Finding Your Light Through Grief

Happy Friday, everybody. It's kind of new for me to be here on Fridays, so I'm excited to join the Friday team. Hope you are all having a great week. Some of you might be like, I'm not having a great week. And that's okay, too. I guess what I mean by that is I hope that you're just in a good space and you're able to find some connection, find some community. So I'm gonna just hold some space for a few seconds here and then dive on in. Hey, Luke, good morning. Happy Friday. Really excited to be here.

And I'm not gonna lie, I'm kind of nervous. I'm nervous. So today's discussion is new. It's a new time. It's a new topic. If you haven't held space together before, my name is Jean Mitchells, usually here on Mondays and Sundays. So Friday mornings is a little new for me. So I hope to see you all out here. If you're listening on replay, just type in the chat what your name is that you're on replay. And on this Friday, I simply am going to invite you to take a deep breath. Breathe. We're here. We made it.

It's Friday. It's a holiday weekend. So today's discussion is going to be focused on finding your light through grief. And as you're popping in a chat here, you know, grief can be many things to many people. And I went out to Google and as we are starting the journey on this discussion, I wanted to write a little definition, so I did some Google searches. Good morning, H. Bird. How you doing today? So grief, by definition, deep sorrow, especially caused by someone's death. A major loss. A major loss could be.

You worked at a company for 30 years and you got laid off and you didn't have a plan and you didn't know it was coming. You lost your family, you lost your community of people. A major loss could be a hurricane has come through or a tornado and your home has been destroyed or a fire, Right? So there's a lot of ways in which grief can pop in. My specific experience and the conversation that I'm going to lean towards, especially today, is going to be about that deep sorrow for losing someone. But here's some things that I've been learning and I'll share a little bit more about my story.

Grief. The organ that affects grief the most is our heart. That makes sense, right? When something happens, there's a great sorrow. It's as if our heart is broken in some way. We can feel it there. There's almost a heaviness in our chest when I say the word. My question for you is if you've experienced grief, where do you feel grief in your body? Have you thought about that before? Until I started doing some research, I don't think I actually physically connected the feeling to the, oh, that's an organ that's going.

Having something happen. Other organs that can be affected in our bodies can be our actually can just be our organs and our immune systems both can be impacted by grief. So when we think about grief, we often think that there's the mental component to it, but there is a huge physical component that goes along with it. Well, it's not just do I mentally have the motivation to continue or move on or move through the grief physically. Something can happen with us as well. So I'm going to share a little bit of story and why I'm out here and why finding light through grief is really important to me.

So I've experienced grief in the past. I have had transitions, right as, as a little kid, you could feel grief because your family moved when you were in first grade and lost all your friends and you had to make new friends and you felt really sad and angry. Right? So grief has a lot of emotions that can go with it. You can have sadness is the obvious one. There's anger that goes along with it. There's guilt, there's despair. There are tons of emotions that can come along with grief. And so here's a little bit of my last two and a half year journey.

I was super, super close to my dad. I was really close to both my parents to be hon. But my dad was like my dad. Like, I don't know how to explain my connection with him. Energetically, if something was happening with either of us, one of us would feel it. When I was in high school, I was in college, I got into a really bad car accident and my dad had this feeling in his body. He was so anxious he couldn't sit in the house. And so he and my mom went to the Dairy Queen to get a sundae or a cone because he, he was so anxious in his body and he didn't know what was going on.

And when they got home, they got the call from the hospital that I had been in an accident and I had been taken to the emergency room. I was okay. I got super, super lucky. But my dad could feel that. So we have always had this really unique connection and bond. And so my dad had Alzheimer's. And you know, if you've ever gone or been with somebody who has had that experience, it's really hard to watch. Little by little by little, they lose a part of who they are. And it's almost as if they. They go deeper into the archives of who they were or some past memories, because their world just continues to get smaller and smaller.

And. And I remember when I was in college, my dad and I were talking about his dad who had passed away, and his. He had a really hard time because his dad had Alzheimer's also. And he told me that the hardest day in his life was the day that his dad for who he was and I had that day, and he never wanted me to have that day, you know, And. And we had that day. There was the day where he didn't know who I was, and he thought I was just a really kind person. And then he associated me with. With various things.

