S2 E9 Letters to heaven; grief, healing and laughter

S2 E9- Letters to Heaven

In this heartfelt season finale, Ali and Laura pull oracle cards to guide their conversation, and without a planned topic, the healing light leads them somewhere deeply personal. They open up about grief, loss, healing tools, and the messy, non-linear journey of processing pain. From losing parents to pets, from estrangement to death, this episode is an honest and at times laugh-out-loud conversation about finding your way back to yourself.

Key Takeaways

1. Your healing tools don't always work in the thick of it

When trauma hits, it's completely normal for all your tools to go out the window. Don't judge yourself for not meditating or journaling — surviving the acute phase is the work.

2. Grief compounds

Multiple losses stack on top of one another. Laura experienced the loss of her dad, her cat, her nan, and several others all within 2024, each new grief can reactivate previous ones.

3. The difference between coping and healing

Ali makes a powerful distinction: distraction helps you cope, but true healing tools help you do the work. Know the difference.

4. You can heal a relationship without the other person

Therapy and inner work can bring you to peace with someone, a parent, an ex, an estranged family member, without ever needing to have "the conversation." Your peace doesn't depend on theirs.

5. Writing letters is a powerful processing tool

Whether to someone who has passed, someone you're estranged from, or a relationship that's changed, writing (and burning, ripping, or keeping) letters allows you to say what needs to be said at a soul level.

6. Grief for the living is still grief

Losing a parent to distance, addiction, or estrangement is a real and valid loss. You don't have to wait for death to grieve a relationship.

7. The double whammy of losing someone twice

Laura shares the unique pain of reconnecting with her dad after years apart, only to lose him again permanently. Getting him back made the loss deeper, but she wouldn't trade those three years.

8. Focus on yourself; that's the season's message

The closing Moonology card: Focus. When you turn your attention inward and do your own healing, everything else begins to shift.

Laura's Top 3 Healing Tools

1. Grief counselling — Having someone outside your circumstances to talk to and learn from. Laura worked with Dipti, a grief counsellor recommended to her.
2. Meditation & journaling — Not as a rigid daily practice, but as something to return to when you need to reconnect with yourself and something higher.
3. Retreat / community — Taking yourself out of your everyday life, even for a few days, to find perspective. The sound healing course Laura attended six weeks after her dad passed was a turning point.

People & Recommendations Mentioned

Dipti Solanki

Grief counsellor — highly recommended by Laura for processing grief and loss.

Angela (The Ice Warrior)

Breathwork practitioner — helped Laura with nervous system recovery techniques.

Naomi & Martin

Relationship coaches through the Modivorce programme. Their approach: work on your relationship with yourself first before tackling the relationship with others.

Yasmin Boland

Author of the Moonology Messages Oracle Cards used in this episode.

Sea Soul Journeys Oracle Cards

Ali's oracle card deck — used to pull the Fluid card that guided the direction of this episode.

If you need support please use the links below;

Mind Charity UK

https://www.mind.org.uk/need-urgent-help/using-this-tool/

Samaritians UK

https://www.samaritans.org/how-we-can-help/contact-samaritan/

Other support is available and if you would like to be signposted to other tools please email is at intwominds25@gmail.com and we will do our best to help.

Follow us at @intwomindsuk on social media

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Ali Swift. Laura Moss, how are you? I'm fine, thank you. I just pulled not that anyone can see when they're listening to this, but if you ever go on my socials, you'll see the cards that I sometimes pull. And I've pulled the healing light for us this morning. Because we've both gone. What are we speaking about then? I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Should we pull a card then? Actually, I've got to be honest, before you say what this card's about, for the first time I've gone, what did we talk about today? And I actually haven't had something go boom into my head. Yeah, and usually we're like we've got a few, haven't we? Yeah, and this is the last episode in season two, I do believe. Possibly. I think it possibly is. And we've covered so much. And I do recognise in what I think our last podcast, I recognise it was a bit repetitive as something we've covered before, even though it came out in another flavour. So I don't know now whether I'm just really aware that I don't want to be repetitive. But I think as we know, the right people will hear the right message at the right time. And I don't know if you've seen the stats from last week, but we do have listeners now without us even promoting this podcast, which is amazing. And so we know that it's obviously resonating with people, it's helping people, hopefully, and it is a healing light. And I'll hand that very nice.

