Tiny Buddha

Tag: death

  • The Grief No One Talks About: How to Heal After Losing a Soulmate Pet

    The Grief No One Talks About: How to Heal After Losing a Soulmate Pet

    “Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.” ~Anatole France

    When my cat Squiggles died, I didn’t just “lose a pet.” I lost a part of my identity, my greatest source of comfort, and my sense of home.

    Squiggles was the one constant in my life through every milestone, every heartbreak, every version of myself I grew into over the course of two decades. I had her since the moment she was born, and for almost twenty-two years, Squiggles was my constant companion, my emotional support, my soul-kitty.

    But no matter how much I prepared myself, nothing could soften the blow of saying goodbye and being forced to live without her.

    As a therapist, I tried to apply all of the coping mechanisms I’ve learned over the years. But the human in me wanted to reject them all. I was just too deep in my grief.

    So I turned inward. And over the past two years, I’ve been learning how to live with the loss of my soul-kitty. Not get over it. Or try to forget. But live with it.

    Here are five things that helped me cope with life without her.

    1. I validated the pain of my grief.

    I knew the loss of Squiggles was going to be devastating one day, but knowing it didn’t make it easier. What it did do was help me validate just how deeply it hurt.

    I didn’t try to hide how sad I felt. I cried every day for weeks. I canceled plans. I moved slowly. And instead of shaming myself for how awful I felt, I tended to the pain.

    Even though many people out there might think, “She was just a pet,” to me, she was everything.

    There’s a term for this kind of mourning: disenfranchised grief. It’s when your grief isn’t recognized by society in the same way a human loss might be. That doesn’t mean the grief is less real. It just means others may not understand how impactful the loss is.

    The bond I had with Squiggles was deeper than many human relationships. I’ve heard countless people say the death of their pet hurt more than the death of a relative. I believe them. I felt it.

    So I reminded myself daily: This was one of the most significant relationships in my life. I’m allowed to be this heartbroken.

    2. I tried to find balance.

    As a therapist, I’m well-versed in the idea that “the only way out is through.” But when you’re in the middle of overwhelming grief, feeling your feelings can quickly turn into drowning in them.

    So I did it in small doses. I yearned for her. I cried. I talked to her. I allowed myself to remember.

    And I also gave myself permission to take breaks from my grief when I could.

    In the early weeks, I couldn’t imagine feeling anything other than sorrow. But slowly, I started allowing myself to step back from the pain. I gave myself a night out with friends. I practiced guitar. I gardened. I let myself laugh without feeling guilty about it.

    And here’s the truth of taking breaks: It does not mean you’re moving on. It means you’re doing the best you can to survive.

    Joy and grief can live side by side. One doesn’t cancel out the other.

    3. I stopped saying “should.”

    Grief doesn’t follow logic. Or timelines. Or “shoulds.”

    And yet, they still popped up:

    “I should be feeling better by now.”

    “I should get rid of her things.”

    “I should be grateful I had her for so long.”

    At some point, I realized those “shoulds” were self-judgments in disguise. So I started replacing “should” with “could,” or “would like.” Sometimes I just asked, “Who says?”

    Who says I have to move on quickly?

    Who says keeping a box of her things means I’m stuck?

    Who says I’m grieving “too much”?

    Grief is a unique experience for everyone. No one knows how long the acute pain will last. For me, it has been about two years. My grief isn’t as all-consuming, yet I still have days where it hits me like a wave.

    And now, two years later, I cherish those moments when the grief hits. Because it connects me back to Squiggles.

    4. I connected with others who understood.

    One of the most painful things about losing a pet is how isolating it feels. That one being who knows you in and out is no longer there. It feels incredibly lonely.

    Friends didn’t always know what to say. People who had never had a close bond with a pet didn’t understand why I was so shattered.

    Talking to people helped, but only if they really got it. The people who had been through their own soul-pet losses were the ones who I felt most comfortable with. And it helped.

    Eventually, I created an online community where pet lovers could gather after losing a pet. A soft place to land where you don’t have to explain why you’re still crying six months later, or why it hurts more than you expected. People just get it.

    This community has become a huge part of my healing. And I continue to witness the power of connection every time someone shares their story, their pet’s name, or even just their pain.

    5. I used creativity and art to express how I felt.

    In the beginning, the only way I knew how to stay connected to Squiggles was through my sadness. But as time went on, that love started to move through me in different ways.

    I started gardening. Being in nature and witnessing seeds bloom into flowers reminded me of the circle of life and the connectedness of all beings.

    When I really missed Squiggles and didn’t know what to do with myself, I’d express my emotions through poetry. Or draw every detail of her little face, the patterns in her fur, the way her paws tucked under her body. I looked through old photos and let my emotions guide me.

    These small creative acts didn’t fix the grief. But they gave it somewhere to go. They gave me a way to keep loving her and helped me bring new forms of beauty into my life, even in her absence.

    If you’ve lost a soulmate pet, please know that you’re allowed to take all the time in the world that you need to grieve. Our pets are members of our family and a huge part of who we are. The grief you experience is simply the love you have for them, just in a new form now.

  • From Loss to Hope: How I Found Joy Again

    From Loss to Hope: How I Found Joy Again

    “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” ~Helen Keller

    The phone call arrived like a silent explosion, shattering the ordinary hum of a Tuesday morning. My uncle was gone, suddenly, unexpectedly. Just a few months later, before the raw edges of that loss could even begin to soften, my mom followed. Her passing felt like a cruel echo, ripping open wounds that had barely begun to form scabs.

    I remember those months as a blur of black clothes, hushed voices, and an aching emptiness that permeated every corner of my life. Grief settled over me like a suffocating blanket, heavy and constant. It wasn’t just the pain of losing them; it was the abrupt shift in the landscape of my entire world.

    My cousin, my uncle’s only child, was just twenty-three. He came to live with me, utterly adrift. He knew nothing about managing a household, budgeting, or even basic self-care. In the fog of my own sorrow, I found myself guiding him through the mundane tasks of adulting, a daily lesson in how to simply exist when your world has crumbled.

    Those early days were a testament to moving forward on autopilot. Each step felt like wading through thick mud. There were moments when the weight of it all seemed insurmountable, when the idea of ever feeling lighthearted again felt like a distant, impossible dream. My heart was a constant ache, and laughter felt like a betrayal.

    Then, the losses kept coming. A couple of other beloved family members departed within months, each passing a fresh cut on an already bruised soul. It felt like the universe was testing my capacity for heartbreak, pushing me to the absolute edge of what I believed I could endure. I was convinced that happiness, true, unburdened joy, was simply no longer available to me.

    For a long time, I resided in that broken space. My days were functional, but my spirit felt dormant, like a hibernating animal.

    I went through the motions, caring for my cousin, managing responsibilities, but internally, I was convinced my capacity for joy had been irrevocably damaged. The idea of embracing happiness felt disloyal to the people I had lost.

    One crisp morning, standing by the kitchen window, I noticed the way the light hit the dew on a spiderweb. It was a fleeting, unremarkable moment, yet for a split second, a tiny flicker of something akin to peace, even beauty, stirred within me. It startled me, like catching my own reflection in a darkened room. That flicker was a subtle reminder that even in the deepest shadows, light still existed.

    This wasn’t a sudden epiphany or a miraculous cure. It was a slow, deliberate crawl out of the emotional abyss. I began to understand that healing wasn’t about erasing the pain, but about learning to carry it differently. It was about allowing grief its space while simultaneously creating new space for life to bloom again.

    The first step was simply acknowledging the darkness without letting it consume me.

    I stopped fighting the waves of sadness when they came, allowing them to wash over me, knowing they would eventually recede. This acceptance was pivotal; it transformed my internal struggle from a battle into a painful, but necessary, process.

    I also learned the profound power of small, intentional acts. This wasn’t about grand gestures of self-care. It was about consciously noticing the warmth of a morning cup of coffee, the texture of a soft blanket, the simple comfort of a familiar song. These tiny moments, woven into the fabric of daily life, began to accumulate, like individual threads forming a stronger tapestry.

    Another crucial insight was the importance of letting go of the “shoulds.” There’s no right or wrong way to grieve, and no timeline for healing. I stopped judging my feelings, stopped comparing my progress to an imaginary standard. This liberation from self-imposed pressure created room for genuine recovery, allowing me to be exactly where I was in my journey.

    I started to actively seek out moments of connection. This meant leaning on the friends and remaining family who offered support, even when I felt too exhausted to reciprocate. It was about sharing stories, sometimes tearful, sometimes unexpectedly funny, that honored those we had lost and reminded me that love, even in absence, still binds us.

    Embracing vulnerability became a strength. Allowing myself to be seen in my brokenness, to admit when I was struggling, paradoxically made me feel more grounded. It revealed the immense capacity for compassion that exists in others, and in myself. This openness fostered deeper connections, which became vital anchors in my recovery.

    The concept of “joy” also transformed. It wasn’t about constant euphoria but about finding contentment, peace, and even occasional bursts of laughter amidst the lingering sorrow.

    It became less about an absence of pain and more about a presence of life, in all its complex beauty. I learned that joy is not a betrayal of grief but a testament to the enduring power of the human spirit.

    Ultimately, my journey taught me that resilience isn’t about being tough or never falling. It’s about being tender enough to feel, courageous enough to keep seeking light, and brave enough to get back up, even when every fiber of your being wants to stay down. It’s about collecting the pieces of your broken heart and finding a way to make it beat again, perhaps even stronger and more appreciative of every precious moment.

    I now stand in a place where I truly believe I am stronger and happier than ever before. Not despite the pain, but because of the profound lessons it taught me.

    Every challenging step, every tear shed, every quiet moment of discovery contributed to the person I am today—a little wiser, a little braver, and with a way better story to tell.

    My hope is that anyone facing similar darkness knows that the path back to joy is always possible, and that your story, too, holds immense power and purpose.

  • The Child I Lost and the Inner Child I’m Now Learning to Love

    The Child I Lost and the Inner Child I’m Now Learning to Love

    “Our sorrows and wounds are healed only when we touch them with compassion.” ~Jack Kornfield

    Her absence lingers in the stillness of early mornings, in the moments between tasks, in the hush of evening when the day exhales. I’ve gotten good at moving. At staying busy. At producing. But sometimes, especially lately, the quiet catches me—and I fall in.

    Grief doesn’t always roar. Sometimes it’s a whisper, one you barely hear until it’s grown into a wind that bends your bones.

    It’s been nearly three years since my daughter passed. People told me time would help. That the firsts—first holidays, first birthday without her—would be the hardest. And maybe that was true.

    But what no one prepared me for was how her absence would echo into the years that followed. How grief would evolve, shape-shift, and sometimes grow heavier—not lighter—with time. How her loss would uncover older wounds. Ones that predate her birth. Wounds that go back to a little girl who never quite felt safe enough to just be.

    I’d like to say I’ve spent the past few years healing. Meditating. Journaling. Growing. And I did—sort of. Inconsistently. Mostly as a checkmark, doing what a healthy, mindful person is supposed to do, but without much feeling. I went through the motions, hoping healing would somehow catch up.

    What I found instead was a voice I hadn’t truly listened to in years—my inner child, angry and waiting. While this year’s whirlwind pace pulled me further away, the truth is, I began losing touch with her long before.

    She waited, quietly at first. But ignored long enough, she began to stir. Her protest wasn’t loud. It was physical—tight shoulders, shallow breath, scattered thoughts, restless sleep. A kind of anxious disconnection I kept trying to “fix” by doing more.

    I filled my days with obligations and outward-focused energy, thinking productivity might shield me from the ache.

    But the ache never left.

    It just got smarter—showing up in my body, in my distracted mind, in the invisible wall between me and the world.

    Until the day I finally stopped. I don’t know if I was too tired to keep running or if my grief finally had its way with me. But I paused long enough to pull a card from my self-healing oracle deck. It read:

    “Hear and know me.”

    I stared at the words and wept.

    This was her. The little girl in me. The one who had waited through years of striving and performing and perfecting. The one who wasn’t sure she was lovable unless she earned it. The one who held not just my pain but my joy, too. My tenderness. My creativity. My curiosity.

    She never left. She just waited—watching, hurting, hoping I’d remember.

    For so long, I thought healing meant fixing. Erasing. Becoming “better” so I wouldn’t have to feel the ache anymore.

    But she reminded me that healing is less about removing pain and more about returning to myself.

    I’m still learning how to be with her. I don’t always know what she needs. But I’m listening now.

    Sometimes, she just wants to color or lie on the grass. Sometimes she wants to cry. Sometimes she wants pancakes for dinner. And sometimes, she wants nothing more than to be told she’s safe. That I see her. That I won’t leave again.

    These small, ordinary acts feel like re-parenting. I’m learning how to mother myself, even as I continue grieving my daughter. It’s a strange thing—to give the care I long to give her, to the parts of me that were once just as small, just as tender, just as in need.

    I’ve spoken so much about the loss of my daughter. The space she once filled echoes every day. But what also lingers is her way of being—her authenticity. She was always exactly who she was in each moment. No apologies. No shrinking.

    In my own journey of trying to fit in, of not wanting to be different, I let go of parts of myself just to be accepted.

    She, on the other hand, stood out—fearlessly. The world called her special needs. I just called her Lily.

    Her authenticity reminded me of something I had lost in myself. And now, authenticity is what my inner child has been waiting for—for so, so long.

    Sometimes I wonder if the universe gave me Lily not just to teach her but to be taught by her. Maybe our children don’t just inherit from us—we inherit from them, too.

    Her gift, her legacy, wasn’t just love. It was truth. The kind of truth that comes from living as you are.

    Maybe her lesson for me is the one I’m just now beginning to accept: that being fully myself is the most sacred way I can honor her.

    It’s not easy. The adult in me wants a checklist, a result, a clean timeline. But she reminds me: healing isn’t a destination. It’s a relationship.

    It’s a relationship with the past—yes—but also with the present moment. With the part of me that still flinches under pressure. With the softness I once thought I had to abandon in order to survive.

