Giving Myself Space to Grieve, With Help From Shelby Forsythia
[00:00:00] Made Remarkable Intro: Welcome back. And thanks for tuning into the made remarkable podcast, hosted by Kellee Wynne.
Today's episode is filled with insights into the world of grief and grieving. With compassionate tips offered from Shelby Forsythia, who is a grief coach, author, and podcast host.
Shelby and Kellee are sharing their personal experiences with loss and how it has impacted their understanding of grief.
They discuss practical tools and perspectives on grief integration. The evolution of grief and how to foster a meaningful life amidst, ongoing grief.
This is something that Kellee herself has been dealing with heavily throughout the year, 2024, and wanted to shed a better light for listeners. On the multifaceted ways that grief can affect our lives. relationships and businesses. Check out the show notes and transcripts for more information about Shelby exclusive promotional offers and any special links mentioned during the episode. Kellee loves connecting with listeners.
So don't be shy. Reach out on social media or just tap replying Kellee's latest newsletter together. Let's build a community that celebrates the remarkable. If you want to be notified every time a new episode hits the airwaves, just hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform. Thank you for joining us today and always remember. You are made remarkable destined to achieve the unimaginable. Now let's get to the good part. Introducing Kellee Wynne and Shelby forsythia.
[00:01:22] Kellee Wynne: Well, hello. Hello. I'm Kellee Wynn, artist, author, mentor, fiercely independent mother and wife, and the founder of a multiple six figure creative business. And I love my life, but I've been where you're at. I was slogging away at this art business thing for more than a decade. Once I finally connected with my true calling, unlock the magic of marketing and built a system that could scale, while I realize I can make an impact and make a substantial income, I'm finally running a business that I love and it makes all the.
Difference in the world. My biggest dream is to help you do the same. Let this podcast be the catalyst to your biggest success. You already have it in you because you are made remarkable.
Hello, Shelby.
[00:02:12] Shelby Forsythia: Hi, I am so glad to be here with you today.
[00:02:16] Kellee Wynne: So, I asked you here because, as many of my followers know, I lost my dad this year. It's actually the first time that I'm really struggling with death as a grief process. Not that I'm unfamiliar with grief and all of its other many forms, as we were discussing before we hit record.
But when you came through my feed on threads, I was like, this is a person I'm really interested in talking to and I really feel like my audience is going to enjoy, and maybe be soothed by a new perspective because, I mean, now really I'm looking at most of us deal with this, off and on through our whole life and everyone eventually.
goes through it, because guess what? This is part of the human experience. So my new grief buddy here, Shelby, tell us a little bit how you help people, what you do, and why you even started down this line of work.
[00:03:11] Shelby Forsythia: Yeah. So this is, I will condense it as much as humanly possible. And then of course, if you want to read more, you can follow along on my journey on the internet.
I, like many people did not Set out in my childhood with the intention of being a grief coach. I every portrait I drew of my adult self was an artist. I really wanted to be a painter and that gradually evolved into wanting to be a graphic designer because technology caught up with what I saw in my brain.
And, I had every intention of becoming one of these like mad men sort of people in a high rise in Chicago creating the coolest advertisements for, for what was coming next and I went through what I affectionately now refer to as the four years of hell, where the entire time I was in college and college had nothing to do with it.
But the entire time I was in college, I was experiencing an onslaught of grief events. The first is that it was quiet at first. My father lost his stable job and we were kind of flung into financial instability as a family. I came out as a queer person in the South, in the United States, which was both accepted and not accepted.
Um, very complicated, lots of emotions there. My father was diagnosed with two, brain aneurysms, one on either side of his head and required two different surgeries, and there was the very real fear with him being on medical wait lists that in that time he would die. He did not die, but he did change.
Because when people go digging around in your brain, invariably things about you will change. And as soon as the meal trains and the casseroles and the drives to Duke hospital were over for my dad, or we thought they were over, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. And then about a year and a half later, despite the fact that she was in remission, her cancer came back and doctors operated that did the best they could.
And by the time they, they got to the end of their abilities, they said, we can buy you time. We can no longer buy you a cure. And that was on December 19th, 2013. And we called in hospice and had some really difficult conversations as a family. And everybody sort of reassured us that we would have six weeks to six months to say a long goodbye to her.
And she died in seven days, the day after Christmas. And It was the most life altering event to ever happen to me. I was 21 years old at the time, all these huge dreams of going into advertising and I interviewed on another podcast in the last couple of years or so. And they called that my launchpad years, like those early twenties sort of things.
And she was like, it's like your rocket was getting ready to take off. And then the boosters, the thrusters, the wings, just everything collapsed off the plane. And it was as if somebody pulled the rug out from under me, but then also the floor and then the foundation of the house. And then the earth that the house was built on and then the very center of the earth, and I was just floating.
All of a sudden in gravity, I was nowhere on planet earth. I was removed from everyone and everything. And it to this day remains, I call it the first and the worst, uh, grief loss event that has ever happened in my life. And. I did not want to deal with my grief for the first probably year and a half, two years or so.
I avoided it in my first book, Permission to Grieve, I write about keeping grief trapped in the metaphorical basement. I could hear it at night, it was howling, it was hungry, it was pacing the floor, and I was like, I want nothing to do with that. I'm putting on the mask of I'm fine. I'm pushing down the anger and I'm pushing down the fear and the sadness and the rage and just carrying on with my life because that's what it seemed like everybody around me wanted to do.
And frankly, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to get on with it. I was like, I am so tired of being sad all the time. I just want to feel like I'm capable and I know what I'm doing and where I'm going. And then somebody stole my wallet. And you would think that was such a tiny, small thing, but in losing something so precious to me and having it taken from me, it brought up all of these memories of having something so precious taken from me, the death of my mother.
And. I went home and I, you know, called and canceled all my credit cards and stuff, but the emotions kept coming up and I couldn't keep them down in the basement anymore. And I essentially, through what I call an adult temper tantrum, I turned on screamo music. I was wailing. I was pounding the floor, high rise apartment in Chicago.
So I'm so surprised that none of my neighbors called the police because it really sounded like I was in a deep amount of distress and pain. But to be fair, the whole thing lasted 20 minutes and I was lying there on the floor and I And I heard this voice in my head that said, you just gave yourself permission to grieve.
And I thought, what is that? I have never, I've never heard that phrase before. I've never felt that freedom before. I don't know what that means. And since that moment on the floor of my apartment, I have been sort of chasing and studying and learning what it means to give myself permission to grieve and then by proxy other people.
It started with. Me reading a bunch of grief books and listening to a bunch of podcasts like this one and learning from people who knew more than I did. And I would just post what I would learn on Facebook to my friends and family. And so many people were like, you should do something with this because I am learning things from you that I have not learned in school from my friends and family.
God knows not from the media or society. And, um, even people who I knew who were close to me, who were counselors and therapists said that they didn't even teach us this in school for master's programs. And so I started a podcast. I wrote my first book. I wrote a second book. I've created a few more podcasts.
