048: How to Process Death of Loved Ones

The podcast delves into the topic of coping with the loss of loved ones, discussing the emotional impact and ways to process grief. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the underlying dependency or attachment to the deceased and suggests methods to release emotions associated with sadness to gain a wider perspective on the events.

Connect with Mike Chang:
- Instagram: @mikechangofficial
-Youtube: Mike Chang
- Website: www.flow60.com

Connect with Stephen Yeh:
-Instagram: @iamstephenyeh
-Twitter: @iamstephenyeh

Transcript

Stephen: [00:00:00] So I recently went back to the States to go back because my, my uncle, he was, he was essentially getting to the end of his life and I wanted to see him for the last time before he goes. You know, fortunately I got there. Just a few days before he passed. So I was very grateful for that. And it's, it's been quite the crazy rides, you know, essentially since like COVID time, 2020.

Cause that's when my dad just randomly passed one day. And then, um, you know, and then my grandma passed as well, shortly after, as well as my mom. And also another aunt, so it's been quite the ride in terms of [00:01:00] just deaths, close deaths that I've had. Because before that, it was almost like nothing, and just came all of a sudden.

And, everyone has, we essentially will all go through this process. And, it can sometimes be tough, but at the same time, it doesn't need to be. And so over enough experience and I guess enough understanding, I feel like I've gotten to a point where it, doesn't hit as hard and I don't carry it around as much anymore.

And I wanted to get your take as well with your experiences of loved ones and people you cared about passing and kind of how you deal with those situations as well. 

Mike: I had a, I had my shares of people passed in a way as well. Sister passed away about two years ago. Father passed away about four years ago.[00:02:00] 

And on top of that, I think my, one of my, my grandmother passed away. Mother's side, yeah, just other grandma, dad's side passed away. Maybe a few years before my dad. And then, yeah, just so it's, you know, we're at the age, you know, people, people are passing away. It's, it's the time to go. How much it affects us when people pass away.

This is heavily determined by the relationship that you have with this person and also the level of dependency that you have. I want to say dependency, not attachment. Because in reality, it's the same. It's just a different word describing the same thing. If I depend on this person to make me feel strong, make me feel loved, Make me feel like this is the person that will have unconditional love [00:03:00] for me and now this person is gone Now there's nobody that can truly love me like the way this person loves me So let's say if a person was to experience something like that, we would ask Why do you need the love from that person?

What is it about that love that It's so gratifying to you and ultimately as we dive into these answers, we find that this person doesn't truly love themselves. They don't fully accept themselves. So then they need this other person to give them the acceptance. Give them the love that this person cannot give to themselves or confidence.

Any of those things. If you have a great relationship with somebody, but they, passed and you're not dependent on them for anything. You have a great relationship. But your sense of self is not dependent on them, your sense of value is not [00:04:00] dependent on them, your sense of self love is not dependent on them, then you're not going to experience a tremendous amount of emotional pain.

You may have some sadness, but the sadness is coming from other things. It's coming from, I really love this person, now this person is gone. Okay. Yeah. Alright. Be sad about that. We had really awesome moments and now we won't have these moments anymore. Okay. Yeah. Sure. Be sad about it. But how long would this sadness last?

People hold on to deaths for many months and many years, and some for their whole life. It affects everything. We're human beings, we have emotions, but there's no reason that somebody should hold on and let things in the past constantly affect their future. Give it a week, give it two weeks, give it a month, give it two months.[00:05:00] 

Alright, no big deal. You only have one mother, one father, you only have one uncle, okay, but then move on. If we are dependent on them for our sense of self, our sense of value, if we are attached, then it will be very difficult to move on and we will always feel a sense of lack. And then now their deaths are constantly affecting us.

So when somebody passes and a person decides then that they're going to try to let go of that attachment, it's not gonna happen. Because that was something they were supposed to practice on beforehand, but you can't practice on detaching from people's deaths, unless you got people around you constantly dying, right?

How are you going to practice that? So we practice with other parts of our life to become unattached to it, to not constantly depend, not have our sense of self attached to the things in our life, the [00:06:00] titles, the possessions, to stuff like that, right? Just so when the bigger things happen, like deaths, we're able to handle it better.

Stephen: So what you're saying is of course, , in the beginning, when you lose a loved one's emotions will come up, but the reason why it actually stays around it's not so much that they miss them. It's not so much that the past memories come up, but it's more so the dependency.

There's a certain dependency or, like you said, , attachment to them. 

Mike: That's on the level of mind, yes. Then there's also level of body. That's slightly a little bit different. They work hand in hand. If I have a lot of sadness inside, because when I was younger I had a lot of sadness. I was sad from this, sad from this, sad from that.

And I [00:07:00] never really processed that sadness. Now, somebody passes away, so the dominant emotion that comes up is sadness. So then, now, so life moves on, and every time when I get sad, I start to think about the person that passed away, because it triggers that event. But that's the way I'm constantly responding to my environment.

