New Ways New You ( Tendrils of Grief- Life After Grief)

Susan, your host, welcomes Kate J. Meyer to today's episode. Kate is an author, a public speaker, a professional counselor, and an ordained minister. Kate is the author of The Red Couch, a novel just out in the summer of 2021 about missed expectations and seeing how the past doesn't define but informs you. Kate's book: Faith Doesn't Erase Grief is a get-help-now manual on loss and grief at the intersections of faith and psychology, helping spiritual readers see loss more clearly. A fan of NaNoRiMo writing goals, she lives in western Michigan with her husband and two chocolate labs, Rocky and Duke.

Key Takeaways:

• Kate shares her grief story
• We never know when we are going to need to know about grief and how to navigate it.
• People need permission to grieve in their own particular way.
• Kate and Susan talk about how society imposes ridiculous time periods for grieving.
• Our grief experiments with different changes as life go on.
• Susan shares her experience this fall, being the first one alone after her husband died and now that her daughter went to college.
• In most situations in life avoiding pain is ok, but not with grief. While grieving, we have to walk through our pain to be able to release it.
• Susan confesses she was angry at God.
• We are allowed to question and express our anger.
• God created our emotions, He won't be surprised by them.
• Things just are - we assign value to them.
• Grief is a whole being experience.
• Kate shares her inspiration and hopes in her book: Faith Doesn't Erase Grief.
• Faith and grief can coexist; you can be angry at God and still keep your faith.
• Doubt is an essential part of faith.
• Kate shares her advice for those who feel they have lost their faith: Hope is a cushion, it doesn't fix the problem, but it helps in sustaining and supporting us.

Resources

Tendrilsofgrief.com

Email Susan: [email protected]

Meet Kate J. Meyer

Find more about Kate on Instagram and Facebook

Visit katejmeyer.com

Faith Doesn't Erase Grief: Embracing the Experience and Finding Hope, Kate J. Meyer

Susan welcomes Nicola Mercer to today's episode. Nicola is a transformational health coach, supporting women in business to transform their health into wealth by building confidence and self-worth using her successful framework of mindset, movement, nutrition, sleep, and stress. Her vision is to help normalize a healthy lifestyle for families, so kids grow up having healthy habits modeled to them, value themselves, and live with health and happiness.

Having been made redundant from the corporate world in 2021, Nicola made a big decision to pivot her career and enter the entrepreneurial world, launching Life Now Coaching. Nicola is a certified health coach and qualified personal trainer with over twenty years of expertise in one of the world's largest sports brands leading successful projects and teams. She combines her corporate leadership experience with her journey of living with mental and physical health challenges to support other women to build healthy, happy, and strong lives.

Nicola has learned through the power of moving her body daily and putting sustainable habits in place the positive difference this can make to how you feel, think, and live. She advocates that living a great life and achieving the success you desire results from how you take care of your mind, body, and soul.

Key Takeaways:

• Nicola shares her grief story.
• Waiting for someone to die is just horrible, losing that special someone also means that his or her suffering has finished.
• After someone who was suffering passes away, the first feeling is relief, and consequently comes immense suffering.
• PTSD is a common diagnosis for caregivers of terminal patients.
• Grief doesn't go away, it becomes a part of who you are.
• Nicola talks about how to help someone grieving by sharing techniques and valuable advice.
• Susan shares how she focuses on the beautiful story that comes with her grief, it was the end of a loving relationship filled with great memories.
• Death is another stage of life, instead of funerals we should do a celebration of life.
• You can choose how to transit your grief, you can decide what is the possible healthiest way to process your loss.
• How do you want to feel at the end of your life? What would equal a happy life for you?
• So many of us live in the past or the future, forgetting our present moment.

Resources

Tendrilsofgrief.com

Email Susan: [email protected]

The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing, by Bronnie Ware

Meet Nicola Mercer

Follow Nicola on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Life Now Coaching

Find more about Nicola's free challenge to build your self-worth and know why you should take care of yourself for a strong and healthy life.

Susan, your host, welcomes Gwenda Lambert to today's episode. Long before becoming an Advanced Grief Recovery Method Specialist, Gwenda was drawn to helping people navigate loss. She had experienced 17 deaths by the time she was 21 as well as being the daughter of a Gerontology nurse.

