Transcript
Speaker: believe the the the most other significant event apart from coming into life is the part where we leave life. But that's just not honored. It's not seen. It's not acknowledged. It's sort of taboo. And, you know, all of us, you and all of us on the podcast, we we know that's how it is. So then then what that means is it's up to us to create venues, whether professionally or personally with friends and loved ones and podcasts, and to begin to give room to this huge and
Speaker: vastly important human story to talk about. Like, how do we be when we grieve? What what is grief? What what is this phenomena? How does it change us? How can we turn toward it?
Speaker: Welcome Grief, Gratitude, and the Gray in Between podcast. I'm your host, Kendra Rinaldi. This is a space to explore the full spectrum of grief, from the kind that comes with death to the kind that shows up in life's many transitions.
Speaker: Through stories and conversations, we remind each other that we're not alone. Your journey matters, and here we're figuring it out together. Let's dive right in to today's episode.
Speaker: Let's start with a quick disclaimer. This podcast includes personal stories and perspectives on topics like grief, health, and mental wellness. The views expressed by guests are their own and may reflect individual experiences that are not meant as medical advice.
Speaker: As the host, I hold space for diverse voices, but that does not mean I endorse every viewpoint shared. Please listen with care and take what resonates with you. I am so honored to sit down with Ghiani Richards.
Speaker: Ghiani is a grief professional. He has a master's in counseling psychology and a certified grief educator. He uses mindfulness, somatic inquiry, and explorative dialogue to help his clients navigate the land of loss. And he has his own personal journey with loss and And we will be chatting about that and many other things, including Aikido, martial arts as well, ah and how that's even impacted your life. So welcome, Vianney.
Speaker: Thank you. Good morning, Kendra. It's great great to be here. and Thank you for for the invitation. It's lovely. Good morning. Yes. And so usually when I'm chatting with guests, I'd like to know where they' where they are and kind of little bit of life story. We know you live in California. So tell us, how did jesus is this where you grew up and a little bit of your upbringing? Because that is a big part of your story is your dad's passing when you were 13. So can you tell us about your upbringing as a child? Sure, sure. Yeah, so um I grew up here and I'm in Northern California in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Speaker: And this is where I grew up. And as ah as a young child, as a young person, ah we grew up in sort of a, won't call it a rural area. There's nothing rural about the San Francisco Bay Area, but there's some parts that have more trees and little mountains and rivers and lakes and stuff. So that's where we grew up. And they call it the East Bay.
Speaker: And i was one of five brothers, so mom, dad, and five brothers. And it felt, I recall that time in my life is a bit like, ah sort of like the Tom Sawyer days, where there, you know, we had some land and and so there were, and being one of five brothers, there's always something going on, soccer in the front yard, football on the back, ping pong, dogs, cats. It was a whole sort of, you know,
Speaker: seen during my early days. But it was a beautiful time. was a beautiful time. We were a very close family, close with all my brothers still.
Speaker: And yeah, that whole dream was sort of ah shattered. I was 13 and my my father died of cancer. And um you know, was just, it was my first encounter with with the beast of grief, as we'll call it.
Speaker: And, you know, like most young people and most families, i was completely ill-prepared. i Our family had no idea what what death was about, what grief was about. And so, you know, the the grief bomb, as it were, landed on the family and we we sort of staggered around like like most people, how how do we deal with this? and we I don't recall we got any sort of formal counseling. I'm a grief counselor, but so there was no formal therapy or counseling, but we sort of made it through, but right? like Like most humans, we find some way to kind of rail our way slowly, not without being kicked around and semi-scratched and punched along the way, but we we somehow made it through that time.
Speaker: um
Speaker: Should I continue? There's more to the story. No, yeah now continue with this. but So how you were 13. Which order were you? what which what I was your number four. yeah So there were three above and one younger. okay And the family system was sort of divided into the the older boys and the younger two. So I was part of the younger two, my my younger brother, Pete. There was about a six or seven year gap.
Speaker: So that so that that event, that tragedy happened and and we we somehow made it through. ah My mom had never worked before, so she became a ah working woman at ah I don't know, whatever there she was, maybe 35 or 40.
Speaker: The older three were kind of off to college already. So Pete and I were still home. um But, you know, significantly, Kendra, what what happened for me and I and I sort of put these pieces together many years after not at the time, but about four or five years after my dad's death, I discovered the world of meditation and yoga meditation.
