Good Life Project - Refuge in Grief: How Megan Devine Came Back to Life

Episode Date: October 3, 2016

The day Megan Devine's partner died started like any other.The sun was shining as they walked to a favorite spot by the river. Matt waded in, as he'd done countless times before. Minutes later, he was gone. No warning, no time to prepare, no chance to say goodbye.Megan is a psychotherapist. She trained for years to help people through moments like this. Now, being on the other side of the experience, she was faced with a daunting reality. None of it worked. And, heaped upon this realization was a mountain of judgment about "how" she grieved and what that must have said about who she "really" was.Megan realized, she'd have to find a new way to not only move through that window, but also through a life that was almost unrecognizable from the one she'd been forced to leave behind.What emerged was not only a profoundly different approach to loss, but also to life. How could it be any other way? Megan is no longer the person she used to be. Her journey and the set of tools she built are detailed in Everything is Not Okay: Practical Tools to Help You Stay in Your Heart & Not Lose Your Mind.In our conversation, Megan pulls no punches when questioning our culture's approach to grief: Why do we offer platitudes to those grieving, rather than nonjudgmental companionship? How can we better support each other when experiencing tragedy? How do these lessons apply to everyone? We dive into this deeply moving journey in this week's conversation, and come full circle to explore how she's found a new place of grace in the world. In This Episode, You'll Learn:How people use blame in an attempt to distance themselves from death.How Megan got through the days when she felt angry to wake up.Why a solid spiritual practice won't make you safer from death or grief, and why that's okay.Why it’s more important to be a companion to a grieving person than to try fixing their pain.How Megan appreciates the beauty and awe of life differently now than she did seven years ago.Mentioned in This Episode:Connect with Megan: Refuge In Grief | TwitterAudiobook: Everything is Not Okay: Practical Tools to Help You Stay in Your Heart & Not Lose Your Mind by Megan DevineThe Dalai LamaModern LossErin Moon: Walking the Path Back to Life on Good Life Project+++Have you heard? My new book - How to Live a Good Life: Soulful Stories, Surprising Science and Practical Wisdom - is available for pre-order now! It's a joyful, story-driven, engaging and eye-opening deep dive into what really makes a difference in your pursuit of a meaningful, alive and connected life. Click here now to download and read the first chapter for free. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Thanks so much. I'm Jonathan Fields on to our show. I've talked a lot about the incredibly crappy things that I heard after Matt died and that grieving people hear, you know, when their lives explode. And I think one of the most insidious is this idea that if your spiritual practice was deep enough, you would not be so upset by this. And, you know, the Eastern traditions tell us that we shouldn't be so attached. Well, neurobiologically, attachment is survival. Today's guest, Megan Devine, was a practicing therapist for a lot of years, working with clients on all sorts of struggles in life.

But then in 2009, something happened in her own personal life that would forever change the way that she experienced life, even her desire to live for a long period of time, and also the way that she would relate to other people. She actually watched her partner die in front of her, drowning in a horrendous experience. So good to be hanging out with you. We first met, I think it was backstage, probably, right? Well, we spoke on the phone before we met backstage. Oh, right, right, Domination Summit last year.

And you came out. And it was interesting for me because the topic that you were about to speak about, I know it's a sensitive topic, is charged for some people. And that's what we're going to dive into today. And at the same time, I wanted to be respectful. I wanted to honor who you are and not sort of make light of what you're about to share. And at the same time, I really didn't want to share too much because I knew you had a powerful story to tell. And you came out and you told a really powerful story and mesmerized people. And it's really part of your life work that I want to dive into today. So I'm excited to have this conversation. Yeah, me too. So I thought maybe as sort of a fun jumping off point, actually, I want to talk about your story.

We can kind of back our way into it a little bit. If somebody visits your website right now, and they go to the Start Here tab on your website, the very beginning, the first few words are, do you remember exactly what it says? I'm blanking. It's something like, I'm so sorry that you're here, but welcome. The standard greeting of the griever, right? Like, I'm so sorry you have reason to be here, and I'm so glad you found this place. Yeah. Right?

Because people who find my website are in pain, or someone they love is in pain, and that sucks. And I'm also really glad that they're there. Yeah. And I found it really powerful because I think that's what somebody wants to know the moment. I mean, the marketer in me is like, okay, so you should tell the right person that they're in the right place immediately. And then the human in me kind of said, okay, this is somebody who is more in need of knowing that they're in the right place than almost anyone in the planet at that point. So to just start the page for anybody who is more in need of knowing that they're in the right place than almost anyone in the planet at that point. So to just start the page, for anybody who's not in that place, it's probably very jarring.

But for anybody who is that person that needs what you have to share in that moment, it's probably about the most powerful thing that they could read. Yeah, I'm so glad to hear that. Yeah, and that's my intention, right? I mean, it's such a wasteland out there when you're in that kind of pain. And to spend that little energy that you have searching and searching and searching for the place that's going to reflect you and make sense to you. I want people to know everywhere they go on my website that they are in the right place. That this is a place where what's happening for them is valid and real and gets reflected back to them and not made pretty.