Her greatest loss came in 2012, a loss of health. She experienced a Post Traumatic Stress diagnosis that completely sidelined her. She was unable to focus or hold a thought. She was unable to sleep or actually even feel safe enough to leave her home most days. Even in all the chaos, she knew she had to find out what was going on. Basically, all those traumas and emotional losses including deaths and loss of trust that were locked in a room burst out. While she is well versed in the death and dying part, grief and embracing all those messy emotions still needed work. She had tried many different modalities from Yoga and somatic work to talk therapy yet it wasn't until she found the Grief Recovery Method, a simple, yet not easy, four-step process that allows you to get a lay of the land of your own emotional landscape, that she was able to embrace her incomplete relationships and trauma that held her back in ways she wasn't aware of. Now she wants to share that emotional freedom with you.

Key Takeaways:

• Anger, loneliness, and confusion are all part of grief too.
• Gwenda talks about the brain after experiencing trauma.
• Grief not only comes from death.
• Laughing and crying are both expressions; if you are not comfortable around tears you need to ask yourself what is wrong with you with this emotion.
• Gwenda explains how she ended up with post-traumatic stress disorder.
• Everyone grieves differently.
• Self-care is never selfish.
• It is hard to be supportive sometimes, we need to learn how to support people.
• Allow yourself to feel how you feel because if you don't, it will come out in an unexpected way.
• Grieving is not necessarily being strong but it is courageous and brave to do what you can each day.
• If you got through the first year after losing someone and you are still standing, prize yourself, it is not easy to grieve.
• Practice self-attention, pay attention to yourself, and learn to treat yourself with compassion and respect.

Resources

Tendrilsofgrief.com

Email Susan: [email protected]

Meet Gwenda Lambert

Learn more about Gwenda

Email Gwenda at [email protected]

Today, Susan, your host, welcomes you to another episode of Tendrils of Grief Podcast. In this episode, she shares her thoughts about going through the upcoming holidays while grieving. You would say that holidays are tough enough when someone is grieving but unfortunately, there are a lot of pressures that add to the pain of grieving during this particular time of the year (parties, gifts, celebrations…). Susan shares the best tips she has compiled over the years of grief and podcasting.

Key Takeaways:

• Susan acknowledges the suffering of going through the holidays while grieving.
• Tip no. 1: Be clear about how you want your holiday experience to look and feel.
• Tip no. 2: Communicate your wishes to others. (They don't know how you feel.)
• Tip no. 3: Set limits when visiting.

• Tip no. 4: Don't be afraid to say "No."

• Tip no. 5: Surround yourself with the right people.
• Tip no. 6: Make self-care a priority.
• Tip no. 7: Ask for help!
• Tip no. 8: Be kind to yourself! (This is the most important tip, and not only during holidays.)

Resources

Tendrilsofgrief.com

Email Susan: [email protected]

Susan welcomes Marie Scott to today's episode. Marie is the Creator and Founder of Happy and Healthy After Widowhood. After losing her beloved Dave of almost 30 years, and her mom the same year, she went back to school to learn more about the link between food and cancer. After becoming a certified health coach, Marie now coaches widows and widowers using her 7 Steps to Healing After Loss, a unique roadmap to finding a new purpose after a devastating loss. After her health transformation and getting off all meds, losing 20 pounds, reversing pre-diabetes, and through her life transformation of becoming an author of three published books, an international speaker, and a wellness coach, she has many testimonials and is now happily married again to the second great love of her life.

Key Takeaways:

• Sugar feeds cancer.
• Marie talks about Dave and their amazing relationship.
• Dave didn't want chemotherapy, he choose quality of life, not quantity.
• Marie talks about her life after losing Dave. He was concerned about Marie living her life after his death.
• Marie decided to become a life coach and learn more about nutrition.
• There is no guidebook for grief.
• Dating after 50 years old is hard.
• Marie talks about how food can become your medicine.
• Marie speaks of the 7 Steps to Healing After Loss.
• Who dates a widow and a widower needs to hold space for the spouse who passed away.
• Find a sense of community; you will need it to ease the path after loss.

Resources

Tendrilsofgrief.com

Email Susan: [email protected]

Learn more about Magic Mind at https://www.magicmind.co/grief and take advantage of the special discount for The Tendrils of Grief's listeners: GIREF20

.

Meet Marie Scott

Visit Marie's website

Join Marie's Facebook community

Connect with Marie on Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube

Susan, your host, welcomes Page Park to today's episode. Page has her own grief story; she helps people navigate grief through yoga, meditation, breath, and connection within themselves. At Tulsi Rose Yoga, she creates a space where clients can get in touch with their inner voice and listen to their bodies to tune in to personal needs, and desires. Teaching for 24 years as a classroom teacher, Page explored ways to reach students and studied yoga completing her registered yoga teacher 500-hour program, 95-hour registered children's yoga teacher, and 100-hour yin training. In addition to teaching yoga and meditation, Page also writes poetry, about yoga, meditation, and how to connect with people.

