Laura Part I: Death Was My First Teacher
My story starts as a journey of loss, grief, and trauma, and ultimately leads to a heart cracked wide open to love. I promise it won’t leave you sad if you’ll stick it out. Like so many people’s paths, it is a hero’s journey revealing the great potential for expansion. While difficult, it allowed me to unlock certain secrets to the puzzle of life. How do I really create a life full of love when I’m faced with suffering that I thought I could not survive?
Death was the first teacher in my life. My father, whom I adored, died before our eyes over 9 months from a brain tumor at 44 years old. It was heartbreaking. He was the center of joy in our family and we were completely lost as to how to cope and grieve his death. I had no idea how to grapple with it, which led to depression and a burying of my emotions.
Not many years later, the roommate of my brother, Spencer, called and said he hadn’t come home after going hiking. It turned into an agonizing search in the Rocky Mountains deep into the night. He was found dead from a fatal fall off a cliff. Devastated is the only word I can find for how I felt. That seemed like more than I could bear.
Later my baby brother, Drew, moved in with me and my family before grad school. A couple of months into his stay, he went out for a run and died blocks from my house. I had been led by my daughter at that moment to go down the street, and we came upon him and I tried desperately to help resuscitate him. It felt like my family was marked for tragedy and sorrow. I carried a heaviness with me daily.
I dealt with my grief mostly by burying it and went on with my life. I had grown up in a strict religious environment that taught me to mistrust my own inner sense of truth, and to be a “good girl” at all costs. It instilled a stifling quality in my life I was struggling with. I tried to juggle it all -- work, marriage, being a mom of three young children until I felt the burnout.
It seemed I was on a treadmill that I couldn’t get off. I remember looking down at my daughters begging for attention while I stood at the stove cooking, and I knew no one was getting my best – not me, not them.
I also began to feel further and further at odds with the religion I was raised in. I disagreed with its tenants and with trepidation. First I left a tight religious community and not long after that, I also left my corporate job. This was exhilarating — and terrifying.
I was awakening, and I decided to use all my savings to go back to school to do a master’s degree in Spiritual Psychology. This provided time to focus on myself. I began unearthing buried grief, heartfelt dreams that I had ignored and started paying attention to my own needs. Meditation was a lifeline that I relied on daily to support myself.
In this process, an unexpected door within me opened to the greatest secret of my life. I thought I’d already had enough surprises, but I was about to uncover something hidden in my body, unacknowledged for decades, that was causing me disassociation, fear, and anxiety. All these things were impacting my life profoundly and I had no idea at the time how powerful it was going to be to choose to open that door.
Hang in there with me to read the rest of the story next week. I promise to share the secret that upended my life and became my most profound teacher—along with some of the gifts that moved me through it.
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