Some starting, general thoughts about grief and grieving:

Something I want to remind you all about to begin with, no matter where you are along the way, is that our grief journeys can be long and very emotionally painful. Our movement through our grief and into living again does not usually have a quick turnaround nor a simple resolution. 

Grief and grieving are painful! Finding our way through them is not easy. Healing usually doesn’t just happen on its own, it requires work and time to find our way through the pain to a place of wellness. We cannot quickly replace our loved ones in our lives, our grief journeys are about finding healing not substitutions nor diversions.

Our healing journeys are mainly about finding ways and ideas to help in building the next part of our lives with meaning, purpose, intent and awareness. Anything we can use to help us in our healing and in finding the most graceful way to encompass the changes that have come into our lives is something to be considered and used if it suits us and if it helps us. Anything that resonates with us along our way is something to use as a tool to support ways of finding acceptance of all that has happened and changed in our lives.

What does it all mean:

The experiences and ideas we are going to talk about at this meeting may or may not happen to you. They are not required to happen, there are no judgements associated with whether you have experienced any of these things or not. They are just possibilities. They have been reported by many people but surely not by all. Their meaning is always open to how you interpret them if you do experience them.

My purpose here is to suggest that if you do experience things like this, that you might consider them in a way you perhaps have not in the past. If you do experience them, perhaps they can be a comfort to you and can also be used to help in your growth and healing. If you do find these things entering your life, perhaps they might become a door to a new understanding of life and death and of spirit. 

If you do not experience them or you do not find that the explanations that I propose resonate with you, that’s fine as well. We are not here to judge them in any way; right or wrong, good or bad are not what this discussion is for or about.

As I’ve said many times, we all have to find our own way through our grief and what works for you is the important thing for your growth and healing. These ideas are based on what I took from my own experiences. How I interpreted them is how they seemed to be for me as I was experiencing them. I share them in hopes that if you are trying to understand similar experiences you can use what I learned to help you with your own understanding. There will also be a chance for you to share any of your own experiences that may be of a similar nature.

I’m going to begin by proposing some thoughts about how you might be able to recognize and understand that a manifestation and communication from our loved ones in spirit might be possible within the context of our grief.

Definitions:  My terminology for the discussion…

Spirit or soul: The animating force within us; soul when it is within a body and spirit when it is not. Soul isthe spiritual or immaterial part of a human being, regarded as their true self and as capable of surviving physical death and being immortal.

Spirituality: The quality of being concerned with the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things and specifically for this discussion, not in a religious way.

The veil: A way to describe the “boundary” between the material world and wherever spirits or souls exist when they are not within a body. 

The Spirit World: Just a way for us to talk about a place where spirits or souls may exist when they are not animating a body. There is nothing supernatural or religious implied here either. You can use any terms you would like if you have different ones to describe the same concept.

“Confluence” as I use it: Through the years of my grief journey, there have been numerous times when I experienced what I came to call confluences. These were times when I had a thought or a feeling, and at that exact moment, something happened that was totally unexpected but that was usually strongly related to that thought or feeling. At that moment everything came together and all the parts and sometimes the people, were there to “close a circle” in the perfect way and at the perfect time and place. 

These things began to happen so often that I gradually started to see that many of those “confluences” were Andi, sort of tapping me on the shoulder and saying, “I’m ok and I’m still here.” After awhile, it also became clear to me that they were a door to a new understanding of spirit and spirituality in my life. They were an opening to a new way of thinking, a new way of communicating and a “new language” for that communication to use.

Some ideas to consider:  Connections that end, connections that remain…

We are our spirits (souls):

If you believe that there is an animating force within us that is who we are and that it is usually called soul or spirit when we talk about it, then that implies that who we are isn’t limited by or to the body that surrounds us. 

If spirit is really who we are, then when our bodies die, it is possible that our spirits become free of the constraints of the material world and are free to move onward. For this discussion, let’s just call the place where they go the Spirit World. How they go or why that happens is not something we have time to talk about at this meeting. 

In the way I see it though, what is important in this context is that if who we are is not just our bodies, and if we are truly our spirits or souls, then the passing of our bodies doesn’t have to end the existence of the essence that is ourselves. 

Dreams, visions, voices from “across the veil”: 

It seems likely to me that our loved ones would not want us to be hurting or sad or lonely without them in our grieving as much as we would not want that to be true for them if the roles were reversed. 

So, should it not also be possible that they, as spirit, would want to reach back across the veil to give us reassurance and peace if they could. Would they not want to sooth us, to comfort us and to hold us with spirit arms to let us know that they are safe and at peace, that they are out of pain now and that they are still with us in spirit and that they are and will be connected to us and be a part of us forever.

Love flows both ways: 

From a similar perspective, I think that most of us can agree that our spouses or partners loved us as we loved them and throughout our lives together, the love that we shared may have built not only a physical connection but also a spiritual connection between us. 

If you believe, as it says in so many different places, that when you die, you are able to reconnect with your loved ones who have gone before you in some way, then since neither of you will have bodies at that point, they need to be able to find and recognize you, spirit to spirit, and you need to be able to find and recognize them, spirit to spirit when you encounter each other in the Spirit World.

I believe that we learn that recognition, not only of the bodies we occupy but also of our spirits all throughout our lives together, through the love that we build and share, no matter how long our lives together went on. In some ways, building that recognition may be what love is all about.

