Customer Reviews

Unattended Sorrow: Recovering from Loss and Reviving the Heart

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Your child died or your spouse left you. Your parent abandoned you. Your kids are "disconnected." Grief has many faces. Stephen Levine's book was recommended by a counselor I recently saw due to some personal grief issues.

There are times I got lost in the read, but this was due to the sometimes poetic nature of the writer. I just keep reading and learned about breathing, tapping, mindfulness and forgiveness. Interspersed are tidbits of wisdom from Buddhist philosophy. All positive ways to embrace your life.

This books isn't written to take your pain away. Rather, it helps you to embrace your human-ness. It affirmed my belief that the inability to feel empathy, hurt and pain, is -- apathy. I prefer being human and Stephen Levine wraps you in that comfort.

I read the review that said this book is repetitive, etc. . . . and I felt I needed to share my experiences with this book.

Sorrow can run deep. Especially when a pattern of grief and sorrow is laid down when you are a child; it can persistently sap your energy, your joy.

What is lovely about this book is that, recognizing the persistent nature of this malaise, it gently speaks to you of other alternatives. When I was in pain, I really appreciated the slow pace; the way it is written with such kindness, and compassion; the gentleness with which the materials are presented. This book is more about helping you find your peace within your sorrow than about expressing tools and techniques; although the tools and techniques are there.

It is a lovely book, and it can be very, very helpful in working through those old patterns. I highly recommend it.

This book has a very poignant message about sorrow which is not attended to. It also goes into how and why we sweep our feelings of sadness under the rug. Not only is it not acceptable to be sad beyond a certain length of time in our culture, in our fast-paced world we tend to accumulate ungrieved losses.

There are many very lyrical and moving quotes throughout the book. For this reason alone it is worth owning. For example, Levine uses the following metaphor to illustrate a point, "Where we expect to find a highly sensitive area around pain, we may discover it is actually going numb from overload. This is a true of a broken bone as it is of a broken heart." He goes on to say that this numbness is unattended sorrow, "it's all the places where we've gone numb... overflowing the walls by which we attempt to compartmentalize our pain."

While the book is filled with powerful content, you will have to wade through a lot of repetition to find the gems. The book is also loosely organized and I didn't find many of the specific suggestions useful for dealing with acute grief. I think he fails to present enough detail to get the full benefit from his practical advice and he tends to just keep repeating the same basic two or three concepts.

On the other hand, Levine does a great job of articulating the pain of grieving and some existential realities that accompany it. The style of the book is poetic and it's a good book to open randomly and just read for short periods of time. It could be very comforting at a time of loss, but it doesn't present a real roadmap of the grief process or a systematic way to get through it.

Stephen Levine is a mindfulness proponent, so is approach is more meditative and meandering. For Westerners, this may not come naturally, although I don't argue that it could be a very effective way to deal with grief if you understand more about it. However, I feel some important supporting text is missing and a more comprehensive overview of the grief process as a whole would probably be an addition that most readers would appreciate.

After the recent, too-early loss of my youngest sister, I searched for insight to help me and my parents through our grieving. This book addresses the accumulation of sorrow due to death, loss of love, disappointment, disillusionment, rejection, betrayal and the many injuries over the years that scars our hearts and drags down our lives.
The aim of the book is to help "process the grief" so we aren't overwhelmed by the anxiety, fear or anger that unresolved sorrow can bring. I feel the need to reread the book later when my mind and emotions are clearer. When grief is too fresh, it is hard to concentrate on the important concepts this book contains.
Here's what is covered in the 40 chapters:
Chapter 1: Unattended Sorrow
Chapter 2: Every Day We Lose Something
Chapter 3: The Heart of Loss
Chapter 4: Softening the Belly of Sorrow
Chapter 5: The Reservoir of Sorrow
Chapter 6: Loss of Trust in Life
Chapter 7: The Meaning of Life
Chapter 8: In the Absence of God
Chapter 9: When the Mirror of the Heart Is Broken
Chapter 10: A Bad Dream
Chapter 11: Opening the Heart in Hell
Chapter 12: The Trauma of Survival
Chapter 13: Connection
Chapter 14: Making Peace with Our Sorrow
Chapter 15: What Is the Body Pattern of Grief?
Chapter 16: Reentering the Body
Chapter 17: Attending the Mindset of Loss
Chapter 18: A Day of Walking
Chapter 19: Heart Breath
Chapter 20: Tapping the Resources of the Heart
Chapter 21: Loving Kindness
Chapter 22: A Day in the Heart of Pain
Chapter 23: Making Peace with Our Pain
Chapter 24: Mindfulness: An invitation to Liberation
Chapter 25: A Day of Silence
Chapter 26: Breaking the Isolation of Fear
Chapter 27: Forgiveness
Chapter 28: A Day of Forgiveness
Chapter 29: Our Most Ordinary Existential Grief, Our Very Human Architecture
Chapter 30: Overcoming Perfection
Chapter 31: The Ten Thousand Sorrows
Chapter 32: A Day of Singing
Chapter 33: Our Life Is "Just This Much"
Chapter 34: The Map of Our Lives
Chapter 35: Who Are We When We Are Not Who We Thought We Were?
Chapter 36: A Day of Compassion
Chapter 37: A Day As If It Were Our Last
Chapter 38: A Heart Revived into a New Life
Chapter 39: Day in a Life of Love
Chapter 40: Gratitude

