C.S. Lewis, the renowned author,
experienced intense grief, anxiety, pain
and fear like all of us do.
Today I'm gonna read from
his book, "A Grief Observed"
that he penned after he lost
his wife and great love.
We will explore the root cause
of these negative emotions
and then I'm gonna give
you five practical ways
derived from evidence-based
science of positive psychology
and ancient wisdom to help you dissolve
these negative emotions so
you can find some sanity
in these uncertain times.
Join me on this journey today.
(soft music)
"No one ever told me
that grief felt so like fear."
"I'm not afraid, but the
sensation is like being afraid."
"The same fluttering in the stomach,
the same restlessness, the
yawning, I keep on swallowing."
"At other times it feels
like being my mildly drunk
or concussed."
"There is a sort of invisible blanket
between the world and me."
"I find it hard to take
in what anyone says."
"Or perhaps hard to want to take it in."
"It is so uninteresting."
"Yet I want the others to be about me."
"I dread the moments
when the house is empty."
"If only they would talk to
one another and not to me."
This is the beginning of the book called
"A Grief Observed" written
by C.S. Lewis some time ago.
The book was not intended to be published.
This was his journal
that he wrote to himself
while grieving the loss of his great love,
his equal, another writer, his wife.
They were married for
just about four years
when she passed of cancer.
In fact, he knew that she had cancer,
when they met, she was in the hospital.
Despite that, the love
between them was immense.
And when she passed on,
the grief was immense too.
The situation that we face today
is not dissimilar to what Jack,
as he was lovingly called, faced.
Now, Jack was a very compassionate man
but suffered a lot of
loss during his life.
He lost his pet dog Jacksie,
and he actually named himself Jacksie,
from that came the name Jack.
He lost his mother at a young age.
And his father was,
let's just say eccentric
and not very forgiving.
And he was himself going
through a lot of pain
of osteoporosis and other
physical conditions
when he lost his wife.
So the amount of emotions he
must've been going through
were like a storm, a perfect
storm coming from all sides.
And today we find ourselves
in a similar situation.
We are captured in our homes.
We are captured in our minds.
There's fear of being
infected by this silent enemy.
We cannot do the things we love to do.
We don't have jobs.
We are worried about our paychecks.
The grief, the anxiety, the
fear are all mixed together.
And because these emotions
are like a cocktail
that we are all experiencing right now,
there's an article that was just published
in Harvard Business Review
where they interviewed a
gentleman named David Kessler.
Now those of you who
don't know David Kessler,
he is not a stranger to grief.
He in fact authored the book
with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
called "On Grief and Grieving"
"The Five Stages of Dealing with Loss"
that became the standard
for dealing with grief
in the world of psychology.
It's called The Kübler-Ross model.
David spent many years dealing with
all kinds of adversities around the globe
with Red Cross, in the
hospital systems, in hospice,
and he came in intimate
contact with grief all the time.
And then he lost his
son, a 21 year old son,
about three and a half years ago.
Following that immense amount of grief,
he published "The Sixth Stage
Of Grief", called "Meaning".
And in our discussion today
we're gonna try to figure out
how to dissolve this fear, this anxiety.
And I'll give you five ways
that are tested
empirically, scientifically,
and experientially,
from ancient wisdom to modern science.
That have been proven to be durable
in dealing with grief and fear.
But before we get there,
let's hear what David Kessler had to say
to this interviewer about
what we are feeling today.
He called it anticipatory grief.
This is the anticipation
of what could happen to us
in this crisis.
What is already happening to
us and how it could get worse.
That feeling of fear and anxiety
is essentially from the lack of control.
Feeling absolutely helpless
against this invisible enemy.
And there's an Italian
widow who lost her husband
to this crisis.
She is in her late seventies,
her husband was in the early eighties
and when somebody asked her what she felt,
she said, "I don't feel sadness
and I don't feel disappointment."
"I feel impotence against
this silent enemy."
And I think that's the essence,
the foundation of grief or
fear is this lack of control.
That we may, in fact, become irrelevant.
So the question that comes
up is how do you manage it?
What do you do about it?
And that's what we're gonna
discuss in the next few minutes
to go through five strategies
that can help us deal with and dissolve
some of this grief and fear.
Now, it's easier said than
done, I acknowledge it.
Because it's very difficult
to place myself in the shoes of those
who are currently going
through these stages of grief.
