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53. Grief Birthed Me Into Who I Am Today- With Pixie Lighthorse
206 Plays4 years ago
Pixie Lighhorse is the author of the Prayers of Honoring series, “written to restore bonds between people and nature while healing interior patterning and spiritual/religious trauma. Lighthorse’s books of prayer, boundaries, and greater sources of inner peace and wisdom. She works with themes of restoration of voice, liberation of soul, and vitality of body. Earth and all living things are her inspiration. She is working on a collection of poetry due out later this year. Lighthorse resides in Northern Paiute territory in the Pacific Northwest, and is a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.”
In our conversation we primarily talk about her book Prayers of Honoring Grief and weave in talking about her own experience with grief, as well as how society views grief. She feels it was grief that birthed her into the person she is today.
Contact Pixie Lighthorse or order her books: https://www.pixielighthorse.com/
Contact Kendra Rinaldi to be a guest or for coaching:https://www.griefgratitudeandthegrayinbetween.com/
Music: https://rinaldisound.com/
Logo: https://pamelawinningham.com/
Production: Carlos Andres Londono
Recommended
Transcript
Reflecting on Divine Experiences
00:00:01
Speaker
then I would remember that I had this experience, this sort of light of divinity in a way that was just walking with me, not telling me what to do, not requiring anything of me, just being with me. I felt very not alone because this experience had happened for me. And so, you know, I say that the community was, were midwives, but it was really grief that birthed me into the person that I am today.
Introduction to the Podcast: Grief Stories
00:00:35
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Grief, Gratitude, and the Gray in Between podcast. This podcast is about exploring the grief that occurs at different times in our lives in which we have had major changes and transitions that literally shake us to the core and make us experience grief.
00:00:58
Speaker
I created this podcast for people to feel a little less hopeless and alone in their own grief process as they hear the stories of others who have had similar journeys. I'm Kendra Rinaldi, your host. Now, let's dive right in to today's episode.
Introduction to Pixie and Her Book
00:01:20
Speaker
Hello, Pixie. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Welcome. Thanks, Kendra. So happy to be here. Thank you for being here. Thank you for accepting to be here. So I'm going to share just a little of how it is that we connected. So I happened to receive your book from one of my closest friends as a gift when I started to do this podcast. She's like, oh, I have to send you
00:01:46
Speaker
this book that I know the author and so she sent me and gifted me prayers of honoring grief and that is how I know of you is through my friend Catalina and so thank you Kata for connecting us. So I'll just kind of do that shout out to Kata. So I'm just so honored to have you here.
Shared Perspectives on Grief
00:02:06
Speaker
I'm really honored to be here. I always love talking about grief. Well, you wrote about it. So I'm like, now I'm like, before we started recording, I was just telling Pixie, I'm like, I was just even reading, rereading the introduction. And just in the introduction itself, there are amazing, I always say the word nuggets or little pieces of like wisdom that are like throughout every single paragraph of this introduction.
00:02:33
Speaker
So your insight on grief is definitely something that is very much alike to how I feel about grief. So I'm just excited about this conversation. So let's talk then about the different books you've written and when you started to write and all of that gist, and then we'll dive into this particular book. Sounds good.
The Concept of Birthing Books
00:02:55
Speaker
Well, I began writing the prayers of honoring series in about 2014 it came out in 2015 it started as blog posts and I sort of jumped around in 2016 I wrote prayers of honoring voice and in 2017 I wrote boundaries and protection and then in 2018 prayers of honoring grief and then dipped back in
00:03:22
Speaker
To gold mining the shadows in I think it came out in 2019. So I've been kind of birthing a book a year Yeah, it's like And I love that that and that what you're saying birthing. I love that I love that concept of birthing. It's not about writing. It's just it's born Yeah Yeah a seed gets sewn and then you have to decide am I gonna follow this energy and see what it has to teach me
00:03:53
Speaker
Love that. Now, which of these books, this is going to be a hard one because I've been asked that even just about the podcast.
Emotional Personality of Books
00:04:03
Speaker
Is there one of them that is more of that baby that you're like, wow, this is the one I was definitely meant to write because it's something I learned from it as I was writing?
00:04:15
Speaker
They really are like children. Each of them has kind of their own personality, you know, boundaries and protection, has a mountain lion on the cover. So it's got a very feisty and fierce and
00:04:31
Speaker
you know kind of care self-care caretaking kind of personality prayers of honor and grief just from the cover image alone you can see that it's very this book is sort of like her own personality too so she's sort of just sitting courageously with her with her feelings and and all that has come to be and trying to
00:04:54
Speaker
figure out how to, you know, be with grief every day and be with all of the other things, joy and pleasure and responsibility and these sorts of things. Prayers of Honoring Voice is a special book too because, and this is the one that your dear friend Catalina
00:05:13
Speaker
Sanchez Frank just translated into Spanish is is very timely. So for our times prayers of honoring voice is really out there right now because people are saying I want to I want to speak truth and I I need some confidence around my voice. I need to be courageous in the way that I
00:05:33
Speaker
um speak and gold mining the shadows similarly is just a deep dive into how we can in a very kind way um re-parent ourselves for you know kind of stripping away some of this colonial programming and some of this stuff that's been stuck on us for hundreds of years um so every book kind of has its has its own sort of
00:05:57
Speaker
Persona and and each one is sort of also like born out of the other in that sort of in keeping with that sibling theme you know the first one sort of paved the way for the second one and so they sort of all travel together. In a in a big conversation that
Reading in Spanish: A Healing Experience
00:06:14
Speaker
covers a lot of really key topics for healing.
