When Loss Becomes Initiation: Somatic Grief, Ancestral Practices, and Sacred Healing with Sundari Malcolm

What if grief wasn't something to survive, but something to move through with presence, ritual, and the full weight of your body?

In this episode, Nina Rodriguez sits down with Sundari Malcolm, a birth, grief, and death doula, yoga and breathwork teacher, author of Grief Gems, and founder of A Healing Doula Academy. Raised by Yogi parents, Sundari brings a deeply embodied and ancestrally grounded lens to loss.

After seven years caregiving for her mother before losing her to breast cancer at 27, and later losing her father to brain cancer, Sundari wasn't just grief-stricken. She was initiated. This conversation explores what that initiation looks like, and how honoring grief as a sacred passage can transform your relationship with loss, your body, and your lineage.

In this episode:

• Caregiving, anticipatory grief, and identity shifts in young adulthood
• Grief as an initiatory and spiritual awakening process
• The somatic side of loss and how the body holds grief
• Reclaiming ancestral rituals, altars, and indigenous death practices
• What a grief or death doula actually does
• Breathwork, candle meditation, and practical tools for tending grief
• Navigating collective grief without losing yourself
• Challenging Western death narratives and systemic barriers

Connect with Sundari Malcolm: 

• Website: ahealingdoula.com 
• Book: Grief Gems
• Instagram: @sundaribliss
• Academy: A Healing Doula Academy

Transcript

When the chips crumble and when the dust settles and the fog rises, to look around and truly say what is working here and what isn't. Death is so incredibly painful that what you are left with is usually simply truth. And so many people who aren't touched by death or grief are rarely living their dreams. And so I think it...

allows you to become who you were supposed to be. You just lost your loved one. Now what? Welcome to the Grief in Life podcast where we explore this new reality through grief-colored lenses. Openly, authentically, I'm your host, Nina Rodriguez. Let's get started. How can we reconnect with our mind, our body, and our spirit after a major loss?

Welcome back to Grief in Light. My name is Nina Rodriguez and I am your host. And today I'm speaking with Sundari Malcolm, who knows intimately that grief isn't just an emotional experience, but also a physical one that reshapes us from the inside out. At 27, after seven years as her mother's caregiver, Sundari lost her mother to breast cancer. Four years later, her father died from complications of brain cancer.

These profound losses redirected her entire life's purpose and today Sundari is a birth, grief, and death Dula, a yoga breathwork teacher, author of Grief Gems, and founder of A Healing Dula Academy. She's dedicated her work to helping people navigate life's greatest transitions, not by moving past them, but by moving through them with presence, ritual, and embodied awareness.

Today we are going to explore the physical, the somatic side of grief, the spiritual side of grief, and the wisdom held in our bodies and how loss can become a profound passage. let's begin. Soonjury, welcome to the Grief and Light podcast. Hello, Nina. Hello, community. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here today. It's an absolute honor. I've known about your work through our Griefy Collective and we got to

do a collaboration over the holidays last year, and I was attending your session, loved the way that you presented so much of this wisdom and information to move through grief. And I would love to share some of that with our audience today. for them to get to know you a little bit, where did your relationship with grief start and how has it evolved into what it is today? Big question, but start wherever it feels right today. My relationship with grief.

I think, you know, as you mentioned, I was a caregiver for my mother in my 20s. So at that time I was living in New York City. I was working in public relations. I was not working in this field at all. I was planning parties, record labels, and football teams, and living what I thought was, you the sex and the city life in New York, you know, post-college.

And my mother had been diagnosed for the second time with breast cancer, the first time I've been when I was in high school. And this time, you you're in your 20s and you become a caregiver. And for those who are listening who are caregivers, it's a role that you are usually completely unprepared for. I could not have been further from the role, from being prepared to step into the role, such a large and heavy role.

I, for a while, attempted to maintain that 20-year-old lifestyle, you know, that I really tried to still live in New York. I was living in Long Island City and Battery Park City, and I was trying to commute back and forth, and all of my friends at that time were getting engaged and getting married and starting to have children. And I was going to doctor's appointments, right? I was, my mother was divorced by that point. I'm a single child, an only child.

And so it fell on me. We were living in Westchester, New York, not a whole lot of family around. And all of a sudden I found myself taking care of the person who had taken care of me my entire life. And my mother was such a large, like most of our caregivers are, right, is they are large figures. And...

And for the good or the bad, they are enormous figures in our life. And to be in that shift of having to step into her chaperone and her driver and her advocate was a lot. And eventually it became clear that I needed to leave the city and move in full time. And...

The caregiving role that I think a lot of people don't speak about is how long that is, right? It was seven years. was a long, long time of slowly watching someone shift and transition. And so that's how my grief walk started because for those who have done that walk, anticipatory grief is what we call it, right? Because you know that it's coming.

You just don't know when, and so you are kind of slowly waiting for that other shoe to drop at all times. She died when I was 27, and then three years, three and a half years later, my father was diagnosed with brain cancer. He had been at work and fell into a coma, and he was kept in the coma, medically induced, and when they brought him out, we were told that he had brain cancer, and he would pass less than a year later.

And our relationship was much different. My mother and I, because one, we were both Leo women. I was actually born at her birthday party. And I like to say that because that's always like how codependent that relationship was. In all the ways, we were extremely close. And so when she died, my grief felt world shifting and world rocking. My father and I had a much more complicated relationship. He and my mother had split when I was 10.