SPEAKER_01 1:19

I mean, I've definitely had this card before, but again, like you said, no no podcast is ever going to be the same, like bang on. And we might have worded it. I always think sometimes you can hear something so many times, but somebody words it in slightly a different way and it just lands with you differently, or it might be because where you're at at that time, it just lands different, doesn't it? Yeah, absolutely. So this card, the healing light, we feel pain many times in life, whether we feel it in our head, our heart, or body. Although it hurts, and we may wonder why me. It is only by going through these painful moments that we fully appreciate and experience the good moments in life too. The healing light oracle comes to you today to represent healing from something higher. We have different beliefs in what that something higher is, but whatever it is to you, it wants you to know it is here for you, healing you, protecting you, and sending radiant white healing light your way to take away your pain. You have the power to call on this pure healing white light anytime you need to for assistance in healing or protection. Is accessible to anyone and everyone who has the courage to ask. I like that. The affirmation is I am light, I am protected, I am healed. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

Really beautiful, and it's leading me to ask you the question through your most traumatic times, most difficult times, what would you say? You don't necessarily need to do your top three, but I'm gonna say top three because it sounds good. What would you say are your top three healing tools? What are the tools that you called upon that really have helped you heal, not cope, and there's a de there's a mass or not a distraction that actually allowed you to do the work. I actually would find this one of the most difficult questions to answer. Nice, thank you so much. But yeah, let's go down that road, I think. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 3:20

I'd say the first thing is that to start with, especially if you go through a trauma, all your tools go out the window, and that's perfectly normal. I had no tools, I had no capacity to think about anything other than what was going on in my life at that time, and obviously talking about my dad passing away. Because and I think people probably look at people like maybe us or other people that go on about oracle cards, that talk about meditation, that do sound baths, that you do loads of talks on your dwellness toolbox. I think they probably think that we just whip this tool bag out and we sit there and meditate, but it just doesn't work like that all the time. You just go through the thick of it, don't you? While you're laughing.

SPEAKER_00 4:08

I just can't whoop.

SPEAKER_01 4:11

Yeah, whip you out. And then and it's true, isn't it? And I remember speaking to Ange a few weeks ago, and I was saying, I'm not gonna lie, I've not had any time to do any of the breath work that we've been through, or even think really about it, because this has happened and this has happened and this has happened. She was like, That's fine. She said, So now what can you do to help your nervous system recover? Think about it as the week of recovery. No, you won't probably go through that same week again. So, what sorts of things can you just bring your nervous system down slightly and just bring some karma and balance into it? And I just thought, that is so true, and it and it's exactly what I just said. You don't always have those tools to hand because it just isn't practical. But I think when I started coming out the other side, for me, grief counselling was a win because not only is it someone to talk to that's outside of your circumstances, she really makes you think about things and she teaches you about grief. Because I think it's so important to understand what grief is and understand just how you've been through grief before and it compounds on top of one another, and that's true. After my dad died, my cat died, my nan died, Rob's brother died, the dog died. Did I say the dog? And then Rob's friend died, all in the space of 2024, yeah, 2024. And that really helped me realise that actually the grief compounds on top of one another, and how to try and process that.

SPEAKER_00 5:45

I guess there's also a not only does it compound, but you are grieving and you're dealing with one grief, and then another one kind of just comes and smacks, smacks you and shocks you, and there's slightly different paths of grief, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 6:03

