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Category: Transformation

  • Chapter 2 ~ Early Grief

    Chapter 2 ~ Early Grief

    I find the juxtaposition of early grief and 21-year grief startling.

    As I went through this latest date marking Leah’s death, it felt more difficult than other years.  Maybe it always does, and I forget that it does. The date of the death shines a glaring light on the event that changed the course of my life.

    Revisiting the time of early grief in this chapter shows me the passage of time in an almost surreal way.  This chapter plunges me into the unknown territory of life without Leah’s physical presence. My feelings were raw and unformed back then. I was reminded of the terror I felt as I faced what was to come, not feeling like I had anywhere near the skills or capacity to do so.

    How does one continue to live after the death of a child?

    All those thoughts were coursing through my body at that time, sending me deeper into my own shell, isolating me from my deepest fear.

    This year as I sat with my feelings, I noticed them circling around me, waiting for their turn. It’s almost like they trust me now, so they can wait quietly until I am ready for them. I invited them in, one at a time, feeling them deeper than I have allowed myself before now. It feels to me that as I continue this journey, that is what happens, each year I am able to go deeper into my feelings, and when I do, they shift a little more, and show me their wisdom.

    It’s always a relief when that day is over, it’s intensity, even now is not somewhere I want to live every day.

    I do take with me the blessings and grace that always show up when I am with my feelings as they arise in each moment.The blessings and grace that allow me to continue this path, to walk with others on their grief journeys and teach them how to tend to their hearts after a loss so deep.

    I always emerge from this time with gratitude.

    Gratitude that I met my grief journey the way I did; by doing that I am able to live my life fully. And that means being able to feel the full spectrum of all my feelings, even when they are painful.

  • 10 Lessons I Learned from my Grief Journey

    10 Lessons I Learned from my Grief Journey

    Grief is not linear

    I used to think that I would move through each stage of grief progressively. When I completed one stage, I would move to the next, never to return again. Grief is nothing like that. It is messy and chaotic. Especially in the early days, we can be all over the place. I began to think of the stages of grief as aspects of grief. Stages to me suggested a more linear movement. I also realized that when I felt a feeling again after thinking that I was “done” with a certain stage, that when a feeling comes around again, it is a slightly different feeling.

    Everyone grieves uniquely.

    There is also no right or wrong way to grieve. This can take pressure off when we hear things like, “Aren’t you over that yet?” or “It’s time to get on with your life.”  And you may feel differently on different days, or times of the year. Listen to your own needs.  This may be difficult in the early days of grief when you are still reeling from your loss. This is a time to go slow, don’t try to do too much, be gentle with yourself.

    Grief was a doorway to transformation.

    This was a big surprise for me. I never expected to be able to live a meaningful life again after Leah died, let alone find my grief journey to be transforming. It was only after I allowed myself to feel all of my feelings that I was brought to a place off “now what?”

    Grief is nothing like I thought it was before my daughter died.

    Not because I spent time contemplating what grief would be like, I definitely did not. Yet, I remember thinking that it was not what I expected it to be. This is a good reminder that grief shows up differently at different times of our lives.

     

    I’m still the same person I’ve always been.

    Maybe even more so.  I think it’s more like grief removed all of the layers of protection I had built up so that my true self is the one who is now living the life she was meant to live.

     

    Everyone in a family has a different experience of grief, even though they are grieving the same person.

    That is because everyone has their own unique relationship with their loved one. In my own experience, my husband, son and I each had to meet our own grief before we could be of any help to each other on our grief journey. Grief brings up a lot of stuff, feelings, regrets, things we wished we could have said or done. Each of us had our stuff to work through.

    No one likes to talk about grief.

    Not even me, ok, maybe that’s not completely true, I talk about grief a lot, and I’m more comfortable talking about it now than when grief was new and raw. We don’t want to be vulnerable. Talking about our grief makes us vulnerable.  That’s why it’s important to find a safe space with someone you trust before you delve into those difficult and painful feelings.

    Grief is a Life-long Journey.

