Episode 5: Grief and the Void

Episode 5 - Grief and the Void

Transcript

Welcome to the mystical alchemy podcast, where we voyage into all things woo spirituality and psychology to inspire action and growth. I am your host. Shandra Shultz, a spiritual midwife, alchemist, Mystic, shaman and best-selling author with over a decade in experience through a trauma informed lens, we will journey into self-discovery, healing our shadow self and reconnecting with our inner child by diving deeply into the parts of our soul that remain unseen, we'll shine a light to allow them to find their way home. Have you dealt with trauma, abuse, or addiction? Are you curious about the Woo, and are you searching for tools to live the life you've always desired? Then join me on an adventure, and let's dive in.

Well, Howdy, y'all, it's been a while since I have recorded a podcast. The last five or so months has been pretty challenging for me. I, like the whole world, has been going through the craziness and to protect my peace and to keep my sobriety, I found that I needed to step back from a lot of things due to what was going on in my personal life, what was going on in the global scale, politically. And now that I have started to come out of the proverbial darkness, if you will, because I realized this was a deep, dark night of the soul that was coming to a close, and as I find myself coming out of this darkness, which of course, coincided with coming out of winter and going into spring here in the northern hemisphere, I realized that I was starting to feel the energy of Creation show back up in my life. And the last couple of weeks, I've been adding in more of the tapping that I do Emotional Freedom Techniques, along with going through some other trainings in my life. And I realized that I was moving through energy faster and faster, and today is the 21st anniversary of my dad's passing. He died from cancer after a three-year battle, and that time is really where my intense addiction started. Before I was more running from the pain of being alone, being undiagnosed, neurodivergent, not realizing it, the pain of bullying from my classmates, which was intense and brutal. I was running from physical pain that was likely manifesting from the traumas that I had lived through up to that point. And yet, when I graduated high school and I went out into the real world, and I started meeting people who were partying on a deeper level, that's when things really started to fall apart, or I got off track, if you will. And around that same time is when my dad got diagnosed with cancer, and I feel like that was my first really big grief that I had felt as an adult, I had little griefs when I was a child, I had my grandfather pass away when I was six, that story was pretty amazing, but I didn't feel upset or angry or sad about losing my Grandfather at that point, because I had had an amazing out of body experience, etheric experience, and because of that, like I knew he was always with me, but when my dad died, we didn't have a great relationship. I had said lots of mean things over the years to him, even so far as to once or twice, possibly I can remember it right, telling him I hated him and I didn't understand him.

I didn't know him really, even like my dad was a long-haul truck driver, and for 14 years of my life, he did truck driving. And I think it was only four of those years was he actually a more local driver versus a long-haul driver. And so for the 10 years from the time I was like seven or eight until I was 17-18, my dad was over the road 330 days a year, and so I I didn't get to see him a lot, and I thought it was my fault that he did that, that he didn't want to be near me, that he couldn't stand me, that he had to run away from me and that he didn't love me. Those are all the stories that the little me created to make sense of why her dad wasn't there. I've since come to understand as an adult and know truly in my heart, especially in the last 21 years, and say I've been able to go through the healing journey that I have. My dad loved me fiercely, and if he had at the time, thought that there was any other way to support his family and not have to be away from us, he would have done it. But my dad had this deep desire inside of him to take care of his family, and he found the way to do it that worked for him, and so he wasn't there most of the time. However, he always made a point of coming home when I needed him most for things like graduation and prom. He was really great for me then. I got my heart broken on prom night, and he was there for me. Told me I deserved better and not to let myself take what someone else was saying or thinking or doing that was mean and not let it rip me off and keep me down, that I was stronger than that, and I did remember that for a long time. I didn't remember that he said a lot of that stuff, and how supportive he was. I was in a pageant, and he made sure to make it home, and he was in a tux, he'd make it home for Christmas. I remember one year that he almost didn't make it home, and I was so sad. And then he came climbing in through the window, and because he didn't want me to, I guess, hear the front door, I don't know. I can't remember. You know, memories of a little kid, right? And he put together my toy, and he put it under the Christmas tree for me, and I woke up, and my daddy was home.