So as you're healing, you then like you say, compounds you, it's it's yeah, and when and if you're not healing, it's even more yeah, and when the cat died, so I took the cat in, we've got two cats, we've had them since 2008 when we moved into our very first house. So in 2024, in the August, she just wasn't right, and I just thought it's not really fair to keep her here, she's 16. I'm not gonna put her through any treatment, and her sister's still going, she's 18, bless her. Anyway, I took her into the vet, and I've never had a pet die on me. And I said, I know that sounds a bit weird, but when we by the time our family dogs died, I'd moved out of the house, so I hadn't got experience with that. Our family pets actually passed over the people because we moved to America, so I never had had had any experience with a pet dying. And I remember going in there and she's saying, We'll put her down. Do you want to be here? And I was like, No, I don't think so. She was like, We can take her out the back then, and I was like, That's fine, do that then. And the emotion that came out of me at the vets was like, it didn't seem proportionate. Some would say it was, I know it was a family cat, but she also really pissed me off she was actually a twat. My my sadness just didn't seem quite right to me. I was like, I remember saying through my tears to the vet, I don't know why I've crying so much. She was such a twat. And I bet she was like, oh my god, what is the matter with this woman? And I cried all the way home, and I cried when I got home. But I do feel like it's just I don't know, it's like almost having somebody something's life in your hands and being the one that's in control of it. Yeah, oh God, it was not a very nice feeling at all. And then I realised that it probably is me crying about my dad and my nan's not well.

SPEAKER_00 7:53

It was all sorts of things. I remember when, and we might have mentioned this one before, you know, when the queen passed and the nation mourned. I remember watching something around the fact that when the queen died, she allowed a nation to grieve the things that they needed to grieve. Not necessarily her loss, her loss came into it, but it wasn't frowned upon for you to be upset that the queen had died, and that's ancestral, that's got to be ancestral. Because I think about all the things that we weren't a nation of royalists in the way that they would have been centuries gone.

SPEAKER_01 8:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:32

But we you know, I remember Eloise the very first time we had to sing God Save the King at one of the football matches, was on the tele, and Eloise dropped herself to the floor and started crying after we'd sang God Save the King, and I said, What's wrong? And what would she have been at this time? She's nine now, so this was a couple of years ago. We were still living in the old house, actually, six or something. I'm trying to think now, the year's where we're at. And she dropped onto the floor and she starts sobbing. I said, Darling, what on earth is wrong? She said, I don't want the queen to be dead. And so as a child, she picked up on that grief as a nation, not necessarily me and my ex-husband, like other people talking about it, what was happening at school. And I think though it did give in that situation aside, it did give the nation an opportunity to grieve whatever it is they had to grieve. And let's face it, we all had a lot to grieve, and after the loss of a year to COVID, and everything that COVID brought a lot of people and a lot of loss.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

And do you imagine all the things that have happened since in that monarch that has they've lost or has changed, or it is it doesn't, it's not surprising, really, is it? If you think about, like for instance, my nan. Imagine watching her what's the word? What when you have your crown put in your head? Coronation. Coronation. Imagine her watching the coronation, thinking about all the people she's lost within that space of time to when the queen dies. Good god, that long time. There's a thread, isn't it, of all those events that runs through all those events and it takes you back through them on oh wow, in all those years, and it makes you reflect and then it brings up the and I think England was that what that's she represented England, and it's yeah, it still feels a little bit weird the way that it is now, I think.

SPEAKER_00 10:27

A little bit of a side note, we are completely off topic, and we will come back to we've you've only mentioned one tool. Uh this might come out a few weeks after the events of this week. So Aston Villa, one of our local teams. I know that your household loves a bit of Villa. And I used to go down there as a kid actually, because my best friend's family were Villa fans. Um they used to look after me and take me down there, the good old Ron Atkinson days. But I it was amazing to see, it was wonderful to see. I loved the celebrations and all that. But you know what absolutely filled my heart was watching Prince William as a villa fan, be a human being, and in that moment of joy of that moment of just pure excitement, you saw that eight-year-old kid, that football fan, and he wasn't you didn't look at him and go, he's the king to be. And I I loved that for him.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:25

I loved that for us as a nation because I do think it shows they are they are so much more in touch now, I do think, or getting more in touch with society, maybe. I don't know, it just I don't know, it it felt to me a real special moment for community. Yeah, yeah, anyway. Sorry, that's a bit of a side note. So let's come by as our Jojo come by come by, let's get back onto focus.

