So talking about the area, any grief area, is a way to go about handling grief. This can apply when you grieve about a great variety of circumstances. You may face a situation of grief concerning the loss through death or divorce of a marriage partner. Your grief may be about some practical thing like the collapse of a business that was important to your self image or, upon retirement, the loss of your job that did so much to define who you were. You may even grieve, as you get older, for the loss of your physical stamina or your good looks, your beauty or just the loss of the carefree days and friendships of your youth. The circumstances of grief are almost endless, but whatever is your own private grief it will help if you can face it in a relaxed meditative state and remember all the good things.
But then grief is a progression. It is a progression through a particular mental state and then leading on to somewhere else. The length of grief can vary from being almost momentary in some people to other cases where it lasts for years. I know that we live in a society of fast foods and other quick fixes that are offered to us daily, and what I am about to say could be misconstrued by some to mean that I advocate a fast food, quick fix approach to grief. I don't and I know that time is one of the most important things when dealing with grief. It is however also true that a long term and sustained grief can be quite unnatural and totally debilitating to the life of the grieving person. To explore ways of directing our minds to deal appropriately with grief is therefore a good thing. It may even represent a return to some of the things we knew instinctively in our culture before the industrial revolution ever began. In many cultures there have been, and there are today, certain ritualised forms of grieving which ensured that it became a process and not a permanent state of existence. This is the type of thing I advocate in my work.
When it comes to other issues like anger, hate and revenge I had to handle that inside my mind too in a meditative process. I gradually got the message that to be hateful, to be revengeful, to want to hurt the person who killed my children, would only make me be the same type of person. I could become lost for the rest of my life in a quagmire of hatred and bitterness. I valued my life too much to allow that to happen. I saw it quite clearly, if I was going to be consumed by hate and anger and by revenge then that's the type of person I would become myself. For me to let go the inclination to hate, was the process that I knew I needed to go through. It wasn't an easy process but I quite clearly got the message after meditating. The message went like this, “Hey if you're going to be hateful, if you're going to be angry, if you're going to be revengeful, if you're going to think these thoughts about the guy who did this or anything else, then you'll end up the same way.”
Now that was quite a revelation and it was the beginning of me thinking, “Okay I've got to do something about it – the thoughts of hate that is – I've got to go through this barrier to something else.”
The first step in going through it was to come to an acceptance of where I was and what had happened. This involved accepting that chaos, not order, not logic, not reasoned thinking had ruled on the night of 23rd January 1987. So the process for me was acceptance first, acceptance of where I was, acceptance of what was happening with me, acceptance of my whole life. That takes into account love and it takes into account the handling of guilt.
I have already spoken a little bit about guilt but it was rather a big issue for me. I thought of every possible single thing that I'd ever done in my life to harm others. In my worst moments I concluded, “I deserve this.” So I thought of all the bad things, all the wrong things – and there were lots – and this all came up in my mind, and if you take it on board you just feel worse and worse. And so I realised that the next step in overcoming hate and moving on through the process to a position where I could jettison the feelings of hate, was that I had to aim at forgiveness.
The ultimate aim, what might seem the unachievable aim, would be to forgive the person who had done this thing. I soon realised that if there was ever to be any forgiveness, the process ultimately had to start with me, myself. I went through all these other things that had been causing me guilt, all the things that I had done in my life to harm others. One by one I forgave myself and others, saying “Hey it's okay .... it's okay, it's just human.” I went through this forgiveness process with the help of books and with the help of the Insight course recommended by my army friend.
About this time I started to experience a new sort of thought coming into my mind during meditation. About a month after the girls were killed I was getting quite vivid pictures, really vivid pictures of them. Now I'm a person who doesn't visualise by seeing when my eyes are shut – like being able to see your dreams. Some people dream in colour, some people dream in black and white, some can easily visualise in meditation, they just shut their eyes and “see” pictures. Some people “hear” clearly and some “feel” a lot. I find that I am one who “feels” but I don't often “see” things clearly. But in this case I was “seeing” things, I was “seeing” Jenny, Kirsty and Lexie quite clearly, they were talking to me. This worried me and I went through the whole process of thinking I was going quite mad or something.
And then I could recognise their voices and they were saying things like, “Hey I'm all right, I'm all right I'm happy up here, I've done my tour of duty, I've finished with the earth, I'm a lot better off up here, I'm enjoying it you know.” This is the sort of thing that came through to me and then Lexie would come in to the meditation and say, “Oh come on Dad! Get off your butt and get into gear!” Lexie was quite a rebel and that's how she would speak to me. Or she would say things like, “Come on! Do it Dad!”
I was quite enjoying going to my meditative state and having “conversations” with the girls and thinking about them quite often. Through this process of talking with them I came to be a little bit at ease with “where they were” and “what they were doing” because I knew that they were “out there somewhere”. Just what “out there” meant was a little hard for me to really put my finger on. Maybe it was to do with some form of energy, yes energy, that appealed to my logical part – you know Newton's Laws and all that – energy is neither created nor destroyed (but it can change its form). Maybe it could all be my imagination as well. Whatever it was, and I still find it hard to put it into words today, it gave me a deep sense of spiritual insight. And whatever it was, it was a form of energy or a life force that was very powerful.
Worried by the whole concept of having such vivid visions I decided to write to the person in the United States who had originally founded the Insight Seminars. His name is John Roger and I posed a series of questions including whether it was possible that I was seeing the girls. His reply was, “Yes! Absolutely!” But then he challenged me with a profound concept.
He put it to me that while I was doing that sort of thing, while I was bringing them into my mind every day, I was actually hanging on to them. And by hanging on to them I was inhibiting their spiritual progress. Well that was like a real big stick, I mean there's no way in the world that I would turn around and inhibit anyone's progress. I didn't really understand what “progress” meant at that stage, but there was no way that I wanted to inhibit their progress. Right now I was really beginning to understand that this form of energy that's out there is their soul. I was beginning to understand that they are living on, and wherever the soul goes, or whatever it does, it needs to have the freedom to go.
I knew a little bit more now and so I decided to “let them go”. That was rather overwhelming