How mindfulness has helped me to live with my own grief and support others with theirs
“I work as a grief and wellbeing mentor and the skills of mindfulness have become an integral part of this work.”
Georgie supports private clients, is a bereavement group lead at a local hospice and an end-of-life doula in-training.. She also spent four and a half years as a bereavement support at CRUSE Bereavement Support. Here she describes how mindfulness helps her to learn to live with her own grief.
This blog post is based on an interview with Tamsin Bishton using Georgie’s words. It’s part of a blog series “My journey with mindfulness” edited by Tamsin.
How I came to mindfulness
I experienced profound bereavement in 2000 and it was life changing. At that time, everyday language around therapy, accessing counselling support or relying on wellbeing at work was not as it is now. It took a long time to learn to live with my grief and I relied heavily on patient and strong friend and family relationships.
For me, everything had changed. Finding the focus and energy for my demanding career was hard, I went travelling and I partied, finding escapism in music and dancing. I loved the tribalism of groups of friends, the groundedness and physicality of dancing. Yet none of this stopped the circular thoughts and questioning nature of my grieving brain.
I’d seen a random article on mindfulness meditation, and even though I was curious, I forgot about it with the busyness of life with a young family. A year or two later the article reappeared and I thought I’d give it a whirl. I found it to be transformational. Bit by very slow bit, the circular, questioning thought patterns started to lessen. I connected fully with this gentle-but-robust training of the mind that offered easier quietness, safe exploration, gentleness and compassion to me and, by default, to those around me.
It was an immediate decision to start the eight-week Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy course. I followed this with the mindfulness teacher training for Brief & Adapted Interventions at the Sussex Mindfulness Centre. Many other trainings, events and courses in mindfulness, mindful-self compassion and mental health followed after that. Now, I work as a grief and wellbeing mentor and the skills of mindfulness have become an integral part of this work.
Personal benefits of mindfulness
Mindfulness has helped me in profound ways with the overwhelm of bereavement and the prospect of life going forward:
- It helped me factor in quiet time into my day, even for five or ten minutes.
- I felt less caught up in my thoughts and more connected to my body.
- I learnt new skills and practices – from breath practices to body scans, to mindfulness of sights and sounds and everything in-between.
- It gave me confidence to investigate and to know how I am in any given moment.
- I found a way to relate differently to life’s events and the world around me.
- It helped to reaffirm my personal values and boundaries.
The contemplative time of mindfulness offers space to connect inwardly with my loved ones.
Ultimately, I give huge value to the qualities of self-reliance of mindfulness. To be able to confidently check in on myself, to access skills at any time and in any place, and the ability to offer myself care during difficult times is invaluable.
The wider benefits of mindfulness
The experience of bereavement is uniquely different for everyone, the intensity of emotions, how complicated they are, and how long they will last are questions no one can answer. Grief never goes away, but we can learn to live with it in whatever shapes or forms it may arise in our daily lives.
With the skills of mindfulness I slowly started to feel comforted, settled and strong again, happier in the knowledge that I would cope better with life’s ups and downs going forward.
I have enormous respect and gratitude to all the different teachers and friends that I have made in this world of mindful meditation. I am delighted to be an advocate for such a worthwhile organisation as the Sussex Mindfulness Centre.
You can find out more about Georgie’s work on her website here.
Join a free taster
If you’re interested in learning mindfulness for yourself, then please do come along to one of our taster sessions. They’re free. You get to experience a practice as well as hear a little bit more about what’s involved in the various mindfulness courses that we offer. Most of our courses are online and can be booked by individuals.
And if you would like to share the magic you can join a free online teacher training information session.
And if you’d like to find out more about becoming an advocate check out our Advocates page.