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Welcome to the Classroom Narratives Healing and Education Podcast, the space where education meets resilience.

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I'm Dr. Joey Weisler, and in each episode, we dive deep into the personal stories of educators, students,

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leaders, and frontline advocates who are navigating the complexities within modern education.

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Whether you're just starting your teaching journey or are a seasoned professional looking for inspiration,

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we'll explore how to foster meaningful change, prevent burnout, and build trauma-informed communities within our schools.

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Now, let's take a seat at the front of the classroom as we get started.

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Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. I'm Dr. Joey Weisler, and today we have Maria Belanic,

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who is a certified grief educator whose work centers on supporting individuals navigating the complexities of grief and emotional exhaustion.

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Maria creates compassionate spaces for healing and shares her insights on resilience, acknowledgement, and connection.

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And as we begin the new year, her wisdom offers a timely reminder of how we can carry our pain forward in meaningful ways.

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So we are thrilled to have her on the show. Welcome, Maria.

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Well, thank you so much, Joey. I'm honored to be here with you and, of course, to speak out about a topic that I'm definitely passionate about.

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It's great to have you with us. And, of course, our audiences are likely listening to us here at the start of the new year in 2025.

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So happy new year to those who are tuning in here in January.

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And as we begin our conversation, I want to go ahead and ask for Maria, first of all,

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would you be open to telling us a little bit about your journey as to what led you into your work with grief education?

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Definitely. Thank you, Joey, for asking.

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So my journey, of course, like many others who have become a grief educator, especially for peer to peer, is through my own personal experience.

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My oldest son passed away in 2009 after an 11 year battle with cancer.

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And so he did have leukemia for 11 years. And then when he passed away, all of a sudden, my world just shattered.

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This was a pain that became so anguished that all of a sudden I didn't know what to do.

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And like many grievers, we find ourselves in a world that has turned upside down.

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Like you're looking outside the window and it's like everyone is going along at their own business.

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I mean, the world continues. And yet, at times you just feel like you're shattered.

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Like all of a sudden, it's like, am I in a different dimension or what? And then it's like so much pain that I was in.

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And I kind of go that for 10 years, I lived in limbo or as I like to say, a zombie for 10 years in that middle section of not being able to go back to who I was.

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Because, of course, grief changes you and you don't know how it changes you.

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And everyone around me was expecting me to bounce back into who I was beforehand.

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And so you sit in this middle not being able to go back, because if we could, then it means that your loved one is alive.

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They're not. So you're in this middle and you're afraid to move forward because the future is so uncertain, so scary.

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It gets filled with anxiety. And then one morning, when I was looking at myself in the mirror years later, I didn't recognize who I had become, who was staring back at me because it felt like an empty shell.

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And that was when I questioned of who said that grief had to end, who said that I had to be over it.

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And when I embraced it and went, grief is going to stay with me for the rest of my life, for a lot of people, that's going to sound daunting.

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And yet it was liberating because it felt like a weight had been lifted.

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Like grief was telling me, be yourself, sit in with your feelings, stop hiding and stop wanting to run away.

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And so it's kind of like that aspect where they say what we hide from or what we want run away from is kind of running after us.

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And when we turn around and lean into it, that's when we embrace it.

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And I think one of the things that I've learned over the years is, buffalos, when there's a storm, will turn towards the storm and face it rather than running away.

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And I think as a society, we're taught to hide from our feelings or anything that's uncomfortable, pretend it didn't happen.

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Pretend everything goes back to what was and just live your life.

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And then what becomes is that you become more mechanical.

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You're living life, but you're not really being fully present in life.

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And so I wanted to change that narrative and say, I'm going to be present in my life.

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And finding purpose takes a while.

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So it did take a while until I was called into my purpose, which is a grief educator, which is a grief coach and helping others navigate their grief journey.

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I think a lot of us in society feel like we're programmed to only get fulfillment once we get X, Y or Z.

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It's like once I can do this or once I get that degree or that job or that family, then everything else will dissipate in terms of the other problems we're facing.