    We often think that grief arises only when we lose a loved one. Maybe you’ve discovered, as I did, that grief visits us many times throughout the course of our lives. Anytime we experience a loss, we experience grief. The loss of a pet, a job, a friend who moves away, the loss of our health, a relationship or divorce, the loss of a dream. These are just a few of the life experiences that we may go through. When we don’t recognize them as grief, they can stay underground and wreak havoc on our health, physical and emotional.

    My grief journey brings many gifts.

    This is one that had me scratching my head for a while. How could grief bring gifts? And who was I to deserve a gift after my daughter died? That was when I still believed at some level that it was my fault, and that not being deserving of gifts was a way to be punished for not keeping her safe. The gifts began arriving when I was able to bring a feeling into my heart. As my heart shifted the feeling, I would receive and insight, as well as a miraculous gift. A phone call from one of Leah’s friend telling us something about our daughter that we didn’t know. A random meeting with Leah’s favorite teacher. A lilac in my mailbox when there was not lilac bush in our neighborhood. Eventually I began view these gifts as blessings and grace, exactly what I needed to continue on my path.

    Distraction and diversion will not make my feelings go away.

    Our first response to the overwhelming intense feelings of grief is to push them away, or use a diversion or distraction like food, or TV to take our mind off of our feelings. While these can be helpful, eventually they stop working.

     

  • A Lesson From My Granddaughter

    A Lesson From My Granddaughter

    Living close to my son and his family means I get to watch my granddaughter Arya’s growth and development. At a little over 1 year old, she is currently learning to walk.  I’ve watched her progress over the last several weeks, first pulling herself up with both hands and walking along from chair to chair, then from chair to wall. She then progressed to pulling herself up and standing without support for a few minutes.  She got really fast at traversing the entire perimeter of her house, moving from furniture to wall, and back again.

    Last week she began taking 3-4 steps from furniture to wall, falling down many times throughout the day.  Each time she fell down, she pulled herself up again, this time with only one hand, and started the process all over again.

    By the end of the week she was standing on her own at times, and taking 6-8 steps in the middle of the room.  Again, falling down again and again and getting up, each time with a big smile on her face, to try again.

    She never stayed down and told herself that she wasn’t good enough to walk, or that she would never get there.  She continues to toddle (I now know why children this age are called toddlers!) find her balance and takes more and more steps on her own.

    We all were just like Arya when we were learning to walk.  We all have that determination and thrill of accomplishment in us.

    When we are working toward something and it feels hard, or elusive, and seems like we are never going achieve our goal, remember that childlike drive.  What if we would have given up when we were learning to walk? What if we remained crawlers our entire life?

    That’s what is happening when we give up too soon as adults.  Each attempt to walk gives Arya more information for her to be successful.  The same is true for us.

    Each time we strive to reach our goals, we gain valuable information about ourselves. Let’s all use that information to continue to become the best possible humans we can be.

     

  • My Book

    My Book

    After I began helping others to navigate their grief, I thought to myself,

    “This is the life I was meant to live”;

    referencing the message I heard shortly after Leah died that said, Losing Leah is too high a price to pay to not live the life you were meant to live.

    About this time, I begin to hear that it was time to write my book.  I resisted writing it for all kinds of reasons. I told myself,:

    I’m not an author,

    I can’t write,

    I don’t want my vulnerable story out there for anyone to read, and on and on.

    I resisted writing my book until it was easier to just write the darn thing!

    I began a writing boot camp to see if I had a book to write.  I still doubted myself, and I thought if I wrote a book at all it would be an ebook, and it would live where ebooks live, thereby not being a “real” book because I couldn’t hold in my hand.

    The boot camp consisted of writing 1000 words for 10 days, and then sending them each day to my writing coach.  After the ten days, we had a phone conversation. He told me, not only did I have a book, my book needed to be a physical book I could put in someone’s hands. There went my ebook idea.

    I spent the next 3 months writing my first draft, and then sent it back to him.  We had a 2-hour conversation, going over the book chapter by chapter.  He helped me to format it so it was cohesive, and gave me ideas on how to flush out each chapter.