You know, you could have planned a wedding
that you had to postpone.
A birthday party.
Somebody may be going through
a divorce right at this time.
You may be estranged from your loved one
and feeling remorse.
I could name a thousand other ways
how we could be feeling this challenge,
which is multiplied a hundred times
because of what's going on around us.
Because of the fact that we
are encaged in our homes,
let alone being encaged in our own mind.
So how does this anticipatory
grief express itself
physiologically and psychologically?
You may call it simply stress.
There is the episodic
stress that evolutionarily
we are built to deal with.
If there is a snake you see
on the street, you run away.
The flight or fight
mechanism that we all have.
In fact, there's a wonderful book
on episodic versus chronic risks called,
"Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers".
It's written by Robert Sapolsky,
he is a professor at Stanford.
There's a very important
point he makes in it.
That human beings haven't been designed
to have the snake chase us forever.
So the reason zebras don't get ulcers
is because the event
of a tiger chasing them
to eat them happens and is over.
Either they become food for
the tiger or they escape.
But the event is over.
But this event is creating
stress not only day after day,
but week after week and
potentially months after months.
And our bodies are not designed
for this elongated
stretch of chronic stress.
It can cause havoc, physiologically
and psychologically.
One of the biggest challenges
in this time is insomnia,
the lack of sleep.
Insomnia and stress are
very closely related.
In fact, it can become
a very vicious cycle.
You don't get enough sleep,
you're more stressed.
If you're more stressed, you can't sleep.
And that just continues to snowball.
And the effect on our body,
on our heart, on our liver,
on our lungs, on every
aspect of our physiology,
but most importantly on our mental health
can take a huge toll.
So you ask, how can we
dissolve this fear and anxiety?
Well, I'm not that smart or wise,
I depend on these books to
actually get that wisdom.
So I'm gonna read you something from
one of my favorite
writers, Thích Nhất Hạnh.
And this particular book is called
"The Heart Of Buddha's Teaching".
"Embrace your suffering, smile to it,
and discover the source of happiness
that is right there within it."
"Buddha's and bodhisattva suffer too."
"The difference between them and us
is that they know how to
transform their suffering
into joy and compassion."
"Like organic gardeners,
they do not discriminate
in favor of the flowers
or against the garbage."
"They know how to transform
garbage into flowers."
"Don't throw away your suffering."
"Touch your suffering."
"Face it directly and your
joy will become deeper."
"You know that suffering and
joy are both impermanent."
"Learn the art of cultivating joy."
So to learn the art of cultivating joy,
I went to another source.
And that source is aptly
called "The Book of Joy."
It's written by His Holiness the Dalai Lama
and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Two people who are well
known to all of us.
And this is their recipe,
one of the recipes in this amazing book,
of how to cultivate joy.
"Why be unhappy about something
if it can be remedied."
"And what is the use of being unhappy
if it cannot be remedied?"
"In this short teaching
is the profound essence
of the Dalai Lama approach to life."
"It was at the root of a stunning ability
to accept the reality
of his exile without,
as The Archbishop put it, being morose."
"Once we can see life in
its wider perspective,
once we were able to
see our role in its drama,
and with some degree of humility."
"And once we're able
to laugh at ourselves,
we then come to the fourth
and final quality of mind,
which is the ability to accept our life
in all its pain, imperfection and beauty."
"Acceptance, it must be pointed out,
is the opposite of
resignation and defeat."
"The Archbishop did not accept
"the inevitability of apartheid,
but he did accept its reality."
"We are meant to live in joy."
The Archbishop explained.
"This does not mean that life
will be easier or painless."
"It means that we can
turn our faces to the wind
and accept that this is the
storm we must pass through."
"The acceptance of
reality is the only place
from which change can begin."
"The question," he had said
"is not how do we escape it?"
"The question is, how can we
use this as something positive?"
"Acceptance, whether we
believe in God or not,
allows us to move into
the fullness of joy."
"It allows us to engage
with life on its own terms
rather than rail against
the fact that life is not
as we would wish."
"It allows not to struggle
against the day to day current."
"The Dalai Lama had told us
that stress and anxiety
come from our expectations
of how life should be."
"When we are able to accept
that life is how it is,
not as we think it should be,
we are able to ease the ride -
to go from that bumpy
axle, dukkha or sadness,
with all its suffering, stress, anxiety,
and dissatisfaction,
to the smooth axle or sukkha or happiness
with its greater ease,
comfort, and happiness."
