Note: Names have been changed to protect the privacy of those mentioned and this post addresses a loss due to suicide. 

The death of a loved one can be a spiritually transformative experience, sometimes taking us deeper into our religious or spiritual faith for comfort and grief healing, and sometimes causing us to question everything we thought to be true about life and God, leading us to explore new supportive ways to frame the pain of loss.

Shelley
My client Shelley found her religious faith of great comfort during her sister Ann’s death and dying process.

“When I was young - and into early adulthood - I read a lot about the lives of women saints,” Shelley said. “When my sister got cancer – throughout her illness and while she was dying – I thought a lot about how these women handled hard situations and I prayed to them and tried to the best of my ability to be like them. This gave me strength I felt I didn’t have on my own.”

Ann had always been a “challenging personality” for Shelley. “She was always a bit odd, marched to the beat of her own drum. She was unconventional and that made me uncomfortable as I’m kind of the opposite.”

In the last weeks of Ann’s life, Shelley came to see her sister in a different light as she witnessed her sister’s “peaceful, good death” and dying process.

“At the end I saw the authentic Ann - the light of her soul shining through her,” said Shelley. “I could really see it. The beauty of it was astonishing and humbling. I was so grateful for my faith and connection to the saints. Ann’s death was beautiful but still so hard. My faith gave me a bigger picture of life and Ann and something to hold onto.”

Mark
As a young man Mark didn’t believe in a need for religion or any sort of spiritual practice; from what he could tell church-goers were “sold a load of sh%t” that allowed a church to “scare you about heaven and hell and take your hard-earned money to line their own pockets.” Then his best friend Jason died in a boating accident, leaving Mark devastated and floundering, obsessively wondering where his friend was now.

Mark became my client with the clear understanding that traditional religion was not for him; and with the clear understanding that he was willing to explore non-Western spiritual practices to help ease the pain of loss. In our work together Mark became drawn to philosophical and spiritual practices grounded in the concepts of reincarnation and that all people in life and death are connected and part of a greater whole or shared consciousness.

“Now that makes sense to me,” Mark said. “Jason is still around. We’re still connected, just not in the same way.”

To Mark this understanding “feels like peace.”

Spiritual Grief Resilience

Spiritual resilience/spiritual grief resilience is the ability to persevere and maintain a sense of purpose and self through a commitment to one’s values, principles and beliefs, especially during times of stress, challenge, change and adversity such as the death of a loved one. A tolerance of others’ values and beliefs, and spiritual flexibility (the ability to question, explore and when needed change beliefs without self-judgment) are additional defining characteristics of spiritual resilience. As Shelley’s experience highlights, spiritual resilience can help us to find inner strength and make meaning of even the most difficult experiences, including the loss of a loved one. And as Mark’s experience shows, spiritual resilience is something we can choose to improve in the wake of profound loss when a certain belief or belief system causes us suffering.

Spiritual resilience helps us to return over and over again to inner balance as we traverse distressing moods and emotions and turbulent thoughts during mourning. Conversely, when there is a lack of spiritual resilience suffering or the pain of loss can feel devoid of meaning, making it difficult to sit with anxiety wrought by the uncertainty inherent in loss.

Some Religious Beliefs Can Complicate the Grieving Process

In her book Grief and God, chaplain and grief educator Dr. Terri McDaniel explores how our religious beliefs sometimes “cause more harm than healing,” keeping us from moving forward or adjusting in a healthy way to loss, especially when a loved one’s death does not conform to religious doctrines on suicide, original sin, salvation and eternal punishment. When this happens, says McDaniel, making adjustments to our worldview, spiritual beliefs and values is imperative to improving grief resilience and healing the pain of loss. Adjustments can come in many forms such as:

  • Learning to shift the focus of grieving toward inner transformation and away from external events
  • Reframing the way a relationship with the divine can look and function
  • Exploring new types of prayer practices
  • Delving into new spiritual resources beyond those of an inherited religion or family culture
  • Creating personal rituals to replace traditional rituals that now feel unhelpful or meaningless
  • Counseling

My client Rachel’s experience serves as an example of how – as McDaniel outlines in her book - some religious beliefs can complicate the grieving process, lessen grief resilience and add to the pain of loss.

Throughout childhood and well into her adult life Rachel found comfort in her fundamentalist faith as well as a sense of belonging in her religious community. She believed without question her religion offered the one true path to God.

Then her brother took his own life.

Rachel’s church doctrine teaches that suicide is an unforgiveable sin; she was told by her pastor and faith community members she must forget her brother as he was now damned to hell’s fire for all eternity. Rachel remembered her brother as a likeable and carefree child. And she remembered his adult struggles with alcohol and drug addictions and the suffering it caused him and others. Despite her religion’s teachings, Rachel kept coming back to the question: Would God abandon my brother in his suffering or in his death caused by that suffering?