I launched an online course and now it has grown into this thing. That's this business, this creative grief business where every single week I am coaching, grieving people through what I call the three Ds, death, divorce, and diagnosis, but also these other huge life altering events, these doorways they cross through that they can never go back through financial loss, pet loss, miscarriage, pregnancy loss.
Empty nesting all of these things that society sometimes refuses to see as grief events, but but very much are and I use this combination of Mindfulness tools, but also reframes just really gentle reframes and language to help people wrap words around what they're feeling and then start to have wheels under feelings of stuckness or lostness or disorientation that they're feeling.
And it truly feels like the work. I was put here to do. I would have never asked for this. And sometimes I still wake up and I'm like, do I, do I really want this? Is this, what I saw for my life when I was a little kid drawing caricatures of myself as a painter? And the answer is no. But now I can't see of myself doing anything else because the, the deep joy, not surface level joy, but like really deep soul joy that I feel in connecting with other grieving people who feel so incredibly alone, who are drifting on their own grief planets.
Coming together with that and then seeing that all is not lost, or even if it is, there's still a way forward from this or with this, you can carry grief with you. It, it is just, very much a vocation, uh, very much a calling. And I, I truly love the work that I do.
[00:10:06] Kellee Wynne: So you're in your zone of genius.
[00:10:08] Shelby Forsythia: Yes. Said another way. Yes. Somehow grief is my zone of genius. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:10:15] Kellee Wynne: But we all have different purposes and paths to live in this world, you know? And sometimes we don't even realize what it is until you're like, maybe 50 and I'm like, okay, I thought I was supposed to do this. Then I thought it was supposed to be this.
And then when you finally start accepting that there's a role that you're meant for, because it's not always, it's It's apparent that that's what you're meant for until you're in it, and then you feel how powerful it is, and I think that's what you've gone through, is like, you didn't really want it. You didn't ask for this.
You definitely didn't want, you know, traumatic event after traumatic event, and then culminating with losing your mother. But then where does that door, like you said, you've crossed the door, but where does it lead you to? And who would have ever known that then, in your grief and in your exploration, that's paved the way for you to help so many people?
[00:11:09] Shelby Forsythia: Yeah, that was really well said.
[00:11:12] Kellee Wynne: So I am, because of what I've been going through this year, really re evaluating how I work and what I do. Which is one of the reasons I was so excited to have you on the podcast today, is I still don't have all the language or tools to understand what's happening, right?
It's been, right now as we're recording this, it's the end of August, and my father passed away suddenly in April, and yes, he's a little older, he passed away with a sudden heart attack. He was almost 75. In my mind, he would live into his 90s because his father lived into his 90s, because my great uncle did, because there was a family history of longevity and he was generally speaking very healthy, still rebuilding his home and getting on the roof and laying the tiles and mowing the lawn.
And that day he had done all those things, you know,
[00:12:07] Shelby Forsythia: I like him already.
[00:12:08] Kellee Wynne: Yeah. Artists tend to live longer. Because they have the joy of creativity and, and so in my mind, I believed, and he had just moved to Maryland. So I left California in 99 and, definitely was a hard to leave my family, but I came to a new family, married my husband, I've got three boys and beautiful in laws and it's like, life's been good to me here, but I've been missing the family.
And he had just moved here with his wife, not my mother, but his wife. With this dream of being close to us and finally in his last couple of decades of life, of course, that's the dream. In his mind, he would live forever. He said, you know, a hundred's not good enough. He really had this very optimistic, powerful, kind of manifesting mind of, if you believe it, it will happen.
Unfortunately, sometimes damage has been done long before we get to the point of having that kind of, powerful vision for ourselves. And I think a lot of damage had been done to him in his life through the own, the grieving processes he's had to go through. Which I don't even need to bring all that up into the conversation, but that's been part of my painful journey this summer too, is realizing that kind of, What does that he's been through.
That also, I would say maybe this is something you could tell me about is through everything that he had been through. He had not really checked in with a proper medical. Practitioner and made good healthy choices soon enough. So even though he had in the last decade really done well for himself, there was still like disease that had built up and he had a massive heart attack, you know, I wasn't expecting it.
But in hindsight, I think I could have seen that it was happening in a lot of ways. Not that that's a blame or anything that I'm mad. It's just, it's just. You can see in hindsight much better than you can when you're in the middle of it. It was right before, so this is where it's the compounding grief. It was right before I was supposed to get on a plane and go fly to the UK and do this really amazing, fun event with my friend Alice for other creative entrepreneurs.
We've been planning it all year and at the same time my oldest son had been in the hospital. He had just been through surgery. He was out the other side and he was supposedly doing much better with, he has Crohn's. You had to have a bowel resection, but that day it's like, if I was listening to my intuition, my intuition was saying, you're not going anywhere.
You're not going anywhere. So in some ways, when I got that call late in the evening on a Friday night, I was like, well, of course, of course, this is how things are going right now. I don't know the stages of grief very well, but I was in shock and denial for sure. Yeah, I was at least sensibly enough to cancel the trip because I knew it would hit and the last thing you need to do is be somewhere where you're taking care of others when really you need to be taking care of yourself.
And of course, I'm glad I canceled also, because my son ended up in the hospital a lot longer than we expected. It was supposed to be a week stay and it ended up being a month long stay. And so work suffered, I suffered. I am really grateful that our family didn't suffer because we've grown closer and been very supportive to each other, my husband, my three boys, my in laws and my dad's widow, but I think I'm still trying to figure it out ever since then.
I had responsibilities I still needed to pick up and carry through that. The biggest aha I had was my relationship with work and life were out of balance. And my priorities were upside down, and I at least gave myself permission to take a break this summer from social media, from the podcast, from writing newsletters, and just do the work that I had committed myself to doing, and nothing more. And so I did give myself some down time and processing time, and I'm still processing. I think, like you said, sometimes it's something you leave in the basement for a while. Um, I'm okay. I'm okay. That's the thing that's kind of cool about it all is you do survive it.
[00:16:27] Shelby Forsythia: Yeah. It's freaky, um, to be both upright and standing and thinking, thinking thoughts, and running a business and to be deeply grieving at the same time. Uhhuh, , um, I, I like what you said about priorities because. I often refer to grief as the great reshuffler of if your life is not in order in the way, not just that you need, but like your soul needs grief will show you sometimes rudely and violently, but grief will reshuffle your life for you.
It will, it will tell you what matters very loudly. Sometimes very quietly, but a lot of times very, very loudly. What needs to matter to you most right now and what else can fall away. And sometimes there is additional grief and grieving the things that fall away because we are attached to them.
My very best friend of more than a decade died very suddenly from COVID in 2022 and I had been running my grief business for six years and to stop taking clients when I'd been taking clients for six years to pause building. grief support programs for people who I knew needed it and, and had been a dream of mine to finish, get the thing done for years and years.
