30. Grief Is Love: How to Find Healing Through Connection with Amar Atma Singh Khalsa

In this deeply moving episode of "Nourish with Dr. Anikó," grief specialist and board-certified chaplain Amar Atma Singh Khalsa joins Dr. Anikó to explore the transformative power of grief. Together, they redefine loss as a path to healing, self-awareness, and deeper connection.

About AmarAtma Singh Khalsa:
Amar Atma Singh Khalsa is the founder of the Institute for Compassionate Grieving, a sought-after speaker, retreat leader, and author of the upcoming book "The Tender Art of Grieving." With over 15 years of experience, Amar blends mind-body medicine, spiritual wisdom, and somatic healing to support individuals through the emotional, physical, and spiritual dimensions of grief.

Episode Highlights:

• Why grief is not just an emotion, but a universal response that can open us to greater love and connection
• The dangers of emotional suppression and how it fragments our sense of self and community
• How reframing grief as an expression of love can transform our healing journey
• The role of embodiment and somatic practices in processing grief and fostering emotional safety
• Practical tools for making space for grief, including rituals, movement, and daily check-ins
• The impact of collective and personal grief in today’s world, and how compassionate grieving can be a radical act of social justice
• Amar’s upcoming book, retreats, and resources for those seeking support

Key Takeaways:

• Grief is a story of love, not something to be fixed or overcome.
• Suppression and shame are the real barriers to healing, not grief itself.
• Embodied practices and emotional literacy are essential for integrating grief and living a more connected, meaningful life.
• Collective grieving and compassionate community can help heal both individuals and society.

Connect with Amar Atma Khalsa:

• Website: compassionategrieving.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amaratmacoaching/
• Upcoming Book: The Tender Art of Grieving
• Retreats: Annual grief retreat at Kripalu, workshops, and online programs

Connect with Dr. Anikó:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.aniko/

Website: https://www.draniko.com/

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Disclaimer:
The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The views expressed are those of the host and guests and do not substitute for professional medical advice. Always seek the guidance of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding your health or a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking it because of something you heard on this podcast.

Transcript

Dr. Anikó: [00:00:00] I've been really excited and happy, truly about our conversation.

I've just been looking forward to it so much. So let's just jump right in. hello, hello y'all, and welcome to Nourish with Dr. Aniko. Today we have a really special guest that we get to talk to, who is Amar Atma Khalsa. He's a grief specialist, board certified chaplain and founder of the Institute for Compassionate Grieving Redefining Loss as a path to healing and transformation.

With over 15 years of [00:01:00] experience, he blends mind, body medicine, spiritual wisdom, and somatic healing to support individuals through griefs, emotional, physical, and spiritual dimensions. He's a sought after speaker and retreat leader, and he helps others embrace grief with compassion, resilience, and deeper self-awareness.

Welcome, welcome. 

Amar Atma Khalsa: Woo, so grateful to be here. Aniko. Thank you for the invitation, and I appreciate it. You know, like being excited to talk about grief can feel very unusual and very weird in that way. And so I wanna definitely center this in the, just a compassionate tone, a tender tone of love and kindness for anybody who is listening to this who might be actively grieving, facing really life-changing loss at this particular moment.

And when we speak about the excitement of this conversation, it's sometimes revolves around the realm of not the excitement of grief itself, but perhaps an openness that comes in with a different narrative or a [00:02:00] reframing or a different style of a conversation that maybe just something to get over or something purely just to manage, but something that's like very real and very raw, and creating a permission and an aliveness that comes through that.

Dr. Anikó: Yeah, I'm really glad that you said that. And also the way that we crossed paths was through your wife Siri Chan who was a guest on Nourished before we talked about the messy midlife. Yeah. And also I attended one of the lectures that you gave, um, at Stanford for the integrative peds group there. And it was really moving to me to talk about grief in such a deep way and such a universal way.

And so one of the things that you said in that presentation and that we also talked about in our conversation before this recording was that a conversation about grief can never be just educational or instructional. Because it is so deep and [00:03:00] so personal. And just by opening the door to that, our hearts, if we're allowing them to really get touched in a way that is often scary for a lot of us.

Yeah, because grief is sort of the ultimate scary thing, right? Yeah. It's the scariest thing in the world to think that we're gonna lose what means the most to us. So I wanted to start off maybe with you speaking a little bit to that. 

Amar Atma Khalsa: I think that's really powerful and I appreciate you sharing. I might start with a personal story, if that's okay.

Please, please. So I've had a lot of layers of grief that have happened in my adult life, but grief really started for me at a very young age, and some of my first memories were dreams of my father dying. I was About three years old and. I had recurring dreams of my father being shot or killed, leaving this world.

And something [00:04:00] about that was very powerful for me as a young brain, A developing brain that was already experiencing what it meant, meant to feel longing and lost, but without really a cognitive or neuro capacity to really understand that nor the language or a culture who could handle it. And so I started really experiencing life in a deeply existential way at a very young age, almost like formidably.

And in some ways I can't really think of my life outside of grief and loss. And my dad continues continue to live through that experience. But this anticipation of loss is really important to recognize 'cause. The fear of grief often is associated not just with a loss that we might have had now, or what might be of the past, but what might be coming forth, and how are we equipped to hold the experience of the loving tenderness that grief offers without the sting of fear that collapses us.

Dr. Anikó: Yeah. Okay. 

Amar Atma Khalsa: [00:05:00] And I had to really work with my life in a powerful way to befriend something that was so scary and made me tremble, that made me freeze, that didn't allow me to have attachments effectively at a young age that all of a sudden grief started to share with me. I'm not here to scare you. That's not my point.

And I said, well, then why are you here? What are you doing? Why? Why are you so devastating? I says, I'm a story of love. And I want you to love deeper. I want you to love with more enriching this in your life. And we hold back from love. We guard against love. And it's like, are you here to help us grief?

' cause you're scaring the living bejesus out of me. And it says, how is it that we have a neurobiology evolutionary to build attachment, to [00:06:00] maintain connection with people wired for connection? And yet there's loss that exists in our life. And permanence is creating an opportunity for us to live, to arrive, to be with and to courageously love, knowing well there will be loss.

