I have been silent for almost three weeks as I have been deeply immersed in a personal soul journey through Japan and Bali. There is so much I want to share in the coming weeks, but today I simply want to honor grief, in all the ways each of us experiences it. No loss is the same for any one soul.

During this time, I revisited one of my deepest truths: even while experiencing the most profound grief, we may still experience immense joy. Both can be true.

Based on my own experience, and that of so many I have witnessed, there is no fixing or solving grief. It simply does not work that way. And there is no ONE single way through it.

We each must find our own way to discover the Beauty through the Pain, a chapter in my upcoming book, Live and Die Awake.

There is a profound polarity between pain and joy. We can carry deep pain and still remain open to life. We can grieve and still laugh. We can ache for what has been lost and still feel gratitude for what remains. Joy does not erase grief, and grief does not make joy any less real.

And grief is not only about death.

Loss and grief show up in so many forms: divorce, abandonment, the loss of a job, a move, estrangement from an adult child, the death of a beloved pet, the end of a friendship or relationship, or the loss of a life we thought we would have.

The list is endless.

Each loss brings its own grief, and that grief is real for the soul experiencing it.

Today, on National Grief Awareness Day, I simply want to honor all of it.

The grief.
The love.
The pain.
The joy.

Both can be true.

Here are my personal reflections on my final morning, yesterday in Bali, thinking about grief, loss, the importance of bringing awareness to grief and my personal pathway of shattering, deep pain and finding my way to joy and love.

With love,
Julie

Sacred. Awake. Alive.

If this reflection found you, a free guided meditation is waiting for you at https://risingphoenix.life. While you are there, add your name to the Live and Die Awake pre-launch list to receive the pre-order invitation when the book releases on November 4, 2026.

Living Awake is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

About Julie

Julie Wright Halbert, Esq. is a national voice for grief literacy, a certified death doula, a certified transformational soul coach, and the founder of Rising Phoenix LIFE. The book, Live and Die Awake: On Love, Loss, and Living Fully, releases November 4, 2026, with Thought Leader Academy.

“Death is a doorway to living awake.”

Sunday Presence is a weekly letter from Julie, from inside the Live and Die Awake movement.

Website: https://risingphoenix.life and https://liveanddieawake.com

Substack: https://juliewrighthalbert.substack.com (handle: @liveanddieawake)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-wright-halbert

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/transformational_soul_coaching

Email: julie@risingphoenix.life

Sometimes that is all it takes for everything we thought was certain to suddenly become uncertain.

This week, my brother lost his dear friend, David Hochberg, unexpectedly in a boating accident. David always had a smile and a genuine greeting with warm love. I will remember him always with great affection and admiration. My heart breaks for his family, dear friends, patients and all the lives he touched each day. I feel deeply for my brother, Mark, who is experiencing a pain that is shattering to his soul.

I am reminded, once again, of how quickly death brings us face-to-face with the questions that are so easy to push aside while we are busy living.

Who am I?

Why am I here?

What is the meaning of this life?

And perhaps most importantly, Am I actually living it?

The day after David died, I went for a walk and was standing at the edge of the water when I picked up my phone and recorded what was moving through me. I didn’t know then that I would share it with you. It is not prepared or polished. It is simply my truth in that moment.

I am sharing it with you exactly as it is. Please listen to Siesta Breakers

In memory of David Hochberg, MD.

David’s sudden passing is another reminder that none of us knows how much time we have.

So perhaps the invitation isn’t to figure everything out.

Perhaps it is simply to stop waiting.

Say what needs to be said.
Love the people you love.
Notice where you are.
Be here for your own life.

Because this moment is the one we are living right now and the only one we have.

With love,
Julie

Sacred. Awake. Alive.

If this reflection found you, a free guided meditation is waiting for you at https://risingphoenix.life. While you are there, add your name to the Live and Die Awake pre-launch list to receive the pre-order invitation when the book releases on November 4, 2026.

Living Awake is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

About Julie

Julie Wright Halbert, Esq. is a national voice for grief literacy, a certified death doula, a certified transformational soul coach, and the founder of Rising Phoenix LIFE. The book, Live and Die Awake: On Love, Loss, and Living Fully, releases November 4, 2026, with Thought Leader Academy.

“Death is a doorway to living awake.”

Sunday Presence is a weekly letter from Julie, from inside the Live and Die Awake movement.

Website: https://risingphoenix.life and https://liveanddieawake.com

Substack: https://juliewrighthalbert.substack.com (handle: @liveanddieawake)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-wright-halbert

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/transformational_soul_coaching

Email: julie@risingphoenix.life

I vow to honor the wisdom of my body.