SPEAKER_01 11:49

So, number one was grief counselling, that was definitely one, and that took me a year to get there as well. I remember Jojo mentioning Dipty in the June after Dad passed away. I don't even remember where we were, we were in a petrol station. Me, you, Jojo, and Amy stopped the car to get petrol, go into a top barn, and she's like, I guess that would be November. No June, always in the summer. It's like any June, I thought it was in November. Yeah, always in the summer. And I remember her saying to me, I know it might not be the right time for you now, but Dipty's amazing. I was like, okay. And it took me till January to message her, so that took a little time. That was a tool that I took out later. And if I'm perfectly honest, completely honest, I actually lost my faith a little bit because I couldn't quite comprehend how someone that I'd talked to the week before could suddenly not be here, but I could still communicate with them in another way. It made me go, this cannot be real. Like, and so it took me a long time to come back to that belief that there is something else after this and that and that he's somewhere else, and that I can still communicate with him in some way. Meditation and journaling massively helped me. Once I'd had Louie, I feel like that was a tool that I needed to get back into because I kind of lost myself again and I was determined not to do that. I got stuck in the motions of being a new mum, and I thought, oh my god, I feel like I'm drowning a little bit. I need to pull back that connection that I feel there is with something higher than what we are, and just sit in quiet. And I suppose actually finding my business was very healing. Finding something six weeks after my dad died, I thought I need to go on this sound healing course. Everybody was like, I think everyone was a bit like they probably were like, What is she doing? But they were like, Okay, you go. They don't want to say what are you why are you going six weeks after he's died. But I needed to but and I just felt like it was something I've thought about before, and then I thought, oh, he's passed away, I can't go to that one. And then I thought, actually, maybe I really do need to go to that one. Yeah, the best four days, the best piece I had. But I've said to you before, and you've said the same, I wouldn't have known what those tools were had I not done the work on myself before. I wouldn't have known where to start because grief would have consumed me to the point where I would have lost myself, felt very disconnected from everybody else. I thought about this the other day actually. When you lose a parent, you feel this sudden loss of identity, like something you you can't quite fathom how somebody that bought you here is not here, and then you're all of a sudden in a new group of people that's got a parent that they've lost, or and I just couldn't understand how I was there, and so it's a really difficult thing to get your head around. I think just losing that sort of identity, feeling like you're a different person because you've no longer got both parents. So, yeah, I'd say, in summary, grief counselling was a definite big one for me, and grief counselling or any type of therapy or anything that people find for me, talking was really key. For others, that might not be the thing, but finding something that is outside of I think your immediate family and what's going on, you need something separate to process things, definitely therapy, finding your purpose, and I think that's what I did with the sound healing. I found a purpose. I could channel my grief into helping others because I feel like the connection that I have with myself was the thing that pulled me through. So if I can help other people to find that connection, I can help other people get through the most difficult times in their life, and it should not be a shit, I've lost myself. It should be a I never want to lose myself. Whenever I go through something awful, I want to be able to always come back to myself. So it should be something proactive we're doing. So if I can help other people in that way, then I will. And definitely journaling and meditation, but again, this isn't a tool that I feel like I've been using religiously, it's just something that I do when I I need to or when I can because life's busy. Yeah, and you know that it helps you. Exactly. I do think the retreat that me and you went on really helped me as well. That would be another tool. Finding a group of people or finding something where you can literally take yourself away, and that's probably why the sound healing course helped me as well. Take yourself out of your life for if you have the luxury for a few days and just go, Oh, okay, there's something else past this grief, there's somewhere else that can be past this darkness. And at that point, it was the anniversary of dad's death, so a very poignant time to go. But I just felt like I and I released my dad's pain at that point because I was holding on to that, and I was like, it's not my pain to hold on to, I've got my own pain to to deal with. I felt like that was a huge shift for me. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Because I think you think you're gonna know what to do, or you look at other people and you think, God, look, they're doing this and this, but until you're in it, it's really tricky to know what's gonna work, and what I'm saying now is not necessarily gonna help other people.

SPEAKER_00 17:22

Yeah, it's so personal. What works for you won't work for others, and what works for others won't work for you. It's it depends on how you've what you've really been through before.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

True.

SPEAKER_00 17:32

What shaped you, your morals, your values, all your relationship with those people like that that is a huge one, isn't it? Did you or have you ever written letters to heaven?

