Ben Decker and David Kessler on grief and meditation

Early just to give everyone time to find us. Hey, Ben. Good to see you.

Good to see you, David. Hey, everybody.

All right, we're gonna give people a good minute because I came on a whole minute early for people to find us, because finding the online live is always a challenge.

So.

Coming up. See, I'm looking, and I haven't even found it, and I kind of know where to look.

So when you come on and you do find us, say hello. So I know you have found us.

We got one friend here from Pennsylvania. Hey there.

Hi there. Oh, good, good, good.

All right.

So we're clearly broadcasting live somewhere. Even though I can't find us, y', all, I'm not distracted. I'm just trying to find the feed.

Here to see your comments.

All right.

Just say hello when you come on. Oh, someone from Ohio.

Indiana. There we go.

I found us.

There we are.

I finally found us.

All right.

Let'S see.

Pat's here from Virginia. Hey, Virginia. Sarah's from Louisville. Anna's from California.

Betty's from Ohio.

Ben, you're coming to us from Ohio, right?

Yeah, I'm in Ohio.

Yeah. And Diane's from Corona. She's like, David, don't keep asking me. Lisa's from Pennsylvania. Wonderful, wonderful. Hey. Kinoko from Hawaii.

Donald.

Lynn says hello.

Ben.

Robin's here from New York. Judy. Minnesota. Lindy from northwest Michigan. Northern California is Linda. Welcome, everyone. Glad you're finding us.

All right.

Terry's from Nova Scotia. Wonderful.

Patricia.

New York City. Glad you're all here. We'll just give it one more minute for everyone to come on. So if this is your first time here, just know usually what we do is we say hello in the beginning.

I do this every night with a guest because there's so many voices in grief. I want to share a lot of different wisdom from a lot of different people with you. Then I come on every day at 1:00pm Pacific Time, 4:00pm Eastern, and we pick a topic every day, usually that I find through looking through your feed, and we discuss that topic and the rest of the 22 hours that I'm not here. This group is amazing at supporting and loving one another and helping out. I started this because of COVID 19 that the idea that grief is isolating on a good day in a normal world. Now we're here doing this, and I'm like, no, we have. We have to have people that can help us. All right, Brenda's here from Orangevale. Wonderful, wonderful. Rachel from Tarzana. You're not that far.

Hey.

Wendy from the UK I'm in Los Angeles. Donald, North Carolina. Wonderful. Well, glad you're all here.

I'm so glad you could join us. I love to bring in people who have had different experiences, different topics, different views on the world, different talents and so glad you're here tonight, Ben. I'm looking forward to hearing from you. One of the things that I like to do is we're here because someone we love died. So I love just to take a moment to close our eyes.

And just send them love. Wherever they are, send them love. Whether that's heaven for you or your heart, send them love.

Thank you, everyone, for doing that. I so appreciate it. So, Ben, you are. You know, I'm almost like anyone who's here is here because they've dealt with something horrible in their life, a loss. So tell us, how did you get to this world? What brought you into the world? I've been studying for years. How did you get here?

Right. Well, the.

You know, I think, you know, my first interest in understanding grief and everything actually happened when I was younger. I had a friend who was. Who was kidnapped when I was about 10 years old. And when she was recovered about eight months later, it was very public. And when she was recovered about eight months later, I took very deep interest in what that process she was going through with the process the family was going through. A lot of people had actually thought she died.

And then that, you know, then life. Life goes on. And, you know, when you're that age, you. You're in school and your expectations are high and. And, you know, you're. You're very, very busy. And then it wasn't really, again, until I was in my mid-20s, when a good friend of mine, great guy, successful, really, really loving, loved kids, loved animals.

Had everything. He had a beautiful car, his beautiful home, supermodel wife, and great guy, honestly, was just such a loving guy and a dear friend of mine.

When he died by suicide. And in some ways, it was.

Looking back, we saw signs, but in the moment, it was extraordinarily shocking and absolutely devastating.

And that was actually when I was introduced to your work for the first time. Initially, I had been working in meditation and also in activism. I was very familiar with Marianne Williamson. I had been working on her campaign for Congress at the time. And so she was the person that I called. I called her.

She said a beautiful prayer with me and said a few kind words. And the first thing she really said was, you know, you've got to talk to David Kessler. You've got to talk to My friend David Kessler, and I'm not sure if you really remember this, but she sent an email introducing us to each other. You immediately responded, and I took about six months to respond. It was so fresh. I think that that introduction happened within three days of his death.

And I really was not ready at the time. I wasn't ready to even really go there. I was really in shock. But then going through that experience and going through some of your trainings, your in person trainings, reading your books and listening to different interviews.

