Profound Faith in Life After Life

During this month of blog posts, I’ve shared with you some parts of my story and how I dealt with the pain of losing a loved one. To close out the month, I’d like to end with this final excerpt from my new book, Walking in Grace with Grief Meditations for Healing After Loss.

Faith: Inner Knowingness

Talking with Rick, being surrounded by magic and miracles, gave me a profound sense of peace. And with that peace came a deepening of my faith and an unshakeable inner knowingness of life after life. Here was proof that we live on as Spirit after we leave this earth. While spiritually I soared with Rick, however, my body was still grieving a mother’s loss.

I felt the searing pain mostly in my womb and in my heart. Some days I thought that my heart was actually breaking open and spilling its contents onto the floor. I felt a gaping hole in the back, lower-left area of my chest that I came to describe as “Rick’s Space.” There was also deep, burning pain in my lower abdomen, and I often doubled over in a cramping agony reminiscent of the last throes of childbirth. The pain was particularly noticeable when I allowed myself to descend into the “what ifs” and “if he’d only lived” stories. That’s when I experienced a sorrow that was full of self-pity, agony, and despair. After a bout of crying from this state of mind, I didn’t feel any better. There was no sense of relief. If anything, a cloud of depression was ready to march in and take over. I could just allow the cloud to engulf me, or I could fight it off. It was my choice. It’s always my choice in how I choose to react.

So I fought. I held those stories at bay and lived in the present moment. Every time my thoughts wandered to the what-if-Rick-had-lived stories, I pulled myself back. I literally would not allow myself to experience those thoughts. I chose to say to myself, “Forget that—Rick’s not here, and if you think of what could have been, you’ll feel pain. Choose another thought.” And I would. I would force myself to think of something else—to remember a time from the past when he made me laugh, or to remember his voice or his smell. Anything but a what-if-he’d-lived story. This took energy and effort, but I really think it made the difference in how I healed. I shifted the thought and experienced my sorrow in a different vibration, if that makes any sense. It was a higher, cleaner vibration—a healing vibration full of love and mercy. This vibration felt full of acceptance, kindness, and gentleness. I knew that if I could stay in this vibration—if I could surround myself with thoughts and feelings that resonated there—I could heal from this deep wound. I had energy tools to help me stay in this vibration. One of my favorite tools to stay out of the story of “what-if” is Blowing Up a Rose.

Healing Meditation: Blowing Up a Rose

1. Close your eyes and take some deep, cleansing breaths. On the inhale, bring all of your awareness into your body. On the exhale, ground to the earth. Inhale and center, exhale and ground. Breathe deeply as you focus on the present moment, right here, right now. Leave all your to-do list thoughts behind. Allow yourself to feel at peace.
2. Now think of a story that is no longer true for you. Perhaps you’ll think about the story of how your child will marry and have children. Maybe you have told yourself stories of a retirement planned with your life partner. You can acknowledge that the story has always been that, just a story. It was your fantasy about what you wanted to happen.
3. As you continue to think about the story of what might have been, and now will no longer be, imagine the image of a rose appearing in front of your closed eyes. The rose can be any color, any shape, and any size. In this rose is a giant magnet that is pointing back to you.
4. Ask the magnet in the rose to draw your story to it. Watch as each piece of your story leaves your body and moves into the rose. Watch the streams of color as they leave your heart, your throat, and your mind and move into the petals. Watch the rose grow bigger and bigger as the story takes up residence in the flower.
5. Feel the emotions that you’ve attached to this story leave your body and flow into the rose. Allow self-pity to leave. Allow the deep emotional pain of a story that won’t come true to leave your body and flow into the rose. Feel the sadness, the deep sorrow of loss, without the despair and hopelessness.
6. When you’ve collected as much of that old story as you can, then blow up that rose. Watch it disintegrate and feel the story disintegrate too.
7. Before you come out of meditation, fill your mind with thoughts of peace, tranquility, and serenity. Intend for those energies to surround you for the rest of the day.

Defusing the power of the story allows you to return to the present, the now, the current situation without the baggage of what could have been, should have been, or wasn’t meant to be. Releasing my old stories allowed me to look at Rick’s death from a new perspective. It was not about what could have been. It’s about what is—right here, right now. I still felt the pain, but it was a pain of missing Rick right here, right now. It was not about all the future things that would not be.

Blow up the lies, the wishes, the hopes, the pictures of what life was supposed to be. All you have is now, this moment in time.

Thank you for sharing this month with me. If this post resonated with you and you would like to read more, Walking in Grace with Grief Meditations for Healing After Loss is available on Amazon or at your local bookstore.  From my heart to yours.