    I’m learning that my softness was never the problem. It was the silence that followed when no one responded to it.

    She is the key. The key to my own heart.

    It doesn’t always come in waves.

    Sometimes it’s a flicker, a breath, a quiet knowing that I’m still here—and that they are, too.

    My daughter, in the memories that move like wind through my life. And my inner child, in the softness I’m learning to reclaim. In the space where grief and love hold hands, we all meet.

    Maybe that’s the lesson she’s been shouting all along: that we can’t truly love others if we abandon ourselves. That within our own hearts—tender, bruised, still beating—lies the key to beginning again.

    We can’t mother our lost children the way we once did.

    But maybe, in their absence, we can begin to mother the small, forgotten parts of ourselves—with the same love, the same patience, the same fierce devotion.

    Maybe that’s how we honor them—not by moving on, but by moving inward.

  • I Lost My Father—and the Illusion of My Mother

    I Lost My Father—and the Illusion of My Mother

    “Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.” ~Eckhart Tolle

    In July 2023, my father died in a tragic accident. We were devastated—my sisters, my mother, and I. Or so I thought.

    What followed in the months after his death forced me to confront the truth of my mother’s emotional disconnection, a truth I had sensed but never fully allowed myself to see. In losing my father, I also lost the illusion of the mother I thought I had.

    A Sudden Exit

    By September, just two months after my father’s death, my mother packed up and left the home we had just helped her settle into. She moved from Florida to Alabama to be with a man she had secretly loved for years—her high school crush. A man she had long referred to as her “co-author.” I will call him Roy.

    He had been a nightly fixture in her life for a while. She would stay on the phone with him late into the evening, even while my dad slept in the next room. She always claimed it didn’t bother my father. But looking back, I wonder if he just swallowed the discomfort, like so many other things.

    Let’s take a step back. In 2022, my sister and I bought a home for our parents to retire in comfortably. We thought we were giving them a safe and loving space to grow old together. But before my father even passed away, my mother had already planned her escape. The house we bought wasn’t her sanctuary. It was a stopover.

    She didn’t ask us for help moving. She didn’t even warn us. She bought new luggage, made quiet arrangements, and disappeared. We were suddenly bombarded with text messages filled with excitement: stories of her “new life,” her “adventures,” and her rediscovered love. She glowed with freedom while the rest of us were still gasping for air.

    A New Life, A New Name

    By January—six months after my father died—she was married to Roy. She changed her last name. She discarded decades of shared identity with my father like she was shedding an old coat. She left behind his ashes. She left the framed photos that we had prepared for his memorial. It was as if he had never existed.

    But it wasn’t just him she left behind. She also abandoned her daughters. Her grandchildren. Her great-grandchildren. A family many would cherish, tossed aside like clutter.

    Her new story was one of long-suffering redemption. She recast herself as the woman who had endured a marriage with a difficult man and had finally, after decades, found joy. The truth? She had slowly detached from the rest of us for years—investing more time in writing projects and Facebook groups aligned with Roy’s interests, and less in her own family.

    Her new husband had also just lost his spouse, only days after my dad died. The narrative practically wrote itself: two grieving souls who found each other through fate. But those of us watching from the outside knew the foundation had been laid long before the funerals.

    The Pain of Rewriting the Past

    Eventually, my sisters and I had to step away. We had asked for space to grieve our father—kindly, repeatedly. But every boundary was met with denial, deflection, or emotional manipulation. There was no recognition of our pain, only excitement about her “next chapter.”

    Sometimes I wrestle with the urge to correct her version of events. In her telling, she’s the eternal victim: a woman finally liberated, only to be judged by ungrateful daughters who refused to be happy for her. But I’ve learned that arguing with someone’s internal mythology rarely leads to healing. It only deepens the divide.

    So, I let go. Not of the truth, but of the need for her to see it.

    I grieved deeply—not only for my father, but for the mother I thought I had. I began to wonder: Had she ever wanted children? Had she ever truly been emotionally available? Was it all performative?

    Those are hard questions to ask. But once I allowed myself to see her clearly—not as the mother I hoped she was, but as the woman she actually is—I began to feel something surprising: relief. And eventually, acceptance. Accepting that a parent is incapable of giving you the love you needed is one of the hardest emotional tasks we face. But it’s also one of the most liberating.

    Breaking the Cycle

    There were red flags in childhood. My mom wasn’t nurturing. She often complained of pain, stayed stuck on the couch, irritable and disconnected from the rest of the family. I walked on eggshells around her. I can’t recall warm, playful memories. That emotional void quietly shaped me in ways I didn’t fully understand until recently.

    I developed an attachment style that drew me to avoidant relationships, repeating old patterns. I didn’t know how to ask for what I needed because I had never learned to recognize my needs in the first place.

    Through therapy, reflection, and support, I began to break the cycle. But it required giving up the fantasy. It required grieving not just the loss of my parents, but the loss of the childhood I wished I had. This is not a story of blaming parents, but rather one of gaining a deeper understanding of my mother to better understand myself.

    I want to be clear: I have compassion for my mother. She grew up with mental illness in her home. She wasn’t nurtured either. She didn’t learn how to attune, connect, or show up. She may have done the best she could with what she had.

    But compassion doesn’t mean ignoring harm. I can hold both truths: her pain was real, and so is the pain she inflicted.

    The Freedom of Letting Go

    I’ve stopped hoping for an apology. I’ve stopped trying to explain myself. And I’ve stopped trying to earn her love.

    Instead, I’m investing in the relationships that nourish me. I’m giving myself the emotional safety I never had. I’m allowing myself to feel it all—the grief, the clarity, the compassion, the peace. Letting go of a parent doesn’t make you cold-hearted. It means you’ve decided to stop betraying yourself.

    Because here’s the truth I’ve come to accept: we can love our parents and still recognize that the relationship isn’t healthy. We can give grace for their pain without sacrificing our own healing. And in some cases, we can—and must—walk away.

    There is freedom in seeing our parents as they really are—not as idealized figures, but as complex, flawed humans. When we hold onto illusions, we gaslight ourselves. We call ourselves too sensitive or too needy when in reality, we’re responding to unmet needs that have been there all along.

    To me, that doesn’t mean sitting in resentment about what you didn’t get from your parents; it means figuring out how to provide that for yourself as an adult. If we don’t examine those early wounds, we carry them forward. We struggle to trust. We tolerate toxic dynamics. We confuse love with emotional labor.

    Understanding where it all began leads to healthy change. We can choose different relationships. We can choose ourselves.

    And that, I’ve learned, is where healing begins.

  • Healing Through Grief: How I Found Myself in the Metaphors of Loss and Love

    Healing Through Grief: How I Found Myself in the Metaphors of Loss and Love

    “When the soul wishes to experience something, she throws an image of the experience out before her and enters into her own image.” ~Meister Eckhart

    For most of my life, something in me felt off—misaligned, too much, not enough. I moved through the world trying to fix a thing I couldn’t name.

    Then, a beautiful chapter emerged where I no longer questioned myself. I met my husband—and through his love, I experienced the life-changing magic of being seen. His presence felt like sunlight. I softened. I bloomed. For the first time, I felt safe.

    Losing him to young-onset colorectal cancer was like watching that sunlight disappear. With his last breath, the safety I had finally found evaporated. And in the long, aching months that followed, I began to reflect on all the environments I’d moved through—childhood, adolescence, adulthood, relationships—as gardens. And myself as a plant, either nurtured or wilting depending on the conditions and my individual constitution.

    His absence clarified the kind of care I had—and hadn’t—known.

    I was never defective. I am a being with specific needs for thriving—just the right light, language, and nourishment required for blooming.

    When I look back, I can see that while my basic needs—shelter and food—were met, I didn’t understand what it meant to feel emotionally safe or deeply seen. I cycled through endless loops of What’s wrong with me?—never realizing I wasn’t broken. I was just trying. Surviving.

    Presence. Attunement. Emotional safety.

    These aren’t things you can name as missing when you’ve never known them. Not because anyone was overtly cruel but because no one had ever been taught to ask, What kind of care does this particular being require?

    Humans don’t come with cue cards. No tags that say, “partial sun, low stimulation, daily emotional attunement.” We enter this world as mysteries.

    My mom carries a sixth sense with her plants. As if she can smell it, she knows when they need water or tending without even looking at them. She is attuned to her garden in ways I only experienced years later with my husband.

    After he died, I longed for the kind of care we cultivated together—the way he could sense what I was feeling without looking at my face. The way my heart used to sing when he looked at me. The way he listened.

    My relationship with my mother has been tenuous at best in adulthood. But after my husband passed, I saw her try—in the ways she knew how. Fixing. Filling space. Masking the pain with doing. On our occasional phone calls, she’d talk about her plants: who was dry, who needed new soil, who was ready for a bigger pot. No performance. No expectation. Just attention.

    I recognized in those moments that she couldn’t offer me the kind of gaze she gave her plants—and for the first time, I understood why. Her care was real. She’d just never encountered a plant like me before.

    Before I met my husband, I’d already been living in survival mode for years—self-medicating in the wake of emotional upheaval and familial crisis, eroding what little trust I had in myself. His love opened something in me I hadn’t known was possible: safety. And after he died, I had to learn what safety meant in my body at this stage of my journey.

    Most of us are raised in environments shaped by inherited urgency, unexamined patterns, and a generational lack of curiosity. There is no fault here, but there is consequence.

    The body, in its wisdom, keeps score. It holds unmet needs and unspoken truths like a second skin.

    And it’s often when we encounter a metaphor—one that mirrors our inner experience—that something in us exhales.

    That metaphor becomes a form of attunement. Not a solution, but a shift. A felt sense that maybe nothing is wrong—only unrecognized. It doesn’t fix the past, but through meaning-making, the body is able to rest. To breathe.

    We speak of regulation like it’s a technique. Breathe like this. Move like that. But often, the truest form of regulation is recognition.

    Something outside of us that echoes what lives within. A melody in our favorite song. A story. A metaphor that reminds us: You are not alone in this shape.

    And in that moment, the body softens. The charge lifts. We are seen.

    This is why metaphor matters. Not just as art, but as medicine. As orientation. As survival.

    When we are mirrored—by a song, a painting, a stretch of sky that looks exactly how grief feels—we are granted a kind of coherence. Our experience, once scattered or silenced, is gathered into form. And form is something we can hold.

    Often, it’s not the literal circumstances that make us feel safe. It’s the resonance. The reassurance that someone, somewhere, has known a similar ache.

    Even if the path is different, the terrain feels familiar. And that familiarity becomes a nervous system offering—a tether back to self when the ground feels too far away.

    The metaphors that make us human are often subtle. Soldiers of our intuition: they arrive as gut feelings, patterns, images, or melodies we keep returning to. The ocean. The desert. A cracked shell. A single tree that blooms late every season.

    They take root in us slowly. And then one day, without even realizing it, we see ourselves reflected back in the world—and a sense of belonging begins to ripple through our internal landscape.

    Viktor Frankl once wrote that “those who have a why to live can bear almost any how.” He understood what trauma researchers like Bessel van der Kolk and Gabor Maté have continued to illuminate: that suffering, when given meaning, becomes bearable.

    Not erased or justified but metabolized. Held. Breathed into.

    Meaning doesn’t change what happened. It changes how what happened lives in us.

    This is where metaphor becomes more than language. It becomes a vessel—for pain to move through. A frame sturdy enough to hold the unnamable.

    Frankl found this truth in a concentration camp. Van der Kolk found it in bodies that refused to forget. Maté found it in the tender ache beneath addiction and illness.

    I found it in my mom’s garden.

    And I keep finding it—in metaphors that arrive like lifelines when I don’t know how to explain what I’m feeling.

    These metaphors don’t heal the wound, but they give it form. And form allows grief to become something we can live beside, something we can integrate instead of suppressing.

    Metaphor isn’t something we create in isolation. It’s something we receive—through dreams, through symbols, through the quiet choreography of the natural world.

    A bird showing up at your window. Song lyrics that name exactly what you needed to hear. The shape of a tree that mirrors your own posture in grief.

    These aren’t just coincidences. They are collaborations. The world, whispering back: I see you. I’m in this with you. In that echo, we find compassion—for the pain, for the path, for ourselves.

    We like to think of ourselves as the authors of our stories, but more often, we’re co-writing them with something larger. With the landscape. With our ancestors. With the energy of what’s unresolved and aching to be tended.

    Metaphors arrive from this conversation—between the inner and outer, the seen and unseen. They root us in the relational fabric of existence.

    This is what it means to be human. Not just to feel, but to recognize. To witness ourselves mirrored in a leaf, a line of poetry, a stranger’s eyes. To belong—not because we fit a mold, but because something in the world has shaped itself to meet us exactly where we are.

    —

    Perhaps the more honest question isn’t “What’s wrong with me?”

    It’s “What shaped me?”
    “What conditions was I sprouted within?”
    “And what have I learned about the kind of soil, sunlight, and care that allow me to bloom?”

    What symbols found me along the way?

    We are beings of pattern and story.

    Metaphor is how the soul speaks back.

    And meaning is the thread that carries us home.

  • A Transracial Adoption Story of Love and Resilience

    A Transracial Adoption Story of Love and Resilience

    “Make it a great day that ends with a smile in your heart.”

    Growing up, I always heard my father speak variations of these words. They’ve always sort of been ingrained in my head, but now more than ever are forever planted. He lived by them. He breathed them. And in doing so, he instilled them in me so naturally.

    They weren’t just encouragement—they were a way of life, his life, and how he chose to show up each day. He was naturally positive, uplifting, and, without exaggeration, the best human I’ve ever known.

    From a very early age, I understood that how you show up is a choice. But, along with that too, every day is a second chance, which were both powerful lessons that have shaped my resilient nature.

    Whether it’s in moments of challenge or joy, I believe the responsibility for your mindset and actions is completely in your hands. You choose how to respond to situations, people, and yourself. 

