248. Why We're Doing a 10-Part Series on Grief (And Why You Need It)
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Henry: Hello, I am Henry Emmons and welcome back to Joy Lab.
Aimee Prasek: And I am Aimee Prasek. We are in our Element of Savoring and so often in this Element we talk about savoring the good because the majority of us don't do that quite enough. Researchers Bryant and Veroff, describe savoring as the capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance the positive experiences in one's life.
And so this skill of savoring is something that can help us get out of rumination. Out of, uh, hyper self-focus, negative self-focus, out of racing thoughts. It is a skill we need and it's a skill that isn't just limited to what is obviously good or positive. I think it's really an essential skill for us to tap [00:01:00] into when we're dealing with grief. And I'm not saying that dismissing grief with toxic positivity is what we're getting into here. It's that savoring amidst grief can allow us to move through grief and help us see, open up to, and also soak in what we love rather than getting smothered by just the heaviness that grief can bring. So we are gonna talk about savoring and grief this month, and then next month in our Element of Equanimity, we're gonna talk about equanimity or balance
as we navigate grief. So yes, we are starting a 10 part series on grief. And I can hear you saying, well, that's depressing. I came here for joy, not grief. But I can promise you that when you make space for grief and work with it, we make space for joy. They're not opposites as we'll learn through this series.
And I really don't think [00:02:00] you can have one without the other.
Henry: Yeah, yeah. I'm remembering a little snippet of, something I heard from a Buddhist teacher, and I can't remember who said this, but it just stuck with me. And she was talking about you know, folks wanting to reach some desired state, like equanimity or inner peace or, or even enlightenment. And her statement, what that I remember was: but first you have to tell the truth. And I think that's kind of what, what we're doing right now. 'cause you know, grief and loss are things that of course we'd rather not be focused on. But the truth is that they are there. And you know, I, full disclosure, I think that you and I were kind of drawn to this topic because we have each gone through, you [00:03:00] know, kind of more than our share of grief in the last, year or two.
And I certainly have. And I, through, through doing that, I have learned a lot more about grief than I knew before. And, honestly, I'm not sure savoring is quite the word I would use for this, although I definitely see how it fits with, with where you're going with that, Aimee.
For me, I kind of like the word marinating, because feels like this experience has sort of tenderized me.
You know, it's, it's softened me, if you will, and, you know, maybe it's even made me more interesting, more nuanced, and I'd probably better stop with, cooking marinating metaphors.
Aimee Prasek: I love it. I love it. Yes. More flavorful. Absolutely.
Henry: So on the surface of it, I get that grief might seem like the opposite of joy or it [00:04:00] doesn't really belong in a conversation about how to live a joyful life. But I don't see it that way. I really do see them as two sides of the same coin or two halves of that Yin Yang symbol. You know, in a sense, one doesn't exist without the other.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: So for me, the, the question is not how can I not have any grief or loss in my life? The question is, how can I live a rich, full, and even joyful life while I am carrying those things. You know, one hand holds joy, the other hand holds grief or sorrow. So I'm just really looking forward to getting into this and exploring it.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah. Me too. I, I hope all of you are, this is gonna be a wonderful experience for us as a community. And so, yeah, how can we live a full joyful life with all of this? How can we tell the [00:05:00] truth and still hold joy? 'Cause it can be hard to tell the truth. . So yeah, I wanna give a few more reasons why we're doing this, this series. First, we are living creatures who will experience grief and right now we are a community experiencing a lot of collective grief as well.
Henry: That is so true.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah. There's no hiding from it.
Henry: There is none.
Aimee Prasek: Nope. You can't. Like you, you can't even consciously stick your head in the sand and avoid this. Um, there's been a loss, a community loss, of a sense of safety, loss of trust in institutions, I think of community connections, of our understandings even of right and wrong.
Kinda these moral injuries. This loss of sort of the essence of how we feel our, our fellow humans are. And even if this stuff is manufactured, even if what we're being told is not true, we are still gonna experience [00:06:00] a loss, a grief, a collective loss from this. So second, related, we don't do grief well in the US. Maybe other folks in other countries can resonate.