And that story started to really formulate my adolescence, my young adulthood. Into the work that I've evolved into. 

Dr. Anikó: Yeah. It sounds like grief called you into the work that you do as an adult in this world. And I really, that reframing of grief as love, I think is really powerful and probably feels a little bit alien to a lot of people because grief is something that, like you were explaining when we first encounter it, it's usually something really, really scary.

Yeah. And a lot of us spend our entire lives running from it. [00:07:00] Yeah. And what do we lose when we run from grief? Yeah. What do we lose when we suppress that? 

Amar Atma Khalsa: So I'm writing a book right now and it's called The Tender Art of Grieving. Okay. And in part what I'm trying to do in this book is to talk about.

What happens when we run away from grief? What is the emotional, psychological, physiological realm that exists with when we run away from grief? What I was doing for the first 20 years of my life, what led me towards a deep level of overwhelming pain, dark nights of the soul. And I think it's important to recognize, and I think it's a really great question, how is grief and fear so deeply intertwined?

And what can we do about that? How can we separate fear from grief and seek grief as it is and what it is and what it's saying to us? [00:08:00] What is life saying to us with the story of grief as a story of love? And how do I hold with tenderness? The fear that I feel, the unknown, the uncertainty. The abyss, the freeze.

Yeah, the fight, the flight, the sympathetic, the survival mechanisms, the adrenaline, the cortisol, the flooding, the amygdala, firing the threat. How can I turn the relationship of grieving being something that triggers me or that I'm threatened by That leads to a survival mechanism into a whole new narrative that I can work with, which really becomes what I have been writing about, what I, what I teach about, and how to disentangle emotion phobia from grief and develop a skillset of emotional safety with grief.

Dr. Anikó: Yeah. It actually reminds me as you're talking a lot about how we talk about how you can't just shut off. The negative emotions. You know, when people are like, I [00:09:00] don't, I don't do sadness, I don't do this, I don't do scared. Yeah. And in shutting that off, you shut off the joy and you shut off the delight.

And so in suppressing grief, you're kind of taking your, not kind of, you are taking yourself out of the life experience because in so many ways, and I, and I would love to talk more too about how grief is bigger than what we imagine in terms of, it's not just losing a loved one. It happens in a million little ways every day.

And how when we try to shut ourselves off to the pain of losing connection, we miss out on connection. 

Amar Atma Khalsa: Suppression creates separation. Okay? Suppression is gonna create an invisible boundary that's gonna exist within the psyche or within our own heart. It's gonna create a fragmentation and those invisible barriers and boundaries that exist within suppression as a way to cope with.

Really starts to create a division within our own reality, which I believe, which is why I do grief [00:10:00] work, is because I believe that those divisions we create in ourselves are in part, part of the divisions that exist within our world. It's almost like the suppression leads to a, our own form of dehumanizing.

Dr. Anikó: Which 

Amar Atma Khalsa: perpetuates a dehumanization that exists within our world. There's an invitation that grief is allowing us to come into a fullness within our heart that is not fragmented, an integrated wholeness. And in part, that story has to recognize that it, it didn't begin with grief. It begins with a judgment about emotions themselves.

When we start to label emotions in good and bad or light and dark or positive and negative, these binaries that are created are inherent stories. That build meaning and constructs and defensiveness to them. When I have an emotion that I want or emotion that it feels good, if emotion that is light and positive, why wouldn't I want that?

I'd want joy and love and peace and security [00:11:00] and aliveness and courage and confidence. I want all of that. But then I don't want fear and sadness, and I don't want insecurity and loneliness. And so all of a sudden this binary of good and bad, happy and sad, positive light, light and dark realities becomes what I desire versus what I don't desire.

And when I don't desire or come into familiarity with, then it becomes an other and we become into other parts of our own self that othering, okay, of what seemed to be as negative emotions. Cannot be contained by grief. So suppression is our mode of operation, right? We have suppression that says, I'm having big emotions, big feelings, can't deal with it.

I'm gonna avoid, I'm gonna minimize. I'm gonna judge. I'm gonna suppress, I'm going to buffer, 

Dr. Anikó: right? 

Amar Atma Khalsa: I'm gonna compare it. I'm gonna compete it. I'm gonna bypass it. Yeah, I'm gonna rationalize [00:12:00] over it. I'm gonna intellectualize over it. There's many ways in which suppression exists. And all these tactics are very well known in our culture.

So now up creating divisions and fragmentations within myself, okay? When grief hits you are automatically drawn into your heart. You can't negotiate it. And the walls that we build up to protect or to create containers or categories of good emotions and bad emotions, they can't withstand the realm of grief.

 it is not that we are breaking down, we are breaking through constructs that we have within our culture and our society around the binary of how we judge and shame emotions in that way, that breaking through, breaking open has to be recognized as a deeply physiological experience, a deeply embodied experience.

When we have emotions that have been put aside and othered and become so unfamiliar in our life, grief is [00:13:00] saying, I'm gonna bring all of them to the forefront because they are all normal and natural. They're not good and bad emotions. They're just emotions. They're messengers.

They're trying to tell you what matters to you in your life. They're trying to share with you what you hold value and what you love. Their indications when harm is done or morality is there, or where an injustice occurs. And so when we suppress a whole bevy of emotions that we deem to be dark or evil or negative, we lose a relationship to ourselves in the most human of ways, which then guards us from the true love, the true peace, the true joy, the true excitement that we were looking for in our lives.

All of a sudden, we become numb. And that numbing, that disassociation, that freeze is a problem, is a, is a very, to me, a very societal. Issue that we are [00:14:00] facing. And I'll finish with this 'cause I know this is long-winded. In this context,

is that for many of us, it's the life shattering loss, the big loss that comes in, that breaks us, that breaks us open into that construct. But the challenge is that it's not that simple. The challenge is, is because suppression has been a big part of our life and the divisions we create within ourselves have been entrenched, and we have othered emotions and parts of ourselves as if we've amputated a part of our own being.

We've handicapped ourself. And in that reality, what have we suppressed? Those are the other types of losses that are part of our life. Those are the breakups, the moves, the loss of friendships. What else have we lost? The disappointment of a dream that didn't come to pass a divorce, the death without a body.

