Perhaps it had ended several years ago, but the day reality dawned on her was a regular weekday except for her. She felt as if a long journey came to an abrupt end.
Meera’s life changed without giving her the slightest clue, nor allowing her to fully prepare for what’s next.
3 years passed, and Meera carried an unnamed pile of emotions in search of an answer that remained elusive; it took her everywhere. She consulted astrologers, met shamans, and had a few therapy sessions.
She also took on a lot of pro bono work and sought escape in work supporting social causes, thinking it might help her find the meaning she was missing.
The emptiness refused to budge and lingered on.
Certain projects at the workspace had very difficult clients and office politics at their peak, and then, way back home as a single parent, her patience would be tested, especially at the parents’ teacher meet, where she was met with feedback targeting both her parentage and her children’s attitude towards completion and quality of their respective school assignments.
Meera exclaimed exasperatedly, “I don’t know how much more is required to be given, and to what extent.”
Is there an end to this?
We started our work on this note, and I began the session with some breathwork so that I might offer her exhausted inner self a moment of rest before we begin our exploration.
Among the various tools she had learned and practiced throughout, the Control technique brought her a major breakthrough. A simple technique in which I had asked her to pull out a list from the copious notes she had from the deep dive sessions.
The list was to be put into a table format, with the remaining columns as the titles “What’s within my control” and “What’s beyond my control,” and then, against each sentence, she needed to run the control technique and put a tick against the one that matched her thoughts in the list.
A simple tool and a table ended up offering Meera countless insights, surprising her as she learned so much about herself from a 3-column table and her copious notes scribbled during the sessions.
Meera’s major breakthrough came when she discovered the disconnect between her intention to help and her complex grief showing up seeking acknowledgment, which she would constantly bury in her work.
When Meera understood the wrong match in the following pattern, she was able to differentiate and detach the emotions of loss from the workspace.
At present, Meera still grieves, for Grief comes in waves and has no set pattern; however, she now knows how to identify which category the grief belongs to, then the spillover of it at work.
The moment an episode triggers it, she practices the intentional pause technique in combination with the control technique and breath work, followed by a tool that has the same set of questions she needs to answer to find her grip, often times she also practices the acceptance technique, assisting her in reducing the intensity and being more in control of her emotions than her emotions controlling her.
Feeling empty is another kind of emotional exhaustion in which we might be too tired to even feel, leaving one feeling hollow and empty.
You may not have a long-term relationship that has abruptly ended, like in the case of Meera, but if you feel too tired to even be able to articulate what’s going on inside you, then remember to offer your emotional exhaustion the attention it deserves so that it does not take over your work and life and keep you limited in both.
Grief and loss are not just confined to a person or a relation; they can come in many forms; the most common is the loss of identity or identities and roles we play, which keep shifting in the various transitional phases of life.
The way to arrive at the other end of Grief varies and is highly individual, just like grief itself; however, the outcome lies in deep surrender to an emotion in the form of acceptance, which can manifest differently for each of us.
Journey of Self is your vehicle to reach that point of acceptance of what is.
If you are ready, click here to book your free consultation and begin the journey.
Warmly,
Mehnaz Amjad