GRIEF AND LIGHT

Is Joy Possible After Loss?

• Nina Rodriguez • Season 3 • Episode 43

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How can we unlock joy after loss? 

This episode explores the possibility of experiencing joy after loss and provides guidance on incorporating self-compassion and joy into the grieving process. It emphasizes the importance of honoring each moment, leaning into curiosity, and rewarding the questions that arise. Nina shares tips for cultivating joy, such as setting reminders for gratitude and using mantras, and discusses the complexities of feeling joy after loss, including guilt, betrayal, and the recognition of all the things the loved one will never experience.

Join us as we discuss grounding techniques, reducing stress, and adding gentleness and lightness to daily life. This episode is a compassionate guide for anyone navigating the delicate balance of grief and joy.

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Takeaways :

  • Experiencing joy after loss is possible and a sign of readiness for the next step forward in the grieving process. 
  • Honoring each moment and leaning into curiosity can help incorporate self-compassion and joy into the grieving process. 
  • Setting reminders to practice gratitude and affirmations can create an anchor for joy and make it safe to feel joy again. 
  • Feeling joy after loss can be complex and may involve fear, guilt, and a sense of betrayal, but it is still possible and can evolve over time. 
  • Finding one's own path to joy and embracing the fullness of the grief experience is important. 
  • Feeling joy after loss can be complex, involving feelings of guilt, betrayal, and sadness.
  • Creating a sense of community and support is essential in the journey towards joy after loss. 
  • Letting light and joy into one's life slowly and gently can help navigate the vulnerability and risks associated with feeling joy after loss. 
  • Grounding oneself, reducing stress, and adding gentleness and lightness to daily life can contribute to the experience of joy after loss. 


About Nina Rodriguez: 

Nina is founder and host of the Grief and Light Podcast, created after the unexpected loss of her only sibling, as an authentic exploration of grief and life after loss. Through each conversation, she aims to give a voice to the griever’s experience, and foster a more grief-informed, hopeful world. 

Beyond the podcast, Nina extends her heart-centered support through monthly circles, personalized mentorship, speaking engagements, active presence on social media, and forthcoming in-person retreats. 

She regularly contributes to Get Griefy Magazine and has completed the Grief Care Professional Certificate Program under renowned psychotherapist and best-selling author, Megan Devine. 


