Contents
Letting them go might sound obvious. After all, they’re gone. Their body is no longer here. So why would we need to "let them go" when we have no choice?
Because, instinctively, we don’t let go. We hold on. Our nervous system clings to them, fearing the pain of truly accepting their absence.
Grieving begins with facing this truth—their perfect, precious fur body is gone. The way we once knew and felt their presence is no longer the same.
Though your heart already understands—and as this book will guide you to experience more deeply—those you've lost are never truly gone. Their essence, their love, and the connection you share will always stay with you. Still, the pain of their physical absence is real, raw, and undeniable. And learning how to embrace your pain is the heart of healing.
From my experience, it works most gracefully if we allow ourselves to begin to feel the pain of accepting that our loved one is gone in physical form before we can truly reconnect with their inner essence.
When we’re in deep emotional pain, trying to immediately focus on reconnecting with them in a positive way can feel forced and ineffective.
The loss of a loved one is experienced by our brain, body, and nervous system like a major trauma. It’s real, it’s painful, and it deeply impacts us. We can’t begin to heal or restore balance in our mind and body until we allow ourselves to express and release that pain.
Here’s a simple analogy: imagine someone stomps hard on your toe. Naturally, you express the pain, whether it’s shouting “Ouch!” or saying, “Get off my toe!” But if you suppress that response, it’s harder to find balance again. And when we don’t express our feelings honestly, we can end up resenting others or even ourselves.
The same is true when we lose someone we love. Our body, heart, and mind cry out, “Ouch! This hurts!” If we allow ourselves to feel and express that pain, we stay connected to our true essence—our life-force and authentic self. But when we suppress, ignore, or numb the pain, it drains our energy and leaves us unbalanced—emotionally, mentally, and physically. By not honoring the love we shared and having the courage to fully feel the depth of this loss, we risk unintentionally resenting ourselves for abandoning our love and our relationship with our loved one.
Most importantly, it is through honoring that love and the miracle of our connection that we will, in time, find a new way to reconnect with our Rainbow one.
When we have a religious or spiritual belief system, it can be easy to spiritually bypass the pain of losing someone we love. We might focus only on our thoughts and tell ourselves that “they’re in a better place”, but if we don’t also allow ourselves to feel that our human is in pain without having them here, we rob ourselves of the chance to more authentically connect with their inner essence.
While we may believe that they are in a better place, we won’t feel that connection in our hearts. It will remain distant and intellectual, rather than feel warm and real.
I share this from past experience. I found my spiritual journey first, before my healing journey. In my mid-twenties, I would have told you that my mum was in a better place and that we were at peace. But I also steered clear of any conversation about death, family, or mothers, because I could only suppress my emotions for so long before they started to surface.
I could have told you I was at peace with my mother’s passing, but my body, emotions, and nervous system were telling a very different story.
For those of us who are sensitive, empathic, and deeply compassionate, feeling and expressing pain comes naturally. But because our emotions can be so intense, we may unintentionally get stuck in a cycle—proving our love through pain and punishing ourselves by holding onto it.
In this approach to compassionate grieving, we’ll learn that simply feeling our pain isn’t enough. If we don’t also embrace it with love and compassion, we risk recycling our pain instead of releasing it.
Highly sensitive and empathic people also tend to experience deep guilt when losing a loved one. Logically, we know we’re not at fault. But emotionally, that guilt can feel real and overwhelming, even obsessive. Compassionate grieving will help us not only release that guilt but also free ourselves to heal.
The brain is a mystery in so many ways.
Did you know that your body reacts to what your brain imagines just as it does to real events? For example, if you imagine putting a lemon in your mouth, your body will respond the same way as if you had actually done it—your mouth may water, your face may tense from the sourness. Reference: The Power of Mental Imagery on Health & Healing
In a similar way, even though your loved one is no longer physically beside you, your brain still experiences them as if they could be.
Mary-Frances O’Connor, neurologist and author of The Grieving Brain, explains:
“You have lost in the physical world, no doubt about it, and you’re not going to have new experiences with their ‘body.’ But your brain has not actually lost them. You still carry around exactly how they would respond if you asked them for advice, or the exact way they would look at you if you did something ridiculous. Our brain really is still carrying them—because we loved them.”
— Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD
While science may not fully explain this, I believe it’s because we are wired to understand that love never dies, fades, or disappears.
Yes, our bodies can be separated, but we are never truly apart. In the love we feel for them, and in the love they gave us, we are still together.
We feel emotion in our physical body, not in our mind. So if we want to feel, grieve and heal, we must first learn how to get out of our head and into our body.