Speaker: the world of the healing arts. And I began studying and reading a lot about the great wisdom traditions of the world. And when i was 17 or 18. And I think at the time, the way i I make sense of that or way I make meaning of that is that my young my young psyche was really looking for something that perhaps couldn't be taken since the most important thing in my life had been taken. So something deep in the soul and the psyche was sort of wondering, wow, is there anything here that might that might be deathless?
Speaker: And again, I wasn't thinking of that consciously, but looking back on it. And so that's what happened. and And I think in retrospect, that was part of the way that I began to deal with the immensity and the enormity of of this, of the grief and the loss that I felt having no sort of personal tools of how to be with that.
Speaker: And as it turns out that worldview and that that paradigm, that that way of being in here and out there has remained and sort of activated a whole new arc of my life that has informed and shaped the rest of my life for all the decades past.
Speaker: So. Thank you. the i i i love that you're sharing a little bit of how then seven years later, a few years later, that then it is that you, you know, kind of found your own tools per se. Since you were a child, you weren't given those tools at 13. Then when you were able to find them yourselves, you found your own tools of understanding to be able to navigate grief. Because something that I've talked about several times with some of my guests who were, um,
Speaker: who are adults and now, but experience grief as children. One of the guests, her name is Randy. She calls herself like a little griever, like little, her little, the little griever, like her young grieving self. she It's still that it is there because she was 10, even though she's now, you know, an adult, like it's kind of like you're carrying this little griever in you. Yeah. that Because at the same time, you never really were given even the opportunity to even,
Speaker: grieve And maybe the attention went to the parent and not the children at times, right? At that moment. And the parent was in survival mode, you know, the like the parent that was left. So when you when you then are in this journey of discovering and and kind of piecing together your own grief journey, at what point did you decide that this was the path you were even going to study to then become a grief counselor?
Speaker: Oh, well, there so there are multiple layers of ah chronology going on. Okay, so okay, here okay. ah So again, the backdrop was, know, I was always still in high school. I was 18, I think, when ah when I began to practice and study meditation and the healing arts and so forth. It wasn't until Wow. Decades after ah that, that my formal sort of my my formal sort of meeting with grief counseling as a as a spiritual journey occurred. That's a great question because it it has me piece together these little these strands of my life.
Speaker: um But i'll I'll try my best at sort of piecing them together because it it helps me sort of reframe how it all sort of occurred. Yeah, please do. I'm always curious about these. like Because, again, it's grief doesn't – I feel like grief doesn't define us when we've gone through grief, but it does transform us and it does transform the trajectory of our life. And in your case – shifted everything. So it's like, I want to hear this journey.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Again, I think, I think, you know, when we look back at our own personal journeys, there's the parts we know about and the parts we don't know about, or the parts that we can understand and the parts that may have been invisibly sort of marinating in the background. And then a decade or two occurred and began to shape our journey. That's more what happened with me with grief, because it wasn't until many years after. So my dad died at 13. Meditation and all that began in my late teens.
Speaker: But I hadn't really connected those dots really at all. um And then fast forward kind of a decade or two, um I begin to to feel like in terms of in terms of a professional journey, I wanted to work with people. I wanted to to be a therapist. So I went back and got my master's in transpersonal counseling psychology, which for those of you who don't know what that is, it's essentially counseling psychology with kind of a spiritual layer. It's more of a holistic approach to psychology that honors both the sort of body, mind and heart, but also within the context of whatever this larger domain we want to talk about, God, spirit, being. So it it holds psychology, but within a larger frame. So I went back and got my master's in that in the kind of the mid 90s, thinking that I would be a ah clinical therapist. um
Speaker: Didn't happen. like like Life. ah I seem to have some of these interesting transitions where I prepare for one thing heading left, but then kind of a right turn happens. So ah that didn't happen. And what did happen was I began to develop a professional work in which I was working in the corporate world as a career counselor.
Speaker: as a career consultant, really a technology consultant, helping people navigate their career. Now, inside of that, there are a lot of ups and downs, losses and so forth. I wouldn't say grief, but that's somehow the way that the skills and the training wanted to emerge. And so I did that for a long time.
Speaker: And it was only, i'd say, a ah few short years ago that internally I began to feel like, you know, I'm ready to to to move out of that space kind of work and do something much more personal, so something that something that lights my heart up, something that really speaks to me from a soul level. And it was really at that point that the world of grief counseling and working with people in the in that capacity emerged.
Speaker: So I went back and got additional grief training, et cetera, et cetera. So again, that was only a few short years ago, um but that gives you some sense of the chronology of how it all unfolded.
