Grief and Love

In my journey of self-healing and my liberation from the diet and hustle culture that I tend to write a lot about, I have discovered that these two emotions, grief and love, seem to be each other’s siblings. When we lose, what we love, we encounter grief. Working through grief, we rediscover the power of love.

We certainly like talking about certain kinds of love in our culture while ignoring others. The romantic and parental love are probably the most “advertised” of the bunch. Some people do mention a friendship love, but that one can already raise suspicions. Others sneer at the universal, selfless love for the humanity, believing it to be our misguided “selfish” need for belonging. There are many lists available online of various types of love, such as this example, citing Greek philosophers.

Which love am I speaking of when I say that it helps us process the grief, which is an unavoidable part of the self-acceptance journey? I would describe this type of love using the ancient Buddhist concept of loving kindness. Other useful descriptions for this feeling could be: compassion and care. This type of love can be equally applied to ourselves as to the others, and it will, with time, heal all our grief. It does takes practice though.

I see this a lot in the diet recovery journeys of others – the fear of gaining weight, the pain of looking at one’s changing body in the mirror, the sadness of having to buy new clothes and to say goodbye to the old ones. I experienced a similar grief myself when I started my non-diet “lifestyle”. I grieved for my imagined future “self”, which of course was supposed to be “fit, thin and healthy”. Some type of grief will most likely happen to everyone, regardless of whether our body size or shape changes.

As we learn to care for this sadness and pain with compassion and love for ourselves and everyone in the similar situation, we can develop trust in our bodies. For a while, we will accept ourselves and find peace from struggling against the natural biological processes our bodies conduct every single day. But, as we age, our bodies will change. They will not work as well as they used to. There will be pain. Much worse things will happen to our bodies, and we will feel repeatedly betrayed by them.

Therefore, the best thing we can do for ourselves is to learn to work through the grief already now, at this very moment. Even if it is just a passing thought that we can easily dismiss for now. By practicing the expression of self-love, care and compassion towards ourselves every day, we learn the most important tools we can apply when we lose much more than just our “thin”, “fit”, “healthy”, “young” or “whatever” body privilege.

If you are dealing with grief, finding additional help in psychotherapy, coaching, mindfulness, and other healing modalities may be very helpful. As a part of the free discovery call, I offer everyone a brief experience of RAIN meditation, which I find particularly helpful in resolving strong emotions and persistent disturbing thought patterns – and you can read a bit more about this tool in one of my previous blog posts.