120: 3 Ideas to Support You Through the Holidays

Holiday season is a time for happiness and making good memories with your loved ones.

How can a grieving mom experience true happiness if she is still having intense pain and longing for her child?

In these special holiday episodes,I am going to help you in going through this holiday season.

Here are my practical tips for you:

1. Have a plan A, plan, B, and plan C.

• Because you truly don’t know when a grief wave will hit, and it’s helpful to have something else you can do if you are just not feeling it that day.

2.  Let go of judgement of how your grief is supposed to be and ride the waves as they come.

• Let yourself grieve, and if you do have moments of joy, allow those to come without judgment.

3. Allow yourself to say NO.

• Use no freely. When you are in deep grief, your tank is beyond empty and you have nothing left to give to others.

If you want more tools to help you, I have a workshop called Stop Talking, Start Feeling, it’s a workshop that dives into emotions, what they are, and how you can begin to feel and process them and get them out of your body instead of stuffing them down. It also goes specifically into processing and releasing the emotions of guilt and sadness. You can get access to this workshop and all the extra things I have in there for FREE ( limited time only). Go to www.stoptalkingstartfeeling.com to check it out. 

If you want to dive deeper and have a coach who understands grief, and triggers, and what it’s like to be walking with child loss grief, message me at hello@meganhillukka.com and we can chat about how I can help you on your grief journey.

If you are a grieving mother and looking for others who know the pain of child loss, come join my free Grieving Moms Community Facebook group: www.meganhillukka.com/community

119: How Much Do You Judge Yourself In Your Grief?

Episode Pointers:

• Judgment is anytime you think you should be doing better, differently, or than you are. 

• This quadruples the pain and takes precious energy away from just grieving. 

• Judgment and shame are huge reasons why grief is so much more difficult. 

• When you lead with curiosity, you can begin to explore what emotions you are having. 

• One of the most difficult things we can do in our lives is, to be honest with ourselves about our experiences. 

• One of the hardest things to do as humans is to honestly look at our lives and ourselves and get curious about it.

If you’ve been judging yourself and berating yourself, and you are ready to learn compassion and curiosity, my group coaching program opens up in a few days. Get on the waitlist at www.lifeafterchildlosscoaching.com to be the first to hear about it!

If you want to dive deeper and have a coach who understands grief, and triggers, and what it’s like to be walking with child loss grief, message me at hello@meganhillukka.com and we can chat about how I can help you on your grief journey.

If you are a grieving mother and looking for others who know the pain of child loss, come join my free Grieving Moms Community Facebook group: www.meganhillukka.com/community

118: Have You Become Comfortable?

Episode Pointers:

• When grief first comes into your world, it’s so foreign. The grief wave of emotion almost feels too big to bear.

• But as time goes on, and this cloud of sadness hovers over your life, and nothing seems to make it go away.

• As you get comfortable with that cloud of sadness, it becomes your new normal.  But just because you have become comfortable with guilt, sadness, or anger, doesn’t mean you have to stay there.

• Just like our thoughts, our emotions can become a habit. 

• In order to get out of the “comfort of the heaviness of grief”, you might have to decide to step out into the uncomfortable again.

• Healing in whatever shape or form is a lot of work but it’s so beautiful.

Join my  Relief in Grief on October 27th, 28th, and 29th. This is my 3- day workshop that is so fun and I love getting together with the moms who join, we spend time learning, coaching, and talking. To register, go to www.reliefingriefsupportgroup.com

If you want to dive deeper and have a coach who understands grief, and triggers, and what it’s like to be walking with child loss grief, message me at hello@meganhillukka.com and we can chat about how I can help you on your grief journey.

If you are a grieving mother and looking for others who know the pain of child loss, come join my free Grieving Moms Community Facebook group: www.meganhillukka.com/community

117 : Mental Health and Addiction with Aaron Huey

Disclaimer: This episode talks about mental health, addiction, sexual assault and suicide.

Episode Pointers:

• Take care of yourself. Self-care is all you can truly model for your children. 

• Everything that crumbles or catapults you into guilt and shame comes from a lack of self care and lack of adult relationships.

• There are 5 things a parent can do when their child has spun so completely out of control. They are :  sleep, drink water, have healthy nutritious meals, move your body and breathe on purpose. 

Without any of these 5 things, your system begins to domino and collapse.

• Our desire to avoid the pain is so overwhelming. We will cause more pain in the long term to avoid it in the short term.

• We are dealing with solutions, not problems. The focus has been wrong.

• You're not gonna get over, you will get on, you will get through, you carry this with you.