Speaker: Was this before or after your brother Pete died? This was after. So again, some chronology. So Pete died five years ago. Should I share a little bit of that story? yes Yes, absolutely. Yeah. This is your space. I'm just here. I'm just here to just ask yeah questions and listen to the story.
Speaker: beautiful. Yeah. So... So, you know, it's interesting because so Pete was my younger brother, just a beloved human being. we We were so close. We were only 18 months apart. And, you know, for all of you, including you, Kendra, I know you lost a your sister, right? At 18. So for those of us who have lost siblings, there's a very, i discovered a very different relationship.
Speaker: very different nuance to losing a sibling versus losing a parent or even a child, or there's something very unique about that in terms of, it almost feels like a, what they call an out of order loss. Like that shouldn't really happen because we're, we're brothers or we're sisters, or there's sort of this unconscious assumption that if you're someone's brother or sister, you just do that like forever, but it doesn't happen that way, obviously. So Pete died five years ago from cancer and that was sort of the second big grief bomb in the family. But by that time, you know, it was 40 years later, something we, we had all become adults and presumably with some more understanding and some more tools about how to accommodate and sort of tolerate and make room for grief, and including myself.
Speaker: And one thing I noticed that in addition to the immense pain and sort of
Speaker: destabilizing impact of of losing a brother. i was gonna say disorient the way you moved. I'm like disorienting like it just kind of disorients you. Yeah, it throws you off of that. left Yeah. Yeah. So all of that, but because of the mindfulness training and the martial arts training and just what I've been up to the previous decades of my life, there was a place inside of me that could hold the grief in a in a way that that i certainly couldn't at 13 and nor should anybody be expected to at 13. We don't have those life skills, but there was a, there was a container and, and it felt like in a sense, the, the pain of the grief sort of existed within a container rather than me bobbing around in this grief ocean, which is kind of what it felt like when my dad died completely completely
Speaker: unmoored with no doc in sight just blobbing around and not to minimize the the pain or the suffering that came with pete's death but you know i'd i'd grown up a bit and and i'd i'd developed ways of sort of being able to relate with it that that's really the key i was able to like be with this phenomena of grief in a way that i knew it would it could touch and transform me and opened me and deepened me in a way that you can't expect ah a young person to know.
Speaker: So that that was that was the main sort of, that that was a big difference or a big takeaway for me. I think something that you and I have in common of what I even read on your website is that Grief is not something to overcome. It's not not an illness. It's not like something like, oh, let me just get over it. It's not something, I think that's the word you used was overcome. It's really just something to live, experience and be with. And it does transform us. It has the capacity of transforming us. And that's the part that we do have control over is that choosing how we wish for it to transform us.
Speaker: i i you know We do have so many things that are out of our control. The how someone dies, the when someone dies, But then when something occurs and we're going through something like this, the emotions may be uncontrollable, but but we do we do have a a say and to some extent which path we choose to kind of take with with us in that. and And I can see that that was your your journey there because then you just decided to then deep you know dive deeper into then the world of grief counseling and grief education and
Speaker: And it it changed it changed the trajectory of your life at that point, too. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. As you were speaking, Kendra, I was reminded there's a beautiful, one of my favorite Persian poets, Rumi, who many folks have heard about.
Speaker: ah There's a one-liner there that that can sort of could sort of be the subject line for all of us grievers, which is Rumi says that the wound is the place where the light enters us.
Speaker: And it's a beautiful way of holding our relationship with grief in that what I'm continuing to learn is that the more more I can learn and practice to turn toward my wound and allow it to sort of ventilate and breathe. and But there's something profound about about turning in that direction because that's not the default. We we we don't we we normally will turn away. and ah I really hold this this first turn toward the grief wound as being a ah ah radical first turn toward the direction of our healing and our integration, because then we're in what we could call right relationship with this with this wound, with this loss. We can see it. We can feel it. We can breathe it. We can relate to it.
Speaker: Whereas if we're turned away or certainly running away or fighting or fleeing or freezing, which are kind of the three primary defaults that we tend to do. But if we can begin to step outside of those and relate with it in a sort of a more spacious way, new new things can happen.
Speaker: Yeah, on your website, you say grief is one of the deepest spiritual practices because it comes from the deepest parts of who we are. It's something you say that and it's exactly what you're touching on right now. it does have that, like if we really just honor it and just kind of like you say, view it like viewing that wound, it has that potentiality of really transforming us spiritually. And, and, um and that's, it's, it's beautiful. I don't know, I feel that there is, there isn't,
Speaker: I know that like as human beings, like we wish we didn't have to go through the things we go through and the changes, but it it is constant but the world is always going to change and things are never static.