And we lost him, everyone. So that's how this works. It being live. And here he is back. I said. I said that's how. I said that's how live works. And here he is.

Sorry about that. I don't know what happened.

No worries.

The universe. Like what happened to those in person trainings?

Gone.

And then you're gone.

Oh, yeah.

Well, the person is gone.

The. You know, I think. I mean, that was it, you know, to answer your question, it was the suicide of my. Of my close friend and colleague.

That really got me. It was really my strongest, most in depth experience with grief.

Yeah, it was interesting. I.

Don'T remember responding to that email. I'm glad I did then. It was strange because you weren't on my radar.

Because I don't know how long it was after that email was sent. But.

In Los Angeles, a lot of meditation places were popping up and people were telling me about, check this meditation place out, check that out. And there were a few that I had liked on Facebook. And I was on our one day on our famous 405 freeway, which just was a nightmare in traffic. I forgot where I was going, but.

I was going from here to the.

West side and traffic was just hideous.

And I remember I was going to.

Something and I left really early because.

I knew about traffic being horrible.

And I remember being just so stressed. And I pulled over and I said, what am I going to do?

I got here so early from one.

Thing to another, and I was looking.

Through my Facebook feed and I saw like, there was a class about to start right where I was.

And I'm like, well, I'm gonna go in and check this out.

And I went in. It was a meditation class that you were leading.

Yeah.

And then afterwards I'm like, hey, my name's David, you know, And I had. Didn't even think about. I didn't remember or know about the email.

Right. I. When I saw you walk in, I was like, oh, man. Oh, David Kessler's in my class. I Hope this is good.

Not a good meditator. I wouldn't know whether it was not that they're meditator but you were great.

It was great to see you that day.

And then that was actually so powerful because that brought me that just having that exchange with you, you introducing yourself to me was what caused me to really.

Allow myself to experience the grieving process that I think in a lot of ways I had been not totally avoiding but, but really not allowing myself to experience fully.

Well, and this is a group that you can admit you, you've avoided grief because I bet you how many people in here have avoided grief. I mean, I think it's part of the grieving process is probably avoiding some of the grief. I think we've all sort of done that. So death by suicide is, and we're trying these days to not use the word committed anymore because it's, it's not a crime. We use the dead word, death by suicide. So did you have so many people have after a death by suicide, clearly I heard you say, oh, there were signs. We looked back on. Is there a sense of why didn't I know this? I should have done that, it should have been obvious. And any self blame went on with.

You, I would say that was the strongest thing. You know, we had a very close knit community, a great group of friends.

And we were very social through a lot of parties, had a lot of get togethers, everyone was going on vacation and things like that together. I helped plan his beautiful wedding and you know, and all kinds of beautiful experiences. And so that built a community around this cluster of friends. And when he died, I think all of us really experienced self blame. I personally certainly did and I also witnessed it tear the whole community apart. We all sort of went our separate ways after that. And a lot of, I think in a lot of ways we were blaming each other as much as we were all blaming ourselves.

People can relate to that.

One thing, it's kind of interesting. One thing that came up for me quite a bit was.

About six months before he passed.

He was having a party at his house and it was a reggae themed party. He hired a reggae band and.

Everyone was going to be smoking weed and it sounded like a great party in a lot of ways but for me I didn't want to be around them.

Obviously that's quite the theme.

Yeah.

Okay, go on.

And so for me I, you know, I wasn't drinking, didn't want to be around the marijuana, you know. But I did tell him I would go, I Told him I would go to the party. And then when it came down to it, I ended up not going. And, and it's, it doesn't sound like that big of a deal, but looking back on it, I remember he was really hurt that I didn't go. And he was really hurt that I told him that I would go to this party.

But I, I ended up flaking and not going to the party. And so as much as that, me going to that party wouldn't have changed anything. You know, people not going to parties doesn't kill people. Right? People not, you know, but, but that was one particular memory where I told him something I would do and I, and I didn't. And, and it kept coming up for me like that.

I think about the range of experiences that people have with a death by suicide that it's all the way from. You literally have someone in your life that has self harming tendencies and they're openly in battle with them all the time and you're openly trying to help them all the time. I often think about. There was a show years ago, it got turned into a movie called Night Mother and it was about.

A mother who realizes her daughter is planning to die by suicide. And her fight all night long to.

Keep her daughter from doing it.

And all the way from.

It's so clear, they're open about it.

They'Re talking about it all the way.

To the other extreme.

They're fine, they look fine, everyone's fine. How could that have happened? And everything in between. And just like you said, our mind goes back and goes, you know, Ben, you hurt him. It didn't go to that part, you know, your mind decides to pick out a little cruel nugget. Go after you with that.

Yep.

My first experience.

