Welcome And The Core Question

Joya 0:00

Everyone teaches you what to do to change your life for the better. But here we explore what happens when life changes you. This is Grieving Awake, and I'm your host, Joya Cesnowski. What if the life you haven't been able to live is locked behind the grief you haven't been able to feel? I'm Joya, and today on Grieving Awake, this is what we're going to talk about. This

Unmet Self And Unlived Life

Joya 0:34

problem of humanity that I see, and only because I've walked through it myself and experienced it, is that so many of us are carrying an unmet self and an unlived life and unexpressed grief. The unmet self is who you learned that you could not safely be. And this is the truest part of yourself. A long time ago, I synthesized this idea around the owl, or what I call the original wound, that something happened, and it's not the wound that happened that caused us to shut down our truest self, but it was our agreement that that part of us is what's wrong with us. We fear our own self. And so we covered it up. And that light that we are began to come out sideways. And the unlived life is the life that never, that this, that self, that truest self, the unlived life is the is the life that that truest self never got to live. And so there's all of this unmet, unexpressed potential. And we feel it inside of us as a pressure because every single human being has been given this seed of life that comes from the divine, that comes from the mystery of all that is, implanted in us, this nature, right? Like we just have to look to nature, and we are nature. We live on a planet of nature, nature expressing itself. And the urge of nature is growth and expression. And so we have that same urge planted inside of us that seeks our growth. And this seeking of this unlived life is what fuels a multi-billion dollar industry built on seeking the unlived life and the unmet self. But beneath all of those, or I should say the consequence of all of those, is unexpressed grief that accumulated around that loss. And not only the unexpressed grief of the unlived life, but then we find the unexpressed grief of this shutting down of our truest self, the unmet self. And so we often mistake the symptoms as the problem. And we experience it as burnout or resentment or envy, numbness, rage, restlessness, addiction, midlife crisis, chronic dissatisfaction, no matter what you accomplish, the feeling always that something is missing. Sometimes even the compulsive need to constantly change things, changing partners, changing jobs, changing cities, changing identities, changing your body, changing your clothes, changing your name. But underneath some of that, there is something so much more elemental, a truth that's living there that says, I abandoned parts of myself in order to belong, survive, succeed, or even be loved. And every abandoned self leaves behind an unlived life. And every unlived life carries grief. And I think that if we really examine this, this is a social thesis. Because so much of humanity's suffering may be the collective consequence of people living from adaptations rather than from their aliveness, carrying an unmet self, an unlived life, and grief they were never taught how to express, or even that it's grief in that energy of dissatisfaction. And in my experience, grief becomes the doorway backward through that sequence.

Compound Grief And True Self

Joya 4:50

Because when I was grieving my son so heavily in those early days, I was so shocked to be going through what I called compound grief, that I was not only experiencing my grief of losing him, I was also going into these deeper griefs in myself, of the mom I never was, because of an unlived life I never lived, and an unmet self that would have lived that life. It's the grief of unexpressed and unlived potential. There's a book about dying that I love. I'll have to find what it is. But she says that she interviewed thousands of people. She was a hospice nurse and she interviewed thousands of people who were dying. And she said that the number one regret of the dying is that they didn't live a life true to who they were. They didn't live the life of the unmet self. And I think that beneath all of that, there is an unconditioned self that survives before the adaptation. And that is the self that I have met in my grieving process. This, the truest, most alive spark of me. And that's why I think that all shadow work is grief work. There is no shadow work that doesn't also have grieving involved in it. Because we're not trying to eliminate our undesirable traits, our shadows. But really the deeper questions are what did this part of me have to give up? What did she never get to become? And what needs to be grieved so she no longer has to remain buried. Grief is not just something that we experience when someone dies. It really is in the whole in the process of us rebecoming whole. It truly, truly is.

