5 Reasons I Celebrate My Mum’s Birthday, even though she’s been ‘dead’ for 30 years

Thanks for choosing to read this. It’s a vulnerable one for me to write.

I celebrate my Mum’s birthday every year 🎉

I watch ‘Out of Africa’ – her #1 favorite movie, and it’s definitely in my top 5.

I make Chocolate Slice – I’m going to put my best guess on her recipe below for you in case you want to experience the true genius of my Mum.

And I share as much as I want about her. Mostly to my husband and my family. But I do my best to mention and share about her as much as I can.

We Never Stop 'Missing'... 🥲

I’ll never stop missing my ‘Physical’ Mum. I don’t think the painful sting of missing her physical presence in my life will ever completely disappear. She was my rock. She was my everything. And yep I’m now allowing the tears to stream down my face as I write.

She passed away when I was 14 after a very tough battle with ovarian cancer for 3 years. She fought and loved her way to another 2 and a half years than the Doctors said she’d have. And she was the Best Mum on the Planet.

But the pain and the missing, has lessened over time. And the journey of transforming our relationship from a physical one, into an inner or spiritual one, has given me more than I could have ever imagined. This journey has become, one of the biggest blessings in my life. And my Mum is still one of the most important relationships and influences on my life.

Grief is a Bitter-Sweet Journey 🧗‍♀️

I share with clients often, that grief is a bitter-sweet journey. And that analogy doesn’t come from my training or education. That comes from my own personal experience of choosing to go through the humanity of loss, rather than avoid it, or spiritually bypass it.

Don’t get me wrong. I did choose to avoid it for more than a decade. And as often happens when a highly compassionate person runs from their emotional opportunities, rather than face them: I created destructive patterns in my life, including drugs, alcohol and an eating disorder.

Then I spiritually bypassed really being present with my Mum, for another decade. (If you’re not familiar with the term spiritual bypass: it is using “spiritual ideas and practices to avoid facing unresolved emotional issues or psychological wounds”.) Even though in many ways during this time I did make many incredible choices back towards having my Mum in my life in positive, powerful ways.

But about 10 years ago, I chose into having a rich and real relationship with my Mum.

I chose to hug her every day.

And I chose to celebrate her birthday big time.

And so today I wanted to talk about practically about this incredible adventure – that we are all going through in some way or another, whether we want to, or not. And the very empowering and healing steps we can take to milk this very messy, but always magical and miraculous adventure of transforming your relationship from a physical to only inner one.

Overview of The 5 Reasons & Strategies 🧭

For Showing Up for Real Relationships with Loved Ones that Have Passed

1. We evolve our emotional experience from one of bitter pain, to bitter-sweet and beyond.
2. The Loved Ones that we have in Spirit are profound spiritual guides for us, and so in opening fully to our relationship with them inwardly, we open to a profound and practical support system in our life.
3. We get our Loved Ones back! We get to have them in our lives. We get to continue to allow their gifts, blessings and unique ways to continue to inspire and expand our life.
4. We get to awaken and access the magic and miracles that are lying in the heart of every journey of grieving a Loved One that has passed, or no longer with us physically.
5. We find the meaning of life. We find out one of the keys we are here on the planet.

The 5 Strategies for Transforming Our Relationships with Loved Ones that Have Passed ❤️‍🩹

I first want to dive into the 5 aspects that are important to me, as we dive into facing grief, and going THROUGH the adventure of transforming a relationship from a purely physical one into a deep, real, rich and supportive inner relationship.

Evolving Our Emotional Experience 1️⃣

We evolve our emotional experience from one of bitter pain, to bitter-sweet and beyond.

When we lose someone we love, it's natural to experience pain, sadness, and grief. But often, for too many reasons to go into here, we don’t allow ourselves the time, resources and compassion needed to grieve that loss.

The great news about this, is that whenever you choose to dive into this experience, it will be the perfect time. Not a moment too early. And not a moment too late. Trust your journey. Trust that you’ve needed whatever experience you’ve chosen up until right now.

And while we can have wonderful, amazing lives without truly processing and going through the grief of loved ones, we do know that this repressed emotion does have potential impact on our health: physically, emotionally and mentally.

What perhaps is the hardest part about grieving, is trusting our own way, and our own timing. It has seasons, and cycles, that are unique to us. And it might not make sense to those around us.

So however you do, allow yourself to feel whatever you do, whenever you do. And that includes the joy, and intimacy and beauty you feel, just as much as the sadness and the anger and the missing.

Our Most Powerful Spirit Guides 2️⃣

The Loved Ones that we have in Spirit are profound spiritual guides for us, and so in opening fully to our relationship with them inwardly, we open to a profound and practical support system in our life.

Ok this is pretty Woo-Woo to throw in at Number 2.

