Shar(e)on Lightly Yoga

This time of year, with Thanksgiving right around the corner, there is a lot of talk about gratitude and feeling grateful. Cultivating gratitude within ourselves and our lives is a potent healer in times of loss and grief. However, I want to speak to something that may not be often shared. When we experience a great loss in our lives, there is a time when we cannot feel gratitude without feeling the grief. They feel tied together. Bonded by some unknown force.

Writing has always been an outlet for me. It has been a way I can process and express myself with the most clarity. The letter below is to my mother and I wrote it on her birthday, Halloween, just a few days ago.

This past year has been one of the most difficult for me since my mom passed away almost a decade ago. It wasn’t that I lost someone to death but I lost someone through choosing to speak up about what I desired. Our desires did not match. And in that, the pain of rejection and choosing an ending was much harder than I imagined.

There can be a lot of grief and emotions wrapped up in the letting go and yet you know, you must let go. Much like how the trees let go of the bright and sometimes multicolored leaves, we too have to let go of something or someone that brought a lot of light and colored our world a different shade.