I say all this to say that grief is a funny thing, because my dad was my first big brush with grief and not my first brush with death. However, it was heartbreaking to lose my dad. I remember how angry I was, though so angry I was I thought he wasn't trying hard enough to live and that he wasn't fighting for me and my mom. I've come to learn that wasn't true. I was angry because when he did do things, I didn't see it as him fighting and yet, because it was taking time away from us being able to spend time together, and it was kind of like a double-edged sword. And within, you know, three years of my dad passing, I lost several friends to horrific accidents, and the grief just kept compounding, and it felt like I couldn't catch my breath, and I couldn't, you know, find my footing. I kept running from it and kept hiding from it by doing the various drugs and impulsive behavior. And even when I got sober, I kind of ran from it. I didn't know how to deal with it. I was not ready to deal with it.

It wasn’t until I went through my brain injury and I started to uncover my life and have the awareness that I had started to have, and then take the healing spiritual journey, because I was in a completely different place, and pretty much really open to finding whatever could work for me, to try and bring me healing. And throughout all of that time, in the last 21 years and in the last 11 years, I have found myself often dealing with bouts of grief, and it wasn't until I came to understand grief is just love with nowhere to go, that I was able to start allowing myself to feel it, because I had an understanding that I had all this love inside me that just had no place to go, because the people didn't exist in the physical world anymore. And so I was able to do a lot of work around healing my grief when it came to my loved ones, and I wouldn't find myself so overwhelmed most of the time, because I knew how to feel it when it would show up and then let it go. I started to do somatic work, which is body work, to allow my body to process, in addition to doing energy work and all the healings, and I've just been dealing. Layer upon layer upon layer, just peeling them back. And this year, I kind of shut down this last year because of everything I was going through. I found myself completely heartbroken. The life that I had created after my accident didn't exist anymore, the relationship that I had thought was going to be forever was no longer together, and a lifetime's worth of grief that I had feeling over the life that I was no longer going to have boiled over and I felt like I was drowning. I was doing so much physical healing and so much body work on so many different modalities, and it got to a point where, you know, I had a calmness about what was going on in my life, and yet I was living in this, like intense darkness, and I didn't understand it. I was like, how? How am I going to move forward?

What I'd come to understand now, though, is that I was in phase of what they call the void. I had stripped away everything in my life that had previously been working, that was no longer working, and I found myself starting from scratch, all over again, and yet not because like I was the seed that had all the memories of all the things before. So I knew what not to do. So I got to start over as I started to realize that the life that I had created as a temporary stopgap for when I separated from my spouse was not a life that I actually wanted. I had realized that the field I was working in and the people that I had been around weren't who I wanted to be or where I wanted to be, and I didn't know what to do. I have been blessed that I was able to get through the last year, and particularly the last five or so months, and have this time to really figure out who and what I want to be and do. And the reality is, is that I get to live this life for me and only me, and I can't make anybody be who I want them to be. If I'm gonna love someone, it's gonna be because they are completely and authentically themselves, and we mesh that way, not because I enticed them into being someone that I had dreams of them being, because that's not fair. And you might wonder how this connects with grief again, like I said at the beginning, grief is just love with no place to go.

So I've been taking this time to really allow myself to grieve soul level, depth, grieving, because that's what that relationship was to me. That's what creating that stopgap was to try and support me during a time when I thought that I would eventually get back to where I had been, and my life would go back to where it was supposed to be, and I realized that that life didn't exist anymore. I don't even know if it actually ever really existed, or if it was just me romanticizing all of the things, and then coming to the realization that I had grown and they had grown, and that we were no longer the people that we met 11 years ago, and that all those memories, all the love, it just sits there, and it's always going to be there, and someday, maybe they won't be so intensely pain filled.

