Is this grief just life?

Thoughts on anxiety, on grief, on life... and other contemplations that have been on my heart lately...

Hello lovely one

How is your heart today? How are you feeling?

Today’s letter to you is a little bit of a reflection of life lately… it poured into the notes app on my phone in fits and spurts over the last few days and addresses some of the things I have been experiencing, pondering and sitting with over the past few months.

Let me begin with a little bit of honesty

If you have been here a while you will know that I am always transparent about how I feel and what I am experiencing in my life. My writing is very much experiential — however I also know that some things need a little more time to integrate before they can be shared. While the internet is very ‘pro’ vulnerability — and I am too in the right held spaces when the timing is correct — I also think that we need to be aware of the transmission we express and how that can impact others, as well as how that can actually impact the parts of us that may still feel very fragile.

Some of what I am writing about today has felt too tender to share until now because it was simply fragments. Pieces of me that hadn’t landed anywhere yet.

I have been writing and sharing online now for over twenty years and I have learned (sometimes the hard way) the importance of letting these life phases settle in my system before I even try and express them in words through a published piece of writing. My friend

Vanessa Sage, PhD

once shared with me the importance of sharing from the scar, not the wound, and that has always stuck with me. When something in me is ready to be shared, my desire and energy to write about it is often the thing that signals to me that it is the right timing.

When I sat down to write on Monday it wasn’t actually with the intention to share the following piece, but the words flowed from my fingertips with such consciousness and ease, that I knew it was time.

A snapshot of where some of this piece was written during a moment where my littlest was very contentedly playing in the sandpit. Oh… and a little sneak of my new studio space that is almost ready!

Hello Anxiety… my dear old friend…

I have journeyed with anxiety for most of my adult life. It became quite crippling in my twenties and was a huge part of my motivation discover holistic ways of taking care of myself back then. I ‘cleaned up’ my diet, found my way to exercise, discovered yoga and meditation and for the past 10 - 15 years I have been exploring and experimenting with a multitude of different ways to manage my mental health.

I call it anxiety… because that is the easiest way to describe it but truly this is a complex set of patterns and behaviours that can’t really be explained in just one word.

Every now and then my anxiety has swept over me and brought me to my knees… again… usually just when I think that I have got a ‘handle’ on it using whatever controlling techniques have worked in that particular phase of life. The pattern thereby goes that I go on a quest to find ways of ‘coping’ until it feels like it doesn’t hold as tightly as it had done previously.

Yoga. Meditation. Nature. Restrictive diets. Multiple external health experts to ‘fix’ my diet (again). Bodywork. Healing sessions. Flower essences. Herbal tonics. Tapping. Self soothing techniques. Breathwork.

There is nothing inherently wrong with these things — I, of course, am an advocate for so many of them and they have become an important part of my own life and what I share with others. They are incredible practices of support but they were never meant to hold it all… not long term anyway.

And here is the thing…. even with all of these incredible wellness tools (and the tens of thousands of pounds I have spent on them) … the anxiety never really goes away. That terrifying feeling of tipping over the edge into a swirling spiral of discomfort (physically and emotionally) is always no more than a few steps away.

This has made me live my life on metaphorical tenterhooks for too long. It has stolen experiences away from me. It has stolen me away from moments that I will never get back. Never.

Return of the A…

Last summer my ‘anxiety’ poked it’s head up once more in a more intense way and this time it took a new shape. Heart palpitations and body sensations that were simply not possible to escape from. A heaviness in my chest that felt like I was drowning at times. Severe nausea. The feeling of utter terror coursing through my body — and often times this would be while I was trying to get the girls ready on my own in the mornings, or in the depths of the dark nights where everything always seems to feel supercharged.

On speaking to a medical expert it appeared this was a kind of panic disorder… and then the knock on impact was that I was then finding myself panicking and having intrusive thoughts about having the panic attack. The fear of those sensations sweeping over me kept me in a toxic loop of feeling so scared that I could only ‘just’ function.

Distraction was the only way I could get through some mornings and after a few hours, either after I had dropped off the girls in childcare settings or I had simply ridden the wave, it would settle and my body would return to me. My human brain left trying to ‘figure out’ how I could alleviate this and get back to ‘normal’… but the reality was that my normal was not really the where I needed to return to. My ‘normal’ had become something that was a scary place to be.

Instead of in the past when I had found a ‘tool’, stuck to it and my anxiety had simmered away into background noise, this time nothing truly worked to escape it. I knew that I had run the course of avoidance and now it was time to face this head on. This was a signal that it was time for a deeper excavation because no longer did I want to be in a cycle of control.

