jaci@hygieialife.co.uk

jaci@hygieialife.co.uk

Tag: grief

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Rediscovering Personal Power: Navigating Life’s Challenges and Finding Meaning

Introduction:

Life often presents us with significant events that disrupt our path, leaving us in a space between worlds. That middle place where you embrace your grief and are trying to find a “new normal” – but before we realise that it’s in this transformative process that we gain a deeper understanding of ourselves.

The middle place helps us discover what truly supports us during difficult times, and shows us how to embrace the freedom to live authentically. These moments force us to pause, reevaluate, and rebuild our lives from the ground up. In this blog, we will explore the themes of fear, happiness, and meaning as we navigate the journey of self-discovery and personal empowerment.

 

Section 1: Embracing Fear and Seeking Meaning

During times of transition, fear often becomes a formidable challenge that demands our attention. Embracing fear with courage is essential, for it is through boldness that we conquer its grip. As renowned psychologist C.G. Jung aptly puts it, “Only boldness can deliver from fear.” By taking risks and embracing the unknown, we breathe life into the very essence of our existence. Without such audacity, life becomes stagnant, devoid of colour and vibrancy.

In the midst of this transformative process, I stumbled upon Dr. James Hollis’ book, “Living Between Worlds.” Although written prior to the pandemic, its timely publication during those transformative times adds a layer of synchronicity. Dr. Hollis explores the space between worlds, guiding us in rebuilding our lives after experiencing profound shifts. It is through this exploration that we begin to uncover our authentic selves and identify the sources of support that will accompany us on this journey. Dr. Hollis reminds us that true happiness is fleeting; what truly matters is infusing our lives with meaning.

 

Section 2: The Science of Motivation and Dopamine

Have you ever found yourself engrossed in a repetitive and unexciting task that initially seemed very tedious and unrewarding, only to realize that you derive satisfaction from the act of doing it well? Neuroscience sheds light on this phenomenon. The brain’s reward system, specifically the release of dopamine, plays a significant role in our motivation. Even in situations where the end result may not bring immediate joy, the act of engaging in the task itself can generate a sense of fulfilment.

Additionally, dopamine strengthens neural connections related to rewarding experiences, aiding in learning and memory formation. Understanding dopamine’s role can help us cultivate intrinsic motivation and create a positive environment to enhance our motivation and overall well-being.

As someone who trained in Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) early in my career, I have intermittently followed scientific advancements in the field. Recently, I came across a Ted talk video called “Brain Hack: 6 Secrets to Learning Faster, Backed by Neuroscience ,”.  It’s interesting to understand the most effective ways to learn and why.  We’re better motivated to learn as small children because we need survival and social skills while we’re vulnerable and dependent on adults.  We lose this imperative as we get older, so these hacks are good.  The Ted talk also echoed the growing research I’d seen on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and the impact of those on learning and memory.

In a related podcast titled “NEUROSCIENTIST – You’ll Never Lack Motivation Again” I discovered why life really is as hard as we think it is.   Not that life is meant to be punishing: this is just the physics of life.  What we learn from the neuroscience is that that by consciously transforming effort into an enjoyable experience, we gain greater control over our lives. These insights reminded me of the principles of the Law of Attraction, where envisioning and embodying our desires in vivid detail sets the stage for their manifestation. Although it may initially feel like self-deception, it is essential to understand our limits and allow the process to unfold naturally. Trust in the process is a fundamental aspect of attracting what we desire.

 

Conclusion:

In the midst of life-altering events, we find ourselves standing at the intersection of fear, happiness, and meaning. By embracing fear with courage, we unlock the potential for growth and transformation. Dr. James Hollis’ work guides us through the process of rebuilding our lives, discovering our authentic selves, and suggests how we may infuse our existence with meaning. Neuroscience provides valuable insights into motivation, highlighting the role of effort and dopamine in creating fulfilling experiences. As we navigate this journey, we must trust in the process and tap into our innate personal power. Remember, this is your road to traverse, and only you can.

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National Grief Awareness Week – 2-8 December 2022

I wouldn’t have thought grief needed an awareness raising week, at all, after all, it’s part of life, right?  But it’s good to know where the resources and support are as we go into a long, deep winter and because we’re now entering the festive season.

If you have lost someone recently you’re simply reminded you won’t be celebrating with that someone this year or any future years.   If you’ve lost someone a long time ago, this is when you’ll miss them especially. Memories of seasons past come up in that bittersweet way that memories do. We choose to focus on celebrating with the people that are with us, but we also remember those who are not.

