Losing someone you love is never easy. Saying goodbye to a parent is like bidding farewell to a piece of your soul.

Everyone grieves differently, and there’s no timeline for when you should start feeling better. However, the world doesn’t grind to a halt to let you mourn as much as you wish it might. You need to nurture yourself during this time. Here are five healing tips to help you get through a parent’s death.

1. Give Yourself a Break

If at all possible, give yourself time to mourn before resuming your regular responsibilities. Doing so can prove challenging, depending on your circumstances.

If your employer won’t grant you time away, or you can’t afford to take it, clear your calendar of any responsibilities you can safely shed. Talk to any organizations that you volunteer with to explain your absence. If you were planning on something like going back to school, postpone it if possible.

If you were empowered to change life -- in order to give yourself whatever is always good and true for you to know and have -- would you ever make any other kind of changes? For example, would you fear unexpected events, such as a loss of any kind? No! Even though they may come as a surprise, you already know that they herald a new beginning of something better.

Would you resist the passage of time and the slow changes that grow out of it like branches on a tree? No! You already know that patience and willingness to persist through what is being revealed -- even if momentarily bitter -- will bring only sweeter fruits.

Inner peace and joy are spiritual gifts. The gifts of spirit enter the heart when we make the choices we need to make to be available to them. What are these choices?

Presence

Peace and joy exist in this present moment - not in the past or future. If you are in your left-brain ego programmed mind - your wounded self - you are likely thinking about the past or the future with a desire to have control over something. The moment you are out of the moment with a desire to control, you cut off access to the spiritual gifts of peace and joy, as well as to the gifts of love and truth.

Gratitude

The heart needs to be open in order to receive the gifts of spirit. Nothing opens the heart faster than deep gratitude - gratitude for your life, your soul's journey, for the body your soul lives in, for the food you eat, for friendship and caring, for shelter, and for anything else that you are blessed with - eyes that see, ears that hear, arms, legs, health, and so on. Being truly grateful for your particular blessings opens the heart to the gifts of spirit.

Sudden, unexpected, horrific or repeated types of negative incidents in life can all lead to the development of trauma.

Many people think of trauma as something that causes immediate changes in a person’s level of comfort, ability to feel safe, and constant feelings of fear or anxiety in specific situations or locations.

All of these can be true, but trauma and its effects are not all that easy to pinpoint. For some people, the effects of trauma may not occur for weeks after the event, and they may build gradually over time if the trauma is the chronic type of repeated stress such as living in a chaotic or unsafe environment or dealing with bullying or abuse.

Besides the obvious reactions to fear, stress and atypical negative events in life, it is also essential to be aware of three other lesser-known symptoms of trauma.

In this life, we have one of two choices when it comes to painful events, past or present. We can either go on hating and fearing what we think life has done to us (or others), and let these negative reactions create our experience for us ... or we can learn to use these same dark reactions to free ourselves from them. But just wanting to learn the truth isn't enough; we have to be willing to see the truth if we want its liberating touch.

Hating the past and blaming it for the pain we're in now seems to justify our continuing suffering. But whatever justifies blame and hatred is, itself, a part of – in league with – these negative states. 

Are you curious about wholeness and true healing? 

Do you desire to “heal” something for yourself...be it physical, mental, financial, or maybe a relationship? Do you have a desire to support people you love, the planet, or shifts happening for humanity right now?  

It's a common desire...the desire to heal. It's what we've so often been taught—something needs fixing. The truth is, you, we, are already whole. There is nothing to heal. 

The frustrations and the angst that continue to rise for so many are energies that have been stored on the inside—packed away in the subconscious. We were previously able to override those energies that felt uncomfortable, any sense of dis-ease. However, overriding those energies doesn't dissolve or integrate them to reveal wholeness or resonance. 

For wholeness to happen, we have to land in the Soulful Self, in the truth of who we actually are.  

Kendra had been depressed on and off for the last three years before consulting with me. "I've tried various medications and they help somewhat, but I still feel depressed. I've tried psychotherapy and it also helps a little but not enough for me to feel happiness or peace inside. I hate feeling this way and I just don't know what to do."

The first thing that I did to start Kendra on her Inner Bonding journey was to help her create a personal source of spiritual guidance. I asked her to make up a being who was very loving, wise and powerful to whom she could turn, in her imagination, for help and guidance. Kendra made up an older Indian medicine woman whom she called Elder One.

Next I asked Kendra where in her body she felt the feeling of depression. "In my heart and stomach. My heart and stomach often feel so heavy and sad."

"Kendra, imagine that your feeling self, the part that is presently depressed, is a child within. How old is this child?" She told me she thought the child was around six.

Have you been wronged?

The Practice:
Beware of anger.

Why?

Anger is tricky.

On the one hand, anger – feeling annoyed, irritated, resentful, fed up, mad, outraged, or enraged – alerts us to real threats, real injuries, and real wrongs that need correcting, and it energizes and fuels us to do something about them. In my family growing up, my parents had a monopoly on anger. So, I suppressed my own, along with a lot of other feelings, and it’s been a long journey to reclaim my interior, including anger, and be able to feel it fully and (hopefully) express it skillfully.

Whether in personal relationships or in the halls of power, people in positions of authority or privilege often tell others that they don’t deserve to be angry, they shouldn’t get so worked up, it’s their own fault, etc. when in fact they have every reason and right in the world to be angry. It is certainly important to know in your heart what is actually happening, how bad it is, what the causes are, and what to do – and decide for yourself how much you want to get or stay angry.

No one really wants to talk about it, but the truth is, there is a kind of “evil spell” hanging over each of us and our world as well. In fact, part of this global spell is our denial of its existence. It is called suffering. Everyone does it—and, like hypnotized captives, everyone believes that their suffering somehow benefits them. That’s how the spell works. Why else would anyone punish themself with unhappy feelings unless they had been tricked into somehow perceiving self-hurt as self-help?

 Let’s examine one of these instances. First of all, to be angry is to suffer. It doesn’t help anyone to get angry. Anger hurts whoever is angry. It burns. Anger ruins relationships, causes heartache and regret, and devastates health. And yet, in spite of all of these facts, when we are angry it feels right. Somehow, in some unseen way, anger proves to whoever is experiencing its heated feelings that he or she is right—even though, in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. The same scenario holds true of worry, anxiety, resentment, doubt, guilt, or any other dark state.