The Motherhood Mentor

Embracing the Messy Middle: Grief, Growth, and cycles of health with Sarah St. John

• Rebecca Dollard: Somatic Mind-Body Life Coach, Enneagram Coach, Speaker, Boundaries Coach, Mindset • Season 1 • Episode 34

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In this deeply moving episode of the Motherhood Mentor Podcast, Sarah St. John takes us on a raw and transformative journey through her personal experiences with grief, healing, and self-discovery. From childhood loss and physical and somatic manifestations of grief, to the profound challenges of losing her brothers and navigating a miscarriage during the onset of COVID-19, Sarah shares how these life-altering moments reshaped her worldview and how she moves through life and grief. 

We talk about how we as a culture approach and move through grief and how to bring more humanity to our grieving seasons and grief anniversaries. We talk about ambiguous grief that often comes in motherhood including burnout and postpartum challenges.

The conversation challenges societal expectations of perpetual success and emphasizes the beauty of embracing life’s natural cycles — the highs and the lows, the moments of clarity and uncertainty. 

At the end of the episode, listeners are invited to reflect on their own “aha” moments from the conversation and take actionable steps toward embracing their own personal transformation. 

About Sarah-
Sarah St. John is a somatic coach, author, and host of the MotherGrief podcast. She’s been teaching and mentoring women using body-based healing since 2010. Sarah specializes in working with empathic & highly sensitive women who have experienced grief, trauma, & loss. She is a mom of two little girls and leading a movement to support mothers in healing their nervous systems. Sarah is trained in yoga, breathwork, meditation, somatics, hypnosis, EFT, and NLP.

Find Sarah Here:
Mother Grief Podcast
Grief Books For Motherhood
Mama Nervous System Reset

Resources shared in episode:
Wild edge of sorrow by Francis Weller


Chapter Markers:

  • 0:02- Exploring Grief Journeys and Healing
  • 11:16- Embracing Grief Through Healing Journeys
  • 16:48- Transforming Grief Into Inspiration and Growth
  • 22:59 -Navigating the Aliveness Within Grief
  • 28:58- Navigating Life's Ups and Downs
  • 34:30 -The Nature of Grief and Resilience
  • 46:33 -The Power of Expressing Grief
  • 1:02:06- Exploring Cultural Grief Rituals and Traditions
  • 1:09:49- Empowering Actions for Inspired Living




Join us next time as we continue to explore the multifaceted journey of motherhood.

Thank you for tuning in to The Motherhood Mentor. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review us.

Stay connected with us on social media and share your thoughts and experiences tagging @themotherhoodmentor

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Motherhood Mentor Podcast. I'm Becca, a somatic healing practitioner and a holistic life coach for moms, and this podcast is for you. You can expect honest conversations and incredible guests that speak to health, healing and growth in every area of our lives. This isn't just strategy for what we do. It's support for who we are. I believe we can be wildly ambitious while still holding all of our soft and hard humanity as holy. I love combining deep inner healing with strategic systems and no-nonsense talk about what this season is really like. So grab whatever weird health beverage you're currently into and let's get into it.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to today's episode of the Motherhood Mentor Podcast.

Speaker 1:

Today I have a really special guest, sarah St John, and I met her at a birth conference and I'm trying to think someone all of a sudden was like oh, have you met Sarah?

Speaker 1:

And I was like I have no idea who that is and they're like you need to meet her. And then you were on the grief panel and I just had this like when you meet someone and you just find yourself like leaning in of like, oh, I want to know her, I want to know her story. And we started talking and she shared that she was about to start a podcast on grief and I was just like I've been wanting to do a series on grief, so I'm so excited to have you here today. And we were talking before we started recording of, like I don't know if we can use the word fun, but I'm excited to talk about grief because it's such a universal experience that I don't think our culture holds or talks about very well, so I'm excited to have you here. Will you tell us a little bit about who you are and just what pieces of your grief story you would want to share?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely, I think of my grief story very chronologically and like these little checkpoints along the timeline of my life and when I zoom back into time I think I started grieving really like pretty young, as a child, and didn't have the language or the resources or the ability to like connect to my body, to know, of course, like what that was, but I really think it was present from a really young age and one of the biggest sort of like moments in my life in the context of childhood was my parents getting divorced and even just not knowing how to process that and not knowing what role I was going to play then in my family once we were living in two homes lay then in my family.

Speaker 2:

Once we were living in two homes and I think a lot of my grief began there. But again, I had no idea that's what it was as a kid. But grief doesn't always manifest as I'm really sad or I have the language for my experience. Sometimes grief expresses itself through physical symptoms, and I was diagnosed that same year with stomach migraines, which is, just as I understand it, migraines manifesting in a child, in the stomach, versus like as a headache, and then they would hit me hard and out of nowhere and they were debilitating and like nothing would make them better really, except for time. And so I think a lot of it really started at that young age and, as I mentioned, kind of this like timeline, these checkpoints of life. You know, by the time I was in high school I was a soccer player, a pretty accomplished soccer player, but I had really really bad back pain and had seen 17 doctors within the course of like two years. And so by the time I was 17, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, um, which is a very like confusing diagnosis People don't really know what to do with that and it ended up um requiring basically me to stop playing soccer, and there was grief. Then the next year my team went on to win the state championship and it just like I think of little teenage Sarah and how sad she was without the again like language for that. And so my coping mechanism was like flight. I just stayed so busy. I was in every extracurricular when I had to stop playing soccer. I got a job. I like kept myself so, so busy. I was like this, peacemaker and communicator within my family.

Speaker 2:

Um, and a lot of my grief up until then was, uh, not a death loss. It wasn't death loss. It was these more ambiguous losses, these often intangible losses, but I think they're're still important to point out in that journey of grief. And then death loss. Death losses really felt like they started to spiral into my life really fast, way too fast for my nervous system. We know the definition of trauma is like this too much, too fast, too soon, right, and my brother Jordan committed suicide in his mid-20s, when I was also in my 20s, and so that was like a huge rupture in what I knew life to be and how I saw the world, and like just an explosion of grief. And then, four years later, a week after my wedding so my wedding was the last time I saw my other brother and then a week later he also died from an accidental overdose, and so it just like life felt really fucking unfair, like I was like why, like this is not fair, what is happening?

