By Rachel Cline · August 10, 2026

Episode 37 · Radiantly Rooted with Rachel

Today I want to talk about something I feel like we don’t talk about enough, and that’s the grief that shows up when we realize there’s a part of our life we can’t go back to. Maybe your kids are older now and the years when they needed you for every little thing are behind you, or you left a job, or a relationship changed shape, or your body feels different than it used to.

Everyone else sees the milestone, and you see it too, and underneath all of it there’s still this ache that’s hard to explain to anybody without feeling like you’re being ungrateful. Most of us learned that grief belongs only to death, so when the loss arrives inside something good we don’t have a name for it, and we push it off to the side and remind ourselves that other people have it harder, and a midlife identity shift leaves so many of us stuck between chapters.

I’ve been there. In this episode I’m sharing my own trust fall of leaving corporate and the burnout that caught me off guard on the other side of a decision I was sure about, along with what actually helped when trying to think my way through it didn’t work, the one word swap that makes room for gratitude and grief at the same time, and the yoga teachings that give you somewhere to come back to when your body already knows something has ended.

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In This Episode

Welcome Back, and What I Did With My Summer
The Grief We Don’t Talk About Enough
Why We Don’t Recognize This as Grief
Back to School, the Clearest Example I Know
When Wellness Advice Makes It Harder
Try “And” Instead of “But”
What Unprocessed Grief Actually Feels Like
Do You Ever Miss the Woman You Used to Be?
My Trust Fall: Leaving Corporate
Certainty and Grief Can Live Together
Different Rooms, Same Doorway
Why Jumping Straight to Chapter Two Feels Hollow
What Was She Giving You?
Aparigraha: Loosening Your Grip on Identity
How Yoga Actually Brings You Home
The RAIN Practice
Seasons That Carry Transition in the Air
Coming Home Isn’t Going Back
Frequently Asked Questions

Welcome Back, and What I Did With My Summer

Welcome back to Radiantly Rooted with Rachel. I am Rachel Cline, and I’ve been practicing this inner work for over 25 years now. Hard to believe. And for the past 10 or so years, I have been walking beside other women through yoga, through mindfulness, and this work of staying connected to ourselves while everything around us keeps changing.

Now, I have taken a few weeks off from podcasting because not only did I have some projects to work on around the house and in my business, but also, summer is my absolute favorite season, and I really wanted to just step in and savor it while it’s here. And I don’t know about you, but with the longer days, it just feels like they fill up so quickly, and the time goes so fast.

I would love to hear down in the comments what you have been up to this summer. As far as my summer, we’ve done some camping, spent some time at the beach, got out on the river, and then of course that usual juggling of work and home and garden and pets and all the things, right? All the things that make life so magical and also so complicated.

I hope that you have had an opportunity over the last few weeks not only to savor the summer, but perhaps also to catch up on the podcast, because I don’t know about you, but even with my favorite podcasts, I just have a really hard time keeping up with every single episode. So taking a few weeks off, I hope, was as helpful to you as it was to me.

Even though stepping away was good for my heart, good for my soul, good for my productivity, coming back to you now feels even better. I have missed this routine.

The Grief We Don’t Talk About Enough

Today what I want to talk about is something that I feel like we don’t talk about enough, and that is this sense of grief that shows up when we realize there’s a part of our life that we can’t go back to.

Maybe your kids are older now, and the years when they needed you for every little thing, they’re behind you. Maybe you left a job, or a relationship changed shape, or your body feels different than it used to, or you’ve outgrown the version of you who carried you through a chapter that is finished.

You can’t go back to it now. And the reality is, you might not even want that old life back exactly as it was. You might remember how tired you were, or how much was being asked of you, how much you gave of yourself, how clearly you felt in your soul, in your gut, that something had to change. So wanting to move forward doesn’t mean that there’s nothing there that we need to grieve.

Sometimes that ache comes from knowing that even if you did want to go back, you couldn’t, right? Your kids can’t grow small again. You can’t step into a past version of a relationship. And as much as we sometimes want to, we can’t be the woman we were before that big thing that changed us.

That chapter is so important. That chapter still matters so much. It’s deeply personal, deeply important. It helped shape who you are, how you got to be where you are right now, and yet it’s behind us. So how do we close that chapter and move forward while acknowledging and honoring and accepting and even grieving what brought us here today?

You Can Feel Two Things at Once

It’s disorienting, trying to carry all of those mixed feelings. You can feel happy about where your life is going and still miss and feel nostalgic about where you’ve been. You can feel relieved and excited and grateful and sad all inside the same shift, the same transition. I wanted to bring this up today because I feel like most of us have learned that grief belongs only to death.

