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Goodbye and Hello – Passing Through Grief

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Terese CastellanosLife is a fairly constant flow of goodbyes and hellos.  Sometimes, those goodbyes are incredibly painful.  The death of a loved one, the loss of a relationship, the loss of a job or role.  All can be painful.

And sometimes, those goodbyes feel like the end of the story.  But many times, there is more.  More to the story, more to life.  More to live.  Those are the hellos.

When you are caught up in the grief of a goodbye, it may seem like a hello is impossible.  It takes courage.  Vulnerability.  A willingness to live again.

We can live behind a fortress, trying to protect ourselves from hurts.  But that also keeps us from connecting and loving… living.

Sure, the goodbyes hurt.  But that is part of the deal with life.  Sometimes, the pain breaks us open to new possibilities and new people.

In this Thriveology Podcast episode, I interview Terese Castellanos.  As a therapist, Terese helped people through losses and life struggles… and one day realized that she, herself, was faced with the same thing.  Her husband was dying.

In our interview, Terese and I look to her story of goodbye… how that felt like the end of the story… but it wasn’t.  So, we also discuss hello.  And how to live through the goodbye, open to the hello.

RELATED RESOURCES
Dealing With Grief
Lessons From A Chaplain
Lessons From A Chaplain, pt. 2
Terese’s Website

 

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Grieve Losses and Celebrate Gains

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The Rules of Living by Lee Baucom

Losses are painful.  No way around it.  They are also normal. Or to say it differently, loss is a normal part of life.  Not an anomalie.  Part of being alive.

And loss leads to grief.  That is our natural reaction to any loss.  Big grief or small grief — that is simply how we process a loss, so that we can re-weave life and continue.

Sometimes, we get caught up in the “unfairness” of a loss, and we get stuck in the grief. In the process, we lose out on life.  We fail to celebrate the gains that also are a part of life.

Think of these three stages throughout your life.  We have a certain orientation to life — we understand what life is about… until something changes — a loss or a gain.  And then, we experience disorientation.  The process of grieving and celebrating brings us to a new orientation — a re-orientation.  Not the same as before.  But not necessarily worse than before.  Just different than before.

So, rule #4 is to grieve your losses and celebrate your gains.  Listen for details below.

RULES OF LIVING SERIES
#1 Let Fear Point, Not Direct
#2 Be Present In The  Present
#3 Accept the Past and Revise the Future

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Dealing With Endings and Beginnings

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Life is filled with endings.  And beginnings.  There is no avoiding the endings.  And there is always another beginning.

Some endings are by choice:  you decide to leave a job or move to a new town.  Some endings give you no choice:  someone dies or there is an illness.  Others are just what happens by stages:  children come along and children depart for their own lives.

Every new opportunity, every new beginning, only comes along because something ended.  And whether the ending is by choice or by circumstance, our challenge is to accept, adapt, and move forward.

In this podcast episode, I discuss four ways to move through the ending and four ways to move into the new beginning.

Life is all about change, whether we fight it or embrace it.  Change comes.  Learn how to end and begin in healthy and helpful ways.

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Living The Big Stuff: An Interview with Kristine Carlson

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I finished my training in psychotherapy, and promptly realized I had a thorough education in what is wrong with people.  I was far less clear about what is right with people — how people bounce back, thrive, and grow through all of life’s challenges.

This began a search for me, to educate myself on how to help people to thrive.  But my first project was (and is) myself.  Along the way, I stumbled upon Richard Carlson, author of the Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff series.  I dug deeper and found a deeper pool in the thinking behind the popular series.

This was my first immersion into the ideas about thoughts and how thoughts weave our reality.  I learned that my thoughts are simply that:  thoughts.  Simple, but revolutionary, when we generally confuse thought and reality.

Kristine CarlsonTragically, Richard died in December of 2006.  His wife and co-author, Kristine Carlson, carried on their efforts to bring joy and peace to many.  It is fitting that almost exactly eight years later, I got the opportunity to interview Kris.  Since I had been following her during these past years, I knew she had much to offer on her own.  She shared in Richard’s thoughts and understandings.  But her grief over his loss taught her even deeper lessons.

Today, Kristine shares her lessons with us:  how she moved through grief to a deeper understanding of life, how we can stop sweating the small stuff and live through the big stuff, how we can get out of our own way and get in touch with a deeper essence, how to be more and more present.

This is a rich interview, and one you will want to listen through a couple of times, to make sure you take it all in.

If you would like to connect with Kristine, her Facebook page is HERE.

And you can find her at KristineCarlson.com

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Moving Through Grief: #34 Thriveology Podcast

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Grief is a part of life. Keep on living.We don’t like to face loss and grief in our culture.  Yet loss is inevitable.

Unfortunately, since most people don’t want to face grief, we don’t always have the tools we need to deal with that inevitable moment of loss and pain.

In this podcast, I take a look at grief.  I name the 3 types of grief:

  1. Clean
  2. Confusing
  3. Complicated.

We can feel that pain of grief when we lose:

  1. Person
  2. Potential
  3. Process
  4. Possibility

But there is a way to move through grief.  I outline the process in the podcast as:

  1. Remember
  2. Resolve
  3. Re-Create
  4. Re-Weave

If you find yourself in the midst of grief, I hope you find this podcast helpful in your process.  Grief is a universal emotion, yet feels so personal.

Please listen and let me know what you think in the comments area below.

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