Speaker 2:

And then COVID hit and that was just like, maybe like a month or two before COVID and right in the beginning of COVID in March 2020, I miscarried a baby and I was just like so desperate for light. I felt like I was really in the depths of grief. But I got pregnant shortly after with my first daughter and I feel like she started to to bring some of that balance between the light and the dark back into our lives. And most recently, I have been grieving my maiden identity and who I used to be before I became a mother. And then this past March, I also had another miscarriage. So I had my grief, my excuse me my due date grief roll in last week because last week was when I would have been due for that with that baby this year. So, like there's so many different flavors and colors and layers of the grief, so like there's so many different flavors and colors and layers of the grief.

Speaker 1:

I know that's a lot to sort of like spew out, but I hope that people can see that grief is not always just death loss, like there's a lot of people who don't have capacity even for the smaller emotions, if you will like, the emotions that are like energetically a little less heavy, and I think grief is so much. It's so much to hold in your own body and it's a lot to witness for other people as well, especially, you know, there's this whole like how do you help other people in grief which we'll go to later. But I just want to start with honoring that anniversary, because I think for many, many people, anniversaries are a big part of grief, like that chronological I. You know there's. I have this experience where there will be anniversaries that I don't logically think about and I'll start noticing symptoms in my body or my emotions that I don't catch up to yet.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that happened to me last week, so it was Thanksgiving and then two days later was my birthday and it felt like everything went really lovely and like we had a great holiday weekend, and not that I mean there was still like undertones of grief in that Cause there's always this missing like two seats at the table when I'm with my family but it felt like something bigger in my body.

Speaker 1:

And.

Speaker 2:

I could get like. I woke up, actually at 1am one day last week and I woke up into a panic attack and I was like why the hell is this happening? Like what? And then, yeah, yeah, I went back to bed and I thought about it the next day. I'm like why? You know, I'm always trying to find meaning behind things and this is part of like a coping strategy for me. I'm like what is the meaning of this? And I pulled up my phone and I was like oh, oh my gosh, like yes, of course my body has muscle memory of that, like cellular memory of that, and I remember earlier this year when we unexpectedly got pregnant, but like embraced it and celebrated it and looking at the app on my phone and my due date and being like, oh my gosh, this baby is going to arrive right around my birthday. And so that's kind of what sparked it. I was like, oh yeah, I was so excited about a baby coming in around my birthday and and but yeah, it was physical symptoms.

Speaker 2:

Like I didn't have that written in my calendar it my body showed me that, that that due date was like arriving, and I know so many other grieving humans who have, like you know, every September maybe is just like a heavy month for them because there's a lot of grief, due dates or anniversaries around that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, and there's the grief anniversaries themselves, and then it seems like big, important holidays and events also often mark kind of these grief anniversaries where it feels bigger and one of the things when you were sharing, I think grief might be harder for us because it's one of the emotions that we, even when we're really good at controlling our emotions because I think of myself and my clients, we've gotten really efficient at meaning, making and working through our emotions in ways that seem really healthy but I think grief is one of those emotions that feels very uncontrollable. It just can seem like it just hits you out of nowhere and it and it often hits hard or it hits. It seems like it can hit in unexpected, different tones of like the feeling itself can feel very different have. Has that been the experience for you?

Speaker 2:

yeah, absolutely, and I will say that the moments that it's hit me out of nowhere and it's felt inconvenient, so therefore I've had the capacity to then push it down and kind of focus on productivity and achievement and success and moving forward and putting one foot in front of the other that came to bite me in the ass. I've come full circle on that, where that felt like it was a pretty decent coping strategy for a while.

Speaker 2:

It was like oh okay, Like yeah, I'm pretty good at just putting that aside and focusing on what's right in front of me. And last year I got really, really sick with mold illness. It took us a long time to figure out. I was also struggling postpartum anxiety and depression, ended up being hospitalized for five days and I was having like three seizures a day. It was miserable and I in that, losing half of what we owned because of mold. Moving back across the country because of mold.

Speaker 2:

There was so much grief, but what I noticed in that is it wasn't about losing our belongings. It wasn't about like the I mean, a part of it was and a part of it was about like this future I thought was going to be a certain way, a postpartum experience I thought was going to be a certain way that ended up going a different way. But another part of it was all the layered grief, compounded grief, that I had been avoiding. It's like my body was in a pretty shut down mode because of how physically ill I was and it's like my grief saw this outlet and it just like it funneling, pouring out of me.

Speaker 2:

So I work with a somatic therapist myself and I just noticed like in all of our sessions I'm like mold was like a catalyst for actually all of this emotion within the umbrella of grief to finally be expressed and in a really big sort of like, get whipped around by the water, your hair is in your face and snot is running down your nose kind of way.

Speaker 2:

Like not a very elegant way, but I needed it, like I needed to just finally lean into that versus use that like kind of band-aid coping strategy of like. I'll pop you over here for now and I'm glad I actually feel so much lighter and so much more liberated and free now that I've had this like year of reckoning. I don't think it had to go that way, but that's just how it like panned out for me and I learned really in, especially in the past year. Like I said, I feel like I've been like a grieving human since childhood, but in this past year it really taught me how allowing myself to be in this depth of grief can actually benefit my life and add to all the things that I have put on the pedestal, like success and productivity.

Speaker 1:

Yeah it. You know the way that I describe it. Sometimes it's like when you're using a pressure cooker and an instant pot. It's like it keeps building, building, building, and then sometimes like there'll be some steam seeping out sideways and you're like, huh, what was that? That was weird. But then sometimes something comes and pushes that little release and then all of this steam just starts coming out and it's a lot really fast, and I think it really scares women because then they start saying I can't let this seep into everything, I can't let this take everything over.