00:06:18
Speaker
Yes. And talk about healing. And by the way, I've read the one in Spanish of the Oraciones de Heneracion Vos, the voice one, since I was able to read it before it came out in print and write my little review in your book too. So that was exciting as well. So grateful.
00:06:38
Speaker
No, and you know the reading that I also felt very identified what you just said about when when you read that like you feel as if it's you that's writing it it's as if I'm reading a journal entry of my own voice like it really does feel that way in in in voice and in voice sorry I'm saying boss because that's okay in front of me
00:07:00
Speaker
That's what we call it. So this one and as well as grief one are the two I have also have worksheets and to be able to write your thoughts and even prompts for questions.
00:07:15
Speaker
And so it's also a way of also not only just reading, but really looking within as a reader. So you mentioned something regarding part of this healing journey. In your bio, I was reading that you're a trained healer. So would you dive a little bit into that?
00:07:39
Speaker
Yeah. Um, thank you for saying that about the journal
Interactive Book Design: Self-Inquiry and Journaling
00:07:42
Speaker
prompts. The books are definitely built to be interactive. Um, and they do kind of provide like a self inquiry and also grief and, and voice and voice are written in first person.
00:07:54
Speaker
So you get to kind of interact with it as if they are your own words. Prayers of Honoring is a little different. It's sort of more from a we perspective. My training as a healer started in, gosh, many, many, many years ago, 23 years or so ago, I trained as a body worker.
00:08:10
Speaker
in Los Angeles and that led me through many different modalities of healing the body and then that led me into examining a lot more being in my 20s and early 30s I
00:08:28
Speaker
Started to you know enter that time in my life where I was doing healing on myself and my emotional body And so I studied with various teachers indigenous teachers non-indigenous teachers For the for the times that was a little bit
00:08:46
Speaker
now it's called sort of New Age and some of my trainings were of a shamanic nature, not training to be a shaman, but just to call in some of the transformative tools of
00:09:03
Speaker
utilizing some of our more indigenous gifts of imagination, of visualization, of meditation, of sitting practice and things like that. So I received my, how do you call it? Like, I want to say well-rounded, but you know, sort of like this very broad spectrum conversation in healing over the course of about 20 or so years.
00:09:34
Speaker
And I'm sure that's played a huge part as well than
Healing Journey: Emotional and Physical Self-care
00:09:38
Speaker
in your perspective when you're writing, because you already know the concepts of healing the body, and a huge part of being a well-rounded, like you just even said that, is really the within, right? The emotions, the mental state is not just the outward, not just the outwardly affecting the inward, but also happens vice versa, that our inward emotions can affect our,
00:10:03
Speaker
our outer body as well, correct? Yes, it's just a long experience that builds a body of work. I'm very kind of caring to mention in the introductions of all of my books that
00:10:19
Speaker
you know, I don't have a degree in clinical psychology or anything like that. I just have my own lived experience with moving through some of these challenges. And having also had the privilege of a lot of support around me, a lot of key players to help
00:10:38
Speaker
me understand what kinds of healing can actually do harm and what kind of healing creates space for the self to, you know, basically sort of forge their own path into being in their own body with not ease. Obviously, these are not easeful times.
00:10:59
Speaker
So be accepting. Accepting, yeah. The ease, I think, is also that aspect of just the flowing, of allowing it to just come out, right? So some things can actually become blockages. And in this, what you've been able to experience and learn is ways of opening it, like you said, in a safe way of emotions, to be able to kind of travel in a safe way, correct? Yes. Does that read the right way? OK.
00:11:27
Speaker
Yes, for the sole purpose of being able to be in our bodies, be honest with ourselves, break some of the patterns of self betrayal and becoming very kind of shut down and frozen and things like that, which is sort of the conditions that we were
00:11:48
Speaker
hatched in here, especially in America is one that causes us to kind of really compartmentalize the parts of ourselves that are that are aching for healing and just kind of narrowing ourselves into this, you know, performative
00:12:05
Speaker
Individuals that you know show up like very good citizens when in actuality There's so much more to us than that and we feel we feel that need for emotional healing Knocking and if we're not training ourselves or having the conversations with ourselves where we can be honest
00:12:22
Speaker
then we just keep shelving it. Emotions like grief and sadness and guilt and shame, those things can really creep up on a life and diminish its quality and diminish the quality of relationships.
00:12:42
Speaker
Yeah, because if you're just kind of bottling them in, which is one of the things you mentioned even in the book, we are so used to not allowing them to show like these other emotions of joy and things like that are allowed, right? They're commonly known. You're okay to show you're happy. It's okay to show, right? But then-
00:13:02
Speaker
Yeah, then there's some other emotions that are like put in this like back burner, like they're not okay. Yeah. But did you just call them sanctioned? Sanctioned emotions. Yeah. Yeah. And so let's talk now go back to this aspect of grief. Give me one second. My dog is wanting to leave the bedroom so I have to open.