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Grief comes with any meaningful ending. It shows up the most when something that told us who we were has changed.

What I found in my own life and in the work that I’ve done with others is that grief comes with any meaningful ending. And I’ve come to think that it shows up the most when something that told us who we were has changed. A role that we’ve identified with has shifted, or a relationship, whether with a person or with a career, some kind of relationship has changed.

So we feel this sense of grief about the versions of ourselves that have taken us so far that we’re leaving behind now, right? That we’ve outgrown for whatever reason. That’s really what this episode is about. It’s not the sadness of a chapter closing, it’s the disorienting experience of looking around at a life that you built on purpose, and finding yourself in the space where you feel lost, where you’ve lost yourself in it. You can’t find yourself.

Why We Don’t Recognize This as Grief

What I found in all these years of work on myself and work with others is that there’s a reason so many of us don’t recognize this as grief. We’ve learned to name it when the loss was visible, right? So a marriage ended, or somebody passed away, or a diagnosis changed everything. In those circumstances, even if people don’t know exactly what to say, they understand that something big has happened. It’s visible from the outside looking in.

When the Loss Comes Inside Something Good

It gets a whole lot harder to explain when the loss comes inside of something good. A few examples of that, just to help bring it home. Your kids start school. You get the promotion at work. You retire. You leave the career that was wearing you down. Your daughter moves into her own place for the first time. You finally have some of the freedom that you spent years wishing for.

From the outside looking in, it’s harder to see that shift, right? Everyone else sees the milestones. They see the growth and the progress, something worth celebrating. You see all of that, too. You’re inside of it. You feel it, but at the same time, there’s this inner sense of sadness, of loss.

That is usually where the self-questioning comes in. Man, this is what I wanted. I’m so fortunate. I should be grateful. Other people have it so much harder than me. So before you even articulate how you’re feeling, before you share it with anybody, before you offer anybody else the chance to judge how you’re feeling, you’re judging that feeling for yourself, right?

I’ve been there. I’m raising my hand. If you are, too, put a hand up in the comments. I’d love to just show you that you’re not alone. You’re not the only one. We get really good at that, right? We smile through the changes. We smile through the transitions. We put on our happy face. We post the proud photo, and we write the celebratory caption, and we tell everybody how excited we are.

Back to School, the Clearest Example I Know

I don’t have kids myself. I have a niece and nephews, but in my experience with clients, I feel like back-to-school season is one of the clearest examples that I’ve come across. Think about the first day of kindergarten, or the first day of school for whatever age your child is, or your niece or your nephew or your friend’s kids.

That first-day picture goes up, right? And then there’s the kid with a backpack and the fresh haircut and the little sign with the grade on it. You write about how proud you are and how fast it went. But then you really think about how fast it went. And you’re sitting in your car, maybe in the school parking lot, maybe at work looking at your niece and your nephew and where has the time gone, and they’re taller than you now, and the tears come because you know you can’t go back.

Time only moves forward. What is the song? Anna Nalick. It’s “2 AM,” I think, or “Just Breathe,” and she says, “You can’t jump the tracks, we’re like cars on a cable.” Something like that. You know that a chapter has ended, and time continues to move forward, but there’s no real way to mark that passage of time. There’s no real way besides the beginning of the school year and end of the school year pictures, where you see just exactly how fast time is moving.

There’s so much room in the public story for pride, for celebration, for gratitude. But the grief, I feel like that is something we don’t name as much, we don’t share as much, right? It happens somewhere else, in private, in the car, in the shower, when you can’t sleep at night, late at night when the house finally gets still, or early in the morning before everybody else wakes up.

When Wellness Advice Makes It Harder

What I have found on my own journey is that the wellness world can actually make this harder, too. Think about all the messaging that we hear. Stay positive. Focus on gratitude. Look for the lesson. Trust the process. And I’m sure I have used all of those on myself and with clients before when the time was right. They all have their place. Those ideas can carry real comfort, and they can also become a way of rushing yourself toward acceptance before you’ve had time to admit or even process what you’ve lost.

Gratitude turns into self-correction, right? I’m sad, but I should be grateful. I miss that part of my life, but I’m so lucky. I’m struggling right now, but yeah, I chose this. When we do that, when we minimize how we’re feeling, we minimize our experience, and the feeling gets erased before it gets to tell you anything, before we get to process it, or learn from it, or evolve.

Try “And” Instead of “But”

I’m going to offer you a different perspective, a different shift, a different mindset. Instead of “but,” try the word “and.” Try the word “and,” because we talked about this earlier. It can be very disorienting, and there’s room for both. There’s room for more than one feeling at a time.

