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Grief is often confused with anguish. Anguish is a painful feeling that comes along with deep resistance to an experience or truth. Grief that leads to healing is an expansive state. It is a willingness to be with an experience and truth. If you're not resisting grief, then it's a neutral-to-pleasant experience. Pleasant sensations can include a sense of space and relief as something is integrated and tense holding releases.

As you witness injustices in the world, tension, anger, hopelessness, despair and more, may rise up in you. These feelings may lead to reactive thinking that doesn't contribute to healing nor wise action. Mourning is a universal need. If your culture pushed away grief and its emotional expression, you may have habits that block your access to the aliveness of grief. Read on for ways to give grief the space and support it needs.

Grieving reminds us of the preciousness of life, it helps us integrate loss, and it opens us to deeper compassion, inspiration, and joy. We need to create space in our lives to grieve fully.

When faced with someone’s grief for the world, how do you engage with them in a way that is informed? In this session, Kristin suggests exploring what they might be grieving… what they’re afraid of losing… and what it is that they love.

Integrating a full living involves grief/mourning and gratitude. Here we'll more deeply integrate inner and outer dimensions of gratitude and grief. In any experience there's the outer aspect, an event that occurs in life. And there's the inner response to the outer event. When we judge the outer positively or negatively we're in tension or resistance to our experience. Here we'll explore a more integrated mode of experiencing.

In this practice group class, certified CNVC trainers Jim and Jori Manske are facilitating the exploration of the topic of Mourning using the three modes of NVC: self-empathy, honesty and empathic presence. You'll learn how to accept a loss, let yourself feel the sadness and all the emotions, and allow yourself to grieve.

Mourning, grief and celebration is a way to connect with what we love and want to honor.  In this trainer tip we learn that these three things can become a way for us to understand our emotions regarding our losses and appreciations.

This gentle, healing telecourse recording will assist you in unearthing feelings and issues that have become tangled up with loss, enabling you to face whatever is blocking your grief.

Trainer Tip: Mourning enables us to heal the pain and gain clarity about how to meet our needs in the present moment.

What have you lost this year during this COVID-19 pandemic? Are you grieving too? Recognition of loss can helped contextualize our emotions. When we can meet grief with understanding, patience and tenderness, when we create space to mourn our losses -- and to begin to process, heal and metabolize loss. This can help us make sense of change and orient to a new reality. Grief is a longing for what we love.

Judgment is an attempt to protect from hopelessness or insecurity, at high cost. Instead, check in with fear, grief, or hurt. Then wonder what needs are at stake for everyone. This makes space for grief instead of anger, for negotiation rather than control, and for "calling in" rather than excluding. Wonder: “For whom would this be life-serving or not?”, “What strategies would care for all needs?” or, “What can I contribute now?”

Read how an American Buddhist NVC teacher with Jewish roots reflects on how any dehumanization in the Israel-Hamas conflict can be used to justify all kinds of violence that can escalate for generations. With acknowledgment of the complexities, his desire is for us to bring in respect, dignity and peace -- for both Israelis and Palestinians. He emphasizes compassionate advocacy of all humanity amid the ongoing crisis.

Your needs and your values are your Life Force: the river that flows through your spirit and your life, giving life and light to your being. Explore this river with Robert, and map out routes that support your growth. Gain a deeper understadning and acceptance of the spirituality and beauty of needs and values.

Mourning is not just a process that happens after someone dies: it's an experience we go through with loss of any kind. Here, Shantigarbha offers us seven tips for working with mourning and healing.

Is there someone you wish was more willing? Try guessing what obstacles they might be struggling with. And allow yourself to feel your grief. As you grapple with your own desire for someone to find their willingness, its essential to recognize that this is about you and your needs. You can also express your needs honestly, make requests for how to collaborate, and be responsive to what they want. Read on for more on this, plus four common ways someone’s willingness might be blocked.

When something happens that we don't like no amount of resentment nor magical thinking will make it disappear. Instead, we can mourn to dissolve our own resistance, resentment, and numbness of resignation. Mourning can allow us to feel pain with acceptance, and without needing to be okay with what happened. Acceptance can bring us to a place where even all the anguish in the world is fully, part of life.

Three things can be helpful to practice when you want to contribute to someone caught in repetitive fears: self empathy, allowing grief for what you wish was true and is not, and empathy for their difficulty. You can also ask them what's helpful.

Using real-life examples from class participants, Sylvia Haskvitz demonstrates the life-changing results of clarifying the needs underlying "shoulds." Some of the situations covered in this audio are:

• A grandmother shares how she was able to spend time with her grandchildren even when experiencing estrangement from her daughter
• A father examines how to repair a conversation with his daughter
• A woman explores her "should" thinking about her financial stability, her job and grief regarding her husband's death
• A woman connects to her deeper needs that arise with the statement "I should do my taxes"
• A woman perceives that she has conflicting needs for family harmony, relaxation and comfort when deciding whether to spend holiday time with stepchildren

If your life is fraught with "shoulds," this resource will support you in translating them into needs and, in some cases, to let them go entirely.