Fast Forwarding Grief - Don't Do It
One of the most profound lessons I've learned to date is to allow myself to grieve.
For most of my adult life, I felt myself getting depressed and would push it aside and make myself very busy. I was working a full-time job managing people, co-directing a dance company, and had an active social life. Why wasn't I happy then? In fact, why wasn't I full of bliss from the fullness of being so active?
I wasn't allowing myself to feel. I was on autopilot and pushing through the pain. I didn't even know it, but I was a mess.
Then, even when I was so depressed that I quit the job that I had anticipated retiring at, I made the leap to follow my dream and immerse myself in the Martha Beck Life Coach training. About half-way through this training, I realized that I never allowed myself to feel and process the sadness that I felt from giving up my "old way" of life.
Part of my training was to coach and be coached by my fellow cadets. It was quite the piece of wisdom to learn through being coached by my fellow cadet that I could give myself the same space that I would suggest to my clients. You see, I was coaching my clients to fully process their own emotions and feel the connection with their body, yet I was still trying to >> fast forward >>, or worse yet, completely skip over my emotional pain and grief. I had a load of stuff that I was dealing with emotionally and I fell back on an old pattern of putting my rosy colored glasses on and applying the piece of knowledge that my situation was just my reality. So, I should just absorb this new reality and move on. Right?
Wrong. This was an old ineffective patter of escapism that I relied on most of my life...Why fight it and feel it when it's easier to skip past it?
Yes, I was transforming and going through a death of my old self to rebirth the new self. I was smack dab in the middle of square one of this change cycle. Skipping this process is like missing all the goodness too.
Fast forwarding, or in my case, completely skipping over my pain and grief was creating all sorts of blockages all over my life. I'm not saying to get stuck in the sadness. I'm suggesting that we allow ourselves to FEEL our emotions and all the physical sensations that accompany them.
Grief isn't just for people or pets that die.
Grieving is a gift that we can choose whenever we
lose an old way of being.
Grief is where the wisdom lies.
By giving yourself space and time, you release so much more than you could possibly have imagined.
And this, my friends, is how you start to let the light back into your life.