00:13:21
Speaker
Oh, there, okay, my husband just opened it for her. She wants to, she likes to play, give me company while I'm doing this, but then she decides to exit and then I have to get up from the desk to get up. Sorry about that. Yeah, she's usually the one that interrupts my podcast because of that. So yeah, so let's go into why then Grief and
00:13:48
Speaker
your own journey if you don't mind sharing whatever parts of grief you'd like to share in this podcast. Because I can know you've lived grief, and you even say, oh, if you think that you haven't experienced grief, look around you. Like, where was it? Oh, nothing to grieve, have you? Look around. People are hurting everywhere. The Earth is grieving. The loss of her biodiversity. Humankind is becoming rapidly more unwell.
00:14:15
Speaker
due to environmental pollution and economic inequality. There are things that whether we've experienced it ourselves, or if we're
Miscarriage and Community Support
00:14:22
Speaker
just able to look around, we're going to have something to grieve about. So what is your grief journey? Let's go there. Yes, let's go there. Well, some of us also carry grief for others, whether it's consciously or unconsciously, and it's probably more unconsciously than not. But just to look out on the
00:14:45
Speaker
earth and see trash or pollution or things like that you know it hurts to a feeling body is affected by that and so you know anytime we feel a sorrow uh which is a you know a daily thing around here i guess is to encounter
00:15:04
Speaker
grief. And so for me, I experienced routine grief and I just wasn't calling it that until I had a second term miscarriage, second trimester, sorry, am I saying that right? Second trimester? Yeah, second trimester miscarriage when I was 31. So in the early 2000s. And it just so happened that I experienced this loss
00:15:32
Speaker
While I was surrounded in a community that I had been part of for a couple of years So I I it is as if I was able to grieve Because I had support Otherwise before that all of my grief I think was in a vacuum. I
00:15:49
Speaker
And I could share grievances with friends and family and things like that, but I don't feel that I really got the opportunity to embody my grief, to have supporters around me who are wise to say, you are in a grieving process. So that was an all new language for me just 20 years ago.
00:16:10
Speaker
So what the unique thing that happened that I did not expect, I made time and space to grieve this particular loss, which is, you know, this is a pregnancy loss or the loss of a child or even the loss of a parent. These are kind of like, you know, approved, allowed,
00:16:39
Speaker
examples of mourning or situations in which our employers and things say, of course you lost your mother. I'm sending condolences. I'm so sorry. So there's sympathy around these kinds of losses. But what happened for me as I got my first permission in my life to grieve was that every other grief that was significant for me that had happened up to that point came like little children,
00:17:08
Speaker
Yes the banging on the on the mausoleum saying we want to be acknowledged to we deserve space in here to be felt for the first time ever after decades of not being felt and so i became very overwhelmed at that time with how many.
00:17:27
Speaker
things. It almost became to the point, Kendra, where the loss of the pregnancy was number one, kind of a portal, a pathway into living with grief every day. And it also, the many griefs from childhood and other events that had happened began to almost eclipse the loss
00:17:51
Speaker
this dream you know of having this baby that wasn't gonna get to be it was sort of like
00:17:59
Speaker
Cathartic, it was a cathartic experience. It seems really cathartic and cleansing to some extent, but what you're just saying about it kind of clouding, kind of like eclipsing that, even though that was, but it just kind of showed, I'm sure, I don't know if this is your perspective. In my perspective, I had a miscarriage is what my first pregnancy was a miscarriage, but I feel that with what you're saying, it's as if it had to occur for you to be able to
00:18:29
Speaker
Live all these other or. I don't want to say the word deal what would be deal with I don't like that I don't like that and be able to feel these other grief experiences you've had you had had. So it was a catalyst for that yes it was my initiation.
00:18:49
Speaker
Yeah, wow. So that was then that particular then instance. Yeah, because when I read this, and you talk about then the community, sorry, I'm like retraining again my thought here, because I'm looking at your book, I want to ask things here, but then I also want to ask things regarding the things you just said. You just mentioned the community you were in. What was different about this community that allowed you to be able to express
00:19:16
Speaker
your grief than what you had been brought up to up to then. What was unique about this community? There were a few things that were unique. One is that it was a very, I lived in a very small town that had about population 1000. And so the people who
00:19:34
Speaker
I gathered with were consistent. There was some real family vibes in this place. But probably the most significant thing about it is that up until that point, my peers had been mostly disconnected. They had all come together at my wedding, which is one reason that we have weddings, is so we can have all of our support people around us at once.
00:20:00
Speaker
Although the the custom itself is is evolving These women in particular that were around me were older than me some of them were as old as my parents and others a little bit less so but they had of such a
00:20:20
Speaker
Body of life experience that I didn't have so they sort of took me under their wing and while I recognized that is That was very unique to me. I'm realizing that today there are
00:20:35
Speaker
it's much more common today that we have a circle or a group of friends that we can share our hearts with and and I hope you know my my hope and my goal is that people Build this and create this around them a safe circle And so that was very different for
Supportive Spaces for Grieving
00:20:56
Speaker
me. And so it it really was kind of like going to birth my next self and
00:21:03
Speaker
through this grief process and that suddenly I had five or six very reliable and experienced midwives or doulas to be able to say, we've got you on this. And it was simple things too, Kendra. It wasn't like a large grief ceremony wailing in veils and such.
00:21:22
Speaker
Although I have staged such things since then, it was just permission. Just permission to be where I was at. I was provided verbally and spatially with
00:21:39
Speaker
the space to process, to talk about it, to be stuck in it even. There was no judgment about, gosh, you have been talking about this loss or this pain for so long. When are you going to get over that? And this is the kind of way that it was growing up in my family. Move on. Just stop loitering in it.
