Introduction – Understanding The Impact Of Losing Your Mother – A Gentle Healing Journey
Going into our pain is one of the most confronting things that we will ever do. Most often we run from our feelings, but in the next few days or months, you will stop running.
This journey you are about to embark on will give you so much awareness of the pain living inside you. A lot of the exercises are reflective, which means you can go back and reflect on feelings, memories, events or whatever is coming up for you. It will be painful, but it will be worth it.
Losing our mother is devastating, and I often say that “there are no words”. It’s like there is a tornado of emotions swirling inside you and the pain is unbearable.
The pain of losing my mother changed me in so many ways. I am not the same person anymore and I am sure some of you feel exactly the same way. The agonising reality of living without her haunts you on a daily basis and you wonder how does life go on when your mother is no longer in it?
This is why I put together “Understanding the impact of losing your mother – A GENTLE HEALING JOURNEY“. It was an opportunity to bring some awareness to our pain. To open up our mind and our heart. To give our body a voice. To seek insight into what is happening inside us and to embrace our pain, instead of trying to push it away.
We will all experience pain in our life, but grief is a different type of pain. It’s long lasting, actually it lasts forever. It doesn’t discriminate. We will all experience grief at some point in our lives. Grief is a potent pain and when we feel it fully, can be life changing. It opens our heart and somehow it makes us more compassionate and empathic. It teaches us about love. I never thought that I could love so deeply, until I lost my mother.
The Healing Journey will be hard for some of you, without a doubt, but when you begin to gain awareness of how grief is impacting you, it will be transformative. You will get to make some new choices. They may be really tiny choices, as simple as “I will rest more often when my body is exhausted from grieving”.
The healing journey is not designed to take away your pain, but to give you some insight into your inner world and to be a witness to your pain. When we see and feel the pain and acknowledge its existence, it opens us up to a deeper level of awareness. It gives us clarity. Once we gain the awareness, we can’t go back.
I’ve been on a pretty intense grief journey. My whole world fell apart when mum died and I didn’t want to live any longer. It was so painful living without her, I just couldn’t do it anymore, actually, I didn’t want to do it anymore. It wasn’t until I started going within that I became aware of the pain of losing my mother and all the unresolved pain living inside me. It was only then, that I wanted to live again. I still miss my mum with every part of my being, but I want to live again. I want to live for me, but mostly, I want to live for her.
Our mother was our first love. From the time of conception, she nurtured us in her womb. After many months in her precious womb, she births us.
She became our caregiver and took us under her wing. She shared a love with us that was so unique and beautiful. Most of us may not have memories of our mother holding us in her arms and looking down upon us with so much love in her eyes. We may not remember all of her kisses and hugs and the enormity of her love for us, but somewhere in our body, we remember. We bonded with her over the years. We built a life together that was filled with many ups and downs, but no matter what happened between us, we never stopped loving her.
Then that dreaded day comes along and you lose her. For some of us we lose our mother very suddenly, then there are those of us that watched our mother die from a long-standing illness, such as cancer. Losing a mother can be one of our most devastating life experiences. That inner pain that rips our life apart changes everything. It hurts on so many levels. The body is so exhausted, the heart feels like it is broken into millions of pieces, you cry a river of tears, the emptiness is overwhelming and deep inside you is a lonely feeling that you have never felt before. You feel lost without her and you have no idea how you are going to survive the rest of your life living without her.
The sadness that lives inside you is crippling some days.
Mother’s Day, birthdays, Christmas, special anniversaries come and go and the pain is still living inside you.
Some days are better than others. The unbearable days are just that, unbearable and on the other days, we put one foot in front of the other and take baby steps.
I’ve been grieving the loss of my mother just over 5 years now and not a lot has changed for me. I still feel the pain living inside me.
It’s like there are two life paths that coexist alongside one another. The first one is my “grief path” and the second one is my “ordinary life path”. On my grief path, I get to feel, witness and experience my grief and on my ordinary life path I live each day as an ordinary person doing things like going to work, spending time with family and friends, cooking, cleaning etc.
