Finding Your Light Through Grief: Freedom To Celebrate

Hey, everybody. I am Jean. This is Major. We're coming in to you on this beautiful holiday. Hello. Hello, my nice little sidekick. I might be coming in here solo today, and that's okay. It's Fourth of July. It's a Friday. Friday. Many of you might be out on picnics. Maybe you'll listen to this later. Maybe you'll dial in now. But whenever you listen, if you take the time today, amazing. I apologize. I had to move the time back. I was actually taking a spin class at the time. I was going to be on here originally, and so here we are, dialing in now.

So if we haven't met before, my name is Gina. Jules. I am always excited to be here with all of you. I have these really egregiously big sunglasses. Like, look at these. They're huge. I have the tiniest head. So we're gonna put those off to the side here for a second. So today is our time together. And on Fridays, every other Friday, I talk a little bit about grief. So today is about finding your light through grief. And in honor of our theme for the month, it's freedom to celebrate. Now, I don't know about you, but I find that especially as grief is new or raw or you're in the early stages of a loss of any kind.

A job, a family member, a best friend, moving away from everybody, changing into a new city, having a big shift in your life, you know, there's a lot of emotion that goes with that. And, you know, on this holiday here, holidays can be really hard. We have memories of old holidays, memories of how we shared holidays with people that we loved or friends and families. And then sometimes we feel maybe a little lost. Maybe it's more that we don't want to allow ourselves to celebrate or have fun or be in the moment or feel joy.

Because if we feel joy, we aren't grieving or we aren't feeling the loss. And none of that's true, right? We feel what we feel. And sometimes I know that I felt this. I've been recently talking to other people who have grieved losses, and we feel sometimes guilty. Like, there's a way that we're supposed to show up when someone has passed. You know, do we do a memory? Do we share on Instagram or social media about person that we're grieving? Do we do something annually to celebrate them? But at the end of the day, whatever it is, it's yours, right?

And there's no right or wrong. There's no should or shouldn'ting. There's simply being and feeling and being in your space, being in your moments, being in your bodies, being in your spirits, being alive. Right. Because that's what we are. We're alive. And that sometimes can be the part that is a trigger for us. We're the ones that are still alive. We're the ones that are still moving forward. Insert whatever that might be. So finding the freedom to celebrate. As I've mentioned several times or in the past, I have lost my mom and my dad.

And recently, you know, I have had a lot of transitions with that and what that feels like. And I set out to do a bunch of races to process my grief, but really rediscover myself, because often what I find is in my own life, in my own perspective. But even in talking to other people who are grieving, we feel a piece of us lost along the way. Maybe a piece was stolen from us because that person left our lives before we were ready. And now it's our time to figure out, why are we still here? Why am I the one left behind?

Why am the one who got to keep the job? Or why am I the one that got to live and continue on this path or journey? So I'm just gonna put it out there that having those moments where you feel like you should feel a certain way, but you don't tap into that, see what that means, see what that feels like for you, and just tap into it and then give yourself permission to feel exactly how you feel. Now. I'll give you an example. Hello. Hello. Happy fourth of July. I'll give you an example. You know, freedom to celebrate and freedom to find our light again.

For me, you know, I went through a period where, when I lost my mom and dad, birthdays are really hard. But birthdays have become hard for a period of time before that because my dad had Alzheimer's. And so gradually he forgot who I was. And so it became this thing where, you know, we go through our whole lives and growing up, we'd celebrate my birthday. I was adopted, so we'd celebrate my adoption day. And it wasn't about gifts. It was just about celebrating who we were as a family, who I was in whatever age I was at.

And finding that I am missing those opportunities to celebrate with my parents was something really hard. And this year it was fascinating because I went through those days and I just celebrated those days. I celebrated my adoption day. I celebrated my birthday. And it wasn't as if I didn't miss my mom and dad anymore. It was as if I could redefine what that celebration meant and remember what it means to have had the experiences that I've had and feel joy for those. Because we're sad, because we're grieving.

You know, it doesn't matter if. If A loss happened six months ago, a month ago, 10 years ago, we still are going to feel elements of that. We still might feel guilty that I'm here. They're not. Guilty that I didn't get laid off from my job and they did, and I'm the one left behind, guilty for all these other things. But guilty is one of those words where the only one that can make you feel any of that is you. So the question becomes, what is the story I'm telling myself about having the freedom to be happy?

What is the story I'm telling myself about needing to always feel sad? There will be a point in time where you'll find happiness and feel happiness, and then you'll pause and be like, well, I might need to feel sad right now, or why don't I feel sad right now? And all of that is okay. All of it's okay. So I find for me what I'm choosing to do instead. And when I have in conversation with people who are experiencing loss and they're questioning, you know, should I do a post on social media? Should I, you know, find something to celebrate?

All of whom, who they were, what I discovered for myself and what I discovered as I remembered how my mom and dad went through losses of their parents. We found reasons to laugh. We found reasons to find joy to celebrate. And we allowed ourselves to not feel guilty for laughing and celebrating. Because at the end of the day, we will always carry a piece of all the people that have been with us forward. And maybe there's a loss in a friendship and not even just a death. Maybe the friendship just didn't serve each other anymore.

Or maybe you moved away or changed careers and that friendship faded away. There's a celebration in what it was. There's a celebration in the part of you that grew through that experience. And so allowing yourself the opportunity to remember what it was like to have a Fourth of July with whomever it was that has left your life. For me, it was my mom and dad. But I can still remember going out on the boat, seeing their faces light up, or hearing my mom yell at my dad when I didn't have my life jacket on tight enough.

And I can remember those moments and feel the joy that those moments had. And then I get to choose. I get to choose. Do I create a new experience today that might be a new celebration, a new memory doesn't mean that that the memories of them or the past go away. It means that I'm choosing to honor the celebrations that they brought into my life in a different way so that once again, we can try to find joy and we can find compassion for ourselves. So today, it's again, it's a holiday. There might be a whole bunch of different memories that are happening with you, depending on what stages you're in with grief.

A grief of a loss of a job or a person or a family member, a friend, could be anything, a dog, all of it. But remembering again that having those moments to celebrate, celebrate the life that you had, celebrate the memories that you shared, celebrating and creating new memories and moments, that's human. And at the end of the day, we get to show up for ourselves. We get to feel all the feels and know that that's okay. We can pack them down for the things that are important, but they're always going to come back up and we can celebrate and feel the freedom to celebrate in the moments that we feel that joy, however big or small that is, whatever that looks like.

So today, my invitation to you is to allow yourself this space to create the space to be the space to remember and the space to just love yourself and have the freedom to find that joy again. I hope you all have a great day. Thanks for tuning in. I look forward to seeing you again. I'll be here on Sunday talking about me, time and freedom in a different way. Enjoy your day, get outside and move and we'll see you soon.