    I wrote for another 3 months, everyday, writing and editing, again and again. When it felt complete, I found someone to help me edit and self-publish it.  This was really happening!

    While it was being edited, I did a lot of work to release old beliefs about my value and worth so that I cold talk about my story when my book was ready to publish.

    That first year, I took my book on the road and did over a dozen events in Raleigh, where I lived at the time, as well as Chicago and Boulder. After that year, I claimed the fact that I am an author as well as a speaker.

    Today, when I pick up my book and read a portion of it, sometimes I wonder who wrote it. In some ways it felt like it came through me.  While I was writing it the words flowed easily. I find that is true most of the time when I am writing. I am able to touch a place where my words describe what I am feeling, sometimes before I even know that I am feeling a certain way.

     

    Writing my book was another step in saying yes to the life I am meant to live.

    You can find my book here.

     

     

  • What Does Healing From Grief Look Like?

    What Does Healing From Grief Look Like?

    I’m often asked what it means to heal from grief.

    It’s a question I’ve pondered for over 20 years, and I’m not sure even now I know what it means.

    We hear often that “Time heals all wounds.”  Time by itself isn’t the only factor; it’s what you do with that time that makes the difference. If I broke my arm and allowed time alone to heal it, the bones would eventually knit back together.  My arm may not be very useful to me.  If I had it set in a cast, and then did physical therapy, my arm would then have a better chance of regaining full functionality.

    The same is true of grief. If we do nothing with our feelings, stuff them in a drawer and hope they go away, what we may find is they seem to get louder and more intense.  All we want is relief from the incessant overwhelming feelings, and for things to be the way they were before we experienced our loss.

    Let’s look at the dictionary definitions of healing and heal:

    Healing-Adjective

    • Curing or curative; prescribed or helping to heal
    • Growing sound, getting well, mending.

    Noun

    • The act or process of regaining health

    Heal-Verb

    • To become whole or sound, free from ailment.

     

    Looking up these definitions sent me down a rabbit hole, looking at definitions of curative, (serving to heal) mending, (an act that mends or repairs) of becoming whole, (comprising the full quantity) etc.

    Each definition provides another layer of meaning, yet none fully describes what healing from grief means to me.

    With each definition, I became more and more sure that the healing that is described in the dictionary looks nothing like what healing from deep grief looks like. The closest I can come to what healing feels like for me is this. As I began to emerge from the day-to-day fog and shock of my daughter’s death, what I describe as healing came in glimmers of hope.

     

    • A smile after I heard a song that reminded me of Leah.
    • A day that I didn’t sob all day long. In the early days I stopped wearing make-up because it was cried off my face before I got to work.
    • Being inspired to paint again after a couple of years of not wanting to get my paints out of the closet.
    • Sleeping better at night.
    • Wanting to eat nourishing food.
    • Wanting to get showered and dressed in the morning.
    • Being ready to go through her clothes and her room. (I did this with someone who did not know her, which made it easier for me)
    • Decorating for Christmas again. (this looked different every year, I’ll write more about this in specific blog about navigating the holidays.)
    • Being ready to move from the house we lived in with her. (after 7 years)
    • Wanting to bring a painful feeling to my heart because I knew it would shift. There were many years that I still avoided this, even though I knew it worked.
    • Being ready to write my book and share my story.
    • Being ready to speak about my story.

     

    I can point to these as sign posts along the way like I was reclaiming my life, even though it looked different than it did before. I didn’t experience healing as a linear journey. There were many starts and stops, and sometimes it felt like I was taking one step forward and several backwards. The common ground was continuing to see hope and light, no matter how dim, at the end of the tunnel.

    Everyone’s healing journey is unique just like everyone’s grief journey is unique. What is your experience of healing after a loss?

     

     

  • What Inspires Me?

    What Inspires Me?

    When I saw this question as a prompt my first thought was,

    “No one will be interested in that.”

    Then I realized that quite often, my first thought is an attempt to avoid a place that feels too vulnerable.  I wondered why I felt vulnerable writing about what inspires me.

