The First Last Breath I Ever Witnessed: What Death Taught Me About Grief

A Year After I Opened for Sir Richard Branson, and the Resilience Lessons That Stayed

A year ago today, the mountains held me. I remember the thin, bright air of Deer Valley, Utah, and the way an unexpected invitation can rearrange a life. My travel season was winding down, or so I thought, when Shauna’s message landed in my inbox. Come to the mountains. Take the stage with Sir Richard Branson. When the universe hands you a door like that, you don’t knock politely. You walk through it. Loudly. With sparkles. The night I spoke to a room full of change-makers That evening, I stood before a room of dreamers and builders and delivered my signature keynote, “The Five Secrets to Strengthening Your Resilience Muscle.” I spoke about bouncing forward through grief and trauma, not back, never back, and about the heartbeat behind The Global Resilience Project: the radical idea that our hardest stories, told out loud, become medicine for someone else. The energy in that room was electric. I could feel it move through the rows like the weather. And when it was over, the feedback wrapped around me like a warm coat on a cold summer night. Thirty seconds with Richard Branson The next morning came soft and unhurried. An intimate breakfast, a small circle of us, no fanfare and no fluff. Just stories and hard-won wisdom from a man who built an empire out of big ideas and bold action. I had thirty seconds with him. Just enough for an awkward hug, a quick photo, and to press a copy of Resilient A.F.: Stories of Resilience Vol. 2 [https://blairkaplan.ca/books/] into his hands. Here is what Richard Branson said that morning, words I’ve turned over like river stones in the year since: * “If you don’t come up with an idea to make someone’s life better, you don’t have a business.” * “Kindness is so important.” * “You have to believe in what you’re doing.” * “If you make people smile, people will appreciate that.” Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs aren’t new at all. They’re reminders of what you already know and already practice, handed back to you by someone whose voice makes you finally listen. That was exactly what I needed that week. What I carried back down the mountain A year later, I’m still unpacking those thirty seconds. I don’t know if Richard Branson ever opened the book. But I know he held it. I know the stories inside it are still making waves across the world, in inboxes and book clubs and quiet bedside-table moments where someone realizes they are not alone in what they’ve survived. The four truths he offered in that Utah dining room turned out to be a compass. Make a life better. Be kind. Believe. Make people smile. I’ve returned to them again and again this year, every time I’ve taken a stage, written a page, or sat across from someone who didn’t think they’d make it through. The mountains gave me a moment. What I’ve done with the year is the real keynote. The takeaway, one year on If Richard Branson believes in making people smile, then I think we’re on the right track. Resilience was never about hardening into something that can’t be broken. It’s about staying soft enough to be moved, and strong enough to keep walking forward anyway. A year ago, the mountains held me. This year, I’m learning to be the steady ground for someone else. XX Blair P.S. I am booking keynotes and workshops for fall and winter, into 2027. Interested in having me speak at your event or to your organization? Let’s talk: blair@blairkaplan.ca. Where’s Blair? * June 23-24, Unleash AI for Business Summit Learn the RIGHT Way to Use AI — And Get More Done in 1 Week Than Most People Will All Year For anyone ready to create more content, faster, without the burnout — whether you’re building a business, scaling a side gig, or looking to work smarter. SIGN UP HERE. [https://www.unleashaiforbusiness.com/link.php?id=864&h=9439bd982a] * June 24, online, Beyond Grief: a Roundtable on Living Fully After Loss What happens when grief isn’t as heavy as it once was? This candid, multi-voice conversation explores what it means to live fully after loss. While much of the grief space centers on surviving, this roundtable makes space for what comes after the initial sorrow that follows loss and life-altering change, when life begins to expand again, often in unexpected ways. Together, grief and resilience leaders, podcasters, and grief-informed creators explore meaning-making, post-traumatic growth, and the nuanced reality of carrying grief while also reclaiming joy, purpose, and possibility. This is the conversation for everyone who needed to know grief shifts, that joy and aliveness are possible, and for everyone who’s arrived at lighter and isn’t sure what to do with that. REGISTER HERE. [https://letsreimagine.org/76768/beyond-grief-a-roundtable-on-living-fully-after-loss] * June 25, Kamloops, BC I will be in Kamloops. BC, MCing a golf tournament for a private client. * June 28-July 2, Sawtooth Survival Skills Gathering, Sawtooth Mountains, Idaho, with Hazen Audel At the Sawtooth Survival Skills Gathering [https://www.hazenaudel.com/primitive-skills-gathering-2026], we believe that there’s nothing quite like the bond formed around a campfire, learning to craft a shelter with your own hands, or trading knowledge with those who share your