These books have an
incredible amount of wisdom.
And the question is
how do we translate that into
actions into our daily lives?
So here are the five ways in
which I believe we can manage
this really quite unprecedented
time period to deal with
the anticipatory grief that
David Kessler talks about.
To deal with this cocktail
of guilt, sometimes shame,
sometimes anger, sometimes frustration
and sadness and anxiety and stress.
To dissolve this as much as possible.
Here's the first way of
how to manage this anxiety.
And we're gonna start with where I left,
which is acceptance.
Now, acceptance has a few parts to it.
In order for us to accept
what's happening to us,
the first thing we have to do is recognize
that this is real.
And not hide from it.
Some of us still exist in that stage,
the five stages of dealing with loss,
which is natural, which is
human, and that's denial.
So recognizing that I'm suffering,
that this is happening
to me is the first step.
Then being emotionally aware
of how you feel inside.
What does this do to you?
What does it do to your mind?
How does it feel in your body?
Where does it sit?
Does it sit in your stomach?
Does it sit in your chest?
Do your legs feel weak?
Becoming emotionally honest with yourself
on how your body is processing this grief
and the stress, this anxiety, this fear.
The third part of
acceptance is recognizing
that this is not your fault.
It never was.
It's not anyone's fault.
This is where, as the Dalai
Lama said, life is.
It's not because someone did something
that this misery came upon us.
We may believe that to be the case,
but it is not your fault.
And the fourth thing about acceptance
is the common humanity.
Knowing that you are not alone in this.
That others are with you on this journey.
In fact, the entire world
is going through this journey together.
So common humanity is an
important part of acceptance.
Just that step alone, to
deal with anxiety and fear,
is a huge step in terms
of being vulnerable
and having the ability to process
whatever it is you're feeling.
Giving yourself the permission
and the right to feel it,
and not letting others
affect how you feel.
Cry if you want to cry.
Be angry if you want to be angry.
Obviously don't hurt someone.
There's a way to process
all of these feelings.
In fact, Buddha and Thích Nhất Hạnh
and all of the enlightened souls
have talked about the seeds
inside us of anger, of pain,
of suffering, of lust, of greed, of ego.
They all exist in us.
The question is when they
arise, do we acknowledge them
and more importantly, do we water them
or do we tell them to go sit back down?
Sometimes it's necessary to water them.
Accepting what's happening
is like watering them
and recognizing it's
okay to feel this way.
So the second step is
managing this anxiety,
how do you control it?
And I'm gonna make it
really simple for you.
This is something that the corporate world
and individuals are all excited about.
But I'll break it down in
something incredibly simple
and easy to exercise.
It's called Mindfulness.
You've heard about it, right?
There's all kinds of mindfulness
meditations out there.
But this is really quite simple
because you're by yourself
and you can do these things fairly easily.
The first way is mindfully
walking in a forest
or grove of trees or in nature.
There is something called forest bathing
that is very well known
in the Japanese culture.
And now science tells us that
when people walk mindfully in a forest
where they listen to the birds,
the leaves rustling in the
wind, the smell of the forest,
the pine leaves that may have fallen down.
If it has just rained recently,
the fresh smell of the earth,
that it actually enhances our immunity.
It increases the good stuff in
our body to deal with stress.
It activates our
parasympathetic nervous system,
which releases all kinds of
beautiful neurotransmitters
that help us relax.
Some of you may naturally experience that,
but there is science behind it now.
So mindful walking in a forest or a nature
is one way to do it.
Second, mindful eating.
When you sit down to eat,
you'll find that it'll make
a whole world of a difference
in the taste of what you're eating,
if you eat it mindfully.
So when you're eating your
lunch or dinner next time,
take a moment that when you
take a bite, just savor that.
Enjoy the way the food is
breaking down in your mouth;
the way your enzymes are turning
carbohydrates into sugar;
how it turns sweet.
Even if you're having a drink,
a glass of wine, a scotch,
whatever it is,
smell it, drink it, taste it
and let it go down your throat mindfully.
And you'll find that just
that simple act alone
really helps us manage our anxiety
because we are mindfully
engaged with the present moment.
Mindful reading and mindful writing.
When you read something like
I just read from the book,
try and read slowly to
absorb what you wanna absorb.
The goal is not to
finished book or a chapter.
My daughter chides me that
I never finished a book.