00:21:59
Speaker
And so for the first time ever, I had permission to just be how I actually was without having to, you know, as women also were very surveilling of ourselves, always checking ourselves and watching ourselves. So we're not disrupting anyone's peace in any way. And so this was a permission. Grief is messy. It's disruptive.
00:22:21
Speaker
you go ahead you be in that space we'll hold it around you meanwhile we're going through all of our own things too and we'll find common ground but there was just a very sweet intersection of allowing me to be where i was at and that sounds so simple but it it really i grabbed that ball and ran with it
00:22:44
Speaker
helped space for you. They really just like held space for you to be able to just be with your emotions, be where you were at, be who you were, but maybe you had even not been able to be totally you like you were just even saying even before that maybe. Yeah. So what a beautiful community then that
00:23:05
Speaker
birth to you, birth pixie 2.0 version of pixie at that moment, I'm sure. Every single experience, there's a growth component. What would you say in that particular instance, what was the biggest growth component in you and in your life, having experienced grief at that point in your life?
00:23:31
Speaker
You know, a big, I would say in looking back that so much faith was cultivated in me. I did not grow up with religious practice in my family. And so this spirit that was in my body and then suddenly wasn't was, I felt connected. I felt
00:23:55
Speaker
I felt like it was something that happened that turned the lights on, and then the lights could never be turned off again. It was an awakening of sorts. And it wasn't this monumental thing that I woke up with one day and was like, oh my gosh, the lights have been turned on. But each time I started to find myself in emotional situations, then I would remember that I had this experience, this sort of
00:24:23
Speaker
light of divinity in a way that was just walking with me, not telling me what to do, not requiring anything of me, just being with me. I felt very not alone because this experience had happened for me. And so, you know, I say that the community were midwives, but it was really grief that birthed me into the person that I am today.
00:24:51
Speaker
And so, you know, cultivating trust in the process of life, because of course, when you have a miscarriage, everyone is saying, well, you know, you're young, you can try again. They're saying all these things that are inappropriate. Trying to comfort their own discomfort with loss and pain that they're not dealing with, maybe.
00:25:11
Speaker
I think you say that. I think you say that in your intro. Wasn't that like, I think you mentioned exactly those words that you just said that a lot of times what makes people uncomfortable is not your own grief, but it's because it's something within them that they have not been able to deal with yet to be able to express themselves, express themselves.
00:25:34
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. So with that knowledge that I am here to soothe myself. And how can I do that? And so through practices of sitting, through healing, through bodywork, and listening, and writing, and all of these things, I began to understand, oh, creator gave me the ability to soothe myself.
00:26:04
Speaker
Because, you know, life will not be in balance. We will not get everything that we want. Things will not always go smoothly. And my reactions to it, which were at the, you know, before that, rather limited to shutting down, fighting back,
00:26:24
Speaker
you know, fleeing, cutting and running in a situation that was scary, essentially just not being able to be with myself and be with my feelings. I was self-abandoning. And so the process of grief allowed me to stop self-abandoning, to just be with what was. And it was every day it was different. Some days I could get up and walk the dogs and other days I needed to just be with my journal in my bed or
00:26:52
Speaker
wait tables at a restaurant or you know whatever it was that I felt called to do I realized that my doing was not the same as my feeling and so I cultivated and you experience this when you're when you're going through the rounds in the prayers of honoring series is that we have these different ways of being in these magnificent human bodies one is our capacity for thinking and ideas
00:27:21
Speaker
the next is our capacity for action and doing and The next is our capacity for feeling I like to think of that as being in the West on the compass and then our capacity for just being and so I I realized that as I started writing and being with myself I realized everybody wants to skip the West, you know, like we were great for ideas and creative and
00:27:49
Speaker
Creative thinking and intellectual izing and we're great on the ground at taking action and then when it comes time to feel it's i heard many times people say well i'm i don't i'm afraid to open the floodgates because i fear that it will never stop.
00:28:09
Speaker
And I heard during my years of being a body worker, I heard people say that so many times. I thought, this is a thing. We really fear our feelings and we really fear grief. We think it's going to swallow us up. We think it's going to be like quicksand. It's going to drown us. And it really is akin to the waters of which, you know, makes up our body, makes up our earth. And so I thought, why is this
00:28:35
Speaker
Why is this being so rejected? Why is the feelings part being so not just rejected, ridiculed? And we see this today in our politics. Why is this not cultivated in many people, but probably what we think of first is it's not really cultivated in males. It's rejected in males or anything that parts of us that are male.
00:29:03
Speaker
And so I just started to really want to spend time, quote, in the waters. And it was a very transformative experience. And it still is. Grief didn't just go away one day. It's not a package that you wrap up and go to the post office with and mail to the North Pole or something, you know? It's with us every day.
00:29:29
Speaker
That's what you were going to hear to come on to tell people that they could just like wrap it up and move on with their lives. It's quite the opposite. It actually is something we carry. And the aspect of the wheel, which you mentioned here, and I was actually going to read the part of the West here when you were mentioning it, because I'm like looking, I'm like, okay, the West just went there. The West invites you. So the way Pixie has written this,
00:29:58
Speaker
book is in east, east, then it's south. Am I right? Hold on. East, south, west, and then north. And it's in the, you know, like that wheel. And you never know when it's gonna go back again. It doesn't always go in a circle.