Trust what my body knows before my mind names it.

There is a gift that lives inside every one of us, and most of us have been trained out of trusting it. The gift is discernment. Not the analytical kind, where we make a list of pros and cons. The somatic kind. The kind that lives in the body and knows what is true before the mind catches up.

Your body knows. Your body has always known. It has been telling you yes and no long before you had the language for either.What we forget, and what we can learn again, is how to listen. Pause here for a moment, before I say anything more, and let this question meet you.

When was the last time your body told you something, and you talked yourself out of it?

Sit with that. You are the only one who needs to hear the answer.

How does YES feel in the body?

There is an energetic response. You may feel chills. You may feel a lightness. When my eyes are closed, I sometimes see a neon green energetic color, or a vibrant radiant purple. What it looks and feels like will be a little different for each of us, but there is always a sensation of knowing.

Recently I said yes to a soul journey to Japan and Indonesia. I was leaping through my phone the moment I connected with this beautiful soulful coach who will be guiding my internal immersion in Bali. There was a deep knowingness. This is where my soul is intended to go---it is calling me, pulling me to a land and location uncertain to my internal and external being. I did not need explanations. I did not need understanding. It was a knowing, and the knowing to trust was everything.

Where in your body does yes live for you? Take a breath. Notice what you find. It might be a lightness in your shoulders, or a warmth behind your eyes, or something you cannot yet name. There is no right sensation. There is only your sensation.

How does NO feel in the body?

A tightness. A contraction. A deep heaviness within the gut that will not let itself be argued away. Even when I do not want to listen, even when I am in resistance, it is clear. It is evident. It is heavy.

One year I said yes to a yoga retreat in Greece. From the moment I said it, there was an intensity in my gut. It was as if my body was flagging a safety concern. Something felt completely off. Eventually I listened. I did not go to Greece. Instead, I was called to organize a women’s retreat in Sedona with my coaching colleagues from the Sedona Soul Transformation course we had just completed in 2023, immediately contained in the summer solstice.

My soul knew what I couldn’t see, yet I deeply felt an alignment calling me to return to Sedona. My body knew that before my mind did. It was just about listening.

And no? Where does that one land in you? For me it is almost always in the gut, low and quiet and stubborn. For you it may be somewhere else entirely. Take a breath and let your body show you where. The body speaks first. The mind explains second.

Most of us have been trained to give the microphone to the mind, to talk the body out of its knowing, to be reasonable and polite and accommodating even when the body is quietly refusing.

In my coaching practice, I sit with clients who are navigating the hardest questions of their relationships. Whether to stay and work through what has arisen, a betrayal, an infidelity, a hardship thar shows up and the one person in the relationship has to make a choice to communicate more deeply to honor what my partner Glenn calls in his Neurological Intelligence framework, the I within the WE. The choice whether the I decides to stay and accept what is, to release and move on, or to focus on their inner work within the space of WE.

It is not for me to answer that question. Nor is it for anyone else. The only true answer comes when a person goes within, listens to their highest self, and lets that voice guide them.

That is where your truth lives.

This is what the second vow is really asking of us. The body has been speaking all along. What we are learning is how to trust what it says.

How do we come to trust the body?

The same way we come to trust anyone we have known a long time and are only now learning to hear. Slowly. Through small experiments that we let the body win. Trust in the body is not a leap of faith. It is built one small yes at a time, and one small no at a time, and it takes as long as it takes.

You listen to a small yes and follow it, and the ground holds. So next time you listen a little sooner. You honor a small no and nothing terrible happens, and next time you honor it faster. This is how trust grows. Not in the big decisions we make, but in the small ones we quietly stop overriding.

Bring to mind a time your body was right. Not a dramatic one, necessarily. Just a time you knew something before you had words for why. Maybe it was leaving a room, or trusting a stranger, or refusing an invitation you were supposed to accept.

Sit with that memory now. What did the knowing feel like in your body then, before your mind caught up? Whatever that felt like, that is what your body’s voice sounds like from the inside. It is what you are learning to trust.

I will share one of mine.

I have learned this in the ordinary rooms of a normal life, and I have learned it in rooms where the stakes were much higher. Once, years ago, my body warned me of danger, and I did not listen fast enough. I got away. I was grateful. I have never again negotiated with the body when it tells me to leave and to run quickly.

The lesson has stayed with me in quieter forms too. Since I began writing my book, every coach, every editor, every designer who has come into this work arrived the same way. Not through a plan. Not through a search. Through a knowing. Someone would come across my path and my body would say yes before my mind had any way to explain why. And every time I have followed that yes, the alignment has been undeniable.

