An Awakening Conversation with Anita Ramirez: Spiritual Life and Grief Coach

awakening conversation Nov 20, 2023

Dr Shuna Marr interviews Anita Ramirez, Spiritual Life and Grief Coach.

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In this insightful conversation, I chat with Anita Ramirez about her awakening journey, and the catalysts that have led her to become a spiritual life and grief coach.

Get ready to be inspired by Anita Ramirez, as she shares her journey and provides invaluable resources for handling grief. The conversation covers a wide range of topics including spirit guides, raising your vibration, and navigating life's symphony.

If you're curious about Anita's transformative journey and the wisdom she shares, I invite you to watch our conversation above, or read the full transcript below.

Love

Dr Shuna Marr

Spiritual Awakening Support

If you would like to connect with Anita, here are the links:

Her website: The Awakened Griever

Instagram: Anita Ramirez (@theawakenedgriever)

More about the courses mentioned in the video:

The Ascension Path is a short course on climbing your personal spiritual mountain.

The flagship course Anita took, which can be self study or with coaching is Ok I'm Awakening - What Happens Now?

Find out more about my 'Discover Your Guiding Light: Connect with Your Spirit Guides' here.

Check out our Everything Page for all our free and paid offerings and services.

For those who find it useful, below is the video transcript:

SHUNA: Hello, I'm Shuna Marr of Spiritual Awakening Support. I am a former academic and I now am a spiritual guide for personal and business growth. And my aim is to help people to give them the knowledge, skills and tools they need to successfully navigate their awakening journey. And one of the ways that I do this is by conducting these awakening conversations from time to time.

[00:00:22] When I Meet someone who I find interesting and who has a great story to tell. I like to have these awakening conversations about their awakening journey so that you, the viewer, can perhaps find parallels in your own journey and also recognize that, you know, that sometimes no matter how terrible things seem at a time, there can be a lot of growth and development that comes as a result of that.

[00:00:47] And that's certainly true for my guest today, who is Anita Ramirez. Hello, Anita.

ANITA: Hi Shuna.

SHUNA: Well I have had the pleasure of working with Anita this year in a coaching capacity and I've gotten to know her really well and also to find out about her fascinating story and so I've invited her to share it with you today.

[00:01:09] So Anita is a school teacher and she's also a grief coach and how she got into grief coaching is something that I'm sure will no doubt unfold because it has been a key aspect of her awakening journey but I'm going to let her tell you that story in her own way. So, Anita, welcome. And would you like to begin by introducing yourself, please?

ANITA Hi, thank you, Shuna so my name is Anita Ramirez. I currently live in Long Island, New York. As Shuna mentioned, I'm a full time high school teacher and I'm also a part time spiritual life and grief coach.

SHUNA: Thank you. So nice and short and sweet. I can never do mine in a nutshell like that. So I always appreciate when somebody else does.

[00:01:52] So normally these kind of follow up a pattern almost. And although it organically arises, but we usually begin with how about how did you awaken, so everybody's awakening journey is different. Everybody. Sometimes it's a slow burn, sometimes it's a kind of major catalyst or whatever.

[00:02:11] So do you want to tell us about how yours unfolded?

ANITA: Yes. And mine's a mixture of both. So looking back, I would say that it's been a slow burn since the age of four. I can remember at the age of four, having these big questions about what's out there, who is God, how am I connected to him? What is his role in my life?

[00:02:36] And I began this spiritual journey, really, at that age, where I just was drawn to and devoured all things spiritual.

[00:02:45] For most of my life, what that looked like was a journey hopping from religion to religion, because I was seeking a connection with God through religion, because that was all I knew. At the age of 5, my aunt, who was a Jehovah's witness, she brought some reading materials to our home and she gave me a children's Bible story book.

[00:03:06] And then she gave me a copy of the King James Bible. I was five years old. I can remember reading the Bible on my own in my room because I loved to read. I read those Bible stories. I knew all the stories in the old Testament and I just loved it. And when I got a little older, I started attending different churches.