00:30:14
Speaker
Yeah, there's no particular stage, but it's there. So the West invites inward healing. It is often passed over in hurried attempts to sidestep the pain of messy hardships, just what you were just saying. It's like we kind of don't want to go there, right? We don't want to go... And the challenge is, what it says here, facing ghosts and skeletons in order to gather
00:30:40
Speaker
dissociated fragments and integrate the abandoned contents of the soul.
00:30:48
Speaker
And it's just so beautiful. And then each prayer, it's just so beautiful because I'll just give you guys, listeners, just a hint here, like a little bit of it. And for example, in this section of the West with grief, it's like honoring trauma, honoring lowlands, honoring isolation. It's not about like,
00:31:15
Speaker
Oh, take it away, please. No, it's honoring where we are in that messy. Yeah. That's the beauty, because it's not about pushing it away. It's honoring it. And I love that. So take us then into that. Your background, a little bit into your background, you're from the Choctaw, and I'm going to be bad at pronouncing Choctaw Nation. Did I pronounce it right? Yeah, Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
00:31:43
Speaker
of Oklahoma. Does your background itself influence a lot of your beliefs? I know you say you didn't grow up in a very spiritual, was it a spiritual home or was it just not religious? Was it spiritual but not religious or neither one necessarily? It was not religious in my immediate family, but of course my grandparents had been brought up in one or
00:32:12
Speaker
or more versions of Christianity. My native family were pretty easily Christianized at the time of assimilation in the 1800s and that definitely trickled down into my family.
00:32:27
Speaker
When it comes to spiritual and family matters, I like to say that we didn't get the benefits of a religious practice or spiritual practice, but we got all the dregs, the shame of it, the trickle down into our... The water diversion. The water diversion. Yes, which was much to do with
00:32:54
Speaker
Shame and that imprint on my parents definitely came through so my parents were born in the 50s and for my dad who is native this was a time during Indian Reorganization Act and relocation act and so many many natives were being moved out of their territories and and reservations and spaces and into the cities So there's a whole gap generation
00:33:18
Speaker
from the 50s to the 80s that did not learn their languages, did not have any pride around being native. Obviously, I can't speak for all... Or of almost any, even the immigrants. My dad grew up Italian, the same. My grandfather never spoke Italian to my dad. That was not something you did. You hid that part of you that was not necessarily accepted
00:33:46
Speaker
in whatever that was in society at that time. Yes, blending in was and assimilating was very, very, very important. So certainly coming back into, you know, trying to wrap back into my ancestors and my grandparents' indigeneity and the practices of
00:34:06
Speaker
my nation did influence. I've always felt very indigenous, although, you know, we only learned a little bit of the language. And I'm still experiencing now, like I'm really understanding how much of that culture, what was left of it, you know, for my grandparents did come through. So in a very nuanced way, I'm having fun exploring the traditions and tracking them back into
00:34:36
Speaker
You know ancestral food ways and things like that total aside, but in terms of grief And it's huge by the way food food is a huge link to ancestry So it's like that's like right that I think that that that's a that's a way into back into your ancestry with food. Oh, yeah Yeah, yeah big time
00:34:58
Speaker
So, you know, and, and so wrapping back into that experience, I'm finding myself, I mean, I'm almost I'm going to be 50 years old this year as well, a lot can happen between 28 and 49. And so the, you know, the, the spiritual influence just keeps
00:35:18
Speaker
probably settling a little bit more into my bones and coming out of my blood memory. And there's room for that to play. And I think that's what a lot of folks are experiencing right now. There is a shift away from
00:35:36
Speaker
It's subtle. It's been rippling through the people for a long time to not have to move in a straight line with things. I think that these times are calling us to be more fluid, to be more like water, to never to take something and leave what we don't need behind in terms of religion and things, and the difficult lessons that grief teach us and self-abandonment teaches
Collective Grief and Global Healing
00:36:05
Speaker
us.
00:36:05
Speaker
and self-betrayal and some of these kinds of things are spiritual concepts that
00:36:13
Speaker
that appear in all of the holy texts, but that are available to us at all times. So it was a very spiritual journey to be with my grief and then many years later to write about it and to realize how there's a, there's a wonderful teacher of grief. Her, she's no longer with us, but her name was Sabonfu Somay and she taught grief rituals around the world. She is from Burkina Faso and, um,
00:36:42
Speaker
was a wonderful, wonderful teacher and mentor. She would say things like, you know, if only the leadership in the world would attend a grief ceremony like this one that we're having, then there would probably not be any war.
00:37:00
Speaker
You know, that many of the greater world's problems are because we have not gone into and been with our pain. We have adapted to it in a way that is very harmful, toxic internally, and doesn't serve.
00:37:21
Speaker
The period that we are living in that is so industrialized that put so many people, uprooted them, disrupted their life ways and put them on different continents to either dominate or be dominated. There's a lot of trauma that we're holding in our bodies.
00:37:40
Speaker
that came down through the ancestors and and shame and you know victimness and so being with that is very uncomfortable and yet this is what time is calling us to do is to be with what how the world really is and not how we want it to be or how we fantasize like Disneyland it is
00:38:03
Speaker
And what you're saying right now is very similar to then what you even experienced then in your miscarriage because when you do sit with it, when you do sit with the reality, then you allow all these other emotions and memories and traumas or whatever to come through like you, like even like what happened with your own grief experience, right? Like we need to be present in order
00:38:30
Speaker
to acknowledge everything that's happened to us in the past to come through and allow it to flow. Yeah. Yeah. And I think grief is like a scary animal with very sharp teeth for some people. And the truth is that it's your own teeth. Are you going to bite yourself? Or are you going to be gentle with yourself with how things really are? We have that choice.