The book you will hold in your hands this November is the book my body chose, in every collaborator, at every stage. Not because I always knew what came next. Because I trusted what my body knew before I had the words for it. I still have a lot of uncertainty about the path Live and Die Awake: On Love, Loss and Living Fully will take me on , but I have a deep knowing and trust that it embodies my purpose, my soul and my passion to guide others to live awake.

This is what living the second vow looks like in real time. It is not dramatic. It is quiet. It is a knowing about a person, a project, a room, a next step. It only works if you honor it.

Here is what I want you to try this week.

Bring to mind a question you have been sitting with. Something you have not been able to decide. Perhaps a request someone has asked of you. Something you are considering saying yes or no to.

Then try this three-part practice.

1) First. Place one hand on your heart. Place the other on your gut. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath in. Hold it. Release it. And see what sensations arise. Where is the yes? Where is the no? What is your body already telling you?

2) Second. Open your eyes and write about what you noticed. Journal what came. Not what you think you should feel. What you actually felt.

3) Third. Come back to stillness. Take a few more breaths. Be in the pause. Then ask the question again. See if anything has shifted energetically within you.

Sometimes the first knowing is the true one. Sometimes the second knowing, the one that comes after breath and quiet, is the one your soul was waiting to speak. Either way, your body knows. This is the deeper truth of the practice. We get to create our own path. And our bodies help inform us, through our hearts, of where the path is calling us next.

Every yes is a doorway. Every no is a doorway too.

Your body is the one that knows which one is opening for you now.

I vow to honor the wisdom of my body.

Trust what my body knows before my mind names it.

Say it once out loud if you can. Say it for the vow itself, and again for the body that has been waiting a long time for you to finally listen.

Trust it. Walk through.

Sacred. Awake. Alive.

With love,

Julie Beth @ Living Awake

My sister Devra and our Great Aunt Shirley

Uncle Barry Cohen - Forever a Defender of the People

Sunday Presence letter for August 2, 2026. For a long time, I have said death is a doorway to living awake. What I have not said, until now, is that every loss is a doorway. Not only the ones that end with a casket.

Divorce is a doorway. The parent who stops calling is a doorway. The child who chooses distance is a doorway. The friend of thirty years who falls silent is a doorway. The marriage where someone walks away is a doorway. Every loss is grief, and every grief is a threshold whether we chose it or not. I know this because I have walked through a door I did not want to close.

When we left Harrisburg, we left behind a life woven with so many beautiful childhood memories of our children. It was a move I chose, and it was still a loss. The friendships changed. The rhythm of daily life shifted. The pain of leaving carried its own grief.

Years on, I can tell you what I could not have told you then. The friendships I have now are the friendships aligned with who I am today. They are incredibly rewarding. I am blessed by them in a way I could not have imagined while I was still standing in front of the door that had closed. But when you are deep in the pain, you cannot see what is being made. Others make judgments and assumptions about your choices without knowing or understanding. That is their choice. What you learn, slowly, is not to have expectations.

I came to know it through the unfolding. Through the pain itself. Through the witnessing of my own pain.

There was a day, and I could not tell you exactly when it was, when I picked up a picture from a trip, we had taken as a family. A beautiful memory from before. I did not cry. I smiled. I laughed. The memory came to me with joy and gratitude, instead of the deep regret and sadness it had carried for years that Jim was no longer alive to create new memories.

That was the day I understood. Grief had not left. It had changed form. What I had been calling sorrow was still love. It was love that had found its way back to joy.

Here is the hardest truth I have come to on the other side of the door.

Sometimes this means someone we love walks away from us. Sometimes it means we are the one who walks away. I have known both.

There was a friendship, a special one, from many years ago that I had to release. It was too complicated, too misunderstood. No matter the love that had been shared between our two souls, our lives were not intended to move forward in alignment together. I wish this sister of the heart well. I believe she knows I love her with a whole heart. And I know the loss and the sadness and the grief she must have felt as I walked away, because I have felt that grief from the other side too.

This is the truth I do not think we say out loud enough. Walking away is grief. Being walked away from is grief. Both people at the closed door are grieving. The one leaving does not do it lightly. It is done because it is time for the pain to find a voice, to find a landing, to know it is time to release and move forward.

Not a metaphor. Not a comforting phrase. A literal threshold that appears when a door closes, whether we chose the closing or not. You cannot un-close a door someone has shut, and you cannot un-close one you had to shut yourself. You can only stand in front of it, or you can turn and walk through the threshold that has opened beside you.

The threshold does not always look like an opening. It looks like empty space. It looks like the silence where a friend’s voice used to be. It looks like the empty chair at the table. It looks like the town you no longer live in. It looks like a life that has to be built again.

