Narayani: The more you use your voice to talk about what is true for you now and what you're feeling the more it dismantles the charge of the sadness and there's something really valuable about talking through that, which is uncomfortable that I  find is really important for healing.

Jill: Welcome back to "Seeing Death Clearly" I am your host, Jill McClennen, a death doula and end-of-life coach. The purpose of these conversations is to challenge your existing ideas and expand your understanding about death, dying, grief, and life itself. In today's episode, I'm joined by Narayani Gaia. We'll be discussing the loss of her partner and the valuable insights she gained while navigating the grieving process. We appreciate you joining us for this conversation. On today's episode, I have a guest, Nariah Gaia. Thank you for joining the podcast. 

Narayani: You're welcome. I'm happy to be here, Jill. I'm excited. So this is a topic close to my heart, and I think you know, not everybody is ready to talk about grief, but when they are, it's great to have support and we need a lot of support these days for everything.

Jill: There's so many people that need support with death, dying, grief, all of it. And we've spent so much time avoiding the topic. It's time that we really face it and face it in a healthy manner, and it's not scary. It doesn't have to be overwhelming. If we can just face it now and then move forward, I feel like we'd all be a little bit better equipped to deal with it when it's time.

Narayani: I agree.

Jill: So why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself where you're from originally. You know, if you wanna share how old you are or approximately how old, anything that will kind of set the listeners up for a little bit about you and your background. 

Narayani: Sure. I actually love talking about how old I am. I'm 51. I'm gonna be 52 in March of 2023. And I feel like when I talk about how old I am, I'm making peace with how old I am. So I remember like a couple years ago after my partner passed away and I was ready to start dating, he passed away six years ago. A lot of people who have children talk about their lives in relation to their kids.

Well, I don't have kids, I end up being like life before and after I met my soulmate and when he passed away is like a big timestamp in my life. I. And I appreciate that this podcast is about grief, so we can talk about that. Cuz I'm, I'm just really looking forward to this conversation and it's almost like you're, you're creating a safety.

So talking about death can be normalized and there's so many cultures that. Behold that awareness and honor that it is where it is normalized, basically like in India, you know, which is where my name comes from, ion, it's an Indian name that I received from my guru in 2002. And even though I grew up Jewish girl from New York, I received these different kinds of initiations in different cultures because I sought them out to get answers to things that I wasn't getting growing up in the suburbs of New York.

The interesting thing is that the more that I started to learn from different cultures, the more I found the common threads and even the mm. Kind of the, the messages or the learnings that I actually did receive from my own culture, if that makes sense.

Jill: Totally  makes sense to me. 

Narayani: Yeah. Yeah. But I was saying, oh, a couple years ago when I was dating, And I was dating a guy and I just talk about my age. I actually talk about it a lot, talk about it with my clients, talk about it on my podcast, I talk about it. It just comes up and he said, well, why do you have to keep you look so young and like, why do we have to keep talking about how old you are?

Because it's real and it gets me here. It has me claim who I am. And just by using your voice, which is similar, I think, to healing from loss and grief is the more you use your voice to talk about what is true for you now and what you're feeling? I found that the more it dismantles the charge of the sadness and Over time you could tell your story, right and you feel more clear and peaceful and there's something really valuable about talking through that, which is uncomfortable that I find is really important for healing.

Any anything. In our lives, I think our whole lives are about healing. You know, cuz I'm a healer, so I, I feel like everything is about, like, at least for me, my purpose and the purpose of our lives is to learn to love unconditionally no matter where you're from. And anything that's in the way of that is an opportunity to return to love and peace.

And it, it trickles so deeply into. The essence of who we are when we can return to that practice even diseases are caused from discordant disconnection from the truth of who we are. Right? So I'm going on a long rant after you asked me one question, but it's perfect. I'm ready for this topic. Does that make, does that all  Totally 

Jill: It does. It all makes sense. And I think the point that you're making too, about aging, Really what we're feeling, especially as somebody in a female body growing up in a culture that is so focused on us keeping our youth, is we really are feeling grief.

