way loss issues survive for generations and become the focus of rituals, rivalries, retributions and traditions for entire communities, nations or religions.

A natural extension of this "option" to grief is the notion that people can become so fully "enlightened" that they transcend the need for survival because life is no longer fettered by material attachments. Survival comes in an after or parallel life. This perspective gives priority to spiritual consciousness at the expense of the corporal. No attachment means no sense of mortality and no need for grief. This too is a way to limit conscious experiences, and I believe it is a denial of the fullness of mind, body and spirit that encompasses both pulls to go within and to reach out, the expression of the human condition of being both a social and a solitary creature.

I often meet or read the writings of people who express a belief that they (and anyone else who achieves "higher consciousness") no longer have to suffer losses, or to grieve them. They have, in essence, "survived" the need for grief.  However, after some gentle probing, I usually discover that these people have merely "stopped" grieving before they could fully embrace the deep, dark awareness that accompanies a significant loss - or that they have been reluctant to share that aspect of their journey for fear of alienating potential audiences. I find that American culture often supports this false abbreviation such that many people stop their grief prematurely and consequently mistake the lack of deep emotions for having successfully "let go" or "gone beyond it." 

 Victimhood as a Response to Loss and Grief

A second alternative to grieving fully is to see loss in every change, that is, to see everything in terms of being connected to it, and that every potential change is a threat to existence. All connections can be lost, and the first one, that of mother, the most devastating and unrecoverable. Everyone is a potential victim, swayed by every change in relationships, devastated by separation, abandonment and aloneness, or by the loss of material attachments. As victims, people are vulnerable to charismatic forces, arbitrary disasters, promises of unconditional love and liberation from suffering through subservience of the individual for the good of the whole-or the leader. Many feel overwhelmed by the complexities and intricacies of life and the necessity to absorb its every nuance. They feel helpless to alter the realities. All too often a charismatic leader pulls such individuals into a cult-like relationship by promising a simple answer at the expense of their individuality.  All too often that dominant figure destroys its victim.

Victim oriented approaches to loss, grief, death and dying often emphasize that in the past were the "good old days," the future contains doomsday.  The consequence is that the present moment is frequently avoided, for it contains too much grief. Hope is based on reclaiming the past and restoring its glory, getting back on our feet, finding a miracle cure or a fountain of youth.

In both of these approaches to consciousness, people become either victims of change or survivors to carry on the history and memories of the past. In some tradition bound cultures, women who are widowed will wear black the rest of their lives and remain celibate-simultaneously victims of loss and evidence of the survival of strongly held traditions. So it is in many support groups with long term participants whose identity as victim gives meaning to their survival, but not growth from it.

 When Grieving Stops Prematurely: Falling Asleep

There is a difference between limiting awareness of what's been lost in active grieving, and stopping the grieving process prematurely. This is where fear comes into play as a restrictor of consciousness. Coping is intended to give times of respite and to delay letting in all of what a loss means. Yet some become "too good" in coping, and go for months or years without acknowledging the reality of the loss because they manage to keep busy or otherwise distract themselves from experiencing what has been lost. They have fallen asleep to the reality of suffering, the need for healing and the potential for joy. Some mistakenly assume they have options to grieving or they have "transcended" the loss and are above material connections, as noted in the previous section.

Others distort what actually occurred and make it into something else-effectively skipping over the loss aspect in pursuit of "putting it behind them" or denying its significance. Still others must destroy any evidence of the loss and the messenger as well. Their loss is compounded and now involves their integrity as well.

Grieving also stops or perhaps never starts when the loss is so massive there are no effective ways to limit its presence.  Some rely on desperate tactics to distract the focus from the loss, to the point of giving up on living a life that previously had meaning and coherence. People can feel deeply traumatized by overwhelming losses and live in a state of shock and disbelief. I believe this "frozen" state of consciousness has an important purpose, to ensure the significance of that moment is not lost.  As was found in trying too quickly to move citizens of New York through their traumatization from 9/11, people resisted techniques that are intended to move them beyond trauma before the meaning of the experience is grounded. Perhaps that is why it has been suggested that traumatizing moments may alter genetic structure-they need to be remembered until a way can be found to be consciously experienced, remembered and given meaning-perhaps by a future generation.

 Are There Alternatives to Loss and Grief?

Other "options" are variations of the survivor or victim approaches-designed to limit the need to grieve-on one side because there is nothing to grieve if one is not attached to anything, and on the other because there is too much. For example, it is a common practice among health care professionals to restrict the need to grieve only to major losses which involve death, usually one's own or immediate family.  Any loss of lesser magnitude simply requires medications, adjustment, accommodation or else learning the cognitive skills to overcome their effect.

By restricting what is recognized as grief, many discount what they are experiencing when any other significant loss occurs. Certainly it is possible to distract oneself from the impact of loss and the need to grieve for long periods of time. Major life changes, however, can be and often are stressful when there is no conscious affirmation of their full impact, although the resulting effect may take many years to manifest.

Change inherently has both a loss and a gain component. Leading full lives means one cannot start something new without relinquishing something old. Grieving is the discerning process that helps one make wise decisions about what to let go of and what to retain. That letting go can include parts of one's self-definition. Unless loss aspects of change are recognized and grieved, shattered dreams and broken stories cannot heal, the fullness of memories of the past cannot be truly "re-membered" nor can new dreams and enriched stories emerge.

 Transcendence as a Denial of Loss

Throughout history there have also been remarkable and inspirational accounts of nonordinary experiences and transformed lives. A closer biographical look often reveals that what looks like transcendence to a higher plain of existence also had its cost. When existential issues were denied or abandoned, a serious price was paid-the loss of the capacity to enjoy the sensory and the material as integral parts of the greater wholeness of life. Even great lives have times of falling asleep, then reawakening. Many inspirational lives (e.g., Jesus Christ, the Dali Llama, Jellaludin Rumi, Mother Teresa) reveal times of suffering and loss as essential precursors to their capacity to transcend normal consciousness.

