Summary
Joe Hudson and Alexa (an anthropologist and coach) explore the beauty and function of grief. They begin by defining grief as what happens when a part of your identity is challenged or goes away — whether through death, breakup, personal insight, or societal change. Joe distinguishes between grief where freedom emerges (when a limiting identity dissolves) and grief where a wanted part of identity is lost (as in losing a beloved partner).
The conversation explores how most of humanity’s pain and suffering comes from unprocessed grief, connecting this to identity politics, relationship conflicts, and societal divisions. Joe shares stories of his mentor’s death teaching him as much as the mentor’s life did — how expressing anger in a grief circle unlocked deeper movement for everyone, how the amount of “story” around a loss slows the grief process, and how the mentor’s death either freed or collapsed the people he served depending on how his identity held theirs in place.
They discuss practical techniques including the “actor technique” for accessing stuck emotions, embodied grief rituals based on the seven stages, and Joe’s practice of pre-grieving his marriage to dissolve the identity attachments that block authentic relating. Alexa shares how her partner Brian’s death taught her that breakups are absolutely worth grieving deeply, and Joe explains that ungrieved breakups lead to dating “the same person with a different name.” The episode concludes that grief increases our capacity to love, that every heartbreak expands the heart, and that grief is the mechanism through which limiting identities dissolve to reveal greater freedom.
Key Concepts
- Grief is the dissolution of identity
- Unprocessed grief creates most human conflict
- Pre-grieving loss creates resilience
- Grieve the relationship to avoid repeating it
- Grief and gratitude coexist
- Shame about grief shuts down all emotions
- Heartbreak is expansion
Key Quotes
“Death is the end of a life, not the end of a relationship.”
“Most of humanity’s pain and suffering comes from unprocessed grief.”
“If somebody doesn’t grieve a breakup, 90% chance they will date somebody almost identical to the person they dated last time. If they grieve it, zero percent chance.”
“Every time we allow our hearts to break it increases our capacity to love.”
“The more story there is, the more conflated the grief process becomes.”
“When I fully grieve something, my actions become far more effective and far less power dynamic.”
Transcript
foreign [Music] died a good friend said to me something that I was not ready to hear at that time he said death is the end of a life not the end of a relationship yeah well that gives me chills welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease laughs anyone who’s been alive for a while has experienced grief in some form or another and when it hits you it’s not always easy to see any practical value in the experience let alone Beauty welcome back everyone you may remember my partner Alexa she’s an anthropologist and Coach who’s active in our community and you may remember her from our episode on boundaries and today she and Joe are going to explore the beauty of grief I hope you enjoy it hi Joe hi good to be with you again good to be with you so the topic I had suggested for today is grief yeah it’s good timing for me my dad just passed recently so I’m really appreciative yeah yeah it’s very relevant in my life right now as well but happily not not due to death um actually you know I’m currently on hormones related to um possibly creating life yeah and it turns out that there’s a lot to let go of in that process as well um that’s true I think I think the most important thing to start with is what the hell do we mean when we say grief because that can mean so many different things to different people I remember as I was thinking about this interview I was asking different people what you what you know what do you see as grief and my daughter when I asked her she’s 13. she means do you mean giving somebody grief or do you mean like grief I was like oh wow she’s like that first definition that first way of using the word it’s like I’ve hardly thought about it in in years so so I think that I think before I can answer any of the questions I think it would be good to set the set the level of like what what the hell are we talking about when we say grief and um it was interesting so when I was asking people I asked my daughter asked a couple of folks and my daughter my daughter’s response to grief was it’s when you lose something it’s the feeling you have when you lose something that you don’t want to lose that was her experience of it and then I was speaking to a friend who you know we we had a lot of exploration together he was actually the first person I ever coached and um we used to take walks on these paths and he would every time I said something that really got me to punch me in the arm and so they had this um very fun relationship and uh and uh and so I asked him what he his thought process of grief was and for him he said it’s this is this was his exact quote his name is boss he said it’s like if your foot falls asleep the experience of it waking up again is grief which is you know he’s like it’s this thing that like is is um like a cleansing is like the more aware you become there’s this necessary cleansing that happens and that experiences grief and and they came and it was interesting to listen to everybody because I was what I was doing and asking the question was testing my own my own description of it in my description of it is that grief happens when there’s a part of your identity that is goes away that’s challenged and and in it what’s interesting is that both of their two definitions correspond to that in my world anyways and and so for me it’s um let’s say you take the one experience I have with grief is when I when I have this moment of recognition of of something that’s like oh my gosh I’ve been you know trying not to