    Life, though, doesn’t have to be a series of irreversible moments; instead, each new day offers a clean slate. Whether you learn from the past or are trapped by it is a choice. And even when you face setbacks or make mistakes, you have the opportunity to reset and approach things differently the next day—you just have to do it. This belief in daily renewal is a cornerstone of resilience and gives me hope and motivation to keep moving forward, even when things seem tough.

    My story began in a small Ohio town many years ago, with a phone call that changed two families’ lives forever.

    I’m a biracial female (white and Black) who was placed for adoption and came home to a white family that loved me deeply. It was considered a transracial, open adoption thirty-nine years ago. From the moment my new family laid eyes on me, I was theirs and so deeply loved. I completed their family of five, being the only girl, the only adopted child, and the youngest.

    But life doesn’t always unfold predictably.

    When I was just eight months old, my adoptive mother passed away from liver cancer, leaving my father to raise three young children on his own for many years to come. His profound loss was immense, but he didn’t let grief define him. Instead, he poured every ounce of love into me and my brothers, ensuring we never felt a void he couldn’t fill. He not only surrounded us with his love but also made sure we were supported by the love of our community.

    All three of us share a different relationship with our dad, but the depth of our bond that he and I shared was immense. He was my rock, my greatest cheerleader, the person who saw my potential long before I recognized it in myself. He taught me resilience in the face of adversity and instilled a belief in myself that has carried me through even the most uncertain times. I am who I am because of him.

    For as long as I can remember, I’ve identified as Black because of the color of my skin, though I’ve always known that I am also half white. Understanding my identity, however, has always been a challenge—and I believe it’s a struggle that many transracial adoptees can relate to.

    Raised in a small, predominantly white town until fifth grade, I was often the only person of color in my circle. This made it difficult to understand where I fit in. The complexities of identity are immense when you find yourself in situations like this, and being biracial adds an extra layer of nuance. It becomes especially important to understand and embrace all sides of who you are. But how do you do that?

    I remember seeing Ebony Magazine around the house, something that might seem small to some, but for me, it was powerful. I would just flip through it as a little girl and look at the pictures, but it showed me people who looked like me.

    I also had a big sister through Big Brothers Big Sisters for several years, and there was never a moment when we shied away from discussing race or my adoption story. My dad, too, was always committed to understanding and supporting me—he continually read and educated himself on raising biracial children, even into my adult years.

    Being white, he was intentional about ensuring I never felt alone in my experiences. How he did this, as a white man himself, is truly special. He understood his privileges and my disadvantages, yet he made it his mission to learn everything he could about raising a biracial child in a world where kids—and adults, in my case—could be cruel.

    He could rarely (if ever) relate to the nuances of my reality, but he made it his life’s work to make sure I knew my worth in every possible way. That’s what made him so unbelievably special.

    When I came home in tears because classmates questioned why I “acted white, but I was Black,” he reassured me that I didn’t need to fit anyone’s definition of who I was “supposed to be.”

    After remarrying my wonderful stepmom and moving to a more diverse town, he was excited when I chose to attend a more culturally diverse high school. But when I struggled because of kids poking fun of my hair not being done or ignorant remarks from strangers, he stood by me with unwavering support, ensuring the trauma I faced was addressed head-on and talked through, because it was all part of my story.

    By the time I reached adulthood, I still often grappled with the complexities of my identity. But these words echoed in my mind: “It’s not meant for them to understand” and “Sometimes, there’s no reasoning with people like that.”

    These simple truths have continued to free me in times when I struggle to let go of things that don’t serve me. I didn’t need to explain myself to people who weren’t willing to listen. I only needed to be true to myself. And even today, I sometimes forget that in the moment, but I always come back to it when those moments happen.

    At thirty-eight, I was forced, for the first time, to truly find my own path and face things head-on. In May of 2024, my father passed away suddenly.

    Grief is heavy and unpredictable, and I find myself reaching for the phone to call him, only to remember he’s not physically here anymore. His voice, his lessons, and his love and zest for a better, more fulfilling life live in me now.

    One of the things that my dad and I shared was a love for the Tiny Buddha blogs. This was the only publication we ever read together consistently. It seemed only fitting to me, in the wake of his passing, to submit this post on the anniversary of his death. Through the blogs, we learned about resilience, about finding yourself when you’re lost, and about facing life’s challenges with the absolute best intention.

    My father was always the messenger of these lessons. He would say, “Life is tough, but it doesn’t have to break you.” Facing challenges, and even trauma, is essential to growth. Trauma doesn’t always have to stem from family—it can come from anyone and anything in your formative years and beyond. But what matters is how you choose to process and overcome it.

    Life is unpredictable. It will challenge you, stretch you, and break you down when you least expect it. But within those moments, there is also love, resilience, and the opportunity to define your own path and start anew. My father taught me that. He would always say, “Tomorrow is a new day.” And in his absence, I am choosing to live by the words he gifted me:

    Make it a great day that ends with a smile in your heart.

    Because no matter what life throws our way, we have the power to choose how we respond. We have the power to create joy, to uplift others, to choose to see the glass half full, and to find meaning even in the hardest moments.

    That is the legacy he left me. And that is the lesson I hope to pass on.

  • Walking My Mother Home: On Aging, Love, and Letting Go

    Walking My Mother Home: On Aging, Love, and Letting Go

    “To love someone deeply is to learn the art of holding on and letting go—sometimes at the very same time.” ~Unknown

    Nothing has softened me—or challenged me—like caring for my ninety-six-year-old mother as she slowly withdraws from the world. I thought I was strong, but this is a different kind of strength—one rooted in surrender, not control.

    She once moved with rhythm and faith—attending Kingdom Hall for over sixty years, sharp in mind and dressed with dignity. She’s a fine and good Christian woman, often compared to Julie Andrews for her beauty and radiant grace. But now, she rarely gets out of her robe. She sleeps through the day. The services she once cherished are left unplayed. She says she’s tired and feels ‘off.’ That’s all.

    I ache to restore her to who she was. But no encouragement or gesture can bring that version of her back. Something in me keeps reaching for her past, even as she settles into her present.

    As someone used to teaching, creating, and mentoring, I’ve built a life around helping others move forward. I’m solution-oriented. I try to inspire change.

    But I can’t fix this. I can’t lift her out of time’s embrace. Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, wrote, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” That quote feels especially personal now. Because I can’t change what’s happening to my mother—but I can soften my resistance. I can change the way I show up.

    Walking Each Other Home

    There’s a beautiful quote by Ram Dass that returns to me in this quiet moment: “We’re all just walking each other home.” I think about that when I bring her a bowl of soup, hold her hand, or whisper, “I love you.”

    I’m not here to bring her back to life as it was. I’m here to walk beside her—gently, imperfectly, faithfully—as she lets go of this chapter.

    I think often of Pope John Paul II, who remained remarkably compassionate while bedridden in the last days of his life. As his body failed, he interpreted his suffering not as a burden, but as solidarity with the poor and the sick. His vulnerability became a doorway to greater understanding. That vision moved me deeply. Because that’s what I hope to do—not just care for my mother but be transformed by the act of caring.

    I’ve studied meditation. I’ve written and taught about presence in filmmaking. But this—daily care, raw emotion, the unknown—is the deepest form of mindfulness I’ve ever known.

    Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that “When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence.” So I try to be there. Not fixing. Not explaining. Just breathing. Just sitting beside her.

    In Buddhism, impermanence is not a punishment—it’s a truth. Everything beautiful fades. Clinging brings suffering. Peace comes from loving without grasping. That’s what I’m learning, slowly, as I witness her journey unfold.

    Some days, I feel like I’m failing. I lose patience. I say too much, and I say it too loudly. But I show up again. I apologize. I soften. I learn.

    There’s a quiet kind of love growing in me. It doesn’t look like grand gestures. It looks like warming her tea with honey. Adjusting her blanket. Noticing she’s cold before she says a word. This is slow-burning compassion—the kind that asks nothing in return. It’s not about being a hero. It’s about being human.

    I used to think wisdom came from those who spoke the most. But now I see that some of the greatest teachers say little at all. My mother, mostly silent now, is teaching me about humility, aging, and surrender.

    Like Pope John Paul II, I want to turn my suffering into understanding. To feel my heart break open—not shut down—and to know that this is not just her time of transition, it’s mine too.

    Lately, my own health has begun to shift—macular degeneration, diastolic heart failure, near-blindness, persistent fatigue, and a growing sense that I, too, am aging. At first, I resisted. I wanted to stay useful and strong. But now, I see these changes as reminders: to live gently, to love fully, and to be present. My body is not the problem—it’s the messenger. And its message is simple: this isn’t about me. It’s about how well I show up for her.

    So what is it that I’m learning here in this strange, quiet space between caregiving and grief?

    • You don’t have to be perfect to be present.
    • Love doesn’t always look like joy. Sometimes it looks like patience.
    • Letting go isn’t failure—it’s an expression of grace.
    • Even in loss, there is growth.
    • The end of one life chapter can open your heart to all of humanity.

    A Whisper Before Sleep

    Each night, I make sure she’s ready to sleep. Sometimes she’s dozing. Sometimes she’s half-aware. Sometimes she’s just staring at the TV. But every night, I whisper, “I love you, Mom.” Maybe she hears me. Maybe not. But I say it anyway—because love, at this point, is more about presence than response.

    And now, another quiet miracle has entered her world. Nugget—the small, grey-furred cat who is super cute and equally crazy—has become her closest companion. My mother never cared much for animals. She found them messy, distant. But Nugget changed all that.

    This tiny creature curls at her feet, climbs into her lap, and purrs without question. And my mother responds—stroking her fur, talking softly, calling her ‘my little kitty.’ It’s pure, surprising, and profound. Nugget brings her back to the present in ways I cannot. She opens a door to tenderness that has long remained closed.

    My mother still shares vivid stories from the distant past, though she forgets what happened an hour ago. Still, she knows me. She knows Nugget. And for that, I am grateful.

    I still wish I could do more. But I show up—quietly, imperfectly, with love. I walk her home the best I can.

    And in that walking, in that surrender, I’m beginning to understand what it really means to be alive.

  • How My Dog Became an Unexpected Source of Healing

    How My Dog Became an Unexpected Source of Healing

    “The place of true healing is a fierce place. It’s a giant place. It’s a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light. And you have to work really, really, really hard to get there, but you can do it.” ~Cheryl Strayed

    My memories of my sister are much hazier than they used to be—somehow less crisp and colorful than before. But time has a way of doing that. Images of her that used to show up in bold, bright colors in my mind’s eye have slowly faded to black and white, with various shades of gray and silver popping in from time to time, almost as if to keep me on my toes and keep her memory alive.

    I can still remember her last days, the light slowly dimming from her eyes as she lay bound to her bed, no longer able to move or eat on her own, with feeding tubes in her nose and various devices surrounding her for those inevitable—and fear-gripped moments when she needed help breathing.

    Like the rest of my family, I would take my turn staying in her room, checking on her to make sure she was still breathing. It was always the same routine. With anxiety creeping into my chest, I would place one hand on her belly to make sure it was still rising and falling while leaning in close to her nose, listening for the soft sound of her breath. A sigh of relief would pass through me every time I heard her gentle exhale.

    The night she passed, I had just finished performing that very ritual, rising to leave only once I felt the repeated slow, steady rise and fall of her belly and the soft whisper of her strained breath on my face. I can still remember walking back into the family room and gratefully announcing, ”She’s okay.”

    Maybe it was mother’s instinct, but only moments later my mother rushed back into my sister’s room. Her sense of urgency took me by surprise since I had just left the room and everything had been fine. I assumed she didn’t think I could be trusted and needed to see for herself.

    It wasn’t long before I heard the sound of my mother’s screams through the thin walls of our small duplex. I knew right away what it meant—my sister had stopped breathing.

    For a long time afterward, I blamed myself for not having been in the room when she took her last breath, and for leaving her alone in those last few seconds. If I had just stayed another minute, I could have been with her. Instead, I had left the room right as she had been getting ready to leave the world.

    The months that followed were a blur of pain, confusion, and disbelief as I tried to make sense of a world without her in it. At ten years old, I was too young to understand how much my parents were hurting or how deeply my sister’s death affected them. I mistakenly thought their withdrawal and anger were because of something I had done. Maybe I was the one who had messed up—missed the signs that could have saved her night. Or maybe I was the one who they wished had died instead.

    Those thoughts became the foundation for years of self-punishment after my sister’s death. I found myself struggling with feelings of self-hatred and inadequacy, which often showed up as eating disorders, self-harm, and feelings of unworthiness.

    Survivor’s guilt and the belief that I was the “bad” daughter who didn’t deserve to live only added more shame and self-doubt that I couldn’t shake off. But as I got older, I learned to shut the pain—and the memories—out.

    Soon, I stopped thinking about that night altogether. I convinced myself that I had moved past it, telling myself that time really does “heal all wounds.” I couldn’t have been more wrong.

    It would take me decades to understand that time hadn’t actually healed anything. I had just pushed the memories so far down that they became buried under layers of guilt, shame, and unresolved grief, waiting to resurface when I was ready to face them.

    The truth is, time doesn’t heal all wounds unless we do the work to heal them ourselves.

    My own healing came in an unexpected way after years of trying to prove my worthiness through constant people-pleasing, overworking, over-committing, and deliberately taking on more challenging projects and activities, both personally and professionally, just to prove that I mattered and was deserving of my life. I still hadn’t forgiven myself for being the one that lived when a soul as beautiful, bright, and loving as my sister hadn’t.

    I finally realize now that it wasn’t even the rest of the world I was trying to prove my worth to—it was myself. And if it hadn’t been for my dog Taz, I’m not sure if I would have ever come to that realization.

    When I first rescued him, I was unknowingly bringing Taz into my life as yet another way of trying to prove I mattered. Having been severely abused and fresh off a major back surgery, he could barely walk when I first took him in.

    His (understandable) anxiety had created severely destructive—and, at least initially—fear- and pain-based behavior that made him particularly challenging. I can still remember countless friends saying to me, “You know you can’t do this. What are you trying to prove? He’s too much for you.” But my self-punishment game was strong, and their words only pushed me to try harder.