These have to do with job changes, financial changes, [00:15:00] illnesses, autoimmune diseases. This has to do with fertility. This has to do with learning about spiritual leaders who have maybe not lived to their ethics and morality. These are associated around changes that are existing within our world that are slightly apocalyptic from climate change to instabilities to wars and genocides.

This has to do with abstract forms of grief that have to do with like losses of trust, losses of identity. You see, there are many types of losses that go unnamed through suppression, and the challenges is that grief is remarkably opportunistic. Because once you feel that breakthrough experience, it's not just one loss that we'll be facing.

What comes with that loss, that life changing loss, that death that you might be experiencing or feeling is gonna come with many losses. Also, all of the ones that have been on process all at the same time. So grief is always multiple things come together. And the reason why grief is so untenable is in some part because of [00:16:00] the lifetime of suppression that we've done to the unnamed grief that have been part of our life.

And when a major loss breaks us through and opens our heart and finally has an opportunity, grief is saying, yeah, the acknowledge, let this breathe. I'm trying to bring life into you. I'm not trying to kill you, suppress you, destroy you, break you down. I'm trying to bring life. You, I'm trying to bring love expression through you.

And all of a sudden as I started to understand this in my life, which has dedicated my life to this work, and I said, oh, I see you grief. I see what you're trying to do. And then I'm sad for you grief, because we are all hurting so deeply and we don't know why. And the thing at which is trying to birth us to deeper love is that which we are seeking to suppress.

And that's so painful. We are ourselves dividing our own being, but the very source that which is seeking to give us life, giving nature, 

Dr. Anikó: that hurts me [00:17:00] deeply. Yeah, and it's like the original othering, right? You're othering your own self, and if you've othered yourself and suppressed all this grief that when grief comes for you.

Or enters your life comes for you as a little ominous. But when we experience grief, because we all do, we isolate. Like we're not gonna turn to somebody else if we are feeling this thing that's so scary that we have turned away from it within ourselves, and yet it is collectively that we grieve, you know?

Yeah. Both because of the universality of grief. Like nobody gets out of grief. And it's an interesting, and we talked about this in our call, it's sort of, especially in the US it feels like we live in a grief denial society where we're like, not me. Don't wanna think about it. And yet it's happening all the time.

And when it happens to you in a body [00:18:00] and spirit where you've othered it in a culture that is actively suppressing it. It's the loneliness in grief when it shouldn't be lonely actually, right? It's an expression of love. It's one of the most collective experiences you could imagine that breaks you open, and yet you're left there alone without even being able to face it in yourself or be held by anybody else.

And often we don't know how to hold others in grief because we don't even know how to hold ourselves in grief. And so what can we do? Like what are the mindset changes and the, and we talked about grief is love, but how do we start to lean into it as an opportunity to connect to our own humanity? And we talked in our call too, about how, and I didn't know this going into medicine, but one of the things that I love deeply and find so sacred about medicine is that [00:19:00] you are.

Sitting with the person in front of you, or in pediatrics, the family in front of you's, true bear, humanity and emotion and rawness. And it is an invitation for you as a practitioner to also bring your full and true humanity. And that feels so sacred, especially in a world where there's so much image and there's so much what we're projecting to really be in a space where it's just humanity.

Yeah. And so, yeah. Yeah. What, how do we do this? How do we start to do this? 

Amar Atma Khalsa: Well, I think it's really important. Well, we've sort of dedicated this time and this podcast too, and conversation is to name the problem. The problem itself is not with grief. And grief is not a problem that needs to be solved.

It's not something that needs to be fixed. Even in my bio, and I'm gonna have to change it because even the narrative and how the bio came across as this sort of transformation, we don't really wanna transform from grief. We wanna arrive [00:20:00] into grief with a sort of safety, with a sort of love. So it's not something that we want to overcome.

We don't feel like grief is, we're gonna get to the other side of grief. It's not that we're gonna get over it or let it go. I think that these are myths that we have. So in some ways, our first part of our conversation is naming that the problem is suppression itself. The problem is emotional literacy and the judgments that are created around good emotions and bad emotions, and bringing awareness to what we might do to create this dehumanization within ourselves, or what it is doing in terms of othering parts of ourselves, which are reflections on how we other other people.

In some ways, the reason why othering takes place is because we're afraid. So as we arrive into grief, let's recognize that we're arriving to something that in and of itself is not. Seeking to be scary. It's not seeking to destroy you. It's not seeking to overcome you, to make you drown or get lost. It is seeking to awaken.

It's like a [00:21:00] portal. It's like a threshold. It's an invitation. Invitation to wear our own hearts, our own humanity. And when we see and reframe grief as a story of love, that is trying to open us into a deeper realm of love, love, and sort of a cosmic force. Not a sort of arrows kind of a love, but maybe an agape, Greek oriented universal love.

So if grief is a story of love, a universal experience, a story of love, then we must meet love in its same universal force and say that I am awakening into perhaps through an annihilation, through perhaps an unbecoming, through perhaps a breaking down to breakthrough. It's going to shed layers. Of how I think about emotions themselves or how I think about grief or how I think about the world.

And it's saying, okay, I'm gonna arrive into grief. You're not the enemy. You are the means in which the birthing is [00:22:00] happening, and we're gonna arrive into this space here. And so when we frame it that way as a construct of a mindset, that then changes, then our modalities and our practice and our methods about how we beat grief.

Okay? Now, grief is not now something to get over, not something to move on from, something to let go. All of a sudden, letting go means something different than too, okay? It's not some sort of finish line, it's not some sort of chopping block of detachment, and it doesn't mean forgetting. Okay? So letting go is now changed.

The whole narrative around grief has changed the language. We use changes around all of this. So then how do, then we meet grief in the love that it's delivering or the love that it's inviting for us. To me, that's how we use the body as a fulcrum for that experience. The question is how do we now let grief breathe?

How do we create a spaciousness for grief to be present? If grief is a story of love, then letting go is about letting flow. [00:23:00] Okay. Now, grief is now not this heavy, dense object that's hard and cold that brings this hole within our heart that creates this hollow, vacuous, empty space. No, it's something that's needing to fall.

