Get SpiritLit: Release Your Grief to a Purpose: Release grief to a Purpose

By Jacqueline D. Bowden

“Get SpiritLit: Release Grief to a Purpose” is a spiritual self-recovery work which centers around the of loss of a spouse a few months before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic. This book helps in grief and other stressful times to change your focus attention to comforting meditation, pleasant breathing, brighter thoughts, and a purpose. It is not a substitute for medication or appropriate medical care and does not promise a cure. The goal of SLEM2 is to feel closer to the organizing intelligence and power of God to heal and replace grief with a purpose that benefits others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jun 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9781665759717

Jacqueline D. Bowden

First, as this is a spiritual book, my religious upbringing requires some comment. I was baptized and raised Methodist. I changed to Baptist during my first marriage. Second, my strong childhood curiosity and proclivity to reading and writing happened early and has persisted into these later years. Third, my academic and professional librarian and research experiences are broad, diverse, and universal. I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher, but after fifty years of meditation, many truths were revealed to me. Stoicism is the philosophy that best correlates with accepting life’s bumps as they come. I approached this book from the perspective of a Christian widow to provide comfort to people of all faiths. I write to inspire healing and resilience in the time of great loss of a spouse, a loved one, wars, pandemic isolation, and even the unique American sickness called mass murders.

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Copyright © 2024 Jacqueline D. Bowden.

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ISBN: 978-1-6657-5970-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-5971-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024909577

Archway Publishing rev. date:  06/11/2024

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction: Darkness and Light

About the Author

How to Use This Book

PART 1: WHAT IS GRIEF? A LONG, DARK NIGHT 60149.jpg

Chapter 1 Grief is Darkness

Chapter 2 The Lion, the Mouse—and Grief

Chapter 3 The Wet Journal: Grief Writing

PART 2: WHAT IS SLEM? SUNRISE 60151.jpg

Chapter 4 Search for Light

Chapter 5 SLEM Lights versus Dimmers

Chapter 6 Guide to the SpiritLit way

Chapter 7 Finding Your Purpose – The last stage of grief

PART 3: WHAT IS A STOIC SLEM LIFE? SUNNY 60153.png

Chapter 8 A Self-Controlled Day

Chapter 9 An Inspired Day

Chapter 10 A Blessed Day

Chapter 11 New Path, New Purpose, New Life

Bibliography

To all our loved ones who have passed on

We sorely miss you and honor your lights and purposes.

There is a voice that does not use words. Listen.

—Rumi,

thirteenth-century Persian Sufi poet

Self everywhere, shining forth from all beings, vaster than the vast, subtler than the most subtle, unreachable, yet nearer than breath, than heartbeat. Eye cannot see it, ear cannot hear it nor tongue utter it; only in deep absorption can the mind, grown pure and silent, merge with the formless truth. As soon as you find it, you are free; you have found yourself; you have solved the great riddle; your heart is forever at peace. Whole, you enter the Whole. Your personal self returns to its radiant, intimate, deathless source.

—Mundaka Upanishad

Spirit of the Living God,

Fall afresh on me.

—Daniel Iverson, 1963, Birdwing Music

PREFACE

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

—Willa Cather, American novelist

O Pioneers (1913)

The important life lesson I learned was the way to choose a husband who could teach me lessons while he was living but especially the lessons I learned from the storm of his death. The calm for a year after Oliver’s death was more than enough lesson to reflect on and to share in this book. He was my best teacher.

But it was the after-calm that prepared me to relax enough to write this book while receiving the calm man God was sending me—Clyde.

This book is about God’s light in calm and God’s light after a storm. It is dedicated to both my husbands.

I am so blessed. Thank you, God.

INTRODUCTION: DARKNESS AND LIGHT

Depression and anxiety are increasingly common in our society. Many of us are trying to cope with daily reports of gun violence, road rage, political and social intolerance, identity theft, unnecessary wars, the plight of refugees, and other issues that cause restlessness, worry, and sometimes anger.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many books on grief became available for anxiety relief. Only a few, however, offer a spiritual approach along with a specific healing technique.

To lighten my burden of grief during the pandemic, I reached for therapies, spiritual books, and meditation. I learned the Stoic way to release tearful resistance to the sober reality of the death of my husband a few months before COVID.