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And I think what you're justifying, Maria, is that we will never get that full sense of fulfillment that we need if we don't embrace any grief that's going around that.

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We need to make that a part of who we are to move forward versus trying to think once X, Y or Z happens, then we will never have to feel that ever again.

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And the other aspect, too, is no one ever thinks it's going to happen to them.

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We have this I don't know if it's like a padding or a comfort zone where bad things only happen to other people.

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It's not to us. Right.

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It's always we hear about others.

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And one of the things about grief is that it touches everyone's life.

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And it's not a matter of if it's really a matter of when is it going to touch your life?

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Because grief is a big umbrella and grief encompasses whether it's loss of a person, whether it's loss of a job, a relationship.

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So there's a lot of things that it encompasses.

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And so on the opposite aspect, if you will, when it comes to addressing grief, tell us a little bit more about resilience.

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And in terms of resilience, how can those struggling with grief use that emotion to work through their feelings?

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Well, resilience is getting up in the morning when you don't feel like it.

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Resilience is taking that shower.

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Resilience is taking that one step at a time, like putting that one foot forward at a time.

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I think a lot of times we look at when someone is living life or still going through the motions and doing things, we attach strength.

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We attach courage.

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And neither one of those courage or strength really fit in with grief.

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Grief is about vulnerability. Grief is about the resilience.

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And the resilience means that you're doing something because there isn't really anything else.

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Because really, in grief, there's only two choices.

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You can remain where you are, and that's going to be living in the pain constantly.

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Or you embrace that pain and you go, I'm going to find ways to move forward.

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And a lot of times, I think what we feel like when we're moving forward is that we feel that we have to forget the person who passed away.

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And that's incorrect. We are actually keeping the people with us.

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They come with us on our journey because the memories that we've made with them stay with us.

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Their presence, even though it's not physical anymore, stays with us.

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And at times, I think the reason we get, I'm going to use the word stuck, stuck in that middle is because in some ways we kind of feel like if we're moving forward, it means we have to lose them or forget about them.

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And that's incorrect because you cannot forget someone who made an impact on your life, who was part of your life.

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It's not like a chair that you can go, well, yeah, OK, great. I don't like it anymore.

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And you forget about it. This is an actual human being that you cared for, that cared for you, that you loved.

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Doesn't matter whether they lived one nanosecond or a hundred years.

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They were part of your life and they deserve to be honored, as does your grief, which is the loving and the yearning because you're missing them.

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And it makes me think about how people who are no longer with us in the physical sense can remain very much alive in the memories that we hold on to the actions that we take in their aftermath.

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So I wanted to also ask in terms of if you were to take this conversation into the grief that exists, even in education, I'm thinking about teachers who have maybe dealt with loss in their own classrooms.

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Maybe they've had students die of suicide, perhaps that their school has been a target of violence or any other type of experience that they may have encountered where there is something now missing from their classroom because of a circumstance.

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I wanted to think about how people carry on in schools and even just workplaces in general, how people carry forward with their trauma on their shoulders.

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So what are some of the practical steps that you can advise for people or even leaders working to create environments that prioritize compassion over silence for those that are carrying their grief with them?

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And that is an excellent question, because a lot of times I think society definitely, you're right.

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They just want to erase that it didn't happen, start from a clean slate.

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And that does an injustice for, say, the students who passed away and the students who are living.

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One, both need to be honored.

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The living need to be honored of what they've experienced and also for the students who have passed away, they need to be honored.

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And sometimes it's about what ritual can someone have or the classroom have for those students?

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And I think that has to be part of the curriculum, because then it's a way for everyone to remember.

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It doesn't matter how long it's been, because a lot of times people will go, oh, yeah, we'll do it well, because it's still recent.

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Yes. And yet when the years go by, it's like, OK, it's forgotten.

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Well, no, I think the school has a degree or a level of compassion in the sense of saying they need to be remembered, because this is where it happened here.

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And it also shows the living students that compassion of saying it doesn't hide grief, it embraces the grief.

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And it's also about having the conversations where sometimes maybe years later someone will go, I remember so and so and allow them to speak about their friends.