be abandoned for 20 years and I’ve done all these things of not being in myself all these things of hurting myself to not be abandoned and I never had to do that like there’s a grief process I go through yeah there’s this experience and it’s and it is an identity of that he who is abandoned or he who can be abandoned or whatever that identity is dying and and even though I see the freedom in it there’s this process of like oh that’s an identity and it’s leaving and there’s a part of me that feels secure and safe and that I don’t want it to go and so there’s a grief process that happens in that often for me there’s when it hits I’m like oh this is like a time of big change for me when those kinds of big grief processes hit and then there’s the grief process of like your father dying or your husband at 32 years old dying or your child dying or your and it’s interesting because so we are defined in large part by who we interact with and what what roles we hold each other in and and so I see people who have had really complicated relationships with their father let’s say and when they pass it’s like they’re free of this emotional and this like this way of being that they were held into or there was an agreement to hold into and so that grief process looks one way and then there’s people I see who had a close and intimate relationship with their father and there’s this part of their identity is that closeness and and then there’s that grief process which unfolds in a very different way because it’s different parts of their identity that are that are being removed and and I see people who um you know especially like young lovers an example would be like somebody’s people have been married that have a really happy relationship and one of them dies I’ll see that that great process it’s like there’s no getting over it there’s no like there’s like you you move forward with it but you don’t get over it because they are always a part of your identity and it’s something that you want it’s like there’s this part that’s like you’re holding and whereas other times there’s a grief process where there is a feeling of getting over it because like that part of your personality has moved and there’s a freedom to it and you’re grateful for what has happened but you’re not still like part of yourself isn’t isn’t identified in that way and nor do you want it to be so it’s a so that that’s how I come that that’s that’s the way I reconcile what grief is and it’s an emotional feeling but it’s not like sadness sadness is a part of it almost like sadness is the wrapper of it but there’s anger and fear and helplessness there’s a whole bunch of denial and there’s a whole bunch of emotional experiences that come along with grief absolutely it’s not just sadness yeah well I I really want to go into that but I think this definition of grief is when you lose a part of your identity could be pretty hard for some people to swallow like Yeah Joe what part of it what part of my identity is it when my father died everyone has a father it’s not about my identity I miss him right yeah yeah yeah it’s like if the way I would say that is like if you had a non-relationship with your father and um you had healed all the dad issues or a tremendous amount of the dot issues that you might have had and you aren’t then that that isn’t an intricate part of your life and you’ve gotten to a point where you can love them unconditionally for who they are even though they’re maybe not what you want them to be you’re not going to have this gigantic grief process whereas if you called them every day and asked for advice and loved them you’re gonna have a much bigger grief process because there’s a part of you that knows yourself in relationship to them there’s a part of you that it’s not I’m not saying by any stretch that it’s there’s not a missing it’s not about them being important in your love for them it is but that love for them is part of the identity and and so so I would say it like that I would say it’s not like I would say maybe we’re disagreeing on the idea of what the identity like that it’s a bad thing or that it’s personal it’s just the way that we relate to ourselves and others and and that’s being challenged because all of a sudden there’s a way that we can’t relate that we’re used to relating to ourselves and others and because it’s either been stripped from us or because we’re letting go of it either because we broke up or because they died or because we’re like oh this it doesn’t work for me anymore or because I can now see it clearly for the first time yeah so I’m really interested in giving some attention to those times when there is grief that is not about death because it really seems to me that death is like the one time when we really allow each other to grieve but there are so many other things that have a big impact on our identities and the way that we relate to ourselves and others like you’re talking about yeah and I see a lot of social pressure not to grieve those things or at least not to show it yeah so for instance one of the things that’s going on for me right now that’s really bringing up feelings is well there’s something going on politically right now as we’re recording and I’m seeing a lot of people especially uterus havers grieving and I’m hearing women privately say that they don’t feel seen or supported in their feelings but then I’m seeing a lot of posts on social media like okay have your feelings then fight as if fighting isn’t part of a feeling um yeah so I think yeah so yeah there’s a lot of topics in that one and just to start the answer to the original question that you asked um I think there’s a helplessness and death that people don’t know how to contend with as much so it’s really easy oh you had a breakup oh Roe v way oh whatever experience that’s happening there’s like here’s an action you can take here’s something you can do here’s how you but with death it’s like you don’t get to do that like and so I think that’s why