Your Soul Family

Emotions

How do I move forward after great loss?

Loss comes in many forms. A sense of loss is felt when you no longer have a person you love in your life or something such as a job, business or a home. The cause of the loss is varied such as death, a breakup, redundancy, a failed mortgage, but the outcome, a horrible feeling that strikes right at your heart, is the same.

For me loss and fear feel very similar. I lost my husband through an unexpected death in my 40s and experienced real fear from a very public failure of a business project I was leading in my 50s. Both had an enormous impact on my life and my security.

Loss and fear strike right at your heart as if someone has stabbed you.

How do you recover from such a strong emotion it affects you physically? You can’t make the loss go away. It is what it is.

Allow yourself to feel the pain and then let it go. It is not healthy to hold onto the pain as it will ultimately affect your body. In many cultures, it is encouraged to wail – a loud cry of pain, grief, or anger. All of these emotions come with loss and get muddled up together. Wailing is part of the process of letting go. In western cultures, it is not so condoned in modern times. But you can wail in private.

After my husband died, I use to wail in my bathroom late at night with a towel stuffed in my mouth so my children couldn’t hear me.

I needed the release of letting the pain out. Visualise your pain coming out of your body and floating away on a little white cloud. Give it to Mother Earth to deal with so nobody else absorbs your pain.

To help you get up in the morning and put one foot in front of the other – don’t look too far ahead. Take each day as it comes and deal with it. Just getting through the day is an achievement. You should congratulate yourself and not allow your thoughts to go around in your head with – what if?

Know that in time you will feel calmer.

Despite how you feel, the old adage time is a great healer is true. Only then is it right to consider a longer time horizon and what you might like to do next. It is alright to take your time. It is your life and everybody grieves the loss of something at their own pace.

Once you feel calmer, it will be easier to connect with your soul through your intuition. Your soul will help to comfort and heal you. It will give you good guidance.

Try to listen to your intuition and feel your guidance.

Life Lessons

Follow your dreams and find your happiness

Life is meant to be lived and enjoyed.  It is true everyone has challenges to help us to learn. But alongside that we are meant to enjoy this wonderful world we live in. The sight and the sound of the sea always lifts my emotions and makes me feel good. Simple things like this brings me joy.

Everyone should have a dream of how they would like their life to be.  Dreams are made to be followed.

Do you remember your dreams?

Everybody dreams but sometimes it is difficult to remember them. If this is the case, before you go to bed write on a piece of paper a question about something you would like to happen in your life. Leave the rest of the paper blank with the pen on top of it beside your bed. Your soul will not be able to resist giving you something during the night to write on it.

As soon as you wake up, before you even put your foot on the floor – write whatever comes to your mind. Make some notes about the ideas and dreams you were given.

It is very easy to lose these ideas if you do another activity, even running to the bathroom or making a quick cup of tea. As you have your morning shower think some more about what you wrote on the paper. Some more ideas might come to you. Quickly add them to you piece of paper.

Do this for a number of nights and see what your dreams are telling you. The dream could be literal but it could also be symbolic. You will need to consider which it is. Dreams can be more fantastic than everyday life.

Your dream may include a visit from a passed loved one. Consider if they gave you good council in their life time.

Sometimes the dream is about something in the future which may not be meaningful until you get there.

How did you feel when you woke up?

Dreams can inspire you, alert you to a future potential danger or just be full of love, support and information.

You will need to consider the dream to know what it is saying to you. Then think about;

What action should you take to honour the dreams you are having?

It could be you need to research something to understand the full meaning of the dream. You might be asked to take a small step forward to your ideal life before more dreams arrive to guide you on the next steps. Having clarity on what you want out of your life, helps the universe to bring it to you. Being able to manifest is a good skill to have. This simple process can help it.

To enjoy your life to the full, it is important to take some steps, no matter how small they are, to achieving your dreams.

This post is dedicated to those struggling to follow their dreams and to find joy.

Your Soul Family

How do I help my children to thrive in this changing world

Our children are often the dearest people in our hearts. We put a lot of time and effort into raising them. We want to know that they can have a good life ahead of them. No matter the age of your children, you never stop being a parent and wanting the best for them.

What can a parent do to help safe-guard their children?

By the nature of living in a changing world, the greatest gift for your child to not only survive within it but to thrive, is being flexible. Careers and jobs are no longer for life. Everyone expects to change them in a life time with a possible geographic move thrown in as well. Technology is moving fast and impacting our lives. Those who do not adopt it and take the best from it, are in danger of being left behind.

Are you being a good role model on flexibility?

While children are growing up, they tend to love routines and structure. These may well be useful and practical for maintaining a family schedule for times to eat and go to bed. But it is also useful to teach your children that changing the schedule is good if it leads to a better place or their environment necessitates it.

This is sometimes easier said than done. My son as a child loved his familiar routine. If we went on holiday, he would not change either the time to eat or sleep. It was a nightmare when we might want to stay out later to enjoy an evening walk or a meal. However, I do feel I brought this on myself. When it was just him and me at home, our lives ran better when we followed a schedule. When his baby sister arrived, we did not have this luxury. I still had to take and collect my son from school. The baby had to learn to wait for a feed or to sleep in her push chair if our family schedule necessitated it. My observation is my daughter grew up coping with being flexible more than my son.

As parents you want to warn your children of the inherent dangers in life. You may encourage them not to talk to strangers when they are little. When they grow older you warn them not to drink too much, to study and work hard, to manage their money carefully.

In all of this there is a danger you make your children fearful. It is important that they remain as curious about the world around them as they were as a baby and toddler.

There is a fine line between following your curiosity and safety

Curiosity keeps you engaged in the world and therefore informed on what may be upcoming in the future. With an understanding of upcoming changes, your children get the chance to consider what it will mean to them and to seek the benefits but mitigate the negatives. This gives them time to prepare and adapt to the changes.

An example of this today maybe Artificial Intelligence (AI). There is much fear around this topic from the risk of it being abused by powerful people and institutions. If this should happen, many people could be impacted negatively. However, used appropriately AI can bring many advantages to every day people like you and me.

If all fails, being resilient will help your children to get through any change that faces them. They may have a life plan of what they want to do, but they should be open to changing it. This can be rapid and significant if it is needed. No-one knows what these changes will be. But being able to ride the change is key to surviving and thriving in a new environment.

The conversations about being flexible, remaining curious and being resilient begin in childhood. However, it is my belief that the most important conversations happen in young adulthood and going forwards. As I said earlier, you never stop being a parent.

Of course, to be qualified to help your children as adults, you need to be all of these things yourself. It will not assist them if you use the rhetoric;

in my day……