Chillin’ with Adam Holiday Special with Sara & Adam Kujawa
Losing a child has been both the absolute worst thing I’ve ever experienced as well as my greatest lesson. My oldest son, Adam, transitioned in January 2011 as a result of injuries sustained in a car accident. My friend, Sara Kujawa also lost a son named Adam in January 2014. Almost seven years later, the holidays are still a challenge. Sara and I decided to put the “lesson” part of our loss to work for us and we created this holiday special with our Adams with the hope it helps other mothers to survive the holidays.🎄
Cindy: Hi Sara!
Sara: Hi Cindy, how are you?
Cindy: I’m great. How are you?
Sara: Good. I love your Grinch sweater.
Cindy: Thank you! (Standing up) Here we go! There’s the rest of him.
Sara: Did you see mine?
Cindy: No. I can’t wait to see yours. I can see you have things on there. (Admiring Sara’s holiday sweater.) Oh, my gosh!
Sara: Mine’s all trashed out. It’s actually kind of heavy.
Cindy: That is one of the most awesome holiday sweaters I’ve ever seen. I mean you have multi-media going on there. I can hear it!
Sara: I can’t wash it. I cannot wash it. Yeah, you can hear it. You can hear all the sounds it makes.
Cindy: That’s great! Hi folks! Welcome to our Chillin’ with Adam Holiday Special with Sara & Adam Kujawa. Sara and I decided to dress in our holiday sweaters today and we happened to be in Texas and California, so it is not very wintery here. I have a sweat mustache and goatee.
Sara: And so do I.
Cindy: And Sara turned her heat off. So, what we wanted to talk about today is we wanted to recognize how difficult the holiday seasons are for people who are grieving the loss of a loved one.
Sara: Yes. So, we have different suggestions and tips that Cindy and I have put together to help us through the holidays. It will be almost four years for me and for Cindy….
Cindy: It’s going to be close to seven, so let’s back up a little bit. Sara and I both have sons named Adam who transitioned in the month of January, right after the holidays. My Adam, Adam Hamel, transitioned at the age of 27 in January 2011 due to injuries sustained in a car accident. Adam was an organ donor. For the last four days he was with us, he was on life support. He spent a good part of the entire four days showing us that he is still here and he’s been communicating with me ever since. Sara’s son, Adam Kujawa transitioned in January 2014.
Sara: Yes. He died suddenly in a work accident and we began receiving messages from him within hours. As you can see, Cindy and I have been through the worst of the worst and we’re here to help some of you get through the holidays with a little bit more pep in your step. So, that’s our goal.
Cindy: Please keep in mind that there’s no right way to grieve. That we’re not here to give anybody advice. That we’re just here to share what we do and if you hear anything helpful that lifts your spirits or helps you get through this holiday season, then we’ve accomplished our purpose and our hearts are happy.
Sara: Yes, and like Cindy said, there’s no right or wrong, so the tips we’ll give you are suggestions that have worked for us, that may or may not work for you; or they may work for you in the future. You may have tips or suggestions you may want to share on the comments on the YouTube video.
Cindy: Please do. If you have suggestions about how you survive the holidays when you’re hearts are heavy with grief over the loss of a loved one, please put that in the comments. That brings me to a very fundamental point, in terms of why or how Sara and I “do death differently.” Prior to Adam’s accident, part of my belief system is when a life ends, in other words, the death of our physical body, it’s not a period, like the end of a sentence. It’s more like a comma. Life continues. Sara and I were both shown by our sons that they are still here. Because of our beliefs and because of the fact…. I don’t want to say because of our beliefs. Maybe the better way to say it is you need to be open, first of all, to the idea that your loved one is still here to be able to receive signs from them.
Sara: Right.
Cindy: Often what happens is it’s not that they’re not sending them [signs], it’s that we miss them. If you have a belief system that requires you to say good-bye forever and you don’t expect to hear anything from them again, then you’re not going to be looking for it. So, part of the reason that Sara and I do death differently is we do not experience the same sense of separation once you know they’re still here.
Sara: Yes.
Cindy: You know, it really took me a long time to really get my head around it. I mean, I could conceptually say he’s still here, but even saying, “He’s still here,” felt nebulous to me. Where is here? When you connect with the energies of your loved one to communicate, they are literally (wiping my hands down the front of sweater) here. (Waving my hands around in front of me) I mean I could be slapping him in the face.