Speaker: Plants die, animals die, we die, and it's always in that flow. We are, you we're just part of this ecosystem of life and, and we just have to learn to navigate honor the emotions, and then just see what we do, what we do with that, with the seeds. You also say was that in your sub stack that you mentioned the, part of the seeds. Can you can you share a little bit more of that perspective of the of kind of this, that I like analogies like that. It just kind of grabs just like the ones of waves and stuff with grief. I like the ones that kind of create an image in my mind.
Speaker: Yeah, for those for those of us who are who are visual image learners, Yeah, grief seeds, um grief waves. These are ways of that our psyches can sort of hold and and make meaning out of the out of this experience.
Speaker: um I think what you're referring to is what I feel like. So when my dad died, being 13, I felt like the first the first seeds of grief were were planted.
Speaker: uh unbeknownst to me i mean i felt the emotional impact but i didn't know that something had dropped sort of deeper into me to marinate for a long long time before it was time for them to be to sort of be digested and and integrated again and interestingly uh the way again we're we just do our best to someone someone once said we're all meaning making machines Okay, because we all wanna frame our lives and hold our lives in a way that we can sort of digest it and make sense of it. And so as I look back at at my younger self, as you were saying early on, I feel like at that time, sort of the seeds of grief and the seeds of meditation were planted at the same time. ah And it took a long time for them to sort of,
Speaker: sort of co-mingle and fertilize together over time before they realized that there was a relationship there that as it turns out many decades later that the the practices of meditation and mindfulness and so forth can actually allow they allowed me and can allow us to turn toward these still growing grief seeds in a way that we can make room for them in our life because they are
Speaker: they, as you said, like it or don't like it, they are part of our, of our ecosystem, as it were, they're a part of our human garden. And the sooner, the better that we can turn toward them and go, Oh, these seeds didn't expect those to flower. I don't even know what that plan is, but let's look at it. Let's tend it. Let's water it because it is now part of this human soul. yeah,
Speaker: like there's There are a lot of these images that we that we can, I think, hold and and tend along the way to help us, ah you know, always with baby steps sort of make our way through through our own personal grief path.
Speaker: And its you said about the meaning, right? We're trying to find meaning. It was like this the rational part of our existence on this planet is that of like, okay, like I'm constantly creating stories of the, oh, the why. Oh, if I see somebody on the street, I wonder why that lady is in front of him. Like you create these stories of trying to,
Speaker: fit things into storylines and meaning. And I wonder if that is only of our mind or if our soul is also trying to find meaning. Like in your in your practice of meditation, have you discovered if it's just our mind that is constantly trying to do that? Or is it it was it just part of our, yeah, of our being? Just curious. This is just my own, my own like thinking here, as you're saying.
Speaker: Your own reflections. Yeah. Yeah. Reflect. You know, in in my, in, for me personally, and and also professionally in my work with clients, what I discover is that the role, the role of story, um, can help open us into sort of deeper parts of ourselves.
Speaker: Um, that That's sort of how for me it it functionally shows up. So we begin in counseling sessions with tell your story. And that that's not a kind of a one hour thing. that that That is a thread that obviously moves through people's lives. And I think we we revisit it and we deepen into it. Then we need to turn away for a while and digest it. Then we come back to this. And so the storyline is is not to be minimized. it it It holds so much of our own narrative about who we are, where we came from, where we may go.
Speaker: It's above my pay grade to say, does that like really exist? I had no idea. All I know is that it is an alive thread within the human psyche that when people can begin to dip into that and to begin to speak to it and from it, from a heart full place, it really begins to open a lot on the grief journey. And the other piece of this importantly, at least as grief counseling,
Speaker: in the world of grief counseling is that, you know, well, we do not live in a culture that really knows much at all about how to be with grief. Doesn't know how to talk about it.
Speaker: Doesn't know how to frame it. Doesn't know how to hold it So what that means is very few people have places in their life, even with close friends and family, sadly, but there's just not a lot of places where people have the opportunity where they can drop in and tell their story and not just tell their story, but tell their story.
