FIFTEEN years ago, I was walking home from school one day. I approached my house and saw the door was open. I entered, went into the living room and on the floor I saw my dad. In that moment, I didn’t know it but he had already passed away. I called the ambulance, they came but nothing could be done. He was gone.

I was only 13 years old. This was a completely unexpected shock that no one saw coming. At that age, I had no clue how to deal with this. It took me many, many years to heal and overcome my grief and this is why I am sharing my story. Almost all of us will experience the loss of a loved one during our lifetime, but grief is rarely spoken about and still heavily misunderstood.

I am sharing my story for those of you who are still suffering, who don’t see a way out of the grief you are experiencing. After my father passed away, I buried and ran from the grief. My world was completely shaken up and processing the pain at that point was too much. Years went by and I didn’t know how to talk about it. I felt shame, hurt, anger at the world and in the rare moments it did come up I struggled to talk about the experience.

It felt like there was a void in me that could never be filled again. It felt like I would carry this pain to my grave. After I graduated from university I began soul searching, diving into spirituality and looking for answers. I spoke to someone who helped me open up about what I went through. A flood of emotion came over me and I released a lot of the heaviness I was feeling.

You see, spending years hiding from the pain doesn’t mean it goes away. It's still there festering under the surface. I began allowing myself to feel my feelings, to hold space for them and surrender without judegment. There is a deep healing that happens through feeling. There's a transmutation of energy that occurs when we allow ourselves to feel the pain, feel the grief, feel whatever emotions are there without needing to push them away.

In my spiritual exploration, I found deep healing in seeing that on some level this experience I went through was chosen. There's an understanding that before we incarnate into this life, certain things are written for our soul to go through, and this is decided before we come here. The reason this helped so much, is it helped me to take ownership of what I went through. It helped me to bring the focus into how my father passing away had a role to play in my life, and it was up to me to choose what role that would be.

I could either keep suffering and hiding from it, or I could use this experience to evolve in unimaginable ways. I chose the latter. I can say with conviction I am now grateful to have gone through this, because of who I have become as a result. The wisdom, the maturity, the drive to help others was moulded through this experience. In the years since my father passed, I had grown up. I had become a man but there was an inner part of me that was hurt.

The 13-year-old who still felt broken. I had forgotten and neglected that part of me for so long because I didn’t realise it was there. As the version of myself I am now, I began visualising that younger part of me, and giving him the love, compassion, safety and understanding he needed in that time of his life. I embraced and held that inner child, and in doing so, that pain began to subside. Love was the answer.

One of the biggest breakthroughs I had in my grief journey was during a coaching session. I spoke earlier about this void I felt that would never be whole again. I was carrying a belief that when my father passed away, the love I felt from him was gone too. The absence of that love is what felt like a void. Like something was missing. What I realised during that session was the love I felt when he was around, wasn’t actually coming from him. It was coming from me the whole time I was just projecting it externally.

And it makes sense, because we are the ones who create our experience. In essence, the love never left. It was with me the whole time. I just couldn’t see it. The void wasn’t real, and the wholeness I was searching for had never left. It was always within. You hear all the time how people say things like "I will never get over this. This will scar me forever".

I thought the same for a long time, but what if that didn’t have to be true? What if we are able to feel whole and complete again? If we keep telling ourselves that we will never get over something, guess what that does? It solidifies it as the reality we are making for ourselves. But that doesn’t mean it’s a fact. This is why time does not heal everything; time might make something easier to cope with. But who wants to just cope? Time didn’t heal me. The pain was still there. It's only through beginning to look within, to doing the inner work that healing happens.

Another big shift was changing the way I saw and experienced my memories. I used to think if I began reflecting on my father passing all those years ago and felt emotional it would mean that something was broken, but this also wasn’t true. In that moment, I was simply experiencing a memory and feeling something, but it's really a bit like watching an old movie, a projection and I could appreciate and be with that experience, but that’s all it needs to be.

The past is only kept alive in our memories, and our memories are made of thought. Those memories aren’t anything to fear. It is interesting how we can sometimes see the death of a loved one like they are gone. But waking up to our spiritual existence helped me to see how false this is. No one is ever really gone, because all of us are one. We are interconnected in a way that our minds cannot comprehend.

When someone passes, their form is just different now. It's just a different way of being with them. We never really lose anyone. If you are really going through it right now, please know there is hope. There is a path forward for you. There is a space within you that is unbroken and infinite. You may just not see it right now. You wont have to suffer forever and your life can be greater than you could ever imagine even if it seems dark right now. You’ve got this. Be with the journey you are on and look for the windows to transcend the pain. I love you.

#grief

Navigating the complex journey of grief

My dad died when I was 13 – this is how I healed