Can Meditation Help You Cope with Loss and Pain? An Answer You Need to Hear

AVAlexander Volchek

When someone experiences a loss, a breakup, the death of a loved one, or a very difficult period in life, they often naturally want to get through it more gently. They may turn to meditation, thinking, “Perhaps it will help me let go, suffer less, calm down, or live through this state.” But an important question arises: how does meditation actually work at such times? What happens when someone enters a meditative state amid pain, loss, or intense inner distress? Can meditation really help them move through it more gently? Where is the boundary between genuinely expanding perception and simply wanting to stop feeling? What depends on the meditation itself, and what depends on the person's state and purpose in entering it? That is what we will discuss today.

OLOlya

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

AVAlexander Volchek

If someone comes to meditation with a specific goal of experiencing particular states, it can hardly be called entering a meditative state. They have set themselves a task, and any task needs to be approached more conceptually, rather than through meditation. Entering meditation to earn a billion dollars, change your perception and love for another person, or work through a loss is a fantasy. It is a black box, like placing a bet in a casino—not on a color, but on a number, or even on a particular number coming up at a particular table in a particular minute. The odds of entering a state to get the desired result are probably even worse. First, examine the approach itself. If someone has experienced a loss, perhaps someone has died, begin by understanding what they feel and what they want to work on. People die. Can we examine the death of others? We can try not to feel distressed about it, or we can try to understand what is happening, what should happen, and what is right.

We live in a world where everyone will obviously die. Every single person. Recently, I told my wife that different events could happen in my life and I could disappear. She said, “That is not a normal psychological phenomenon.” I said, “Why not? I could die right now, and so could you.” “That is not the same as disappearing.” “Conceptually, it is the same. All right, someone could be sent to prison. They disappear.” She said that was still not the same: being imprisoned is not your choice, whereas changing your state and deciding to spend a month in a cave is. She disliked the idea that a person could want to stay in a cave. I explained that the point was not that I might develop such a desire, but that my system could change its perception of life, redirect it, and begin perceiving something different.

Or circumstances in my life might lead me there, just as circumstances and cause-and-effect relationships lead people to prison, though those causes and effects are of an entirely different kind. Death, too, is a circumstance a person arrives at. If we see death as natural and understand that it is not the death of the person or their spiritual system, but death within this incarnation, this particular life, how will we relate to it? I can immediately recognize that my distress about someone else is my own experience of no longer being with them, or my own desire. I remember when my father died and I later had children. Everyone around me, including me, said, “How wonderful it would be if my father could see his grandchildren.” Who decided it would be wonderful for him? Perhaps it would not. Many people do not want to see anyone or have children or grandchildren, while many others do. We have made that decision on his behalf.

We have even made that decision for their spiritual being. Yet the distress is our own selfish experience. Whoever we talk to as we examine their experience of loss will say, “Yes, this is my own selfish distress.” All right. If we have arrived at that, what do you want to happen when you say you want to overcome it? Specifically, what? There are choices. You could also die and no longer feel it. When you die, believe me, your spiritual being will experience concern for that person very differently, from the perspective of its spiritual system. “No, I do not choose that.” Then what exactly do you want? When you go to sleep, you are not distressed. Someone might drink alcohol; that is why people drink. Often, at that moment, they are not distressed either. Why? Their own perception narrows. How do you want to stop feeling distressed? Do you want to forget the person, or stop loving them? What exactly do you want to do? The only way not to suffer this distress is to become aware—to learn the truth of what is happening.