But the threshold is a door too. It is the only door you have any say in whether you walk through. The practice I have come to on the other side of the door is spiritual forgiveness.

Spiritual forgiveness is not for the person who walked away, or the person you had to walk away from, or the parent who withdrew, or the child who chose distance, or the spouse who left. It is for you.

It is the carrying and the releasing of resentments, no matter the actions of others. It is what allows you to walk forward without dragging what has already happened behind you like a heavy chain.

The full practice for spiritual forgiveness lives inside my book, Live and Die Awake, releasing November 4, 2026. The book walks you through the meditations, the reflection pauses, and what spiritual forgiveness looks and feels like when you actually do it.

Until the book is in your hands, I would also point you to the foundation of Colin Tipping’s Radical Forgiveness. It is a practice that has served me and many people I love. Sit with it this week if you feel called.

But start here. One hand over your heart. One hand over your gut. Breath.

Presence. Begin there. Take a deep breath in. Hold it. Release it. Be within your breath.

Do this three times. Be present in your somatic body. This is how you begin to feel what you are holding, and what is asking to be released.

Reflection Pauses

1. What door in your own life has closed, beyond a death? Divorce, distance, silence, abandonment, or a season that ended. Sit with it. Name it, even if only to yourself.

2. Is there a memory that once carried sorrow and now carries joy? What allowed the shift? Where does grief live in your body today, and how does it feel different from a year ago? Five years ago?

3. Whose choices have you been trying to make? What might it look like to release that, wish the person well, and turn toward the door that is opening in front of you?

4. What resentment are you still carrying that is asking to be released, not for them, but for you?

Sacred. Awake. Alive.

With love,

Julie

If this reflection found you, a free guided meditation is waiting for you at https://risingphoenix.life. While you are there, add your name to the Live and Die Awake launch list to receive the pre-order invitation when the book releases on November 4, 2026.

About Julie

Julie Wright Halbert, Esq. is a national voice for grief literacy, a

certified death doula, a certified transformational soul coach, and the founder of

Rising Phoenix LIFE. The book, Live and Die Awake: On Love, Loss, and Living Fully,

releases November 4, 2026, with Thought Leader Academy.

“Death is a doorway to living awake.”

Sunday Presence is a weekly letter from Julie, from inside the

Live and Die Awake movement.

Website:

https://risingphoenix.life

Substack: https://juliewrighthalbert.substack.com (handle: @liveanddieawake)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-wright-halbert

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/transformational_soul_coaching

Email: julie@risingphoenix.life

first room, the one where you meet yourself.

The one you walk into when the phone is turned off, the computer closes, the podcast goes quiet, and it is just you and whatever wants to come and sit beside you. This is where your heart opens and you learn the gift of listening and being with yourself. This takes intention and Living Fully Awake.

This Sunday we enter the second room. The one you walk into when another is in front of you. Being with another is the same practice. But this space asks something entirely different of us.

Presence with another person is not about what you say. Most of us have been trained to prepare our response while the other person is still speaking. To gather the right advice. To find the fix. To land the perfect thing.

That is not presence. It is performance. I am deeply guilty of living in this space for a large portion of my earlier years. I have had a great need to fix, not to listen but rather an internal need, or even pull, to solve others’ problems. I must admit that as a practicing lawyer, functioning from my left brain, I believed I was quite effective. I now believe I was mistaken, at least in my personal life.

After Jim died, I wanted to fix whatever came up with our sons. Now I know my role is to guide, to listen, to ask questions, to show up with love. I’m nowhere close to perfect, but I work at it.

My older son called while I was writing this. I told him I’d call back. I can’t be present with him and present here at the same time and knowing that, choosing it, is the work. I will share this article as soon I finish with our sons and hope my oldest will have time for me to be fully present to listen to him today.

I define presence as when you set everything down.

When we allow the person in front

of us to be the whole room.

When we decide, before we open our mouth,

that our job is not to solve them. It is to see them.

The dying have taught me this more than anyone. I have sat at the bedsides of my husband, loved ones and other souls in their final days. And here is what I know as a death doula. The moment a person is dying, they do not need advice. They do not need cheerfulness. They do not need someone reminding them of the good times or telling them everything will be fine.

They need someone who will not look away.

They need someone whose face is with them. Whose breath slows to match

theirs. Whose hand can be held. Whose silence does not need to be filled.

And here is the most profound lesson I have learned. What is true at a deathbed is also true at a kitchen table. It is true when your teenager or young adult child says the thing that is under the thing. It is true when your friend calls at ten at night and cannot yet name what is wrong. It is true when your partner says he is fabulous but he is not fabulous.