And we just, we were estranged for most of my life. And so when he was diagnosed and when it came down to figuring out who was going to step in and who was going to help, was, it was a lot to take on. Consequently, my grief with him has been different, right? And that was 2011, it's 2026 now. So I'm sure we'll get into that, but that's how this all began. Thank you for sharing. And that is such a,

such a journey, right? Like there's so much there. And what I am envisioning as you were talking is that 27 year old version of you, like somebody in their early 20s having to do caregiving, understanding that, maybe not even understanding, it's just moving through that anticipatory grief as it showed up every single day to then have to reconcile the relationship with your father facing yet another challenge. So it's just, it's a lot for somebody, especially in formative years as an adult, as a young adult, right?

So talk to us about, you let's say somebody's facing a similar situation. They're in their young adult years facing a loss or facing a pending loss with that anticipatory grief. Speak to that person from the perspective of Sundari back then. What would you say to that person? Wow.

This is going to be a long, hard road, and that's the truth. And I think the one thing that I underestimated was the support that I would need through it. I think because you're so new to it and you don't know what to expect, and because you are just showing up day by day, all of a sudden you are months in or years in or weeks in and you're like,

wow, I did not build a network around myself to cushion myself for when this gets really, really heavy. And not all days will be that way. But I would urge you to look within your community and who are the people that you deeply trust and invite them into this time with you.

really be intentional about, and sometimes this isn't possible and I understand that also as someone who was an only child, being more intentional about putting time in for yourself, about taking breaks. It sometimes can feel like you can't take a break, right? I talk about in my book how I didn't turn, I turned my phone off after my mother died and didn't turn it back on really until like this year, last year.

I still mostly keep it off. And that's because it was like, it becomes your lifeline, right? Everything is connected to this phone and to the news that you're going to receive and the calls that you have to make. And I think you get on this wheel of, and it's valid that you want to be there at all times, but that is not sustainable, right? And what comes after that is a lot of burnout.

And so if there is someone that you can call and say, can you just come in on a Saturday for an hour so that I can go take a drive or take a walk, so that I can take a bath, so that I can take a shower, asking for breaks is important. I think I wish I had known that there would be times when I would be really resentful and that's a really human emotion. I used to feel a lot of guilt about that. Like, how dare I be like,

annoyed that I have to take care of this person that's dying. But like, that is a human reaction and it's really like normal. And when that comes up in you not feeling shame and guilt about that, nobody in the situation asks for this, right? And so everybody is, everybody in every phase is trying to figure out like, how the fuck did I get here? And you're gonna wrestle with that. So I guess I would start with that.

Those are wise words and thank you so much for sharing them because it's not just applicable for somebody in their early 20s or 30s. It's applicable all across the board. But I did want you to speak to that particular demographic because it is a unique experience that most... Let me speak to that demographic. You're right. I forgot about that. Let me speak to just the 20s for a second because you're right. I did forget about that. For just the 20s, that is a real transformer of time.

And everyone around you is usually shifting into what seems like a life that is taking off, right? If they've gone to college, then they're graduating and they're applying to jobs. If they haven't gone to school and they've chosen to get married, then they're starting to have children. If they decided they're going to go travel, then you're watching photos of them like travel the world, right? It's always this like...

Everyone's figuring out which version of themselves is the one that they want to land in. And it will feel like you are absolutely being left behind. And that in and of itself brings up a ton of emotion. The anger that comes with that, the sadness that comes with that, the grief of watching your friends move on while you feel really stuck. Because it's very hard. You when I talked about like,

I really tried hard to hold on to that old version of myself while I was still a caregiver. And at a certain point I had to let her go. And not everyone will have to do that. But for me, I couldn't still work and I couldn't still commute and I couldn't still keep up the social network and the friendships. And so I had to say goodbye to a lot of that. And so I was mad about that, right? And I was sad about that. And it's hard to then...

hold yourself and what you're losing while you're also trying to show up for somebody else. And I have to say, the only wise words I have to say to that are, there will come a point where you will be able to revisit.

the grief that you're not able to sit with them. And there will come a time when you will be able to sit with the anger that came up. It might not be right now. And that's okay. That's a lot to figure out. But there will be a time for that. And your relationships will shift. And that will be really painful, especially at that point, because we're usually so social and so tied into.

networks. But I promise you the ones who are left are the ones who should be left with you. And the ones who leave are the ones that shouldn't be there in the first place. And that will be hard to see at the moment. But you will, the ones who remain are the true ones. Thank you so beautifully said and so much honesty in your words. There, I do agree that

Grief taught me some people are here for seasons of your life. Not everybody's meant to stay throughout the ups and the downs and that's okay. I can say that now. It doesn't feel like right in the beginning, but I can say that now definitely. And you allude to that in your book, Grief Gems, which is a wonderful read. We were commenting before I read it and I said, this is like the type of honesty and clarity that I wish I had.

in beginning, and I've read a lot of books on grief that make sense to me now, like six years later, and I agree that they're beautifully written and all these things. And also, when you are in the throes of grief, you don't need 300 pages about the meaning you're going to make later on in life. You need honesty, you need anchoring, you need somebody to speak to you directly, like hold your face both sides of your cheeks.

look you in the eye and say, you're going to be okay, but this is going to be hard and this is what it's going to look like and you have permission to do things your way. So I feel like that is what this book was to me as I received it. It felt like a friend saying, I got you. I've been through this. You will be okay. This is what a lot of this is going to look like. And, you know, giving, giving that person permission. I don't know if you have the book handy. I wish I would have asked you this before we got recording.

Okay, perfect. Would you be... There it is, if you're watching on video. And if you would be open to reading the chapter on anticipatory grief, which I believe is at the very beginning, I thought you did such a beautiful job of, you know, walking the reader through that. Yes, I would love to. Anticipatory grief. No one talks about how fucking terrible it is to know someone is dying and you just kind of have to wait around until it happens.

