Fall is the time of year where the colors are so brilliant and the weather is changing here in Colorado. It’s a time when leaves are falling and we are going into the dormant season where the growth isn’t happening and we are preparing for winter to set in. What the leaves represent I feel is a time of shedding off the old and allowing the dormant time of winter to prepare you for new growth in the spring.

What are you wanting to shed off?. is it some grief over a loss of marriage, or family member that never got dealt with and keeps lingering?  Is it the loss of a career that brought an unexpectant change and you were left wondering where your work is headed?  Or are you going through a loss of a health, or a dream that has left you without hope.

You don’t want to allow it to continue to stagnate your energy holding onto these feelings. Research shows that unresolved grief will be harder to assess if it is prolonged. What people typically do is get busy and push aside those feelings thinking maybe they will go away if they don’t think about them. A lack of knowledge and accompanying inability to grieve and complete unfinished emotions leads to a build-up of emotional “crud” around the human heart. This almost automatically tends to cause us to limit or restrict the kind of interactions that require an open, loving, receptive heart.  We may find ourselves not open to attracting new relationships because we never want to experience any loss again.

This can be equated to the oil filter in our car. When we don’t change the filter or oil on a regular basis it gets clogged up and unable to release the buildup.  We can keep emotions at bay so that the cleansing that should be happening in our hearts doesn’t get released.  If this process happens effectively it will release whatever may be clogging up the system and enable your heart to be open again. So we can change the filter now or suffer from engine failure in the future.

Changing the filter can also be equated to the way we were left perceiving the events that happened to us. We may see our loss through a filter that devastates us and leaves us void of wanting to move on. Or it might have left us resentful at God about why it happened. We may also form an identity around the pain that continually fuels us and keeps us in a victim mode.

The best remedy for grief is to take action to start the process. I encourage those to engage in the feelings and go through the necessary stages that are preventing them from letting go of the emotions. They might have also held onto beliefs that formed a colored lense that they now see their life through. In addition, taking action to move into a new vision or purpose will be another way to set the wheels in motion.

You owe it to yourself to release whatever you are holding onto so you can move into a renewed vision for your life.