So you have been practicing therapist for 15, 20 years? 15 years, yeah. What got you into that field in the beginning? It's a funny story. So I was doing social action work for much of my 20s. I have a very overpriced and not terribly useful MFA, which was great at the time, but it didn't let me do what I wanted to do in the world. And after working in sexual violence education and doing some non-clinical social action, social work for a long time, I realized that I didn't think I could do what I wanted to do without going back to school and becoming an actual therapist. So I did that. And

I worked in that field for a long time and got tired. I got tired of sitting in an office and listening and not moving. And after quite a number of years, it started to feel like I was sort of a disembodied head. I did really beautiful work and I know that and I trust that. And sitting there and just sort of talking about things wasn't emotion helping field. And they've had a really similar experience where they feel like they're doing really good work or creating really good work. And at the same time, it feels like it's coming almost entirely from the neck up. Yeah. So it seems like that's a really common experience. I think so. I mean, when I

say that, when I talk to other clinicians about why I wanted to leave, they just, you know, their bodies relax. They're like, I hate that. I hate that I sit all day long. And it's such an interesting combination because again, like we, I know I was doing good work. We know we're doing beautiful, useful work, But if you can continue to do beautiful, useful work and not actually be present, is that really beautiful, useful work? And I used to say, if we could be outside, if we could be working in the garden or working in the barn somewhere and having these discussions, that would be great because we're present and we're here. And I love metaphor, right? So if we're out in the world, there's so many stories

that come back to us and so many things we can connect with and relate with. But in my office, there's only so much input. Yeah. What do you think of the idea also? Somebody once said to me, and I'm sure this was taken from somebody else who's famous, but some variation of the phrase, women speak face to face and men speak shoulder to shoulder. And what the point that they were making was, and I actually don't think it's so much to like a separation between women and men, but I think the bigger point that they were trying to make was that so much of the deeper conversation unlocks when you're not sitting down to have a conversation, but when you're just, you're working on a project together,

shoulder to shoulder, you know, you're needing a quilt, you're building a house, you're whatever that thing, where you're engaged in some form of actual like almost manual labor or artistry or craft. And the conversation tumbles out as an aside, but it ends up actually, for some reason, you allow yourself to go to a much deeper place in that conversation than if you sat down for the purpose of having a specific conversation about a specific topic. I'm curious what your thoughts are on that. Yeah. I mean, that's parallel play, right? And I think that also comes back in some ways to learning styles, that if we sit down and we decide we're going to have this conversation, you kind of have to psych yourself up for it. But if we know we're going to talk about this, but we're also not really looking at it directly, we can sort of join it obliquely.

And it's easier. It sort of like disarms the defenses. And I think creative therapies, art therapy and stuff can do that in some ways. But I absolutely think that when we're moving, we can come at difficult things from a different angle and join them that way. Yeah. I guess also that's part of what happens in physical yoga practices and other physical practices. Back when I was teaching, I saw so many people weep openly at any given moment in a class, especially there were certain postures where you knew that if anyone was holding anything, I never believed really before I was teaching that this was, you could literally put somebody's body into position and all of a sudden emotions were just.

Yeah. But I saw it happen so many times. Yeah. I mean, when we align ourselves with what's true and that's what we're doing in yoga practice, right, then those things can get unlocked and they can cascade and they can cascade in a way that you're not, oh, I have to talk about this, like in the container of yoga practice. Yeah. And a safe place also. Yeah. Like that energy can flow and it can release itself. Yeah. So you're going about your practice, still feeling a little bit weird about it. And then you're still practicing in 2009? Okay. And then a day comes that changes your life.

Yeah. Want to hear about it? I do. So in 2009, I was practicing and, as we've been saying, tired of it and really ready to leave it. My partner was going to take over financial responsibility for our family so that I could quit and start working on farms so that I could stop working with humans. And it was a beautiful, ordinary, fine summer day. It had been raining in Maine where we lived for six solid weeks. It was a lot of rain. And we stopped by our usual river to go for a swim before picking up Matt's son at the airport.

He was coming back home after visiting his mom for his birthday. And we were walking in the woods with our dog, and the river was beautiful. It was big because there was so much rain and we kept stopping in the woods and Matt kept pointing out how gorgeous the water was and how the features had changed. And we got to the place where we normally went in for a swim and he walked into the water and I stayed in the woods with the dog because I was playing with the dog. And Matt's been, he's half mountain goat. So, it didn't even occur to me to be worried about him. And he walked into the water to go for a swim and I heard him cough. And I turned to the dog and I was like, man, he sure makes a lot of noise with water up his nose. And again, no alarm bells,

no anything. And I didn't realize anything was wrong until he called out for help. And he called out my name. And I turned around and looked and he was holding onto the top of a tree on what we used to call dog wash island. So he used to take the dog up there to soap him up and then throw the ball and he could go get rinsed off and little tiny tree on that island that was then only visible by about the top foot and a half or so. And that was the point where you go into really calm, clear emergency mode and ran into the water after him, but he was carried off by a current. And the dog and I got into the water and we were carried down the river for two miles before we got sort of thrown back out by the rapids. And then we wandered in the woods for two hours,

completely confused and disoriented. So at that point you had no idea where he was? No, I had no idea where he was. The last time I saw him was when he let go of the top of the tree. Right, but you knew by the fact, I guess, you saw him struggling. And then when you got swept away by the current, that was so powerful. Yeah, and from the surface it didn't it didn't appear dangerous and that man had decades of experience in the wilderness and in the water and you know