[00:03:25] My parents, to this day, I've never seen my father inside a church. My mother would attend on holidays, and my grandmother was Catholic. And I would attend mostly on holidays with my grandmother. But then as I got older, I met friends who were Mormons. Friends who were evangelical Christians, and I would attend their church services with them.

[00:03:47] So looking back, I was always a seeker, but I didn't know any other way to go about like searching for those answers other than through organized religion. And that continued on and off throughout into my adulthood. When I got married the first time, because I'm married two times, my ex husband, he was raised as a Christian scientist.

[00:04:11] So, that was a very interesting religion. I attended that church for a while, so I had all of these messages and all of these different spiritual experiences and instructions, but everything was very academic when I would attend these churches and try to learn these things. It was always on a very, like I was studying and it was a very

[00:04:32] mind centered, you know, endeavor. I never, I think the reason I was always seeking was because I never felt the connection that I was seeking. And so I was looking for it in all these different places, looking for love in all the wrong places, not to say religion is wrong, but you know, there was always something missing and it was that connection. And then jumping forward to 2019 is when I started looking at things, not through organized religion, not through that lens.

[00:05:02] In 2019, I got very sick and I was hospitalized for like 11 days and I was, I had a lot of time to think cause I was just sitting in the hospital all day, you know, for 11 straight days. And I'm like, what is, what am I doing with my life? How did I get to this place? And I said, I need to make a radical change.

[00:05:19] And one of those things that I implemented was a transcendental meditation. So that was the first time in my life that I had started meditating and I began a meditation practice in early 2019. And that was daily for, for years and it continues to this day, although not daily right now. But that was, that kind of opened the door for me to have that connection, not through organized religion for the first time.

[00:05:45] And it opened the door for me to learn like, Oh, there's so many other ways of thinking out there again, thinking right. And transcendental meditation is very focused on your thoughts. And just allowing, you know, your thoughts to pass by and that mindfulness and, you know, it's a wonderful way to be in the present moment, but most of the teachings that I was exposing myself to, to learn that practice was just very focused on kind of mind control in a way.

[00:06:13] And while I'm being in the present moment, there was not much instruction, at least in the direction I was looking. Like what to do with my body other than just sitting there in 2020... so that was, that was the slow burn. The major catalyst for my awakening was in 2020 when my adult son died suddenly from a brain aneurysm, he was 25 and we were a month into the pandemic.

[00:06:38] And I was, I had been attending a Christian church for several years, every Sunday I was there when the pandemic started. Of course, the church closed, they went to virtual services. And then after I lost my son, just like little by little, I was moving a farther away from that, from attending even those virtual services.

[00:06:59] And I was moving more into like curiosity about the spiritual side again. I was still doing the meditation. I started reading about like Oracle cards and crystals. And like, I just got really, really curious. And in the 2 to 3 years after his death, I really just kind of dove head first into that. And the reason I think is because.

[00:07:23] I was seeking a connection with the other side because I wanted to connect with my son. And that was really the impetus that just pushed me into seeking on a whole other level. And it was almost like an obsession. It became like, I just got to get my hands on this. I got to learn how to do this. I got to learn how to connect.

[00:07:44] I got to learn. I got to learn. I got to learn. I got to learn. And again, I'm studying it all. Right. So I started listening to spiritual teachers and following people like Rebecca Campbell and Kyle Gray and Marianne Williamson. Reading and listening and studying and trying to practice things and it's all good stuff, but the big change came when I discovered you in early 2023, because like I said, my whole life, and then even when I was like, voraciously trying to connect with with spirit and try to understand it and have that connection.

[00:08:20] There was a huge piece missing and you kind of provided that piece in your, I found your course, the Ascension path, and then, you know, connected with you and then, you know, did the coaching program with the okay, I'm awakening course and you were really the first spiritual teacher that allowed me to understand that the body is such an important part in this process and that I can't fully know myself if I'm not connected to my body.

