Ep #194: Grief Mirrors the Capacity to Love

 

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Full Episode Transcript:

#194: Grief Mirrors the Capacity to Love

Welcome to More Than Mindset, the only podcast that bridges the gap between spirituality and success. Go beyond the mind with clarity and confidence Coach, Kim Guillory, and learn how to integrate your passion to serve with your skills and experience to create a business you love. Let’s get started.

Hey, my friends and welcome back to the show. It is a beautiful day out here in Louisiana. It’s cool and warm and breezy, and there are leaves on the ground, so that means fall has arrived. My guys are in camouflage, and they have been off hunting on the weekends. It’s one of my favorite times of the year.

This is when I met my husband, so I still get the butterflies in my belly whenever I see the camouflage and the four-wheelers cranked and heading out the driveway. It’s just a very warm and yummy feeling. And it’s also the time for soups and grounding foods. So, think about it, like root vegetables, and we move away from the cold and the green juices, and we tap into warm and cozy, right? Because we want to be grounded in our body. Isn’t it amazing how the seasons are?

So, I am talking about something that’s a little heavy today, something that’s been on my heart I’ve been giving a lot of consideration to, and that is grief. And it’s like, what is grief? How do we process grief? And where does it come from? What do we do with it?

So, I’ll just read you the definition, the meaning of grief. It’s a strong, sometimes overwhelming emotion for people, regardless of whether their sadness stems from loss of a loved one or from a terminal diagnosis that maybe they or someone else they love has.

I’m going to take grief a little bit further than this because grief for me and my experience and my lifetime, which has lots of experiences… grief is the loss of an idea of something that you imagined or hoped for. Grief of something that was… maybe you used to be able to walk, but you lost that capability. Grieving a dream that you had, the loss of the possibility of maybe going into business or a marriage working out, or the hopes that you had for your children. So, it is something that we imagine that we feel and experience in the mind. We have this vision of what was or what was going to be, and then it gets shattered. And then we live with the disappointment and the sadness. And it’s an emotion. It’s a heaviness, and you often feel it in the chest, in the lungs. That’s where grief is held and processed or unprocessed. So, I notice when I work with clients who have unprocessed grief, that they will often get conditions of the lungs.

And so, we treat this in dōTERRA®. I usually recommend Deep Blue and Breathe oil because it addresses those emotions. And I’ll also notice that when I am doing processing with a client, and we are in session, and we move beyond some old grief, they always cough. Always! Never, never fails. And so, when we’re processing these deep, unresolved traumas that are actually lying dormant in the body—they still exist. Feelings buried alive never die. They’re still there. They just show up in different ways. And grief very often, very often, is a heaviness on the chest and in the lungs, and it is a heaviness in the body.

And so, think about this. If ever you’ve lost a loved one and you are coming to grips or coming to terms with those emotions, and you’re kind of in this little cocoon or cave of figuring out, because it’s very disorienting because you’re not sure, like, what is this? It’s so surreal. And the rest of the world are giggling and laughing and drinking and carrying on, maybe blowing the horn, doing cartwheels. It is offensive!

Offensive to the spirit, offensive to the body. Like it is just… I remember my dad, like the day of my dad’s funeral, and Facebook was just, like, cutting up or whatever the theme of the day was. I was so repulsed! Like, I was in so much heaviness and grief. And then I remember for 9-1-1, I had just opened the gym. I just opened the fitness part. And there was a couple of clients working out and we had a little TV on, and the 9-1-1 thing came on. Like breaking news. Oh my God. We were so heavy. Our spirits of souls, like our bodies, were so heavy you couldn’t exercise after that. I remember this intently because I had just invested what I thought was a lot of money.

I’d just invested about $65,000 in this equipment and suddenly members were not working out. Who wants to get on a treadmill? To get their heart rate up, to hop and skip around, to dance to music when they are grieving loss. It’s nearly impossible unless you are completely checked out and bypassing. And pretending like it doesn’t.

And I have seen this over and over and over because, guys, I’ve worked with thousands, thousands of clients over the years. Like I was a nail tech, a hairdresser, massage therapist, yoga, meditation, fitness, like all of the things, right? Health coach, life coach, I’ve heard all the stories and I’ve lived a lot of stories.

I have lost my mom, my dad, my grandparents, a brother, couple of very close friends, and my godchild, and my close friend’s children. So, really, really deep loss. Death. Loss by death. And it was so weird and so different and so surreal, and it was in my body. It was a sensation in my body. It was a heaviness that I really couldn’t move beyond. Now I’m a very deep-feeling person, so that could have something to do with it.

But this is what I noticed a few years ago. It’s been quite a while now. I was probably around forty and my best friend of seventeen years and I got into a… whatever you want to call it. And something happened that separated my family and my 17-year friendship.