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A lot of times, I think the survivors have survivors guilt, and that is never addressed.

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I mean, even as a mom and my son had cancer, even when he passed away, I still have survivors guilt.

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I mean, for the longest time I did.

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Now it's not as prevalent, but a lot of times it's that aspect of, you know, you question why did someone live?

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Why didn't I? All these questions, because there's also these secondary losses that come in and a lot of questions.

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There's the what ifs, the should haves.

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There are so many things that we can go down.

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And I think it's because nobody's really addressing the onslaught of feelings, because grief is complex and it's messy.

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A lot of times I always go that first year.

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That first year is a blur.

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Most of the time, everyone's turning their head going, when am I waking up from this nightmare?

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Now, this isn't real.

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And it's not that you haven't accepted what happened.

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It's our brains have a way of protecting us and giving it to us in a little slow way.

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Grief at times hits when it's year two or three or five.

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And that's the time when people need someone to talk to, who's going to be compassionate and witnessing their grief,

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rather than kind of brushing it aside and go, oh, that happened a while back.

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Why are you thinking about it?

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And so that's part of the aspect of grief is that it can show up in years later.

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And not only that, grief also brings up old wounds that you yourself may have.

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And I look at a small child and I'm thinking, you know what?

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No one really addresses the pain that they have.

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And that will resurface years later.

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And then they don't know they're not equipped of how to handle it because no one's shown them

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that they need to have compassion for themselves and kindness.

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You're reminding me of a study by Bessel van der Kolk.

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We'll learn about him in our show notes here.

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And van der Kolk says that the brain and the body keep score with one another.

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So when the brain is impacted by any kind of stimulation, then the body is going to feel that reaction and then it stores it.

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So when you mentioned that children tend to go through things that they store later on,

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absolutely it can resurface later on in their lives in ways that can be very unexpected.

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And so thinking about what that looks like in terms of expressing grief,

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I wanted to think about what are some strategies that you can advise when that grief just comes on and hits you, if you will?

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What are some recovery strategies or some resiliency strategies that people could think about during those challenging moments?

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Well, one of the strategies or tools is again, journaling is always great in the sense of writing down your thoughts or feelings.

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And usually it's in a free flow, right?

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Like when we write something down and then we stop and read it, we get into our heads and we stop the process sort of actually tapping into what we're actually feeling or what the body is wanting to tell us.

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And if people don't want to journal, there's always like I always go, there's the painting or the free flow of drawing, right?

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Allowing colors to express those emotions or thoughts that you're feeling, which at times words aren't justified or not justified.

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But there isn't any words to describe what you're feeling.

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Even times, I mean, we hear of tools of saying taking a walk and actually so you can take walks for walks or you can do a conscious walk.

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Either with breath work or looking at again, you hone into the flowers or the trees or the leaves, looking at the different shades, the colors.

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So what you want to do is you want to bring yourself to the present, but also honoring what you're feeling.

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And I think a lot of times people want to suppress what they're feeling because we're judging ourselves.

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And so we do it in a way that's non-judgmental, because one of the things that have been taught is feelings are just feelings.

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They really have no judgment to them.

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And the same thing with thoughts.

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I mean, if we say red, well, red is really red.

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What does it really it doesn't have a meaning to it.

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We attach the meaning to it.

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And that's exactly the same thing in grief, because one of the things is that some words will land differently for each person.

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I love that idea because language is very arbitrary and we decide what meaning to give our language based upon what we think it should be meaning.

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So when it comes to grief, we do the same thing or even feelings.

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We do the same thing. We need to know what types of meaning to give to our feelings or for them to be fully felt and acknowledged.

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And so I also wanted to ask what advice would you give to someone who may be listening to this conversation and also perhaps feel stuck in some sort of grief or overwhelmed by emotional exhaustion and what can help them rediscover their hope and purpose?

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Well, one is that you have to be where you're at and not put any added pressure of where you think you should be, because it's the shoulds.

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At times, we just need to be with where we're at at the moment.

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It's acknowledging. And I know a lot of times people will say, well, you have to accept the acceptance really is about acknowledging and being aware of what you're feeling like there has to be an awareness.