SPEAKER_01 17:44

Uh yeah, I used to write letters to my dad. Yeah, I haven't for a long time, but I do I have written and actually I do whenever I do a meditation, I I put I'll call in all the people that I know are like looking after me, not necessarily people I know, but anyone that might be there, so that those that's the way I feel like I connect, and then I used to just write letters to my dad about what was going on, but I'm more now just have conversations like I know you can see this, but are you there? But and then no, it's why is that something that you've done then?

SPEAKER_00 18:22

Yeah, I have written letters to heaven in the past. I think what you've said there though, in all those tools that you've talked about is processing, it's just allowing your brain to process what's happened, whether that's through talking. As you said, not everybody wants to talk, so journaling is a really lovely alternative to that. And it might be that you're angry at your loved one who you've lost for whatever reason. It might be that you've lost somebody who you weren't actually in contact with because you've been estranged from them for whatever reason, and there's still and you're confused as to why you're so hurt and angry, but writing letters to them is a really powerful way of processing that hurt or those feelings, that pain. And I feel that it really does make a difference, and there's a lot of science behind this stuff as well, I believe. Um but no, writing I've even written letters to so not just in death a loss in life, relationships that change when I've written letters to my ex-husband, I've written letters to people from my past that I wish I'd said things to that I didn't get to say. I've written letters to both my parents at times. I've not sent them, I've burnt them or ripped them up or what have you, but it's just a really powerful way to process and again probably stepping into a bit of woo for some people here, but I now believe those messages get sent at soul level.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

Yeah, I do for yourself.

SPEAKER_00 19:51

It's quite amazing what happens from you write a letter to somebody and you explain how it's something that's made you feel, and within days they reach out to you, or a sign comes, or the next time you hear from them, it's no tension, it's like they got the message.

SPEAKER_01 20:08

Yeah, I agree. And also just a message, it might even just be a message to your own soul to release that. And that in itself helps. Dipty made me write letters actually. I say make me like shouldn't force me, but Dipty was saying letters are really good. And I think what I really found difficult was processing grief that I'd had with my dad previously because he'd left to move to another country. I found it really difficult to feel negative about things in the past when he wasn't here. It felt really uncomfortable for a long time to go he made me feel shit or you know, I felt like this before. And again, like you said about anger, I did have some anger. I was like, You've left me again, you bloody done it again. What on earth's the matter with you? And it's good to process all of those things, and it's absolutely perfectly normal to do that as well.

SPEAKER_00 20:56

I remember someone said to me, and they said it with love, they weren't saying it to be horrible towards me, but they went and they were going through their own grief, their own loss, and they said, Oh, you know, something about you don't know what it feels like to lose a parent. And I haven't lost a parent to death, but I have actually at times I lost a parent when my dad moved away, and I didn't have that relationship with him anymore, so I hadn't lost him to death, and I know there's a there's a huge difference in the scale of loss there, but I had a loss and had to go through the grief of not I didn't know when my dad first moved away, it was nearly a year without words, and then I had lost other relationships in different ways. So if if you live with someone with addiction or with that have unhealthy habits, and that becomes their priority, you can lose that person to those things as well, and then therefore your relationship dynamic changes, and so in a lot of ways, I had experienced loss, but not in the way of complete. And the reason I'm saying this is I know Laura that. That's our common ground when we first met was we both lost our dads to the moving abroad and moving away, and we both resonated and related to the kind of pain that brought us at the time, and what that then led on to our actual relationships with them. And both of us, around the same time, got the relationships back with our dads in really healthier ways. And so I guess really what I'm gonna ask you now is because I haven't experienced this do you feel that when you lose someone when you lost your dad again, you got him back and then you lost him again? Do you think that impacted the grief even more?