While their stories inspire everyone's transcendent capacities, they can also leave us uncomfortable-on the one hand wanting to believe that we too can "arrive" at a level of transcendence and live there permanently, or on the other, wanting or having to remain in, and of, this world with all its attachments, pleasures and earthly challenges.

Some also believe that the need for forgiveness for past destructiveness or indiscretions can be transcended as well. Advocates of positive thinking do not leave room for remorse or guilt, considering them as negatives which pull one down rather than keep one connected to life's realities. Transcendence of this sort cannot be attained without a loss of integrity with the past.

Some notions of transcendence assume that there is a kind of choice involved, whether based on some vague "karmic" belief or the conviction that each individual is ultimately responsible for his or her condition or state of being-any losses incurred are, therefore, the result of this "bad karma" or "bad thinking," both of which can be altered by actions of the individual. So if one becomes ill, one must accept full responsibility for it in order to heal or be cured-no matter that genetic, environmental, or accidental factors are also possible contributors.  So I have come to believe that personal responsibility has its limits, too, especially in the case of significant loss.

I have found that people go through these series of awakenings many times-transcendence doesn't happen only once and then life is perfect until we die some glorious, enlightened death. In all my experience I have never encountered this.  Nor do I believe that people have an alternative to grieving if they are to live fully. Everyone has to go through the darkness to get to the light. 

 The Transformative Potential of Grief

The dictionary definition of "transformation," is "a significant alteration in the form of something has taken place-a moving across or beyond an old form to something unknown or unknowable before the change began." In its healthiest sense, transformation means transcending the limits of the personal ego to include a larger reality than could be experienced or comprehended previously. During the process of a significant loss, people experience being "broken"-a discontinuity in their lives as they go through major life transitions, up to and including their own death. That sense of discontinuity and the healing that begins by validating the experience is an important part of the transformative journey called grief.

Grief facilitates the transformation of consciousness in three ways: first, it reduces fear, second, it engenders hope and third, it creates challenges. 

Reducing fear. Significant change disrupts old patterns and attachments. People naturally fear change. The worst changes are those that threaten survival or force the relinquishing of ones assumed essential to survival. David Whyte conveys how grief pushes one through this fear of not surviving:

Those who will not slip beneath the still surface on the well of grief
Turning downward into its black water
To the place we cannot breathe,
Will never know the source from which we drink,
The secret water, cold and clear,
Nor find in the darkness glimmering
The small round coins thrown by those
Who wish for something else.
David Whyte. The Well of Grief

Grief results when survival is not the most important value, when the person chooses to go into rather than to avoid. Grieving requires going beneath the surface, to the place we cannot breathe, and then discovering we can transform the fears underlying them. There are fates worse than death, legitimate choices to die rather than exist without hope, connections or meaning. Unknown strengths, new reasons to go on living, and the courage to go on a little further can be discovered. These are aspect of self that couldn't have known previously because one has never been challenged so deeply.

The result is a lessening of the control that fear and anxiety play. If worst nightmares (e.g. drowning in grief) can be transformed, then can lesser fears hold us back? Do we need to limit ourselves solely because of the fear we might not survive? 

Fear puts blinders on options, usually limiting one to fight (Holding on) or flight  (Letting Go) responses, both evolutionary mechanisms enhancing the capacity for survival. When fear is reduced or eliminated, other options that come from facing the fears and conquering them can be considered. Consciousness is expanded when fear is conquered and a new paradigm open: in grief, it is the discovery of what remains or can be restored.

Engendering hope.  This second paradigm of grief is based on hope that life can be worth living if enough remains or can be recovered. Grieving is based on the belief-the hope-that the capacity to love and find meaning can be restored. Such hope requires active exploration and completion, first of memories associated with the loss and then of current realities. In the first paradigm of grief, only one aspect, the loss or the gain, is in awareness. In this second paradigm, both loss and gain can be simultaneously held and balanced.  One can feel both joy and sadness in the same moment. This expansion of consciousness further limits the intrusion of fear, for it permits paradoxes to exist: out of worst fears comes hope, out of loss there can also be gain, and out of relinquishing objects of love no longer available, new possibilities.

Hope also comes from those who model and inspire it. I could face my own shadow of being destructive in a divorce once I heard about the mediation programs between the victims and offenders of violent crimes; when South Africa's Office of Reconciliation took place, when I heard of the programs between the offspring of the Gestapo and the holocaust in Germany. If these people so deeply wounded, could experience remorse and forgiveness, why could I not at least begin to face the pain and suffering I inflicted?

Increasing hope and decreasing fear permit grieving individuals to see beyond the threat to their personal ego: they can envision the need for completion of what no longer is in order to move forward to new levels of awareness and to new possibilities. Those new possibilities involve the creation of challenges previously unthinkable.

Creating challenges. A common challenge that defines reaching the point in grief where living fully is possible is reflected in the statement at the beginning: I would not want my loss reversed if it meant giving up all my growth from it. Prior to reaching the point in grief where the focus is on what is possible, such a statement can feel offensive and even disloyal. It reflects a hidden bargaining aimed at going backwards to recover the unrecoverable. Once the inevitability of the past and the need to give it meaning is embraced, then losses can be embraced as perhaps the ways that awakening to growth can take place.

Perhaps the greatest challenge to old ways of thinking and behaving come when people, in their grief, find what is necessary to forgive the previously unforgivable, say good-by to what was once considered essential, restore integrity through admitting responsibility for having done harm and letting go of the comfort of conquered emotions associated with the loss.

Consider again the work of David Doefler on restorative justice. He has developed programs for mediation between death row inmates, with nothing to gain from participating, with the families of their victims to find forgiveness. Consider a Nelson Mandela who invites his prison guards to his presidential inauguration.  Or a Martin Luther King who could say I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear. Does such transformation of incredible loss not require meeting the challenge to let go of the embitterment or the comfort of being a victim, the smugness or the revenge dictated to survivors? When one holds on to not forgiving any transgression, does that not give free rental space in one's mind for the perpetrator?

