Are you mourning a loss in your life? How can practicing intentional grief help you process your loss?
Practicing intentional grief involves deliberately setting aside time in your day to grieve. You may be grieving the loss of a loved one, being laid off from a job, the end of a marriage, or something else. The important thing is that you allow yourself to process the loss.
Here’s how intentional grief works, the different types of mourning, and advice for practicing it.
Mourn Deliberately
In his book Life Is in the Transitions, one of Bruce Feiler’s strategies for navigating transitions is to practice intentional grief. One way to do this is to create personally significant rituals to mark the ending of one life phase and the beginning of another. These rituals allow you to externalize and honor your grief, whether you’re mourning a literal death or a symbolic one. Processing loss in this way is especially important in the case of traumatic loss—if you don’t process the loss properly, you’re more likely to develop symptoms of trauma later on.
According to Feiler, there are four types of mourning rituals to choose from:
- Individual rituals, where you create or do something personally meaningful to honor what you’ve lost (and what you’ve gained by losing it). For example, one of Feiler’s interviewees ate his first cheeseburger after leaving a religion that forbade it.
- Community rituals, where you process the loss with the help of your community. For example, some people throw divorce parties to celebrate their ending marriages.
- Identity rituals, where you change your name to distance your new and former selves.
- Renewal rituals, where you make changes to your body, habits, or surroundings with the intention of making space for a new chapter of your life to begin. For example, you might overhaul your wardrobe after leaving an industry with a strict dress code.
Another way to mourn deliberately, according to Feiler, is to gather and periodically interact with physical keepsakes that remind you of the thing you’re grieving. Feiler says that such objects encapsulate memories, and interacting with them allows us to revisit those memories whenever we need to. For example, if a friend of yours who was an artist has died, hanging a piece of art on their wall could create opportunities to feel their presence again and remember the moments you shared together.
Advice From Other Experts for Grieving Intentionally
Feiler recommends using rituals as a tool for deliberate mourning. In The Art of Community, Charles Vogl says you can build a meaningful ritual in three steps—and although his approach is intended for community rituals, you can adapt it for individual rituals if you’d like, too.
Step 1: Introduce the ritual by greeting participants, stating the purpose of the ritual, and giving any necessary instructions. If you’re conducting a ritual alone, you might just focus on clarifying the purpose of the ritual for yourself.
Step 2: Engage in the ritual—start with a few meaningful words, and then practice a symbolic activity. For example, if you’re grieving the loss of a loved one, you might say a prayer before lighting a candle representing the life of the departed.
Step 3: Conclude the ritual by stating what you’ve gained from it and releasing participants so they can return to mundane life. If you’re doing the ritual alone, you could journal about these things instead.
Vogl also offers some wisdom about physical keepsakes, which Feiler recommends as powerful reminders of the people and experiences that matter to you. According to Vogl, when someone in your community gives you a physical object, it tells you that they value, accept, and care for you. This fosters a sense of belonging—one of Feiler’s three major sources of meaning. Experts say that when you lose someone or something you love, your sense of belonging is severed—you feel literally or figuratively abandoned. Holding onto mementos from people and experiences from your past may help you maintain a sense of connection with them, dulling the pain of severed belonging.
On the other hand, some losses can feel liberating—if you leave an abusive relationship or a restrictive religion, as one of Feiler’s interviewees did, you might relish that your sense of belonging to that relationship or religion was severed. In such cases, you can develop an individual ritual that celebrates your newfound freedom by engaging in something you couldn’t do before the loss. This can be as simple or as complex as you’d like—for example, pop star Britney Spears celebrated her financial freedom by buying candles when her conservatorship ended (which she discusses in The Woman in Me).
Feiler also presents identity rituals and renewal rituals as options for deliberate mourning. If the idea of an identity ritual appeals to you, you could hold a name change ceremony, which is popular among transgender people, or find another way to celebrate your new identity—for example, you might draw inspiration from Catholic baptismal ceremonies, which also emphasize the significance of names. If you’re more interested in a renewal ritual, you might consider options like decluttering your mental and physical space, going on a retreat that supports your new life (some people use ayahuasca retreats—meditation experiences powered by psychedelic medicines—for this purpose), or simply taking an “everything shower,” in which you deep clean to address every aspect of your hygiene needs, that leaves you feeling like a whole new person.
