Lessons I've Learned From Listening

Susan returns to her podcast "Growth From Grief" after a break and discusses the importance of listening to oneself, particularly for those experiencing grief. She emphasizes that her podcast is a safe space for listeners who are newly bereaved or have been grieving for a while. Susan encourages listeners to find ways to express their feelings and move forward during challenging times.

Susan discusses her experience taking a break from grief-related work and activities in the fall of 2025, finding it necessary due to personal and global challenges affecting her energy. She explored self-care practices, including writing, knitting, and meditation, which helped her reconnect with her intuition and needs. 

Susan emphasizes the importance of listening to oneself, allowing time for stillness, and moving the body to release stress and emotions. She shared her new project, a prayer shawl ministry at her church, as an example of merging her passions with community service. Susan encouraged others to take time for self-care and reflection, especially in times of grief or feeling overwhelmed.

Thank you for listening!   Visit www.sueandersenyoga.com for Yoga for Grief classes and additional resources.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hi, and welcome to this episode of Growth from Grief. I'm Sue Andersen, and if you're new to this podcast, welcome and if you're a returning listener, I'm thankful that you're back. It has been a while, I think two months since I have, uh, made a podcast recording. Today I am gonna talk a little bit about why this is the right time for me, and I'm going to also talk a little bit about the topic today, which is what I learned from listening.

But before I get into the topic, I just want to remind you that if you are grieving, whether you are newly bereaved. If you experienced loss [00:01:00] a year or so ago, or even longer, whether that's a personal loss, loss of a pet, a, a friend, a family member, a job health, or if you are grieving about what's happening in the world today, I, I hear you. I understand you. And I know what it feels like. 

I also know that we need to move out the emotion that we're feeling, whether that's anxiety, stress, anger, sorrow. It's important to move this out and, and there's many ways to do it. Journaling, just resting. Moving, like yoga, getting out into nature.

[00:02:00] And you can find all kinds of ideas on my website, www.sueandersenyoga.com. Especially if you look in the past podcast episodes or my blog posts, I give you a lot of ideas on how to, uh, move with your grief.  It's going to be with you, but it lessens over time. And again, it's important that we're able to address it, to almost befriend it in a way.

So I mentioned in today's episode that we're talking about lessons that I've learned from listening. I wanna take you back to the Fall season, to the holiday season. So for me, over the last five years or so, [00:03:00] this holiday season becomes quite busy because I want to offer as many programs as I can or support that I can to people that are grieving.

And I do this through special yoga programs, whether they're online or in person, podcast episodes, blog posts, emails, different ways that I try to support you because the holidays can feel overwhelming. Grief can be more intensified during that season. So, um, I like to offer these different programs.

Last holiday season, I felt it was really hard for me to offer these programs, and I think it was because for [00:04:00] me, I was just taking a lot of energy. Energy from people that, uh, I knew who, who had experienced recent grief in their lives. What's happening in the world was feeling overwhelming to me and feeling like I couldn't do anything about it.

And so I was taking on all of this energy. It was really sapping my own energy and, "you can't drink from an empty cup", that's the saying? Right? So I, I wasn't doing enough to support myself as I was trying to help others and, and it was feeling difficult for me, and so I made a decision in [00:05:00] December that I had to take a break from what I was doing, uh, which included online teaching, which I've been teaching online since the pandemic.

Uh, so, you know, a good five years of teaching online and I have to tell you, I enjoy it. I enjoy the community. A lot of the people, um, who I was teaching online, I knew, uh, because they were in my community at the time and we were in person and then we had to go online because of the pandemic. But I knew I had to do to kind of break away from that for a while.

So I made the, that decision and it also felt right to not record any podcasts. It felt right to kind of cocoon, right? To just allow myself to, to [00:06:00] just be, to not have, um, any responsibility, if you will. Certainly had responsibility, but, not to be supporting others. I needed to support myself. 

So I also felt during this time that I wanted to be more involved in my community. And so I've been taking this time since, um, mid-December to reflect. And just kind of hang about, to cocoon myself, to sit in a chair in a sunny window, look out the window, uh, to relax, to rest to. [00:07:00] Go with the flow almost, right? And to investigate what I might wanna do that's still supporting people who are grieving, but might be outside of yoga and something that I could do in person.

So I let people know that were in my community, that I was going to be stopping, these online classes.  And a lot of it, uh, just as another aside, a lot of it was a financial decision. I found myself increasingly focused on finances. How much was I spending? To, to offer these kinds of programs because of course when you're doing anything online, you're still having to pay for a lot of applications that you're using [00:08:00] and you know, I didn't want to think about that.

I didn't want to focus on the financial end of it because that's not why I got into this Yoga for Grief and supporting people who are grieving. So again, it was the right time to break off from what I was doing and take a break. So what I started doing, as I mentioned, was just kind of sitting in a Sunday sunny window, letting my thoughts just drift, and reading books.

I try to read as many books as possible. Um, I'm still doing that, you know, just, just reading. Now I have to tell you that I, my personality is one where I like order. I like lists. I like checking things off of lists. [00:09:00] So even though I'm telling you that I'm just sitting around and, you know, sitting in sunny windows and reading books, I wasn't doing that all day.