And so, everything that meant anything to me was gone. And it was in my face. I couldn’t get away from it. I couldn’t ignore it. And it affected every part of my life. It affected my business; it affected my clients, my children, my grandchildren, my marriage, myself, everything. It affected everything. She was someone that I did absolutely everything with.

We talked several times a day. She was the closest thing that I ever knew as safety and security and a forever. And this event went on for about four years. It was very, very painful. And I’m going to tell you that the death of that friendship, the death of that relationship and that security and that life that I had, was as intense as losing my brother, my mother, my father, my friend.

It was as intense. That is grief. Grief is the loss of something that was. That affects you on an emotional level. And so, when someone talks about losing a baby, you know, a miscarriage. Like, they had a vision of this beautiful, amazing, perfect child and this life. And so, when they have the miscarriage, it is as intense as actually losing this.

So, I notice how we often like, “It’s not a big deal. It wasn’t this, anyway.” And we kind of, like, just kind of want to skim over it. But that is not true. That’s not legit. I lost a house to a fire. We had four children. No insurance. My husband had been through a divorce prior to that, so this was, like, everything that we had was in this house.

And I think we had about $3,000 to our, like everything. That was like retirement accounts at that point. And we had these four children, no home. Everything was destroyed. We had no money. We couldn’t find a house to live in, a rent house. We had to, like, my sister-in-law took us in her camper, which was a really tiny camper, and some of the kids slept on the floor in the patio, and like it was just very uncomfortable.

But that loss was one of the greatest losses of my life. Not because the house was amazing and not because of the lack of money. But because that house and that relationship represented everything I ever wanted. Because as a kid growing up, I always wanted a family, and I finally had a family. I finally had a family, and it didn’t last long.

It was within a year that I stood out in the front yard, and I watched this house, just up in flames, just burn, just lose everything. We threw the kids out of the window, so everyone was, was safe. It was like one o’clock in the morning. The ground left from beneath me. It was the weirdest thing. I just fell through the ground.

I… my… I just had no support, and it was so weird. And it didn’t make sense because it was… this house didn’t mean anything. I didn’t understand what was happening. And I was really young, so I was early twenties, and it took me on about ten years, it took me about ten years to recover from grieving that. The grief was: I finally got what I always wanted, and then it was gone.

It was gone. In my mind, because I had lost the foundation, I had lost the house; I had lost the grounding. And what was happening in—Everything changed. Our relationship changed. That grief was probably the most impactful grief of my life. So, maybe it wasn’t the most painful, but it was the most impactful.

And it’s not just these circumstances. I have lost clients to death and to them going somewhere else. And that felt the same. Because I get really attached, really emotionally attached. I am a very deep soul. I love people deeply. I dream deeply and I see a lot of potential, and I believe in that potential.

I’ve talked about this before, and the grief of failed friendships or changed environments and even social statuses hurt. They’re painful. Because as humans, we’re meant to attach. We really do connect and need connection. We need each other. We’re meant to support each other. And we don’t necessarily have the best communication skills to understand what each other is thinking and wanting and sees.

And we think the other things like us, and that creates a lot of loss. And I see this for my new business owners, new coaches, as well as those who’ve been in business for 15-20 years and it’s time to make a change so they’re now having to move their business online, or they’re having to advertise differently, or the laws change, or COVID happens, and all of their security is gone, and they experience grief.

And the reason I want to talk about this today is because we are on the other side of this grief. And we are seeing it show up in our bodies. I want you just to close your eyes and just think really quick. Just the last time you went to a grocery store, the last time you walked into a restaurant, what did you see?

Broken bodies, sad faces. Guys, we have not fully recovered from this grief. We have all faced mortality in one way or another. Recently, in the last couple of years, whether you lost someone or you thought about losing someone because this COVID thing was going to come and take lives, right? It was like huge.

It was. There was so much fear that came up, and insecurity that came up in our bodies, and unresolved grief that is still in our bodies. And you can see people carrying extra weight around. You can see the sadness. You can see the bags under their eyes. You can see the sadness around their mouth. It is really something that is not being addressed! And when you have the loss of a client or the loss of funding or whatever it is, that is stacking on top of this these past few years.

And so, to some people, it’s like, “it’s not a big deal. What’s the big deal that you had to blow out? What’s the big deal that you lost $200?” Or like in my case, I got like charged a lot of money. Over $200, I paid to the board of massage therapy because my license wasn’t visible in the place that it was supposed to be. And like, just some stupid stuff.