love for the outdoors. Our gathering brings together individuals of all skill levels who seek to deepen their understanding of traditional skills, self-sufficiency, and natural living. Over the course of several days, participants will immerse themselves in hands-on workshops, demonstrations, and meaningful discussions led by experienced instructors. All the while enjoying the beautiful Sawtooth Mountains, Payette River, and natural hot springs. Whether you’re here to hone your bushcraft skills, practice primitive fire-starting techniques, or simply take a step back from the hustle and bustle of modern life, you’ll find a welcoming community and a place to reconnect with the wild. * August 3, Birmingham, Alabama Alana and I have been invited to be the keynote speakers at Integrating the Pieces: A Workshop on Resilience, Loss and Grief for the University of Montevallo. * August 23-29, Porto, Portugal I will be co-facilitating the Portugal Grief Trip alongside Rachel from Happy Grieving. There is still room for you. Learn more and book your spot! [https://grieftrips.com/portugal] October 2-4, La Le Jeune, BC Join me, Kayla and Simone this May at the Regulated Retreat [https://lljresort.com/regulated/]. I’m stoked to be speaking at Regulated - Autumn Exhale, a three-day nervous system reset retreat for people who are done surviving and ready to feel steady again, because most of us don’t need more motivation; we need regulation. And that’s what makes this experience different. This retreat blends nervous system science, movement, nature, and honest conversation to help your body downshift and reset. I’m honoured to create and be a part of this experience and would love to share it with you! How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading How We Navigate Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe [https://howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

MAYhem: The Highest Highs, the Lowest Low, and the Mother’s Day That Ended My Marriage

Well, May. You had some high highs and very low lows. As I write this, I’m on my sister’s couch in Winnipeg, Manitoba. If I’m being honest, this is the post I almost didn’t write. It’s easier to show you the highlight reel. The stages, the microphones, the new friends, the good hair days. It’s harder to tell you that in the same thirty-one days, I had some of the proudest moments of my career and the single most devastating day of my personal life. May was mayhem. So here’s the whole story, the parts that made me glow and the parts that brought me to my knees. The short version: In one month, I hosted a retreat, spoke at events, recorded podcasts, co-MCed my Rotary club’s signature gala, and connected with brilliant people at one of the biggest tech conferences in North America. My marriage also ended on Mother’s Day. The Highs It started with Regulated The month opened with the work I’m proudest of in this world: Regulated, a retreat I got to host right in my own backyard. Twenty-one people. Eleven communities. One retreat. They came from Cloverdale, Burnaby, Prince George, Sooke, Vancouver, Terrace, Williams Lake, Lake Country, Surrey, Sun Peaks, and Kamloops. They drove. They flew. They showed up tired, brave, and ready for something to be different. Over one “weekend,” I watched people put down the weight they had been carrying for years. I watched walls come down quietly, without anyone having to say a word. I watched strangers become the kind of people who just get it. It was so special to plan a retreat in my backyard, to drive thirty minutes instead of flying thirty hours. Workshops, movement, nature, writing, colouring, a bonfire by the lake, stories, laughs, tears, free time, and lifelong friendships made. We did not fix anything that weekend. We did not have to. We just remembered what it feels like to be steady. To breathe. To exist in a body that is not in survival mode. That is the work, and it is the most important work I know how to do. To every single person who said yes to themselves that weekend: I will carry this with me. You changed the room just by walking into it. And, who would have thought that I needed this retreat just as much as each person there? Thank you to Lac Le Jeune Resort [https://www.instagram.com/laclejeuneresort/] for hosting us, to our incredible speakers Simone Lovell [https://www.instagram.com/simonenlovell/] and Stacey Owen [https://www.instagram.com/heystaceyowen/], and to everyone who trusted us with their hearts. Extra love to our sponsors who believe in what we are building: Castanet Kamloops [https://www.instagram.com/castanetkamloopsdigital/] and Tourism Kamloops [https://www.instagram.com/tourismkamloops/]. It was such an honour that we decided to do it again. Regulated returns October 2 to 4, so save the date. [https://lljresort.com/regulated/] If something in you just stirred reading this, pay attention to that, and come join us this fall. Web Summit Vancouver: AI, authenticity, and the right connections Then came Vancouver. I joined Web Summit Vancouver (May 11 to 14 at the Vancouver Convention Centre) alongside my friend Lou, and it was everything I hoped a conference like that would be. The conversation I kept coming back to was the tension between AI and authenticity. As the technology gets more capable, the human signal becomes more valuable, not