What Grief Does to Your Brain — and the 4 Foundations That Keep You From Getting Stuck

Grief can hijack your mind so completely you reach for a loaf of bread instead of your wallet and then wonder if you’re losing it. This shocking experience sent me searching what was happening to my brain. I’m Reverend Joya Sosnowski, and I’m naming what most people never get taught: grief is the process of losing someone or something foundational, and it can also be the process of rewiring your identity as your reality changes.

We talk about what happens in the brain during grief, including why your sense of self can feel unplugged and why grief brain fog is so common. From there, I share the first four foundations of Grieving Awake: present moment awareness, radical acceptance, self-kindness, and non-resistance. You’ll hear how emotions move like waves, why the body’s chemistry supports release through tears, and how “pain multiplied by resistance creates suffering” becomes a real-life map for surviving the hardest moments.

I also introduce what I call the second grief: the argument with the loss, the endless what-ifs and self-blame that deepen the wound. To help you come back into your body right away, I guide a simple 5-4-3-2-1 grounding practice and a heart-centered self-compassion mantra you can repeat when your inner critic gets loud. We close with a short practice and an invitation to keep walking this path with support.

If this resonates, subscribe so you don’t miss the next practice, share this with someone who needs a steadier breath today, and leave a review so more grieving hearts can find Grieving Awake.

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Transcript

What Grieving Awake Means

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Grieving awake with joy.

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I am Reverend Joya Sisnowski, and this show is Grieving Awake, a show about not only grief, but who you become through grief. Today, on this first episode, I want to talk about grieving awake, what it means, and the first four foundations that you can use, not just when you're in grief, but in your life in general, to consciously participate daily in who you become. Because life itself is a process of constant change and hopefully constant evolution. We are meant to not be locked and stuck into one hard, fast, fixed identity. We are meant to grow and to expand continually into the fullest expression of who we came here

Defining Grief And Identity Loss

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to be. So the first thing that I want to do is define grief correctly. And I say that grief is the process that you go through when you lose someone or something that was foundational and meaningful to your life. There are all kinds of ways that we go through loss as individuals, and we don't necessarily call it grief. And then we think there's something wrong with us for how we're handling it because we haven't had the education about how to walk through grief. The second part of grief that nobody tells you is that it's also the process of rewiring your identity and who you become, because you also lose your identity and who you were. There are so many ways that we come face to face with ourselves. When this happens, it does two things that I discovered right away. And I'm going to share with you how I discovered these things. Because of my background in mindfulness, my decades-long meditation practice, my somatic facilitator training, my training as

The Bread Story And Brain Fog

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a sound healer, I had all of these tools that had me very present and very aware. Within the first week of my son's passing, I had to move my office because I had signed a new lease and I had to move out of one place and into the other. And of course, I had to stop and get gas. I arrived at the gas station. I looked down to grab my wallet and was utterly shocked to discover that instead of grabbing my purse off of the kitchen counter, I had grabbed a loaf of bread. And I sat there looking at it and just wondered instantly what is happening to my brain? Because I'm not the kind of person who does something like that. And it really kind of scared me. I went back home and I immediately began to research what happens to the brain in grief. And what I discovered completely shocked me. And I was like, how do people not know about this? This is so important to know. The first thing that grief does is that it unplugs the part of your brain called the default mode network, which is the self-referential part of your brain that tells you who you are in relationship to the world around you. We are the individual creators of our own version of reality. And when our version of reality gets disrupted, that version of reality gets altered. It's completely altered. It doesn't make any more sense. And we don't make sense within that reality. The second thing that I discovered is that grief actually mirrors on brain scans a brain on psychedelics. So when I realized

