Healing After Losing a Loved One to Suicide

A Personal and Professional Reflection on Grief, Guilt, and the Long Road Back to Life

If you’d asked me in the months—or even years—after my brother Jack died, what I thought my future would look like, I wouldn’t have been able to answer. Not truthfully, at least. Because it didn’t feel like there would be one. Not really. Just a fog. A blur of days. The dull ache of being alive when someone you love no longer is.

Jack didn’t just pass away. He died by suicide. And that distinction matters, because it changes everything. It changes how you grieve, how you exist, how you relate to your body, your nervous system, your sense of self and safety in the world.

It makes you question everything, including whether you want to be here, too.

The Moment That Breaks You

When Jack died, something inside me fractured in a way that felt unrecoverable. It wasn’t just heartbreak. It was a kind of spiritual and energetic annihilation. One moment you’re living in a version of the world that makes sense and the next, you’re dropped into one where nothing feels safe, nothing feels solid, and your nervous system is in free-fall.

No one tells you how physical suicide grief is. The chest tightness. The stomach pain. The insomnia. The adrenaline surges at 3am. The moments you can’t breathe. The way your body stops trusting itself.

It’s like your cells are screaming out for answers that your mind can’t give.

And then comes the guilt.

Survivor’s Guilt. The Grief You Can’t Say Out Loud

There’s a guilt that comes when you lose someone to suicide that is so heavy it feels cellular. It sticks to your bones. Not because you caused it. Not because you didn’t love them enough. But because you survived and they didn’t.

You start to ask: Why not me? Why couldn’t I save them? Why didn’t I notice sooner?

You replay everything. You try to find the moment it all tipped. The message you missed. The one more hug you wish you’d given. The call you didn’t make.

And then, quietly—secretly—you wonder if maybe you’re meant to go too.

It’s one of the most terrifying parts of this kind of suicide grieving: the part where you don’t know if you want to be alive without them. Or maybe you do, but you don’t know how. It feels impossible. Cruel, even.

Like you’ve been dropped into a world that took your safety blanket away—and handed you a blindfold instead.

Living in Fear That It Will Happen Again

After Jack died, I didn’t just grieve him. I became terrified that it would happen again.

To someone else I loved.
To someone I was responsible for.
To someone I hadn’t noticed was suffering.

It created a kind of hypervigilance that bled into everything. I couldn’t relax. Couldn’t trust joy. Couldn’t let myself settle. Because what if the other shoe dropped again?

Grief wired my nervous system into a state of permanent alert. I lived in survival mode. And when you’re stuck there, even the kindest moments can feel like they might be ripped away from you at any second.

This is what we don’t talk about enough: how trauma from grief after suicide loss doesn’t just hurt. It hijacks. It lingers. It lives inside you until you find a way to meet it.

Shame, Pain and the Energy of Grief

Shame is one of the heaviest frequencies I’ve ever felt. And it’s often silent. Unspoken. Hidden under a smile or a busy schedule. It’s the part of grief that tells you that you should have done more. That maybe it’s your fault. That if people really knew what was going on inside you, they’d walk away too.

At JAX, we talk a lot about how emotions live in the body. And this was no different.

That shame, guilt and fear got stuck in my hips, my chest, my jaw. My body started to ache in places I’d never felt before. Energy doesn’t disappear—it gets stored. If it doesn’t move, it stagnates. And it begins to shape how you live, think, relate, and breathe.

In many ways, I became a shell of myself. Smiling, functioning, pretending. But energetically? I was frozen.

That’s where my healing after suicide began.

How Trauma Lives in the System

You can’t think your way out of trauma. Believe me, I tried.

What began to change things wasn’t reading more books or trying to convince myself I was okay—it was coming back into my body. Slowly. With support. Through trauma-informed healing. Through the very work I now teach.

It was through Kundalini energy activation, somatic processing, spiritual connection and breathwork that I finally began to feel again.

To release.
To shake.
To cry.
To move.
To stop holding it all in.

Energy healing became a gateway back to my soul—not because it was mystical, but because it worked with the parts of me that words couldn’t reach.

That’s what I built JAX on.

Healing Didn’t Make It Go Away—It Gave It Meaning

I didn’t heal to erase Jack. I healed so I could carry him. So I could honour him. So I could find meaning in his pain and purpose in my own.

Jack’s death changed me. But so did what came after.

JAX wasn’t just a business. It was a prayer. A reclamation. A promise that I wouldn’t let my grief go to waste. That I would learn how to hold others through their own trauma—not from theory, but from embodied knowing.

And now, every retreat, every transmission, every somatic session is infused with that same intention.

To let the pain move.
To let the energy clear.
To let the nervous system come home.

Not by force. Not through bypass. But through real, trauma-informed, body-led healing.

What Grief Feels Like in the Nervous System

Suicide grief changes your baseline.

You don’t just cry and feel sad. You become disconnected. You dissociate. You numb out. You struggle to feel joy. Or you feel too much, all at once, and it floods you.

In the nervous system, we call this dysregulation. And it’s why talk therapy—while incredibly valuable—sometimes isn’t enough on its own.

At JAX, we work with grief through the body, not just the story. Because your story doesn’t live in your head—it lives in your tissues. Your fascia. Your breath. Your energy field.

That’s why our work includes:

• Kundalini energy activations to awaken, move, and clear blocked trauma

• Somatic healing practices that guide people back into their bodies, safely

• Rituals and ceremony to give grief a sacred place to be seen and felt

• Post-retreat integration so the process doesn’t end when the retreat does

Grief needs a container. A place to land. A body to live in safely again. We help you build that.

A Note to Anyone in the Thick of It

If you’re reading this and feeling like you’re in that early space—where everything hurts, where everything feels dark—I want you to know that you’re not broken.

You’re grieving.

And grief is a kind of love with nowhere to go.

You are not alone in this. And you don’t have to carry it by yourself anymore.

You don’t need to have the answers. You don’t need to feel ready. You just need to be willing.

Willing to feel. To be held. To let your body speak what your mouth cannot.

Healing after suicide loss is not linear. It’s cyclical. Sacred. And it’s possible.

You’re allowed to come back to life.
One breath at a time.

Ready to begin your healing journey?

✨ Apply for one of our deeply held, trauma-informed healing retreats in Bali
✨ 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
✨ Join us for a two-hour in-person JAX class and experience the method firsthand