I am grateful for this life, and I miss who I used to be. I’m proud of my child, my niece, my nephew, my friend’s kid, whoever it is, and I miss being needed the way I used to be. I’m so excited about what I’m building, and I miss the people I used to talk to at work every day. I wanted this freedom, and I feel a little lost inside of it.

So I invite you to try one of those in your own words right now. Don’t overthink it. Out loud if you can, or if you’re alone in the car. And just think about what is something that you are feeling sad about, or you’re judging yourself for, or you’re feeling self-critical about, or you’re thinking, “Oh, even though I feel this way, I should feel this way.”

Is there a way that you can reframe it with that “and” statement so that you can acknowledge, admit to yourself, that there’s room for both? I am, fill in the blank, and fill in the blank. And if nothing’s coming up for you right now, that’s okay. There’s no pressure. Just keep that in the back of your mind.

It doesn’t have to be black and white. It doesn’t have to be either/or. There’s room for both. There’s room for very complex layers of feelings, and you’re allowed to experience all of that at the same time. That’s part of being human. Both halves get to be true. Neither one has to cancel the other one out.

What Unprocessed Grief Actually Feels Like

What I’ve found is that when we minimize our grief, when we invalidate our grief, when grief doesn’t feel valid, we push it off to the side, and we try to keep moving forward, right? Because there’s things to do. Life doesn’t slow down. The calendar needs managing. Messages need answers. You gotta get dinner on the table. Work keeps going, and people still count on you.

So from the outside, everything might look normal, but inside, you might feel this sense of heaviness that you can’t really explain and can’t put words to. You’ve built this life on purpose, and some days you feel like you’re going through the motions, living on autopilot, like you are watching yourself live this life from the outside looking in.

You might feel tired, exhausted, depleted, without actually knowing what’s causing it. What’s actually making you that tired. When you finally get a chance to slow down, instead of taking the opportunity to rest and relax, you feel restless. Because when you slow down, that’s when things have a chance to come up, right?

Filling Every Open Space on the Calendar

We avoid these things. We fill our days so full we don’t have time to process them. We fill every open space on the calendar, when what we really want is this feeling of just being settled, at ease, at peace in our own life. And then if it is a new chapter that we’ve stepped into with intention, oftentimes there’s this excitement that we expected to feel, and once we get there, once we step into it, it’s not quite what we expected it to be.

So we start wondering, “Gosh, I worked so hard for this. This is what I wanted. Why am I not more grateful? Why am I not finding contentment? Why am I not fulfilled?” And that’s when we start to question ourselves and wonder, “Gosh, what’s wrong with me?” I’m raising a hand, because I’ve been there. If you’ve been there, I’d love to hear in the comments, what were you going through? What was that transition like for you? It can be very disorienting.

Do You Ever Miss the Woman You Used to Be?

Here’s something we don’t say enough, so I’m going to own it, and I invite you to own it. Sometimes I miss the woman that I used to be. Do you ever miss the woman you used to be? Her energy, the way she could go all day and not need two days to recover. Her confidence, her creativity, the things she was curious about. You look at a photo from 10 years ago, and you know that’s your face, but you can’t really remember what it felt like to be her.

A Note on Getting Real Support

I want to be careful here, and I’m going to take a little detour, because these are some questions that deserve real care. Grief might be a very real part of the answer, and there may also be things happening in your body and your mind that need support from a professional, from a doctor or a therapist. I just want to bring that up here, because it’s so important to get the support we need.

Losing interest in things that used to excite you, real changes in how you function day to day, feeling detached from yourself or not being able to feel pleasure at all. Please take these seriously. Please get the support that you need.

Sometimes a woman is moving through an identity shift while she’s also running on years of broken sleep, right? While her hormones are shifting, while her family expects more from her than any one person can give. A lot of things can be true at once. It’s not either/or, it’s and. And not every hard feeling needs to become a transformation story. Curiosity about what’s actually happening is going to serve you better than any label ever will.

Stuck Between Chapters

When grief is part of the picture, dismissing it, kind of brushing it under the rug, that’s what’s going to leave us feeling stuck between chapters of our lives. One foot in one door, one foot in the other door, not fully in either place. Your body knows something has ended, something has shifted. But our mind likes to hold on, right? Our mind likes to insist that there’s no reason to be sad. Holding those two apart, the body and the mind, it takes energy that we could invest in other things in our day-to-day life.

When you are in that place with one foot in one door and one foot in the other door, you’re stuck between chapters. I’ve been there. The instinct is to hurry up and figure out what’s next, right? Hurry it up. Figure out what’s next. But sometimes the first step is not deciding where you’re going, it’s coming back to yourself, slowing down enough to come home to you.