I've come to realize that with my dad being gone like I can cry because I miss him, because the little girl inside me misses her daddy. There's so many things, so many things that I just wish that I could talk to him about, and so sometimes I do, like today, I went on a walk with my dog, and as we were walking, I had this intense feeling come over me, this emotion of ‘I was so sad because I missed my dad, and I wanted to talk to him.’ So, you know what I did? I don't care anymore if people see me and think that I'm crazy talking to myself. I'm talking to spirits. Sure I talked to my inner child. Yeah, you know what? I'm healthier because of it. I'm not afraid of it anymore. And so I had a conversation with my dad. I had a conversation with the little me that was in there, that was sad that her daddy wasn't around. And it was beautiful, and I cried, and I let him know how much I miss him and how I wish life could have been different. How, if he had been around it, it would have been different, yeah, because it would have; I also wouldn't be the woman that I am right now, and I'm really grateful that I am her. And so I ended up tonight taking some time to go do something that my dad and I used to love doing. My dad is who instilled my love of movies and being a cinephile, we used to go and spend hours, and we would just sit next to each other in the dark watching a movie. And the funny thing is, I realize now that my dad was probably autistic too, just like me, and that we would enjoy being the only ones in the movie theater during the middle of the day. Sometimes he would home from being on the road, he would pull me out of school, and we would go to the movie theater, and we would just sit there and watch a movie or two, get some popcorn and candy and soda, and just sit in silence and enjoy the movie. I just… I had not remembered that until just now, so I decided to go to the movies. And I went, and I just watched Captain America, Brave New World. It was decent. And I just enjoyed being in the movie theater. And I had this sense, this like feeling that my dad was sitting right next to me, just watching the movie with me.

And so I knew I had to record this episode, because I was really being called to talk about grief. We talked about it in one of the support group meetings that I am a part of, that I'm going to be that I'm working on, I'm volunteering with NAMI. I’m going to be leading an art group. And we were, you know, talking about that when it came up in that another group, had mentioned needing a support group around grief. And so I mentioned it, and it's something that's going to be in the works. And it made me realize that so many people are feeling so many levels of grief right now. We have grief over lost loved ones who may or may not still be here on the physical realm. We have grief over family that is now divided because of the political climate that we're in, and even though we may be angry at them, we can hold more than one feeling at the same time, it is possible, and that's the beauty of learning about healing the inner child and living in the healthiest adult self, is that we can hold both and at the same time and know that that's they can both be true. It's not either/or, black and white. Doesn't have to be one or the other, like we can have love for our families, even though we know that they have made horrible choices that hurt us, and we can be angry and filled with rage and disappointment and all of the feelings, because they can all be there, and we can still feel grief too. We can still feel like betrayal, and all of the things, and still feel grief because we love them, even if they hurt us. There's a part of us that loves them, there's a part of us that understands and has compassion and empathy, and knows that they're wounded too. We may not understand that right away, may take some time of healing that, but we come to understand that they are wounded, and that does not mean that what they've done is okay, or they should be allowed back into our lives, or that we need to, you know, let go of what they did in a way that absolves them. That's not what that's about. It's about understanding that for them to be where they're at, they were taught to be that way, and that is challenging, because that can be painful, and they can be hurtful, and yet there's still someone that we as a little kid always wanted to love. Maybe we didn't, maybe we don't feel love for them right now, we did once, and it's not to dishonor that part of us that feels the love, and it's not to dishonor the part of us that feels the other feelings. It is to allow them to know that all can exist at once and do, and so I realized that there are so many levels of grief.

You know, there's grief of lost loved ones, there's grief of lost pets, there's grief of friendships, you know, family, of romantic partners. The spectrum for grief is vast, and a lot of people are feeling it right now, intensely so, and it deserves to be honored. Grief can feel intense, and grief can feel so challenging, and we aren't taught how to handle it or how to deal with it, and so a lot of times, we run from it, and by taking it step by step and just a little at a time, we can lean into that discomfort to learn how to actually embrace it eventually, so that we can move through it, and we can hold that love in our hearts while also allowing ourselves to let go of the pain of the loss. That's where I'm at is working through in a healthy way, letting go of the pain around the loss, so that I can just feel the love, and I can send that love out in the universe and the etheric, because understanding that we are all just energy, and energy cannot be created or destroyed. So just because our soul is no longer in a body that's corporeal doesn't mean that our soul doesn't still exist out there, and that, you know, our loved ones are not able to feel that love, even if they are still alive, if it's something where we've had a separation of connection with somebody and we aren't able to speak with them or see them, or hug them or anything, we can still send them love and wish them joy and peace and happiness. And that's really what I've been working on, is showing that for myself and for others.