We're feeling the grief that we don't look the same, that we're not being treated the same, because whether we wanna admit it or not. Society treats women that are younger differently than they do when they're older, and so we're taught that we need to color our hair so we don't show our grays. We have to get all the fillers in our face so our wrinkles don't show like God forbid.

Don't tell people your real age. It's really unhealthy and it's really just very tied with that grief of moving through the different stages in life. I don't think. Men have it quite the same as women do, but , I didn't think I was gonna be affected at all when I turned 40. I didn't, as I was aging, I was like, oh, whatever, I don't really care.

And then as I got closer to 40, there was part of me that was like, oh man, okay. Like this is, this is real, like 40, 40 is a real thing to me now. And now I'm 44 and I'd love it. I mean, I, again, I have no shame. I tell everybody how old I am. But I had to go through a grief process of letting go of all the stories and letting go of all the things that I thought I would've done by 40 and all these other narratives in my head. I had to grieve them and let them go. And so the aging and the grief are really very tied together. 

Narayani: Yeah. I'm glad you said that because I wasn't gonna say it, Jill. That wasn't where I was going. So you tied it in to a whole other topic, which is really valuable. That is about the process of embracing aging from a, from a perspective of honoring the natural cycles and that is, I think important in healing and grief is, you know, one of the most important things to feel.

But there's all kinds of other things to feel to heal too. And what I've understood from studying Taoism Asian body work, Ayurveda, a lot of different kinds of modalities that I've been able to receive teachings and practices from and in initiations I've received lineages I've been able to receive teachings from.

Is that anger, blankets, grief. And we also have worry, and we also hold on to different energies. And these emotions exist in the body in different kinds of ways. And so if any of your listeners have studied anything about indigenous healing or even just been to therapy, we understand that to feel is to heal.

To feel is to heal. But how you're navigating through feeling your grief, feeling your anger, feeling your disappointment, or Whatever comes up for you. There's a lot of disassociation, especially in in wellness, in therapy, maybe not as much in traditional psychotherapy, but these days with a lot of people spiritually awakening and having different kinds of experiences.

Now we have so much awakening with psychotropic medicine, which is wonderful. Love plants, love plant medicine. There could be a lot of challenges when we're having these like mental spiritual experiences without integrating our emotional bodies. So that's kind of my work is, is really supporting that integration of both who you are as a profound, amazing miracle and what you're experiencing as a human being because life is hard.

And the more that we move through, then the more joy that awakens and the authenticity and the gratitude becomes authentic and not a bypass. Not like, oh, just be grateful. It's like, well, I don't freaking feel grateful. I need to go weep, or I don't even know what I need. I just need to sit by myself or go away or sleep in for a few months, or whatever that is that you need.

And it's that peace where we don't honor our needs. That keeps us from even asking others to support us in that, because we don't have examples. Of women or men, very few that know how to be in a healthy dynamic of expressing needs, honoring needs and meeting needs. Past our basic needs if we're lucky as children, the basic needs of food and shelter.

But what about the need for connection, fun, respect. And so I find that a lot of my work is , helping people feel through everything. Understanding the energetic patterns underneath the emotions cuz there's actually deeper layers of grief. And then, As that stuff clears, then you can actually learn what you need.

Then you could start to have maybe , some insight or communion with your soul and your spirit. Then maybe you're able to start to communicate healthy boundaries. So it's like a very sequential process of development that prepares us to really To really honor grief that only comes when people around you allow that within themselves, which is why we end up hiring so many professionals these days because we don't necessarily have personal relationships that teach us how to really honor that which is authentic and part of the human experience. I remember cuz my partner who transitioned in 2017 was Dakota. He was native and it was, I, I received so much, so much love and powerful healing from our time and I still do with him on the other side. And one of the beautiful teachings that he gave me was the value of crying.