Every person you love is, at some point, in their own kind of dying.

Something in them is ending. A version of themselves.

A relationship. A dream they held. A future they were counting on.

Your presence in those moments is not a small thing. It might be the only thing.

The vow I use in this room

Most of us have been trained, in the moments when someone is opening up to us, to move immediately toward advice. To share what worked for us. To suggest a book, a person, a strategy. To try to be useful.

The vow I return to whenever I sit down with another person is the fourth of the Seven Presence Vows in Live and Die Awake.

I vow to ask permission before offering guidance.

Six words that have changed my closest relationships. Because most of the time, the person in front of me does not need my guidance. They need my witnessing. And when they do want guidance, they will tell me. The asking is not a formality. It is a doorway.

Sometimes the answer is “not now, just be with me.”

Sometimes it is “yes, please share. I would love to hear what you think.”

Either way, they get to decide. And when guidance is invited rather than imposed, it is actually received.

Holding space, and the lesson I am still learning

There is more to being with another than asking. There is also holding space. Holding space begins with holding yourself. It is arriving with yourself intact. Being present with your own being first and then choosing to share that presence with another without intrusion.

Not pushing in. Not stepping over. Not filling their silence with your solutions.

It is reflective listening. Active listening. It is soft, gentle guidance offered with love, only when love is what is being asked for. Not with a need to fix.

Here is the lesson I am still learning, and I will name it plainly.

For those I love the most, I have carried a quiet weight of responsibility. As if my love should also mean I can protect them from every hard thing. As if being present meant being useful. As if witnessing was not enough.

It is enough. The people I love the most do not need me to solve them. They need me to release the burden of solving them, to show up in kindness, in compassion, in love, and to simply listen. When I do that, my presence becomes a gift they can actually receive.

My work and my goal are that when guidance does come from me, it comes softly. From love. From a place of presence, not from a place of anxiety about what will happen to them if I do not intervene.

The releasing is the presence.

Before you speak, three breaths

Here is one practice I use, especially when I know I am about to be with someone who needs me.

Not a long meditation. Not a ritual anyone needs to notice. Just three slow breaths before I open my mouth. In that small pause I remember I am not here to perform. I am here to be present.

Try it this week. Before you answer your child. Before you respond to your partner. Before you say hello to the friend who has been waiting for you. Three breaths.

You will notice something. The quality of what comes out of your mouth will change. It will be less about you and more about them. Less rehearsed. Truer.

Hineni, again

Last week I told you I say Hineni to my own life each morning. Here I am. I try, quietly, to say it again inside myself each time I sit down with another person. Here I am. With you. Not somewhere else. Not carrying the weight of trying to fix you. Just here.

That, in the end, is the whole second room.

Reflective Pause

1. Who in your life this week has been trying to reach you, and what were you

preparing to say instead of listening?

2. Where do you carry the quiet weight of responsibility for someone you

love? What might it feel like to set that weight down, even just for one

conversation, and simply be with them?

Until next Sunday, breathe in. Breathe out. You walked through the worst of

it, and you are still here.

Sacred. Awake. Alive.

Happy Sunday to you all. I decided today that I will post at 3:33 PM to honor Jim’s life and death.

With love and presence,

Julie

Glenn and I recently traveled to Bryce and Zion national parks. It was magical and surreal. I literally felt as though it was a scene out of Star Trek and we were beamed to a location that was not like any other we had ever experienced.

When reflecting on our journey we realized that sometimes nature doesn’t answer our questions, yet instead it changes the questions we ask.

As we walked through the rim of Bryce Canyon and later stood beneath the towering sandstone walls of Zion in the water amongst, pebbles and rocks that have been shaped and formed by the force of nature, we found ourselves wondering how landscapes like these could possibly come into being. Glenn inquired if there was one defining event? An earthquake? An Ice Age? Some unimaginable force that transformed the land in an instant?

As we learned more, we discovered something both simple and profound. These places were not shaped by one extraordinary moment. They were shaped by millions of ordinary ones. Water finding the same path over and over. Winter freezing and then releasing stone, while wind carried away what had become loose.

Time doing what time has always done.

Like many people, we have both spent years sitting with stories of healing, loss, resilience, and transformation. Working within ourselves and with clients.

Glenn has listened to people searching for the moment that explains everything, the moment they became anxious, shut down, disconnected, fearful, or lost.

Sitting in our car on the drive back to Park City, we asked what was the commonality between nature and our own soulful erosion? Was there any connection to what we experience on the inside and what we were witnessing on the outside?