00:38:56
Speaker
to be that way. And that's what you wrote here. The brief doesn't bite. Yeah. And I think the thing is, is that like a clinical psychologist will say, you can titrate, you can utilize like a, you can be a gate, a little bit of a gatekeeper for yourself. Like I'm going to give myself an hour to feel whatever comes up. And then when the hour is over,
00:39:22
Speaker
There's a very Western approach obviously, but when the hour is over I'm going to get up and you know make lunch for my family or something like that Just to be able to say okay. I'm feeling oh, I'm feeling oh, there's a sensation. Oh, that's really uncomfortable Oh my gosh, that's making me so sad and then like okay. I'm gonna let the part of me. That's scared of that and
00:39:43
Speaker
just close the gate gently on that. And then we have this wisdom then. Oh, this lives in me. It's there. I can visit it again. I can make priority. I can make time for it. But we're learning how to know ourselves.
00:40:02
Speaker
And there's nothing wrong with where we're at at this place in time. I mean, there is obviously grave harm that has been done by people not feeling their pain. But collectively, it is a time for us to make safe feeling, make feeling safe.
00:40:25
Speaker
I like that you're bringing it back not only to just ourselves, but just as a collective of what's happening even just in our nation. So it's not just about our individual grief of things that we've had, but back again so that anybody listening to this could relate to that, to relate through this call. Oh my gosh, I'm like, what is happening with my words? I'm like, I think because I said things before in Spanish, I told you Catalina's name.
00:40:50
Speaker
Something's happening with my tongue that wants to maybe be in the Spanish mode. Something's off.
00:40:57
Speaker
Why am I having trouble speaking? Well, that's that not moving in a straight line anymore. You know, we're such we're we are beings who are not just in this one language in this one way. I just I wish we could understand each other better. But, you know, for a podcast. The Spanglish that wants to come out and I love it. What's happening. Bring it. No. Yeah. Yeah.
00:41:24
Speaker
Now that you've read your own book in Spanish, now you can understand it. So no, that aspect of that collective grief that you're sharing and the sitting with it, it is such a healing process. I really have felt that that is something that this year, talking with other people that feel this way too, about
00:41:45
Speaker
As hard as this last year has been as a collective, it also has been beautiful because it has allowed us to see all the areas in which we are hurting as a nation and that we still have to heal and work through certain things. So I feel that just as in the personal life grief allows you to kind of shine a light in other areas of your life as a collective, I think it's done that as well as a nation.
00:42:16
Speaker
Yeah. And we see as a nation what happens when we invalidate feelings, when we skip a place in our critical learning here on human school or earth school.
Creating Safe Spaces for Grief Expression
00:42:28
Speaker
We see that so much harm can be done and overlooked. And if we're not tending it in ourselves, then we're not going to want to tend it. We're not going to want to create mutual care and mutual aid for others.
00:42:40
Speaker
And that's being called for right now, and a very big way is to reimagine how we're caring for others. But how can we do that without the trappings of co-dependence if we're not tending to and caring for ourselves? And it's beyond self-care. It's beyond a really good-smelling bubble bath, although that can be nice, big fan.
00:43:08
Speaker
we're going to have to care for these bodies that we're in and realize that the waters, the feelings, the memories, it's all part of us. So do we need to loiter? Do we need to really make a big fuss and a scene about it? If it serves you, okay. If that's not what serves you, then still just people say, well, when I go to feel my feelings or I feel my grief, what does it actually look like? I mean, this is how
00:43:34
Speaker
how different everybody yes well this is how disconnected we are from our feelings so it can be something like just saying i feel i feel low today or i feel a little blue today or oh that little thing made me feel sad for a moment you know like
00:43:49
Speaker
Our feelings are fluid. So they move in, they move out. We react to things that are coming toward us and things that are in us and then they move out. That's what tears are such a great example of that. You know, we don't just cry, cry, cry rivers until we're dry. The tears come and then it's sort of like the rain, you know, the clouds part that's clear again. It's a very natural process for us to be able to move through feelings. Now, some traumas are very, very, very
00:44:18
Speaker
Painful and very complicated and need need witnessing they need space created, you know by professionals and people who work in mental health and things like that and so
00:44:29
Speaker
Making sure that we have those spaces so that people can tend to their grief is so important as well. We have a little grief center here in circle. It works in the prison system, works with individuals. Access is made very doable. Every community needs a hub for grief.
00:44:49
Speaker
so that you can be resourced when you're going into this process. The daily grief is something that we can just speak a sentence, you know, I'm not happy that this happened or that really hit me in a hard way or that scared me. This is something we're having a really hard time saying in this nation right now, I'm scared.
00:45:10
Speaker
Meanwhile, it's bubbling and brewing and having its way with us inside. But sometimes just giving it a voice can really help move it through. And other griefs that have been sat on for a very long time, you know, holding the suitcase, sitting on it and keeping it buckled in. We need help with, we need to get extra help with that.