neither of us had a single alarm bell go off about that and just from looking at the surface of the water it didn't look fast at all but when i got in there and felt how powerful it was it's like this is incredible and i mean i wasn't thinking thinking that, but if I allow myself to look back at that moment, that was insane, right? I mean, it carried a giant dog and I for two miles before we happened to get stuck in some reeds and get out. So the dog and I were lost in the woods for a couple hours and finally saw a housing development across a big field and walked out and got help and got driven back. And the wardens searched for Matt for another two hours or so with divers and search planes and all of those things. Then they finally found his body actually pretty

close to where I had last seen him. His body got stuck in some reeds. And that was it. And that was the world exploded. That was the most surreal thing ever, right? Like, here's this beautiful, normal day. And then suddenly the world splits open and everybody is going around like everything is normal or fine or that it's the same world and it is not the same world. And having to call my stepson, you know, who were supposed to go pick up at the airport and say, kiddo, somebody else is going to come get you and your dad died. How do you say that? How do you say that over and over and over to, you know, the next morning, I went back to our normal coffee shop and told the people who knew us every day, like walked in and took them all aside and said, I want you to hear this from me before you hear this from anybody else. But Matt died yesterday. It's boggling.

Yeah. My sense is that so many of us picture loss as seeing it coming. And we don't picture it like that. We don't picture young, fit, healthy, and beautiful, normal moment one second and the next second. Like you said, everything has changed forever. I think we tend to think of if something like that, if a loss on that level happens either to us or in our lives, like there's in some way it'll be telegraphed, you know, we'll be able to prepare for it. Yeah. We should know. Yeah. If we were in tune with ourselves enough, we would know. Yeah. The only experience I've had with anything like that was 9-11 being in New York and, you

know, knowing somebody who we knew who went to work that morning, not expecting not to come home. Exactly. But he didn't. Right. And of all of the emotions that enveloped me during that window of time, that realization was the thing that rattled me more than anything else. Yeah.

Yeah. One of Matt's friends who I spoke with soon after he died said, our death is right beside us all the time. And we never know when we're going to cross that line. And I think we have such an aversion to both death and grief because the reality of that statement is terrifying for people. You have no idea. And I think that gets sort of a rainbow gloss over it. You know, like, oh, live each day like it's your last. Like, the reality of that statement is actually much deeper and much more challenging. Like, how do we live here knowing that anything can change at any moment but not be terrified of that?

Right? I mean, I'll often say to people, you're not safe, but you're not in danger either. Anything can change, right? I mean, we're sitting in this lovely studio with the birds singing outside and anything could be hurtling towards us right at this moment. It's true. Asteroids. Crazy pants. I was on the subway, especially in New York City. It's madness. I was on the subway yesterday and just sitting there and there was a gentleman who looked homeless and probably was struggling with some sort of mental condition. I don't know if

that's the proper way to phrase it. And he was walking up and down in the subway car and muttering and gesticulating. And then I glanced up at one one point I realized his both hands wrapped around something in front of his chest and he's kind of making almost stabbing movements and what he's holding is actually a branch a small branch from a tree that's been sharpened at the end and he's like please don't use that yeah not on yourself and not on us yeah you know you brought up this thing where people say it's this really powerful reminder, live each moment and embrace it. And on some level, I think that's true. It's Steve Jobs' famous commencement talk that everybody loves to talk about.

The greatest reminder to live is the notion that death could be around the corner. And I find that mobilizing. It's also terrifying. You know, there is, this has been thrown around, I have no idea if it's true or not, but I've heard slash read that Dalai Lama meditates on and permanents on death something like six times a day. And that's actually a fairly regular contemplation in Buddhist practice.

And every once in a while I do that. I meditate on my own death. I meditate on the death of those who are closest to me who I love dearly. And it's horrible. And it's powerful. Yeah, it's interesting that you bring up that particular one. Matt actually had a practice of imagining his son's death. Imagining his death, he was okay with. But imagining his son's death. Imagining his death, he was okay with, but imagining his son's death really, to use his language, agitated him. So he had that as a practice in order to maintain equanimity. And a lot of people said after Matt died, he was so solid. He just had such a deep foundation and he was so okay with death that I know he was fine with this. I was there. He was not fine with it. I mean, I know that man, like at the moment when he somehow realized and

recognized that this was it, I have no doubt that he was in his zen bliss bubble because I know that man. I saw him before that. That was not fighting. I think we have this idea sometimes that if we are rooted enough in our practice, that we will never fight anything, that we'll never be upset about something. I've talked a lot about the incredibly crappy things that I heard after Matt died and that grieving people hear when their lives explode. And I think one of the most insidious is this idea that if your spiritual practice was deep enough, you would not be so upset by this. And the Eastern traditions tell us that we shouldn't be so attached. Well, neurobiologically,

attachment is survival. Of course, we attach to each other. Of course, we're upset. Of course, we're destroyed when somebody we love is ripped out of our lives. The point of practice is not that you're unflappable, but that you have roots or a container that can hold you no matter how destroyed you feel. So I love that practice. I love keeping that in our minds and in our hearts that anyone we love and even people we don't like, anything, this entire planet can disappear at any time. Yes, please reflect on that. in our minds and in our hearts that anyone we love and even people we don't like anything this entire planet can disappear at any time yes please reflect on that think about that because it can be that motivation for i'm so tempted to swear like crazy i'm gonna try not to uh it's okay it's a podcast you can go wherever you want to go oh careful it's not like public radio this this

temptation to stop fucking around or this motivation to stop fucking around, right? Like there is no time to waste with circumstances or situations or humans that don't serve you to the best of your ability. There's no time for that. And I think that focus and that meditation on everything I love can be vaporized. It does lend that urgency to like, what am I doing with this person in my life? Or what am I doing in this job that doesn't feel good to me? What am I doing not being in alignment with myself? I love that. But this idea that the more you focus on impermanence, the more zen you will be when impermanence shows up. I don't think that's kind.