He took snippets of different memories, and that's who I became for him. The morning speak wonder. And so. But because he had shared with me his own scary story about what it was like for his dad, it almost made it less scary for me. And then I got to flip the story in my mind, because how scary was it for my dad to not know who I was anymore? And I tried really hard to put myself in his shoes, to be like, who's this stranger who keeps coming to see me? And why are they so nice to me? And I don't know them, but I feel like I know them, but I don't know them.

So I just. I found myself in a weird state of just changing the story, but it was hard. It was really hard. And then watching it when it happened to my brother and my nephews, because they didn't see them as my dad as often as I did. And then eventually my dad passed away, and I literally felt like my whole world had just shattered. Even though I knew it was coming. The day that he passed away, like, I was there with him multiple times, and I would hold his hand, and I thought on the last few days when I was holding his hand, today would be the day.

And I would be there when he passed, and I would be able to hold his hand while he took his last breath, because I wanted to be there for him. I wanted to create safety for him. But my dad is stubborn, and he took his last breath when everybody left the room. And I had been on the road home that day. So he's stubborn, but I was sad and my heart shattered. But here's what's funny. The day that my dad died. I had to do a sound bath. I was driving home because I had to do sound bath that day. And I got to the sound bath.

I knew that he had passed away. And I told the girl that was there, and she's like, what do you do? And I was like, we do the thing because people need to heal. And I heal when I receive healing when we heal. And so I did the sound bath. And a week later I came back and I went to go do the sound bath again, and my bowls hadn't moved. I have a set of bowls that I leave in this one location all the time. They hadn't moved. And I went to unpack my bowls and one of my bowls was shattered, but it wasn't cracked on the side.

It was shattered through the bottom. Like somebody had touched the bottom and like broken out the bottom of a glass. I don't know how to explain it differently. And when I pulled out the bowl, I was like, what happened? And I asked the girl that worked there. I was like, did my bowls move somehow? But they're in a really sturdy case, so I don't know how it would have happened. And it was the a middle bowl inside of a stack. So no other bowl was wrecked. It was just one bowl. And the bowl that broke, the bowl that shattered in the bottom was my heart chakra bowl.

And I'm an energy healer. I work with a lot of energy healing. I work with people a lot. And I sent a photo to my Reiki master, my teacher, my mentor, and I was like, sat. I'm like, my heart chock a bowl, it shattered. And he goes, gene, he goes, that's your dad. He's like, you know this. I know you know this. But he goes, when something shatters and something breaks, it creates an expansion so that you can do more. So your dad is telling you that he is going to help you do more. He's not left you.

And I lost it in that moment. I started crying the hardest. I've cried in a really long time time. And then I laughed and I was like, but did he have to break my bowls? They're expensive. And so I started laughing. But. But I got the message that even though my dad was gone and my heart was broken, he was always going to be there, right? So if you're dialing in today and if you've lost someone, I'd love for you to just type your. Type their name in the chat. Let's create community, because these finding your light through grief sessions are really going to be about us finding community together.

I'll share some of my stories, but I want us to have an opportunity, a space for us to come together and have community and celebrate the people that we've lost. Because for two years, I've literally been running around the world. And I shared this a year after my dad passed away. And I'll wrap this part up. My mom passed away, too. And I'll share a different story, different day about my mom. But here's what I did. I'm a doer. That's my nature. I do things. And I immediately launched into this series of running marathons.

So in the last eight months, I've ran four marathons in four countries. And my birthday is next week. So in the year time span of my birthday this year, I've done this thing, and I've done it to raise money in honor of my mom and dad. But what I realized I haven't done is I haven't taken the pause to celebrate in community, my family, my parents that I've lost. I've been, I don't know, just doing and sad. But I haven't shared that with a lot of people. So you guys are kind of some of my firsts. Because what I've realized, too, is that we can heal so much in our bodies, we can heal so much in our hearts by meditation and taking time and journaling, remembering, running, doing what's natural to us.

But there's something really special about sharing in community our grief. So my hope is that this becomes a safe space for you, a space where you feel like you can pop into the chat, you can share the name of someone that you're grieving, or a job that you're grieving, or anything, Right? A relationship. Maybe you were in a relationship for many years, and that relationship is no longer, and that shift is abrupt, and you feel that grief. So in the past year, as I've been doing these things, like my way of trying to find light through all of it, trying to.

To make something out of it. I mean, I was lucky. My mom and dad lived until they were their 80s. I've met people who lost their parents in their teens, in their 20s. Now that I've started to share my story verbally and vocally in spaces, I get to hear other people's stories. And it brings my heart so much joy to feel the connection in just a new way. But also things that we recognize, things that I listed out earlier. I have notes today. I took notes. I don't ever take notes, but I took notes Today, because this is really important.

