Soul's Code

A Scandinavian tradition on Christmas Eve is to illuminate the graves — and spirits — of departed loved ones with candles (left). We dedicate this series to those who have recently suffered the loss of a loved one — especially during the holiday season.

When others around you are in a partying mood, it’s the most glaring time to take a loss.

We share the following guidance for dealing with loss from first-hand experience, not from a distance. We felt called because of the striking synchronicity of so many recent deaths in the friends-and-family network of Soul’s Code itself.

The penultimate loss is a death in your immediate household — a being who lives with you, or whom you have lived with.

But these steps can also help those who are feeling down after a break-up, divorce, job loss — or even literally losing part of yourself due to surgery, illness or an accident.

We begin this series on a personal note . . .

Taking Care of No. 1

Processing loss draws down an enormous chunk of your psyche’s bandwidth. The death of a loved one is exhausting. You keep asking yourself what’s wrong with your because you’re staggering around as if you’ve been hit by a truck.

Your energy anatomy is metabolizing the loss. Other forms of loss — betrayal, abandonment, down-sizing, divorce or even losing a part of yourself because of surgery – can come close to death in the energetic drain they exert.

This is the time to ground yourself in a single truth . . .

A Whirlpool of Emotions

After the death of a loved one, every funeral home in America will give you a psychological tip-sheet that cites the five stages of grief. It’s cribbed from the 1969 book, On Death and Dying, by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a Swiss-born psychiatrist who almost died as an infant (she was a two-pound triplet). Kubler-Ross’ five stages are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

That paradigm can also apply to losses like break-ups and lay-offs. Or, say, loss of freedom faced by white-collar criminals like media baron Conrad Black (left) who have been sentenced to federal penitentiary (Black is still stuck in the denial and bargaining stages).

Forty years later, Kubler-Ross is a little too linear. Here is our take on the stages of grief, based on collective first-hand experience.

What to Say to Someone Who has just Lost a Loved One

Woody Allen’s aphorism that “80 percent of success is simply showing up” is the cardinal rule when helping out someone who has just had a parent or loved one die on them.

If you want to be an anchor for a friend or lover who is in that place — first thing, show up! For the funeral. Or if someone’s had surgery, or been in an accident — at the hospital. If you can’t visit in person, do flowers, cards, tributes, or phone calls.

How do you know the right thing to say? Here, people fall into two distinct camps:

Loss, Trauma and Somatic Therapy

On the opening page of Love in the Time of Cholera, Nobel-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez set down one of literary fiction’s most arresting images of death: He writes that a character who commits suicide “had escaped the torments of memory.”

The flip-side is that when the person who dies is one of our own, their death — however it happens — logs a new memory of torment for we who remain living. Peter Levine, a biophysicist who became a renowned psychologist and author, goes further. Any death, divorce, or loss is not just a physiological trauma but a physiological trauma to your nervous system.

“Because traumatic events often involve encounters with death, they evoke extraordinary responses,” writes Levine. “The very structure of trauma, including hyper-arousal, dissociation. and freezing, is based on the evolution of predator/prey survival behaviors. The symptoms of trauma are the result of a highly-activated, incomplete biological response to threat, frozen in time. By enabling this frozen response to thaw, then complete, trauma can be healed.”

How to Take a Leap of Faith

After the immediate shock of death or a life-loss, expressing your emotions and sharing your story of the loss helps to discharge some of the trauma. But if you cling to the story of that loss for years, the narrative itself has become a self-reinforcing source of trauma. You’ve used the story to form a pain identity.

Eckhart Tolle‘s rare lecture, Living the Liberated Life and Dealing with the Pain Body, is both a brilliant exposition on this phenomenon — and an induction into an meditative and expansive state. It’s encapsulated in his great line about loss: “The winds of grace blow through that hole.”