Key Takeaways:

• Page shares her grief story.
• Grief also includes a "business part" that can bring anger and sadness and even resentment and frustration for having to deal with so much.
• Practicing meditation is an incredible help, even one minute makes wonders.
• Find grief interrupters.
• Self-care is not being selfish.
• Susan shares her passion for yin yoga.
• Page talks about grief yoga and its special features.
• Yoga and self-care practices are so important when you are grieving because they have the power to take you out of your head and into your body.
• Where do you store your pain in your body?
• When you move your body, you are moving the flow of energy through it.
• Soaking sunshine can be a great help to boost your mood.
• Ask yourself: What is it that I need right now? Learn to listen to your body.
• If you keep searching for answers, they will come to you.
• You are not alone! There are people out there who will understand how you feel.

Resources

Tendrilsofgrief.com

Email Susan: [email protected]

Check Susan's blog

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel van der Kolk M.D.

Meet Page Park

Tulsi Rose Yoga

Follow Tulsi Rose Yoga on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn

Susan, your host, welcomes Geralyn Ritter to today's episode. Geralyn is a recognized expert in healthcare policy and an executive vice president at Organon & Co., a new Fortune 500 healthcare company dedicated to the health of women. She was formerly senior vice president at Merck & Co., Inc., one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. She has spearheaded global government affairs and policy, led initiatives on corporate governance and corporate responsibility, created and launched a widely acclaimed half-billion-dollar philanthropic initiative to end preventable maternal deaths around the globe, and has served as President of the Merck Foundation. In 2020, on behalf of Merck, Geralyn accepted the Disability Employer of the Year award. She is now the author of a memoir about her recovery from the 2015 Amtrak derailment titled: Bone by Bone: A Memoir of Trauma and Healing.

Key Takeaways:

• Geralyn shares her story as a survivor of the 2015 Amtrak derailment.
• Geralyn talks about the confusion that took over her when she woke up after the derailment: "It seemed too unreal to be true."
• Susan shares her thoughts about the day her life turned upside down; she remembers thinking: "This can't be happening to me."
• Geralyn talks about first feeling grateful for being alive and then, realizing how life-changing the derailment was going to be, she really started to crash.
• Geralyn couldn't accept that somehow she deserved to survive.
• Geralyn came to the realization that she did have the right to grieve even though she had survived.
• Geralyn talks about the difficult task of accepting the lack of control.
• Keep your hope; you can't control the time frame, remember that grieving has no schedule and that you will get better.
• Life has unlimited opportunities; you will find joy, and grief will be less searing.

Resources

Tendrilsofgrief.com

Email Susan: [email protected]

Meet Geralyn Ritter

Learn more about Geralyn

Bone by Bone: A Memoir of Trauma and Healing.

Susan, your host, welcomes Coleen Ellis to today's episode. Coleen faced the death of her pet in 1998 and that moment changed her forever. It was the beginning of her vision of how to best meet the needs of pet parents in their desire to mourn, memorialize, and pay tribute to their beloved pets when they die. In 2003, the experience of the death of her dog, Mico, guided her in starting the nation's first stand-alone pets-only funeral home, Pet Angel Memorial Center. In 2009, Coleen founded Two Hearts Pet Loss Center, to guide people who wish to provide meaningful pet death care services in their communities, as well as to be an educational resource in the pet grief discipline. In 2009, she received the first Death and Grief Studies Certification specializing in Pet Loss Companioning by Dr. Alan Wolfelt as well as releasing her first book, Pet Parents: A Journey Through Unconditional Love and Grief. Her second book co-authored with colleague Dr. Mary Gardner, Forever Friend, released in 2022. She is Certified in Thanatology and is a Certified Pet Loss Professional.

By 2014, Coleen was ready to take her vision to a new level. She was a co-founder of The Pet Loss Center and assisted the company in opening pet loss operations across the United States, with this operation being acquired by a national acquisition company in 2020.

Coleen is an internationally sought-after speaker on the topics of pet loss and grief. Through her delivery style, pet care professionals learn a variety of techniques immediately applicable to implement on how to companion families in their grief journey. Furthermore, her talks to pet parents give them the permission they need to not only grieve but mourn the loss of their beloved pet.