Facing that reality resulted in a hard-earned SpiritLit purpose and a SpiritLit way of life. I healed by writing this book about a unique meditation technique called SLEM.

What is SLEM and SpiritLit?

SLEM means the SpiritLit Eye Meditation process. It is a Christian form of meditation that I developed for relieving stress during grief, unrelated to COVID. In addition to focused breathing, SLEM moves you into focused attention on God’s divine light behind your closed eyelids. The immersion into God’s Spirit is like the baptism into water. This SLEM process can result in feeling SpiritLit, lit by God’s Spirit. It is similar to photosynthesis, the process through which plants get energy from light. A SpiritLit refers also to a self-realized spirit with a definite purpose for living.

Instant SpiritLit would be the ideal way to God, to be a Christian, and to know the Word. The intent is to lessen the need for indirect Bible study, Sunday school, preaching. Just praise and worship. Instant SpiritLit.

You get direct expectations from God.

You honor It by embracing and fulfilling those expectations.

You praise God for Its gifts, sovereignty, and Its power.

Holy, holy, holy. Amen

Stoic SLEM

Before SLEM and SpiritLit, my curious nature somehow coexisted with our household of devout Methodist worshippers. After leaving home for Alabama State University in Montgomery, I started a similar quest in George Bernard Shaw’s story The Adventures of Black Girl in Her Search for God.

The Black Girl has a sharp intellect and asks theological questions, which only exposes unremarkable answers. After she becomes dissatisfied with the inconsistencies of the answers from the missionary who converted her to Christianity, the girl leaves to wander in the forest, searching for God.

She meets several versions of God from the Bible and too many conflicting world philosophies. She rejects all the false gods and wishy-washy thinkers. After searching until she grows old, she is convinced that there is a true God to be found and resumes her search, rather than abandoning it.

As an older woman, I also resumed my search. Later, I found the book Socrates Express by Eric Weiner. After rereading the chapter on Stoicism, it persuaded me to use Stoicism as the perfect complement to SLEM and its connection to releasing resistance to the way things are. That sounds rather Stoic, after reading stacks of books on Stoicism.

People are not disturbed by things, but

by the views they take of them.

—Epictetus, (c.AD 55-135) Greek Stoic philosopher

This book flowed from the waves of distress flooding my soul. It swelled into Stoic SLEM meditation. The terms Stoic SLEM and SLEM are used interchangeably in this book. This spiritual meditation was a healing solution for grief and eighteen COVID-conscious months that will work for similar spiritual challenges in the future.

SLEM absorbs that light from within, along with practicing Stoicism from without. Together, the daily changes further developed into a bolder Stoic SLEM way of living.

Mindful SLEM

Mindfulness and SLEM both focus attention on breathing in the present moment, whether in grief or not. We spend so much of our time constantly wondering about what we will do tomorrow or what we wish we could have done in the past. The goal of meditation is not to stop yourself from thinking. The goal is to allow the constant flow and release your thoughts by bringing your attention back to the here and now.

According to Jon Kabat-Zinn, master of mindfulness, The core invitation of mindfulness is for you to befriend yourself. That means recognizing and inhabiting your own intrinsic wholeness and beauty in the only moment any of us ever has—namely this one.

According to Medical City Healthcare of Dallas, Texas,

Meditation can be used in combination with other mental health treatments and is generally safe. If you have any concerns about a meditation practice, you may want to consult your doctor or work with a certified teacher.

Self-care habits during grief like mindfulness and SLEM meditation are very helpful if practiced daily. Although they are not grief cure-alls, there are several potential benefits of daily meditation that I discuss in this book.

God Is Genderless

God the Spirit is also discussed in this book...a lot. But pronouns such as He, She, Him, Her, His, Hers are insufficient to address God. God is not an actual being but is being Itself, life Itself.

God is light and the Creator of all things. Because God created everything and is infinite, It has an infinite list of names, including Spirit. I refer to God as Spirit and It throughout this book. It is neither a He nor a She. And, of course, I mention the many other names for Almighty God.

God’s Aseity

This spiritual book is based on the aseity of God. Aseity is the property by which a being exists of and from itself. It is the spiritual theory that God does not depend on any belief or cause other than Itself for Its existence. It creates whatever It wants whenever It wants.

This book is about the wise way to relate to God that was divinely inspired. During the year of my SLEM and SpiritLit epiphany, I was open-minded, and my research was not overshadowed by organized religion.

