So maybe you're caring for aging parents or losing people that you love in a relationship or quietly grieving your younger self or your younger body or a job. Whatever it is. Most of us grew up hearing about these five stages of grief, right? Like it's a neat orderly process. You're in stage two or three or five and then eventually you're you're finished with it.But I think some of you might not even realize that what you're experiencing is grief in certain parts of your life. Instead, you're told it's stress or you're burned out or you can't sleep or it's a part of getting older. And I think that makes it even more confusing. So joining me is Megan Rearen Jarvis, a leading grief expert and therapist who challenges the idea that grief is something you just quote get over and instead she's going to show us how it lives in the body. She's here to give you a new way to understand what you're feeling and then some real tools to help you move forward with more clarity and steadiness.Megan, welcome to the show. Tamsen, I am really delighted to be here. It's so good to see you and you know I have to say there are parts of what you have talked about and what I've listened to over time that really hit me because I think when you go through a loss at an early age you think okay I I understand grief and I understand how to grieve but I think after hearing you talk about it I'm I'm not sure that I ever did. So for people who are are listening to this and are not sure if you know they're they're grieving right now because it could be about a job or a relationship. It doesn't necessarily have to be about death.Can you start by defining what grief is? Yeah. So I define grief as the energy that's created in the body on account of loss. And that can be any loss. It could be the death of a loved one, which is how we primarily think about loss and and grief in general.But it can also be a divorce. You didn't make the team, you didn't get into the college you wanted to get into. I would say that we grieve something every day. It's interesting because I think of grief I I do think of it as death. Like that's what I think of.So I think anything else is is maybe less than that. And that's not really what you what you believe that grief is, right? Well, if we didn't have a description around grieving and loss that was negative, we probably wouldn't have to do that thing to ourselves where we start to compare or we minimize. If we looked at it as just an everyday experience like hunger, I get hungry every day. I feed myself every day.If we looked at the idea that I'm going to feel some kind of loss every single day and then attend to it because it's mine. I think what a lot of people do is they they say and they may even in a support network place say that person's loss is more significant than mine. Yeah. Right. And so then they say, "Well, I'm not going to speak up about it.
I'm not going to talk about it." But the reality is you can only attend to your own loss. You can't feed somebody else. So if if you hadn't eaten since Tuesday and I just haven't eaten since breakfast, you are very hungry. I am hungry. But the only hunger that I can attend to is my own.
And when I'm teaching in different environments, when I explain that to people, you can see them sort of loosen up and give themselves a little bit of permission to just attend to whatever the experience their loss really is for them. And for some people I have worked with, the loss of their pet is the most profound loss that they ever experienced. Not because they didn't have other loved ones, but because their pet loved them so simply and easily and readily. And yet, I have not seen a policy at a company. Actually, I think I just heard of one where you get the day off or days off or anytime you need because your pet died.
Yeah, that's a that's a real that's real grief. I that's real grief. I will real grief. So let's start with your own experience because you know I think our intention today is to make sure that people understand that we all have permission to do this but beyond that to really understand some of those tools to help because I I really agree with you how necessary it is. So what is your can you share your own experience around grief and what drew you to this work?
Sure. So I think it's important to say that grief is a developmental experience and not a mental health issue. Okay. It's something that happens to everybody in their over the course of their lives and it can become a mental health issue. And the reason that I preface that is that my story ends in the beginnings of a mental health issue for me.
But I experienced early childhood loss which I had no idea was significant until much later in my life. So I had a teenager who was beloved to me and my family drown in a community that I spent time in on Cape Cod in the summers. And because it was in the early8s and we believed that keeping kids away from hard topics was the right way to be, no one spoke to me about what it might mean to have a teenager in your life die. And I grew up not understanding. And you were young then?
Yeah, I was nine. And and I have five brothers and sisters. It impacted my family in ways that you could feel but wasn't spoken about. So, it was sort of alternately the most important thing that had ever happened and not not important enough to even mention. And it wasn't until I went to therapy for a breakup in my early 20s, I was noticing that other people seem to be recovering and going back out and dating and my breakup seemed like the end of the actual world.