Speaker 1:

I'm such a good Disney movie fanatic. Do you love Disney movies? Have you seen Frozen 2? Oh, yeah, Many times, thank goodness, because I love describing that scene of there's that water that's like magic and there's this bridge or there's that dam that's like holding it all back, and they're terrified that when the dam breaks, that water is going to come and it's going to wash away this beautiful city.

Speaker 1:

I think that's what it feels like when we've dammed up emotion, emotion, emotion, especially something as big and as deeply intense as grief. It like gets dammed up and then we're terrified that it's going to come and like wash away the city. And that's where I talk about, like how Elsa's down there and there's a boundary. There's a boundary that protects the city and it helps this water flow in a way that actually ends up being very life-giving and productive, if you will. But it's also terrifying and intense and a lot so I love. I wanted to give that language for that, because I think story is one of the powerful ways we move through grief, because it's not intellectual, it's not as logical. But one of the things you were sharing is the way that you've held grief differently and I'm just curious if you, how would you explain that to someone of like, how are you holding grief? How are you moving through it? Now that's different than before. What does that look like?

Speaker 2:

First of all, that story metaphor from Frozen 2 is spot on. I think that's really beautiful and something we can all create a visual for, especially for those people who are really visual. And then that brings me back to, like, the experience, you know, of grief, holding grief, and I believe we all do that in different ways. I'll speak from you know, my perspective, but I just want to, like, give voice to those of us who maybe hold grief more in an intellectual, like cognitive way yeah um, versus those who are more visual and um grief might show up in really visual ways for them.

Speaker 2:

Um, or maybe some of those people like myself who tend to be more kinesthetic and body-based.

Speaker 1:

Sensational yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so that felt sense experience.

Speaker 2:

And we have all of them, like every human has all of these capacities to experience grief.

Speaker 2:

But I for myself just noticed that grief is especially held in my physical body, in my felt sense experience.

Speaker 2:

Held in my physical body, in my felt sense experience.

Speaker 2:

And that goes back to the story I shared in the beginning of getting these stomach migraines, developing fibromyalgia, I have multiple autoimmune diseases and there's many root causes for these things.

Speaker 2:

But when I think back on it I'm like that's my body's way of getting my attention, it's really my way, that's my body's way of getting my attention, it's really my way, my body's way, of communicating with me when I would not listen, when I was in such a stuck flight mode and that stuck flight mode has benefited me immensely in life in certain ways and in other ways that became too much to sustain, became too much to sustain, and so I've had to relearn like how to get back down into my window of tolerance and reconnect to my body in a way that doesn't require it to throw out these like really challenging symptoms and instead can be gentler, softer, welcomed, like there can be a home for grief in my body, versus it feel like this invader that was unwelcomed, not productive, not in alignment with a life that I was moving towards or the vision I had, and so a lot of that has been like little grief, dates with myself, where I give myself the space to be with a sensation that my body's bringing to the surface and by doing that it fizzles out so much faster than if I just keep trucking along and moving forward.

Speaker 2:

So the actual somatic experience of it differs, like every single day, like sometimes it's tightness in my chest, sometimes it is like this lack of flexibility and tension in my sacrum and my pelvic area that changes, that moves through my body. But I will say I'm somebody who, of the different ways we can experience grace, grief tends to be more of a sensory experience for me yeah, and when you're moving through your life and grief kind of interrupts you.

Speaker 1:

What's your response now with that?

Speaker 2:

I feel like I've really welcomed grief in as a teacher, and I'm hesitating to say that fully because I think there's a lot of toxic dialogue around turning pain into purpose and just this dialogue of having to find the silver lining in everything and sometimes there's not a silver lining and shit is just really fucking hard and I am leaving space for that truth as well. And I am leaving space for that truth as well. But it is also true for me that grief has been a huge mover and teacher for me, and so I don't see her as a just giving grief an identity here. I don't see her as an inconvenience anymore. I see her as this thing that is like a partner with me in my like, literally the passion that I have for the work that I do. That has inspired me to leave.

Speaker 2:

You know, eight years ago I left my nonprofit job where I was working like way too much for way too little, and to start this business in the first place. After my brother, jordan, died, I just like I couldn't stay where I was, and so in many ways grief inspires me, like it's made me super passionate about mental health and my own mental health, but just like spreading word around and support around mental health, and so I think that there's so much inspiration and creativity to be birthed from grief, and sometimes it's just really hard, but I think that there's space for two truths, for a duality there.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and you mentioned that grief has taught you a lot. What do you feel like? Yeah, and you mentioned that grief has taught you a lot. What do you feel like she's taught?

Speaker 2:

you Maybe both like the painful lessons and also the ones that are like pain, where I do feel like the ocean wave like came in, sucked me out, whipped me around and tumbled me and then spit me back out to shore just like completely disheveled. And those have been some of those moments where grief comes kind of out of nowhere and I mean just like last week, right, but my body shows me and so I've had a history, a long history, with panic attacks and anxiety, I think because of this withholding of emotion. And there's been painful lessons and realizations around living outside of my window of tolerance and the physical implications that's had on my hormones, on anxiety levels, on my gut health, like so many sort of downhill things. And then there's been the softer lessons, like you were speaking into around this. One like this is it's actually harder for me to speak into the softer stuff than the harder stuff.

Speaker 2:

So, like the softer stuff feels like I have two daughters now that are one and three years old and it's, and how I parent them and how I mother them and how I imagine what my brothers would have like, the role that they would have played in my daughter's life and how I want to infuse that role, that sort of is like that missing seat, like into their life.

Speaker 2:

And in the best way I can to honor my brothers, I can to honor my brothers and looking at life is this thing, that is one big liminal space from birth to death and it's this finite time that we have. And so when I think, I think, when grief has impacted your life in such a big way, you look at that and you really take a few steps back and you go how do I want to live my life? Like what's really, really important to me, what are my values, what are my priorities, what do I want to spend my time doing? And in that way it feels harder to talk about, like bigger but also way softer of a lesson or just like a understanding no-transcript emotion for me.