less. The people who win in this next era won’t be the ones who automate their voice away. They’ll be the ones who get clearer about who they actually are and why anyone should listen. But the real win at Web Summit wasn’t a session. It was the people. The hallway conversations, the people we met networking, the “wait, you do that? I do that too” moments. I left Vancouver with a fuller phone, a fuller heart, and a few collaborations I’m genuinely excited about. I recorded some epic podcast interviews I also sat down for a run of podcast interviews this month, and I mean it when I say they were some of my favourite conversations to date. There’s something clarifying about being asked good questions. You hear yourself answer and realize what you actually believe. A few times this month, I surprised myself. Speaking locally, and remembering why I do this I spoke at events close to home, too. The big international stages get a lot of my attention, but the local rooms get my heart. These are the people in my own backyard, the ones I’ll see at the coffee shop next week. Showing up for them is its own kind of reward. Co-MCing A Bollywood Affair And then there was the night I got to co-MC A Bollywood Affair, my Rotary club’s signature event. Colours, music, a room full of people who give their time and money to make our community better, and me on the mic, helping hold it all together. Service has been my anchor for a long time. This month, more than I knew at the time, I was going to need that anchor. The Low On Mother’s Day, of all days And then there’s the part I choose to keep sharing, because leaving it out would make everything above a lie of omission. On Mother’s Day, of all the days on the calendar, my marriage ended. The Wasband (yes, that’s what I call him now) made it final. So, I packed up most of my life and put it in storage. I don’t have a tidy paragraph for this. There isn’t one. You spend years building a life, and then it fits into boxes, and the boxes go into a unit with a roll-up door and a padlock, and you stand in a quieter house, wondering how we got here? Mother’s Day will never be a neutral square on the calendar for me again. It was already hard because my mom and baby are both dead. Now, the day is even darker. I will be okay, and I can already feel myself healing. I’m making my peace with it slowly, the way you make peace with anything that rearranges you. What May taught me Here’s what I keep landing on, and it’s the reason I’m publishing this instead of deleting it. Two things can be true at once. You can be thriving professionally and grieving privately. You can stand in front of a crowd and feel whole, then drive home to an emptier house and feel like the floor is gone. Neither one cancels the other out. They just live side by side, the way real lives actually do. The highlight reel was real. So was the storage unit. And I think the bravest thing any of us can do is refuse to pretend otherwise. There’s a strange poetry in it, too. I spent the month teaching other people how to put down the weight, how to come out of survival mode and back into their bodies. And then life handed me my own version of that lesson. I’m doing the work I tell everyone else to do. Turns out it’s just as hard from the inside. May tried to take me out. It didn’t. I’m still here, a little more cracked open, a lot more honest, and strangely more myself than I’ve been in a long time. So here’s to June. I have no idea what you’re going to be. But after May? I’m ready for you. XX Blair P.S. I am in Winnipeg until June 23 and am open for speaking, workshops, coffee dates and anything else that is rad. Please connect. How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading How We Navigate Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe [https://howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Fifteen Years Fits in a 5x10 Storage Locker

I stood in the doorway this weekend and looked at what’s left. Boxes stacked in a concrete room the size of a parking space, behind a roll-up door with a padlock I bought from the storage facility office. Fifteen years of a life together. And I’m not even done. Two more loads at least before I leave for Winnipeg in June. That’s the math nobody warns you about when a marriage ends. Not the lawyer fees. Not the custody calendar. The math of square footage. The brutal, quiet arithmetic of this is what’s left. The lie we tell ourselves about “stuff” I’ve said it out loud maybe forty times in the last month, to friends, to my online followers, to the woman at the storage facility who asked if I needed insurance: it’s just stuff. And I mean it. I do. I’m not the girl who confuses decorative pillows with a marriage. I know the difference between a thing and a life. I’ve read the books. I am doing the work. I can recite the line about how we don’t own our possessions, they own us, and I can say it with a straight face while I’m taping a box labelled CLOSET MISC and trying not to think about the memories made in these outfits. It’s just stuff is true, and it is also a lie, and both of those things can sit in the same sentence without breaking it. It’s just stuff. And also, that’s the shirt we bought on a date, at a show. That’s the cutting board that was given to us by our neighbour. That’s the box of Christmas ornaments we collected, one for