people behave differently around it the more the grief is there’s more helplessness in grief the more we feel incapable the more it’s like I’m so sorry yeah instead of like okay now we’re gonna fight or whatever it is so I think that’s the first part is that’s my that’s my experience of it as to why death has a different we handle the grief of death differently I think the other thing that you’re tapping into there which is I think there’s a way to say that like most of societal most of societal maybe most of humans pain and suffering comes from unprocessed grief oh big statement yeah I think there’s if you think about it the way I like think about it this way that um when I talk about grief is the identity um it is people fight over their identities I mean they even call it identity politics and you know we’re Christian you’re Muslim or we’re black you’re white that’s all identity my way of thinking is right your way of thinking is wrong like all of that most of our conflict boyfriend girlfriend conflict is wrapped up in an identity of oh I’m I’m going to be abandoned or I’m I need to fight for myself or I need to and so so when I’m saying I’m processed grief I’m saying that most of our fighting comes because our identity hasn’t been dismantled in a way that creates peace in our system and therefore we project it out into the world and so I when that when you have societies there’s like examples of these in Eastern Africa and other places that and the I don’t have a huge amount of experience there but when I here read about these cultures where they have grief rituals and they’re grieving individually when they’re grieving as groups there is a lot less conflict and there’s like that’s part of how they resolve conflict if you look at South Africa when the when the apartheid shifted they did this thing Truth and Reconciliation and it was like it was like a national grieving process and and it allowed the transition to be very different than it did say in the other countries nearby that switched um and you know a lot less volatile and so I think that that’s those are some examples of how grief has a huge impact and families that can grieve together is like less compartmentalized emotions less passive aggression or aggression less Etc so yeah so so again tying these two threads together sort of the importance of dismantling our identities in this way and then this thing where people are often uncomfortable around others is grief what do you think is being lost when people are like come on like look on the bright side right right yeah I don’t want to experience your emotional so I’m going to I don’t want to be with you in this emotion it’s uncomfortable for me so let me help fix you out of your emotional state yeah it’s a lot being lost it’s that’s that’s the formation of future conflict I wonder it’s funny you were talking about you know the Roe v Wade decision that happened recently and I’m curious like there’s real grief on both sides of that right I’m sure that there are people who cried for unborn children that grieved for unborn children that probably on a regular basis thought about all those children that were unborn children fetuses that were dying and and had grief experiences and I am sure that there are people right now having grief experiences over the fact that their rights are being taken away that they’re that this one thing that helped save their lives you know as young women is not available to others and or you know that whole experience and and so there’s real grief on both sides it’s and and I think that like our ability to see that and feel that and be with each other in that is the solution to the problem not one thing or like one way of handling it or another way of handling it and it’s not in a law I don’t think that there’s a law that’s going to make this issue go away either way um for everybody I think there’s a there’s grief on both sides of it oh I see the truth in that definitely goes so deep in our society but I just know people are out there like but Joe that’s too hard my identity doesn’t want to be challenged by really being with somebody on the other side of this and even maybe it’s easier to just keep you know stay in the fight and like I I that’s I I can almost guarantee that was set on both sides you know have your feelings yes and now we’re fighting for this and Maybe not maybe just have your feelings and then see what action comes out when that has fully moved through you right there’s it yeah so it’s an it’s an interesting thing and there’s a tremendous amount of identity tied up in in all in all of it and I think that there’s this I think there’s another idea that comes into play when you start talking about this where people think to themselves if I have the grief all the way then I won’t fight like then I and and maybe maybe you won’t fight but it doesn’t mean that it you’re not gonna take action that helps move the ball forward that you’re not going to be part of the process of finding a something that works for everybody because you’re not going to be part of a situation where you’re finding uh a way of being that that can be good for everybody yeah I find that really compelling yeah and I you know it’s like I don’t think that like um yeah there’s I definitely have noticed in my own world I won’t make a big example out of this with some historical figure but I have noticed in my own world that when I fully grieve something my actions become far more effective and far less um Power Dynamic far less like it’s either I’m controlling you or you’re controlling me and I mean the example of this that I use a lot is like in my is in my marriage where you know we’ve been through many marriages together my wife and I and um and there’s times when we’re where we’ve been in it where it’s like ah where I have to grieve the marriage I have to like assume that my marriage is lost and I have to have that full I don’t have to I choose to have that full experience of visualizing the marriage