I was like, I have to put everything on the back burner, take on a full time job again, let that be the thing that sustained me. And the grief of not being able to rely on myself for work, was a big one that I grieved in addition to grieving her death. And so that as an identity grief, in addition to her grief, was huge.
And it was a huge priority reshuffler. It is like, I, I won't just, you know, yes, family and friends are important. And a lot of times that's what floats to the surface when grief demands we reshuffle our priorities, but a lot of times we are also being forced to release things that are very cherished, either because we've taken a very long time or a lot of energy to build them, or because we really don't want to let them go and something that I often reassure clients of, and one of my favorite word tools, so I'll give you a word tool, for the season of your life is, is two words right now.
Right. And. It helps contextualize grief's role so much. And what I mean by that is if I were to say when my best friend died two years ago, right now, I can't take any clients as opposed to, I can't take any clients, which has a very big period on the end of that sentence, I may never take clients again, is the fear that echoes in the back of my mind with that, but to say right now in this season for the time being, I can't take any clients and to let that be.
A little bit of a lifter of like we'll revisit it. It's not forever. And that's one of the great fears of grieving people universally is that the pain and suffering I'm feeling, or the intensity of the grief that I'm feeling will last forever, because a lot of times the loss lasts forever.
When people die, they don't come back. And then we think that all the consequences of that, when you know, our child dies, my spouse and I are taking a break. Maybe this break will last forever. Maybe we'll get divorced is the great fear versus saying right now, we're taking a break
right now
and figuring out how to grieve.
Or right now I'm pausing this element of my business or right now. I'm feeling disconnected from my creativity or right now I'm struggling with insomnia as opposed to letting those things simply have periods on the end of the sentence. It changes what's possible in, in your future. And that changes the story of all of this pain and suffering will last forever.
[00:20:03] Kellee Wynne: Yeah, well, it does, some things do last forever because you become different as each time you evolve through. Life keeps giving you grief. As a present. It's, it's. It's unavoidable, as we've said, it is unavoidable because, it's just part of the human condition, but some of us are more fortunate to go a long period of time without having to deal with it, and some of us, it, it does hit more and more, and it was kind of a, a quite a heavy hit to have, you know, my son was incredibly ill, like, scary ill, like, I'm glad he made it through that, but then also, then, it compounds, and I think something that you talked about that really, to me, is realizing Your identity and your relationship with work too, and even because I love my work.
It's not like this You know, I've killed myself for nothing, but sometimes that's what comes out the other side You're like, I mean like I'm doing all this work and who am I am? I'm not even where I wanted to reach in the first place then all this Um, that's what I'm realizing now as I talk to you all this doubt about myself comes up You know, it just, it brings up to the surface everything and like you said, a lot of us will maybe go ahead and push it into the, the basement or maybe we'll deal with it a while and then we'll just be like, I'm done with that.
And then it'll hit. I just know it hits over and over again. And it's, again, it's not just my father. There's a lot of the grieving process. That's his whole life that I'm looking at now. That comes up in my whole life with him, my relationship with my siblings, and my mother, you know, and it just all comes up at the same time.
Now I look at the fragility of, other family members that I love. I, I feel very fortunate to make it to 50 without someone super close to me, passing. But that does, like you said, that's not the only kind of grief that we go through. And I honestly, this is not that you ever compare grief, but the grief and loss of losing my father is in some ways it's terrible, but in some ways more bearable than some of the other griefs I've been through, grieving periods of time I've been through because in his passing, I, it's so apparent how much I was loved and how much I loved him.
And that fills me up. Whereas some grief you go through and on the other end, it's just pain and, and hurt because there isn't love to go with it.
[00:22:46] Shelby Forsythia: Mm hmm.
[00:22:46] Kellee Wynne: You know.
[00:22:47] Shelby Forsythia: Wow, that was really beautifully said.
Mm hmm. There is grief that, I wish I knew, like, the mechanic tool that I'm thinking of, but there's grief that, like, lodges into your life and, like, ratchets love open, like, so much wider, and you're like, Whoa, isn't it so obvious the amount of love that was present here?
That's how I felt with the death of my mother, the death of my best friend. Oh, my God. Like, the amount that just, like, giant funnel superglue to my head just poured in all the time. And then there are other losses, you're right, that I faced where it's like grief ratchets open. It's like, how'd you like to Let loose every bit of pain, every bit of suffering, every bit of torment or self doubt that you've ever faced in your life here.
Enjoy. And then you figure out, okay, where the hell does that belong in my life? For sure. Breakups, absolutely. Sudden abandonments, job losses, financial filing, bankruptcy. There are so many things that can contribute to the pain side of grief as opposed to the love side of grief. And I think they both play a big role.
They both exist together and for, for each of us, even if we lose the same person, so your family members might have different relationships to your father than you did, but they all lost a father, grandfather figure, they will each have different ratios of pain to love. And that will change on, on different days and different seasons with different memories, with different future milestones.
I'm thinking weddings, graduations, things like that happening. Right. Right. Right. And also the memory of who he, who he was, who got the most time, who got the deepest time, who got all the stories that, yes, absolutely. And so I think that ratio is always something that's like influx. It's like always moving.
Right. It's never, it's never gone.
[00:24:26] Kellee Wynne: So you said there's three specific griefs that you. Focus in on it, if you will, or that you identify as death, divorce, and
[00:24:36] Shelby Forsythia: diagnosis
[00:24:38] Kellee Wynne: diagnosis, right? And some of those diagnoses can be terminal. And some of them are just a life altering diagnosis. I get what you mean by that, but divorce is not just divorce of parents or of your relationship, but divorce of friendships.
Yes, divorce of, this whole thing we go through now with parents and children that don't talk to each other, divorce of, siblings that don't talk to each other. Yeah. So there's a lot of different kinds of divorce to go through. And those are the divorces that I've. Those are the grief that I've really had to challenge, you know, have my, most of my challenges over the last two decades have been about that.
Yes. , there's so many layers to it. So many layers. So why don't we talk about where do you start? What are these? Are the typical phases of grief real? You know, when they say, you know, denial and rage and whatever, acceptance, I don't remember what they all are. I actually haven't done any studying.
I've just allowed myself to move through this process and had a lot of love and support from family to help me get through it. There are still days when I think that I probably could use more help though. Yes. So why don't you help me understanding the process of grief and also how we live with it. How we come back to wanting to run a business or making art or doing the things that we were lit up by that may now, like in my case, I like have some fear and hesitation.
[00:26:13] Shelby Forsythia: Yes. So I'll take you through the five stages. I'm going to do this in two parts. I'll take you through the five stages and a little bit of backstory, and then I'll take you through the revised five steps. Okay. The five steps full disclosure is of my own invention, but I find it works a lot better and it relates to a lot more people.