Speaker: And then the work can begin to happen because they've never had the opportunity. Um,
Speaker: said Sad, but true. Like, I mean, arguably the the the most other significant event apart from coming into life is the part where we leave life. But that's just not honored. It's not seen. It's not acknowledged. It's sort of taboo. And, you know, all of us, you and all of us on the podcast, we we know that's how it is. So then then what that means is it's up to us to create venues, whether professionally or personally with friends and loved ones and podcasts, and to begin to give room to this huge and
Speaker: vastly important human story to talk about. Like, how do we be when we grieve? What what is grief? what What is this phenomena? How does it change us? How can we turn toward it?
Speaker: um Anyway, there's a lot in the story. It's not just the story. It's it's it's more of an archetypal story. And we sort of fit in there.
Speaker: Yeah, because it's not even our, just even the time, our story doesn't even begin with us. Like it begins with our ancestors. Our story is long. It's like to think of the ah impact. I even have even said this and because I've started to try to write something, you know, like a book a few times.
Speaker: It's still in that process. But that we are born in already... a family that has already experienced grief. So we we regard whether we know it or not, we already are born in that exp within that DNA. So just even our upbringing is already being impacted by grief in some shape or form because our parents might have grieved whether a death or ah or or just the change in their own, like like my dad, for example, he had lived in the States, then moved to Colombia, married my mom, his dad died the year before I was born, right? So technically there,
Speaker: A year later that I'm born, my dad was already grieving the death of his father. And then he has a child, right? In another country away from his yeah his mom, who still lived in the States, his sister.
Speaker: There's already a grief sentiment there that we don't even know how that even fits into our own DNA, right? And who we become. So when we see it that way,
Speaker: And that we're all like technically intertwined with grief, whether we've experienced it personally or not. We have, we right? are we and it it And then these stories and these conversations become ah more of that awareness of like, oh, I see. So if if I know my dad's story, if he knows his parents' story, then we carry these stories on.
Speaker: We can... we can see that journey of the now because we've listened to stories or of our friends or of our fellow podcast guests and things like that.
Speaker: Yeah. know, that's beautiful the way the way you say that. And I think it's a great point because for those of us who are interested in in the world of grief and and the way it can open and contribute to our spiritual life, to your point, yeah, we're we're essentially born into a field of grief.
Speaker: ah You know, the Buddhists would say we're sort of born into a life of impermanence, right? Like this is finite. Another way of saying it. And you're right, we're born into this this ah system of grief, most of which we don't know about consciously. we We might know about dad mom, maybe the grandparents. And if we're like really lineage people, then maybe our great grand, but most people don't. But in fact, it goes all the way back, back, back, back ad infinitum that we're born into this human phenomena that is kind of been grieving and will be this sort of ocean of grief. Here we are. Like, how how do how do we be with that?
Speaker: And I think for for me, my introduction to that was the was when my father died. It's like, oh, you know, you're not normally thinking about dying when you're 13. Most of us, you're still on the you know, you'rere you're at the beginning of the racetrack, right? you're You're just at the in the front end of the journey. And then you're reminded, oh, the journey can end, it can end very quickly and very suddenly.
Speaker: So yeah, to your point, I feel very much that we're born into this sort of lineage of of of of grief and and how do we how do we how do we relate with that? It's all all about sort of fine tuning our relationship with this sort of fact of having a body and a mind and a soul and a human incarnation, right?
Speaker: Yeah, no. And literally, actually, we also we do experience grief the moment we're born because we're moved from one home to another. We're moved from the womb to this unknown. So and we could even go further that if we if the the sole component of it, to you know, whatever it is, we are it we are constantly that's my that's my that's my take on grief, at least for my own personal story, I guess, that I make to make meaning of life.
Speaker: So let's go into your practice of the martial arts and how you've kind of weave that into your meditation as well as your integrating that into your own grief journey.
Speaker: Mm-hmm. Again, this is another one of these situations or one of these practices that I began ah not correlating it directly at all with, oh, I'm grieving.
Speaker: Oh, I need a practice to address it. it just I was drawn to the martial arts ah probably 25 or 30 years ago. And this particular martial art is called Aikido. It's a Japanese martial art.
Speaker: And it it was kind of born out of the, what we call kind of the harder martial arts, meaning it came from jujitsu and karate and all these like combat arts. But the but actually when you when you look at Akito, if you've seen it, it's a very beautiful dance. It's always done in partnership.
Speaker: And there's something about that that spoke to me. I'll tell you a a short, quick anecdote about how I discovered Aikido versus one or the other. It was a time of my life and i thought, oh, i've I've always wanted to do a martial art.