Grief Rewiring And The Default Mode

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those two things, there's more, but those are the most two important things because when I realized those two things, the first thing I said was, oh my God, I'm being rewired. I am going to be rewired. And I didn't want to be rewired to get stuck in the worst day of my life. Neurons that fire together wire together. It's our repeated thoughts, our repeated actions, our repeated emotional experiences that begin to wire our brain to become the new story, the new reality that we are living within. You might be somebody yourself who is wired and stuck, if you will, in the worst day of your life, holding on to grudges for your ex that you divorced 10 years ago and now he's moved on and he's happy and you're still miserable and you're still angry. I've met women like that. I've met women who are still heavily grieving someone that they lost decades later. And now I understand

Four Foundations For Grieving Awake

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why. So the first four foundations of grieving awake are present moment awareness, radical acceptance, self-kindness, and non-resistance. And I'm gonna share this path with you now in something I've created here. All right. So the first path, the first step on my path is present moment awareness. This is the practice of bringing your attention fully to what's happening right now without being lost in the thoughts of the story about it, not thinking about the past, not thinking about the future. It's a state of conscious presence in which you observe your experience with openness, curiosity, and acceptance, and you allow life to be met directly as it unfolds, which means in grief, without the story, I would have moments where I could function. And then I there would be moments where I could feel a wave of emotion coming toward me. And I've heard it described like this in my, I've taken somatic grief training now, and other people have described it the exact same way. It feels like a wave of energy is building and you can feel it coming. And sometimes it's a freaking tsunami and you know you need to get ready, and other times it's a trickle and you cry and it recedes back out. Everything in nature has a tempo. Everything in nature is rhythmic. And there's also a science of crying and tears and grieving, and that when you cry from sadness, from grief, the neurochemistry in your tears is actually different than when you cry because you're happy or you cry over a movie or something like that. Your body is actually producing hormones and chemicals to help you feel better, to get you through your grieving experience. And this is why present moment awareness is such a key and to stay in the present moment without the story. The next one is radical acceptance. This is a concept that I learned in mindfulness training from Tara Brock, which she learned from Shin Zhen Young. And radical acceptance is the practice of fully acknowledging reality as it is without arguing with it, resisting it, or wishing it was different than it was. It does not mean you're okay with what happened. It doesn't mean you like it. It doesn't mean you're giving up. It means that you recognize that this moment is already here as it is. We stop fighting with realities, we free up the energy that's trapped in resistance and can begin responding to life from a place of presence, clarity, and choice. And all of this correlates at the end, which I will tell you, it creates something that, if you don't follow these things, it creates what I call the second grief. And I'll get into that at the end of these four concepts. The next one is self-kindness, which is meta practice. And self-kindness is the practice of turning toward yourself with compassion instead of judgment. So when I was judging myself for how I was grieving, and I realized I was judging myself, and I realized how painful that was for myself, I decided not to do it. And I decided to treat myself with compassion. I know how I feel. I love myself, I respect myself. And this is really freaking hard without the self-judgment. It's the decision to become an ally to your own heart rather than another source of criticism. When we're suffering, self-kindness reminds us that we don't need to earn love, prove our worth, or carry our pain alone. We can meet ourselves exactly where we are and offer the understanding and the kindness and the compassion that we so freely often give to others. It's becoming your own inner best friend. And then non-resistance. Pain multiplied by resistance creates suffering. This is a formula that I learned from Tara Brock. And let's say that again. You're in pain, you resist the pain, you create suffering. If you're in pain and you just be with the pain, it releases this clinching tightness that you experience inside of your body. And in grief, this takes a specific shape. It's the wish, the deep wish that anything was different than it actually was. This is so easy to fall in, as you can see just when I'm reading this, right? That I know for me, it was instantly like, why did I let him go? Why didn't I make him fly? Why did I knew something was going to happen? Why did I let him go? This should have happened. That could have happened. Why didn't this happen? Why didn't that happen? And when I found myself in that experience, which I didn't even know I was having, this came on really unconsciously within that first couple of nights after my son passed. I woke up and I felt like there was an elephant sitting on my chest. I couldn't breathe from I hadn't really even slept. I maybe had slept two hours and 48 hours. And my I woke up my husband and I said, I think I'm having a heart attack. You need to take me to the hospital. But then I had a thought and I said, No, no,