I don't think that's fair because it gives us this idea that when we're in pain, we're only doing it well or healthy if we're completely like monotone Zen. That's not true. I mean, it also brings blame. Absolutely. To the equation. Oh, it's so pervasive. The reason that you feel this way in part, I mean, you couldn't control what happened. But, you know, you can control how you respond to it. And one of

the reasons you're feeling this way is because of your you or your practice or your behaviors or your assumptions. And, you know, so if you just change this, you know, or if you had done things better, you wouldn't be in such a dark place. That's right. If you would just change your thoughts, pumpkin, everything would be fine, and you would know that everything is just exactly as it needs to be. Did you hear a lot of that? Oh, my God. Yeah. It's really a testament to my previous practice that I did not punch more people. Yeah, it's so pervasive. And I was talking with somebody here in town about this the other day that all of that stuff is really the puritanical blame model put into new Eastern clothing. Take me more into that.

Yeah. So that sort of early religious idea that if things aren't going well for you, you are not good enough. You're not following the scriptures enough. You're not pleasing God. And if you are pleasing God and you're doing everything you're supposed to do and bad shit happens, well, then your reward is later, right? There's never any acknowledgement or okayness about the fact that life goes sideways sometimes. So you take that sort of puritanical blame model where if something is going wrong, you caused it, you displeased God. And we put

that into whether it's pop psychology or pseudo Eastern philosophy that if your thoughts create your reality, I actually had people tell me that I created Matt's death with my thoughts. Really? I'm that powerful? I am really fucking powerful, but I am not that powerful. And what about everybody else's thoughts who loved him? What about his own thoughts? Can we give him some autonomy and sovereignty over his own life? Right? So inside that is still that if something is going wrong in your life or something is painful, you somehow caused this and that it's happened and you are so upset. That shows how not developed you are and how not deep you are. I have really, really good hearing.

And the number of times I heard people say, wow, she must not have been very stable before this happened if she's this upset now. Really? It's incredible. The kind of things we say to each other and to ourselves when we're in pain. It's intensely cruel and it's wrong. I wonder if behind somebody saying that about you to somebody else is their own fear. No, it's existential terror. Right. Because they want to imagine that if they, God forbid, ever are in that same position,

that they wouldn't be that on the hints. And the possibility that you are them and they could end up going there is too much to handle. So instead, they judge you as being other. Totally. I have a theory that is not yet scientifically proven, but the more unusual, random, or out of order the death, the more judgment the grieving person hears, right? Because if this can happen to Matt and I and our family and our world, here's this strong, incredibly skilled, powerful man who walks into a river he's walked into a thousand times and drops dead, right? Anything can happen. That could be me. And we have that limbic resonance, right? Our bodies recognize how fragile we are. And this

could be me. My child could disappear. My partner could not come home from work today, right? We hear about that stuff. And instead of letting that poignancy in, one of my favorite teachers used to say poignancy is kinship. And I love that. But we don't let poignancy be kinship. We feel that come into us and we go, oh shit, that could be me. So let me see what they did wrong, right? The only news story that I read after Matt died, I was never a news person anyway, but I read one news story that actually blamed him for his death because he was not wearing a life jacket. What grownup do you know wears a life jacket to go swimming? No. You read the comments section under any accidental death or earthquake or any of these things, and the comments are largely full of blame.

What did they do wrong? They weren't wearing their seatbelt. They didn't eat right. They didn't exercise enough. They exercised too much. Blame, blame, blame, blame, blame. It's our way of otherizing. It's our way of giving distance so that this can't be me.

And if we can't say like, oh, I wouldn't do all of those things so I'd be safe. If this did happen to me, I would deal with it much better than you were dealing with it. What we're doing is we're distancing ourselves from annihilation. We're hoping that we would survive. What's really called for there is silence and respect and acknowledging that yes this could also be me and right now it's not and this afternoon it might be and we can let that poignancy run through us it's like we were talking about in yoga practice when emotion comes up we can let poignancy run through us and it will not kill us. It hurts, but it hurts because we're related, because we're connected. It should hurt. There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, I think it also runs deep enough in some people that they actually stop themselves

in developing those relationships that would lead to depth and poignancy should something major happen in the first place just as a shield and then go through life wondering why they're not feeling. Yeah. And I mean, I think we do that personally, but I also really see that globally, right? When something awful happens, like you and I were just talking about Sandy Hook a minute ago, we get into debates and arguments and yelling at each other and all of these things, which is really a cover for, holy fuck, like so much pain in this world, right? And instead of being able to feel into that and respond, feel into the nightmare of that or the horror of that,

we instead go into our brains and we start arguing with each other. Or I can't remember who I was reading, but she was talking about the tsunami back. I don't even remember my dates now because it was during my early grief time as a total fog, but I think it was 2011, the Boxing Day tsunami. And the woman who wrote The Secret came out and said like those people who died during the tsunami were clearly having tsunami thoughts. Right? I know you're looking at me with this very perplexed face. But like, this is what I'm talking about is that in we do this whenever there's global trauma or war or, you know, environmental destruction, all of these things, it's almost like we don't think our human containers can

can withstand that. So we we go into judgment and blame and here's why this happened and all of these sort of top level arguments about why this shit happens instead of just being able to look at each other and say ow right it's okay to look at each other and say ow we don't have to jump into arguing about who's right and who's wrong and what the hell we're going to do about it the first thing to do is triage which is match your heart with somebody else and recognize the pain they're in. It's very simple. It's not easy, but it's very simple. Yeah, and it also, I mean, it brings on a level of emotional empathy that makes you maybe have to go there with them.

