Embracing the "New You" After Loss: Reflections of 2024 and Hope for 2025

In this reflective episode of Grief and Light, Nina Rodriguez delves into the process of embracing a new sense of self after experiencing loss and life-altering change, offering insights and encouragement as we transition into 2025. As the new year approaches, she reflects on the ways grief reshapes our identity and forces us to confront changes we may not have chosen, emphasizing how it shapes identity, perspective, and priorities. Drawing from her own experiences and those of her clients, Nina offers insights on how to honor who you were before the loss while making space for growth and self-discovery. She shares practical tips for navigating change with compassion and highlights the importance of hope, curiosity, and hope as guiding forces in the healing process. This episode serves as both a comforting companion and an empowering reminder to invite harmonious change amidst life's most difficult transitions.

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Takeaways:

• When we experience life altering loss, a new version of ourselves is born.
• Show yourself grace as you learn who you are becoming.
• Grief can be confusing to navigate; honesty is essential.
• The pain of loss is unchangeable, but suffering can be adjusted.
• Community support is vital in the grief journey.
• The Forever a Sister program provided a safe space for sharing.
• Grief is not limited to physical loss; it's everywhere.
• Life is change, and with loss, it's accelerated change.
• It's important to honor your own timeline in grief.
• Resources are crucial for those in early grief.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Preview & Intro song
• 0:50 Leave room for the "wild card" in 2025
• 2:13 Reflecting on 2024 & Forever a Sister
• 4:20 Pain gets tended, suffering gets adjusted
• 5:52 Embracing the "new you"
• 8:52 Grief work is life-affirming work
• 10:20 Reaching grievers when they need it most
• 12:05 IRL in Miami & looking ahead to 2025
• 13:30 Leaning into the 5 Ps and Community

Transcript

griefandlight (00:00.183)
When we experience life altering loss, a new version of ourselves is born. So I always say, show yourself grace as you learn who you are becoming. Don't waste your energy trying to go back to anything. Spend your energy getting to know this new version of yourself in the context of your lived experience. That's going to take time, that's going to take showing up situations that you have yet to experience, people you have yet to meet.

and conversations you've yet to have, start walking the path and the path will appear. 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 everyone and welcome back to the Grief in Life podcast. My name is Nina Rodriguez and I am your host. I hope you are doing well.

hope the end of the year has been as gentle and kind as possible within the context of grief. However, that's shown up in your life that it's been gentle. We're nearing the end of 2024 and I know that can be very difficult for a lot of people. There are many changes from everything that's happened in our life, whether it's through loss of a person or a pet or life altering circumstance. And as we look ahead to 2025, it can feel very overwhelming.

I want to remind yourself to always center yourself in the present, leave space for the unknown. There are things that are coming into our lives that will be supportive to us as we move forward on our journey. You will meet people that will be instrumental in your grief journey that you have yet to meet and you have no idea who they are, but they will come into your life. That's a weird paradox about grief. Sometimes we get so close to absolute strangers, either on the internet or random person we'll meet.

that will see us so personally, profoundly, and honestly in our grief and in our lived experience. So leave room for that wild card and the beautiful things that will also enter into your life even after loss and life altering change. So this episode is to reflect on 2024 and look ahead for 2025. And I want to start with...

griefandlight (02:20.622)
talking about the Forever a Sister program. If you've been following me, especially on social media, then you probably saw that I created and recently completed the Forever a Sister program. And this was a four week program for brief sisters navigating the holidays together. And it was such a beautiful experience. The idea was inspired behind what I've experienced to be the most difficult time of the year, which was the two weeks leading up to Thanksgiving and the two weeks leading up to Christmas, right?

So what I did is I created a four week program where we meet two weeks before Thanksgiving and twice before December. And I had no idea how it was going to go. It was inspired on the fifth anniversary of my brother's passing. It something that I felt in my heart to create and I did. And the sisters that showed up amazed me. It was so beautiful to watch and witness not just them unfold into their great sense of share openly and honestly.