Non-Resistance And The Second Grief

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let me call my friend Andrea. She put me on her emergency contact list. And my friend Andrea is a somatic trauma therapist that I happened to meet while I was waiting in line to hug Ama, the hugging saint from India, when she was in Orange County the summer before. And so I called Andrea and she helped me come back into the present, come back into my breath. I was hyperventilating, release the trauma from my body. It took about 45 minutes to go through this with her. And as I arrived back in the present, as I arrived back in my body, I heard it. There was this voice in my head, and it was saying exactly these things. Why did you let him go? You shouldn't have let him go. What kind of mother are you? I was completely being awful to myself. And I just started sobbing. And I said, Andrea, I have the most horrible voice. It's blaming me. And she said, You stand up and you stomp your foot and you tell that voice it's a liar. And so I did. I stood up, I got my saltiest sailor voice, and I said, You're a liar. I yelled it so loud. And that voice thankfully went away. This is where we come into the second grief, because the first grief is the loss, but the second grief is the argument with the loss. And when you get into the argument with the loss, you start grieving a grief that there's nothing that can be done about it. It's you're grieving something that's not even real. And so it's one thing to grieve the loss, to feel how you feel about the loss and to love yourself through that loss. And it's another thing to grieve what should have been done, what could have been done, why didn't this happen? Why didn't that happen? To blame somebody else, to blame yourself, all of those things create the second grief. And non-resistance is the practice of laying that argument down. Not because the loss is acceptable. Again, you it's not, and you're still grieving and it's still hard, but because the fight with it deepens the wound. So the first grief is the loss, and the second grief is the argument with the loss. And these are the first four foundations in grieving awake, and they're so key, they're so important.

Grounding Practices You Can Use Now

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Present moment awareness. How can you practice present moment awareness? Present moment awareness is anytime you just bring yourself right here, right now. Can you stop what you're doing if you're multitasking while you're listening to this and just focus on my voice? Focus on how you're feeling inside of yourself. And a very simple thing to do when you're in the present moment and you're having present moment awareness and it starts to feel very overwhelming is a 5-4-3-2-1 practice that drops you right back here into your body in the present moment. And you simply stop and you notice five things with your eyes, five things you can see. So quickly look around your room or wherever you are, do this with me. Just notice five things, label them without putting in a story about them, just label them what they are. Notice five things, and then notice four things you can hear. Just tune in and listen to the sounds beyond my voice. And then three things you can feel. Can you feel your clothes against your body, the weight of your seat, your shoes on your feet, your earrings hanging from your ears, the warmth of your own hands? Then name two things you can smell. Do you notice any smells? Can you smell your own body? Can you smell if you're wearing perfume or deodorant or even your hair? And then one thing you can taste. What's the one taste you notice in your mouth? And then you take a deep breath. And notice how you feel after that simple practice. It brings you back here into the present moment. Radical acceptance is fully acknowledging reality as it is without arguing it with it. And for me, I would say uh with my grieving process, if another voice started to come in or anything that would come in that was wishing something was different than it actually was, I would stop myself and I would say, This is here, this is happening. This sadness I feel is enough. It's enough to bear. I will not tell myself a story that isn't true. And just breathe with it and notice what's here and don't fight reality. And you can see that radical acceptance and non-resistance actually go hand in hand. Self-kindness, may I be happy? May I love myself, may I be healthy, may I be free. And you can say that mantra over and over to yourself as many times as you need to, depending on your own inner self-talk. And then the non-resistance is to not resist. And that includes don't resist your resistance, by the way. I've heard people say they're in resistance, but they're resisting their resistance. I don't want to be in resistance. Okay, stop it, stop resisting your resistance and just accept and be in what is. Be with what is. Why do you want to do these things? It's so you don't