Yeah. And we don't want to do that. No, we don't want to do that. We don't want to do that. And honestly, I think about practice, whatever your practice is, like, I think about that not as a way to keep steady or a way to honestly, I think that sometimes we think that doing good practice means we're going to be safer, right? So that when we do have to show up, when we do have to ask our organisms to go to that place, we have enough backup, our roots go deep enough that we can actually withstand that, that there is something larger and deeper than us, not that we'll make it better, but that can like absorb that shock. It's like, it's why we go to

big open landscapes when we're in pain or when we're out on a hike and we see that view, even if we're not in pain, like there's something in us that relaxes because there's something larger than us that can hold whatever's happening. So I've been doing a lot of research on awe lately and how it literally just sort of rewires your mental models and the way you see yourself in the world. I guess it is probably why some people end up, when you have something so devastating happen to you, sort of retreating into the grand environments.

Yeah. I don't know if retreat is the right word there, but maybe. Collapse? Maybe? I don't know. Maybe it's not so deliberate. It's just well i yeah i mean i think that i think that for a lot of people in maine they're looking for that whether they're finding it in the in the landscape or in themselves or or you know something because that's that's personal to each person like what what feels like a vista that can hold that and i think an important distinction

there though is that we don't go to those places, whether in the world or in ourselves, to feel better. Right? Like, awe is a wonderful thing. And awe, I mean, I feel like awe is the root of my existence. I'm always, like, amazed at everything because everything is amazing. But that's not meant to make things, like, sunny and happy. And sometimes we, I mean, I was in awe of everything just differently after Matt died. It's a much darker and sharper and harder awe, but it's still awe.

And I think we have this idea that if you can only access that openness to wonder, you would feel better. And none of this is about feeling better. It's about carrying what you have to carry. And how do we do that in a way that doesn't cause more damage? How do we find those places that we can lean into and find any kind of beauty as a companion for what's happening? And that's really how I think about all of the things that we do to support ourselves and to support each other is that we do these things as companions, not as medicine to make anything better. Which doesn't seem like it's the common approach to somebody who's in grief. It seems like it's all about how do you support somebody or how do you, as the person who's

going through it, get to a place where you're better? Yeah, how can you get out of it? And then if you're supporting that person, how do you help them feel better? Yeah. Is that a lot of – I'm curious because you had all this training in therapy for so many years before and work, practical work. Do you feel that that did anything to give you skills? My professional history?

Yeah. Or was it – did you learn things that were almost antithesis in some ways? Yes, to all of those. So when Matt first died, I wanted to call all of my former clients and apologize for being full of shit. I really felt like I knew nothing. And I could check with some of my previous clients and be like, I feel like I was full of shit. And they're like, oh, no, no, I know that I did good work. I mean, that saved me. I also know that there are many things that I would have done differently. The tricky thing about clinical training for therapists is that for licensure reasons, the curriculum is very regulated. It's very strict. So within the course

of a two and a half year program, you might get a four hour class on grief, which is based on the stages of grief from Dr. Ross, who thought they were not useful for that herself. But you get very, very little about grief. And it's this medical pathology model about these stages that you go through. And if you're not doing the stages, you're not doing it correctly. And the whole point is to come back to normal as soon as possible. So you have all of these clinicians who think of grief as a problem, and not everybody comes into your practice. And a linear process too. Yeah, a linear process for Pete's sake. What else is a linear process? Come on. But not everybody is going to come in with devastating catastrophic loss, but everybody who comes into your practice is in pain. Everybody is carrying some kind of grief. And if as an institution, as a clinical

institution, we think that's a problem, then we can never serve them. We can never meet anybody if we think what's going on for them is a problem that needs repair. So you find this in the clinical world, which trickles down into common human interaction in life. If our trained clinicians don't know how to companion grief in a way that is respectful and offers somebody's sovereignty back to them, then the average person really doesn't stand a chance, right? Where you take otherwise incredibly intelligent humans and they think that their job is to make you feel better. That is not your job that their job is to make you feel better. That is not your job.

Your job is to companion what's happening, to come up alongside somebody and give them something to lean on while they fall apart, not to make them stop falling apart. It's ridiculous. There's right timing in there. You meet the situation that faces you. The time to talk about feeling better or rebuilding your life is not at the moment when somebody's worked with clients, patients for years and years and years, moving through moments.

