Gems Guiding Light

What date has meaning to you in your loss? Not necessarily when you said goodbye but it could be this date too, maybe it’s a different date like their birthday, or a date they got their diagnosis or the day they overcame something.
One of the dates that has meaning to me is 16 August 2023 – the day my life changed forever. The day she died, and the day became her angelversary.

Please share yours if you would like too x

You have the answers, you already have everything you need inside of you. Your grief, your story – it is yours. You hold the key to move forwards, but we get stuck in survival. Sometimes we just need someone to walk beside us and clear the fog. Someone to listen, understand, validate and support you moving forwards. To create a safe space for you to be seen and heard. This is what I can offer as a Holistic Grief Coach & someone who gets grief.

It is normal to experience exhaustion and tiredness with grief. There is nothing wrong with you, you have been through trauma and loss which impacts our nervous system as we often go into hypervigilance or hyper independence. As our nervous system is on high alert, and preparing for the next impact, loss often leads to dysregulation. What you may find is that you feel fatigued and experience brain fog. Among many other things we may feel, exhaustion can be a huge part of our experience after loss - as we process the event and the loss. We carry the emotional weight of grief, draining our mental capacity giving our mental load more to carry. Most often, grief affects our sleep (insomnia/nightmares) which can impact the fatigue we feel. If you are having trouble concentrating, this is also part of carrying our mental load after loss.

Grief is a whole body response, which is why as a holistic grief coach we have a whole body approach to it. Fatigue may be one small part of what we can look at together.

However, if you are having severe difficulty, please seek the support of a medical professional who will be able to support you through this.

Tomorrow, Tuesday 7th July is global Forgiveness Day 2026, a day to encourage forgiveness. Forgiveness is a conscious decision to release anger, resentment, vengeance to another who has caused pain and can include ourselves. Whether this be a deliberate decision to forgive or an emotional decision to internally forgive, it can have so many benefits for ourselves and others.

In grief it can be especially hard not to blame ourselves. For something we feel we didn’t do, should have done differently and don’t feel we have the chance to change. Sometimes its for the relationship we lost and sometimes we just need to feel safe & supported enough to give ourselves grace for mistakes we made. For a trauma like grief, where we hold on to guilt, resentment and anger we deserve forgiveness, understanding and compassion too. These feelings are a completely normal human experience.

It doesn’t mean forgetting, excusing, condoning or forgoing accountability and doesn’t mean you have to reconcile with anyone who has done you wrong.

What is something today you can forgive yourself for or someone else in your life? I forgive myself for doubting myself. I held onto guilt, I felt that I didn’t handle the illness with my Mum well enough- I did my best. That is all that we can do.

Lots of Love
x

Here are 4 mini tools to try for somatic regulation. Not just for when you are feeling overwhelmed or feeling deep in an emotion but for any time you can and want to give it a try, including when regulated. Small and easy to incorporate into our busy and hectic daily lives.

Do you need reminding to do this sometimes and what do you find helps?

After a traumatic event, such as grief, our brain goes offline. The fancy words for this are that our neocortex, cerebral cortex go offline which is when we see a reduction in our cognitive function. It can bring about various changes that affect both our functions and behaviours.

Trauma can also leave lasting imprints on the brain, which affects our memory formation and emotional regulation. Our trauma is processed in the neocortex, but can contribute to our long-term response of the traumatic event.

Somatic methods support our nervous system and they have been shown to help restore regulation. As well as our capacity and processing. Supporting grief somatically helps when our mind is offline. To restore our body with the regulation, capacity and support it needs.

This helps us to work around the trauma, meeting you where you are at safely, in a way that you can start to move forwards with it.

When we hear the news, when we try and move on from our grief (which isn’t possible), we don’t understand that our nervous system is responding to this loss as well not just the thoughts in our mind and the ache in our hearts. We carry on, continue as best we can without the support and understanding that loss is a really big traumatic life event and forever changes us. It is a completely normal and human experience but also really devastating with great impacts in all aspects of our daily life.

Our nervous system responds to our loss. We are not always able to hear and see what is going on for ourselves underneath the surface. Our mind, body & spirit doesn’t understand time, our nervous system doesn’t understand time, therefore it doesn’t make us feel safe or help us move forward. When we are understood and supported we gain understanding and build on our safety, this helps our nervous system to not see a threat. Because all the while our nervous system believes there is a threat, it will defend and protect us.

This is a huge part of what we support and look at together when we are working around our grief with the support of a holistic grief coach. Please reach out if you have any questions.