00:45:31
Speaker
Yeah, I feel that those, like you said, the suitcase sitting on it, I feel like I always compare it to like a pressure cooker kind of thing. Like you're just like waiting for it at one point to just like. Oh, yeah. And so I always say you got to let the steam out. Right. So I feel that grief is like that. You need to allow it. This, you know, allow the steam to come out. If not, it will just go, you know,
00:45:58
Speaker
And it will come out in a way that you don't recognize it as grief either because it comes out sometimes way later in life and you just have, you think you just have anger issues or whatever you want to call it, whatever it is that came out and not realizing that all it was, it was just unattended grief. You even said something about like a little house, you compared it to like a house at the beginning in the intro, something like in the, oh, a little house out in the woods.
00:46:24
Speaker
you know, kind of that you don't go and visit. You forget to go even to visit. And so, yeah, like you need to go see the lady who sweeps the lady who the woman who throws the bones, you have to, you know, go visit with grief, make time for her. Yes, yes, yes. And it's, and it really is not that it really is not that scary. It really isn't. I don't know. The more I talk about it, the
00:46:52
Speaker
especially in these conversations, the less scary it is. I think if it surprises folks, if they're in a clinical therapeutic process or they become triggered by something a partner does or says or, you know, things that happen even in the political world can be very triggering. It reminds us, it opens up these spaces that remember, oh,
00:47:15
Speaker
something happened to me that really really really hurt and I am I'm scared I'm sad I feel like I'm gonna be wrecked and it can be very disruptive when it surprises you I think it can you know that's that's what I think surprises or scares folks when they say I'm afraid to open the open the flood you know if the floodgate is opened I'm afraid I'm never gonna be able to get the
00:47:39
Speaker
gate back down on that you know put the damn back up but it's not been my experience even with the you know the seriously severely traumatized it has not been my experience or witnessing
00:47:55
Speaker
limited though it is that it works that way. We can sip it a little bit. It doesn't just come drowning us. I agree. I agree. I feel that it's just that you say ebb and flows. I've compared myself with like the ocean. It's just like waves in and out. You
00:48:15
Speaker
don't know what it is, but they're manageable. And yes, some of them might just tumble you down. And I think the most important is having the tools in order to be able to navigate your grief. You even say you're kind of like this, like you're the one rowing this boat, kind of what people are in this. You're kind of like the guide with this book in your prayers of honor. I keep on referring to the book because I'm holding it.
00:48:44
Speaker
you are just taking people into this journey, into their own grief journey, but they have to still be there to row, right? You still have to kind of be there, but you can have that tool in order to navigate that, whether it's journaling, these journal prompts, writing, having a community, like you mentioned before, when you experience your own grief. What other tools have you found that have been helpful in the different grief journeys you've had?
00:49:13
Speaker
I mean, self-talk for me is very important. I have to have a gentler voice with myself than the one I had, you know, many, many years ago. Because we live in a culture that relies on dominance and, you know, submission, this is sort of how we motivate ourselves and get ourselves to do things. We say rough things like pull it together or, you know,
00:49:41
Speaker
Stop crying or you know stop wasting time and things like that so as as we get older I think that it maybe becomes can become the invitation is to Become a little bit more curious
Gentle Self-talk and Language in Healing
00:49:56
Speaker
a little bit more gentle, we're re-parenting ourselves in a way. And so we think differently about how to raise children these days than we did 30, 40, 50 years ago. And so I sometimes, if I'm speaking harshly to myself, I'll say, would you say that to your daughter or your son? How would you say that?
00:50:22
Speaker
for the outcome that you're wanting to see happen. If you're wanting them to feel supported, if you're wanting them to stay open and stay well, how would you say that? So I'm learning to talk to myself differently. I'm also learning not to feel ashamed about telling people about it. Probably the most empowering for me is just finding language around my grief.
Using Metaphors to Understand Emotions
00:50:45
Speaker
What is it like? Is it like a river today? Is it like an ocean? Is it like a sprinkle of rain?
00:50:50
Speaker
you know, like a boggy puddle. Just finding ways to say, oh, I am in my body. It is like this.
00:51:03
Speaker
And then being with it that way, oh, I'm like a hurricane today. I'm just ratcheted up and cleaning my house in a frenzy. I think I'm avoiding something. I need help, but I don't know how to ask for it. I'm stuck or whatever. Just what is the truth in this moment? How is it? And then eventually it shifts, it moves. That is the only constant is change, right?
00:51:31
Speaker
Our fear of expecting it to always be this way keeps us in a kind of trap.
00:51:38
Speaker
That is a good way of saying because it's not, I don't know why we expect things to stay the same when we know they never are, right? Life is always changing. Yet, you're right, like when we want those things to continue the same, then it's like expectation hangover or like we let ourselves down because of things we thought
00:52:02
Speaker
that we're going to be a certain way or things like, you know what I mean? We make the grief be what it is, not the situation itself. It's our own ideas about what it's going to be. That's exactly right. Yeah. And we were not made to be patient. Patience is not built into us. So if we have to revisit the same pain or the same lesson four or five times or more, then we're just like, I thought I was over this.
00:52:29
Speaker
You know, like, why am I still suffering in this same way? And we punish ourselves cruelly for having to revisit the same lesson. And we know it is like a spiral. It is like an onion. It is like something that comes around and teaches us again and again. And this is, you know, our pain, our experiences.