I used to call my mother every few minutes like a panicked rabbit when I left the house, just in case she died while I was out picking up cat food. I couldn't concentrate on anything. It was hard to have normal conversations. It was hard to have regular friendships. I was furious when people would complain to me. I'm sure all of their complaints were valid. I just didn't have the bandwidth to give a shit.

I stayed in a relationship way past its expiration date because I wanted my mother to die thinking I was safe and loved, and that wasn't fair to him or myself. Below is what I did on my mother's last day, and then a list for you. Not everyone has this moment with their person, but if you are able to, do as many of these as you can to memorialize your person before they transition. I read to my mother on that last day. I played Nina Simone.

I rubbed her feet and vacuumed the house and kissed her cold cheeks. I told her I loved her deeply. I kept candles lit and the windows open so she could feel the sun on her face and I wept. I urge you to dim the lights, to take a picture of their hands. With care, take a deep breath, rub your hands together until they warm up and lay them on their legs and hum.

Let the vibration and gentle pressure of your hands soothe them. Clean the home so they can transition without clutter and with ease. Play their favorite music. Tell them everything you've never had the guts to say before. They may not respond, but you will want this closure later. Write a draft of the email or text that will go out to your friends, family, and colleagues to let them know your person has passed.

No one wants to deal with that shit when they're in pain. No people do not need personal messages. Your pain is personal. That's one of my favorites I gotta say. Make sure you know who will be with you when they die and the few days directly following. They may make sounds in their throat that sound like they are softly gurgling. This can be scary to hear. Some call it the death rattle. I call it the crossing over bell.

And when you hear this, the time is near. If you're able, open a window in their room, allow the breeze to flow in and blanket them. Give the soul a passage way out. No matter what your relationship was, let them know that they are safe and allow them to die with grace and dignity. We all deserve.

Thank you so much. That was beautiful. I read that and I just was, I felt like I was there with you in this sacred moment. I often say that the transition from life to afterlife, whatever that may be, is as sacred as the transition into life as a birth. And I feel like in your work, you would agree with that. You reframe grief not as a problem to solve, but as a rite of passage and that.

felt like a rite of passage in a way there was a sacredness to it. And this rite of passage reshapes identity, values, and spiritual orientation. So in your own words, if grief is sort of a rite of passage, what are we being initiated into? Hmm, that's a beautiful question.

I think you're being initiated into a deeper relationship with your spirit.

I think that you're being invited into an opportunity to.

when the chips crumble and when the dust settles and the fog rises.

to look around and truly say what is working here and what isn't.

I think death is so incredibly painful that what you are left with...

is usually simply truth. And so many people who aren't touched by death or grief are rarely living their truth.

And so I think it allows you to become who you were supposed to be.

smiling as you say that because I felt those words absolutely. Grief can, loss in general, can take us one way or another, but I feel like when we lean into it and when we decide to allow it to burn away what it needs to, like you said, that truth emerges. I feel like when you said that, I really resonated with that about how it attunes you to the truth of your life and of life. That's really beautiful. And it sounds like you...

you know, from reading that part of your book, sounds like that was very intuitive for you to be able to, you know, hum at her and dim the lights and open the window. Where did this wisdom come from?

Well, I was raised between New York and a spiritual community called Yogaville, which is in Virginia. And so my mother, before I was born, was studying to be a Swami, which for those who don't know is akin to a monk. And she was in Connecticut with a number of other 70s hippies in their 20s and was really dedicating her life to the spiritual path.

And her mother was diagnosed with ALS. She moved back home to be the caregiver for her mother. And interestingly enough, she was 28 and her mother was 25 and then I was also the same age and my mother was 55. So it's quite ancestral, I think when you look at some of these passageways, right? These are not coincidental to me.

And so I was raised with a mother who had been studying this and then had walked through her own initiation, right? And she met my father who was a meditation learner and was studying quantum physics and becoming a vegan, which for black folks in Brooklyn in the 70s, this was like real, you know. And so I was really raised with spiritual teaching. So I went to school in New York City, but...

On summer vacations and holidays, I would spend my time in Yogaville and I went to yoga sleepaway camp. And so I grew up meditating and chanting and practicing yoga and not just learning the asanas, but the principles behind them. And my godmother ran a women's integrative health holistic center in Harlem and left to open a community in Uganda. And so these were the women that I was surrounded with.

I was surrounded with lot of healers and teachers throughout my whole life. It wasn't until I was a caregiver that I really understood how these practices impacted me. It wasn't until she died that I started pulling on them and applied them to myself. But in that moment, I think it was intuitive. think...

You know, within the spiritual practice, one of the things that I carry with me always is the breath and stillness, the breath and stillness. And when you can figure out nothing else, go to the breath and stillness. And I was terrified. I wasn't calm. My mother was actively dying. was, there were sounds I did not recognize, but I was also very aware. And yes, that was very intuitive. And I will say this, I believe that's because I've done this in other lifetimes, but I think it snapped.

in in that moment of be really still and open windows and allow the breath to pass and play sound healing and and allow there to be real gentleness in the house. When I look back on it, I'm amazed at that I was able to to do that. And I think that's because it was that's what I was supposed to be doing. That was the agreement.

and I had made for that last moment. And it's why I'm so intent on teaching that now. The Western view on death and grief, one is new. the approach... You know, we think we have to look at, especially when you're looking at times like this, as you are watching systems crumble, what I hope you are garnering from it is that this is the time to be unlearning things.

and to recognize that most of what has been taught to you has been a lie. And when it comes to, especially spirituality, there is this idea that a lot of these practices are new, and it's new age and woo-woo, and that has been what has been pushed to you so that you do not ever look into how powerful these practices are. The truth is, these practices go back to the beginning of time.