The more she prayed to God for an answer the more she was able to hear an emphatic “NO!” that brought her peace.

“God still loved - still loves - my brother, was still and always with him,” said Rachel. “I feel this with all my heart and soul. God did not abandon my brother so I didn’t either.”

Rachel eventually joined another faith community, one in greater alignment with her belief of God’s kindness, forgiveness and unconditional love. Making this adjustment gave Rachel a feeling of renewed hope and connection to the God of her heart. “God has returned to being a source of peace for me again,” said Rachel. “But God has also become a greater source of wonder and awe because of his love.”

Some Essential Spiritual Self-care Tips

Spiritual grief resilience can be improved by:

Learning to focus on working with suffering rather than trying to stop or avoid it. Working through the pain of loss is the essential work of grief processing; there can be no spiritual bypass – no jumping over grief to get to the other side of grief. Grief processing is just that: a process. While grief especially at the initial stages of loss may feel like walking through knee-high mud to get to a far river bank, taking that walk is the only way to heal.

Seeing suffering as imbued with meaning and growth. It is not unusual after the death of a loved one to experience a sudden and deeply felt profound realization regarding the frailty and impermanence of earthly life and as my client Mark found out, an expanded world or spiritual view. An essential task of grieving is to move forward with what was lost; finding meaning and viewing loss as a growth experience can help us do this.

Understanding that reassurance devalues suffering. We only grieve the loss of people who are meaningful to us. Trying to get on board with common platitudes such as “He is in a better place” or “She was old and it was her time” devalues our right to deeply feel and work through the pain of loss.

Practices for Improving Spiritual Grief Resilience

When navigating loss, people often turn to prayer and meditation practices for support in traversing the bumpy ground of grief. Here are several additional spiritual practices that can improve your spiritual grief resilience:

Gratitude Breathing
Bring your attention to your breathing two – three times a day. Notice how your breath flows in and out of your body without you having to do anything; continue breathing in this way. Once you have established a good breathing rhythm for each of the next five to eight exhalations say the words “thank you” silently to yourself of the gift of your breath and the gift of life.

Practicing gratitude can help reduce stress and anxiety during difficult times.

Rest the Mind in Appreciation
Mindfully learning to cultivate appreciation and acceptance for what is can be helpful in navigating loss. This short appreciation exercise can be done anytime, anywhere for one – two minutes throughout the day to spiritually, emotionally and mentally renew yourself when you feel the stress of loss.

Begin by looking around your immediate surroundings - the room you are in; as you do this gently notice something that pleases you. Place your attention on this pleasing object as you consider how wonderful, beautiful or useful it is. As you continue to focus on this object, note if your feelings of calm or pleasure increase. Do this for one – two minutes. Before you end the exercise, notice how you are feeling now. See if you can appreciate how you feel.

Resting your mind in appreciation of a photo of a loved one helps to enhance this practice when you are mourning. This exercise can also be done in a nature setting or when looking out a window.

Meditate
Meditation can help you achieve a sense of spiritual, emotional, and intellectual well-being. See Improving Your Grief Resilience Part 3: Mental Resilience for tips on how to do mantra meditation.

Self-compassion
Research in the field of mindful self-compassion has concluded that self-compassion is the cornerstone of emotional healing – in that regard it is an essential self-care practice not only when we are mourning but also whenever we are navigating the ups and downs of life.

Self-compassion can be a deeply spiritual practice, involving offering yourself understanding, kindness and tenderness when you are suffering or not yourself, or when you fail or make mistakes, rather than judging yourself harshly. It also involves realizing that suffering, failure and imperfection are part of the shared human experience. To explore a wide variety of self-compassion practices see: www.self-compassion.org.

Related Remembering A Life Blog Posts

The Four Tasks of Mourning
The 5 Stages of the Soul and Grief Processing
Journeying Through Grief: Death, Memories & Healing
The 5 Things We Cannot Change
From Death Denial to Death Acceptance
Grieving and Healing After a Loved One Dies by Suicide
Faith & Grief
The Process of Accepting Difficult Grief Emotions
Grief and the Language of Emotions

Related Remembering A Life Podcast Episode

Grief Re-imagined: 50 Creative Strategies to Build Resilience

Other Resources

The Grief Recovery Handbook by John W. James and Russell Friedman
Grief and God by Dr. Terri Daniel
The Language of Emotions by Karla McLaren
10 Helpful Tips for Resilient Grieving by Claire Bidwell Smith
Diagnostic Criteria for Complicated Grief Disorder by Mardi J. Horowitz
The Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement: A Decade On by Margaret Stoebe and Henk Schut
When One Religion Isn’t Enough: The Lives of Spiritually Fluid People by Duane R. Bidwell
National Institute of Health https://pmc.nbi.nim.nih.gov