[This is one post I've written in an upcoming sequence on what I call "yin". Yin, in short, is the sub-art of giving perception of truth absolutely no resistance as it updates your implicit world-model. Said differently, it's the sub-art of subconsciously seeking out and eliminating ugh fields and also eliminating the inclination to form them in the first place. This is the first piece I wrote, and I think it stands on its own, but it probably won't be the first post in the final sequence. My plan is to flesh out the sequence and then post a guide to yin giving the proper order. I'm posting the originals on my blog, and you can view the original of this post here, but my aim is to post a final sequence here on Less Wrong.]

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In this post, I'm going to talk about grief. And sorrow. And the pain of loss.

I imagine this won't be easy for you, my dear reader. And I wish I could say that I'm sorry for that.

…but I'm not.

I think there's a skill to seeing horror clearly. And I think we need to learn how to see horror clearly if we want to end it.

This means that in order to point at the skill, I need to also point at real horror, to show how it works.

So, I'm not sorry that I will make you uncomfortable if I succeed at conveying my thoughts here. I imagine I have to.

Instead, I'm sorry that we live in a universe where this is necessary.

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If you Google around, you'll find all kinds of lists of what to say and avoid saying to a grieving person. For reasons I'll aim to make clear later on, I want to focus for a moment on some of the things not to say. Here are a few from Grief.com:

• "He is in a better place."
• "There is a reason for everything."
• "I know how you feel."
• "Be strong."

I can easily imagine someone saying things like this with the best of intentions. They see someone they care about who is suffering greatly, and they want to help.

But to the person who has experienced a loss, these are very unpleasant to hear. The discomfort is often pre-verbal and can be difficult to articulate, especially when in so much pain. But a fairly common theme is something like:

"Don't heave your needs on me. I'm too tired and in too much pain to help you."

If you've never experienced agonizing loss, this might seem really confusing at first — which is why it seems tempting to say those things in the first place, I think. But try assuming that the grieving person sees the situation more clearly, and see if you can make sense of this reaction before reading on.

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If you look at the bulleted statements above, there's a way of reading them that says "You're suffering. Maybe try this, to stop your suffering." There's an imposition there, telling the grieving person to add more burden to how they are in the moment. In many cases, the implicit request to stop suffering comes from the speaker's discomfort with the griever's pain, so an uncharitable (but sometimes accurate) read of those statements is "I don't like it when you hurt, so stop hurting."

Notice that the person who lost someone doesn't have to think through all this. They just see it, directly, and emotionally respond. They might not even be able to say why others' comments feel like impositions, but there's very little doubt that they do. It's just that social expectations take so much energy, and the grief is already so much to carry, that it's hard not to notice.

There's only energy for what really, actually matters.

And, it turns out, not much matters when you hurt that much.

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I'd like to suggest that grieving is how we experience the process of a very, very deep part of our psyches becoming familiar with a painful truth. It doesn't happen only when someone dies. For instance, people go through a very similar process when mourning the loss of a romantic relationship, or when struck with an injury or illness that takes away something they hold dear (e.g., quadriplegia). I think we even see smaller versions of it when people break a precious and sentimental object, or when they fail to get a job or into a school they had really hoped for, or even sometimes when getting rid of a piece of clothing they've had for a few years.

In general, I think familiarization looks like tracing over all the facets of the thing in question until we intuitively expect what we find. I'm particularly fond of the example of arriving in a city for the first time: At first all I know is the part of the street right in front of where I'm staying. Then, as I wander around, I start to notice a few places I want to remember: the train station, a nice coffee shop, etc. After a while of exploring different alleyways, I might make a few connections and notice that the coffee shop is actually just around the corner from that nice restaurant I went to on my second night there. Eventually the city (or at least those parts of it) start to feel smaller to me, like the distances between familiar locations are shorter than I had first thought, and the areas I can easily think of now include several blocks rather than just parts of streets.

I'm under the impression that grief is doing a similar kind of rehearsal, but specifically of pain. When we lose someone or something precious to us, it hurts, and we have to practice anticipating the lack of the preciousness where it had been before. We have to familiarize ourselves with the absence.

When I watch myself grieve, I typically don't find myself just thinking "This person is gone." Instead, my grief wants me to call up specific images of recurring events — holding the person while watching a show, texting them a funny picture & getting a smiley back, etc. — and then add to that image a feeling of pain that might say "…and that will never happen again." My mind goes to the feeling of wanting to watch a show with that person and remembering they're not there, or knowing that if I send a text they'll never see it and won't ever respond. My mind seems to want to rehearse the pain that will happen, until it becomes familiar and known and eventually a little smaller.