Build your perception of your whole life on truth. Understand that the issue is not this person or that one, but that I am not truly perceiving life as a flow of causes and effects that includes death. I do not want to work on my dependence on social circumstances and my personality. I do not want to examine my ego. It turns out that the work is on your ego, not the loss; those are different things. When people feel bad, they often want to work on the loss, not their ego. They do not want to become aware of what is happening; they want to replace it with something else. Does meditation help? That depends on the meditation, how it might help, and how it relates to this at all. It is like asking whether ice cream helps. If by a meditative state we mean an aware perception of everything happening in life, then entering such states certainly helps. But it is serious work on yourself, not a way to make yourself feel better. If we mean meditation that temporarily disconnects us from certain memories and thoughts…

That will not help. You could undergo hypnosis to block off part of your brain, but you might as well stick two nails into your eyes and stop seeing things. Someone dislikes seeing that their boyfriend or girlfriend has left them for another person. Put two nails in your eyes, and you will not see or perceive them. Or isolate yourself from that information: delete yourself from every social network, disconnect from the internet, and you will no longer perceive it. But you are limiting your perception, not expanding it. This applies to any loss. Someone says, “My loss is unique. My child died at five or fifteen.” What makes that loss unique compared with someone dying at ninety? “Well, at ninety it is normal.” Normal in what sense? I know people whose deaths at ninety caused others tremendous distress. And there are people who kill fifteen-year-old children and feel no distress. We see that in the world.

People kidnap and sell children without feeling distressed. Everyone has their own perception of loss and of good and bad. Someone says, “This is my own experience. This is how I feel.” All right. Are you willing to examine it? Remember our conversation about earning money? I said, “Allow for the possibility that you will never earn money in your life.” If earning it or not earning it means exactly the same to you, that is a real achievement, not indifference. If you relate to it with a truly healthy perception of your whole system, that is not indifference. What, then, is the true purpose of meditation? We have said you cannot enter meditation with the goal of making money or gaining something for yourself. Even if you enter it with the goal…

Of restoring your current state, that will not lead you to genuinely expanded perception, the true understanding needed in a meditative state, or what that state can really offer and lead you toward. What is meditation's purpose, then? Suppose we understand meditation as expanded perception of everything happening and as something that should always be part of a person's life. Meditative consciousness should always be present. A person should enter a state of expanded perception and remain in it regardless of what they do: work, drink coffee, or talk to their child. A meditative state means perceiving everything around you. You truly attend to the state of your son or the boss you are talking to while simultaneously perceiving your own state, the energies affecting you, and what is affecting everything around you. You begin to understand causes and effects. When you open a YouTube video, watch a Short, or read the news, you begin seeing many patterns, some connected to your own life and others not.

From that perspective, meditation's purpose is to observe your state so that you can move into expanded perception. Yet expanded perception itself is not the ultimate goal. Meditation's purpose is to know life as it truly is. Meditation becomes part of your life, an activity that allows you to come to know it. If I live from the understanding that my life is eternal and I am a spiritual system, then my life is not confined to ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred years. It is not limited to my family, physical body, or the causes and effects I remember or store in my brain. If I want to know and truly develop all of that, I understand meditation, genuine presence in a meditative state, learning about that state, and participating in genuine meditative practices as part of exploring and understanding my whole life, and as an opportunity to follow a true path.

OLOlya

For example, someone experiences a loss and comes to meditation not to stop suffering or relieve their personal pain, but with the possibility of expanding their perception. Perhaps that expansion will let them see the situation from a different angle or even make them want to explore it. Is that intention also not okay, or can someone come with an intention like that?

AVAlexander Volchek

Olya, we could spend a long time discussing intention, expanded perception, and what conditions it. The motives behind a desire to expand perception have a whole range, a minimum and a maximum. Someone can say, “I want to expand my perception,” and be driven by ego motives, while that same state is simultaneously shaped by a desire to know Christ's solar energy, all spiritual beings, and everything that is happening. The range between these extremes is infinite. A person's task is to keep expanding that range and becoming aware of it. Many states arise in every person at once, supposedly negative and supposedly positive. In fact, they are all states of your own life. What you can direct your attention toward is whether you are truly interested in knowing your life regardless of what happens, and whether you really live to serve people and the world, trying to understand what that means. At least show joy toward everyone. Are you actually living this way or not?