[00:08:49] And I was truly disconnected from my body. And I would say that going through your course and, you know, having the coaching with you really helped me so much find that piece that was missing for so long. And to be perfectly honest, for the first time in my life, I feel like I'm at peace.

SHUNA: Woo! Well, thank you very much.

[00:09:10] I hadn't expected to take that sort of turn because I know that after your son died, you had, um,

[00:09:21] that was a, that was a catalyst that propelled you. And as you were talking about there, that was the kind of driving motivation that took you beyond where you had been looking before and took you looking in a different direction from where you before. And I, as you were talking along and you were talking about all the different kinds of religions.

[00:09:41] That was very much when I was very small, I remember going through that, going to Sunday school, Church of Scotland, Episcopalian, going to the Seaside Mission with the Wee Frees and then the sort of Brethren churches and various other things. And I never found what I was looking for there. I was seeking to be something that was bigger than myself, seeking to be part of something that was beyond myself, but I never found it in that organized religion.

[00:10:08] And that's not to say that some people do, don't find it, because, because there are many that do, and everybody is following their own unique path through, and some people will take that religion and, and see their own truths and find their own truths within it. But as you say, a lot, and there's a lot of, most of the churches are built on a truism, you know, there's a, there's a universal, universal truth, a universal truism of love at the basis of it.

[00:10:40] But for a number of them, anyway, they have become much more distorted in terms of that message. And, so many people now are feeling that they don't really need to have that intermediary to be able to have the connection with source. And so a lot of the time churches were set up to be the intermediary to give you a framework in which to understand and move on.

[00:11:03] And the Ok I'm Awakening course, this was where I spent, you know, after my awakening, my motivation was to find out what this whole thing was about, what awakening was all about. And I spent so many years doing that to understand my own structure and understand this framework of what of what it was about and how people could operate and organize within that.

[00:11:28] And that. Sort of brings to the sort of next question that you have that, ... I'd like you to speak a little bit more about the sort of what happened after the... that kinda situation with with your son dying and how that propelled you into the..., to the sort of grief coaching side of things.

[00:11:54] You know, can you maybe speak a little bit towards, more towards that?

ANITA: So I, you know, we mentioned that I'm a full time high school teacher and I teach immigrant students. The majority of them are from Central America and they're learning English, but I teach them literature and composition in Spanish and through all my years of teaching them, what I noticed is that a lot of them, they don't have strong literacy skills.

[00:12:19] That's a generalization, but a lot of my students come with weak academic background, not big readers. And so trying to get them to read was difficult, but sometimes I would get them interested in reading, but then I was hearing over and over again from them that there aren't enough books that with characters they can identify in.

[00:12:38] And so I got the idea, like, I'm going to write a book for my students. So I started writing this novel for young adults, a bilingual novel, where 90 percent of it was in English, but 10 percent of it's in Spanish, but there's no translation. It's intended for people who speak both languages, so they understand the switching back and forth.

[00:12:57] So I was Almost finished writing that novel when my son died suddenly. And, my plan at that point was to start this side business as an author, start writing more books, selling my books on the side, and just, I knew I wanted to do something on the side. I love my full time job, but I don't know.

[00:13:16] I'm just driven to do more. I'm very ambitious. So that was my plan. But then when my son died, I finished that book, wrote the whole thing, about 400 pages. And I started writing my second book, but as I was writing the second novel, like the words were not coming out, like it just wasn't flowing like the first book.

[00:13:37] And I was like, what's wrong with me? Did not realize. Hello, grief, you know, grief. Hello! so I put those projects aside. And I even stopped the process of trying to get the first one published and I felt really stuck. Like, well, what now, you know, but obviously my full time career wasn't enough. So I'm like, well, what do I do now?

[00:13:58] I don't know what to do. And, um, I went through about a year and a half of just soul searching and I think really allowing myself to grieve because I wasn't, I hadn't been allowing that I'd been so focused on my side projects. And through that process, I came to the conclusion that. Yeah. You know, I'm doing pretty okay.