• Being alone is one of the first signs that you're in an addictive pattern

• The hole doesn't go away and you'll learn to live with it.

• The healing doesn't mean that the hole has closed. 

His book recommendations :

1. The Slight Edge by Jeff OIson

2. A Guide to the Gods by Richard Carlyon

Connect with Aaron through his :

• Website : www.firemountainprograms.com

• Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/firemountaintreatmentcenter/

• Facebook Group : Parenting Teens that Struggle

• Podcast : Beyond Risk and Back

Join my  Relief in Grief on October 27th, 28th, and 29th. This is my 3- day workshop that is so fun and I love getting together with the moms who join, we spend time learning, coaching, and talking. To register, go to www.reliefingriefsupportgroup.com

If you want to dive deeper and have a coach who understands grief, and triggers, and what it’s like to be walking with child loss grief, message me at hello@meganhillukka.com and we can chat about how I can help you on your grief journey.

If you are a grieving mother and looking for others who know the pain of child loss, come join my free Grieving Moms Community Facebook group: www.meganhillukka.com/community

Some links may contain affiliate links in which I receive a small commission if you decide to purchase something, this helps support the grief work I'm doing.

116 : Building Your Grief Toolbox

Episode Pointers:

• When grief first comes to you, you might have a few tools in your toolbox. It may be ways you have used to cope in the past or things you’ve used to get through hard seasons in your life before.

• But imagine that you get to build a toolbox of skills that you can pick and choose from to help support you on your grief journey.

• If you begin practicing skills and putting tools in your toolbox, you can have options and choices to help you get through a grief wave, and a place of support when things are really hard.

Here’s an idea of what has been in my toolbox, and what is currently in my own toolbox:

1._Thought work:

• Learning this skill of noticing my thoughts, and taking captive thoughts that are not serving me in my life and grief has been life changing. I learned this through coaching, and I teach this in my coaching.

2. Learning to feel, experience emotions, and building my container for my emotional capacity:

• It is allowing me to practice feeling my emotions instead of reacting to them when they come up. I think of this as having body awareness. Being aware of what’s going on in your body.

3. Movement:

• Having a way to move my body in many different ways.

E.g. Yoga, biking, running, walking, stretching, working out at the gym, volleyball

4. Meditation

• I use mediation often to notice what’s going on in my body and also to bring a sense of calm to my body and to my brain.

5. E.F.T ( Emotional Freedom Technique - Tapping)

• I can totally feel the difference, especially when I am so stressed, anxious, angry, or sad. I do E.F.T. and talk through what's going on, noticing in my body, and I always feel better after I’m done.

6. Therapy

• I have been to therapy and I also got the treatment, EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing).I think EMDR has saved my life. It has helped me in being grounded again, and feel that I have a little bit of control over my brain.

7. Coaching:

• Getting coaching changed my own life in so many ways, especially learning how much more control I have in my thoughts and feelings in my life. It helped me get perspective on many things in my life and grief, and coaching in some form or another continues to be a part of my experience.

8. Energy work:

• Different types of energy work, emotion code, body code, wearing different necklaces of gemstones that support different types of energy. I think energy work is the oddest thing I’ve used to support my grief. I can feel it, even though I can’t see it.

9. Bodywork

          -  Massages, Craniosacral Therapy, Chiropractic Adjustments, any sort of bodywork that helps support my body physically.

10. Leaning on my Faith

• Having my faith helps me put my trust in God and my cares in his hands. It has helped me when I get anxious about the future, or wonder how I will handle another thing happening in my life. I’m able to give it to God and live for this moment.

• There are so many ways you can come to support your body and mind through this grief journey. And I believe that if you can build your toolbox, you have more options and ways of supporting yourself.

• You don’t need to build your grief toolbox all at once, but as you do something, imagine that you are building the skill and capacity to have more tools in your toolbox.

Join my  Relief in Grief on October 27th, 28th, and 29th. This is my 3- day workshop that is so fun and I love getting together with the moms who join, we spend time learning, coaching, and talking. To register, go to www.reliefingriefsupportgroup.com

If you want to dive deeper and have a coach who understands grief, and triggers, and what it’s like to be walking with child loss grief, message me at hello@meganhillukka.com and we can chat about how I can help you on your grief journey.

If you are a grieving mother and looking for others who know the pain of child loss, come join my free Grieving Moms Community Facebook group: www.meganhillukka.com/community

115: We are Moving in a School Bus

Episode Pointers:

• When Aria died, one of the biggest things I learned was that death can happen at any moment. In one instant, someone you love can be gone.

