Grief as the Highest Form of Intelligence: Paula Gasparini-Santos on Trauma, Transformation & Sitting with the Unknown

Paula went into "the void," and returned with a question that changed her life: What if grief is actually the highest form of intelligence?

In this episode of Grief and Light, I sit down with trauma and grief therapist and artist, Paula Gasparini-Santos, to explore a different way of understanding grief, one where loss becomes a portal, and "the void" transforms us.

Paula's work sits at the intersection of trauma therapy and grief, and she brings a framework that honors how intelligent grief actually is. She shares how grief operates as a form of intelligence, and how to access what it's trying to teach us.

We go deep on the surprising relationship between grief and trauma, Paula's own journey of developing intimacy with her pain, and the growing use of AI in grief support, what it can genuinely offer, and where it keeps us at arm's length from the real work.

We also get into the difference between real curiosity and curiosity that's just fear with better PR. 

Paula explains how our information-gathering instinct, especially in grief, often becomes a way to stay safe rather than a way to grow. And she offers practices for building a relationship with emptiness, with silence, with the parts of ourselves we usually try to outrun.

If you're looking for a different perspective on grief, and ways to move through, tune in.

In this episode:

• Grief as one of life's highest forms of intelligence
• Why grief and trauma are more connected than we think
• What "intimacy with grief" actually looks like in practice
• What "the void" is, and isn't
• How to trust the unknown
• AI in grief processing: where it helps and where it doesn't
• The distinction between true curiosity and fear-based seeking
• Low-dopamine practices for reconnecting with yourself
• Why sitting with emptiness might be exactly what healing requires

💬 "If we deny grief as a universal experience, we deny the pivot point for regeneration and expansion to happen." — Paula Gasparini-Santos

Connect with Paula Gasparini-Santos: 

• Art: https://paulagasparini-santos.com/ 
• Work with Paula: https://www.theconsciousconnection.org/ 
• Substack
• Instagram
• TikTok

Transcript

If we can help people see that thing that we are so afraid of as just emptiness, the fear dissolves almost inherently. think grief is the most generous giver, is because grief goes over the fear, because it dismantles everything, and we go straight into the void. I teach people how to surrender into the unknown. What happens if we just relax here? 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. What if grief is so much more than what we understand it to be? Welcome back to the Grief in Life podcast. Today's guest is Paula Gasparini-Santos, a trauma therapist with 15 years of clinical experience who is completely reimagining the way that we understand

and move through grief. Paula is an immigrant-born therapist who works with depth psychology and trauma-informed care for individuals and couples. Paula's work invites us to see grief not just as loss, it's a profound meeting with the unknown. Through a spiritual psychology lens, she helps humans understand that grief might actually be one of life's highest forms of intelligence.

love to know more about that. let's get into it. Paula, welcome to the Grief and Light podcast. Thank you, Nina. I'm so excited to be here and thank you for the work you do for the grief space. Thank you so much. It's an honor to have you. was telling you, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. You approach grief with so much depth and I resonate with that quite a bit. Before we get into your personal story, I'd to open with big kind of overarching perspectives.

So when you say grief might be a higher form of intelligence, what do you mean by that? Absolutely. I know that seems almost like a radical statement. Because of the trauma background that I've worked with, I take a lot of these theories that I'll share with you today from clinical observations that include settings where I've worked with.

both victims and perpetrators, or what we call perpetrators in the world, and really getting curious about the suffering space and what's underneath it. And then the healing part of it, of course, right? As the clinician, we're interested in the integration work. As I worked through all of that, I've discovered this theory on grief that, especially in the clinical world, we separate grief and trauma work.

very separate fields, right? We think of them as like this is for people who are grieving and grieving is for people who experienced loss and only loss and then this is trauma and this is only trauma. And I, as a trauma therapist was in this category, which I myself didn't even identify as having a lot of grief because I only lost my grandmother, but I identified as having a lot of trauma.