We often treat it like an inconvenience, something to get over as quickly as possible, and that's bad because the research is clear that folks who experience significant loss and process it often show greater emotional wellbeing and flexibility, deeper relationships, a stronger sense of meaning in life, better sleep and other physical health outcomes as well. Grief is strangely good for us when we work with it. Third, grief has really become an individual thing to process alone, and that's not how we're wired to work with grief. At its essence, like grief is about a [00:07:00] connection really that has changed or been broken or removed or taken away.
And because of that loss of connection, it's a pain that so often needs connection to move through.
Fourth, grief hits so differently, and as much as I appreciate the normalization of grief that, frameworks like the five stages of grief can offer, grief just doesn't show up so ordered like that. I think like in the, in the, the stuff that's really knocked me down in life, those stages of grief just,
Henry: hmm.
Aimee Prasek: I didn't hit anger until probably, I don't know, 15 years later. So
Henry: A slow burn.
Aimee Prasek: Real slow burn. So, you know, if you're just waiting for the stages to hit, you're gonna be stuck in for a while. And I'm not trying to slam on the stages, but, you know, grief is really complex. It's unique for each and every one of [00:08:00] us.
And as I'm slamming those stages for a moment here, it, it is still really helpful to give it some language and expectations. So I get, I, I appreciate those five stages. it's helpful to lean on a framework, but we need something that's flexible, something that's kind of holistic, maybe dare I say, more accurate.
That's why I, I do really like the framework proposed by Francis Weller in his book, the Wild Edge of Sorrow. He talks about grief, not as something we go through in stages, but as something that enters our lives through different doorways and he calls them gates. And I love that because it's not even that we enter these doorways that we choose to walk through 'em.
It's that grief enters our lives through doors. They have the key, whether we invited grief in or not. So we're gonna get into those gates in the, in our series together. We'll get into this also, those reasons I just named of why we're doing this [00:09:00] series, our collective grief, you know, how we can do grief better.
We'll get into all of that, and just to note, because this is how I think when I, when I'm thinking about these gates. Awesome, i'll just, I'll just shut those gates. I'm gonna lock it up so grief doesn't come in. As I said though, grief always has a key. The other problem is that grief and joy both walk through those gates together. So if we're gonna lock the gate to try to keep grief away, then we're gonna lock the gate to love. We're gonna lock the, the gate to joy as well. I've done this. I've locked that door with all sorts of locks, nonetheless. Grief still comes in. I love this quote from Weller. He says, grief and love are sisters woven together from the beginning.
So you just can't have one without the other.
Henry: Hmm. Wow. I just love that. It's so good. I, the metaphor, I just, I just think it works so well.
Aimee Prasek: [00:10:00] Mm-hmm.
Henry: So you know, you talked about those, those doors and I think, I think that just like opening and closing a door, grief can shut us down or it can open us up. I think we actually do have a lot to say in that we don't have much to say about whether grief enters, but I do think we have a lot to say about
you know, whether, whether it's it opens us or, or shuts us down.
Aimee Prasek: Absolutely.
Henry: I also wanna say that sometimes I think grief can be so overpowering that it actually might be an okay idea to shut it down for a little while or to, to let it in, in, you know, kind of a measured way, because in that moment that just might be the only thing we can do.
I, I have experienced that myself and I think sometimes the best we can do is just to, I don't know, put a pause on it or something, but only for a while, you know? 'Cause I think [00:11:00] ultimately it is meant to open us up. I do think that's the purpose of grief, to open us up and, and for us to let it flow through.
And when we ignore it or when we try to brush past it, not let it derail whatever we think our lives are about, essentially what we're doing is we're, we're shutting down, we're voluntarily shutting ourselves down. And this is one thing I am sure about, grief does not go away just because we choose not to give it our attention.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: It is there, it is stored in the body until we open it up and look at it. We have to feel it. We have to marinate in it for a while,
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: but not forever, just for as long as is needed.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah, just for as long as it's needed. I wanna go back to your marinating metaphor. What happens when you marinate something for way too long?