It resonates with a lot more people than the five stages. So for anyone who doesn't know, which I imagine is a lot of people listening, because unless you're sort of enmeshed in the grief space and studying grief as like a student all the time, you really don't know this backstory, but the five stages were actually never intended for grief.
They were intended for people. Who had received a terminal diagnosis. So if, for instance, I had been diagnosed with, some sort of brain tumor that would certainly kill me, I would go through denial. This isn't real. This isn't happening. I can't believe this is my life. Anger. Rage at the gods. Rage at the doctors.
Rage at my family members. Everybody else. Depression. This is so incredibly sad. My suffering is so great. It sucks to be human. Bargaining. Maybe I can make this better. Maybe I can do a trial treatment. Maybe I can bargain with God and, and, and figure out some sort of way to make this right. And then finally acceptance.
I'm accepting my fate. I'm accepting. I'm going to die. I'm recognizing my mortality and I am making amends or conversation with everybody in my life. I feel like I needs to happen with in order to feel at peace. And these were created by Elizabeth Kubler Ross, who I believe was a Swedish, Psychologist or anthropologist.
She studied people who were dying for many, many, many, many years. And over time, she kept seeing this pattern of people who were told they were going to die consistently went through these 5 stages, more or less in that order. And she put this out sometime in the 1980s. The media got ahold of it and they're like, Oh, five stages for death also equals five stages of grief.
So there was no scientific study. There was absolutely no evidence that this worked on friends and family members of people who lost a loved one, but because the media took it and ran with it, it suddenly became societal lore that the five stage that people who are grieving the friends and family members of the person.
Yeah. Who was terminally ill would also go through these five stages. And that is simply not true because grieving people do not go through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance in that order. They have way more emotions than that. They come at different times. Some people don't do things like bargaining or go or have intense anger at all.
So they would never think to call it that. And one of my favorite books, if you're interested in reading on it, you and everybody who's listening is on grief and grieving. And it is actually written by Elizabeth Kubler Ross who goes through, you know, the media. Pardon my French. Bastardize my work. And here's how the five stages of grief can apply to people who are grieving, but it's out of order.
You can see them as different buckets. You can, you can call it the five stages of grief, but the way it shows up in grieving people is not as I intended it, which is for people who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness. So the five stages of grief, I take it and chuck it out the window.
[00:29:11] Kellee Wynne: Unless you were just diagnosed, then maybe this is
[00:29:14] Shelby Forsythia: then maybe yes.
And, and. The, the reason I chuck it out the window is because so many people come to me and so many people exist who are grieving, who are measuring their grief against that scale, what stage am I in for how long is it benefiting me? Is it hurting people around me? And when will I get out? The goal is to get to acceptance as fast as possible.
And then you can quote unquote, be done grieving in reality. Grief is never finished. The intensity of grief ebbs and flows. And for a lot of people after the first, you know, One to eight years like tends to subside the intensity of the emotions or the initial shock shock and denial and and numbness of the intensity of the loss subsides, and you can resume what a lot of people would consider like normal life or being upright and functioning, as I often refer to it, but being visited by grief or having grief folded into everything that you do.
For the rest of your life, that never goes away. Remembering your person, carrying them forward, or for instances of divorce or diagnosis, remembering how this event has changed your life. And sometimes wishing things were different, like that exists forever, but finding ways to live with that is the work of grief.
So because the five stages don't apply, toss it out the window, um, I, in my work with grieving people have created something that I call the five steps. And cheekily I call it the grief method, G R I E F, so there's five steps to, and it's not how to get out of grief, it's five steps to living a good life with grief.
Because this is what so many people come to me wondering. They're like, I see people who have experienced traumatic, overwhelming, natural disasters, loss of children, war, and come out the other side of grief, feeling more whole or more peaceful or more purposeful or more creative or more fulfilled. I am so lost, stuck, broken, disoriented, overwhelmed.
How do I get there? I see other people. I see that it's possible, but I have no idea how to get there. And this is the how to get there. G Is for grounded, get grounded first, because grief shows us that we live in a world where anything can happen at any time to anyone for absolutely no reason at all, we need to find ways to feel safe in the world.
Again, this is a lot of nervous system regulation work. A lot of if meditation resonates for you. Great. It doesn't for me. So I do things like rituals and I teach my clients and students to to use rituals that incorporate their loved ones. If that feels correct to them, or their five senses to bring them to a place.
For one shred of their day, I say 1 percent of your day, five to 10 minutes where it feels safe to exist and be grieving at the same time. Release is the second part. And this is what a lot of people think of when they think of doing grief work. This is diving into your emotions. This is releasing things like anger, like disappointment, like grief, like, guilt, like envy, like, nostalgia, things that hurt.
We take an inventory of who were you before your loss, any loss, death, divorce, diagnosis, but any other loss in addition to those, and who do you see yourself as now, and graving all the differences between those two lists. So for instance, before my mother's death, I would have definitely called myself a morning person.
I was up with the birds, I was singing songs, I was doing like Snow White Disney Princess action. Very early in the morning after my mother's death, I slept at yeah, a thousand percent. I was like that since I was six though. Like my mom told people as a kid, I would sit and sing to myself in my crib until someone came to get me.
Like it was an inherent part of who I was. And after her death, I was sleeping for 12 to 18 hours a day because I was just so exhausted by grief. And the story I told myself going back to right now is I will never be a morning person again. And so I aggrieved that identity of. Being a morning person. And so creating a ceremony for releasing that might look like, remodeling my bedroom or getting new sheets that do allow me to sleep more or allowing that to be real or, turning off the alarm on my alarm clock, because I know I'm not going to wake up at that time.
And so releasing the pressure to be a morning person in this season right now in my life. And I encourage people who are coming through my courses. To create rituals that are personalized to them. So people who are going for, through divorce often, rearrange their closets as a releasing ritual. I had a friend who lost her daughter suddenly to suicide, and she was a member of the queer community and she lived near a river and she wrote on leaves.
All the things that she was releasing and drop the leaves in the river one by one and watch them float away. People make lists, people make paintings, people dance, people write songs, people play sports, people shatter plates. They do all kinds of things to release the old identities, the old selves, the old hopes and dreams that they used to have that lost took away from them.
And then we get to integrate. This is step three on your roadmap. This is where you start folding in memories of your loved ones, memories of your life that you want to take with you, even for divorce and diagnosis, non death losses. This is where you start to see grief as maybe not predictable. Cause I don't know that we can ever predict grief, but it's familiar.
And so you're in the grocery store and you see their favorite cereal. Oh, it's grief again. Isn't that interesting? As opposed to, this is so awful and it's crippling and, and I'll never be okay again. It's like, oh, see their favorite cereal. There's grief again. Predictable, familiar, a part of your life. You learn to see the world through grief glasses because you are now and forever a grieving person.
