Grace and Grief

On grief, small miracles, and learning to receive

This summer I went back to Santa Barbara without a home of my own there. I arrived with a heart full of hope, uncertainty, and… yes, grief too.

What happened next, I can only call a series of small miracles.

It was as if the universe had been waiting for me. What I needed arrived before I could name it. My classes and sessions filled with beautiful souls ready for this work. Teaching and healing felt more alive than ever. People showed up at exactly the right moment, as if they had been sent. Doors opened that I didn't know were there, with an ease I couldn't explain. New friendships came unexpectedly, and old ones grew deeper than I knew they could. The community I had built over the years welcomed me back with open arms. My heart, which—truthfully—had been tired, began to fill again. It felt as though life itself had decided to hold me.

I wasn't pushing or chasing anything. For the first time in a long while, my heart, my body, my work, and the place itself were all pointing in the same direction.

But the miracles weren't the whole story. Alongside all that grace, there was pain. I was grieving the life I used to have: my marriage, the home we built, the family we were, the daily rhythms I thought would last. Even the city I love felt different. The same streets, the same coastline, but I was walking them as someone new, without the life that used to be waiting for me at the end of the day.

The second arrow

For most of my life, my response to pain, mine or anyone else's, has been to do something about it. That's what healers do. But when the pain is my own, "doing something" can quietly become a way of not feeling it. I can process it, reframe it, send it energy, find the lesson in it, and stay one step ahead of it the whole time. It looks like healing, but sometimes it's actually a graceful way of looking away.

The Buddha taught a simple parable. When we're struck by an arrow, we feel pain. That's the first arrow, and no one escapes it. But then we shoot a second arrow at ourselves: the resistance, the story, the urgent need to make it stop. The first arrow hurts. The second arrow is what turns pain into suffering.

This summer, I noticed how many second arrows I had been shooting. I should be further along in my healing by now. I'm a holistic healing coach, a healer by both training and nature. I should know how to handle this. This shouldn't still hurt.

So I practiced something very simple and very hard: I let the pain be the only arrow. I didn't analyze it, rush it, or try to heal it away. I put my hands on my heart and I stayed.

And the pain changed. Fully felt, it rose, peaked, shifted, and softened. It was the resistance that had been holding it in place.

Seeing what was already here

There were moments when I felt the miracles and the pain were two separate stories. I had to remind myself they were one.

For years, without realizing it, I had invested in a picture of how my life was supposed to look. And what we invest in becomes the lens we see through. It limits us. When you're holding on to what was, it's hard to see what is. Life can be all around you, and you look right past it.

Every time I stopped resisting the pain, that lens loosened a little. And every time it loosened, I could see more of the love that surrounded me.

Receiving was part of this too. Giving comes naturally to me. Receiving does not. When someone offered a helping hand or a kind word, I had to resist the urge to repay it right away and simply let it in. That was its own kind of sitting with discomfort.

The love had been there all along: in my friends, in my work, in my students, in the place itself. Life didn't suddenly become generous. I finally stopped looking past it.

Maybe that's what a miracle really is. Not something that comes from outside to rescue us, but a shift in perception that opens us to a larger dimension of the life we are already living. Nothing new is added. We simply gain access to a wider range of what was always here: more love, more support, more beauty than our fear allowed us to see.

Grace and grief were in the same room the whole time. I just had to stop running long enough to notice both.

Grief and joy, side by side

I still feel some grief. Some days it's quiet, and some days it washes over me. I've stopped waiting for it to be gone before I let myself move forward.

Because alongside the grief, something else is here now: a sense of creative freedom I haven't felt in years. Excitement for what's coming. Joy that arrives without a reason. And with it, a creative energy I can actually feel in my body, rising from my heart, pulsing, almost restless, carrying me forward.

It doesn't feel like pushing. It feels like alignment and flow. As if, by letting myself feel everything I lost, I made room for everything that wants to come through me next.

I'm learning that grief and joy don't take turns. They can live in the same heart at the same time. Making room for one makes room for the other.

A practice for you

If you're carrying something heavy right now, try this:

1. Sit somewhere quiet and place both hands on your heart. Take three slow breaths.

2. Ask gently: What is here right now?

3. Name what comes up without explaining it. "Sadness is here." That's enough.

4. Notice if you're shooting a second arrow, a "should," a judgment, a hurry. If you are, simply set it down.

5. Before you finish, ask: What is supporting me right now that I haven't noticed?

You don't have to fix the pain to heal. Sometimes healing begins the moment you stop fighting it and start receiving what's already here.

If any of this resonates with you. If you're moving through a loss of your own, whether it's a relationship, a home, a chapter of your life, or a version of yourself, you don't have to walk through it alone. I would love to guide you across that threshold, from pain into renewal, where grief and joy can live side by side and something new can begin to rise in you.

Book a session with me here.

With love,

Guille