I think grieving is how we experience the process of changing our emotional sense of what's true to something worse than where we started.

Unfortunately, that can feel on the inside a little like moving to the worse world, rather than recognizing that we're already here.

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It looks to me like it's possible to resist grief, at least to some extent. I think people do it all the time. And I think it's an error to do so.

If I'm carrying something really heavy and it slips and drops on my foot, I'm likely to yelp. My initial instinct once I yank my foot free might be to clutch my foot and grit my teeth and swear. But in doing so, even though it seems I'm focusing on the pain, I think it's more accurate to say that I'm distracting myself from the pain. I'm too busy yelling and hopping around to really experience exactly what the pain feels like.

I could instead turn my mind to the pain, and look at it in exquisite detail. Where exactly do I feel it? Is it hot or cold? Is it throbbing or sharp or something else? What exactly is the most aversive aspect of it? This doesn't stop the experience of pain, but it does stop most of my inclination to jump and yell and get mad at myself for dropping the object in the first place.

I think the first three so-called "stages of grief" — denial, anger, and bargaining — are avoidance behaviors. They're attempts to distract oneself from the painful emotional update. Denial is like trying to focus on anything other than the hurt foot, anger is like clutching and yelling and getting mad at the situation, and bargaining is like trying to rush around and bandage the foot and clean up the blood. In each case, there's an attempt to keep the mind preoccupied so that it can't start the process of tracing the pain and letting the agonizing-but-true world come to feel true. It's as though there's a part of the psyche that believes it can prevent the horror from being real by avoiding coming to feel as though it's real.

The above might seem kind of abstract, so let me list a very few examples that I think do in fact apply to resisting grief:

• After a breakup, someone might refuse to talk about their ex and insist that no one around them bring up their ex. They might even start dating a lot more right away (the "rebound" phenomenon, or dismissive-avoidant dating patterns). They might insist on acting like their ex doesn't exist, for months, and show flashes of intense anger when they find a lost sweater under their bed that had belonged to the ex.
• While trying to finish a project for a major client (or an important class assignment, if a student), a person might realize that they simply don't have the time they need, and start to panic. They might pour all their time into it, even while knowing on some level that they can't finish on time, but trying desperately anyway as though to avoid looking at the inevitability of their meaningful failure.
• The homophobia of the stereotypical gay man in denial looks to me like a kind of distraction. The painful truth for him here is that he is something he thinks it is wrong to be, so either his morals or his sense of who he is must die a little. Both are agonizing, too much for him to handle, so instead he clutches his metaphorical foot and screams.

In every case, the part of the psyche driving the behavior seems to think that it can hold the horror at bay by preventing the emotional update that the horror is real. The problem is, success requires severely distorting your ability to see what is real, and also your desire to see what's real. This is a cognitive black hole — what I sometimes call a "metacognitive blindspot" — from which it is enormously difficult to return.

This means that if we want to see reality clearly, we have to develop some kind of skill that lets us grieve well — without resistance, without flinching, without screaming to the sky with declarations of war as a distraction from our pain.

We have to be willing to look directly and unwaveringly at horror.

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In 2014, my marriage died.

A friend warned me that I might go through two stages of grief: one for the loss of the relationship, and one for the loss of our hoped-for future together.

She was exactly right.

The second one hit me really abruptly. I had been feeling solemn and glum since the previous night, and while riding public transit I found myself crying. Specific imagined futures — of children, of holidays, of traveling together — would come up, as though raising the parts that hurt the most and saying "See this, and wish it farewell."

The pain was so much. I spent most of that entire week just moving around slowly, staring off into space, mostly not caring about things like email or regular meetings.

Two things really stand out for me from that experience.

First, there were still impulses to flinch away. I wanted to cry about how the pain was too much to bear and curl up in a corner — but I could tell that impulse came from a different place in my psyche than the grief did. It felt easier to do that, like I was trading some of my pain for suffering instead and could avoid being present to my own misery. I had worked enough with grief at that point to intuit that I needed to process or digest the pain, and that this slow process would go even more slowly if I tried not to experience it. It required a choice, every moment, to keep my focus on what hurt rather than on how much it hurt or how unfair things were or any other story that decreased the pain I felt in that moment. And it was tiring to make that decision continuously.

