Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 21: Holding the Sacred Weight of Grief
30 Plays1 year ago
In this episode of Sacred Self Love, I open my heart to explore the many layers of grief we carry as women—some tender, some fierce, all worthy of being felt. From the recent deaths of beloved chickens on our farm to the unresolved grief and anger that can linger even after a family member has passed, this episode is an invitation into the sacred space of emotional honesty.
I speak to the collective grief we hold as women—especially the grief of being disconnected from our wombs. I share how, through the lens of quantum entanglement, we remain energetically intertwined with our mothers, often carrying and feeling emotions that are not entirely our own.
This conversation also touches on the heavier realities of mental health, including a discussion around suicide. Please be gentle with yourself and listen only when you have the capacity and support to hold what may arise. My hope is that this episode offers a reminder: grief, when held with love and awareness, can be a powerful path to healing and wholeness.
Connect with me:
https://linktr.ee/valerie.vazquez
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Host Background
00:00:06
Valerie Vazquez
Aloha and welcome to Sacred Self-Love. I'm your host and guide Valerie Vasquez. For those of you who are new to this podcast, i just want to tell you a little bit about myself and also just thank you for being here. So I am and ordained and certified energy healer, minister, earth steward.
00:00:31
Valerie Vazquez
I also live on 10-acre farm in why e and I am ah priestess of the rose, ah cycle breaker, witchy,
00:00:45
Valerie Vazquez
like multidimensional, which we all are.
Podcast Focus and Goals
00:00:50
Valerie Vazquez
We just have been raised up in a society that just wants us to believe that we're only one thing, you know.
00:00:58
Valerie Vazquez
And um while I'm exploring all of things, avenues of my multidimensionality. In this podcast, I share a bit about the farm and herbs, and i also share about my own spiritual journey.
00:01:17
Valerie Vazquez
And the main thing with this podcast is that I really want to touch the women that are wanting to once again feel safety within their own bodies, feel safety walking on this earth, and just helping you reconnect to and remember who you you truly are before we picked up all of these programs and patterns and limiting beliefs about ourselves.
00:01:52
Valerie Vazquez
So if you haven't subscribed to the podcast, please do so. And um without further ado, I'm going to go into today's episode.
Farm Life Challenges and Reflections on Grief
00:02:04
Valerie Vazquez
And I usually start out with a little bit of a farm update. And so This last week ah was a, it was a tough week on the farm.
00:02:18
Valerie Vazquez
We had actually four of our chickens die we
00:02:31
Valerie Vazquez
One of them was all of them for different reasons. And the thing that I've come to learn on the farm is that when you have the amount of birds and animals that you know, things are going to happen. And you when you're living out in nature, I mean, not only do we have our own animals and birds, but we also have tons of, you know, wild birds and mongoose and little kangaroo mice and butterflies and dragonflies. And, you know, we're, we are immersed in nature. So the birth and death cycle is in our faces ah quite often.
00:03:13
Valerie Vazquez
and um, we really do steward and care for our land and our animals and they are a very special part of our own healing journey here. Our farm is Healing Hearts Family Farm and so we do put a lot of care into our animals and their well-being and so yeah this last week you know we had sweet cheeks she's so sweet she was like one of our first chickens that we ever got like our first like 12 13 pullets that we've initially got on the farm which was about four years ago so you know they're getting to that age that it's possible that you know they're just going to pass from natural causes and that's what happened with her as far as we know and then we also had our little
00:04:06
Valerie Vazquez
crookie beak we called her she was definitely a special chicky that had kind of a crooked beak and her body was you know she she was very special and and then we had a dog attack and then we had a little chick that um yeah fell into a large water pond and yeah things happen you know even with the best stewardship things happen and um And this theme of, you know, I personally don't love the word loss.
00:04:43
Valerie Vazquez
Like when everyone has this, sorry for your loss. It's kind of like I heard Peter Crone say this one time because he, both of his parents died when he was younger.
00:04:54
Valerie Vazquez
was like, everyone kept saying to me, oh I'm so sorry for your loss. I'm so sorry you lost your parents. And he said that set him into this like feeling of like, well, if they're lost, maybe I'll find them again. And he said, no, I got to the point where I just said, no they died. I'm not going to find them again in this life. Like they have died. They're gone. So I'm not saying the way that we say things is wrong.
