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Category: Self-Love

  • Being Arya’s Baba (Part 1)

    Being Arya’s Baba (Part 1)

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    Ever since we knew we would be grandparents, our friends asked us what our grandparent name would be.  That’s something I never really contemplated for myself. If I were to be lucky enough to be a grandma, that name would be the best possible name my grandchild could call me.  Nonetheless, we played with names. Names like Grand-Dan and Grand-Nan felt playful, and in the end, we mostly referred to ourselves as Grandma and Grandpa when we were with her.

    Until she named us Baba, both of us are Baba.

    We always know which one of us she was speaking to. If only one of us is there, she would ask, “Baba?” And we all knew she wanted to know where abouts of her other Baba.  Eventually she began calling us Baba-Na and Baba-Da, and our hearts swelled even more, if that was possible.

    Being with Arya is not something I can easily describe.  I now know why my grandparent friends used to tell me that I’d never fully understand what being a grandparent really meant until I experienced it for myself. To say I’m enthralled might be heading in the right direction.  I have the luxury of time to contemplate her hair, her hands, her feet, and marvel at their wonder.

    Sitting on the floor with her looking at her books, and her listening to her A Bs and watching her grasp new concepts is an extravagance that feeds my soul.

    Opening the door and being greeted by her huge smile, and a “Hi Baba!” and not moving until I pick her up almost brings me to tears every time. Yes, I love my role in her life and in Peter and his family’s life.

    I know that I was enthralled with my own children too, yet not having the same kind of responsibilities of life makes being a Baba feel indulgent.  The time I have to contemplate her being brings me pure joy.

    Take her hair for example, I’ve spent what seems like hours meditating on her hair.

    Its color, its texture, the curls, and the way it grows out of her head.  The way new layers start growing under the top layers.

    When I gaze upon her hair, I see colors I never knew existed. If someone were to describe her hair color to me, they may say it is blondish.  Yet blond doesn’t come close to the colors I see the dancing with each other to create colors not yet named. Colors light and dark, and in-between, gossamer colors that use light as their expression.

    Yes, I am completely in love.

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  • “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”

    “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”

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    What happens when your life is going along in a fine fashion, the way you envisioned your life going, no, the way you intentionally created it to be, and then something changes to seemingly spin you off the rails?

    “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans”

    This John Lennon lyric has come to mind often in my life, and revisited again recently.

    The month of May and June 2022 have been full; full of wonderful things, yet full enough to make me step back and take a deeper look at the structure of my life.  While at first glance there was a familiar feeling to the busyness, as I took a closer look, I found that underneath it all was a sense of calm and peace.  I did not feel the panic as I wondered what wasn’t working after I had seemingly carefully considered the structure of my life. (what I used to do until I got to this stage of flow)

    For part of that time, we were supporting Peter and his family with almost fulltime child care for Arya, our almost 2-yearold granddaughter.

    During this time we also had out of town guests, we got sick, (not covid) and our support was needed in additional ways.  Throughout all of this, I was very present, I was still doing the basic things I needed to do for myself, and for our business, and I had a chance to see how the life I created was working. (!!!)

    This year has been a year of further grounding and anchoring deeply listening to myself, and staying loyal to my soul.

    As a part of the move from Raleigh to St. Paul, I not only left behind stuff that no longer was needed, I also examined my resources for my business and relinquished everything that I thought I needed, yet when I put them into practice, discovered that I didn’t.

    Things that coaches I’ve worked with told me I needed to do to be successful, that didn’t feel aligned with my Truth. Things that I thought made me a failure if I didn’t figure out how to fit them into my work. And the judgment that I sometimes felt for myself for not conforming to what others told me would be sure success.  The thing is I tried a lot of those things, and none of them worked.  Why?

    Because they weren’t aligned with my values.

    There are so many strategies, formulas, and techniques that help to create a successful business. And just like there is no one perfect diet or food choices for everyone, there is no one formula for a successful entrepreneur.

    Many coaches wanted me to turn to something other than grief as my work.  Here are some of the things I was asked, or was told.

    “What made you choose grief as a focus?”  (I didn’t choose grief, it chose me)

    “Are you sure you want that to be your message?  Not many people are comfortable talking about grief?” (I know, and it’s so needed……)

    “You talk about gifts from your grief journey, and how you are living a full life, how is that even possible after such a devastating loss? If you tell that to your potential clients, they will think you are making false statements to get a sale.” (I can only speak from my own experience, and as I traveled my own grief journey, I was receiving gifts, the very gifts that allowed me to stay on my path, and yes eventually find meaning, purpose and joy again in my life.)