Speaker: So I went and visited some dojos, right? you want to I want to go see it and see what they're doing. And I remember walking into one. And even before I got to the dojo, I could hear sort of lot a lot of shouting and and sort of violent oohs and ahs coming from down the hall. And I thought, where am I going? And i it was in a school gym and I opened the door and there was like a karate class going on.
Speaker: And it was not my thing at all, right? It it was just not my thing. and People with headbands and t-shirts and big muscles and beating each other up. I thought this is not my thing. And then shortly thereafter, I found my way to the Sakido Dojo.
Speaker: And as soon as I opened the door, i felt like I'd walked into a temple because it was utterly silent ah with Japanese calligraphy in the wall and people in partnership were moving around the mat. And um that spoke to me and aikido comes from sort of this enlightenment experience that its founder had in which he discovered that there's a way that we can be together that promotes peace and connection and harmony as opposed to fighting and combat and separation so something about that theme really spoke to me the practice of aikido is always done as i said in partnership so um
Speaker: I began and ah diligently I just threw myself into it and it was like a 20 or 22 year run. um And the principles of Aikido essentially are um how to be in relationship and how to how to receive force or pressure.
Speaker: in a way that you open and relax instead of close and contract. So I'll speak about that. Oftentimes in Akita, the way we practice is there is an attacker, someone who grabs you or strikes you, and there's the person receiving that attack, right? So they sort of set up this conversation as it were, which can be really transferred into all walks of life. But on the mat, there's a person punching or kicking, and there's a person sort of receiving that. And it's a way that we practice, how to how do we receive um uninvited challenges as they come at us? And what one learns very quickly, and I wrote about it in an article that I wrote called Grief in Aikido, Relaxing Under Pressure, is the first time you have someone, and it's done slowly in the beginning so you can you can practice, but the first time actually someone grabs your wrist, for instance,
Speaker: you have this experience of, it well, this is an odd thing. And you begin to struggle and fight it and try to get, and pull it off. And in fact, the the principles of Aikido, first and foremost, back to the Rumi um a reflection of turning toward the wound.
Speaker: First, we need to turn toward this person who's attacking us. And then we need to sort of relax and open into the situation. And this is all done very slowly so that the nervous system can begin to feel, what does that actually feel like? If someone just grabs our wrist and we relax together for a moment or two or a minute, and there's no pushing or pulling, and you can feel how your nervous system is completely wired to do one of three. You're either gonna push, pull, or freeze. which to transfer to the grief world and how we generally respond, that's how we generally respond. So Aikido in its own way for me began to show me a lot of these um basic body-mind principles of how we reply to our world when there's incoming challenges. It could be emotional, could be mental, could be physical. But as it relates to grief,
Speaker: what I call our default setting when it first hits is one of the big three, we we will fight, flee or freeze. And the Aikido practice began to help me learn, oh, I can stop, I can pause, I can exhale,
Speaker: i can I can see what's here. i can blend with what's here. I can be present. And so it began to help me reshape how I am and how I was with a lot of the challenges and in in my life. So it's it's a brilliant way of being being able to reframe and um sort of re-relationship the the tough spots in our life of which grief for most of us is kind of the the big one or a big one.
Speaker: So that was like a round. No, no, I love it. I was seeing it. I was, i was seeing it in my mind as you were saying and feeling it and that surrender and kind of like just easing into it and not feeling right away as if we have to react when some, you know, when we've experienced, we can, we can pause and,
Speaker: respond in a way that instead of like the reacting that we usually do as human beings, anytime something is like, we can first acknowledge then this is hurting, this has happened, digest it, digest it somehow, and then yeah see how we either dance with it. As you were saying Aikido and that that kind of thing, I'm thinking of like capoeira, that's like also like, yeah you know, the dance move. It looks a little bit like capoeira, yeah. coupleta And it's just like this fluidity that just you know happens and in life. And how do we dance with how do we dance with grief? How do we Aikido with grief? in so you know And how do we just make it be flowing into our lives? How do you then, as a grief counselor and grief educator, what are some of the ways in which you...
Speaker: and it kind of translate this or you've shared a few here because it's your own experience into how you coach or how you counsel.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it's interesting because in my, in my counseling practice, I certainly use the principles of Aikido and the principles of mindfulness or meditation. They're, they, they certainly intersect and, and um move together.
Speaker: um But as I said before, most of the most of the counseling practice, the counseling journey is a for me is a combination of inviting people first and foremost to begin to tell their story, tell their their own unique grief story and the operative word being unique, right? we We each have our own unique experience and we each have our own, therefore our our own unique way of of moving through it.