Alternate Realities:

With those ideas in mind, it also seems, from so many conversations I have had, that the passing of a spouse or partner can often be a reality altering experience. Just like time seems to flow at a different pace at different times during the day and during our lives as well, so too, our perception of other aspects of reality may be different and perhaps altered, especially during our grieving. 

Sometimes, in the extreme sadness, disorientation and emotional pain of our grief, we may seem to see a bit more of the universe than we normally do. Sometimes we may seem to be able to see or hear our loved ones reaching out to us in dreams, visions, voices, in other physical world manifestations or in “confluences” or seeming coincidences. 

Perhaps, instead of these things just being a product of our grief or imagination or even of our physiology, maybe we actually can experience different things during our bereavement that we may not have been able to do under more ordinary circumstances. 

Perhaps in a sense, the veil to the spirit world thins or even parts with the passage of a soul through it and that creates an increase in permeability through which we can experience things that we may not be able to have done otherwise. 

Alternatively, maybe the veil is just a cultural creation of the society we live in and there really is no separation between the Spirit World and the Material World. Maybe we have just been taught that they are separate. In this view, maybe in our bereavement, for a time, we can become aware of the Spirit World and maybe even come to see that it is always there, right alongside us. So our loved ones, when they are of spirit, are still there with us and they can actually reach us and we can reach them, anytime at all. 

So maybe, we can see and hear elements of the Spirit World in our bereavement because we are shaken loose from our usual perceptions for a time and we forget the separation we believed was there and the spirit world can manifest to us more easily and without barriers. Maybe the barriers are all in our minds!

However it happens, the thinning or the opening of the veil or our change in perceptions may allow us to experience dreams, visions, voices, manifestations and events that are actual messages if you will, from our loved ones. At least for a brief time, we may sometimes actually experience true perceptual changes and real messages from our loved ones; not as hallucinations, but as actual transcendent experiences, as reality, not illusion.

Suspending our disbelief, a new way to look at the world:

If, in our grief and grieving, we experience these moments of perceptual change, if we see or hear more than we are used to and are experiencing things we may not understand or may not have believed in or that we are not able to explain, we have a choice. 

We can decide that what we are perceiving is not real and hold tight to the world as we knew it or how it was explained to us or we can suspend our disbeliefand accept that the world is a larger and stranger place than we thought or that we were taught. 

Either way is ok..

If we choose to however, we can perhaps come to see that there are things that are possible that we may not be able to explain or fit into the seemingly rational way of looking at the world we may have grown up with, been taught or have lived with all our lives to this point. 

We may not be able to explain them or measure them but by suspending our disbelief, we can take the dreams, visions, voices, physical manifestations and confluences we experience and listen to them and accept that we do hear, see and experience them. We can be joyful that messages and communications are able to reach in both directions across the veil. Maybe we can still have a conversation and it can still be a dialog instead of a monologue. Maybe the language and the mechanism is just different than it was before.

And if we do experience things outside of our normal perceptions and ways of looking at the world, I believe that we can also choose how involved we want to be. We may choose to just experience them and let them go or we may choose to let them into our lives and encourage them to continue, to give our love the freedom to keep expressing itself in these ways. We also may begin to do so at any time down the road. It may be easier at the beginning when we are most open and shaken loose from the world as we believed it to be. Or not.

But please remember, if you don’t experience any of these things, it doesn’t mean your love wasn’t or isn’t strong, it just means that you didn’t experience them or recognize them now or yet… It also doesn’t mean that you might not experience them at some time in the future. Again, there are no judgements here about good or bad, right or wrong, reality or illusion; these are just experiences we may or may not encounter along the way and some ways to think about them and about what they might mean if we do.

New ways to communicate: 

I’ve told a number of stories from my life and grief journey over the time we have been meeting together. Today, my story is about a connection, an affirmation and a couple of communications. Or creative sharing: music, writing (book and notes) and channeling information about grief and spirit that I didn’t know. Then it’s your turn…

Your stories:

Please let’s share any stories of things you may have experienced of this nature.

It’s the experiences we wonder about or that we consider to be communications and contacts that we may have had with our loved ones that I think will be helpful and interesting for us to share and it would also be interesting to know how you feel about what they mean and perhaps how they happen. I would like us to keep our comments in a non-religious context since we all may have different views of the meaning of these events from that perspective.

Questions: 

• How do you see it? 
• What do these types of experiences mean to you?
• If you have not had any of these experiences, how does hearing about them impact you? 
• Would you be willing to try to “suspend your disbelief” if it meant you had to change how you view the world? What if it allowed you to have additional connections with your loved one?
• If you have had any of these experiences, do you see them as hallucinations or do you think they are indeed real communications from your loved one, even if you don’t understand how that might happen?
• Do you need to know how they happened to accept them?
• Do you need to be able to explain them or measure them to believe they are possible or that they can manifest in the material world?
• No matter whether you have had them or not, do you see these as possible and real or are they too strange and “out there” to believe?
• What do you think these things mean in the context of your grief?
• If you have experienced things like this, do you see them as a way to continue to have your loved ones be a presence in your life? Is that a good thing or not?
• How might we encourage these types of experiences to continue if we want them to?