Each of us, gradually experience one moment at a time, lessons learned relationship by relationship, loss by loss, love by love throughout our childhoods and adult lives.

Grief and pain show up too in daily moments that shape us a little at a time.

That realization brought our work together in a way we hadn’t quite seen before. The geology of a canyon and the geology of a soul are not separate sciences. They are the same patient process, working on different timescales.

Glenn’s work in Neurological Intelligence® helps his clients understand how our nervous system adapts to life’s experiences. It explains how protective patterns develop, not because something is wrong with us, but because something within us has been trying to help us survive.

My work with the Living and Dying Awake Framework™ begins where awareness enters the story. It invites us into the descent, not to become overwhelmed by it, but to witness it. To gently turn inward toward what we have spent years turning away from. The work is to stay present long enough to see our protective patterns (Neurological Intelligence ) without becoming defined by them.

This is particularly challenging in our intimate personal relationships where we, or in my case where I, easily get triggered when safety or uncertainty shows up.

I teach in Live and Die Awake: On Love, Loss and Living Fully that in our witnessing it allows each of us to embrace living fully which begins the process to awaken and for each of us to rise from within. We are our souls beneath the layers.

I compare this to experiencing deep grief and loss, and that we must find our way forward to live again and embrace life with meaning when we may make the personal choice to live fully. This is the moment where we awaken and our given the opportunity to live in the now and be present.

A young owl, full of presence, witnessed during our stay at Zion.

Standing in Zion, we noticed that the canyon itself is an expression of our human journey. Before we may uncover our internal depth, it requires us to embrace the descent. Before there may be beauty revealed, the wind, the water, the sand had to be gently worn away.

The stone was never fighting the river. The river simply remained faithful to its path.

Zion Narrows 6-24-26

Perhaps healing asks something similar of us. We may not force ourselves to change and to become someone else. But rather that we remain present with enough honesty, enough compassion, and enough courage that what no longer serves us can slowly loosen its grip.

The canyon is not beautiful because it escaped erosion. It is beautiful because erosion revealed what had been hidden, the layers fall away and leave behind the truth, the inner beauty, the heartwood and roots of this tree.

Bryce Rim. What erosion revealed.

Perhaps we are not so different. The descent is not the end of the story. It is where we begin to see. Witnessing is where we learn to stay.

Awakening is where we rise, not untouched by life, but more fully present within it, experiencing each moment.

Maybe that is what the canyons have known all along.

Reflective Pause:

1) Where in your own life are you living through the descent right now?

2) What is waiting to be revealed?

3) What lessons do you find in nature each day? When taking a walk, a swim, a hike, a bike ride, simply gardening or any other activity that you find peace in silence, take a breath and go inward to listen to your soul, what may it reveal?

With love and presence,

Julie and Glenn

Living Awake

Sunday Presence reflection with Julie and Glenn from Bryce and Zion.

Bridging the Living and Dying Awake Framework™ and Glenn’s Neurological Intelligence® work through the metaphor of soulful erosion.

If these reflections found you, a free guided meditation is waiting for you at https://risingphoenix.life. While you are there, add your name to the Live and Die Awake launch list to receive the pre-order invitation when the book releases on November 4, 2026.

About the authors

Julie Wright Halbert, Esq. is a national voice for grief literacy, a death doula, an end-of-life educator, a transformational soul coach, and the founder of Rising Phoenix LIFE.

Glenn S. Cohen is a Master Neurological Intelligence® Life Coach based in Charleston, South Carolina, and the Founder of the Center for Neurological Intelligence. He is the author of the Neurological Intelligence® book and audiobook series: Wired Within, A Guide to Your Human Operating System; The Inner Work; Why Love Activates You and The NI Workbook. Connect with glenn@centerforni.com

Invisible Grief: A Father’s Day Letter to the Men Who Stepped Closer

A Father’s Day letter, for the men who stepped closer when life could have easily pulled them away.

Jim was fifty-one when he died. Our sons were sixteen and nineteen.

They will always be fatherless sons. That is the truth I could not soften,

could not fix, could not protect them from. It is the pain I still carry as

their mother, the one that does not lessen with the years.

I could not bring their father back. I could not give them more time with him. I could not stand between them and this loss, no matter how fiercely I wanted to.

It will be eight years this coming December. While I could not protect my sons from losing their father, other men stepped closer when life could have easily pulled them away.

When we talk about parental loss, we often focus on what is missing, and there is no denying the absence. Jim was and will not be there for college graduations, major career decisions, relationship beginnings and endings, weddings, grandchildren, or the countless ordinary conversations that shape our boy’s lives.

