Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick - Makes Sense Mondays - Making Sense of Grief - Episode 47

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

MAKING SENSE OF GRIEF: THE MINDS ATTEMPT TO DEAL WITH THE BREAKDOWN OF EXPECTATION. Grief is one of those things that is either happening to you or for you? In order to reclaim control during those times where you experience loss, it is of high value to take a conscious look at and better understand the science, art, and philosophy of Grief. Welcome to MAKES SENSE MONDAYS with Dr. JC Doornick "Dragon" where we makes sense of the things that make you go Hmmm? Start your week off the right way by reclaiming control of your Great Morning.   LIVE STREAMED on Facebook, Linkedin, and Youtube   MAKES SENSE PODCAST SUBSCRIBE/RATE/REVIEW & SHARE our new podcast. FOLLOW the NEW Podcast - You will find a "Follow" button top right. This will enable the podcast software to alert you when a new episode launches each https://podcasts.apple.com/.../makes-sense.../id1730954168   OUR SPONSOR: Enjoy the show and consider joining our psychological safe haven and environment where you can begin to thrive. The Makes Sense Academy. https://www.skool.com/makes-sense-academy/about Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hmm. Makes sense. Great morning world. Great morning humans. This is Dr. J.C. Dornick. And this is Make Sense Mondays. Another edition of the Make Sense with Dr. J.C. Dornick podcast. So welcome. If you're here with me today, you've been granted another 24.

So congratulations. Maybe that's just an opportunity for you to start this day off, this makes sense Monday, with just a little bit of gratitude for the simple things, the simple things. Today is going to be about making sense of grief. Well, that's what we do on Make Sense Mondays. Make Sense Mondays is a live show. So it gives you the opportunity to tune in live and increase the odds of hearing me do something wrong, which is exciting. Funny how people get so worried about doing something wrong.

I kind of like when people do something wrong, at least on social media or something. We guess it's real, right? What's not real is when you see somebody never do something wrong. We do Make Sense Mondays. It's just a great way to just reclaim control. as a shock call or dominant force of your life by spending a little bit of time away from that normal boot up that may have already taken place today. But now you're here with me and what we're going to do is we're just going to spend 20 minutes or so together in some higher level of

consciousness where we're going to be thinking about some of the things that make us go, hmm. Grief is a big one. I don't know you might be going through grief right now. You might know grief well. You might be afraid of grief. So many different things. Grief takes place. So it's one of those things that makes us go, hmm, and it's also one of those things that has a double-edged sword to it, which is why it fascinates me, because if you can grab a better understanding and perception of grief, meaning what is it, where does it come from, how does it serve you, what are the challenges associated with it? If you're conscious of that, which is what this is all about, you'll have this opportunity to maybe navigate it better, stay on course,

not be so distracted and spend too much time in various ways. That right there is an interesting concept. When I just said that, I just realized that somebody that's going through grief, this is what's interesting about grief. If you're going through grief, you've been programmed to expect and hope that people will feel bad and come by and covet you. But at the same time, you're not necessarily happy with that because you don't want to accentuate your grief.

But if somebody doesn't say, hey, I'm so sorry while you're going through the grieving process, you can get a little upset about that. So I have to be careful not to downplay grief, especially for those that are going through grief, because while grief is taking place, to a certain degree, you go offline of other things that you were involved in that day. What I mean by that is we wake up every day

and we have our hopes and we have our prayers that we hope that we'll get answered and we have our goals and our dreams, but then something happens and we don't control what happens. We control how we respond to what happens. There's the conscious opportunity. right there to say, okay, so grief is something that in large part is my reaction, and it's a word that we use to something that happened, which I had no control over. That's a nice insight.

But once it does happen and it grabs you, it takes you offline. And what I mean by offline is, here we are. We're about to have an online conscious conversation about grief. But if you're in the grieving process, it might be a little bit of a struggle or might not for you to hear somebody dissecting what it actually might be, because when you're in the grieving process, only you know what it is and what you expect and how you feel and how long you want to take with it or run away from it and things like that. It's a fascinating topic, which is what brought my interest to it. I just think it's such a great idea. At least once a week, we do this every day in our Make Sense Academy. We have a live rise up every day. Or we come up with these conversations and we interact live.

this episode will be polished up and shortened for the, the makes sense with Dr. J.C. Dornick podcast. But if you're into this idea of putting a pause, like I said, on the boot up of your computer and everything, I asked my daughter the other day when you boot up a computer, what is it boot up? And she goes, the program, you know, the hardware, the software. And I go, but from when?