[00:14:19] I still like, I still think about my future. There's still things I want to do. I miss my son, but at the same time, I feel happy and okay. What is up with that? And I realized that that's, that's a good thing. That's, you know, there's nothing wrong with that. That doesn't mean that I loved my son any less.

[00:14:35] And then I started realizing like, this is a message that people need to hear. That we can hold our grief and our loss and our and our sadness and all of the love with for that person in one hand and we can hold in the other hand our joy and our desire for a fulfilling life and our ambition and everything so we can have both at the same time.

[00:14:58] And having one doesn't negate the other. And I want to get that message out. So I'm like, well, how do I do that? I'm a full time teacher. I don't want to go back to college and like get a master's degree in psychology and become a therapist. So I had never even thought of coaching. Didn't really know much about it.

[00:15:15] But I stumbled upon it and all my searching, like, how do I help people in grief? What can I do to help grievers? And I came across grief coaching. I was like, oh, so I went through the whole process of becoming a life coach. So I'm trained as a general life coach. And then I did another training with David Kessler, who's like world renowned expert in grief.

[00:15:35] He trained under Elizabeth Kubler Ross, you know, the stages of grief. So I did a certification program, so I'm a certified grief educator as well now. And then I did a happiness training, so I'm a certified happiness trainer, because for me, all of those things go together. I needed the coaching for the foundation.

[00:15:54] Now I have the grief piece, so I know how to deal with people in grief. And I want them to know that happiness is still possible, even while you're grieving. So that's, that's how that came about. And the spiritual piece of it, you know, so I call myself a spiritual life and grief coach, because I don't see how, at least for me, I can't have those conversations without

[00:16:18] you know, recognizing the spiritual piece. I can't have those conversations with someone who isn't open to the spiritual piece so for me, that's a really important part of it.

SHUNA: Yes, because it's that whole idea of, of your spirituality being something separate from you, and it's something that's separate that you do on a Sunday or whatever, and that's it.

[00:16:42] It's actually recognizing and understanding that everything that we do is spiritual, that we are spiritual beings and that the things that happen to us on our paths like that are very often the motivation, they're very often the catalyst, the driver for what it is that comes next. And... but I know for some time that you, you struggled with seeing the connection between that, but then things shifted for you.

[00:17:09] Is that, would that be true to say?

ANITA : Well, I think I always knew that because, you know, like I said, going back to the age of four, like the spiritual piece was important for me. What I was lacking was the body piece because, you know, our Western society, Western culture, we're so focused on our minds.

[00:17:30] And I think we, the emotions take a backseat and the body takes a backseat. I think when people think of the body, they think of like their physical health or their fitness, but they don't think about it in terms of how it informs the mind, how our body informs our feelings and. You know, we call them feelings because we literally feel them in our body.

[00:17:52] I didn't realize that I'm embarrassed to say until I was like in my late 40s. Like, Oh, it was like, you know, major aha moment. Oh my gosh. I didn't realize that, you know, I thought my emotions just came from my heart, you know, but I didn't realize that it was like the emotions or the body so connected to our, the sensations in our body, you know, the increased heart rate or sweaty palms or whatever, you know, whatever emotion you're talking about.

[00:18:21] For me, there's four pieces to be a whole person. You need to have development, not only of your mind, your body, your emotions and your spirit, your soul. Yeah. For me, if one of those pieces are missing, it's not complete. And so I always knew that the spiritual piece was important. I just hadn't found, you know, and I think the key was not, not recognizing that, Oh, this is how the spiritual piece works because I'm not going to say there's one right way that it works.

[00:18:50] Right. I think it works how it works for each individual person, but I think the piece that I was missing is that all four connected and and the one that was most disconnected for me for so long was my body and I think that's what made the grieving process difficult at first. Because I was grieving in my mind, all my grieving was, you know, just my thoughts.