I didn't want to forget and I knew I'd get emotional. We feel things in our organs and our bodies, so this is a fact. When my dad died, I hurt. I got hurt, one of my legs got hurt. When my mom passed away, I ran a marathon two weeks later on an injury. And after I crossed the finish line, my injury went away. I don't know how, there's no way to explain it, but it's almost as if crossing that finish line, something shifted in my body because I pushed through some real deep sorrow and pain. And it's like I came, I came across the finish line.

But what I also recognized in the last year was I've been working my way through this. My body feels physically strong, stronger than it's felt for maybe a really long time, or maybe it's just always been this strong. But I've been holding in a lot of this grief. And what's happened because of it is I've had some blood work done and some tests done and my kidneys aren't doing great. They're carrying all of my stuff, stress. And so I now need to take a pause from doing some of the things that I love because my body needs to heal.

Because as my doctor has explained to my logical brain and my emotional self is I've been putting my body under a lot of stress, doing all of these marathons, traveling around the world, sleeping. I don't eat well when I'm stressed, I'm a stressed non eater. I forget to eat or I'm just not hungry. And so a lot of that just has taken a toll. So together we are going to continue to find our light and we do that by community. So today is just the first day, the first day that we come together. My goal was to introduce you a little bit to the concept of community and sharing with grief.

My goal was to help you understand that grief can impact us so much more than just our heart. And also sometimes with grief, it's really hard to talk to people that haven't experienced grief. So I have a team of people at my psychobar studio. I have lots of clients and none of them, a couple of them have experienced grief before. Losing a grandparent or something like that. But they haven't really attached to it yet. And so I don't want to bring that to my team. But what I found is people that ride in our community.

Just last week I had a gentleman share with me that he was making a change. He was going to take some trips And I was like, where are you going? And wrote down crying. And he said, I'm taking all the trips the. To my wife and I can't go on together because she passed away two years ago. And he just started crying. So what I found is that in community, we can heal, we can find our light because we can share that with people who have experienced what we've experienced. So whether it's on the chat or you send me a comment or you listen on replay or you find me wherever, know that you're not alone.

Know that sharing your grief and community is one way that you can start to find your light again. I found so much of my light this last year, traveling around the world, running these marathons, meeting some really cool people, and seeing my mom and dad in spaces that I didn't know that they would be. Speak Wonder. Thank you for putting the name out there, Roger. Roger, I love you. I'm sending kindness and love and compassion to you, Speak Wonder. And to you, Roger, your memory lives on because Speak Wonder speaks your name and lives your essence.

So together in this community, we get to share. And so every other week for the next few weeks, I'm going to be out here and we're going to do this conversation around finding your light. I'm going to share with you different things that I've done to help me find my light. But I also invite you to share who's your person or persons. I invite you to say their name, share what it feels like to not have them here anymore. Share what it feels like to move forward. The motions that we feel. Sadness, guilt, anger, despair.

The number of times I have said to myself, I didn't do enough. The number of times I've said I should have done more is huge because I feel guilty. But I also know that my mom and dad loved me a ton. I also know that I've done a lot for them, and I know that they are proud of me. So all these things that I feel right now is just because I miss so much. So whatever you feel, just know that this is your space to put it out there. Speak Wonder. Yes. It feels hollow. And that's okay. The question becomes, how do we move forward?

How do we help their memory? How do we take the essence of the impact that they made in our lives and keep that magic and expand on that magic? So for me, I ran all these races. I still have one, or who knows, maybe 10 more to go and a bunch more money to raise. And I'm excited for that opportunity, experience and I'm excited to share this with you so I will see you in two weeks I look forward to more conversations. If you're listening on replay type the name of the people that you're holding on to that you miss that you grief let's in community keep that together and I will pop back into this chat every single time to see who typed what and make a comment when I see it come up.

I'm here for you. We're in this together. I love you. You are loved and all of these people that you've lost they mean something and we get to hold on to that piece of them their light, their spark and we get to make it shine together. So just know you're not in this alone we're here with you Cadre family I love you. I hope you have a great day and I will talk to you all in a couple of weeks and I'll be here on Sunday at 9am as well and on Monday. Chat soon. Enjoy this long weekend and celebrate you.