It’s nearly the anniversary of the passing of my son-in-law and my nephew (they both left us in the same week, Christmas week 2021) so, just as I feel I’m recovering from the shock of them passing, now I’m feeling a certain kind of way about this anniversary.  In the family we have talked about how to note the occasion and some of us have chosen to be together for this – I both dread and welcome it, just as I did the funerals, beautiful as they were.  I expect we’ll also have some healing, though, being together in our individual experience’s of loss.

My daughter posted this on Instagram in the early hours of this morning and I have founded it comforting (I believe it’s paraphrased from Jeremiah 31):

  • I heard the Lord say, “I will turn your mourning into joy, your grief and sadness into rivers of grace this season.  I am with those who are mourning, to heal your heart and show you my heavenly perspective.  This life is not the end.  And even so, I will bring restoration in this life for where you’ve suffered deep loss.  There is joy on the way, and a deep level of healing for your heart”.

Mostly, my hope for 2023,  is to experience and understand Joy.  Seasons greetings to all readers.

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Grief is the Price You Pay for Love

On a world level there has been great and sudden and impactful change.  A great, sudden loss.  Impossible to ignore that, even if I wanted to.

Actually, I don’t want to: I have always had a kind of grudging fascination for the Royal family and I’m in awe of the Queen who seemed to keep her marbles and impeccable standards intact for all of her 96 years.  Who does that?  How many have that privilege?  Well, literally, no-one else – not to that degree.  She was like a perfect mother figure; constant, wise, non-judgmental and loving.  I loved her sense of duty – she had one job and she would that one thing perfectly.  I saw affection in her duty, to her people and to her family.  I admired that about her.  Her passing has been felt by me personally.

I thought the funeral day was wonderful.  The British do pomp and circumstance better than anyone else and we were reminded of that again.  I understand the Queen had a heavy hand in striking the balance between proper ceremony, ritual, saying goodbye and showing outrageous opulence.  She wanted to avoid something that would get long and boring and over-mournful and I think she found exactly the right balance.  How moving was every part of the day itself, as well as the days leading up to that day?  We’ll never forget it, that’s for sure.

On the day that I heard of the Queen’s death I’d arranged to meet my daughter, the grandchildren and the sisters of her late husband to commemorate his birthday.  I had mixed feelings about that – we were definitely not celebrating, just remembering, and I was already sad about that, but then we had to accept the loss of the Queen too.  To say “I’ll just avoid the news for a while” to avoid feeling even more sad didn’t seem realistic even then.   Now I understand how triggering the loss of a really famous person is on the collective anyway, and as this famous person was something of a parental figure too, I know it’s only natural to remember our own personal losses recent or historic.  So the nation is in a period of grief and while the Queen was so old and we might have expected she must leave us soon, still there’s no way to prepare for a significant person passing out of our lives.

And we need to also acknowledge we’ve been the privileged ones, just to have had that love.

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No-one Ever Told Me That Grief…

My father passed away last week.  It’s not possible for me to create a blog that doesn’t reference this huge event.  I wouldn’t want to avoid it, and I see this as an opportunity to work through some personal things that are common to us all – we all know what grief looks like.  I loved this C.S. Lewis quote that I came across recently; I have taken some time to think what this means to me.

Dad was that ideal daddy, when I was a little girl, who could do no wrong and who I loved unrestrainedly, unconditionally.  I was very lucky.  Later, I knew him as a fallible human being, but one I could relate to as our souls would contact each other, sometimes just through eye contact.  There was always a special bond.  Some days before he died, I imagined I saw a brief glimpse of that and I’m grateful.

Moments of recognition, by then, were rare.  My father lived to be 92 but I would have to say he’d mostly slipped away much earlier than that.  At the age of 79 or so, he was diagnosed with dementia and that slowly took pieces of him away year after year.  We started grieving a long time ago, then.

At the same time, we couldn’t know when this would end, how much damage there would be – and we certainly didn’t want his life to end any sooner than it had to.  For him, this was a very difficult period of his life and “no way to live” was what he could be heard to mutter at those really hard times.  Not too often; he was made of stern stuff, in the manner of his generation; but by that same token, he was proud and his dignity was a thing he held dear throughout his life.

It doesn’t matter to me who he was, what his achievements were other than what I’ve just expressed, how he appeared to me.  How I will remember him – how I will choose to remember him, that’s what is important.  He was, in all, a kind, decent man.  My siblings have their own memories, as does my mother who survives him, and we all hold those personally dear.