    For his entire first year with me, I would carry him around in his special harness like a suitcase, setting him down for short spurts so he could get the feeling of putting weight on his legs and paws and build enough strength to start walking.

    In the beginning, he couldn’t understand that he had to lift his paws and set them down again to walk, so he would drag them instead, scraping his paws until they were raw and bloody within seconds and prompting me to pick him right back up and carry him again. (I can only imagine what others thought when they saw my 5’2 frame carrying a seventy-pound pitbull around like a duffel bag!)

    That drill went on for months. Inside the house, I would bring him into the carpeted rooms and teach him how to place his paws—down on all fours and crawling along the floor with him as my other dog, Hope, did her part and pranced around showing him how she did it. Slowly, he started to understand. And even more slowly, he started to walk.

    A year later, he was running, which turned into sprinting a few months after that. Another three years after that, he was (cautiously) able to go up and down stairs. And seven years after he came to me, just when it seemed that he was at his strongest yet, he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer.

    “He has hemangiosarcoma. The tumor is on his heart, and every pump is spreading it throughout his body. There’s nothing we can do. He has about ten days before his heart will stop pumping.”

    What had started as an emergency visit for his stomach issues had turned into a death knell for Taz.

    The thought of this being the end of his story, when he had already been through so much and finally made it to the other side, seemed unfathomable. In some ways, it was the biggest challenge I had faced yet, and I was determined to save him.

    I didn’t sleep the night of his diagnosis. Or most of the nights after that. Instead, I found myself waking up almost every hour, gazing at him sleeping by my side, tears gathering in my eyes, and wondering how I could save him—and what else I needed to sacrifice to keep him by my side.

    I initially failed to grasp that his illness was the beginning of my healing. And the darkness that would ensue was actually the beginning of the light that would start pouring into my childhood wounds.

    As the pain eclipsed me in those dark, late-night moments, I didn’t even realize what I was doing at first. What started as just trying to soak in every moment with him had triggered the very ritual I had performed for so long as a child. Only this time, it wasn’t my sister I was watching over—it was Taz.

    Every time I woke up and gazed at him throughout the night, I would place my hand on his belly to make sure it was still rising and falling and lean in close to see if I could hear him breathing.

    Just like that, I had brought myself right back into the unresolved trauma loop that I had buried and ignored so long ago. When the realization hit me, I immediately felt transported back to that night decades ago—to that last moment with her, the last time my hand had been on her belly.

    I understood then that I had never truly healed—I had only learned to suppress it. I also realized that the shame, blame, and guilt I had carried for so long had never really left me and were still huge parts of who I was and had been for decades after she died.

    All the unshed tears, anger, and grief that I had never processed came pouring out. I wept for hours. And every time I thought I was out of tears, a new stream would surface.

    That ritual lasted every night for thirty-four days. Courageous as ever, Taz had outlived the ten days he was given, and on the thirty-fourth day, my Tazzie Bear left me. Only this time I was in the room.

    Somehow, we both knew the time had come, and as he lay his head in my lap one last time, gazing lovingly one more time into my eyes and proceeded to take his last breath, I felt his soul leave his body. And somehow, an unexpected sense of peace seemed to have entered mine.

    That beautiful, amazing soul of his had taken my pain with him, and in the process, he had somehow broken the trauma loop I had unknowingly been caught in all those years.

    His death had helped me heal years of pain I didn’t even know I was carrying. As I sat there, holding him in his final moments, I realized that his presence had been the biggest gift I had ever received.

    For animal lovers, this next sentence will make perfect sense: Taz had been far more than my pet; he had come to me as a lifeline, guiding me into my next chapter of healing and self-discovery.

    Because of him, I had officially started a new chapter of my life. One that was free from the debilitating shame, guilt, and pain I had carried for so long. And in that quiet moment, I understood that healing isn’t linear—it’s a journey, often led by the most unexpected teachers.

    And I will forever be grateful that I was lucky enough to have him as one of my teachers.

  • The Changes I’m Making to Stop Wasting My Limited Time

    The Changes I’m Making to Stop Wasting My Limited Time

    “Contentment has more to do with a heart of joy as life unfolds than it ever will with a life filled with stuff.” ~Kate Summers

    Recently, an older friend who was no longer able to attend to life without assistance was placed in a senior care facility. From my observance, she seemed content, and her relatives confirmed that when they visit, they find her awake and alert, propped up in bed or sitting in a chair, peacefully gazing out her window.

    One of my immediate thoughts when reflecting on my visit was, we should all be so lucky to enter our final years in a mind space of inner peace and contentment.

    The hope to be content in the final years of life is not a new concept, but the idea of a “bucket list” and the quest to achieve it is. The term bucket list was introduced in 1999 and solidified into pop culture with the subsequent release of a movie.

    For those who are unfamiliar with the expression, a bucket list consists of a catalog of experiences and adventures that someone wants to have before they kick the bucket, meaning die. The idea is that if someone checks off all the items on their bucket list, their final stage of life will be bearable because they will be satisfied with how they spent their time.

    The visit to see my friend put the time I have remaining into perspective. As I approach sixty years old, the truth that in twenty-five years I will be eighty-five is inescapable. The fact that the twenty-five years between thirty-five and sixty had gone by in the relative blink of an eye caused me to pause and think.

    What did I want to do and experience before my final stage was upon me?

    My mind went immediately to my hobbies and interests, and although I could think of many goals to strive for, nothing seemed important or compelling enough to be considered for my bucket list.

    As examples, I enjoy traveling and have a desire to see all the magnificent natural wonders across the globe and walk in the footsteps of ancient cultures, but I do not see myself in my final years upset because I never made it to Victoria Falls or knelt before the Moai of Easter Island. And I thrive on learning, but earning a master’s degree or PhD will not bring me contentment on my deathbed.

    And what about my friend? I don’t recall her speaking of a list of experiences she desired to have or tangible targets that she strove to hit before her life was over. Yet, as I witnessed, she had entered her final phase of life with an air of inner peace and contentment.

    Throughout our friendship, I observed my friend actively focusing on seeing the glass as half full and consciously concentrating her focus on the bright side of events. She did not cultivate drama within herself, and consequently, she repelled it when others brought it around. And she fostered love for herself and others.

    When the realities of individual agendas and manufactured circumstances triggered a need to respond in a heavy-handed way, she delivered the reprimand swiftly and, as best as she could, without the emotion of hate and thoughts of judgement.

    And the rare time when she fell completely short of her behavioral standards with her thoughts and emotions sinking deep into a dark muck, I observed her climb out, find her light, and move on. She never berated herself for what she referred to as a “little dip.”

    Many times, I asked her how she could rise above the fray of office politics, for example, or shift her focus to what was hopeful and good in an otherwise dreary situation. Her response was unfailingly along the lines of “Why waste time dwelling on unpleasantness?”

    Her words came back to me as I pondered what I wanted to experience and accomplish in the next twenty-five years. How could I spend my time in a way that would leave me content in the final stage of my life?

    Having already run through my goals and desired escapades and determined they were not the answer to what had become a nagging question for me, I reversed the query and asked, “In what ways is my time wasted?”

    My answer came to me the next day. I had just hung up the phone after completing a conversation with a member of my greater social network. Having too little in common to consider her a friend, I find our interactions to be tedious, and we rarely see eye-to-eye.

    She views herself as the victim in all situations and thrives on stress and drama. In this conversation, she expressed that she was feeling left out because a group dinner was scheduled for a night on which she was not available.

    I spent twenty minutes attempting to reassure her the chosen date was not intended to exclude her, that she was a valued member of the group, and similar proclamations. All of them landing on the unfertile soil of her negative self-image. Nothing short of changing the date could convince her the decision was not personal.

    As I terminated the call, I heard myself say, “Well, that was a waste of time.”

    A few days later, I found myself involved in an interaction with a co-worker with whom exchanges typically left me feeling shaken and upset. The pace and tone of that afternoon’s conversation were especially triggering. Once at home, even with the co-worker nowhere near me and the interaction several hours in the past, simply thinking about what had transpired caused my body’s fight-or-flight response system to kick in.

    With limbs ready to spring into action and breath quick and shallow, I hung suspended in a state of physical limbo, waiting to fight a battle perceived and conceived in my head. It took me close to an hour to calm myself down, and afterward the sense of time wasted was palpable.

    At that moment, I committed to not wasting time feeding the unpleasantness created by others and to take responsibility for ways in which I cultivated upset within myself.

    After a bit of reflection, I realized that I disrupted my peace of mind and contentment by:

    • Taking things personally
    • Needing to be right
    • Overreacting by magnifying small issues into major problems
    • Continuing unproductive conversations in my head with others long after they have concluded in real time

    While commitment is the initial action needed for instigating change, practice is the many small steps taken to solidify the habit.

    Over time, I developed a practice that involved morning meditation, journaling, and body awareness.

    • Meditation cultivates a calm mindset, allowing for heightened self-awareness and control of my thoughts and emotions.
    • Journaling gives tangibility to my unpleasant thoughts. By making them visible, I am able to challenge their validity and shift them towards ones that uplift me.
    • Body awareness gives way to enhanced intuition. By paying attention to sensations in my gut and noticing the pace of my heart and breath, I can quickly sense when I am shifting from a responsive, cooperative mode to a reactive, fight/flight approach to a person or situation.

    If you are interested in cultivating a mindset that brings you inner peace and contentment, below are a few tips to get started.

    1. Find a meditation style that works for you.

    My practice utilizes mindfulness, focused, and loving-kindness styles of meditation. Mindfulness meditation allows greater access to my thoughts, focused meditation sharpens my ability to keep my brain from wandering, and loving-kindness meditation cultivates compassion and patience for my ego struggles and those of others.

    Here is a list of the nine most common forms of meditation. A definition of each can be found here.

    • Mindfulness meditation
    • Spiritual meditation
    • Focused meditation
    • Movement meditation
    • Mantra meditation
    • Transcendental meditation
    • Progressive relaxation
    • Loving-kindness meditation
    • Visualization meditation

    2. Write down thoughts and feelings that you struggle with.

    My journal is a loose compilation of thoughts and the emotional responses they trigger. By writing them down, I am able to distance myself from my thoughts and see them from an objective point of view. I am then able to explore alternative thoughts and assess their capacity for cultivating pleasant feelings.

    According to this article, the benefits of journaling include:

    • Stress reduction
    • Increased sense of well-being
    • Distance from negative thoughts
    • Avenue for processing emotions
    • Space to figure out your next step
    • Opportunity for self-discovery

    3. Get in touch with your body.

    Whenever I feel my shoulders creeping toward my ears, my breath becoming shallow, or my digestion being disrupted, I take it as a signal to check in with my brain. A quick scan reveals thoughts and conversations happening in the background that might otherwise have gone unnoticed until they transitioned into action.

    I achieve and maintain my mind/body connection through a combination of contemplative running and intentional stretching. Both of these allow me to focus on my body and become aware of areas where I am holding tension.

    While I chose running and stretching, there are many other methods, such as:

    • Yoga
    • Tai Chi
    • Qi Gong
    • Solo Dance
    • Intentional cleaning

    Above are the ways that I chose to strengthen my commitment to not wasting time wrapped up in someone else’s drama or creating unnecessary turmoil in myself.

    I am far from perfect in this practice. I still catch myself rallying against what I view as someone’s agenda or reacting to what I consider a personal affront, but I am able to quickly identify the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in real-time and mitigate the damage to my sense of well-being.

    When it comes down to it, the only goal for my life is to cultivate inner peace and contentment. And along the way, connect with and encourage those who, like me, are actively seeking to heal, grow, and live in a space of positivity and love.

  • Grief Has No Rules: Love, Loss, and Letting Go

    Grief Has No Rules: Love, Loss, and Letting Go

    “Grief never ends … But it changes. It’s a passage, not a place to stay. Grief is not a sign of weakness, nor a lack of faith. It is the price of love.” ~Unknown

    “Thank you for letting me know.” The moment I hung up the phone, the tears came. I was confused and caught off guard. Why was I crying over the death of my ex-husband?

    We’d separated six years ago. I had a new partner and hadn’t thought much about him in over three years. So why did his death hit me so hard?

    Big Girls Don’t Cry

    Growing up in Ireland, emotions weren’t something we talked about. Tears were for small children, not grown women. When I was upset, I’d hear the same phrase, “Big girls don’t cry.” It wasn’t meant to hurt me, but it stayed with me.

    I learned to swallow my feelings. Anger, sadness, fear—those were things you kept private. I thought strength meant holding it all in. But as I grew older, that kind of strength felt heavy.

    When my ex-husband died, all of it came rushing back. The sadness, the confusion, the guilt. And then the shame. Why couldn’t I just be stronger? Why couldn’t I pull myself together like I was supposed to?

    Grief and Guilt Collide

    I felt like I was failing. Crying didn’t just feel wrong—it felt like a betrayal. A betrayal of my upbringing, of the image I had of myself, and even of my current relationship. I couldn’t stop thinking: What if my partner saw me like this? Would he understand? Would he think I still loved my ex?

    The guilt weighed on me. But so did the fear. I wanted to go to the funeral, but I was terrified. What would his family think if I showed up? Would they see my tears and think I didn’t deserve to grieve? Would they think I was pretending?

    I wanted to hide. I wanted to run away from the emotions I wasn’t supposed to have. But this time, something inside me told me to stay.

    Reaching Out for Support

    I couldn’t carry it alone anymore. The grief, the guilt, the fear—it was all too much. For the first time in my life, I did something I’d always avoided. I reached out.

    I called my mum.

    At first, I hesitated. My instinct was to keep it together, to pretend I was fine. But the moment she picked up, the words spilled out. I told her everything. How lost I felt. How ashamed I was for crying. How afraid I was of what people would think if they saw me like this.

    She didn’t say much at first. She just listened.

    The Power of One Simple Truth

    Then, when I finally stopped talking, she said something simple. “It’s okay to feel this, you know. You loved him once. That doesn’t just go away.”