Christian and Non-Christian Meditation

SLEM is offered as a simple Christian meditation for people who worship God and Christ. It is for those who believe in God and Its words as truth.

SLEM is a more natural enlightening practice than some religious practices. Enlightenment is a universal phenomenon of the religious and irreligious.

This is a book for the open spirit, loosely tied to but not driven by organized religion. SLEM is knowing the sovereignty of God through closed-eyelid meditation; it encompasses Stoicism and enlightenment, the SpiritLit state.

SLEM is knowing the God of dead bodies, now with awakened souls. God is too great for us to contain or bear, even within the Holy Bible. That is the reason we shiver when we encounter God as the light behind our closed eyelids.

This book challenges anyone who attempts to do the following:

• Pigeonhole grief stages

• Lower the importance of spiritual meditation and mysticism

• Consider SLEM too mystical and prefer grieving, rather than feel the Holy Ghost or feel sanctified

Scriptures

The Holy Bible is God’s Word and Laws revealed in scriptures.

7 The law of the Lord is perfect,

refreshing the soul.

The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy,

making wise the simple.

Psalm 19:7 New International Version

Though the scriptures say, make a joyful noise, my writing and SLEM are my quiet forms of praise to God. My scripture references are taken from the King James Version of the Holy Bible. I selected other versions to make God’s Word clearer.

I base my life on God’s Word that is absolute truth because it is revealed with authority and when released, it is unbound.

⁹ for which I am suffering even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But God’s word is not chained. 2 Timothy 2:9 NIV (New International Version)

Every Word of God is complete down to the tittle, the last jot. It is the fixed standard and the only point of reference to all things.

God’s Word is perfect, the voice of God is sufficient.

¹⁶ All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, ¹⁷ so that the servant of God[a] may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

2 Timothy 3:17 NIV

Human words are also important to me. Get SpiritLit also includes my private grief journal that chronicles the beginning of the loss of my first husband, into the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, then to the low point of my grief as it paralleled with the tapering off of the COVID scare. I tell my own grief story in chapters 2–4.

My Wet Journal

In addition to reading Stoic and other philosophy books during those gloomy two years, I expressed this grief every day. Chapter 3 reveals my mental, physical, and social struggles through grief during the pandemic.

I caution you that journaling and writing about your grief is very difficult but also very therapeutic. One year of revisiting and writing about the most painful events and memories of your life every day is like scraping scabs from healing wounds.

Some of these were intrusive memories that came suddenly when I was feeling normal. These memories were involuntary, and I was not doing or thinking anything related to my husband’s death. These unexpected memories bothered me more because I was not prepared for the emotional turmoil they brought up.

My hard grieving started July 2019 and continued into the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in January 2020 and coincided with the publishing of this book. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on May 4, 2023, the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency declaration.

The Language of Grief

I avoided attending church during grief for fear of seeing a well-meaning church friend who might trigger another sobbing episode with insensitive words of comfort that were devoid of feelings.

This book may guide well-intended comforters who often fail to say the best words at the worse time ever in a griever’s life.

Whits—Revelations and Resolutions

As a retired educator and librarian, I asked myself, What is God trying to teach me about life through Its light and this grief? What am I to learn that I can share to help others?

I reveal the answers in chapter 9, Revelations, and chapter 10, Resolutions. I call these universal truths Whits.

Music

I also included a few lines of song lyrics—I Can’t Stop Loving You, This Little Light of Mine, and other melodies—in various chapters that leaked into my mind. These songs evoked the exact unspoken feelings of longing and despair that were buried deep inside me.

Sad religious tunes like Let the Church Say Amen disturbed my rare peace and caused a steady flow of tears. Sometimes my sadness was accompanied by the endless loop of the melody You Are the Wind beneath My Wings. Songs like that continued filling the well until I thought I would drown in my tears. I forced my tears to dry by splashing chilly water on my face, like a quiet finale to an evocative Schubert piano nocturne.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

First, as this is a spiritual book, my religious upbringing requires some comment. I was baptized and raised Methodist. I changed to Baptist during my first marriage.

Second, my strong childhood curiosity and proclivity to reading and writing happened early and has persisted into these later years.

