Four ways to make sure Grief Doesn’t Eat you Alive this Holiday Season
Grief is a unpredictable beast. Grief creeps into your heart often times without being noticed right away. It can dull your experience of the present and your hope for the future without you even knowing that it’s happening. Grief is stubborn. A heavy load, a beast of a burden to carry. The beast seeks to weigh you down enough so that you stop and sit with it, so that you can feel it.
But we live in a busy world, many times we are forced to just keep going. Our culture doesn’t value grief and this beast needs to be valued. Grief can and often will snowball when ignored, when the grief snowballs it often shows up as panic and anxiety. As an energy healer I believe that the grief shows up most in the heart and when not dealt with it moves up the chest and into the throat, hence the shortness of breath and panic. It takes over, it tries to eat you alive so that you can look at it.
We can grieve people that are alive or people that have passed. We can grieve for our loss of connection and saddest yet we can grieve for our past, our future. When relationships end, when we get sick or have a bad accident, when we don’t feel like we’ve lived our purpose these are can be experiences with grief.
Recently while working with a client that was grieving I wondered if grief could eat us humans alive but I already knew the answer. We all want to be light and bright and shiny. Not bitter, heavy and closed off. Why can’t we find that same peace again easily? That’s a question I’ve been asking myself in my own path with grief. I want you to find peace so I compiled a list of what has helped me on my own journey of healing and helping others heal. I think grief will always be a part of the human experience but we can learn so much from it.
Four Ways to make sure your grief doesn’t eat you alive:
Set up a date with your grief
We are often afraid to go into our pain, I think the fear is that it will eat us alive if we sit with it. It is quite the opposite. If we resist sitting with it, that’s when it snowballs. Grief is heavy and grey so in order to make it so it doesn’t eat you alive you need to sit with it, don’t keep busy with this heavy load, that only makes it get bigger. Sit with it, let yourself feel it. You are encouraged to feel, this is the human experience.
2. Find Flow
The experts say that the last stage of grief is acceptance, I would argue that healing comes after acceptance. We can always have a fresh start, this is how we make sure grief doesn’t eat us alive. Healing comes from flow, flow means laying down some of that heavy load and it only comes when you are ready for it. Flow comes from tears, flow comes from writing, flow comes from hiking or dancing. Experts say that tears from emotions contain more toxins than crying from something like an onion. Tears release the heaviness of grief. It is only after sitting with your grief that you can release and find flow.
3. Create your own releasing ritual
Sit in candlelight, a circle of ten or so candles sat in a circle. After sitting there and meditating blow out each candle with a wish for each candle light to release. “I am releasing my grief from my heart around my relationship with my mother.” With each candle blown feel yourself becoming more and more present. Afterwards you may lighter and happier. Are you ready for a fresh start? It’s ok if you have no idea how it looks. Being open to what is in the future for you is a huge step in releasing grief instead of clinging to it like a heavy security blanket.
4. Let Gratitude Fill your Heart
Gratitude replaces grief. Once you get more present and light it is then that you can have gratitude. You can look at the people in your life right now and honor them, you can look into your children’s eyes and know that you are creating their memories for a lifetime, you can recognize that you have made it, you have compassion for other people suffering. When we recognize that to some degree everyone is suffering not just us, that is when the load is lightened. You aren’t alone. My mom’s used to say “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” And this is the truth. We are amazing beings because of our life experiences. This is when we can really live in the present. After doing 1-3 try putting a hand over your heart and speaking aloud what you are grateful for.
“I’m so grateful for..”
