 Hello, it's Bridget. Welcome to Sunday Morning Coffee with Bridget. The purpose is always to inspire your spirit. I hope you enjoy this podcast style of audio to keep us connected. Today I start with a question, something I've been pondering. What if we've already been grieving? Okay, so I guess I have to give you a little back story to how I came to this question. What if we are already grieving? Over the course of this unique year 2020, it seems as though we have been united or united in our disconnection through this common understanding that we don't talk about. This silent suffering of grief and loss. I'm not talking about the kind of grief when someone dies, someone that you love, leaves their body, leaves you for the afterlife or whatever it is that happens after you stop breathing. We know that there is some comfort in that spirit being free because after all we're grieving. We miss them, but we know there is something better. But what if there's something better now? What if what we're really grieving is almost an envy of the freedom of spirit? Can that exist while we're in a body? Yes, yes, of course it can. And it does always. But during these times, these strange times where we're grieving the loss of our coworkers, not being able to see them every day for working remotely from home, not hanging out at the coffee pot or chatting at the water cooler or hearing your cubemate laugh so loudly that you're annoyed, but yet smile because you appreciate the feeling of pure joy being released into the atmosphere of your office, breaking the silence of boredom, frustration or deep concentration. You know what I mean. Or maybe we are missing, missing the times when we could sit right next to people and say hello and talk with them and smile and see them smile and greet them with a hug. Together collectively, there are things we are grieving that is beyond simple death. It is change. We're grieving change of our patterns of our routines of the rituals that we have encountered every Sunday, every Wednesday, every Tuesday and Thursday or Saturday morning on the soccer field, whatever it may be for you, we are grieving and all of these levels and ranges of grief matter. They are all very valid. They are all very impactful to us and the way that we feel and the way that we're moving through our days. What if we are already grieving? Is my way of acknowledging and asking myself in my journal this morning, what if when we entered into this collective time of great change, what if when we entered into this, what if when we started this new collective change experience of disconnection, what if we entered this already grieving? Not a loss in the human sense, but a loss in the spirited internal intuitive sense. And what I mean by that is perhaps our entire lives, we've been grieving the losses that we've suffered that we've experienced of the lack of the parts of ourselves that we've had to disconnect. We've had to fragment ourselves. We've had to be this way at work. We've had to be this way on the sidelines of the soccer field. We've had to be this way in the church. We've had to be this way in our classrooms and our educational settings. We've had to be this way. We've had to be this way. We've had to be this way. We are constantly morphing ourselves into what the expectations of the institution of the collective identity is. And what if we are already grieving the fact that every time we've stepped into those situations, we have made a conscious choice to abandon or set aside, even momentarily, a part of ourselves. And in that way, we're grieving. Because each time we do that, we lose a part of ourselves. We diminish the shininess of that cool aspect of who we are, of the wholeness of who we are, and we forget that we have that and how sacred and how special and how important that is. So what if we are already grieving even during these times of tremendous change in the world that is calling us into feeling our emotions fully? And that ain't easy, is it? Because we've been functioning so well in our cognitive minds, we know the expectations, we know the roles, we know the rules, we know the standards, and then we make choices to be rebellious against them or which rules we'll follow and which ones we won't, and who we are is crafted based upon those choices of which we will follow and which we do not. And now collectively, we are being separated into groups or cousins based on those choices decisions. And it's very, very transparent and visible. What if we are grieving the friends that we had that are now so different in their thinking than we are? That the fear creates such a gap between us neighbors, family, friends, fellow soccer parents? What if that gap is so great, we are grieving the loss of the simplicity of the human connection and simple relationships that we had, our relationships ever simple? Maybe we are grieving those good old days, back in the good old days when everyone was ignorant, when we were not awake to the separation, we were not awake to the awareness of the disconnection. So what if we are already grieving internally? The loss is within ourselves over the course of our lifetime that we've already suffered through. What if that pain is what the ache really is about and the stuff that's happening externally in politics, globally in the environment, in nature, in your communities, in your churches, in your families, in your schools? What if those things are simply reflections of the broken pieces of us that we dimmed, that we set aside each time we stepped into those places? We never brought our fullness, our all, our wholeness. We never believed more strongly in the wholeness of who we are and what we can contribute. Instead, we adjusted to meet perceived expectations and now all of those places are grieving because they never experienced our fullness. Maybe that's what we're coming to. Maybe that's what this collective grief and disconnection is about, finding our fullness, calling our parts and our pieces back and healing within ourselves together inside me, my parts, you, together inside you, your parts, each of us calls our parts back and slowly and gradually and with tenderness over time, we as individuals heal and our light begins to lead the way. This is Sunday Morning Coffee with Bridget. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. I hope it inspires you and gets you to thinking, grab your journal, grab your journal and to write, write what sparks you, write what you feel, write what you think, and don't be afraid to write what you want, what you crave, what you desire. All these parts of you are beautiful and you won't need to grieve them anymore when they come back and you are whole. You remember your wholeness and you're connected. Please take a moment if you haven't already to subscribe to the channel so you never miss a weekly episode of Sunday Morning Coffee with Bridget. You can find me on social media on Instagram at Bridget Inspired, on Facebook at Above Life Channel and Bridget Inspired and on YouTube, of course, Above Life Channel and Fairy Grasshopper. Thanks for listening.