Trusting Yourself With Grief

A Guided Audio Meditation from Doing Grief in Real Life

Trusting yourself with grief takes courage. It means being brave enough to feel your way around your suffering as well as through it. It means going out on a limb to celebrate whatever it was that makes your grief possible. Trusting yourself with grief means being bold enough to stand with your grief and to let it go now and then, and to imagine a future in which your grief guides you to the heart of hope and healing.

This guided meditation invites you to contemplate your grief from three different perspectives: past, present, and future. Trust yourself. Trust your grief. Together, you and your grief can forge your own best path to healing.

Self-Care: Before listening, you may want to create a quiet, healing space for yourself. Gather paper and pen/cil to reflect in writing or sketching pencils or crayons to reflect in drawing. If your grief is especially present and raw for you, you may want to ask a qualified counselor or spiritual director to guide you through this process. Use this meditation as it’s useful to you. You know your healing path better than anyone.

Self-Blessing: Choose a favorite blessing to begin and end your contemplation or use the blessing included in this guided meditation, “All shall be well,” by Julian of Norwich.

Contemplation 9 from Doing Grief in Real Life by Shea Darian (2022)

Be blessed and a blessing.

Buy Doing Grief in Real Life here

Published by Shea

Shea Darian, M.Div. is a family and grief educator, spiritual care provider, and award-winning author of Doing Grief in Real Life (IPPY Award) and Seven Times the Sun: Guiding Your Child Through the Rhythms of the Day. Shea is the creator of the Model of Adaptive Grieving Dynamics, published in the journal Illness, Crisis & Loss, Vol. 22(3), 2014. Books on family spirituality include Sanctuaries of Childhood: Nurturing a Child's Spiritual Life (Foreword Book of the Year Award) and Living Passages for the Whole Family: Celebrating Rites of Passage from Birth to Adulthood (Nautilus Award). Connect@DoingGrief.com