Speaker: um And it's always a mystery, right? It is always a mystery. There's no, ah my experience is that there's no sort of preset well here are the nine steps to get through grief um other people may work with that and find success i had that's never worked for me i work more from the level of sort of principles so what are the principles that we can embody and that we can practice that over time and with patient attention will begin to shift something. But specifically, that what I work with is certainly what I call explorative dialogue, which is this idea of sharing our story.
Speaker: The story takes us into ourselves. The story begins to open us to ourselves in a way that often is surprising. When we're given the space and the attention um we begin to to drop into places of ourselves that that may be new to us and we meet grief in these places that we didn't know and one of the places that we meet grief is certainly in our body uh in our physical body someone said i love this that that the issues are in the tissues and when we when we talk about grief and loss grief lives deeply with within our somatic uh experience and
Speaker: Mostly we don't hold it that way, right? Grief tends to be generally when it's unattended, it's sort of a neck up experience. And for those of us who have walked the path of all at all, we realize that it's, there's, there's this component. We need to sort of see it and narrate and know the story. But most of it happens from here down into the flesh, into the body and into the heart.
Speaker: And so the practices that I work with essentially are um mindfulness practices, tools of attention to begin to help and support people turn toward their wound in a new way.
Speaker: um And as they do, they begin to feel into themselves ah in a new way. They begin to notice that, oh, there's a sittingroom there's a sensation in my back and my shoulders. I've always I i didn't know.
Speaker: I thought it was a chiropractic issue. And I went, but nothing. yeah Oh, maybe we'll do a a guided meditation or we'll do some visualization around that. the the energy of grief can live from head to toe. It does live head to toe. And it really is about our our our patient attention to to this energy in us that can begin to allow it to speak to us. i I see grief, interestingly, as ah as a respiratory phenomenon. There's a very... um
Speaker: there's a very breathing breathy component to grief and the way that it, it moves between release and containment, right out and in. So there's something very visceral, something very somatic about the experience of grief.
Speaker: And so my work helps people begin to attend to that. Like, like, what is that? Where is grief in your belly? Uh, Soft belly meditation. There's countless ways of beginning to access how we embody and live our our grief. And um it's an exciting and challenging journey. But as you said, what else to do? I mean, once you discover, oh, it's here, never again can you go, I'm pretending it it's not as it's pulling you this way. So attend.
Speaker: and the And the last piece I will add
Speaker: Regarding the the mindfulness practice, oftentimes when people hear mindfulness and they they think mindfulness and grief, like what an odd combination. But when I talk about mindfulness and grief, I don't necessarily mean the formal practice of mindfulness. I mean, that's great. If people have a formal meditation practice, fantastic.
Speaker: The truth is most people don't. It's it's not their thing. That's fine. The principles of mindfulness, however, are really the underpinning of my work, which is helping people learn to turn toward their experience with an attitude of friendly curiosity, with an attitude of kind attention.
Speaker: And that may sound like sort of just another way of holding it, but it is a ah ah transformational way of holding our experience because as it turns out, to the degree that we can do that more and more, our experience begins to sort of thaw, it begins to open because it's never been, it's never been witnessed that way.
Speaker: It's never been, it's never been received that way. And so the principles of mindfulness are really about learning to hold our experience with that spacious kind attention. And then things begin to open and thaw and shift and new, new, new terrain ah begins to unfold on our grief path.
Speaker: it It does happen.
Speaker: As you're saying all this, I'm still thinking of the analogy of the seed, right, of the seeds of grief as well. And you were saying how, you know again, each grief experience is unique, even for ourselves. We really do not even know for when something like you said, your dad's grief was one seed and your brother's grief was. a different seed that landed and then you do not know, one, where in the body did they land? And that could be like where you hold them. It's kind of like throwing closing your eyes and throwing seeds out in the backyard and then you you have no clue where it is and then finding where it is so that you know where to water it. And to so that would be like one of the ways of learning how, okay, where did where did it land? Is it, do I hold it in my gut? Do I hold, where is it that it's being held so that I can release it, you know, movement wise or whatever as well, and then tend to it and honor it and water it, and then just see how it's going to then flower as you're as you're saying this. So for you to be this very, ah it's like a guard, you're the...
Speaker: as a counselor, I guess, would be the person would still be their own gardener. But you would like you as you're like as this counselor, right, you're just making them aware of educating where they're what does their terrain and their soil need in order to to really and like make these seeds be able to flower if they wish them to be flowers. Maybe they're not flowers. Maybe they're, they're going to be a plant that is, you know, ah not all plants have flowers, right? So it just tending to it just as unique as that particular seed is and how that garden and soil look.