    Her words broke something open in me. I cried harder than I had in years, but for the first time, I didn’t feel alone in it. She stayed on the phone while I let it all out. She didn’t try to fix it or tell me to stop. She just stayed.

    That moment was a turning point. I started to see that grief wasn’t something to fight against or hide from. It was something I had to let myself feel. And asking for support didn’t make me weak. If anything, it gave me strength.

    Leaning on my mum helped me find my footing. I wasn’t over the loss—not even close—but I felt less trapped by it. For the first time, I could breathe again.

    Facing My Fears at The Funeral

    I arrived early at the church with my friend, my stomach in knots. The air felt heavy, like it knew I didn’t belong here—or at least, that’s what my mind kept telling me.

    A car pulled in beside us, and my heart sank. It was his sister. Without thinking, I slumped down in the seat, silently pleading for the ground to swallow me whole. What am I doing here? I wasn’t sure I could face their grief. I wasn’t sure I could face my own.

    But I’d come this far, and I couldn’t back out now.

    Finding Unexpected Comfort

    Dragging my feet, I walked toward the church door. Each step felt heavier than the last. I caught a glimpse of his brother standing near the entrance, and panic bubbled up in my chest. I almost turned and ran.

    My friend, sensing my hesitation, gently squeezed my elbow. It was a small gesture, but it steadied me. I kept walking.

    Then I saw her—his sister—standing at the church door. Her eyes locked with mine. There was no way out now. I braced myself, expecting a cold stare, a sharp word, maybe even outright anger.

    Instead, she stepped forward. And then, before I could react, she wrapped her arms around me. The hug was warm and full of love. It broke down every wall I’d built up in my mind.

    Finding Solace in Shared Memories

    Inside, the service was simple and poignant. The priest spoke softly, and memories of our life together floated through my mind—some good, some hard, all real. As the coffin was carried out of the church, I felt the tears welling up again.

    My friend placed an arm around my waist and gave me a little squeeze. For a moment, I considered pulling away, trying to summon that old stiff upper lip. Pretending I was fine. But I didn’t. I let the tears fall.

    After the service, the family invited me for a drink. It was an Irish funeral, after all. I hesitated, unsure if I belonged in their circle of mourning, but their warmth melted my fear. As we shared stories about him—some that made us laugh, others that brought tears to our eyes—I realized something profound. We had all loved this man in our own ways, and in that moment, our shared grief united us.

    Carrying the Sadness, Embracing the Joy

    Leaving the funeral, I felt a strange mix of emotions. The heaviness of loss was still there, but so was something else—a sense of lightness, even relief.

    The family’s kindness had reminded me of something I’d forgotten in my guilt and fear. I wasn’t just grieving a person; I was grieving a chapter of my life. My ex and I had shared 18 years together. Those years mattered. They shaped me into who I am today.

    A Beautiful Realization About Love

    At first, I struggled to reconcile those feelings with the love I have for my current partner. I worried that my grief might hurt him or make him feel less important. But over time, I realized something beautiful: love isn’t a competition. There’s space for both past and present love in my heart.

    I still feel sad when I think about my ex. Some days, it sneaks up on me—a song he used to love, a random memory, or even a quiet moment when the world feels still. But I’ve learned that sadness doesn’t mean I’m stuck or broken. It’s just a part of healing, a reminder of the love we shared and the lessons we learned together.

    Lessons Learned Through Grief

    • Grief Has No Rules: It’s okay to mourn someone even if your relationship wasn’t perfect or ended long ago. Grief is deeply personal and unpredictable.
    • Emotions Are Strength, Not Weakness: Feeling your emotions doesn’t make you weak—it makes you human. Suppressing them only makes the weight heavier.
    • Ask for Support: You don’t have to carry grief alone. Lean on those who care for you and let them help lighten your burden.
    • Grief and Growth Can Coexist: Mourning someone is also an opportunity to reflect on what that relationship taught you and how it shaped you.
    • Healing Takes Time: There’s no timeline for healing. Be patient and gentle with yourself as you navigate the journey.

    Grief isn’t something we “get over.” It’s something we carry with us, but over time, it becomes lighter. We make space for it, and in doing so, we make space for love, connection, and joy again.

    If you’ve experienced grief, know that you’re not alone. Share your story in the comments below or reach out to someone who can support you. Sometimes, simply being heard can be the first step toward healing.

  • How I’ve Become My Own Source of Love and Reassurance

    How I’ve Become My Own Source of Love and Reassurance

    “Create a safe space within yourself that no one will ever find, somewhere the madness of this world can never touch.” ~Christy Ann Martine

    Losing my grandmother was like losing the one person who had always been my anchor. She was my steady rock, my quiet cheerleader, and the only person who truly made me feel that I was perfectly fine, just as I was. I never had to pretend around her or hide my mistakes or messiness.

    She had this way of being present and calm, even when life around us wasn’t, and that gave me a sense of security that, looking back, I had leaned on more than I ever realized.

    Her gentle spirit taught me what unconditional love looked and felt like, and without fully realizing it, I relied on her presence to keep me grounded and to make sense of things when everything else felt uncertain.

    In my eulogy to her at her funeral, I called her “The Mary Poppins of Grandmas, practically perfect in every way.” And she was perfect in my eyes; she always will be.

    When she passed, I felt an incredible emptiness; upon receiving the news, I fell to the floor. I was alone, I couldn’t muster up the strength to lift myself from the floor, and I was crying so hard I started choking. I crawled to the bathroom, thinking I was going to throw up. I was leaning up against the bathtub, sobbing, when a strange sense of peace came over me.

    I started to calm down, and the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” popped into my head, creating an earworm repeatedly playing the song. I got up from the bathroom floor, grabbed my phone, and posted a video of the song on my social media profile. I found out later that day that that song was my grandma’s favorite.

    It felt like I’d lost not just her but a part of myself—something I had unknowingly depended on for so long. Her love was a mirror that allowed me to see my worth; I wasn’t sure how to recognize it without her. The grief of her loss was profound, but underneath that grief, I knew something else was stirring. I needed to find the consistency she had provided, but this time, it had to come from within.

    My journey toward healing began with the understanding that if I wanted to feel whole, I had to become that steady, loving presence for myself.

    For so long, I had looked to others for validation, believing that if I gave enough, worked hard, and stayed flexible, I’d finally receive the desperately desired acceptance. But when she was gone, something clicked—I realized no one else could fill that space in my life. It was up to me to find that security within.

    In the beginning, it felt like too much to take on. I faced layers of emotions and beliefs that had been there for as long as I could remember, and the thought of working through all of it was intimidating.

    I saw how often I had tied my sense of worth to what I could offer others, how I felt I needed to prove myself through giving, and how I had relied on external reassurance instead of my inner validation. I had learned to take on the role of the fixer, the supporter, and the giver, often without realizing that I had neglected to support and care for myself.

    With time, I began to understand that, like my grandmother, I needed to cultivate a constant, gentle presence within me that I could turn to, no matter what. I needed to become my safe place, someone I could rely on for kindness and encouragement.

    One of the first steps was creating rituals that mirrored the warmth and steadiness she had always provided me. I would sit quietly each morning, meditating on gratitude and journaling about my worth before I began my day. These small, intentional acts became a way to ground myself, check in, and create a sense of stability in my life.

    I wasn’t naturally good at setting boundaries—I would get an anxious feeling in my stomach when it came to saying no. I was always worried that if I said no, the other person would stop coming around, or I would hurt their feelings, and I would guilt myself.

    Eventually, I reached a point where I knew I had to change things. I was allowing myself to be taken advantage of repeatedly. It went into a pattern of me giving too much, then resenting the other person or people involved and not realizing that the problem was me.

    If I didn’t start respecting my limits, I’d have nothing left to give. Little by little, I practiced saying no without offering a reason or apologizing. It wasn’t easy. It felt foreign at first, like I was somehow selfish for doing it. But with each boundary, I began to feel a new sense of inner strength that I hadn’t felt before. It was like I was finally treating myself with the same kindness I tried to give everyone else.

    Learning to sit with my emotions instead of running from them was the most challenging part. I understood that grief wasn’t something you just “get over.” It’s something you learn to live with. I stopped pushing away the sadness and let myself fully feel it, allowing it to come and go without judgment.

    There were times when it felt overwhelming, but it was also healing. In those moments, I felt almost as if she was still with me, her presence comforting me as if saying, “It’s okay to feel this. It’s okay to let yourself grieve.”

    Through this, I began rediscovering parts of myself I had set aside. I allowed myself to get creative again, expressing things I’d bottled up without worrying about how it would come across. I started journaling daily, writing about my dreams, fears, and memories. These weren’t just words on a page—they were my way of healing, piece by piece, as I found my way back to feeling whole again.

    As time went on, I began to notice a shift. I felt a growing sense of worth that wasn’t based on anyone’s approval. I didn’t feel the same need to prove myself. I slowly accepted my flaws, realizing self-love doesn’t mean perfection. It means patience and the willingness to keep showing up for myself, especially on the tough days.

    My grandmother’s passing taught me one of the biggest lessons of my life: I could be my safe place. I could build a life where I feel valued and loved from within without relying on anyone else to create that for me.

    Of course, there are still days when I slip back into old habits, looking for validation outside myself, but now I know I have everything I need inside. Her memory stays with me as a reminder of strength and love—two things she taught me through how she lived.

    For anyone struggling to find that sense of inner peace, I hope sharing my story shows you it’s within reach. It’s a journey; it takes time, patience, consistency, and commitment, but it’s worth it. Otherwise, you will never gain the sense of peace you deserve. In doing this, I’ve found a calm and self-assurance I never imagined. And I believe that’s something my grandmother would be proud of.

  • Lessons from Death and Awakening to an Authentic Life

    Lessons from Death and Awakening to an Authentic Life

    “Life doesn’t owe us anything. We only owe ourselves, to make the most of the life we are living, of the time we have left, and to live in gratitude.” ~Bronnie Ware

    Today, I’d like to tell a story about death.

    It’s a word that tends to shift the energy in a room, isn’t it? People tense up, lean back, or grow silent. Death is often seen as morbid, something to avoid or fear. But I’ve come to see it differently. The more we speak about death with openness and reverence, the less heavy and frightening it feels.

    My earliest experiences of death were when my grandparents passed away. I remember the moment my parents told us about one of my grandfather’s deaths. The atmosphere was so tense, so thick with unspoken grief. I was five or six and wanted to laugh. It wasn’t disrespect or indifference—I now realize it was my body’s way of releasing the unbearable tension in the room.

    But the most profound experience of death came when my mother passed away. I was twenty-six. Almost twenty years ago. She had cancer.

    I spent long, quiet days with her in that stark, clinical hospital room. I vividly remember the stairs—climbing them one at a time, deliberately slow, as if dragging my feet might delay the inevitable. Each step felt heavy, as though I could somehow resist the truth waiting on that floor.

    I remember not knowing what to say or do, especially as she told me, “It’s hard.”

    I think she held back her tears for my sake, just as I held back mine for hers.

    Part of us denied the truth. Part of us clung to hope. And part of us knew the inevitable was coming.

    Looking back, I wish we had cried together. I wish we had allowed ourselves to fully feel the grief, the sadness, the heaviness of it all. Instead, we put on brave faces, trying to protect each other. But what were we protecting? We were both struggling.

    If I knew then what I know now, I would have approached her final days differently. I would have offered her a soft space to breathe, to release, to let go of the grasping. I would have guided her into that transition with love, reminding her she was returning to the beautiful energy of the universe, back to the souls she loved.

    I would have told her I loved her. Many times over those last few weeks together.

    I carried the weight of guilt for years, particularly over not being with her in the exact moment she passed. She transitioned in the middle of the night while my sister and I were sleeping at home.

    But now, I choose to believe she wasn’t alone. Perhaps she was supported by the unseen forces in the soul field, her guides, and her loved ones on the other side. No one knows what happens after we die, but I find this thought comforting.

    I’ve come to believe we need to talk about death—not to dwell on it but to embrace its truth. Death is part of life. It’s a cycle—a beginning, a middle, and an end.

    When I returned to Florida after her passing, I was in shock. Everything felt different, small compared to the immensity of what I had just experienced. Parties and drinking no longer appealed to me. My relationship felt empty, and I couldn’t even remember why I was in it. My job felt meaningless.

    Death had brought to my attention a way deeper understanding of impermanence, driving a quiet urgency to reevaluate my life. Not a frantic urgency but a deep realization that life is short. Life is precious. That realization was life-affirming.

    Each breath matters. Each moment matters. It made me ask:

    • Where am I spending my energy?
    • With whom?
    • What am I serving?
    • What am I contributing to this world?

    This questioning was the beginning of my expansion. It wasn’t linear—there were steps forward and plenty backward—but it set me on a path toward alignment with my evolving truth.

    I believe we must live with an awareness of death. Not just intellectually but deeply, in our bones. When we truly embody the knowledge that we will die—perhaps even today—it reshapes how we live.

    Buddhist teachings encourage meditating on death, imagining one’s own passing. It’s not morbid; it’s clarifying. If you knew you might die today, how would you live?

    In The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware shares wisdom from her years as a palliative care nurse. These are the most common regrets she heard:

    1. “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

    2. “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”

    3. “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”

    4. “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”

    5. “I wish I had let myself be happier.”

    These resonate deeply with me. When my mother passed, I unknowingly began a journey to align my life with these truths. I’ll admit I’m still working on the five of them. Life has a way of distracting us from what matters most.

    But this is my reminder to myself—and to you—as we near the end of the year:

    Slow down. Take a step back. Reflect on how far you’ve come and where you want to go next.

    My wish for you is to reflect on this. Let the thought of your mortality infuse your life with intention—not pressure, but clarity. Maybe you’ll realize that what matters most is spending time with loved ones. Maybe it’s pursuing a dream, letting go of a grudge, or simply savoring the gift of being alive.