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And so with that awareness, you're recognizing what you need.

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And sometimes you can verbalize that and sometimes you cannot.

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And part of it is saying is that if your body needs rest, give it rest, because a lot of times even in grief, our old habits come in of how we deal with stress.

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If we're an overeater, we're going to turn to overeating. If we stop eating, that's going to be it.

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So we have to be conscious of what we're doing.

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And also, I always go the number one thing is really giving yourself compassion or being the friend that you want.

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Treat yourself like you would the friend that you would want to have around you to be supportive of you.

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We don't talk about that enough. The fact that we are going to spend the most of our time in our lives with ourselves.

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I mean, I saw a chart earlier that shows that as people get older, they tend to spend less time with, let's say, their parents and their grandparents, and they spend more time with their spouse and their coworkers.

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But even beyond all of that, the majority of that time spent completely just with their own.

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And even when you're with all those other people, you're still acknowledging yourself.

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And I think what people tend to maybe underestimate is the power that the way you talk to yourself really allows you to get along with others, because our other segments also address the idea of authenticity.

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And when you can be authentic with yourself by being in that compatibility, right, with one, then that can fully allow someone to then be a part of society and be alongside others as well.

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So true.

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And I think as we come to the end of our conversation, I wanted to ask Maria, if you wanted our listeners to take one thing away from our dialogue today, what could that look like?

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That a lot of times it's really about embracing who you're becoming.

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It's sitting with who you are right now and not looking back to who you were.

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Because a lot of times we want to go back to who we think we should be.

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And one of the things about change is that, you know, people always go, there's that transformation, there's that silver lining.

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Well, when we're changing, there is no good and there is no bad.

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It just is.

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And I think that's the part that we need to just sit in.

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It just is, and only you can choose where you want to go, like what your path is.

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So one of the things is really about listening to the heart whispers.

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If you're a person of faith, you're going to call it the God whispers.

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If you're a person of intuition, it's your gut.

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However it, you yourself will have the answers and you will be the best person who knows your grief better than anyone else.

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As you mentioned earlier that Maria and I were talking about this before we began recording, but I think it's worth mentioning to our listeners as well.

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I was thinking the other day that we never actually know what we physically look like.

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And I think about that a lot. I'm like, what do I really look like?

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It's a weird question, but I thought about it because we trust a piece of glass, otherwise known as a mirror, for the judgment of who we look like, everybody else around us.

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So everybody else around us can physically look at us and say, yes, this is what you look like.

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But we don't know that for sure. We're trusting.

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And I always wonder before mirrors, what do people use?

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That's all another conversation.

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But what we do know is how we feel, and that is something that nobody else around us who knows what we physically look like.

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They will never know how we actually feel.

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And so what I think Maria and I would both agree with our takeaway is to just acknowledge your own feelings because you are the only person who has the ability to make that happen.

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How can our listeners learn more about the work that you do and keep in touch?

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My Facebook page is Maria Belanic.

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And my website is also Maria Belanic.

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And I do have a private page for grieving moms, which is specifically for grieving moms and grief support.

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Well, thank you again, Maria, for starting your year with us and for allowing us to be a part of an inspiring conversation on grief, healing and resilience.

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And your conversation here on self-compassion and fostering connection is incredibly impactful, especially for listeners dealing with their personal and professional lives.

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And for those of you that are looking to follow Maria's work further, please follow her on social media at Grief Unscripted.

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And if you're looking for practical tools to manage grief, check out her resources and stay tuned for her upcoming workshops.

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And if this episode has resonated with you, please share it and leave a review because it helps us to reach more listeners.

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And until next time, let's continue to hold the space we need for ourselves and for others.

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Yes, and much peace in the new year.

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Thank you for joining us on the Classroom Narratives Healing and Education podcast.

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If today's episode inspired you or made you think differently, I'd love to hear from you.

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Drop a comment or review wherever you listen to podcasts and stay connected with us on the at Classroom Narratives podcast over Instagram and Facebook.

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Remember, together we can transform our scars into stars in education, one conversation at a time.