It is extremely important to remember that the lessons of grief are at their most potent not when they are being learned, but when they are being integrated into your life. It is one thing to read about these ideas, but it is quite another thing to put these ideas into practice. Grief has the power to radically change your life, to encourage a more meaningful, richer life, but only when its lessons are manifested in the way you live your life every day. This means becoming a more active and more mindful participant in your life.

One of the hardest steps in this process can be putting the lessons of grief into practice. Many people I have worked with have a passive appreciation of the concept of mindfulness and the positive transformation of suffering long before they integrate these ideas into their everyday life. By exploring specific areas of their lives, they help this passive appreciation to develop into a more active, dynamic process. It becomes an invigorating, life-affirming task, even though there are still many emotional ups and downs along the way.

In order to help you explore and prioritize ways in which your life can change and improve, try to answer the following questions on a piece of paper, or in your journal:

1. What are my emotional triggers—which people, what places, what activities remind me of the intensity of my loss?
2. How has my relationship to these triggers changed?
3. What do I do differently after my loss that helps me feel invigorated, or in touch with my life’s purpose? How have I changed?
4. Are there negative habits or routines that I have developed, or old habits I would still like to break?
5. How do I structure my time? What healthy activities am I doing?
6. How has my diet changed? How can I go about taking better care of my body? What kind of exercise can I do?
7. How have I grown spiritually?
8. When my loss was more recent, what kind of person did I want to be? How am I closer to being the person I wished I could be? How am I different? How am I closer to being the person I want to be in general? What do I need to do differently?
9. What am I putting off that would improve my life and help me be the person I want to be? Am I cultivating mindfulness in my life? If not, why am I putting this off?
10. If I had to go through grief all over again, what would I do differently? How would I enact the lessons this loss has taught me?
11. Are there moments in the recent past in which I passed up the opportunity to put the wisdom of my grief and compassion into practice? What obstacles stood in my way? How can I overcome these obstacles in the future?
12. Are there things that I do every day that could be enriched with greater mindfulness or greater compassion?

I suggest that you review these questions at regular intervals, but especially after you go through a period of acute grief. The raw intensity of acute grief, even months after your initial loss, brings with it a vulnerability to change, and a reminder of the preciousness of life, relationships, and love. When you have this awareness, your spiritual potential—your life’s purpose—is at its most accessible because your identity, your ego, is left unguarded and is unable to block your inner growth.

excerpt from Grieving Mindfully: A Compassionate and Spiritual Guide to Coping with Loss by Sameet Kumar, Ph.D.