by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Grief Can Be an Unexpected Gift if You’re Open to Receiving It
There are few experiences more universally human or more universally avoided than grief:
This makes sense because it HURTS and so our general strategy is to tiptoe around it, soften the language we use when talking about it, distract ourselves from it, and then treat it like a cosmic error that needs ‘fixing’ when it inevitably shows up.
When we are facing this dark night of an emotion, we want to move past it as quickly as we can and resolve it as quickly as possible so we can “get back to normal” – that can’t really happen, though, because grief is something that always ends up REFINING us and so whatever we end up being on the other side of it will always be different to what we were when it initially found us (so we end up with a “new normal”).
Grief can either make us or break us depending on whether or not we’re ready to accept it and learn from it.
This article is about the idea that grief isn’t some kind of malfunction in the system but an example of the system doing exactly what it’s meant to do:
Of course, grief is brutal, it hurts, disorients, and can knock the wind out of you in ways nothing else quite can – paradoxically, though, it also carries gifts that very few other experiences are capable of delivering.
These ‘gifts’ might not exactly be the most nicely wrapped and they only reveal themselves when we stop fighting what’s happening and allow ourselves to be refined by it but they’re gifts nevertheless.
That’s what we’re going to explore in what follows:
Grief can turn shit into diamonds – if you let it.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Grief as a Gift: What We’ll Cover in this Article
- Grief Can Be an Unexpected Gift if You’re Open to Receiving It
- Grief as a Process of Refinement
- The Many Faces of Grief
- The Truth Will Set You Free (But First It Will P*ss You Off & Make You Miserable)
- Losing Something Means Losing a Part of Ourselves
- How Grief Makes Us More Real
- Grief as Gift: Practical Steps to Turning Shit into Diamonds
- The Final Word: Grief & The Gift That Can’t Be Taken Away
Grief as a Process of Refinement
Grief is one of the most difficult emotional experiences human beings can face but it’s also strangely beautiful – not because the pain itself is beautiful (of course it isn’t) but because of what grief does to us over time:
Grief has an uncomfortable and unexpected way of stripping life back to what’s real.
When something we care deeply about is taken away (or never even arrives in the first place in some cases) all the things we were clinging to that weren’t real start to fall apart:
The stories, the assumptions, the emotional attachments that were serving as the scaffolding to our sense of security, and the ego’s self-image that told us, “This is how my life is meant to be” all get held up against the light of truth and seen for what they are.
We are shaken so that we can awaken.
What remains after this stripping-back process is uncomfortable, raw, and often terrifying but it also takes us more deeply into truth which is always a blessing because it allows us to build the rest of our lives on a foundation of acceptance instead of resistance.
What’s real is always real which means that it can’t and won’t disappear but we often hide from it behind ego, avoidance, performance, and emotional armour but grief breaks through those defences by simply showing up and saying “It is what it is”.
Whilst this revelation can feel cruel in the short term, in the longer term grief becomes a process of refinement because it shakes us loose from the unreal and forces us into contact with what actually remains when everything else falls away.
In other words, it guides us back to a sense of realness that we may have distanced ourselves from for a while.
The Many Faces of Grief
We often associate grief exclusively with death but grief has many different faces:
It can arrive at the end of a relationship.
It can show up when someone we love dies.
It can emerge during major life transitions like ageing, being diagnosed with a terminal illness, becoming a parent, losing a career, or realising that a version of life you were moving towards no longer exists.
It can even appear when we lose something intangible but that once defined our experience here on Planet Earth like our innocence, our self-image, a sense of certainty, or a dream that we harboured but which never came true.
As Schopenhauer once pointed out it is loss that teaches us the value of things and so without loss in our lives we will always remain in a state of abstraction – detached and living life through concepts and ego instead of experience and realness.
Loss sucks but it always forces truth to the surface of our awareness.
It’s for this reason that grief – as devastating as it is – can be such a powerful gift because it teaches us the truth about ourselves, the world, and reality itself and removes the filters we were unconsciously using to avoid seeing things clearly.