And if you can go back to the hieroglyphics on cave walls and see people meditating and practicing yoga, using breath work, connecting to spirit, sitting in community rather than in isolation, there is a reason that the Western world has separated you from that. And it's to disconnect you from what is a true healing path. And so we have all been programmed to believe that these are not sacred transitions.

that this is just what happens and then you move on. That grief is like this thing you get over, that these practices are weird and depending on what faith or church you're affiliated with, that they're demonic or that there is something wrong with them. And all of it's ridiculous. Whether your grandma did it or your great grandma didn't, I promise you your great, great, great, great grandma did.

and your great, great, great, great grandpa did, because that is what all of our elders did. These new behaviors and habits and ideas surrounding something as powerful as death and grief are one of the reasons why we're so sad and disconnected today. And I think that something that I'm intent on teaching, something that I know so many of us are, and...

embodying it, living it, and then making sure other people understand it is that these practices are yours, and they are important, and they live within your body if you allow yourself to be still. And they are extremely effective. When you are walking through things as powerful as death and grief, which often come with so much fear and unknowingness.

The one thing you do have control over is breath and stillness and your ability to impact your nervous system. If there's nothing else you can do with that. And so there's a lot of empowerment that comes with adopting these practices and rather than outsourcing your pain, your grief, your trauma, your fear to institutions that are not built to sustain you.

Thank you so much. And I am nodding yes because the Western society tends to deal with things from the neck up. So in your mind, if you will, like talk therapy, which is great. I host groups, I believe in it. There is a lot of healing in that. And we cannot return our sense of agency if we don't connect mind, body, spirit. I would argue spirituality purpose and, you know,

a lot of other things there, but at least my body spirit. A lot of the work you do sounds like that reconnecting to return agency to each person within their own knowingness. And I love that you touched on your great, great, great grandparents probably did this because there is an importance and I'm starting to see more conversations happen about reconnecting with our ancestry, with where we come from, with our lineage, with who our great, great greats were.

and what wisdom did they pass down to us through who we are today. So it sounds like you not only did that, and obviously it helped that you grew up with perhaps a mom who understood this innately and you got to see some of that modeling when you were growing up, but it sounds like you also embody it so much for yourself. I lost my only sibling, so one of the most jarring comments was, well, now that you're an only child, right? And that...

shocked me because my identity had always been in relation to my brother. So now I'm still his sister and all the things. also there is a truth that now when my parents pass, assuming everything goes in the natural order of things, I will have to bury them, right? And I will have to be the one left essentially walking in the world by myself. I don't have kids. He didn't have kids. The family tree, I always say the family tree ends with me. And that is a heavy burden to carry sometimes. So

I'm hearing a lot of that and in the way that you have seemingly from where I'm standing made peace with so much of that and honor your ancestors and bring healing into this world and, and, right? I don't know what the question is here, but what is your sense of legacy, identity and purpose in all of this? How do you carry so much in the way that you show up every day?

You know, I've lost my parents and I've had three miscarriages. I refuse to believe that I have gone through this for no reason. That is part of what grounds me every day. Like, I'll be damned to think that I have had to go through all this for shits and giggles. Like, that just does not make any sense to me, one. What is extremely important to me is

to always look at like, when you think about purpose, I try to look at it more like, what was missing when I was walking through this? And then how do I fill that gap for other people? And that's what's always kept me, kept me really focused on how to show up and how to keep moving. And when it feels really heavy, how to stay the course. Because,

As we mentioned, the conversation about grief and loss is often, the Western approach to it is so disconnected from the mind-body spirit that we leave people so unprepared, I feel, to truly understand, one, that this is a walk that you're gonna have to do forever.

Two, if it is not integrated and embodied, this will physically show up. And so you're going to need to learn how to move and shift this energy. Understanding that energy really is real. And...

I think that the ancestral part that ties, and I might be losing my train of thought, but the ancestral part that ties into it with me is, I believe in reincarnation. So let me start with that. I believe that we keep showing up to do work and that we have often walked each other home before. And so it feels like,

Like this was my role right now. It was not fun. It was not enjoyable. did not like, you know, from a like real human perspective, the idea that like I signed up for this on purpose, I was kind of crazy. But it does feel as though to watch my mother have done what she did with her mother and me to be put in the exact same place at the exact same age, to think that it is not tied into something bigger than me like ancestry that is that.

It is not tied into the fact that our family roots, whether one leaves or not, that we just keep walking each other home in one form or another. To think that we're going through this because life just happens, that also is a very Western way of looking at this, right? Ancient cultures believe nothing is by coincidence and all of this is spiritual and all of this is energetic. And all of this requires care and grace and sacredness.

And this is your purpose. This is it for all of us. The bad bitch boss energy, like all that's fun, but like not your purpose. That's actually not. Being in community, deep care, empathy, like understanding how powerful you are, how capable you are, how resilient you are.

your soul's journey is so much more important than your physical journey here. And so when I think when it comes to this work, when it comes to how I sustain it, when it comes to how important I think ancestry is in part of this, it's like, because this is why we are walking on this planet. It is not like, you know, to, I mean, the rest of it should be fun, yes, have a great time, but this is the meat and potatoes of it.

So pour into it, lean into it, and then allow it to show you who you are on the other side of it.

all just walking each other home. That's one of my favorite quotes. And I thank you for sharing that perspective because if I'm really, really honest with all I've learned about grief work and theories and all the things what actually helped me move through grief and the greater understanding and make peace in my heart with what is, is that knowingness that we're more than just this human iteration. And that really deeply resonates. I didn't know about

past life, know, soul contracts, soul groups, soul families, and any of that until my brother died. It cracked me open to learning about these things in the first place. Near-death experience stories were the gateway to opening my mind up to this world, and it was exactly that. It was the spiritual that

understanding that we are so much bigger than just us two here talking in this moment, although this is also very important and this is also very, but we're so much bigger than this and our role is much bigger than even this lifetime. do agree with that. So thank you for sharing that perspective. It truly is healing. And if you're listening and it sounds completely new to your mind, these are concepts that may be helpful and they may hold you as you navigate forward in your own grief. So

I always invite people to crack the door open and see what feels helpful to them. That's beautiful. And we're talking about mind, body, spirit. A lot of your work is that reconnection with self, return to self, return to agency. talk to us about what is a death doula? What is a grief doula? And what does this work entail if somebody wanted to work with you?