00:05:29
Valerie Vazquez
I'm never going to say that on this podcast or any of these episodes that any of these things I'm sharing are wrong. They're just like, i think they can be confusing. And one of the real stages of, you know, accepting grief is to really truly accept that people are going to die animals are going to die we are all going to die and um to just really lean into that knowing that we have to accept that that is part of our human experience here and so with that um
00:06:15
Valerie Vazquez
There's also just like this, you know, being here on the farm and knowing that we are going to pass through that. We are going to have animals that die.
00:06:25
Valerie Vazquez
i don't have the intense grief that I once had when we first got to the farm and I was not at all surrounded by death, you know.
00:06:36
Valerie Vazquez
um And now it's kind of like, you know, I feel it. And I am I'm just more grateful that I had time with these, you know, beautiful birds that have been in our life.
00:06:50
Valerie Vazquez
um And I do know that certain animals are I'm attached to a little bit more, but um I still feel, you know. that grief of that, that I won't see them when I go out anymore.
00:07:04
Valerie Vazquez
And I just want to continue on this talk of grief.
Processing Grief and Familial Connections
00:07:08
Valerie Vazquez
and am It's important in the current state of the world that we really allow ourselves to grieve And this next part I'm going to go into is about the ways that we have grief and stored within our body that can, in our energetic system, our emotional system, since, you know, we were very young young.
00:07:40
Valerie Vazquez
if you really understand like this process as a cycle breaker you are releasing grief that might not even be yours you're releasing grief of the collective too of all that we are experiencing and all that we are living through right now so this last week my mom hi mom I know you're listening um And was led through a grief ritual with one of my mentors, and I have mentioned her on the podcast before, Ka'uakea, is one of the teachers that was at Sacred Path. She's also a wonderful astrologist and energy healer and just amazing woman. And I'm so grateful I get to be on this island and she lives on the island too. so
00:08:35
Valerie Vazquez
At the specific time that my mom was doing a grief ritual, I felt it come through me. I didn't know, but I felt it.
00:08:46
Valerie Vazquez
And I just allowed myself to start crying. And then, you know, i was just like, whoa, I don't know where that came from. But like at this point in the journey, when an emotion comes up and I'm not like out in public where it would be,
00:09:01
Valerie Vazquez
you know a little more difficult for me to just like go straight into like allowing myself to feel the tears I just out here on the farm I'm I'm generally like not around too many people except for my husband and son and they've definitely seen me cry a lot so anyway I really allowed myself to just feel these tears and I was like whoa I was on my yoga mat at the time, so and just let it come through. And the reason I'm saying, telling the story that my mom was doing this and I felt it is because, see, that is the, that's the thing that we we really, as mothers and daughters and sons, we are connected energetically
00:09:52
Valerie Vazquez
to our family to our mothers especially you know we have her dna in us and we have like this this this quantum field like this entanglement we have together so it's not crazy you've heard a mother's and about a mother's intuition you've if you've heard about those um um telepathy tapes, like if you haven't listened to that podcast yet, highly recommend it.
00:10:22
Valerie Vazquez
We are connected, so connected, and we can feel each other's pain and grief, and we can like think of someone and then they call us, you know, all of that, like it's, it's, it's real.
00:10:39
Valerie Vazquez
so Then when my mom called me and she told me she was doing that, I was like, oh, that makes so much sense why I just started
Motherhood and Spiritual Awakening
00:10:47
Valerie Vazquez
crying, you know. And um and at the time, I was kind of processing through this, you know, showing up as a mother.
00:11:00
Valerie Vazquez
when you are on this spiritual healing journey, it's like you're not the person you once were because you're becoming aware of the ways that are not healthy ways of showing up for your kids, but yet you're not quite there. And sometimes, like I remember after really awakening to everything, I just had this immense guilt and of the things that I did.
00:11:31
Valerie Vazquez
and then I was trying to like, the thing is like with your children, there's really no way if they're already like adults and you've already passed on these wounding patterns, these traumas to them, there's no way that you can actually like now take it away.