But there is another layer of loss that often goes unnamed. Fatherless sons do not only grieve the man who died. They grieve the future they imagined with him. They grieve the advice they will never receive, the questions they can no longer ask, the reassurance that would have come during life’s hardest moments. They grieve the chance to be known by their father as adults.

Research now confirms what families have always known: a parent’s death keeps speaking across a lifetime, surfacing again at every milestone.

Much of that grief is invisible.

People check in and offer condolences in the early days. Then life moves forward, while our sons quietly carry the ache of milestones reached without the one person they expected beside them: the way Jim was for them at every soccer, hockey, and tennis match, every school event, even the simple ride home from practice, a friend’s house, or the neighborhood tennis court.

There is a particular loneliness in looking around a room and realizing everyone else’s father seems to have grown older while yours remains frozen in time.

He would have turned fifty-nine this year.

While our culture readily acknowledges the loss of a parent in childhood, we often overlook the ongoing grief that unfolds across a lifetime. We do not always make space for the sorrow of becoming an adult without a father, or for the ways that absence resurfaces at each new stage of life.

Because our culture often teaches boys and men to suppress vulnerability, much of this grief goes underground. It can emerge as anger, withdrawal, anxiety, perfectionism, or a persistent sense that something essential is missing. Too often, the pain is misunderstood because it does not always look like grief.

No one replaces a father.

As I reflect on the years since Jim’s death, I am deeply grateful for these Gentle Men who chose to show up anyway.

My father, their Papa, who loves them fiercely and is always present. Happy Father’s Day, Dad. We are so grateful to have you in our lives and to be the boys PaPa.

And to their inner circle: Uncle Doug, Jim’s brother, you always show up for every milestone, my brother Mark, brother-in-law Randy, Uncle Les, Cousin Dennis, my beloved soulful partner Glenn, and many friends by choice who loved Jim from childhood and through his short adult life. Wishing each of you a Happy Father’s Day!

You are the kindhearted men who chose to step closer when life could easily have pulled them away. You have not tried to become their father. Instead, you honor Jim by helping carry forward the love he left behind.

You became witnesses to my sons’ lives.

I recently shared on Every Widow Thing what a mother cannot fix, and what other mothers will understand without my having to say more. Watch or listen from 31:24 to 33:00.

▶ Or listen on Spotify, from 31:24 to 33:00

In a culture that often tells men to be strong, stoic, and silent, these men demonstrated another kind of strength: presence.

They taught me that while no one can fill the hole left by the death of a father, a community of caring men can help ensure that a child does not have to carry that loss alone.

As we speak more openly about grief literacy, I hope we also begin talking more about fatherless sons. Not only about what they have lost, but about the grief they continue to carry and the support they still need.

They need mentors.

They need witnesses.

They need safe places to tell the truth about their pain.

They need men willing to step forward and say, “I’m here.”

Thank you to those men who understand that your presence could never erase the loss of a father but could help soften its loneliness for many sons. You remind these sons that love continues, not only through memory, but through the people who choose to carry it forward.

Reflection for each of you:

If a man stepped closer for you or your children after a loss, will you name him in the comments today? Honor them. Please share any wisdom for other fatherless sons.

I welcome every one.

With love and presence,

Julie

When my husband Jim was dying, our younger son William, then a junior in high school, turned to me and asked what he could do in those final hours.

I told him to write a letter to his dad. So, he would always know what he said to him in the final moments.

William wrote it. Then he climbed into bed next to his father and read it aloud.

I will never forget that moment. My heart was filled with so much love for both of them, and so much anticipatory grief for the loss I knew was coming.

I did not write one. I have wished, every year since, that I had.

In the seven and a half years since Jim died, this is one of the only things I would do differently if I could. It would give me great comfort now to know exactly what I had shared with him in the end. To have a record of what was passed between us in the final hours.

I cannot go back. But you may not have to.

If there is someone in your life who is dying, or aging, or whom you love and have not yet said what wants to be said, this is the letter I am here to teach you to write.

It does not need to be long. It does not need to be perfect. It will hold three threads.

Actions of gratitude. What did this person do for you? What did they bring into your life? How did they make you feel? How did they make you better? Begin with *Thank you and let the rest follow.

Lessons learned. What did they teach you about life, about love, about yourself? What wisdom have you carried from them? How did they influence who you are today?

Legacy. What of theirs will you carry forward? What part of them lives in you now, and how will you keep that living?

These three threads. Actions of gratitude. Lessons learned. Legacy. They are the foundation of the letter. The voice you put around them will be entirely your own.