Second, there were some things I did feel were important, even in that state. At the start of this post I referenced how mourners can sometimes see others' motives more plainly than those others can. What I imagine is the same thing gave me a clear sense of how much nonsense I waste my time on — how most emails don't matter, most meetings are pointless, most curriculum design thoughts amount to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I also vividly saw how much nonsense I project about who I am and what my personal story is — including the illusions I would cast on myself. Things like how I thought I needed people to admire me to feel motivated, or how I felt most powerful when championing the idea of ending aging. These stories looked embarrassingly false, and I just didn't have the energy to keep lying to myself about them.

What was left, after tearing away the dross, was simple and plain and beautiful in its nakedness. I felt like I was just me, and there were a very few things that still really mattered. And, even while drained and mourning for the lovely future that would never be, I found myself working on those core things. I could send emails, but they had to matter, and they couldn't be full of blather. They were richly honest and plain and simply directed at making the actually important things happen.

It seems to me that grieving well isn't just a matter of learning to look at horror without flinching. It also lets us see through certain kinds of illusion, where we think things matter but at some level have always known they don't.

I think skillful grief can bring us more into touch with our faculty of seeing the world plainly as we already know it to be.

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I think we, as a species, dearly need to learn to see the world clearly.

A humanity that makes global warming a politicized debate, with name-calling and suspicion of data fabrication, is a humanity that does not understand what is at stake.

A world that waits until its baby boomers are doomed to die of aging before taking aging seriously has not understood the scope of the problem and is probably still approaching it with distorted thinking.

A species that has great reason to fear human-level artificial intelligence and does not pause to seriously figure out what if anything is correct to do about it (because "that's silly" or "the Terminator is just fiction") has not understood just how easily it can go horribly wrong.

Each one of these cases is bad enough — but these are just examples of the result of collectively distorted thinking. We will make mistakes this bad, and possibly worse, again and again as long as we are willing to let ourselves turn our awareness away from our own pain. As long as the world feels safer to us than it actually is, we will risk obliterating everything we care about.

There is hope for immense joy in our future. We have conquered darkness before, and I think we can do so again.

But doing so requires that we see the world clearly.

And the world has devastatingly more horror in it than most people seem willing to acknowledge.

The path of clear seeing is agonizing — but that is because of the truth, not because of the path. We are in a kind of hell, and avoiding seeing that won't make it less true.

But maybe, if we see it clearly, we can do something about it.

Grieve well, and awaken.

I'd like to start by way of analogy. I think it'll make the link to rationality easier to understand if I give context first.

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I sometimes teach the martial art of aikido. The way I was originally taught, you had to learn how to "feel the flow of ki" (basically life energy) through you and from your opponent, and you had to make sure that your movements - both physical and mental - were such that your "ki" would blend with and guide the "ki" of your opponent. Even after I stopped believing in ki, though, there were some core elements of the art that I just couldn't do, let alone teach, without thinking and talking in terms of ki flow.

A great example of this is the "unbendable arm". This is a pretty critical thing to get right for most aikido techniques. And it feels really weird. Most people when they first get it think that the person trying to fold their arm isn't actually pushing because it doesn't feel like effort to keep their arm straight. Many students (including me once upon a time) end up taking this basic practice as compelling proof that ki is real. Even after I realized that ki wasn't real, I still had to teach unbendable arm this way because nothing else seemed to work.

…and then I found anatomical resources like Becoming a Supple Leopard.

It turns out that the unbendable arm works when:

• your thoracic spine is in a non-kyphotic position
• your head isn't hanging forward (which would mimic the thoracic tension of kyphosis)
• your shoulder is rolled back and down enough for the part of your clavicle immediately above the sternoclavicular joint to stick out a bit (see here)
• your shoulder has slight tension in it from holding your elbow in a pointing-down position

That's it. If you do this correctly, you can relax most of your other arm muscles and still be able to resist pretty enormous force on your arm.

Why, you might ask? Well, from what I have gathered, this lets you engage your latissimus dorsi (pretty large back muscles) in stabilizing your elbow. There's also a bit of strategy where you don't actually have to fully oppose the arm-bender's strength; you just have to stabilize the elbow enough to be able to direct the push-down-on-elbow force into the push-up-on-wrist force.

But the point is, by understanding something about proper posture, you can cut literally months of training down to about ten minutes.