Work with me as the client or work with me as the student of the academy. I know we've You can speak to both actually. Yeah, we'll delve into both sides. So for me, it has always been important that my spiritual work is intertwined with all work that I do within grief and death work. Let's start with Grievers.

I am not trying at all to heal anyone from their grief, right? Like that's impossible. I'm not trying to fix anybody. That is not my purpose of being there. What I am trying to do is return them back to their body. Grief is traumatic. And I think what sometimes people don't understand is like, there's a soul fracture that happens when you move through a traumatic experience. And so that means that you've...

feel that you literally, the brain in order to protect itself, the soul in order to protect itself, parts of it shut down. And you go to the places just to keep you functioning. That is what happens in those immediate times, especially those beginning times. You usually start to disconnect from things that while they might be helpful.

you do not have the energy for. So someone telling you that you need to eat a certain way or that you need to be drinking a certain way or that you need to be moving your body, any of those things, you usually feel like, do not have the energy to give to that. But how a grief doula can be helpful is it's the person that comes in to help guide you through that. And so you don't have to feel like you have to figure out how to do this alone when you're exhausted and sad, that someone is going to either show up or call you or be on your computer.

and maybe they're talking to you, and we do have a lot of time for conversation, but sometimes it's just for breath work, and sometimes it's just for movement, because the understanding from an ancient perspective is talk is exhaustive, and a lot of times we don't have the words for it, but we might have sound for it, right? We might have movement for it, we might have art for it.

And those are all really important too. There is a real belief in a lot of faiths. I come from the perspective of yogic principles, but also TCM, which is traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, which talks about the energetic centers of the body and that when we are not moving intentionally with either sound or breath or movement, energy literally becomes stuck in different areas of the body.

When it becomes stuck in different areas of the body, it either manifests as emotional or physical. So emotional can be the wide range, but physical can also be, I'll talk about myself. I had huge stomach issues. I had a lot of like skin issues right after. A lot of headaches, a lot of hair issues, reproductive issues. got fibroids. I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. Just like the gamut of it. was all, it was all stress and grief.

but I had not moved through my body. And that is what happens because the body loves you, and so it's trying to protect you. And at a certain point, it can only hold so much. And so in your co-creation with your body, you have to recognize that I can't keep it in here, even if I'm mentally not ready to deal with this. I need to find other ways. And so I work a lot with plant medicine and herbs and tinctures and...

sound healing because we understand if you study sound healing that the frequencies of music were changed in the 60s. And so we are now dealing with a frequency that makes you anxious. That is what is in mainstream music. It makes you anxious and fearful. You can research this on your own. The Rockefeller Foundation shifted that in the US. The Germans did in the 60s.

And so becoming intentional about what you're listening to, because if you are already panicked and anxious, while it might feel good to listen to the latest song, it's probably not helping your nervous system. And so I'm not telling you not to listen to it, but my goal is to bring in frequencies to help counterbalance what you might've just listened to on the way home on the radio casually without realizing its impact.

So that's a lot of the grief where we talk about nutrition. We talk a lot about ancestry. We build altars together. We build in ritual to one's daily schedule because ritual and ceremony is how we stay connected to the dead, but also to ourselves. When we think about soul fragmentation, these moments that you sit at altars, that you light candles, that you sit with those who have passed are also a way to retrieve yourself, right? Like, who am I now?

Where am I now? My mission, my hope is that they learn how to walk with grief, how to create with grief, how to help their physical vessel so that they are able to live a healthy life once the dust settles. With death, with those who come to me who are transitioning,

I'm there to make sure that their transition is sacred, that the end of their time here is sacred, that we work on releasing beliefs that are keeping them stuck in energetics of fear before they transition. know, ancients were really intent on understanding that your soul did not die.

Your spirit did not die, only the physical body did. And so if the spirit continues, then it needs to be effectively healed before it does. Not because something happens to it, it just makes the transition easier. And so if you are able to talk to people about that thing they're still holding, that guilt they're still carrying, that conversation they wish they had had.

If you can feed them the foods that make them think of their childhood so that they can return to a happy moment. If you can play music that makes them think of their ancestors so that they connect back to those who are deeper than maybe the not so happy relations they're in now, because not all family winds up being who we want to be in company with at the end. It's about returning people back to themselves so that they pass with ease and understanding that there is nothing to fear.

that there is something wonderful on the other side of this physical body, and that they do so peacefully and being cared for and loved. And again, in that, there's a lot of ceremony. Our ancestors from each faith had a lot of ceremony around death, around post-death. This idea that this man just comes and, listen, this happened with my parents also. The mortuary came and put them in a body bag and rolled them out.

But that was the truth of what happened then. It doesn't have to happen that way. I wish I had known that. That's part of what we teach in the academy and how I train students. It's like, know what state you're in, what country you're in, what rights you have as a family to keep a body home, to wash them, to cover them, to play music for them. The Western thing is like, well, they've passed now, push them out.

It's transactional and so sterile. That to me is something I'm still contending with, that it was treated so mechanically and so not human. And yet how many of us are just accustomed to that, right? We see it in movies, we see it in TV, it's told to us that this is what should be done. And so we just keep continuing these practices that are just taking us further and further away from being rooted.