And she goes, the last time I used it. And when was that? And she goes yesterday. So I said, the brain works the same way. So if we can learn how to pause that, which is what we're doing right now, We're together. We're going to be conscious. We're going to think about something that might be.

More importantly, you're putting a pause on what you think is, which will dictate the day. And that's the same thing as waking up and just saying, yes, master, how can I help you? If you allow the day to dictate your reality rather than claim control as the shock call or creator and dominant force of that reality, well, then you already know what the results are going to be, similar to yesterday. So that's what this is about. And if you like that idea, I do this every Monday. Live, the podcast is absolutely free. If you're new to the podcast, I recommend you start from scratch from the beginning because I explain a lot of the verbiage. I go over my interface response system and then that'll bring you up to this place where we pick apart these things that make

us go, hmm. And before I get started, remember, you know, if you learn something today, the best thing that you could do to live some sort of a fulfilled life of totality to live at full out would be to give it away that which you learn today, because that's the only way it's going to stay, and there's nothing greater in the world than being the candle that lights the others. Very excited news. This has come to you Monday, live on the 19th of August.

We are completely blown away. Chicken and I launched recently our first relationship retreat, where we're just taking all these tools that have helped us navigate what we perceive in comparison to the world as just a crazy, sequence of events that have happened with so many opportunities to have our relationship struggle. We've just devised this simple system that has helped us become not only a successful relationship, but, you know, just this amazing, strong, safe love and communication that can

last the test of time. So we created this experience called the Sati experience where we're going to invite people to have this amazing vacation couples, you know, married couples can come and have this vacation and just really get away because it's a lot of fun and it's in Costa Rica and it's in a mansion and it's beautiful and it's comfortable and it's relaxing. But it's going to incorporate a lot of our tools, meditation, communication tools. Chicken is a licensed mental therapist and sex therapist and relationship coach, all the dragon stuff. So we came up with this whole program and we set it up and it sold out in three days. Unfortunately, a lot of people that have been reaching out and asking questions, that event for October is closed. But we're going to announce today or tomorrow the

next event and we're going to create a waiting list for it. So very exciting to come up with something that you're very excited to pay forward and help people with. I don't know if you, but there's also a lot of fear associated with it. Will they like it? Will it work? Apparently we're on to something because in three days it's it's sold out. Let's get into making sense of grief. Feel free to just say make sense. If you want to come in to our Make Sense Academy and check it out, very, very low monthly cost of $24. you gain access to all of our live masterminds as well as everything that we will ever do or have ever did all of our courses beta test my book all of that stuff we're going to have business academy in there and chicken's going to do all of her relationship stuff in there

24 bucks a month which is really just a way of coming up with the funds to support the makes sense podcast so let's talk about grief so i'm really really into a lot of awakening stuff right now just allowing myself to be in this space where I don't need to know everything. And that's a power move for you today. When it comes to grief, I have my own idea that boots up right away, my knee-jerk reflex of what it is. But in my readings and in my just open and curious state, when I hear a different interpretation of it, I love to just say, hmm, and say maybe.

And I found one the other day in my studies. And, you know, I've been reading a lot of stuff from Ram Dass, the polishing the mirror. and I found so much more stuff from him. He's amazing. R-A-M-D-A-S. I'll put that in the notes. This is what I heard. He says, grief is the mind's attempt to deal with the breakdown of expectation. So just sit with that for a second. Whether you're in the grieving process or you know it well, the mind's attempt to deal with the breakdown of expectation. What I loved about that, which spawned what I wrote next, is it made me realize that this thing that we call grief. And remember, grief is like an emotion. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a,

a perception. There's entitlement associated with it. There's the comparative reality of sometimes if you're not grieving like you think you're supposed to, sometimes there's a little bit of shame associated with that. It's a fascinating thing that we've been taught how to grieve. Strip all of that away and just say, well, what the heck is it? And you say the mind's attempt, meaning effort, which doesn't always work, to deal with the breakdown of an expectation. So it got me thinking about the fact that we get so tethered in a codependent way with so many things in people, relationships would be an easy one to look at. The problem is, is we very often start to identify ourselves and our purpose and all of these things with that person or that thing. You know,