How do I grieve at work? How do I grieve within my family? How do I grieve within my community? These are questions we ask in the integrate section, as well as what signs and symbols do I want to assign to my people, or have they already assigned to themselves? So I see my mom through pennies.
I see my mom through birds. I see my best friend through corgis every time I see them. And so I encourage people to create libraries, entire lists Of how do you know that you're seeing your person out in the world or what glimpses of them can you get? And they start to fold them in throughout their lives.
You integrate grief into your life. The fourth step is established. And this to your point is talking about friendships and relationships and mourning, uh, people who can't support you or be there for you as you grieve. The first three steps are all about doing grief by yourself. The fourth step is how do you do grief with others?
Because grief never happens in a vacuum. So you are looking around, taking an inventory of here's like the top 10 people I see on a regular basis. Which ones do I feel safe sharing my grief with? Which ones are kind of 50 50 can't really tell if they're safe or not. Or sometimes they say great things and sometimes they're telling me everything happens for a reason, or God just need another angel or all this really crappy stuff that people say to us when we're grieving.
And then what people are absolutely just not. Welcoming of your grief at all. People who try and fix you or cure you, people who compare their grief to yours relentlessly, people who burst into tears when you tell your story. So then you have to comfort them. People who've disappeared entirely, which is one of the most heartbreaking griefs of all.
And how do you negotiate relationships with them? That we all do in the establish section. And then finally, this is the best part. This is what people are waiting for. As they go through the course is foster. How do I foster a good relationship? Lifetime partnership with grief. How do I see examples of other people who've lived with devastating loss?
And how would I like to model my life after theirs? How do I make room for hope and joy and purpose to appear again? Even if they've been in a fight, even if they've been beaten up by grief, even if they're a little more fragile than they were before. And how do I look forward to a future that actually feels like I can carry my grief forward with me, as opposed to feeling the pressure that society often puts on us to leave it in the past.
And so all of it kind of comes full circle and together. And what I love about this, this is the five step framework I teach in my course. It's called Life After Loss Academy. What I love about this is, Grieving people go through the course and then as they experience new losses, they come back again and again and again.
It's a very secular, circular process that builds on itself as you go and it is, it's not the five stages. We're not rushing to acceptance. We are slowly making our way toward a future that feels good, even with the presence of grief,
[00:37:07] Kellee Wynne: right? Because, you know, We don't just get to a point of, okay, check the box, it's done, now we can put that aside and move on.
I love how you're like, this is part of you now. How are you going to move forward with this as part of you? How are you going to, in some ways, just honor the grief that exists?
[00:37:25] Shelby Forsythia: Yes. And keep honoring it because people are like, Oh, I honored it once. I'm good. I'm like, it's coming back tomorrow.
It's coming back next week. It's coming back on their birthday, on their death day, on the anniversary of the divorce, whatever the case may be, it will come back to visit. And are, are you prepared for that? Are you equipped for that? And I don't use that as a fear tactic, but like you can be equipped for that.
And so instead of, you know, pushing grief down into the basement, you're able to open the front door and say, I've saved a place for you already. I've been expecting you. And that is a totally different energy of approaching grief than, nope, get down there, go away, I don't want anybody to see you, versus my doors are wide open to you, and it takes a lot of practice.
I've been doing this for eight years, and, I've been working with people for, for about that time as well, and given these tools, and a lot of them are, they're not difficult tools, you just practice them over and over again, you create a life that feels good. Rich instead of deprived or empty.
It's, it's really, and again, to your point, the love gets honored and expanded the presence in their life gets honored and expanded. I've had students come through the course. We're like, I finally created a shrine in my home for my mom who died and my friends come over. Now we talk about it because I put her on display.
Right. And so it, it makes it clear to people that I have a place for her in my life. So they can too, or I've had other students come through the course and the established module, especially and say, I realized my workplace would never give me more days off to take care of my mom, who was dying from dementia in a nursing home.
And so I actually quit that job and started a new one with two grieving people, and now we get to grieve and talk about tea, which was her favorite thing in the world, drinking tea as like a coping mechanism. She was like, that's one of my grounding rituals is drinking tea. She, was taking care of her mom who's dying from dementia, and then she ended up working with, or being hired by, these two widows who owned a tea shop, and all they did was talk about grief and drink and sell tea, and she was like, I cannot tell you how much this has enriched my life, and how much happier I am, and the grief gets to come forward into the future.
[00:39:19] Kellee Wynne: Wow. I heard a story, and this was Or an analogy, if you will. And this was years ago before dealing with the D death part of grief. 'cause like I said, I've had more than enough of other things to come up in my life and those come up again and again, in some ways less pleasantly, but it was a really good analogy and I didn't understand it until in Reflection and even now in Experience.
I'm gonna see if I can remember it in a way that like sounds Intelligent and not just me rambling, but we can imagine our heart or soul or our being, as a bookshelf, an empty bookshelf. Have you heard this one?
[00:40:04] Shelby Forsythia: Yes. Yes. The original illustration is by Jar of Salt. She's an incredible artist.
[00:40:08] Kellee Wynne: There you go.
And I'll make sure that we put that in our show notes so that. Everyone can come learn about you, Shelby, and also see this. But the book goes on that empty bookshelf. That's grief. It is apparent. There is nothing else around it. There is just grief, and it is glaring. This book is just like there.
But as life goes on, we start adding more books, and the grief will always be there, but it's gonna be mingled amongst All the other parts of life, and sometimes some of those books are going to be more grief, but it's just part of the evolution of human experience really is, it never goes away, but it's there kind of integrated in with the rest of everything that we do.
[00:40:56] Shelby Forsythia: It's one of my favorite pictures because the myth is that over time grief gets smaller, but what actually happens is our life grows around the bigness of grief and our life gets bigger, which is why it feels so intense at the beginning. It's like, all that's in front of your face is grief. Of course.
Like, what, what else would you expect? Like, grief, grief is the thing that's happening right now. And I, Tell people in Life After Loss Academy that over time, with more life happening, with more practice of these tools, with more interactions with people, finding people to share your grief story with, with creating the rituals, and finding the signs and symbols, doing all of the work, grief gradually shifts from being your focus To being your foundation, it becomes part of a thing that built you and informs your decisions in the future and informs how you show up in the world, but it's no longer the only thing you're looking at in front of your face.
And that's a really incredible shift, like a transformation that happens. It's like when, when grief ceases to become the only thing that you're seeing in front of you to being the thing that is the part of the ground underneath your feet, what you're building on as you continue to move forward.
[00:41:58] Kellee Wynne: Mm. So, in some ways, can we look at grief in a positive way and not always a negative way?
[00:42:06] Shelby Forsythia: Yeah, I think that a lot of people perceive of grief as a word that you used, and rightly so, is suffering. I'm suffering, my family's suffering, everybody who knew him is suffering on some level in this moment. And grief is also very inclusive of nostalgia, and joy, and love, and remembrance, and legacy. And all of these things that, That make up a life.