If you get this, and already have your own experience of how your passed over Loved Ones have been pulling strings and supporting you from the other side in magical and miraculous ways – good for you. Pretty amazing right.

And if you’re open to the fact that your Loved Ones are now your Spirit Guides or a kind of Guardian Angel on the other side – just know that they’re already pulling those strings and supporting you unconsciously. If you choose, it is lovely to be more conscious of your connection, and to receive even greater support.

There is so much I could share about this, and I have a story I often tell clients, that I’ll share at the end. But what’s most important to consider here, is that it might take some time and effort to truly be open to allowing your Loved One back in your life.

While having a connection with your Loved One might sound like a wonderful idea to part of you, it might also sound incredibly scary to other parts of you. For your inner children for example, they might not have recovered from being left or abandoned, and so they’ll need some love and support from you, in order to release that impact so you can reopen to your Loved One authentically.

Getting Our Loved Ones Back 3️⃣

We get our Loved Ones back! We get to have them in our lives. We get to continue to allow their gifts, blessings and unique ways to continue to inspire and expand our life.

I remember when I was younger, even though Mum and I used to garden all the time, and knowing the names of various flowers was our thing, I abandoned that part of my life for years. Simply it was just to painful. I didn’t want to feel the pain of losing her. So I avoided flowers.

I wasn’t consciously aware of it. Until I began to heal and it was almost like my love for flowers was re-awakened.

Today I can’t walk passed a flower that I know my husband doesn’t know the name of, without sharing the name with him. And my husband and I talk about flowers often. In fact gardening and flowers are a massive part of my life, my home, my family and my joy.

As you reopen to a real inner relationship with your Loved Ones you’re going to find more of your Inner Child energy, enthusiasm and intuition coming back too!

The Unexpected Heart of Grief 4️⃣

We get to awaken and access the magic and miracles that are lying in the heart of every journey of grieving a Loved One that has passed, or no longer with us physically.

Perhaps the biggest thing that grieving the loss of my ‘physical’ mum has given me, is my husband.

I feel confident that I would not have such an amazing marriage if I had not processed the pain and abandonment I felt from ‘losing’ my Mum. It was in choosing to really get to know myself, to learn how to Love myself, that I was able to let go of many limiting patterns of basically ‘avoiding getting hurt again…of getting left again’.

I have also miraculously healed bulimia in this process.

And I have now worked with hundreds of clients that have had similar experience in Love and Health as a result of truly grieving and healing.

More Meaning 5️⃣

Through this process, in grieving and reforming new inner relationships with our Loved Ones, we find the meaning of life. We find another one of the keys for why we are here on the planet. Ok this is so on-the-nose. I apologize. But it does deserve to be mentioned.

I believe, that one of the most significant reasons our Soul chose to have this human experience on planet Earth, was to experience not just Love and Fulfillment from this physical world: from outside of ourselves. I believe we came here so we might experience the real Love that we are within.

If I had not been willing, to courageously feel and go through memories of Little Zoë just dying and crying to be with her mum, I might never have found the Huge and Profoundly Healing Heart that I Am within.

Through picking up Little Zoë, in deep inner child work, I loved her back to health, back to hope, back to being ready to open to and receive: real human Love again.

3 Habits for Rewiring from Loss and Lack back to Health and Love PLUS Video Training with Dr. Zoë [SUBSCRIBER ONLY] 🎖

Habit 1. Evolving our emotional experience from bitterness, to bitter-sweetness and beyond.

This habit I call Feeling for Healing. Most simply, it’s taking time to feel and spiritually process your feelings back to Love.

I encourage clients to do this anytime that your emotional state is ONE or MORE of the following:

1. Big. When you have big, massive, negative emotions.
2. Repeating. When despite focusing on positivity, or productive intentions and strategies in your life, a particular emotion keeps coming up again, and again.
3. Irrational. When something very reasonable happens in your life, but your emotional reaction to it is not proportional. When it feels like you have been betrayed, but in reality your friend forgot to meet you for coffee.

And if you’re called to transform a relationship with a Loved One, I encourage at least once a week you go through the 4 steps below: specifically around how you feel towards your Loved One.

The heart of Feeling for Healing is below. But if you want to dive deeply into this habit you can get the full guide here: https://allowinglove.org/the-heart-of-rewiring/  You can scroll down and begin reading at the Heading: Feeling for Healing, A 4-Step Guide for Rewiring.

F. Feel Your Feelings, Feel the Grief, the Missing, the Anger, the Whatever

Let go of your head. Relax. Breathe. Stop thinking and running from how you are feeling inside.

E. Embrace Your Feelings. All of them.

Welcome your feelings whole heartedly. Let go of resistance and accept and embrace your feelings.

E. Express Your Feelings. Say what you need to say.

Give your feelings a voice. Let them express without censorship. Out loud or in writing.

