Grief - my understanding at this time

Last weekend at the Spring Festival of Awareness in Naramata, B.C. I facilitated a workshop on Past Life Regression. It is a workshop I enjoy presenting and over the years have had wonderful results with groups of people seeing themselves in other places and times. This year it became clear as the workshop progressed that many people were dealing with Grief. I asked how many people where dealing with grief and to my surprise a lot of people put their hands up. I did not take a count of hands, but I was surprised by the number who put their hands up. In a room of over 40 people, there was a lot definitely over ¼ and possibly 1/3 of them.
As grief is not an emotion I spend a lot of time in, I decided to go inside to my inner teachers and ask about it. I went and spent some time by myself and found out the following.
First I need to explain I have a model around sadness (depression) and anger. It goes like this. Outside there is a situation over which we can respond in two ways, either sad or mad. If you go through the feelings, you come helplessness, (in other words you feel helpless about the situation). Going down through helplessness, you come to unworthiness, (you will feel unworthy of the situation being any different than it is). If you drop through the unworthiness, then you come to source/love/connection. Once you have made the connection with the source energy and feel the love you do not feel unworthy anymore, therefore you are not helpless and can make a different decision about the situation which will take you away from the sad or mad energy. This is the model I teach.
Grief as we know has steps, there is the sad, there is the mad etc. But, I was shown grief was all of the feelings of sad, mad and helplessness all mixed up together, but the major effect was there was no changing the situation. In unexpected death, or anything else which is sudden there is no control. Therefore, the feeling of helplessness moves to the maximum degree, you are unable to change anything. All you can do is accept what has occurred, which you may not want or be able to do. If you do not have a strong spiritual base and an understanding of the bigger picture, you can get lost in the grief for a long time, until life itself slowly fills in so much space the grief becomes a thin layer (sometimes 7 – 10 years) within. The loss is never forgotten, it is always there. In fact for many if they do give up their grief they have betrayed themselves (or the person they have lost).
I feel all you can do is aid people to accept and give them time. Realizing you do not control all aspects of your life can be devastating for many people. Even though you may realize you cannot control everything in your life, somehow you do not expect your life to change from what you think it ‘should’ be.
Grief … we all experience it sometime or other, but for me thank goodness I do know there is a bigger picture, of which I do not always understand, but know it exists and I trust it.