And until I went into this deep theory around grief as this higher form of intelligence that affects us all, right? It's the energy of the world. And what I mean by that is like nature. Nature composts and like loss is a part of regeneration. Loss is a part of expansion. Loss is a part of integration in all that is natural. And in all that

we do in the world and our psyche, it's so much matching that energy of nature, right? Like our ecosystem works with creative and destructive energy and the psyche has creative and destructive energy and loss and gain. And so I started seeing those patterns in the psychology of those who I work with. And in that started to find that like, if we deny grief as a universal experience,

We are denying that pivot point for regeneration and expansion to happen. We may cope, we may survive, but we don't fully integrate and live without integrating that truth of existence, which is that life is impermanent. And impermanence touches every single soul on this planet, whether you've met that through loss and death or through just existing through...

being a human being. So I don't know if that answered it in a roundabout way. know it was beautiful. you know, as listeners or somebody watching could already tell there's a depth to this. It's all tied together. I really resonate with that personally, and I completely agree. And it's interesting. I wasn't even going to include what I'm about to say in this conversation, but it actually flows very naturally. Right before this recording, I read an article about AI and grief.

and how a lot of these legacy slash death tech companies are trying to quote unquote, like get rid of grief, help people move past it through tools like artificial intelligence. And specifically what they were naming is if you could get, let's say, know, grandmother, you mentioned your grandmother, but let's say somehow you could plug in personality aspects and traits of your grandmother into this AI. And then all of sudden you can have this sort of

AI version of continued bonds with your person. I would love your take on that based on what you just said about the natural way and the natural cycle. Remember, you reconciled that or are they mutually exclusive? So I'm not a believer of ever being like, this works and doesn't work because I think things work for different people at different times of their healing process. What I will say, and this is personal bias, is that

When we do things that are to overcome anything, overcome trauma, overcome grief, I believe it's similar to that theory I was starting to share that we're not actually being with the thing, we're just trying to move past it, which feeds survival, which I will argue that there are moments in our life that all we need to learn is how to survive because we have to, right? And that's inclusive of grief or trauma, like we have to just get.

through because life requires us to show up, to show up to work. So we kind of have to do a little bit of that shallow band-aid thing. And perhaps I would classify a tool like that in the AI world we're moving into as like band-aids for moving forward. And I won't give it a classification if it's good, helpful or not, but I will say that it's missing that depth work.

that actually allows us to transform with grief, not from like moving away from it, but to transform with it just as that regenerative energy I'm speaking of. Thank you for that. And I know that was a big question in terms of what's happening, but I love your perspective of it's not an absolute, it's that it doesn't go to the depth that grief requires us to go to.

And I completely agree and your answer is a lot more generous than the one I would have given. But thank you for that. so people get to know more about your story. Where did your relationship with grief begin? And how has it evolved into the version that it is today? So it probably began before I could even trace it, because that's, think, what happens. Like, there's so much impermanence that we meet from such an early age.

And we don't get taught how to sit with that unknown space. So all we do is learn to create our little personality structures to move about those empty voids that we go through. So it will be hard to pinpoint my first touching of grief, but I can share when I became aware that what I've experienced was grief rather than trauma or all the other things I used to classify it as.

I won't share so much the experience, but I remember having gone through a very difficult year of what I used to call traumatic experiences and sitting at the culmination of a ton of those where my personality structures that I used to get over these things with no longer were strong enough to continue to do that task it had set forward to do because so many compounded

so quickly that it overwhelmed my system. And I remember laying outside of my house in Tallahassee, Florida, and I was just like on the grass, almost dead to the world, like that over consumed energy where you just can't hold anything anymore was this like emptiness that had no space for anything is what I would describe. Like nothing could come in and nothing could leave.

It was just nothingness. It was the first time I ever really touched the void within self, within a soul if there's such thing. And I couldn't even hear the birds. You know, was this moment where I was like, okay. I normally would rush to fill this. I remembered just sitting there curious, like, what is this?

Is it that bad? Is it that scary? Do I have to make sense of it? Do I have to be here? Do I have to make a story to make this make sense? Or can I be with this like I do art, right? Where I'm like curious about the unknown, where I'm like excited or traveling, right? Like when we travel, we're so curious about the unknowns that we are excited about.

But the unknowns that happened to us that we didn't choose, right, we didn't plan the trip to the grief void, we don't meet it with that curiosity, right? We don't go into it with that same open energy. We usually immediately close away. We immediately go into fear or control or numbing. And it was the first time I was like, no, I wanna know this space. And that's where this theory started to be born. It was what I call

I developed an intimacy with grief that day where I just sat with it and I was in it and I didn't feel the need to fill it or make sense of it or label exactly what took me there out of the experiences. I just allowed it to inform me of things rather than me informing it of what it needed, right? And I know that's a little ethereal, but I remember that moment. I always will.