The letter can be written by hand or typed. It can also be recorded as a video. Some hearts speak more freely than they write. Both are sacred. Both hold. Choose the form that lets the truth come out of you most freely. Your camera on your iPhone is enough.

If the person you are writing to is alive, you can read the letter aloud to them. You can hand it to them. You can keep it for later. Trust whatever your body, your highest self, guides you to do.

If they are gone, you can read it aloud anyway. To the room. To the sky. To the candle on your desk. The reading is part of the practice. Imagine the hearing happens whether or not you can prove it or believe it.

If they are aging or healthy or you simply do not know when their final moment will come, you can write the letter now. You do not have to wait. You do not have to know what time is left. My video to my boys shared below in a iCloud link is about living, not dying. Embracing every moment.

In the book, I walk you through this practice in greater detail, with five specific exercises that build the letter step by step, including a meditation of presence to ground you before you begin. For now, all you need to know is this.

The letter is waiting to be written. You already know what is in it. The page is patient.

Start the letter today. To anyone. To someone alive and well, to someone you have lost, to someone whose seat is still at your table but whose words you have not yet spoken. The practice does not require grief. It only requires that something inside you is waiting to be said.

If my articles are landing for you, a free opening guided meditation is waiting for you at https://risingphoenix.life. While you are there, you can also add your name to the Live and Die Awake launch list (see book in menu bar) to be the first to know when the book opens for pre-order.

And if it helps to see one before you make your own, here is the video I made for my own sons when in Sedona in 2024.

Until next Sunday, breathe in. Breathe out.

Sacred. Awake. Alive.

With presence,

Julie

Living Awake Circle, July 12

Paid members: this month the Circle meets one week later than usual, Sunday July 12 from 5:15 to 6:30 pm Eastern Time, because of the Independence Day weekend. Watch for your email invitation with the Zoom link a few days before.

Not yet a member? The Living Awake Circle is a 75-minute monthly gathering, first Sunday of every month, for those who have been deep in grief or who are simply choosing to live fully awake.

Seven and a half years after Jim died, I am walking today for the Cholangiocarcinoma Foundation.

My sisters are walking with me miles away from each other, yet together in our hearts. I am walking alone, with my parents, with our youngest son and my sister’s dog, Shiloh (the peaceful one—seems appropriate).

I am walking for Jim and the hope of all the others that research may progress and save their loved one’s lives.

I want to be honest about something, because I think it matters to say.

I am not in grief today. I am in love.

I carry Jim with me. He is here. He is in my chest, at my side, in the eyes of my son. I do not walk for him out of sorrow. I walk for him because he was loved, and is loved, and because other families deserve more time with the people they love than we got. Cholangiocarcinoma is rare. It is aggressive. It is usually caught late. It takes people quickly, and it takes them young. We are walking so that one day, that is no longer the story.

But this piece is not about the cancer.

This piece is about the people who walk with you.

My mom and dad are with me today. My youngest son is with me today. Jim is with me today. That is what I want you to hear.

Because if you have someone in your life who has lost a person they loved, you’re showing up matters more than you know. You do not have to say the right thing. You do not have to be a grief expert. You can simply be there. You can say their name. You can ask, tell me about them. You can come to the walk. You can sit at the kitchen table. You can text on the anniversary. You can show up in the ordinary day and let them talk about the one they love.

This is the work. This is the love. This is the medicine.

We do not talk enough about how the living helps us keep loving the ones who have died. We do not talk enough about how saying a name out loud, again and again, keeps a soul present in the world. We do not talk enough about what it means to be witnessed, in our love, by the people who stayed.

Seven and a half years in, I am not heavy. I am full. I am full of Jim. I am full of my love for our sons. I am full of love for my parents who raised me and are still walking beside me. I am full of the love Glenn, my partner who loves me now, grateful beyond words for the sisterhood of friends in Sarasota who have become family, the people who only ever knew me on this side of the loss and love Jim anyway, because they love me.

This is what it means to live and die awake.

To carry your people with love instead of weight.

To let the ones still here see you doing it.

To say their names out loud and let the names be holy.

To walk forward, with them, not without them.

I am living. I am awake. I am aware. I am learning.

I am growing. Every day.

And today, with my mom and dad on one side and my youngest son on the other and Jim is everywhere; I am grateful.

_______________________________________________________________

Today, I am walking with the Cholangiocarcinoma Foundation in honor of my 58^th birthday and my late husband, James Andrew Halbert. If this piece moved you, you may support research into this rare and aggressive cancer here:

https://www.facebook.com/donate/1343725007598895/?fundraiser_source=external_url .

And if someone you love is grieving, please know: your presence is part of the medicine. Show up. Say the name.