And it wasn't until I went into a therapist's office and sort of wept about this breakup and said, you know, I just don't see any way that I'm ever going to recover. And we got to the end of the session and she said, "Did anything hard ever happen in your childhood? Anything bad?" And I my first thought was, "I'm going to have to find another therapist. This lady wasn't listening." And then I left and as I walked home, I was in I had just moved to DC where I live. And I walked home and I thought, "Well, there was that death of that teenager who's beloved to my family and whose family I'm still connected to." and so then I went back just to tell the therapist that and she sort of said like, "No, I I knew.
I knew." I was asking if you knew something terrible had happened. So what she was looking for was trauma. And trauma is different than grief. Trauma is an imprint like a tattoo that's left in the system that then you kind of navigate your world around unbeknownst to you in some cases. Unbeknownst to you.
And what we're always trying to do, I'm a therapist. What we're always trying to do is be able to help people navigate a difficult experience without it leaving them less than. Without leaving an imprint that means your life is going to be less good. And with grief, that's tricky. You know, it feels like it's already less good when you've lost someone you can't live without.
So, how do you So, how did you get into grief in particular? Was it was it that moment that made you say like, I really I I want to help somebody else understand this? So, I immediately sort of pivoted in in my work. I was in education and worked at a social policy think tank and just said, I'm going to learn everything I can about myself and about therapy. And I went into trauma work.
And at the root of all trauma is some unprocessed loss. And so, I was doing grief and loss work without a lot of formalized training in grief and loss work because there isn't a lot of formalized training in grief and loss work. So, why is that? When we all know, I mean, we all know and this is a Not I I always hate saying this that we're all gonna die. We all know that we're gonna sadly people around us, loved ones.
Why is that? I don't know. I mean, I my I think what I would say is it's because we want to side eye death and that we are more comfortable minimizing it and making it your personal problem. You're having a hard time. Well, you must not be doing this very well.
I mean, if you look at most work policies, they give you 3 to 5 days off. Mhm. And I say this all the time, but I'm not joking. My son does not recover from his soccer team losing in 3 to 5 days. So just allowing our culture to say you get 5 days off for the death of a child, we are really embracing this notion that what we're supposed to do is keep functioning and keep hustling and and actually what happens for people when they go through through profound loss is they're irrevocably changed and not always for the worse.
So, so my early experience was with this teenager Chris dying. I became a specialist in grief and loss. Worked with people who often 12 months after a significant loss would come to see me with symptoms like not sleeping, not eating, poor word recall, muscle pain, hair loss, all the things. And I would ask the not so genius question of what happened 12 months ago. And what people would say to me over and over was,"Well, my dad died or I got fired or I got divorced, but I don't think it has anything to do with it." And each time I would say, "I need you to know it does because I don't want people waiting 12 months where we're letting that energy settle, that grief, that energy settle into the system and start to impact how we make decisions." Grievers talk about being isolated.
That's one of the things they talk about the most. But if you understood it's typical to start to have that sensation and you really it's better for you to push yourself to go to the Christmas event and just understand that it's going to be hard and hurt your feelings. Let a person know. Well, I also think there's parts of grief where you go, "Oh, I'm not allowed to to enjoy or smile or feel or go back into real life too soon." And I think that a lot of that has to do with us growing up thinking there's these five stages of grief, right? That this is what you do.
Go through 1 2 3 4 5 and then you're going to be on the other side of it. You should be you should the word that you know over and over pops up. Be okay. So can we talk about those five stages and what you really believe those are. Yeah.
Let's not talk about the five stages. Let's talk about going but what why do why did we need to compartmentalize those into a a box? It's you know you talk so much about menopause and I think I've said this to you before. Menopause the whole process that you have brought forward is really fighting against that terrible study that gave the misinformation. Sure.
Grief and loss has the same sort of like PR problem. Elizabeth Kubler Ross in 1969 wrote this seinal book which was meant for people who were dying. It was meant to partner people who were going through a slow death and so could participate in their own death which is how I describe my dad. My dad had small cell cancer. He spent a year dying of cancer and at some point really understood he was coming to the end of his life.
And so he is somebody that I would say went through some of the stages as she describes them. But I almost avoid saying them. They are elements that people can experience in their grief and loss. But what happened was the grievers who were left had nothing. So the person that's going through that process, that's what those stages were for.
That's what they were for. And the wife or the children or the spouse, figure it out yourself. Figure it out. And so they just borrowed them. And really what the stages do, any stage theory, that's not the only stage theory, but what it really does is sort of like promise you a mile marker on a highway so that you know when you're getting off at certain exits.
