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Month: February 2014

Swimming

Swimming

The journey I am on is a journey with a very distinct beginning, yet it is a journey without an end. Imagine walking down the beach towards the sea, taking the first tentative step as the waves break around your feet and walking out deeper and deeper into the ocean. As the water surrounds you you realise at some point you need to start swimming and so you just swim, further and further away from the shoreline. The further you get from where you were the more lost you become until eventually the shoreline, and everything you know disappears completely from view. As you lose sight of where you were, you have no idea which direction to go in, and so you have only one option, keep swimming, keep swimming.

And whilst that analogy holds true we wouldn’t really do that would we, we wouldn’t just walk out into the sea and begin swimming. If we wanted to swim the English Channel we would have a support vessel, we’d cover our bodies in a protective layer to keep us warm, we would inform the Coast Guard of where we were going, we would avoid all the large ships which crossed our path and eventually, with the aid of everything around us we would reach the other side.

And yet, even with all this help, I’m sure that when the sight of land disappears behind us and has yet to appear in front of us, it could seem as though we are in the middle of the channel with nothing but pain and torture in front of us. It’s only the sheer determination to keep going that would keep us on our path to the other side.

The difference with grief is that there isn’t another side, there isn’t a destination. There is only the journey. And yet, with the support of those around us, our own internal resources and the sheer determination that we all possess. We can just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.

And as I keep on swimming it becomes easier to accept that this is my life now, it becomes easier to accept that I can no longer see the shoreline from where I started. It was a lovely shoreline, I spent many happy years relaxing on it and enjoying being there, but it’s gone, it has disappeared from sight and will never return.

I’ve no idea which way to go on this journey, I’m just going to pick a direction and keep tenaciously swimming, accepting the help of those around me to act as my support vessel and just keep on going until the glorious day that grief turns in to love and I sight land head.

Dealing with Grief

Dealing with Grief

I thought in this post I would share some of my own experiences of dealing with grief, and I mean dealing with grief, not living with it, not ignoring it, not pushing it to one side as if it doesn’t exist, but actually dealing with it on a day-to-day basis, or even a minute-to-minute basis.

I guess it comes from spending two years developing myself that I know we all experience significant emotional events in our life at some point, these can have huge impacts on the way we view things in the future. We all know that we have beliefs about ourselves and some of those beliefs are empowering (I am good enough, I am strong) and some of those beliefs are disempowering (I don’t deserve it, I’m not worth it). From the moment the consultant came into that little room and told me that Claire had died I knew this was a significant emotional event where one of those limiting and damaging beliefs could easily have been adopted.

“I don’t deserve this”, “why did it happen to me”, “I’m worth more than this”, “she’s worth more than this”, “she doesn’t deserve it”… All would be easy thoughts to adopt yet all are dis-empowering decisions and beliefs.

I knew that from the moment I was told that I no longer had a wife any decision I made had to be empowering. I had to continue with life and I knew that from the second the consultant told me.

Not one single day, and I mean not one single day has passed without me working on myself. Every thought, every emotion, every single nagging idea that has dared to enter my brain has been dealt with. I’m working on the way I think 24 hours a day (and yes, I believe that my unconscious mind is also working on it whilst I am asleep).

The decision I made when Claire died was that I had to deal with it and I had to continue to live my life in a way that respected the 28 wonderful years I spent with Claire. Pushing those thoughts, emotions and nagging ideas to one side and not dealing with them has never been an option for me. I have faced them all head on and at the beginning they were hitting me literally every minute. Every minute of every day I was being pummelled with these thoughts, but because I have dealt with them as they have arrived things are much quieter now. My program of self development with NLP and Hypnosis gave me a toolbox of techniques, ideas and thinking patterns that have allowed me to work on those thought processes – no longer do I fill up that great big dustbin of negativity that so many people carry around on their backs all day, getting heavier and heavier as the years go by – in fact I went in to this whole process with a dustbin that had had a hand grenade chucked in it to completely clean it out, and as the days go by I refuse to fill that dustbin up again… it remains as clean today as it has ever been.

I genuinely feel at peace, those negative emotions and thoughts have almost stopped. Instead, they have been replaced by love. Love for everything that Claire was, everything that she did for me, everything that she did for the children and indeed immense love for her as my wife and best friend. I would much rather welcome those thoughts and emotions into my mind and allow them to live there rather than all of the negative ones.

If we are to make room for all of the positivity then we need to deal with the negativity. I continue to do so and will continue for the rest of my life.

A finite vessel or bottomless pit?

A finite vessel or bottomless pit?

As I’m working through the issues that present themselves after losing Claire some things are beginning to strike me in quite a profound way. When something like this happens we seem to use phrases like “I’m at my wits end”,”I have nothing left”, “it’s all gone…” I know I have used these phrases myself several times and when I do I challenge myself to think about what I have said a little deeper and I think I’ve had it wrong for a while.

When we think in these ways it’s as though we are looking at our body as a finite vessel with finite emotions and finite resources. We seem to view it as though we have only a certain amount of forgiveness, love, respect, strength etc to carry on, but what a limiting way of viewing our infinitely resourceful selves.

I’m constantly challenged to dig deeper and deeper yet constantly surprised to find more and more. It just keeps coming – my ability, indeed our ability, to love, forgive, respect (Plus loads more) never ends. We’re not a finite vestle we are a bottomless pit, we aren’t born with resources that get used up, the truth is that they just keep on coming.

So if that’s true why don’t we dig deeper and deeper faster and faster? If all of these resources seem to replenish and keep on coming then let’s use as much as we can. 

It is so inspiring to notice our own internal strength to keep going, I remember when I first started jogging I could go at a slow pace for 2 min at a time before I required a one-minute walking breather. By practising every other day, and pushing myself a little harder each time I soon got this 2 min up to 30 min, and then 40 min and then an hour. My body just kept on responding in an amazing way, the more I pushed the more it gave. I didn’t ask my body to do it it just responded, all I had to do was put in the effort and it just did it.

So as I’m finding that our mind responds in a similar way, and keeps on providing the resources we need  in a never-ending pit of resourcefulness I’m going to keep digging, and the more I dig the strong I get and the stronger I get the harder I can dig.

If digging is the order of the day I’m off to exchange my little shovel for a great big JCB…