Consciousness is expanded and transformed when someone can do what was once considered impossible. Those actions taken that represent forgiveness, good-bys, restoration and letting go open people to possibilities that emerge from grief, not in spite of it. Most prominent is the awareness that reaching this point resulted from opening to powers beyond the limits of the self, the senses and feelings or the ego.  It took the love of others, grace from above, and the example of respected models to get this far. The acknowledgment of connections that transcend physical and sensory limits is a common way consciousness is further expanded in the grieving process.

As people successfully emerge from active grieving, the transformations they experience are usually like nothing they had imagined. Having gone through many myself, I've realized that I will probably experience loss many more times before my life ends, but with new awareness each time, new challenges to my integrity, renewed necessity to embrace the healing and to seek the empowering capacities of my community. My old notions of being either a survivor or a victim won't be completely invalidated-they will become integrated into a new and larger one that connects me with the universals of living while honoring the unique pathway I have traveled to discover them.

This is the transcendental quality of grief-not that one will never have to grieve again, but that each new loss, and the suffering and transformations it brings, offers the opportunity to transcend and encompass whatever came before. 

I have come to know very deeply that how people die is directly and intimately connected to how they have grieved losses. "Lifelines," the journey and the transformations, can add up to a life, and a dying process, fully lived.

Definitions of Grief

Let me share the model of grief that I embrace: grief is a process of discovering the full extent of what was lost, what is left or can be restored, and using that conscious awareness to create new possibilities. Grief makes possible new levels of attachment by relinquishing the form containing the old.  It involves the full range of conscious experiencing in order to mend the breaks in life stories-from coping through awareness of the loss to a healing and growing process. Grief can also happen while moving beyond the temporary highs of successes and peak experiences in order to integrate them. Grief makes it possible to forgive human weakness and enjoy the experience of being whole, capable of loving and attending in ways more encompassing than were possible before.

Grief is a highly individual process, filled with paradoxes that are capable of leading us through life's alienations and suffering to universal truths and connections. No two people experience exactly the same loss, nor do they respond to loss in the same fashion. However, there are patterns that I have recognized in my years of professional work-patterns that reflect levels of awareness (i.e., of what's lost, what remains and what's possible) that seem to contradict each other. The nature of transformative experiences is that we could not have imagined or believed possible the new level of awareness while in the old.

Elizabeth Kübler-Ross pioneered the recognition of loss and grief as important processes in her seminal work On Death and Dying ⁷. In it she proposed five stages of grief, from denial to anger to bargaining, depression and acceptance. While this was a major step toward understanding the processes of dying and of grieving, the way these five psychological states came to be understood and applied by the public (and by caregivers in particular) created problems. Most notably, I have observed a strong tendency to regard the five stages as an inflexible sequence, and all there is to deal with. Somehow grieving people would move through these stages at some prescribed pace or else they weren't "doing it right."  Acceptance, her final stage, was all that could be expected out of grieving one's own dying. Consequently, many caregivers have ignored other responses as unrelated to the dying process or as a sign of a pathological reaction, or more recently, the tendency to see anything more than these simple steps as signs that grief was getting complicated and therefore in need of professional help⁸.  There was also the sense that these stages weren't necessarily consciously experienced (after all, how can one be conscious of denial at the time it is happening?).

In studying other theoretical models of loss and grief for many years, I find, with a few notable exceptions, that most lack several critical understandings of grief's role, function and potential. Strikingly, the vast majority of approaches to grief focus on death and dying as the ultimate loss, perhaps the only loss worth grieving or the only loss that can't be avoided. The implication of these approaches, then, is that if one can avoid death and dying, one can also avoid the necessity of grieving.

Most approaches overemphasize the social side of grief, the need to be in relationship with or dependent on a therapist, grief expert or other external authority that claim to know the bereaved individuals better than they know themselves. They tend to be pessimistic, looking at what can go wrong with, or prevent healing after a loss. Some approaches suggest there are losses from which one can never recover or never forgive: the slogan of Compassionate Friends, for example, that "there is no death so sad as the loss of a child," a saying that both validates the severity of that type of loss while also suggesting it may be more than anyone can bear. Few approaches are comprehensive in nature, including the effects of loss on mind, body and spirit over a sufficient time period to include the integrative and growth potential of grief. 

Nor have most experts on grief paid much attention to what the grieving person is aware of and currently experiencing-and how that changes. Because the theoretical orientation of many studying grief^{8, 9, 10} is narrowly phenomenologically based (i.e., on the observation of others) and does not see the necessity of introspection and one's own full experience with grief as relevant, there is a strong tendency to think of grief as observable behaviors rather than as a process that encompasses a progression of varied, often antithetical states of consciousness, some of which may be known only to the person experiencing them.

Part of the difficulty with approaches to grief is the limited time span and the limited settings in which observations take place. John Bowlby ¹¹ in his observations of grief in primates and infants, cautioned professionals from concluding they knew all of what was happening for the people they observed in their particular setting or times of observation. For example, some focus exclusively on the time of the funeral9, the first thirteen months¹² or on people seen in psychiatric or medical settings 10, and yet claim to represent the whole of the grief process.

I believe this lack of attention to the conscious experience of the grieving process is also a result of a modernistic medical system overemphasizing diagnoses and ignoring the need to be a full participant in one's own healing process by being conscious of what is happening to the practitioner. It is also due to an emphasis on only seeing people in crises or when there is a definable problem. Normal grief is not a reimbursable category by managed care, so unless the process is disordered, professional caregivers will probably not see individuals whose grief is normal. 

If grieving is not a conscious experience, it places the responsibility for awareness solely in the hands of the treating agent who will diagnose it as an illness, complication or disorder that, with proper treatment, will rectify itself and allow the grieving person to return to their previous baseline of health, none-the-worse-for-wear. For example, Shapiro's¹³ "eye movement desensitization response" (EMDR) technique for treating traumatization-a first step for many in experiencing a loss-does not require the traumatized person to be aware of what is happening to them nor usually need a follow-up processing of the event and its meaning.  Nor do approaches that create trance conditions (e.g., neurolinguistic programming¹⁴, the use of antidepressant or mind-altering drugs) require the individual to be conscious of and fully experiencing the suffering of their grief.   In many instances, their responses to loss aren't even recognized or diagnosed as grief-they are labeled "depression"^15,16,17-a term, when appropriately used, that refers to a process out of the potentially healing consciousness of the person experiencing it.   