And it’s like, there was a time where that $200 would’ve knocked me down for a very long time, and I know some of you listening. That is a big deal. $200, $250, $300, $500. Losing that amount of money is a really, really big deal. I get it. I didn’t forget that. Just because I’m in a different monetary frame of mind now, don’t ever think that my body forgot it because it is still there. Losing the friendship is still there. We did make amends by the way and thank God we did because she lost a child after that, and I just can’t tell you… I just knew I needed to contact her, and we needed to make amends.

And then this happened not long after. And it is one of the things I am the most grateful for today, is that I learned how to communicate and humble myself and have conversations that were uncomfortable. In being transparent so that I can have rich, deep relationships. But it doesn’t stop other people from not wanting what you want and you losing those relationships.

And I am feeling that. I am feeling grief from lost relationships, that I had the best intention and we had misunderstanding and disconnection. I can speak about it because I’m sure they’re not listening to this because they’re not wishing me happy birthday or loving on me at all, which is another thing that we can talk about.

Its grief stuck on top of grief. Because of misinformation, because of lack of communication, and this is something that we don’t hear much about, so I just wanted to bring it to light. We will be talking about this in the More Than Mindset Facebook group. You are welcome to join us there. We have some challenges coming up.

We’re actually in a challenge right now as this is being broadcasted, is being recorded. And I’ve got some really cool stuff coming up for you that want to heal unresolved grief, want to heal chronic pain that is in your physical body, want to heal relationships and unresolved trauma. You want to heal your money stories; you want to heal scarcity (scarcity is the lack of. There’ll never be enough. I’ll never catch up). Do you want to heal those stories? We have a process to help you do that, and I want to invite you into our world and get some relief. Allow the grief to be processed.

But first, you have to recognize that it’s even happening, and I didn’t know it was happening. That is when my whole cycle of medication started is when I went to the doctor because I was having severe headaches. He put me on antidepressants. And I was going through this whole thing with losing the house and the family and all this stuff happening. And the way that I was affected by the antidepressants really took me into a very, very, very dark place for a really long time.

And I experienced a lot of the unresolved grief from childhood in that time period. It was the darkest… it was the darkest decade of my life. If you want to talk about dark night of the soul, that was the dark night of the soul. So, I honestly didn’t think I was coming out of it, and nor did I want to. And so, even that, even grieving life itself, like the disappointment, the disheartening of events that—I love humanity. I love people; I love that we’re different. I’m so disappointed that we can’t be honest about that. That we can’t share and express without being told off, put down, shut down, slammed, shunned, all of those things because where there is lack of expression, there is depression.

Lack of expression equals depression. And right now, the way that the world is and the way that social media is, you can’t express. You can’t express, right? And so, what follows is depression. And this grief of losing your voice, of losing your opinion, of losing your expression, losing who you are, and not being able to share that.

So, it’s kind of a big deal. All right, my friends, so, that’s what I wanted to talk about today is grief and how it affects all of us. And I want to give you a different spin on it. For those of you who are living in deep grief right now, it’s the capacity that you loved this person at or this thing or this dream that you were experiencing the capacity of the pain. I have a very close friend who, again, is not listening to this podcast. My best friend of 30-something years, and it has been over three years of a very intense grief. And it is so hard to witness to. It is really hard to witness to and to be a feeler, a deep feeler, and be in this experience and not be able to stop it.

And so, all I can say is the capacity to feel this grief… it mirrors the capacity to love so deeply. So, when we love deeply like I’m saying, I’m grieving some of these relationships. I’m grieving some dreams. It’s because I believed so deeply. And grief is just love that has nowhere else to go.

Because you still love these people. You still love this dream. You still… but it has no place to go. There’s no receiver. There’s no into it. Like, it’s like I have this deep love. I want to give it to you, and you’re not there. The relationship is not there, and I still love you. That’s grief. It’s an intense emotion that has nowhere to go. And it’s really hard to open yourself up to receive love again because you don’t trust love, because love hurts, and sometimes love is not enough.

That’s what so many of us are experiencing, and it’s really hard to express and it’s really hard to explain. So, I am hoping to open some hearts and some minds to just being more present with grief. The gift of grief. And allow love to knock on your heart and open your heart to receiving and to believing again.

To believing that it’s possible to believe in the dream, to believe in people. And it ain’t easy. And I have not mastered it. I am disheartened. I am sad. I am grieving. It’s hard. It’s hard. It’s hard not to throw in the towel. This is what I talked about last week. It’s hard not to bail because we really don’t want to feel these dark experiences, yet they’re there.

All right. I love you all and hope to see you around. If you have gotten something away from this and you think someone else could benefit, I ask you to please share it. And let them know that we have a free community that they can come into where we gather every week.

Thanks for listening to this episode of More Than Mindset.