Overcoming Grief and Negative Attitudes Through Mindfulness
Overcoming Grief in Your Life Through Mindfulness
Grief is a multifaceted response to loss, particularly to the loss of someone or something that has died. Although conventionally focused on the emotional reaction to loss, it also has physical, cognitive, behavioral, social, cultural, spiritual, and philosophical dimensions.
This can be the loss of a relationship, the loss of an ideal, or the loss of a loved one. Grief can be short term, chronic or crop up again years after you’ve experienced the loss.
People grieve in different ways, but when you don’t deal with grief, it can impact your physical health. You’ll notice more aches and illnesses than normal. Grief can cause you to feel anxiety, anger, fear, and depression. Here is excellent information and help dealing with depression.
It can cause you to withdraw from your family, friends, and avoid any other type of social contact. Grief can affect your belief system and cause you to question things you used to believe.
There are various treatments for grief, but one of the most natural and effective at helping to deal with both short and long term grief is mindfulness. What mindfulness does is to allow you to keep your mind on the present, on what you know to be true.
When you practice mindfulness, you’ll immerse yourself in a lifestyle that will help you understand the fleetingness of grief.
Like all emotions and experiences, grief will not last forever.
Mindfulness will help you to focus what you think about and how you feel about those things as they pertain to the here and now. You’ll be able to come to terms with whatever it is that you’re grieving about.
When you make mindfulness a habit, it can help you not to let grief be the center of your emotions. Any kind of loss will result in agony, and that’s natural. It’s also healthy because you need to go through the stages of grief.
Those stages are mentally or emotionally denying the loss, feeling angry about the loss, bargaining – which is a central argument based on if only or what-if scenarios of what you would do if only you could reverse the loss, depression and finally, accepting the loss.
Mindfulness can teach you how to walk through the grief of your loss by showing you that the grief is not a constant.
Every day the grief will change in intensity. Some days the pain will feel devastating, and you might wonder how you can possibly continue on.
Other days, the sting of the grief won’t feel as sharp. You’ll begin to see the positives again. You’ll reach acceptance. Through mindfulness, you’ll learn exercises that can help you get through the grief.
You’ll learn how to sit quietly and focus on the breaths that you’re taking. As you’re focusing, you’ll begin to think about grief and how you feel. Don’t shy away from the thought.
Instead, acknowledge it. Once you acknowledge the thought, release it and bring your thoughts back to the present.
Six Mindful Strategies to Recover from Grief
Sit Quietly and Reflect
No matter what grief you are experiencing, sit quietly and ask yourself, have I lost someone before? How did I get over from it? Now use these past experiences to tap into your inner courage and strength and explore if you can implement the same approaches again.
Trust Your Inner Self
Once you realize that you survived other griefs before now trust in yourself to know that you can get through your present challenge.
Learn to Keep Yourself Centered through Grief
When the waves of sadness and helplessness wash over you initially feel the emotion, and its depth but then start to breathe through the grief with slow deep breaths. This will help you stay grounded and bring you back to the present.
Start Imagining a New Life
Even though you are experiencing immense grief, start to imagine and create in your mind’s eye a new future for yourself.
Practice Mindfulness
While doing grounding practices such as meditation, yoga, or even walks in nature remember that your loss is cyclical like the seasons. Also when we are in the depths of winter we know that eventually, it will become more manageable with the advent of summer. Learn to endure and leap yourself through the most severe times.
Mindfulness to Defeat Negative Attitudes
The attitude that a person has is based on their thought patterns and linked with emotions. It displays as actions. Negative attitudes often have a foundation of resentfulness at their core.
This resentment can be caused by a person’s point of view of themselves, of other people or toward life in general. If you struggle with negative attitudes, you’ll want to deal with it as soon as possible.
There are a lot of studies that have linked negative attitudes toward health problems, job performance, and relationship struggles. When you become stuck in a negative attitude, it can keep you imprisoned and lead to anxiety and depression.
You can set yourself free from any kind of negative attitude by practicing mindfulness. The key to defeating negativity is to stop fueling the thought patterns that fed into it from the beginning.
The more you allow your thought patterns to center on negative things, the more ingrained within you, a negative attitude will become, and it will be your default response.
Mindfulness can bring you a positive attitude along with peace and joy.
When you practice it, what mindfulness does is to help you realize what your negative attitude patterns are.
An attitude is not a single occurrence. It’s something that’s developed with layer upon layer of negativity, and this usually begins with your thoughts. Negative thoughts are a direct result of your emotions.
Your emotions can become a direct result of your thoughts.
The two are tightly connected. Mindfulness will help you to be able to see the negative thoughts that are creating negative attitudes.
You’ll learn how to deal with these thoughts when they do enter into your mind so that you’re not dwelling on them. When you have a negative attitude, it’s often too caused by anxiety.
You’re worrying about what has happened in the past or what comes your way in the future. You struggle to believe those good things can occur in your life. This kind of negative thought pattern becomes a negative attitude, and you learn not to expect anything good.
This is the kind of self-defeating attitude that mindfulness can help you to overcome. When you get trapped by a negative attitude, you don’t just view the world around you through cynicism and negativity, but you see yourself that way too.
You’ll turn on the inner critic you have, and you’ll continuously rehash what you see as your flaws.
You’ll drag into the forefront of your thoughts all the mistakes you’ve made in the past and all the mistakes you believe you’re going to make in the future.
This feeds into feelings of low self-esteem which then feeds the negative attitude. Mindfulness teaches you how to break this feeding frenzy by focusing on what’s good and what’s true in the present moment. It allows you to set yourself free from any past regrets and any future expectations and simply live in the now.
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