you can get comfortable habits and play into this as well. But we know that we don't control the happenings. We just can control how we respond to them, which is what this is about. If I'm attached to something or someone, and I'm identifying myself and my life's purpose and who I am with that thing and I lose it. That's what it's saying grief is. It's not the loss of something that makes us grieve. It's the loss of the expectations that you had for that thing. So just sit with that for a second. That's a powerful thing to consider because one of the hardest parts about grieving is this idea

that you've lost something. I know that. I've experienced that several times. I recently just experienced it again, unfortunately. But at the same time, if I'm conscious and I'm thinking about, well, what's actually really going on? I created some sort of an illusion or expectation that that was a part of my identity. And that's okay, too, to say that was a part of who I was. But if it goes away, which could happen at any time.

And by the way, you could be that for someone else. Then it gives you the ability to see that the real struggle in grief is that you set up this expectation of that playing a big role in who you were. and that's scary to lose to lose that. Let me just read a little bit of my journal entry, and this is going to be a blog post. I'm starting this new substack blog post because I do this every day.

So the attempt to deal with the breakdown of expectations. So the experience of grief is almost as if you were living your life through a dream. I love to look at life as a dream. Life is but a dream. I love that. What I'm saying is we're in that dream. You based your identity on some sort of a necessity and expectation of something or someone. So in the dream, if you were to look at your life as a dream, in that dream,

your identity was based on the necessity and expectation of an outside force, which is dangerous if you think about it. But if you're not thinking about it, that's where codependency and things like that can take hold of you. Remember, we're talking about some of the skill sets of handling adversity with grace, because adversity is, you know, pretty prominent in our lives. It's true to a very large extent that life sucks and then you die. So what I'm trying to be. So what I'm trying to trying to do is I'm giving people sequences, and this is what I teach in the interface response system, of ways of becoming, in essence, unfuck withable. It's a very good thing to do, based on stoic principles. When that necessity, that expectation or that necessity suddenly goes

away, which is always a surprise, if you're expecting someone to be there for you and they go away, that's the hardest part. Sometimes we have the opportunity to see them progressively going away and create some sort of a defense mechanism to prepare for their loss. But it, worst kind is when it just happens. When the dream is over, it is something that you now must deal with. So when the necessity suddenly goes away, the dream is over and you must in some way, shape, or form deal with it. So the feeling of grief is not a pleasant one. That's an interesting thing to say, is to somehow label grief as a negative. And we know that that's a dangerous thing to do, and it's not our fault. We've been programmed to think that certain things are positive and certain things are negative. But then you go pick up any book,

or you listen to my podcast or you watch any video and you realize that positive and negative or omnipresent in both as necessary. There is no light without the dark and so on. So it's interesting to say, do you think that grief and you can put this in the comments is a positive or a negative thing? And I can tell that this is a popular topic because I can see that folks coming in. So the feeling of grief is not a pleasant one as we're taught and stimulates feelings and actions that seem unproductive, confusing, and sad. So look at the things that we typically do when we're experiencing grief. And by the way, we can easily justify those things because we're allowed to. You know, grief kind of excuses you from things, right? As a matter of fact, you'll notice

that your friends will say, take it easy. Going through the grieving process, take it easy, right? You're grieving. And there's so many different ways to look at that. But, you know, the way I look at it is, it's like, what is it that I can truly justify is worthy of me taking advantage of taking time off from my goals and my dreams. That assumption is based on this idea that I have more time. But if I really understand this concept of the mortality mentality, momento moray, right? This is this idea of recognizing that you're going to die one day. Does anything validate? This is just an idea, not my opinion. Is there any valid reason to take time off of your goals and your dreams? I guess that would be something in the eyes of the perceiver. So a natural force of

urgency comes upon the griever that seems to encourage them to move away from the feelings. Now, when we have a negative feeling, because we've been taught it was negative, we have a tendency of trying to do things to move away. Non-greivers, meaning people that are outside of you, and if you're the griever, come to join the grieving process with that griever as if their goal is to take some of it away. So it's interesting, grieving is such an attractive thing, obviously, but go put up a post today. I mean, I'm not telling you to do this, but you know the outcome. If I put up a post today and in some way, shape, or form exposed that I was grieving, watch how many people come to join the grieving process. They don't know that they are, but what they would say is, I'm so sorry.