And one of the criticisms or the reasons why people say that you can't teach grief and loss is because it's so different for everyone. Do you believe you can teach it? Absolutely. I do teach it. I teach it all the time.
And and so what happened in my story is that my dad died of cancer and then two years later my mom died suddenly in her sleep. And my dad's death was difficult. It was what I would say is sort of a typical grief process where it impacted me of course but it didn't knock me off my horse. When my mother died it was like the whole center tent pole fell and the circus went down. Why?
I mean, I have my theories, but I think what had I think when I was a child and we had this death in the family and there were no adults that were looking out for I'm just going to say me. I won't speak for my five siblings and helping me process those feelings. I oriented towards them instead. So, I looked and started taking care of my mom. She was very hard hit by this loss, as I understand you would be if you were an adult sitting on a beach where a teenager died, of course.
And in my world, we call that codependency, right? Where instead of focused on your own needs, you start to focus on somebody else's. And I think when my dad died, I inadvertently had like a relapse of that. I'd done a lot of work on that in therapy. And I think when my dad died, I just was like looking towards my mom again.
And my mom was an extraordinary woman who had a really big presence. So there were a lot I had this one moment after she died where I was sitting on my couch looking up at the mantle of my fireplace and I was like that's a picture of where she lives and those shells come from her town and do I even like this paint color or did she did I paint my house this because she would like this paint color. Sure. Right. There was a lot of where does she end and I begin and I really just went down and and my symptoms were I wasn't eating.
I went many days without eating. And I wasn't sleeping and I was muddled and confused. I had a lot of brain fog. But I also had this sort of metacognition because this is what I treat. It's what I I'm a specialist in.
So, I also kind of knew how to fake it, right? And I knew my symptoms were so serious. The one in particular that was the hardest when I learned my mom died, the very first thought I had because I was with her on vacation was that it was my fault she died, which is so common for grievers. Yeah. And it literally just came as a it's your fault she died.
I I saw the words. And anytime there was a pause of sort of thought in my head, some anytime I didn't have something I had to do, that thought started to run like a racehorse. And that that concept, that element, I know can be really dra. It's it's like a little bell that says your brain is not doing great here. And if you don't stop that, it's called a rumination.
Yeah. It can really make you unwell. And that is ultimately what happened to me. So I knew it was happening. I was using my interventions.
I couldn't get it to stop and then I knew I needed more intense help. Thank you for sharing that first of all because I I think these conversations are hard and I think they're so necessary at the same time.
Let's talk to people who are listening right now and say, okay, have I been doing grief wrong all along or, you know, how should how should I be looking at this right now? How should you know I have a friend that is is watching sadly watching her father die and I put myself in her shoes and I don't even know what to say to her right now even though I've been through you know the the death of a parent what what do you suggest what do you recommend when somebody comes in and says look I it's grief and I don't know how to I don't know how to handle it I've never handled it I mean I think just normalizing that that is what it feels like and that's what it feels like for somebody who talks about grief and loss all day long my neighbor's wife died recently and My first thought was I don't I don't know what to do. I don't know what to say.
So I think that's the the universal human experience. I also dream of creating a culture where we do have better knowledge about what to say because we're just saying more things a lot of the time. So, one, I think just acknowledge that we live in a culture, Western culture, really would rather you go to your therapist's office for an hour, talk out your feelings, and then come back and seem as though you did before your profound loss. So, we don't have a lot of comfort around it. And then two, there isn't a right thing to say.
There just isn't. So, that's a thing magazines will call or people will, "Hey, can you give us the fat top five things?" and I'll do it. But even as I'm doing it, I'm like, "Oh, this is a betrayal to the person." So, I could say the top things that are helpful to a griever, give them concrete help. That's one thing that people talk about a lot. You know, bring them food, mow their lawn, help them with something, tangibles, right?
But then I've worked with a griever who was like, "All those people coming to my house, ringing my doorbell, you know, insisting they needed to mow my lawn just made me feel self-conscious about my lawn." So, there isn't one right thing. So what I normally do when grievers are when people are trying to support grievers is say who are you? What is it that you do well? What would feel good to you to offer? So I am not bringing you a lasagna because I am a terrible cook.
