Weighting the bar – Grief and Gratitude
Weightlifters know that before lifting a heavy bar, it is essential to get the weights balanced and establish your centre of balance – feet, hips, shoulder, hands, head. Chin tucked in. “Weighting the bar” is an apt metaphor for living in times of challenge, confusion, and change.
Weightlifting requires hours of practice in the gym, developing skills, gradually building muscular strength and mental acuity, working to co-ordinate breath and full body movement. It also requires acceptance of your limitations, setting yourself up for success and taking steps to avoid injury.
The image of someone bent over, preparing to lift a bar loaded with heavy weights, implies concentration and hard effort. When the effort required risks exceeding the strength of the lifter, a spotter is recruited and asked to stand by. The spotter’s job is to watchfully allow the lifter to exert to his/her maximum, but quickly step in to lend a hand, in case of a quiver or fail.
The correlation to writing in a journal, finding weights, sorrows and fears that are heavy to hoist makes sense to me. After thirty years of writing daily, I can attest to the fact: Writing to yourself is not easy work, but it is important work and builds mental stamina.
As human beings, we are full of contradictory and complex emotions that can flush our bodies and impact us physically, spiritually, intellectually, emotionally. It has been well researched and determined that gratitude is a complex psycho-social emotion. This means that in addition to feeling profoundly grateful by enjoying a quiet quiver of joy in the belly, an urgent motivation may be asking for action. Gratitude has been identified as a pro-social motivator, a cause for action that can improve social connections and build our social capital. Hence the contradiction: while gratitude is deeply personal and private, it works to maximum advantage when the private thoughts become positive change agents in the public domain.
Grief works similarly. When the burdens of loss and adversity are heavy, it may take exceptional effort, and deep mental focus to keep going. But, with good social supports, in instances where we risk failing or stay bent over, we can rise to stand taller.
Gratitude, can ease the burden, but does not erase the feelings of sadness. Grief and sorrow can be counter-weighted with feelings of love, joy and gratitude. Francis Weller, “psychotherapist, writer, and soul activist” helps people deal with grief by hosting rituals that are social, communal and synthesize the strands of psychology, anthropology, mythology, alchemy, indigenous cultures, and poetic traditions. Weller writes: “The mark of a mature human being is the capacity to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other, and to be stretched large by these two presences.”
I contend that writing longhand in the journal creates a similar mash-up of our humanity, our cultural and personal realities, our memories, our potential and the depths of our myths and traditions. Writing with a pen and paper is a powerful way to emote, to process fear, to absorb loss, to self-regulate, to explore the dimensions of your reach and to actively look for reasons to celebrate. Writing takes you deep into your soul.
Grief becomes counterweighted by Gratitude. With time and gentle prompting, we stretch our arms wide, learn to weight the bar and prepare for the effort as we rise again.
Being stretched large, we are forced to try our hardest.
Positive encouragement and social supports can be found in the kindness of strangers, nurses, poets, teachers, and your designated spotter, ready to lend a hand at those quivering moments when we falter or shake.
From Google: Spotting in weight or resistance training is the act of supporting another person during a particular exercise, with an emphasis on allowing the participant to lift or push more than they could normally do safely.
Writing Prompt: Got a frown that needs to be turned upside down? Got a heavy load that needs lifting?
For close to thirty years, I have been balancing, centring, lifting, accepting, pondering, and seeking answers to the weights, counter-weights, joys, and contradictions in my life. If you are working to shoulder your own heavy burden, try writing a scene describing your world, using the words, metaphors, lines of a poem, that best suit your situation.
Feeling grief? What grateful counterweights can you find?
Feeling sorrowful? Is there a joyful moment of simplicity that you can describe? A line from a poem?
By concentrating on the moment, savouring something simple, possibilities appear, losses can be better absorbed. Describe some heavy load that you are in the process of assessing, or that needs moving. Get playful with the metaphor. Describe the weights on each end of the bar. What are your best strengths for getting the job done? Physical? Social? Intellectual? Emotional?
Take some deep breaths and think about the ideal spotter who can help you to stand tall, and then get even taller.
