00:00 Why grief needs more than support
00:45 Welcome and episode overview
01:40 Why grief feels chaotic and exhausting
03:10 What people mean when they say “just get through it”
05:05 Why a system helps when emotions surge
07:20 The difference between stages and systems
09:10 How structure reduces suffering
11:05 Mindfulness as a practical skill, not a mindset
13:40 Choice, agency, and the nervous system
16:15 What the Mindfulness & Grief System offers
18:50 Who this system is for
21:30 What to expect in the 8 episode series
23:10 Closing reflections

Episode 58
Grief Step by Step:
How the Mindfulness & Grief System
Can Help After Loss 

Heather Stang: So today I’d like to first just welcome my co-host, Amanda Palermo. We decided that it would be really interesting to share with you what the Mindfulness & Grief System is, because this is what all my books are based on. It’s what all of my work with clients and groups and everything else is based on.

And yet, I think with the exception of maybe one or two episodes many years ago, I’ve never really talked about it on the Mindfulness & Grief Podcast. Amanda recently became certified in the first cohort of the Mindfulness & Grief Coach Certification program, so I thought it would be really interesting to get both of our views on why we have a system for grief in the first place.

Why are we going to take something that is so unique and individual and nonlinear and somewhat unpredictable, and we know it’s not something that has a completion, we don’t finish it, and give a structure to work through it?

So from your personal perspective, how did having that support you?

Amanda Palermo: I was just thinking about this, actually, because this system that you use in the grief support group, those steps, the system, it reminds me a lot, because I’m a yoga teacher and I’ve been practicing yoga for a long time. I’ve been teaching yoga for a long time. I lead a lot of trainings and have led some trainings in the past, and I always look at everything through a yogic lens.

And so to me, it reminds me a lot of the eight limbs of yoga, which, for people who are listening, they may not know what the eight limbs are, but they might learn more about what the eight limbs are as we go through the system in later episodes.

But it reminds me a lot of that. The eight limbs are there to support yoga students to have a very fulfilling life. And I think, in regard to grieving and grief, having the system is there to support you during a really difficult time in your life.

The eight limbs of yoga are there to support you through all the different stages of your life, and they’re there as a guide and to help you make skillful choices. So I think, in regard to grief, the system is there to guide and support you through this part of your life that’s very difficult and to help you make skillful choices when you’re grieving.

Heather Stang: To that end, I love that you are putting those two systems side by side, because certainly the Mindfulness & Grief System is influenced by Patanjali’s eight limbs of yoga, along with other things out of the Hindu tradition and the Buddhist tradition, and research, contemporary studies in thanatology, which is the academic study of death, dying, and bereavement.

The way you’re putting it as a system to support you is beautiful. It’s not here to tell you how you’re supposed to be or how you’re supposed to feel, and that’s what makes this very different than, say, the five stages of grief, which I’ll spend a moment on.

I am deeply moved by the work that Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross did for people who were dying. That’s who she studied. That’s where she came up with those five observations that she herself said are not all-inclusive. This is not empirical. This is just what I noticed from talking to these people who were dying.

They didn’t come from her having conversations with people who were grieving initially, but they took those five stages and packaged them up as a grief experience. Again, her work was revolutionary, deep bow to her, and I’m not in any way disparaging her. But the problem is those five stages are about feelings, and not everybody fits neatly into five buckets. There are many other things one can feel.

I like the idea, for me personally, as someone who loves learning and who, as a Libra, has a hard time making decisions, it can be really helpful to know what to do when. And that’s really what this system is about.

When you are feeling dysregulated and exhausted, and you feel like your nervous system is stuck in fight, flight, or freeze, here are the things you can do to bring calm and peace to your body so you can rest. It’s not telling you how to feel, but it’s giving you a pathway forward.

Amanda Palermo: And I think for me personally, because I can’t help but always see my life experiences through that yogic lens, when I was in Awaken, doing the grief support group, I would always sort of see my own experience that I was having on that particular day through the yogic lens.

