Dec 17, 2022
“Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.” ~ Francis Weller
Guest Introduction:
Welcome to another episode of Exploring the Seasons of Life, a podcast for women with a big heart on a spiritual journey who are ready to lead healthier and happier lives and improve their emotional well-being. I’m Cindy MacMillan.
In this season of the podcast, I’m inviting you to lean into well-being. Well-being takes into account the entire person, body, mind and spirit. It’s feeling good and functioning well; it’s experiencing positive emotions such as contentment and gratitude; it’s developing your potential, having a sense of purpose, and experiencing close relationships.
Self-love well-being and mindset are at the heart of our conversations. Because once you change the inside, the outside will begin to change as well.
In this episode of Exploring the Seasons of Life, we are chatting about what death can teach you about living. And my guest is Jill McClennen.
Jill is a certified death doula which is a non-medical person trained to care for someone holistically at the end of life. She offers support, preparation, and soul-level healing to her clients and their families in person and virtually through her work as a death doula and end-of-life coach. In addition to being a death doula, Jill is a trauma-sensitive yoga instructor, and she also uses reiki and shamanic healing techniques to help her clients heal their fears around death and dying as well as work with their grief.
Here’s a glimpse of our conversation:
13:50 That's what started me down this path to really being able to help other people through these experiences so that they can just enjoy it for what it is. It's you know, death and dying is not always going to be pretty but it can really be a beautiful time to connect with your loved ones if we can get over our fears and our anxieties and open ourselves up to the possibility of what it could be like other than what we've essentially mostly grown up with, which is not talking about it, being afraid of it, sheltering our children and our loved ones from the reality of it. It really doesn't have to be that way.
15:49 And the reality is, if you're living, you're going to die, I mean, that there's no way of escaping that. But that doesn't mean that we must suffer at the end of life. Yes, I mean, most of us will probably die from the disease that might give us some pain. But the mental part of it, you know, the fears and the anxieties, we don't have to die that way.
17:17 It's important for us to do this work now, before we're faced with our own death or with somebody that we love. And not only will it help us navigate the end of life, if we can work with some of our old grief and our shame, and our fears and all that stuff. It'll really help you to live a better life.
19:05 You know, no matter how much we educate ourselves around death, dying and bereavement, we're all going to have our own individual experiences. It doesn't mean that any of it is right or wrong. It just means that really, we need to honor ourselves and what we need, so often, especially women, we are taught to care for everybody around us before ourselves.
22:00 I mean, self-care, to me is still something that I struggle with a little bit, it's still something that I'm trying to make sure that I put some importance on my own self-care, because again, you know, the way that society has essentially taught me is that my worth is based off of how much I'm getting done. And oftentimes, how much I'm getting done is not part of taking care of myself.
35:20 I love this kind of work. I mean, this, to me was something that I didn't necessarily plan on doing. When I became a death doula, I thought I was just going to help people that were dying at the end of life. But this is the work that I think can really transform people the most if we start doing the work now at any age at any stage of life, because it'll really kind of ripple out into our life and the way that we interact with other people.
38:30 And it's really important that we understand that forgiving other people takes our power back. And that was something that I had to go through forgiving somebody that really hurt me when I was 21. And I was able to really heal it and forgive and let it go about two years ago.
39:50 Forgiveness is so important for us to be able to move on from a situation.
46:29 I mean, I think honestly, the biggest thing is I would thank her for is not giving up because I was in a rough spot when I was a teenager.
You can find Jill McClennen at:
End of Life Clarity FaceBook Instagram
IF YOU LOVED THIS EPISODE WITH JILL MCCLENNEN YOU’LL ALSO LOVE THE CONVERSATIONS I HAD WITH:
Lynn Principe is an End-of-Life Doula, Coach and Celebrant
The New Face of Grief with Katie Rössler
Conversation with End-of-Life Doula, Sue Phillips
Grief and Secondary Losses with Nesreen Ahmed
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👉 Contact me to get started on your journey. My e-mail is Cindy@CynthiaMacMillan.com or go here to my doTERRA website.