Third, my academic and professional librarian and research experiences are broad, diverse, and universal. I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher, but after fifty years of meditation, many truths were revealed to me. Stoicism is the philosophy that best correlates with accepting life’s bumps as they come.

I approached this book from the perspective of a Christian widow to provide comfort to people of all faiths. I write to inspire healing and resilience in the time of great loss of a spouse, a loved one, wars, pandemic isolation, and even the unique American sickness called mass murders.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

This book is intended as a guide for practicing daily the SLEM way of meditation to have an encounter with the infinite and to overcome grief and other anxieties.

I read the classic grief stages in the 1969 book On Death and Dying by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross when my mother died in 1980. After my husband’s death, I knew there must be more recent studies to correct my perspectives on death and grief.

According to Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor in her book, The Grieving Brain. O’Connor, who is an associate professor of clinical psychology at the University of Arizona, reported on the Changing Lives of Older Couples research project (CLOC) in 2001. This study of 1,500 participants presented a new paradigm for grief categories, rather than grief stages. These categories have been replicated in several other such studies for determining the best method of clinical relief.

The study determined four categories, or patterns, of grief after the death of a loved one:

1. Resilient—never developed depression after the death

2. Chronic grieving—depression that begins after the death and is prolonged (more than three years

3. Chronic depression—depression that began before the death and continues or worsens after a death

4. Depressed improved—preexisting depression that abates after the death

Grief is a complex of emotional stages and categories. These four categories do not replace the Kübler-Ross five stages. Grief is a blend of both, like layers of a cake baked with a thin filling between.

If you think you are in either of the chronic grieving or depression categories, I encourage you to find the best professional grief therapist.

You may use SLEM in combination with other treatments; it is generally safe. I practiced this while in grief therapy with Dr. M. for a year. If you have any concerns about the practice, you may want to consult your doctor or work with a certified psychologist.

If you are not in either category, I suggest you read this entire book and read some of the sources listed in the Bibliography.

Part One: The Long, Dark Night—Grief is a heavy mourning veil blocking all light.

This first part includes chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4 that are short-story versions of my grief and coping experiences to inspire you to survive any type of loss. They are the same story written in four different but entertaining formats: (1) lion/mouse fable; what I learned; moral of the story; (2) cave myth; (3) wet grief journal, and (4) revelations scriptures and resolutions scriptures.

Part Two: The Sunrise—The dark veil is lifted to the blinding light.

Chapters 6 SLEM versus Dimmers shows roadblocks to avoid with this practice. The detailed instructions for a fourteen-day 2xDaily SLEM challenge in chapter 7.

All bereavement needs some bright lights. Most SLEM sessions light the way to inner awareness and profound realizations and resolutions as bonuses.

Part Three: Full Daylight—The mourning veil is tossed out with the COVID face masks.

Also in Part Three, I share revelations and grief resolutions; show what daily life is like; add more inspirations; and reveal SLEM benefits and unexpected grief blessings.

Who Will Benefit?

My purpose for writing this book is not to tell you what grief is like for everyone. No psychologist or any research study can tell you the levels and duration of grief for everyone. You must experience it yourself to understand your process. I am sharing what I learned from my process. I learned to heal myself, grieve like a strong Stoic, and accept that we will continue to grieve a death if we are alive.

I wrote this book to illustrate what grief is like for me so it will comfort and inspire readers to practice SLEM, to accept Stoicism, and to find a purpose to replace grief.

SLEM is also for believers who want to get back in sync or to magnify and deepen their relationship with God. SLEM and a closer walk every day with God can help control the struggle between the divine spirit and the sinful flesh.

This practice is not only for Christians. Get SpiritLit is for any curious reader but especially for Christian, Jewish, and Islamic believers; nonbelievers; and pagans in the Western civilization of the twenty-first century. I respect all spiritual and religious people and all humane beliefs that benefit all souls.

It is not only for widows, widowers, and orphans. It is for anyone who needs to cease stressing and resisting things they cannot change, especially the loss of a spirit they knew and loved well. It is for anyone with a sound mind to be aware of emotional traumas and personal limitations. It is for anyone who desires greater peace, self-awareness, and higher spiritual experiences in this vast universe.

Inner peace is available for anyone who accepts God as the divine source. God is available no matter what their circumstances or beliefs, in grief or transitioning from it.

