Can Meditation Help You Cope with Loss and Pain?

When a person goes through a loss, a breakup, the death of a loved one or some very difficult period in life, they very often have a natural desire to get through it more gently. And then a person may turn to meditation. They think: perhaps meditation will help me let go, help me not to suffer so much, calm down, live through this state.

In this conversation with Olya, I look at how meditation actually works at such moments. What happens to a person when they enter a meditative state amid pain, loss or a strong inner experience? Can meditation really help them get through it more gently? Where is the boundary between a genuine expansion of perception and the wish simply to stop feeling? And what in this process depends on the meditation itself, and what on the state and purpose with which a person enters it?

Entering meditation for the sake of a goal is a fantasy

– Can meditation help you get through a difficult period in your life more gently, including the loss of another person?

– The thing is, if a person goes into meditation with a specific goal — to live through certain states — it can hardly be called entering a meditative state. It is simply a task that the person sets for themselves. And any task should be approached more conceptually, not from the side of meditation.

Entering meditation in order to earn a billion dollars, to change your perception and love for another person, or to live through some loss is a fantasy.

It is like a black box, like going to a casino and placing a bet. And not on a color, but on a number, on some random probability — or on a certain number coming up at this table in this minute. When you enter a certain state like that, the odds are probably even worse.

First you need to sort out the approach itself. If a person has suffered a loss — say, someone close to them has died — first you need to figure out what they feel and what they want to work with. Let’s imagine: people die. Is it possible to come to terms with the notion of other people’s death? You can go toward not feeling distress about other people’s death, or you can go toward figuring out what is happening at all, what should happen, what is right.

Death as a natural event

After all, we live in a world in which, obviously, all people will die. Absolutely every person will die. Recently I had a conversation with my wife: I was telling her that various events could happen in my life and I could disappear. She says: “That’s an abnormal psychological phenomenon.” I say: “How is it abnormal? I could die right now. And you could die right now.” She says: “That’s not the same as disappearing.” I say: “But conceptually it’s one and the same. All right, someone could be put in prison — the person has disappeared.” She says: “It’s still not the same.”

After all, you are put in prison against your will, whereas if you, for example, changed your state and decided to spend a month in a cave, that is your own wish. She simply didn’t like the idea that a person might have a wish to spend time in some cave. And I explained to her that the point is not that I might have such a wish, but that my system can alter its perception of life, redirect it in another direction and perceive something else.

Or circumstances in my life may come together that lead me to it. In exactly the same way, circumstances, causes and effects lead people to prison — of a completely different nature. And death, too, is a circumstance a person comes to.

So, if we understand and regard death as a natural event and understand that it is not the death of the person and not the death of their spiritual system, but merely death within this incarnation, this life of theirs, then I immediately, instantly diagnose: any distress of mine about another person is my own experience — of no longer being with that person, or my own desire.

I remember that when my father died and later my children were born, everyone around me said, me included: “How great it would be if my dad could see his grandchildren.” But who thinks it would be great for him? Perhaps for him it wouldn’t be great. There are a huge number of people who don’t want to see anyone and don’t want to have any children or grandchildren. And there are a great many people who do want to have children and grandchildren. So we made that decision for this person. More than that, we made it for this spiritual being.

You need to work not with the loss but with your ego

Obviously, this distress is selfish. And whoever we go on to talk with while examining the experience of loss, the person will say: “Yes, it’s my selfish distress.” Okay — if this is your selfish distress and we have arrived at that, then when you say you want to cope with it, what do you want? What exactly should happen? Because there is a choice. You can also stop feeling distress this way: you can die, and you won’t feel it. Because when you die, believe me, your spiritual being will feel for that person completely differently — from the point of view of its spiritual system.

The person says: “No, I don’t choose that.” Then what exactly do you want? You go to sleep — and you don’t feel distress. Someone might drink alcohol — that’s why people drink. At that moment a person often doesn’t feel distress. Why? Their own perception narrows. So how do you want to stop feeling distress? What do you want to do? Forget this person? Stop loving them? What exactly do you want to do?

To take this on for yourself, to build the whole process of perceiving life from a state of truth. To understand that the point is not this person, or another one, or someone else. The point is that I don’t truly perceive life as a flow of causes and effects in which there is the notion of death. I don’t want to work on my own dependence on social circumstances, on my personality. I don’t want to deal with my ego.

It turns out that what you need to work with is not the loss but your ego. And those are different things.

When a person feels bad, they often want to work with the loss rather than with the ego. They don’t want to be in a state of awareness of what is happening. They want to replace it.