Henry: It gets kind of mushy and [00:12:00] loses some of its, texture and,
Aimee Prasek: Yeah, yeah. It turns the mo-- like its structure breaks down. It gets so full of that marinade that, like what was there is gone. It's just all marinade. It gets lost by that power. So I think such wise words, like sometimes I, I think it's really wise. Maybe we just, we wait to, to set ourselves into that grief and then, you know, we, we take note when we need to maybe come out of it, because man, soaking in it too long is, is not great. So it's to our advantage to let the grief do some work on us to marinate us. And we have to be awake and active in the process, noticing so that we don't get broken down by it. Yeah, we, we let it do its work on us in ways that help us kind of rise up more rich and nourished. Oh, I'm getting hungry. Um, gotta switch the metaphor here. [00:13:00] Um. So I think it's helpful to maybe, actually, this metaphor is a perfect example of the curvilinear relationship of grief and growth. So a curvilinear relationship, or a bell curve, in this case, it's gonna look like an upside down U. It means that the more grief we let ourselves experience, the more growth we can receive, essentially.
But- but up to a certain point where too much grief starts to take us back down. Like we've marinated too long, we've soaked in it too much, and the growth recedes. It's just, it's just too much. So there is a sweet spot here. We have let the grief in, let it do its work on us, and we have to maintain some power in there too.
We have a say, as you noted, Henry, we have to come up for air. We have to navigate through it with, you know, with it. Savor what we can alongside it, employ the skills that we can [00:14:00] learn so that we can have growth amidst grief and not let it break us down.
Henry: Yeah. Yeah. As you're saying that, Aimee, I, I am reflecting on my own recent experience, which I will talk a bit about in some of these upcoming episodes. But, you know, I think I, I think I marinated in it too long. I, I let it go too long and I, it's, I things started to break down. Yeah. It's, and you know what, I didn't, I don't think I could have done it any differently, quite honestly.
I mean, me, I'm sure I could have, but at the time it seemed like, it seemed like I was doing everything I could and still, you know, it was too much and too long.
Aimee Prasek: Even great chefs make. You know, they over marinate sometimes. Yeah. Man, there's a lot of self-compassion in this, in this, uh, [00:15:00] series that we're gonna hit on.
Henry: Yeah.
Aimee Prasek: Grief is not something to do perfectly, that's for sure. Well let's talk about what this series is gonna look like. So after today's intro, we'll spend the next nine episodes getting into the these gates of grief that Weller has proposed. We'll touch on these five main griefs laid out and then we're gonna add some other ones that other grief practitioners have proposed. So we're gonna explore what each gate means, you know, how it shows up in our lives. We'll share some stories. We'll look at the science, we'll offer some practices. And because I think as we've introduced here, like grief isn't just an emotional or intellectual exercise. Grief is something we do. Not just something we lay passive in. And it's hard work. Grief is hard work. So if you're in the thick of it right now, this might feel like too much. And that's okay.
Take these episodes slowly. You can pause, [00:16:00] come back later. There's no rush. This series will be here ad free. It's not gonna go behind some paywall. Um. And, you know, you could consider, you're going through this, this series too with somebody else. I think that could be helpful, like maybe a therapist or someone who you think can resonate with your grief at this time and is maybe further down the road than you possibly, maybe their grief feels more like a scar rather than a wound, or a friend or family member who maybe, you know, hasn't necessarily shared the same loss but wants to support you.
Or, you know, like a book club. Start a collective grief club and go through this series because as a community , these are the resources we need. So whether you do this sort of process alone, know that we're here with you, even if you can't see the folks, all of us are gathering here as a community focused on working with our grief together. I just hope that [00:17:00] you know, again, you are not alone in your grief. Grief is absolutely our common bond.
Henry: Yeah. And I wanna echo too that this, this is hard work and it's okay to set aside doing the intentional work and just see what you feel. Just sit with the feelings for a while. That's really just fine. Just let yourself be in whatever place you're, you are. As for me, it's really only now recently with a little distance from my own descent into grief that I can even talk about it,
frankly. For a long time I just couldn't express what I was feeling even to close friends, really, or family, much less to do the, the deeper work that I knew I wanted and needed to do. So I'm just saying honor yourself and where you're at, it will be there for you to do the work whenever you're ready.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah, yeah. [00:18:00] Honor yourself wherever you're at. You are wise and resilient. You can do this work, but certainly there is patience in the practice. So let's take just a moment and touch like real briefly on what we'll get into in the series more specifically. I'll go through the first five. Then Henry, you can do the, the remaining ones.