Yeah. It's something that the coldness of our life that we have created as a separation in the form of suppression that is asking for an invitation to say, let's work to melt this, and how do we melt? We bring tenderness, we bring warm, we bring coziness. Yeah, we bring community into this. So when we bring that warmth into our grieving experience, we created an invitation, an allowance, and a permission to grieve.

Now the story is totally different. Now, my fatigue, my brain fog is not put into suppressing grief or trying to manage my life with it. It's creating daily relationships of like, oh, hey grief. How you doing today? I'm [00:24:00] sad. I'm missing my mom. What's sad about that? She'd be a person I talk to every day.

Are you talking to her today? Even though she's gone? I haven't really thought about that. Well, let's maybe write some love notes to mom. Let's get a daily ritual where griefs presence can be there. Hey, grief, how you doing? You know, I'm feeling really overwhelmed. I have all these things I have to do in my life, and I just don't have the energy for it.

Have you tended to grief yet today? What do you mean tend to grief? Well, have you given, given at some permission to express, have you given it an opportunity? Have you let some tears shed? No, I thought I was supposed to suppress my tears. I thought that made me weak or that there was some sort of failure.

Oh, didn't you know that there's chemicals inside your tears, your emotional tears that are related to stress hormones and that it's your body's way of seeking homeostasis when you let tears unfold? Oh, I didn't know that of by creating tears, I'm creating a release. Yeah, you're letting yourself tend to grief in that way.

Oh, have you created permission for yourself to grieve? [00:25:00] Have you created an allowance for yourself to love? Grief is a story of love. Love is looking for a place to go. It's looking for somewhere to land. What is the container for that landing? What is the container for its energy to move through? That then becomes the practice of grieving.

It is grieving itself. It is creating a space for the emotions to arise. And just like a flower, emotions are not trying to consume you and overwhelm you or make you say that you're impulsive or that you're manipulative. No, emotions are like flowers. They're seeking to blossom and bloom. And what happens when a flower blossoms and blooms, it wilts aways and dies.

Let the emotions rise. Let them come through our body. Let them come through your heart and your spirit. Give it a spaciousness, not a reaction, not a reactivity and not a resistance, but a spaciousness. Let it breathe. And in that breathing and that loving, that love knows where to go. And that is how [00:26:00] we begin to grieve with a tenderness and a compassion.

How we start to thaw what seemed to be cold that was dehumanized from our suppression. Huh? And you're not loving this. That's how we move. 

Dr. Anikó: I love all of the examples that you gave because they're so like real and practical. I think we've all had that feeling of, I just wanna put it away. I don't wanna think about it.

You're just trying to not have it be in your life, even when it is like everything in your life because you are suppressing it. It kind of reminds me of how with kids, especially sometimes if they don't want to eat something, if it tastes gross to them, they just hold it in their mouth for so long without swallowing it.

And it's ironic because you're like, if it tastes so bad, you're, you're essentially keeping it for longer than it needs to be. There's, and it feels like we do that with these emotions that we don't want. That we find unpleasant, especially [00:27:00] with grief. It's like we block its passage we block its flow and integration.

And I remember in the presentation you gave one of the things and it was so simple, but it was so powerful. And I shared it with a friend who didn't have a loss in the sort of traditional sense of the loss. But there was a change and she was sort of not allowing herself to feel how much she was grieving this change.

It didn't feel like big enough, you know, to qualify sort of, and I just repeated one of the things that you said, which was just give grief space. Give it space. Let it be. Let it be there for as long as it needs to be. Yeah. Because so often our reaction to grief is to like, put it away, be normal, make a joke.

Which is a way to, you know, release tension. And in our culture, paradoxically, we often see that as good grieving, you know, the person [00:28:00] who's easy to be around 'cause they're almost acting like nothing happened. And yet that is sort of the, the crunch that keeps grief from integrating into your life in a way that it deepens your joy and your delight and your love because you know that grief comes when we love.

But it doesn't keep you from loving because it's just a part of the deal. And it's no, it actually that open, it actually allows us to, 

Amar Atma Khalsa: to love deeper actually. Yeah. 

Dr. Anikó: So tell us more about Loving More Deeply and also the, you were talking about the embodiedness of Grief. Are there. I know you do somatic work as well.

Are there physical things that we can do? 'cause I feel like all those scenarios that you shared of, have you made space, have you talked to your mom? Have you written down your grief? Have you danced your grief? I'm a dancer, so I've definitely [00:29:00] found myself in moments where I'm overwhelmed and my body just moves.

And I'm so grateful for that because, and one of the things you said before too, is that grief is not intellectual. You're not gonna think your way through it. It's something we feel our way through. So

Amar Atma Khalsa: when we bury emotions, we're gonna bury them alive and they're gonna be landmines in our life. The thing is, is that you don't drown in your emotions. You drown in your thoughts about them. Okay? So when we do suppress grief, we do bury those emotions and they live in our body. The body then becomes a container, a vessel in which all those feelings unprocessed will be there.

They'll represent the manifest themselves and immune issues. They'll lead to, increased chronic pain. This is well documented, increased chronic pain. They'll exacerbate autoimmune diseases. They'll create arthritis. They'll have immune functions in regards to increased inflammation in your gut.

They'll have issues of hypertension and development of diabetes. The relationship [00:30:00] of, of not being able to grieve through the form of suppression will create a whole cascade of physiological responses. And so when we separate ourselves from grief and have a relationship of suppression from our emotions, not only are we in a dehumanized experience or a relationship of fragmentations within our own heart, our own psyche, but we also become disembodied.

Okay? Embodiment is the way in which we allow love to flow. It is through our body in which it becomes easier. If you feel really small to the tidal wave of grief, embodiment is the way in which we start to feel bigger in relationship to it. So in this way, we're changing our relationship and we're making ourselves bigger to the emotions themselves, so that they can be processed with greater ease and with greater love, with greater tenderness.

