Welcome to that Mystic Podcast, a space where the body tells the truth, the false self dissolves, and your deeper knowing rises to the surface. A space for you to know yourself, become yourself, and express yourself. Take a breath, settle in, and let's walk the threshold together. Hello, beloved lights and souls. Happy week of winter solstice and the new moon this Friday. This week's episode brings us the second initiation of grieving the self you never were. And there is a grief rising in so many women and men right now. And it isn't loud, it isn't dramatic, and it doesn't always come with a very clear story, like you can identify why you feel this way. But yet it comes with this heaviness in the chest and a constriction in the throat, a little bit of a fog behind the eyes that's not allowing for clear seeing, or a subtle ache that just seems to follow you. And the mind definitely wants to label it, wants to try to find the reason for it, because that's what the mind does. And it searches for a moment or a story to explain this feeling. But this grief that's coming up is older than the mind. And the grief is wiser than the story. And the grief belongs to a self that you were not allowed to be. So let's just take a breath here and let the breath soften the body. Take a belly breath and just let your mouth release the air from your body without any force. And I like to let it audibly exit the body because that signals to the nervous system that you're safe. And so we're gonna let the body hear the words it's been waiting for. And that's you are grieving a version of you that was built for survival. You are grieving a self you don't even know, a self that's wound under the patterns in the nervous system, in this whole system of our being. And it's a self that we formed from approval or by expectation or through performance or duty or obligation, or the opposite, the self we had to hide, that we learned to conform who we actually are to survive and fit in in our family system. And I know that for so many people that are here for this awakening time that's happening on our planet, we went through literal hell on earth to become the people that we are becoming, which is the self that we were not allowed to be. And so we're feeling this arising, bubbling up beneath the self that you always wore like armor, or carried through rooms that couldn't see you, hiding in plain sight, the self that you survived through, the self that you succeeded through, the self that you go into relationships with, the self that you were celebrated through for being. But now this false self that we've constructed in our lives is dissolving. It dissolved for me last year, the moment my son died. But the self was dissolving very slowly before that for me as well. And I thought that the answer was somewhere outside of me. And maybe you've thought that too. And so you've spent money and time on coaches and therapy and practices and all these things externally trying to identify what this thing is that you're searching for. It's like you know it's there, but you can't identify it. And really, to get to this true self, we have to go directly through the wall we built to protect ourselves from it. And this is the grief that no one talks about because no one understands it. And I heard recently, and I actually wrote this in my journal as well, that through my own process of going through grief and choosing to stay present in my grief, to not allow myself to tell a story about it, to blame anyone, to blame myself, to not go into that place of desperately wanting my son back because that's impossible in life, to choose to stay present and to stay in radical acceptance of what is allowed me to stay in those feelings of grief. And the feelings as they arise and as they come toward you literally feel like a wave. It's almost like you're standing on an ocean beach and you can watch and feel a wave coming towards you. You can sense it, you can see it, you can feel it. Some of them are massive and they wash all over you, and some of them aren't as big. But if you don't tell yourself a story about it, then it just washes in and you express it through tears, the water of the wave, and you let it wash back out. It doesn't stay as your permanent state. And I realized in the having the courage to do this that I started grieving not only my son, but these deeper aspects of self because a lot of self-forgiveness work came up with that, with grieving as well. Grieving the relationship that is gone, grieving the relationship I won't get to have. And then, of course, looking at things I could have done better as a mother, different choices that could have been made, choices that were never made and will never be made. And that's a grief too. And as I did this work, I kept going deeper and deeper into grief until I got to that core wound where I put up a wall around my true self. And this is the grief of letting go of the self who got you here, the self that held everything together, the self that kept you alive in a world that rewarded your abandonment of yourself. But you are also the one who made the agreement to take on this new self in the first place, with a mind that was pre-logical. And so it's like this grief of letting go of a self you used to be, and a grief of the self you never got to be. And you stand in this liminal space of wondering, who am I? Who am I now? Who am I without this story? Who am I without the performing self? And this is where ego death happens, and that is a terrifying process to go through, I can assure you. The ego fears its own demise. And so maybe you feel that too. Like, how will I survive if I let go of this self that I know isn't necessarily good for me anymore? These habits, this life I'm living that I'm not happy in. But we choose it because it's familiar. And to let go of familiarity without being forced to is incredibly difficult. And that is one of the gifts of grief, if you want to call it a gift of grief, is that it rips that familiarity away from you instantly. It pulls your whole life out from under you and you're flipped upside down, inside out, that everything you thought was real is gone. And this is where the default mode network of your brain has been unplugged, literally unplugged. And I happened to be fortunate and blessed that when this was happening, I immediately realized something's happening to my mind. What's happening to my brain? And I started to do some research about it and discovered that the brain in grief is like a brain on psychedelics, and I knew immediately I'm getting rewired. I'm getting rewired. But the good news is you don't have to go through grief to rewire yourself. We can participate consciously in our own rewiring, but it's going to require the courage to go against your own patterns wired within your mind and within your nervous system, and it is not easy, but it is possible. So place a hand on your heart just for a moment. And breathe in. Let your shoulders relax. Let your let your heart expand and feel the tenderness there. Feel that ache that rises when truth finally has a space to breathe. And this is that first gate of awakening, the gate of undoing, the gate of unmasking ourselves, the gate where the nervous system stops performing and begins to feel and tell the truth. And you might feel your breath catch here, or your chest tightening, or something happening inside of your stomach, your other brain, we have three brains. But nothing is wrong. You can just breathe deeply into your diaphragm. Because as you invite the collapse of the self that you built to survive, that no longer serves you, and you choose to shed the identity that never belonged to your soul, that's not what your soul came here to express, this is the holy unraveling that precedes embodiment. Our griefs are not endings, they are express, they're frozen expressions that need expression. Grief itself is a process. And if we never got to go through the process of grieving, then it is locked and stuck and stored somatically inside the body. But when we begin to recognize it, we can work with it just by feeling it, just by sensing it, just by tuning into it inside of us, living there, and we become a safe space for ourselves. We begin to create a containment for your grief to express safely. That there's a part of us that fears this pure raw expression because it was told, stop crying, don't be a baby. If you cry, I'll give you something to cry about. Or parents that made us feel bad for expressing emotions, or ignored us for expressing our emotions, or beat us, or did anything, all kinds of ways. There's so many ways that our emotional expression when we were small was not met with love and acceptance and with another system of being that could sit and co-regulate with you and offer you that safe containment for your expression. And so the work is to become that safe containment for yourself, to become a safe space for yourself, for your own expression. And as that this false self starts to lose its power and our real self begins to rise, is the moment that our system stops negotiating for love and starts choosing our truth. It's the moment you feel how much life you have lived outside of your body and how ready you are to come home. And you don't even know what that feels like. For the many, many moments and experiences in your life. And yet, while your mind might have been somewhere else, somatically it was all recorded in the cells and the fascia of your body. Every experience you've ever had is recorded in you. Which is why being present with our experiences is so powerful, so that it doesn't get recorded and stored, it just flows through you in expression. Goes up through, out. So let the breath move very low into the belly now. Taking a deep breath into your diaphragm and seeing if you can breathe into your literal lowest belly, right above your pelvis. Just feel if you can feel those muscles expand in the whole of your belly. And feel that as you exhale, that you let those muscles in your diaphragm, in your hips, and your low back.