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Being able to open yourself up to joy after loss, aside from it feeling risky and vulnerable and scary and like betrayal even, it takes time. So be very gentle with yourself as you navigate this and as you take the step forward that feels true to you. You just lost your loved one. Now what? Welcome to the Grief in Life podcast where we explore this new reality through grief-colored lenses. Openly, authentically. I'm your host, Nina Rodriguez. Let's get started. Hello friends and welcome back. I wanted to share something that's been coming up quite a bit lately. Somebody asked me, is joy possible after loss? I realized the answer to that question has so much depth to it and there's so much nuance to it and there's so much context to it. So I paused for a moment and I decided to check in with myself and really dig deep for answers. I'll go ahead and read. what I responded to her. The fact that you're asking and are curious about how to incorporate self-compassion and how to experience joy is a sign that you are ready for the next step forward. Acknowledging this is a part of how you do this. It's by honoring each moment as it is, as it comes, as it shows up without resisting it. Leaning into your curiosity as if it's a dear friend guiding you forward. Each time your mind wonders, How do I do this? How do I take the next step? Even if it doesn't yet have the answers, reward that. And that means reward the question, reward the fact that your mind and your heart are trying to figure out a way how. It can be stopping what you're doing at the moment, putting your hand on your heart and saying thank you to yourself, or smiling and saying thank you to yourself. Your heart is doing its best to find a way and that's a beautiful thing to honor. The steps forward are tinier than we realize. They build one on top of the other over time. So that's something that I felt like sharing with her in that moment. And yet that doesn't capture the full magnitude of it. And we'll talk in a little bit about why that's cool. It sounds beautiful, but how do you do this? Something that helped me was that my mom always tells me, have to bless where you are on the way to where you're going. Let me say that again. Bless where you are on the way to where you're going. So on the way to where you're headed. We often don't know where we're headed after loss, but life goes forward. The days go by. And so by definition, we are already moving forward, even if it's just waking up the next day. As we do that, blessing where we're at in that moment, blessing what is currently supporting us, even if it's just our bed or a glass of water. And I mean it. I mean, it's that simple and you have to really get that granular with it. And as we do so, blessings expand. So I told her one tip is to set an alarm on your phone, set a reminder of some sort. It could be a sticky note, it could be an alarm on your phone, it could be an email that you scheduled to be received later, something that sends you that reminder but on a consistent basis. I had a guest recently who said she sets the alarm at nine o 'clock every day, every morning. And when those notifications go off, the point is to show some gratitude. And I know I roll, a lot of people say, yeah, gratitude practice. but it really is one of the most effective ways to let joy back in, to welcome it back in, to make it safe to feel joy again in your body, in your mind, in your spirit. So for example, one of the tips that I suggested was every time the alarm goes off or this notification goes off, say one or all of these phrases to yourself out loud. I am worthy of experiencing joy. I allow my curiosity to lead the My heart knows what to do. I trust divine intelligence to guide me. I welcome all opportunities to smile, feel ease and joy. I can show myself grace as I learn who I am becoming. So say one or all of those, you could write those down again, repeat them to yourself out loud and this is important. There are tools like an app called Retrain Your Brain. I've found it to be very useful because it'll play like a mini meditation and you could just play it, you could create playlists. So let's say you're experiencing grief, you listen to yourself repeating these words at a certain amount of time in the day when those notifications go And the reason for the notifications is it creates an anchor with time. So much of grief is feeling the chaos of the aftermath of losing your sense of direction. It's like being knocked off your axis and not knowing where you're going to land. So creating that anchor and that sense of stability could be as simple as setting a reminder on your phone at a certain time. And after so many days doing it, you almost start to expect it in your mind. hangs onto it because it's quite literally creating new neural pathways in this new paradigm of grief. So let's say you put your notifications at nine o 'clock in the morning, nine o'clock at night, or six o 'clock in the morning, six o 'clock in the evening. And every single time it goes off, you take a pause, repeat some of those mantras or whatever feels right to you, whatever feels good to you in that moment, and repeat that out loud. At first, it's going probably be very awkward if you've never practiced this before. It feels a little silly even. But to be honest, over time, it becomes a ritual. It becomes almost sacred and it becomes something that helps you stay grounded in the midst of chaos. It is so simple. It is so, simple, but it's so effective. Another way is to write it down on a sticky note. So if you're working occasionally, glance at it, take a pause, slow down, read it out loud. and create those anchors. Now, why joy? I recently interviewed the author of Always a Sibling, which is a beautiful book. If you're a grieving, brief sibling, I suggest that you read this book. It's amazing and the one that made me feel seen might grieve. But she has a whole section talking about joy in the context of grief and how ultimately, Joy feels risky and that's why it's sometimes so difficult to feel it. It's not that you can't feel it. It might be that you're actually afraid to feel it. She has a chapter called The Terror of Joy and another one called Joy Grief. It says, there is an aftershock to joy when you can't share it with your person. There is a unique feeling of guilt. that you shouldn't be allowed to feel happy without them. Accompanied by that so friendly reminder that you will never hear the voice of the person whose voice mirrors your own. How dare I feel joy when my brother is still dead? In her context, she lost her brother, but fill in the name of your person there. There's a feeling of selfishness. There's a feeling of betrayal sometimes. It's not just your own joy that can topple into sadness, but the recognition of all the things your loved one will never experience. So the sadness, the guilt, the sense of betrayal, all ripple out from the secondary effects of the loss. It's everything that you get to do that they never will or they should have gotten to. And it's that feeling of living your life for the both of you or feeling like they