So that and that's the you know basic needs like food is the thing that people jump to. But I will throw your four kids in the back of my car with my kids and take them away for the weekend if that's going to be helpful to you. And that's to help somebody that's grieving. If you are the griever, yeah, where do you where do you start helping people? Whether we're talking about death or we're talking about relationship or we're talking about job or we're talking about grieving your your younger body or your younger self or the past.
Yeah, this is the key question and this is the piece of information that I think is really missing culturally. There's a there's a lot of information about grief and loss, but how do you actually do it? M so I have a podcast which is called grief is my side hustle. I first had it the name was first grief is a verb. So the idea that grief is the energy that's created but grieve means how do you move it through the system and so my team and I teach something called the grief mentor method which is six core components to creating a personalized grief practice.
All right let's go through those because I think it's important. So, so it does a couple of things like I I don't know. I I want people to feel like they have something to go to. Absolutely. Right.
And and because I I do think about it. I think about the fact my dad's 86 years old. I think about the fact that I'm 55 years, you know, I do think about those realistically and then I I have to put it out of my head quickly. All right. So, it is the u mentor method.
Correct. So, what is the what is the first part of it? So, the first part is mindfulness. So if you think of grief is the energy that's created in the body on account of loss. Many many people have been conditioned and taught themselves to disconnect from that sensation.
So mindfulness practice brings you into the present moment. We're fine. You and I are fine right now. And I could take you through a quick exercise where you would go in and just find the energy. Where is it in your body?
How big is it? What color is it? What shape is it? Does it get smaller, you know, over time? How long has it been there?
And then what does it want you to know? So, I usually use some kind of guided meditation, but I have clients that use mindfulness practice. And I don't mean meditation. People sometimes conflate the two and they're and they're resistant. Oh, I don't want to sit there and and you know, in silence.
Mindfulness is simply the practice of being in the present moment with curiosity about what's going on inside your system. And that is key. Start with mindfulness so that you can go and find the grief energy inside your system. There's all kinds of you know there's joy inside our system but once we find it then you want to e which is the the second part takes us into what about the energy do you need to know so there are and I think this is really important the same way that we teach kids who are 10 about what it's like to go through puberty I think it's really important to say we filter grief with our bodies we experience the world with our bodies the energy component is are you experiencing your grief in the sympathetic nervous system which is the activation part which it looks like fight and flight. Is it more like anxiety or is it more like depression which is the parasympathetic nervous system?
Because when you open a magazine that says if you're grieving try these five things. Yeah. Always in that is take a bath. Take a lavender bath. Yeah.
But if you haven't gotten out of bed for 10 days a lavender bath is counterindicated. That's not what you need to be doing. So I draw what do you need to be doing? You need to be taking a walk with a friend. And again when I say you need to be this is my conjecture.
This is my hypothesis. I want to balance your energy. So if you haven't been able to move or stillness has sort of got you rooted. I assume the grief energy is in that stillness. So then we try it's sitting there impacting your body.
Exactly. And it's impacting your body and you're going to be able to tell me that the you have these symptoms. Okay, in this instance it might be sleepiness but it could also be irritability. I was the angriest, crankiest, most reactive. So I had more of the sort of anxious energy.
But the interesting thing about we call this the sympathetic parasympathetic nervous system is that when your anxiety gets too high, your body's natural catch for that is to tip you over into the parasympathetic nervous system and you will become depressed. So when you have anxiety and you go to see a therapist, they are always asking you also about depression because it's almost like the the fail safe, the trip wire. They know that that's where it could tip over to. Yeah. And so when I'm seeing grievers that I I have to ask like was it anxious first or was did it show up in your in your body as stillness and sort of depression to start with.
Okay. And what we want to be able to do is support them so that they understand, oh, I'm getting anxious. I'm tipping over into that depression and have some interventions and we love movement for some of those interventions. And then the N is nourishment. Yeah.
So nourishment in the very concrete way which is how do you feed yourself. So a lot of grievers will tell me that they've had pizza, lasagna and banana bread. They come up a lot really comfort food. People are bringing them over. Yeah.