Big experience, was literally in college. My college roommate, his friend called. I had like met his friend. I answered the phone, you know, he said, is Harold there? And I said, no, he's not. I'll tell him you call. Jeff hung up the phone. Like ended up, he died by suicide. And of course I thought I should have gone, so Jeff, how are you? What's, what's your inner thoughts? How are you feeling? You know, and I have to look back and go, why would. But just even someone I didn't know, our mind gravitates on.

Right.

We should have been able to intervene. It's such and such a struggle. And for people, you know, for everyone.

I think, yeah, I think that that's definitely true. I've heard that with, with, with the other friends since then, we've. We've communicated and we've processed some things together. That community of us who all knew him, who all knew Andrew, and the. The things that I hear them say, the things that I hear them think about, it's very similar.

Everyone takes on some level of ownership for it. And then in other ways, we all blamed each other. We. There was, you know, it's just like in the six stages of grief, there's the. There's anger, you know, and I definitely went through all of them. I think that. I think that I was in. I think denial was the strongest thing at first. It wasn't that I didn't believe that he died necessarily, but I was in shock. I was completely in shock that this person that I loved that was so full of life went from zero to 60, you know, went from 60 to zero. Really went from full of life max level of participation in the world to not alive at all. And I really also started to become aware in my mind, especially through meditation, become aware of, you know, you start to notice those different thoughts that you're having. And I started to imagine and have different dreams of, oh, he's not really dead, he faked his death, or it didn't really happen, or I would wake up thinking it was a dream and that he was alive. I would, I would dream that he was alive and that. And imagine that this suicide was itself a death, you know, And I think that's how the stage of denial manifested for me.

And also sometimes we call that magical thinking.

Yeah, definitely.

You know, that it's just all, it's a dream, it's not real, something like that.

It's. Death by suicide is such a challenging loss for people. And you know, I. One of the things I always say is.

If. If you. Because we have, we. Our mind tells us if we had done this, they would still be here.

Right.

And I remind people, if you really had the power.

If you had truly had the power to between life and death, they'd still be here.

Right.

Very fact that you're not, that they're not means you didn't have the power that you thought you had.

I want to spend just a couple of moments. Because you're a meditator, you've written a book on meditation. Can we just talk about meditation and grief? I would imagine there's people in this group that are strong meditators all the way to people who have never meditated.

Right.

Tell us a bit about meditation. Pretend like you know nothing.

Yeah, well, let's talk specifically in the context of grief.

Right.

There's, there's really, I would say, three ways that meditation and grief interact. One is, if you're a spiritual or religious person, meditation can help you get into a spiritual sense of acceptance. A lot of times, meditation can help us open our minds to more eternal or cosmic perspectives. And then the other two are a little bit more practical. One is really navigating today, helping cope. Meditation can help you recalibrate and regulate your emotions so that you can. I mean, for me, some of the, some of the. On my bad days, I had a hard time just doing basic things. I had a hard time taking the trash out, I had a hard time paying my bills, had a hard time showing up for the real, really basic things, you know, and meditation helped me at least regulate myself enough to get through what I had to get through on a normal day. And then the third thing, the third way that meditation and grief really related to each other was.

Something that was very powerful in understanding what I was going through and accepting what I was going through. In mindfulness meditation, the idea is that we're bringing our mind into the moment. We're filling the moment with our mind, mindfulness, we're filling the moment with our mind. And that means we're not living in the past, we're not living in the future. We're bringing the fullness of our conscious, of our awareness, of our. Of our mental attention into the present moment. So, so that means breathing.

A lot of times we'll use essential oils or different things to help activate the sense of smell. But we tune into all of our physical senses in the present moment. And then we observe our thoughts. We observe our thoughts and observe our emotions. And for me, that's when I started to realize, wow, I have all this pent up stuff that I was sort of forcing down and all this energy, all these feelings and thoughts, I wasn't allowing myself to release. So in meditation, you sort of allow your exhales to let you soften and that opens you up so that those emotions can present themselves so you can experience the emotions and so you can breathe through them so you can notice the thoughts occurring in your mind. And for me, it was very important for me to notice in my mind, wow, I'm blaming myself for this death. I'm blaming myself not just for this death, but for his sadness. I'm blaming myself for his depression. And that was in meditation, really, in observing my thoughts, observing my emotions. And I started to realize I'm taking responsibility for his death. Almost as if I Killed him. So there was a part of me where I was taking it on as if I had murdered somebody, as if. As if I was the cause of his death. Like you said, if I had the power of life over death, he would. He would be living. And so there was a part of me that. That was sort of like an insane thought, like an unintegrated thought. And it's not really insane. It's. I think it's pretty normal to have those kinds of thoughts. It's just an untrue thought.

