The Beauty of Grief — Emotion Series #9

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, oof, 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. 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, it's very relevant in my life right now as well. But happily not due to death. Actually, you know, I'm currently on hormones related to possibly creating life.

Yeah.

And it turns out that there's a lot to let go of in that process as well.

Mm, that's true. I think the most important thing to start with is what the hell do we mean when we say grief? 'Cause 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 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 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 years. So I think before I can answer any of the questions, I think it would be good to set the level of what the hell are we talking about when we say grief. And it was interesting. So when I was asking people, I asked my daughter, I asked a couple of folks, and my daughter's response to grief was, it's when you lose something. It's the feeling you have when you lose something. You don't want to lose. That was her experience of it. And then I was speaking to a friend who, you know, we had a lot of exploration together. He was actually the first person I ever coached. And we used to take walks on these paths and he would, every time I said something that really got him, he'd punch me in the arm. And so we had this very fun relationship. And so I asked him what his thought process of grief was. And for him, he said it's— 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, 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 experience is 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. And my description of it is that grief happens when there's a part of your identity that goes away, that's challenged. And what's interesting is that both of their two definitions correspond to that in my world anyways. And so, for me, 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 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 in that. I don't want it to go. And so, there's a grief process that happens in that. Often for me, when it hits, I'm like, "Oh, this is 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 we are defined in large part by who we interact with and what roles we hold each other in. 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 is 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, they have a really happy relationship, and one of them dies. I'll see that, that grief 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 that's how I come— 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 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 you had healed all the dad issues or a tremendous amount of the dad issues that you might have had and you aren't— then that dad 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 call them every day and ask for advice and love them, you're going to 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— I'm not saying by any stretch that there's not a missing— it's not about them being important and 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 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. 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 in 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. Wade. 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, instead of like, okay, now we're gonna fight, or whatever it is. So I think that's the first part, is to— 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, that's a 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 as 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 unprocessed grief, I'm saying there 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 they— when you have societies, there's like examples of these in Eastern Africa and other places that— and I don't have a huge amount of experience there, but when I hear, read about these cultures where they have grief rituals and they're grieving individually, when they're grieving as groups, there's a lot less conflict. And there's like, that's part of how they resolve conflict. If you look at South Africa, when the apartheid shifted, they did this thing, Truth and Reconciliation. And it was like a national grieving process. And it allowed the transition to be very different than it did say, in the other countries nearby that switched, um, 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, it's 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' grief— what do you think is being lost when people are like, come on, like, look on the bright side?

Right, 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 their that this one thing that helped save their lives as young women is not available to others, or that whole experience. And so, there's real grief on both sides. And I think that our ability to see that and feel that and be with each other in that is the solution to the problem. 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. This 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 said on both sides. You know, have your feelings, yes, and now we are fighting for this. And, 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, 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 going to 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. You're not going to be part of a situation where you're finding 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 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 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 marriage where we've been through many marriages together, my wife and I. And there's times where we've been in it where it's like, "Argh," 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.

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, yeah.

So I spend a lot of time afraid that he'll die. And, you know, 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 don't know how to get there. How do I grieve someone that I have not, in fact, lost?

Um, yeah, it'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 for, um, you know, finding another man that could, could die, or whether it's 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 emotion is caught and it's 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, there's 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 going to 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. 'Cause a lot of the times, it's having the emotional experience is not 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, where you embody each of these six different emotional states. And then I just had this idea to take it on into the 7 positions of grief, the 7 stages of grief, but embodying each one of them. So I just looked those up on my phone, and for about 1 minute each, like per stage of grief, we embodied one of these, and all 3 of us had these really big emotional movements.

That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So that exercise is one of many exercises that are about helping us with emotional fluidity, which I think is, 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 6 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'd 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, but 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've noticed that people don't always experience them in that order.

Oh, definitely 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. But I think that it's a really nice map. Of a territory that is a little bit like an Escher map. You need to turn it to the right way to see the perspective that's helpful to you. 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 allows for the full movement. That's a great idea. Yeah. And I think the thing for people who are listening just to— the general idea behind the 6 positions is that there are 6 emotional experiences and you put your body, you find a place that 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 7 stages of grief according to me, which by the way, I don't think that even the original author of the 7 stages of grief had any intention that they were gonna be linear or that you were gonna go through them in any particular order. But yeah, so for me it's sadness, fear, anger, maybe shock, maybe denial, acceptance, and gratitude.

That's nice.

Yeah, yeah. I also think it relates in some ways to something you'd said earlier that I wanted to double-click on also, which was that grief just tends to be really complex.

Yeah, yeah, that's something 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 or 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 6 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 grieved 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 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 on 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 going to just listen to my body. I'm just going to listen to the grief right now. I'm just going to 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, the mind doesn't know how to— like, the mind's relationship with emotion, with the emotions, is usually pretty wonky for most people unless they really have had a lot of, a lot of work with the emotions, the mind just doesn't really know. Like, I love when someone says like, when they say something like, 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 like, 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 them, 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? 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. Yeah, 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. Um, 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. Yeah, 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 leaving something to be desired. So I had 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. Uh-huh. 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, and it was, uh-oh, uh-oh, I didn't mean advice. 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. Yeah, 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 shame, and they'll shame themselves for the exact opposite. I'm not crying enough. I'm crying too much. That happened too quickly. This should happen. This shouldn't have taken so long. And, oh, I can't be angry, but I can be sad. Oh, I can be angry, but I can't be sad. Everybody seems to, on some level, question their grief process. I recently was with a a woman who had lost her husband after 53 years, and a woman who, like, sadness doesn't move for her easily. It's been pretty compartmentalized. And anyways, she was just saying, "I don't want to admit it, but I feel relief." I'm like, "You know, 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 shuts down all the other ones too. And so it's like, 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 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— 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 as, oh cool, I have permission to yell at somebody, to yell at people. Now you're just shaming, 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— yeah, 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 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 fucking 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. And the expression of that anger allowed for so much more depth and movement to happen in the room and a variety of emotional experiences. So that was one of the things I learned in that process. 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 grief 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— 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 slower that grief process was for them, the more that they were caught up in it. Not that it's wrong that a grief process is slow or quickly, but there's just like, it was just more convoluted. So that was an interesting thing to just watch. And then the other thing that I learned through that process of of grieving him was that when he passed, he was a person who was in a similar position to me in the world as far as being a coach 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 back to where it was before him. And some of them, it was like it was freed because he was no longer there to— because he didn't need to be needed in their lives anymore. 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 how his identity held their identities in place in different ways. The same identity from him, which was needing to be needed. And it was important to him to help people. 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 so 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 in 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 in 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's a, there's a freedom on the other side of the identity, and there, 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, uh, or 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, um, 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.

Oh, 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. Ah, 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.

Oof, 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, 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, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's so, 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— 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 shit, 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, I gave advice and I was like Bro, this is what you gotta do. You gotta like mourn the fuck 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 have 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. 6 months later, he's not drinking, he's in shape, his business is going well. He's 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 into 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 in his drinking and his bad habits or in the failed business or how much of that was just grief. How much of that was just unfelt grief? And yeah, it's just— and 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 out.

Yeah, I see. And, 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, 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, 0% chance you're going to 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?

It's the same thing in, in like the idea between the people not grieving the the Roe v. Wade 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 of 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 just felt like— yeah, yeah.

Okay then. Thank you very much.

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 in 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 artofaccomplishment.com.