SPEAKER_01 22:38

Yeah, do you know loads of times I thought, God, I wish he hadn't come back because this wouldn't be so painful. I wish he hadn't come back to this country because I had a distance relate a distant relationship with him. I spoke to him every Sunday night on the phone. I'd see him twice a year, maximum, twice a year, that's it. And maybe it would have been less painful. But me and my sister always worried about him dying in America, and if we'd have a bit of a battle with my stepmum of getting the body back to England because we wanted to get him back here. But as it turns out, he went through a load of loss himself and loads of trauma himself and came back to this country. And we had three years with him, and my mum said it at the time, you wouldn't trade that. I know it doesn't feel like that now, but you wouldn't. And I was like, I wouldn't because my kids wouldn't know who he was. And that what's sad is that when you lose a parent to moving away, like they've gone, when you have children, you start to feel a grief for them because they won't get the relationship either that you did you didn't have one. I did have one up to about nine, I think, and I had a distant one, but I was like, they're never gonna have the relationship that I pictured in my head when I had children, and my parents are around to help out and to have them and to look after them. They're never gonna have that. So I went through my own grief for which was sad, but they didn't know any different, so it wasn't painful for them. But then he moved here and they both had a very lovely relationship with him, like really lovely. My dad in COVID would teach Charlie his maths because he was doing my edding, and I needed someone to help me out. My dad was bored out of his brains living at his mum's house with his with her partner, and he hated the fact that we were separated at COVID, and it only happened three months after he moved back to this country. So it was like three months of like intense like seeing him to then nothing. So anything to keep him busy and to keep him sane. So he helped Charlie out on Zooms with his maths at homework in COVID, and they both and then we all moved to the same village as well. Made him move over to here, and again, he was part of the family, so it's really funny because we said he is with us so much, he should really change his surname to Moss, but then he'd be Chris Moss, and because we'd always see him at Christmas, it's like Christmas, Chris Moss is back for Christmas. I absolutely love that, and now Louis's name is Louis Christopher Moss, but dad did get my name, so it's every time I see Louis's name on anything, yeah, I see Christopher Moss, and I smile to myself because I just think that's a funny story to tell, Louis, um as Louis growing up. And again, I've got a grief for Louis because he isn't gonna know him at all, which find I find so strange, but he's here because of dad, and he's now named after dad, and I just think that's so lovely. Beautiful. So it takes a little while, I think, to get through the I wish that I hadn't had that close a relationship with him. But then you realise that actually you wouldn't really trade that if you were given the choice again. But to start with, you're a bit like, oh god. So I'd say it's it felt it did feel like a bit of a double whammy for me, like uh he's gone again, and then this time it's permanent and I can't talk to him. And I'd rather it be that he moved to another country. I'd rather it be that I can talk to him on the phone. Because of course, like if that's something you believe in, you can talk to loved ones, but it's never quite the same, is it, as seeing their faces when the kids do certain things, and three years he's passed away, he doesn't feel like that much. But when I see my kids when he was alive to now, crazy, like they're not even the same people, they're not Charlie was 10 and he's now 13, he looks like a man, he's got size 11 feet, giant, he's a giant child as my dad, yeah. So I s I'm sad that the kids don't experience that relationship with him now, and that he I can't see what he's like with them, and like with Louie. So yeah, I'd say it was probably a double whammy for me. I wouldn't trade the memories, not at all.

SPEAKER_00 26:52

Yeah, it's like I guess you deal with the loss, the original loss, and then the loss that you're actually experiencing at the time. It's like so much comes up, and I think so. For anyone listening to this, and I guess that resonates, relates to this, is it's okay to feel like you feel it's okay to feel like you're losing again and you're going back and forth over all the previous stuff, the stuff you think you've dealt with, and then it comes up again. That's actually quite normal. That's the brain doing its thing, trying to understand, trying to process, trying to heal, trying to grieve, all of those things. It's just be a bit more compassionate towards yourself rather than trying to fix it up.

SPEAKER_01 27:34

But also, if you're not just talking about parents, but if a loved one isn't is still here and there is like difficulties within the relationship, or maybe there isn't difficulties, but there's things that need healing from that relationship. I would say I do think I'd done a lot of healing between me and my dad's relationship, not with him, a little bit with him, but not with him, but with myself, and I'd come to understand myself because of what my dad put me through. And that's not to say that when he died, I didn't still heal from some of the stuff he did before. It's just saying that I don't feel like it hit so hard because I'd healed from a lot of that stuff. I'd understood why he left and it wasn't about me. I'd healed from I'd made my peace with our relationship, and I understood that it was just important to have a relationship and that he was never really going to understand me. And even up to the point of his death, we had words the week before he died because he wasn't putting me first. And unfortunately, in this lifetime, he was never going to do that because he didn't know how to do that, and so it's so important if you can to just make peace with these situations whilst they're here. If you can make peace with people, amazing. But sometimes you're not going to get the answers you want. So when I say I did healing on the relationship I have with my dad, it wasn't necessarily with my dad because his healing would have taken a long time to understand how he'd impacted me. What I'm saying is I had healed and understood much more about him. I'd have so much more compassion for him because of what he'd been through, of how he showed up in this world. He wasn't here to do the healing, and this is now my job to heal those patterns in our family and move forward positively and not have my kids go through the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 29:29