And when you're in that place, you realize this is all out the window. So how do you come to a place where you realize that the goal is not to be better right now, but the goal is to figure out how to be? Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question. I mean, I feel like what my own practice did, my own personal and professional practice did for me was let me know that being with what is was right. Does that make sense? It wasn't very good English, but I knew enough to knew that the response that I was getting was wrong. In my practice before Matt died, supporting somebody's emotions was what I did, right? Like I was actually a really good companion, but I know that I probably still had some foundation in there

that our goal here was that you companion somebody so they can eventually move past us. And taking out that second part, that futurizing, that I think was what became so clear to me afterwards that like, don't worry about end game. End game is irrelevant. So I'm really thankful to my earlier pre-death self that I knew how to listen to myself. I knew how to be fierce about what I needed and to not worry about hurting other people so much if they were not responding to me in a way that was helpful. And I always had such an intensely interior life. So I could lean on that. I won't say that that was a comfort because nothing was a comfort, but I knew the territory. Way, way back in my

mid-twenties, my undergraduate degree was cross-cultural ritual and religion and dance and spiritual studies. It was fascinating. So I speak myth, right? Like that's my language. And after Matt died, people would come to me knowing my history and be like, here's this myth, here's Inanna, here's like, like that's fucking irrelevant. I do not care about any of this stuff. Like those myths don't help when your world's exploded because they're like, what do I care about some imaginary being who did this and this and this? If there's any myth that's going to help me, it's going to be Demeter, right? Because her daughter was abducted and taken to the underworld. And how did she respond?

She made the entire world die. I'll take that, right? If we need a vision to live into, let's take the ones that actually mirror our reality. And I think, again, that helped me, that facility with depth and imagery and language. Even if professionally, I was like, ooh, we need to really change all of this stuff because it's crazy. That familiarity with deeper inner worlds and interiority, that served me. That helped me.

I probably might not have agreed with that in the first year or so after Matt died because it was just pain. It was just unrelenting pain. And those moments where I felt that deeper net come up alongside me helped. It let me get through the days where I wanted to be dead, but it didn't make me better. So I think that the biggest thing that I take away from that sort of that bridge between my professional life before and my professional life now is that different orientation point of what better looks like. And sometimes better looks horrendous because that's what's valid.

How do you redefine how you live in the world then? I think, I mean, what I often tell people is finding alignment with your own heart and using your own heart as a compass for how you want to live given that you are still alive. How do we do that? And how do we really practice listening to what's true for us and living that? I mean, so for a lot of people, especially people who are widowed quite young, like how am I supposed to live another 40 years, another 50 years after this? And knowing that this isn't ever going to be rosy, and maybe it is, but that's irrelevant in those early days, what you've got is your own sovereignty. You've got your own compass that is never going to fail you. So you make choices that are in alignment with both the love that you had before this event happened, the love that's beside you, and your love for yourself.

So how do you listen for that? How do you come into alignment with that? And how do you make choices from that place, given the fact that you are still here? I mean, the question that keeps coming into my head also is, you know, on the one hand, so how do I get through the day, but also there's got to be this other dark, and I know this, that I know this to be true, not from own experience, but from a dear friend of mine who we've also shared a conversation with on this podcast, Aaron Moon, who lost somebody very young. It's the darker side of that, which is how do you wake up every day and answer the question, why shouldn't I kill myself today? Or why is this not the day that I should die too? Exactly.

Yeah. We don't like to go there when we're not that person. We don't like to think that that's even a question in somebody's mind but if you're that person it's like erin said to me so briefly i mean she's like you know her words were every day i wake up and every day there's like there's a dark pit that i walk beside yeah you know and i have a decision to make like am i going into it or not that's right and especially in early days, like that pit is everything and you are barely on the edge of it. One of the things that changes, we were joking earlier about time heals everything. One of the things that time does is it gives you a little bit more of a sidewalk around the pit. Yeah. But that question in there

about how do you not kill yourself? How do you deal with the fact that you wake up in the morning and your first thought after remembering again for the millionth time that they're dead? How do you deal with the fact that you're pissed off that you woke up again? Right? And this is really, really common for people who are in those intense early days of grief. There's a big difference between actively being suicidal and wishing for all the world that you would stop waking up. there's a big difference between actively being suicidal and wishing for all the world that you would stop waking up. There's a difference there, right? And one of the things, you know, in the grief world, and I get sort of poetic and I say, I'm not in the grief business,

I'm in the love business because it's true. But that it's a big thing in the grief world, this really common feeling of being pissed off that you woke up. Or one of my dear, dear, dear friends in the widowed world, one of the people who is the reason I survived, used to say, like, if a piano was falling from the sky as I was walking past, I would not rush to get out of the way. Right? And that's normal. The way that I got through those moments, and I had a lot of them, I have a really deep and highly developed sense of responsibility. And I didn't want to create a scene that somebody else would have to clean up. So I wouldn't let go of the steering wheel of the car, even though I really wanted to, because I knew that first responders would have to come.

And I didn't want that for them. You're giving me this face like this is what happens in my head. By any means necessary at that point. Exactly, by whatever means necessary. I also had a contract with another person who helped me survive. Her husband was killed in a horrific car accident, I think about a year after Matt died. And we had a deal that we would not off ourselves

because of the impact it would have on the other. And we couldn't sustain any more losses that we could control. So however you get through is however you get through. Yeah. So there's no, this is what you do. No. I mean, there really isn't because I think all the things we think of when we hear that somebody is feeling suicidal, talking to them about how things are going to get better and

you're so strong, you're so smart, all of these things, they don't resonate. They're not valid. You can't say that to somebody. Things are going to get better because where they are, things are not going to get better. They don't feel like they're going to get better. And honestly, living to that point where things feel better feels insurmountable and useless, right? So by whatever means necessary. There's a piece I have out on Modern Loss, and shout out to Modern Loss, about the first New Year's after Matt died.