What will take me a while to process is how much grief is like fear; that end piece of realising we cannot choose when or why or the manner of our leaving, having lived lives where we felt we controlled the big things to find that, no!  We don’t!  All illusion!  Being with my father who had time to come to terms with his life having a finite point, any time now, really brought that home for me.

Still, like fear, we need grief as a signifier and from there we can move forwards to healing.  That healing then becomes a new learning and part of who we go on to become.

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Holding onto Suffering Out of Fear

 

We can probably all agree that there’s no pain and/or suffering that we would willingly hold on to, so at first glance a claim that we would do voluntarily might be jeered at.  Pain is part of life and we learn to deal with that as best we can, of course.  Maybe that’s what is meant by the Thich Nhat Hanh quote above?  That, as we will no doubt suffer, it’s better to do so with as much courage as possible?  Otherwise put, to find a good attitude.  With two funerals behind me and my family this month, here comes the painful part of adjusting to daily life without them.

Harvey, aged 20, my sister’s eldest son and Mute, aged 37, my daughter’s husband, were not part of my every day life.  I knew Harvey well, from birth, of course and so always kind of kept tabs on where he was and what was doing.  He was an extraordinary person but was living his best life as an undergraduate at York University reading music, he was so gifted.  He was happy and healthy, not a worry – until he suicided…  Harvey had his struggles in life, clearly.  As a family, we were aware of many of them but he also tried to protect us from those.  And we had to strike that balance between over-concern and giving him the chance to flex his wings and discover life, of course we did.  We just feel so lucky that we knew him.

I would see Mute from time to time; the way you meet family members who all have busy lives. What was important to know on a daily basis was that my family were happy and healthy, and we were so blessed.  Mute enjoyed, as they say, rude health, all his life – until he had that sudden coronary episode.

My daughter’s husband, Mute, had one of those spirits that was hard to suppress.  He lived his life consciously working on being happy all the time and had good health.  He was happy and healthy right up until he was taken from us very suddenly last December.  He was a person who chose positivity, right living and being an example every day; his spiritual and religious practice made this a conscious decision, every day.  This was him living his best life.

These kinds of death must always be, by definition, a shock to those who knew and loved him.  That’s on top of all the other grief stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance) that we all go through when we suffer a loss.  And we can expect to feel these, in no specific order, over and again for some time.  Others’ losses will trigger our memory of this time and of our own particular loss of these two, just because this is how grief works.  We know that any of these stages can come back on us any time over the next few months and years, and we lean on each other to get through those times.

There’s a warning here, too, that we can get stuck in grieving or other familiar pain… once we give ourselves permission to experience all of it, or feel we’ve been pulled down into grief that goes on and on, we can be familiar with the pain.  Seeking a way out might seem… much more difficult than just feeling the pain.  We might just avoid people and places and things, we might think it’s indecent to smile.  But that’s not the point of pain; that’s a part of your life story, but it’s not who you are.

I’m quite sure that neither of these people would want their family to hold on to pain and suffering from their loss any longer than necessary.  They would acknowledge that we must feel pain, but they would not want it to be prolonged.  I would go so far as to guess that Mute in particular would see it as our duty to use the tragedy as an opportunity to overcome and become an example of how to transmute tragedy, to make sense of their whole lives by continuing the legacies they left. And they did leave legacies, even at their young ages.  You can find out more about these, if you care to at https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/harveyparkerfundraiser and https://gofund.me/a55e15bf.

For the rest of the family, we won’t really come to terms with the loss of these people for some time yet.  When we go on with our everyday lives we’ll notice the lack of these people and mourn, almost afresh, as yet another realisation strikes us “they’re not here anymore”… it will be that way for a while and that can’t be avoided.  We’ll remember smiles and happy times as well as feel pain for the loss.  Life will go on and we’ll learn how we make an impact on the world just as the world impacts us.  That’s what we’ll learn from their passing.

As we struggle to find a way to deal with the unimaginable we need a bank of positive solutions and the more resources, the better.  Often in a family loss like this, our family members are grieving just as deeply as we are, and that’s where an outside resource is really helpful.  At those times, talking to someone who is not going through the same trauma, who can hold space for you to grieve in any of those stages mentioned above, is going to be helpful.  They can help pull you through to smile again.  Do contact me in the forms here or email me if I can be that resource for you.