June Issue of Tidewater Woman Article

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How do you rebuild your stamina

after experiencing a terrible loss? How do you recover from the death of a child, a spouse, or a family member? How do you put your life back together after a divorce? How does anyone recover from a fire, tornado, hurricane, or flood? Everyone handles loss differently. Some people simply never fully recover.

Many people feel that somehow they are so changed that their former selves will never return. Others feel that they age, that the trauma, the emotional bodyblow is so severe that it can cripple them for a very long time. Some people note that while they feel they have aged, they don’t necessarily look older. They just feel older.

Some feel that something has died inside of them, that the very heart for living has gone out of them. Others feel they can never love in the same way and that they have to hold on to who and what they love more possessively. Many feel an exquisite loss of control over their lives. A profound sense of insecurity develops around them, and they begin to withdraw.

If you have experienced any type of loss, perhaps you can relate to these feelings. If you have observed similar behaviors in a friend, worker, or family member, you can perhaps relate to how hard this is by observing it.

There is no easy answer to rebuilding physical, emotional, and spiritual strength after you feel that the life has been knocked out of you. There is no pill, potion, powder, or procedure that will take away the pain. There is no magic that makes the grief waves that keep coming, ever more slowly, turn off. The only aspect that makes this comprehensible is the concept of experience. We don’t enter mortal life to sit and be idle. We come into the physical realm to feel life. For example, one woman can’t explain to either a man or another woman what childbirth is like—it just isn’t possible. You have to experience it. Why do people go to war? They go to experience the extremes of emotion. If this were not so, then there would be no wars. If we cannot get experiences through actual contact with good and evil, then we seek these experiences through film and TV.

The experience of loss is a painfully important one, for it causes us to appreciate what we not only have, but what we have had. When the loss is very personal, we have to go deep inside ourselves to find meaning in the experience. The interesting point is that not everyone crumbles with loss. We are changed, often changed for lifetimes to come from some losses, and yet some people use loss as a vehicle to have the experience of healing. They appreciate the loss, love what was lost, but do not cling to what is no longer in their lives. They choose to move forward with living. The people who learn the most from the lessons learn to love more. They learn that healing can only come from opening our hearts to other people and helping them. The spiritual law that notes, “As you heal others, so are you also healed,” is the truest aspect for rebuilding strength and internal life after severe loss. When you choose to maximize loving and giving and you appreciate and hope for a better tomorrow, you will be lifted up.

The journey and the effort involved can be a challenging ladder to climb. At some point, 100 percent of souls will experience every type of loss there is for the very experience of it. It is the point of mortal life—all these joys and all these sorrows.

Soul evolution is ultimately determined by how we choose to handle these dynamic and painful experiences and by the courage we show in the face of great pain. When we don’t need the experience any more, we no longer have it. It takes tremendous courage to love more after loss, but it is that very courage that takes each soul up another rung of the spiritual ladder and eventually, finally, evolving toward a very different type of existence.

Excerpted from The Lightworker’s Guide to Healing Grief by Tina D. Erwin, CDR, USN, Ret, who has studied the spiritual side of life for many years. These studies were further enhanced by the experiences of a dynamic 20-year career in the Navy, working for the U.S. SubmarineForce. Tina’s book is available from www.thelightworkersguide.com/ and Amazon.com.