I would say, “Oh, this is like in the Yoga Sutras, this idea that attachment causes suffering, or can lead to suffering.” Of course you lose your loved one or your person, and that’s an attachment there. Then you lose that person, so of course it’s going to cause suffering.

To start to dive deep into that and make sense of it that way was so healing for me personally. It helped me make sense of my own experience, a very confusing experience.

So I can’t wait to dive into more of that so people can understand a little bit more about the eight limbs. Even if you’re not a yogic practitioner or know anything about it, I hope I can make it seem enlightening and make more sense.

Heather Stang: More accessible.

Amanda Palermo: Yes, because it can be dense.

Heather Stang: I want to pop back to what you just said about attachment causing suffering.

I remember talking once to a person who was a yoga teacher, and this is probably going to make everybody hearing this cringe, so I just want to say, when I say this, this is not my belief. He said what we have to do is get rid of attachment.

That’s not what we do here.

What we do is learn how to be with that attachment, given that they are no longer physically present.

Amanda Palermo: Yes, because it’s a natural experience. Grief is just a natural reaction to the love that we have for our person. And of course we don’t want them gone. We want them here with us.

So to just say, “Let’s get rid of attachment,” is just not possible. But I think you’re right. I think it’s about having awareness of it and allowing it to be there and working with it.

I think that’s what the system is helping us to do, to recognize our feelings and our emotions and just let them be there. We can start to work with them and understand them better. We don’t have to eliminate the feelings. The feelings can be there with grief and coexist at the same time.

Heather Stang: And the love gets to stay.

Amanda Palermo: Of course. Oh yes. Yeah.

Heather Stang: So let’s look at just a little bit of the academic roots, not to nerd out.

Amanda Palermo: Oh, I like when you nerd out. I like all that.

Heather Stang: Many of you know I’m a thanatologist, so I have my master’s degree in death, dying, and bereavement, and also yoga therapist, which we talked about. And I’ve gone through my own experiences of grief and loss myself.

While studying thanatology, I learned one of the core theories, principles, or systems. It’s really a system. It’s a task-based model that we study, and that’s by Dr. William Worden. He’s a wonderful grief researcher, and he developed what’s called the Four Tasks of Mourning.

He’s the person who really stresses the idea of working with tasks, things to do, rather than ways of how to be. So his Four Tasks of Mourning, I like to think of as the foundation for which my eight steps, or tasks, are built on.

I wanted to share those here because I think they really resonate with a lot of people.

The first task is accepting the reality of the loss. Now, that word acceptance, because of the five stages of grief and because of those irritating people who tell you, “You just need to accept it and move on with your life,” that’s not what he’s talking about.

What he’s talking about is the fact of it.

I don’t know if you’ve experienced anything like this, Amanda, but I can remember right after my stepfather died, in the few days after, there were times where I would go pick up the phone to call him, or I would expect to see him. Even though I was also dealing with the fact that he had just died and I was in that grief experience, and I knew he died, my brain hadn’t quite learned that he was gone.

That’s what we’re talking about. Did you have anything like that?

Amanda Palermo: Oh yeah. Yeah. I think for me, it felt like shock. “I can’t believe this person is not here. I can’t believe she’s not here.”

And still trying to do the things I was doing with her before, the habits, because I was her caretaker. I was taking care of my mother before she passed. So there were things I had to do every day, and every day I would have this major reaction, like, “Oh, I have to go make Mom coffee,” or, “Oh, I have to do this.”

And then realizing, no, she’s not here. Then feeling shock about that. “Oh, I can’t believe she’s not here.” So your brain hasn’t quite caught on to the reality yet.

Heather Stang: That’s what the research shows, that our brain has to learn. It has to learn that they’re not here.

Like you said, habits and repetitions.

So when we talk about accepting the reality of the loss, that’s just the starting point. It’s not about being okay with it or metabolizing it.

The second task is coping with the painful feelings and emotions, coping with the pain that comes with the loss, which we have experienced deeply, both you and I, many times in our lives. I’m sure many people listening are feeling that right now, where there are just these waves of emotion, one after the other, and you don’t know how to be or what to do.