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To oversimplify it a little bit, there are basically three things to get right about proper posture for martial arts (at least as I know them):

1. You need to get your spine in the right position and brace it properly. (For the most part and for most people, this means tucking your pelvis, straightening your thoracic spine a bit, and tensing your abs a little.)
2. You need to use your hip and shoulder ball-and-socket joints properly. (For the most part this seems to mean using them instead of your spine to move, and putting torque in them by e.g. screwing your elbow downward when reaching forward.)
3. You need to keep your tissue supple & mobile. (E.g., tight hamstrings can pull your hips out of alignment and prevent you from using your hip joints instead of your mid-lumbar spine (i.e. waist) to bend over. Also, thoracic inflexibility usually locks people in thoracic kyphosis, making it extremely difficult to transfer force effectively between their lower body and their arms.)

My experience is that as people learn how to feel these three principles in their bodies, they're able to correct their physical postures whenever they need to, rather than having to wait for my seemingly magical touch to make an aikido technique suddenly really easy.

It's worth noting that this is mostly known, even in aikido dojos ("training halls"). They just phrase it differently and don't understand the mechanics of it. They'll say things like "Don't bend over; the other guy can pull you down if you do" and "Let the move be natural" and "Relax more; let ki flow through you freely."

But it turns out that getting the mechanical principles of posture down makes basically all the magic of aikido something even a beginner can learn how to see and correct.

A quick anecdote along these lines, which despite being illustrative, you should take as me being a bit of an idiot:

I once visited a dojo near the CFAR office. That night they were doing a practice basically consisting of holding your partner's elbow and pulling them to the ground. It works by a slight shift sideways to cause a curve in the lumbar spine, cutting power between their lower and upper bodies. Then you pull straight down and there's basically nothing they can do about it.

However, the lesson was in terms of feeling ki flow, and the instruction was to pull straight down. I was feeling trollish and a little annoyed about the wrongness and authoritarian delivery of the instruction, so I went to the instructor and asked: "Sensei, I see you pulling slightly sideways, and I had perhaps misheard the instructions to be that we should pull straight down. Should I be pulling slightly sideways too?"

At which point the sensei insisted that the verbal instructions were correct, concentrated on preventing the sideways shift in his movements, and obliterated his ability to demonstrate the technique for the rest of the night.

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Brienne Yudkowsky has a lovely piece in which she refers to "mental postures". I highly recommend reading it. She does a better job of pointing at the thing than I think I would do here.

…but if you really don't want to read it just right now, here's the key element I'll be using: There seems to be a mental analog to physical posture.

We've had quite a bit of analogizing rationality as a martial art here. So, as a martial arts practitioner and instructor with a taste of the importance of deeply understanding body mechanics, I really want to ask: What, exactly, are the principles of good mental posture for the Art of Rationality?

In the way I'm thinking of it, this isn't likely to be things like "consider the opposite" or "hold off on proposing solutions". I refer to things of this breed as "mental movements" and think they're closer to the analogs of individual martial techniques than they are principles of mental orientation.

That said, we can look at mental movements to get a hint about what a good mental posture might do. In the body, good physical posture gives you both more power and more room for error: if you let your hands drift behind your head in a shihonage, having a flexible thoracic spine and torqued shoulders and braced abs can make it much harder for your opponent to throw you to the ground even though you've blundered. So, by way of analogy, what might an error in attempting to (say) consider the opposite look like, and what would a good "mental posture" be that would make the error matter less?

(I encourage you to think on your own about an answer for at least 60 seconds before corrupting your mind with my thoughts below. I really want a correct answer here, and I doubt I have one yet.)

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When I think of how I've messed up in attempts to consider the opposite, I can remember several instances when my tone was dutiful. I felt like I was supposed to consider the opinion that I disagreed with or didn't want to have turn out to be true. And yet, it felt boring or like submitting or something like that to really take that perspective seriously. I felt like I was considering the opposite roughly the same way a young child replies to their parent saying "Now say that you're sorry" with an almost sarcastic "I'm sorry."

What kind of "mental posture" would have let me make this mistake and yet still complete the movement? Or better yet, what mental posture would have prevented the mistake entirely? At this point I intuit that I have an answer but it's a little tricky for me to articulate. I think there's a way I can hold my mind that makes the childish orientation to truth-seeking matter less. I don't do it automatically, much like most people don't automatically sit up straight, but I sort of know how to see my grasping at a conclusion as overreaching and then… pause and get my mental feet under my mental hips before I try again.