For a while, I wanted to like label or title my book, When Birds Listen, because it was like that moment where like I couldn't hear the birds, but they were there, you know, listening to me crying. But that was my first awareness of my relationship to grief. Thank you. That's beautiful the way that you phrase that and the fact that the birds were listening, even if you couldn't in that moment and in that capacity. And I agree that curiosity.

is I always say heart-centered curiosity because curiosity could also be like nosiness, like when you're going through grief and somebody wants to know all the details of everything that happened. So there's the difference and that curiosity that you talk about sounds more heart-centered and more just cracking the door open to that unknown, to that void, to seeing what else is here. Have you always been like that? Is that something that is innate in a person and through your work, do you think that's something that needs to be taught to people or tapped into?

within a person. There's like a slight distinction there. have a strong belief that it's innate in us all, but we forget and confuse curiosity with seeking. Seeking is still control-based. And that's maybe what you're calling the nosiness, where we're like gathering information, but the goal is still to control a narrative or arrive at a destination. It's still very much from that ego-based psyche.

that cannot tolerate the unknown. So essentially, not to sound too clinical now, but we have our conscious selves, we have our higher self, which is this integrated awareness, and we have our ego self that's fear-based. Ego meets the unknown, fear, control, numbing, like it has to make the unknown known. And that's where most people, what they experience as their curiosity energy is just fear trying to resolve itself.

Whereas true curiosity is that conscious self, which is innate. And why I believe greatly it's innate, because if you witness children before grief or trauma, it's there, it's in all of them. So at one point, we all had access to that innate energy of open curiosity, where we are learning from the world, learning from others, until something in the world and others becomes unsafe to learn from.

And that's where curiosity turns into seeking. Curiosity turns into information gathering for data to keep us safe rather than data to open us, to expand us. Thank you for that beautiful distinction. Yes, yes, yes. And you put words to something that I've been struggling with in terms of how can we show this side to people. And I'm realizing it's because we live in the context of a culture, society that needs control.

answers, labels, boxes to put things in. So when we don't find that, it's the equivalent of like a computer saying file not found. Like we just, it's not there in that context. It's there in another way. So what tools, I know art is big for you, for example, but in the work that you do with other humans, how can you help somebody see this side of the curiosity, the one that maybe doesn't have tidy answers?

How can you take somebody that has never experienced that for themselves besides childhood and as an adult, as a grieving human, go there? I'll say A, it's hard to do even when I'm there as a clinician supporting the space, which essentially is why I love this grief model that I spent three years trying to formulate to write this book on, is that if we can help people see that thing that we are so afraid of,

as just emptiness. The fear dissolves almost inherently. think that when we learn to be with the unknown, the void, the empty space, I always give this image to clients like there's the void and on the edge of the void is fear, right? Fear's job is to protect us from falling into that crevice of emptiness. And so I say why I think grief is the most generous giver is because grief

goes like this over the fear, because the fear is too weak to even protect grief. It dismantles everything. And we go straight into the void. And when we go into that space, we're like wailing and trying to look for the edges because we're not familiar with that unknown space. But I try to teach people how to surrender into the unknown. What happens if we just relax here? And again,

Because I'm trauma-informed, I want to be very mindful to also give the caveat that there are people in literally survival situations that I would never recommend that they surrender. That's when I would be recommending like, yes, let's cope, let's bring resilience and post-traumatic growth strategies, right? Like where it is more control-based because I'm making sure it's about safety. But when we are at a place where we are safe,

there's safe environments, we're in a safe home, we're not in a dangerous situation. I would do the work of, and even recommend to the audience listening, that it's about increasing your relationship to emptiness. And that could be done in small doses like, we're addicted to this, to being in constant connection, constant stimulation and feeling. And I'll butcher the quote, like one of my favorite, the thought of like,

most of human suffering can be traced to men's inability to sit with himself. And if we can just learn to bring in more emptiness into life, meaning don't listen to music, don't listen to data, reading, talking on the phone, and just be in silence a little bit. My favorite thing in the world is nature. Go to nature, sit in nature, listen to the birds, and be with self, right? Even if we just do little things like that and you're not.

having access to a therapeutic space where we can work on that relationship, I find that that increases our capacity to be in that unknown without fear dominating, without fear coming in and then taking us into that ego identity that's basically just coping, right, surviving. Absolutely. And I agree, especially now. There's so much information coming at us every minute, every hour, all the time.

I'm personally taking time to do what I call like low dopamine activities, just arts and crafts, writing, things that are no screen, very slow. And I find myself just wanting to crawl out of my own skin. I'm like, no, I need my phone. And that's when you become aware of how dependent we are on this level of stimulus. You talk a lot, you mentioned a lot the distinction between trauma and grief.