L. Love Your Feelings / Self. Get ready to pick yourself up and find the Love within.

Love yourself like you would love a small child. Give yourself what you need and let go of what you don't.

This one habit is the one that has created my marriage, and changed my life.

If anyone EVER asks me for the conscious habit I believe has the BIGGEST ROI – it’s the one above: Feeling for Healing.

Habit 2. Hugging Our Loved Ones that Have Passed Over

I do this first thing every morning as part of my inner meditation practice.

I hug my Mum.

Then I hug my Nan.

Then I hug my old next-door neighbors that were like grandparents: Joyce and John.

And then I hug John-Roger, my spiritual teacher who I had a close relationship with here for 10 years.

Sometimes I hug them all in 5 seconds.

Sometimes it takes a minute.

Sometimes it’s more of a mental intention to connect, honor them and send them my love.

Sometimes it’s much more of an emotional, completely real and imagined human experience.

The heart of this habit is simply to connect. Be with them. Be present.

Embrace them.

Let them embrace you.

Hug them…however you choose.

From this one easy and simple habit, will expand and ignite deeper connections, if that is what your intention is.

Habit 3. Recommit to One Thing You LOVED When You Were Littler

This might be something you abandoned because of some you lost. But it might just be something you abandoned.

If you want more energy, more enthusiasm and more intuition, dive into this experiment to participate and play with One Thing You SUPER LOVED when you were little.

It could be finger painting.

It could be riding bicycles.

It could be silk worms.

It doesn’t matter WHAT it is. But it does have to be one of the things you really geeked out about. Not just something you did cause all the other kids were doing it. Or because your parents took you to do it.

What was One Thing YOU SUPER DUPER LOVED doing when you were little?

And if there are a few things that are possibilities for you - and one of them has a significant connection with doing this thing with a person who has passed over: choose that one.

Recently I have taken this habit further, after reflecting on how important play and having fun has been for me in creating abundance and intimacy in my life.

So now I do OOFT.

Every Day I OOFT.

And Every Week I do a BIG OOFT.

OOFT = One Only Fun Thing

Every day, I aim to do at least one thing that is ONLY for FUN. Yep cooking might be kinda fun, but it’s also cause I have to eat. So that doesn’t count.

Yep going to the gym might be kinda fun, but if it’s more for your health, it doesn’t count.

Whenever you’re ready, challenge yourself to do an OOFT every day.

Or start with the weekly BIG OOFTs.

I love the weekly OOFTs. I love planning them for the weekend.

Take Your Time. There is No Rush.

I only suggest taking on 1 new habit a month. But some folks are called to dive into more. Trust yourself.

Remember you have your entire life to dive into this stuff. Just save this blog post, or write these ideas down somewhere. You don’t have to create 3 new habits overnight.

And statistically you’ll have more success, if you dive in slowly and incrementally.

Dr. Zoë will now guide you in a closed-eye active meditation for rewiring through grief

My Story of Magic with Mum

I love that a client recently reminded me of this story. I had told her years ago, and as she is on her own journey of transforming an inner relationship with a Loved One, she shared how inspiring this story was for her, as she was sharing her own MASSIVE MIRACOULOUS moment that she had recently.

So this was way before I was having a functional, open, loving inner relationship with my Mum.

But I was on the bus going to University and I was late for an exam.

I had only just begun my spiritual journey, and so I had only recently opened to the idea of calling on the Universe for support, on prayer, on asking for miracles.

But even there was no possible way, given how long this bus usually takes (about 30 mins) for me to get to my exam on time. But we got EVERY SINGLE GREEN LIGHT. I’m crying again as I remember this moment.

I can NOT tell you HOW I just knew it was my Mum. But I did.

I felt her. I experienced her. I knew it was her pulling strings for me. And so as we kept getting green lights I started asking her for more green lights. And I thanked her for all the green lights so far.

Obviously, I made it to my exam on time.

And this moment planted a seed that while it wouldn’t fully be harvested for quite some time, it was planted when I was 21 on that bus.

Yep being positive, and having clear intentions, and being spiritual is great!

AND if you want to truly clear some of the unconscious blocks and blind spots in your life, consider having a closer, more unconditionally loving relationship with your humanity.

I love you so much.
Thanks for being here.
Zoë 🤗

And finally, here is the recording from the LIVE Zoom class I led, guiding you in a meditation walking you through transforming relationships with 'lost' or 'passed' Loved Ones...back into aliveness and closeness.

P.S. This is my Mum 👇  I think I was about 5 or 6. And Stuart my brother and one of my best friends was about 3 or 4. It’s one of the few pics I have of Mum. And the only one I have of us 3.

I also love that there is a HUGE daisy bush in the picture too. I just love it.

Thanks for letting me share it with you.

Oh and here's a recipe that's very close to my Mum's – Chocolate Slice. Enjoy 🥥 🍫