Grief Healing Techniques

You Shall Be Released

Oprah.com | From the April 2002 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine

Do you know that you may have fear in your stomach? A build-up of grief in your chest? Poet and teacher Stephen Levine describes a few exercises to get you through emotional detox.

When we are grieving, moving in a slow healing process through fear and loss, we are also undergoing an extraordinary awakening of the heart. Grief can broaden our capacity for empathy and deepen our strength. We mourn the absence of a loved one, the loss of safety, or the disappearance of certainty—the stark awareness that none of us know what might happen next.

But even here, there is a great life teaching: the truth of impermanence, the preciousness of this fleeting moment. The recognition that we don't have a moment to waste—and the realization that love is the only rational act of a lifetime.

Learn how to heal your grief and find a renewed sense of strength.

Printed from Oprah.com on Wednesday, June 19, 2013