should have been there or the unfairness of it all. There's so many things running in the background you try to feel joy, so sometimes it's just safer not to feel it. In the section where she talks about the terror of joy, she says, looking back, I think that even more than the guilt and the self -loathing, I resisted joy because it terrified me. It was a reminder of how fleeting everything is. The thing that brought such joy one day could be ripped away the next. If I didn't feel joy, I couldn't feel pain. What is sad way to exist in the world constantly muting the most beautiful moments out of fear? I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised then when I learned that joy is the most vulnerable emotion more than shame or fear. Joy is felt so deeply and physically that it brings some people to tears. To feel anything that deeply is risky, but especially joy. If you don't experience pure joy, then you can't have it ripped from If the joy is temporary, then avoiding it means avoiding the fallout. You can't miss something you never had. But here's the truth. A life without the vulnerability of joy may seem easier, but it's empty. It's vulnerability that helps us build resilience and strength. And those are the things we need most. Getting to joy. There's an innate sense of risk involved. Feeling our feelings, if you've listened to some of my previous episodes, it's not easy, but it's definitely doable. and we must be active participants in our healing and in our path forward. That looks like allowing space for joy. That looks like moving our bodies. That looks like setting boundaries and speaking up for what we need. And this is part of what we learn to reestablish through the grief groups that I hold and the one -on -one coaching. And it never fails. We need to either hear it from somebody else or from ourselves. So if you're looking for permission to feel joy, take this as your sign to allow yourself to feel it. Everyone's path to joy is unique, just like your grief is unique, how you express your grief is unique, all of it is unique to you. So you definitely have to find your own path and find what works for you. There's no prescriptive way to get through grief. There are just stories people share of things that have worked for them. And there are tools and techniques that you can leverage to try to open the door to joy. I recently had a guest who said it beautifully. She said that joy was about letting the light in. Now imagine being in a very dark room with blackout shades and somebody opens the door and it's 12 noon, the sun is at its peak and all of sudden it flashes on your face and the light can be so blinding, it almost feels aggressive. That's the importance of letting the light in slowly and opening the door to joy slowly. Leave the curtains a little bit open so that five or o 'clock in the morning sunshine starts to gently pour into the room, gently waking you up and it becomes this gentle awakening more than it is this glaring light in your face. And I hope that illustrates what the process looks like. Being able to open yourself up to joy after loss, aside from it feeling risky and vulnerable and scary and like betrayal even, it takes time. So be very gentle with yourself as you navigate this and as take the step forward that feels true to you. You know that quote that says, if grief is love with nowhere to go, then let's give it somewhere to go. So instead of thinking, how can I achieve joy? How can I take the next step forward? Maybe it's more helpful to you to think, what can I do with this love? How can I show love for my person? What are the ways the love for my person wants to express itself? Whether that's through art or an activity that they wanted to do. or something that reminds you of them or taking a quiet moment to be with them journaling, doing activities in their name, fundraisers, or taking a moment out of your day to pause and close your eyes and think of them, whatever that looks like. And it will change over time. Those little actions, tiny steps forward are the way that we move forward. Our love is Vast, our love transcends, death, grief evolves, love evolves, relationships evolve, and you can maintain that relationship with your loved one if you want to as you move forward. A caveat on that or a point of nuance about that, I talk a lot about the continuing bonds theory, which is death ends a life, but not a relationship. Recent conversations have revealed that the continuing bonds theory is not necessarily helpful for everybody. Some if they had a strained relationship with their loved one or if their loved one caused them harm, it's not necessarily helpful for them to think that their relationship continues on in the afterlife. Those tend to be more exceptions, not necessarily the rule, but again, it ultimately goes back to grief is so personal. A better way to move forward is to decide what is useful versus not useful. If these concepts, and these suggestions are useful to you, or you're even curious about it, go ahead and try it out and see if it's something that works for you. If it doesn't, then it doesn't, and pick something else. There is no right or wrong way to grief. You cannot fail. This is not a test. This is something that you incorporate into your life the same way that you incorporate love into your life. It's all part of the same operating mechanism that human emotions, human experiences, life, love and grief. So to answer that person who asked me if joy is possible after grief, I want to tell them unequivocally, yes, absolutely, it is possible. And I know this because I feel joy now in the context of life after the loss of my brothers. There have been studies about this and in every conversation that I have, everybody has expressed feeling joy, whether they lost their child, their parent, their sibling. their friend, their spouse, sometimes all of the above at once. So it is absolutely possible. Humans are built resilient. We are innately resilient. We are resilient even when we don't feel like it. Feeling like we're capable of moving forward, I believe, this is a personal belief, requires community, requires support, requires us feeling like we're not alone. And we could achieve that by creating a sense of community with each other. And we do that in various ways. One of them is through podcasts like these. are many people creating podcasts about the grief experience. These conversations are so essential. There are virtual groups. There are grief circles. I host a monthly grief circle. There are one -on -one sessions either with therapists or coaches or friends, family, or colleagues, anybody who become a willing audience to listen. Sometimes I know how painful it can be when we expect our family and friends to be that and if anything sometimes they disappear or they disappoint us. That is also a very painful reality in grief. But with time you'll see that as Dr. Mikhail Harris once said, everybody is a different player on your team and not everybody has the same rule. I'm paraphrasing what she said, but essentially if you look at it like a, let's say a football team. Every player has their role and sometimes