00:11:51
Valerie Vazquez
Like you can show up in a different way so that you don't maybe cause further traumas or that you can show up in a more healthy way, but you actually don't have a way now of clearing out what they already have as their own soul journeys and their own wounding patterns.
00:12:14
Valerie Vazquez
But I know for me, I operated from this place of guilt a lot with my children, that I had done these things to them before I was aware. But then and it just has such a different way of like, then you try to show up and make up for it in these other ways. And it's just really like, continuing to look at like how what am I bringing into this now am i coming am I truly coming from a place of love now or am I coming from a place of guilt that I didn't do these things before and so anyway
00:12:53
Valerie Vazquez
This is such deep work and it goes into so many different levels that we really, you know, sometimes don't know just how deep it is until you can feel that connection. Like when I realized that my mom was processing through some grief and then I also could feel it through me.
00:13:16
Valerie Vazquez
It was like there's this shared grief within our lineage that we are clearing out. so that the future generations do not have to carry this.
00:13:30
Valerie Vazquez
And
00:13:33
Valerie Vazquez
I continued through the week to just feel this heaviness within me. And
00:13:44
Valerie Vazquez
being on this path, like if you've listened to previous episodes, I am currently in a one-year spiral through this Priestess of the Rose, and I am...
00:14:01
Valerie Vazquez
each month going through these processes that have to do with, like, for instance, this month, it's really processing grief on the separation of us as women from our bleeding like through our the first time that we you know got our periods or our moon cycles it's like how was that presented for you was it something that was celebrated was it something that was just like an inconvenience like all of these different ways as women that we actually have been separated from how powerful our
Reconnecting with Cyclical Nature and Feminine Power
00:14:45
Valerie Vazquez
womb space is how powerful
00:14:47
Valerie Vazquez
our our blood is and like before everything got turned into like us but basically like the patriarchal life of like just continuing to go through life even though our you know we are bleeding and just shoving tampons up and like just continuing to try to like push forward, even though, you know, this is not the way it was before, but now we have to like go to work. It doesn't matter if we're bleeding or not.
00:15:20
Valerie Vazquez
It isn't, you know, it's just an inconvenience. All the ways that we as women have been separated from how powerful that blood is. I mean, that blood literally has our DNA in it. And back, you know, before,
00:15:33
Valerie Vazquez
the patriarchy really like came in and took over and when we were like separated from the truth of who we are and how powerful we are as women like this blood is called star fire it was used in different you know rituals and it's extremely full of minerals and it's you know it's wonderful for the earth and Anyway, all of these ways that we as women have been stripped away from the power that lies within us.
00:16:05
Valerie Vazquez
And so I had already kind of been in a process of like going through this of like grieving those, you know, different stages of my life of like how separated I truly was from my cyclical nature and how I also didn't, you you know, here it comes up with a mother again.
00:16:25
Valerie Vazquez
i have a daughter and I didn't, you know, know to like have, you know, this time of her becoming into a woman like as a celebration. And, you know, I didn't get to teach her these things that I'm just now learning. And I had to also let go of that. Like I i cannot hold on to guilt for something that I didn't know before.
00:16:47
Valerie Vazquez
I'm knowing it now so it was like I'm getting in touch with those parts of the younger versions of me and the way I related to my body which was i thought it was an inconvenience every month that I bled and i didn't like it and i you know in my thirty s I didn't had an ablation done because I was having irregular periods instead of, you know being able to figure out like what's going on with my body. a doctor's like, oh, well just like, you know, laser out the inside of your cervix and then you won't bleed anymore. And that's a whole nother thing like I had to grieve through that I, you know, i don't bleed anymore. And a lot of people would be like, well, that's great. But
00:17:35
Valerie Vazquez
it's not great for me because it's hard for me to know when my, like what my natural cycle is and what I'm going through hormonally.
