Ep #40 - Embracing Grief

Grief is an emotion that touches us all. It's natural, healthy and yet often hid away and dealt with in silence. 

Have you ever wondered why some cultures openly embrace grief while others seem to suppress it? 

By cherishing each moment with loved ones, we find that embracing grief, while painful, is also a testament to our capacity for love. Allow yourself the space to experience this natural response fully, as it's a crucial step toward healing and understanding the human experience.

While I am not an expert on grief, I passionately believe in prioritizing emotional well-being and giving ourselves permission to fully experience all our emotions, grief included.  

Remember, reaching out for support is a strength, not a weakness. 

Join me as we explore these themes and take a step towards a life filled with love and kindness.

You can also watch this episode on YouTube with Captions - https://www.youtube.com/@TheWorkingMumsLifeCoach

If you'd like to have a chat about how I can help you further, please don't hesitate to click here & book a time with me, I'd love to meet you.

You can also follow me on IG @NickyBevan_LifeCoach

Chapters

• 0:00 The Importance of Embracing Grief
• 15:22 Seeking Help for Bereavement

Transcript

Nicky: 1:07

Hello and welcome to this week's episode where I would like to talk to you about the emotion of grief. I think it really depends on your community where you live, the socialisation that you've been exposed to, as to how you deal with grief. If you look around the world, there are some communities and some tribes and religions. They really embrace grief in the sense that they allow themselves to cry, they allow themselves to really feel the emotion, they bellow and they allow themselves to fully experience and feel the emotion. And I think that is such a beautiful, beautiful thing In the society that I've grew up in. It's very much.

Nicky: 2:16

Shoulders back, head up, must crack on. I'm fine, everything's fine, it's all fine. One mustn't show my emotions unless it's in private type of belief system belief system and then it means that those of us that are experiencing grief feel like we can't, we don't allow ourselves to fully experience it and if we do, we think it's going to last forever. So, as you've heard me talking in other episodes, when you your emotions, how you feel, is created by the thoughts that we have in our head, the dialogue that we hear, the beliefs and the conditioning that we have. So if you have lost someone and you are thinking, okay, I'm never going to see them again, I'm going to miss them. Of course you're going to feel grief.

Nicky: 3:24

Grief is such a normal, healthy emotion to experience. The avoidance of grief is not healthy Normal in some societies, but not healthy Because it's an emotion that we actually want to feel. I heard it described once that grief is the only negative emotion that's fueled by love. It's because you loved someone so deeply or something so deeply that you want to feel grief. So giving yourself permission to actually feel it fully experience it, allowing yourself to cry and to bellow and to really fully surrender to that emotion, is so very cleansing and so very helpful. You don't necessarily want to indulge in that emotion for months on end. You don't want to stay wallowing, indulging in grief, but there's no time frame around your release of it. But it's certainly to begin with. Giving yourself space and permission and kindness to fully experience that emotion gives you a peace. On the other side, that emotion keeps coming up when you think about the person or the maybe it's an animal or a thing that you've lost, because you can also grieve for an unmet expectation. So if you expected to be married your whole life and then you go for a divorce, grief is going to come along with that because your expectation hasn't been met. Grief is going to come along with that because your expectation hasn't been met. So I'm not just talking about losing somebody or losing something. This can. Grief can come along any loss and that could be the loss of an expectation.

Nicky: 5:34

But I coach quite a lot of people on the fear of losing someone or something. I coach a number of people on their fear of losing their parents, for example. Their parents are getting older. It's inevitable. It's kind of the only guarantee in life. We're born and then we die. Everything in the middle is optional. We get to choose our experience. Once you take on board that, you're in control of your emotions. But we're born and then we die. It is the only certainty that life gives us. And if you're frightened about that loss, if you're frightened of how you're going to feel, then it's going to stop you fully living today because you're constantly worrying about an emotion that you're going to want to feel at some point in the future.

Nicky: 6:35

Got two examples of this my parents and my dog. So my dog is now 16 and a half. She's very old. She's really starting to slow down. She's got a cough. She's got a heart murmur. She sleeps most of the time. She doesn't really want to go out on walks anymore. She's quite happy to go for a little sniff on the tarmac. She certainly doesn't want any wet grass or mud, doesn't really have a huge appetite. She's getting old, so I know that we have a very limited amount of time with her. That makes me sad.

Nicky: 7:20

But if I was spending my days worried about her end of life, I wouldn't. I wouldn't be able to enjoy her now. My head would be so full of the future, worried about the future. I wouldn't be present with her. So I'm losing her already. But and I apply this to my parents as well I want to go to their funeral because I sure as fuck don't want them to come into mine In my lifetime. I want to experience the grief of losing my parents. I don't want them to go yet. I want them to be around for many, many happy, healthy years.