To summarize my concerns about existing models of grief, many rarely view grief as a conscious process of healing. Few give more than token acknowledgment that growth or positive transformation can result from even the most devastating of losses. Many limit their definition of a significant loss exclusively to death-related events, as though only death is powerful enough to produce grief. Most overemphasize the role of trained professionals in helping with all the complications that can accompany a loss, while under-emphasizing the importance of self-awareness of individuals or of connecting them with healing forces within their personal or spiritual community of support.  Further, few view loss and grief as natural conditions of life and may possibly be the most powerful and ubiquitous process for transformation that human beings have.

Dying is like any other change, ending, or transformation in that from the moment people are consciously aware that something has ended, life is experienced in ways it was not before. It may take time-perhaps the remainder of a lifetime-for the full extent of any transformation to be realized. Along the way people will continue to experience change and loss. They will know suffering, grief that transcends the material, sensory ties of the ego while affirming the essential, spiritual ways for remaining connected. That transcendence, however, comes from passing through and fully experiencing the three essential questions of grief as a response to any and every significant loss, not as a result of avoiding, treating it symptomatically or prematurely transcending it.

Three Essential Questions in Grief

What's lost? What remains? What's possible? Three simple but essential questions dominate the process of grieving any major life change, including dying. These questions seem deceptively simple, but the states of consciousness that correspond to them are quite different.  These questions correspond to the three challenges I noted earlier: to validate the realities of suffering; to discover what is healing and to explore life's potential for love, meaning and joy. The combination of validation, discovery and exploration I believe are essential ingredients in any transformative process.

To answer this challenge can evoke the most painful, complex and comprehensive of conscious experience. It takes the synergy of integrating mind, body and spirit, of bringing together the resources of our social and solitary sides to move from survival or victimhood to positive transformation.

 First Question: What is Lost? Validation of Suffering

From the moment one is aware of a potential or imminent loss, that loss exists in current reality. What exists in the here and now is what is grieved, not just the anticipation of what lies ahead. What is done in anticipation is to cope and attempt to control the extent of the loss, which is an important aspect of the grieving process. By the time a foreseen loss event actually happens, much grief has already been engaged because much loss has already occurred. 

There are times when what's been lost includes everything of significance. People can be overwhelmed by a trauma or catastrophe that leaves no stone unturned, no relationship untouched, no safe corners or beliefs intact. Their world has been as turned upside down as the World Trade Center, and no refuge is in sight.

At first it's difficult to devote the time and energy necessary to fully explore the extent of a loss, fearing that one may find nothing left. At the same time, individuals have to keep going with the rest of their lives, to distract themselves from how much of living is consumed by the loss. They try to hold on, to keep busy and keep going by relying on the strengths from their "survival instinct," or else they let go-minimize or discount the loss or emphasize their status as victims, freed (at least temporarily) from responsibility for their actions.

Holding on (a survivor mode) and letting go (more victim oriented) represent ways of coping which are activated once awareness of the loss begins, and serve the purpose of granting times of respite and delay from this ruthless awareness. This process, of exploring what has been lost while also distracting oneself from the relentlessness of the answers, is what I call active grieving. It is clearly the most energy intensive, relationship demanding and painful, lonely, empty part of grief. It can take a few days or hours-or it may consume the better part of a lifetime.

Active grieving implicitly accepts that neither survival nor victimhood is sufficient for full life. The limits of just surviving come from the desire to find the best self again-that too much has been lost otherwise. The limits of the victim role come from awareness of the loss of intimacy and reciprocity, from being excused from expectations to be fully functioning.

The ultimate test of conscious experiencing is to permit full experiencing of what is lost-to experience it as a crucible.

The Crucible of Grief: Embracing the Consciousness of Suffering
A "crucible" is a vessel within which a substance is transformed by applying extreme heat. It is also defined as a severe test. In loss and grieving, both definitions often hold true. This is a time when reality seems compressed and intense, as if some great, unbearable pressure was being added, with no escape possible. This defines the capacity to consciously and fully embrace suffering.  It is a test, a challenge to live without all that we have held as essential. In the passage from loss to transformation, it has been my experience that people undergo at least one of the following as an expression of their conscious awareness that they are encountering this crucible of suffering. 

Table One includes statements I have derived from actual client interviews.

TABLE 1: Expressions of Being In The Crucible of Grief

I am helpless to change my life circumstances. The God I believed in does not exist/has betrayed me. I cannot get back what I have lost. I have lost hope for recovering life as I once knew it. My life as it was is over. I have lost everything. I am alone. I cannot make it on my own. I am unloved/unlovable. There is no one out there for me. No one knows/believes/validates my loss. My life feels empty. The pain feels unbearable. There are no good choices. I have no acceptable alternatives to facing fully what I have lost. I have been destructive. I cannot possibly restore what I have destroyed. I cannot be forgiven. I cannot forgive I cannot forgive myself. Understanding why this happened has not taken away my grief. My life has no meaning. Nothing of meaning remains. If life continues as is, the future will be without meaning. I will die if I continue to live this way. Death would be preferable to living this way.

Grieving individuals who are conscious of one or more of these realities often frighten others, including clinicians who are tempted to try to alter or distract from this reality rather than validate it. If one is to pass through this crucible, it will be from a full and thorough embracing of its challenge to existence. Those who companion others during these times need to respect the process they are engaging in, witness the suffering, validate its reality and the choice it represents while holding for them the belief in the grieving person's capacity to experience it fully and live to feel its healing and transformative consequences. There is perhaps no other time so critical for people to have a healing community than during the encounter with the crucible of grief.

I know of no way to train people to be validating of others facing these crucibles. It comes from having been there oneself-and having been validated. It is present from the level of the immune system to the level of a Higher Power, a healing process that only emerges when a clear definition of suffering of all these levels has been experienced. Without fully experiencing the crucible, the full power of healing is not engaged.