I think there's this societal perception that grief is all bad or to be grieving is exclusively bad, but I wish I could remember who said this. I saw an interview that was reposted on Instagram recently where somebody was talking about the death of his mother. And he, he said, every time. I am interrupted by grief or that shows up in my day.
I used to hate it, but now I see it as a doorway of opportunity to remember something very precious about my mother. And I'm the only person who has that memory. And so I've adjusted that in my brain to recognize like how precious it is to be able to remember that bit of her, or, you know, walk into a Macy's and smell the perfume.
My mom wore something like that as an activator of. Of remembering her. And so I think, I think grief can be both. I don't necessarily need grief to be all positive or all negative because I don't live in that world. But I think grief is a lot more positive than we give it credit for. And again, to your point, I often in the foster module of life after loss Academy, I encourage people to see their grief as a living thing that can talk back to them and that they can take care of in turn.
And in talking to grief, sometimes we can ask it things like, what do you need? Or what do you think I need? You can ask for its advice. And for you, especially, it's like, I, I need to shift my priorities. I need to put some things down. I need to see a medical professional. I need to get a massage. I need to take a nap.
I need to eat something that has a vegetable in it. Like, like grief can be a phenomenal counselor or mentor or advisor to the life that we're already living right now. And to see it. Not as something that's here to squash our dreams, to harm us, to take all of our joy away, but to see it as a part of us that wants to remember sometimes with pain, sometimes with love, sometimes with a really crazy mix of both.
Like it changes how you, how you interact with it and the energy you have to interact with it. Cause if you spend all your energy. Pushing grief down in a way that's very, very exhausting. But to throw open your doors and say, I've made a place for you on purpose. I'm interested in your opinion. I'm interested in what you have to tell me or what you have to remind me of.
It creates much more creates. There we go. Getting creativity back. It gives you so much more space to generate something with grief as opposed to insisting that it doesn't exist.
[00:44:44] Kellee Wynne: I like that pathway through it. And that's kind of been the most surprising thing for me. Prior to losing my father, as far as death grief goes, I mean, I've lost grandparents and such, but, you know, I love them, but not quite as close, right?
Prior to that, I feared it so much. When the day would come when I'd lose somebody that I loved.
[00:45:11] Shelby Forsythia: Yeah.
[00:45:11] Kellee Wynne: In fact, when other people lost someone, I was still in my fear space. I didn't even know how to talk to them about, I didn't know what to say or how to reach out, or I was too emotional about death to even really be there.
Like, all right, I'll send the card, but to ask how you're doing, Oh no, that's going to bring up all my own shit. Right.
[00:45:32] Shelby Forsythia: Yeah,
[00:45:32] Kellee Wynne: which is very selfish, but it's also probably a lot to do with culturally how we're raised in the West. Dealing with death and the afterlife, maybe I've been thinking about that as a possibility.
It's also just my own personal, maybe upbringing and things that I've dealt with. But what I was most surprised about is wanting to Live with the experience as it's been happening. I thought that I would, I mean, don't get me wrong. I've been incredibly sad. I wouldn't say so much as maybe depressed and I've definitely questioned myself.
I've definitely gone through the gamut of self doubt, but. I'm surprised that I want to see the oranges, and remember my dad ate oranges every morning. I want people to say, hey, tell me more about your dad. I don't know, like, that's the part that I'm most surprised about in this experience, is that I don't want to hide from it necessarily.
And I thought I would. And maybe that's why in this case it's like, yeah, it's, it's, you're right, we don't have to make it a negative or a positive. Grief is grief, but to live with it is the part that I'm surprised with.
[00:46:45] Shelby Forsythia: Yeah, and I like that that's already in your space as something that you're like, I see myself wanting these things.
And I think desire and grief can be a really cool kind of finger pointing it at. What's driving us here. And so to, yeah, yeah. I want to look at oranges. I want people to ask about him. And also this is, this is such a natural response to especially losing somebody we love to death is their physical body is no longer here.
You can't hug them. You can't call them. You can't hear their voice. They can't respond to a text. Like they can't, they can't be present in your life and the way that they used to be, they may be present in other ways, if that's something you believe. and that's something I hold very loosely in life after loss.
Academy is we are. Whatever your belief system is about where people go when they die and whether or not they can send you things, but what we're left to do is Kind of gather up as many shreds of them as we can and create some sort of almost outline of them Here in the physical world to continue to remember them by and so for you It's like people asking for stories about your dad or that one time he did this and then he ate oranges in the morning and He climbed on the roof even at 75 and all of these all of these different bits and pieces these shreds that made him who he was and That, that you're like, I insist on keeping these parts close.
If this is all I'm left with, I'm going to hold them. I'm going to keep them as close as I can to me. And that's something I very much see reflected in almost everybody I work with. It's like, they're not here. So I'm holding onto everything possible that resembles them, not necessarily physical objects, but memory.
And, and sights and smells and sounds. And, and even in life after loss Academy, like make a library of your person. When I think of my mother, I think of hymns played on the piano. So every time I hear him play on the piano, I'm like, got it. It's like a butterfly catching on thinner. I'm like, come out, come back here, get in the net.
You're coming in here with me. The scent of her perfume, the taste of angel food cake. Every time I get the opportunity to eat an angel food cake, I do. Cause then it brings her much closer to me, but it's like, what, what. What can we possibly piece together to make a mosaic of who they were, because we cannot bring them back and to want to hold those things very close.
That is a way of, to your words, like positively participating with grief in a way that doesn't feel draining, exhausting, sorrowful, suffering. Like it's, it's the, it's the opposite energy. It's generative. It's creative. It's, it's insistent on making something the awfulness of all of it.
[00:49:15] Kellee Wynne: Which is why you were talking about your friend who made an altar or a memorial in her home, and that leaves a space open, openness for the memory, rather than hiding it away and just, again, that's the part that's been surprising.
The other parts that have been surprising is how much of my past gets dug up in this process. Oh, yeah. Oh, boy. And not gently either. And to quote my father, coulda, shoulda, woulda. Sorry, gone. You know, I'm curious too if you think that, because I brought up that, that idea that maybe, oh, the way the West looks at death and grieving is very different from many other cultures.
It's more integrated in a lot of cultures. And yes, we do. I mean, obviously still have memorials and et cetera, et cetera. But even in like Buddhist culture is like, you're already acknowledging we're going to die. And we live with that every day. It is part of the belief and the culture, you know, to accept that this is about to happen.
It's almost like, at least this is how I feel around the people that I know and the way that we live in America is like, I'm in complete denial until it smacks me in the face.
[00:50:33] Shelby Forsythia: Yeah, there's a lot of reasons for that, and I don't know all of them, so I will give you the few that I have, but I, you're absolutely right that other cultures, especially that have other religions underlying them, have Different ways of perceiving death. They see it as, as a part of life. They see it as another sort of birth, a birth into something else.