Nicky: 8:06

But I know that when the time comes I am going to want to feel that emotion, however that may look, and I don't know how that's going to look for me yet. I don't know if I'm going to spend time in bed, whether I'm going to rock in the corner with snot bubbles, whether I'm going to, you know, be fine, one minute and then not the next. But I know that however I, however my experience is, I am going to allow myself to fully experience that grief, because it does not last. When you avoid it, it lasts so much longer, longer, and I really believe that when we avoid emotions, they become a physical unrest in our body. But it's so much healthier to fully experience it. Bend over, over, doubled with grief, that's normal, that's healthy.

Nicky: 9:04

So give yourself permission to do it, knowing that it does not last. It doesn't most people feel like they're gonna fall down into a hole and never come out of it again. But the opposite is true, and it might be that initially you spend days crying. That's okay, let yourself do that and then after a few weeks maybe, or months there's no time frame but maybe then you want to start getting more deliberate and going right. Okay, I'm going to put a timer on half an hour. This is my time to feel the grief. I'm going to fully allow myself to feel it. I'm going to let it all out, however that looks for me, and then I'm going to, as soon as the timer's going off, I'm going to get on with my day. That's healthy. Trying to shoulders up, head up, it's fine, everything's fine.

Nicky: 9:57

I won't show it, it's not so I know that when my dog dies, I want to feel that emotion and, as uncomfortable as that will be, I will allow myself to breathe and fully experience it. I won't hide that away from my children, because us thinking that we have to be strong, strong, being not showing our emotions then is giving them the message that they can't show their emotions, that they shouldn't cry, that they should be strong, and that's bollocks. That is a really shit message to pass down or continue passing down to our children. Because when someone dies, when we lose something, we want to feel grief. That is the normal human emotion. And if you don't, if you don't feel grief when you lose someone you love, you're probably a psychopath or a sociopath or whatever the terminology is. But if you're a normal, functioning human, you want to feel that emotion. It's not something to be frightened of.

Nicky: 11:05

And when you learn how to process your emotions which is what I'm kind of continuously teaching you in this podcast right, and by process I mean taking a deep breath, recognizing where you feel it in your body. Is it fast, is it slow, is it hot, is it cold? Does it move or is it static? Is it heavy or is it light? What color is it Like? Really noticing it? Imagine holding this beautiful emotion in your hand and being really fascinated by it, giving yourself space to really feel it. It then releases you, and it's because you loved them so deeply that you want to grieve for them so deeply.

Nicky: 11:53

So stop arguing with yourself about that process and allow yourself to feel it, because I know that when my parents pass, when my dog passes God forbid anybody else passes in my life that will be the emotions that I want to experience at that time, and I'm not putting an expectation on how that would look or how much time that should take, but I know, because I've done this work around being okay with my emotions, I will be able to process and be okay with those emotions, and then there's nothing to fear. Knowing that you can handle any emotion gives you a self-confidence. You don't have to fear it. The only reason you fear it is because you think you can't handle it, and that is simply not true. And this is I'm kind of an expert at this I do have because I've practiced the capacity to feel all of my emotions. I used to really avoid excitement I used to never be good with excitement but because I've got really good at processing sadness and like that victim mentality and being fed up and self-doubt, the amount of self-doubt and dread that I continue to process enables me to actually then enhance my ability to allow myself to feel excited and allow myself to feel love and allow myself to feel joy. And it's not like grief. It's not like when you feel grief you will never be happy again. It's being able to have grief and happiness and maybe at a time of loss it will be both within an hour or both within a day or both within a week. But what I do know is the avoidance of grief creates so much more dis-ease in our body that the avoidance of it is so much more uncomfortable than actually giving yourself permission to fully experience it, because the other side of that is peace.

Nicky: 14:36

There is a brilliant episode on sort of end of life with Chris Hemsworth, the actor that plays Thor. Along with the National Geographic he did a series. The series is called Limitless and there's six episodes in the series. It's brilliant. It deals with a topic that helps lengthen and enhances our health of our life, so lengthening our life, longevity and the health in that. So it approaches lots of different things, but the last episode is all about end of life, all about end of life, and it's a really a really wonderful episode. If you want to watch something around end of life, it's really fascinating.

Nicky: 15:22

I really hope this has helped you. I am I am not a grief expert. If you're going through any sort of bereavement, please seek out the help that you need. There are some amazing bereavement counsellors out there, people that specialise in grief so please find the help that you need. If I resonate with you, obviously, please come and get in touch and we can see if working with me is suitable, but really giving yourself the permission to get the help that you need at a time when you need it. Have the most beautiful loving week and I will speak to you all next week.