being done and losing somebody who’s incredibly important to me and in that process I lose the identity that’s getting in the way of us being together and in that process I can be true to myself because I’m not scared of the emotional experience of losing her anymore because I’ve already gone through it and so I can be true and I can be myself and I can be undefended and I can be loving without having to prove anything and then that allows the relationship to heal um okay so that’s really compelling again and again it strikes me as being just really Advanced Techniques like okay sure but how how do I do this and for me really actually me you know Joe that I lost a partner several years ago and now my partner today yeah you know he has a very high risk tolerance yes yeah so I spend a lot of time afraid that he’ll die and you know I I want that thing that you’re describing I want not to be afraid all the time of losing him and sometimes I try to pre-grieve it but it just seems so big I I don’t know how to get there how do I grieve someone that I have not in fact lost um yeah that’s a great question I don’t know how to describe how to have emotions very well I I can say that one of the things that I would ask myself if I were in your shoes is what would what would I have to feel if I couldn’t feel the fear if the fear is like constantly coming up and not moving then I would say that there’s an emotion underneath that is looking to be felt whether it’s anger at him for continuing to take the risks or anger at yourself or um you know finding another man that could could die or whether it’s um sadness over is some unresolved sadness um you know there’s helplessness all those experiences so I would I to me it’s like it is the the fear of motion is Cottons preventing some fluidity in the system and so um also you know you can you know some of the breathing techniques that can really help bring some of the emotions forward and they’re all there it’s it’s more a matter of like I mean worst case scenario you can just fake it and it and it and it can open up a channel so um you can say oh maybe it’s these three emotions and I’m gonna go and experiment with them and I’m gonna play the part of an actor and and I think this is this is a this is a very specific nuanced way and it’s and it works really well so I just want to say how specific it is and so it’s the idea is that I’m gonna play the role of myself being angry I’m not going to lose my the idea that I’m an actor and that this is just a performance but I also am going to try to make it the most convincing performance and that experience is can often open up the floodgates and allow for the for the stuff that’s really in there out because a lot of the times it’s it’s um it’s having the emotional experience is not um resisted in the head it’s resisted in the body and so if you act as if and then the body it’s like it starts blurring whether to be scared of this emotion anymore or like it allows for a certain level of safety that then the body can go okay yeah let’s do this oh yeah that’s that’s certainly been true for me um yeah something that Brett and I and our roommate in early lockdown did kind of almost on Instinct was um Brett led us through something that he learned from you I believe the six positions yeah yeah um where you embody each of these six different emotional states and then I just had this idea to take it on into the seven positions of grief the seven stages of grief but embodying each one of them so I just looked those up on my phone and for about one minute each um like per stage of grief we embodied one of these and all three of us had these really big emotional movements that’s awesome yeah um yeah so that that exercise is one of many exercises that are about helping us with emotional fluidity which I think is you know if you’re thinking about the heart the work of the heart instead of the head or the gut there’s kind of two main components of it one is to learn how to be undefended in your love unconditional in your love and the other part is emotional fluidity allowing all the emotions and letting them move through you and you can literally the six positions is one of the ways that it’s all about like oh I’m going to experience I’m going to embody certain emotional things just like I would a stretch and and that allows more fluidity because I’m stretching my capacity to have emotional experiences and so I had never thought about how to I’ve never had the concept of oh let’s do this like in the stages of grief and the stages of grief themselves they don’t entirely resonate with me or they do and they don’t meaning I think that you do experience all of those or there’s a good chance to experience all those I’m not I’ve noticed that people don’t always experience them in that order and sometimes I mean not always in that order yeah and also sometimes some of them don’t happen for some people’s grief process and other ones do and but I think that it’s a really nice map of a territory that you know is a little bit like an Escher map where you can you need to turn it to the right way to see the perspective that’s helpful to you but um but yeah that’s a really really cool idea I’m immediately thinking about how you could use that same principle okay what are the emotional arcs that people take under different circumstances and how do you put them in some sort of order so that it allows for the full movement that’s a great idea yeah and and I think I think the thing for people who are listening just to um the general idea behind the six positions is that there are six emotional experiences and you put your body find a place that your body your body wants to go there when you’re in that emotional place or you evoke that experience through that body position so an easy one of these to think about is like as a kid and you’re yearning you always have your hands up in the sky you’re looking up it’s like hey lift me up Mom hey Lift Me Up mom that physical experience