316. What If Grief Is Bigger Than We Thought?

[00:00:08] Welcome to Soundbite, a reflection inspired by a recent conversation on Girl, Take the Lead, and I'm your host, Yolanda Canny. Soundbites are where I take something that stayed with me from a guest conversation and give myself and maybe all of us a little more room to think about it. Today's reflection was inspired by my recent conversation with Somatic Nurse Coach Lisa Ketcham-Hendrickson, founder of Human Recovery.

[00:00:36] Lisa said something that stayed with me. We can't heal what we don't feel. We were talking about grief, and I realized that before reading Francis Weller's The Wild Edge of Sorrow, I thought I understood what grief was. Someone we love dies, a relationship ends, something precious is lost. Of course, we grieve, or we try not to grieve some of us.

[00:01:07] But Weller describes five different gates of grief, and they help me see that grief may be present in places I had never thought to look for it. The first gate is the one most of us probably recognize. Everything we love, we will lose. Impermanence is part of being human. But then Weller begins opening other doors.

[00:01:35] His second gate involves the places within us that have not known love. Anyone who has followed this podcast for a while has heard me talk about my own struggles with belonging. There have been parts of myself I'd had to work hard to understand, accept, and heal. I hadn't necessarily thought of that work as brief, but perhaps some of it was.

[00:02:05] His third gate is the sorrows of the world. I can feel the struggles of others deeply, and I think maybe you can too. There is so much happening around us that can break our hearts. I've found compassionate curiosity helps me navigate some of that.

[00:02:30] Not turning away from suffering, but staying open to the humanity of others while recognizing that I can't control or fix all of it. Then there's grief for what we expected and did not receive. This one made me think about achievement. For many years, I thought my career path would eventually lead to becoming a CEO. It didn't. And here's the interesting part.

[00:03:00] I can still grieve that sometimes, even though I know that becoming a CEO probably wasn't a good path for me, and that would not have made me happy. So what exactly am I grieving? Maybe it's the expectation I once had for myself. Maybe an imagined future. Maybe the woman I once thought I was supposed to become.

[00:03:30] Can we grieve something we don't even want anymore? I think we can. But it was Weller's fifth gate, ancestral grief, that blew me away. The idea that grief can move through a lineage. In our family, loss was something you stuffed down. We didn't talk about it, and we certainly didn't spend much time feeling it.

[00:03:58] And I bet you a lot of you feel that too. Then suddenly, I was considering what my mother may have carried from her mother, and what her mother carried from the generation before her, and what maybe eventually arrived in me. That changed something for me. Not because understanding ancestral grief magically makes it disappear,

[00:04:27] but because there is something freeing about finally having a name for what we may be carrying. Maybe some of what we feel didn't begin with us, and maybe we didn't have to keep responding to it in the same way. That's what I found so powerful about Weller's five gates. They expanded the question from,

[00:04:54] who or what have I lost? To what in my life might I be grieving that I've never recognized as grief? A part of myself that didn't feel welcome? A friendship or love that wasn't reciprocated? A dream that didn't happen? An expectation I had to release? A part of my life, the suffering I see all around me.

[00:05:25] Something carried through my family for generations. And maybe it's really a loss of a pet. Maybe grief has been present in more of our lives than we've realized. And there's one more part of Weller's book that I keep thinking about. He reminds us that grief wasn't always meant to be something we did alone.

[00:05:56] Across cultures, grief has been held through ritual and community. People coming together to witness one another's sorrow. And as I've been putting this soundbite together, I've wondered, isn't that in some small way what we're doing right now? I'm naming some of the grief I've recognized in my life.

[00:06:23] Maybe as you're listening, you're recognizing something in yours. We're not fixing it for one another. We're witnessing it. We're giving it a name. And maybe we're giving each other permission to feel something we were once taught to stuff down, hide, or carry alone.

[00:06:50] Maybe that's part of what community can offer us. Maybe it's not an escape from grief, but a place where we don't have to hold it all by ourselves. And maybe recognizing grief isn't about becoming sadder. Maybe it's about becoming more alive and more accepting of our own tears.

[00:07:17] By those years, Lisa said something during our conversation that surprised me. When we learn to sit with grief, she believes it can expand our capacity for other emotions, especially joy. I keep coming back to that. Because perhaps grief and joy aren't opposites. Perhaps our willingness to feel one expands our capacity to feel the other.

[00:07:48] Weller writes about an intimacy between grief and aliveness. And I'm beginning to understand what he means. Grief asks us to face what is there rather than numbing it, stuffing it down, or pretending we don't feel it. And perhaps that's why Weller describes grief as subversive.

[00:08:13] Because allowing ourselves to grieve challenges and expectations many of us have absorbed. That strength means staying composed, controlled, and okay. But what if strength can look like feeling? And here are the questions I'm sitting with. Might you be grieving that you've never given yourself permission to call grief?

[00:08:41] And who might you allow to witness it with you? Maybe we don't have to solve it. Maybe we can begin simply by noticing it. Naming it. Sharing it. With compassionate curiosity. And allowing ourselves to feel. Because as Lisa reminded us,

[00:09:08] we can't heal what we don't feel. Thanks for this time with me. If something came up for you while you were listening, perhaps you don't have to do anything with it right now. Maybe you simply recognize it as grief. It's enough for today. And next time on Girl Take the Lead, we're going somewhere quite different.

[00:09:38] I think that may be, there may be a connection. My guest will be Roz Doble. Someone I've had the pleasure of knowing for close to 50 years. After more than 30 years in international marketing and sales, Roz chose a different kind of next chapter. She moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, discovered a passion for mixed media art and turned travel into much more than a vacation.

[00:10:08] Today, she's a pro-level travel advisor for Fora Travel, exploring the world through slow travel, art, workshops, language schools, and experience that leave room for the unexpected. And maybe there is a little connection to what we've been talking about today. If grief asks us to honor what we've lost and what we're leaving behind,

[00:10:36] perhaps aliveness also asks us to remain curious about what might still be waiting for us. Roz brings plenty of curiosity, humor, and one of my favorite questions to the conversation. Why not? I hope you'll join us. Until then, I'm Yolanda Canny. Thanks for listening to The Soundbite. And I'll see you next time on Girl, Take the Lead!.

[00:11:06] Bye!