The Nervous System Chooses Safety

Joya 7:40

The vagus nerve communicates more from the body to the brain than the other way around, from the brain to the body. So we have this very intelligent mind inside of our gut that's communicating and taking in information through this gut mind, our intuition, the like the language that speaks body language, the language of frequency, the language below the words, the language that meets somebody and can instantly sense I trust this person, I don't trust this person. I like this person, I don't like this person. This person has ulterior motives, this person is authentic. We can sense that and we know and it transmits. And so this unmet self and this unlived life, even though the mind can think, the head brain can think what it wants to do, if the body doesn't feel safe, then the body mind will override the thinking mind every day of the week, which is why we wind up doing the thing we don't want to do that's keeping us stuck instead of doing the thing we say we want to do that will lead to what we perceive as our liberation. Because at some point, part of ourself learned that it isn't safe to be this person, it isn't safe to need this, it isn't safe to feel this, it isn't safe to want this, it isn't safe to express this. And so they protected and hid and silenced and adapted around it. And that's where the unlived life begins. So you can think of it as like you're being you're walking on a trail of life, and you're your authentic self on this trail, and someone's telling you you're doing it wrong. This isn't how you do it. This isn't how we walk on trails, you're doing this trail all wrong. And so instead of walking the trail the way you walk the trail, you like skew off and start walking an entirely different trail, an entirely different path altogether, one that everybody else is walking, and you start walking it how they're walking it. And you begin to mistake that life as your own. And then we wonder why we have so much dissatisfaction in ourselves. And the life isn't unlived because we lack ambition. It's unlived because the nervous system learned that some form of our aliveness carried way too much risk. Which means you can't positive think your way into the unlived life. You can't command the unmet self to emerge out of hiding. You yourself have to become safe enough for her to come home. And this is where the power of grief becomes transformational, where it's transformational alchemy shows.

Self-Kindness As Real Protection

Joya 10:45

Because when grief comes, and instead of abandoning ourselves or judging ourselves or rushing ourselves or suppressing our grief or demanding that we get better and we run from it and we distract ourselves from it, but instead we turn toward how we're feeling and we practice loving self-kindness and presence and acceptance. We begin to prove to our nervous system that we will no longer abandon ourselves for having a human experience. Do you know how enormous that feeling is? I do. In sitting in my grief, in sitting in every grief, in sitting in every story that arose, in sitting in all the pain that arose, including the not knowing. And I can't pretend to know what my unlived life would have been, nor can you, and there's no point in that. But the but we can grieve the fact that it's there. We can grieve for what we don't know. But every time that I can stay in my tears without shaming them, without grabbing a Kleenex, without feeling like I need to hide or stop crying, every time I can feel anger without deciding that it makes me a bad person, or every time I can acknowledge longing inside of myself without saying I'm being needy, or every time I can feel devastation without trying to spiritually transcend it. I'm teaching my body, you're safe here. You're safe with me, you're allowed here. I will not leave you because of what you feel. I will not hurt you because of what you feel. Because in our adult life, it's not other people that are hurting us. It's us that hurt us. We choose at all times who we're around, what situations we are allowing into our life, what we are doing with our life, what things we are hiding from other people. And those things that you're hiding from other people that you're doing in secret truly are the things that matter most because it's your own integrity.

Integrity Secrets And The Champagne Test

Joya 13:06

And I had a perfect example of this when I stopped drinking a couple of years ago when I was at the airport and I was flying first class. So you have access to the business lounge, and I went in there. And of course, they have free champagne and free beer and free alcohol. And I felt like I wanted a glass of champagne so bad. And I was very much triggering and I was starting to get to that place where I talk myself into it. And I was like, oh, come on, what's the big deal? It's just one glass of champagne. You can have a glass of champagne, you deserve it. Go relax and just imagine how great this will feel sitting and having this glass of champagne. And besides, you don't have to tell anybody if you do it. Let me tell you, that thought right there, you don't have to tell anybody. I was like, but I will know if I do it. I've betrayed myself. I've I'm and now I'm a liar. Now I'm hiding something from other people. And those things that we hide, like they say in AA, we're only as sick as our secrets. And it's very, very true because we're self-harming when we betray our own integrity. And that's how we create this feeling of not being a safe space for myself. Because that hurts. We might not feel that we're hurting ourselves in those situations, but it really truly does hurt. And so the conditions start to become met when we walk away from those situations, when we don't listen to that voice. And we instead say, no, thanks. I don't have to listen to every thought that I have and obey it. It creates the conditions for the unmet self to finally reveal itself to you. Because the grief starts uncovering the grief that's beneath the grief. Not only do I miss what I lost, but I miss myself. I don't even know who that is, but I miss it and I can feel it and I want it. I grieve how long I've silenced myself. I grieve what I wanted but never asked for. I grieve the years I spent becoming acceptable to myself. I grieve the creativity, the sexuality, the voice, the play, the power, the tenderness, the ambition, the opportunities, the spirituality, the wildness that I learned how to contain and shut down.