Speaker 1:

But one of the things like I'll repeat to myself when I'm in those moments of like this is my aliveness, like this is me feeling how alive I am, and it's pain, like it's. It's painful, it doesn't feel comfortable, it doesn't feel good, it doesn't feel pleasant, like there's no part of me. That's like enjoying it. But what's interesting is like I'm breathing yeah, I'm breathing and I'm relaxed to it and I think of like labor, of it's.

Speaker 1:

Not that my contractions ever were like blissful or orgasmic, but there was a difference when I was breathing into the power of it and being with it, instead of resisting it or being afraid of it or trying to control it or make it more pleasant than it was. It was like this is it, and all I have to do is feel it. Like this is all I have to do for this moment and then it would subside. I'm curious. I don't want to move too quickly into how people respond to our grief, because I think that is one of the hardest parts about grief is that we prioritize how others will respond to it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Or how we respond to others in it, like we prioritize the response to grief. I noticed, like on the grief panels, I had this thought of like man, maybe we prioritize so much of like, how do we respond right, instead of just like being with it and feeling it and connecting with that person? And it's like, instead of trying to do the right thing, which I think I find myself in of like oh, what's the right way to hold this grief, what's the right way to move through this anger, instead of just being unmistakably, irrevocably, unapologetically human and just being with it in that moment? I'm curious how does that grief move you? You were saying it builds and then it recedes.

Speaker 2:

Does it move you in a certain way, like does it move you down or up, or does it slow you down or sometimes, yeah, sometimes, it slows me down, usually in a way that is not always welcome, but, yeah, that's necessary, uh, and like we, we can't be living in that high drive all the time, like our body's not meant for that, it's not capable, capable of that. At a certain point, like there will be burnout and I've brushed the edges of burnout many times and so I can speak to that experience.

Speaker 2:

but, uh, grief moves me in a way that is sometimes slow and then, speaking to you, you really eloquently spoken to how there's aliveness in grief and in some ways, like after I've gotten some of my physical health back after last year being so sick, grief is moving me in this fast, fast way, right now so much happening in my life after giving myself a messy middle, like I gave myself a really, really messy middle to be in and to not have everything figured out and not to define my worth and value and goodness around, how much I accomplished and how much I was doing every day, and these markers of success and I'm Enneagram type three, if anyone knows what that means, it's literally the achiever, like I freaking love to achieve in all different ways, and so I'm just noticing that grief is moving me in a way that is like rapid speed after I've come up for air, like after I gave myself a messy middle to be in, and in that messy middle there was actually clarity, like by not trying to like. I see it sort of as a visual like, sort of relate, like similar to our window of tolerance, where it's like you're like functioning high, high, high, functioning up here, but and it's just like you're sustaining that to a certain extent, sustain, sustain, sustain, sustain, sustain, sort of like this straight line across the, the screen, the page, and I found that by sustaining that level of high functioning, there was actually not growth, it was always just sustaining. Versus when I let myself sort of I'm going to say it's a dropdown, but I don't know that that's necessarily completely accurate language. Excuse me, like I dropped down into this messy middle and just like, okay, maybe I don't know everything. Like maybe I can let some things go, maybe I can take more pauses.

Speaker 2:

Like maybe I can shift my focus over here and playing around with creative exploration, following intuitive nudges, burning some shit down, and then, from allowing myself to do that, I feel like if we're like playing around with a graph here again, this looks visual. Then it's like this I'm. I feel like I'm in this upward trajectory now of like whoa catapult and I feel like I'm like already have matched where I used to sustain my functioning and and I'm now I have the somatic capacity to hold even more like I can break through that plateau. I felt plateaued for so long. It's like I can break through that plateau into a place that is even better, like better and better and better than what was my life, you know two years ago let's say so, yeah.

Speaker 1:

Does that?

Speaker 2:

answer your question.

Speaker 1:

So much so and like in a more deeper, cool way than I even expected, because I think women find themselves in that low space and especially if you're used to like, it's hard because, as you were talking, it was like I know women will think there's this comparison of I need to be up here, I'm just my brain was all of a sudden like crap, people can't see us. But like, when you're up high, our culture pedestalizes being up high, like, quite literally, we're like you should be good and great, like that's the positive, we're like you should be good and great, like that's the positive, good, healthy thing. And I had this thought of like oh well, that's necessary and like that's the like positive trajectory to have like ups and downs and waves. But it's just nature, it's unavoidable, like it's not only necessary, it's unavoidable, it's completely out of your control. That I mean. Even if we look at the seasonality of nature, of like right now we're in winter and you know we've had seasonally warm weather, so the grass is still green. But like, if I look outside at the trees, they look dead. Yeah, I haven't cleaned out my garden yet, so it's like my garden looks horrendous and ugly and all of it looks dead. But I also know that, like those, things will compost and they will be dead and dormant and then, all of a sudden, the sun will start coming out and spring will start coming and there'll be rain and there will be this spring season and then, after spring season, there will be summer and there will be. The produce will be even better, because now the soil is more rich because it's had things die in it and that's not like a silver lining on the clouds making things positive.

Speaker 1:

It's, it's recognizing that this is, this is life. Yeah, death is a part of it and I wonder, I wonder, if our culture could get to a better place, better not being we're always good, but we become at peace with and accepting of the reality that we're not always good, we're not always great. In fact, it's healthy. It's healthy to feel those lows and to have those messy middles and to question everything and have an existential crisis and want to burn things down. And I think for me, I'm in a season of that again in my life, and it was an unexpected season where it was like I didn't see it coming. I didn't have some like big thing happen, but it was just like fuck, this is inconvenient. I didn't want it. But you're like, here I am again in this season where I was like, okay, my only job is to not panic and spiral even lower.

Speaker 1:

Because I do think that's what happens is, we get into those dips, we get into those lows and we think I have to get myself out, and then we rush the process or we ignore the capacity building that's happening, or we spiral, spiral into it and we lose all perspective and we lose any grasping towards what's good. So I'm just curious if you've experienced that moment where, like you know, as a coach, I've had the honor of walking, walking other people through grief, and what I've watched and I've seen is there's this, there's this grasping of like I can't lose context of myself and it feels like a part of that is the journey, but it's like, was there a tether? Was there a losing? How do you stay? How do you be in the low season? Well, I guess, is what I'm trying to ask Like, what does that look like for you?

