There is a way! And you are standing right in front of it. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t, that you should just sit around and “wait” longer… that there is no way out right now. This is your journey and you can write the map to where you are going. Grieve with each small step forward, one at a time, one day after the next. You just need to focus your energy gradually and accordingly. You don’t even have to learn to do it, you already know how. You are literally hardwired to reinvent yourself and overcome. You are born ready even though you don’t feel ready. You are born with the ability to change your life no matter how much loss, sadness and difficulty you are experiencing. You are made to survive the hardest days of your life Therefore, here are five hard yet powerful lessons I’ve learned over the past decade of studying the science of life after loss-just a small highlight of what I dive deeper into in my brand new book, Where Did You Go? A Life-Changing Journey to Connect with Those We’ve Lost: 1. I now realize that we’ve gone far in our discoveries but not far in our experiences, and certainly not far in the sharing of these discoveries. And these different dimensions hold far more than what can been seen with he human eye. For instance, there is substantial evidence-from personal accounts to theories in quantum physics, to discoveries accepted as facts in the scientific community-that life as we perceive it is merely one of many dimensions existing all around us at any given moment. But so many of these findings have not made their way to the masses. The deeper into the science and theories I went, the more I realized how much our scientists already know about the universe, and about how life and death and our perception of it all really works. And one of the biggest questions that kept echoing through my mind was, “Where did you go? Because once we had re-entered our lives and could face such questions like, “How can I possibly move on?”, we were hungry to discover the answers to even bigger questions. In some way, it wasn’t enough to find our way back to a good life. I worked with so many people who continued to search for their lost beloveds-even after they had reclaimed their own lives-even when they were back to thriving again. And yet, there was always one part missing. But that exact advice-that terrible advice I was given-fueled my mission to impact the world of grief with an action-oriented process.ĭuring the next several years that followed, I didn’t just get my own life back, I helped thousands of others do the same. I could do something with what I was learning, instead of just existing in a never-ending state of grief, “waiting,” as so many books on grieving advised, “for time to heal me,” while at the same time telling me that “grief is supposed to last forever.” Those two concepts made me furious because waiting for precious time to pass was not the way I wanted to spend my life. I discovered that, for me, studying the brain was the only way out of the pain I was entrenched in.
I threw myself into the world of brain science and discovered how the brain likes to loop grief and never let it go. The searching and rote surviving continued. Not a pretty picture, and one I’m not proud of. Dark thoughts filled my head-an ugly monster roaring. I was envious of women whose husbands were still alive, envious of parents taking their kids out for pancakes on a Sunday morning and living their perfect lives. I hated my life, my future, and every moment of every day. A routine based on fear of the future and dictated by my ego’s need to “protect” myself by keeping myself stuck in one place. Living day in and day out inside a routine that took away my passion for life. I spent those first few years after his passing barely surviving. The journey that started the day my husband died has been the most important journey of my life. In fact, immediately trying to apply my faith to my dire circumstances actually deepened my doubts about what faith really meant to me, my two young daughters, and life in general, that someone we loved dearly was now in a place called heaven, or the afterlife. One moment I was painfully sad, the next moment I was hunting for his ghost, spirit body, soul-anything that was him.Įven though I’d been brought up Greek Orthodox, my religious background didn’t help me.
In the days, weeks and months that followed my 35-year-old husband’s death, I swung between mind-numbing grief and an insatiable search for him, for his essence.
By Christina Rasmussen, author of Where Did You Go?