[00:19:12] I was just focused on what I'm thinking. I would talk to my therapist and we just talk and talk and talk about my thoughts and, you know, emotions, of course. Sure. Being sad, crying, feeling angry. That's a big piece of it. But never, ever, ever did I with anyone have a conversation about my grief and what's going on in my body in terms of the grief.

[00:19:35] And for me, like I needed all four of those things kind of like together to really make the process. to integrate it and to really understand. Yeah.

SHUNA: Yeah. To recognize that your body stores the emotions that are there and until you work through them and release them from your body,

[00:19:58] that when something happens to you, there's a kind of emotional wound or emotional something gets stored in particular parts of your body. So each time you press a button, it goes back to that particular aspect of it. And it's the necessity to go in and look and process through that out of your body and process these emotions and process, what we've stored.

[00:20:22] And I attract, because I was a former academic, a PhD, somebody who worked in universities for 20 odd years, I was very much part of that genre that, you know, the mind is all powerful and you are not, you know, and I was so disconnected from my body and I was in such pain all the time and I was carrying sore backs and sore knees and sore everything, all this pain that you carry in your body.

[00:20:51] And it wasn't until I started to do, um, and this is like 25 years ago and I started to do my own clearing, my own clearing of my inner grief, the, because of all the things that I've been through in my lifetime when I was carrying grief and, uh,

[00:21:09] Pain and issues and rejection and all the other things that I had had going on in my life. It wasn't until I started to go through that inner processing and release it and let it go from my body that I managed to heal my body from so many of these pains, because your body works with you in that way, in that it is, it is there.

And it's so forgiving of you. And we often reject our bodies. It doesn't look right. I mean, it's not good enough.

ANITA :And we're so focused on the aesthetics of it or the fitness or the health. And we went instead of looking at it, like this is a huge part of me and it's connected to my soul and it's connected to my mind and it's connected to my heart.

[00:21:47] I heard the other day I was listening to a podcast, a neuroscientist was saying that 80 percent of the information that our brain processes comes from our body and 20 percent of it comes from either what we observe or our own thoughts. And that I knew obviously a percentage comes from our body, but I had no idea it was the majority of the information.

[00:22:08] So, you know, our bodies are just, they're, they're, I don't know, what's a way to say it? A library and archive and encyclopedia of information. And just, it's like the most important thing that we can listen to. And it informs the other three parts. Whereas we usually think our mind is the one that informs our body and tells our body what to do, what to move.

[00:22:30] But I don't know. I just think that the signals are so much stronger going from the body to the mind. Yeah. And that was confirmed by what that neuroscientist said.

SHUNA: Well, certainly from a spiritual point of view, the body itself is very wise creature in its own right, you know, and that it's a symbiotic relationship that we have with our bodies as a, you know, our spirit and our body. The mind is there to be a problem solver.

[00:23:00] One of the things that has happened over the last few hundred years has been that the mind has been elevated to be the architect and the driver and the. Everybody who, it wants to, it wants to be the kingpin and everything and we are, we are being sort of led to believe that it's all comes from the mind and the logic and that is king.

[00:23:24] But the more that I have gone on, and explored the other aspects of my, my body, my emotions, my, and my spirituality. I've realized that as you say, they are a complete package and that you cannot have one without the other. And the mind is, um, has its place because it's an important aspect of who we are and our personality in this lifetime, but it is not, it's not the driver.

[00:23:50] It's not the, um, It's not really the... it doesn't know our soul blueprint. It doesn't know what we're here to do. It doesn't know what our mission is. It's, and our body, our body is much more in connection with our soul than, um, than perhaps our mind is at times.

ANITA : Right. That's a great way to put it because our mind

[00:24:10] has that connection already, but if we're disconnected, I mean, I'm sorry, our body has that connection already. If we're disconnected from our body, we're not receiving that information. We can't be in tune with it. You know, we, when we think of intuition, well, at least I did, I'll speak for myself. When I thought of intuition, I always thought of mind.

[00:24:27] I had no idea that intuition is in my body.