Each path is just as important as the other and I acknowledge them both by honouring whatever shows up on a daily basis.
The healing journey was inspired to help others go within and understand their grief journey more deeply. When we lose someone we love, there is so much uncertainty and the overwhelming feelings of grief can take a toll.
The healing journey has a strong therapeutic foundation and will help you understand and express your grief safely as you connect more deeply to the parts of you that are struggling. It will also introduce you to self-care and self-soothing exercises to help you take care of yourself whilst you are in pain. The journey will be unique and reflective and create some well-deserved insight and healing. My love and thoughts are with you on this journey.
You deserve to understand your pain more deeply and to be a witness to the parts of you that you push away.
We can’t heal, what we can’t feel!
Remember to Take Care of Yourself: If at any time during the next few days or months that it all feels too much for you, then give yourself a break. Just stop! Doing inner work can be very exhausting. You know yourself better than anyone, so listen to what you need. Remember, going within is a painful process, but it will be worth it.
“Take care of you, OK!”
Read through each exercise in full before starting
Join Our Facebook Closed Group “Understanding the impact of losing your mother – a gentle healing journey”. If you have any questions or need support or just want to debrief then join our group. This group is only for people who are doing the healing journey.
Your Journal
You Will Need to purchase your own journal.
When purchasing your journal make sure you really connect with it. It might be the colour of the journal, the picture on the cover, it might be that you buy a plain journal and cover it yourself. I know this might sound really strange, but you are about to embark on a healing journey that will be life changing and create so much awareness about the grief living inside you.
I think the journal you choose needs to evoke feelings of healing. Trust me, you will know when you have chosen the right journal.
Before you start the healing journey, maybe you could sit with your journal in a brief 10-15 minute meditation. Close your eyes and hold the journal in your hands, connecting with the energy of healing. Now set an intention that whatever is written in your journal will come from a space of love and healing and connect you more deeply to your mother and to your grief.
Remember this is a forever journal…….
Finding You Again
Grieving changes us in a way that we can’t go back to being the same person we were before our loved one died. If you truly connect to this idea, you will realise that deep inside you something is different. First and foremost, you are trying to live your life without your loved one and this alone brings up so many challenges. You have a multitude of feelings inside you that express a longing for normality because everything on the inside feels like it’s out of control. It’s almost like you are being pushed and pulled in a stream of water where the rapids are turbulent and you can’t seem to free yourself. In and amongst all of the pushing and pulling there are many parts of you that are authentic, genuine and ready to surface, but you can’t see them through the turbulence of grief.
Deep inside us is an authentic being who has so many qualities that have been suppressed as a result of childhood wounds and of course our grief. I know for me personally, my grief took me down the darkest path in life, but then it led me to the light where I got to witness parts of me that I have supressed for years.
I am hoping that the healing journey will ignite the authentic you, the one that knows he/she is in pain but also knows that he/she is a beautiful soul with loving qualities. When we begin to recognise our grief is a journey with no destination and that each day we carry our grief as well as our beautiful authentic self, we understand that we are a whole person and that grief doesn’t have to separate us from life. We need to feel it and then let it teach us the importance of hope, love and loss.
I hope the healing journey allows you to engage in the search of wholeness and recognise some of the following within you:
- Your creativity
- Your ability to connect with yourself and others who are in pain
- To be able to communicate your feelings and honour them
- To nurture your physical wellbeing
- To encourage self-healing
- To develop emotional maturity as you get to know your feelings
- Learn to be more mindful and be in the here and now
- To be tolerant and patient with yourself during your grief journey
- To acknowledge and honour your authenticity
- To be empathic towards yourself and others
- To nurture your emotional, mental and psychological wellbeing
- To love yourself, even when things feel like they are falling apart
Throughout this healing journey, I will give reference to the loss of my mother. I share some personal stories and examples of feelings and situations with the intention of normalising grief.