• I’ve wanted to learn how to live again, because I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. And I want to live, I want to have a connection with my kids and be present for them.

• The only moment we have is right now.

• If you have a dream, or something you want to do, start right now. Something small every single day is how you get to your dreams.

• And for a while it felt like a marathon that would never end. I know I’m working in a way that’s draining for me, and I can’t keep this up forever, but now the end is in sight.

• After Aria died, we took our kids to play therapy, because play is so important for kids. I lean more towards unschooling and following my kids' lead, and I’m amazed how constant their learning is, when I don’t even push them to do something.

• I hope this episode gives you encouragement to live your own dream. Your own version of following your dreams.

• There is always a way for you to follow your dreams. One step at a time. You don’t have to have it all figured out before you start. All you have to do is start and the next step will open up to you.

• At the heart of everything, none of us know when our last days are, and maybe some of you are just wishing and waiting for your last days to be here, and I see you in that space as well.

• I also hope that you can see this as hope, that you can learn to live with child loss, and you can have dreams and excitement in your life, because you know that death can come any moment, that you want to live now.

Book Recommendation:

• The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss

Join my  Relief in Grief on October 27th, 28th, and 29th. This is my 3- day workshop that is so fun and I love getting together with the moms who join, we spend time learning, coaching, and talking. To register, go to www.reliefingriefsupportgroup.com

If you want to dive deeper and have a coach who understands grief, and triggers, and what it’s like to be walking with child loss grief, message me at hello@meganhillukka.com and we can chat about how I can help you on your grief journey.

If you are a grieving mother and looking for others who know the pain of child loss, come join my free Grieving Moms Community Facebook group: www.meganhillukka.com/community

Some links may contain affiliate links in which I receive a small commission if you decide to purchase something, this helps support the grief work I'm doing.

114: Grief and Anxiety

Episode Pointers :

• Anxiety is not a problem.

• The more you resist anxiety, the more intense it gets.

• Having anxiety is your brain’s way of protecting you.

• Thought Induced Anxiety is when your thoughts are like a ‘runaway train’. 

• You do not need to believe every thought you think. Even if it feels true.

• Acknowledge the anxiety, fear, and the worries. Then tell your brain that you are choosing a new thought now.

• Emotional Framework:

1. Identity

2. Event

3. Thought

4. Emotion

5. Result

• Anxiety can present physically in your body.

• Feel and hold space the sensations in your body, and not take action from the anxiety.

• E.F.T. ( Emotional Freedom Technique) can physically calm your body down by tapping points in your body in a certain order, while feeling the anxiety and emotion, and speaking the thoughts or hearing them.

Join my  Relief in Grief on October 6th, 7th, and 8th. This is my 3- day workshop that is so fun and I love getting together with the moms who join, we spend time learning, coaching, and talking. To register, go to www.reliefingriefsupportgroup.com

If you want to dive deeper and have a coach who understands grief, and triggers, and what it’s like to be walking with child loss grief, message me at hello@meganhillukka.com and we can chat about how I can help you on your grief journey.

If you are a grieving mother and looking for others who know the pain of child loss, come join my free Grieving Moms Community Facebook group: www.meganhillukka.com/community

113: Enneagram and Grief With Callie Ammons

Episode Pointers:

• Enneagram is a lens and the way that we look at the world and it's helping us understand what is going on internally

• In Enneagram, there are 9 different personalities wherein each type is so complex.

This is like a basis of the core motivation or what you subconsciously fear in life.

Her book recommendation :  What to Say When You Talk to Your Self 

by Shad Helmstetter

Connect with Callie through her :

• Website : www.callieammons.com

• Instagram : www.instagram.com/callieammons/

• Podcast : Living Enneagram

If you want to dive deeper and have a coach who understands grief, and triggers, and what it’s like to be walking with child loss grief, message me at hello@meganhillukka.com and we can chat about how I can help you on your grief journey.

If you want more tools to help you, I have a workshop called Stop Talking Start Feeling, it’s a workshop that dives into emotions, what they are, and how you can begin to feel and process them and get them out of your body instead of stuffing them down. It also goes specifically into processing and releasing the emotions of guilt and sadness. You can get access to this workshop and all the extra things I have in there for only $27. Go to www.stoptalkingstartfeeling.com to check it out. 

If you are a grieving mother and looking for others who know the pain of child loss, come join my free Grieving Moms Community Facebook group: www.meganhillukka.com/community

Some links may contain affiliate links in which I receive a small commission if you decide to purchase something, this helps support the grief work I'm doing.