Comfort food. I mean, we are craving. When you think about the stress that's happening in the body and the way it's exerting its energy on our metabolism, the idea that we're craving carbs and fats makes sense. But you also need protein in order to make the the all the hormones inside your system need the protein in order to be generated. So, if you're looking to have things like dopamine and serotonin, so excitement about something and also feeling okay about things, you have to make sure you're eating okay, right?
And you know, that gets missed. The other thing about nourishment is I always want to be asking people, do they have any funky stuff that has existed with food, particularly when I'm working with women that's relapsing, that gets missed a lot. Does that happen a lot? It happens a lot. The same way that people start drinking again.
These are old ways to function with hard feelings. Well, to create order or control, right? And so when my mom dies and I'm not sleeping and I feel out of control and I know that I have a big, you know, thing that I have to do for work, what I might want to do is nourish my body. What I might do is what I did in my history, which is restrict food or binge food. Yeah.
And the nourishment is also what feeds your soul. And so for some folks that might be their religious practice, but their religious practice might have gotten a little messed up by a sudden death. Sure. It might be going to see art at or feeling betrayed. I mean, I think that sometimes grief makes you feel betrayed by everything you believed in, right?
And so you turn away from all of it. Yeah. I mean, I think all of us like to think good things happen to good people, right? Sort of the prosperity bible of things. We know better than that.
We know that tragedy happens, but it's really hard for the brain, you know, grief is like a learning process, and it's really hard for the brain to learn that. And also, why would we want to be able to take in injustice and sure difficulty with with no with no reasoning behind it, right? So, translation is the T. Yeah. So, translation is what is the story you're telling yourself about what happened?
And this is important because this can sort of shift over time. When my mom first died, I couldn't even say the words, "My mom died." I couldn't even get them out. I worked with a client many, many years ago who had just moved to DC. She came in and she was furious. And she was in her early 30s and she said, "I can't believe it.
I just moved here from another city and it's happening again." Well, what's happening again? People are asking me about how my brother died. And when we unwound it, she had spent her childhood with this sentence. My brother was murdered when I was nine and he was 12. Sure.
And then people of course said, "What happened? How was he murdered?" When she was young, it was really important in her family of origin to say the word murdered. It was that was a really But it was many years ago now and what she was getting was the same response. So all we did was shift to when I was nine, my brother who was 12, who was my favorite person in the world and the funniest person I ever met, died suddenly. That changes everything and it changes everything.
And so that narrative, right? And so sometimes when it's not a death, let's say it's a divorce, people will say, "I'm never getting married again, right? I I said that, right? And look what happened." So, and again, I don't have I'm not going to take somebody's narrative away from them that, you know, one of the things that I had to say over and over again that was that I felt like it was my fault that my mom died. Sure.
But the element is what you tell yourself is how you live. So if I said, "Oh, I'm I, you know, I'm going to go visit these people and I think it's going to be uncomfortable because they don't have a lot of space in their house." I'm almost predicting that I'm not making it happen in some way. Okay. You have outside is the O. Oh, is outside.
So literally, and by the way, we're spelling out mentor. Mentor. Literally get outside. So get outside in nature. There's a lot of neuroscience around what the sun does particularly before noon to help your body that things like bird song and the sound of water regulate the central nervous system.And the central nervous system is what's being disrupted and uncomfortable and sort of ringing like a gong when you're grieving. But also, you're going to have to go outside your current network of support. Okay? That the people who know you know you right up until that moment of your loss. And the loss you are beginning to transform.
It's almost like our friendship Connley's middlelescence. It's like an adolescent. It's a it's a new way of being and it's really awkward for you. And so people who know you to be the reliable friend who always shows up that gives good advice are may not be prepared for you to be the reactive friend who's cranky and doesn't really care about your problem because they're covered in their own loss. Right?
So finding folks who maybe do speak native grief because they have been through it or are actively also processing their own loss can be helpful.
Well, I was telling you about my dad and he went to this grief course at a church and it I really I wasn't so sure.
I was like, I don't know if he's going to want to do this with other people and talk about this openly. And I went with him to one of them. And it was astounding how he came out of that. And I don't I don't know that I've ever really talked as I'm sitting here talking to you, I don't know if I've actually talked about like what really happened there, but I definitely as painful as the deaths were that he went through who he is now, I could never have imagined how he got through that so incredibly solid. You know, I do think carving out time for your grief, which is part of what the mentor method does is a daily practice.