Grief doesn’t just tell us that something has gone; it shows us what mattered, and in doing so, it brings us into a more honest relationship with life.
The Truth Will Set You Free (But First It Will P*ss You Off & Make You Miserable)
There’s a saying I often use (from my book Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness):
“The truth will set you free (but first it will piss you off and make you miserable”).
Grief is the most extreme expression of this but even so it’s not the truth that grief presents us with that hurts because being aligned with truth always brings freedom, flow, and a deep sense of peace over time.
No, what hurts is when truth shows up unexpectedly and shatters a version of reality we were emotionally invested in and shows us that what we thought was turns out to never have been – at least not in the way we believed, anyway.
What we learn during these periods is that we weren’t attached to reality as it was because we were attached to reality as we needed it to be in order to feel safe, loved, or in control:
Grief exposes that gap…and that exposure hurts.
If we trust the process instead of resisting it, though, grief always eventually opens a door and on the other side of it is a freedom that only truth can bring.
Losing Something Means Losing a Part of Ourselves
When we lose someone or something we deeply care about, we don’t just lose the external object – we lose a part of ourselves that whatever this someone or something activated in us:
We might lose a future we were moving towards.
We might lose a sense of identity that made sense in relation to that person, role, or situation.
We might lose a structure that quietly organised our days and gave us a sense of meaning and direction.
This is why grief is can be so destabilising:
It forces a reconfiguration that we weren’t ‘ready’ for and so we have to adjust not only to a new external ‘reality‘ but to a new internal landscape.
This is reflected in the well-known stages of grief which are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and ultimately acceptance.
While these stages aren’t linear or tidy, they all point toward the same destination:
Acceptance of the truth (which is always the final lesson in life).
Acceptance doesn’t mean liking what happened – nor does it mean that we approve of it.
It simply means we’ve stopped fighting reality and realise that life is beyond what we ‘like’, ‘dislike’, ‘approve’, or ‘disapprove’ of and just is what it is.
When we stop fighting reality, we stop fighting ourselves, and can finally take the medicine that reality has to offer us.
How Grief Makes Us More Real
Grief pushes us into deeper acceptance for a number of reasons – all of which make us more REAL in the long term.
Here are some of the main ones:
1. Grief Shows Us What Truly Matters
At the end of the day, we can only grieve something we had a real connection with and so grief reveals our values in a way that no motivational exercise ever could.
It shows us what we genuinely cared and still care about – not just what we thought we were supposed to care about.
This clarity is painful when dealing with loss but it’s also grounding because it gives us an honest compass for moving forward that’s rooted in what actually matters to us rather than what our ego told us ‘should’ matter or hasn’t allowed us to face accepting that we care about (normally because we’re hiding something real in the Shadow Territory and grief has revealed our true feelings).
2. Grief Teaches Impermanence
Nothing is permanent but treating the impermanent as permanent (or the little fragments of life as the whole of life) always causes problems in the form of friction and frustration.
Grief makes this impossible to ignore but rather than making life seem meaningless, this realisation actually deepens appreciation.
When we see everything (including ourselves) as limited edition, we stop treating fragments like jobs, relationships, identities, and “the good old days” as if they’re the ultimate source of fulfilment (only going deeper into wholeness can give this).
We learn that the only real “ultimate” is our relationship with life itself.
3. Grief Humanises Us
Grief shatters the illusion of control because it humbles us:
The way it does this is by pulling us out of the ego’s fantasy that life is something we can fully manage if we just try hard enough.
We’re reminded that we exist within forces far bigger than us.
(This doesn’t have to mean ‘God’ just that we’re all part of a bigger reality than just our own limited point of view).
This humility is a gift because frees us from the underlying shame that leads to unrealistic expectations and the exhausting attempt to force life instead of flowing with it.
4. Grief Brings Us into the Present
Grief makes performance and hiding behind masks impossible:
All the strategies we used to cope, impress, distract, or numb ourselves start to fall away as the present moment – however initially uncomfortable – becomes unavoidable.
