Living With Grief: The Start Of A New Journey

1. Introduction: Are you dealing with the loss of a loved one and are looking for ways to help you live with grief. Me too high. I'm Ravi dipole, moment dad who received lost my little son Edison. Although I've been a nurse, university lecture, public health expert, nothing prepared me for my little boy. It changed everything. For a long time. I really struggled to find ways to cope. If you're looking to become a student of this course, I can only imagine how your life changed recently. I'm sorry for you. In this class, we're going to look at a number of different ways. I'll teach you. Describe grief. Wait to work with your emotions when it gets too tough. How to keep moving through life rather than through. A final project, will be to create a self-care checklist of things you can do. Feel a little bit better day-to-day. This self-care checklist will be comprised of ways that you personally find are the most helpful to help improve. This class is suitable for anyone who's currently grieving. This class is great for anyone wants a safe space to reflect on their loss and work towards continuing to live their lives after a loss. I'm glad you're here. It shows you are willing to do really hard work and hopes to provide some healing. Let's get started. 2. Everything Has Changed, Forever: One of the books on grieving I was reading about, talks about how in Northern Australia there was a group of Aboriginal sue. The night someone dies, every single villus remember, moves a piece of furniture out into the yard. And the bereaved family wakes up and looks outside. They see that everything has changed. For everyone. They were showing each other that the loss of one person lost for everyone. I found that that story hit me right here. I felt like everything changed for me. And not a lot had changed with other people. It's like as if someone had moved around my furniture. But for everyone else, life is continuing on. This is just one story of how the grief had affected me and changed my mindset on things. This lesson, we will talk briefly about grief. Grieving is important. What to do with your grief? What is grief? Grief is real because lost Israel, each grief has its own imprint, is distinctive and unique as the person we lost. The pain of loss is so intense, so heartbreaking, because I'm loving. We deeply connect with another human being. How long does it take to grieve severity? Common question. Loss happens in a moment, but grief lasts a lifetime. I don't know if there will ever be a time that people get over grief. It is one of those things that unlike getting over, we have to live with. Why is the process of grieving important? Well, for two reasons. First, those who are able to grieve well can live well. Second and most important, grief is the healing process of the heart, soul, and the mind. It is the path that returns us to wholeness. Never is a matter of who you grieve. It's really when you were a grave. Grief is one of life's passages that we all experienced. One of life's equalizers, a shared experience for every man and woman who lives. But though it is a shared experience, most of us don't know how to help. The reality is you will grieve forever. You will not get over the loss of a loved one that's known. 3. Feeling Into Life, Now: Welcome to fill into life. Now, you aren't who used to be? I used to be able to read books, worked 12 h a day to exercise and sleep. One command used to eat healthily, laugh with friends, sometimes on the same day. But after grief, laughter, grief, sometimes I would try to get into my neighbors apartments. Thank you. It was my own. After grief, people would ask my age or a dress and I just stare at them not knowing the answer. What that teaches me and what I've learned is that you're not crazy. Your mind is just in a crazy experience. And what your mind needs in times like this, this time. It's not an easy thing to hear, but sometimes it's just a matter of waiting out the storm. When your mind That make sense of things, things will return to a different way of being. Not necessarily the same as it used to be, but a different way to be. I want you right now to think of your own life. What changes have you noticed? You get outside as much as you used to. You still reach out on WhatsApp to initiate conversations. Did you use to postmarked on Instagram? How is grief changed the way your mind is worked? E.g. I. Can only do one thing at a time. Immediately after grief. Still, I say no to social engagement's. I have to manage my energy a lot more for you. Are you interested in the same things? You visit, the same websites or blogs that you used to. Has your friend group changed? Often, unexpectedly? How do you catch yourself? So whenever I think of how my life has changed, I get a little bit flustered. But the biggest trick that I've learned to help with that as a simple breathing tip that you can use it anytime. I learned it in one of the grief books I read and it was super helpful. Basically, all you have to do is make your exhale longer than your inhale. So let's try it. Start by taking a deep breath and if that's 3 s, make your exhale 4 s. Try it again, inhale. And exhale. If you complete that ten times, I promise you will feel better. There's something psychological about allowing your exhale to be longer than your inhale. And for me, it's been one of the single most effective coping tools that I've been able to find. 4. 