Second Question: What Remains? The Discovery of Healing

The second question, what remains or can be restored, emerges as people come to realize the full extent of what's lost.  Perhaps a lot is left. Change can also sometimes be for the better. What's been lost may have been something burdensome. The suffering is over although sadness often lingers: the challenge now is to heal. They may feel blessed with resources, grateful that they are loved and supported; their loss may have reminded them of how fortunate they are. It may have been a wake-up call to reorder their priorities and reinvigorate their lives.

Or perhaps there is nothing left that is tangible or material. Some people, in natural disasters, divorce, imprisonment and in war lose everything and everyone they love. Nothing remains and not even all of what they considered essential to living-the capacity to love, hope or believe in anyone or anything.

People are sometimes asked what keeps them going while facing the most devastating of losses, and they often don't have answers. Some keep going because something or someone else needed them, loved them, and believed in them. Sometimes their faith in God saw them through. Sometimes they don't know how or why they came through their grief; perhaps it was just curiosity about what else could happen in life. Those who have previously sought answers only from others or in relationships discover the power that lies within themselves or in their capacities to find healing forces in nature. Those who have previously sought answers only in their own uniqueness discover the healing power of love, the grace of Higher Power and in the commonalties of human experience.

Discovering what remains is the most intensely healing time of grief-a time when loneliness becomes solitude, and memories gain sweetness, providing a broader perspective. One begins to put the pieces of the puzzle back together-and to create a new picture. Many find themselves discarding old pieces that no longer fit the new, emerging portrayal of their life story.

The remarkable transcendence of this aspect of grief is the capacity, perhaps for the first time, to simultaneously consider both connections and the self as equal parts of who we are and what we are about. Such simultaneous consciousness is the beginning of an integrative process that creates new possibilities.

Third Question: What's Possible? Exploring Joy, Meaning and Love

There has to be more to life than grief, more than just sorting through the ruins of major losses and recouping what can be restored. One has the capacity for a larger identity than "victim," "bereaved" or "survivor." To find it, one must ask: What is possible?

Such a question challenges people to expand beyond a narrow focus on their loss, on death or the dying process, to relinquish the need to understand it further, to give up having it control their lives, to bear witness to an internal and external world that have been profoundly changed. Paula, for example, in the story at the start of this article, made it known that she was willing to meet with Jonathan because she wanted more in her life than hatred and revenge.

To explore the what-is-possible question is undoubtedly the hardest work of the three, for it means letting go of the relative comfort and support that is often found in righteous indignation, in the familiar comfort of bitterness and rage: it means forgiving the unforgivable, it means saying good-by to a way of life that revolved around grief and life-before-loss. It also means continuing to live while dying, and continuing to die while living fully.

To resolve the question "What is possible?" means not just committing to living life more fully, but to learning how to do so. It's one thing to consider our connections and our selves as parts of a larger whole; it's another to apply a lot of discipline and hard work to make it an everyday reality and to apply new learning. For instance, in the restorative justice programs the mediation rarely takes place before many years have passed, or before each participant has engaged in an extensive journey of self-discovery, of reordering priorities to allow the new life to flourish. In short, such new meaning may take nothing short of a transformation of who one is and what one is about.

     That transformation may mean emerging into times of ecstasy and bliss. That is a goal of Enlightenment in Buddhist teachings. In certain times and certain places, this becomes the ultimate experience, an experience of transcendent wholeness that can maintain itself into death as it did for Jonathan. Many living in Western society visit and appreciate this view of Enlightenment, even practice ways that increase its frequency and accessibility even during dying (which Steven Levine's¹⁸ notions of conscious living and conscious dying suggest).

It is my view, however, that the purpose of a given lifetime is to experience it fully, with its attachments to people, places, things, meaningful activities and the times in which we live. Ram Dass¹⁹ noted:

After one arrives at the summit, after going through the total transformation of being, after becoming free of fear, doubt, confusion, and self-consciousness, there is yet one more step to the completion of that journey: the return to the valley below, to the everyday world. Who it is that returns is not who began the climb in the first place. The being that comes back is quietness itself, is compassion and wisdom, is the truth of all ages. Whatever humble or elevated position that being holds within the community, he or she becomes a light for others on the way, a statement of the freedom that comes from having touched the top of the mountain.

The return completes the cycle. It is this cycle which brings the spirit to earth and allows the divine to feed once again the hopes and aspirations, the barely sensed possibility, that exists in each human being. This is the way of the bodhisattva, the maggid, the shayk, the enlightened soul, the saint. (pp. 211-212)

Hopefully, the return from the summit, the timing of our emergence into and staying with Enlightenment coincides with the moments preceding death-and following it. Prior to that time, our greatest freedom comes not from permanently or prematurely transcending life but living it fully, which means with the full maturation of our feelings, spirit, intellect and body in relationship with loving and caring about others and the universe we inhabit.  George Bernard Shaw²⁰ represented the essence of this view:

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.  I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no "brief candle" to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

The Search for Meaning in Loss

It is the meaning created from loss that can transform life. Losses that create a crucible of suffering can become gifts that stop the searching for something meaningful in outgrown places and in people with unfulfilled potential. That's how awareness of dying can open one to living. In experiencing helplessness and aloneness, many can be opened to healing forces. By validating the absence of meaning or love where it should be, one can surrender the limited ways of finding it; discover it in places and people otherwise overlooked. "It's like I had a flashlight before and I could only search in the darkness" commented Michaela several years after she had attempted suicide following a rape. "Hardly an adequate tool to explore the universe!  Now it's like I've come out in the sunlight, and can see the horizon and all the details around me. I've found things by giving up looking for them."

Meaning comes when context is expanded and old definitions of self and priorities are relinquished. "There's more to me than what meets the eye" is a statement often made by people who have reformulated their role, image, relationships and function following a loss.

How Grief Becomes Transformative

During workshops I've conducted for grief caregivers, I have asked participants, based on their experiences, to list the necessary conditions for people to transform their losses successfully. I have been amazed many times at the deep wisdom that has emerged (see Table Two).