  • Because I Lost My Mom: 6 Gifts I Now Appreciate

    Because I Lost My Mom: 6 Gifts I Now Appreciate

    “The only thing you sometimes have control over is perspective. You don’t have control over your situation. But you have a choice about how you view it.” ~Chris Pine

    I had a happy, carefree childhood up until a point. I remember lots of giggles, hugs, and playfulness. One summer, as we were sitting in my grandmother’s yard enjoying her homemade cake, my mum’s right hand started trembling.

    My worried grandmother encouraged her to eat, but her hand continued to tremble. I remember her troubled look. She must have sensed something was wrong.

    Just three months later, she was gone. Acute leukemia meant that on Monday she received the results of a worrying blood test, on Wednesday she was admitted to the hospital, and by Friday she had died. I was only ten years old.

    My aunt broke the news to us that Friday afternoon by saying, “Your mum has gone to the sky.”

    If I were to explain what the news of her passing felt like, I would say it was like being hit by lightning. I’ve read that in cases of sudden death, children can stay stuck in some sort of confusing reality: They hear what happened and react to the news, but they don’t quite comprehend it. Somehow, deep inside, they don’t really believe it.

    In my case, and for years following my mum’s death, I thought that she had gone to the sky, but that she would come back. It was just a trip, or a bad joke.

    She would most definitely come back.

    As you might be guessing, I did not get much support in dealing with my grief. On the contrary, the message I got was that life should go on. That a page had turned, but the preceding pages weren’t worth reading.

    This is also how all the adults around me acted. So, even though lightning had struck me, I simply stood up and continued to walk, despite all the invisible damage it had done.

    The wake-up call to locate that damage and try to repair it came years later when I started experiencing health issues that my doctors said were linked to chronic stress. That’s when I finally decided to face my grief. My young adult body was giving me a clear sign: There were too many unprocessed emotions, desperately needing to find a way out.

    Once I allowed myself to finally feel that my heart had been shattered in a million pieces, I started putting those pieces together and redefining who I was.

    If my life were a book, grief would be the longest chapter. When I meet someone for the first time, I almost feel like saying, “Hi, I’m Annie, and my mum suddenly died when I was ten.” That’s how much it defines who I am.

    Negatively, you might think.

    Indeed, her absence still causes tremendous pain. I never felt this more than when I had my own children a few years ago. Becoming a mother does not mean that you stop being a daughter who needs her mother. You also become a mother who would like her children to have a grandmother.

    My mother is not there to spoil my daughters, and they will never get to know her. There is no one I can ask to find out how I was as a baby. She isn’t there to listen to my worries or fears while I navigate parenthood.

    I still get a ping in my heart when I see ten-year-old girls with their mums, seeing myself in them and re-living the immensity of such a loss. And as I am approaching the age she was when she died, I’m terrified that I will share the same fate and that my girls will grow up without me.

    Nevertheless—and I know this might sound contradictory, but aren’t grief and life full of contradictions?—in many ways, her absence has also been a gift.

    Thanks to her:

    –I fully embrace the idea “live every day as if it is your last” because I know that there is a very real possibility that this day might indeed be my very last. While you might think this means living life with fear, quite the opposite is true. It means living life full of appreciation, gratitude, and love for this body that is still functioning, for the people around me, and for life itself.

    –I choose to be truly present with my children and close ones and cherish deep relationships because I want to make the time we spend together count. If the memories we are creating are shorter for whatever reason, let them be powerful.

    –I have a job that gives me a deep sense of purpose and meaning because anything else would make me feel like I am wasting precious time that I don’t necessarily have. I’m honored to be making a difference in other people’s lives by helping them think differently about their lives and helping them through their own grief. I make it my goal to share my gifts with the world while I live on this planet.

    –I am (relatively) comfortable with the challenges that life throws at me. When you survive after the tragedy of losing a parent, you don’t sweat the small stuff as much. I still find myself getting upset by little things like anyone else, but I’m able to quickly change my perspective and realize that many of the things that upset us are not as important as we first think.

    –I know that I cannot control life because life is utterly uncontrollable. In fact, I was a control freak for years, trying to make sure nothing tragic would ever happen to me or my loved ones again, until I realized that this was a reaction to my mum’s passing. I now know this isn’t a way to live life, and that is liberating.

    –I take care of my health to feel good in my body, not because I want to live until I’m 100, but because I want to live well. I don’t want my days to be filled with the common ailments that people usually accept, such as headaches, brain fog, or digestive issues. I can only enjoy life fully if my body is allowing me to do so.

    If you have experienced early loss but cannot possibly imagine feeling anything positive about it, there is nothing wrong with you. I am sharing my story to perhaps inspire you or even give you comfort.

    Perhaps all you can do right now is stay open to the possibility that at some point in your life, you might be able to see things in a similar way. Ultimately, the path of grief is entirely unique.

    Would I wish early loss on anyone? Never.

    Has grief made me happier? Perhaps.

    Has it made me wiser? Definitely.

    Just as a friend once told me, “You can’t appreciate light without the shadows.”

  • How to Move Forward After Loss: The 3 Phases of Healing

    How to Move Forward After Loss: The 3 Phases of Healing

    “Whatever you’re feeling, it will eventually pass. You won’t feel sad forever. At some point, you will feel happy again. You won’t feel anxious forever. In time, you will feel calm again. You don’t have to fight your feelings or feel guilty for having them. You just have to accept them and be good to yourself while you ride this out. Resisting your emotions and shaming yourself will only cause you more pain, and you don’t deserve that. You deserve your own love, acceptance, and compassion.” ~Lori Deschene

    To this day, I still remember that call. I had just come home after an exhausting day at work, put on my sneakers, and went jogging. I left my phone on the table because I just couldn’t handle any more calls from my clients that day.

    As I was jogging, I was hit with a feeling that something was wrong. I tried to shake it, but I couldn’t. It was very pervasive, like an instinctive ‘knowing’ that something terrible had happened.

    I turned around and rushed home. As I got there, I picked up my phone and saw twenty missed calls from my mother and father. I didn’t even have to call back. I knew what it was.

    I grabbed my car keys and started driving to my mother. As I was driving, I called her, but she was so emotional and upset that she could barely talk. My dad picked up the phone and told me to come quickly. “Your brother…” he said. “Your brother is no longer with us.”

    At only twenty-eight years of age, two years younger than me, my brother had decided that enough was enough. He’d lived a life filled with severe anxiety and depression, which he tried to mitigate with alcohol and, I suspect, stronger substances.

    It wasn’t always that way, of course. He wanted nothing more than to fit in—to find his place in society and live his purpose. Nothing was more important to him than friends and family.

    But time after time, society failed him. First, by trying to push him through a “one-size-fits-all” education system that just wasn’t for him. Then, after he was diagnosed with depression, he wanted to get help and heal himself, but the doctors deemed him too happy and healthy to receive psychological care. He was dumped full of medication, which did nothing but worsen his physical and psychological condition.

    After years of trying to cope with depression and fighting a healthcare system that’s supposed to be among the best in the world here in Finland, he could no longer take it. He saw no other way out of the constant pain and suffering other than to end it all.

    My brother, as I like to remember him, was always outgoing and social. Nothing was more important to him than his friends and family. He was very open about this, and the last thing he would have wanted was to cause any pain or suffering for those closest to him. Or anyone else, for that matter.

    But there we were, our parents and me, trying to get a grasp of what had happened and how to deal with it.

    How Not to Deal with a Loss

    The first couple of days, I was devastated. I couldn’t eat or sleep or do anything other than just lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. I had daily calls with my parents to make sure they were okay, but they did not know how to deal with it either. They could offer no solace to me, and I couldn’t offer anything to them. I had no idea what to do or how to handle my emotions.

    As days went by, I got back to my routines. My boss was very supportive and told me to take as much time off work as I needed. But I told him I was fine and said I had no intentions of taking any sick leave.

    That was the only way I could handle it: by working and taking my mind off what had happened. My method of dealing with my emotions was not to deal with them at all. I did everything I could so that I wouldn’t have to think about it: I worked, I partied with my friends, and I distracted myself by doing literally anything other than giving some time and thought to what had happened.

    Needless to say, that was not a healthy way to deal with the situation.

    Soon enough, I started to notice a total lack of energy. There were days when I couldn’t even get out of bed. I turned off my phone because I was so anxious that I just couldn’t deal with anything and just stayed in bed all day.

    If I wasn’t happy at my job before, now things seemed even more depressing. I could not find joy in anything and avoided social contact. I was irritable and had no motivation, even toward things that I previously enjoyed

    I thought things would improve with time. Time, they say, is a healer. Not in my case. It felt like things were getting worse by the day. I was checking all the marks of severe depression, and I seriously started to contemplate what would become of my life.

    Then one night, when going to bed, I was feeling so sick of it all. I was depressed and anxious, an empty shell of the joyful extrovert that I had previously been. I sighed, closed my eyes, and quietly asked myself, “What’s the meaning of it all? What am I supposed to do? How am I going to get over this?”

    To my surprise, I received an answer.

    “Help.”

    I don’t want to say that it was a divine intervention or anything like that. It was more like suddenly getting in touch with long-forgotten deep wisdom within myself. My purpose. The driving force behind my every action.

    Whatever it was, I understood at that moment that it would be my way out. The reason I’m not healing with time is that I’m supposed to help myself by learning how to overcome depression and anxiety and then help others do the same. It became very clear to me.

    I also understood the source of my problems. The depression, the anxiety—it was all because of my inability to deal with the emotions related to my brother’s demise. Heavy thoughts and emotions were piling up, thus making my mind and body react negatively.

    I vowed that I would find a way to release the thoughts and emotions related to what had happened to my brother. I decided to be happy again. Happiness and good mental health—those would become my guiding principles in life.

    The process of finding answers was an arduous but rewarding journey. I contemplated and studied, meditated, and sought advice for months, but eventually I found the emotional blockages that were holding me back and methods to release them in a healthy way.

    Now I want to share what helped me with you.

    The intention behind sharing my personal experiences is not to diminish or downplay the unique pain that you may be enduring. Loss affects each of us differently, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach. My aim when sharing this story and the following three phases of letting go is to offer solace or insights to each of you navigating your own paths of healing.

    1. Allow yourself to grieve.

    The first phase, and our first natural reaction to a loss, is grief, and the first mistake I made was not allowing myself to grieve.

    Grief, when allowed to be expressed naturally, is a powerful tool for dealing with loss. It is there to help you let go when you can’t otherwise. It allows you to express and process your emotions, including sadness, anger, and confusion, which are common reactions to bereavement.

    Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified five distinct stages of the grieving process:

    1. Denial
    2. Anger
    3. Bargaining
    4. Depression
    5. Acceptance

    But, as you probably know, the process is highly individual. I never felt the need to deny what had happened. I wasn’t angry about it and wasn’t trying to bargain my way out of it.

    Instead, I repressed my grief. I used all the non-beneficial coping methods, such as overeating, drinking, working around the clock, and so on, and that led me to the fourth stage, depression, and got me stuck there for a long time.

    Fortunately, grieving is very simple. Just allow it to happen naturally, the way it wants to be expressed.

    If you allow yourself to express your grief, it will go away or at least decrease in intensity. My mother was, unknowingly, an expert at this. She said, “I have cried so much that now there are no more tears to be shed.” She had processed the grief and was done with it much quicker than I was.

    When you express your grief naturally, without trying to repress it or ignore it, you can eventually move through sadness. But if you have learned to repress your grief and not cry, your grief can grow into depression, as it did in my case.

    It can take time to heal and recover from the emotional pain and sadness associated with grief. And even though the situation can seem dark, recovering from loss, depression, and psychosomatic health problems is possible, as my story shows. When I finally allowed myself to grieve, I noticed a significant improvement in my mood. I felt lighter and gained more energy, and suddenly life didn’t seem all that dark anymore.

    2. Accept and forgive.

    The second phase is accepting what has happened and forgiving those involved, including yourself, to reduce anger and resentment and, ultimately, create a sense of peace.

    In essence, forgiveness is a two-fold process:

    First, forgive yourself. We tend to blame ourselves, even when there’s nothing we could have done. Odds are, you did everything you could. But especially if you feel like you made mistakes, forgiveness will be crucial for healing. Step in front of a mirror and look yourself in the eyes. Say, “I forgive you.” It will be uncomfortable and hard at first, but it will get easier and easier if you keep working at it.

    Second, forgive others. I firmly believe that, deep down inside, the people we have lost never wanted us to suffer. Forgive them, and forgive anyone you might be tempted to blame for their pain. You can do this by telling them in person or by closing your eyes, imagining them in front of you, and saying to them, “I forgive you.”

    In the case of my brother, it was easy to see that his actions were not intended to cause distress or grief to others. He acted the way he did because it was the only way he knew how to deal with his pain and depression.

    I could have blamed his actions for my depression, but I understood that he was in constant pain and agony and why he saw no other option.

    It would have also been easy to blame my parents for what had happened. They had their problems— including divorce and depression—which heavily affected my brother and me. But the thought never crossed my mind. I love my parents, and I’m sure they did everything in their power to raise healthy and happy children.

    Forgiving myself was the hardest part. I believed that if only I had visited my brother more, given him more of my time, and just listened to his worries, I could have somehow helped him heal. It took time and deep self-reflection to understand that we cannot change other people’s minds. At best, we can help them change their minds, but we cannot make decisions for them. Each of us walks our own path through life, and our choices are ultimately our own to make.

    There’s nothing I could have done that would have made a difference. I’ve accepted that now and forgiven myself and everyone else.

    3. Move forward with purpose.

    For me, the most crucial part of moving on is finding meaning and purpose in the loss. It can be as simple as reflecting on the positive aspects of the relationship, the lessons learned, or the impact your loved one had on your life.

    In my case, I decided to dedicate my life to teaching what I had learned so that no one would have to suffer the same fate as my brother. It was a deep calling that gave meaning to my brother’s life and a purpose to what I had to go through.

    It is my way of honoring his memory, and it feels like it finally gave the meaning to my brother’s life that he was always seeking. He never found his place in this world, but now he would help others live a happy life filled with purpose through my telling of his story.

