8. The pain of a loss or trauma is locked into your cells. Healing requires that you balance your pain with thoughts of a lighter energy. Give yourself permission to focus on what makes you laugh, even if you do not feel like laughing! Balance your pain with time to watch a comedy or time to meet and be with friends (push yourself if you feel you can’t or don’t want to do this). By doing this, you are helping you immune system recover and be able to better protect you from the aftermath of your loss or trauma.

9. With grief and trauma, often come an outpouring of expressions of care, compassion, kindness, love, and prayers. Allow yourself to be deeply touched by such a showering of love. This can forever transform you so that you become more aware of the choice you can make to be equally caring, loving and kind. You may find that you are becoming aware, also, of the power of your own love, appreciation and gratitude for your blessings. Take time to express your heartfelt thanks. This, too, expedites your healing process.

For example, patients and friends have frequently shared with me how moved they are when they are ill and another close and dear friend who just sustained the loss of a loved one calls to see how they are doing. When you step out of your own pain and are present for another in pain, you heal yourself and contribute to the healing of others.

“We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.” Carlos Castaneda

Susan Barbara Apollon
Author of “Touched By The Extraordinary”

©Copyright 2008 Susan Barbara Apollon

See Part 1 of Life Lessons Learned In Healing From Grief And Trauma

Recently, our good friends’ son, a young man we watched grow up, died in a freak accident and another dear friend was hospitalized with septicemia and was suddenly fighting for her life. My patients, friends and family can testify to the quirkiness of life – one minute all is well and the next, your life is totally upside down. Each time you experience a loss or trauma, you are reminded that life is a precious gift. This awareness is the first lesson learned in dealing with any type of loss or tragedy.

However, when difficult situations with others arise, you often fail to remember that you have a choice as to how to view the meaning of the loss or trauma. Frequently, tragedies, losses (of any kind, including loved ones, home, health, job or dreams) and life-threatening events are viewed from the negative perspective. While this is understandably part of the initial grieving process, you slow down your healing by spending needed energy viewing the situation as negative rather than positive in the months and years that follow the crisis.

Why is this? Perhaps, it is the fear that what has happened to another can happen again, and, perhaps, it is because you focus on the experience as a loss and, therefore, you spend more energy dwelling on the pain of separation from your loved one or anything you particularly value. The nature of human beings is that we tend to obsess more about our worries, anxieties, losses and negative life events than we do about those that are positive, joyful and which we may consider to be our blessings.

The truth is that the way you perceive a situation powerfully influences the healing of your body, mind and spirit. Remember that how you perceive a situation is a choice. How you choose to view or think about your situation dete rmines the path your healing will take.

“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”…Albert Einstein

LIFE LESSONS LEARNED FROM GRIEF AND TRAUMA

I offer you the following suggestions to assist you in healing from grief and trauma. They are based on the lessons learned by my own patients.

1. Give yourself permission to truly feel your pain. Healing from trauma and grief does take time. It is an experience that affects every aspect of you, including your identity, thoughts, feelings, body and spirit. No matter how you try, your Higher Self will demand that you do the work of grief. Trying to escape the pain does not serve you. Healing is expedited when you do the best you can to express it, feel it and let it go. (CONTINUED)

Susan Barbara Apollon
Author of “Touched By The Extraordinary”
©Copyright 2008 Susan Barbara Apollon

“It does not matter what you do in life; the only thing that matters is that you do what you do with love.” Elisabeth Kubler Ross

Life is deliciously filled with a mixture of joy and sorrow. At times, it feels uncomfortably weighted with more pain as a result of learning that others, including friends and family, are dealing with illness, as well as issues involving death, dying trauma and grief. At such times, we are left feeling sad, energetically very low and wondering how we are going to handle being available for everyone who needs us.

Whether you are a young mom or dad with several children or a busy working man or woman with a full time job, when you learn of a friend or loved one who has died or who is very ill, you want to learn how to be present and available, stay uplifted, and yet protect and keep your own energy from falling to dangerous levels.

Remember that what you focus on determines how you feel and how you feel determines your level of energy. So be clear about your intention regarding assisting others in need of your help. Be fully present in your attention when you call to see how they are doing and to offer your services. In other words, while speaking with them, be there with everything you have got. When not with them, place your focus on what feels better.

One suggestion: Take a few moments to sit and breathe deeply, enabling you to be at peace and feel truly relaxed before you pick up the phone to call your friend or loved one, or to actually go and be with him or her either at home or in the hospital. While visiting, be sure to be completely present. Listen attentively to their concerns and their feelings, without trying to deny them or make light of them.

However, you can help by then asking your friend or loved one about other family members, their activities and various other subjects such as vacation plans, how their children are doing in both school and in their sports activities, as well as their holiday plans – all of which are lighter and can help shift the focus to something that feels genuinely better and more uplifting.

Take time to balance the heavy feelings dealing with sadness, pain and/or loss with humor, a necessary antidote. The immune system needs the energetic vibration of humor to produce needed chemicals to help it work effectively. Be sure to bring a joke or humorous story, being sure it is appropriate, because humor expedites healing within the cells of the body. How about a video, DVD or audio to life their spirits and bring a smile or laugh or two to them? (It is good for you, as well!) CONTINUED…

Susan Barbara Apollon
Author of “Touched By The Extraordinary”

“Should you pray? If you need to ask, you’ve probably begun.” Larry Dossey, MD

One of the most powerful ways we can live our lives with a deep sense of satisfaction and peace is to give purely, via prayer, from our heart, to individuals who are in dire need of our assistance, including those who are dealing with grief, trauma and loss.

Within recent weeks and months, we have learned of the loss of many thousands of people in Myanmar, due to massive storm and flooding this area has experienced. In China, thousands have lost their lives due to a horrific earthquake. Getting help to these individuals who are trapped, injured, lost and traumatized has been almost impossible, especially for those in the area of Myanmar.

Additionally, many thousands of people in the United States are undergoing horrific losses as raging flood waters have washed away their homes and flooded major cities in the Midwestern part of the United States, causing people to have neither homes, schools or businesses. This kind of devastation on such a large scale has not ever before been witnessed or experienced by American citizens in modern times. – other than 9/11.

Despite the efforts of the Red Cross and others throughout the world, people in other countries are not receiving assistance and thousands of people of all ages are dying. In the United States, the Red Cross and others are doing their best to assist the large numbers of people who are faced with having nowhere to go. You can do something, something very powerful to help these people. You can pray.

I have been researching Mind and Consciousness for many years, including research on prayer and healing. According to a group of quantum physicists, including Albert Einstein, everything in the Universe is energy and vibrates; furthermore, love is one of the highest and most powerful healing energetic vibrations.

Additionally, according to Einstein and his colleagues, your mind has the capacity to connect with and even influence minds anywhere, across time and space. Prayer is the vehicle of the intention of sending love to those in need of such high healing energy.

Part 2…

Susan Apollon
Author of “Touched By The Extraordinary”