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The Labyrinth Leads to Centre

23/9/2021

Labyrinth - Healing For Grieving Hearts - Jacqueline Steudler

Walking a labyrinth always leads you to the centre. The centre of yourself or your soul. You choose (smile)

You never can take a wrong turn. The difference between a maze where you get tripped up by the wrong path or wall, and you have to backtrack. In a labyrinth, you move forward.

We built the labyrinth in our garden a few years back, and every year it seems to become more difficult to keep nature from taking over. We built it when I moved to Nova Scotia from Switzerland seventeen years ago. (WOW)

At the beginning of my new life, I felt lost, not knowing anyone but my spouse and his family. That wasn't always enough to keep me creative and my community-based soul happy.

Homesickness came and went. I wasn't as confident as I had been in my familiar space to go out into a world where I didn't speak the language well enough. Trust me, my then school English wasn't great for an adult conversation. (smile)

In one of those homesickness moments, I remembered my walks in a labyrinth near where I had lived in Switzerland. Yes, in the middle of the bustling city of Zurich, there is a labyrinth a bit hidden in a park. I told my spouse, and we decided to build our own.

It's much smaller than the usual labyrinths, but it's wonderful to walk to the centre early in the morning before starting my day. It's my way of meditating.

A walk in the labyrinth always helps you to find back to your centre. In a time when your emotions are taking over your life, you will find it to be a wonderful addition to calm and nurture your soul.

Don't have a backyard to build your own? No worries, I have you covered.

Even moving your fingers inside the path of a labyrinth can help you have the same benefits as walking it. I've created a short video that shows you how you can draw your own labyrinth. It's super simple. Try it!

Watch here.

Let me know if it helped you too to center and calm your soul. Also, if you have questions or can't get it to work, send me an email; I'm happy to help.

Healing Grief Takes Courage

1/7/2020

I hope you're doing well and your time (mostly) spent at home during the pandemic is a good one. I still find it sometimes tricky that I can't move as freely as before. However, I'm always happy to spend the summers at home in Nova Scotia. Glad to see that more places can open up.

It has been a while since I wrote here. Do you also feel like the pandemic time is a weird one? Time either seems to stand still, or days rush by you?

In April, I released my short-read ebook 'From Grieving to Grateful: How to Heal a Broken Heart'. Thanks to terrific reviews, it became a bestseller on Amazon Canada for three days. (hahaha)
Always fun to see those sales metrics at work. And yes, I admit that it did feel good. (smile)
Following that, I had so many ideas about how I could help more women.

I'm working towards a new offering for grieving women. I want to reach and help more on their healing journey and create a supportive community at the same time.

Just keeping you in suspense for now, but in about two to three weeks, I'm ready to talk about it more and let you in on the secret. (smile) Stay tuned.

We all know that the journey of grief is never a linear one. You and I, we have our up and downs. Some days we breathe in joy, and some days we are just deeply sad and miss our loved one so much that our heart feels like someone is squeezing it.

Be assured that I'm not here to tell you how to grief or that you shouldn't be sad or cry. Instead, I'm here to help you find your healing journey through this messy and sometimes chaotic feeling of grief.

I leave you today with a quote from a young woman that I admire deeply.

"We were scared, but our fear was not as strong as our courage."
- Malala Yousafzai

You might be scared of your feelings sometimes. I assure you there is courage in you. And you can tease it out with love and compassion towards yourself. A good laugh with a dear friend helps too. (smile)

From my heart to yours, take good care and stay safe,
Jacqueline

PS: Do you have questions? Just press reply, and I'm happy to answer.

Are you interested in my ebook From Grieving to Grateful? Get it on Amazon. (You can download the free Kindle App on Amazon to read it on your mobile devices or desktop).

Jacqueline Steudler, Artist, Art Therapist, Creative Grief Coach, and Lover of Nature's Beauty

Why You Have To Be Proactive When It Comes To Your Feelings

25/12/2019

Where do you store your feelings of grief and loss? HealingforGrievingHearts.com

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Where do you store your feelings of loss and grief?

When I lost my mother, I was not prepared for the sadness that accompanied the days, weeks, and months after my mother’s death. It felt like carrying the sadness of every loss I had ever encountered in my heart.

There was nothing holding back the tears. The lid was open and I knew I had to work through my feelings and acknowledge them to be able to heal.

I had to be open to heal into a new me without my mother’s presence but her love still deeply embedded in my heart.

What do I mean when I say the lid was open?

Think of our emotional centre as a pot and our feelings being kept in there by a lid on top of it.

As infants, our feelings move freely in and out. We cry when we are hungry. We laugh out loud when we are happy.

We react spontaneously to our feelings and no-one cares that we do so until we get older.

Then we learn to behave.

Somewhere on the way we also learn that a loss of any kind should be kept to ourselves. That it is a private affair.

Perhaps a grandparent dies and our parents don’t cry in front of us. So we don’t know if they are hurting or not.

Or we hear them cry behind closed doors. The message we get is: “Don’t show your feelings in public”.

There are many examples.

The following might resonate with you.

Our beloved pet dies and we are told not to cry. To be able to cope with the loss we build a wall around that feeling and put it in our emotional pot.

We move and we are promised that we will get to visit our friends but it never happens. We are building our little wall around that feeling of loss and it goes into the pot too.

Our first girl or boy friend breaks up with us and we are told “there are plenty of fish in the pond”. Wall around the sadness and in the pot it goes.