    The Beauty of Life Lies in its Ephemeral Nature

    One truth about life is that it will eventually end. Consequently, throughout our lives, we are bound to encounter loss.

    Even though letting go and moving on after a loss is undoubtedly one of the hardest things to do, it’s what we should do. There’s no point in giving up on life just because we lost someone dear to us. We can grieve for as long as we need to, but eventually, acceptance and forgiveness pave the way for moving forward, reclaiming joy, and honoring the memory of those we have lost.

    And please remember: There is always hope, and there are those who wish to help. So dare to ask for support whenever you feel like things are too much for you to handle. You don’t have to go through it alone.

  • How I’m Navigating My Grief Since Losing My Father

    How I’m Navigating My Grief Since Losing My Father

    “Grief is the price we pay for love.” ~Queen Elizabeth II

    Losing a loved one is never easy, and when that loved one is a parent, the pain can feel insurmountable.

    Last August, I faced one of the most challenging moments of my life: My father, my rock and my confidant, passed away after a brave battle with cancer.

    As immigrants, my father and I shared a bond that was uniquely deep; we relied on each other for support, trust, and guidance in a new world. His wisdom shaped my life, and his strength inspired me daily. This is my story of grief, healing, and the steps I’ve taken to navigate this profound loss.

    Allow Natural Time to Grieve

    Grief is not a linear process; it ebbs and flows, demanding to be felt in its own time.

    My father spent his final days in palliative care, with my mother and me by his side. Watching him in pain, seeing the strongest person I knew slipping away, was heartbreaking. In that final week, I cried more than I had in my entire adulthood.

    His passing brought a mixture of relief—knowing he was no longer suffering—and numbness. In the weeks and months that followed, I allowed myself to feel everything: the disbelief, the anger, the guilt, and the remorse. Each emotion came naturally, and I let them flow. It’s essential to embrace these feelings rather than suppress them, as they are a crucial part of the healing process.

    Prioritizing Self-Care

    Throughout my life, I’ve been the caretaker, always ensuring everyone else was okay. This journey made me realize that I couldn’t continue to pour from an empty cup.

    I slowed down, took time off, and focused on self-care. I rediscovered activities that nourished my body, mind, and soul. Journaling became a therapeutic outlet, and practicing gratitude shifted my perspective. I indulged in spa days, kickboxing, and dancing, drank plenty of water, and tried meditation.

    Staying connected with nature, reading for pleasure, exploring Greek and Roman mythology, and making new friends brought joy and a sense of renewal. Learning a new language also became a way to stimulate my mind and create new memories.

    Seeking Help

    Reaching out for help can be daunting, but it’s an essential part of healing.

    I signed up for a digital health program that offered coaching and connected with friends who had experienced similar losses. While I haven’t yet felt ready to talk to a therapist, it’s something I plan to pursue in the near future. Supporting my mother, who is also navigating her grief, has taught me the power of vulnerability and the importance of accepting help from others.

    Keeping Busy

    Staying busy became a way to channel my energy and emotions positively. I engaged new clients, took new courses, moved to a new city, formed new professional and personal relationships, and even started a new business.

    Challenging myself professionally and personally helped me step out of my comfort zone while being gentle with myself. Understanding the finite nature of life has made me let go of societal expectations and focus on creating meaningful relationships and pursuing goals that truly resonate with me.

    Grateful for the Journey Together

    Above all, I am profoundly grateful for the journey I shared with my father. Not all families are as close as ours, and the bond we had was a true gift.

    My father’s resilience, strength, and street smarts have left an indelible mark on my life. He taught me to be cautious yet strong, resilient yet empathetic. His legacy lives on in the lessons he imparted and the love he gave.

    Grief is a complex, multifaceted experience, but it is also a testament to the depth of our love and humanity. As I continue on my healing journey, I carry my father’s wisdom and strength with me, knowing that he is always a part of me.

  • 5 Things to Know When an Abusive Parent Dies

    5 Things to Know When an Abusive Parent Dies

    “Family is supposed to be our safe haven. Very often, it’s the place where we find the deepest heartache.” ~Iyanla Vanzant

    My brother called me at work on a random Tuesday to say that my mother had suddenly died. Powerful emotions of shock and relief ran through my body, like someone rang a gong right next to me. The war was over.

    Like most people with an abusive parent, I had previously wondered how I would feel when my mother died. I was not surprised at the relief, nor that I wasn’t sad.

    I did not think about what would happen next.

    The Funeral

    One brother and I flew to Houston to meet my second brother. As happens with death in the South, the neighbors loaded us up with food—bless them. While we were tasked with making plans for the funeral, my mother’s extended family converged upon us.

    I should have won an Academy Award for keeping my cool and not exploding on them. I learned to act from the best: My mother was one person in public, another person at home. My mother’s extended family thought she was amazing. I stared stony-faced at the relatives telling hilarious stories and talking about her excellent character.

    The hardest part was when the extended family compared me to my mother. Given what I know about her meanness, tantrums, and childishness, it felt like being compared to the schoolyard bully. I just tried to not roll my eyes out loud.

    After all the hoopla of the memorial service, everyone went home, and my brothers and I had our own memorial in the living room. We laughed at some of her greatest hits. “Remember when she screamed at the cashier who wouldn’t take her coupon?” “Remember when she said my house was too small and she hadn’t even seen it?”

    The Aftermath

    When I got back home, people who cared about me kept saying, “I’m sorry for your loss.” I just looked at the ground and mumbled, “Um, thanks.” Now, when I hear about a death, I say, “Oh, wow” and give that person space for their truth.

    My father died six years earlier. I knew from personal and professional experience that after a death, reality hits at about the two-month mark, when the numbness wears off. I braced myself to dig into the hard emotions.

    The anger and sadness about my mother were like a bomb—everyone in the area felt it. I previously worked through the feelings of unworthiness, knowing the abuse was not my fault (thanks, therapy!). I gained thirty pounds of grief weight. Now I was also furious that grief issues were invading my body.

    Family Stuff Goes On (Of Course)

    I was still in touch with my extended family, of course. When they wanted to regale me with stories of my mother’s fabulousness, I tried to set the story straight. We would just gridlock.

    On my mother’s birthday, the family posted memories about her on Facebook. I then posted a photo of the two of us when I was about seven years old. We were at my dance recital, and my mother had her arms open wide, smiling for the camera, while I clung to her. A friend privately messaged me, “She’s not even touching you.” I messaged back, “Exactly.”

    One aunt finally admitted, “Yes, your mother was hard on you.” I was shocked that people knew about the abuse but did nothing about it. The fact that my family left me to rescue myself as a child caused an emotional setback for several months.

    To this day, I avoid the topic of my mother with these people.

    And Then, Healing

    I purged the grief in my journal, with my therapist, through art and sports. As I sifted through the rubble of my emotions, I became grateful for the many women who were mothers to me over the course of my life.

    I changed my nutrition. I learned to nurture myself in ways I never got as a child. I became my own mother.

    As the smoke cleared from grieving, I unpacked my automatic behaviors from childhood. I started hearing my true Self and made better choices. For example, I found that I have a gentle nature at my core. I couldn’t hear my Self because I was locked in battle with my mother.

    Through even more journaling, more therapy, and more time (seven years at this point), I was finally able to release the situation. People use the word “forgiveness.” More accurately, I can see the wholeness of the debacle of my childhood. I found real peace.

    Tools To Use

    I have seen other people in my practice who’ve feel relief when an abusive parent dies. Like me, they often don’t think about emotions or situations past that point.

    Some things to think about:

    1. You might get compared, favorably or not, to your abusive parent. People outside of the immediate family rarely say bad things about the deceased.

    2. Even though you feel relief, there is still grief, even if it’s “What I should have had…” Boxing up your feelings will make them come out sideways. Grieving is a hard and time-consuming process, but worth it for your healing.

    3. Even though your abusive parent has died, they are alive in your head. Every mean thing they said, crazy thing they did—it’s all still there. Do trauma work to reclaim your life.

    4. You are more than what you’ve survived. Listen for your true Self. Who are you underneath the abuse from your abusive parent?

    5. Family members often push the abused person to forgive WAY too early. This is like sticking a band-aid on a wound. Forgiveness sets you free, but only when you are ready.

    From a Distance

    I am not sad that my mother has died, and I don’t miss her. She was mentally ill, and I am glad that she is not suffering any longer. I’m also glad that she is not hurting me or my siblings any longer.

    Seeing the situation from a distance, I can see my mother for her incredible flaws (I haven’t forgotten), but her strengths as well. She was artistic. She loved animals and senior citizens and tried to help them. She was a feminist before it was cool.

    As expected, her death brought a ceasefire, but it also brought much more. It gave me the chance to unshackle myself from this long-running war so that I could walk away, towards my true Self.

  • How to Comfort the Grieving Without Saying “Sorry for Your Loss”

    How to Comfort the Grieving Without Saying “Sorry for Your Loss”

    “Words have the power to both destroy and heal. When words are both true and kind, they can change our world.” ~Buddha

    “I’m sorry for your loss” is a perfectly acceptable response…if I’ve told you I’ve lost my phone. In that instance, I can appreciate the sentiment, empathy, and authenticity of the phrase. It’s my loss and my loss alone. I know you can put yourself in my shoes and internalize what it would feel like to be without this critical device and, as such, the words carry weight.

    When I tell you my parents are dead, though? Maybe not so much. That’s because they’re monumental deaths that are not easily relatable for most. See, my dad passed away from ALS when I was fourteen. My mom then accelerated her unhealthy relationship with food and passed away due to complications from morbid obesity when I was twenty-seven. I’m an only child.

    Approach me with this filler phrase when this has been revealed, and my knee-jerk reaction will be a rushed “uh huh, thanks. Anyway…” I don’t mean to be brusque (well, I guess I do). I know you’re doing your best. You know you have to say something in response to this info. and, chances are, everything you think of in those few milliseconds after this revelation seems to fall short.

    So the autopilot, reflexive, out-of-office reply surfaces to the top.

    Here’s why it’s problematic.

    Only ‘My Loss,’ Really?

    Not to play a game of semantics, but the first issue I take with this filler phrase is that it conveys these deaths are only my loss. Yes, I know you’re speaking directly to me and not my parents’ siblings, friends, co-workers, or grandchildren. But these—either individually or collectively—are not singular losses.

    My grandmother lost the ability to outlive her children.

    My dad’s friends lost their weekly poker buddy.

    My mom’s co-workers lost the office’s “voice of reason.”

    My daughter lost the privilege to ever know her grandparents.

    The world lost whatever future contributions these two would have made to it.

    My point is, there are many people who lost something on those two separate days—and those losses have continued along with their absence.

    Alienation, Party of One

    Placing this loss directly on me—or on anyone, for that matter—also creates a separation between us. Yes, it might have been a loss in my life, not in yours, but you’ve now squarely bifurcated us.

    I am the bereaved; you are the condoler.

    The last thing someone mentioning a death needs (IMO) is to be constantly reminded that we’re different from the rest of you. That the black cloud is over our heads, not yours.

    Grief and loss and death, not to mention the sadness and depression that can go along with them, is isolating enough. Please don’t magnify that even more by placing us on opposite sides of the fence.

    Comfort, Camaraderie

    The biggest problem I have with the loss apology is that it really doesn’t offer anything. No source of comfort. No relatability. No words of advice that you can turn to when you’re struggling.

    It’s a “break glass in case of emergency” phrase for those who don’t know what to say. For me, it’s words I bob and weave to get away from like a dodgeball torpedoed at my head.

    I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, I really don’t. I know you’re doing the best you can. I simply hope to provide a little cause for pause if this is your go-to condolence.

    Plus, consider yourself lucky. If hearing about these sorts of losses and deaths makes you uncomfortable to the point that your brain turns to mush, it might be because you haven’t experienced this kind of grief yourself. That’s something to be happy about. And trust me when I say, I’m happy for you. I really am!

    Okay, now that we know why this phrase can rub the aggrieved the wrong way, what can we say instead?

    Rephrase the Loss Apology

    Tweak your sentiments slightly, and suddenly you’ve got a phrase that feels authentic and relatable, at least to me.

    I’m perfectly happy with:

    “I’m sorry you had to…

    • go through that.
    • experience that.
    • deal with such early losses.
    • encounter these tragedies so early on.
    • figure out how to navigate life on your own without your parents.

    You get the point. Any iteration of this phrase works for me for two reasons. First, because it acknowledges my personal experience, versus framing the deaths as my loss and my loss alone. Second, because, although you may not be able to relate, a sense of empathy and authenticity comes through by recognizing that these palpable losses had palpable effects.

    Share a Memory

    The absolute best condolence I ever received came from a young man I had never met. We were at my mom’s funeral when he came up to introduce himself. He was the son of one of her co-workers, though her name wasn’t familiar. His presence was a little quizzical to me, as his eyes were red, his nose was runny, yet I had no idea who he was.

    He told me he’d gotten to talking to her when he’d visit his mom in the office. Apparently, they developed a rapport over time. So much so that she was the first person he decided to come out to. He told me how she received this news with love, support, and a welcomed ambivalence that let him know it was okay to be himself. That nothing was different with this added piece of information.

    I have tears in my eyes as I write this. To this day, that short encounter has been the best gift any single human has ever given me regarding my mom. It brought comfort. It let me know she touched others (and kept treasured things to herself). It showed the magnitude of her loss outside of myself.

    When you lose a parent to (food) addiction the way I did, it’s very easy to vilify them. They should’ve known better. Done better. Been better.

    Then I think of that story and, at least in that instance, she’s a goddamn hero in my eyes. And not for how she received the news—though she seemed to handle that well—but for being such a source of support and comfort to this young man that he chose her, of all people, to come out to.

    Wow. I can’t say I’ve ever left an impact like that on someone. That is admirable, and the encounter is something I’ll treasure always.

    I do want to add a slight caveat to sharing stories about the deceased, though. It’s all about right place, right time. Had I been going into a meeting, about to speak to a crowd, or been ready to engage in anything that involved my full attention and right mind, this would not have been the time to share something that might have made me crumble.