For somebody who maybe is trying to understand what they're going through, putting words to their experience, what is that distinction? How can they tell the difference? Well, at this point, I believe they're at the core, and this is more the spiritual lens of mine, I believe they're the same, right? It's a meeting with the unknown. It's a meeting with life's truths. And in all that I've done, like I'm obsessed with reading theory on

theology, all the spiritualities, every book I can get my hand on that's either from the Bible to the Quran to Eastern religious texts, like what is it that we're always pointing to? And I had this, you know, sad realization that the only two guarantees I have found about life, and this sounds sad, but I think it's very freeing, is that we're not in control of it, and life isn't permanent. That those are the two guarantees that we will all face, no matter

how well you've tried to build and articulate your little life, you will meet something that's gonna come in and be like, haha, you thought that? Well, let me show you that all of this is out of your hands, right? And so I think that getting to that truth within self, surrendering to it, harmonizing with that truth makes us go into the unknown, whether it's from trauma. And when I'm...

putting it in categories like this is like, I think the world separates the two a lot. Clinically, trauma can be seen as an event that basically changes your view of self other in the world, right? Like that happens, I love Gabor and Mate's view on trauma and just basically not seeing it as just the event because I think in the trauma world, a lot of people lack even...

validation of self of what they've been to because they haven't gone through like a big T trauma, right? Like an event that feels substantial enough and that they don't categorize as substantial enough to cause the harm. I love in the trauma world to see it as even if it was a small event, but it changed something foundational in you. Like the inside got changed big, even if it was like a boy in elementary school called you stupid.

And inside that day you started to believe you were stupid, that's a trauma. It doesn't matter how big or little the external event, it matters how impactful the internal event was. And I would say that similarly in the typically categorized grief as just loss of people we love and loss.

Some people find dismissive energy if they lose a pet and it's not a person. We like to grade grief and grade trauma as if one is valid, the other isn't. And that's why I like to bring this brush of like, if it altered you into a fear state, it's substantial. Because that means you're no longer living and now you're in survival energy and now you're missing out on connection.

to self, to other, to the world, to life, to love, to open energy, right?

Thank you. And for somebody watching or listening, it's an invitation for you to think of the experiences that you've had that change how you show up in relation to what was itself, other, and the world. And maybe you could be gentler with yourself there because we try to minimize, bury, or just talk ourselves out of what we're feeling inside to toughen up so we can get through the workday or whatever it is that we're doing in that moment.

it's really important to know that this also counts, that you're worthy of being witnessed in your trauma grief, cared for, tended to, and it's worthy of being met with loving care and gentleness as well. You also talk about the wound of scarcity. So what is the wound of scarcity and how does it show up in grief? So similar to this void lingo that I'm giving, right? I think that why we struggle with grief so much is because

Like most of us, encounter that first empty space early in life. When we are at that vulnerable stage early in life, emptiness, and I'll define it a little more in human language rather than this abstract void one, is like lacking protection or love from a parent, attention, validation, like things that felt really detrimental to us at the time, right? Like actually were scarcity-based. If we did not have

parent-aids protection, our lives were in danger. We were in fact touching scarcity. And so what the brain learns to do is associate emptiness to scarcity. And that is why we run to like filling because we believe if we just allow the emptiness, I'm gonna go without. And I think the beautiful part of spiritual transformation is that emptiness is where

all things come from. Think the womb is empty space before its life. Galaxies come from space. Like everything is born from emptiness first. But as little children, we don't have the nervous system to sit with that void. We don't know that our parents, if they're telling us we're horrible or whatever, they're gone, they're focused on their life. All these little things that we all go through in imperfection of parenthood.

We're going to experience that and want to make sense of it so that we create this survival structure of like, okay, now I have to earn love. Now I have to learn how to do this to not be in trouble. have to, like, we learn all these little things because we fear that it is scarce, AKA going to kill us, going to take away from us, you know? And that's where the scarcity fear continues on to adulthood.

in that fear of scarcity, we do all this avoidance of grief.

Thank you for that explanation and distinction. And it makes sense of why then we're afraid of the unknown, of that void of being with our feelings, and especially when we are so encouraged not to be with our feelings and to move past and get over and all the things. And I wanted to talk about you as an artist as well, because you blend the science background, the education, the more clinical work with this other side that is somewhat

argue is the complete opposite. And I would argue that it's just another part of the same thing. But talk to us about who Paula is as an artist in all of the capacities that you're an artist, including writing. And tell us a little bit about that side of your story. Art, I agree. I think it's the same language, different. It's like Spanish and English where we can communicate the same. It's just using different words and has different like

when you speak Spanish versus English, I experienced that with when I speak Spanish or Portuguese, like I experienced the energy different, but I can communicate the same things. And so I would say that the thread amongst all my arts, including clinician as an artist, it's finding connection in things that feel separate, things that we feel are separated. That art form is always trying to find that thread that goes through it all. As a...