SHUNA: And your intuition comes through all the clairsenses, you know, the senses, the... of your body. So the, the hearing, the mind, all the, all the senses that we have in our, in our physical, of our 5 senses in the other senses are hearing the way that we hear things, the way that the nudges we get, the knowings that we get, the feelings that we get and whatever are all part of how our intuition talks to us, how our soul talks to us through how it gives our body

[00:24:59] little nudges and little feelings and little emotions, and these all tell us what it is that our soul is trying to tell us. And, and we get that, you know, if something, I know that for me, if I'm going in the wrong direction, I get a kind of, oh, it kind of, it's, and it's a physical feeling and the only way that I can express that physical feeling is whoa, you know, it gets like, whoa.

[00:25:19] And hold your horses. You, this is not good. Or if you are feeling something, you kinda are feeling a kind of pulling towards it and it's a sensation that it's your body. So your connection with your body is really, really important if you're trying to be in touch with your intuition. Right. And that leads me to a question that I have for, for you, because I know that, if you don't mind me sharing it, that you've recently been drawn to expand your own powers into mediumship

[00:25:44] and it turns out that you have a gift for that, that perhaps you hadn't realized, or perhaps it was because of that motivation because of your son that led you towards that. Yeah.

ANITA : Yeah. Yeah. That was totally there. And like I said, I, I became obsessed with the other side and learning everything I could about death in the afterlife.

[00:26:05] And my desire was to learn how to connect, how to communicate, how to receive information for me with the sole purpose of connecting with my son. And the ironic thing is what I discovered. And it most, I think the first time it happened was in a session with you. Um, We were in a meditation and I think it might've been happening before.

[00:26:28] I was just not aware of it. I wasn't paying attention to it, but in a session with you, I think it was... connect with the blueprint of your business. I think it was that session. Yes. So I was in a meditation with you and I was seeing like symbols, like shapes and symbols and colors. And I remember that.

[00:26:46] Yeah, and so when I came out of the meditation, I described to you what I had seen, and we talked about, you know, what the symbols mean, and I thought, wow, that's really interesting, because I know when I was doing transcendental meditation, I can remember closing my eyes, even those first, I remember the first day in the hospital, the first time I did a transcendental meditation, first time ever in my life, I remember seeing swirling colors, and I just thought that's what everybody saw, right?

[00:27:10] And maybe a lot of people do, I don't know, but I never really paid attention to it. And, now I am aware that when I do any kind of meditation, I can go into it very quickly. I see these things. So that led me into wanting to, well, I'm like, okay, if I can receive these messages, if I can connect with some, with spirit guides, cause I was able to connect with the spirit guide.

[00:27:34] I was able to, I would even say, have a connection with, with some angels that led me into learning more about that. And I took a course over the summer, late summer, um, a mediumship skills course. It was a six week course with a medium. Her name is Rochelle Gaiman. And I learned all the practical ways to develop it.

[00:27:57] It requires a lot of practice. She kept telling me, you're very gifted. You're very gifted. I am not... I would never call myself a medium. I'm just very curious about it. I think that we all have the ability to learn how to develop those gifts. So I wouldn't say that like I'm gifted and other people aren't, I think we all have those gifts.

[00:28:18] It's just who chooses to develop them. And I would say that probably there are some people for whom those gifts develop, you know, really quickly or really easily, or they've been with them since they were young children. I would definitely say if I were to say that I've had a gift from childhood, it would just be the gift of...

[00:28:39] I would, if I want to use the clair language, I would say clair cognizance of just knowing there's a presence. Of knowing that there's something more. I can remember feeling that presence as a young child. So that's an area of my life that I'm really curious about practicing and developing even more.

[00:28:54] And maybe at some point in the future, I would feel comfortable saying, okay, I am a medium. But at this point, I would never call myself that. Yeah, certainly.