each of us, per year, on purpose, like a project. Like we were building something. We were building something. What distillation actually feels like There’s a word for what happens when you reduce something to its essence: distillation. It sounds clean. Scientific. Like you end up with the pure stuff, the truth of the thing, and you throw the rest away. It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like standing in a 5x10 concrete room and realizing that fifteen years of inside jokes, shared playlists, arguments about the thermostat, road trips, holidays, the specific way someone says your name when they love you, none of that fits in a box. None of that got packed. None of that is in here. What’s in here is the residue. The physical artifacts of a life that doesn’t exist anymore. And the cruel part is that the residue is what you have to deal with. The mortgage. The furniture. The padlock. The two more loads are still waiting at the home we built together. The intangible part, the part that actually mattered, just evaporates, and you don’t get to box that up and decide what to do with it later. It’s gone before you’ve finished the inventory. I will rebuild. I know I will. I know this part too. People keep telling me, and they’re right. You rebuild. You get a new home. You buy a new couch. You can start fresh. The boxes get unpacked, or they don’t, and either way, life moves. I believe that. I’m not writing this from despair. I’m writing this from the strange, flat clarity of the afternoon after a load, when the door is locked and there’s nothing left to do today except drive home to a place that isn’t home anymore either. Winnipeg is coming. June is coming. The next chapter is closer than it feels. My single mom, Sharon, always taught me to make sure that I would always be okay on my own. And, so I am and will be. I always land on my feet. A 5x10 storage locker is 50 square feet. Our last place was bigger. The footprint keeps changing. The math keeps changing. Fifteen years, a stack of boxes, fifty square feet, one padlock, and two more loads to go. It’s just stuff. It really is. But I sat in my car in the parking lot for a long time before I drove away, and I want to be honest about that, because I think someone reading this is sitting in their car too. Or about to. Or just got home from doing it. It’s sad. It’s heartbreaking. It’s a reminder of something that will never be what it once was. It’s grief. You’re allowed to grieve the boxes and stuff that is no longer yours. Even while you know better. Even while you’re already rebuilding in your head. Even while there are still two more loads waiting. The stuff isn’t the life. But the stuff is what’s left of the life that I no longer have. And those are two different sentences, and both of them are true. XX Blair P.S. I will be in Winnipeg for the month of June and am open for speaking, workshops, coffee dates and anything else that is fun and soul-nourishing. Please connect. P.P.S. I offer a complimentary call. If you want to see what it’s like to work with me as a Grief and Resilience Coach, book a time here. [https://calendly.com/blairkaplanvenables/bounce-forward-30-minutes] How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading How We Navigate Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe [https://howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Hundreds of Goodbyes: A Poem on Endings, Beginnings, and the Butterflies That Found Me

As a little girl, I turned to writing whenever I had big feelings. In my diary. For school assignments. In poetry. There was something about putting words on a page that made the inside of me feel less crowded. Writing helped me understand myself, and it gave my deepest thoughts a place to go, somewhere outside my body, where I could finally look at them. I drifted away from it for a long time, the way we drift away from a lot of the things that once held us. Life gets loud. Seasons change. But lately, the words have been coming back. And in this season of life, I’m going to keep sharing them, in whatever format they flow out of my mind. Poems. Essays. Half-finished thoughts. Whatever wants to come. This one landed over the weekend, while Teddi and I were at my happy place, packing up my belongings. The Place That Held Me Our lake spot has been a place of deep soul healing for me. It’s where I went after our miscarriage. After the death of my father-in-law. After losing my mom, and then my dad. It’s where my nervous system finally exhaled, for the first time EVER. Where the noise in my chest got quieter. Where I discovered what peace actually feels like, not as an idea, but as a physical sensation in the body. The kind of peace that lives in the sound of water against the shore, in the way light moves across a dock in the late afternoon, in mornings that don’t ask anything of you. For years, it was the place I returned to to remember who I was beneath everything I’d lost. I’m newly at the end of a 15-year relationship, and so there is a lot of undoing in my life. This comes with a deep feeling of unteatheredness. It isn’t the end of my time at my happy place. The lake will still be the lake. The water will still hold me. The beach will always be a soft place to land. But it is the end of my time there with my Wasband. The happy place we built together, the one