I have a severe case of the SADS. I'm entitled. My dog is dying. My 14+ year best friend companion is leaving her physical body, and I have to figure out how to be in relationship with her in an entirely different way. I mentioned in a prior post (A Day for Grief but No Tears), I lost my tears. I don't have the capability to cry like I once did. This makes the sads particularly difficult. Feeling the feels and letting myself grieve looks very different than it did once upon a time, when I was normal. (what is normal?)
Grief is our friend. He is a master at holding space so we can feel our feels and let them pass. But when we see him coming, we tend to run as fast as we can in the opposite direction because feeling those feels isn't very pleasant. Grief takes our hand and walks us through the dark brambly forest. It's scary. It's ugly. It's painful. Yet, we *know* that when we do surrender to him, and we let ourselves process the pain, we *always* get through to the other side. That's where Love lives.
When we run from him, Grief has to get clever in how he helps us through the dark forest of sads. He has to disguise himself in other costumes in order to get us to pay attention to him. I finally learned to listen to take his hand, to listen to him, and to walk with him through the pain. I've figured out how to be MINDFUL about grief and let myself process it through.
This week, as I came to the decision that it is time to let Sukha cross over the rainbow bridge, I had all kinds of symptoms of the sads that didn't look like the normal grief.
Tummy troubles
Nausea
Extreme exhaustion & fatigue
Feeling heavy or dense
Sudden weight gain or loss
Impatience
Irritation
Feeling cold or chilled
Increased monkey mind
Brain fog
Anger & Rage
Loss of appetite or increased hunger
Loss of time
Once I did come the final decision, I took a day off of everything, and I let myself just be. I binge-watched stupid reality tv. I sat in my sunroom and stared out the window. I let myself pick at my food without eating it. I slept. I slept a lot. I took a lot of walks. I took longer than normal showers. And, since Sukha doesn't like to be touched, I asked my puppy Tosha to cuddle me, more than she wanted. So I played with her. Magically, yet not surprisingly, her play was the hardest thing I did, but the thing that made me feel the best.
If you have a case of the sads, and you don't understand why, perhaps you are having symptoms that don't look like grief but really are grief. A mentoring session with me can help you learn to listen to the cryptic language of Grief, and I can give you practical and actionable tasks to help you process the grief and move on.
One of the best ways to get through grief is to BREATH THROUGH IT. I highly recommend the Focused Breathing Course.