And like many of them said, this is the first time I'm ever saying XYZ out loud about how I really feel. It's a level of honesty that they couldn't achieve, one with themselves or their loved ones, because grief can be so confusing to navigate, that we don't even know how to express our feelings. And so I led this very intentional space to help the sisters who participated find their voice, understand what they were feeling, get resources.

tools and understanding about how grief works, what it is, what it is not, and how to navigate it. And that put them miles ahead of where, let's say, I was when I first started in my grief because I had no idea, like most grievers, I had no idea what I was facing. I had no idea what I was feeling. I had no idea what resources were available to me. And it was so incredibly challenging and

unnecessarily difficult. As I learned from Megan Divine, the pain gets tended, the suffering gets adjusted. What that means is the pain of loss is the unchangeable element, the fixed element. This is our person or pet died, there is nothing we can do to change that. We care for ourselves the way we would, I guess, a wound. If you fracture your leg or your arm, just using this as an analogy, if you injure yourself in that way,

griefandlight (04:47.427)
That bone will heal, but it will always have a sensitivity to it or a scar. And that's by design. Scars are there to remind us of this very real experience. With grief, the scars are often invisible, but they're there. And that's the pain of loss. The suffering comes from the shoulds. And I am a fan of saying don't should on yourself because life is. Life is not supposed to be anything. It just is.

It is what it is. And sometimes when we least expected life-lifes and throws us all the curve balls, grief is not limited to physical loss of a person or pet. It's actually everywhere. If you really look at it, it just takes looking through grief-colored lenses at our lived experience and the people around us to notice it. It's actually everywhere. But in order to adjust the suffering, it's about removing what no longer serves us. So expectations that are no longer aligned with our lived experience.

timelines that are arbitrary and unrealistic with the process of grief and loss. It's saying, I need to get back to that old version of myself. What old version of yourself? This is a new version of you. I always say, show yourself grace as you learn who you are becoming. You are a new person. Before a woman gives birth, there's an expectation of what that's going to be like, including the birth and the life thereafter. There's manuals, there's podcasts.

There's all the medical studies and the doctor's advice and your mother's advice or whoever's advice that they offer about this experience. But nothing prepares you for the actual moment of giving birth. And so many mothers are like, my gosh, I was not expecting X, Y, There's always an unexpected element. And when a child is born, so is a mother, so is a parent. In that same way, death is like the opposite side of that.

Follow me here because this is a little bit abstract, but it's like birthing a new version of ourselves in the context of loss. The same way that a mother has to get to know herself, a parent has to get to know themselves as a parent, especially if it's her first child. They have to learn who they are, how they show up, and they could have studied all the science and manuals and heard all the stories. At the end of the day, it's your path, and there is community and there's support and there's information.

griefandlight (07:12.665)
but at the end of the day, you are the one walking your path. Only you know what that experience is like. Telling, for example, a parent to go back to who they used to be is absolutely unrealistic because a new version of themselves was born. In that same line, death is like the other side of the coin. And when we experience life altering loss, a new version of ourselves is born. So I always say, show yourself grace as you learn who you are becoming.

Don't waste your energy trying to go back to anything. Spend your energy getting to know this new version of yourself in the context of your lived experience. And that's going to take time. That's going to take showing up situations that you have yet to experience, people you have yet to meet, and conversations you've yet to have. Start walking the path and the path will appear because it is going to be so specific to you.

Now, community is a key element in helping you navigate this path forward because there is wisdom in community and especially if, for example, you join a community where the loss is similar to yours. So going back to the Forever a Sister program, this was a cohort of sisters. There was a beautiful bonding that took place. I was so in awe of it because we were all sisters, missing our siblings. And there was so much about our experience. We didn't have to explain. It was just a gaze. We just got it.

unfortunately, but at the same time, it was so powerful to see how we understood each other so deeply, more than even our own family members sometimes. That is the power of guided grief groups from grief-informed guides like myself. And what takes place in those beautiful spaces is sacred. It is sacred work. It is sacred to hold.

space for these life experiences as they are, as they show up without trying to fix them. We're not here to fix a loss. We're here to support and provide the space for honesty and a deepened relationship with life and each other. Grief work is deeply, deeply life-affirming work. And when we do it in community, it's even more powerful. It's even more amplified. So for 2025, I was so inspired by the Forever Sister program that I'm going to start doing more of these cohorts.