The reason I don't get to finish a book
is because if I find a
chapter that's interesting,
I go back to it time and
time again to really absorb
what the author meant to say.
My interpretations are
different from the author,
but I really want to mindfully understand
what the meaning of that paragraph was,
like the ones that I just read.
Mindful praying.
When you sit in prayer, those
of you who are religious,
there is incredible amount of evidence
that prayer creates, in
fact, not just longevity,
but it reduces our fear of death.
This is recorded in science.
Meditation does the same thing.
But if you're not into religion or God,
you can achieve the same result
by being mindful in the present moment.
Forest bathing, for example,
or watching a sunrise
or a sunset mindfully
is just like meditation,
is just like prayer.
The same kind of reaction
happens in your body
when you actually do that.
And it's amazing that if you recall
even a beautiful moment
that happened in the past,
your brain actually does not know
that it happened in the past.
It imagines as if it's happening right now
and that's why it creates
the same kind of reactions in your body
that happened when you experienced it.
Now when it was grief or fear,
the same chemicals will get created
if you feel that constantly.
That's why this chronic
stress, for a long time,
is so harmful for us because
your brain doesn't know
that the event is not happening,
that it happened in the past.
But it thinks it's happening now
because you keep thinking about it.
And you can reverse that,
that's the beautiful part.
That you can actually reverse that process
by shifting the frame of your mind.
So mindfulness in simple
ways, mindful laughing.
What was the last time we laughed?
In India, there are people
who do laughter yoga,
and when you walk early in the morning,
there's hundreds of people,
groups of people standing
in parks and lawns
and these squares in their
congested blocks of homes
and simply laughing, forced laughing.
After about five minutes,
you'll be going crazy laughing on your own
because it releases these
amazing amounts of hormones
and neurotransmitters.
It creates this activation
of your vagus nerve,
which runs down from here
into your entire system
that actually causes your
system to become balanced.
To actually get to a place
where you feel peace.
That's why they say laughter
is the best medicine.
There is a scientific reason behind it
and it comes from ancient wisdom.
This is not anything new.
And number three is
related to mindfulness,
but it is very specific.
You will need a journal
and you'll need a pen.
You can even use a computer if you like.
It's called The Three Blessings exercise.
Those of you who practice
gratitude would know it well.
But most of The Three Blessings exercises
that you hear about from people
who are projecting it out,
they miss one very important step.
And that's perhaps more important
than writing the three
blessings themselves.
So the exercise goes like this.
You think about the last 24 hours
and you think about three
things, three blessings
that you're thankful for
and you write them down.
Most people will stop there.
Most people will tell you
that's your gratitude journal.
Just write things that
you're thankful for.
Now that's very important,
but the other half of it is writing
why you believe that happened to you.
The fourth is just as powerful
and perhaps even more.
And that is self-compassion.
There are two people that I
specifically like to mention here,
Kristin Neff and Chris Germer.
Kristin Neff has been
writing and researching
about self-compassion for many years.
More than a decade, I
think about 15 years or so.
And Chris Germer and Kristin
created two separate schools,
but the one that I found
has a lot of information,
both of them do.
One is called
selfcompassion.org - go to that.
The other is called Center
for Mindful Self-Compassion.
In fact, Kristin Neff wrote
this wonderful book
called "Self-Compassion."
And it has a very personal account
of her experience with self-compassion.
And how she dealt with
her own incapacities,
her own imperfections, her
own fears and anxieties
and her own, what she considered
to be, weaknesses or shortcomings.
And how self-compassion
helped her deal with it.
Now, while there are incredible number
of benefits of self-compassion
that I could go on listing,
the most important one is sleep.
Self-compassion will
help you sleep at night
because it again relaxes your body.
It activates your
parasympathetic nervous system,
which releases all kinds of transmitters.
You now know the story
that it creates a reduction in
the level of stress hormones
in your body.
And this has been scientifically
noted and recorded.
So there's tremendous number of studies
around being compassionate to yourself.
In fact, people will go as far as saying
that be incredibly selfish
about self-compassion.
Because before you can even
give compassion to others,
you need to have it for yourself.
Like they say, "How can you
give something to someone
when you don't have it yourself?"
So self compassion is
an incredible antidote
to fear and anxiety.
Now, simple ways you can
practice self-compassion
to break the cycle of stress and sleep
is listed, many, many,
many exercises are listed
in that book, "Self-Compassion"
so I'm not gonna go through
what all you could do.
