How My Grief Taught Me To Live

I've been thinking a lot about grief lately, and of how experiencing it has impacted my life.

Not because it's consuming every moment anymore, but because it isn't.

It comes in waves now.

For a while, it felt like grief was everywhere I looked. In the space of eight months I left my home and the life I had built. I stepped away from my business. I returned to a family dynamic that wasn't what I had hoped for. My children's dad suffered a paralysing stroke. Now my partner has had to leave the country for several months while we work through the visa process.

There have been moments when it all felt too much.

Through all of it, what I've realised is that grief eventually gives you a choice.

You either spend your life running from it, or you turn around and walk straight into it.

I don't know that I consciously chose that. I think grief simply became so big that I had nowhere else to go. I had to meet it, otherwise I think it would have consumed me.

That made me wonder why grief changes some people so deeply.

I've watched people lose themselves in it. I've watched grief become a story they keep reliving until it quietly becomes their identity. It's as though life stopped at the point of loss, even though the years kept passing.

I understand that now in a way I never did before.

And yet my own experience has been different.

Not because it hasn't hurt, because it has....deeply.

But because somewhere in the middle of all of it, I found myself returning to yoga.

Not the postures.

The practice of staying.

Of sitting with what is here instead of constantly wishing it away.

Ayurveda speaks so much about rhythm, nourishment and coming back into balance, and I wonder if that's what grief has really been asking of me all along. Not to fix it. Not to get over it. Simply to stop fighting the fact that this is where I am.

I'm still in the middle of this story.

I still have days where grief arrives unexpectedly.

But it no longer feels like something I need to defeat.

It feels more like something I'm learning to walk beside.

Almost like a gift.

Not because I would ever choose it, but because it has shown me something I don't think I could have learned any other way.

It has made me realise that our days are simply too precious to waste. That every breath we take is a gift. That joy isn't found in perfect circumstances, but in the quiet decision to remain open to life, even after it has broken your heart.

Three months after suffering his stroke, my ex-husband and the father of my children passed away.

As painful as that journey was, it left me with a realisation that has quietly changed the way I live.

His greatest gift to me wasn't something he said or did.

It was the reminder that life is so fragile.

That tomorrow is never promised.

And because of that, I refuse to wait for life to begin anymore.

I will stop to watch the sea.

I will to drink my tea while it's still hot.

I will tell the people I love that I love them.

I will be who I really am, fully.

I wiill laugh smile and be happy without feeling guilty for it.

I will write about it all!

If grief has given me anything, it has given me a deeper reverence for being alive.