Speaker: And, and I don't know, I'm just kind of taking it further with a seed thing for you of this being that, how do you call it, what would it be? Landscape designer, I guess you could be. Yeah, yeah. has grief Griefscaper, yeah, right. Griefscaper, you could be the griefscaper and the clients are the gardeners and we're just gonna find where the so where did these seeds land and then go from there. Yeah, I think the garden analogy is is beautiful, Kendra. ah Again, just to use another visual analogy, Yeah, that that could be ah ah ah ah relevant sort of way of being ah a grief companion or or a grief guide, really. Helping someone learn to tend their garden.
Speaker: Because as she as you say, it it is their garden. It's definitely not my garden. And I don't know what what flowers or seeds or plants or trees may be in their garden. But I know something about gardening.
Speaker: And I know that certain types of fertilizer help. I know that there are certain areas where because if there's flowers, there's weeds and in the grief world, there are certainly weeds. And so let's look at where the weeds might be like old beliefs that may not be functional anymore.
Speaker: Parts of our body that are holding in a way that may not serve us, uh, any, any longer, right? We're looking for a way to have a more spacious, open, fertile, healthy garden with, with fewer weeds, um, in S in some way. So, uh,
Speaker: what what what is your garden? how What's over there? Let's walk there today and and see what wants to grow there or what sort of soil, like like that.
Speaker: so I love it. And I hope that the listeners are feeling as excited about this analogy as we are. Because I'm like, for me, I'm like, oh like even just discovering this analogy of it, ah just completely shifts it. Because again, it's something we can we can see and then we can be as even just other and people that just accompany friends as well as in their own journey and just be that observer and just honor that person in their garden as they are, but but maybe ask questions so that they're able to then analyze if they do have some weeds there that they need to kind of pluck. But you know but but by asking questions, they will kind of realize that themselves, right? A lot of times it's that in in the asking questions rather than in the...
Speaker: telling them what they should do. it's Right? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, as we talk about the grief garden, it's, um it it again, it it what I'm present to is how how rare that we as human beings take time to visit our garden.
Speaker: whether it's the grief garden or love garden, it's the same garden. It's one love grief or love lost garden or one human garden of the heart. And how often or how unoften, how rarely we take the time and space to really explore that, much less explore it and then fertilize it and tend to it. And what I noticed so much in the world of grief counseling is that we we don't have much of that in our in our lives, and in our human lives. And so
Speaker: Uh, ideally, at least in in the grief work that I do, it's that one hour a week where people get to drop into their, their own grief garden, their own, to their own garden of the heart and see, see what is new today. see, see see how to tend to that.
Speaker: And, um, Yeah. So our our culture has a long way to go before we yeah we're were in true, authentic conversation about these topics. But that's that's another podcast. Yeah, but we're being part of it. We're still being part of it and of that transformation of that kind of shifting of the tides and Because we're here. We're having this conversation. we're you knowing a lot more i launched this podcast six years ago. There's way more podcasts now on the topic of grief, way more people now doing grief counseling, way more grief educators than I knew at least about when I started doing this or even when I was grieving many years ago. Yeah.
Speaker: So it the tides are changing. the tides are changing. times are So I think goodness it's ah it's a good thing. Yes, it's a good thing. With the ending now of this conversation, I want to ask you, how do people get in touch with you and in what ways can they ah have your services. Yeah, sure. So I'm a grief counselor. I see people in person here in the San Francisco Bay Area, but a lot of folks I see via Zoom around the country. So you can reach me at my website, which is www.ourgriefpath.com
Speaker: or you can send me an email at guiani at ourgriefpath.com And I'm also on Substack and Instagram. And so i'm I'm reachable, I'm findable, and I love doing this work.
Speaker: And i I love that you brought a different perspective, even again, that I had not even thought about the martial arts concept of it the seeds, all these things that I always learn something new in this journey of this conversation of grief. and and And that way I can apply it myself in my own life. And when I'm also talking with others of the grief. So thank you so much, Gianni. Giani, I'd like to end with, is there something else you'd like to share with the listeners that I have not asked you yet?
Speaker: I will share with one short line, which is m remember that grief is not a problem to be solved, but a sacred opportunity to be embraced.
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.
Speaker: 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.
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.
Speaker: And thanks once again for tuning in to Grief, Gratitude, and the Gray In Between podcast. Have a beautiful day.