And whenever I would go through usually like p m s or whatever, like sadness or cry, he honored it and he was raised that way, that especially when a woman is crying, she's clearing confusion. And she needs to do that. And his brother also taught me that when you cry, if you pray, when you cry, there's something that happens where you're crying for something.

He didn't teach me that directly, just through, through how he spoke to his son one day and his son was just like whining. He goes, son, don't just cry. For nothing, cry for something. And it was a very beautiful way of honoring that. Said, if you need to just sit down and cry and there's nothing, you don't have a story, that's okay too.

So we get to, to learn these natural ways of healing, and so I, I just love what you're doing. I really honor what you're doing here, Jill, because this topic deserves its own podcast

Jill: I appreciate that and I appreciate you sharing about your grief experience. It's one thing to understand grief on an in intellectual level. It's different when you go through the experience and you kind of have to put into practice things that you've learned ways to help yourself kind of. Move through the grief because you know, you pointed out that we don't always have people that can support us through these big emotions because they haven't processed their grief. And they can't be there for you because it triggers what is unhealed in them, and that seems to be the. Narrative in our culture is that so many of us have the unprocessed grief, so we can't help anybody else. And then they end up holding onto their own grief and it just starts this cycle where we all just grieve alone.

Narayani: And it's a gap. Yeah, there's a gap there. Which is one thing that I really, I really love about indigenous culture, and I found a lot of solace in that because I think. I have grieved alone, my whole, most of my adult, my adult life anyway, kind of my childhood too. And as much as my parents did their best, your healing is a personal process and emotional development is a unique journey.

And emotional maturity, I think is a unique journey. And we don't have as many examples of people that have gone through their u unique journey of emotional maturity more and more, I mean, quickly, because life is very difficult these days. So the more suffering we have, the faster we hopefully learn. I mean, if we don't go crazy before that.

But yeah, it's, it's an interesting thing and I remember like the power of sweat lodges, which is a traditional Lakota Dakota. Thing, but actually sweat lodges exist in all cultures. There's also traditions of like grieving tree and things like that, where people learn to hold space , I used to be a massage therapist before I started writing and teaching and doing mostly energy work and training people, which is what I do now.

And I remember when people started crying on my table and I. Fortunately, I've been blessed to have so many, many teachers. The reason I can share any of these things, and been able to allow myself to go through my own grief and loss, which I didn't even share with you about my journey after my partner actually passed.

But that was like 5 million rivers of crying. Hopefully we'll have time to get into that a little bit if you wanna hear about it. There's so much that I wanna share.  So when I was a massage therapist, people would have these experiences on the table and fortunately I had teachers who kind of pulled me in.

And the, I feel very guided by the universe from my own healing. Cause I was doing a lot of inner work while I was working on people. I left home when I was 22. Went on Grateful Dead tour, went to California and I started meeting people, doing a lot of prayer and I became vegetarian for a while and I was trying to find meaning in my life and I had the privilege to have some space to be able to do that at that point.

And. Again, other cultures helped me get clarity on my path, but what I found was I found some good friends. I found women's circles early on where there was space for women to feel and to share. And so I feel very again, blessed that in my early twenties I was able to start to get a glimpse of my purpose.

And my joke, not joke is like my childhood, I spent like all of us, you know, conditioning, colonizing my brain and then my adult years have been, the last 30 years has been deconditioning how I think or unschooling. So I found out in my early twenties that I was a healer actually, and that I was here to help awaken and I was very psychic and I didn't understand that as a kid, right? I was scared of that as a child. So when I started doing spiritual practice and learning from the yoga tradition, I was doing African dance and meeting a lot of African people and studying Taoism in Chiang.

So I was drawn to all these unique things and I was told and guided that. Around this time there would be big earth changes and that we'd be getting ready for them. And along the way I was going through personal healing. The only thing to do was to find a career where I could share these insights, but it wasn't a traditional, I wasn't guided to do this, this academic path.