Right. Right. So one of the things I see in the feed that I was going to bring up is. And I see this reaction a lot when anyone hears meditation or mindfulness and grief. They're like, you have got to be kidding. I am in so much pain in my heart and my mind, and you want me to sit with that? You have got to be crazy. That's one of the things that comes up. And it's strange because I completely understand those thoughts. I've had them. Right. And it. And it's not. It doesn't turn out to be that way. I mean, if you close your eyes and sort of go within, the pain doesn't ramp up.

Right.

So. Right.

It has a tendency.

You know, don't. Don't even do that.

Right. And I think that there's a part, for me, at least, what I observed was it was almost like I didn't. I. You don't get to be relaxed right now, Ben. You know, it was like a part of myself that was like. Felt like I was dishonoring what had just happened by allowing myself to relax into it, into accepting. Felt like I was honoring the death, honoring the life of this person I loved by. By denying it, by resisting it. So I didn't want to go into. You know, we talk in meditation a lot about acceptance and accepting things as they are right now, breathing through it, you know, and also challenging experiences like this, we sometimes talk about them as an initiation. It's sort of like stepping through the gates of initiation, entering into a new level of your life where nothing's. Nothing's ever going to be the same after someone you love dies. Right. And so you're stepping almost into a new dimension, a new world altogether. And. And so I. I felt I could tell within myself, even though I knew those things and had some kind of relationship to that information, I still had to then walk through those gates of initiation myself, which meant I had to really allow myself to experience it.

Can we also talk about the different ways? So for Instance.

I consider that moment I take at the beginning of this mindfulness.

And I'll tell you, I am on a daily basis, sort of more at the first one, the 1pm one, I am usually a little frantic. I'm trying to get things set up. Life's going on, a phone call, an email, it's a little frantic. And then I sit down and I got to make sure everything's right here and up there's Jane from here and all that. And then I just take that moment and.

You know, I usually talk to my son in that moment. That's the sense of mindfulness, right? That, that it's mindfulness meditation, even that we take.

Yeah. And I think that's one of the things that I think is important to acknowledge about meditation is that there are thousands of different ways to meditate. Not every meditation technique or approach is going to resonate with everyone at any given time. I practice, I'm a cross disciplinary practitioner. I practice a lot of different meditation techniques. Not every day do I do the same thing. And then also it doesn't need to be 30 minutes twice a day, doesn't need to be 20 minutes twice a day. It can be a moment, just a moment to allow yourself to experience it. And what I think about meditation, the way I want to define it, is bringing the mind and the heart and the body together. So even if it's just for a few breaths where your mind is fully conscious in the moment where you're with the body and your heart, mind, body, heart all together at once, that's a, that's meditation.

And I think of meditations as, you know, for me, the ones I do, there's.

Sometimes just the quieting my mind.

Beginning to observe, observe all those thoughts. You know, there's a lot of things people use. There's, there's the river that, you know, your thoughts are going by on the river. Oh, I'm blaming myself. Oh, I gotta remember to take the trash out.

Oh, right.

Oh, and you're. They're just going by, Right. Interesting to ask yourself.

You know, who's, whose mind are you in? Where are you? You know, I'm not, I'm not. Those thoughts that I think are me.

Right. And that's, that's an interesting thing. We are, we are the thinker of the thoughts. In the Eastern traditions, there's this concept that there are six senses. And a lot of times we think of that sixth sense as intuition or some kind of psychic ability. But that's not the case in the Eastern traditions. In the Eastern traditions, there are the five conventional senses, and the sixth sense is thought. And so when we look at our thoughts as a sense, as sensory input, it's just data. It's data about our mind and about our brain and about what's happening internally. And so if we think about it that way, an example, a good example would be if you're. If you're at the mall and you smell Cinnabon, you smell it. You are not Cinnabon. You know that you're not Cinnabon, but you can still smell it, you know. And so that's what we practice with our thoughts. We observe our thoughts. We are not the thoughts. Every thought that we have is not even necessarily true.

Oh, I thought that you have crazy thoughts.

Yeah, there's plenty of crazy thoughts. Most of them are probably untrue, you know.

Yeah, they're kind of working themselves out. They're like different ideas that are processing themselves out, you know. And so in that concept, it's a valuable thing to look at our thoughts as senses, as sensory input and our thinking mind as a sensory organ, just like when we smell something. And so that's the interesting part. So right there, there's the key. When you smell the Cinnabon, the key is, what do you do next? Do you go. Do you then go into Cinnabon and get a cinnamon roll for me? More often than not, probably yes. But the sort of. The right decision would be to intervene and to not go get the cinnamon roll. Right. And so think about it in another context. You're at home and you're reading. You're sitting on the couch, you're reading something, and you smell something burning. Well.