My Trust Fall: Leaving Corporate

I call leaving corporate my trust fall, because I went all in on my dreams, in choosing my plan A. I wanted the change. I had worked so hard for it. I knew that I didn’t fit into that life anymore.

And so the grief that came with leaving kind of caught me off guard, right? I was really excited about what I was building. I still am to this day. And I missed the steady paycheck. But more than that, I missed the everyday connection with my colleagues. Even with working remotely most of the time over the last few years, there was this built-in community in that role, and it went away the same day that I left.

I was moving through deep burnout at the time. Also a fun surprise. I had a feeling it was coming, but I thought that I had done enough self-care to ward it off. Turns out I had not.

There’s another lesson in there, that even a woman as versed as I am in self-care and nervous system regulation and burnout prevention can get into that state of burnout when we push ourselves too hard, when we have dreams that are bigger than us, commitments that are bigger than us, and when we have a heart so big that we just want to pour it all out into the world, right?

When I left corporate, I realized that I was totally burnt out. Totally burnt out. So I didn’t recognize grief as grief right up front, because I was just trying to get through the burnout. I felt a little bit more lonely. I felt a bit more unanchored. You know the image of a boat untied that’s adrift out at sea or out on the lake? That’s kind of how I felt. Lost.

Even though I’m very self-disciplined, even though I’m very self-motivated, even though working remotely I had structured most of my days on my own, I didn’t have that person to check in with me. “Hey, can I run this idea past you? Hey, can I check in with you on this?”

What Actually Helped

Even though I know better, I tried to solve it from my mind. Instead of coming back down into my body, I tried to come up with this big plan, right? To think my way through things. And even though I knew in my core that wasn’t what I really needed, I tried it anyway because, I don’t know, it gave me something to focus my energy on. I was like, “All right. When the ground moves beneath us, capable women, we make a plan,” right? Not necessarily, because it didn’t help.

What actually helped was getting still enough to slow down, to notice that I was holding my breath, that I wasn’t breathing right, that I was in this anxious state that really was asking me to slow down and connect with myself internally, inside.

Yoga nidra, shavasana in the middle of the day, meditation, journaling, breathwork, even bilateral tapping where you take your hands to opposite shoulders and just tap back and forth. These were all coping tools that I used to help me get through that stage and season of my life. They helped me to find my way back to myself, to get out of that overthinking mind, and come back to that connected state between body and mind so that I could actually tune in and connect with what I wanted next.

Certainty and Grief Can Live Together

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You can be 100% sure you’ve made the right decision, and you can still grieve what that choice required of you.

One of the things that I find people are surprised about is that you can be 100% sure you’ve made the right decision, and you can still grieve what that choice required of you. You can grieve the people and the version of yourself that you left behind. Certainty and grief can live together, and I think that happens a lot more often than we ever talk about.

Here’s what I have noticed in nearly every woman that I work with, whatever the details of her particular circumstance and situation are. You spend a long time becoming the woman that your life needed you to be. You got very good at it, and now you’re standing in that life wondering, questioning where you fit inside of it. Have you ever been there? I know I have, and it can look completely different depending on where you are standing.

Different Rooms, Same Doorway

Maybe you’ve been through many of these versions in your lifetime.

The Mother

For the mother, it might be the day her child ties their own shoes and remembers their own water bottle. You might have wished for that for years. The relief is real, but so is the heartache. “Oh, they don’t need me that way anymore.” And then that question underneath, “Why do I miss my kids being little?”

I think it comes back more to that identity. Who am I when I’m not running everybody’s day? You’re still the mother, they just don’t need you the same way, but being needed in that way was how you built your identity. It’s how you knew where you fit. As these roles shift, as these identities shift, it can be very difficult for us to navigate where we fit and how we fit and how we are evolving into these new and expanding roles.

The Woman in the Caregiving Years

What about the woman in the caregiving years? Watching a parent change while the parent is still here, and grieving the relationship that you always hoped you might have with them. You get to a point where your kids are more independent. You thought maybe there’s a little more room for me now, and then that space filled with appointments and paperwork and family members who just assumed you’d handle it.

Maybe your siblings are helping if you have some, maybe they’re not, but there can be a sense of anger right next to the guilt, and it doesn’t matter how much you love your parent, how much you would do for them, how much you want to support them. It doesn’t cancel out what caregiving can take from you, and that is a kind of tired that doesn’t need another reminder to practice self-care. Sometimes it might need paid help and a direct conversation about who’s doing what. Sometimes it means sitting down and letting yourself cry, letting yourself journal, letting yourself reflect on all of the changes and what you’re going through.