Speaker 2:

yeah, everything you were just saying reminds me of this, the saying and like nervous system work, that a healthy nervous system isn't always calm. It's flexible, yeah, and the seasons, the seasonality of your garden is like such good metaphor for that and, yeah, we can just see how nature mirrors that back to us. So, so well, comparison that happens and like okay. So there's obviously like gender and sex, but I'm talking about energetics right now between masculine and feminine, and we both embody, like all humans embody both of those things, but maybe one more than the other, and then that can change over time in life. But what I noticed in my own especially entrepreneur journey is that when I am trying to embody one state like the masculine doing, going, giving, constantly there's not that room for that natural cycle. Even women's bodies and our hormone cycle is way different than a man's hormone cycle and there's a cyclical nature to that. That is this very like inherent wisdom that I think our ancestors honored in ways that we no longer honor and I think part of that has been lost because we've lost a lot of the village and support, especially for mothers. But when I don't bring in some of the feminine energetics that are more receiving and intuitive and emotional, then it's just this recipe for burnout and resistance. And so what I was planning on saying is that when I resisted like last year, getting sick so I had already been like pregnant, postpartum I'm like, okay, I'm ready to get back into things, like let's go fresh, you know, like fresh energy, yeah, and then postpartum anxiety, depression and mold illness all hit like trifecta boom, boom, boom. And I can't. I don't even know if I have words to describe how much resistance there was to the level in which I was required to slow down. It was like every cell of my body was like no, no, no, no, like you cannot, you cannot slow down. This is not who you are.

Speaker 2:

I have identity, like parts of my identity are really defined by my ability and capacity to hold and to give, and to hold it all and do it all. And at a certain point and I can't tell you like the day on the calendar or anything, because it was sort of a gradual shedding I stopped resisting and just let myself be in that messy middle, and it was still not comfortable. And it was still not comfortable. But I know this distance made me have so much more shame, so much more guilt. I was so much harder on myself than going.

Speaker 2:

I am 37 years old and if I don't give myself pockets that in the span of life I hope that you know, I live to a hundred, we'll see but like in the pocket of pockets of life, like if I don't give myself some of these moments, then what is the rest of my life going to look like?

Speaker 2:

And I remember interviewing a woman on my podcast a few years ago and she was in her 60s and she's like I've been doing this for 30 years and I was like, oh my gosh, I've been doing this for like four years. If I'm gonna do this for 26 more years, like that's so much more time. Like I think a lot of us have scarcity around time and and so, especially as mothers, because there's like we're always needed right, like there's so many, so many roles that we're playing as mothers. But there was something about that that just made me really lean into like there's going to be time on the other side of this messy middle that is going to be used more efficiently if I just stop resisting and let myself be in it. And I'm not ever going to say that that's actually comfortable, because it's still uncomfortable, but it's more comfortable than staying in the resistance.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's like where are we in a rush to go? What are we in a rush to do or be or find? And it almost this is the meaning making side of me but it almost sounds like one of the things that grief did, is it? It questioned the ways that your identity was tied to, like those fixations, like even like the Enneagram three stuff or what you thought was important. It sounds like that shifted yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I am constantly, though, sort of yo-yoing between time scarcity and I've got this whole life ahead of me, and there's these like micro moments of there's not enough hours in the day.

Speaker 2:

I said I was going to publish my next book by now and just like all these deadlines that are imaginary in my brain and then there's the zoomed out perspective of my kids are really little and they're only going to be little for X amount of time. And there are powerful examples of women who write books in their 80s and 90s and the evolution that we go through as human beings and even just like how the work that I'll be doing, whatever that looks like for me in you know, 20 years or 30 years, it's going to evolve and change and I want it to evolve and change. I don't want to stay stagnant. I don't want to go back to that visual of, like you know, high functioning but plateau, high functioning like that. That's not my way, that's not the way I choose.

Speaker 2:

If I get a choice between that path and the path of like dip down into messy middle, like shake shit up and then bypass that plateau, I will. I will pick that one every time and, yeah, full transparency. I was like forced into that because of physical symptoms and I don't know that I would have consciously chosen that, but because there was so much resistance. But I, because I've gone through that at least one cycle of it in my life and been able to see the impact of it. It makes me want to shout, like the natural rhythms of life and and that, yeah, death and compost and rebirth are all naturally a part of it.

Speaker 1:

I think we've just lost our ways to that connection to nature and yeah, yeah yeah, I get excited when, when I have a woman come to me and she's in a messy middle, I'm like, oh, it's gonna be so good. I don't tell her that in the moment, maybe, but I can like see it and I can be like, oh, I get like so excited, especially when it's going to be so good. I don't tell her that in the moment, maybe, but I can like see it and I can be like, oh, I get like so excited, especially when it's in that like raw, cringy, I don't know who I am, I don't know what I'm doing, and it's like, oh, the not knowing I don't know if you know this yet Like I, this was what I think for her is. It's like I don't, she doesn't know it yet, but that messy middle where, like you, don't know any answers anymore, that's when you start asking the really good questions, that's when you get to the good stuff of life, and I think grief brings us there so quickly and so intensely and like a really brutal, awful way.

Speaker 1:

I wonder if it feels good to you, if we can kind of talk about grief and like a cultural, like zoomed out experience, because even one of the things you were saying, that perspective is like what I heard is like sometimes we zoom in and sometimes we zoom out and I'm like, well, that's so good, because I think that's the humanity that brings us back to present. Is this perspective of how much time we have and then how little time we have? It's that duality of that's what brings us back to here. That's what brings us back to who we are, where we are, what we're doing. It brings us back to choice and agency. So I love that like zooming in, zooming out. But I wonder if we can talk about how our culture approaches grief and even like more tangible, logical if someone's in that season where they're where you were and they're like they're resisting grief, is there a tangible place or action? Or you know, I'm trying to think of how to frame this question.

