Ashok Gupta explains how grief cycles through shock, anger, depression, and bargaining before reaching acceptance and surrender. He argues that anger and dejection can trap people in chronic illness, and uses metaphors like a caterpillar in a cocoon to show how acceptance leads to growth and recovery.
So let's start off in terms of that first emotion, grief. Now many of you may have heard of the grief cycle, which I'll just share on screen here. And many people don't think of necessarily healing from chronic illness being something to do with grief. I'm going to show you this slide here in terms of the grief cycle. So imagine when we first got the illness, we were normal functioning on the left hand side. And when we suddenly got, let's say me or chronic fatigue syndrome, or fibromyalgia or post Covid long haul, there's this shock and denial. Oh my God, I can't believe I've got this. This doesn't make sense. Then there's anger, there's frustration, irritation. Whose fault is this? Why can't my doctor heal me? Why can't the support groups actually say something positive? Why is my doctor not believing me? Right. We have all of those types of emotions and anger and frustration and irritation only keeps us locked in the past with the condition. And I know so many people who are involved in support groups who'd rather be right than, well, you know, they are so working on the advocacy and making sure that the medical profession understands that this is a real condition, which it is. But they get so angry and frustrated that once again it keeps us locked in illness. And there comes a point, and remember, these aren't sequential cycles. We can jump back and forth or we get into a state of depression and detachment. This also can compromise our immunity and our immune system where we feel depressed, detached, oh, I wish this would just go away. I'm fed up. And it's not a surrender to the condition, it's a dejection about the condition. And we'll talk about the difference between dejection and surrender. The next stage is dialogue and bargaining where we begin to try and make sense of what's going on, begin to reach out, begin to understand the deeper meaning behind what's going on. And finally we move to acceptance, acceptance of our condition. And then we move on to that next stage which would, what I'm going to talk about, which is surrender. And within that there's empowerment, there's self esteem increasing. We get a sense of this happened for a reason and we get back to a meaningful life where something shifted. So I'd love for you to now reflect. Where are you right now in this cycle with your condition? What might be compromising your ability to heal? Are you feeling really depressed and dejected by what you're experiencing? So you're at the bottom of the cycle there, with that depression, detachment, do you feel just numb with what's going on, with the amount of anxiety you've had to experience? Or are you still in the anger phase? Anger at those who didn't support you or anger at your doctor? And one way that we can overcome this grief cycle is to understand the deeper meaning behind these illnesses. Some of the grief can be a grief of the loss, the loss of normal functioning, the loss of normal life, the loss of our job, our career, our friends, our family. But if we stay stuck in that, we then can also go into that victim mentality. Look what I've lost. Look how terrible my life is. And sometimes we can compare ourselves to others. Look at all my peers. Look what they're achieving in life. I'm stuck in this illness. Let's recognize that. And I know many of you who are doing the Gupta program. When you're visualizing, you notice that it brings up difficult emotions because you're thinking about the life you had before and wish you could go back. And tears come up, sadness comes up. Let that sadness come up. That is the release of those grief emotions that you haven't processed. So first of all, during meditations or during self reflection, when there is the grief, let those tears come. Think about what you've lost, indulge it for a moment and allow it to be released. But if you find you keep going back to these emotions, then they need to be worked on. And what can help us through grief is recognizing the journey that you know, there are many paths, many spiritual paths, many different philosophies that talk about the power of suffering, that somehow suffering transforms us, helps us grow. And I'll just challenge that. It's not that suffering helps us grow, but suffering opens up an avenue for us to grow. It forces us to recognize our habits and patterns of the past and evolve. And the analogy here is this idea of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. A caterpillar has its old patterns, its old ways of doing things. It may be patterns about life, childhood patterns that come from our parenting and our upbringing. And then suddenly an illness comes along. And if we're in that resistance phase, we think, oh, I hate this illness. The illness is like going into a cocoon. I wish it would go away. But if that caterpillar goes into the cocoon and starts resisting the cocoon, then it just causes more pain and it delays the transformation into the butterfly. Caterpillar says, why did I come into this cocoon? Not realizing that that was its destiny, that was its Cosmic destiny, to make that transformation, to become a more glorious version of itself, to expand and evolve to higher and higher levels of evolution. If we shift our perspective and see it like that, then that helps us let go of the grief that keeps us stuck in the past. So we're in that cocoon. And if we recognize that this is happening for a reason, this illness is a spiritual accelerator, then we no longer battle with what we're experiencing. And it helps us move towards acceptance of this condition. So that's the first secret. Transform yourself from grieving about what you've lost in life and the impact this illness has made on your life, to recognizing it's for your growth, which helps you move towards acceptance and surrender. And then you gradually strengthen your wings coming out of your condition, learning how to do that, learning about yourself, learning about self care, self love, self acceptance. Those are the strengtheners of your wings that as you struggle out of the cocoon, the wings get stronger and stronger and stronger so that you can fly. Imagine each moment that you experience your illness rather than having that resistance to what you're experiencing, you are to recognize the deeper meaning of your life. So this is a beautiful opportunity to recognize this suffering can awaken and evolve us. And you know, in Christianity and Christian traditions, they talk about the way of the cross, Jesus's path that he took, the path of suffering which he accepted and loved. The people saying they not know what they do. In the east, there's always analogies related to food. So they talk about rice, that when you get rice, it's all hard and brittle, but when you cook it, when you expose it to strong heat and pressure, it becomes soft and fragrant. And so in that way, the challenges that we come up with in life that are bestowed upon us are there for our growth and expansion. That's our first emotion, grief, that we now understand, the deeper meaning to transform us to acceptance.