Although now I'm considering in my fifties that I might get a master's and that'll be fun. It needs to be fun for me or interest at least. Interesting. I'm willing to do the hard work. It needs to be interesting, but I studied all these alternative healings while everyone was having babies, and I was integrating my childhood and starting to understand a lot of past life things that I was experiencing and perceiving.

I have a little bit of unique story in that way that, I was doing both spiritual work and. Embodiment work at the same time. And so not only was studying things, I was experiencing them, but like one of my elders, his name is chief Golden Light Eagle, who's the one who actually introduced me to my partner.

I met him in 2003 in the mountains of Western North Carolina, which is where I live again now. And he was talking about these integrated spiritual things of working with like chakras and sweat lodges and like different cultures. He was very eclectic advanced spiritual elder and teacher. And I said, well, I don't experience these colors in my body.

Like, that's not what I experience, which people were listening. If they meditate, maybe they're learning about chakras or read a book, you know, this is for you. Like he said, well, You're learning this. So when you do have experiences, you have a reference point. It's like an, it's, there's a value to having information.

Right? So I was both studying holistic healing and experiencing my own suffering in friendships, and trying to make money in a career that didn't exist yet. Knowing that I was awakening, I was never medicated. I never went into the therapy route. I sought solace at the edge of the culture from different kinds of teachers and elders that I was able to meet.

And I received initiations through dream times and things like that. So I think all of that really prepared me for when I did meet my partner, which was, I'd say the saddest, hardest thing. But everything was hard. The spiritual awakening journey is one where you're, you're shedding layers.

The women's journey, you're shed layers every month. We are all made even men of so much water. So we are profoundly emotional beings and we are spiritual and mental and physical beings, right? So for me, the practice was weaving together those different parts of myself when very few people really understood the things that I was perceiving.

But I was grounded enough, and again, I have to say blessed enough. That I never went down that route of like, oh, she's connecting with spirits and she doesn't wanna work. Maybe she needs to go to psychiatry or be on drugs. I never went on any mental health drugs and it's sad and hard to see that right now.

I see it in my family. I see it in people. They say, well, I have to function. I can't sit around and cry all day. It's like really, maybe freaking that's exactly what you need to do. So I, again, I was blessed and I was supported , to take the time to work, part-time, to have a strong meditation practice and to have a lot of self time.

That's why I didn't have kids. When I finally felt really deeply in love, I met a very profound being who was a spiritual master really a teacher. He knew how to go in and out of body at will. He grew up on the reservation. He had 18 brothers and sisters. Comes from a very powerful family of healers.

And so when we met, it was like, whew, whoa, how can we serve the world? And then he passed away within a year after we were together. And we had moved in and we started a school and we were doing all this stuff. And so that completely shattered my world really. And that took me into the deepest deepest sadness that I ever found.

And hopelessness. But I knew enough that I made the intention that it wasn't gonna ruin my life. The day after he passed, I said that I literally was in Colorado. I, it was just amazing with these grief counselors who we had been hanging out with. I mean, it was just all set up perfectly. And I also learned how to pray with the other side.

So again, my, my story's a little bit unique in that he taught me how to relate with the other side. And then he was diagnosed and passed away in three weeks. So it was like really sudden. And so all that grieving for me kept me in a process of both letting myself be sad, but also in prayer. And I think it's important that as we, as we let go of stories, maybe it's people, maybe it's just an ex or maybe it's a job, or maybe it's whatever you used to have before, covid your life, whatever you're grieving or you're aging, , I'm in menopause right now, so it's a whole nother journey of letting go and it's requiring me to take everything I know to be in the best discipline I can for self-care so that I can feel okay, because your body is tripping out when you're in menopause. So, you know, there's one thing about letting go that's important and profound and necessary.