If I have a lot of sadness that I haven't processed inside of my body, I'm going to constantly respond to my environment with sadness. And there's always something to be sad about. Always something to be sad about. I'm going to look for all the things that I can be sad about, and I'm going to constantly somehow just pay attention to all of them.

And then I always feel sad. And then when I feel sad, I think about sadness, and now I have that mind body feedback loop. It reinforces itself. Now, I feel like everything in life is good, because I'm sad, I feel sad, and that's what I know in my life, and therefore everything is [00:08:00] normal, it's familiar. So, if you want to go and break out of the cycle, we need to release this feeling of sadness, this emotion of sadness, and we need to fully feel it, allow it to come to the surface, fully sit with it, don't think about the sadness, feel the sadness, the sensation, and the more we feel it, the more we process it and let it go, without thinking about it.

And then as we release this emotion of sadness, the stories and the events are going to come up. And when we release the emotion of sadness, we're going to see the event without the lens of sadness. And without the lens of sadness, we see an event, we now understand this event. Up until then, we see it in just one perspective.

But when we drop the lens, we now see it from a whole perspective. We start to be able to see and understand what really happened. Instead of just my point of view at that point of view, at that point of view, we are able to see [00:09:00] more information because we're not looking through a lens, looking through a filter.

This allows us to be able to move on from this event, from what happened. So it's not that we ever just forget about things, is that we have a wider perspective, a deeper understanding of what happened. And with this new, deeper understanding, what happened is not as bad as we thought. It's not as painful.

We don't get so upset. We understand what happened is still what happened, but our understanding, our perception of what happened changes, but this only happens when we can release the emotions of that sadness or that emotion inside. If we don't release it, then we can try our best to try to see it differently, but we can't.

The lens is still on. 

Stephen: So if we reel this back into a death of someone [00:10:00] close, like I'm just imagining how would someone say, Hey, this is not as bad. This is not as sad when something like that 

Mike: happens. If a person is wearing the lens of sadness, it will be impossible for them to see it in another lens.

So it's already too late. At this point, you're just going to sit with the sadness, mope over it. And you can work on processing it, but you're not going to be able to let it go very easily because you carry a lot of that emotion and you never let it go before. And now you had a really big one happen.

It's going to be very difficult to prepare, to handle it. It's like a person who's never played in the big leagues. It's played in always just, you know, neighborhood, neighborhood football, you know, and suddenly you're going to drop them in the NFL. How do you think they're going to do? Get killed in there, literally probably get killed in there, right?

So then they're not going to do well. So you got to practice, right? If you're going to [00:11:00] prepare for something big. And the fact is everybody passes away at some point. So we don't start preparing to go ahead and release the sadness, release the fear, release these emotions inside of us. Then we are 100 percent going to run into a lot of trouble in our future because people will pass.

And when they do, if a person is carrying a lot of emotions, all of those emotions are going to come up. And when they come up, a person won't know what to do. They're going to be so overwhelmed, it's going to influence and ripple into every aspect of their life. Their relationship, their work, their health, everything is going to decrease.

So how much work they have done on the inside will now determine how well they can stand once this happens. And this will happen. They will experience death. So the people that are spending their time, while people are not dropping around like flies, and they're spending their time to go ahead and release these emotions, They're learning how to come to a place of centerness and peace [00:12:00] with their current life situations and these smaller events.

They're learning how to do that now. So now when these bigger events come, they can bounce back much faster. And for some, it won't even skip a beat. Like when my sister passed, it didn't skip a beat for me. I was still taking care of everything. There was no downtime. There was no, I need a day off. There was no day off.

My son was three weeks old, I'm training all of these clients and coaching them, got a full business, there's no day off, I'm running it, and handling all the funeral stuff. So we can do that if we have practice and trained. 

Stephen: I remember hearing this a while back where, especially like Buddhist monks, where they get to a point where, kind of like what you're saying, there's, You don't skip a beat, and, some people think that's, that's just very abnormal.

It's very abnormal for you to kind of just, go about [00:13:00] your normal life without, processing all of that. How, how do you explain that? How would you explain what you went through when your sister passed?

Mike: What people are 

processing is not so much of the death. What they need to process is all the other things in their life.

The death just brings up all the things that they have not processed. Because it triggers the emotion inside of them. And when the emotion is triggered, a lot of emotion, everything that is attached to the emotion is what the person is really processing. So let's say somebody's sibling passes away and this person feels overwhelmed with sadness and grief and all of that.

But what this person, let's say, is experiencing is The fact that they never stood up for themselves in the [00:14:00] past, that they're always scared to go after what they want, that they feel bad about themselves, that they feel helpless on the inside, that they feel like everybody is looking down on them. And this person that passed was the only person that they really trusted and felt safe with.

So now if they don't process all of those things, Now, this person passes, they're processing all of it at one time. Now you think about this, right? Years, you're talking decades and decades of unprocessed stories, beliefs, and emotions. They are now all going to come up, triggered by a big event.

