Nathalie Himmelrich

Inspiring Hope | Finding healthy ways of Grieving | Writer

spirituality

Nathalie with Kelsey Chittick on Looking at Death Differently | Episode 10

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Kelsey Chittick

Today I speak with Kelsey about the loss of Nate, her husband, and the journey Kelsey took as part of dealing with his loss. She believes that: ‘The bigger the grief, the luckier you were.’ Kelsey shares so many different nuggets of wisdom that I found it hard to choose one to share with you below. Her way of looking at death and loss is different too many and honestly is refreshing. It will invite you to open your thinking and feeling about grief and trauma in a way you might never have thought to be possible. 

Here is just one of Kelsey’s nuggets of wisdom:

If you can take the bad out of dying, whether it is suicide or sudden loss or sickness. If you can trust on some level, there’s something bigger going on here. Just like when you’re having that child and you are birthing it, you’re in so much pain you think you’re dying. But there’s something bigger going on here… It gives you a little space to go: Maybe there’s a different way to walk through this.

Kelsey Chittick

About this week’s guest 

Kelsey Chittick is a writer, comedian, and inspirational speaker. Over the past 14 years, she has performed stand-up comedy all over Los Angeles and speaks at events around the country.  She is the author of the best seller Second Half – Surviving Loss and Finding Magic in the Missing, a book about the sudden death of her husband in 2017.

She is the host of Mom’s Don’t Have Time to Grieve Podcast and was the co-creator of KeepON, an inspiring and humorous podcast that explored how our greatest obstacles turn out to be our greatest gifts. 

Growing up in Florida, Kelsey was an accomplished student and athlete—an NCAA Championship individual qualifier and captain of the UNC women’s swimming team. She was married to Super Bowl champion Nate Hobgood-Chittick. 

Instagram:

@kelseydchittick
@momsdonthavetimetogrieve

Topics discussed in this episode

  • Kelsey’s husband Nate’s death from an enlarged heart and CTE (Chronic traumatic encephalopathy)
  • Dealing with the early stage and the physical experience of grief 
  • Grief happening versus deciding when to grieve
  • Death being the greatest teacher
  • Grief growing up with us
  • Living the best life in honor of them

Resources mentioned in this episode

Links

–> For more information, please visit Nathalie’s website. 

–> Subscribe to the newsletter to receive updates on future episodes here.

–> Join the podcast’s Instagram page.

Thanks for listening to HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA. If you’d like to be updated on future episodes, please subscribe to my newsletter on Nathalie Himmelrich.com

If you need grief support, please contact me for a FREE 30 min discovery session.

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is produced and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich. 

Support this Podcast

To support this podcast, please rate, review, subscribe to, or follow the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.

Nathalie with Turiya Hanover on the Loss of Significant Partners in Life | Episode 4

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Turiya Hanover on How To Deal With Grief and Trauma Podcast

Today I speak with Turiya, who – among other losses and traumas – shares the turning point in her life when she lost her then 33-year-old husband Welf von Hannover in 1981. Her relationship with death and the impermanence of physical life significantly changed another time with the loss of her most beloved partner Maja just 6 months ago, where she experienced something, she never had before: 

‘Then one night the message came, and it was: Love Is All. And there was such a strong feeling. Love is the bond that brings us over the bridge and that brings two things into oneness, that overcomes the separation. In this case, the separation is a loss of the physical body. But the heart and the love are there. Love Is All.’ 

Turiya Hanover

Turiya’s story is deeply moving and will encourage you to look for something beyond the physical. 

About this week’s guest 

Turiya is the co-founder of Path Retreats and the transformational process – Path of Love with Rafia Morgan. Together they also lead a one-year Holistic Counsellor training for therapists called Working with People – School of Counselling. 

She has been trained in many different modalities such as Gestalt, Bioenergetics, Psychodrama, Family Therapy (V. Satir), NLP, Hypnosis, Somatic Experiencing™ (Peter Levine), Ego Psychology, Family Constellation, Enneagram and Astrology, and Essence Work.

Turiya’s personal journey into human development started when she did her first 2-year Jungian Psychotherapy course aged 22, followed by an encounter workshop in 1970 in Germany. The revelation and exploration of this Humanistic Psychology approach took Turiya by surprise. The internal shift that she experienced was so profound, that she and her husband, set on a new course of human discovery, which led them to India. Through learning meditation, living, and working in a community under the guidance of a master, she developed a unique approach to working with people that is a synthesis of eastern insights, living awareness, and a western approach to humanistic psychology.

The sudden, unexpected death of her husband marked a turning point in Turiya’s life. This profound experience deeply influenced her own personal search and how she works with people today.