Sara: (Laughing)
Cindy: Okay? They’re right here. They really are right here. It requires a lot of work to, for lack of a better analogy, to prepare your vessel to be able to communicate with somebody who’s departed the Earth plane. These souls have a frequency that is much higher than ours. Our bodies are sort of like an antenna. We are receivers. We can receive messages; however, you only receive messages from stations that match your own frequency.
Sara: Yeah.
Cindy: When you experience a tragedy or trauma like the death of a child, the natural response to that, that Sara and I both had, was to grieve the usual way; however, that began to change immediately once we began receiving signs. Let’s say your son is down in a hole and you’re listening at the top to see if there’s any life still down there. In a different way, Sara and I had an ear to another dimension, so to speak. You know? Just really listening and looking for more signs. Once you acknowledge the first one, you can’t help but look for more. Right?
Sara: Right. Right. One adds to another to another to another. Once you see one sign, it uplifts your energy so you’re in more of a receiving mode.
Cindy: It absolutely does! Every little joy burst of “Oh my gosh, maybe he’s still here,” ride that wave! Ride it higher and higher and higher. Sara has some amazing advice for how to get through the next hour. Do you want to share some Reiki principles?
Sara: Sure. The Reiki principles, I adjusted them to help me in the process of grieving. I became a Reiki master in that first year after Adam passed. That so helped me to be able to slow down my thoughts. Slow down my mind, work on my energy field and to heal my energy body. The five Reiki principles, you can google them, but we’ll post them also. I modify them for my need. I would always say, “Just for this hour, I will not worry. Just for this hour, I will not anger. Just for this hour, I will be grateful, and just for this hour, I will show kindness to all. Saying your own affirmations or having your own mantra that you can write to keep you in a more present moment, just to keep you in a calm place to allow the signs to come through. Because once we go down the road of worrying about what already happened or worrying about the future, we’re not present, and so it’s much harder to receive the messages and the signs. So that was a beautiful gift with the five Reiki principles. EFT tapping was another great form of healing modality. You can google that on YouTube. There’s many of them out there posted, actually for grief and probably grief for the holidays as well. The tapping that you can use too, that will help lift some of the grief. That you can use around the house, when you’re driving, at the store. At any given moment. There’s many simple ways to help you change your thought process. You have to learn to flip that switch.
Cindy: That’s right. You really do have to. When you were talking about the tapping, I noticed that you were going like this (tapping the side of my right hand with the index finger of my left hand) on your hand.
Sara: Yeah.
Cindy: I’m familiar with the way it works and I am telling you, it is phenomenal! I have seen an EFT demonstration done in a forum of let’s say, 5,000 people, and there were people there who had experienced chronic pain for years and years and years, where it was just gone. It’s a matter of just using acupressure points (demonstrating where they are) on the body. You tap them and while you’re tapping them, you are repeating affirmations.
Sara: Yes.
Cindy: So, it’s very, very simple. It’s so simple, you can read a book and do it all by yourself.
Sara: Um-hum. Um-hum.
Cindy: It’s a very effective way to do it, but the bottom line is the energy of grief is so, so dense, it’s so dense. When it is stuck in our bodies, it’s hard to move forward with the feelings and it’s hard to move on to a higher frequency to continue communicating with our children. Another interesting thing for me, as well as for a lot of people, is we tend to become heavier. I actually became heavier after Adam transitioned. I became quite a bit heavier while I was still carrying that grief. Like you, I became a Reiki master. I did my master training in the middle of 2012. Moving that energy out of my subtle energy field, made all the difference in the world with being able to be present. When your heart is in pain. When your mind is in pain. When you’re in physical pain, there’s not a lot of motivation to be present.
Sara: No. No, you can’t even see the light at the end of the tunnel when you’re in the deep muck. But it’s still up to us individually to move forward. You can’t rely on the people around you. You have to be able to rely on yourself. What I’ve come across in many reading and sessions is that many of the moms I’ve spoken to, we were not taught to put ourselves first and to help ourselves. We helped everyone else. Let alone the burden we feel that we were not able to help our child. So, we had to work through that process. I’m going to say, ‘work,’ because it is work, but it’s a process. It’s just a moment-to-moment process to work through it.
Cindy: It is the most rewarding work you will ever do because you literally learn how to untie and remove your cement shoes.
Sara: Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.
Cindy: That feeling that you have when you wake up, when your very first thought is, “Oh my gosh, that person isn’t walking the Earth anymore.” The first thought that enters your mind is that they’re gone, and then you can’t breathe. You feel like there’s an undertow in the world trying to suck you down and drown you before you even put your feet on the floor.