The Woman Whose Work Has Ended

What about the woman whose work has ended or shifted? Maybe it’s retirement or a layoff or our own decision to walk away. Whatever it is, so much of our identity is tied to this role that we filled for however long. It reaches into everything. Work gave us structure and independence and recognition, people to talk to, and the sense that what we did mattered to somebody.

Now, with that role behind us, we might wonder, “Who am I without that title? Who am I without that role, those expectations?” And decades of experience can start to feel like they were never really there, right? You can be ready for the next chapter, excited for the next chapter, but still miss the woman who knew how to walk into a room and do that job well.

Grief for a Life That Never Happened

And for a lot of women, it’s grief for a life that never happened at all. The marriage or the relationship that we pictured, the kids you had or the ones you didn’t, the health we thought we’d keep, the family relationship we thought would heal eventually one day.

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There’s no funeral for the career that you never pursued, and nobody gathers around to celebrate the version of your life that only existed in our imagination. But that doesn’t make the loss imaginary.

Different rooms, right? We’ve talked about a few different examples today, but it’s the same doorway. Something that told you who you were has shifted, it’s changed.

Why Jumping Straight to Chapter Two Feels Hollow

Here’s the part that I invite you to really take with you today. Almost everything I’ve found out there wants you to move straight into chapter two. Find your purpose. Reinvent yourself. Set the goal. Build the habit. Get the confidence back.

Midlife reinvention turns into one more thing we can be really good at, and a woman sets down one demanding identity and then immediately feels like she should find her calling or start a business, travel, overhaul her health, or become somebody new by Christmastime or by New Year’s.

Let’s take a breath together, okay, my friend? Take a deep breath in, and let it out. I’m going to invite you to slow all that down because chapter one hasn’t been honored yet, so we’re not moving on to chapter two. That’s why jumping straight to reinvention can feel so hollow. You can make the vision board. You can buy the new journal, take the course, change your hair. See? Did that. Those things can be wonderful, and none of them touch what’s actually coming to a close.

What Was She Giving You?

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Before you ask who you are becoming, sit down with who you’re leaving behind and ask what she was giving you.

Here’s what I’m going to ask of you. Before you ask who you are becoming, sit down with who you’re leaving behind and ask what she was giving you.

Being needed may have given you a purpose. Producing, feeling productive, may have made you feel worthy. Being the capable one, the strong one, might have kept you safe. Holding it all together might have given you some control, or some sense of control. Maybe your work gave you a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging. Your old role in the family might have made you more visible, might have made you feel more needed.

There’s no judgment in any of this. It just tells us what the old identity was doing for you, and I think that matters a lot more than we think, because we so often try to replace the role when what we’re really needing, or what we’re really missing, is the need in our lives that it was meeting or fulfilling.

We Replace the Role, Not the Need

You might think that you need another big project when what you miss is being needed. You miss being in control. You miss being the capable one who can juggle all of these things happening at the same time. You want your adult daughter to call every day when what you miss is being central to her life. You want your old job back when what you actually miss is having those people to talk to.

So I invite you to sit with that for just a second, just a moment, and ask yourself, when you think back on your life and you think about what you’re missing now, versions of you, roles you’ve outgrown or stepped beyond. Life shifts constantly. When you think about the version of you that was in that space, what was she giving you? And see if you can frame it in just one sentence. What was she giving you?

And if something came up for you right now, because we feel these things in our body, right? It might be a feeling in our gut. It might be tightness in our breath. I’d love for you to share it with me personally. I’d love to support you on this journey. You can head on over to Radiantly Rooted Yoga on Instagram, and you don’t have to explain the whole story. Just let me know what came up for you. One sentence is plenty.

Aparigraha: Loosening Your Grip on Identity

In yoga, there’s a teaching called Aparigraha, and this gets translated into non-grasping. Most of us hear that and we think of stuff, right? Of not needing more things. But what I found in myself and in the women that I work with is that our tightest grip, what we hold onto the most, it’s not always on possessions, but it’s on identity. On being the one who handles it, the one who’s capable, who’s needed, who juggles it all, who makes all the plans, who takes care of everything.

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Our tightest grip isn’t always on possessions. It’s on identity.

The woman who we were at 32, who could run on four hours of sleep and a granola bar. I don’t know about you, but that is not me anymore. Aparigraha does not ask you to stop loving who you were. Instead, it asks you to loosen your grip enough that something else can be set in them.

How Yoga Actually Brings You Home

You’ve probably seen the phrase “come home to yourself” about 400 times this year. It’s on tote bags now. It’s a beautiful sentence. I’ve been using it for years, but what I found is that almost nobody who says it tells you how, and that’s the part that I care about the most. Because for me, the how has always been yoga. Not the workout, not the flexibility, not whether you can put your foot behind your head, but the philosophy, the practice, the whole way of living that yoga actually is beneath and beyond the poses that we see on Instagram.