Speaker 2:

But like I'm trying to think of how to frame this question, but like what's like an in point for them or an out point for them, if that makes sense, it does. And I, in that zoomed out piece you were talking about, like the landscape of grief, yeah, yeah, modern day society it's. We're extremely grief illiterate and we don't know how to talk about grief. We've lost a lot of tradition and culture and ritual around grief that used to exist different cultures in the way that they either currently or historically have honored their loved ones and had ritual and ceremony, and so a lot of that is it's missing and somehow grief became this taboo thing that we're uncomfortable with because we can't hold people's depth and sometimes that sadness, like you spoke about, sometimes that's rage and anger and it's just a discomfort within society, at least like western culture of like individualism. And I'm going to focus on myself and what I need to survive in this body and this humanness and this culture today. And, yeah, I think there's capacity issues, I think there's literacy issues around grief and there's so much to be shifted. I think and and and like, I think we can move the needle on really positive ways, um, during, you know, I'd love to see that in my life here on earth, and there's a lot of people who are doing really cool things around that, but I'd love to see that movement become even bigger.

Speaker 2:

Even there's like statistics within children's grief, which I'm not an expert in, but I speak to because I'm passionate about it, and I think it's one in five kids will be grieving in every single classroom across the United States and yet, like, I think it's like 7% of teachers have any grief awareness, literacy, anything like we can be doing so much, even for our children to support grief literacy and support and resources, yeah, and so many different ways. And so you talked about, like the, the end point and the first thing that popped into my head, which is maybe not. I think that there's multiple end points. I'm speaking mostly from my experience, but I think that breathwork is one end point that very naturally lends itself to dropping back into your felt sense experience and getting out of your head and back into your body. And it's so simple, it's free, like, unless you want to hire a coach or practitioner or go to a class, right, but there's no additional tools that are required, it's just your body and always available.

Speaker 2:

It is, yes, and I think it's a really accessible and beautiful and effective in point to moving, moving emotion in general, because grief is not an emotion Like anxiety, is not an emotion right Like. These are like umbrella terms we have for an array of emotion that exists within the experience of anxiety or the experience of grief. It can be so many different things. There can be like a bittersweetness, there can be a happiness, there can be a gratitude, there can be anger, there can be rage, there can be guilt, there can be shame, there can be like a bittersweetness, there can be a happiness, there can be a gratitude, there can be anger, there can be rage, there can be guilt, there can be shame, there can be resentment all within this umbrella a longing, it's like.

Speaker 2:

The sensory experience is wide yes, and so the breath, a more accessible way and even like a carved out place for you to maybe start to touch some of that, and you know the subconscious mind is not going to. You spoke about like the sphere of like. What, if it like all comes out like this, you know, damn, of like emotion and like or like sadness behavior, even yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

is that going to um or like sadness?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, is that going to like paralyze me in some way? Is that going to like make me shut down? And sometimes, yes, like that's our nervous system's response to traumatic grief and loss and that's protective, that's self-protective. But what I was going to say is that our subconscious mind, like when we're not in that early grief after a traumatic loss, I would say, outside of that, like outlier, it's going to protect you from feeling too much, too fast, too soon, as much as it can, as much as it's capable of, can as much as it's capable of. And so we're so divinely intelligent and like naturally self-healing organisms, as human humans. And so the brain's not going to like spitball every ounce of sadness out at once. It's going to do so in a way that is not too. It might be big, it could still be big. It could still be heavy, it could, could still feel a little out of control for a little while.

Speaker 2:

But, yeah, I think we can trust ourselves more. I think we can trust that our body isn't going to unravel it all at once and it's going to allow that to come out in a little bit more of a trickle, and then some days it's going to be a big wave and a little bit more of a trickle, and then some days it's going to be a big wave, but even that wave you're capable of holding. You're capable of holding that. We just haven't had good examples of adults in our lives, caretakers in our lives, parents in our lives that have shown what it is to hold a big emotion in a healthy way, in an expressive way. So, yeah, I think that there's so much to be changed within our grief, literacy and landscape. And then also one in point access point is literally just through the breath and through the body.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, and that word express, I think, is really powerful here, because even when you were talking about you, know other cultures who do express grief. I even think of you, know our Western culture. We're so good at like buttoning things up, and I mean even when we think of like crying, it's like we'll see people leaking tears. But like, when was the last time someone openly, either publicly, like in a forum, or even just like in a women's circle or in a family home, yeah, broke down and like ugly cried, not in hiding, not in shame, not as in something's wrong with me, but in like this is a normal, natural, healthy response when you have lost something dear to you. Like this is exactly what and how you should be responding.

Speaker 1:

But that is so uncomfortable in our culture because that is not seen as healthy. It's seen as something we need to fix and make better. Like we are so uncomfortable with the wide range of our humanity, especially like how good it is to grieve, how holy and like sacred that is. And I even think of I think that I want to say Hakka. It's that when they do the light, it's like the yell, scream, singing kind of, and it's just like they do it as a group and there's like hand motions and there's facial expressions. Sometimes it's like grief celebration. Do you know what I'm talking about? Every time I see those, I'm like that's human. Yeah, like that's. I'm like that's human. Yeah, like that's a human response to something. And I was like our culture has nothing like that.

Speaker 2:

Like in general. So I and maybe this is true for other people when you see something like that, right, I'm moved, Like there's like chills in my body.

Speaker 2:

And that to me is like a sign, a clue that my body, that my humanness wants more of other people's humanness, and to see it expressed so raw, so beautiful is moving and touching to me. And it reminds me of something that I am craving, that I didn't consciously know I was craving, because, again, it's just absent, it's just not there. But then, like, there's other cultures who part of their expression of grief is literally wailing in public. They go outside and they cry, wail, and it's a natural response to grief. It's something that allows your body to be expressive and to move energy. Emotion is energy, right, like it moves through our body. It's a chemical response in our, in our body, and if we give ourselves the space to move that, it also gives other people permission, just like, you know youtube videos at the haka like to maybe play with the idea of letting more expression into their lives through the example of our expression. And so, yeah, I, I, I try to be an example of that, mostly to my daughters, because that's, you know, who sees me most, but publicly too, but especially to my girls and I. When I was working with a different therapist in Michigan, I told her I was like my body like clams up and like stops tears when I feel like I'm gonna cry in front of my kids, like there's this like response that happens where it's just like no, like I can't let them see me cry. And she invited me to to explore that a little bit deeper. Like you know, why can't I let them see me cry? Like you know, are they just going to see cartoon characters crying and that's going to be their example of crying as a human.