While the present might initially feel unbearable as we’re grieving whatever we’re grieving, it’s the only place where real ground exists and when we have no choice but to stand there we finally find our real roots.
5. Grief Reveals the Truth of the Mind-Body System
Grief opens the floodgates and so emotions that were blocked for years often come rushing forward:
Sadness, anger, fear, love, regret, even relief – all of it finally surfaces.
This can feel overwhelming but it also offers a much-needed reset and a chance to relate to ourselves with more integration instead of suppression or denial.
6. Grief Opens the Heart
Perhaps the most important gift of all is that – if we let it – grief cracks your heart back open.
Life becomes unreal when we close our hearts to avoid being hurt again but grief invites us to do the opposite to stay open despite the pain.
This openness is what makes life worth living because it means we can go fully into life whilst we’re still here.
If you’d like to go deeper into learning the skills and qualities that will help you trust yourself and life then check out Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.
Grief as Gift: Practical Steps to Turning Shit into Diamonds
Grief isn’t something that needs ‘fixing’ but it does require that you give yourself some time and space to realign with the truth about yourself and life.
Here are some practical ways to work with grief rather than against it so that you can take the gifts it has to offer:
- Stop Resisting What Is: Notice where you’re arguing against reality because of what you think ‘should’ be and gently bring yourself back to what’s actually happening so you can stand in what IS.
- Let the Body Feel: Grief lives in the body so allow sensations to do their ‘thing’ without trying to analyse them away or attach stories to them.
- Tell the Truth To Yourself: Be honest about what you’ve lost – including the parts of yourself and your future that disappeared with it but look at the realness that remains.
- Release Unreal Expectations: Notice where you’re holding life to agreements it never made in the first place.
- Stay Present: Bring attention back to what’s here now, even if it’s uncomfortable. Learn to be with it and to embrace the fact that emotional discomfort is not physical danger and so you can ride through it.
- Keep the Heart Open: Grief is evidence of love so let it remind you of your capacity to care and lean into it instead of closing your heart.
The Final Word: Grief & The Gift That Can’t Be Taken Away
Grief will come for all of us at some point – unfortunately, there’s no avoiding it.
Despite this, though, grief also reveals something essential:
There’s something real that can’t be lost and a foundation of truth remains beneath all the fragments we try and cling to that keep us from seeing this.
When that foundation is uncovered, we’re in a far better position – not because life is suddenly ‘easier’ but we can finally build something REAL.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to shift gear and to start stepping into your realness then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you start taking real action.
Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.
It contains practical exercises and dedicated meditations (Transformational Bridges) to take you DEEP in knowing yourself and life.
This book will answer many of the questions you have growing REAL and flowing towards wholeness. It covers everything from shame to addiction to the unconscious mind and synchronicity (and way more).
Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is a book designed to help you look at your life from the inside-out so that you can stop holding yourself back and go get what you really want.
It contains 166 practical ‘Revolutions’ for awareness and over 8,000 Self-Guidance Questions for you to uncover new insight about yourself, the world, and reality that you can translate into action and start building your real life on the realest possible foundation.
Shadow Life is an exploration of the human shadow and the hidden side of our personalities. It looks at the masks we wear, where these masks come from, and how we can take them off.
The book explores how we can better manage our relationships with shame, guilt, and trauma in order to remove the Mask that the world has asked us to wear (and that we forgot we were wearing) so we can live an authentic life with less drama, chaos, or BS whilst we’re still around.
The Flow Builder Journal has everything you need to make the next 21-weeks of your life a turning point.
It has monthly, weekly, and daily (morning and evening) check-ins, tools and reflections to keep you in the zone and keep you flowing with zest and momentum.
If you want to get unstuck and grow REAL then check it out.
Download EGO/SHADOW/TRUST - a free guide to transformation that will walk you through the vital stages of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action with practical strategies to implement right away.
Join the 7-Day Bare Ass Minimum (BAM) Challenge and start to implement foundational health habits and a powerful life vision only a week from now.