00:52:50
Speaker
our loops, feedback loops, every time we come into contact with it, we have the opportunity to react in a different way. But we're so results oriented in this culture, we want to do whatever it's going to take to make it go away. And we can't be thinking like that, like whatever it's going to take for us to be in better relationship with it, you know?
00:53:13
Speaker
I love what you just said. It's feedback. It's feedback because it shows us either where you are now because are you going to make a different choice this time when this presents itself again? Have you grown from that experience before that now when it comes
00:53:28
Speaker
back up again, are you going to react differently than you did before? I like that word feedback that you just said. It lets you know where you are in your growth by depending on how it is you reacted in that moment.
00:53:47
Speaker
Did you play with those little basket tubes that you could put your fingers in? I think they used to call it Chinese finger trap. You would put your fingers in. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. On both ends. On both ends that were woven, bamboo woven. And you try to pull it out and it gets stuck. And the only thing that gets you unstuck is relaxing, right, into it. It's so similar with our emotions. We can get tight. We can get really
00:54:13
Speaker
really, really tight. And then ourselves, our families, our relationships, do not thrive when we are getting tighter and tighter because we're refusing to be with ourselves in the way that we are. It's not grief and feelings are not tidy. They're not linear. And this, as we become more
00:54:41
Speaker
in better relationship with grief and feelings, I think we become much more reacquainted with the qualities of womb that is life-giving and is of value. When we devalued women, when we devalued mothers, grandmothers, when we devalued elders, we
00:55:05
Speaker
did ourselves a great disservice as a human you know as as humans because we just sort of cut that part out of the equation because it was too mysterious too messy too bloody too emotional you know so obviously we have
00:55:22
Speaker
psychology and clinical medicine that says, oh, these are signs of hysteria. These are signs of madness and we're going for sanism here. And I think that that is very, very detrimental. People fear not being well with their feelings so much that they just tied it off in a knot and now it's just building up in there. So as you said, letting the pressure
00:55:52
Speaker
Yeah, letting it kind of just come down a little bit, being with ourselves. I know that we're moving into this and I have seen people relaxing themselves in the trap of fear of feelings for at least, gosh, probably close to 20 years. And as I start to feel my community being better surfers, riding the waves of what comes up,
00:56:20
Speaker
without having expectations for it to just be this one way. I'm seeing a lot of change. We are seeing a lot of change at a national level and I think that seeing things how they really are, being with things how they really are, feeling into our feelings, is having a role on that stage.
00:56:43
Speaker
Yeah, if we're not honest to how it is we're feeling, we can't move forward. We can't grow from it unless we're honest with how it is we're feeling as an individual and as a nation. We can't move forward unless we're honest with where we're at. So yeah, that is absolutely true. Oh, Pixie, it's been a pleasure talking with you in my jumbled
00:57:06
Speaker
Jericho, I don't know what it is. What happened today with my, with my, I don't know. Let's just go with it. I mean, I think that that's what feelings do. You know, we're not in the East with our brains on straight. We're in our feelings, which are fluid.
00:57:22
Speaker
at all. And you know what is so funny? I rarely end up listening back again to my interviews. I only hear them just to be able to get the little, you know, blurb of whatever it is I'm going to use for the intro, like as a little teaser, because if I did, I would be analyzing over analyzing. Oh, my goodness, I did this. I said that. And that judgment component comes in. So I'm like, oh, whatever. You know, like you said, it's this was the this was the day of the tongue twisted Kendra.
00:57:56
Speaker
Just like some days, like we're talking with grief, some days my grief will just be right on my shoulder, right out there in my emotions. Other times, it's not. So same thing today, but thank you for going with this wave, right? Well, we know the magic happens in the conversation, you know? This is what we know.
00:58:14
Speaker
Thank you so much. Now, to be able to get your books, do they go to your website? What's the best way for somebody to access the pixylighthorse.com? Yep, pixylighthorse.com has sales pages on every book and they can be ordered and shipped by my team here. They're also available in PDF.
00:58:37
Speaker
What else did I want to say? Oh, wholesale orders, many stores, boutiques, retailers, yoga studios, things like that carry books. They're half price. And so you would use the wholesale ordering form on the website. So they're available a whole bunch of different ways. Of course, they're at Amazon and Barnes and Noble and Walmart and things like that as well. So.
00:58:59
Speaker
Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure having you and learning from you. And now I'm like, I still I'm like all my highlighted things I wanted to mention of the book. That's why I think I was so lost because I'm like, wait, I want to ask about this part. And then I went and I'm like, wait, but I also want to pay attention to what it is she's talking about. That salad she's tossing.
00:59:21
Speaker
So anyway, thank you once again. Thank you, Kendra, so much for having me. It's such an honor, and I really appreciate your relationship to Catalina. And maybe we'll do a part two someday, if folks want to hear more. Yes, that'd be great. In a day that I'm not like... Thank you so much. Thank you.
00:59:49
Speaker
Thank you again so much for choosing to listen today. I hope that you can take away a few nuggets from today's episode that can bring you comfort in your times of grief. If so, it would mean so much to me if you would rate and comment on this episode. And if you feel inspired in some way to share it with someone who may need to hear this, please do so.
01:00:18
Speaker
Also, if you or someone you know has a story of grief and gratitude that should be shared so that others can be inspired as well, please reach out to me. And thanks once again for tuning into Grief Gratitude and the Gray in Between podcast. Have a beautiful day.