00:17:46
Valerie Vazquez
um i track it the best I can, but it it is hard. And then of course, going through perimenopause is a whole nother thing. So yeah, I've just, I've been kind of like walking through that and And then like activating these different parts of me to come alive again. And when I do that, this energy that's moving through, you know, this shakti, this feminine energy is is like, okay, like you are clearing out these parts of you energetically that are holding you back, that are causing you to still have these
00:18:29
Valerie Vazquez
you know, um patterns in your life that, you know, ah with your relationship, with all of your relationships, your relationship relationships to self, your relationship to your, you know, my husband, my son, my daughter, my mom, my, like everything, these, these patterns that, you know, are energetically and and intertwined into my being. And so I actually just,
00:19:00
Valerie Vazquez
I had so much grief coming through that i was alone on the farm. And
00:19:09
Valerie Vazquez
one day i just, I let myself fall apart. You know, i I let myself just go into this space of like,
00:19:23
Valerie Vazquez
intense grief and I haven't done this in years because I just, yeah, I just haven't really let myself go into this intensity. Like, yes, I let tears come through a lot of the times, but then I'm like, okay. But like, I let myself ugly cry, like snot coming out of my nose, drool coming out of my
Confronting Personal Grief and Anger
00:19:49
Valerie Vazquez
mouth.
00:19:49
Valerie Vazquez
Like I was just like crying. And the thing is with this world, I could be a witness to it.
00:20:01
Valerie Vazquez
I could see myself doing it because of the work that I did in Sacred Path. I have the ability to witness myself in these processes.
00:20:14
Valerie Vazquez
so that I don't pass versions of me before I could witness myself, I would have said, I'm depressed. And I would have called someone and just like, told them all of this stuff, this crazy stuff that was in my head, like that I was going through these stories that I was making up and these, like, I was like this trauma response, I guess you would call it.
00:20:38
Valerie Vazquez
um Or I think, Carl Jung calls it like the complex, like I would be in that and I wouldn't know that I was separate from it. But now that I know I'm separate from this pain, that that's not what I am or who I am, i could just let myself go because I knew that it would clear it out in a big way.
00:21:01
Valerie Vazquez
So I let myself ugly cry and I just like wailed and cried and just let all of this grief come out of me I didn't have to like name what it was or say that it was because of whatever. It just, it needed to come out. It was all encompassing. It was the, the chickens. It was the mom guilt. It was the, it was so much. It was the, what's happening in the world. It was the things that were happening. And then also,
00:21:36
Valerie Vazquez
As i was sitting, i was in the carport area, the closet door that we have outside just swung open.
00:21:49
Valerie Vazquez
and I looked
00:21:52
Valerie Vazquez
And I saw and I just want to say this is a trigger warning for anyone. i I'm just going to say that right now. But I hope that if you're listening to my podcast, you know that like stuff I talk about is going to be triggering already.
00:22:11
Valerie Vazquez
But this closet door like swung open. And I literally saw this gun that we have in the closet. It's like a pellet gun, 22 thing. It's just, you know, farm stuff.
00:22:27
Valerie Vazquez
um But the message that came through for me, and you've heard me talk about this before, my My father, he unalived himself when I was four years old.
00:22:45
Valerie Vazquez
And he did it with a gun. And when I saw that gun, it was literally like he... said to me, yeah that's how I ended all this pain.
00:23:02
Valerie Vazquez
And holy crap, if I didn't have a rage moment where, and I just let it rip, like how, you know, I just, I let it all rip out of me.
00:23:17
Valerie Vazquez
This rage towards him for not being able to
00:23:24
Valerie Vazquez
stay here for us and and passing on that that is an option for us to take our pain away instead of facing it and like I just raged out on it on him and yeah because I I've talked about this before I've believed that past versions me believed that that was an option and I've tried i have been in a coma for days I have a scar on my chest where a Broviac line was in my heart I was led my read my last rites and no this is not this is not an option and so once I fully like let all that rage out towards my father
00:24:18
Valerie Vazquez
oh it was like not immediately But felt after a few hours of just like really like then like, you know, taking a shower and like really rinsing the energy off and like really coming back, I realized, wow, um I have never...