    My biggest inspiration is my family, especially Dan, my husband, Peter, my son, Leah, my daughter, and Arya, my granddaughter. Arya is the newest member of that list at little over 1 year old, and I wanted to go right to her because she is such a delight. I love watching her discover things about her world. I love her unabashed trust in all of us who love her.

    I want to recapture some of her pure delight for myself.

    I would not be able to appreciate her the way I do without the inspiration of Dan, Peter, and Leah, so before I continue my reflections of Arya, I will start with them.

    Dan inspired me from the day I met him. He was the first person who really saw me for who I was, even though it would be many years before I saw myself that way. He was instrumental in helping me to meet that person and grow to appreciate her, and then to love her. He always gave me unconditional love at a time when it was not apparent in my life. He helped me learn to trust myself, and relax into the person I am meant to be. He opened up the door of possibilities before I even knew that there was a door.

    As my firstborn child, Peter inspired me to be a better person, and a better mother than I ever thought possible. The sight of this tiny human that blessed our lives over 40 years ago made me appreciate child-like joy through play and discovery.

    He inspired me to find play again in my own life.

    Leah inspired me to take a stand for myself when I sought a VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean) birth. Peter’s birth was a C-section due to complications from a car accident. I wanted a different birth experience with Leah. We educated ourselves about VBAC, and were successful.  Leah also inspired me by the way she lived her life. (Although I didn’t see it at the time!) She was intense from day one, and always fought for what she wanted.  I later thought that maybe this was because she would be here for such a short time.

    She also inspires me to live the life I was meant to live, in order to honor her life since she’s been gone.

    My family inspired me throughout my life to follow my own path, and to do my inner work, so that I could provide an environment for them to do the same.

    Back to Arya.  I know in my heart that if I had not done my own work, the work involved in creating a family that thrives, and the work from my grief journey that I would not have been able to be fully present to the wonder of my granddaughter. I do not have layers of protection around my heart from suppressing my feelings during my life. I learned how to feel all of my feelings, so my heart is open, and from that place I can appreciate my granddaughter with a completely open heart.

    The humans that I love the most inspired me to live my best life, to meet the difficulties of my life with grace, to be vulnerable. So there you have it. We don’t like to be vulnerable, and yet that’s what makes us open to love and a worthwhile life.

    I am inspired to be vulnerable.  I’ll take it!

  • Full Spectrum of Feelings

    Full Spectrum of Feelings

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    I’m often asked how I can be joyful and live the life I am living when I’m doing it without my daughter’s presence in my life.

    I’m asked if I have gotten over her death, or if I’ve healed and accepted her death.

    I will never get over Leah’s death. I’ve had a 20-year inquiry into what healing form her death looks like, and I have a problem wrapping my head around what accepting her death means.

    I’ve accepted that she is not here, and that in order to live the life I was meant to live that I had/have to find a way to honor her, and to be the best me that I can be. That has not been an easy road, and it has meant that I needed to learn how to feel my excruciating feelings of grief.

    In the early days of my grief journey I used diversion and distraction to keep from feeling my feelings of grief. I thought that if I ate enough chocolate chip cookies, I wouldn’t have to feel the pain of losing my daughter. I thought that those feelings would eventually go away if I pushed them away long enough.

    What I found out is that they got louder to get my attention.

    The intensity of my feelings made them overwhelming.

    I learned that feeling them was the way through, and when I allowed them to be met they quieted down. There are many ways to feel our feelings. My own practice of present moment awareness, Samyama, is what helped me learn to get better at feeling my raw feelings. I could bring one feeling at a time, to my heart, and my heart shifted the feeling. Our hearts are alchemical vessels that can hold whatever we bring to them. As I began to have a greater capacity to feel my painful feelings, I found out that I could also feel joy and happiness to a greater degree. I learned that I can feel joy and pain at the same time.

    I like to thing of feelings as clouds.

    There are different kinds of clouds, and they always move through. Even dark storm clouds move through. Our feelings are the same. They are not good or bad, they are energy that need to be met and felt, and then they move through too.

