AN ANCIENT PRACTICE FOR
HEALING FROM GRIEF Sometimes all the hype around the parade of holidays is too much to bear if you have experienced death or loss. Maybe you lost a job, a home, a friend or a loved one. Maybe COVID and the pandemic were just too much to bear. Maybe you are a caregiver or have a child in the throes of addiction. What can you do besides stay inside, selfisolate, and count the hours until it’s over? I totally get it…I was there.
I
lost my twenty-seven-year-old son, Ben, to a heroin overdose. The dark days that followed were filled with ruminations about the past and all that went wrong and projecting the loss of my son into the future. Ruminating is defined as thinking deeply and repetitively, and this repetitive thinking is like deeply digging the same neural pathways in our brains until those pathways are so deeply entrenched it’s hard to remember anything else.
Many traditions talk about the practice of beauty as a way of rewiring the brain and halting rumination on negative thoughts. What is this practice? When we are feeling stuck in stagnation and despair, we forget about all the things that used to make us happy: chocolate, flowers, art, sunrises and sunsets, walking or hiking. All the small things that delighted us, way back before all the loss. Even though I understood the concept rationally, I had to put it into practice. I knew I was spiralling downward, and as months of inaction passed me by, Ben’s birthday, Death Day, and the holidays were right in front of me again. I knew I needed to take action and pull myself up before another year passed by.
But, we all can change our perspective because our brains are wired that way; they are dynamic. It’s called neuroplasticity, and it is based on how our neural networks operate. The science of neuroplasticity suggests we can rewire the circuits of the brain, and create new, more positive associations with our day-today experiences.
B Y K A R E N V. J O H N S O N , J D 19