    “You can’t talk about meaning and purpose you have to illustrate it in your story. It needs to be grandiose and larger than life, you need to have glitzy programs that cost a lot of money, or your potential clients won’t see the value you bring.”  (no)

    About this time, I was beginning to see that most of the advice I was receiving was not in alignment with my own values, my own experience, and my own truth.

    I got really good at discerning for myself what is a good fit for me, and sometimes took a kernel of an idea from a coach and made it my own.  Perhaps that is what they had intended all along.

    Perhaps our coaches, teachers, and mentors are in service to us to help us to learn to be ourselves, unapologetically full of vibrant life.

    That, at least for me, is the life I wanted.  And I found a couple of coaches who helped me with that discernment process and gave me permission to listen to the longings of my own true heart.  Longings that have been whispering to me for most of my life.

    I was able to tend to the inner little child victim who has been a part of my life for so many years. She wanted to know “why me?  why do I have to be the one that……”

    I found that staying there kept me in a loop of doubt, kept me from fully experiencing my own wonder that I see reflected in Arya.

    Arya makes it simple for me to love myself, when in the past it hasn’t been easy, or even possible.

    I look at her and her own love for her self and feel sad for the little girl who experienced original grief at a young age, and lost her innocence without any support to find herself again for many years.  I know that all of the inner work I’ve done, and that I do is not only for myself, it’s also for my family, and for Arya, and now she is like a guru for me.

    As I look back on this recent busy time from where I am now, I can see that the basic structures I had in place for my own self-care,  (the non-negotiable stuff that I need to fill my energy reserves) and for our business, are in place, and do work.

    Were there other things that I would have scheduled if I had the additional time, maybe, yet I know myself well enough to know that trying too hard no longer gets the job done.

    I’ve created a flow that keeps me able to auto correct my course at any given time.

     

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  • Milestones and Holidays

    Milestones and Holidays

    Nothing can knock the wind out of our sails like the approach of a holiday or a milestone day.

    Even after over 21 years my daughter’s birthday can bring tears. Mother’s Day is bittersweet. The year-end holidays can bring sadness. All of these occasions also bring immense joy and celebration too. I didn’t come to this place easily.  It took attention to what I needed each year, along with the intention to listen to that guidance.

    One of the things that make holidays so difficult are the associative memories that come with them.

    Memories of Christmas tree shopping and decorating were so difficult for us that we did not put up a tree for over 15 years after the first 2 years. The first two years we tried to do things the way we always did, and the memories were too difficult. It brought all of us down, and we just wanted the holidays to be over.  We kept expecting to see Leah come bounding around the corner with her exuberance, and she wasn’t there.

    We started traveling during the holidays, visiting places we had never been before. A change of scenery helped to ease our tender hearts. We still missed her yet being in a place we hadn’t shared with her made space for us to breathe a little deeper.  So often in those first years it felt like we were holding our breath.

    Here are things that helped us, that may help you as well.

    • Change your traditions. No matter what holidays you celebrate, ask yourself what traditions are too painful right now; what new traditions can you do that will still honor your loved one? Ask this question each year because your needs may change from year to year.

     

    • As you anticipate milestone days, whether a birthday, or anniversaries of accidents and deaths, ask yourself what you need this year. Do you need to take time by yourself? Where? In nature, or at a special place to you and your loved one? Or do you need to be surrounded by friends and family.  There is no right answer, only you know what you need from year to year, and from milestone to milestone.

     

    • Make space for feelings to arise at each of these occasions. Even though you may have cultivated resources to meet your grief, the feelings at this time can be especially strong.  Allowing time to be with those feelings can help them move through.

     

    Holidays and milestone days remind us of the passage of time like nothing else does.

    We may wonder about how our lives would have been different if our loved one was still with us physically. Those musings have threatened to take me to a place of no return, to a place of wallowing in my loss, without wanting to find a way out. Yet each time I have found myself there, scrupulous devotion to my practices: Samyama, gratitude, self-care, and creativity always bring me back to myself.

    My grief journey has been about coming back to the self I didn’t even know I was missing. Everything I’ve gone through along the way is in service to that becoming.