A photo taken on my birthday last Summer… I was living but the moments when I felt truly alive were fleeting…

Nothing changes, if nothing changes

At the start of this year, I started seeing a therapist. I’ve seen multiple different therapists before over the past twenty odd years but it has always been through referral from the NHS or through private healthcare (which I am extremely lucky to have thanks to my husband). It has also nearly always been CBT (which I know is amazing for some people but has never worked for me).

This time I knew it had to be different. I found an incredible therapist who covers both psychotherapy AND somatic work (and a huge multitude of other things) and three months in I can start to feel threads beginning to untangle.

It is messy. It is painful. At times I wondered if we would ever get further than me simply dumping a tangled web of hopelessness and helplessness on to her. But a few months in I reached a point of awareness that I knew I couldn’t go back from.

I have walked down this path before many times. Each time in this ‘healing journey’ I have got to a similar point. Feeling OK ‘enough’ to manage and continue as ‘normal’. Gathered enough external tools to keep me afloat until the next deep dive.

At the point where I was just thinking ‘maybe I should just quit now’ there came an invitation from within to take a bolder step forwards. To look at things I had never dared myself to go. It felt different this time.

I reminded myself of these words… nothing changes, if nothing changes. I returned to the neuroscience studies I had briefly picked up but never fully embodied — they gave me a sense of hope and trust in my ability to make changes.

I slowed my entire being down and I rested into the sensations rather than escaping them. I started to feel more trusting and more present. I chose to lie down and create space instead of fill every moment with busyness to the point of burning myself out.

I began gently creating an evidence bank in body that I was actually here to take care of it, instead of ignore it’s many, many signals to stop.

Gently. Nourishingly. Lovingly. I started walking home to myself.

Timing is everything

I want to gently acknowledge the immense privilege I feel to be in this situation. To be able to pay for a therapist, and have the space to be held. And also to have the energy for it…

I also couldn’t have done this a year ago. I didn’t have the capacity emotionally.

The double edged sword of mental health struggles is that often we feel exhausted and in survival mode, so the mere prospect of making changes and shifting our habitual patterns is too much to contemplate.

My past two years have probably, to the outside eye, appeared very expansive… and in so many ways they have been. I have worked with amazing clients in my design and mentoring business, I have created beautiful offerings that I am extremely proud of, I have studied and learned, I have built this Substack from the ground up, I have held space in a multitude of ways that has genuinely brought pure joy to my heart. I have made new connections and friends, raised my two beautiful girls, continued to make our home somewhere we want to spend time in… the list of gratitude really does go on…

AND yet… the paradox of life forever courses through me…

Because there has also been this undercurrent running through the foundations that I know has held me back from feeling truly, truly alive. A thread that I tried to ignore and pretend didn’t exist… a thread that I hid… or at least I thought I did.

This undercurrent of fear… of not ‘enoughness’… of ‘am I worthy of all this goodness?’… of control and restriction… of holding myself back from so many things (creative visions, experiencing, experiencing new things)… of always waiting for the disappointment… these were the most dominant storylines throughout so much of that goodness.

Sitting in awe and magic at Pause Place last November

Sadness for all that has not been

I had the immense joy of being held by Katie Abbott from Pause Place for her exquisite practitioner training last year over the months of September, October and November. This work in Circle stretched me in so many ways and during one particular partner exercise we were invited to ask any question at all to the person we were sitting with.

My partner asked me… ‘can you tell me about the sadness I see in your eyes?’…

It floored me if I am honest. I didn’t know how to answer. I felt like my heart had been exposed in a way that didn’t feel good at first. Was I projecting a ‘sad’ energy out into the world? Did others see this in me?

But she saw a part of me that I hadn’t even seen myself until that moment. And I could barely speak. I was shocked. When I could finally put some thoughts into words I shared that I wasn’t sure what it was… but I ‘thought’ that it was because I felt a lot of sadness and grief about how much I had missed out on in life — or couldn’t seem to experience fully and presently — because this ‘anxious’ part of me was holding on so tight. I was holding myself back from living, from loving, from joy, from devoting myself to the things that my soul came here to do, from showing up on this earth and walking the path that I know I was here to tread down.

I haven’t been the same person since that experience but it has taken until I wrote these words today for me to fully let this experience land. I have been gently integrating a new way of being — no big cathartic experience, just a gentle presence with myself day by day. A presence that is certainly not my default setting… yet… but it is becoming more visible and more accessible to me than perhaps ever before.

Is this grief just life?