You are not the thing that's burning, but it's still giving you data about the moment. So you put the book down, you stand up, you walk around the apartment, you try to intervene, you try to find out what's burning. And so maybe you left something on the stove, maybe your curling iron is on a towel still plugged in. Whatever it is, you intervene. You stop before something happens. And so when we look at our thoughts, like sensory input, we can observe our thoughts. Oh, like you said, like driftwood in a stream, or like clouds passing by in the sky, or like a parade of thoughts. You observe the thoughts and you say, oh, I'm thinking about what I had for lunch yesterday. Oh, I'm. I'm judging myself for not working out today. Oh, I'm thinking about what I have to do later today. Oh, I'm thinking about my friend's death. Oh, I'm blaming myself for my friend's death. You know, and then that would be the thought where an intervention kind of comes into play, and we call it like a mindfulness intervention. It's not a big ordeal. We just take a moment and say, we. We allow ourselves to be with that thought for a moment, and we breathe and we say.

I sure do love Andrew. I sure miss him, and if it were up to me, he'd be here with me right now. And I did not cause his death.

You know, you take a moment and you rewrite it. You know, you don't. So that's the power of meditation.

And let me just throw in the moment you declare, I did not cause someone's death by death by suicide, your mind doesn't go, thank you for sharing that. I got it right. Mind goes, oh, no. But did you forget this piece of evidence? Do you forget there was a call? What about the party? I mean, that's what mine does. It then begins to present the evidence, you know, isn't a belief till it gets challenged. I mean, I like what you said about those thoughts have to work themselves out. They have to wrestle.

Right?

Yeah. And I think that's a. That's an important thing, is like we. We have to sort of live intentionally, have a certain kind of. Like when we. From a spiritual perspective, there's this idea of positivity where we. And I'm talking about real spiritual positivity where you're. Where you have a connection to the truth and you. And. And by positivity, I mean you're radiating something deliberate out, which is just truth, you know, it doesn't mean that you have to go out of your way to go spread yourself thin and do things, you know, take on other people's problems. It just means that you're standing in the truth. And so. And so for me, that's why meditation and even grief work. It's. It's part of an ongoing practice. I. I have to regularly, even today, years after my friend passed, I have to. Even today, occasionally, I'll find my own thoughts saying, I know that you told me that that party had nothing to do with his death, but he was really upset that you weren't there, and it really meant a lot to him that you were going to be there. And it was really your friends who were the reggae band. And, and really. And he. He told a few people he was upset that you weren't there, you know, and it. And it will. It will show up, you know, and you still have to and sometimes I still experience it and I just say.

That'S true. Those things happened.

And the other thing, besides witnessing our crazy mind, I also want to add, when my mind can get quiet, when my mind can get quiet, that is when I can connect with my son David, that is when I can talk to him, that is when I can feel him, you know, And I think those moments, and it's interesting, there were times.

Something would happen and maybe I was planning to go to the cemetery or, or, you know, and I either couldn't get there or it rained or whatever it was, and I would go, wait a minute, he's actually not at the cemetery. So what can I do to connect with that experience I wanted to have at the cemetery? Because really it's here I need to go.

I mean, the cemetery sometimes helps me go here. I mean, to me and you know, everyone who's on here with us is the cemeteries for some people, it's not for others. I mean, all that's very personal. No two people in grief are unique. The cemetery for me is a meditation.

I mean, for me, I love going to the cemetery. That's. I feel like it does help me get into my heart, helps me connect into it. I'm not likely to.

Perform any kind of special ritual or anything to communicate with my loved ones on the other side, but I do find that doing the grief work.

And allowing myself to feel what I'm feeling, but continue to. For me, there is a positive momentum, a progress where I look at these experiences as the things that determine who I am. And it, and it does change the universe. The unit, the entire universe changes when someone transitions to the other side. And we in that transition, we help determine, I believe we help determine what the new universe is. And so I take what I love about that person that I love, that I'm now missing. And I let that color my new universe. I take that momentum of all those good things that he shared with me, all those beautiful experiences that we had, that wonderful friendship that we had. And I let that momentum take go with me into the new world. After the passing. I remember when I did go to one of your all day trainings. It was my first time really, really going there conversationally with, with another person. We did an exercise, a space holding exercise where we, where we shared a little bit about our grief. And I had a dream and I had tried a couple times. I had prayed, I had been like, Andrew, where are you? I can't. And I didn't, I didn't hear him. I wasn't hearing him and, and I didn't feel his presence. I heard all these wonderful stories about people seeing. Seeing a dove and they just knew it was their loved one or they saw an angel or they had a dream. And I wasn't having any of it, but I was meditating, I was doing, I was allowing myself to feel it. And then it was that about that time after our all day conference together.