I'm I use the canvas for my own explorations of self. I find the empty space of a blank canvas very exciting. And the way I treat it is almost like, you know, in that moment that I had with the birds just listening to me in that empty space. I remember thinking, it's funny how life prepares you for things without you knowing you're being prepared for something down the line.

because I had been given this language of painting. And I've never been a classical painter in the sense that like I have, know a skill set and I'm gonna put that and translate this image to a canvas. I've always just met canvas like the unknown and I do it with so much excitement. Like I love facing a brilliant canvas and being like, I have no idea what I'm about to do. And I can't wait. And I like explore.

And then I hate it and I paint on top of it and I have no attachment to outcome. And it's been this core foundational identity of mine. Like my ability to be in detachment energy, and I'm saying that almost like Buddhist energy, like the healthy detachment, which isn't indifference, it's just like, okay, I surrender to, this isn't in my control, I'm gonna let things unfold and flow state.

And art is like the ultimate flow state where I'm just like layering, taking away, adding, taking away, adding. So it also has taught me that empty space is what makes an image pop and dark color makes the light color come to life. And like it's taught me relationship between emptiness and form as well. And so it's, it's almost, I mean, I want to say the word funny, but it's just like almost divine that I end up.

becoming so obsessed with grief down the line because I've been touching it all along and the wisdom of it, I just didn't know what to label it. That's beautiful. And that allowing yourself to be with, it sounds like it just being with what is not indifference, like you said, that distinction is really important and that permission to explore that I feel is very tied to the curiosity that we talked about earlier.

It really is powerful. You also work with poetry and writing, so maybe share a little bit about that as well. Sure. Poetry is like poetry and writing are like my love language. I love languages. I immigrated young out of my country and had to be, you know, Miami is Latin America. So luckily I came from Brazil and was able to learn Spanish, which is easier than English. But I feel like writing is.

It's different because it's not empty space, right? You have words and words carry meanings or how we want to mean. But the way I write is very much like, you know what? I think it's listening. That's as I'm like trying to describe what writing is to me. Writing is how I've learned to listen. It's how I've learned to move out of that kind of

prefrontal brain that like wants to make sense of everything and allow things to make sense with time. Like I write very stream of consciousness and then as I write things are making sense in a way that's deeper than what I originally saw, right? So it's almost like writing has made me a better listener. And would it be accurate to say a better listener to life, to yourself, to all of it?

Yeah, I mean, I personally believe in bigger energy than myself, what some could call God and universe or whatever language we want to use. But I think to higher intelligence, to patterns beyond the definitive linear, like this is good, this is bad, right? Like to beyond good and bad and wholeness. I think it's made me a better listener to the integrated whole. That's beautiful.

I heard you read the most generous gift is grief, which is a poem. I don't know if that's accessible to you right now, or if there's something completely different that you feel would fit with this conversation, you're more than welcome to read that as well. I have a new poem. And it's funny because as I finished this manuscript on grief, and I found in writing this and in three years of researching this theory on grief, like really basically being

obsessed and in other people's grief my own and like just thinking of grief for now four years. I'm on that other side where I feel like grief made me better at love because they're one in the same in a way. And so this poem is kind of coming into that energy more than about grief and it's tied but it's about enjoying life a little bit and the

piece that comes like when you realize it's all temporary, that you just want to live it all as much as you can and love it all as much as you can and like consume the moment and be as present as possible, or at least that's been my experience through my intimacy with grief. And I have not read this out loud or even edited it to myself, so it might be wonky, but I think I'm gonna trust it and go here. So it's called The Finest Oranges.

I hope you take life in as if it's made of the finest oranges, sun-warmed, fragrant, waiting to be pressed open. Drink it to the last drop, let it run down your wrists, staining you with its sweetness. Don't just break the orange open for its sweet juice. Candy the brine, swallow the bitterness, let it teach you. No part of existence was made to shield you, even the peel belongs to the fruit.

The orange was never made to be held intact. It was made to be tasted, to dissolve between your teeth, to remind you that nothing is meant to last unbroken. So live as if the world could bite back. Let yourself be consumed, for only then have you met life in full. When love arrives, taste it the same way. Without defense or demand, let it burst across your tongue and disappear. It was never meant to stay, only to remind you

what sweetness once was and what you are still capable of feeling. And when suffering comes, drink that too, slowly, completely, as if even pain were made of the finest oranges. That is beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing. I felt that savoring of all of it, you know, like the sweet, the sour, the bitter, the peel, all the parts, right? And that is, I...