I'm so sorry. They would give you sympathy and some empathy and stuff like that. But it's obviously something that has a lot of power, because when somebody's going through the grieving process, we all swoop in and join in in it. And I think what our intentions and they're good are to remove some of the grieving pain from the person without knowing that we've become part of it. And when I'm going through the grieving process, or I see someone going through the grieving process, I don't just swoop in and say, hey, I'm so sorry. That rides with me for the day. It spreads.

It spreads. So if allowed to grieve the perception of your loss, your mind slowly begins to consider different ways to move into and create a new dream and reality that exists without the loss of the entity. So what I was recognizing is, is part of the grieving process. So you have everybody trying to encourage you to grieve. When you see somebody like lose a family member and they're not showing any signs of concern, don't you find yourself bothered by that sometimes?

Isn't that interesting? Oh, they need to grieve. You need to go through the grieving process. And I understand the reasoning behind that. But like, who made that up? It's just such a fascinating part of human behavior. So the unconscious mind will steer the grievement. to crave and seek out a new person or a new thing or a new vehicle to build their identity and their

expectations. Sometimes we see this with pets. I've been through that many time with pets. But if I'm grieving the loss of a relationship or a friend, and I've been through that, I don't want to sit in that process forever. So I'm going to try to find something else to give me that psychological safe haven and that comfort. So this is part of the challenge with relationships. And Chicken and I talk about this a lot is sometimes you'll find yourself in the wrong relationship just because you're afraid of being alone. And one of the reasons we're afraid of being alone is there's a little bit of an identity issue there. So sometimes we'll tether to something and create the illusion and the expectations that it's the right person and then find out that it's not.

Yeah, this is a conversation worth having. So the unconscious mind will steer the griever to crave and seek out a new person, a thing, or a vehicle, not to necessarily replace the loss one, because that would be wrong, right, but more to help the mind create a new expectation, direction, and identity, and so on. So grief doesn't exist only in the loss of a loved one. Sometimes when we talk about grief, we just automatically our program to think it's the loss of someone. We can develop, you know, a dream and expectation around our role and acceptance in a group of friends or a career.

What does it feel like when you're in a group of friends and then you find out all of a sudden that they're gossiping about you or somebody said and you and you experience this like loss of that safe, secure identity that you have with that group of friends or a career getting fired or finding out your company's going under. So what is it that we do? What do we do about this? This is a proactive solution focused podcast. So what do we do about this? We have to start first of all. First step of the interface response system is to really understand why this is all happening. think that we've accomplished that with that statement of the acknowledgement that what we're really

grieving is the loss of the expectations we had for something and what it did for us. But here's a question. Can you learn to look at things like love as a universal and omnipresent force that you perceive and experience independent of it coming and going in and out of your life? Now let me read that again because this is a big, big offering for you today, if you can grasp onto this. Can you learn to look at something like love as a universal and omnipresent force that you perceive and experience independently, independent of this idea that it's something that comes and goes in and out of your life? What that means is if you were to strip away all of the expectations of your current reality, your future, and your past, and you're just to strip away.

away everything that makes up your identity, what would be left over. Now, I personally have experienced this in many, many ways, including the work that I've done with plant medicine, where I've gone into the Amazon jungle and worked with things like ayahuasca and bufow frog and things like this and experienced ego death. So I've experienced what it's like to perceive the world without me there, without everything that I think and my perceptions and without me there. And you know what you find at that core, like what's left over? You realize it's left over. You realize it's love. So you stop saying like, I'm in love with this person. I need this person. I need that. You just say, I am love. If you can learn how to do that, it's going to help you with things like the

grieving process. Very, very interesting. And so I've started to incorporate that into my morning affirmations when I get to that phase of my morning. And if anybody is interested, I have a whole written out morning structure. And it's just called the Rise Up Great Morning routine. I've written it out and I'll give it to you. So if you just write morning routine and share it with me, I'll send it to you. It's just a Google Doc and you can chop it up and make it your own. But that's something that I've added to it is I affirm that I am love. And the reason why is because we can very easy get caught up into this illusion of all these things we're talking about is our perceptions and our expectations of the fact that we are who we are only because of outside forces. And the