 

 

TABLE 2:   What Transforms Life Crises?
Conscious Focus	Necessary Conditions
What's Lost?	Accept The Full Reality Of The Loss  A significant loss receives validation. The need to grieve is accepted Sanctuary is available. Safety permits sharing, reflection & discernment. We do the best we can. Someone/Some Higher Power: validates the loss.                 give us permission to grieve.            holds our hope.                     witnesses our process.
What Remains?	Ask: Is There Enough Left? Time creates opportunities for healing & perspective. We accept consequences & endings. We restore what is harmed We provide restitution We remember with our whole being. We integrate: social and solitary aspects of self. physical, emotional, sensory, spiritual, intellectual dimensions  of experiencing. Courage permits us to let go of what no longer is. Grace aids forgiving the unforgivable. Choose -- to live fully or to die.
What's Possible?	Focus On Possibilities Discover identities other than  "survivor" or "victim." There is more to us than what meets the eye. Reframe loss as more than tragedy: change priorities. become proactive. find new meaning. become self empowering. Empathy created from pain ministers to others. Become inclusive in love & connecting. Experience joy.

 Clearly what helps in transforming loss varies from the time when what is lost dominates consciousness, through the periods of recovery and restoration to those which challenge us to discover possibilities. As will be discussed later, these are both characteristics of the grieving person's consciousness and of their healing community.

It is in this context of grief as a response to loss that sense can be made of experiences that bring one close to death itself. Near death experiences, for example, are but one way that people experience the loss of the old way of living. For some, even these close encounters are not sufficiently powerful to transcend their old views and limited ways of experiencing life's realities. Some people deny their dying process and lose the opportunity to be aware that losing everything they have known and loved-can be surpassed. In short, there is no one way that is a guarantee that the limits of consciousness can be transcended -only hope for opportunities throughout life to do so.

An important element that is difficult to measure but may be critical to experiences that transcend consciousness is the existence of loving or transcending connections coming from outside the individual. Carl Jung's²¹ concept of the "collective unconsciousness" being made conscious may be one way to find such deep healing connections. Paul Ray's²² notions of Creative Culturalists suggest that healing communities emerge out of facing the challenges of the times in which we live and the realizing of the synergistic power of shared consciousness. Rupert Sheldrake's²³ "morphogenic fields" and Marilyn Ferguson's²⁴ "Aquarian conspiracy" also suggest that the nearly simultaneous emerging of such healing communities as are represented by the extent and breadth of the humanistic and transpersonal psychology forces, as well as hospice, restorative justice and volunteer community programs for (for example) children's grief. Healing communities are not mere coincidences, but reflect a collective conscious awareness of human potential and the needs of these times.    

The Mind beyond Ego: Healing Communities

 An effective community includes the capacity to be a healing force. People need the safety to openly admit to failings and limits, to permit grief over any significant loss. We need to go beyond the loneliness and isolation imposed by seeking change to the solitude that opens our consciousness to what Henry Nouwen26 would call our "inner mystery":

When we do not protect with great care our own inner mystery, we will never be able to form community. It is this inner mystery that attracts us to each other and allows us to establish friendship and develop lasting relationships of love. An intimate relationship between people not only asks for mutual openness but also for mutual respectful protection of each other's uniqueness. (P.31 Reaching Out)

When the inner mystery is protected, then safety can initiate the experience of community. It includes rather than excludes possibilities that community can serves well and continues to do so. Thus, a healing community can be defined as a gathering of two or more creatures in conscious awareness that believe that in their togetherness lies greater strength and opportunity than would exist otherwise. This is not restricted in time or place-or to human beings alone. Consider for instance, the horse whisperer trainings and the incredible connections between humans and grieving and traumatized animals.

As noted previously, we grieve in order to know we are not alone in this world. Grieving is a process of acknowledging the importance of our connections through validating their absence.  Grieving losses involves community witnesses and participants.

No one else walks our path through life. No one shares the whole of our grief. Sometimes there are traveling companions who share a common loss, but diverge to their unique passageway. We continue to meet kindred spirits along the way.

Sometimes there are gatekeepers who grant entry into the fullness of grief; they legitimize being right where we are, that we're not crazy, inspire us to keep going. At critical times there are validators, keepers of reality who mid-wife us through the crucible of grief. Sometimes there are innkeepers, who provide respite and sustenance, and share inspiring and humorous stories.  Sometimes there are story keepers, who witness the process, appreciate integrity and consider it a privilege to hear and hold tales of grief.

And sometime we'll encounter and embrace those who transcend all we have previously known, who challenge the limits to our perception of reality and our relationship to the universe of experience. That is clearly what happened for me in the beginning story.

Community is essential to the grieving process.  Community carries a sacred trust-to validate reality as well as what's irretrievable. Someone in a healing community may need to hold our capacity for hope, love and forgiveness as one descends into a personal underworld, a necessary step if we are to enlighten and embrace our personal frightening, dark, lonely, empty and neglected spaces.  Someone needs to witness the struggle and the suffering. Someone or something will then provide the challenge to reformulate and self-empower an ego willing to surrender to a collective wholeness. To do so, however, means admitting that out of our dark side, we have done harm, that we are responsible for our choices, no matter how unconscious we were of making them at the time, and to accept the consequences for these choices.

Basic to this community is the notion of "critical mass."  At least one person needs to believe in us. In the ideal healing community, there are enough participants to prevent overburdening any one individual's personal philosophy, view of reality or spirituality and to sustain the community for whatever length of time it needs to exist. This is not always possible.

Healing communities enhance reciprocity and the basic ebb and flow of giving and receiving not typically found in institutional or professional settings. They involve a bondedness that at one time survives challenges and at another thrives on them, that promotes a desire for the well-being of their members, and seeks or creates sources of inspiration, transformation, validation and comfort.

The Non-localized Mind, Group Consciousness, and Intentionality

Another approach to healing community comes from the studies of the "non-localized" mind. Physician Larry Dossey has documented extensive research support for the idea that people can be aware of and influence through meditation, intentionality, mindfulness and prayer what happens in other times and places26.  There are anecdotal stories, many coming out of the near death experiences studies, of contacts with others no longer living or who are at a great distance at the time of death or near death. People have had premonitions, visions of great clarity that were sometimes predictive, and at other times have accurately described events they could not have known through any direct experience or knowledge. Richard Moss27,  from his working with healing energy with the dying often saw an intense energy field surrounding a person who was actively dying, often in the form of profound wisdom or in ways that reached others not physically present.