It's as if you're the healing light of the family. Going back to that original card. But you've raised some really good points there, and I the one thing I'll say is, but you've mentioned therapy before as well. When I had my first breakdown and went through therapy and then throughout therapy again the second time, what I'll say around both of those was I healed relationships without having conversations with those relationships. I did have some rela conversations, but didn't have the full, I didn't have to go and have it out with somebody. By learning about how I was reacting and responding to other people's behaviours and the things that had happened in their life, I had more compassion for myself, which in turn gives you more compassion for them. And I was able and have been able to put in two different scenarios now to heal those relationships for me, and there's a difference there. Are those relationships perfect now? No, but am I at peace? Yes, and if they're not at peace, that's for them to go and do the work to come to peace with those things, which might in turn lead to beautiful conversations. But yeah, I am at peace now because I did the work and I have so much love and compassion for myself but also for them.

SPEAKER_01 30:46

Yeah, one of the things I'm probably sound a bit too deep. No, I think it's good because I think it's good to have these conversations. I think people think that you have to sit in a room with them and have these, have it out with a family counsellor or something, or you have to. I think it's more important to do the work on yourself and then decide whether those actually those conversations are important anymore. Because nine times out of ten, you've got what you needed from healing that, and you don't need to have those conversations because you realise that actually they're probably going to fall on deaf ears anyway, and that's gonna make you feel worse, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 31:20

And I'll quote Naomi and Martin again, who were the relationship coaches through them on divorce. They don't come to help you fix your relationship together. The first thing they do is let's work on the relationship with yourself. When you start understanding yourself and why you are the way you are with people, why you're a people pleaser, why you don't tell people how you're really feeling, why you think you're protecting people, when really you're not, you're just not speaking your truth. And then you start to realise your behaviours and how you are and why you're that way, you then start to understand the dynamic. And you go, okay, if I worked on this, that might help them when I work on that, or vice versa, what have you. But it's not about the other person, it's about you and working on you and who you are and what's going to make you happy.

SPEAKER_02 32:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:07

And if the other person comes on that journey with you, whether that be a parent or a loved one or not, it's all part of it. And if they come on the journey, amazing, brilliant, and if they don't, amazing, brilliant, because you will find peace with yourself and you'll find happiness.

SPEAKER_01 32:19

I love that they do the I love that they do the coaching individually and that they won't do it unless they do that. Because I think that is so important. And me just having my own counselling, my own healing, doing my own healing. This was before my dad died. I've been able to understand myself, which in turn, like I think you've just said, made me understand other people better. So in my relationship with my husband, we've been together a long time, 20 maybe 21 years this year, something like that. But we came into that as with our own baggage, even if we didn't recognise it at that time, and I set expectations on him to want to do what I wanted to do. Why doesn't he want to do what I'm why doesn't he always want to come on Family Holiday? Why doesn't he always want to come and see my family? Why doesn't he want to come and do this? And I realize how much I put on him to and expectations I had on him to be somewhere, and it didn't come across as we want you there, it came across as you have to be there. So my ability to stand back and say, I'm gonna go and take the kids to my mum's, if you would like to come, that's fine. But if you want the afternoon, then you take the afternoon.

SPEAKER_00 33:31

God, that he's from a big family as well, so he probably loves the idea of having some time out.

