Life or death, it all comes down to us.

I am back at my desk after some time off.
My dad recently passed away into the next realm, and my deep core told me that I needed the time to process my life with him and how his life ended.
The tears have been plenty and the emotions have been all over the map. My mom passed almost 25 years ago and that experience had me believing that I could never hurt like that again and that I was then seasoned for any grief that would come my way in the coming years. I was wrong.
We are never seasoned. We are never prepared, even for a death that we hope for to end our loved one’s suffering. We are never ready to say goodbye to someone who has been so incredibly important to us.
This is an emotional shit-kicking. Loss and grief are just two of the experiences that are part of our human existence and can make or break us.
This is a crossroad. It’s a place where, in our overwhelm of feelings and realities, we can stop and decide which direction to go in.
Many people jump into projects, work, or even relationships to distract them from the pain they are feeling. For us women, our desire to support our family is an obvious place to get lost in.
But that just doesn’t work, those feelings and realities  at some point need to be faced for us to heal. When my mom passed, I jumped right into a large consulting project. The project itself had a great result, but the process was disjointed and not my best work. It wasn’t until I realized what I had been avoiding that I was able to stop the train and get off.
In my coaching practice and in this blog, I like to teach women to look inside themselves to determine what they need from any given situation, an emotional shit kicking or your happy place, and act on it. A challenge will be clearer to manage, a happy event will be even happier.
That message is screaming at me loud and clear right now. And it’s telling me how to process toward my own healing.
Go slowly and be guided by your needs, even it it means being an emotional idiot with anyone or anywhere.
Spend time with your feelings. Look for places where they lead you. So many revelations and understandings come from becoming intimate with your feelings.
Share your feelings with friends and family, those who share your pain and love you.
Do the things that you love to do and say a clear no to those don’t.
Take time out to rest and rebuild that which has been decimated by losing someone who helped you build it to begin with. That may mean saying no to things you may really love to do.
Recognize that guilt for not being on your game is going to show up. Also recognize that you are doing nothing wrong by caring for yourself.
Connect with your own version of spirit…God, Goddesses, the Universe or wherever you get your spiritual comfort from. Let the spirit and your beliefs help you understand your loss and your ability to heal.
When I look at that list coming from my deep core, I see clearly that it’s no different from how we can heal from any emotional shit kicking.
And so it comes around.
I know that there are lessons here to support me with losing my dad. One of them is that I am on this earth to reach out, hold the hand of those in pain and support them through their own emotional shit kickings.
Thanks Dad, I’m right on track.