that role is not what you expected it to be. That doesn't make them a bad person. I also learned from a brave mother that she has her grief friends and she has her regular friends and she says both are equally important. And what she meant by regular friends are the friends that don't talk about her son, don't talk about the loss, don't talk about any of that. She said initially she resented them. And now she has learned to appreciate them in a different way, give them grace as well, and understand that sometimes we do need conversations that are not loaded with grief. Those conversations are valuable and we can contribute to somebody else's life. And we definitely need the conversations that address our grief, where we don't have to explain ourselves and we get to talk about our person with each other and move forward in our grief. So see what ways you could find your tribe, your griefy crew, your people, and also embrace the vastness of this experience in whatever way it shows up in your life. Be open to letting the light in gently through meditation tools. Grief asks us to slow down and in a way forces us to and reassess what feels joyful to us in this context. In my example, I always use the word feliz y Teresa, which is feliz, felizidad means joy in Spanish and tristez means sadness and it's a happy sad, it's joy grief, grief joy, inextricably linked and this is just the new reality. My joy for example has an undercurrent of sadness and I think in a way that's okay. I used to be upset that my new normal always had that tinge of sadness and in a way now I embrace it because at the end of the day it's a reminder of my person and my loved one and He gets to be part of my joy, even if it looks and feels like a little bit of sadness, that tinge of sadness. At the end of the day, it reminds me of his presence. So embracing it all in its fullness, embracing that it may not look like what you expected or even wanted ever, but it's still joy and it's still possible. And with time, that joy grows bigger, the light gets brighter, and sometimes we get to be that light for other people. It evolves as we evolve. As I'm recording this, it's almost year five since my brother's passing. And I can tell you without a doubt that there have been authentically, genuinely beautiful, joyful moments in my life. It doesn't look like what it used to look like, but they are still joy. And in a way there's a sacredness about them, a deeper appreciation for life. There's an increased sense of patience for myself and others. There's an increased sense of giving people grace showing life grace. This is hard, life is hard. And if you've seen the news at all, you understand that we're entering some very questionable times. It could be very overwhelming and yet life can hold the vastness of the overwhelming and the joy and the peace and the grace and the gentleness. It's all part of the same And on that note, because it's something that has also been coming up a lot, I recommend getting quiet, getting quiet within yourself, your thoughts, your body, your energy, just going within, it's all within Mrs. Inner Work. Unfollow any accounts, channels, people that don't add to your peace right now. That doesn't mean be misinformed or uninformed. I really believe as humans we were never meant to consume this much incoming data about world events, about people's lives, about celebrities. We were not meant to consume this much information all the time 24 -7. I believe it is part of what's wreaking havoc on our nervous system and reducing our capacity to be able to ground ourselves in more stable energy. So one tip to follow is unfollow. accounts and people that are not adding to the peace in your life, even if it's momentarily, even if it's just as you regain your footing, turn the noise down, turn the noise off if possible. This includes friends and family. If when you see some of their posts or something they share, if it's something that doesn't add to your life right now or that is hurtful, just unfollow it. There's no harm done. Unfollow it. You could always re -follow them later. But for this time, as you ground your energy, do that. And as my coach Vilma also said, just follow kitty accounts, dog accounts, bird, whatever brings you joy, lightness, and makes you laugh, at least for a little while. Try it for a month to see what happens. So much of our inability to feel joy these days is the amount of stress that we have in our lives in addition to the grief. So as I always say, the pain there, acknowledge it, witness to it, but the suffering is optional. The suffering is all the external stuff that comes into our lives that we are totally in control over, including what we consume. This is food. This is anything that nourishes us or doesn't. Information, music. Take every opportunity you can to add light, to add gentleness to your day. Gentle music, gentle information. The news will always get to you one way or but you don't need every single update going off all the time of the day. There's a difference between getting a piece of data and getting the same piece of data in 50 different formats in an hour. So reduce the amount of data you consume quite literally and add more gentleness to your day. Follow accounts that are soothing, follow meditation accounts, whatever. I'm saying these because that's what helps me, but follow whatever makes you and makes you calm. Same with food, same with anything that you can see, mind, body or spirit. All of it is a part of this process of finding joy again. So regulating our nervous system, calming ourselves so we can let more of that light in so that we can add joy to our lives. This is not a comprehensive answer. I don't even know if this was an answer for a person, but it's definitely a question that triggered so many thoughts got me really, really thinking deeply about how do you achieve joy after the loss of our person when everything looks so gray and everything looks so permanent? How we move forward and what ways we get to make meaning of our lives thereafter, that's up to us and those are the elements that we can't control. Some food for thought. How can you add joy to your week in the coming days? How can you add joy to your day today? How can you bless where you're at on the way to where you're going? I welcome you to connect with me on Instagram. For those of you who may not know, I do one -on -one coaching. I host monthly virtual grief groups. Get on my mailing list. The link is in the show notes. And anytime you feel like you need to be supported beyond just the podcast, get in touch. Let's talk. Thank you for being here and see you in the next episode. That's it for today's episode. Be sure to subscribe to the Grief and Light podcast. I'd also love to connect with you and hear your thoughts and your stories. Feel free to share them with me via my Instagram page at griefandlight, or you can also visit griefandlight .com for more information and updates. Thank you so much for being here, for being you, and always remember, you are not alone.

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Nina Rodriguez

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