creates an emotional reaction in you and then the idea is to amplify and like allow those all those emotions to move through you yeah so the way that I have done this grief ritual is it’s the seven stages of grief according to me which by the way I don’t think that even the original author of the seven stages of grief had any intention that they were going to be linear or that you were going to go through them in any particular order um but yeah so for me it’s sadness fear anger maybe shock maybe denial acceptance into gratitude hmm that’s nice yeah yeah I also think it relates in some ways to something you said earlier that I wanted to double click on also which was that grief just tends to be really complex yeah yeah that’s the thing I was thinking about like that ritual is like such a beautiful idea of like how to prime the pump you know like oh we can do this and we can have these experiences and when grief moves fluidly it can go from anger to sadness to anger to sadness to anger to sadness to fear to anger to sadness like it like there’s just an interesting way that it moves where you know different waves come through at different times it’s not it’s not as what do you call it it’s not as um it’s not as linear logical as we would like it to be or some of us would like it to be right yeah I know that um after Brian died you know it took me probably at least six months just to move on from sort of the acute stage of grieving yeah you know it’s never perfect I mean I’m sure that if my if I had just read my wife and our marriage and then we actually did get a divorce it would be you know there would be more stuff there but it does allow for the movement it does allow for um more clarity every every part of the process allows for more clarity and when the when when you get to the point that you can listen to the body and and like for me there’s this process of my brain will say things for each emotional state um oh there’s no reason to be angry I mean why would you be angry at someone who just died you know or um hasn’t this gone long long enough or shouldn’t you have grieved more by now or there’s so many things that the brain says and my my relationship with that is oh so cool I’ve heard from you a lot I’ve lived with that I’m gonna just listen to my body I’m just gonna listen to the grief right now I’m just gonna follow the grief that’ll be my that’s what I’m going to surrender into for a while and I don’t really the mind doesn’t know how to like the mind’s relationship with emotion with the emotions or is usually pretty wonky for most people unless they really have had a lot of a lot of work with the emotions the the mind just doesn’t really know like I love when someone says like when they say something like um like it’s like it there’s no justification for that emotion you know there’s no it’s not logical to be sad about this it’s like yeah the emotions are definitely never lie it’s not logical to be happy or joyful it’s like yes correct like that so to me it’s about listening to the body and and allowing the emotions without commenting on him not having some sort of Head trip around it I love the mind but just it’s not equipped to handle emotions very well it just thinks its job is to manage them right it doesn’t work yeah no but it’s hard if you grew up in our society to let that management go in part because people just expect each other to be in the managing it’s actually this is one of the reasons that I wanted to talk to you about this topic um you know because of the circumstances for me around Brian’s death I processed my grief a lot by writing and so a lot of people saw what I wrote like on Facebook and as a result of that people reached out to me for many years when something would happen in their lives or their friends lives and that was really great in a lot of ways um I really got to be there for a lot of people and a lot of people my age didn’t really know very much about you know about acute grief but I did have a couple of experiences that were uh leaving something to be desired so um I had I had one one experience with somebody that I didn’t know that well who reached out to me when his wife died and we talked about some of these topics and how you can really let yourself have all of the emotions that come as part of grieving including anger yeah and we had this conversation and he was like no no it’s inappropriate for me to have anger and I was like come on man your wife died really young of cancer at least you can be angry at cancer yeah yeah start somewhere and then pretty soon after that he called me again and he was like hey thanks so much for talking to me and based on your Sage advice yeah I know uh oh uh oh I didn’t mean advice um based on your Sage advice I really let somebody have it on the airline today and I was like oh that’s not what I meant yeah that happens a lot um yeah that absolutely and what’s interesting is that there’s nobody who goes through the grief process very few people who go through the grief process without like shame and they’ll shame themselves for the exact opposite I’m not crying enough I’m crying too much this that happened too quickly this happened this shouldn’t have taken so long and you know oh I can’t be angry but I can be sad oh I can be angry but I can’t be sad like everybody seems to like on in some level question their grief process you know recently was with them a woman who had lost her husband after 53 years and and a woman who like sadness doesn’t move far easily it’s been pretty compartmentalized and anyways she she was just saying you know I I don’t want to admit it but I feel relief I’m like you know it’s it’s okay to feel relief and immediately she started to tear up and then immediately she shut it down and so what’s interesting is we tell ourselves that one of the emotional states that we feel is not okay in the process but what that does is it shut down it shuts down all the other ones too and so it’s like or or it makes them spin it