Feel your feelings with these two poems
Sometimes in a therapy session, a poem comes to mind. Depending on the client and the session, I’ll mention the poem and ask the client if I can send it to them. Other times, I go with my gut and follow up from our session with a poem tucked inside an email. A well-timed poem can feel like a gift (at least to me). Poems can be such succinct, magical forms of communication.
The following two poems are favorites for me to send when there’s an invitation to feeling all the feelings, not just the “good” or comfortable ones, but the ones that some of us (me included) can put off feeling. I’ve listed my favorite lines below, but I encourage you to read the poems in their entirety:
The Guest House by Jalaluddin Rumi (Translated by Coleman Barks)
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Go to the Limits of Your Longing by Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by Joanna Macy)
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
What to Say to Someone Grieving
Recently, I wrote a reflection for the Center for Mindful Psychotherapy’s blog on what to say to someone grieving, rooted in my own lived experience of loss. No two people grieve alike, so this is an offering or series of suggestions, rather than an “always applicable” how to guide.
Recently, I wrote a reflection for the Center for Mindful Psychotherapy’s blog on what to say to someone grieving, rooted in my own lived experience of loss. No two people grieve alike, so this is an offering or series of suggestions, rather than an “always applicable” how to guide. I hope you find something in here that sparks a way to support someone in your life or feel a sense of validation with your own experience. And if not, that’s ok too. In the “huh, not for me” I hope a deeper sense of your own self understanding unfolds from this:
Despite being a therapist who specializes in grief and has experienced my own losses, there are times when someone in my life suffers a loss and I find myself frantically trying to find the “right words” to show them support. This happened a year ago and, in a moment of uncertainty, I took my question to google. The results were terrible, predominantly clichés that I remember hating when I experienced the sudden loss of my father 16 years ago. Sayings like “They are in a better place,” “Everything happens for a reason”, or “Time heals all wounds.”
I ran a grief group a few years ago and one of our most engaging nights stemmed from a conversation about so many of those popular “grief” sayings. They may come from a good place, but can make those grieving end up feeling really empty, isolated, and dismissed. So if perhaps an uncertain Google search has brought you here, I want to offer up some alternatives of what you can say to someone grieving.