I'm a new widow having lost my love after almost 40 years. Went through service, thank you notes, legal stuff, but why didn't I feel better? Unattended Sorrow came to my rescue revealing how to deal with the horrible black hole in my heart, what to do with the feelings, how to go on. It is a spiritual how-to book showing a path for the feelings. Widow to Widow is the book to read afterwards that deals with the practical aspects of moving forward. But, Unattended Sorrow MUST come first! I keep a copy to send to newly widowed friends.

This book is very different from most other books. Rather than explaining the grieving process and approaching it from the head, it is an invitation to opening up the heart and letting our sorrow and unmourned material come to the surface and speak to us. In Western societies, the expression of grief or sadness is often swept under the rug. This book treats it more like a messenger from the soul and invites the reader to let the sorrow drive you inward. As such, it is written in more of a poetical and lyrical manner. The analogies and insights are powerful and the book is filled with pearls of wisdom.

If you are looking to understand the grief process from the inside and to gain a fresh perspective on grief, this book will be very helpful. I am a personal growth coach and I recommend this to certain clients, particularly ones who have difficulty surrendering to tender emotions or sadness. There are many tips in here on how to open up to the grieving process in a mindful way and move through it without sweeping it under the rug.

If you like a very linear and logical approach, most likely this book is not for you. However, if you are feeling scared, alone, confused and need to sort out complicated feelings, this may be just what you need.

My mother had a very hard death and it took me nearly 1 1/2 years to come to peace with her death. It was Stephen Levine's "Unattended Sorrow" that brought me peace.

I worked through his exercises of compassion and forgiveness - not only for my mother but myself. It was very life-changing work for me. I savoured and worked through the book a few pages at a time. I sobbed myself to sleep many nights as I worked through my grief with Unattended Sorrow in hand.

I thank Stephen Levine for such an insightful book. I buy this book for friends who have experienced loss. It is not necessarily a book for reading immediately following a loss, but definitely for me it was the right book at the right time after giving some space and time after the loss.

I am a big fan of Stephen Levine's work and this was an excellent addition. There are short stories that really hit home in several areas of grief and loss.

As a professional who helps caretakers find a balance between caring for their loved one and also taking care of their own needs, I read constantly about bereavement. Many of the clients I serve are actually bereaved at some point as the one they loved has died either some time ago or recently.

This book has helped me to help my clients understand their feelings and move forward in a way that works for them.

I found this book from reading "Tuesdays With Morrie", and I have grown to appreciate Stephen Levine so much for his wisdom and his heart. I'm glad Morrie did too.

I'm heartened to hear this book has helped people experiencing recent grief. I'm not sure it would have me. Not that there isn't a lot about 'that process' in this book, but that I don't think I would have been 'ready' to wade through the magnitude of these ideas in that state. I admire those of you who did, and I'm not surprised you found healing. I'm also not surprised to hear people had trouble wading through it while in recent grief (if it's too soon, maybe an introduction such as "Tear Soup" might be easier).

To read this book I need pen in hand, and its pages are marked with underlining and notes. For me, there is so much here. Not just about recent sorrows, or past sorrows from death, but about the unattended sorrows of my life, for which I've found are many. This book is a map through the rest of my life. Through the unrealized grief that has too long kept me from dancing under the gaze of the universe and shouting "yes!".

There may be a lot of repetition, a lot of saying the same thing in different ways. For these ideas, and my resistance too them, repetition works.

Thanks for listening.

There's alot of garbage and simply rewriting and mechanical advice from other authors out there in the self help world. That's what you find mostly. Sometimes it's hard to tell though, until you've read something better.
I checked this out of the library and have been renewing it for a few months. It takes time to read this book. Almost every sentence is a days worth of food for thought. The author doesn't trifle with words to fill pages.

Yet it's not one of those books with a few sentences on each page & lots of space. The chapters are relatively short - 3 -8 pages, I'm guessing, but reading a chapter in one sitting is like trying to eat a weeks worth of food in 1 meal. Bad analogy, I know.......How else can I say it? This guy knows his stuff, which is, sadly, no longer a requirement in today's world for writing a book. I suspect though that you have to be ready for this kind of book. It's not a "law of attraction" achievement book. It's a book about reality - the kind most people will never be interested in facing. When all the excitement is over and you're getting a little disillusioned with "creating your own reality", come and check this out.

And you don't need to be officially in mourning. After getting started on this book, you'll come to realize you have been all your life.