“When. you deny emotional pain, your actions, thoughts, and relationships become contaminated. You then emanate negative energy, and others pick it up subliminally.” Echart Tolle

Stay vulnerable, don’t resist the grief. Don’t close it off with a story of being the victim. Grief becomes grace when you do this, says Tolle. The window that closes off the grace is blaming the other for one’s pain. Instead of seeing the transcendent grace (or Now) in the pain, the opaque window is shut and becomes a mirror for our now very active victim. The pain is now buried and become part of our pain-body.

There is no better time to Practice the Power of Now than when grief strikes. The grief is the Now. When we resist it, blame it away, bury it, hope for a better day, we miss the power of Being, the power of life to heal itself through suffering. In Christin terms, we miss the power of the Cross, which is the resurrection or cessation of suffering. The Power of Grief transmute death into life, loss into liberation. Grief is sacred and the opportunity it brings should not be avoided.

Finding reasons for the pain, like so many well wishers want to do, as that is the practice of kindness, is a positive way of resisting the grief. The hole is important, keeping the hole of grief open is that way to allow grace to flow in. Grace and grief are one when the window is kept open. But the ways we are taught to avoid grief are the way we shut the window to the Grace of the Now.

There is no reason for the pain, for the grief in the Now. It is time where we must find a reason for our suffering so that our suffering has meaning referenced to something in time, past or future. But the raw grief has no reference to anything outside of itself. The grief is Just This…just this, and it is here that we must rest in order to go through the grief to the grace.

Even prayer is a subtle way of closing the window on Grace. One prays for the pain to be gone, which is a resistance to the grief which is Now, a resistance to the Now, creates grief, the loss of the Now. When loss comes, which is grief, it is not easy and it goes against the cultural grain to open the door and say welcome. We are the Now, and when grief comes, the Grief is only Now. But we resist and close the door. Now I have shut the door on myself, for I am the grief and I won’t let myself into my own house. This creates grief, the loss of myself.