All Blog Postings by Mary
Level of Awareness
Archive notice: This is a historical post from Mary’s years of blogging. Some older posts may mention products, courses or shop items that are no longer available, as Mary now focuses her time and energy on supporting widows inside her private Facebook community. The guidance and stories remain here as a free resource for widows.
For current ways to connect with Mary’s work, you can:
- Read her book on Amazon .
- Request to join her private Facebook group for widows .
When you start to heal you will reach a level of awareness where you realize that you are not stuck, and that a healing process has begun within you. You take action and start moving forward according to what you want from your life.
Widows who are grieving are rarely helped by unsolicited advice. Real solutions to our grief have to come from within.
How open are you to your future? I have listened to many widows tell their stories of problems, obstacles, loneliness and frustration. The difficulties of facing each new challenge is often overlooked. Widows cope as best as they can with fear, anger, mood swings and doubt, but grief has a way of holding us down.
The first step is to critically break down a problem until you reach a solution. Be aware of how our feelings may affect the solution. We spend a long time fighting our feelings and hiding our grief out of fear that we will be judged negatively.
Feelings of numbness and depression can make life seem to stop. Your life at this moment is an entangled process as your heart tries to heal. Yet over our lifetime the key to our well-being is our awareness and our coping skills. With strong coping skills widows are resilient in the face of their spouse’s death.
Do you feel that you used to be resilient, but now you just can’t bounce back? The simple but also hard truth is that happiness is built by making your day “happy”. No one can foresee the future, but by believing that your day will have some happiness, you will find that opportunities will unfold to bring it about.
Before that can happen you need to write out the ten things that make you feel hopeless, followed by the realistic steps you can take to avoid those outcomes. Awareness can also come from other widows who have gotten out of their dark place and have learned from them.
I believe that we don’t ask enough in life. Our purpose in life is to quit asking for so little. You are at a time in your life where you should start planting your seeds of dreams and desires. Take some small positive steps every day – don’t over think this as good enough is good enough. Most of the resistance we encounter is old habits of procrastination, wishful thinking that somehow our problems will solve themselves.
First thing in the morning write down what you are going to do that day. Make sure it includes at least one thing you have been putting off. Everything on the list should make you feel good when they are done and you can check them off.