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Your body usually knows you’ve lost your way before you have the words for it.

Here’s why it works. Your body usually knows you’ve lost your way before you have the words for it. It knows before you’ve gotten it into your journal. It shows up as that jaw that keeps clenching, the breath that you’re holding, shoulders you find up around your ears in the grocery line. You can do your best to analyze and understand a transition, a shift, completely with your mind, and you can still be carrying it in your body.

Yoga gives you somewhere to come back to yourself. Not the woman you think you should be, not the woman you were 10 years ago, but the woman who’s here today. You start to notice your breath. You start to notice what you’re holding onto. You notice what you’re feeling before you rush to explain it away or talk yourself out of it. There’s room for all of it. And, not or.

You practice staying with yourself even when something uncomfortable comes up. That might be for one breath, and then another one. And I know that might sound small, but it’s not. It’s not. Because the way you meet yourself in the practice, on the mat, it’s the same way you’re going to meet yourself in the school parking lot at 11:00 PM and in the middle of a Wednesday when the grief shows up without any warning.

Name It as Specifically as You Can

Off the mat, it helps to name what you’re feeling as specifically as you can. “I’ve been feeling off.” Yes, that’s valid, but it doesn’t really give it much shape, right? So try instead to really articulate what’s coming up for you. I’m grieving being needed the way I used to be. I’m grieving the woman who could handle that pace. I miss the people I used to see every day at work. I’m grieving the future that I thought that I would have.

You can fill in the blank with your own words. I’m grieving. And whatever came up first is probably the one you want to work through right now, but your choice, right? Your practice.

The RAIN Practice

I’m not sure if you’ve heard about the RAIN practice. It’s recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture. I really love this practice.

Recognizing might sound like this. This is grief. Or this is the part of me who doesn’t know where she belongs in this new version of my life just yet. Recognizing where you are now. How are you feeling?

And then allowing. That means letting it be there without trying to fix or change anything. Just, ah, that’s where I am today. Okay.

So recognize and allow, and then investigate, right? This is curiosity, and it’s a body question as much as a mind question. Where is it sitting? Is it a tightness in your throat, a pressure in your chest, a weight in your stomach? What do you miss the most? And just go gently. You don’t have to come back with an answer. Investigate. Be curious.

And then nurturing is how you respond to what you found. It might be a hand over your heart, an acknowledgement. Of course this hurts. Growing pains, right? That part of my life mattered. Nurturing is how you respond to what you found.

A few moments to breathe or write or cry or lie down might be exactly what this moment is asking you for. You don’t have to finish grieving in one sitting. Instead, you’re building a relationship with yourself that can hold what’s really true for you in this moment, and that is a lifelong practice. It’s not a one-time event.

What Changes When You Let the Grief Exist

Letting the grief exist and coexist with everything else around you, it doesn’t change the circumstances. It doesn’t change where you are, where you’re finding yourself lost in your own life. Acknowledging that, recognizing it, being curious about it, nurturing it. Your children are going to keep growing. Your old roles are going to stay behind you. Our bodies keep changing. Relationships take on new shapes, and an ending is still an ending.

What changes is how you’re living with yourself. You stop treating every feeling as a problem to solve or correct or brush under the rug. Sadness stops being an indication that you’re doing life wrong somehow. Instead, you start trusting that your feelings are valid, and they’re giving you information. It might feel like letting a long breath out, that big sigh for the first time in a long time. Let it go.

As you acknowledge and get curious about these feelings, as you let everything be there together, the messy middle, what I found is that you often get more present with the people right in front of you. You can sit across the breakfast table from your daughter, and you can actually see the person she is today instead of spending the whole meal thinking about the toddler she used to be. You can walk into retirement or a new career or a different season of mothering without pretending that you know exactly how it’s going to unfold in front of you.

You can miss your old colleagues and still love your freedom. You can mourn a dream and stay open to what’s still possible. So often we get so stuck on the past that we struggle to move forward. What I want for you is to allow yourself to live the chapter that’s actually here right in front of you right now, and there’s no rushing into that.

We need to move through the grief of who we’re leaving behind, what we’re leaving behind, to evolve and grow into the woman and the version of us that we’re becoming for this next stage and season of our lives. That grief is still going to come back sometimes. It might be a song, a birthday, an old picture, the way the light hits in September, an empty room. It doesn’t mean you’re backsliding. Instead, it means there’s another piece of that grief, that emotion, that’s ready to be processed, felt, and released.