And so, you when you bring these practices back, we have to realize, like, it's also not just for the people that we serve as grief and death thrillers, it's also for us, right? Like, to reclaim these practices for myself, for my own family, for the women and the healers who came before me, for the medicine women who I didn't know, but I am guaranteeing were there, right? This is, there's a lot of reclamation in that and...

And I think there's a lot of healing in that for those of us who do this work of maybe we weren't able to do it for our people or even ourselves when we were first starting, but the fact that you're able to pay this forward feels really good for a lot of us. And it feels like you're shifting a conversation because of more people are listening to this and start to think about, how do I want to die? Well, how do I want to breathe? Start asking your family.

These seem like uncomfortable conversations until you're in the moment and no one wants to have that conversation in the moment. Have it when you're calm and peaceful and nobody's sick. You know, have it over a glass of wine or a cup of tea or a walk and figure out like how do you really want to do this because it doesn't have to be done the way these folks have told us. That's ridiculous. Thank you for that. And if somebody wanted to work with you on both capacities, how can they get in touch with you?

My website is the healingdula.com. So I have a Healing Dula Academy which trains grief and death doulas rooted in ancient spiritual modalities. So you're able to join a student by simply going to the site and you can read everything about the school and the guest teachers and the curriculum and you can join there. If you're interested in working with me, I am based in Europe in Germany now, but I see clients and students virtually all day, every day.

But if you are on this side of the pond, then I do see folks in person. And just email me if you have questions. I'm info at a healingdulat.com. But I'm always available for questions and just reach out. But the site has everything, so you can find all info there. Perfect. And that will be, of course, linked in the show notes.

And you weren't always in Germany. You leaned into your grief and part of your own process and reconnection was going through, I would say, different iterations of who Sundari is and what she wanted out of life. One thing that I really loved and admired in your book is that you allowed yourself to follow this intuition. I don't know what to call it, this need to explore something different. So maybe share a little bit about that after you lost both parents, how...

you embraced the unknown in a way. So after my father died, I really realized like, you for lack of a better term that you're like, oh, I was an orphan. You know, like I, that's how I felt at that time. It's how I still feel now. You know, it's, that, that feeling kind of stays with you of like, wow, I don't have these two tethers. And so I was in New York and New York at the time just became really overwhelming for me. Like,

I am a real like true New Yorker, all my family's there. And I was so tied into it that it felt like I could see my mother everywhere, right? Like I could see my parents everywhere. Everything held a memory. it became like, and it felt like I was suffering. I was okay, but it became really clear that I was like, I need to shift. I need to change my environment in order to change how I'm processing this. New York just felt like too much.

I was in a relationship and it's funny when I tell these stories, I'm like, it seems like I just made a lot of rash choices, but in honesty, these all lined up really well. But I was dating a man in a very toxic relationship and moved with him to Miami. And within six weeks, I found out he was cheating on me and I threw him out and changed the locks. And so now I'm in Miami and I'm like, I have no friends and my parents just died and I don't know like what, like.

You know, and I have to like rebuild my life there. And it wound up being the best decision ever. And Miami was an incredible experience. I think it was in, I think I really allowed myself to shift, right? I think New York, and I think back to this a lot, like had I stayed in New York, I think I really would have stayed. I don't know how much I would have allowed myself to change. I think moving to Miami where I had no friends and I had no family and I had to

rebuild my career. I just left this relationship and I remember that I was invited out to Diddy's New Year's Eve party and I turned it down and I stayed home and meditated. Good for you. Knowing what we know now, Ain't that some shit? But that was like a big shift for me of like, I had been such like a social party girl. I was still trying to keep up with, I was trying to return to pre-Anandi dying.

who was the PR girl, the bartender, the waitress. I was trying to go back to her. And when I got to Miami, I was like, I'm really no longer that girl. And so I had to figure out who I was again. And it was a really good place for me to do so. And then in 2019, I had done some traveling, but in 2019, I fell in love with the tiny house movement. And that started to like...

really call. And I went to a tiny house festival in Bradenton, Florida, and I saw how people were living and I was like, these are not like, like dirty hippies in buses. These are like, amazingly beautiful vans, buses, trailers, RVs. I saw like, this also isn't just one demographic of people. These were every race. This was every age group.

It wasn't just couples, it was single folks and it was families. It was just amazing. And I realized when I went to that, that I was like, I'm done with the condo, the two cars. I'm just over this. Sometimes you need to see other people doing it to realize you can give yourself permission to do it. And so when I saw it, I was like, I don't have to keep doing this. At that point, I was in another relationship.

and we decided to sell everything. So I sold the condo and the cars and we went to North Carolina because we eventually joined all these forums on Facebook. I became like really obsessed with it, put myself through like YouTube, carpentry school and tiny homeschool, because I had zero skills. I'm laughing because my husband and I used to watch these videos all the time. Like there was an era where like rehabbing and remodeling and all these things and it was just the best.

But to actually do it has been amazing. Yeah. I loved it. We went to North Carolina, bought a school bus from a watermelon farmer. If anyone is ever thinking about buying a school bus, that's the people to do it from. They buy like extra buses. so anyway, we got a great bus and spent two years or a year basically renovating it. It turned into the most beautiful tiny home. It's an Airbnb right now in Tallahassee.

And we drove it around the US for two years and lived in the bus. And it was incredible. It was also during the Civil Rights Movement, right? It was also during COVID. And we hit the road right before COVID started. So it was intense. It was beautiful. It was also very clear as a Black woman, as a Black couple traveling with two pit bulls in a bus that had tinted windows, that that life in America was not built for Black people on the road.