reason why that's dangerous is you can experience the grieving process as a result, but also we don't control outside forces. We control how we respond to them, but our biggest struggle is to live in the present moment. Sad Guru says that if you allowed yourself the opportunity to just separate yourself from everything and just live in the present moment right now, you could spend a million years acknowledging everything that's already going on that you already have. I love that. If you did learn this, you would allow yourself to move from being in love with something, which is nice. I was walking with chicken this morning and just imagine the heavy talks that we have in the morning. What I was saying to her is, because I believe that what human beings really are were some sort of a soul that never dies,

that's in some way, shape, or form incarnated and is using this body and this identity to have this life experience. And in Buddhism, they would say that that would be to work out some unresolved karma. I'm going to do a whole episode on that. But if that's true, true, then, you know, what, how does chicken fill into this? And because I have to be careful not to place all of my identity as her husband. Where does this all fit? So I'm just so grateful that in this life experience, considering all this stuff, that I have somehow got this awesome, amazing partner that's going through her own life experience, but we get to, we get to just really, really enjoy. And I think that if I hadn't done all this work on consciousness,

I wouldn't recognize how good I have it with her. So these are some of the fun things that the couples that are coming on our retreat are going to have these breakthroughs and just go out and have fun and we're going to do charades. All of our couples are going to have this amazing, just like godly renewal of their vows, right? They're going to all, you know, have this beautiful wedding. And word on the street is that our next one will be on Valentine's Day or during Valentine's Day in paradise. If you're interested in that, you know, maybe send a heart or something like that.

You can imagine how powerful this is. So if you do, you will allow yourself to move from being in love with something, therefore making that love independent of anything. And that's that place of where you say, I am love. So to that of simply yet profoundly being love, not being in love, but being love. And from that space, you know what I love about that is that it's kind of like me paying forward who I already am with my partner, maybe making it even stronger. But if it goes away or some sort of a tough tragedy happens, I'm not saying I'm going to not be affected by that, but I still will be loved.

So independent of the people and the things that predictably come and go in and out of our lives, we know they're all going to come and go. You don't know about yourself, but we know that things, external things, will come and go. They have an expiration. We don't want to believe that, but we know. There was the story of the Maharashi was going through the final days of life when he was dying of cancer, right? So he's dying of cancer. And just imagine if somebody that you had tethered to as your leader or your Maharashi and everything about your identity was like based on him. And now you're seeing that person go.

And you know, you've seen people in your own life go like this. And you get so worried about, will I be able to, what am I going to do? Like I find myself with my wife very often saying, I don't know if I could. could live without you and things like that. So it's a very scary thing. So Maharashi is going through the final stages of cancer and all of his disciples, friends said to him, they call, I think they called them Baguan, they said, Baguan, please don't go. Please don't go. Don't leave us. The story goes that his response was, don't be silly. He says, where would I go? I'm just dropping this body, but I am not going anywhere. What's the value of what we've just talked about for you? To whatever degree, you're going to absorb this

or not. You can discard this and just move right back out into the program. You can leave this podcast and you can just allow the program to boot up again and just go to work for it. That would be the easy, safe thing to do. I don't look at it as safe for myself though, because then I don't have much say in the outcome of the day. So the other opportunity would be to take this and not necessarily get obsessed with doing something with it, but maybe let it sit in this place where you do something that we teach in the Make Sense Academy, and you just go, hmm, interesting. This is a fascinating approach.

And you might be able to look at past grievances or something that you're worried about losing, or maybe you're going through the grieving process right now, and just remember this idea that the actual act of grievance might be, I love the word baby, your mind's attempt at navigating through the loss of something that you expected to stay there so that you can continue thinking that everything was fine and things like that. Love the feedback. You know, please, you know, if you learn something today, give it away, that's how it's going to stay. If you want to get on our newsletter and you want to find out about our Sati experience, our next trip or our Make Sense Academy, you know, just come run with us through life and just grow with us. Everything that we create and all of these conscious spaces, our members will just have access to them all the time.

And you'll also be helping keep the lights on for this podcast. Love and appreciate you all. Have an amazing day. I'll see you next time. Makes sense.