with our shared rituals, our inside jokes, our particular way of being there, is no longer ours. It’s mine to rebuild now, on my own terms. And that’s a different kind of grief. Quieter. Stranger. Harder to name. The Butterflies Saturday morning, a girlfriend and I walked along the beach. We weren’t talking about anything in particular. Just walking, the way you do when there’s too much to say and not enough words for any of it. And then, all at once, they were everywhere. Hundreds and hundreds of butterflies. I’ve never seen anything like it. They moved around us like a slow, drifting cloud, landing on the sand, on the driftwood, on the edges of our shadows. We stopped walking. We just stood there, watching them, both of us a little undone by it. It felt like a gift. A tender sign that everything will be okay. That the universe, or a higher power, or whatever you want to call the thing that occasionally remembers us, was paying attention. I don’t always know what to do with moments like that. I just know I want to write them down before they go. Here’s what came out: Hundreds of Goodbyes At the beach, hundreds of butterflies came to say their final goodbyes. Feet in the sand, tears in my eyes, guttural cries. They circled the shore, wings catching the light a slow, tender flight. And I stood there, undone, learning to part, learning my heart. The end of something special. The start of something true a quiet world made new. If you’ve been through your own version of this, a separation, a goodbye, a closing of one chapter and the slow, uncertain opening of the next, I’d love to hear from you. We need to support one another because it’s lonely over here. Leave a comment. Share this with someone who might need it today. Or just sit with it quietly, the way I sat with the butterflies. The end of something special is also the start of something beautiful. In between the painful moments, I’m learning to believe that. XX Blair P.S. I will be in Winnipeg for the month of June and am open for speaking, workshops, coffee dates and anything else that is rad. Please connect. P.P.S. I offer a complimentary call. If you want to see what it’s like to work with me as a Grief and Resilience Coach, book a time here. [https://calendly.com/blairkaplanvenables/bounce-forward-30-minutes] How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading How We Navigate Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe [https://howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

I Thought I Was at Peace. I Was Wrong.

For most of my life, I thought I knew what it meant to rest and feel calm. I wasn’t having panic attacks. I wasn’t falling apart in public. I was functioning. I was showing up. I was getting things done. And in the absence of visible crisis, I told myself that meant I was okay. I was not okay. I just didn’t know what okay actually felt like. This is the part nobody talks about when they talk about grief, trauma, and resilience. It’s not always the dramatic breakdown that signals something is wrong. Sometimes it’s the quiet hum of tension you’ve normalized so completely that you have mistaken it for your personality. The Moment Everything Shifted I remember sitting in what should have been a genuinely peaceful moment. Nothing was wrong. No fires to put out, no crisis to manage, no one needed me. And I felt... nothing. Or worse, I felt uncomfortable. Restless. Like stillness was a threat. That’s when it hit me. I had spent so many years operating in survival mode, moving from one hard thing to the next, that my nervous system had recalibrated around stress. Stress was familiar. Stress felt like home. And what I had been calling “calm” was really just a lower-grade version of anxious vigilance. My baseline was broken and I hadn’t even noticed. If you’ve experienced significant loss, grief, or prolonged hardship, I want you to sit with that for a second. Because this is more common than you think. When your body has been in fight-or-flight for months or years, your nervous system learns to treat that as the default setting. Rest starts to feel suspicious. Quiet starts to feel dangerous. You become so adapted to bracing for impact that you forget how to simply breathe. What I Did About It I want to be honest with you here: I didn’t fix this overnight, and I didn’t fix it alone. The first thing I had to do was accept that what I thought was my personality, that edge, that low-level readiness, was actually a dysregulated nervous system doing its job. It had kept me safe through hard times. But it didn’t know the hard times were over. My body needed to be taught that it was allowed to rest. Here is what actually helped: Regulating my nervous system became a daily practice, not a reaction. I stopped treating relaxation as something I did after I earned it. I started treating it as something my body needed the way it needs water. This looked like: Writing. I did not come to writing as a wellness practice. I came to it because I had things inside me that had no other way out. Grief gets stuck in the body when it has nowhere to go, and writing gave mine somewhere to land. Not polished writing, not writing for an audience, but the messy, unfiltered, nobody-will-ever-read-this kind. A journal. Morning pages. Notes in your phone at 2am. Neuroscience actually backs this up: naming what you are