So it assumes you're going to feel your grief and I the validation of other people of saying you make sense to me there is sort of normalizing normalizing feeling that somebody else is has lived lived through the same thing. There's a little bit of danger in the normalization in that you know sort of in Tik Tok culture there's a there's this idea that all you have to do is like talk about your feelings. Yeah. Feel your feelings. Feel your feelings.
But if you think about what that means what does that mean? I I mean I think what they mean by it is I would then say let me tell you about the day that my mom died and allow myself to bring up those feelings. It was hard. I was scared. It was sad.
I had a minivan full of kids. I had to get them back to the house. The problem with that is then I have all my feelings. It's like I just took all my shoes out of the closet. Now they're everywhere.
I mean, do you think people I I guess I think I guess I always think like, okay, I have to say it and like hurt myself with it and then I then I'll be able to deal with it better. Is that is that what you think that that is or you're asking the right question, which is, you know, sometimes when I'll say things on my podcast, I have this gentleman who I adore who will immediately email me and say, "Nobody knows what that phrase means." Right? Like holding space or feel your feelings. If you think of grief is the energy that's created in the body on account of loss and what we're trying to do is learn sort of build muscles to carry that pain but also move that energy through us as it begins to accumulate. It'll come back.
People are always at the holidays or an anniversary or some random time in the grocery store remembering their pain. But what we're trying to do is learn to navigate that and live our life and also add and have things. So I think that the notion that you just said which is like I need to maybe allow, you know, like hurt myself with it. I don't know that we're trying to hurt ourselves. Be so honest with it.
Maybe hurt yourself, right? Maybe like just like accept like put it right there in my face so I can keep Yeah. Yeah. Yes. So I think if we did it every day Yeah.
It might not have to have that intensity. I think if we said every day I'm going to spend 10 minutes and I'm just going to do a quick survey of what felt like grief to me yesterday and then I'm going to ask how do I need to process through that today? Otherwise, what does that do when grief sits in your body for those 12 months or 20 years, 18 or 20 years? What does that do? Well, I mean, at a minimum, what it does is it impacts how you make decisions.
It impacts how you see things. In many ways it impacts how you are physically living. So there are 12 systems in our body and there's so much overlap when we talk about menopause here. There's 12 systems in our body and any [snorts] one of those your your endocrine system which drives all your hormones but also your reproductive tract, your integimementaryary system which is your hair, your skin, your nails, your mus, you know your muscles, your skeleton. Any one of those things can suddenly start to quote unquote fail.
Mhm. Grievers throw their back out. They have migraines. They have, you know, dizzy spells. So, in in the worst case scenario, it can make you ill.
Mhm. And in the best case scenario, it can transform you to really begin to live a life that has maybe more of something that you've been missing because culture and habit and and because we simply don't know what we need to do during this process. I want to get to the R so I don't forget. I want to it just it says mento right now. So mento mentor ritual and rest and I think we rest key rest is a really important thing for me to remind folks.So I work with a lot of CEOs and people that are you know they have a high hustle. Rest is not normally a part of even their rest is often intense, right? They're climbing mountains. But this rest is the idea that when you're learning something, right? So when my mom died, I I honestly didn't even know how to be a person on the planet without a mom.I just couldn't navigate. And there were certain things I used to call her every single day after I dropped one of my kids off at school. And I my husband called a bus company and was like he's going to go by bus. You have to everything. We have to learn how to do things differently.When we learn things it exhausts our brain. We're dehydrated. Our body is tired. Just you know anybody who remembers that hard, you know, ethics class in school or that math class knows that's exhausting. So resting rest is key.
But also ritual. Ritual is where people often want to start. So they'll come into my office. People who are aware that they are navigating a loss and they'll say, "I'm here because I want to be able to figure out how to create a foundation, you know, to honor my son." And that's a big ritual, the idea that you're going to create something that's going to be lasting. For many people, 10 minutes in the morning, yeah, just thinking about their dog, their sister is enough.
I have a a good friend, Colin Campbell. He and his wife Gail lost their their adolescence in a terrible car accident and they toast each other anytime they have a drink and they say to Ruby and Hart which is such a beautiful ritual. My kids have never met Ruby and Hart never had the chance but we will often toast and say Ruby and Hart. So those kind of acknowledgement in the ritual. Yeah.