And that's what I learned on that trip. And that was sad, but the aesthetic of van life and all of that was really built for young white folks. And the safety of black people in America, we had a number of incidents, a number of very scary times, one forcing us to hide out in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

in the driveway of the owner of the Fetzer Institute because we were terrified. That's when I was like, I'm done. I'm done. I don't have to do this. I don't need to stay where I'm safe. I've already been through too much. I do not need to repeat what my ancestors were forced to go through. I have agency, which my ancestors did not. And it was exhausting. And I was like, I'm taking my pure, sensitive spirit out of this unhealthy ass country.

And I went to Curacao and I left my toxic husband in America also. I went to Curacao. Curacao is called the land of the healing. And I recommend it to everyone. It's a three hour or two and a half hours straight flight from Florida. It's incredible. And I spent a year there studying herbs and meditating. I think it was the first time I really felt safe enough to revisit old grief. Cause now who am I again? Right now there's been

a civil rights movement, pandemic, a toxic ex-husband, two parents. Grief comes with all of that. And you have to recognize all of those. Those are just as heavy. So I sat in Curacao and really had to think of like now as a black woman, as a griever, now as someone who's divorced, now what happened? And that again was the best decision of my life. Curacao was incredible. I wrote Grief Gems in Curacao and started

pondering the academy in Curaçao. Curaçao led me to Germany and I could not imagine any other path to have taken. It has been an incredibly adventurous ride and I am grateful. I'm grateful to still be here, grateful to be on it. My heart just smiles with joy at the fact that you just honored what needed to be the next step in that moment.

for you, for Sundari, not for anybody else, but for yourself and whatever that season of your life called you to do. That's not easy for a lot of people for many reasons, from just logistics, like let's say you have kids and you're very tethered to a mortgage and a house and all these things. or mentally, just not allowing yourself to think differently. So what I really love is that permission to self and through self to others to think

differently to allow yourself to choose something different, aligned, even if and when it doesn't necessarily follow a traditional path. We are living in times, like you said earlier in this episode, where what we know as we know it is no longer. And we're seeing that coming undone. And that is part of this next iteration of us as humanity. And right now, I personally believe we get to have a say into what this next iteration is.

So much of that is by embodying our own truth and each person is meant to live that truth differently. So I really love that you shared that with us. You also share it in Grief Jumps, book, which I'll link in the show notes. And I love the way that it has led you to where you are today and whatever may come next because there's more to come, right? I really appreciate that. I think sometimes a question I get a lot and I'll end here so I know we're chatting a lot, which has been great.

The question I get a lot is like, well, how am I supposed to know which way to go? Right? Like, and so people are really confused about that. And, and so here's what I'll say. You only know, you only are able to hear yourself when you are intentional about making time for yourself. You cannot think that practices like breath work or meditation or taking a walk.

or sitting in the forest or sitting in a bath, whatever gets you quiet, are a waste of time. That's what allows you to hear you, because the rest of the day, you are usually hearing Instagram, friends, coworkers, family, right? That's the noise. And I think something that we learn on this path is like, oftentimes what you're hearing are not really your own thoughts, right? It's just like the noise.

that's playing constantly that you were then replaying. When you can slow down, you start to hear a much calmer voice. And that's the voice that I always know is not mine, right? That is my guide because I am not technically, I'm not usually that calm, that steady, that like, you should look into this. don't, that, when I feel that

steady hand of look into this more or read this book perhaps or follow this. That's when I listen. And so I urge you just to get quiet enough that you can weed out the noise and the chatter and then wait for the calmer voice that emerges. And she is your guide. He is your

Beautiful and it feels like it goes back to the earlier point you made about how grief, when we lean into it, can help us align with that deeper truth. And I do agree with that and it's getting quiet. I often say grief is an invitation to slow down more than anything. It's just slow the fuck down and allow yourself to let it do what it does. It just changes you from the inside out. So much of that is getting quiet in whatever way you can. Rituals are really helpful with this.

Is there maybe a ritual somebody could do within the comfort of their home? They don't have to go anywhere or go do anything fancy, but something that you could share with our audience that could help them hear that voice, get in touch with that quiet place within.

I would say every single day before you step out of the bed, take two minutes to do breath work. Just two minutes. Before you do anything, before you reach for your phone, and I know that sometimes we can be pulled, right? People have children, people have responsibilities that immediately start pulling them. But at some point when you open your eyes, before you start moving, before you jump into the day, try to land in your body.

I am here now. I'm present now. Just take a few breaths. If you can remind yourself to do that throughout the day, and I always often urge people, like, if you're new to this, set an alarm in your phone. Now, the alarm is kind of like contradictory to the piece that should come, but you'll get to the point of not needing the bell ringing. But set an alarm in your phone three times a day, hand on belly, hand on heart. I am here now. I'm in my body now. I am grounded now.

especially as a griever who's also living in this current world, you're dealing with your grief and then collective grief. That is so loud. So just take those few moments. And then I would pick one day and use that to take five minutes to light a candle and just sit in front of the candle and just look at it. That's it. And try to just, every time your mind gets distracted, keep coming back to the candle.