Speaker 2:

And I had this opportunity to choose how I was going to let my daughters, especially my now three-year-old. She was two at the time. My other daughter was still like under age one, so she doesn't have a memory of this. But we had to we really chose to to put my, my dog of 15 years down last summer and we had a really beautiful ceremony and, um, she had alzheimer's. It was really heartbreaking. She's 15 years old and I was just like what, how do I explain this to a two-year-old? Like, what am I going to do? How am I going to express myself?

Speaker 2:

And part of that is just like not completely controlled right, like we can't control every aspect of our like being this, but I I did make a bit of a conscious decision that when I felt the welling in my eyes till I was going to let it out and I was going to let her see me be really, really fucking sad.

Speaker 2:

And this is a year and a half ago now and she still talks about how mommy was really, really sad. Mommy cried a lot and Bella was really old and really sick and that we she misses her, that mommy misses her, that we all miss her so much. And she, like, points to her picture and you may have seen my Instagram story. She put a sticker on me a couple of days ago of a dog that looks sort of like Bella and she was. She stuck it on my leg and she was like mommy, this one's for you in case you miss Bella, this one's for you in case you miss Bella, and I I feel proud of myself. I feel proud of myself for allowing her to see grief tears and it wasn't.

Speaker 2:

It was not pretty right, like not in a way that I she had to feel like she had to take care of me because I want her to still be a child, but in a way that was like yeah, mommy was really sad and I saw mommy be really really sad, and mommy still gets sad sometimes, and just to normalize that and so I think, yeah, there's ways that I'm trying trying my best to sort of impart that example of the expression of grief into, like our next generation.

Speaker 1:

But I think so much, whatever we want for our kids, whatever we want to teach our children, it's usually something we have to learn to allow for ourselves, right, like. So normalizing grief for our children is first normalizing grief in ourselves, and I constantly remind myself like I'm my children are actively watching. Is it okay? Yeah, and I would love to be able to teach my children that someday you're going to be this adult and everything's going to be okay. But that's not actually reality, like that's never been.

Speaker 1:

My reality and I think honestly that was such a huge grief of mine when I became an adult is that everything wasn't better, everything didn't feel better just because I had what I wanted and I had this beautiful, successful, wonderful life.

Speaker 1:

And it still didn't feel better just because I had what I wanted and I had this beautiful, successful, wonderful life.

Speaker 1:

And it still didn't always feel good, I still didn't always feel okay, even when I was okay. And so I make a conscious decision that I want my children to understand that you can be okay and not feel okay, that you can feel these massive, healthy waves of grief or anger, or sadness or disappointment, and what does it look like to resource yourself and move through that in a healthy way, because I think so many of us as adults, as mothers, we watched adults in our lives repress it and we watched that grief come out sideways or we watched adults not be resourced for that sadness and grief right Like they weren't resourced for that sadness and grief right Like they weren't resourced in themselves or outside themselves so they didn't have other healthy adults or they weren't healthily holding that. And I think that's now what I think of is how can I hold this? And I will intentionally let my children see me and I do tell them and I make sure I actually can say that in integrity of I have the support I need.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

I'm okay.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for your hug. I love you. Mommy's gonna go talk to her coach. Yeah, mommy's gonna go call her aunt, your auntie Jess. Like I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go get the support and love that I need from adults in my life and you know I don't always say that directly, but they watch me do that of like I text and tell my husband when I'm having a bad day and it's like I think that's changing culture in a really big way that I think mothers underestimate.

Speaker 2:

We underestimate how much when we change things in our home and on our direct line of how we comfort the women in our lives. When someone loses or someone's lost, when we make space for that, how profound that act can be. And it is these more subtle things like you were talking about that, I believe, start to shift culture in a way that becomes tangible. And I was just thinking about how, when my daughter was, she grieves often before bed at night and one night she was really sad about Bella, about our dog, and I just pulled up my phone and I was like, hey, let's look at pictures. So you know, you can like search dog in your phone or your iPhone, right? And so I just like all these pictures of Bella from over the years popped up and we talked about it and we told stories and she was like, oh my God, she's so cute there.

Speaker 2:

You know, this is like before my daughter was even born and she got to see Bella like when she was a puppy and it just opened up dialogue and conversation. And, yeah, my daughter is like very sensitive and like very intuitive, like she's like bordering psychic child and just like super, super tapped in and so, yeah, it felt really appropriate to just be like let's open up the phone and let's have conversation and tell stories and yeah, even like the story you talked earlier about the impact of story Right, and I think that the story that we, that we tell our children and also the example that we we give our children of how we're resourced and how we grieve does really start to, over time, tangibly, tangibly shift that grief landscape and again, that's something that I'm so hungry to see and to experience in our culture.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and just that normalization of it I think that's a powerful piece of it is just normalizing it for ourselves and for others and even witnessing human emotion not as a problem that needs solving, not like, oh, I have to fix this, I need to make it go away, versus, how can I be with this is really powerful. I'm curious if there's anything else that feels like an open loop or anything else you would add before we close I.