This leads me to the question I asked in the title of this piece. The question that made me sit down and begin writing today.

My ‘anxiety’ has shapeshifted recently. I would say that the hold it has on me is less panicky and terror-like and more like a dull ache of overwhelming emotions. It has felt like being on the verge of tears but without the tears ever (or rarely) coming.

It feels like some sort of grief is stuck. The kind of grief that it is for no reason other than the pure, heart breaking reality of living and existing. The grief of love… of beauty… of awe… does that even make sense? I am not sure I can even fully put these feelings into words.

Every single day my heart agonises over watching my girls grow and change before my eyes. Like sand slipping through fingers I witness the beauty of childhood wonder and I can’t help but feel a simultaneous sense of utter devastation combined with adoration, amazement and awe.

It feels as though some part of me is going to spill over at any time and on one hand I want to sob my heart out and be relieved of this pressure… but the other part of me wonders if this is just how life is now? At times it feels too much to hold… that fear of loss and heart ache and pain can devour me in a mere mouthful, and I feel myself distance and build a cage around my heart protecting me from the vastness of losing even a single second with them.

I’m confused by it. It’s certainly not comfortable. I wonder is this just me?

My sensitivity to life and being human appears to be awakening more and more as I age. As I Mother. As I unravel. Some days I wish I could go back to the simplicity of not feeling as deeply… to just exist in life on a surface level. But I also simultaneously know that depth is what I came here for… and with depth comes emotions and feelings that feel like a tidal wave at times.

And yet, it all feels like such a gift.

This sadness and grief is not something I’m ashamed of, or even fearful of anymore in many ways. It’s actually a welcome signal to me that I am alive in my body and I’m inhabiting my humanness. I spent so many years numb and disconnected… fearful of the big feelings that I hadn’t learned how to hold.

Only when I started to gently allow the surge of sadness, of fear, of disappointment and overwhelm to be present messengers to me was I also able to feel the fizz of excitement again, the awe of bone deep love, the tingles of true connection with someone who sees and adores me for who I truly am.

A new identity inside and out

I’ve told myself for so many years that ‘anxiety’ is who I am and it has become possibly the most significant part of my identity. Yet recently I have started to question if this is really the right word. Is this simply how it is to live with an open heart?

The rawness. The tenderness. The softness.

There are, understandably, protective parts of me that are going to step in over and over again and try and keep me safe, they are going to tell me I can’t cope, that I am too much, that it is too risky…

…but I am learning to hold them.

I am resourcing myself more and more and learning that in this adult body, this Mother’s body, this woman’s soft nurturing body… I have the capacity to hold it all. The love. The grief. The rage. The joy.

With these shifts internally comes a shift externally too, my heart and soul work taking on a depth that I haven’t felt before. A calling to new ways of holding… leading… guiding… this personal journey taking me through a portal of new beginnings in the work I am here to bring to the world.

It is by no means a complete journey, and it won’t ever be, but I feel more whole than I have done in a long time.

I notice that I am feeling more tired these days… but it is a kind of tiredness that tells me my nervous system is not quite on high alert so much. And instead of pushing through I am honouring it.

I notice that I am slower. More intentional with my energy. My boundaries are stronger. I am operating less from the future and more from the presence.

I notice that when my mind becomes overwhelmed and I start to feel panicky it is almost always because I have started to think too far ahead into an unknown future and I am learning to bring myself back to this moment. This breath. The trees. The ground. The air. The sound of my daughters giggling.

I notice that this shift in being is no longer motivated by an external pressure to be something that I simply am not… it’s a loving choice to return to the core and centre of who I really am.

A part of me is whispering and gently guiding me home.

Before I sign off I wanted to gently remind anyone that is craving rest that my Bluebell Yoga Nidra is currently out from behind the paywall and you can access it here. If you would like to also join us in the next Restoration Session (live Yoga Nidra) then we will be gathering this Saturday at 9am (UK time). You can find all the benefits of joining the membership here and subscribe to get access below.

As always, I welcome your comments or replies if any of my words resonated with you. I am so grateful for your presence here lovely one, thank you for walking this path with me.

Until next time

With so much love and gentleness

Lauren

xxx

Hello to anyone who is new here… I am Lauren. A Mother of two daughters, Writer, Women’s Circle Facilitator, Sacred Business Mentor & Guide, Soul Branding & Website Creator and multi-dimensional human being. I walk with, and hold space for, others who are treading the tender path of their heart and soul work. You can find out more about this space and what to expect here. If you wish to be held in a deeper way do consider joining The Balm membership for restorative practices, sacred heart work offerings and more…

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