It's the story of emotional safety. So embodiment is the way that that happens. You don't think our way through the grief, we have to feel our way through it. It's an emotional response, not an intellectual one. So the issue is, is not [00:31:00] actually solely about letting grief flow. It's actually about how we quiet the mind so that the body and the emotions that have the most intimate relationship can do its stance.

It's the way in which we quiet the intellect, quiet the rationalization, quiet, the needs of suppression, quiet, the shame and the judgment. The minimization, the invalidation, the comparison, the competition, all of that has to be quieted so as to allow grief to breathe. So this becomes the how of grieving.

Okay? How do we do this? We framed it very beautifully. Story of love. Love looking for a place to go. How do we do it? Embodiment. Why? Because when the body is rested, the mind is quiet, the heart can open. When the body is rested, the mind becomes quiet. The heart can be open, state, informed story. It's not the other way around, okay?

It's not. The other way around. State is informing the story. The activation of the autonomic system doesn't allow for the [00:32:00] mind to be quiet. The mind, the thoughts themselves are the lower part of the river To clean, the river of the mind has to go closer to the source. The mind is not there. We still live in a realm of mind body dualism, that it makes the mind in hierarchy to the rest of the body.

It's the vice versa. It's the body that helps to hold the mind, the thoughts, the intellect, and the intellect has to be quieted so that the body can do grieving with the emotions. Okay, so in this book, the Tender Art of Grieving that I'm just finishing incorporates 75 exercises, embodied exercises about how to do grief in varying different levels and realms.

It's very, it's it in itself sort of like a resource or reference guide, and I take each emotion, anger, sadness numbness, fear, anxiety. I even bring in joy, and there's also regret [00:33:00] and shame and guilt. And I give five to six exercises per chapter on each of those emotions about how do we work with that realm.

So as to have an embodied relationship, to change our relationship, to actually grow and be a bigger container so that we can hold the movement of grief. So if grief is an emotional spot, an intellectual one, let's recognize that emotion is an energy seeking motion, okay? It's wanting to rise up and then to dissipate.

And how do we allow that to happen? With is through the body, is through an embodied relationship. The reason why the resistance comes is because we have a precognitive triggered experience at a sympathetic autonomic level that's leading us to say, I'm afraid of this emotion. I have so much unfamiliarity with them.

I have othered them my whole life, and now I'm being broken through. And grief is just ravaging me through and I cannot handle this. This is so overwhelming. How do I hold this as a container? I gotta let my [00:34:00] body be a partner within my grief. I gotta give it its rest and its allowance to feel. I have to learn how to feel again.

Feeling better comes from learning how to feel, and that is an embodied experience. And so through that we use exercises like shaking and just discharging the energy and just moving our body. We're using chi massage. I'm trained in Chinese medicine and acupuncture, so I use Chinese medical theory and Vedic theory as long with modern trauma research to build in new practices that could be helpful.

So we're not actually learning how to grieve, but we're remembering how to grieve. So we use chi massage and we tap on our chest to move energy from its stagnated space where we're using breathing exercises like, deep breath and arms coming up, and then rolling it down as a discharge practice.

We're doing exercises to help us ground and feel ourself into the earth and to allow us [00:35:00] subtleness and a steadiness because when the body is rested. A parasympathetic state in a ventral vagal state, and we can allow the body to rest into it. The mind will then be quiet. State will inform story. An activated state will be an activated mind, A rested state will have a rested mind.

Then we can have the heart to open in the grieving experience. Okay? So we need body based embodiment practices so that we can be real with how emotions are moving through our body. 'cause it's energy and emotion. When they rise and we're not familiar with it, we will stop it. It is overwhelming. I can't handle this.

We don't have great windows of tolerance. We don't have distress tolerance. We are low intolerance of our emotional capacity. We are babies in this way and we need to expand that. We need to grow with that. Embodiment is what helps us grow in our relationship. So when you feel this [00:36:00] small, really tiny to grief feeling so large, of course that is so overwhelming.

That makes sense. Embodiment is a way where we start to feel really large and the grief waves feel smaller and I can work with it. That's how we do this. 

Dr. Anikó: That's beautiful. And I'm so excited for your book. That sounds amazing. And it reminds me, I mean, as you're talking, I'm just, so much is flowing. Like a few things.

When you said the state determines the story, it reminds me, I just had this experience where there was like a group text and there were certain people that were reading the text and saying, that sounded really snarky. And other people were like, no, that's totally fine. And the way that we can read the same thing, experience the same things in life.

And if we're in a certain state of body. Yes, we will experience it totally differently. And the other thing that I was thinking about was the way that you were talking about just being embodied and meeting the grief and not having a story about it and not [00:37:00] having despair around it. Reminds me of childbirth and how when you get in your head about giving birth and you have this story, it's gonna be so hard.

I can't handle this, I can't do this. It's never gonna end. Versus when you can just really feel and be in your body and describe the experience, not the emotional experience of the experience. 

Amar Atma Khalsa: The reactive emotional experience. Yes. Right? Yes. The thoughts about the emotions. 

Dr. Anikó: Yes, yes. Exactly. Exactly. The, I can't handle this.

It becomes a totally different and much more, not just manageable, but present, alive game and. And the other thing I was thinking about too was how when we can't approach grief, and it doesn't even have to be grief, right? It could be sadness, it could whatever the thing is, and there's many things that we other within ourselves, but grief is a great example because [00:38:00] grief is that proof of our connection and our love.

And then when we don't need it and we don't work with it and flow with it and let it, let us breathe, it disconnects us from further connection in our lives because we can't lean into anybody who is grieving when we're like, oh no, I don't want, not that. And there's 1,000,001 ways we do this beyond grief, but grief is sort of the, it feels.

So quintessential and representative of all the ways that we kind of avoid one another in a world where the deepest meaning and purpose is connection. Yeah. 

Amar Atma Khalsa: I gotta, I gotta speak to that because this is so big. 

Dr. Anikó: Yeah. 

Amar Atma Khalsa: And I appreciate, I appreciate your framing on this because it's not actually grief that does, this grief has been made out to the enemy in that context.

And so I am like an advocate for grief. I'm like a PSA for grief all over the place. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. We're thinking about it [00:39:00] all wrong. And not all wrong, and I can't say anything in absolutes, but there's so much narratives and myth and misconceptions that there has to be a bit of an unlearning to this.