    What practices or rituals help you come back to yourself?

     

     

     

  • Everyday Grief

    Everyday Grief

    One of the gifts of my grief journey was realizing that grief is a lifelong journey.

    That idea may have been peripheral before Leah died, yet as I navigated the months and years after she left us, I became much more aware of how grief affects our everyday lives.

    Before Leah died, I had experienced the grief of other loved ones passing, my grandparents, my parents, aunts and uncles; yet it was my daughter’s death that cracked me open. In order to make sense of my life after Leah died, I had to come to terms with grief in all forms as it showed up in my life.  It seemed as if the collective grief of a lifetime saw an opportunity to be seen through the fracture that was opened in my life as I came to terms with what it meant to create a meaningful life in the midst of the devastation I was feeling.

    I saw that all the experiences in my life that carried grief;

    • The times I didn’t get chosen for a team in school,
    • Not becoming a ballerina,
    • That job that I didn’t get that I thought would hold the answer to my future,
    • My loss of innocence after the sexual abuse I suffered as a child,
    • The loss of a natural childbirth with my first pregnancy,
    • The school I didn’t get to go to.

    All the of my life’s lost dreams lined up for attention.

    I had a choice to make. I could recognize that I now had an opportunity, a gift really, to meet these places that needed healing, or I could push them away and lock them up in the hopes of never having to experience the feelings that were clamoring for my attention.

    The second choice would have been the easier road.  I told my self that many times as I traveled the first path, the one that brought me face to face with everything that allowed me to climb out of the well of grief into the light. It hasn’t been an easy path, it has been, and continues to be, the most fulfilling experience of my life.

    I’ve often been told that I am courageous for facing my grief the way I do.

    I used to think that it wasn’t courage at all, that it was the only way I could make sense out of what seemed senseless, and I thought that grieving for my daughter would keep my connection to her strong.

    My grief journey did all of that and more, in ways I could not have fathomed all those years ago. I now know that grief is a sacred journey. One that reveals so many gifts, what I call blessings and grace, that teach us about living a life worth living.

    It is an alchemical journey that transforms.

    It has allowed me to hold sorrow and joy at the same time. It continues to call me into my best life.

     

     

  • Blessing and Grace

    Blessing and Grace

    Blessings and Grace became the mantra of my grief journey.

    I found that each time I was able to meet my feelings of grief in my heart I would receive blessings and grace, each and every single time.

    When this first happened, I was perplexed.  I didn’t think that I deserved to receive blessing and grace, after my daughter had died.  On some level, I blamed myself, and I didn’t think I was deserving of anything that resembled a gift.

    Over time, I began to see that the blessings and grace were a direct result of feeling my feelings.

    I began to see that by bringing my uncomfortable and painful feelings to my heart; I was healing my heart and making it possible to receive again.  I began to see the gifts of blessing and grace were exactly what I needed to continue to meet my grief.  It was one of my early breakthroughs during a time when I thought my life was over.

    In truth, my life as I knew it was over.

    The blessings and grace opened me up to new possibilities amid the devastation in which I found myself living. They were the miracles that gradually brought me back to myself, to a new life, and to the work I was being called to do.

    Throughout the years the gifts and blessings have appeared in many different forms. I speak about some specific gifts I received during the early, most tender days of my grief. The gifts haven’t stopped. Each day I meet the day with gratitude for my ability to recognize and acknowledge the gifts and blessings. Some days it is a spectacular sunrise, some days it’s a photo of my granddaughter, and on others it is a reminder from Leah that she is watching over me. I don’t take anything for granted these days.

    The blessings I receive allow me to give my gifts with grace.

     

     

  • Staying and Leaving

    Staying and Leaving

    All my life I had been fearful of endings.

    Endings meant I would have to change the way I did things.

    Endings were uncomfortable. I did everything I could to hold on to things for as long as I could.

    And then Leah died, and I experienced an ending that I couldn’t undo.

    It was an ending I hadn’t prepared for. It was my most profound lesson as my grief journey progressed; learning how to say good-bye to people, places, and things that were no longer a part of my life, or that I had outgrown.

    My grief journey opened me up to what was possible when I welcomed the initiation that I wrote about in an earlier blog, and in chapter 8 of my book. It was not a lesson that I learned easily, or that I wanted to learn. It was so much easier for me to hold on to the thing than to face the feelings, and then do the work necessary to say good-bye to things that no longer served me.