So does meditation help or not? It depends on the meditation, on how it might help or not help, on how it is connected with this at all. It’s the same as asking whether ice cream helps. If we are talking about a meditative state as awareness in perceiving everything that happens in life, then entering such states certainly helps. But it is work, very serious work on yourself. It is not in order to make yourself feel better. And if we are talking about meditation that simply disconnects us at some moment from certain memories and thoughts, that won’t help.

Of course, you could go and get yourself hypnotized, block off part of your brain. But you could just as well stick two nails into your eyes and stop seeing anything. Someone doesn’t like seeing that their boyfriend or girlfriend has left them for someone else. Stick two nails into your eyes — and you won’t see them, you simply won’t perceive them. Or isolate yourself from this information: delete yourself from every social network, cut yourself off from the internet — and you won’t perceive it.

But you are simply narrowing your perception, not expanding it.

This applies to any loss. Someone will say: “My loss is unique. My child died at five, or at fifteen.” But what makes your loss unique compared with someone else losing a person who died at ninety? “Well, at ninety it’s normal.” Normal in what way? I know people who died at ninety, and others grieved for them like crazy. And there are people who kill children at fifteen and feel no distress about it. We see this in the world. People who kidnap children and sell them — and feel no distress.

Everyone has their own perception of loss, their own perception of what is good and what is bad. Each person’s is their own. A person even says: “But this is my own experience. This is how I feel.” Please, go ahead. The question is: are you ready to deal with it?

Remember, we once talked about earning money, and I told you: “Allow for the possibility that you will never earn money in your life.” If it makes exactly the same difference to you whether you earn it or not, that is no small success, and it isn’t indifference. If you truly relate to it with a healthy perception of your whole system — a healthy, real, truly good system — then it isn’t indifference.

What is the true purpose of meditation

And what is the true purpose and task of meditation at all? We say that you can’t enter meditation with the goal of earning money, you can’t enter it with the goal of gain. And even if you enter meditation with the goal of restoring your state right now, that won’t lead you to real expanded perception, to the real, true knowing that is needed in a meditative state, or to what a meditative state can actually give you and lead you to. So what, then, is the purpose of meditation?

If we approach meditation as expanded perception of everything that is happening, if meditation, meditative consciousness, should always be present with a person in their life, then, in essence, a person should immerse themselves in a state of expanded perception and stay in it regardless of what they are doing. They are at work, they are drinking coffee, they are talking with their child.

A meditative state is a state of perceiving everything that is happening around you.

You are simultaneously, really and truly, paying attention to the state your son is in, or the boss you are talking with. You are really perceiving at the same time your own state, the energies acting on you, and what is acting around you, on everything that is happening. More than that, you begin to understand causes and effects: opening some video on YouTube, watching some Short or reading some news, you begin to see a great number of different patterns — connected with your life or not connected with it.

From this point of view, of course, the purpose of meditation is observing your state in order to enter an expanded state of perception. But even so, the expanded state of perception will again not be the goal.

Meditation will be part of your life and the action that allows you to come to know your life. If I live from the position that my life is eternal, that I am a spiritual system and my life doesn’t end after ten, twenty, fifty or a hundred years, that it isn’t limited by that, isn’t limited only to my family, my physical body, the causes and effects I remember or that are stored in my brain — and I want to come to know all of this and truly develop it — then I understand: meditation, real presence in a meditative state, coming to know the meditative state, taking part in real meditative practices — this is part of studying and knowing my whole life and an opportunity to step onto the true path.

What conditions the intention to expand perception

– For example, a person has suffered a loss. They go into meditation no longer in order to end their suffering, to make things easier for themselves in terms of their own pain, but with the possibility that they will expand their perception. And perhaps this expanded perception will let them look at the situation from a different angle or even make them want to figure it out. Is that intention also not okay? Or can you already go with an intention like that?

– Look, Olya, do you see what the point is? We could discuss for a long time what intention is, what expanded perception is and what it is conditioned by. Because what conditions the desire to expand your perception has a certain range of extremes — a minimum and a maximum. A person may say, “I want to expand my perception,” and it will be conditioned by ego motives, and at the same time this very state will be conditioned by the knowing of the solar energy of Christ, of all spiritual beings and of everything that is happening. This range is infinite in terms of minimum and maximum.

A person’s task is to be constantly in the expansion of this range and in the awareness of this range. In any person a great many different states will be born at the same time — supposedly negative ones and supposedly positive ones. But in fact these are all states of your own life.

The only thing you can direct your attention to is whether you are truly interested in coming to know your life regardless of what happens, and whether you truly live in order to serve people and the world. And whether you are trying to understand what that means. At least showing joy to everyone. Do you really live by this or not?

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