makes it like oh and I’m still scared and I’m still scared or I’m still sad and I’m still sad when we tell ourselves that we can’t have one of the emotions and because what because they’re illogical or because of it’s it’s not appropriate or blah blah blah blah but if you’re not doing them at anybody they’re all appropriate they’re all great they all offer relief yeah I don’t know how many times by the way I’ve had my no matter how often I’m like do not but I do not recommend and nor do I suggest putting your anger on somebody or your sadness on somebody or at them somebody still hears it is oh cool I have permission to yell at somebody to yell at people no you’re just shame you’re just creating a cycle of anger and shame you know but yeah yeah so you’re not alone in that having you thanks I appreciate that um and and actually it strikes me that when you’re sort of like looking out at this this big scary sort of cloud of grief ahead of you maybe it’s actually easier to create a cycle of anger and shame because that’s something that you’re used to as opposed to moving on into the rest of your grief yeah I I so I had one of my mentors case passed and it was unexpected in a weird way because he had cancer but he was healing the cancer and then died of a heart attack and it was really interesting his death taught me a tremendous amount maybe even as much as his life did and so the first thing I learned from his death was you know I asked for a a circle of his friends and his very close friend got very angry at me for asking for that but I asked for it and it happened and everybody there was like 25 people and I was kind of halfway through and it was like sadness sadness sadness sadness sadness and that was the appropriate thing and I just got so angry I was so pissed there was no reason for it of course and and you could just see the whole room like went to another level it was sitting there in the whole room and nobody would express it then the expression of that anger allowed for so much more death and movement to happen in the room and and a variety of emotional experiences so that was one of the things I learned and in that process yeah one of the other things I learned in that process was that the more story there is and we have that episode about story The More Story there is the more conflated the grief process becomes so I think this one’s really critical for people understanding the group process so like I noticed if somebody had the story he died too young or even if they had the story he died perfectly it was like the right it just happened just right or the story of I never got to know him as much as I wanted to or um the more that that story was there it’s almost like saying the more the identity was there the the the slower that grief process was for them the more that they were caught up in it um not that it’s wrong that a grief process is slow or quickly but there’s just like it was just more convoluted um so that was an interesting thing to just watch and then the other thing that I I I learned through that process of of grieving him was that when he passed he was a person who was like in a similar position to me in the world as far as like being a coach and to people and when he passed one of two things happened either the people that he was serving collapsed they were dependent on him and they collapsed and their life went you know back to the where it was before him and some of them it was like it was freed he would because he was no longer there to you know because he didn’t need to be needed in their lives anymore the the this huge Freedom happened to them and there was this explosion of creativity and capacity that happened in their lives it was really interesting to see that process at play of of how his identity held their identities in place in different ways the same identity from him which is was needing to be needed and it was important to him to help people um how for some of those people it kept them unempowered and from some of those people that it prevented them from having the full expression of themselves it was really interesting to watch and I yeah and uh and so it’s it’s interesting and I think that grief process and it was like yes that’s that is the identity shedding in different ways and the the identity holding pattern between people you know that hopefully if you’re in a really good relationship that is constantly a question you’re constantly changing the way that you interact with each other and your identities are constantly shifting towards each other but we do we do have that tendency to hold each other’s identity in place it’s why we don’t do couples and groundbreakers typically because it’s like harder for someone to transform when somebody who is has a lot at stake with their transformation is in the room yeah which again points back at your suggestion to grieve a relationship that you’re in on a regular basis yeah so the thing that’s coming up for me now is it seems like we’ve talked about all these different components of the grief process but I’m not sure we’ve really talked about what is beautiful about grief yeah I mean my friend said it really well right it’s the the feeling that you have when you realize that your leg’s been asleep and you’re waking it back up like there is a there’s a freedom on the other side of the identity and their there’s an implied love and care we don’t grieve for things that we don’t have love and care for and so it’s a far more direct and intimate conversation or experience far more direct and intimate experience of love and care it’s like you’re you’re not when I talked about emotional fluidity and I said are about the heart about like the work of the heart and it’s the emotional fluidity and it’s the undefended love the grief allows us to be far more undefended in our love you know the grief the grief allows us to be have that empowered what I would call empowered love where we’re not running away from ourselves or leaving ourselves to