5 Stages of Grief & Finding Meaning: Now I wanted you to be aware of the five stages of grief. These five stages are stages that were coined about 50 years ago. And these are stages that you may or may not have gone through, that you may or may not go through. They don't have to be in order. You don't have to do them in steps. Sometimes you totally miss them, and sometimes you are in one stage of grief for a long time. There is no right or wrong way for these stages to be processed. They are just common stages that some people experience. I personally have experienced all of these. To some extent. Some of them I've hung out in a lot longer than I'd like to admit. The five stages as they were written. The first one is denial, which is shocking belief that loss has occurred. The second one is the stage of anger. Anger that someone we love is no longer here. The third stage is about bargaining. All the what-ifs and regrets. Like I wish I would have done this. What if I changed this? Would they still be around? For is the depression, which is sadness from the loss. And five is acceptance, which is acknowledging the reality of the loss. When going through my grief process, I realized that these five stages for me were quite important. But then I also read a book on the sixth stage. So the six stages about finding meaning. This is another stage that you may or may not go through that may or may not be a part of but I wanted you to know that there was a possibility of another stage. Finding meaning is relative and personal. It takes time. You may not find it until months or years after the loss. It doesn't require understanding. You don't need to understand why someone died in order to find meaning. Meaning is what you make happen. Loss is simply what happens to you in life. And only you can find your own meeting. So I wanted to bring this up because if you are taking this course right now, if you were with me trying to learn about ways to continue on your life now that you've lost someone, this stage might be important to you and just by bringing awareness to it, I hope that it's helpful at some stage of your process. 5. Stories You Tell Yourself: For me personally, it's the small moments I find the easiest to find meaning in saying unkind word to the checkout person. Being considerate to the driver is trying to enter the lane in front of you. Thanking the person who delivers your posts. Everything can have potential for meaning. I know these are little examples, but it's the little things that help you day-to-day that continue to help you get through the loss? When I lost my little boy, Aztlan, I did not. Everything I find meaning I withdrew from my own life. I left for a long time. I essentially had to run away. And for me to be here to teach this course, to try and help other people go through their own grief is in essence my way to find meaning. It's my way to connect with you. It's my way to try to find a meaning in what for me, it was the most difficult time in my life. In that sense, I do want to thank you for being here. I want to thank you and let you know that I am with you. And this might be the most difficult time of your life too, but it's part of the process of finding a new life beyond this. And one of the ways that I had to work my way through grief was figuring out the story that I was telling myself. So the thoughts that we create impact our present and our future, and I realized my thoughts were so different to what I used to think. So I always used to think that this death happened to me. And now my new meaning is that happens. They used to think that I'm a victim. Now. I think that, well, I have a chance to honor my baby through this loss. I used to think that this death was a punishment. And now I think, well depth is pretty random. I used to think, well, why does this happen to me? Why am I the one going through this difficult, incredibly difficult time? No one loses a child. The new meaning now that I have for that as well, that everyone gets something in this lifetime. So to end this lesson, I want you to think a little bit about some of the old meanings, the old stories that you're telling yourself. Like I've just listed. If you're able to start reshaping that, started thinking about how you can change that story. Started thinking about, is this really true? And if it is, of course, just leave it. But if it is something that's not true or something you can change or something you've been wanting to effect. Now would be a good time to start thinking about how to change that original meeting to a new meeting. 6. Stupid Things People Say: Well, many people who understand your feelings, lots of people don't. And they say stupid things. When someone dies, we expect people to evolve. But I'm here to tell you they probably won't. I've heard things like congratulations on your newborn in comments about as lends deaf on Instagram. I've heard you can always have another one. You'll get over it. Are you still talking about this? And my personal favorite? I didn't know what to say. I didn't reach out to you. People are who they are. And grief has an interesting way of bringing things out in them. They don't change because we need them to. What I've found. If they're important to you, you might overlook there and sensitivity. For lots of my friends and folks that have sent me some of these messages, their friendship is more important and I've had to learn how to let a few things go. If they aren't the most important to you or maybe a friend of a friend, you might consider letting the friendship go. I've had to use for ways to try to forgive people. The first way is I picture that person as an infant. And remember that they were born innocence. Number two is, I think of them growing up in someone wounding. Now. I know wounding people, people who are wounded wound other people. And they would do because it's how they've been taught. Number three is I can forgive the person, but not the action. Number four, because I remember I'm not perfect either. Lots of points during this grief process, I probably reached out and said a few things that I definitely regret. 