Hurricane Florence, The Power of Grieving

As Ready for Florence as we can be…

I’ve spoken to several friends over the past few days who have called, concerned about us here in North and South Carolina. And the best way I’ve known to describe the experience is that it feels like one of those darkly comic scenes of a man standing in the middle of a road yelling “nooooooo!!!!!” with a steam roller coming towards him at 1 mph. There’s a big part of me that’s just like “hit us already!!!”

Anyway, here south of Charlotte, we’ve already had lots of wind and rain and it’s only the beginning. And while there are certainly a lot of hardships for a lot of people, there’s also a part of me that weirdly enjoys the excitement and opportunities this kind of thing creates to become a closer-knit community. I’ve lived in the south off and on my whole life, so hurricanes are not a new thing. And there has always been that feeling for me. You find yourself talking to strangers in the grocery store, at the gas station, and communicating with people online whom you wouldn’t have spoken to otherwise.

Of course, I don’t want to ignore the fact that a lot of people are going to experience what we think of as loss. And I’ve actually been thinking about grieving a lot lately. Some dear dear friends of mine just experienced what we all think of as a devastating loss recently. Their son transitioned at his own hands.

When we experience loss as spiritually aware people, we know on the one hand that it’s not really a loss. We know that that person is still very much present and available to us. And that they are Pure Positive Energy now. At the same time, it really doesn’t help to try to JUMP to living in that place right away or to try to push down all those feelings.

We talk a lot here at Living From Inspiration about FEEEEEELING your feelings. Grief is one of the feelings we can sometimes resist the most even though allowing yourself to fully feel it is one of the most healing things you can do. The key is to ALLOW yourself to feel that grief. Not to resist it. Put on a brave face if you need to around other people (or don’t), but make sure you give yourself the time to really feel those feelings. And you know what? It takes as long as it takes! My mother transitioned unexpectedly several years ago and I can say with complete understanding that it took me a good 3 years to move through it. Now…at that point I wasn’t really allowing myself to FEEEEEEEL the grief, so it could possibly have taken less time than that, but that’s not the point. It takes as long as it takes and that’s okay.

The things we find (well, really that find us) on the other side of grief are so beneficial and really just…beautiful. Peace. Understanding. Such an incredible love for the other person. For the situation. And for ourselves.

And many times once all those emotions have moved through and the energy has shifted, we actually end up freeing up parts of ourselves that may have been “stuck” before. It’s quite interesting that way!

So if you’re experiencing or have experienced something you would consider to be a “loss,” please soften around yourself and your feelings. Give yourself permission to feel everything you’re feeling. Be so so very kind to yourself. And know that you are being taken care of and soothed by Source/Universe/God.

Always.

I’ll let you know how it’s going here…we’re having some nice big wind gusts right now and I can still hear the cooing of a dove. Oh! And we have these crazy yellow butterflies that fly around our yard in wild patterns when there are no storms (we call them “drunk butterflies”) and yesterday those crazy suckers were trying to fly around in all the wind we had yesterday!