I imagine that wasn't helpful - but I think we have examples of good and bad mental posture in action. In attachment theory, I think that the secure attachment style is a description of someone who is using good mental posture even when in mentally/emotionally threatening situations, whereas the anxious and avoidant styles are descriptions of common ways people "tense up" when they lose good mental posture. I also think there's something interesting in how sometimes when I'm offended I get really upset or angry, and sometimes the same offense just feels like such a small thing - and sometimes I can make the latter happen intentionally.

The story I described above of the aikido sensei I trolled also highlights something that I think is important. In this case, although he didn't get very flustered, he couldn't change what he was doing. He seemed mentally inflexible, like the cognitive equivalent of someone who can't usefully block an overhead attack because of a stiff upper back restricting his shoulder movement. I feel like I've been in that state lots of times, so I feel like I can roughly imagine how my basic mental/emotional orientation to my situation and way of thinking would have to be in order to have been effective in his position right then - and why that can be tricky.

I don't feel like I've adequately answered the question of what good mental posture is yet. But I feel like I have some intuitions - sort of like being able to talk about proper posture in terms of "good ki flow". But I also notice that there seem to be direct analogs of the three core parts of good physical posture that I mentioned above:

1. Have a well-braced "spine". Based on my current fledgling understanding, this seems to look something like taking a larger perspective, like imagining looking back at this moment 30 years hence and noticing what does and does not matter. (I think that's akin to tucking your hips, which is a movement in service of posture but isn't strictly part of the posture.) I imagine this is enormously easier when one has a well-internalized sense of something to protect.
2. Move your mind in strong & stable ways, rather than losing "spine". I think this can look like "Don't act while triggered", but it's more a warning not to try to do heavy cognitive work while letting your mental "spine" "bend". Instead, move your mind in ways that you would upon reflection want your mind to move, and that you expect to be able to bear "weight".
3. Make your mind flexible. Achieve & maintain full mental range of movement. Don't get "stiff", and view mental inflexibility as a risk to your mental health.

All three of these are a little hand-wavy. That third one in particular I haven't really talked about much - in part because I don't really know how to work on that well. I have some guesses, and I might write up some thoughts about that later. (A good solution in the body is called "mobilization", basically consisting of pushing on tender/stiff spots while you move the surrounding joints through their maximal range of motion.) Also, I don't know if there are more principles for the mind than these three, or if these three are drawing too strongly on the analogy and are actually a little distracting. I'm still at the stage where, for mental posture, I keep wanting to say the equivalent of "relax more and let ki flow."

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A lot of people say I have excellent physical posture. I think I have a reasonably clear idea of how I made my posture a habit. I'd like to share that because I've been doing the equivalent in my mind for mental posture and am under the impression that it's getting promising results.

I think my physical practice comes down to three points:

• Recognize that having good posture gives you superpowers. It's really hard to throw me down, and I can pretty effortlessly pull people to the ground. A lot of that is martial skill, but a huge chunk of it is just that good posture gives me excellent leverage. This transfers to being able to lift really heavy things and move across the room very efficiently and quickly when needed. This also gives me a pretty big leg up on learning physical skills. Recognizing that these were things I'd gain from learning good posture gave me a lot of drive to stick to my practice.
• Focus on how the correct posture feels, and exactly how it's different from glitchy posture. I found it super-important to notice that my body feels different in specific ways when my shoulders are in the right position versus when they're too far forward or back. Verbal instructions like "Pull shoulders back" don't work nearly as well as the feeling in the body.
• Choose one correction at a time, and always operate from that posture, pausing and correcting yourself when you're about to slip up. Getting good shoulder posture required that I keep my shoulders back all the time. When I would reach for water, I'd notice when my shoulder was in the too-far-forward position, and then pull back and fix my shoulder position before trying again. This sometimes required trying at very basic tasks several times, often quite slowly, until I could get it right each time.

Although I didn't add this until quite late, I would now add a fourth point when giving advice on getting good physical posture: make sure to mobilize the parts of your body that are either (a) preventing you from moving into a good position or (b) requiring you to be very stiff or tense to hold that position. The trouble is, I know how to do that for the body, but I'm not as sure about how to do that for the mind.

But the three bullet points above are instructions that I can follow with respect to mental posture, I think.

So, to the extent that that seems possible for you, I invite you to try to do the same - and let me know how it goes.