And I was in my kitchen on the floor where I spent a lot of the first year. On the floor, like, dragging myself across the floor, sobbing. And when the body goes through that kind of intense grief, like the sobs that rack your body are amazing. And it's completely visceral and not voluntary, but crawling across the floor, trying to decide if today was the day I was actually going to kill myself. And I'm looking at the knives, which would have been a really poor choice, but looking at the knives and thinking I can either kill myself or I can make myself make cupcakes and go give them away somewhere. This is my choice right now. And I was crawling across the floor because I couldn't stand, climbing up the face of the cabinets and my phone rang and I decided to pick it up. And it was an old colleague of mine randomly calling me and said

I have this ritual that I do every New Year's where I go to the grocery store and I buy a lobster and I take it back to the water and I set it free you need to join me and I'm eyeing the knives and I'm eyeing the mixer and I went

I'll be right there and I walked away and that that was, I probably wasn't going to kill myself again with the overdeveloped sense of responsibility and sort of a unquenchable curiosity for life even in that moment. But that did it, right? Like how random at that moment where I'm at that choice point for somebody to call me and say, let's go liberate some lobsters. Right? So by whatever means necessary, which can also sort of loop us back into, if you're supporting somebody in pain, don't be afraid of that shit. Right? I had people I could go to and say, those knives are looking really enticing right now.

And they didn't freak. They understood. When we have people in our lives that we can go to and say what's true, we don't have to hide it. And if we don't have to hide it, then it doesn't become this sort of furtive, secretive thing that we're trying to hide from ourselves. And anytime we're doing that, it gets more dangerous. It gets harder to carry, right? So finding those people in your life to whom you can call up and be like, this is one of those days when I don't want to be here anymore. I need something. And remembering not to focus on how things will be better later because in that moment

later is completely irrelevant. What we have is right now and right now is pain. So how do we companion that? There's no one easy answer for that. But that intention of companioning what's actually happening in that moment, it's like, that's your Swiss army knife. Yeah. And I guess from the lens of somebody who wants to support that person, just maybe letting them know, I can be your person.

Yeah. Yeah. It's okay to talk to me about this. Back a million years ago, it seems now when I was doing sexual violence education in the schools, some of the educators used to wear buttons that said, it's okay to talk to me about rape. It's okay to talk to me about child abuse or whatever the language was. It's this permission giving that I am a safe person for you to talk to because I'm not going to talk you out of it. Which sort of seems like the antithesis of being a support person. I'm supposed to talk you out of feeling suicidal. No, I'm not. I'm supposed to be here with you. I'm supposed to sidle up alongside you and be with you when you're in pain. That's compassion. That's presence. That's allowing somebody the truth of their reality. So just like looping

back to what we were talking about in yoga practice, when emotions start flowing, like your job is to allow that. I remember as a teacher, students would sometimes come to me after class and apologize for becoming so emotional. And it revealed to me this sense of impropriety that we associate with going there, even on a much less intense level, that somebody would actually feel the need to have to apologize to a teacher who was in a room who just happened to offer a sequence of body positions that in some way triggered some sort of emotional experience,

that in some way that was affrontive to me as a teacher, that somebody would feel that, that there's something in their family or their history or in culture that we, there's that layer that we create that people would feel that both when you're in that place. And again, like when you're supporting somebody or trying to figure out how to support. And again, the thing that keeps coming back to me is this, is the culture of better, that the thing we're all working towards is getting you as fast as humanly possible to that place

where the world is okay again. And I think, look, in the end, of course we all want to be there again. Sure. Because we don't want to live in this dark place for the rest of our lives. But at the same time, you said honoring and just supporting the fact that that is the reality on the ground and in the moment. And the goal is simply just to get through now, whatever that looks like. You've used the phrase a couple of times in the conversation, the grief world, the widowed world, almost as if it was this sort of like secret society. It kind of is. So take me there a little bit. I mean, yeah, it's especially in that what I usually call the close to impact time after

a death like this. And there's no timeline there. So sometimes people will say like, what do you mean by early grief? Like whatever you say it is, I don't care. One of the analogies I've used before is if you're at the movies and everybody's watching the same film, but the screen suddenly melts and splits in two. And now it's a horror movie and it wasn't a horror movie. That wasn't what you bought tickets for. And you're watching this movie, this horror show, but everybody else around

you is looking at the screen as though it's still the same movie. And if you start getting upset or freaking out, they're like, it's a movie, eat your popcorn, right? But what you see is completely different than what they see. And it's sort of like seeing testicles, right? Like the reason why a lot of grieving people find the most companionship with other people who have suffered or survived devastating losses because we see the same world. We don't know exactly what that's like for you, but like, oh yes, we recognize this territory. I recognize that face. I can walk down the sidewalk and recognize that face where somebody's world has just completely melted. It is a very different place. And it's not so much to say that if you haven't survived a loss like this, you can't understand.

That's not accurate. But there's something very special about sitting with somebody whose loss has carved a similarly deep cavern in them. We recognize something. And I mean, this is true with anything. We gravitate towards people with whom we share our experience or share a territory. It's like soldiers who serve together in wartime. Exactly, right? Because we have a shared landscape and we know those places.

And, you know, as yoga teachers, we like, we cluster around other yoga teachers, right? Because we have a shared language and shared language is important. So, you know, the grief world, the young widowed world, the people who have lost babies and children, my phrase for that is out of order death. I think we have this. I don't know if you saw this, but there were some comments after Prince died. I promise I'm going to loop this back around. After Prince died, somebody actually commented like, what is this with all of these artists dying so young? We need to clean up our karma because what is this with all of these artists dying so young?