Suffice it to say you could
even do a Google search
and find exercises on self-compassion
and you'll find tremendous
number of things you can do.
Simple ones and you don't
need people around you,
you do this by yourself.
Finally, the fifth one.
Now, this is a tough one.
When you are embroiled in
this day-to-day challenge
and this fight, this is
about focusing on the future.
Now, some people will tell you
that if you think about the
future, it can create anxiety.
And yes it can.  That is a fact.
But the way we wanna
think about the future
is not how you would
think about the future
in most circumstances.
This is where David Kessler's work,
on "Meaning: The Sixth
Stage Of Grief" comes in.
This is about thinking about the future
that will give you meaning,
that will give you purpose.
We are actually going
to do a whole segment
on meaning and purpose.
So how does one focus on the future?
There's a wonderful poet
who's written about it.
He is one of my favorite poets.
His name is Rabindranath Tagore.
He won the Nobel prize in literature
in the early 1900s, I believe it was 1912.
And Yeats actually gave the foreward
to his famous collection of
poems called "Gitanjali".
"Git" meaning song, "Anjali"
meaning an offering.
And they're all prayers.
And this particular one liner
in his collection called
"Stray Birds" says,
"If you shed tears when you miss the sun,
you also miss the stars."
So, if we stay focused on
what is bothering us today,
we are gonna miss the future
too, the immediate future.
But the question is
what kind of immediate
future are we talking about?
I wanna end this talk by
reading from another book.
In fact, there's two pieces
that I want to read for you.
One is from this ancient
book by Mikhail Naimy called
"The Book of Mirdad".
And this is where he writes
about the focus on the future
and what you could do in
the service of others,
which is essentially the
message of David Kessler's book,
"Meaning: The Sixth Stage Of Grief".
"You must be ever full, that
you may feel the wanting."
"You must be ever strong and steady,
that you may prop the
wavering and the weak."
"You must be ever ready for the storm,
that you may shelter all
the storm tossed waifs."
"You must be ever luminous,
that you may guide the
walkers in the dark."
"The weak are burdens to the weak."
"But to the strong
they are a pleasant charge."
"Seek out the weak. Their
weakness is your strength."
"The hungry are but
hunger to the hungry."
"But to the full, they are a welcome outlet."
"Seek out the hungry. Your
fullness is their want."
"The blind are stumbling-
blocks to the blind."
"But they are mileposts to the seeing."
"Seek out the blind. Their
darkness is your light."
Before I give you the prompt of the day,
I wanna read from another amazing book,
"The Purpose Driven Life" by Rick Warren.
It's not a strange book to
anyone who knows Dr. Rick Warren.
As you know, he's a pastor in LA
and has a deep, deep, deep faith in God.
But he's also suffered a recent tragedy
just like David Kessler.
Dr. Warren also lost his son.
I believe he was also 21 or
22 years old, very recently.
So he has suffered grief also.
On page 29, he cites a
poem by Russell Kelfer
and I'll only read the four
lines or five lines at the end.
"No. That trauma you faced was not easy
and God wept that it hurt you so."
"But it was allowed to shape your heart
so that into his likeness you would grow."
"You are who you are for a reason."
"You've been formed by the masters rod."
"You are who you are beloved."
"Because there is a God."
Now, whether you are a
believer in God or you're not,
The meaning of the passage
is still very powerful.
And that goes back to the
concept of acceptance.
Accepting that we are where we are,
but that we can get past it.
That this too shall
pass as the adage goes.
So I wanna leave you with this prompt.
I will accept my grief and anxiety by,
the action goes here on how
you're going to process it.
And that could be journaling.
It could be forest bathing,
it could be the mindfulness,
different exercises.
Don't forget self-compassion.
Sitting quietly with yourself
and being kind to yourself
is a very important part of this prompt.
That's all that's needed,
is acknowledging right now.
And the processing will
come, it will follow,
I promise you that.
Thank you for joining us today.
Before you go, I'd like to tell you
about two important things.
First, a little bit about Karuna,
and second, how you can be
part of this journey with us.
At Karuna, our mission is threefold.
First, to support and
empower youth and women
who've suffered unspeakable abuse,
neglect, abandonment, trafficking,
and all of the traumas
that life brings their way unfortunately.
Second, to support early
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in disadvantaged communities
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You can join us in one of five ways,
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