Key Takeaways:

• Coleen talks about how pets are considered family members for most of their owners and as a result, the grieving process is as profound and painful as it is when we lose a relative.
• Coleen advises people to choose wisely who they will be surrounded by when they are grieving, some people just don't get it.
• Coleen talks about the anticipatory feeling of loss when a pet owner has to take the tough decision of ending their pet's life.
• Coleen explains how hospice for pets works.
• Please remember to be kind to yourself.
• Wherever you are right now is exactly where you should be.
• Honor the journey you shared with your pet every day.
• Ask your pet for a sign.
• You are not losing your mind, allow yourself to receive the signs as you notice them.
• Every grieving process is different.
• Mourning is the active part of grieving; you have to do something with your grief and honor the time you spent with your pet.

Resources

Tendrilsofgrief.com

Email Susan: [email protected]

Meet

Learn more about Coleen Ellis

Two Hearts Pet Loss Center,

Pet Parents: A Journey Through Unconditional Love and Grief, Coleen Ellis

Forever Friend, Coleen Ellis

Foreverfriend.pet

Susan, your host, welcomes Maria Verdeschi to today's episode. She is an acclaimed Psychic Medium, Speaker, Best-Selling Author, Teacher, and Coach with clients all over the world. Her extraordinary ability to communicate with spirit began at the age of four while living on Long Island. Now with over a decade of experience, Maria is well known for her accuracy and delivery of evidential messages from departed loved ones. Her kindness and compassion are unmatched. She has a genuine interest in each client that provides for a relaxed and down-to-earth reading.

Maria is the host of the spiritual podcast Hello From The Other Side and is a co-host of the Blog Talk Radio show Reading The Signs. Her best-selling book There Is No Death, Only Life, with a foreword written by Celebrity Medium Thomas John, has provided support to readers while healing from grief, and she is a contributing author in the best-selling book The Last Breath.

Her successful coaching and mentorship program features classes on Mediumship, Connecting with Your Loved Ones in Spirit, Meditation, and Manifesting. In addition, she is a Master Reiki Practitioner proficient in Pranic Healing. Her ability to connect with teachers, students, clients, guides, and departed loved ones is nothing short of astonishing. Most important to Maria is that people understand the simple truth that, "there is no death — only life."

Key Takeaways:

• Maria shares how she discovered she had psychic abilities at the age of four and decided to keep that to herself for a long time.
• Maria believes everyone can have a psychic ability to a certain degree.
• The more that you acknowledge the signs, the more they will come in.
• Our loved ones want us to know that they love us, they want us to save time and money and move forward and be happy.
• Can our deceased loved ones have an influence over our lives? Maria affirms they can.
• Maria explains how to tell the difference between a message from the other side and what we want to hear.
• Maria suggests stopping second-guessing yourself when you think you have received a message from the other side, quieting your logical mind.
• How can you prepare yourself to hear messages?
• Gratitude is a practice that will help you connect with your loved ones from the other side.
• Maria talks about the most common ways people receive messages from the other side.
• Maria gives advice on sharpening your senses to be able to connect with your loved one who passed away.
• If you think it is not happening to you, that you cannot receive any signs, stop and breathe, since your frustration brings your energy down, keep a higher vibration in order to hear the messages from the other side.
• When is the right time to visit a psychic medium and when isn't?
• Maria talks about what someone can expect from seeing a psychic medium: Closure, comfort, clarity, and peace.

Resources

Tendrilsofgrief.com

Email Susan: [email protected]

Meet Maria Verdeschi

Visit Maria Verdeschi's website

Follow Maria on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok

Susan, your host, welcomes a lifelong friend to today's episode, Geri King. They met in high school and married men who were really good friends.

In this show, Geri shares her son's struggles with depression and alcoholism, the hardships he needed to face, and how these all lead to his death. Geri openly talks about her grief, her pain, and her current work on her mental health.

Key Takeaways:

• Geri shares her journey after the death of her son.
• Geri knew that something was wrong with her son.
• Addiction got a hold of her son, he was in total denial of his problem with alcohol since he was a functional alcoholic.
• Geri's son confessed to her that he didn't want to "be here anymore."
• Geri woke up the day her son died knowing something was terribly wrong.
• Geri shares her pain facing the indescribable feeling of losing a child.
• Geri invests her time in helping people be more aware of the signs of addictive behavior.
• Geri gives advice to people who know someone close to them who is struggling with depression and/or substance abuse: You are not alone; talk to someone you trust.

Resources

Tendrilsofgrief.com

Email Susan: [email protected]