Sara: Yes. Right. Right.
Cindy: So, the most rewarding work you will ever do is to try to process…. I’m not going to say “try,” I’m going to say “to process” the emotions and the feelings that are holding us back. Another thing that isn’t helpful is to consider myself the victim of a terrible tragedy or ask, “Why me,” or “What could I have done differently” or to review the details of the accident in my mind. Any time thoughts want to be present to pull me down, it’s my job to find some way to go back up.
Sara: Right.
Cindy: There’s nothing more important than that. It’s like emotional 9-1-1. I’ve got to find a way to get myself back up. One of the things I do, I call the High Vibe game, with Adam. I try so hard to just dismiss any negative thoughts I have and any good thoughts I have about something, I try really hard to generate those. I’m like, “Hey! Did I do good, Adam? Ding-ding-ding! It’s like he gives me these etheric points for doing things that raise my vibes. It’s just another one of those little Jedi mind tricks, but it works.
Sara: Yeah, I know, that’s fun. I remember Adam showed me how to play this game where I’d feel his energy because after learning the Reiki, I’d be able to feel the tingling. Instead of using dowsing rods or a pendulum, I would use my hands. So, I’d say, “Adam, we’re going to play Marco Polo in the room.”
Cindy: Oh, wow!
Sara: And I would walk around until I sensed his energy and it was so much fun. So, that lifted me right up. It was proof that he was there in my energy field.
Cindy: I love that! That’s a great way! Another little game I play that’s similar to that, something similar with my hands, where I tell Adam to make my left hand tingle.
Sara: Oh, okay. Yeah.
Cindy: He’s doing it right now. It’s starting in the thumb. But not the right hand. I feel just a sense of serenity and calm on my right hand right now. My left hand is beginning to tingle, beginning with the thumb and it’s spreading into the palm now. So, then what I do is say, “Okay, turn it up. Make it stronger. Make it stronger.”
Sara: Yeah, that’s cool.
Cindy: I have to share with you, your Adam, he paid me another visit yesterday evening.
Sara: Oh, he did?
Cindy: He did! It is so amazing. I’m telling you, I’m just learning. You’re way ahead of me with this, I would say, mediumship work. Sara communicates with her own son. She works as a medium now. She’s a practicing medium and you can actually get a reading with Sara. My intuitive work is a little different. I do communicate with Adam directly, but I hadn’t really tried to communicate with anyone else and I haven’t explored working in that capacity. I’m doing different things. I’m doing the videos. I’m writing a book and I’m not even really sure that’s even my path.
Sara: You’re busy, busy, busy.
Cindy: But, here’s the deal, this is what was interesting, though. Sara sent me a clip yesterday, a little vignette that her son, Adam, did on this application called “Vine.” It was hilarious. It was so cute. I was showing my husband last night and I became aware of a certain feeling that I had in my chest that felt very familiar. All of a sudden, I remembered it. In July, just before we did our previous special with you and your son, Adam, I was in Lake Tahoe, when all of a sudden, your son Adam connected with me. I had this sensation in my chest and I knew unquestionably that it was him. We made this deal that he would use that feeling to show me that he’s there. I remember telling you about it. Then last night, I’m showing Greg this Vine video where he is just cracking us up. He had such a wonderful sense of humor. The feeling entered my chest. He was there.
Sara: So now you know that Adam’s going to come visit you in your chest.
Cindy: (Doing a little shimmy that sends ‘the girls’ left and right) Well, something doesn’t seem quite right about that. Let’s say he’ll visit my heart.
Sara, who’d just taken a sip of coffee, slammed her cup down, trying to stifle a laugh.
Cindy: (I couldn’t resist) So, how’s that feel having coffee squirt out your nose, Sara?
Sara swallowed her coffee and we enjoyed a hearty laugh.
Sara: That’s right. We’ll say heart. That’s so funny. It’s really cool.
As much as I’d like to transcribe the rest of the video, it would take the rest of the week and I’m pretty sure you’d rather not wait another week for our next episode of Chillin’ with Adam. We hope you enjoy our holiday special. I’ll get busy editing so you’ll be able to enjoy our visit with Whitney Houston and daughter, Bobbi Kristina soon with lots more to look forward to in the coming weeks.
Up next: James Brown, Lou Gehrig, Laura Ingalls Wilder and daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, Robin Williams (full hour), Freddie Mercury (full hour) and George Michael.
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