When I had a dream and I've never had a dream quite like this one. And I was at this beautiful paradise. It was like Tahiti. And there was a. It was like a festival. It was like Burning man in Tahiti.

That's a visualization.

That's where they should be doing Burning Man. I was like, note to self. And instead of in the desert and I. And I was just looking around and I felt his presence. I thought of him. And so in that moment I thought, oh, he would have loved this. He loved Tahiti. He loved Burning Man. He would have loved this. And then I felt someone tickle me from behind me. And I turn around and it was Andrew. And so I'm in this beautiful vision in this beautiful dream and he's being playful with me. He tickled me and he's laughing and I was like.

Hey.

And he was like, hey. And we just had a moment where I was like, how are you? And he was like, dude, I'm great. I'm so good. I'm so glad you came to see me. Thank you for coming to see me. He hugged me and he was like, I love you. And then he ran and jumped in the water and I woke up, you know, and that was the whole dream. But for me, it wasn't necessarily coming when I went to the cemetery. It wasn't necessarily coming when I was trying to. Trying to communicate with him, you know. But it did come.

In rest, you know. Right.

By the way, I can't guarantee you'll have that dream after my seminar, but I'm glad that happened to you. I wish I could. That was always an outcome for everyone.

Because it sounds right.

I would say what did give me that, first of all, it was a gift from the universe, a gift of chance. But also the depth that I had gone to that day. And it was up to me. You held the space you gave me content to work with. But I do know that it was up to me to really go there. And it's not to say that if you go into a deep sense of acceptance that you will have that. But that's what I think unlocked the possibility for me was that I was. I was really accepting that he was gone. I was starting to realize that he was gone and I was starting to allow myself to, to move on in a new kind of way where I wasn't dishonoring him, I wasn't forgetting him, but I was still stepping forward in life.

All right, if you have a question for Ben, please put it in. And while you're putting questions is I also wanted to say we have been dealing with this top so much that so many people deal with death by suicide. I just want you to know I have a three week class that's three different modules that I have for free right now because I would love anyone who's dealing with it to feel free to get some help. So just know you could go to grief suicide.com griefsuicide.com and hopefully that will help you on this journey because I get into detail more in those modules.

Than we ever get to here because I know people struggle with that.

All right, so let's see. Any questions coming in?

Lots of comments on the dreams and all that.

People talking about going to the cemetery helps their hearts. Wendy says I usually have nightmares, pretty dreadful at times. I wake up in a pain, panic or crying. Even on the rare occasion when I dream a nice one, I cry when.

It'S over.

You know, I think first of all, thank you so much for sharing that, Wendy.

When. The way I understand dreams, I see them as a way our unconscious is.

Processing what's going on in our lives. And I think that when, when we're, when we're, when we're at a loss and when we have.

Uncertainty, I think it's perfectly normal for scary dreams to come up. I think that in meditation we can help regulate the nervous system. There are things that we can do with visualization, with mantra and with some very simple breath work to introduce a saying, right?

Just a saying.

Yeah, Mantra is just a saying that you repeat, you know, and you can repeat it. In one of my books, I have it, I have them in Latin so that it's a little bit outside of what you would normally be speaking. So sometimes you'll find them in another language, but it can just be one word or a phrase like an affirmation. Your healing grief cards, a lot of the cards in the deck of your healing grief deck, those are great mantras. So if someone were to pick one of those statements.

Something that one thing that I really loved, I felt like my heart was really broken. And.

Something that was in one of your books, it Was the idea that a broken heart is an open heart. Right?

A broken heart's an open heart. Absolutely.

And that was a beautiful meditation for me. When my heart was broken, when I had fear, when I had anxiety, I just. I would just pray. And what I would do is I would breathe in, and sometimes I would hold my hands in my heart. And on my exhale, just even now, if you're listening, just allow your exhale to send a wave of relaxation through every part of your body.

And just allow everything to soften. And in meditation, I would do that with every single exhale for 5 minutes, 20 minutes. And on my inhale, I would say, a broken heart. And on my exhale, I would say is an open heart. A broken heart is an open heart. And it would help tweak and alchemize that pain and that fear and that sadness into compassion and openness.

All right, we have some questions.

How do you quiet? I'll give them both to you in case they relate.

Okay.

How do you quiet your mind? If I'm having trouble quieting my mind and someone else says, what if I come from an abusive past?