The entire next chapter is devoted to helping you understand that we live in a world where most of us are not embodied. We aren’t present. We’re not alive in all levels of our consciousness. We are living in our head.
We are anxious, and stressed, because we’re in our heads worrying about tomorrow.
And we’re depressed, and exhausted, because we’re sick from punishing ourselves with the past.
Essentially this is the heart of somatic healing: addressing our emotional distress by becoming more aware of our bodily sensations and being able to then release stored tension in our body, emotions and unconscious.
Perhaps the single most valuable piece of information for healing and grieving: is to move your focus from your head into your body. We don’t heal in our minds as a process of thinking. We heal and rewire our nervous system and neural pathways by being and feeling inside of our bodies.
Moving our focus into our body serves in multiple ways:
• It moves us from the usual forms of avoiding or resisting emotion including fixing, figuring stuff out, analyzing, blaming, and other mental manipulations.
• It starts to naturally feel and release emotion.
• It helps us embrace and give space for feeling and releasing deeper emotion.
Often it takes patience and perseverance to get into the habit of simply feeling our emotion in our body, rather than resisting and thinking about them in our head. The Week 3 [Experience] A Simple Nervous System Reset will walk you through a series of very practical experiences to help you understand how to embody and experience your emotions in your body.
As we use our grieving experiences to allow greater vulnerability, connection and authenticity in our life, we will come to see, that we have the opportunity to feel and heal through so much more than loss.
When our loved ones suffer, we can allow our empathy and compassion to move us in support and become closer.
Ellie, my Rainbow daughter, came into my life as a severely neurologically disabled puppy. She turned my world upside down, helping me to break free from an old, devastating wound. And then she stayed, to support me forever.
For the two months and two days I had her, my life revolved around her. It was challenging and often uncomfortable, but it was also deeply fulfilling. I experienced the intense joy of mothering a beautiful soul who needed me completely. It was a season of motherhood I will always be profoundly grateful for.
Ellie came into my life for many reasons. She helped Fenix and me grow into greater independence. She inspired and supported thousands on their own healing journeys. Most importantly, she helped me find my voice—encouraging me to stop hiding my Light and playing small.
What I didn’t expect was how hard it would be to watch her struggle. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I wasn’t prepared for the heartbreak of seeing her try so hard, only to still be unable to stand, run, or do the things she so desperately wanted.
Every day, I balanced between holding her up so she could walk and giving her the space to try on her own—to fall, flail, and learn as best she could.
Like all puppies, Ellie needed a lot of sleep. After a couple of hours awake, she’d need to nap. When she woke, she’d have a little more energy, and I could help her walk with support. But as she grew tired, her nervous system would start shutting down, and she’d struggle even more. It was devastating to watch. She became frustrated when she couldn’t move at all. By the end of her awake time, she would spin wildly in circles, her little body thrashing. It was painful to witness, and I had to make sure she didn’t hurt herself.
Holding her during these moments wasn’t an option—she would try to break free, launching herself into the air or into anything around us. It became dangerous. It was excruciating to watch her condition worsen, feeling her pain so deeply.
And that pain triggered something in me, too.
One day I just broke down. I was exhausted. Worried and scared for what kind of life Ellie could have. And I fell on the couch in a deep sob. My husband and I often support each other with somatic healing work, and so of course he came to me, and he held space for me as I cried, and shared. I let overwhelming waves of sadness wash through me. That word—sadness—doesn’t even come close to describing the depth of what I felt. I let myself fully feel it. The grief. The despair. The helplessness.
And suddenly, memories from my own childhood surfaced.
I vividly remembered being held down, unable to move or protect myself. The painful memory of being raped flashed through my mind. In that moment, I realized I wasn’t just grieving for Ellie—I was grieving for myself.
Her struggles triggered the deep pain of my past—of times when I, too, couldn’t get up, couldn’t be safe, couldn’t be loved, couldn’t be okay.
Ellie wasn’t just here to heal. She was here to help me heal.
She led me to parts of my past I had buried, helping me release old wounds I didn’t even realize were still there.
Your Rainbow Ones came into your life for the same reason—to wake you up.
And they are still with you, guiding you toward healing.
But to truly feel their presence in a new way, you must first allow yourself to grieve. Feeling the pain of losing their physical body is the first step. This journey begins when you let yourself be shaken, let go, and fully feel.
3 • Letting Go [Allowing the Waves]
<aside> <img src="/icons/arrow-left_gray.svg" alt="/icons/arrow-left_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Previous [Guide 2 • The Initial Shock]
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