Spiritual Healing and Emotional Processing
00:24:43
Valerie Vazquez
processed anger, which grief is anger, I've never actually processed that towards my father because he's been dead for since I was four and I'm 47 now and there is this aspect I believe of like when a parent or anyone else is no longer here it's it's a bit harder to process anger and rage because they're no longer here with us but I'm just gonna tell you that like
00:25:29
Valerie Vazquez
to heal from your father wound, your mother wound, which is something we all have, we have to be like real that the little girl or the little boy, our inner child,
00:25:50
Valerie Vazquez
was hurt by them in some ways even if they didn't mean to and those energetics are still held within our body they're still held in our energy centers in our chakras and the second chakra where the womb space is i I've talked about this before about like the the pain that you can have in your body and I I usually always have pain in my body and then I release something and then the pain goes away I was literally having pain in my right side lower like womb space and back and um
00:26:32
Valerie Vazquez
it lifted after that like the next day I got up and I was like wow this isn't there anymore and so pain is stored in your body and sometimes it's stored and it um manifests as a disease sometimes it's manifests as actual pain so I know this episode has been heavy And so, but this is part of like the spiritual healing journey is like actually getting real about these energetics that we have within our bodies that sometimes we are, well, we have been programmed against truly feeling these things because they are intense and intense.
00:27:21
Valerie Vazquez
i don't always recommend that like if you are new to this journey and you haven't you you haven't um made the container container within yourself to like be able to be the witness to what is going on that you do have someone there with you to work on, like ah someone that knows how to work with trauma or someone who and knows how to hold the space and be the container for you if you're not able to be it for yourself.
00:27:51
Valerie Vazquez
So, but I do recommend that, you know, if you are struggling in any way, And that you really want to free yourself from the suffering. You're not going to free yourself from all pain in this lifetime because that's just like not possible.
00:28:10
Valerie Vazquez
That isn't why we came here. That isn't the human experience. um It's a mixture of both. pain and beauty.
00:28:22
Valerie Vazquez
And to move through the pain, to see the beauty again, a lot of times, yes, you have to process these energetics out of your body. And as women, we, well, women and men, we have just been really told to suppress our emotions. And I just want you to know that you are not crazy in any possible way.
00:28:51
Valerie Vazquez
with whatever it is that you're experiencing. But also just to let yourself have the experiences of allowing yourself to grieve, allowing yourself to let go of anger. And, you know, it's really best not to do it against towards anyone else.
00:29:08
Valerie Vazquez
um But I know a lot of the times when we haven't healed through certain things or release things, it is easy to take it out on other people because that's what we have witnessed. And that's like what we've gotten in the groove to do and programmed. so Well, I wasn't really sure exactly how this episode was going to go today.
00:29:30
Valerie Vazquez
And i hope that you were able to glean something from this episode that processing grief is ah is a ah very important thing.
00:29:42
Valerie Vazquez
And just remember that even if you haven't experienced certain things in your life, There is still the grieving of what we are watching unfold in the world and what we are experiencing in our everyday lives. Just the things that we see that are just put in our faces constantly. so
00:30:14
Valerie Vazquez
you If you feel grief within you, it may not just be the grief of what you've experienced, but what is being experienced collectively.
00:30:24
Valerie Vazquez
And if you are on this journey of but being a cycle breaker, being someone that's really wanting to shed the layers of yourself that are holding you back from experiencing love for self and others, then it is, it's okay to let the tears come up. It's okay to ugly cry.
00:30:48
Valerie Vazquez
Just try not to get stuck in that and think that that is you because it's not.
Closing Remarks and Future Plans
00:30:53
Valerie Vazquez
So thank you for all that you do. Every time we release things do become lighter and so yeah if you haven't subscribed to the podcast please do so please give me a five star rating leave me a comment I in the last episode I talked about whether or not I was going to continue the podcast and I did find an avenue that I will be able to do that
00:31:19
Valerie Vazquez
So for now, this is where you will find me. i am hu giving up social media for a while and just really letting myself walk through this spiral path and playing with my animals and with herbs. And so Yeah, that's, that's it. I'll put my link tree in the description or the the episode description so that you can connect with me. Yeah, I'm not on social media right now. So but I will put something if you need to connect or if you ever just want to send me an email.
00:32:02
Valerie Vazquez
or leave a comment or anything else, then yeah, that would be wonderful. I'm always open for suggestions of what experiences i can talk to you about. And um we are really truly all in this together.
00:32:23
Valerie Vazquez
And i just want to send you so much love for your journey. And thanks for being here with me. Aloha.