    When they come back, it doesn’t mean we are regressing. When we are present to our feelings, we realize that the feeling may seem similar to feelings we have had before, yet in this moment it is slightly different. Just like no two clouds are alike.

    My grief journey taught me that when we feel the full spectrum of our feelings, we can live a fuller life. When I fully participate in all aspects of my life, does that mean I have healed from the death of my daughter? That is a question that I continue to sit with. Healing doesn’t look like what I thought it would when I considered it early on. That may be a topic for further discussion.  What I know now is that when I can bring all of my feelings into my heart, my heart can hold them, and my head doesn’t have to try to figure out what to do with them.

    That right there is a step in the right direction for me.

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  • Nuances of Perfectionism

    Nuances of Perfectionism

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    When I was preparing to move from Raleigh to St. Paul in the fall of 2020, there was a lot of purging of things we no longer needed. Some of these were easy to pack in boxes and take to places that were accepting donations.

    Then I came across my journals.

    In the course of my life I’ve been a somewhat sporadic writer. Early in my journey, I would decide that writing in a journal would help to uncover what I needed to know to work on in myself, and then I could get to the work of “fixing” it. This was all before I found presence as a practice, and before I knew that there was nothing to fix.

    Whenever I made a new promise to write in a journal, I bought a new one.

    I couldn’t just pick up where I left off in an old one because that represented failure to me, I had stopped writing daily in that journal (or weekly, or….) and I needed to find the perfect journal to capture the deepest thoughts that would lead to the transformation that I was envisioning for myself. Inevitably, I would not be consistent with my latest attempt to fix myself, and yet another journal would go into the pile of half started journals.

    This was only one place where perfection showed up in my life. I used to think that if I could just “get it right” i.e. find the perfect combination of goals, rules, insights, etc. that I would attain what I was looking for, and I always failed. These attempts of finding the perfect combination of things out there to make me happy; always sent me into a tail spin of self abuse.

    If I couldn’t achieve the perfect body, the perfect hair, the perfect disposition; be the perfect mother or wife, how could I be successful?

    How could I teach my children?

    How could I find fulfillment?

    This cycle repeated itself numerous times before I began to unravel perfectionism in my life.

    After Leah died, the fabric of my life was ripped apart. My life was cracked open. It was only when I looked at my life from that place that I knew perfectionism was not attainable. At first I thought it was because my daughter died, how could I have a perfect life without her physical presence?

    Didn’t that right there mean that I had failed as a mother?

    My grief journey took me to the depths of despair. As I climbed out through presence, and my Samyama practice, I began to see that perfectionism is a myth. That there is no perfect place to go; no perfect way to be.  I learned that I perfectly imperfect just as I am.

    I began to look for answers inside my heart rather than outside myself. My heart would often lead me to a teaching, or teacher, yet the inspiration always came from within.  That was not an easy lesson for me to learn. The more present I became, the more I could discern my inner voice. I learned what my intuition felt like in my body. I learned to trust my full body yes.

    Do I still try to find the best way to do things?  The perfect way? Yes, sometimes I do, and now know that this work is a practice, not a perfect, and I can give myself grace when I find myself heading down that particular rabbit hole.

    Living my life in this way has brought more joy into my life, more inspiration, and yes, more happiness and contentment. I’ve loosened my grip on things that I thought were needed to achieve a particular way of living.  Now I allow rather than strive so hard to attain something.

    Back to that pile of unfinished journals.

    When I found them I read a little from a few of them and realized I am light years away from where I was when I was striving for perfection. I toyed with the idea of picking them up and continuing to write from where I am today.  That didn’t feel right to me.

    Before I moved I held a ritual to burn those journals, as well as other things that helped me along the way in my journey, yet no longer were aligned with where I am today. Burning my journals released more of the hold that perfectionism had on me. I thanked them for serving their purpose when they did.

    I released what I no longer needed to make space for what was coming next.

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  • Another Side of Grief

    Another Side of Grief

    It’s been 8 months since we’ve moved to St. Paul from Raleigh, NC.