feeling engages the rational part of your brain and creates just enough distance from the raw emotion to breathe through it. You do not have to be a writer for this to work. You just have to be willing to be honest on the page. The nervous system does not care about grammar. It just needs a door left open. Getting Outside. There is something that happens to my body the moment I step outside that no supplement or habit stack has ever replicated. Something releases. Nature does not require anything from you. It does not need you to perform okayness or meet expectations, and in a life shaped by loss, that unconditional quality is genuinely therapeutic. Research shows that time in natural environments lowers cortisol, reduces heart rate, and quiets the part of the brain responsible for rumination. What I have learned is that it works best when I leave the podcast at home and resist the urge to make the walk productive. Just outside. Just sky and ground and air and whatever is around you. On the days I least want to go out are usually the days I need it most. I have learned to treat that resistance as information, and then go anyway. Practicing Gratitude. A decade ago, I started setting an alarm on my phone. Not a wake-up alarm, not a reminder to take a vitamin. A gratitude alarm. It goes off every single day at 9:00pm, and when it does, I stop whatever I am doing and I find three things to be grateful for in that exact moment, from the past 24 hours. Not later. Not in a journal at the end of the day when I can curate and reflect. Right now, in the middle of whatever ordinary or hard or chaotic moment I happen to be in. That practice, which I have now been doing for over ten years, changed the way my brain is wired. Grief narrows your vision by design and locks your nervous system into a state of lack and danger. The gratitude alarm was my daily interruption to that pattern. A forced pause. A tiny, non-negotiable moment of noticing. A strengthening of my resilience muscle. Over time, those moments stacked. My brain started scanning for good things in real time, not just when I prompted it. Gratitude did not make my grief smaller. It made my life larger. Consistent sleep and food. This sounds basic because it is, and also because we chronically underestimate how much dysregulation is really just a depleted body screaming for basics. Strengthening my resilience muscle required me to stop treating resilience as a destination. Resilience is not something you arrive at. It is not a reward for surviving enough. It is a practice, a capacity you build through repetition, through choosing to return to yourself again and again even when it feels uncomfortable. For me, that meant: Sitting with discomfort instead of immediately filling it. When stillness felt threatening, I got curious about that instead of reaching for distraction. What was I afraid would happen if I just... stopped? Letting grief be grief. I stopped rebranding my grief as strength. Sometimes I was just sad. Letting myself be sad, without performing okayness, was part of how I healed. Building a life that included genuine restoration. Not just productivity recovery, not “self-care” as a buzzword, but actual moments of joy, connection, and rest that existed for no purpose other than to fill me back up. What Peace Actually Feels Like Real peace, I have learned, is not the absence of difficulty. It is the presence of capacity. It is knowing that hard things will come and trusting that you will be able to meet them without fracturing. Real calm is not a low-grade hum of readiness. It is a body that can soften. A mind that can wander without panic. A nervous system that knows the difference between a genuine threat and just a hard day. I still have hard days. I still feel grief. I still sometimes catch myself bracing for something that isn’t coming. But now I know what I’m feeling. And I know how to come back. That, more than anything, is what resilience has given me. XX Blair P.S. I offer a complimentary call. If you want to see what it’s like to work with me as a Grief and Resilience Coach, book a time here. [https://calendly.com/blairkaplanvenables/bounce-forward-30-minutes] Where’s Blair? May 3-5, La Le Jeune, BC Join me, Stacey and Simone this May at the Regulated Retreat [https://lljresort.com/regulated/]. I’m stoked to be speaking at Regulated, a three-day nervous system reset retreat for people who are done surviving and ready to feel steady again because most of us don’t need more motivation, we need regulation. And that’s what makes this experience different. This retreat blends nervous system science, movement, nature, and honest conversation to help your body downshift and reset. I’m honoured to be part of this experience and would love to share it with you! Early bird rates end March 15th! May 11-14, 2025, Vancouver, BC I’ll be attending Web Summit Vancouver so that I can sharpen my skills and spread our mission. August 23-29, Porto, Portugal I will be co-facilitating the Portugal Grief Trip alongside Rachel from Happy Grieving. There is still room for you. Learn more and book your spot! [https://grieftrips.com/portugal] How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading How We Navigate Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe [https://howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]