I did a quick photo shoot with my friend Daniel Turner last week. We’ve worked together many times. He offered to make this little video for me, in the place I make most of my daily offerings. I didn’t create this offering with an intention while he was filming, but I went back the next morning to hand over more grief from my marriage that ended 10 years ago. There’d been fresh reminders of old stories, so I asked the earth to transform them and thanked her from the bottom of my heart. Grief moves with us and shifts and changes but isn’t ever “over.” We keep working with it and making it sacred. That’s what the earth wants us to do.
There’s a story. It’s a long and tragic one. It planted the seeds for my work that helps people transform their grief into medicine for themselves and the world.
These days I’m discerning about sharing the details of my story. It’s one that tends to overtake every other conversation and, depending on who I’m telling, usually leaves me feeling vulnerable in a way that I’ve learned isn’t healthy. I can and do say that, when I was 29, there was a loss, in extraordinary circumstances, that turned my world upside down and split it into Before and After.
It came with a shame that made it hard to talk about, and I wasn’t even sure that I was allowed to. So I didn’t - in the beginning.
I cried alone in my bedroom every day for months. I wrote in a journal like my life depended on it, to try to make sense of my despair. I created small rituals to express and navigate my pain and hand it over to whichever invisible, wise forces existed and might know more about these things - and what to do with them - than me.
I couldn’t understand how the rest of the world could function normally around me. I’d see people dressed in work clothes standing at a bus stop in the mornings, and cars being driven on the roads, and people working in shops, and wonder how on earth they could keep going as usual, when it felt like my world as I’d known it had disappeared and I was deep down in the Underworld of grief. It was one of the loneliest times of my life.
The following year, I was offered a role as a TV news presenter. I’d sit behind the news desk, with my hair streaked and sprayed rock hard, wearing perfect make up and a suit jacket. “Fan” cards were designed and printed – postcards with a photo of me on the front – that I’d sign for people at public events like the annual Royal Show. People lined up for my autograph. It was so strange and I could never get my head around it. Holding the tension of a public persona while internally navigating the continuing pain and confusion of grief, and being aware that if my story became public it could have created a public relations… let’s say situation – was all sorts of fear-inducing and difficult.
I hadn’t exactly kept my story private. I’d told people outside my inner circle. I even told the leader of the state government at the time – the Premier - one day when, as a journalist, I was in his office for a meeting. We need to tell our stories. We need them to be witnessed. It’s a crucial part of our healing process. And if we don’t have safe spaces to share them, we might just tell (and in my case shock) anyone who’ll listen.
That chapter changed me. It taught me what it means to grieve in silence, to long for support but feel unable to ask for it, and how complicated and confusing grief can be in a society that doesn’t deem it acceptable (even grief after the death of someone we love is considered unacceptable if we don’t get over it and get on with it within pressured timeframes set by others).
That experience has informed ALL of my work since I started my own business 15 years ago – from helping women to own and stand in their power and speak powerfully, to this work I’m offering now to help you transform your grief.
A business I love, working with clients I genuinely adore, has been one of the many unexpected gifts of my grief. It led me to my soul’s purpose. Your grief has gifts and medicine for you too, and the world. For all of us, grief offers the opportunity for more vitality, freedom, joy and pleasure; more of what we all want.
While grief has walked with me for decades, often showing up as “disenfranchised” (losses that aren’t acknowledged or validated in our society so are misunderstood and often silenced), as I get older it feels like there’s more of it arriving on my door step.
It’s on yours too. Grief is inherent in our daily lives and impacts us all. Are you in a transition phase? A time of uncertainty? Do you know, deep down, it’s time to let go of something, or someone? Are you being called to grieve a future you thought was certain, a path that’s no longer yours to walk, a dream, a relationship, an identity that no longer fits?
In the space that’s left, what seeds are being planted? What’s longing to be born? What’s being asked of you? Listen carefully for the answers and allow them to guide you, with love, in the dark.
As someone who loves moving quickly, birthing this work during the past two years has been excruciating. Yet it was an initiation, and the stories of what happened when I was 29 - the seeds that were planted - re-emerged with clarity as all the final pieces fell into place.
In my heart and soul I know that beauty is one of the highest offerings of reverence and love we can make. I think that’s why it’s a tradition to use flowers in weddings and funerals, and place them on graves.
The Balinese make offerings to the gods multiple times a day: to the creator, preserver, and destroyer/transformer gods. They grow fields of flowers solely for the purpose of using them in their offerings. Their connection with beauty melts my heart.
At my Held retreat in Bali next June we’ll make sacred offerings of nature’s beauty with the local women and together. We’ll make offerings to what’s broken our hearts, and to our hopes, dreams and wishes for what we want next for our precious hearts and precious lives.
This retreat is more than half full. If you’re feeling called to join us:
Find out more and book your space here
With love,
Tricia xx