Okay, so tips for quieting the mind. I'll start there. There are. It's about allowing the mind to unravel itself so we're less trying to suppress the thoughts happening in the mind and more allowing them to sort of just like, drift off and away. So it's about sort of letting go and just breathing. And look, it's sometimes uncomfortable. Sometimes the thoughts that we're seeing and observing, sometimes it's uncomfortable, especially at the beginning. But as we breathe, we find that it's almost like a weight is lifted off of us. And that's how the mind quiets. The mind doesn't quiet from us suppressing the thoughts occurring in the mind. It quiets from us allowing ourselves to be who we are, how we are right now, and then coming from an abusive past, you know, there's a lot to be said about that. I'm sorry that that happened. That is unfortunately much too common. And when it comes to. When it comes to abuse, sometimes what we have a hard time doing is loving ourselves, taking really good care of ourselves, valuing ourselves. And so I would say.

If you experienced abuse in the past, what I would encourage is what we call a loving kindness meditation. And a loving kindness meditation is essentially first cultivating a sense of love, acceptance, and compassion for yourself, and then gradually opening your mind to extending, connecting in energetically to that sense of compassion and love to your loved ones, to Your acquaintances and ultimately to people with whom you have difficulty. But I think the crucial part is starting. We start with ourselves. So a lot of times when we have abuse, we have self love, self care, self respect issues that come from that.

Someone said.

Any tips on helping yourself get to sleep when your mind is so noisy?

Yeah, I think that getting to sleep, one of the best techniques is called a body scan meditation. And when, when you give your mind something to focus on, like a mantra or a part of the body, like we do in body scan, it, the attention goes to that thing that you're thinking about rather than allowing the mind to sort of determine what's. What's going on, you know, so you choose different parts of the body. Like you, you might start maybe with your, with your hands. And so if you were trying to get to sleep, you would lay down and you would breathe, take a couple deep breaths.

And then you would bring your inner awareness into your hands, which were resting still. And you allow your exhale to bring a wave of relaxation specifically into your hands, allowing the hands to sort of like let go and go limp under their own weight. And then you would gradually move through every single part of the body.

Letting go of any tension in that part of the body. Just through letting go, just through opening, decompressing, letting yourself know that you're in a safe moment. And there's a lot of different body scan, a lot of resources to locate body scan practices.

And I'll tell you, your mind is what you're fighting in those moments. One of the things working in the hospital years ago that someone told me about getting to sleep, that's always helped me so much is the first thing that happens when you can't fall asleep or you wake up in the middle of the night is you go, oh, crap, now I'm not going to be able to sleep. Thinking about how it ruins your next day, oh my gosh, I've got this tomorrow. And then you're getting all those images.

One of the things I was taught that's helped me is to go, all right, maybe I'm awake. So if I'm awake, I know that just the body laying down is so helpful to rejuvenate the body. So even though I'm not going to fall asleep, I'm just going to lay here just to allow my body to rest. And there's something about you quit fighting or trying to get to sleep. And then as you're like. And I'll take breaths, all right.

Just letting my body rest and rejuvenate you're sort of. It's an acceptance, and then, you know, you're waking up, and it's. You know, your alarm's going off.

Right.

Someone said here about, well, what if you don't, you know, you can't go to the cemetery or. A loved one was cremated. You know, that. That's why, you know, even on those days, I can't go. This is where my son is. This is where my son is. You know, my mother's cemetery is across the country, and my father. So you don't have to go to a cemetery. Your loved one may have been cremated. It's, you know, it's in you to connect with them, you know, and there's tons of places, and music is a good way to really connect and familiarize yourself. You know, like, take some music in that they loved. It's really great. Mm.

All right, let's see. So one of the concepts, and I see a couple of people talking about it, that we do bend is. And it's a game our mind plays with us, is that if I meditate, that's where the deep pain is. If I come into this group, that's where the pain is. If I go there, that's where the pain is. And we love. Our mind loves to pretend like the pain is over there. Now, you do this to escape the pain when. Yeah, the pain's right here. The pain's always us. Not in the support group, not online.

You know, it's here.

Yeah. I mean, for me, one of the unhealthy ways that I would cope with with trauma and pain is overeating. It's like my drug of choice. And part of it is just the reality that if I feel like I'm escaping the pain, there's no way around it. That's what I've really learned is there's really no way around the pain. The pain is there. The cinnamon roll will delay the pain and cause some other pain. You know what I mean? But the reality is that the pain is actually there. And it's not that I want to escape the pain. I want to allow the pain to transform me. I want to become.

In the shamanic indigenous traditions, what they say is to go. If you have a vision or a dream or a fear, they say, go directly to what scares you.

Right.

And that's how you go get over the fear. And so if you have pain, the idea is to allow yourself to be in pain right now. Sometimes that's what we need. We need to experience right now. Maybe right now it's not about fixing other people. Maybe right now it's not about healing other people. Maybe right now it's not about being perfectly proper and pristine and presentable. Maybe right now it's actually about being in pain. Maybe that's what this moment supposed to be for me.