I believe what grief cracks us open to, that we always think that we need to be happy and the sweet parts only and all the good things. But thank you so much. That was really beautiful. And where could people find that poem along with the rest of your writing? You said this was the new manuscript, correct? This is just my poem. write poetry for fun. My manuscript is more about the theories we shared. I'm seeking publishing right now, so it's not out or available.

Anyone knows publishers. Hit me up. But the poetry I post on my social media, on Paula GDOS on my Instagram page, and then I just started a sub stack because I love writing. And a friend was like, why don't you just share all your writing? So now I'm doing a daily, I'm just going to write with my coffee in the morning without thinking about it. So I'll be posting on there too poetry, random thoughts about life, my mind musings, my mind doesn't stop.

There's a lot to be shared. But mainly my Instagram is where I share most of my writing and art. Like I do it with visual images. And I've seen some of your art. It is stunning. I know that you were inspired by, I think it was Picasso and Basquiat. You knew it. you weave a lot of words into your beautiful paintings. Really, really stunning. you're multifaceted because it's not just the painting and the writing. Like I believe you also did ceramics and other forms of art as well.

So where can people find all of you? So the art, if they wanted to work with you in a clinical capacity, and then you mentioned your social media, but go ahead and mention that as well. Yeah, sure. So for more clinical kind of base stuff too, I have a TikTok called Trauma Teachings where I kind of share some of these deeper things about how we can become better at integrating self. So that's a little bit more on the psychological side. The Instagram is a mix of

the theory, art, poetry, so that's like my whole self I think is more on the Instagram. For clinical work, working with me either through coaching or therapy, it's a consciousconnection.org, my website. And also on social media, all my links are kind of linked to my profile, so it's easier to find me and I'm happy to share a little list with you if you want. And my art, I'm not in the US right now, but occasionally I have art shows, I used to have a lot in Miami and stuff, but.

that always I get, I post that on my Instagram as well. And I have a website with certain paintings up for sale and things like that, which is paulagaspadini-santos.com. Beautiful. I will go ahead and of course link all of that in the show notes. So please make sure to check there so you can collect with Paula. Since we're on this creative side of the conversation, you talk about curiosity as an artist's way of meeting life. we...

touched on that earlier, but maybe go a little bit deeper. What does that mean to you? To me, it means the key to loving life. think curiosity is open. And when we are open, we touch it all. And when we want to touch it all and experience it all, everything is a gift. And I'm very careful to not say happy, because I happiness is a state that comes and goes. But I think joyful in the sense of

I can be suffering and still joyful when I'm in curiosity space. I can't be happy and in pain and suffering, because those are states. But I think that joyful of like, okay, I'm here to enjoy life. And enjoying is just being with something so I can be with something dark, heavy, difficult, and something beautiful, light, bright, fun.

And I truly feel that, like I've gotten to a place in life, I wasn't always in this embodied integration work, but through my personal work, I can say that when I suffer now, I enjoy it, and not in a masochistic way, but in a, find beauty in it. As an artist finds beauty in everything. And that's what curiosity gifts us, is that ability to find beauty and enjoy every single taste and flavor that life is gonna throw at you.

Kind of like the orange and the orange peels. Absolutely. And for somebody who maybe right now is listening and they're in the depths of their grief and they cannot for one second imagine that there's going to be joy, happiness, forget it. Like it's just sorrow, pain and heaviness. And this maybe sounds so abstract to them. How would you help them open that door or maybe understand what you're saying in terms of grief can also have joy?

Beautiful question because I think there's nothing worse to hear like when I was in that deep dark, the crevice where you can't see anything but the darkness. And we've probably all experienced this like there's nothing worse to hear that's gonna be okay. It's gonna be, it's all great. Like, no, right? Allow yourself to hate everything in that moment too. I think it's like keeping, I think the way I experienced it that was helpful was like,

Keep in that darkness, stay in it. Allow yourself that you're there. That's where we are now. That's the present moment. We're honoring it. But to make a story that you're gonna be there forever is you grasping to control as well. So at least be open, right? Be in the darkness, be there, but just be hands off in the darkness. You're floating, but don't define it because I think that's where we get stuck is defining that.

as the forever, defining that as the story now. So I think if we could see that that's the control that we're trying to get, and that's actually taking us away from being with the darkness, like I think being with the darkness, I support it. I help people stay with the darkness. But be in the darkness, be with it, let it be with you, because it will change. every, like I have on my website,

Bad news, everything is impermanent. Good news, everything is impermanent, right? Because I think that that's the trick. You won't be there forever if you allow it to just exist. It will change. Night has to become the day. Sometimes we're in the north part of the country in our psyche and it's gonna be dark for a lot longer and it feels like forever, but then eventually that sun will come out.

