In keeping with last week’s post about my own personal grieving process, today I’ve invited a very soulful, brave and honest woman to stop by my blog and share her own, similar-but-different experience with grieving.
For Catherine Keating, loss came in the form of miscarriage. Twice.
Finding a path back from grief into gratitude, from sorrow to strength involved writing a book.
Reading There Was Supposed To Be A Baby was so beautiful for me because it echoed so many of the same tools I was using in my own healing process… all outlined in one supportive, gentle, pure, raw and real book.
It’s a Healing Idea Book, really… a guide book that Catherine specifically adapts to the situation of miscarriage, but a book that anyone in the grieving process would find comforting… I know I did.
Catherine shares the reality of her journey in such an empowering way…. weaving stories and emotions together with simple tools like specific yoga postures, affirmations, soothing dietary changes, body work and more that can all help specifically support the grieving and healing process.
I’m a huge fan of this book. So huge, I want to share this book with all of you here on my website.
Because miscarriage, life, love and loss happen to so many of us, and I truly believe this book can help heal hearts.
Catherine, was there one defining moment when you *knew* you had to write this book?
After my first miscarriage I was devastated but a part of me was like ‘ok, lots of women go through this, I’ll do my thing and make it through too.‘
After my second, it seemed like a bigger call from the universe.
I noticed I had a bag of tools to pull out to work through my grief and find joy and peace and beauty again and I noticed other women might not have the same tools available. I suddenly saw it in my mind – in a format — as a “how to guide†and I knew it had to be done. In one way or another.
It is a fantastic how-to guide… not just for miscarriage but for anyone experiencing a loss.
What was your biggest triumph/breakthrough in writing it?
Writing this book has given me so much. Not necessarily the more obvious fact that it was healing to write this and put it out in a bigger format for other women, but more subtly.
Writing this book allowed me to step into my Real Life, my Real Self, no apologies.
I knew in my gut it was something I had to do, even when it felt crazy. But the more I’ve worked on it, on workshops, on the whole project, the more I believe in it and the more it keeps giving back to me.
I guess that has been a breakthrough — finding my work resulted from a dark place — and that I really, truly enjoy holding the space for that dark place for others.
I can tell very clearly that you not only enjoy holding that space for others, but that you are very very good at it. The entire book feels just like that… like one loving soul who has been through the trenches is now holding a sacred space for another to walk through it as well.
While reading the book, I had a very clear sense that I was not alone and that there was a safe space waiting for me every time I picked it up.
Odd as it is to say… what was the best thing that has happened to you as a result of going through this experience of pregnancy loss?
I opened up to mySelf.
I’d been sliding along doing things I thought I was supposed to do, living the way I thought I ‘should’, trying desperately to make everyone around me happy.
With the total heartbreak that came from losing my babies, I was freed in a sense.
I was freed to do things my way, to grow, to learn, to stop saying yes when I wanted to say no, to SLOW DOWN. I finally understood what it meant to find contentment in each little moment. I realized I was worth it. I started walking in my own shoes, living by my rules.
I am able to say it now, 4 years later, that I am so very grateful for those first babies who came to me.
They changed my life. For the better.
What is your core message, if you had to sum it up into one sentence?
You deserve the beauty that can evolve from taking the time to grieve — to allow mind, body, and spirit to process your loss — and come out the other side able to hold both the light and the dark. It’s a beautiful way to live. (I guess that is two sentences!)
Thank you so much Catherine for sharing your inner journey with us and for lighting up that dark journey for other women who are entering the process.
For more info on There Was Supposed To Be A Baby, you can go to the website here, the Facebook Page here, or find the book on Amazon here.