And you know, after I was driving home from the movie tonight, I realized that I've been closing myself off because of the grief that I've felt. I've been afraid of letting people in because I've been afraid of getting hurt. I've been afraid that I'll have to feel what I've felt, and that it might break me again. And the thing is, when it broke me, it didn't break me like I couldn't be fixed. It broke me open so that I could become the woman that I am here to be, and it allowed for fresh growth. It allowed me to bury myself in the proverbial soil so that I could heal and then bloom all over again. It's a cycle, and if I don't take a risk, then I will never be able to grow anymore, and I won't have the rewards that come from taking the risk, and if the risk is putting myself out there and saying, I know I deserve love, and I know how to have healthy love, because I've taught myself, well, even if I do lose, “lose it”, I am so grateful for the experience of ever having it, because it teaches me about who I am, who I want to be, where I am going in life, it allows me to show someone else that I love them, and I am so grateful for it, and so I welcome grief. I see it as a teacher. Not only did I allow myself to feel it, I taught myself how to do so and learn from others by tapping into the parts of me that were hidden by going and shining a light on them. What I do as a coach, doing the inner child healing and the shadow work that I do, we take a lantern and we walk into the shadows, and we find those pieces and bring them home. I use tapping Emotional Freedom Techniques. Use Reiki. I use so many different modalities. I go and I get massage. I do the pelvic floor work that I'm doing, cupping, Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and cranial sacral. All of these have been really pivotal in my learning how to heal and deal with my grief and how to live life, doing meditation and mindfulness art, all of these things allowed me to take all of the things that were trapped inside of me and bring them out In safe ways.

I was afraid of sharing this because I was too raw while I was going through it, and I felt a level of heaviness and denseness and even shame, to some extent, by finding myself being so quiet and not sharing my journey, and I took the time as I was starting to feel those feelings, to allow myself to, like, get curious and ask why I felt the way I did. What was it teaching me? And what I realized is it was teaching me to let myself just be and that there was absolutely nothing wrong with just being, to slow down and heal. I actually ended up writing that as an affirmation on my whiteboard “I allow myself to slow down and heal with ease”. Sometimes you have to take a step back because you've burnt out, or you're doing too much, or life just gets heavy and has so many different challenges thrown your way, and you have to reevaluate. You get to reevaluate. That’s what I've been doing. Now, I have realized I went down a road that was paved, that wasn't for me, and I had to backtrack to get back to the starting point where I lost my way, and it's been beautiful. So now I've been able to allow myself to start dreaming and having vision and setting intentions and goals for myself, allow myself to manifest the life that I truly desire living, and I allowed myself to grieve the life that I thought that I wanted, and heal the shame when I realized that that wasn't a life I wanted anymore, and that I'm unwilling to play small. I'm unwilling to be quiet and silence myself, and to not shine as brightly as I meant to shine, I finally allowed myself to come back home, to become centered and start sourcing from myself, versus looking outside of me and sourcing from outside of me. And so from this space, I get to allow myself to feel free, and I've set boundaries, and I'm holding those boundaries, and I'm so proud of myself for that, because you know when you realize that you didn't know what boundaries were, and you didn't have good boundaries, and you were letting people walk all over you, and you've been able to accept your part in things, That's a huge growth opportunity and moment like when I stopped being the victim and I accepted what my part was and how I allowed certain things. It's not a shame moment at that point; it was more of a radical acceptance of, “hey, I had a part in this too”, and now I get to choose what that part's going to be, and it's going to be different.

Yeah, it's going to be different because I'm different, and I love who I am and I love who I've become. It's really beautiful to see the woman that I am now, and to know that the younger me would have looked up to me and been so proud of me and excited to meet me and to know me and to follow me and to see the adventures that are just getting started. Yeah, it's a beautiful place to be. I know that grief is something that a lot of us are feeling, as I mentioned before, and so I will be working on a workshop around grief and how to allow ourselves to lean into it and feel it in small, safe ways, so that we don't feel overwhelmed and we can break through the barriers that might have held us back from living the life that we truly desire. So look forward to that and be kind to yourself. We're all going through it right now, and we're going to get through it, and it will be so much more beautiful on the other side when we do because we were gentle with ourselves.

I love you. Spirit loves you, and until next time, blessed be.

Thank you for joining me this week. to view the complete show notes and any links mentioned in today's episode, visit mysticalalchemypodcast.com. You can download your chakra clearing meditation for free at www.Igotthewoo.com/meditation or find a link in the show notes. Oh, and before you go, please make sure you subscribe to the podcast so you never miss out on an episode of diving deeply into our shadow self. You can subscribe right now in the app you're listening on, or check out the sign-up link in the show notes. Thank you again for joining me on this episode of Mystical Alchemy™. I'm Shandra Shultz, sending you blessings of light and love until next time.

Transcribed by https://otter