It's not grief itself that does this. It's shame. Mm. Shame is what isolates grief. When we say, I gotta grieve. I gotta grieve alone. I gotta do this all by myself. I gotta burden this cross. I gotta burden this weight. That's a shame story. 

Dr. Anikó: Mm-hmm. 

Amar Atma Khalsa: Okay. When we say that, they gotta say I have to be strong, right?

Like, I can't let myself show emotions. I gotta be strong for myself. I gotta, I gotta hold in that strength. And if I feel emotions, I just feel like I'm gonna go, I'm gonna fall apart. I'm gonna be weak. I'm gonna be a puddle in the ground. That's a shame story when it says that I have to be strong for others.

I gotta take care of them. I gotta, I gotta do this for them. I gotta, I gotta be right within myself so that I can be right for them. That's a story of shame. When it says that I may not be doing my grief wrong, why is it that I'm still feeling this way after all these years? You know, my dad died, my [00:40:00] brother died.

I lost my best friend, and it's been five years, 10 years that I still think about them, and their birthdays come and I still feel sad. The death anniversary comes, and I feel like I'm still reimagining the experience about what had happened at the hospital, holding their hand when I saw them on the ground, when I walked into the room.

All those things that come in. This says, what's wrong with me? Why am I not over this? That's a story of shame, not grief. So what is it that's actually preventing us from grieving is the key to the grieving process? 

Is knowing what those barriers we create. Suppression is the large container, but what perpetuates the story of suppression, stigma and taboo shame, guilt, and judgment.

These are the four barriers, defense mechanisms that perpetuate a story of suppression that makes us negate that relationship. Okay. And so when we allow grief to breathe and we do it in an embodied way, just like you mentioned in that birthing process, we gotta bring it back to the body each time. So grief expresses [00:41:00] itself before the thoughts even know what it is.

The lump in the throat, the heaviness in the chest, the butterflies and the stomach, the tension and the shoulders. This is griefs expression in the body before the mind even understands its expression. The tears that start to come as, I don't even know that I was sad. I didn't even know that I was feeling that.

The nervousness and the anxiety with the shaking of your arms or the sweatiness of your palms emotions are expressing themselves. And we gotta be clear. This grief itself is not an emotion, but a response that comes with many emotions at the same time. Okay, so I should have said this at the beginning.

Grief is an not an emotion. It's a response that comes with many emotions at the same time. So in this narrative and in this story of, in this expression of our grief and how we're holding all of this energy in a big way, bringing it back to the body is gonna bring it back into an experience that's, oh, what is the sensation of grief?

How is grief expressing itself before my mind even knows? And can I become [00:42:00] largely aware of the embodied sensation of grief expression and be present to that? And then watch how the narrative of my mind and my story and the memories that start to come in. Not to say that those are wrong, but to watch them like a wave.

Not buy into it, not draw into it, but let it be like a wave, like a ocean that moves with tides that are flowing. And if I could feel, oh, the lump in my throat, yes, I'm feeling that and I breathe into it and I say, you're allowed, you're absolutely allowed. Lump in the throat. You're tight and you feel tension.

But I know that I swallow back my emotions. I know that I'm suppressing, I could feel that I'm wanting to say something, but this lump is there. What needs to be expressed. I know grief, you're expressing yourself through my chest. And I feel so heavy and so hot. But you're allowed, I give you space to just be and to be present.

I'm not gonna fight you. I'm not gonna resist you. I'm gonna be present to your sensation. [00:43:00] I'm gonna let you flower, let you blossom, and I breathe into you, and I build safety inside the sensation. And I know that you're just trying to move. I can name you, I can see you and you're there. And I just create a spaciousness for your allowance.

I know you're not my enemy and I know that you're not just trying to make me weak or make me feel like a failure. You're giving me a space for love to move and I can be okay with that. Neuroscience says that it takes 90 seconds for that to happen. 90 seconds. If we don't resist it, 

Dr. Anikó: wow. It can happen that 

Amar Atma Khalsa: quickly, 

Dr. Anikó: which I think is so 90 seconds.

That I think is such a powerful piece of knowledge because of obviously so often what keeps us from allowing ourselves to give grief space is the fear that we will drown in it. That it will never go away. And if 90 seconds, you know, and that, and again, we're not trying to make grief go away, but that, that deep [00:44:00] physiological again, and when, you know, physiological means that it's normal.

But this grief is not pathological. It's not a problem that, you know, medicine needs to solve and we need to get the cure for grief or something. Grief is a normal life experience and you will not drown in it, especially when you allow it to blossom and come through you. And one of the things that I just found so powerful, well, a few things because I am noticing in life right now and in my life right now, you were talking about the lump in your throat.

I find myself crying so often. Something beautiful, something sad, something heartbreaking. And it reminds me a lot of your, the concept that you have of the grief backpack and how we're not just carrying our own personal grief, there's collective grief that we're carrying right now. There's a lot of [00:45:00] collective grief that we're carrying and yeah.

Another thing that you said was that it's sort of everywhere, but no one's calling it grief. We're all like, oh, I'm really teary, or I'm really, you know, and we're not naming it as the grief of losing, losing our imagining of what the world would be or, or whatever it is that we're both personally and collectively grieving.

And also this idea that you don't have to like have processed everything in your life to be able to meet grief. You just have to like name it and see it and see what your stuff is essentially, because not seeing your stuff both keeps you from allowing grief to sort of take you on that journey of opening.

And it also keeps us from meeting one another in grief because we either push away what's scary to us or what we have shame around, or whatever it is. Or we like bleed into the other [00:46:00] person and we bring our grief into their grief. That's which is just the totally, you can't really be there for the person if you're bleeding into what they're experiencing.

Amar Atma Khalsa: That's exactly right. There's a paradox on that. When you suppress grief, you don't allow it to breathe, and I would say you suppress emotions and you don't allow your emotions to breathe. You inherently are creating a division within yourself, but that division, that fragmentation is against the natural order of it.