Today Turiya has the joy of being a grandmother and spends her free time painting and writing a book about the rising of the feminine and about Death as a friend and the realisation of Impermanence. 

Topics discussed in this episode

  • The death of her grandfather when she was 7 years old 
  • The sudden and unexpected death of her husband Welf von Hannover at the age of 33 years old at the Osho Ashram
  • The lacking understanding of shock and trauma in the 80s
  • The fear of death always being present
  • Living in a culture that avoids death and experiences a lack of connection to the formless
  • Osho’s death
  • The death of her partner Maja
  • Grief and loneliness can make one feel orphaned by existence
  • The importance of contact in the face of grief

Resources mentioned in this episode

  • Quote by Carlos Castaneda:
    ‘Death is our eternal companion. It is always to our left, an arm’s length behind us. Death is the only wise adviser that a warrior has. Whenever he feels that everything is going wrong and he’s about to be annihilated, he can turn to his death and ask if that is so. His death will tell him that he is wrong, that nothing really matters outside its touch. His death will tell him, I haven’t touched you yet.’
  • A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as if It Were Your Last by Stephen Levine

Links

–> For more information, please visit Nathalie’s website. 

–> Subscribe to the newsletter to receive updates on future episodes here.

–> Join the podcast’s Instagram page.

Thanks for listening to HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA. If you’d like to be updated on future episodes, please subscribe to my newsletter on Nathalie Himmelrich.com

If you need grief support, please contact me for a FREE 30 min discovery session.

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is produced and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich. 

Support this Podcast

To support this podcast, please rate, review, subscribe to, or follow the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.

Remember to keep breathing, I promise, it will get easier.

Who Is Your Spiritual Authority?

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milky way
Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

Going through life we learn from parents, teachers, lecturers, educators, coaches, trainers, workshop leaders, religious leaders, partners, and children. Spiritual seekers often learn from gurus. But who is your spiritual authority? Who tells you what’s right and what’s wrong? What to believe and from whom? When to apply what you have learnt and why?

The good, the bad and the useless

As a child, we learn and believe our parents. As pupils, we learn from our teachers. Sadly, not all the teaching we receive is beneficial. When the teaching is received in the formative years of a child, it is often taken on before they gain the ability to decipher between good and bad. As we grow older, we hopefully become more and more equipped to differentiate between what of the learning and beliefs we want to believe and what we need to throw overboard. 

Experience and perception

If you were to ask me what I believe after all that I’ve been through, I wouldn’t be able to give you a simple answer. The answer is continuously changing and adapting to the current experience. The personal experience comes from within my body and my perspective of the current reality based on my perception, which is based on my learning and experiences in the past.

What have you been encouraged to believe?

Luckily I haven’t been brought up with strong religious dogma. My parents were liberal in their religious thinking and early on my dad encouraged me to read spiritual books about the kabala, numerology, meditation, hypnosis and various eastern religions. With any of those he used to answer my question “Do you believe this?” with his permissive statement: “I see this as a possibility, an option of many.”

Admiration of teachers

Encouraged to read and learn more I followed the breadcrumbs from one book to the next, picking and choosing what resonated with me. I have fallen into the trap of admiration of teachers and gurus, believing their version of the story to be the one. And I have been disillusioned many times and thrown my admirations over board.

Claim your spiritual authority

Just the other day, a new friend of mine said something about ‘claiming spiritual authority’ and I suddenly felt alert. When speaking more about the topic, she explained that in relating teachings to personal experience and picking and choosing what related to the self I suddenly felt my process and experience to be understood. She spoke more about the process of owning your own spiritual authority. This concept makes sense to me and it ties in with owning our body, mind, emotions and our spirit. I like it.

The only answer to the question above is: “I am!”

5 Tips for Christmas – How To Survive The Celebrations

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Christmas
Photo by Valentin Petkov on Unsplash

The fact that Christmas originally really had nothing to do with family, love and being together in harmony might shock you. In fact, I was quite surprised to read that it apparently originated in what the Roman pagans first introduced as a weeklong period of lawlessness, the holiday of Saturnalia. In the week from 17 until 25 December, Roman courts were closed and no one could be punished for injuring people or damaging property. Imagine that!

According to the ancient Greek writer, poet and historian Lucian the festival included intoxication, going from house to house singing naked, sexual frivolities and even human sacrifice. He also mentioned the consummation of human-shaped biscuits.