So I want to I don't want to I don't want to let you leave without asking and talking about menopause. Yes. Because I don't think that we attach the word grief to that necessarily, but when you and I spoke for the first time, you did and I and I've thought about that ever since. So, could you address that a little bit of what it is we're grieving? Are we grieving our younger selves?
Are we grieving cuz are we grieving our bodies? Are we grieving our what are we grieving? Yes, we're grieving. Yes, the Well, if you think about a woman who's in her 40s and 50s, right? So, we can we can bring the perry menopause in.
What's going on in her life. Sure, she's got k kids that are probably headed into college. So headed out the door if not out the door. That is a profound change for many many families, women in particular who identify part of their, you know, who they are and their purpose in their life as being a mom. They are caring for aging parents or living with aging parents or dying parents, which is a profound shift and also really hard work.
It takes about 18 months to do all the estate work. And it's all sad and hard. You know, you're cleaning things out, you're closing things down. It's all harder than it should be. They are living in bodies that are different than they were.
And, you know, we live in the culture that we live in that really likes things to look young. And although I have to say, I really think some of that is shifting. I've been reading articles about, you know, friends of yours, the the actresses that are doing their best work in their later life. But still our bodies are changing and to some degree that might mean you're playing pickle ball instead of tennis, right? Or you're, you know, you're not doing the black diamond and that's real.
And there's also some shifts. So people who have lived in a town their whole lives, they were there, they're thinking about maybe spending half their time there and half their time somewhere warmer. Yeah. Everything's changing. Yeah.
And that element that anytime there's change, there's loss. And anytime there's loss, there's grief. So, what is your recommendation to the woman who's listening right now, whether in pmenopause or menopause or much younger and going, "Wait a minute, I want stuff to look forward to as I get older." What is your advice dealing with all those things? Because it really is this, you know, I see like circles all intertwined with each other of of what we're all going through during this time. I think the idea of having a conscious practice, okay, something where you say, "I'm going to check in on my grief every day." Okay?
I'm going to check in on what it is and if you don't know where your grief is, look for loss. Where have you experienced loss and to try to do that without judgment and then talk about it out loud. So, I have this practice that I love with my best friend and my sister, which is kind of anytime anything feels griefy to me, I just text them. Grief, griefy. And I just text them and I just say like I'm in it.
And then I and then I connect to somebody else and then maybe we'll circle back around on the phone later. They both live, one is in Boston and one is in Seattle. But maybe we won't. And all I've really done is kind of like put it up on the pin board like, "Oh, I experienced that sensation of loss today." Acknowledging it. Acknowledging it.
And then what I will do because I do it every morning is when I'm journaling. I like to journal as part of my practice. And that's what we do is sort of teach people along those six core components to find activities that work to support them. And then they have a grief practice. And yours might look like doing yoga and then painting.
And mine might look like journaling and, you know, gardening, but it's going to be ing words. It's going to be something where we're we're actively in our grief experience. Finding a cohort of people. For me, it's my sister and my best friend and a couple of others. I mean, I talk about grief all day, so a lot of people will come and and but doing it consciously and doing it without judgment.
You're not failing at something just because you feel bad. If there's one thing you want people to take away from this conversation, what would that be, Megan? I mean, I want people to know that grief is a normal experience in life and that if you're not grieving right now, you will be at some point. So the notion of getting educated about how it impacts your body, about how it traditionally is supported by what systems, looking at it not as a pathology but as something that is part of our culture and getting more curious about what it is that you can do about that. So as a supporter or even as a griever, I would love for folks to say, "I'm listening to a podcast on grief.
I'm reading a book about grief. I'm having a conversation about grief. I'm watching a TV show about grief. And then I'm sharing that. I'm talking to somebody about it.
I'm telling them about it. That to me would be a dream. Well, hopefully they will be listening to you on this podcast. Thank you so much. You know, I knew I knew when we first met we needed to to have this conversation.
I'm glad it happened. Thank you so much. This is such an honor. If this conversation gave you words for something maybe you have not been able to name and I so understand that Meghan book, Can Anyone Tell Me? Goes even deeper into all this work.
I'm going to link it in the show notes for you. And if this episode resonated with you, leave a quick review for me. It really helps people find these conversations and I like to know what you're thinking. I appreciate you being here and I will see you in the next episode.