Spiritual Awakening After Loss

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get stuck in the second grieve, but also you begin the process of grieving awake because where grieving awake takes you is you are in a non-ordinary state of being. Your identity is being rewired. We as human beings are wired for divine transmission. We are multidimensional beings of light. Death is not the end. My son was very adamant about that. That's one of the first things he said to me. Death is not the end. It's walking through a door, mom. And you arrive on the other side with the exact consciousness that you leave here with. We are here to grow and expand our consciousness. We're here to grow and expand our capacities for love in the hardest place to do it. This is a place of soul mastery to learn to love, which is why Yeshua said, love yourself as you love your neighbor. Love God, love yourself, love your neighbor. And I always say, you know, love your neighbor as you love yourself implies that you first love yourself. And we need to learn to love ourselves and to learn that we are souls inhabiting skin. We are not just human beings put here to suffer. When Weston first came through to me, it was less than 24 hours. Actually, it was right about the 24-hour mark that he had passed. I still hadn't slept. And I decided to get up out of the room my husband and I were in. And I went and sat in front of my altar with candles lit. I was closing my eyes, I was sobbing, I was praying, I was crying out to God. And then all of a sudden, I was taken up and out of my body. And it was like I was viewing the earth from outer space, and I could see these white lights shooting up from all over the earth. And I somehow knew that those were prayers that were going up into the ethers for Weston, for me, and for my family. And then I felt his presence come into me. And it was this feeling of being so honored and so proud, and just this feeling of reverence and awe and humility. He said, Wow, momulus, I had no idea what you were up to. And then I was back in my body at my altar, and for just a brief moment, it was like time stood still. And I knew from that moment, that was the moment I knew he was okay, that there is life beyond this one. And he, in fact, told me to stop calling this life. He said, This is your incarnation. This is this is unincarnation, this is not your life. Your life is eternal. And we will get into lessons that my son taught me on this show. He has taught me so many things. He's the most profound teacher I've ever had. And I'm here to share these messages with you and also about how much the creator absolutely loves each and every soul on this planet without exception. And I have stories I will share about forgiveness and go through each one of these processes my son taught me.

Book, Practices, And Living Library

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My book comes out August 14th. This book is really profound. It's got practices. I've also put beautiful art in there from my art journal pages and journaling questions because journaling is such a key way to practice after death communications. And I'm going to have a whole episode on that and what automatic writing actually is, and how you might even already be receiving messages or be a channel and you don't even know it, because I certainly didn't. The practices also I'm creating a living library that you'll be able to log in when you buy the book and have access to every practice in this book recorded so that you can practice it. And I'm creating that to be beautiful and interactive with sound practices and somatic practices so that you're not just taking in information, you're actually doing the work moment by moment, day by day, to actively participate in who you become through grief. And so I'm here to share all of these messages with you because we are living in a time where an awakening is clearly happening on our planet. And we came here for this. We came here to be here for this time. And I never in a billion years expected that my work would be through grief. But grief is a powerful door, it's a powerful initiator that dismantles the constructs of the wounded, conditioned self and allows you to get deep into the truth of your true nature of who you are. And it's a remembering, it's a reuniting with the truth of who you are, a self that you were when you were a baby, until all of that conditioning started telling you that it's not safe to be who you are in the world. But now, as an adult, it is safe to be who you are in the world. And I'm going to talk about boundaries and all kinds of stuff on this show. Let's ring a little bell and then we'll dive into a short practice because we will always end

Closing Guided Practice And Invitation

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with a practice to bring this and land this in the body. All right, beautiful souls. I invite you to close your eyes if it's safe to do so. And take a deep breath. Exhale with a human.

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Let's do that again.

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Inhale.

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And on the next breath, we're going to take two breaths in, and we're going to let out an audible sound. So you take two breaths in. And I invite you to place your hands over your heart and say these words aloud.

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May I be happy. May I love myself. May I be well, healthy, and may I be free to see the truth of reality as it really is.

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Let's take one more deep breath together. Just listen to the sound of this bowl. And I invite you to find me at grievingawake.com to get on the wait list notification for when the book comes out, when the course comes out, and to get access to these beautiful practices. Sending you much love. Thanks for listening.