Okay? The body is seeking homeostasis. The body is seeking harmony. The body is seeking a sense of balance. There's a negative feedback and a ular system that is perpetuating a relationship to come into harmonization. And so when we are fighting with our grief through suppression, when we are fighting with our emotions through suppression.

What ends up taking place is that we are then fighting our own nature, our own natural harmonization. So the body is then gonna say, okay, we have something that's suppressed and we're gonna have to [00:47:00] process this. We're gonna have to digest this. Okay, now what's gonna be stored in our muscles and our tissue.

It's gonna be stored in atherosclerosis and plaques that are gonna be developed 'cause of immune functions and inflammation. That's gonna be increased. We're gonna have to, you know, we have a little bit of an injury in our knee and all of a sudden it's arthritic. It's gonna be exacerbated with pain and the body's gonna speak, it's gonna speak loudly.

It's gonna say, pay attention. Hey y'all. But then what do we do? We suppress it, suppress pain. We suppress the sensation of our body thinking that discomfort is a problem that needs to be fixed when it's the body, our bestest of friends, our most loyal friend is there. And so when we start to people to turn towards grief and we developed a little bit of grief literacy.

In the sense of naming losses that have been unnamed. The body's like, thank you. Oh, thank you. The body, which is the container for all of this, this best and loyal friend who is the main [00:48:00] processor and digestor of grief. Your mind, you think your mind is doing it. You think your emotions, you're doing it.

It's not the body that is doing a lot of this work. And if we allow the body to do it, the body's like, thank you. This feels so good. What then comes with that is a deeper sense of an aliveness, a joy, a, an uncovering of something that's very powerful within our life. And part of that experience is recognizing that we do all carry an invisible grief backpack of unnamed losses that exist within our life.

I have them, I process through them and we will work on them, and that's something that we do, but we don't solve them. We give acknowledge that we witness them. We say, I see you. You would do to a friend. I'm here to listen. Tell me your story and what happens when a friend feels that they feel so loved, they feel seen, and that alleviates a loneliness.

Loneliness is a shame story based in [00:49:00] suppression. Okay? Loneliness is a shame story based in suppression. It is not allowing that invitation and our world and its collective grief is almost like grief saying, Hey, y'all, we're in this together. This is a big deal. Pay attention. We have so much more that connects us than divides us.

Find ways of connection with each other and let that mirror back about how you can be in connection with yourself. Find the connection within yourself to the fragmented parts of your own being by suppression, by shame, by judgment, and come into a loving tenderness of those pieces, we will then help make this world a better place.

Truly, I believe that by engaging with our grief is a radical social justice act. It is a way in which we can feel empowered to make a difference within our world by changing the narrative and the frequency, the literal resonance of our being [00:50:00] in a way that can help us create change. So collective and personal intertwined in a beautiful webbing of us to allow it to breathe, feel the shared humanity.

Watch how that shame comes in, that isolates, it breeds itself in secrecy. It breeds itself in isolation. It breeds itself in self blame, self hate. It'll tell the stories that there's something wrong with you fundamentally, and that you'll never be good enough. It'll tell the stories that says, no, it's not worth it to put that energy in.

You're not even worth it. You are undeserving of feeling joy and love. Then grief becomes weaponized in an oppressive agent to make you feel horrible, to make you feel suppressed, to then push yourself down, put you in states of perpetual survivability. This is the problem. This is a big deal, and I think grief is one of the fulcrums that creates the movement of this.

It's a very loving and tender act that has great capacity in our time right now. 

Dr. Anikó: It's beautiful and [00:51:00] just resonates so deeply as like, yep. And also that grief. It's complexity, right? Because you were talking about it's a collective emotional experience, as in it's a collection of emotions.

Yes. That often isolates us, but what it really is is a calling towards one another. Right? Yeah. When we can give grief space, it allows us to allow our bodies to seek what they need, which is the comfort and presence and warmth and connection with others. And when we have made friends with that, then we can be that for others.

Because when people bring their stories of grief or pain and we find ourselves recoiling or whatever that is, that is our sign that we have not done that work within ourselves. And as you said, the recoiling from the experience of others, particularly the painful or oppressive experience of others.

Creates a completely different world than when [00:52:00] we are able to see ourselves in one another. Yeah. And connect through that experience as well and support one another through that experience. Because one of the reasons we don't support is because it's too scary and painful to look at. Yeah. 

Amar Atma Khalsa: Yeah. That's our, that's that is our quest of this lifetime at this time, in my opinion, I study Chinese medicine, so I'm looking for root causes of disease.

I'm looking at the disease of our culture. I'm looking at the disease of our pathologies within our world. Why is it that we have so many preventable diseases within our time that are causing so much strife? How much money is going into healthcare? How much I think about this from a sociological or societal level, and I keep coming back Grief, grief, emotional literacy come into a harmony and a loving nature with great tenderness to this universal experience. It'll be a bridge of compassionate care, empathetic connection of our shared humanity. And through that, not only we do start to feel better, we're starting to learn to [00:53:00] feel and by feeling without the mind, without the thoughts, without the intellect, without the rationalization, overcoming that and coming into emotional safety and to being big in that context, utilizing embodied techniques to say, I feel you.

I come into this relationship. Ah. Then something starts to happen. Something starts to change, and this changes into another part of our conversation that I don't think we'll have time for today, but maybe a potential another time becomes grieving as a lifestyle. The practice of grieving, not when you get over it, but how we incorporate this as a practice within our life.

So for me, and just as a point here, I believe grief to be a liberatory force, and I believe, believe grief to be a lifestyle that informs how I bring in aliveness and how I move within my life. Once you feel better because you've learned to feel and you have an embodied relationship, there's another level of that invitation and that invitation, I have stepped into that realm.

I live my life [00:54:00] by that realm. Grief informs my decision of movement. It informs my ethic, my morality, and my service to the world. Because loss is not gonna stop. Loss will continue to happen. Grief will continue to be there. It's not something we get over. It's not something we overcome. Being in relationship then with grief becomes informed by grief, story of love, which means that I'm now awakening myself to what I call the unscripted life.

When we start to ask ourselves what matters most, listen for that answer from within our own heart and live. By that force, that power that's there is a very, very different frequency that grief is also creating as an invitation. So the story of grief continues if you want to journey down in that way.