This book is for the religious and irreligious who worship or do not worship the God of Christians, Jews, and Muslims. It is for all open-minded persons who are curious about death, grief, meditation, God, and the Trinity, and who seek a way to become a better human for self and the world.

Widowhood

Get SpiritLit illuminates a path for anyone traveling the road of widowhood. It offers a deeply intimate look at widowhood through the lens of a SpiritLit. It shows you how to apply Stoic thought to thrive in life after a loss. This book inspires the bereaved to climb above grief suffering. Face grief, SLEM Release it, and move on. This is not just SLEM for the widow’s soul.

What Is SLEM Release? More Angst Relief

Angst was on its way out. I infused Transcendental Meditation from the East with my Protestant God concept from the West. This blend was later enhanced as SLEM Release. I later combined SLEM with my reinterpretation of the Sedona Method as a type of SLEM Release healing.

The Sedona Method is a practice developed by Lester Levenson that offered effective steps to release the most uncomfortable thoughts and feelings.

First, I released cancer fears with a small pebble. I did this several times before feeling lighter. I released cancer fear as though it were a pebble. This step deflated my balloon of resistance throughout my health challenge. After releasing fear several times, I moved to the next stage.

I flowed into slow breathing in, out … here … now … God, God, God—following the lights—then I prayed to the only other one present, It. Even after Oliver’s death, I was determined to experience that euphoria again, despite my depressive grief.

SLEM Release allows breathing in the body and the God mantra in your mind to slow down. This cools down the body and mind to recharge for something good after the session.

The good is as pleasant and sweet as a white gardenia. This recharge reduces anxiety-like grief, even in a noisy, busy place, because you will have trained your mind and body to rest at will.

How many techniques, grief books and therapies have you tried with little or no success? In desperation, I tried SLEM again and revised it to Stoic SLEM; I climbed out of depression and reached the mountain summit with healing and a new reason for living.

To find, transcend, or direct grief to another place, one needs help from an objective, superior being who creates and re-creates all lives. Belief in and the connection with It are required to uncover your full potential. Stoic SLEM your grief away in exchange for your creative gift (writing, painting, pottery, woodworking, fashion design, floral arranging) to overcome your state of grief anxiety.

We cannot abolish stress and grief, but we can master them and control their negative effects on us. Practice SLEM and let your little light shine brighter. Give Spirit your grief to transform.

When it is your time to change, you will have increased the love of God more than many people. Then, you will not mind returning to God from this world.

Are you ready for the new grief stages to

• follow the Light of God through Christ;

• commune and SLEM Release daily;

• become a sanctified SpiritLit;

• heal your grief and claim peace;

• find life clarity and life purpose;

• face the future with confidence; and

• build a life that allows you to love and be loved again?

Learn about SLEM and how becoming a SpiritLit can speed up recovery and put you on a path of a new purpose and a happy relationship.

We know more about grief than we want, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. I am sharing the SLEM way to move up from a dark grief cave to the bright mountaintop with a firm purpose in hand and with even more benefits.

PART ONE

WHAT IS GRIEF?

A LONG, DARK NIGHT

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CHAPTER 1

GRIEF IS DARKNESS

Grief was a heavy mourning veil someone pulled over my eyes that blocked all light. It was a dark shroud enveloping my home after the sudden death of my husband, Oliver, July 25, 2019.

Grief was an endless process of bittersweet memories while I was forced into recreating a new identity. With all this darkness, I could not see any lighted path to healing and replacing grief with hope and a normal future.

Please, God. Please help me stop these tears, this perpetual fountain. How many tears could I possibly have remaining?

By Fall 2020, I did not think I had any more tears left, but I realized that if I have memories, I’ll always have tears.

Grief is a moist cave. Grief is a new, uncharted territory. Some grief caves are deeper, darker, and wetter for some, more than for others. Love crushed me down to the deepest, darkest, and wettest kind.

Grief is filled with fury, fear, sadness, and a terrifying blankness that nothing can soothe. Grief is a thought and a feeling. I just miss him. This is a thought and a feeling. I can’t change these feelings, even though they make me very sad. With my neck and shoulder muscles tense, I wailed at the silent walls. This may never change.

Nothing ever goes away until it has taught what we need to know.

—Pema Chodron,

American Buddhist and author

Grief was caused because I was not just resisting God’s will for me and Oliver. I was resisting life without Oliver, life as his widow and no longer his wife.

