Exploring both acute and chronic grief, RamDev shares perspectives and practices for consciously bearing our grief and opening our hearts.
Find out more about Dale’s work at the Living/Dying Project: livingdying.org
Acute Grief & Chronic Grief
Opening this episode focusing on grief as healing, RamDev explores the various kinds of grief we encounter throughout our lives. Much more nuanced than acute sadness in response to immediate loss—unresolved chronic grief and day-to-day grief can sneakily accumulate, causing a numbing effect, creating addictive behaviors, and blocking free expression of the heart. From this perspective, RamDev shares how the goal is not to stop grief, but to help process it by being with whatever arises in the heart.
“It’s not the anger, it’s not the sadness that’s the problem, but it’s getting lost in it, becoming the emotion, ‘I am angry,’ rather than ‘anger is here.’ Or, on the other hand, pushing it away. Can we be so trusting of our true nature that we allow these feelings of grief to arise as a healing message—not as a problem to be fixed—but as a message to open to?” – RamDev
In this Real Change anthology episode, Sharon Salzberg explores grief to resilience, on Ep. 168 of the Metta Hour
Bearing Grief & Dancing the Tantric 3-Step (11:28)
How can we be with grief in an embodied way that deepens our access to the boundless heart? RamDev shares how when we are open to grief, when we are open to bearing the difficult feelings, we can come into access with deep truth, compassion, and wisdom. Offering a modality to help us start working with transmuting difficult emotions like grief, RamDev illuminates his method – the Tantric 3-Step.
“I’ve been in psychotherapy, I’ve been in bodywork, I’ve gone to long meditation retreats, I’ve taken psychedelic drugs, I’ve been with Maharajji and so many gurus—and in some way, being in deep grief, other than the direct experience of being with the Guru, is the deepest access to my heart that I have ever experienced.” – RamDev
Dr. Svoboda shares Ayurvedic wisdom on working with individual & collective grief, on Ep. 18 of Living With Reality
Audience Questions on Conscious Grief Work (19:44)
RamDev opens the floor to moving audience questions and comments surrounding consciously working with grief.
“To the extent that you’re doing conscious grief work, you’re creating some sacred time occasionally, a protected time where you really invite the grief to come—often it will, sometimes it won’t—but you invite it to come, and you do it as a ritual, as a practice: How nakedly directly can you be with those feelings? What does it actually feel like? Where is it in your body? What is it trying to tell you?” – RamDev
For more RamDev on bearing emotions like grief to move from separation to connection, tune to Ep. 67 of Healing at the Edge
Guided Meditation on Grief from Stephen Levine (36:30)
RamDev closes this episode by reading a guided meditation on grief from the late and legendary death and dying expert, Stephen Levine.