Seasons That Carry Transition in the Air

Some times of the year carry transition in the air, and for me, I feel like this is one of them. As I am recording this, it is early August, and so the evenings are getting dark a little bit earlier. I know that everybody with kids is out there getting school supplies and school clothes. My niece was trying to tell me about her aesthetic the other day, and I was like, “Wow, she’s growing up so fast.” The light is changing, and our routines are shifting. It can feel like a little bit of grief about summer coming to an end.

The kids are going to move into different grades, new schools, new apartments. We’re going to get back into our normal fall routines. Even if you don’t have kids, like I don’t, or even if you’re long past raising school-aged kids, it’s still all around us, right? So many of the people we’re talking to, the energy in the stores. There’s a beginning and an ending that come together at the same time.

A Few Questions to Sit With

I invite you to just check in. Let this be a moment where you pause and you check in with yourself. What feels complete for you? As this stage or season of your life is evolving, what feels complete? What are you setting down? What are you stepping into? What space is opening up that you haven’t looked at yet?

And those questions don’t need to. I don’t know, I’m an over-thinker, and so I invite you not to overthink it. You don’t need a five-year plan. Just let them meet you at the transition you’re in before it catches you off guard next time you’re walking back to your car in the parking lot, right?

So just think about, what are you ready to let go of? What feels complete in your life? What are you ready to set down? What are you stepping into, or who? What version of you are you stepping into? And as we release, acknowledge, find gratitude for the past, what’s opening up ahead of us that we may not have been prepared for or ready for yet, that we haven’t looked at yet?

What If Feeling It Pulls Me Under?

If you are worried that letting yourself feel this is going to pull you down, I understand that, especially if we’ve learned early on that big feelings were dangerous to let out. What I have found is the opposite. At least in my experience, the feeling gets bigger when I spend years trying to fight it off.

What we resist persists, right? And then you can’t shut it off. It just keeps going in circles, ruminating thoughts, the same thoughts loop, and you judge yourself for having them, and nothing moves. Meeting yourself where you are, even if it’s scary, even if you don’t really want to admit it, it feels different. You notice what’s there with a gentle understanding, with truthfulness, with honesty, with compassion. You feel a manageable amount of it, what you’re ready for. You respond with care, and then you go back to your day.

You’ll do it more than once. It takes time to process. And there’s no deadline. There’s no rush. That’s the part I feel like we always try to rush through this life. Let yourself feel the things.

Coming Home Isn’t Going Back

Women come to me asking, “I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what my role is right now. How do I find my way back to myself? What are the steps?” And I have to tell you, I get it. I understand that question to the depths of my soul. There was a version of you who felt familiar. She knew what she wanted. Confidence and energy and creativity came easier. And of course you miss that version.

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I don’t think you need to go back. I think you need to come home.

But I don’t think you need to go back. I think you need to come home. And I want to be clear about what I mean by that and what the difference is, because coming home isn’t rewinding. There’s no original untouched version of you sitting somewhere back in 1998 waiting to be recovered. You have been shaped and molded by every single thing since then, and you’re still being shaped. And there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s a life.

Coming home to you means finding what’s been true underneath all of it, the part of you that was there before the roles and will still be there after the roles, and getting to know her as she is right now.

Svadyaya, or Self-Study

Yoga, of course, has a word for that. I know you’re not surprised to hear me say that. Svadyaya. It means, or it’s been translated as, self-study. Not self-improvement, not self-criticism, which is what a lot of us do when we turn our attention inward. Study, curiosity, awareness. The first step in my A.L.I.G.N. framework: awareness.

This is just being curious and watching yourself with the same interest that you would give a friend that you were trying to understand better. That’s what the practice is really for. You get on the mat perhaps, you notice your breath and your grip and your reaction to the pose, even if it’s a pose you don’t like, and you start to see how you meet things.

Small Experiments

We can carry that same attention into the rest of our lives, and it comes back to these small experiments. What gives you energy these days? What have you been curious about lately? What are you still carrying that isn’t yours to carry anymore, maybe never was? What would you try if it never had to be useful or impressive or profitable? Where do you feel most like yourself? And who in your life knows you as more than what you do for them?

It can feel like we are wearing a mask, right? I remember at a certain point in my life when I really felt lost, I really felt like I had given so much of myself to this relationship, and then I realized that I needed to move away from that. And I did not know who I was. I didn’t know what brought me joy. I didn’t know what made me happy. I didn’t know what I liked, what I wanted to do. For so many years, I had poured everything I was into what I thought was making this relationship work, when really I realized that I was just giving myself up.

That’s a story for another day. But what helped me at that time was this small experiment. Every day I would ask myself, “Okay, I don’t know who I am right now. I don’t know what makes me happy. I don’t know what brings me joy.” So every day I was on a mission to find one thing that made me happy, one thing that brought me joy.