Beautiful. Yes, the only constant is change. And it sounds cliche, but my goodness, yeah. That is helpful also in those heavy days when we feel like assigning permanency to that state and it's just not. It will shift and it will change. It'll be different. I think that's what somebody said to me that was really helpful. It like, it'll be different. And it just cracked the door open to what do you mean different? different, you know, it has evolved since then and taken on a new meaning.

I love this. love the lens through which you see life and grief. And I could totally resonate how you see grief as this out, like teacher. It's akin to love. It's the other side of lover. It's a part of love and how we integrate in all the things. And I heard you say, and I'm paraphrasing here. I'm thinking, and these are not your words. These are my words, but meet people in their darkest, like in a very challenging situation. And specifically, I'm talking your work with people in prison.

how you like to bring light to the places that need it most. And that's not to say necessarily that's the only place, there are many places that need this type of work, but maybe shed some light, pun intended, on your work there and where that came from, where that particular side of the work came from. I think whatever it is in my being that's always sought wholeness or wanting to understand the whole picture from a young age, like those who hurt me or caused me pain,

I was curious how they could do that. I've always had a curiosity for that other side and then, and this is more vulnerable to share, I think so much unprocessed grief in my life in my marriage, I'm divorced now, but in my first marriage, was, kind of the worst part of me came out of that at the end and it wasn't out of not loving him.

but it was out of my own suffering that wasn't metabolized yet within my being. And so I think the work with incarcerated individuals for me really started during that period. So as I was in grad school, I was going through separation therapy and trying to resolve my marriage and figure out why am I being this way and learning about my shadow, like knowing I'm a good person, but knowing I was capable of causing harm too.

that I started to see this population in that same light of like, I truly believe that the capacity for darkness is within us all equally, and so is the capacity for light. And I'm a big, I love spirituality, and a part I always got frustrated with was the disembodied nature of it, where it just kind of highlights the light, and not the mess of being a human, and not how we arrive at

awakened states or enlightened states of consciousness or being better people without having been bad people at some point. And by bad, I don't really even believe we are good or bad people, but like acting in fragmented ways. And I'm a therapist and like obviously in the position of a therapist, people put you on a pedestal as if like you've always just been this divine guiding light to others. And it's like, I can be that light because I've been both hurt by darkness and

a perpetrator of darkness unintentionally. But I think until we see those two sides of self, we will live in a world where we are just blaming and shaming. Like we want to point a finger of like, you're causing the suffering and we miss wholeness. That's how we fragment within self. That's how we fragment in society as we're witnessing right now in the global.

situation and environment. And blame and shame is similar to the start of our conversation on the theory of fear. Like, it needs to make sense of things. So we like to divide it up into good, bad, your fault, my fault. So we either shame ourselves and get stuck in narratives of, I'm a bad person, I'm this, this, this, and this. And then we perpetuate those behaviors or we get stuck in victim identity and we like say the world's against us and then we feel like everything is unsafe.

get stuck in those. I think that work helped me integrate greatly because I was doing that work simultaneous to working with victims and witnessing both sides of the spectrum of some of these victims were unconsciously hurting their kids because they were so consumed by their pain that they're the perpetrators of their children. like, it's just this web of

unprocessed grief. I think it's just this web of not being able to sit with the complexity and paradoxical nature of what it means to be a human being. Thank you for that. I completely agree that we are capable of both good and harm and it could go either way if we are unconscious to the sides of us that can cause and do cause harm.

great as we may think we are. We are all capable of it and have in some way or shape or form. And I feel like there's a lot of that morality talk being thrown at people all over social media with everything that's happened. This is right, this is wrong. And we're having, from my point of view, this global reckoning with morality, with right versus wrong, with good versus bad. And so much of it is externalized, like you did this and they did that and this is wrong and this is clearly right.

But have we done the internal work? Have we looked at ourselves and how we contribute to both of those sides? That's an open question, right? And it's something that is worthy of self-examination. So I appreciate that you took the time to look within yourself, to look at both sides, even when you were working with both, like you said, perpetrators and victims. Thank you so much. We're getting to the end here. This has been fascinating. And I just want you to...