You know, maybe it's. Maybe, you know, that is what grief looks like and that is what we feel like in this moment. People have heard me talk about this when I was researching Finding Meaning. I was like, I wanted examples for the book of that very thing about how we run from the pain. And I love the example I found about how buffaloes sense when a storm is coming and the buffaloes run into the storm, thus minimizing the uncomfortable time.

We sort of have our grief and we keep running from the grief, really maximizing the uncomfortableness.

It's like you're running with the storm. It's like as the storm is moving, you're running right along with the storm, keeping yourself in it rather than moving to the other side. That's what I thought was so powerful about finding meaning, you know, And I feel like in a way, when all of the. All of the COVID 19 stuff was happening, I was experiencing a sense of grief from normal life, had lost some work, and, you know, lots of challenges were happening in that little moment. But it was almost like meaning was the first thing that I found. And that's what was interesting for me. It was like. It was like in that particular grief, I saw, wow, this is an extraordinary transformation. This is a huge moment. And then after that, I went into anger and I went through the other stages of grief. But I had that first. It was like I went into it immediately, which helped me, I think, run through it, you know, run directly into it, you know, so one, one, three one mantra that I have used is go towards what scares you. And there's something that, Eleanor, what you're avoiding, what was that?

You could be. Another version of that would be go to what is you're avoiding. Yes, you're avoiding the grief, avoiding the pain. And it helps me to remember. The grief at its core is love.

Yes.

You know, pain at its core from someone dying is the love we have of them.

So. All right, well, just time flies by, as usual. I want to mention a couple of things. Griefsuicide.com if you want that free training I did, because I really want people to find a little peace after a death by suicide. So a griefsuicide.com I mentioned, I don't even think I've told you this. I came on the other day and I was so furious that like Finding Meaning since we talked about it.

They had, it had run out and they weren't reordering it because Amazon wasn't ordering non essential things even though I got a sofa cover.

And people started selling finding meaning for $60 and $90 online and price goggle. And for the first time I actually said to people like right here I'm like do not buy my book. Like I'll give you everything here. Do not spend 60 or $90. And luckily we wrote a lot to Amazon and it is now 17. So if you were ever thinking of getting it and I don't like to say you need anything here, you don't need anything but get it when it's $17. Tell us about your book, Ben.

Yeah, my book, my first book is called Practical Meditation for Beginners and this is really based on technique. It's a technique based book. And what I did was I studied, I researched all the different meditation techniques, organized them into 10 categories and so there's breath awareness, mantra, body scan, loving kindness, there's 10 different meditation categories, how to practice them.

What they're scientifically proven to do, what the different spiritual traditions say about them and then different variations on them. So it's a very practical guide if you're interested in meditation to go look at to figure out the different ways you can approach it.

Very good. And website, social media, how can people find you?

One of the, I mean I've got, I'm on Facebook, facebook.com bendecker meditation my website's bendeckermeditation.com I'm on Twitter as Ben Decker. On Instagram is Benjamin W. Decker. And the, yeah, the first book is called Practical Meditation for Beginners.

So very, very good Ben, thank you so much for being here. It's, it's a real blessing to have people educate us and meditation is something that you can find peace in and it can also feel scary when you're in grief because like I said, our mind goes, oh, that's the pain. Don't go near there. So thank you Ben, for those of you who are new here. In the evening at 5 or 6pm we have a different person on every night. Next week we have a really interesting week. We're going to have Libby Boyce. Cameron Boyce is the Disney star. Cameron Boyce, who died tragically and suddenly is going to be here next week. Beth Segaloff is going to be here talking about the death of a fiance, Melissa Rivers. Joan Rivers daughter is going to be here talking about the death of a parent. Tanya Wright from Orange Is the New Black is going to be talking about her brother's death and what she's how she's found meaning in that. Tom Zumba is going to be coming on. Many of you know his work. He's a grief coach and he had to deal with a wife and two kids dying. So he, like, has been through this. Paul Denniston is on Tomorrow night at 5pm Paul created grief yoga. We're going to talk about what that is and how it works. Paul's done some demonstrations, but this time tomorrow, we're going to talk about him and how he came to that and about how grief gets stuck in your body. So something every night for everyone. And then I'm back here at 1pm with a different topic. There's people who are out there alone in grief. I hope if this is helpful to you, you'll post this link on Facebook, tell other people about it so that anyone who's dealing with a death can find some companionship and we can at least be with each other during this time virtually. So no one's grieving alone. Thank you, Ben. Thank you everyone for being here and thanks all the support you're giving one another. I so appreciate it. And I'll see you tomorrow. Thanks.

Thank you, David. Thanks, everybody. Thanks. Lots of love.