Speaker 2:

what just came up for for me when you were speaking was the the influx of, of people pleasers in in our culture as well, and how sometimes that fawn response to please and appease is part of what blocks our grief experience and this outward focus of our energy versus a redirection of focus inward into our own experience of keep pleasing. We can start to open up a dialogue with our in a way that is really really healing, like cross-generationally yeah, yeah, that's really beautiful.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, thank you so much for having this conversation around grief. It's just my heart feels so full and I feel so much aliveness of like getting to connect with you and with your story and just hearing a new perspective. I think talking about it is really important, especially these conversations where we're not so buttoned up. Important especially these conversations where we're not so buttoned up. And when I say buttoned up, I think a lot of times when we talk about grief, we talk about it when you're in the not messy middle, or we talk about it when we talk about it in this like silver lined way that like just isn't truly authentic, like in, and there are moments and there are people where, like, that silver lining piece feels very authentic for them and I don't want to take that from them and for so many people that steals so much of the real experience of it. So I just appreciate this conversation so much.

Speaker 1:

I love your podcast, mother Grief. Have you done an episode? I'm just really curious have you done an episode talking about, like, the other cultures and how they've done grief?

Speaker 2:

no, um, but I've participated in in a training, a class around these different cultural expressions and, yeah, tradition around grief and yeah, they're all very different but they exist.

Speaker 2:

You know, like it's there and it's something that is like the public wailing, that's, you know one of them and I think that we can learn a lot, not to appropriate, but to um glean what we can from these examples of expression and then also to just track your own lineage, like that was something that we were invited to do within this class was go back and look at your own ancestry and how, whatever cultures make that up. What the more like past expressions of grief, what are, what are those rituals, what are those traditions, and are they still alive in your life and your family? And if not, like maybe you could go back to, yeah, your lineage and revive a little bit of that. Or you don't have to, you can make up your own stuff.

Speaker 1:

You can create your own ritual or ceremony.

Speaker 2:

Francis Weller oh my gosh, he's just. I hope to meet him someday. I'd love to have him on the podcast. He's written several books. One's called the Wild Edge of Sorrow. I highly recommend it.

Speaker 2:

And he really speaks to the importance of ritual and ceremony and gathering, and and that we can't heal grief in isolation Like we grief heals in community. And so he, he just his book, I feel like, is an invitation to also create your own ceremony, your own remembrances. Yeah, as simple as like lighting a candle at the table for each of the people that you've lost. You know, at Thanksgiving, something that we did in my family or looking at traditions that you have. The holidays are upon us this is on my mind but the, the traditions that maybe are not possible anymore because there's a person missing in your life, um, that has died, and so do you continue to do that tradition in a way that is, you know, edited and different because their presence isn't there? Or do you at least be thinking about, in the way that we honor our loved ones, the way that we literally have funeral people in colorado doing, um, some more natural, environmentally, environmentally friendly ways of um, burying bodies, even like it's? To me it's fascinating, um, but I think that there's just so much to explore, so I would invite people, whatever they're feeling curious about, whether it is doing some research or playing with, experimenting with new rituals or traditions and, by the way, it's never too late, like I, I, with my first miscarriage, got pregnant two months later, and so it just felt like there was no space to grief, and so I've noticed that, after I've had my two daughters, now again like grief, I'm revisiting that grief that never went away. It's just that my focus was kind of elsewhere. So it's never too late to have a ceremony or to express grief, even if it's been 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, that's okay. So, yeah, I just invite people to take what stuck with them, brought up a somatic sensation in their body today, and maybe continue to explore that a little bit as a starting place.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and even just talking about it or writing about it, I think that's always a good place to start If you don't know where else to start, just being able to be with it. I know, you know there's like the. What's coming up for me is like those more ambiguous griefs. You know, I think of you know, a lot of women who are I think of a lot of women who are their loved ones, aren't gone, but the relationship has changed, or there's no relationship anymore, or there's those types of grief or the loss of what motherhood used to be or what they thought it would be, of what motherhood used to be or what they thought it would be.

Speaker 1:

And those griefs like those deserve just as much ritual and ceremony and space and time because they, I think we tend to repress them, because they don't seem as intense as losing someone you love yeah, losing someone you love or those like more traumatic losses.

Speaker 1:

And you know, sometimes those little marginal things, we tend to brush them off, but it's like those marginal things make a difference. You know, it's the straw that breaks the camel's back, but it's also the straw that, like, brings you back to life or gives you a moment of, like, humanity or joy, or peace, or just presence, even if it's uncomfortable, presence like it can be really beautiful to make a little bit of time and space for that, even amidst all of the crazy hustle, bustle, joy that allegedly you're supposed to be feeling, and it's okay if you're not yeah, yeah, yeah, I always tell people, because some people don't think they have grief and this is a big, big thing I'm trying to change within the narrative and grief is a universal experience, like we are all going to experience grief, even if you don't think you have grief, and so something I invite people to sit with or maybe reflect or journal on, like you were talking about, maybe you just start writing about.

Speaker 2:

it is like what lives in that gap between how you thought things were going to be or go and how things have turned out to be, and especially in our motherhood journey, like I thought I was going to be this kind of mom. I thought my kid was going to be this certain way. I thought I was going to have this many kids. I thought that pregnancy or breastfeeding were going to go this way and they went this way. And within those gaps, there is so much grief that we hold as mothers, which is why I love this show about mother grief. Right, it's not just death losses, it's not just fertility challenges. It's also these intangible, ambiguous, disenfranchised pieces of grief.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, thank you for sharing that. Thank you for this conversation. Thank you so much for being on this podcast.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate you so much.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I just want to, as we end, I just want to invite you know you listeners to reach out and, you know, share this episode with someone or let us know what resonated with you, what stuck out, what like, what your experience has been. Maybe you have a ceremony or a ritual. So, yeah, thank you so much. Thanks for joining me on today's episode of the Motherhood Mentor Podcast. Make sure you have subscribed below so that you see all of the upcoming podcasts that are coming soon.

Speaker 1:

I hope you take today's episode and you take one aha moment, one small, tangible piece of work that you can bring into your life, to get your hands a little dirty, to get your skin in the game. Don't forget to take up audacious space in your life. If this podcast moved you, if it inspired you, if it encouraged you, please do me a favor and leave a review. Send an episode to a friend. This helps the show gain more traction. It helps us to support more moms, more women, and that's what we're doing here. So I hope you have an awesome day, Take really good care of yourself and I'll see you next time.

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