I was making time for it. It was something on my mental list that I wanna make sure I took care of, but I still had other things that I was doing because I wouldn't feel in balance if I wasn't right. That's just my personality. I, I like to have a lot of order, but it was nice just to be. And listen to myself and let things percolate.

So I had this dream and it was really very strange, but also very [00:10:00] joyous. And the dream was that I was pregnant and I was a young woman pregnant. And I was happy about it. And when I woke up I was thinking, okay, what does this represent? Pregnancy represents, you know, a seed, right? Something that's growing, something that, that you're nurturing. And in my case, I was nurturing ideas of what would want to do next. 

So that was kind of, kind of fun to have that dream and think about, gee, what would I wanna do next? So some ideas started to percolate, and this is where the listening came in. [00:11:00] So I allowed myself to sit at my morning window and have my tea, do my meditation, and just sort of let my mind wander when it wanted to.

So this meditation that I was doing was just sitting in a window. Sometimes I'd close my eyes, sometimes I'd look out and spending by 10 or 15 minutes doing this little morning ritual. And as I got more comfortable doing it, by the way, timed because I had things to do and I like order. Um, but just setting a timer so I could do this meditation.

But little things started to come to me and one of the things that started to come to me was as soon as I would sit down and look out the window, words would come to me. Poetry, [00:12:00] you know, poetry would come to me, and so I would sit there, I would just write out the words that came to me, do nothing else.

Take that paper and put it in my journal and not try to fix it. Again, you know, order -  fixing like things to be so, but with these little poems that I started writing, I didn't do that. I just wrote them put, put that paper in my journal.

So I wanted to keep those in my journal because sometime I'm gonna come back to them. And I'm gonna say, okay, you know, what does this represent? Or what does this seed of an idea tell me? Or encourage [00:13:00] me? So that's one way of listening to myself, giving myself the opportunity to sit in meditation. And then go ahead and write down some things that I thought of right away.

So it's a nice creative opportunity. I'm not a big journaling person, so that's, these little kind of vignettes have been fun.

Another thing that I'm doing is I've been doing more knitting. So I love knitting and I love knitting things that are a little bit complex. And so I've been knitting, um, different small projects. So a nice scarf couple of scarfs. [00:14:00] I'm making some Nordic mittens right now. Uh, so some nice, fun projects and I've been thinking about, how can I merge things that I really like? Yoga and knitting or knitting to support somebody that's grieving. 

Well, one of the things that I've, uh, or groups that I've joined is a group in my church. Um. Of women that do a lot of, uh, the fundraising aspects and, and support of people, um, in the church. Well, I went to my first meeting and they were looking for somebody to restart a prayer shawl ministry. I thought, oh gosh, I can do that. I love knitting [00:15:00] and. So now I'm gonna be one of the people in this prayer shawl ministry, and I'm really excited about that because that allows me, again, to merge two things.

A creative outlet of knitting and this warm blanket that will support someone who maybe is grieving or having a hard time or, uh, is lonely and just needs, you know, that kind of support. And this again, came from me just sort of listening to myself, taking that, uh, little idea of how do I merge things that I like to, to help my community and keep alive.  This work that I wanna do around, uh, supporting people who are grieving.[00:16:00] 

Daydreaming is, you know, again, something that I've been trying to do more and more sitting in the sun, which is great, and just allowing myself to look outside, see what I see, find something different every day. As I'm recording this, it is February of 2026. I live in the northeast. It's been really cold, and so just sitting by a sunny window is just wonderful.

It's so nice and it gets me out everything else that's happening in the world. The violence, the hypocrisy, just the way that we're treating each [00:17:00] other as a collective human race. And because I don't know how to support that, it, it has been weighing on my mind. However, over these past two months now that I've allowed myself to just be in the moment to listen to what's happening with my body, with my mind, with my heart, I have found small ways to do this. 

So one, of course is this prayer shawl ministry, so I can help people in different ways. I will still be doing Yoga for Grief because I feel that moving the body is so important. It allows [00:18:00] all of these emotions that we're feeling - whether it's anger, sadness, sorrow, guilt, anxiety, stress - it allows us to release them from the body.  And as we release these emotions from the body, so to does our mind calm, our emotions calm, and we can bring ourselves back to center. 

None of it's simple.  None of it's easy. But if you listen, listen to what you need, give yourself that opportunity, you will, you will find that you can take these [00:19:00] seeds that are growing inside of you and grow them into something else. It maybe a community activity that you've been thinking about and haven't yet joined Maybe it's a grief group that you've been thinking about joining, but you've been afraid to, or you're not sure you wanna share what's going on, or you don't know what will happen. Maybe just giving yourself a chance and trying it and seeing if it's right for you.

So I invite you, I encourage you to take some time. To just allow your body, your mind, your spirit[00:20:00] to have a rest and to tell you what it needs to listen to into your intuition.

The winter season, as I mentioned, has been really difficult, but we're coming up to the spring, the spring, which allows us this opportunity to move forward with the ideas that we cultivate in the winter. To try something, try something to support ourselves, and then once our, we are supported to then take that love, take that light and send it out [00:21:00] to support someone else.

Give yourself that break. Give yourself the opportunity. I thank you for listening to this episode today. You can find more information about my offerings for grief on my website, www.sueandersenyoga.com or on YouTube. Thank you for listening. I wish you grace and peace.