Spiritual Workout

Dear Spiritual Workout:
It seems like losing loved ones who die and losing homes and livelihoods and losing degrees of safety, security, and certainty are all around me and almost everyone I’m close to right now. For me, it’s not just one of these, but many. What are some ways to handle so much loss?

Dear Reader:
From where I sit as a practitioner and from my own personal experiences of loss — via death and the loss of house/home/community/money, etc. — the first thing I’ll say is that, culturally, we Americans are not champions of processing loss. The next thing I’ll say is that a rather wide array of beliefs that any of us have will emerge in particularly strong ways when loss is the subject. Often, there are cultural and religious beliefs that guide people. Often, people realize they do not know what they believe, which makes processing their experiences particularly challenging, even frustrating. People who believe, for example, that “nothing is mine; everything is borrowed” literally don’t believe in the concept of loss and see it, rather, as change. Something has changed.

Change, we see, is embedded in the concept “we belong to the planet, not the planet to us.” That means change is a part of our human nature just as it is part of Nature’s nature. When we allow change, as Nature does all day every day, when we offer it no resistance, when we don’t judge it, we thus align ourselves with the nature of Nature. When we resist change, when we judge it to be wrong or awful or tragic or anything like that, we prolong our pain. So “handling loss” has a whole lot to do with what one believes loss means — and going from there.

Dear Spiritual Workout:
Why is it so hard to set boundaries with my friends?

Dear Reader:
I could use a little more to go on here, but here goes. And because your question is not even a little bit uncommon, I feel reasonably comfortable spewing forth in the face of “not much to go on,” trusting you will correct me, if necessary, because, as always, I could be wrong. But is it possible that when it comes to setting boundaries, it’s relatively easy to be clear about what you are wanting? Is it relatively easy to be clear about why boundary-setting is even a thing? That part is often easier than the next part: enforcement. And that’s what I’m getting at here. I’m suggesting that “setting the boundary,” telling someone you work with or go to school with or live with or are related to, to cease doing something you find bothersome or inappropriate or whatever the case may be, is one thing. Easy for some, less easy for others, but typically rather doable. What’s hard, usually much harder, is enforcing the boundary. The boundary is crossed but there are no consequences for the one having crossed it. So, the question often actually is: Why is it so hard to enforce the boundaries I set? Could that be your question?

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Dear Reader
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