    We moved here to be closer to my son and his family. Our granddaughter Ayra was born in July of 2020, and after we met her, we knew that we wanted to be a part of her everyday life.

    One of the things that I’ve been aware of since we’ve moved here is the grief of all of the time lost when we lived apart.

    I was surprised to come upon this as grief.

    The fact that I can still be surprised by grief tells me how complicated grief can be. Even though I am aware of grief in my life, I can still be taken aback by the more subtle nuances of grief.

    My son had lived an airplane ride away form us for over 13 years.  We saw each other 2-3 times a year during that time, and we all longed for more time together.

    There was a time when I didn’t see a solution to wanting to be more of a part of my son’s life.

    Because I didn’t see a solution, I also didn’t see the possibilities.

    Because I didn’t see the possibilities, I was not open to any of the ways we could be a part of each other’s lives on a more regular basis.

    Once I began to get curious about how we could spend more time together, possibilities began presenting themselves. One of the first was to build a tiny home in his back yard, and spend summers in Minneapolis, and winters in Raleigh. Our plans to do just that were well underway when we learned of our granddaughter’s impending arrival.

    Because I had already opened the door of possibilities, when we were called very strongly to move here permanently, we walked through that door with ease.

    My grief came from not engaging the field of possibilities sooner.

    Thinking that I have wasted time that could have been better spent. I’ve found that is a common theme when we are looking at life decisions from the lens of grief, or disappointment.

    What I’ve learned through my own journey is that we are not ready until we are ready. When we are ready, we find what we are ready for, our teacher appears. Lamenting what we haven’t done, what we didn’t say yes to earlier can keep us stuck.

    Learning how to live with presences helps us to embrace what is here now, where life is calling us in each moment. It doesn’t mean that we will never feel difficult feelings again, or that grief stays up on that shelf where we put it, hoping it will stay our of site.

    Rather it means that we have the resources to meet our feelings, all of them, when they show up.

    As I met these most recent feelings of grief, I realized that up until now, I was not ready to make the move that I made. I am aware of all the reasons that this is true. I became aware of them in a moment of knowing as I sat in my daily Samyama practice. I was able to hold those feelings of grief in my heart, and allow my heart to transmute them. I also know that I don’t know ALL of the details of this move, and that is ok. I trust that as I continue to be devoted to the present moment, I will know what I need to know at exactly the right time.

    When you are ready to get curious about your own grief journey, I am here.

     

  • Emerging From Covid

    Emerging From Covid

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    I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately about how we are feeling as we emerge from the absurdity of the last year. The way we showed up in the world changed in an instant. The way we did business shifted, maybe forever. The way we socialized was distanced. From the first time I heard the term social distancing, I thought, no, that’s not what we need. We need physical distancing with social connections.

    As I think back to the early days of last year, when we first knew that our lives would be changing, yet we didn’t know how they would be changing, I was reminded of my early days of grief. And I realized that we were going to experience grief in ways we never had before.

    In my conversations about this past year, (and beyond) I’m hearing about so much grief.

    Grief about what we lost.

    Grief about the changes we experienced.

    Grief about the unknown.

    Our losses are so much more than the obvious.

    Some of us lost loved ones,

    And our losses extend into many layers of our lives.

    The way we work, the way we connect with friends and family, the way our children attend school, and so much more.

    Maybe some of the things we lost are better off gone from our lives, maybe they made space for more important endeavors.

    I think it’s important to consider what we have gained. So many questions arise as I consider these for myself.

    How have your relationships with your immediate family changed? What is different from the way it was before? What opportunities for creating a life you want to live presented themselves during this past year?

    A new understanding of what is important.

    The urgency to take a stand for those things, or make changes that align with your values.

    A greater understanding of who we are and how we want to live our lives going forward.

    We hear a lot about the “new normal”, what does that mean for you?

    Whenever you experience a major life-changing event, there is an opening to create a new life, to change the way you show up, and respond.  Where is your life calling you?

    Take some time to consider how this past year impacted you and what changes are right for you.

    And take time to grieve for your losses, honoring your feelings and making way for what is emerging.

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