To be emotionally healthy and physically healthy and disease free if you don't move through your emotions. Mm-hmm. And then it's another to fill yourself with a new prayer. Because what happens is when people are depressed and they don't, mark, and this is something my spiritual mentor taught me, Lonnie, Lonnie Desmond, that if you don't mark your grief,

Then you're missing an opportunity to heal. So that's like a little kind of a mindfuck, you know? And what you're doing is you're communicating your higher self and your lower self so they can be on the same page. So my work is very much that kind of integration work and sharing these teachings that I both received and experienced and practice daily through meditation.

Through spiritual work. You can light a candle. And you have your journal and have the most profound ceremony in the world. You don't need to have some of the kinds of experiences that other people may have had. , like I spend time on the reservation, different kinds of initiations that you don't need any of that.

If you're called to it, follow those impulses. But sitting down with a beautiful, authentic prayer to the universe and a candle and a box of tissues and a cup of tea can take you everywhere you need to go because we can all connect to this. We are sacred. So when we connect to what is authentic, the universe will continue to guide us.

So with my work I teach people certain forms of embodied meditation. So they learn how to track their, energy and dismantle the stories that they may be looping in, that are often not even rooted in our own, like you were mentioning, Jill, you know, society expects you to be young forever.

Like, I'm not doing that. I'm not dyeing my hair, I'm not doing the filler. I mean, there's things I do wanna do. I let, I'm really to get my nails done now, but whatever. I just started an energy healing practice here in Asheville. I know I need to cut the nails. I'm gonna be getting people on the table.

Again. There's certain things that we do that are our thing to do, and if you wanna use filler and you wanna dye your hair, it's fine. Mm-hmm. But it's it's also not good for you and could cause more likelihood to have disease, and I love that there's all this silvering of hair that's been happening, it's like, just be who you are, beauty is natural. Like, a Rose Bush doesn't have to try to be beautiful, you know, or a hummingbird doesn't have to try to be beautiful. It's just itself. And we are that beautiful. So that, that's a whole other thing.

Grieving that. And then also there comes a time when people get to choose what's theirs, to move through their body. And a lot of people don't know how to do that. You know, grieving for me, grieving the loss of my partner. And then when my dad passed away in 2021, I was so ready. It taught me.

I had that initiation. I also worked for hospice in my forties and nobody passed in my presence, which was interesting, but somebody referred me to that job when I was living in the Bay Area in Santa Cruz, and I would get paid to like go massage people at the end. And I didn't even, I just.

They didn't wanna be touched, so I ended up just praying and like bringing frankincense and like music and spritzers and just coming in with prayer and then working on their energy and supporting them because there's this thing about learning how to work with your energy that can prepare you for the end of life.

Like you mentioned in the beginning, our chat about leaving your body through your crown. So Buddhist, do you know about that? Like Buddhist teach that, right? Like are, do you practice meditation? 

Jill: Oh yeah. I actually am Buddhist. I took my vows I don't know, probably like nine months ago now. But yes, I have a very beautiful, strong meditation practice and it helps me so much in life. 

Narayani: Great. So Buddhism and many teachers in Lineage talk about, we're all just spending our lives preparing for the end of our lives so that you can exit properly and not get stuck in, in the bardo. I started understanding a lot of different things and then I found like cultures and teachings kind of had those answers and I was like, oh yeah, that's interesting.

So people can become Buddhist. You could do your practice or you could sit quietly and breathe and just relax and, and the world will be shown to you, but it helps to have instruction. 

Jill: It doesn't necessarily even have to be Buddhism. My grandmother was very Catholic. She would sit and she would pray her rosary beads at night as she was getting closer to death. It's that acceptance, that connection, that faith that you have in your body, being able to do what it needs to do. So you can find that same guidance. And that's actually something that I'm trying to work on now when I sit with clients that are dying. I want to have spiritual teachings that I can essentially read to them about the soul crossing over that aren't necessarily connected to any one religion, because I was finding that I gravitate towards, the Tibetan Book of the Dead and that spiritual teaching in Buddhism.