7. Self Care Checklist: In our class project, we will create your very own self-care checklist to help you cope with grief, is designed to be easy to complete. It is designed to not take much time. I know how doing tasks as difficult during this time. So I've tried to make this as simple as possible for you. This checklist will be comprised of ways that you personally find that the most helpful to cope through life now and give you a reminder to come back to when you are needing a boost. I hope this checklist will help you on your journey. And I will personally read in congratulate, every student will uploads their checklist. I wanted to show an example of my self-care checklist when I was starting out my grief process. So as you can see here, I started off with sleep. Sleep is for me the most important thing that I was not getting that I used to be able to cat. So I knew if I got 78 h of sleep a night, ideally going to bed by 10:00 P.M. that everything else in my life might be a little bit better. That's the same thing with caffeine. I was drinking too much caffeine throughout the day really is just a coping mechanism. And so I wanted to limit my intake and stop it by 3PM. Also by the end of the day, I would to scroll through my phone. So I wanted to end that at 09:00 P.M. with boots. I didn't want us I didn't want to drink anymore after supper. So I knew that that would be a slippery slope for me. So I abstain from alcohol after something with eating. At the end of the day, if I have a huge meal, I knew I wasn't going to sleep. So I kept a huge meals before six, ideally, moving with simple I just wanted to walk once a day. Nature wanted to be outside for 20 min a day. I think being inside for too long. The bacterial community, I wanted to respond to two WhatsApp messages. So I'm sure you probably got tons of messages piling up to and for me, I stopped responding to people, but I didn't want to reach out and contact the people that I knew were going to be helpful in that time. So I would always try to respond to two WhatsApp message, just stretching. I would find I wanted to find a yoga studio where it shouldn't have to talk to anyone. That just means walking into the studio, go into the back, not knowing anyone, and just do my practice there. The last thing was healing and acupuncture. It helped me so much throughout my life that I really wanted to find an acupuncturist that was going to help you go to them. Maybe some of these you're going to resonate with you. Like I said, maybe not, maybe you have completely different goals and it's all totally fine. Your grief, zero. And as you can tell from my list, getting some sense of sleep was going to be the most important thing. I think those first four or five are related to sleep. So very interested to see what you come up with. Also have a look at other students and what they've uploaded. And together we'll be able to create self-care checklist that will help us on a day-to-day process. 8. Thank You & Next Steps: In a documentary called facing the store, one of the narrators describes how buffalo run into the scar, therefore minimizing the time they will spin. I find that a really beautiful analogy for grief. It don't ignore it. They don't run from it. Or hope it'll go away, which is what we ought to do. Or what I should say I often do. For the Buffalo, It's better to turn around and go through it. Knowing that at the end of the storm, they'll get to sun quicker. At the end of the hard work. It'll be easier. I hope this course has done for you a little bit. I know it's turned you around and help you ride through a little bit of storm. And I'm glad to be here with the worst kind of loss is your loss. It's your job to honor your grief. Knowing that you can understand it and work through it. There are challenges to find the median. I need meaning means saying goodbye to the life rehab. I'm trying to say hello to future. We never envisioned. My baby boy will always be a part of me. I like you right now. I'm trying to figure out who I am, that my teachers chain. Now that the time that I had with Athlon here step, your loved ones story is over, and you've experienced great loss, but life continues. You will never be the same, but you can be whole again. You deserve to be. I think the people that we lost want us to be. Thank you for being a part of this course on grief. It's hard, I know, but you've done it. And I'm proud of you. I hope it helped in some way. I'm also open to adding more to the course. So please reach out if you'd like to see more on a topic that wasn't covered, please use the next 10 min to finish your self-care checklists and post the project in the gallery. I look forward to reading your work, congratulating you on finishing your self-care checklists and the course.