Nowadays, most people in the Western world will deal with eating and drinking too much, keeping their family tradition-loving and harmonious and unpacking presents bought in the pre-Christmas frenzy but luckily we do not have to fear being sacrificed. In the light of today’s challenges, let’s have a look at how to ‘survive’ Christmas:

Tip 1: When Christmas is ‘just too much’

Think about what it is that you need and what you do not want to be a part of. Be honest and communicate it clearly. If, for example, you do not want to take part in the Christmas present frenzy say so, preferably ahead of time. Suggest an alternative like donating money to a charity.

Tip 2: When you are alone

If you are alone and prefer not to be: check out the local community and whether they offer something that might interest you. Talk to friends and mention you’re feeling alone. Ask to be invited or invite some friends to your house. There are other people who are alone and do not want to be, like ex-pats or people in homes. Why not invite them or volunteer somewhere?
If you are alone and prefer it that way: make sure to plan something that you like. Maybe it is watching a movie, reading a book or… (Fill in your own activity).

Tip 3: When you just want to get away from it all

Why not plan a holiday? Or go away for the day? Find an activity that you like and that is open on Christmas, for example, skiing. If you stay at a hotel you will surely be around people but you can choose whether you want to communicate or stay to yourself.

Tip 4: It’s a lot of work

Delegate. Make a list of all the things that need to be done and ask for help. Even though it might have been tradition that you cook the roast, serve the sumptuous meal and clean up after everyone we do live in the 21st century and people do help each other. Traditions can evolve.

Tip 5: I miss them…

Given all the (pretend?) happiness and joyfulness people who are no longer with us, whether they are dead or have left, can be missed more strongly. Remember that you are allowed to feel sad but also know when you have to pull yourself out of feeling miserable. Preplan what you can do, if you need to cheer yourself up.

Self Knowledge – Differentiating Intuition From Conditioning

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intuition
Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash

Part of anyone’s personal development will be getting to know yourself and learning to tap into your intuition. At the beginning of that endeavor this can be a not so easy challenge to sort out “what really is intuition and what is all the other ‘crap'”?

Conditioning

To shed a bit more light on what’s driving you we need to understand conditioning. The way you are today, the way you think and behave is the result of your conditioning, your upbringing and your education. The sentences you heard from your parents, all well-meant and intended, will have left a mark on your unconscious mind. Some of those statements have become guiding principles, like the policies of a company that are stored somewhere in the archive cupboard.

Years later, in the present time, you are still running your ship with guiding principles and policies that might have been useful at an earlier time, but are outdated now. The crux of the situation is that they don’t update themselves, they quietly influence your everyday thinking, emoting and behaving. It’s time to clear out that archive cupboard and throw out those not really useful beliefs!

How to find limiting beliefs or guiding principles?

Start by listening to your mind. For example, you might be standing in the kitchen, preparing breakfast, intuitively reaching for the passion fruit yoghurt when a voice says: ‘You should first use up the blueberry yoghurt or it goes off.’ Alarm bells! ‘Should’ is always a good indication that you’ve just uncovered some old belief or guiding principle that was created by someone else. In the example it might be something like ‘You shouldn’t waste food’ or ‘You must always eat up what’s on your plate’ (later ‘in your fridge’). Does this make sense?

Even though those principles may not be ‘wrong’ as such, it is questionable if you are in the process of honing your intuition. For whatever reason, you were reaching for the passion fruit yoghurt. Often there is no clear logical explanation for intuition so don’t bother searching for one. It just is.

Choice point

When you are at the point where you notice what I’ve just explained in the example above, you are now at the point of being able to make your choice. This is the process of getting to know yourself and finding your voice of intuition.

If you find yourself overthinking a topic, there is a good chance that intuition has already been surpassed a while ago. Intuition usually is like a subtle voice, sense, or feeling that comes immediately when you do something. Also if you find yourself tossing and turning between two options that sound equally good and you find it hard to make a decision, just step back for a moment and when you come back to it, go with your gut instinct – that’s practising following your intuition.

What If… today was your last day?

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There has been a song on the radio called ‘If today was your last day’ sung by Nickelback which makes me really think: What if today was my last day?

There have been a few deaths of people I knew, friends of people I know… and as sad as it might be it allows serves me as a reminder to live every moment fully.

[Edit January 2021: 12 years later and I would add the following: I have lived through the death of my daughter (2011) and my mother (2012). Remembering that every day is a gift is a daily practice, especially in the light of those people who do not have that possibility.]

What would you do, if today was your last day?

[Read more…] about What If… today was your last day?
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    Nathalie Himmelrich

    I accompany people therapeutically as a holistic counsellor and coach.

    I walk alongside people dealing with the challenges presented by life and death.

    I’m also a writer and published author of multiple grief resource books and the founder of the Grieving Parents Support Network.

    Copyright © 2012 - 2022 Nathalie Himmelrich