Grieving Awake Into Living Awake

Joya 15:34

We don't grieve the unlived life so we can remain mourning for it, though. We grieve it so we can begin having the courage to live it. That's the unlocking. Grief metabolizes what could otherwise remain frozen in us as continued regret, resentment, shame, longing, shadows. Our own self-kindness provides the safety necessary to feel it. And once it can be felt, the energy that's been bound up protecting us from it becomes available for our life. We free our energy. We suddenly have much more energy. So grieving awake doesn't just mean how do I remain awake while I'm grieving what I lost, but it's asking a deeper question. And it's what if grief awakens me to everything in myself that I have yet to live. And this is where we walk from grieving awake into living awake. Because grief does not manufacture the true self. The true self is always there, it's never left. It helps loosen what's kept it inaccessible to you, unknown to you. And self-kindness says it's safe to be you now. It's safe to be you now. And it's just so beautiful to step into this place. Because when you learn to become a safe space for your own grief, your own full spectrum human experience, the grief and the joy, there's these polarities of experience, and we learn how to hold all of it. So it doesn't become either grief or joy, it becomes grief and joy. And it becomes the unmet self and meeting this self and living from this place now with the life that you have left. And this is what I really believe is that grief, the power of grief, the sheer power of grief brings us to a place of human liberation.

The Unlived Life We Inherit

Joya 18:08

Because we realize that when the grief that we hold is also a collective grief. When my children were really little, I remember hearing a quote from Carl Jung that said, nothing affects a child more than the unlived life of the parent. Think about that for just a moment of what I just talked about. Nothing affects the child more than the unlived life of the parent. Your parents' unlived life affected you. And you too took on an unlived life. And it affects you. And if it doesn't, then amazing for you that you haven't had these kinds of experiences in your life. And you had enlightened, wonderful parents who encouraged you to be exactly who you are. And I hope you consider yourself so blessed. And that's what this society can actually move toward. That as we awaken, as we step into this unfoldment of our truest self, which is our divine nature that we are not separate from, when we really start to realize there is no separation between my body and my soul, it's all one thing. And my soul is not disconnected from spirit. It's right there next to me. It's all one thing in this beautiful web, just beautifully intertangled in a way that I can't see but can experience. And we begin to live from that place. Imagine what the world will become. The consciousness. The consciousness. And the way that our world is unfolding right now on every front, politically, economically, technologically, spiritually. There's these massive unfoldments happening at a massive society level. That we must individually wake up to exactly this, so that we don't just repeat the same unlived life, unmet selves, and unexpressed grief again and again and again. Because it doesn't have to be that way.

Book Invitation And Next Week Teaser

Joya 20:32

I invite you to purchase my book, Grieving Awake, now available on Amazon or on my website, and sign up for my email list so you know as soon as I launch Grieving Awake Circles Retreats and beginning the first cohort where we walk through this beautiful framework together to awaken and realize our fullest potential and become fully human. Next week on the show, I will have a near-death experience story from Holly Porter that is just so incredible. It's going to blow your mind. And I'm headed to the Helping Parents Heal conference today, where I plan on meeting some other amazing people that I can interview on this podcast as well, because I come alive in conversations. And I know that that is one of my gifts is the relationship exchange, the give and take, the back and forth of listening and listening and sharing someone else's wisdom and experience besides just my own. So that's what's coming up. And don't forget to like and subscribe and share if this conversation resonated. Have a blessed and beautiful day. Bye, everyone.