Rise Up After the Most Challenging Chapters of Your Life

Onward Podcast logo and photo of guest Stephenie Zamora

We Can All Rise Up!

Stephenie Zamora tells us how we can rise up after the most challenging chapters of our lives. She knows how because she did it. Stephanie recently published her memoir, Unravel: Rising Up and Coming Back from a Season of Living that Damn Near Killed Me. Now if that book title didn’t capture your attention, I’m not sure what will!

Stephanie helps catalyze individuals on their healing and growth journeys so they can uncover the purpose of their path, step into who they’re here to be, and do the work they’re here to do. Also, Stephanie developed a signature Journey Mapping process and program. This program helps individuals reorient to their own life, work, and relationships in the aftermath of life’s most challenging chapters and big life transitions.

The Fall is not the Hard Part!

Stephanie reveals that the fall is not the hard part. The hard part is the return, the rise, the comeback. She explains this is because this part of the journey requires a series of simple, yet incredibly difficult choices. Moment to moment, day to day. In addition, Stephanie tells us that life is always shaping us in relation to our purpose—who we are here to be and the work we’re here to do. Furthermore, we must be willing let go of what no longer serves us so that we can start carrying forward only what’s truly aligned and become who we’re meant to be.

Finally, Stephanie shares that we can make the impossible happen if we’re willing to untangle ourselves from the winning strategies that have kept us safe, successful, and secure up until this point in our lives.

Episode Highlights:

  • First, Stephenie shares her life changing moment.
  • Then, Emily and Stephenie discuss grief.
  • Also, we discuss the growth opportunity offered by that the coronavirus.
  • Next, Stephanie talks about her book Unravel: Rising Up and Coming Back from a Season of Living that Damn Near Killed Me. 
  • Then she gives high level over view of what led her to write the book. 
  • Also, she explains how that season of her life nearly killed her and how she blamed herself for what happened.
  • Furthermore, she shares her how Post Traumatic Stress Disorder showed up in her life. Then she takes us through her difficult healing process. She shares the therapies she tried and what worked for her.
  • As part of her healing process, Stephenie let herself feel pain until she thought she couldn’t take it anymore. In other words, she shares how she bravely faced her unresolved grief and trauma.
  • Once this happened, Stephenie could start healing and find genuine joy, peace, and love.
  • Stephenie is still navigating her grief and learning how to live with it.  
  • Stephenie explains the concept of the void. She explains it as a feeling of nothingness – no feeling no light.
  • Next Stephenie explains that we must pass through the void to access pure joy or purpose 
  • Stephenie shares how we can start dealing with our feelings:
    • One: Build trust in intuition and inner knowing and guidance – grief work requires discernment.
    • Two: Begins with feeling feelings – gain insight – sit still become overtaken by your feelings.
    • Three: Find the  purpose in your anger. Be with yourself – see what comes up and feel it.
  • After that, Stephenie shares how we can go through the layers and the void. 
  • First,  feel the emotion emotion and feel it fully.
  • Then, get immersed in the emotion and find your way through it.
  • Next,  see what’s beneath it. 
  • Finally, keep going and work towards the void.
  • Journaling by hand helped Stephenie heal.
  • Stephanie shares that we have to do the deeper work. 
  • In other words,  you have to be uncomfortable and none of us want that!
  • In addition, it’s important to be able to call yourself on your own BS.
  • Next Stephanie shares how she developed the Journey Mapping Process from her own experiences.
  • Then Stephanie talks about the second coming of grief and how she realized that the fall isn’t the hard part. In other words, we don’t hit rock bottom and bounce back. The hard part is making the choice to rise up.
  • Next she explains that coming back is a series of tiny choices and tiny moments.
  • She also explains that when grieving, people need space to be heard and to feel it’s ok to say whatever they need to say. 
  • Also, when grieving, we repeat our stories because we are  processing so much.
  • Stephenie ends her interview with some final words of encouragement. She says you’re exactly where you need to be – you are so much more capable of navigating what you’re going through.
  • Also,  we get to decide what meaning we give things that happen to us. 
  • Finally, trust yourself.

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