You take a class, you call a friend, you sit in the park by yourself for an hour. You try a hobby. And you don’t have to turn it into a business, just have fun with it. You let yourself want something before you know where it’s going to lead. And then over time, you end up building this life where you are known as a whole person.

You are a whole person. You feel whole. You feel complete. You feel fulfilled. Not just helpful, productive, capable, or needed, though those things can all coexist, but you’ve reconnected with who you are, with what lights you up. And when you reconnect with that part of yourself, you are more radiantly rooted in the core of who you are. Your light shines from the inside out.

Honoring Her Is Not Going Backward

I know that there may always be some tenderness around the woman that you used to be, the life that you had. You can miss a chapter, even if it’s one that you would never choose to repeat. You can love your children exactly as they are today and remember who they were, all those little versions of them on their way up. Freedom can feel wonderful while part of you misses feeling needed the old way.

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Honoring her is not going backward. It is gathering up the parts of yourself that still belong with you, and leaving behind what she can’t carry with her anymore.

The relationship was real. The role was real. The dream was real, and the woman who lived that life was real, too. She got you to where you are today. Honoring her is not going backward. It is gathering up the parts of yourself that still belong with you, and leaving behind what she can’t carry with her anymore.

Maybe this season isn’t asking you to figure everything out. Maybe it’s not asking you to reinvent yourself by Christmas, or have an answer ready when somebody asks you what’s next. You don’t have to have it all figured out. Maybe it’s asking you to come home to you. And maybe you get there not by deciding who to become, but by listening to your body, to your breath, to the knowing underneath all the noise about who you’re supposed to be by now.

Who gets to decide that? You. And that’s what yoga is for. That’s what it’s always been for. You don’t have to have every answer. You may just have this, which I think is worth more. I don’t know exactly where I’m going yet. I just trust myself to find the way.

This Is the Work I Do With Women One to One

This is the work that I do with women in my one-to-one coaching, and I built it the way I did because these feelings never come at a convenient time, right? They come in the school supply aisle. They come after you scroll past somebody else’s first day photo. They come when your adult kid says, “I’ve got it, Mom.” Or at night when the house is finally still and you can hear yourself think. A scheduled call two weeks out is a long way from the moment the feeling is alive.

That’s why inside my coaching, you can message me exactly when it happens, and we slow the moment down together, and we listen to what’s underneath it. Sometimes your body’s asking for care. Sometimes your life’s asking for a decision. Sometimes you need to slow down and reconnect with who you are at the core.

Thank you again for tuning in to Radiantly Rooted. I hope that this episode has been helpful for you. I encourage you to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if anything landed for you in this episode, share it in the comments, or share it with a friend who could use this message today. All right, my friend, I will see you next time on another episode of Radiantly Rooted with Rachel.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you grieve something that isn’t a death?

Yes. Grief comes with any meaningful ending, and it shows up most strongly when something that told you who you were has changed. That includes an empty nest, a career ending, a body that works differently than it used to, a caregiving season, or a future you were counting on that isn’t going to happen. The loss is real even when there’s no funeral for it.

What is a midlife identity shift?

A midlife identity shift happens when a role you built yourself around changes or ends, and you’re left standing in a life you created on purpose wondering where you fit inside of it. It often arrives disguised as good news: a promotion, retirement, a child growing up, freedom you worked years for. That’s exactly what makes it so hard to name and so easy to judge yourself for feeling.

Why do I feel sad when everything in my life is going well?

Because gratitude and grief aren’t opposites. When we use “but” to correct ourselves (“I’m sad, but I should be grateful”), we erase the feeling before it gets to tell us anything. Try “and” instead. I am grateful for this life, and I miss who I used to be. Both halves get to be true, and neither one cancels the other one out.

How do I use the RAIN practice for grief?

RAIN stands for recognize, allow, investigate, nurture. Recognize what’s here by naming it (“this is grief”). Allow it to be there without fixing or changing anything. Investigate with curiosity, and make it a body question as much as a mind question: where is it sitting, what do you miss most? Then nurture, which is how you respond to what you found, whether that’s a hand over your heart, a few minutes to breathe, or letting yourself cry. You don’t have to finish grieving in one sitting.

How do I actually come home to myself instead of just reading about it?

Start with the question underneath the question. Before you decide who you’re becoming, sit with who you’re leaving behind and ask what she was giving you: purpose, worth, safety, control, belonging. Then run small experiments to find what’s true for you now, and use your practice to notice what your body already knows. If you’d rather not do that piece alone, that’s exactly what my 1:1 coaching is for. You can message me in the moment the feeling is alive, and we slow it down together. Apply here.