Love is the energy that makes us who we are and who we want to become. The only hazard of love comes from the pain that arrives with loss. We experience grief in relation to how profoundly we have loved – the more deeply we love, the more painful we experience loss.
The fear of loss and the pain that comes with it can hold us back. It can make us not want to love or live too strongly. But grief can actually be a powerful and necessary tool for our spiritual growth if we know how to use it.
Here are 3 powerful ways that grief can help you grow:
1. Grief can be transformed into gratitude. When we lose someone we love, it’s natural to feel like something precious has been taken from us. But it’s important to remember that we are blessed just to have had that person in our lives in the first place. When we focus on the tremendous appreciation that we have for the people who have come into our lives, both those that are still with us and those who no longer are, we can actually redirect our grief into gratitude.
What if you could see your grief as evidence of your incredible capacity to love? What if the deep feelings of loss remind you how precious your life and everyone in it really is? While this doesn’t diminish the weight of grief, it does transform it into a powerful way to connect with the Creator. The more gratitude and appreciation we have for all the blessings in our lives, the more we open ourselves up to receive even more gifts.
2. Loss can motivate you to live more fully. If you ask most people what is really important in life, they will likely have the right answers: helping people, connecting with friends and family, making a difference in the world. Yet, how much time do we actually spend developing those areas each day? We tend to waste so much of life on things that don’t really have any significant meaning, even if we know better.
Death exists to teach the living. It is meant to impact the way we live our lives every day. Some of the greatest inspiration we can draw from death is the joy, appreciation, and excitement with which we should live every moment. Life is too important to waste on the silly things.
Death is unavoidable, and yet we spend so much time fearing it instead of being inspired to live more fully. Don’t allow grief or the fear of death to hold you back. Ask yourself: what energy am I creating in the world every day? How many people did I connect with today? It is moments of connection with the Creator and other human beings that make a life well-lived. When we leave this physical world, we don’t leave accomplishments behind, we leave impact.
3. You can connect to the Light, energy, and wisdom of those who have passed. The wisdom of Kabbalah teaches that energy never dies. When someone passes away, their physical form may no longer be here with us, but their energy remains with us. The question is not whether or not they are here with us, but are we connecting to them or not?
One of the most important gifts we can give ourselves is to not let go of those who left this physical world. Think about things they said or did and continue to find ways to learn from them.
Sometimes we have complicated relationships with the people we lose. Don’t allow hurt to obscure the beautiful gifts of opportunities that someone has given you. Even in the challenges or areas they lacked, there were things you were meant to grow from. Let go of the expectations of who you wanted them to be and start seeing them for who they really were. Find something that was really beautiful that they gave you and hold on to that. The love that you have for them does not end – it continues to exist.
Grieving is one of the most painful processes that we go through in life. There is no quick fix or easy way to avoid it, but we can change the way we view it. Instead of looking at loss as an ending, we can view it as the beginning of a new chapter in our spiritual growth. It can make us appreciate our blessings past and present, motivate us to live our lives to the fullest, and open doors for us to learn from those we have lost.