Just pick your day and don't be so hard on yourself. You people automatically say I'm not good at meditation I'm not good at like no one is good at like if that's you do it because you're not good at it, right? Like it's you do it because you need it. The chatter will be normal It might take you weeks months until it gets quiet. That's okay Just focus on the candle and breath Thank you for those and those actually were three tips. So

There you go, bonus. And something you can implement right away. Sometimes the way forward, the path forward, the next step forward is tiny and it's quiet and it's barely there. But when you attune to it, it's incredibly powerful. Just even, I love the fire gazing meditation because it is something that humans have done since the beginning of time, sit around a fire and stare at it. And there's something very like, the flame resonates with something within us. So it is very powerful. As simple as that sounds, I...

invite you, we invite you, Sundari invites you to try it out today and see how that feels. You mentioned collective grief. There is so much. There's just so, there's too much happening right now. That's the most. Life is doing the most right now collectively. what would you say, what's your take on everything and how would you help somebody navigate both personal and collective grief? There's no one specific, I'm aware that's a big question. It's more like,

What's your take on all of this? My take on it, I'll tell you from a spiritual perspective, and I have a feeling there's a lot of people who are in the spiritual community that listen to this because of just how your platform is and who you are. And so I think folks will understand this when there is a real conversation in the spiritual community to just keep your head down and just ignore everything that's happening and raise your frequency and

That's not the kind of spiritual girlie I am. One of my perspectives on this is, yes, you are a spiritual being, but you are here to have a human experience and not to bypass the human experience. Part of why we are here is to sit in community. I am an advocate for finding a community right now. Part of why we are here is to look and to bear witness, right? And I think as grievers,

One of the most upsetting things can be as you continue to move through your grief is how few people continue to hold witness or hold space for you. And I think about all that people are moving through right now. It's like, if I can do nothing else, then it is to keep paying attention. It doesn't mean I have to go down every rabbit hole and I have to burn myself out, but I am going to continue to hold space and to bear witness.

I also think that there is something to be said about collective grief that for those of us who are really sensitive, which many griebers are, you can pick up on the energy of this walking to your car, right? Going walking through the grocery store. Everyone is on edge. And so a lot of us are picking it up, just walking into the office, just going to run errands. And so,

I think what's important right now is to recognize how powerful all of that is and to boundary oneself during these times. To realize that you are sensitive and that you are dealing with your own grief, your own personal loss, that right now your brain and your nervous system are trying to calculate and reformulate. And so,

While we are not bypassing the human experience, you can only handle so much. So drop in, bear witness, hold space, then be aware of what your boundaries are. This is not a time to ignore what your limits are, to ignore when it feels like you are about to crack or when it feels like it's become too much. This is when we return back to our rituals, our candle, our breath, to movements, to nature.

I think that collective grief is something that doesn't get talked about enough because we think that it's something that's just happening by talk, but it's something that people are literally emitting in their field. It's like everyone is walking around with a six foot field that is emitting all that they are processing themselves, which right now is incredible amount of fear and incredible amount of grief and

and uncertainty. And so what I often remind myself and my friends, and I do this a lot, is like, when I feel my own emotions taking a real dip, is to pause and say, is this mine or is this the collective's? Because sometimes it's not yours. And I think that's going to be really important as you move through the next few months, the next year is discernment. What is mine and what is theirs?

What can I hold and what can I not? Learning how to observe without absorbing is going to become really important. I would focus on that. We are here to be human and caring and kind and community. We are also here to be sustainable and resisting requires sustainability. And so...

That drop in, that stillness, that quiet when you're checking in with yourself, I'm in my body, I am here now, is also what is my grief and what is coming from the collective. Got to separate the two. Discernment and that check-in, you talk about that often in your book as well, that need to check in every so often. You don't just do one check-in and you're done in grief, whether that be individual and or collective. It's a constant conversation.

within, with life, with your relationship to yourself and with relationship to your life. And it sounds like that's what you're inviting people to do. And also these practices help anchor us into our truth and how we show up in the world. So thank you so much for that perspective. I could talk to you for a long time. This has been so much fun. I thank you for your wisdom. There's so much that you from, you know, the hour that we've been talking, listeners and anybody watching can already sense that you have so much to offer.

So again, everything will be linked in the show notes if you want to connect directly with her and her work and her book and also on social media. So I'll put all that stuff in those show notes. I want to give you the floor to touch on anything that maybe you want including this conversation that we haven't touched on or just any final thoughts that feel like they want to be part of this conversation.

I think just for all listening to...

These are really, these are times we have not seen before.

I invite us all to use this time to figure out who we want to be and how we want to live and what's important to us and to

Allow, you know, just, when I just wrote something for the Get Griefy magazine about like, allow your grief to be really loud right now. So I think it allows you to be really authentic if you are allowing yourself to be the most grounded, the most joyful, the messiest, the angriest, the most feral, the most...

You know, let yourself be all the things right now and let you, let this be a time where you really figure out like, what, who do I want to be? Where do I want to land?

And also as a griever, when times like this are really loud, this is really good time to get really quiet.

So I just want to, you know, when everyone else is focused on something else, sometimes it can be a really good time to say, maybe this is a really good time to take care of myself. Right? When everyone else is a little bit more distracted. So use this time, folks. Use this time. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Sundari. And final question, what would Sundari today say to Sundari at 27 after the loss of your mother?

Buckle up, buttercup. is... Be a little f***ing right. Buckle up, yes. Buckle up. Honestly, I just think we have, you know... Especially to young grievers, there's so much of the age wrapped up into it also. You're so... There's so many versions of you waiting. As a griever, there are so many versions of you waiting. There are... There are parts of you that you haven't met yet that you will love so much.


And I wish I had known that. when you do this work and when you allow it to forge you and when you really lean into this, I think you're such a badass on the other side of it. And it's like, I think the love that is waiting for you to give back to yourself, of like, you fucking did it. You're gonna do it. You're gonna make it. And that's a big deal.

Sundari, thank you so much for your wisdom, for your words, for your work, and for being you. Thank you. Thank you, Nina. That's it for today's episode. Be sure to subscribe to the Grief and Light podcast. I'd also love to connect with you and hear your thoughts and your stories. Feel free to share them with me via my Instagram page at griefandlight, or you can also visit griefandlight.com for more information and updates. Thank you so much for being here, for being you.

And always remember, you are not alone.