Grief Never Leaves Us
Grief never leaves us.
When we experience a loss… whether it’s a death, a divorce, or the loss of anything that was significant to us, it inevitably leads to grief.
We’ve all heard about the 5 Stages of Grief - Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression & Acceptance.
Moving through these stages is not linear, it’s not easy, it’s not quick, and it’s definitely not pretty… but, it’s necessary for our healing.
Even when we’ve reached Acceptance, we may always experience grief on some level.
This doesn’t mean we aren’t healing, and it doesn’t mean we’re broken… it simply means we loved deeply… and that’s amazing.
We are only able to feel love, and give love, because we are love at our core…
The depths of our grief are indicative of the potential for our joy… because if we can grieve deeply, we can feel joy deeply too.
We get stuck in grief when we live in fear of feeling joy again, in fear of feeling love… we mistakenly associate love with pain…
It feels safer to put up barriers as a form of protection…
We think we’re building walls to shield ourselves from pain, but really we’re just building a fortress around the pain of loss within us.
To overcome grief, it’s not about shrinking the pain…
It’s about growing around it - expanding our lives… expanding our capacity to love again.
Love doesn’t equal pain… the absence of love does…
But, love never leaves us…
Even when the relationship ends, or when the physical body is no more… the love is still there… because love is who we are.
To let ourselves feel that love again is to come home to ourselves.
To experience grief is a gift because it is to experience every facet of this life fully… it’s what we do with our grief that will determine whether we’ll ever feel happiness, connection, love & joy again…
Experiencing grief is a normal human experience… none of us leave this life unscathed.
We only know it’s dark because we’ve experienced the light… we only know grief because we’ve experienced love.
Don’t let your grief become your prison guard… let your grief be the evidence that you have the ability to love, and to love deeply… let grief be your guide to loving again.
To live a life full of love is to live a life well lived.
How wonderful we get to experience love in many different ways throughout our lives.
We are all connected by love… remember it… feel it… and let it in.
XO,
Stacie