So the first gate, that we'll cover is everything we love, we will lose. So we're just diving right in.
Henry: This is Joy Lab folks.
Aimee Prasek: God, I feel like we might need a warmup, but no. Um, So, you know, this is the most common experience. It's the gate that is just, it's like a, it's like at the state fair. Any have been in the Minnesota State Fair?
Yeah. You know, it's just, we got people coming, coming in and out all the time. But it's here that we can really tap into that idea of loss and love being fully connected. So, [00:19:00] this will be empowering, I promise. The second gate, the places that have not known love. This is where we can turn to those pieces within us that are hard to look at or that have been shamed. We that pain and loss, see that rejection and bring them back with compassion.
Third gate, the sorrows of the world. So here's our collective grief and this hits us in sneaky ways, I think... no, they all do, but when we can work with it, it really brings an immediate sense of connection. I, I think that this gate offers that pretty clearly, and we're all craving this right now, this division, this disconnection.
There are symptoms, of that, and we are just craving, for that connection. So the fourth gate, what we expected but didn't receive. These are the losses related to what really is our birthright of belonging. [00:20:00] These are the sometimes unconscious sort of wounds that can really snag us until we bring them into awareness.
Fifth gate is ancestral grief. This might sound woo woo, but this is real. So, for example, chronic stressors, can create changes in our gene expression that are passed down to our kids. So our system does to help the next generation handle the stressor better. But if those stressors are no longer relevant, or they've changed in such a way, then those alterations can cause more harm than good.
So, if we, we have to acknowledge 'em, then we can work with them. So we'll talk about how we can keep these gates open, move with the grief that enters, whether they're open or not, and even savor whatever comes. And then, as I said before, we'll do a little pivot into our Element of Joy for March, which is Equanimity.
And we'll continue to work through our series with that idea of balance, equanimity, amidst [00:21:00] grief. And so, these next ones that, Henry, if you wanna introduce, they, these gates come from practitioners like Sophie Banks, Sarah Platz, Azul Thomé uh, and others who have kind of worked into this, framework.
You wanna share those gates,
Henry: Yeah, you bet. So the sixth gate is the grief for harm done. So just like none of us can avoid grief, none of us gets through life without having caused harm to ourselves, to others, to our communities, to the earth, and it's worth reckoning with that.
The seventh gate is trauma, and anyone who's experienced trauma, big or small, has lost something; trust, innocence, a sense of safety, something that needs to be grieved.
The eighth gate is anticipatory grief, which is the fear of future loss. And this can happen with anything [00:22:00] that we cherish and don't want to lose, but it's especially tough when we're talking about a loved one or someone who's in the throes of an a known illness and, and we know that they're gonna decline.
And then the ninth gate is sort of a catchall, just other, things that don't quite fit into the other gates.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah, I actually like the "other" category. It's a reminder that grief is dynamic and complex.
Henry: Yeah, yeah. Comes a lot of shapes and, and sizes.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah, so we're gonna some really good work together over this series. It's courageous work. And it will support you in meaningful, noticeable ways, I hope as we practice together. I also like to think of grief.
Let me give one more metaphor. Like the movie, How To Train Your Dragon. Such a cute movie. Every grief is like one of those dragons. They come in through those gates, and so often it can feel terrifying. So we might hide [00:23:00] from those dragons, but when we finally turn toward it with courage and care, it transforms into something else.
And then we're like flying in those wonderful worlds. So, some something that can take us to new places. Something that creates connection that expands us. So bring your dragons, bring your curiosity. Bring your courage, bring your compassion, bring your sadness. bring your fears. It's all welcome here. Tears are welcome, vulnerability, permeability. It's all needed. It's not easy. But we do get better at it with practice, and we'll be able to train more dragons together, marinate better, keep the gates open, any metaphor that resonates with you. So to close, I do wanna share some wisdom from one of our favorite humans here, Parker Palmer. Here's what he said. "The human soul doesn't wanna be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed. To be seen, [00:24:00] heard and companioned exactly as it is."
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