be loving and we’re not defending ourselves with the idea that the other person’s lack of Love Can Hurt us we’re accepting that I talk about that in another phrase where I say him every time we allow our hearts to break it increases our capacity to love so yeah life the more we grieve the more loving the more peace the less I less you know identity is holding us away from Who We Are I love that I’m I’m amused how much of this interview has been about identity that was really unexpected for me on this topic there is something else moving in me let’s see uh yeah it’s this so when my partner Brian died a good friend said to me something that I was not ready to hear at that time he said death is the end of a life not the end of a relationship yeah that gives me chills yeah and at that moment I was pretty much like how dare you say that our relationship is clearly over yeah yeah as we’re talking about him now years later right right yeah yeah so eventually I moved into a lot more of the grieving process out of that initial place and now I see very clearly that the rest of that process allowing all those different parts in into my awareness into what I was doing in life at that moment and sometimes it was like I was putting my face on the floor and this thing that’s happening now with my face on the floor and whatever kinds of sobs and weird sounds that are coming out of me is a development in my relationship with Brian yeah that’s a so incredibly beautifully said and it’s interesting because I would say because of that grief process that you went through with Brian you show up differently for Brett yes like without that you would have showed up differently and so his relationship with you that continued relationship even now it affects the relationships that you have and and your grief is changing your relationship with him as well meaning like I would my assumption would be that your relationship with Brian is far more clean now and and so it’s it and and to Pivot that to like non-death is I I don’t know if I’ve told the story maybe I have had a close friend who was like drinking too much business was going to had a girlfriend lifestyle was bad habits were bad girlfriend broke up with him it was the love of his life he mourned he wasn’t going to I was like this is what you got to do bro it was it was young I gave advice and I was like probably that’s what you gotta do you gotta like mourn the out of this and so he would drive to Yuma Arizona every day every once a week he’d drive there once a week he’d drive back and he would just he’s like I cannot I can’t tell you the sounds that are coming out of me like I wouldn’t even thought those sounds were possible and it was just this wailing and anger and fear and shaking that would happen in this car ride in this big open desert six months later he’s not drinking he’s in shape he his business is going well his like and when I was talking to him about it he goes yeah first I was mourning the loss of the girlfriend and then I was mourning everything that allowed me to be in that relationship everything that had it so that I was seeking the love and running after the love and instead of receiving the love all you know the relationships with my parents like he just mourned far beyond the loss of this one thing and to everything that allowed for that in his life totally transformed his life and I can’t tell you there’s countless stories I know of people grieving like that and that’s what I mean by like that like how much of his like pain and suffering that for him and that he caused other people and his drinking and there’s bad habits are in the failed business or how much of that was just grief how much of that was just unfelt grief and yeah it’s an amazing thing and so anyway yeah that’s the yeah that’s so beautiful that that’s exactly what I was trying to point at yeah I see and and oddly not dissimilar to your experience with Brian you know like there’s a yeah one’s a death one’s a you know a loss they’re both losses one’s a death but the experience is really the same right there’s differences but there’s something very similar there is and there are differences but I actually feel much more clearly now since Brian’s death that breakups are absolutely worth grieving and grieving deeply yeah and there’s really something being lost when people are like nope I’m fine I’m moving on yeah I I think it’s even more practical than that like if someone was like okay I broke up with somebody and I didn’t grieve it I would say Okay 90 chance if not more that you will date somebody almost identical to the person you dated last time if you grieve it if you grieve it and really go into it zero percent chance you’re gonna date the same person with a different name next time and so so it’s just like there’s also some really practical implications of grief yeah want to tell us about any more of those practical implications well it’s the same thing in in like the idea between the people not grieving the the Roe v way thing on either side it’s like they’re recreating the cycle instead of moving to the next cycle without the grief without the grief we recreate the cycle without the grief we relive the trauma without the grief we don’t find the freedom on the other side of the limited identity limited identity meaning ego right whether it’s ego of like I’m so great or ego if I’m so bad still ego still identity still limitation and we recreate those patterns without the grief yeah that’s really beautiful this conversation has had a really nice Arc uh is there anything else that you wanted to discuss today no I was just thinking go wow that’s the end isn’t it like that I just felt like what yeah okay then thank you thank you what a pleasure thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate US on your podcast app we’d love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments you can reach out to us join our newsletter or check out our courses at Art of accomplishment.com foreign [Music]