These phenomena occur with those who constitute a healing community. A healing community is not based in time or space but on conscious intention and inclusive love. The intention is to be in a healing presence. Love can often but not always give direction to or an object for that healing energy and communication.

When a healing community is empowered to be a part of someone's process of dying, it is similar to what has already been noted as its role in facilitating transformation through grief.

When people find themselves without a healing community, at least not one that can journey with them around a particular issue or loss, when no one understands or validates where they are, they may seek a therapist, a minister, a family member or a friend, desperate to create or reconstitute a sense of connection.

Interestingly, Dossey has noted that those most resistant to the persuasiveness of the research on this "non-localized mind" are scientists who, for example, would say, "I wouldn't believe it exists even if there are a million such studies"28. Such individuals actually experience a near death experience and come away from it dismissing it as a physiological anomaly that does not alter their life. As William Hazlitt29 noted long ago, their "repugnance of death increases in proportion to (their) consciousness of having lived in vain"-which may suggest the necessity of questioning the spiritual basis for the careers and life philosophy behind their way to approach science.

Katharine Butler Hathaway30 suggests "You never realize death until you realize love." When people "turn toward the light," the light is frequently in the form of a loving presence. Whether this loving presence is in the form of a person living or dead, a higher power, the healing beauty and symmetry of nature or a life force from beyond self, people in grief or near death feel connected in ways they had not recognized previously.

Characteristics of a Healing Community

A true test of a healing community is its capacity to embrace the three realities noted earlier: the reality of suffering, of healing and of joy and love. Healing communities provide sanctuary, places for safe inner and outer personal explorations of the fullness of suffering. They can conduct rituals to remember, renew and celebrate as aids in healing. Courage is basic to community-to break through the shame that keeps old, deep wounds hidden, to encourage the reconciliation or resolution of unfinished issues-in order to fully experience joy and love. These are the activities that strengthen faith in a community.

 

Table 3: Characteristics Of A Healing Community

Safety Sanctuary Witnessing Validation Comfort Restoration Restitution  Forgiveness Freedom to Choose Challenge Empowerment Celebration

In addition, effective healing communities contain freedom to choose, to come and go, to explore individuality and to celebrate talents and relationships. Healing communities allow their members to die consciously in the embrace of others. They encourage risk-taking, for it is in taking risks that we learn about losing and about resilience, about the need for forgiveness and for wisdom. A healing community is an energy reservoir, filled with the spiritual waters of grace, love, faith, intentionality, consciousness, commitment and belief in the synergistic power of the whole.

In a healing community, the spiritual manifests itself in mutual respectful protection and in openness, grounded in the belief that suffering begets the desire to heal through restitution and restorative actions that permit forgiveness. Spirituality in healing communities is inclusive, permitting members to enter and exit on their own terms.

An example of a "healing community" occurred recently when a good friend of mine, Donna31, experienced a brain aneurysm from which she miraculously recovered:

Aneurysms of the type she experienced are usually fatal and almost always leave a survivor in a near vegetative state. Remarkably she was able to organize and actively participate in a transformative grief workshop six months later and to describe what had happened to her. She identified a time while she was comatose that corresponded to several gatherings of her friends and family around the country to pray for her in which she experienced a tremendous infusion of light from beyond that radiated throughout her body. This light felt not only cleansing but also healing. She felt that loving healing energy from without was a turning point in her recovery.

Many in her healing community did not pray for recovery but for acceptance, for a capacity to love and to accept whatever form or lack of it Donna would become.

     The presence of a healing community that includes those who specialize in the passage into death can help create rituals to make meaningful grief and dying. We need ways to remember the breaks and the wholeness of life stories, to overlap beginnings with those who live beyond our personal life span. For grief to gain meaning, a healing community provides support, comfort, and challenge. The spirit of community remembers the essence of people's lives, and empowers living stories well past individual lifetimes.

     Offering comfort, validation and challenge, healing communities can empower recovery, the grace to forgive, the courage to restore and the joy of renewal. Such a community witnesses rites of passage and rituals for remembrance and creates opportunities for genuine forgiveness. A community is healing when it encourages its members to let go in order to pass from one level of life to another. A personal healing community sings our song and tells our story as a part of the larger story of life.

What Is Needed To Heal

When grieving, people need to find the support of a healing community, or else create one. The shift in focus from loss to remembering and restoration and then to growth is the core of grief that cannot be accomplished wholly on our own. It is beyond the capacities of the individual ego to tolerate losing its place as central to all that exists. The shattering of personal ego happens many times and is essential if inevitable deaths are to be more than fear-filled meaningless tragedies. For the life that preceded death to have any meaning, something must be added to it -- something that came from beyond the isolated self. 

Without integration of mind, body and spirit, we cannot let go of an ego that blinds us to existence and meaning that go beyond a particular lifetime in a particular place with particular functions, roles and relations. Our journey includes a healing community, where personal vulnerabilities resonate with universal human conditions, where the spiritual connection with loved ones goes to another side of existence, whether darkness or blinding light.   

Though it may more often than not happens that way, the way one dies doesn't have to reflect the way one has lived. Death can be one final opportunity to transcend the limits of conventional realities. My friend Donna31 also loves to tell her "St. Margaret" story of her mother who at the end of a life that had been filled with alcoholism and neglect of her children, "reinvented" herself to the hospice workers who envisioned her as a wonderful, loving parent and grandparent at the end of a meaningful life. "St. Margaret" died peacefully with this illusion, surrounded by admiring hospice volunteers, while her family observed from a distance. Was this transcendence or delusion? Either way, her children still had to come to terms with the reality of her life in order to allow themselves to grieve their loss and accept her redefinition of her life.

Thus the question is raised, does the way life ends matter? In these times when life with illness can be extended while tortuous treatments take place, some begin fearing living more than dying itself. On the other hand, death, as was the case for my mother, whose last three days were pain free and a celebration of her healing community. It can also become one last opportunity to be loving and loved, to give hope that life until the last breath can have meaning, as it did for Jonathan at the time of his execution.