That's what people are processing. Now, on the other hand, let's say the same situation, but this person has spent the time, they put in the work, a lot of work, and they process these things already. Over the years, [00:15:00] they process and take a look at their life. They went ahead and really decided to connect to their body and not let these old emotions run their life.

And they process all of these things, and now they are at peace with themselves. They're at peace with their past. They have a level of confidence, now. And now, their sibling passes away. So the only thing that they need to process Is the passing, not everything else in their life.

So that's why deaths are not a bad thing in reality. Not because, because number one, we are going to the next place. It's not a bad thing, but challenges when they happen, they get people to really look at their life and sometimes somebody's death is the beginning of somebody else's life. So it was never really a good or bad thing.

There's just [00:16:00] effects. 

Stephen: I think another aspect is kind of like what you said, you know, people are born, as a human experience, all of us at one point will pass away. And it's just part of the journey. And I feel like. As if we can really just grasp that and understand that this is just a cycle that the cycle of life and nature reminds me of Lion King.

And yes, we can be sad that, someone that we cared about has gone, but we don't, like you said. We don't have to carry that for years upon years and maybe even for a lifetime. Something that I've seen in certain people where they, they don't ever let that go.

And you can see that it completely affects their life. 

Mike: But you see, they know already about the cyclical circle of life. They know all this already. 

Stephen: But [00:17:00] they can't accept it. That's the challenge. Right. 

Mike: Just like everybody knows that you diet and exercise if you want to be healthy. Who doesn't want to be healthy?

People know these things. But knowing it versus actually doing anything about it is very different because even if they know it, they can't do it because to do it, they need to go and process those emotions on the inside, let it rise. They need to fully feel it. And when it comes up and they can release it, then they need to go ahead and quote, rewrite the beliefs, rewrite their perspective that they had about the events in their life that they would consider to be.

Dramatic or what created their personality, what created influences them, events happen in people's lives. And every big event really makes shifts into somebody's psyche and the way they perceive themselves in the world. Small events do the same, but the big ones make the bigger impact. And so now we look at a person, this person is acting this [00:18:00] way, talking in this way, this person sees the world in this way.

Now, let's say if this person, they're not getting what they want in their life. So they need to go and change the way they see things. But to change the way they see things, They need to go and actually be able to change the contents in their mind. And they can't if the emotions, the energy in the body is the same.

So they have to change the energy. So when we go ahead and change the energy, what we really need to do is let go of all energies in the body. All energies in the body that is blocking the base energy. This base energy neutrality or inner peace, ease. calm That is the base energy inside a person, but we have stored a lot of other energies, AKA emotions inside of our body.

So now what we're [00:19:00] experiencing is this motion, that emotion, that emotion. And every time when we store emotions, we also stored beliefs, events, stories, perspectives that shaped the way we see ourselves and life. So now, if I want to go ahead and change my outlook on things, if I want to change my life, I need to go ahead.

Let go of these energies, and then my mind becomes clear, and now I need to create new ways of looking at things. Hmm. We see how it's like, it's very specific. It's not like we can just go, hey, you know, I'm decide I'm gonna change. That's not gonna do anything. You know how many people, every day, is trying to decide that they're gonna do something different, and they go back to the same thing.

And they're fighting, and they're going, why can't I make the change? Because they don't understand that they need to change on the physical level. In other words, they need to change their energy. [00:20:00] Their energy is inside of them. They need to go and change that energy. And the way they change their energy is by releasing all energies that is blocking the base energy inside, which is peace.

And all they have to do is release it, which means they just need to feel everything inside of them. That's all. Just feel everything inside. It's such a simple, straightforward request, right? Just feel it. That's like, clean the table. What do you want me to do? Um, wipe the entire table. Clean it. That's it.

Clean it, right? It's not complicated. Clean it. And then what happens? Nobody wants to clean it. So now we go, just feel into your body. Just feel everything in your body. Just feel it. That's it. Just that one simple request. Most people do not do that because once they start to feel it, it's so [00:21:00] intense. It jumbles up their mind, like a plane with a radar and it's all just whacked and they, they can't no guiding system and.

Beginning, they're like, yeah, I'm going to feel it. Yeah. And I'm going to process it. The moment they start feeling it, abandon ship, abandon ship. So yes, I understand. That's exactly what happens. So this, thing that seemed to be so straightforward and simple is not actually so straightforward and simple once a person starts applying.

So this is why they need to have practices to help them be able to do this one thing, which is just to feel the body. And then once they do, they release the emotions, release the old programming. Mind is clear. Now, they have processed their old stuff. If somebody passes, it's okay. It's 

Stephen: alright. Now, the loved ones can rest in peace.

Mike: Yes. 

Stephen: While you're still alive, you get to live in peace. [00:22:00] Alright, guys. I think that's it for today's episode. Hopefully, that helps you through any of the times that, you will experience. And, we will see you on the next episode.