Losing my brother to suicide has changed shape over the years. That is the reason I find it harder to talk about now than I did before. Not because it has become okay. It has not, and it never will. When I go back there and really sit with it, with the devastation he must have felt to believe he had no other choice, with what it did to our family and the wreckage it left behind, it is as raw as it ever was.
What has changed is what I did with it, and if you are searching for how to heal after suicide loss, I want to tell you honestly what that road looked like.
Sink or swim
I was thirty when he passed. I had a life ahead of me that I wanted to live, and I had no idea how to live it after he went. It was sink or swim.
Before his death, human suffering was something I read about in the news or watched in films. It felt removed from us, as if it could not touch us. Then it came knocking at our door, and I have never felt removed from another person's suffering since. For a while I was in that place myself. I wanted to die, and I wanted to get better, both at once. I could not bear the thought of anyone else feeling this pain, and I could not see how I would live out my days knowing others were suffering like this while I did nothing.
Why I chose the holistic path
I chose holistic healing because it changed me from the inside out. The conventional route did not. I hated the drugs, and going over the events leading up to his death again and again in therapy left me feeling more traumatised, not less.
It was only after somatic healing that the hallucinations, the panic attacks, the blackouts and the seizures stopped. I have never had them since. The autoimmune conditions no longer rear their heads. The inflammation, driven by cortisol, driven by trauma, is gone. Trauma healing changed my life, and that is why trauma healing is what I give my life to now, through our healing retreats in Bali and the facilitator trainings that carry the work further.
I needed it to fuel me
I could not spend my life wallowing in the pain and being a victim of it. I needed it to fuel me, to find meaning in it and forge another path. So I took the most awful thing that ever happened to me and made it the thing I work towards every single day.
Where I am now is gratitude. For the blessing it was to have him as my brother, and now for having him as my teacher, guiding me as I guide others. If it were not for him, thousands of lives would never have been altered the way mine has. That was his final gift to me. Healing. It is why I host these retreats and trainings, so that it spreads far and wide.
A long road
It has been a long road. Years of feeling muted, people pleasing, hiding away, working through deep shame and guilt, to finally have this peace over the last few years. I would change all of it in a heartbeat if I could. But this is the path I have chosen, to heal and to help others find their way.
I know how unimaginable life feels after suicide loss. I also know how beautiful it can become. Happiness is real now. Joy is real. The simple things matter more than they ever did.
What somatic healing did that talking could not
I want to be precise about this, because it is the part that matters most to anyone still searching for suicide grief support. Talking helped me understand what had happened. It did nothing for what my body was doing with it. The panic attacks, the blackouts and the seizures were my nervous system still living inside the event, years later, and no amount of insight reached them. Somatic healing worked underneath the language centre, in the body itself, and that is where the alarm finally switched off. Once the body believed it was safe, the symptoms stopped, and they have stayed stopped.
What I would tell myself at thirty
If I could sit with the version of me who had just lost her brother, I would tell her three things. That the pain is not a sign she is doing grief wrong. That her body is going to need something beyond words to let this go. And that she will meet him again, in a way she cannot imagine yet, once she has released enough of the pain that stands in the way. I would also tell her that the life ahead of her is going to be beautiful, and that she will be the one holding space for others in exactly this place one day.
Who our healing retreats in Bali are for
People sometimes assume a trauma healing retreat is for those who have already done years of inner work. It is not. Some arrive having never set foot in a yoga shala. Some arrive straight from the funeral. What they share is a knowing, somewhere in the body, that it is time to stop carrying this alone and that talking has taken them as far as it can. If you have lost a parent, a partner, a sibling or a friend to suicide, if you are living with the guilt and the replaying and the fear of it happening again, this is for you. Men and women both come, and both are welcome.
Why grief and energy belong together
The part of this that is hardest to explain in words is the part people value most once they have felt it. Our loved ones in spirit are no longer bound by a body. They are everywhere and everything at once. When we drop into deep states of peace, the kind that come after the pain has been released rather than before, we tune to a frequency where meeting them becomes possible. I have had this with my brother more times than I can count, and I have watched it happen for hundreds of people in our shala. It is not something to chase. It arrives when the body is finally quiet enough to receive it.
If you have lost someone to suicide
This is far from the only grief or trauma we work with at JAX, but here I am speaking to you, the one who has lost a loved one to suicide. There are spaces for you where deep healing can happen, and I promise it is worth it. Nothing can bring them back. Through healing, though, we forge a deep spiritual connection to them, and for that we have to understand energy.
Our JAX healing retreats run once a month in Uluwatu, Bali. If you are in the depths of it right now, please reach out to someone today. You do not have to carry this alone.
Join us online to begin your emotional growth journey no passport required.
Come to a JAX Day Retreat for a powerful immersion into trauma-informed healing.
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Learn more about facilitator training: https://www.jaxhealingretreat.com/kundalinitraining