One of my favorite, very real world examples of this is every year. There's a holiday in Japan where, people go to a shrine that has teeny tiny little stone statues. They're no more than a foot off the ground and they dress them up and in baby clothes to honor. Babies that they have lost to miscarriage, pregnancy loss, uh, abortion oftentimes.
But there are dedicated celebrations that happen annually for different types of losses people experience. And we have nothing like that in the United States. We have like national grief awareness day, which is happening on August 30th. By the way, the end of this week,
[00:51:23] Kellee Wynne: we
[00:51:24] Shelby Forsythia: have like national grandparents day, but it's more for living grandparents and you buy them a Hallmark card as opposed to anything else.
We have holidays for grief, or we have months for mental health awareness month or suicide awareness month that we don't talk about or, or fold death into the fabric of our everyday lives. I think a lot of it has to do with kind of this focus on capitalism and productivity, this myth that Everything will always be growing up into the right forever and ever and ever.
Amen. And anything that's not, that is, is failure. And so death is perceived of, especially in the medical and health care system is a kind of failure. If you do not survive cancer, if you do not survive another terminal diagnosis, you have failed or lost the battle. It's spoken very much in these terms of like, you're either Wynneing something or you're losing something.
You're conquering death or you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're Or you're defeating it or you're crushing it or even success at work is framed as you're killing it. You really killed that presentation. Huh? Like how, how violent is that language we use about death as success, but also death is something we avoid.
And there's also some fascinating books. I don't remember who wrote it. But one of my all time favorite books, it's slightly separate from this, is Confessions of a Funeral Director by Caleb Wilde, who talks about how in six generations of being funeral directors, his entire family, um, funerals were gradually taken out of homes, where we used to, you know, lay out people's bodies in the parlor and have friends and family come to visit and bury them ourselves.
Two, being an industry, a paid industry where somebody would come take your person away, prepare the body, and then set up some sort of ceremony for you to see them. And so it was removed from this personalization of, of the intimacy of being cared for by loved ones at end of life. And as a result of so many of these things, people don't talk about how they want to die, where they want to die, what they want to happen to their bodies after their death until, yeah, it's maximum of the face.
And it absolutely happens. And people see death as a, as a failure to live. And it's not. It is something for sure that definitely will happen to all of us. And something I really like to practice is seeing the death in every day. Not to bum me out. Not to sink into depression.
[00:53:35] Kellee Wynne: This is why other cultures do better is because they do exactly that in seeing the death in the every day.
[00:53:42] Shelby Forsythia: Yeah. And so even sometimes when I go to sleep at night, I was like, I'll never, I'll never see this day again. Again, this is one day I'm alive on planet earth. Whatever that means for tomorrow is whatever that means for tomorrow, but that's one last day that I will live. There was, there's this beautiful trend that's going around with Gen Z on Tik TOK right now.
I'm talking about, cause many of them are starting to get married. The last time they'll ever live with. Roommates versus living with a spouse again and grieving that as a chapter in their lives. Or you and I were talking before the mic on like, when you get married, you grieve a single life. When you have a baby, you grieve being 2 instead of 3.
Even these milestones that are perceived of as successful when you graduate, you will never be in a school system again. You will never again be perceived or viewed as a student. If you go back to school, maybe, but then you'll also have the baggage of being an adult and all this other stuff.
When you go through puberty, you will never have a childhood again after that. You can do things to express your childhood as an adult, but like you will never again know what that's like. And so seeing grief and death through all these invisible doorways that we're passing through, these things we experienced that we can't go back through.
It's just a noticing in a way that's kind of strengthening of look at all the losses you've already survived. Look at the things you've already grieved, even if you haven't consciously grieved them. Look at the, the doorways that you've crossed through, that you have built a beautiful life on the other side of.
And so when you're met with these larger things, like the death of your father, you're like, I actually have some tools for this. I've actually sort of been through something sort of like this before. Like it's, it's, you know, I've been through estrangement and so I know what it's like to, to grieve friends and family members.
I've been through breakup of a person I thought I was very much going to marry. And so marriage is much more precious to me now. Every single doorway you cross there teaches you things about future doorways you have yet to, to endure future losses you've yet to face.
[00:55:34] Kellee Wynne: I remember crying with my dad at the end of summer, grieving that it would be a whole nother year before summer would become, would come around again.
As a child, it was just one of those things that I can now, as you mentioned it, go back to those days as a kid grieving the loss of something like summer. Yes. And, you know, I was very aware of the passing of time and I think when you get busy, busy, busy with being an adult, sometimes you maybe don't even notice it as much until it starts showing up in the day, daily grief, like you said, like there's just this real apparent It's, I'm aware, I'm aware, but there's still a lot of days where it's kind of nice to be ignorant of it as well.
[00:56:23] Shelby Forsythia: Yeah, yeah, it's a lot to carry. And sometimes it just feels easier to just not have it.
[00:56:30] Kellee Wynne: Guess what? Human, being human, and our human earthly brains, it's a lot. It's a lot to take in on a daily basis. Grief, loss, family, even in some ways this year, like I said, I was, I was bringing up a lot of stuff about myself in this process.
And a lot of that has to do with having been so ambitious for my work. Like you, when you lost your friend, you're like, I need to go back to a nine to five. And there's this identity loss with the business. Will it ever come? And you're right. I need to put a pin in it and say right now, but that's been also a big challenge for me looking at how do I build this business?
And can I ever accomplish it? Because I've been reaching for this goal, reaching for this goal. And then every year it's like something else is happening and I'm not quite there. And maybe I'm just not worthy of it. And maybe it's just not meant to be. So that's piling on top of it. It's like, I had the whole first half of this year stripped away from me, from being able to do this thing.
So who am I, if I'm not doing this thing, how am I going to get there? If I'm going to keep having these interruptions, how do I get back into the workflow? Which is something that I really enjoy, but do it in a more holistically healthy way. I mean, well, I've been mentioning it on the podcast. By the time this comes out, I will have had a couple of episodes talking about the fact that I deleted all social media off of my phone.
That was one of the first things that I really, actually it wasn't first. I didn't do it until July, but it was one of the first things that was very apparent to me in my. Frustration with life, the business, losing my father, having my son be sick, losing the opportunity to travel after having worked four months to put this project together.
It's like, okay, I need to get back to what's here, what's now, what's present and not what's out there on the internet all the time and the comparisons and the things that I think I need to do and blah, blah, blah, I could go on. It's like, what is, what is it that I know right now? And that's exactly what you said at the very beginning.
We can come full circle to that. And that doesn't mean I don't spend days where I'm still beating myself up. Like I should be further along by now. What's wrong with you? Right?
[00:58:48] Shelby Forsythia: Yeah. I wonder, something that I should practice more. I'm shooting myself, but something that I would love to practice more.
