#46 - Vulnerability & Grief
Hey, hey ladies. Welcome to Lady Sculpt Lifestyles. So just a quick update since last week's podcast on overwhel, you guys. I have hired help. I'm super excited after sitting down and really looking at what was causing my overwhelm last week, I was able to make a really good decision for myself to bring in some help with my business. And I think one of the reasons I was so overwhelmed with that is because I don't know how to train an employee. I've never had to do that before. So I've actually hired a company to help me with that process. So we start in August and your girls are excited. Yo, I'm so excited to get some help with just the day-to-day administration tasks and the tech tasks that go along with having an online business, the production of this podcast is going to be one of those tasks. That means I have way more time to show up and coach and record podcasts and do live events. And get on Facebook and go live and do live workouts with you. I'm so excited for all the extra time. So sometimes we just, you know, need to lean into those big hard emotions, those big, hard, negative emotions that are telling us that we need to slow down or hire, help, or feel our feelings for a minute. And that's something we're going to talk about today in episode number 46, vulnerability and grief.
Grief is such a unique feeling for each of us. Every single person experiences grief differently. And in their own time and in their own way. And the process of grieving can take hours or days, or weeks or months or years or decades, sometimes grief never goes away. It's just a heavy purse that we carry around with us. Right.
I want to talk a little bit about my experience with grief and I want to talk a little bit about how I look at grief because I think that I look at grief a little uniquely and it really helps me to be okay with it. So let's start with my views on death. Great topic, right? Totally not morbid at all. And for those of you who have religious beliefs or whatever you choose to believe about what happens after we die, that's fine. You get to do you, I just find that my belief systems around death really serve me in utilizing my life to the fullest. And not paying so afraid of death and missed opportunities. So I believe that life that we're in right now is I like to think of it as like a level in a video game. So like, you know how, when you're playing a video game, each level has like a task or like a challenge, something you need to do, some things you need to collect and get and things you need to learn and then you kill all the demons and then you graduate to the next level. You complete the level and you move on. I think of our human life,semi similar. And some of you may find that very morbid. Some of you may find that very disconnected with what you believe in that's totally. Okay. But why I choose to believe this is because I do think that our time on this planet is limited in this body, in this human experience that we are in currently. And I want to utilize it to the fullest. I want to learn everything I possibly can. I want to take on every challenge I possibly can. I want to meet as many people as possible. Do as much as I possibly can. And like build up my tool belt, build up and collect all of the jewels and all of the things right now. And I don't mean material things, but just all of the knowledge I can so that when I go into that next level, I am the best prepared for whatever comes next. Now what else? This way of believing helps me think is, death is not the final page, right? I'm a big believer that this life is not all there is. It can't be, there's too many coincidences and weird deja vu moments and young people that come into this world was so much talent and knowledge and experience already. That it makes me believe that they had to learn that somewhere. They had to have had something before this life. And I also really liked to believe that people who die early, those we lose in high school, Uh, younger half siblings pass away at 16, and I have to believe that that wasn't the end for him. You know, he was here for a short period of time to do something very specific. And now he's elsewhere doing better things and I don't know if we come back and are reincarnated in this world, or if it's something different. I have no idea. And I don't pretend to know. But this way of thinking, this life is short and I'm here to achieve and, create and inspire and collect knowledge is a way that I like to live my life. And then it also allows me to be at peace whenever it's my time. I'm up leveling. It's time to go into that next thing, that next phase, that next level of whatever that is. So this is the way I think of death, which helps me grieve a little easier.
So when, let's take Taylor as for example, when I lost my half-brother him and I weren't super close. I got to hang out with him whenever I was at my dad's place. And when he passed, I was upset and I shed a lot of tears and I took moments, but I was living on the other side of the country and I didn't really get a chance to go home and spend time. I was in my early twenties and I was very focused on what I was doing and so I grieved on my own and. Um, Taylor was an old soul. He was somebody who you could tell had lived more than one life, multiple lives. He just knew so much and was so talented and so it really helped me when he passed to know that he had done his work here. He had up-leveled, he'd come here for a very short amount of time to do something very specific. And he had achieved that goal and it was time to move on. And sometimes people who we lose young when babies die, when, when children die, it's not so much that they were sent here for a challenge for themselves, but maybe as a lesson or a challenge for us. Something we have to process and learn and handle and hold on to, for our journey here. So if this way of thinking opens up your brain a little bit. If it feels good to you, please feel free to take it on is your own belief system.