griefandlight (09:35.3)
I would love to know how to best serve you. And in order to do that, I need to know what kind of loss you've experienced and what type of help you need. So send me a message about the type of loss that you've experienced. And that can be something simple. You could message me on all social media platforms, reference the podcast and just say, I lost my son or my daughter or my sister or brother, my mom, my dad, my grandma, my grandpa, my uncle, my friend, my dog.

my cat, my child. Oof, that's a big one for a lot of people. So I would love to know how to best serve you. And in order to do that, I would love to know what loss you've experienced so that way I could put together these programs and let me know if this resonates with you because I think it is powerful, powerful work. Also in 2024, we're going to continue the podcast. have some really exciting guests lined up for you. I'm already booked all the way to February, which is really exciting. The Grief in Light podcast is

growing thanks to you listening, thanks to you being here. If I could ask actually for you to share, like, subscribe, wherever you're listening or watching, interact with the platform, interact and follow because that helps us grow. And if you haven't rated the podcast yet, please go ahead and do so. It helps tremendously. It helps us reach the right people at the right time. And this is my intention behind this podcast is to be the resource I needed when I was going through.

the early grief and found nothing. I don't want other grievers to experience that type of loneliness ever. So if it's within my power to help them through this podcast, through the various offerings that I have on my website at griefandlight.com, then I would love for this information to reach them. And if you're listening and you need extra support, I highly encourage you to join our online community that it's called the Community by Grief and Light. I will link the access to the show notes. And I want to remind everybody that it is

free to join until January. At that point, everybody who has joined by then will be grandfathered in. So if you're listening to this, do not wait. Go ahead and click that and join us at the community. And it's a virtual home for grievers where you can talk openly and honestly about your loss, connect with others, and more importantly, be resourced. I share so many resources there to help you navigate different types of losses at different points in your life and in your journey.

griefandlight (11:56.88)
I also offer one-on-one grief support, which you can access through griefandlight.com and monthly grief groups. My hope for 2025 is to start doing things IRL in real life. I am based in Miami, so I will begin locally. If you're in Miami, please, please, please reach out. I would love to meet you and I would love for you to be a part of the live events. And then eventually we may do some retreats, TBD on that.

but I am so excited for what 2025 holds. I am so grateful for each of you listening, for everybody who has provided feedback. At the end of the day, I'm here to serve this community as best as I can, and your feedback is key to that. So if we haven't connected yet, please message me. I'm most active on Instagram, so if you go to Instagram and look for at grief and light, you will find my account. Let's connect there, send me a message and.

Tell me all about your story. And if you're in the community, I interact there quite a bit. My goal is to do less social media next year, more community work. Again, if you haven't joined, please go ahead and join. All of that to say, Greece is hard, you guys. Greece is not easy. It looks different every year. It evolves as your life evolves. As you get to know who you are becoming, life is change. With loss, it's accelerated change. So it's almost like we have to grow up.

quicker and we have to change faster and the change feels more profound and it's more noticeable. So it's about showing ourselves grace every step of the way, finding the community that feeds us, leaning into the people, pets, places, plants and personal items that bring us comfort, being honest with ourselves about our experience, the lived experience of loss as it is and honoring our own timelines. looks so different for everybody. Grief is very subjective. It's very specific to our losses, to our life circumstance.

But what I can tell you is the people who fare best in the long run are resourced in their early grief, especially. So if you are listening to this, especially in your early grief, lean into the resources that I mentioned. griefandlight.com, could be this podcast, the one-on-one sessions, the monthly grief circles, the online community, and all the other things that we're going to be working on in 2025.

griefandlight (14:14.531)
And if you're listening and you are somebody who works in the grief space, I would also love to hear from you. I am a huge fan of collaboration. Collaboration is the way to go. And I am a big fan of co-creating in this space. So if any of this resonates, please go ahead and reach out. And I send you so much love. This is not easy. Be very gentle with yourself as you learn who you are becoming and let's connect if you haven't already done so. I would love to learn about your story. I would love to learn about you and I would love for you to join the community. So.

Looking ahead for 2025, there's going to be a continuation of all of the work that I mentioned and also the in-person events. So I will see you there. I wish you a beautiful end to 2024. May it be exactly what it needs to be. Thank you for being here.

griefandlight (15:13.723)
Grief and Light, 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.