SHUNA: Yes. I remember when you were in that session and started to see, and I said, well, that's the way that your spirit guides, people often think that if you're going to connect with your spirit guides, they've got to talk in your ear or something like that, as if you're hearing them or seeing them.

[00:29:19] But very often colors are the very first level of connection that they make with you. And The Spirit Guides talk to you in terms of symbolism and, metaphor and as you go through your own ascension, you go through your own awakening, your vibrational frequency rises. As you go through that and raise your own vibrational frequency, and move into higher dimensions, it becomes much easier for those you connect with the higher dimensions.

[00:29:46] So if you're down in the, say, the third dimension and they're in the seventh, that's quite a lot of interference and static to get through. But by the time you go through to the point that you're raising yourself into operating in the fifth dimension, you know, where you are... you've sort of shifted your own vibrational frequency to open that there's much less interference.

[00:30:05] And so therefore the opening and connection becomes more easy. So as you go on your journey, the more you connect, the more you make that connection, the more likely it is that they're going to come through.

ANITA :Yeah, that makes sense.

SHUNA: Yeah, so yeah, so I've just been, I've just, this has all been top of mind because I just yesterday finished doing, putting together this little mini course, Discover Your Guiding Light, which is all about how to connect with your spirit guides.

[00:30:27] So I'm absolutely with you. Everybody can connect with their spirit guides. It just requires a motivation to do so, because as soon as you do it and you recognize how it is that they connect with you and how it is that they talk to you and how that, that is, um, then once you realize how it is that they connect with you, then it becomes easier and easier and easier to do.

[00:30:50] And you can offer things like tools, you know, so people use cards or dowsing or channeled writing, or...

ANITA: I've tried all of those, through you, and I found that all of those ways work for me. I wouldn't even say which way I prefer, which one is easier, all of those ways have worked for me.

SHUNA: So, and the thing is that they're all... it's just a different tool and you use, it's like you can open a tin of paint with a claw hammer, you could open it with a screwdriver.

[00:31:15] You can use the same, you can use different tools for the same job. It just depends whichever one's to hand at that particular time and whichever one you prompted to use at that particular time. But yes, its... Yeah, so I've lost my train of thought with what I was saying, but time's pressing on and, that's probably a little nudge from my guides to say that, it's probably time to ask you about what it is that you, that you offer now in terms of the services that you, that have evolved as a result of you going through your awakening and If you want to share about that, there's a chance to give yourself a little plug.

ANITA: Okay. So like I said, I'm a spiritual life and grief coach. I do offer one on one grief coaching. I offer one on one spiritual life coaching, but I always do it through the lens of grief. It's hard for me not to see everything through the lens of grief. And I think all of us have experienced grief of some sort or another.

[00:32:15] It may be, if not the loss of a loved one, we've all been through some kind of grief. So that's those are the waters in which I swim But you can find me at the website the awakened griever dot com. That's my handle as well on Instagram I have a Facebook page. I also have a Facebook group for people who are grieving it's called grieving with spirit so you can look that up. And the things that I offer in addition to one on one coaching, I do have some freebies on my website, some PDFs, one is a guide for, to help you journal through the six stages of grief.

[00:32:50] And another one is just a, a PDF with a list of different resources, my favorite go to podcast books and websites for grief. I also offer a Voxer, I don't know if everybody's familiar with Voxer. Voxer is an app that you can use to like just do audio or just text message type coaching. So I offer a 30 minute Voxer support session.

[00:33:15] And I also have for sale one grief meditation connecting with the spirit of your loved one through a meditation that I recorded. So those are my offerings right now. I'm developing a podcast and I'm developing a group coaching program and an online course. All of that is in the works right now.

SHUNA: And I will have links to your website.

[00:33:35] So if somebody is watching this in the future, and it's a wee bit further down the line, those things might have shifted and changed, but if you have your website and they go to there, it'll be on the front page or whatever, uh, whatever the link is that will be there. So to wrap up. Would you have any final advice for people who are going through their awakening and a final sort of parting advice for somebody who maybe is in the throes of going through a difficult time, maybe in a process of grieving or whatever that has resonated with this?

