A Book Finish And A Rebrand

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I missed last week's episode because I have been up to my eyeballs in my book, which is now finished and being formatted. It'll be out in August, grieving awake. And as I sit with grief, being a grief walker, and I've been resistant to wanting to work in grief, I received the message that all I have to do is just be me. It's as easy as that. It's as easy as that for all of us. And so being me who I am now, of course, is a lot about grief. And so I'm going to rebrand this podcast again for the last time to align with my work as I now step

Why Grief Includes Many Losses

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into grieving awake. And it's not just about grief, because loss of any kind that shatters your identity and the world that you were living in before, including spiritual awakening, including plant medicine journeys that gave you insights that you can't unsee, and the dissatisfaction many women and men are experiencing with their lifelong career choices and now want to do something more meaningful. And then, of course, people who have lost someone through death, through divorce, through betrayal, companies, our work, and even the call to step into an expanded sense of self can cause grief because we're losing who we were. We're stepping out of our comfort zone. We have to let go of things that served us probably for a really long time. And so grief is such a massive word for all of the myriad of experiences that it contains. And the more traumatic the grief experience, the deeper and more uh dismantling of the identity

Grief As Identity Dismantling

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it actually is. And that is really the message that I want to get through to people is that grief dismantles your identity. I can't shout it loud enough from the rooftops. It's the process of being being rewired into someone new. And how you walk through it determines who you become through it. And so for me, I was very blessed and very fortunate to already have such a strong foundation of being a daily meditator for well over a decade, practicing mindful self-compassion, practicing non-attachment, practicing self-kindness, practicing self-radical acceptance, like all of these tools. Of course, with my sound and expressive arts and somatic practices, I had every tool that I needed to walk through grief consciously the way that I have. And so it's really woken me up into a whole new way of being. I am literally not the same woman that I was. And if you've been listening to my show for as I've been walking through grief, you could probably hear all of the changes that I've gone through, including my voice. I listened to something from myself like from two years ago, and I almost didn't even recognize myself. And so in this process, you know, it's difficult. It's painful, it's such a painful initiation. And it also brings you to these heights of such deep joy, not manic bliss, not those states of manic bliss, those false enlightenment states. I'm talking about deep and abiding joy, which has just this hum of peace for me that appreciates and notices the little things in life, you know, and it's not to say it's not even about holding this constant state all the time of it's always got to be high vibe, I always gotta feel good. That's bypassing, and it's ridiculous because we are humans and we go through these experiences. And the more that we're able to stay present to ourselves and to what's arising, and as we do this inner work to expand our inner capacity, not only to be a safe, safe, a safe space for ourselves, to hold a container for ourselves and how we feel and what we're going through with love and compassion and self-respect and sovereignty. We're also realigning our external world, friends, jobs, things you used to do, things you used to like to do that you don't anymore, what is starting to drive you instead of what did, what you care about now, that's always been there, secretly lurking in the underbelly of your being,

Science Meets The Mystical Unknown

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that now is screaming to be expressed because our soul wants to be expressed in this lifetime. And over the course of this last year, I have been receiving countless downloads. I have six journals full of the most beautiful messages, the most beautiful transmissions that have come through. And so this message dropped in how to serve the best way I can serve. And it was read your journals. And so I'm going to start reading some of those transmissions, as well as having guests on my show to talk about after-death communication and near-death experiences and the science that's being discovered of the mystery that we all live in. And I love science because it seeks the how, and I love the mystical because it seeks the who. And I don't think that those two things are separate from each other. It's all fingers pointing at the moon. But it's so beautiful to have these conversations and explore this wide range of consciousness. And that's my passion. Consciousness and expanding consciousness and awakening and expanding our perception and learning how to become a three-centered being through your mind, moving into wisdom, your heart, moving into love, and your nervous system becoming such a safe space within yourself that you're able to stay present in the present moment so that you can consciously choose to listen to that beautiful inner guidance that's constantly guiding us if we know how to pay attention, if we know how to listen, if we know how to follow those very soft, gentle nudges of the spirit.

Soul Guidance And Life Alignment

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Ego screams at us. Our soul does not. Our soul whispers. It'll say, Hey, do this thing. And you could be like, No, I don't want to do that thing. And it's not going to beg you to do it. But you're going to feel the repercussions of not doing it. And as we move into these energies that we are moving into more and more of what energetically, frequency-wise, doesn't serve your soul on a soul level, is going to create this discomfort within you so that you stop doing it. And if you don't stop doing the things that are harmful for your soul, well, you're not going to have a very happy life. Not going to have a very peaceful life. And you're certainly not going to have a meaningful life. And you're definitely not going to have a smooth transition when you exit this body and walk through that door to the continuation of your consciousness because it does not end at the end of life. And I know that with every fiber of my being, I would bet my own soul on it. That's how sure I am. And that's why I feel like I can talk about it now, because it took me all this time to become that sure of it, to become that deeply trusting of my own inner guidance and my own information that's been coming in through my son. And one of the first things he told me within the first couple of months was there is no such thing as death, that we arrive on the other side at the exact level of consciousness that we leave this life with. And so our job here is to wake up the soul and live from the soul and do what the soul came here to do. And it certainly wasn't about making yourself famous and making a ton of money so that you can get all the things that you want to get in the world. Those are lovely. I'm not against those things, but it's more important, so much more important to figure out what it is that your soul came here to do and to do that thing. What your soul came here to heal. I know that mine was to overcome trauma and transmute it into compassion and to overcome selfishness from that trauma and transmute it into a heart of generosity. And with that comes a complete responsibility to live in total alignment and integrity within yourself. You can lie to other people, but we all live with ourselves. And we want to awaken the soul and begin to live at that level of inner integrity, of that level of inner light, of inner love, of inner compassion, of inner kindness, and awakening whatever your soul qualities are, your soul qualities of aliveness.

Trauma Stored In The Nervous System

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And so I'm going to keep this short today and just tell you that this is what I'm now moving into is grieving awake, because I feel like it's just such an important conversation to start having and putting out into the mainstream that grief comes in many flavors, many colors. Grief is cultural, grief is in the collective, grief is everywhere. Every unresolved trauma inside of your life is stuck in stored grief in the nervous system. Every addiction in your life is stuck and stored grief. Most of the problems that you're having in your life are from grief and trauma. And so only each and every one of us can take up the responsibility to do the work to heal, to remove all of the blocks that are in the way of your soul, which is already here. You're already in your capacities. You already have all the fullest capacities you have. You're just misusing them through the lens of the wound. And that's what we're going to start talking about here on Grieving Awake, staying awake, and creating awake. Because this is what this world needs now. This is what we all need now to fall deeply in love with life. And I don't mean life just physical life. I mean life of the soul, life of your energy, life with God, feeling yourself, feeling your divine connection, and having that inner reverence for the beautiful, incredible

Next Week Teaser And Practices

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being that you truly are. So next week I will begin my first official episode kicking it off of Grieving Awake, sharing the journal entry I received the day before my son died, in which I was told grace descends upon the heart that has been broken open. I invite you to go to my website, joyososnowski.com, and click on meditations and follow me on Insight Timer, where I am now uploading lots of practices, daily practices, so that you can begin to create the ground beneath you of meditation, of prayer, of present moment awareness, of self kindness so that when grief comes into your life, which it will, the ground does not fall out from underneath you. Sending you so much love, everybody. See you soon.