How to feel

How to feel when you don’t know how you feel

Emotions, families, reality and feelings they are all some of the tougher things to navigate in this human life.

When someone close to you passes away due to age and failing health, how are you meant to feel or react?

In one respect you feel grateful that they are no longer suffering and are at peace but in another aspect are you meant to begin grieving because that is what is expected of you, if you don’t will you appear uncaring, cold, distant, then labelled with so many colourful phrases.

As I sit writing this, I don’t know how I am meant to feel other than relief that my father has finally let go of his human body and the pain, not just physical but emotional pain and anger he has carried for decades.

Yes, I have shed a few tears for the man I have been estranged from for the past 6 years but are they relief tears or sadness?

Are they feelings of shame and guilt for not being the dutiful daughter and giving up a life with my own family and grandchildren to be at his disposal.

How I’m feeling I don’t know but I know the tears are cleansing no matter the reason they are flowing.

Talking through this with my husband I feel a level of guilt and shame for being so far away from my parents not just physically but emotionally. Have I been selfish and in my own world or have I finally become aware of myself and my own needs, certainly both feel true, the guilt and shame only children can feel when their parents don’t approve of something stays with us throughout our lives. No matter our age the young child still lives within and that need to please or have the approval of the parents or parental figures is something we don’t always realise is there.

Looking through clouded feelings is what grief does, it can cloud us with a lot of emotions or feelings.

Reflecting on my earlier writing I see and feel this with a different view, one I will attempt to share in an unbiased clear way.

Grief for most people hits them as loss, the loss of life is enormous and one we are conditioned in Western culture to believe this is a sad event, generally, the loss is felt by putting ourselves into the space of what am I going to do now you're gone, how will I get through my day, life something akin to this.

I will break here and add that there are different levels of loss so naturally grief can come from shock if the life ends suddenly or traumatically or both. I’m not negating this it is a process that the system needs to go through. When the end of life is expected due to failing health and age it doesn’t make the grief any less real but it doesn’t always have the shock attached.

Shock and accidental or planned life ending is and always will be a tough grief to navigate especially if there are a lot of unanswered questions.

I needed to clarify this before I continue with grief and how the life that has ended in many other cultures is celebrated as the life lived and the good times shared a celebration of them as they were not as the body was the end.

I find myself in a space of reflecting on this and how grief used to feel like loss and the what, how all the things I used to attach to this, but now as I have looked at this through a clouded lens I cannot grieve in the mourning loss way but be joyful that he is now at peace and be grateful for all the things I learned from him, the things parents teach their kids, the good and the not so good moments and I feel a sense of expanding knowing that he is now in the next phase of his transition to spirit and whatever his next duty is.

I’m a believer in the soul reincarnating after a period of debriefing and clearing to see if the lessons you came here in this life to learn have been cleared. I also believe that he will be with his soul family until his next assignment, job, duty whatever name you want to give it is.

Do I believe he will reincarnate at some point yes but I don’t know where or when that is not for me to know, that is for that soul and its next contract.

With this outlook and the feeling that he is at peace and no longer has any pain>

How can I feel deep loss?

I feel deep gratitude and calm that on deeper reflective levels I understand my feelings and how I used to be conflicted with a lot of these understandings and the feelings we are told we must feel and if I am honest any grief or fear I feel comes from how is my mother going to be after the loss of the man she has been married to for 65 years. This I feel, this is where the true grief is it is for the living and how they will cope with such a big change and what will feel like a big void in their life, with the extra time they now have and not having to care for another on a daily basis.

I feel this deeply and it feels sad. But this is a sadness for my mother it is not grief it is concern.

Grief is how we react and often that reaction is to the reaction of others around us and how surreal death can be.

I’m not sure there is anything else to add so I will finish this off with this is my personal reflection I am not a counsellor, psychologist medical practitioner or professional in any way but I am someone who loves to share her reflections and insights with others in the hopes that it will give someone another view. You may not agree with these reflections, and that is perfectly as it should be. I encourage you to question, seek and reflect on your own feelings and experiences.

We are all unique in the way we experience and feel things and how we become aware.

There are millions of people on this planet and there are as many different and unique ways to understand, experience and process things.

Until next time may you feel the slightest breeze the soft kiss of a butterfly, the sighing of the trees and the warmth of a hug.