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5 Mindfulness Strategies You Can Adopt to Help with Grief and Loss
Managing this grief has taken me on a journey. This is how I’ve coped
In many ways, 2020 was a year of mass grief as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world and loss became part of our everyday lives. At 22, I was lucky enough to have never personally lost a loved one. As a result, when it hit me fast and hard during February 2020, I didn’t know how to cope with the range of emotions.
One day I had a 24-year-old brother, and the next, he was gone. At first, I could barely believe it had happened. It seemed surreal. But during the course of a day, I would feel this unrelenting sadness, frustration, guilt, and anger all rolled into one. And just at this time, the world was also coming to a standstill due to the pandemic, and I didn’t even have the support of my loved ones around me. And I know that I was far from the only one during this time.
Managing this grief has taken me on a journey — and that journey is in no way complete. Still, I have developed some practical strategies to help cope with the myriad of emotions that can come with the process. These are based on my experience during the past year, so they are not guaranteed to work for you, but I hope they will give at least someone a bit of guidance.
Like most challenges in life, regardless of the context, grief is yet another one that takes time to overcome. In many aspects, you’ll never entirely get over the loss of someone close to you, and this isn’t an attempt to claim that it is possible, but merely a selection of my tried and tested management strategies.
What Is Mindfulness, and Can It Be Useful during the Grieving Process?
Before losing a loved one, I had come to regard “mindfulness” as a buzzword that self-help gurus on the internet liked to boast about. I didn’t know how to incorporate it into ways that could help me or how to use it as a mindset to approach life and help with difficult times. My first experience of mindfulness was in my third year of university; when I saw a councillor for my anxiety. She mentioned square breathing to me and how it could potentially help.