    Everywhere I lived I had boxes and boxes of stuff that I couldn’t get let go.

    Everywhere I lived was cluttered as I delayed decisions to go through the piles to release old stuff.

    Saying the ultimate good-bye to my daughter caused me to come face to face with my fear of endings.

    I was called to leave a job that was no longer in alignment with who I was becoming, or the life I was meant to live. I had to take a stand for myself and risk my perception of what may happen if I left that job.

    Our perceptions of what may happen can keep us stuck for a long time. Mine sure did.

    Saying yes to the initiation of Leah’s death was not an easy task. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done. And it came with huge rewards.

    During our last move I let go of Leah’s school papers and report cards. I let go of wedding dresses, and baby clothes, and so much more. As I opened all of the boxes, all of the emotions that I hadn’t faced came pouring out. The good news is I now know how to meet those emotions.

    I gained a new understanding of endings. I felt lighter when I wasn’t carrying around years and years of old outdated stuff. I found that I had made space for new and wonderful things to enter my life, and that I had more energy for them.

    Endings are sad, even if they are welcome.

    It’s in learning to honor what we are letting go of that we receive the grace necessary to move forward and open our heart and lives for what is coming next.

    Imagine the image of a closed fist. If someone handed you a beautiful gift, when your fist was closed, you wouldn’t be able to receive it.  What if you opened your hand ready to receive the gift?

    My fear of endings was similar to having a closed fist. I spent so much time with my fists clenched and my body closed in around itself that I didn’t even see what was being offered. Now I can see what life has to offer me, I meet each day with an open heart.

    What a wonderful gift.

     

     

  • Grief As initiation

    Grief As initiation

    Rereading this chapter was interesting.

    It took me right back into the feelings that I had as I was beginning to find my voice in the middle of my grief journey.

    For years before Leah died, I had been working thorough childhood wounds. Leah’s death created a sense of urgency that I hadn’t felt before. What I realized is that all of those years I had been doing my inner work were laying the groundwork for the initiation of Leah’s death. When grief entered my life in this profound way, I was ready to make the changes, almost without thinking about them.

    Initiation is both the ending of one part of life, and the beginning of another.

    It is a rite of passage, and we can go through many initiations in our lifetime. I began to understand that the way I was moving through grief was an initiation each time I took a stand for myself, or spoke up for what I believed in. Losing Leah made the difference. Each time I was faced with a decision to speak up or stay silent, I was reminded that the cost of saying nothing was too great if I was to find the life I was meant to live.

    We often hear that in order to grow, we need to get passed our comfort zone.

    I was already out of my comfort zone as I tried to figure out how to live without Leah, and I had nothing to lose. That newfound urgency and the years of preparation were coming together to show me the way forward. Each time I heard myself take a stand for a belief, or set a clear boundary, I recognized that it was my grief journey that was giving me the courage of heart and the perseverance to be myself.

    All of this didn’t change my grief.

    It’s still there. It’s still strong but now I am empowered to meet it successfully.

    That is a distinction for me. Cultivating the resources to meet my grief allows me to be fully myself, which includes being with my feelings of grief when they arise.

    So often we think that if we resist our painful feelings long enough, they will go away, and we won’t have to feel them. Whenever we resist something, it persists. Our painful feelings don’t go away, they go underground, and wait for a crack in the surface of our lives to burst forth. And burst they do. Like a volcano erupting, our overwhelming feelings spew their wrath when we least expect it. And we crumble.

    When we develop and nurture tools to meet our grief in a way that makes sense to us, we are on a path back to ourselves. We are learning how to be who we were born to be.

     

     

  • Renovations

    Renovations

    If you are like me, the thought of renovating a house brings excitement.

    Renovations mean newness, new paint colors, new furniture, and perhaps new room configurations. Have you ever considered that in order to renovate, we first have to deconstruct the space? Demolition and deconstruction are messy. It is during this time that we may wonder why we wanted to renovate, yet the walls are down, the floor is torn up, and we may have paint samples all over the remaining walls to determine which color looks best in the new space.

    Demolition is messy; deconstruction brings chaos.

    Maybe I like these metaphors because of my time working as a project manager for a contracting company. From the beginning of my grief journey, I always viewed what was happening as a deconstruction. Grief is messy.

    My life was ripped apart.