And I hope that more entrepreneurs and creative people will practice as a result of listening to this is yes, set your goals. And also set goals in partnership with grief. And so if I were to set a goal of like, I want a hundred people to join my membership this year, which are big numbers for me. I say my membership life after loss Academy, this course that I host for, for grieving people.
And then what's grief school. Grief's goal is to make sure that I remember, memorialize, talk about everyone I have ever lost in some form, in some way on every day that is important to me. So my mom's birthday, my best friend's death day, I have a lot of grief dates to commemorate throughout the calendar.
And my grief goal would be, yes, aim for that. Aim for that huge, big thing. And also do not forget All the people you have built this business in, in honor of. And so grief school is like, I don't necessarily care about the numbers. Yeah. The money's important. And the, and God knows helping people is like through grief, like kind of that shepherding guiding process is something I feel literally tugged to do from my soul, from my heart.
And also grief is like, it would matter a lot to me if you would take each of these days to write something, to draw something, to play in, in their honor. Don't forget. And so that's a goal written in tandem with grief, and sometimes, the grief goals Get achieved throughout the year. Sometimes our goals get achieved throughout the year.
And sometimes we get to blend them together and they both happen in in their own unique ways. But, it is hard when our grief bleeds into us telling stories that. That we are not worthy of what we set out to do, or that we're never going to be able to accomplish it. And it kind of goes back to that, well, the loss is permanent and the loss keeps coming and it don't stop coming and you hit your ground running, it turns into that, like, all star song.
Yeah, right. And so you're like, well, if the grief keeps coming, then how will I ever get where I want to be? Something that's helpful, this is, this is one last tool I'll give you before I go, but I, I encourage grieving people to track progress in new ways after loss, because we cannot keep measuring up and to the right.
Right. That is, that is how society, Westernized society teaches us to measure growth, and it does not serve us when we're grieving. And so I encourage people, whether you do this daily, weekly, monthly, the choice is up to you and whatever energy level you have. I do a type of journaling that I call two S's journaling.
What would you like to surrender? One thing. And what would you like to summon? Something you'd like to see leave your life or go away and something you'd like to call forth? And you can be, have it be very practical. I want to surrender insomnia and summon a good night's sleep. Or you could say something.
I want to surrender the belief that I'm not worthy of these goals I'm setting and summon somehow you don't have to figure out the how, summon the energy to return to my work again. And you can do this every day. You can do this every week. You can do this every month. But what's really neat is as you study your surrenders and summons over time, you see how your priorities shift and change.
Or As your priority shift and change, you're like, wow, I'm not telling myself that story of worthlessness anymore, or I'm not telling my, I'm not trying to figure out a way to have the energy anymore because I actually do. And so you sort of see how things come to you or, you know, serve are surrendered from you.
As time goes on and it changes the up into the right. You don't succeed by saying, yes, I no longer tell myself I'm worthy or I'm not worthy. You succeed by shifting your focus to other things as you're grieving. And then, you know, that you've successfully either achieve them or, or set them down, you've surrendered or summon them.
And it's something I love doing with my students, because suddenly there's not this measurement metric of, well, I have this goal of getting a hundred thousand followers on Instagram, and I only made it to, you know, 60, 000 or whatever the case may be. I'm like, what were you trying to surrender? And what were you trying to summon?
If you're trying to summon authentic connection and you have it with 60, 000 freaking people, that's a lot. And if you're trying to surrender, the stress of constantly posting online. Yeah. Maybe you lost out on 40, 000 followers, but God knows you gained this, this authentic connection you're actually striving for.
And that's something that grief may have requested of you as opposed to you demanding of yourself. And so setting goals in partnership with grief and then Practicing sort of like a surrender summon as opposed to growth metrics, which I think is such like a tech bro way of looking at grief. It's not helpful.
These metrics
[01:03:15] Kellee Wynne: have
[01:03:16] Shelby Forsythia: to shift,
[01:03:16] Kellee Wynne: very much have to shift. Exactly. Exactly. And just, and like you said, up into the right, we're always thinking that we have to keep growing, growing, doing, doing, productive, productive. Of course, it's always going to leave us without a chance to be whole. And so, yes, surrender, summon, I love that idea.
I feel like that's the most appropriate thing. Now, we want everyone who, almost every one of us human beings have gone through this process of grief to one level or another, so we want them to be able to connect with you, Shelby, and to know what you have to offer and find a way, like, if this conversation resonates with you, if you're if you're struggling, if you're looking for Just like I have been looking for the right person to talk to and to, like, fill in the gaps along the way in your process of grief, Shelby may be the one for you.
So how can they connect with you?
[01:04:17] Shelby Forsythia: Yeah, so everything I do is at shelbyforsythia. com. I try not to complicate it because grief brain is hard. Um, and if you want, like, a taster of what it's like to be inside of Life After Loss Academy, that grief, Process G. R. I. E. F. and join the community of dozens of people who are working their way through death divorce diagnosis and tons of other losses, uh, along with weekly coaching with me.
There's a place on my website that's on every page. You can't miss it where you can watch a free hour long workshop where I give you 3 tools from inside the course and then tell you more about what it's like to be inside of it. And that's. It's absolutely free. It's like a trial size grief coaching situation.
And if you want to join, there's a discount code at the end of the workshop. But otherwise I definitely do group coaching through life after loss academy. I do one on one coaching. If you're not ready to share your story with others yet, which I totally understand, but And if you're a podcaster or creator of any sort like Kellee is, I love speaking to groups, whether on podcasts, non profits, organizations, workplace, wherever you want me, whatever you want me talking on, I can show up for you.
So I really love doing that too. But again, all of that, including my books and my podcasts that I've created too, is all at shelbyforsythia. com.
[01:05:28] Kellee Wynne: Your name of your book. Books too. Let's make room to plug the books.
[01:05:34] Shelby Forsythia: Yes, the first one is self published. It's called Permission to Grieve, and if you want to see who I am as a creator, I did all the illustrations for it.
And so I'm proud and also like sort of cringey at that. I was like, ooh, I was a baby when I did that. So you can see, um, the doodles I did about my grief in the early days. And then the second book is a daily non religious devotional for grief culture, Grief Your Way, where every single day of the year there's a grief book.
Very, very short entry. So if you're really early in your loss, or if it's still hard to read, I would recommend that second book, your grief, your way, and you can find both of those anywhere that books are sold.
[01:06:06] Kellee Wynne: That's really amazing. I think that we'll, we probably got, like I said, a wide community of people that are going to resonate with this and seek you out.
I highly encourage it. You might see me on the other side working through some grief with Shelby. Uh, and I will link every single bit of this in the show notes so that you can find Shelby easily on social media and on her website. And even this. Free offer to, to take her hour long course to work you through some of the processes.
Thank you for joining me so much.
[01:06:39] Shelby Forsythia: Thank you, Kellee. And thanks to everybody listening too. I wish you so much ease and love and creativity, even in the midst of grief.
[01:06:47] Kellee Wynne: Thank you.
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