SPEAKER_01 33:36

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And and you know what, nine times out of ten he does come now, but he's given that option, and I just think that's just a very small example of how your own healing can help with your relationships with others and understanding other people. Absolutely caps are bloody lootly. One of the things that I think I didn't I haven't ever probably mentioned out loud, but you you probably know about it, I'm sure you do. But the week before my dad died, I actually sent him a letter and and it said that I wanted to remove myself slightly from the relationship that we had because I didn't feel like he was listening to me, and it was like a really you really annoyed me. I don't think you're stepping up properly, so I'm gonna take a step back. And then obviously, he we didn't get time to talk about that letter. He emailed me back with an email, he emailed me back and said, I'm really sad about this, and I'd like to talk about it, and I said that's fine, but by the time we didn't get around to talking about it because he died, and so one of the things I would say is that what some of my healing has given me so much compassion for myself, not one time, okay, maybe once, maybe one time I went, Oh god, that letter, and now he's not here, and that was why he did it. But then my sister and my mum were like, No, Laura, that's nothing to do with it, and you can't even go then. I was like, You're right, and so since then I've not blamed myself for that letter, I've said what I needed to say, other people's actions. I can't control that. How other people respond to those things? I can't control that. Did it impact the situation? Possibly, but there was multiple factors in the whole scenario. And I was not really blamed with that. Yeah, exactly. No, and then that's one thing that I think a lot of people do is that they feel that guilt, maybe they didn't have that conversation, or maybe they said too much, or maybe they didn't say something, or they went to bed on an argument, all these things. You've just got to do what you've got to do. You've just got as long as you come in with a kind heart and you say things with compassion, you've just got to say what how you're feeling. Because a lot of us don't say enough, I don't think. Don't stick up for ourselves, don't put our own feelings first.

SPEAKER_00 35:47

And actually, from another way of looking at it, you had that honest and open conversation with him on left on email. I know you hadn't actually spoke, but you that was the relationship you had, you were able to do that, and I think that's something to hold on to.

SPEAKER_01 36:04

Yeah, we had a good relationship when he was here, and we were able to talk about things, and he did a lust all searching. His stroke really changed him as a person, and we all said that he wasn't the same person after his stroke, and he apologised to people after 30 years, and yeah, it I think it's it was nice that we had that open relationship. He was a an a different person, and I felt like I could talk to him. Whereas when he lived in America, I did not feel like I could have those conversations because he wasn't listening, and I felt like he did listen a little bit more when he was here. But yeah, I think it's been a very powerful episode, and who knows that's what would have come from the healing light.

SPEAKER_00 36:41

I think this is definitely the last episode. I'm sure this is episode nine. I'm I'm alright. What's gone out today?

SPEAKER_01 36:49

No, I'm gonna do it. Sorry. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 36:52

Sorry. So at the very beginning, when you pulled a card, I also pulled a card from my Sea Soul Journey Oracle cards. I'm gonna pull another one, but the one that I pulled from the Sea Soul Journeys Oracle cards was fluid. And what I loved is it was like, what should we do with this podcast? And the fluid card came out. So we had absolutely no idea what we were talking about today. But I actually think it's been a beautiful episode. We've really stepped into the discussions around grief and loss in quite a lovely way. And laughter, and laughter, bit of laughter, and I've cried nearly a few times as always, but I think it'd be really nice to end this season on a final card. And this is from the Yasmin Boland immunology cards from her oracle message immunology messages. Let's get a message from the moon. Okay. Nice. So the focus cards come out. So I intuitionly, intuitive, I'm just gonna say that as we come to the end of this season, we really do hope that it has given you time and it's given you space, it's given you thoughts, it's given you inspiration, it's given you some connection to focus on you and to focus on your own healing, your own life, your own loss, and your own laughter. And yeah, that's I think a really lovely way. Lovely card focus. Don't focus on you for a bit. Sometimes when you focus on you, everything comes back into the light comes back in, doesn't it? Um the actual under focus it says moon beams. But it's about light as well. Nice. I don't know, yeah. Just go and light up your own life, focus on you, and just see what magic can happen when you do that.

SPEAKER_01 38:47

Beautiful. Thank you very much. It's been a wonderful season, and we'll see you again in the autumn. Well, summer.

SPEAKER_00 38:56

We might be coming back with a bonus season for the summer, but just watch this space.

SPEAKER_01 39:00

Yeah, we'll see. See you soon. Love you lads. Bye. Thank you.