Grief. It's a unique experience and is not a process we willingly enter into -yet once in grief, finding the way back can be overwhelming and seemingly impossible.

Having experienced the passing of my 23 year old son, I am well familiar with the path of grief. Truthfully, I know I will live the remainder of my life with a hole in my heart. A place that aches to see my boy and hug him - but much of what I've learned about grief is that my experience is more about how I chose to respond to my thoughts not what actually is truth.

I have learned that the keys to relieving my grief were truly locked away in uncovering the beliefs I held about death. Our belief systems control so much of how we respond and manage life in every experience. Our beliefs can be empowering or they can be destructive and debilitating. Understanding what I believed to be true about death was a truly an enlightening process freeing me from a lifeless path.

Here is where I will get personal - I realized that I could believe death was final or I could believe death was a re-birth. I love quoting Terri Daniels. "When someone says a parent should never lose a child, she says who says?"

The truth is our beliefs truly can create our own personal hell. Our beliefs are a compilation of all of our experiences, what we not only learned but what we have held onto sticking to our conclusions. Our beliefs run in the background - like programs of an operating system running a computer.

The tools we have in hypnotherapy that help us deal with grief include uncovering the underlying, low level beliefs occurring in the subconscious mind. When we uncover these beliefs, it helps us to be able to shift just a bit, moving us one step towards peace. We also have the sacred tools of transpersonal hypnotherapy that can aid in receiving some closure on any lingering matters.

If It doesn't seem possible that you will ever feel again. I can tell you one of my saving graces was reading and listening to books about death, dying and the after life. It helped me to form new beliefs and open my mind to newer ideas and other possibilities. Surviving the death of our loved ones is a daily process.

I believe my son would never be happy wherever he is if he felt or knew I was living a joyless life because of his passing. Intuitively I knew I needed to truly celebrate his life by honoring that his time came. I respect the Divine Plan even in grief. Because of some of the personal work I've done with hypnotherapy, I can no longer believe the old outdated beliefs. I know that for this moment only I have the choice in my mind to live in grief or in grace.

I wish you the true grace of peace and comfort in your journey.