Grief as Celebration

I remember exactly where I was, in the Austin condo where my Dad and I were living at the time, when I walked into the main living room area and noticed that my Dad was on a phone call with a friend, discussing my work. “Grief as celebration,” my Dad spoke into the phone to support his friend in understanding my work. “Grief as celebration?” I remember thinking. My Dad, in that moment, showed me that he really understood and saw me in my work, without ever having seen me in a client session. My Dad, in that moment, giving me a huge gift, a way to position my work, a means to support others in seeing their grief as not just an invitation to grow and transform, but also in seeing grief as an invitation to celebrate the infiniteness of love.

As I paused that night in the living room, my Dad completely unaware that I’d heard him in this conversation, it felt only too poignant of a scene that he just explained my work in this way.

For my Dad’s 70th birthday, on May 7th, 2020 I woke up early and put confetti all over his office chair and all over the area near his desk. I’ve always loved the celebration that confetti brings us into, and the way in which it not only invites the presence and joy that comes from surrender and release, but the way that it can represent all of the textures and colors of the spectrum of our human feelings (especially within grief). A few weeks after his birthday, desk was still encircled by confetti.

One of the hardest truths I have recently walked through is the grief of someone not only misunderstanding me, but also taking my words, ideas, and insights as their own. The words that were taken were the words gifted to me from my Dad: “Grief as Celebration,” and it has taken a lot of processing and heartache to walk through this.

In creative and divine spaces, this is an all too familiar story. Words and phrases can have so much power, and people want to capture them for themselves. Back in 2020, I was blessed to be mentored by the beautiful visionary and seer, Lalah Delia. In light of the frustrations I was experiencing with Grief as Celebration, I remembered a story that Lalah told me about an experience she had seeing her words on a UK based jewelry line: “She remembered who she was and the game changed.” Lalah’s words engraved on bracelets thousands of miles away from her, with no attribution or credit to her.

If you are a visionary or seer, you know the grief and pain that this causes, and it’s even more painful when it’s done by someone you have known and worked with. And this is exactly why those of us who are visionaries and seers must leave those partnerships, and reclaim our visions. 

For the longest time, I felt trapped, as though I couldn’t use the words from my Dad that meant so much to me and my work. As an Integrative Grief Guide, I recognized this was coming from my grief, and realized I needed to take the necessary actions to move myself from grief into growth – so that I could be in a place of healing in relation to this wound.

Like all of us, I deserve to be seen, appreciated, and celebrated for who I am – in the same way I do this for my clients as I hold space and co-create with them in healing their grief. 

So moving forward, I am reclaiming “Grief as Celebration” as words gifted from the Divine, through my Dad to me and my work in Fall Up. I’m excited to see what these words will birth.

(as a side note, Lalah was able to reclaim her words too!)

Grief is not just an invitation to growth and transformation, as is my core teaching, but an invitation to celebrate that we have the capacity, any day of the week, any month of the year, to stand up, stretch out our lungs, and alchemize what has taken up space as grief in our hearts, through speaking our truth.

Now an invitation for you, the reader, the Fall Up Community member, where is your grief inviting you into the freedom that comes from expressing your Truth?