I want you to have the floor to share anything that maybe we haven't touched on or something that feels relevant to this conversation or any announcements that you have in terms of your work. All of it is welcome. No, I think just leaving, hopefully if you take anything from this is just like to trust that life and returning to the wisdom of nature. We're here to expand.

into our highest self. And I think especially with this collective grief we're feeling and hopelessness and then pair that with individualized hopelessness or despair from personal things happening in people's lives. It's like, I know there's these moments where we feel like it's all doomed and we're just heading in one direction. And I just love to return to witnessing nature like after huge disasters, the rejuvenation, right? Like how a

a forest will burn and then all those new sprouts come up. So trust higher intelligence, trust that like on the foundational level, starting with ourselves to everything in the being of the universe, of energy, of everything, it's here to expand and to grow and connect, right?

no matter if it feels like we have no control of it, if we actually surrender, the beauty of that is that it's gonna go to where it's naturally trying to go to, which is cohesive and harmony, like nature seeks harmony. And so, hands off, it's like the scariest thing to do, but it's the most beautiful way to exist. Like it's to harmonize, we need to be able to.

let go of the one thing we think we need to make the loudest or the most contained. So just have the courage to stay curious about that one thing that you may be holding on so tightly to and just what happens when we open that palm a little bit and just witness. And if you don't like it, you can close back down again, but just give it a little experiment. I love that. And how can somebody do that? Right? Like what's a practical thing that they can do because it's like

I want to be more open. I want to be more curious. How do I do that? Start small. Make it non-threatening things. Like if you want to be more open to connection, but you're scared of rejection or what people think of you in judgment, do it in small places like saying hi to the person who serves you coffee.

Maybe you don't even get to the point of saying hi, but you just make eye contact and then you can look away again, right? Like commit yourself to not perfection, but courage. And I think that that's the best way to do it. It's like, if we expect that we're just gonna pivot and go from zero to a hundred, A, if you even are successful in that, it won't be sustainable typically when we do those big changes.

but instead we're like increasing our window of tolerance for these things that make us uncomfortable. So if you're a person that really struggles with that closing down and feeling protected by that seed casing that you've created, just like peek out of it one little bit and then a little bit and then like you'll slowly, right? Just like a sprout. It's very, and like a sprout, remember that it's tender when we first come out. It's terrifying.

We're weak in that yet, right? Like we haven't really found that solid root yet. And that's okay, that's part of it. And like, again, keep going, like keep going little by little and you will become that oak tree that you were meant to be, right? Like the seed becomes the oak. so. Beautiful. Thank you for that. I agree. It is sometimes so small, the steps to crack ourselves open sometimes are so tiny, we miss them. So thank you for that perspective. I will.

look at my barista in the eye and I will kind of say hello and say their name and put my phone down and connect because it really does help to bring that awareness to our daily lives. Whether you're in the thick of grief, whether you are years into your grief, whether you're building a relationship with grief in life wherever you are, all of this makes such a big difference. And I do want to add that you

are, you casually mentioned it before, but you are from Brazil, you also lived in Miami, and now you are in Portugal. So tell us about the journey of living in different places and where you are now, what season of your life are you in now? What does Portugal hold for Paula that is nourishing for school, you will? Yeah, Portugal held the book. So I moved here to write the book simply because

I work US hours and as you can imagine, holding grief and trauma for people is a heavy job. And I was finding it difficult to, after sessions, also hold conscious awareness for writing about grief and trauma. And I just wasn't, like the book kept being this back burner. And the bigger I saw this theory,

helping people like in the work I was physically doing when I was in Florida and in Colorado prior. Like I was, as that need grew bigger, the calling to like actually find a way, a container to actually get these words out felt bigger and bigger. And the reason I chose here was a time zone language and

Portugal, there was something unspoken about coming here. I have Portuguese heritage. And so it just felt like the right decision. It's, who knows, it's impermanent. I'm in the unknown with it. I don't know what the next chapter of my life will be. And I'm not trying to, and it's really actually interesting. And I can admit that this is the first year of my life that I'm actually really living my theory, where I'm in full surrender and I'm not trying to control anything.

and I can already say it's been the best chapter of my life.

I'm taking your words in because I resonate with what you just said about living in that surrender state. So easy to say, not as easy to implement, especially for somebody that likes a lot of structure. But I am inspired by you and I'm inspired by your journey and your willingness to be with all that is the void and the joy and all the things as they are. So thank you for sharing your light with.

me with our audience and with the world and everything that you do. It has been so nourishing. This conversation has been wonderful. So I thank you so much and I thank you for being you and all that you do. Thank you for all that you do and creating containers for all this work to come out. Thank you. I really appreciate it I love your way of asking questions. So loved it. Thank you. 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.