[00:34:07] Would you have any parting advice that you want to share before we go?

ANITA: Yeah. So three things, because you mentioned if I have advice for someone specifically who's in, so I had two pieces of advice, but to address the one about someone who's going through a hard time or going through grief, My motto is one, one thing that Winston Churchill said during World War Two, he said, when you find yourself in the middle of hell, keep going.

[00:34:32] And I know that sounds harsh, but for me, just know that the only way out is through and hang on. Right. I love the acronym hope, hold on or hang on pain ends. So just that might be something that someone could hold on to when they're going through a difficult time. So that's that piece of advice.

[00:34:54] The other piece of advice we've been talking about a lot is just stay in your body, stay connected to your body. That's going to keep you on the path. Even if nothing's happening at the moment or feels like you're not making any forward movement. If you're staying connected with your body, things will begin to shift and, and just don't lose that connection.

[00:35:14] And my last bit of advice, and this is, I laugh because this is one thing you've told me several times and I'm like, no, no, no, it's fine. It's fine. It's don't rush. Because, yes, don't rush because right now I'm in a period where not much is happening. I'm kind of like, okay. And there's that part of me that type A ambitious part of me that's like, but, but, but you got to do this.

[00:35:41] Then you're not practicing enough. You got to do more. You got to learn more. Did it. Okay. But the, the stronger part of me now, because I've developed it is just observing that other part of me and going, I see you over there spinning. You go ahead and spin, but, um, we're sticking on this path and, and right now I know that, like, not a lot's happening, but I know that things are going on in the background.

[00:36:04] Something's brewing, something's getting ready to shift, and so I'm just waiting it out and, and I'm doing it very patiently. And that is not an easy thing for me to say, because that is not, that goes really against my nature. But it's becoming more my nature now. And so I'm grateful and I have you to thank for that.

SHUNA: I totally, as you know, totally relate to that because for so many years and years, decades of my life, I pushed and pushed and pushed.

[00:36:33] And it was one of the biggest things that since I went through my main awakening in 2017 through my third breakdown, from sort of over doing it all. And I was totally in resistance to being in ebb. And, but what I've since learned is that there are times when you flow, but just when you're in ebb, that doesn't mean to say that you're not following your path or whatever.

[00:36:58] It just means that things are shifting in the background. You are things that might be coming in. There's, there's stuff that's being moved because you're all, we're all part of one big symphony. We all feel that we're separate and alone and we're just doing it on our own, but actually we're all part of one huge big symphony.

[00:37:14] We're all part of, um, each playing our own individual note in this grand orchestra. And so, although we think that, you know, that our particular thread is, is important to us, which it is, it's all part of a beautiful tapestry that's being woven by spirit. And we are responsible for our little bit, but we might be waiting for another thread to come in and another one to go out or leave or things to happen or things to reach a certain point for us to shift.

ANITA: I love the metaphor of the symphony because, you know, I played an instrument when I was younger, but that's a, that's a, such a helpful metaphor for me because now I recognize that My instrument was the flute. The flute section is at rest right now. I have several bars of rests. So that's where I'm at.

[00:38:00] Then I'll come back in with my part.

SHUNA: So when, when you get a little bit further down in the symphony, the, you know, the flutes will then be twiddling away... at a high rate of knots or whatever, but then sometimes, you know, the bass has got to have its turn and the violins they're gonna be doing theirs. So, you know, so if you're, if that's helpful for anybody who's watching, if that's a helpful metaphor for you... Light bulb moment.

[00:38:23] Yes. Love it. And that's a wonderful place to end. So thank you so much Anita, for being and sharing your wisdom and your thoughts with us. And it's been a great pleasure to walk this path with you for this past year. And thank you very much, if you're watching us, for joining us today and below the video, you'll find links about how to get in contact with Anita and how to get in contact with

[00:38:44] myself. Anyway, thanks for watching. Bye for now.

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