    In the early days, I really didn’t want to put it back together, and I didn’t know how to take the first step even if I did want to reconstruct a life worth living.

    Over the course of my grief journey, my life was deconstructed many times as I excavated the wreckage that Leah’s death created. I tried to figure out where to start putting the pieces back together, yet I had no idea where or how to start. Each time I thought I found a way through the maze that I was in, I came upon another obstacle. A closed door, or a tangle of feelings that felt too overgrown to unravel.

    I used to think of them as false starts, until I realized one day that each and every turn on the labyrinth serves a purpose. Each and every deconstruction exposed a place in my life that needed attention and love.

    It felt exhausting at times, because I thought that loving myself in the messy, chaotic places meant that I would have to admit that there was something wrong with me; that I was flawed beyond repair.

    In truth, it was, it is, love that heals me.

    Loving myself as I am in all the messy imperfection showed me the way through the confusion, through the disarray. What I know now is that I was loving my way back to myself; healing old childhood wounds, even ancestral wounds; all the places that needed to be seen and loved because I am deserving of love.

    Love is like the sword that cuts through all of the detritus of my life.

    It is love that renews our life. I find this to be a revolutionary thought because all through this journey I’ve heard versions of loving being the way through, and it wasn’t until I was able to experience it directly that I was able to take it in, to know the power of love.

    The renovations I have done on living spaces, when viewed from completion, have all been worth it. We are more comfortable in our space, it is lighter, and we can move around with more ease.

    I can say the same thing about my life having gone through many deconstructions of grief. In all cases, the experiences were different than I thought they would be; they took a lot longer to see progress; and the outcome is/was completely different than I could have ever dreamed possible.

    Having successfully moved through both experiences, I can say with certainty, they have all been worth it, every single time.

     

     

  • Radical Grief

    Radical Grief

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    This was a hard chapter to read, and as I recall it was a hard one to write.

    It tells the story of my relationship with Leah and some of the struggles we had as she was growing up.

    I remember when I was writing it that I wanted to be true to the story without sugar coating our struggles. I could feel the dynamic between us back then streaming off the page, as well as how much I wanted to understand what Leah was going through at the time so I could help her make good decisions.

    From where I am now, I can more fully see how my own upbringing influenced my approach to mothering, and how it defined what I called my radical nature. To help Leah accept who she was, I needed to accept who I was; the connections between our stories are undeniable.

    As I came to own the way I approached life, my radical nature; I also saw that it was the way I approached grief.

    Always feeling like I didn’t fit in as I was growing up served me well as I entered mygrief journey. I felt like I was different from everyone else because my daughter was no longer present in my life. The feeling of being different was a familiar one to me, and maybe that’s why grieving for my daughter felt different than I thought it would too. Even as I write those words, I’m not exactly surewhat I mean; maybe I mean that I was more comfortable finding my own way to grieve, which led me to understand that we all grieve in our own unique way.

    One of the topics that I frequently talk about with colleagues and clients is the ability to prepare for grief.

    We like to be prepared for all things in our life, yet when an unexpected tragedy occurs, we may feel ill prepared to cope with it.

    I certainly felt like I wasn’t prepared to face life without Leah’s physical presence in it. At the time I didn’t fully understand what that meant. If I had, I’m not sure what I would have done. I think that’s part of the grace that I received; the complete story of what life would look like would only be revealed as time passed, and I was ready for the next layer. I feel like that is a blessing of the journey, that I was not plunged headfirst into the deep pool of grief with all the stuff all at once, it’s revealed only when I’m ready to meet it. Being ready to meet it also means doing the necessary work during that time.

    It’s one of the reasons that grief is a life-long journey.

    It’s only after a time that I can acknowledge that I was better prepared than I thought I was. Claiming my radical nature helped me to realize that. I also think that it’s possible to cultivate practices that can help us navigate difficult feelings and experiences when we encounter them.

    What has helped prepare you for difficult experiences that you may not have considered helpful until you go through a challenging time in your life?

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  • Family Vacations

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    Recently we took a family vacation with our son and his family. We went to northern MN, to the boundary waters. The lake we were at was at the Canadian border. As a matter of fact, the border was in the middle of the lake.

    Here are some photos of our trip. I think they speak for themselves.

    I also know for a fact that I would not have been able to enjoy it like I did if I had not met my grief the way that I did. (Reason 7, 468 for meeting grief when it arises in you life….:)

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