For me, that's where it goes. It continues to go. 

Dr. Anikó: That's so beautiful. And it, it goes back to what you were saying about grief. Like even though grief isn't an emotion per se, but how all the emotions and grief are calling your [00:55:00] attention to something. Yes. An injustice, a loss and grief is this powerful spotlight on what means the most to you and living with it integrated and as part sort of top of mind feels like the wrong way to say it, because it's not mine, it's body.

But keeping it centered, I guess is the word I'm looking for, allows you to then. Live the life that means the most to you. 

Amar Atma Khalsa: There it is. That's what it is. It's a, there's a cost of, there's a, exactly. It's a compass. There's a cost of living and then there's a cost of not living. And I spent enough time holding the hands of the dying to know there are regrets of their life.

And so there's a grief informed, and then there's a death conscious. There are two aspects, two sides of a similar coin. Okay. It's not love and fear. It's not grief and love. It's actually, it's actually the grief informed, the grief literate and the death conscious. And when we start to have grief share with [00:56:00] us this story of love, we are then changed by that in a way that allows for what matters most to become prominent within our life.

And when we live from a relationship to that energy, that force that now awakens that change is very sacred, is very, very special. Could we do without the grief to make that happen? Absolutely. I would like to unveil that reality. Without there having to be a major loss, somehow there is a mechanism of life.

That means I'm wired for connection, I'm wired for attachment, but yet there's gonna be grief. What else? What else is the force of grief that creates it? What is that rabbit hole that takes us through this inner compass, this deep unveiling, this deep unclaiming, this deep reclaiming. And in that the birthing process of life starts to happen and almost a way in which

what my actions, my behaviors, my posture, my [00:57:00] work in the world is informed from this level. This is a very different world if many of us are living this way. This is a very different world if people are living from this place. When people are informed from this level and then act from this level and continue to listen and step into and center themselves and ground themselves into the force of what matters most and live by that courageously 'cause.

It's gonna be things that might not seem like it makes sense. It might be uncon contextual, you listening to your heart from a deeply informed place, and many of us live from that place. I tell you, this world is a very, very different place. Something very special can start to unfold, and I believe grief is inviting us to that special reality.

Dr. Anikó: I agree. I agree. And we are definitely going to have more conversations around this because it is such a rich space to discuss and to embody and to be in. Thank you so much for being here. How can people get in [00:58:00] touch with you if they'd like to work with you? I know you do retreats, you have this wonderful book coming out.

When's the book coming out? 

Amar Atma Khalsa: So the book will be coming out in September, 2020 sixth. So for those who are listening currently, it'll be in a, next year for those who might be listening to this, whenever that is September 20, 26. Shambala is the publisher. They're very sweet, they're very loving, and I love working with them.

Uh, do retreats. Many of them are shared through Kripalu, which is in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. I lead an annual grief retreat in October during the fall season. It's a six day grief retreat. It's called Compassionate Grieving, which is the name of my institute, the Institute for Compassionate Grieving compassionate grieving.com.

And so we have an online institute where we'll be growing more programs and more education on this form of grieving. If this is something of interest to you, I call it the compassionate grieving model. And so I lead retreats there. The book will come out. I have that retreat. I have, yeah, the institute is there.

So I have workshops, I have eBooks, I [00:59:00] have infographics. So we're building more, more, more things that could be effective from that way. And then I do, I will be leading a retreat in the spring of 2026 during the Equinox with two other people who are other grief specialists. And it's called tending and mending to grief.

And we're trying to bring a lot of people for that so that we could do, where it's gonna be somatics sound and story as a way to tend and mend grief. And so we'll bring three specialists of each of us bringing that. I'll bring the somatic portion. We'll have a person who specific specialize in sound, and then another specializes in story.

And we're gonna be having this collaborative grieving experience as a community force that by allowing ourselves to breathe with our grief, then we can start to create a transformative energy in that way. So that'll be happening. You can find me on social media. 

Dr. Anikó: Yeah. Instagram is at Omar Atma Coaching, and we'll have the link with the podcast description, and I just love that you and other grief specialists are tending to this [01:00:00] deep human. Experience that we don't tend to very much and we spend a lot of time avoiding. And, uh, it is such a universal experience.

So thank you for that work. And you are, you didn't mention this, but you're also at Harvard right now? 

Amar Atma Khalsa: I'm at Harvard right now, yes. Yeah. I'm in a one year fellowship specializing in leadership from a theological lens that I'm gonna be bringing to this grief work. It's potentially gonna be the second book that I'm gonna be coming out with 

Dr. Anikó: The 

Amar Atma Khalsa: Tender Art of Grieving is the first book, second book potentially becoming him.

But I'm trying to learn about how to be a leader in this work, to be totally humble about it. I don't, this is very intimidating work and it's a very big world and I have a lot of big energy. Taking from Hamilton, this is not just a moment, it's a movement. And so there's a potential grief revolution that I'm trying to instill in the world to help us awaken up to this energy.

And I needed Harvard to help me hold all of these thoughts and pieces. So if we're watching this like by video, and I'm not sure if people are gonna catch this by video, but I'm right in front of the divinity school. I'm the [01:01:00] divinity school is behind me, and you can see that the leaves are changing and people are walking around and the room that I happen to be in as light has turned off.

But I hope that's all right for the video 

Dr. Anikó: Oh, it does. And it's beautiful. I can see that beautiful tree behind you. Yeah. That has all red leaves. Thank you so much for being on with me today and sharing this really deep, complex, deeply human conversation. And we will definitely have part two, part three to expand on this conversation more deeply.

Thank you for the work that you do in the world, and I agree. With my whole heart and self that doing this kind of work changes us and it changes the world. So thank you. Yes. 

Amar Atma Khalsa: Yeah. Anika, thank you so much. I'm so grateful. To all the listeners out there, be tender with yourself, hold with compassion, be loving.

Dr. Anikó: Give space for your grief to breathe. It is not seeking to destroy you, It is seeking to awaken us [01:02:00] Thank you. And thanks for listening, y'all. I'll see you next time.