    This strategy requires you to read the room a little, but it can be the best condolence you can bestow if the timing is right.

    The Leading Statement

    As the above example shows, your statement doesn’t even need to involve an apology. After all, you didn’t kill them, right? If you did, totally apologize. Hopefully from behind bars.

    Anyway, I love the leading statement strategy because it gives the aggrieved options.

    “That must have been so hard for you.”

    “I’m sure that was a difficult thing to experience so young.”

    These open-ended statements give us choices. We can simply acknowledge them, usher an appreciative thank you, and steer the conversation in another direction if we don’t feel like deep diving into grief.

    Or we can use them as a jumping off point and say, “It was really hard, I think the most difficult thing was…” Now we’re in a conversation. An exchange. Two people on the same side discussing an experience. It’s not me on one side receiving an apology about a “singular” loss and you on the other, nervously scratching at your neck and wincing, wondering what happens next.

    And, in case you’re wondering, yes, I am absolutely guilty of wielding this phrase myself. I’ve never appreciated hearing it or saying it, but I’ve really started to internalize how hollow these words are recently, since discussing my parents’ deaths more publicly.

    So let’s all strive to do better. I know we can. If we shift our thinking more toward what may benefit the aggrieved—versus allowing the first obligatory phrase we can think of to pop out of our mouths—these encounters will be a lot less uncomfortable.

    And, if all else fails, show us a picture of your dog. They always bring comfort, relatability, and connection. Hey, they don’t call them emotional support animals for nothing…

  • Embracing Aging: I Want to Be Shiny from the Inside

    Embracing Aging: I Want to Be Shiny from the Inside

    “Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.” ~Eleanor Roosevelt

    Yesterday my son called me from college and asked about my day. I told him about my morning, which entailed celebrating my friend’s birthday with her daughter.

    My friend passed away almost two years ago. Her daughter reached out to me a couple weeks ago and asked if I would share my morning with her to honor her mom. What a privilege and honor. Hands down YES to that.

    The celebration was full of smiles, laughs, tea, stories, tears, yoga mats, birds, fresh air, and tight hugs. As I told my son the story, he asked if my friend’s daughter is cute. (Let’s acknowledge the fact that he asked zero questions about how my friend’s daughter is doing and said nothing about the depth of the meeting.)

    “Yes. She’s very cute,” I said. “And I think she’s a bit old for you.”

    “How old?” he asked.

    “Hmm, I think twenty-eight or twenty-nine,” I replied.

    “Oh my god, Mom, she’s a dinosaur.”

    My son is twenty. I giggled to myself. If she’s a dinosaur, then I’m…

    My friend died because cancer ravaged her body. She fought so hard and had the best attitude, and sprinkled it with humor, which was even more admirable. I miss her every day. I also had cancer, but I am a lucky one. It is now gone, in my rearview mirror, and I’m very grateful. What happened to my perspective along the way is still gnawing at me, though.

    I received a breast cancer diagnosis in 2019. I endured chemo, radiation, being bald, living with a port installed inside of my body, chemo pills, and surgery.

    What happened after all of my treatments was probably even more challenging. I kept getting sick. One thing after another—diverticulitis, which causes excruciating stomach pain and generally requires antibiotics to cure, UTIs, severe brain fog, reflux, the flu, food poisoning…

    It was clear to me that my body was very compromised after cancer due to my immune system getting challenged by all the protocols, and of course the cancer itself. I have been working with an integrative practitioner to clean up my system and to get strong and hardy. This has been hard and arduous work, but I’m not afraid of working.

    I started working when I was nine years old, delivering papers in the snow, sleet, and ice in Colorado. I paid for my college and worked three to four jobs the entire time so that I could graduate and get a degree.

    My amazing, helpful husband and I raised three boys who went through a myriad of large, not tiny, struggles. I have run six marathons. I consider myself pretty resilient, but this work I have done to get back to homeostasis after cancer has been the most challenging thing I’ve endured. It has been more taxing than the cancer.

    There were at least seven days, probably more like twice that number, when I truly thought I was dying. My body was sapped of energy and was fighting to rid itself of the bacteria, mold, metals, candida, and H. pylori. I would lie in bed and try to meditate, but my brain fog was so severe that this was challenging. My body would finally succumb to sleep, only to do it all over the next day.

    I woke up feeling horrible for two years. I was preoccupied with my health. It was almost all I thought about. I had not been sick all my life until my diagnosis, at age fifty-two.

    I used to feel sorry for friends and for my boys and husband when they were sick. I didn’t even understand it. How could people get sick so often? When I was sick, though, I realized being sick changes everything.

    It’s hard to concentrate; it’s hard to focus on others and/or reach out; it’s hard to care. Yes, it is hard to care. It was hard to care about anything other than trying to feel better and hoping I would. Many days I lost hope by the end of the day. My brain did not work right, so I felt numb most of the time. There were a few days when I would not have been upset if I didn’t make it through the night.

    I am still working daily with food, supplements, breath, yoga, walking, running, and meditation. I am elated to say I haven’t had that feeling of imminent death in months. My brain fog is gone. I’m sleeping well, and all the other things that were really messed up are now going swimmingly well. I often joke that we are all just big babies because poop and sleep are everything, and baby, I’m pooping and sleeping.

    Lately, I’m noticing a new set of thoughts that have entered my brain daily. I am certain it is because I have so much room and time now that I’m not working hard to stay alive. I am not worried about the cancer returning or dying from being so sick anymore.

    I have now started noticing how I look. Before cancer, I cared enough to drag myself to Target to get a few items to wear so that I didn’t look like I was living in another decade, or I would order clothes online once in a while. I have always worked out, so I stayed in shape, but I actually glean more from the mental effects of working out, rather than the physical benefits.

    I’ve always brushed my hair and teeth and put on some mascara, but I’ve been a “less is more” person. Now I’m realizing that it all worked well when I was younger and didn’t have the lines, wrinkles, and saggy skin.

    It’s so interesting to me that during all of my health struggles I never thought about how I looked. Don’t get me wrong, I did not get excited about being bald, but I plopped a wig and a baseball hat on my conehead and kept moving.

    Currently, I seem to think about my looks way too often. I do not like it at all. I like to think about how I can make a difference in my little world, how to help others, and how to be a better mom, wife, friend, and teacher. I do not enjoy the thoughts about my extra skin from surgery and from age.

    What makes it even worse is that I have an inner compass that is not interested in doing one thing to my body or face. I actually think it’s interesting to see new lines on my face. I’m not saying I like them, but I find it fascinating when they show up out of nowhere.

    I think I’m grappling with this because 99% of my friends do botox, fillers, and/or face lifts. When I am around them, I notice their shiny pulled back foreheads, their plump cheeks, and their jacked-up lips.

    I actually do not like this look at all. To me, everyone that does this starts to look the same—alien-like. However, I also do not love the look I sport (old and tired). What a weird place that I don’t want to do anything about it and I don’t enjoy how I look.

    When I meet up with a friend that I haven’t seen in a bit, I’m sure she is thinking, “Good lord, she looks old. Why doesn’t she do botox at least?” But I’m thinking, “Geez, you don’t look like yourself anymore.”

    I notice actresses that possibly share the same thoughts I have, and I get so excited to see natural older women. I feel for them because they are in the public eye. When I saw Dear Edward I thought Connie Britton looked so beautiful and real. I saw some lines, and she looked so natural. Yay. I wanted to thank her for looking like a real female in her fifties. It warmed my heart.

    This new internal battle of mine won’t get the best of me. I feel like it’s helpful to even get it all out on paper. Now I get to work on my mind. I am intrigued by the amount of work we can do if we can rein in our thoughts and feelings. This is one of the many reasons that I teach yoga, breath, and meditation. They all can help us with our monkey minds.

    This is not easy work, but I’m up for it. I want to be so shiny from the inside that people don’t even notice my looks, and I don’t either.

    You know when someone walks into a room and their energy and light draws you to them? Many times, that person isn’t even pretty or handsome, but they exude such a peace that you want to be in their presence.

    For me, that is being fully aware of my uniqueness, completely vulnerable, and keeping my heart and soul open to every person I encounter and everything that arises. I am not there yet, but I’m acknowledging the struggle. Isn’t that the first step?

    After every class I teach, we end with “namaste,” which translates to the light in me honors and salutes the light in you. If you’re also grappling with your aging face and body, I honor your light. Shine on!

  • The Tremendous Pain and Beauty of Letting Things Die

    The Tremendous Pain and Beauty of Letting Things Die

    “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” ~Joseph Campbell

    My husband Jake and I sit in anguish on our beautiful new linen couch, inches away from each other, yet worlds apart. Hours of arguing have left us at another impasse, the stalemate now a decade long.

    I look around in despair at the beautiful life we built together, petrified by the decision I know I have to make. My partner, my friends, the country I live in, the ground beneath my feet—all on the brink of collapse.

    I stare at the ceiling in heartache. What will be left of my life? So begins my descent into the white-hot heartache of letting things die.

    Lost in Translation: Identity and Adaptation

    I’d moved from Australia to the United States ten years earlier to be with my soon-to-be husband.

    This wasn’t a particularly dramatic move for me. I’d spent my whole adult life up until that point traveling and living in foreign countries and, although there was always a natural adaptation period, I managed. In fact, I loved it—I feel born to be foreign.

    So I thought this would be similar; straightforward, even. But I was wrong.

    The nature of being foreign is unfamiliarity. Each day feels like a fragile dance between two worlds that requires a huge amount of personal strength, emotional generosity, and energetic adaptation, because you are perpetually read from a different worldview, which means you likely feel constantly misread and misunderstood, even when you speak the same language.

    Along with that, and the other difficulties inherent in making a life in a foreign culture that I had learned to deal with—having no outlet for huge parts of who I am, constantly navigating an environment that reflected nothing of my values—I now also had to reckon with the need to adapt to my partner’s lifestyle. I needed to be friends with his friends, take the vacations he wanted to take, and fit myself into the predetermined role of “wife” in his life.

    We made large-scale decisions that seemed like compromises at the time, and I was often genuinely happy to make them in the name of the unit. But with each compromise, a piece of my identity slipped away, and I eventually realized how much of what was true to me was being weeded out of “us” and how little importance I was placing on my own desires and happiness.

    I became deeply alienated in my life and my marriage. I stretched myself so far outside my own skin that maladaptations started to occur. I would find myself in conversation with friends saying things that felt like they were coming out of someone else’s mouth.

    In trying to survive, I’d created a life that reflected little to nothing of my truth, a life that was emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually starving me to death.

    But even when I realized this, I couldn’t bring myself to end it. Deconstructing my half-life seemed worse than living it. I knew it would spark a tsunami of such unknown proportions that it was an absurd decision to make. So I didn’t.

    For months, I coped with my unhappiness, convinced it was better than starting all over with nothing.

    Confronting the Inevitable: Embracing Endings and Loss

    A few years ago, I joined a group that met monthly to grow in death awareness and reckon with the grief and heartache of the little and big endings that occur in each moment, month, year, and lifetime, in preparation for our final ending—death.

    Through it, I realized that I was avoiding the death of my relationship, for fear of enduring the pain that inevitably came with that, and in doing so, I had forced it and myself to be alive in unnatural ways.

    For ten years, my ex-husband and I were two planets orbiting each other—day in and day out. I never thought we would have to live without each other. And even in the later years, despite all we’d been through, I was still in love with him and had great love for him.

    Losing this love came with an immense level of pain—even worse that I thought.

    For six months I walked around feeling like my chest had been ripped open. The pain was not just a fleeting sensation; it was a tangible, daily presence in my life, so intense that by the time the afternoon came around, I could do nothing but lie down on my bedroom floor, the weight of the world pressing down on my chest. The pain was so dense and heavy it felt like it was squeezing the air from my lungs.

    When things we love end or die, we experience pain. Pain and grief are the natural response to death, and to endings in general. But we also have a simple, biological tendency to cling to things that make us feel good and to avoid things that make us feel bad.

    This is a paradox—pain is biologically natural, but we try to avert it. In averting it, we miss the point.

    The Alchemy of Pain: Increased Resilience and Sensitivity

    Pain and fear are so profound that they transform your understanding of life.

    If we’re lucky, we don’t get a lot of opportunities for them over the course of our lives, but they are an important part of nature’s design.

    The human organism evolves through many things, and pain is a very potent catalyst for our evolution. It makes our interior worlds wider and deeper in their capacity to understand and hold life, and the more pain we allow ourselves to feel, the bigger our tolerance for it grows.

    What I came to feel, through the death and ending of my relationship, was more deeply in touch with the nature inside and all around me. It was as though the pain had entered into and worked out all the petrified spaces within me and brought renewed sensitivity back into my life.

    Death and Endings are Not Tragedies

    Death and endings are natural parts of life. To argue with them is like arguing with our need to eat—we only hurt ourselves. More importantly, we rob ourselves of the biological purpose these endings are here to serve.

    I have learned to notice more closely when I’m stopping a death from occurring. I’ve learned to embrace the pain of endings, to love what they’ve done inside me—reshaping my life to bring me to new, more authentic, more deeply fulfilling places I never thought I’d be able to reach.

    My deconstruction still hurts every day, but I am much less afraid of it now. I feel way more in partnership with my fear, and I can now recognize it as a healthy, normal part of my own psychology.

    As I face life’s uncertainty, I know that when this immense level of pain comes again, I will feel it just as much, but the fear will be more tolerable. And I know now to take solace in the beauty and intention of its design—to grow my heart and soul in breadth and depth.

    After a year, my divorce finally came through last week, and when I look around at my life, I realize I was right—not much remains. The people I surround myself with, where I spend my time, and even my business is different.

    It will be a while before I can say my healing journey is complete, but as I continue to sink deep into my bones, to reclaim the parts of me that were lost these last few years, and re-learn how to dream my dreams alone, one thing above all else is clear: I am back in touch with everything inside me again, feeling all parts of my humanity and all parts of my life, and that’s all that matters.

  • I Hope You Know You Stayed

    I Hope You Know You Stayed