More losses follow and soon the pot is full.

We are told not to feel bad so we put a lid on our emotional pot to make sure these feelings don’t bother us.

The lid is pushed down by myths about grief that we hear from all kind of sources and society.

Don’t feel bad.
Replace the loss.
It just takes time.
Be strong for others.
Move on.

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Emotions Are Energy

Emotions can also be described as energy.

Every day life’s stress adds fire underneath that emotional pot.

We can feel the pot starting to boil over. To avoid the over-boiling we take part in activities that help us feel a release so that we can slam the lid back on.

What do we do?

One thing I used to medicate myself with, was to watch TV. I don’t mean one movie. I mean binge watching a whole series in one night and walking around like a zombie the next day.

Other energy releasing behaviours:

Shopping
Eating
TV, Netflix
Fitness
Sleeping
Internet
Social Media
Gaming
Alcohol and other drugs
etc.

What is yours?

What happens when it becomes too much?

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing." — C.S. Lewis

While our life goes on, our pot gets filled with more tucked away feelings.

The fire of stress might get hotter underneath with more responsibilities of every day life.

Example: If the pot is already full and then you go to work and the other co-workers are mean to you or your boss has an unreasonable request, you might have an explosion of behaviour. I always wonder if road rage has its roots there too.

If you drop one more loss into that already overfilled pot you will probably get an over reaction. An explosion of emotions that can overwhelm you and stop you in your tracks.

You might think that this loss was nothing compared to all the other losses in your life but it was the one that burst the pot open.

All of a sudden you are not dealing with one loss anymore but with all your stored emotions as well.

At that moment, it is important to gather your support system. This can be your friends, your family, or outside help from a therapist.

While the feelings are out in the open, we want to tackle all that accumulated and unresolved grief. It is an energy that you want to acknowledge so that your healing can start.

The illusion that suffering in silence works is just that an illusion. Waiting until things resolve themselves doesn’t help us.

We have to become active.

Why?

“We are designed as processing plants and not storage tanks.” - anonymous

"Just because you feel lost doesn’t mean that you are. Sometimes you just have to relax, breathe deep, and trust the path you’re on." — Lalah Delia

Thank you for reading.

If this resonated with you in any way, please send me a comment.
I do my best to respond to every one.

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How To Better Grief - A CBC Tapestry Episode

19/8/2018

The other day I listened to CBC's program Tapestry with guest host Christa Couture.

The title of the show was Better ways to live with grief.

The heartfelt discussions were uplifting and at the same time touched me deeply.

I was glad to hear psychologist David Feldman debunking the 5 stages of grief.

If you have followed the Healing Notes for a while then you know that there are no stages and that everyone grieves in their own unique way. It can get messy.

Next up was actor and comedian Cariad Lloyd. Cariad hosts the podcast Griefcast. I have been listening to some of her episodes and they are worth listening to for sure.

Last but not least Christa Couture talked to artist and designer Emily McDowel. Emily creates empathy cards that are to the point and sometimes full of humour.

Emily gave advice on what to say and what not to say when you have a friend that is grieving. I was glad to find her cards in one of our local greeting card shops.

You can listen to this episode of Tapestry at
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/better-ways-to-live-with-grief-1.4723337

Let me know if this or a part of it resonates with you as well.

Wishing you a wonderful Sunday,
Jacqueline

PS: Take a step forward and sign up for the Healing Notes that will arrive in your inbox every second Sunday.

If you want to create rituals and the many ways you can honour your loved one join the Healing Rituals online course.

Click the link to find out more at Healing Rituals.

Love Is A Huge Gift

5/8/2018

The last month has been heartbreaking.

You remember that our cat wasn’t well in the spring. She bounced back and we thought everything was OK. We thought/hoped that she had gotten over the hump and that she would live with us for another couple of years.

A month ago, she didn’t come home from her day outside. Over the last couple of years, she always stayed very close to the house. And even closer since she didn’t feel that well.

She always heard when I started to cook supper.

Immediately, I would have company in the kitchen.

She would wait for us to sit down for our meal. I don’t know when it started but over the last couple of years, she would get a few drops of cream on a small old plate on the floor. And we all ate together. (smile)

Later, she would spend the evening on one of our laps.

This isn’t happening anymore, because a month ago she didn’t return home.

We searched everywhere. We talked to neighboors, called all the shelters and vets, put up posters, and listed her missing on the local FB group.

We are coming to terms with the fact that she will not return. That she might have followed nature's call and went into hiding to die.

Every evening our heart breaks a bit more because she isn’t around anymore to share a meal with us.

Love is a huge gift and she has touched us deeply over the last ten years.

We are grieving the loss of our little companion. The loss of our fun times together, our rituals, our connection, and her trust that she gifted us with.

Our love for her will always be a part of us.

I am humbled again by my own grief that has enveloped me. I know it will get easier but we will always miss her and love her.

Take good care,
Jacqueline

PS: I will take a few weeks off to recharge, traveling around Nova Scotia with friends, and spend some time in my art studio. (smile)

You can always reach me by email at jacqueline(at)healingforgrievinghearts.com

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The Labyrinth Leads to Centre

Healing Grief Takes Courage

Why You Have To Be Proactive When It Comes To Your Feelings

How To Better Grief - A CBC Tapestry Episode

Love Is A Huge Gift

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