We need to clean up our karma because this is messing with everything. I'm like, wait a minute, our collective karma caused Prince's death? Really? Oh, I hope I can link that back because I might have just lost my train of thought. But like sort of coming back to this idea that like somehow we're ultra powerful and we create other bad things that happen and that bad things that happen are evidence that we're wrong somehow. When you've had an out of order death, you really get to see how ridiculous that is. And so I think that sometimes my favorite thing about widowed folks and folks who have lost children, Oh, I know where I was going. Sorry. This is the inside of my brain sometimes. That idea that when death happens, it's wrong,

right? That somebody dies at the end of a Western natural lifespan in their mid-70s, that's not unusual and it's not wrong. So I don't usually talk about death being a wrong thing. It happens. But there are deaths that are unusual, that mess with the understood and expected order of things. And people who have survived those kinds of deaths, we have something different. We have an understanding of our own selves and the world that is different, not better, not worse. It's just, it's a different orientation point. So not to say that people who experience sort of normal course of action deaths don't have that, but there's something very unique about out of order death or, you know, life-changing accidents or illnesses. I have a client who, you know, taking over the world, young man in his early thirties had just come back from a year trip around the world and dove into a pond

and came out paralyzed, right? Like life changes like that. And there's just, there's something different about people who see that or who have experienced that. It is a whole different world. It's not a dark world. It's not a terrible world. It's a different world. And it does change the way that you see things. We're good people, the deaf folks. Sitting across from you, so it's now, you're recording this in 2016,

it's seven years post. You seem somebody who actually you have this slightly devilish grin on your face. It isn't looking at you. You laugh. You seem to be in a place where you can find a lot of light in your life. Yeah. Yeah, there's so much light in my life. I'd like to think that a lot of that is because I went dark for so long, because I insisted on that for myself. I really didn't think any of my pre I'm goofier now than I was then.

But this is who I was, and it survived that blast, and I'm amazed at that. What has happened since Matt's death is, you know, I would say after the first three years, because the first three years for me were really bleak. And I wasn't sure I was going to survive and wasn't sure I wanted to. The only people I really laughed with were my fellow widowed people because we were dark. You could make those jokes nobody else could make. Oh, we could make those jokes. That's right. We could really make those jokes and we still make those jokes. I'm a lot less restrained with my inner dorkiness and fierceness than I used to be. I used to be a lot more like, I'll contain this and I won't do that anymore.

I can't really do that. Earlier in our talk, I was like, oh, I'm trying not to swear. I never swore before mat time, ever. Now I'm a sailor. It's crazy pants. Spending all day, every day inside traumatic death and grief and loss and the random shit that can happen i know more ways that people can die than most people normally think of and there's a i feel like there's a comfort in me with that and that willingness to go to any of those places there aren aren't many places that I won't go. In fact, there might only be one and we're not going there. I think because of that, I can be devilish and goofy and really passionate about how we care for each other and how we care for ourselves.

Because there's no place I won't go. Because I'm allowed to be disruptive in really difficult ways. And that's so much fun for me. I love messing with that stuff. And I, I still do the same work that I did before Matt died. It's just a different facet of it. I mean, before he died, even though I was burned out in my clinical work, I was still helping people find their own alignment and finding ways to live that out into the world and pointing out beauty and recognizing beauty. That has always been my work. And now that shines through this particular prism of traumatic grief and how we care for each other and how we fail each other as a culture and individuals. I get to shake shit up all the time. Like,

how fun is that? I would have done that anyway. I was doing that anyway. I didn't need this. This is not the only true path I could have had. It is the path I have. And that I've found some beauty and some joy and some fun in it doesn't make his death okay. My life is incredibly beautiful and so much fun. And there are times when that hole that we talked about shows up again. And I'm like, holy fuck, I have this entire life right now because of that beautiful, ordinary, fine summer day when I watched my love die. How is that possible? It just is.

It's not a trade. It's what this life is. And I do my best. And I think that's what my message is for people in pain, is that it's not going to get better. It's going to get different. And what you have in your power is not how long you live or how long the people in your life live, but how closely you are aligned with your own heart and how much you're listening and how fierce you are for your

own beauty and whatever joy you can find. It feels like a good time to come full circle also. So to ask you that final question. So we're sitting here with a project called the Good Life Project. So if I offer that term to you, to live a good life, what does it feel like? Well, that's it, isn't it? That that's all we've got is listening. That's all we've got is checking in with what we need and what we want for ourselves. No matter what that is, like no matter what hurts or what's lifting you up or exciting you or grinding you into the dust, like a good life is not a pretty life. It's not. There's a difference between pretty and beauty. So for me, a good life is always going to be one aligned with beauty. And beauty is not easy.

And it's not pastel and puppy dogs and rainbows and happy endings. It's not. But it's also not bleak, rocking in a corner in the basement forever. There's a middle way there. And that middle way is what you find while you're being as aligned and true to yourself as you can be, no matter what that looks like. Thank you. You're welcome. Hey, thanks so much for listening.

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And then you'll be sure to never miss out on any of our incredible guests or conversations or riffs. And for those of you, our awesome community who are on other platforms, any love that you might be able to offer sharing our message would just be so appreciated. Until next time, this is Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project. Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later require, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot?

Flight Risk.