But I know not everybody's Buddhist, so I was trying to like reword it a little bit and I wanna kind of write my own, almost like script that ties in a bunch of different religions and their beliefs about how to transition from this life, this body to the next. Mm-hmm. Without it actually being religious because it talks to the soul on a different level.

I think religion is needed for this human experience for a lot of people. But the soul doesn't need the words that religion necessarily tries to use. It doesn't need to connect to Buddha, right, or Jesus or Muhammad or whatever. The soul connects on a different level to the truth that they all have. So that's kind of one of my projects that I'm like, oh, I need to, I need to find what I have not been able to find, which is something that's, Connecting us to those real deep truths.

Narayani: But for me, yes. I wanna introduce you to, I wanna introduce you to someone in a project in New York through my yoga sangha, through Integral Yoga Institute, because there's a whole project they were working on the last couple years on death and dying. And the cool thing about integral yoga, Is that it's an interfaith all faith community.

So amazing teachings and practices involve alters from all faiths. So I think that could be a good resource for you. I'm gonna introduce you to some people. Yeah, please do. That would be awesome. I'm so glad that you're doing that work that's such beautiful work and I found that when I worked for hospice I wasn't ready.

It was too much and I felt like I wanted to be with the living. And I wasn't ready. And then I had to be ready when I held space for my partner to transition and then him transitioning. And then when my dad passed, who wasn't religious and spiritual at all, but yet he was open to like guided meditations.

I was able to give him some visualizations and sit with him and take him to that beautiful beach and things like that to waken the pituitary and help him to connect to the light. I was able to at that point for my dad, it was so normalized for me. After the grieving that I had done and been through, I was able to hold space for my whole family and stay grounded.

Stay grounded energetically, because I'd cultivated that. This is why spiritual practice and personal care is so important so that we're ready for anything, whether it's your own death or illness or whatever. So you have those tools or holding space for others and women's path is through the body and the feminine path, which we're all hopefully have the opportunity to awaken to at this time. So I appreciate what you were saying about women and my work as a woman is very much with women as well. Yeah, yeah. It's important work.

Jill: And I find that for me, my connection to women has been difficult maybe, I guess would be the word 

Narayani: We should talk about that.

Jill: Yeah, I know. 

Narayani: We can talk about that another time.

Jill: Exactly. Next time you come on, we could talk about that. Cuz Yeah, it's, it's important and it's my own healing work that I need to do. I'm not even blaming other women, I'm not saying, well, it's all them.

It's within me as well that I have to do this healing work. Because we have lost that connection that women used to have and. There are people that are doing that work in the world to bring that female kind of connection back. 

Narayani: But it's important. Yeah. But a lot of that, this is another topic, but I'll just say it real quickly.

A lot of the female empowerment work could be really based on. False ego if it's not working at a spiritual level. Yes. 

Jill: Is there anything else you wanna end us with? 

Narayani: I'd love to offer your community a free meditation and also they could check out my podcast if they'd like. I can share the link with you about multidimensional meditation where I guide people to work through their physical, emotional body and also to activate their higher chakras as well. I can share that with you to free gifts.

I have a podcast which is Awakened Life Radio, which you can find on my website, https://narayanigaia.com/ or on Spotify or Apple Music, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And then I have different episodes. One is on healing from grief.

One is on how to clear energy. I think clearing energy is really important. People don't know as much about that. And creating space for yourself is really important. So honoring the cycles. If anyone wants to reach out to me, I'm always make myself available. Not every day all the time, but I will get back to you within a couple of days.

You can email me hello@narayanigaia.com to follow up. Wonderful, and I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this and talk about some of my favorite topics. Thank you. 

Jill: You're so welcome. Thank you for coming on, and I will put all those links in the show notes so people can find you. 

Narayani: Thank you. 

Jill: Thank you for listening to this episode of Seeing Death Clearly. My guest next week is Jeff Hoper. Jeff, a hospice chaplain, shares his personal story leading up to his current role as a chaplain and sheds light on the important work he does with his patients.