When asking if the way life ends matters, we need to trust ourselves. In spite of the broken or the liberating appearances of the dying process, humans do not alter what is meaningful. We can only alter form and appearance; the essence of who and what we are remains. The gossamer thread that weaves its way throughout our life stories remains unbroken.  Just as transformation from a loss is a coming into a new light,  it cannot be achieved without going through the darkness. And paradoxically, going into the darkness is often not as bad as our anticipation of it-- just as night itself has its own magic mystery. Even when the darkness is as bad as it seems, what can emerge is a test of courage, of the strength of connections or of the grace of a higher power that allowed survival and gain from the experience. Inevitably it is in darkness we discover what it means to be whole persons, how to disarm fears of that wholeness and to appreciate the strengths in weaknesses, the opportunities in  limits, the creativity in shadow and the appreciation of life in being mortal. This is the most fundamental truth I have learned about grief, and about life generally.

Conclusion

Curiosity and joyful living need not disappear if loss is accepted as a consequence of living. Nor is it necessary to reconcile to decline as the only future in the aging process, or to revenge as the only response to violence.  Transformative power can be discovered by living into and perhaps beyond death by accepting three challenges to conscious living: to validate the reality of suffering; to discover the need for reach beyond the self for healing; and to explore the human potential for joy, satisfaction, meaningfulness or love. Dying may represent one last opportunity to embrace this threefold challenge. We lose nothing in this final reformulation of the life of experiences-we simply modify the form of engagement with life.

References
1. Callahan, M. & Kelley, P. Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs and Communications of the Dying. Poseidon Press, New York, 1992.

2.  Simonton, O.C., Matthews-Simonton, S. , Crieghton, J.  Getting Well Again. Los Angeles, Tarcher, 1978.

3. Achterberg, J. & Lawlis, F.  Bridges of the Body Mind: Behavioral Approaches to Health Care. Champaign, IL. Institute for Personality and Ability Testing, 1980.

4. Schneider, J.M., Smith, C.W. & Whichter, S. The Relationship of Mental Imagery to White Blood Cell Function: Experimental Studies of Normal Subjects. Paper presented to the annual Meeting for the American Society for Experimental and Clinical Hypnosis. San Antonio, Texas, October 1984.

5. Schneider, J., Smith, C.W. Minning, C., Whitcher, S. & Hermanson, J. Guided Imagery and Immune System Function in Normal Subjects: A Summary of Research Findings.  In Kutzendorpf, R.  Imagery: Recent Developments Yale University Press; 1990

6. Lindbergh, A.M. Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead. New York; Signet, 1973.

7. Kubler-Ross, E. On Death and Dying. New York; Macmillan, 1969.

8. Rando, T. Treatment of Complicated Mourning. Champaign, IL: Research Press, 1993.

9. Wolfelt, A. Understanding Grief: Helping Yourself Heal. Center for Loss and Life Transitions. Ft. Collins, Co, 1988.

10. Engel, G. L. "Is Grief a Disease?" Psychosomatic Medicine, 1961, 23:18-22.

11. Bowlby, J. On Knowing What You Are Not Supposed To Know And Feeling What You Are Not Supposed To Feel. Journal of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, 3; 1979, 33-49.

12. Stoddard, S. The Hospice Movement: A Better Way to Care for the Dying. New York; Vintage Books; 1991.

13. Parnell, L. Transforming Trauma: EMDR. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.

14. Bandler & Grindner Frogs Into Princes

15. Schneider, J.  Clinically significant differences between grief, pathological grief and depression.  Patient Counseling and Health Education. 3, (1980):161-169.

16. Schneider, J. Finding My Way: Healing and Transformation Through Loss and Grief. Traverse City, MI: Seasons Press; 1994.

17. Klein, D.F. & Wender, P.H. Understanding Depression: A Complete Guide to Its Diagnosis and Treatment. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

18. Levine, S. Who Dies? An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying. New York: Doubleday, 1982.

19. Dass, Ram Journey of Awakening: A Meditators Handbook.  Bantam: New York, 1990.

20. Shaw, G.B. Man and Superman, London: 1903.

21. Bennet, E.A., C.G. Jung. London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1961, p. 88.

22. Ray, P. The Integral Culture Survey: A Study of the Emergence of Transformational Values in America. Sausalito, CA: Institute for Noetic Sciences, 1996. 

23. Sheldrake, R.

24. Ferguson, M. The Aquarian Conspiracy. J.P. Tarcher, 1980.

25.. Nouwen, H Reaching Out: The Three Movements of Spiritual Life. New York; Doubleday, 1975.

26. Dossey, L.  Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine.  HarperSan Francisco, 1993.

27. Moss, R. The I That is We. Celestial Arts, Los Angeles, 1981.

28. Dossey, L. Running Scared: How We Hide From Who We Are. Editorial Note. Alternative Therapies. Mar 1997 3(2); pp. 8-15

29. Hathaway, K.B. The Journals and Letters of the Little Locksmith.  1946

30. These stories are personal communications from my friend Donna O'Toole and are used with her permission.

Significant editorial help was given in the preparation of this chapter by David Johnson, editor of Dr. Schneider's books, Finding My Way, The Overdiagnosis of Depression and Grief's Wisdom. Mr. Johnson is currently editing Dr. Schneider's next book, Lifelong Journeys an examination of several of the major themes of this chapter.

John M. Schneider, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University, Colleges of Medicine in East Lansing Michigan. He received his doctorate from Oklahoma University. He has practiced as a therapist for over thirty years. In addition to his clinical work he has done significant research in grieving as a transformative process and in psychoneuroimmunology, specifically the effects of various types of imagery on human physical processes such as blood chemistry. John is the father of three daughters. He now lives with his wife, Sharon on Old Mission Peninsula near Traverse City, Michigan, and takes long walks near Lake Michigan, experiencing transcendent sunsets and the cycle of the seasons.

John Schneider can be reached at
PO Box 55
Old Mission, MI 49673
231 223-9299;
schnjoh@chartermi.net

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