So as I've grown up I've come into my thirties and had people closer to me pass away. I lost my dad a few years ago and I think one of the hardest parts is watching the other people around and close to you grieve as well. Watching my sister go through grieving him and watching his siblings and the people that were really close to him and love him grieve as well and feeling their hurt. I feel like, because of the way I believe I don't necessarily see death as a bad thing and sure, we all miss him. Part of missing him as not being able to share things that happen in my life with him still, but I'm a big believer you guys, when you lose somebody, you can still have a relationship with that. You can still talk to them. Your relationship with other people is simply your thoughts about them? So the people in my life who have passed away. I still have relationships with them. I still think about them often. I still think to myself, what advice would he give me? What would he suggest I do in this situation, how would he handle this? And I tap into the people that I've lost for guidance and for comfort when I'm alone. And I'm getting a lump in my throat, you guys. And this is how I continue to have a relationship with the people that I love that I've lost.
I want to talk a little bit about grieving pets because I think for me, this is some of the deepest grief I've ever felt, even more than losing humans. I feel like losing our pets for me, that's been for babies, puppies, doggos, and losing my dogs is some of the deepest grief. And I'm not quite sure if it's because you don't really get a chance to speak to them and find out how they're feeling. And, you know, have those conversations, you don't necessarily get to hear them say I'm ready or have those post death conversations with them. I've lost two dogs in the last five years that both lived to the age of 12, I had them for their whole lives. And in both cases, I took full weeks to process my grief. I allowed myself to be devastated and to cry and to remember and to celebrate their lives. And I ordered all of the cheesy things, the mugs with the dogs, with angel wings and I, you know, had pictures made and canvas drawn up and had little replica stuffies made, to me that felt good. And something that I kind of came to realize when I was grieving my last dog that passed away Baldwin, who I felt was kind of like my soulmate and I dog, he was just, one of those dogs that just knew when I needed a nose nudge or I had leaned on my lap. He was just so aligned with how I felt in my emotion. He was just my sidekick and my buddy, and he was such a good dog. When he passed, I recognized that the heavy hurt that I felt was probably the hardest grieving process that I've ever been through. And I recognized it was because the love that I felt for him was probably the biggest love that I'd been through. So what I realized in that moment, in that process, in that time after he passed was that grief is the other side of love. We often think of hate and love as two sides of the same coin. But hate and love are the opposite emotion. But the other side of love is grief. So when you have the opportunity to love unconditionally when you have the opportunity to love so hard. Knowing that grief is a showing of that love. The harder you love, the harder you grieve and it doesn't need to mean that it is debilitating or it takes longer to get through, although it might. And that's totally okay too. But I find that both emotions are such a similar vibration for me. Like, you know, first love that puppy loves that honeymoon period, when you first start dating someone or you first fall in love where you don't want to eat, because it feels so good and your senses are all so alive and you can just feel every ounce of emotion in your body. I feel like grief is the exact same way. Right? You lose your appetite and you feel every ounce of grief in your body and you have no choice, but to be in it, right. You can't. Put it aside for a minute and, you know, function and pretend it's not there. I remember after losing Baldwin, I'd go to the dog park and I'd wear these big sunglasses, oversized sunglasses, and I would sit on a bench and just bawl my eyes out and dogs would come up. And their owners would see me. And I explained to them that I just lost my dog and they'd understand cause they're dog people too, but how it was, how you guys, I'm crying. Okay. Take a minute. That's how I process my grief is, you know, by surrounding myself with other fur babies. And I know that I've had a few friends, a few sculptors, and a few people in my community recently lost fur babies. And I like to extend to them that grief is the other side of love. So the deeper, the harder, the more it hurts, the more you are loved. And that's a beautiful, beautiful thing to embrace and feel and allow yourself to just be in it, predict a hurt. Grief is one of those feelings that you don't want to think your way out of, right. I teach that our feelings are a result of our thoughts when we're grieving. It's because we are thinking beautiful thoughts about a human or a fur baby that we aren't going to get to spend time with anymore. What I teach is if you change your thoughts, you change the emotion. But I think that grief is a beautiful emotion that we should all be honored to feel because when we feel grief, It means we've also experienced love and to love fully and deeply is so rare.
That's me getting vulnerable with grief, you guys. I hope there's been a few things in this podcast that you resonated with, or that you can take from it to help you, either process your grief or going forward if you do lose somebody you love. Remember it's okay. It's okay to take time. I highly recommend that you book the time off work, you clear your schedule and just allow yourself. Space to feel it, to process it to be in it, don't rush through it. Give yourself time. And then remember, open yourself up to love again, I know that that's risky because I know that it also opens you up to the hurt of grief again. But personally, I think that love is worth it. I think that loving hard and deep and unconditionally is worth the grief, at the end. I want to love as much and as many humans and for babies as physically possible in this lifetime. All right my friends, how about a fantastic week. I will see you next week. Bye for now.