I will never forget him, so I’ll always grieve. Always and forever. But Oliver is at rest, resting with no memories and no tears, as it should be.

Now what? Choose how to respond to the thoughts. You can only wait and see what happens, but make sure you’re holding on to something steady when it starts moving again.

If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil … the Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your needs in parched places [places that lack love]. (Isaiah 58:9, 11)

Hard Grief Is Hard Darkness

On some lonely nights, I woke terrified of being completely overcome by this darkness. I felt out of control and was afraid of having a nervous breakdown. Thinking that I would never put the pieces back together again. It was painful and gut-wrenching.

I was already in grief darkness. Then, in December 2019, the entire world started turning darker fast, with the beginning of COVID-19 pandemic. This dark shadow hovered over bright spirits with panic, fear, anxiety, and death. COVID-19 was a worldwide health threat that caused great losses—lives, jobs, school days, and businesses. I was in double darkness.

Hard darkness is when you can’t see anything, not even your own hand in front of your face. It’s like being blind but worse. You don’t know where you are, what time it is, or if anyone else is there with you. You feel alone and scared, and you wish for a glimmer of light to break the gloom.

COVID-19 also caused me to sink down into hard grief. Hard grief was when I was suffering with personal non-COVID grief, while every human being was under attack by an invisible enemy. My simple black grief ribbon was then twisted into an oversized gray choking knot for two years.

COVID was a King Kong–like monster that squeezed us tighter and tighter each day, with enormous fists that were filled with death and that crushed and closed buildings. We shivered in fear, isolated in our homes by restrictions, food shortages, and shutdowns.

It attacked our bodies with spikes of protein of over fifty mutations genetically designed to survive by spreading to get into our cells. And its self-created mutations gave COVID the ability to escape weak immune responses. It won the fight and became more transmissible from person to person because many leaders resisted world health warnings, and many humans refused to wear a mask.

Some mutations were created to allow the virus to spread more easily or to make it resistant to treatments or vaccines. As we helped the virus spread, it strengthened and became harder to stop.

My grief during COVID-19 became darkness to the second power. It, like humans, had genetic instructions for learning to survive longer. COVID-19 was naturally inevitable, but many deaths were preventable. Helping the virus spread filled many minds with anger, misery, confusion, sorrow, and sanity.

Too Much Darkness-Am I Going Insane?

Months before the COVID monster, my brain was already grief-confused. It had no logical reason for not locating Oliver, whom it had tracked every day for four decades. My brain could not grasp the concept that Oliver no longer existed in this dimension with me.

It asked in frustration, Why is Oliver absent? Why can’t I find him anymore?

No logical answers caused it to miss him and to long for him, triggering the flood of tears. My brain also tried to fill in Oliver’s void with phantom sounds, visions of him, and expecting him to step inside the bedroom any minute.

I realized that I needed to imagine Oliver as an angel in heaven or as an angel singing in our church choir stand. My brain just could not adapt to all this newness all at once.

After forcing myself to write thank-you cards and death-related paperwork, my brain was learning to sign letters and Christmas cards and as only Jacqueline and not Jacqueline and Oliver. It noticed that I threw our joint mailing labels in the trash. It also noticed that I washed my laundry rather than our laundry.

My Brain Needed Structure to Keep Sane

After a week of nonstop grief episodes, visions, and loss of appetite at the dawn of pandemic shutdown, I wondered, How dark can it get?

To keep my hold-it-together sanity, I needed the tight, binding straps of structure, focus, and routine. Instead of allowing sad thoughts and virus fears to flood my brain, I needed to control and shrink and release my searching, missing, longing thoughts. Overthinking the crisis only led to miserable hard-crying floods. I was desperate for anything to overshadow those thoughts with structured, focused, objective thoughts and fewer feelings.

My brain needed something I could control. It needed uniform, repetitive, controlled structure, available in well-written books, daily meditation, and a time-filling purpose. My brain needed a focused daily routine.

Without a focused meditation routine, we are ego-driven heathens, depending only on our wits and physical strength. But our minds and bodies are too filled with fears, evil, worry, doubt, and grief to calm down.

I was in a messed-up state. I could not master daily meditation without constant practice. I was unable to sit still and focus on my breaths while memories of Oliver swirled