That’s where the Mindfulness & Grief System really starts, coping with the physical ramifications, the emotional ramifications, getting that nervous system to settle a little bit, and then a little more, and then a little more.

Amanda Palermo: Yeah, and I think that’s where people start to realize that if they’re not making skillful choices around those feelings and emotions, it’s then sometimes when people say, “I think I need to go and talk to somebody,” or “I think I need to join a grief group,” because the pain and the emotions are just so overwhelming.

Heather Stang: You said make skillful choices. I can think of when Tom, my stepfather, died, all the unskillful choices I was making on autopilot. Drinking too much, eating too much.

I just want to say, whatever choices you’re making right now, we’re not here judging those choices.

Amanda Palermo: No.

Heather Stang: But like you said, eventually you come to a point where you go, “I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired,” or “I’m scared,” or “I’m lost and I want some direction or some help.”

That’s where people usually do pick up the phone and call a hospice, or they reach out to me, or you reach out to a friend. You start to try to connect, or you pick up a book. It just depends, right?

Amanda Palermo: And the system is the thing that helps you decide personally for yourself if you’re making skillful choices. It’s not really for us, like you said, or for anybody else to judge that.

It helps you observe yourself and ask yourself those questions and see how these choices are impacting your life, in a good way or bad way. But that’s for you, as the person, to decide. And the system helps you do that.

Heather Stang: Yeah. Let’s take exercise, for instance. For one person, exercise could be a very skillful choice. For me, when Tom died, one of the things I did is I went and hit tennis balls against a wall, and I would make a lot of noise. I’d be like, “Huh!” I thought I was like Serena. That was my way of getting out that energy and moving my body and focusing.

But let’s take someone who might decide they’re going to spend six, seven, eight hours a day at the gym.

Amanda Palermo: Yes.

Heather Stang: That’s where it becomes maybe not healthy. But then there could be somebody who’s a bodybuilder for a living, and that is healthy. It just depends on you, what is going to serve you and your body. It’s different for each of us.

Amanda Palermo: Yeah.

Heather Stang: And you’re right, the system helps you decide. The mindful piece, when we talk about Mindfulness & Grief, is that the whole point is to be conscious of the choices you’re making, how you’re showing up for yourself.

Through that mindfulness, it lets you decide, is this behavior helping me reduce my suffering, or is it adding to my suffering? No judgment, but it puts you back in that driver’s seat.

Amanda Palermo: Yes.

Heather Stang: It gives you some control again.

Amanda Palermo: Absolutely. And you may not even have the answer in that moment. You still might not know it, but it’s more about, I think, being with it and observing it, and just letting it be there.

Heather Stang: Dr. Worden’s third task is about learning to adjust to the many changes that happen when someone is no longer physically present. That can be things like you said, you don’t make the coffee anymore.

Or maybe someone has to figure out who goes and picks up the kids. Who’s going to manage the checkbook? Who do I talk to at night when I want to talk about my day? There are so many things that change when an important person leaves your life. There’s this void in many areas, and we have to learn how to live our lives and make those adjustments.

Amanda Palermo: Yeah, and this is scary. That’s one of the scariest parts, I think, of grief, those changes. And if you’re someone who finds change difficult, it turns your whole life upside down. I can’t even begin to tell you how many changes happened in my life. It was just overwhelming.

Heather Stang: This is why we give you things to do about it. How do you sit with those difficult emotions? How do you still take their advice if it was good advice?

How many times have you heard me tell people for their homework, go sit and write a letter from your special person and have them tell you what to do?

Amanda Palermo: Oh, yeah. I’m just thinking about this past week, and you asked me, “What would your mom say?”

Because the change in my life is that I can’t go to her and ask her anymore. If I have a decision, “Oh God, what do I do?” She’s not there. I have to figure this out on my own.

That was something that you said to me, “What would your mother say? Try to think.” It was so interesting to have that thought process in my head, thinking about that. It was almost like I could hear her voice and hear her responding to it. But that’s part of the change. Those are the adjustments.

Heather Stang: Yes. That’s one of many changes.

Or it could be practical. It could be seeking out professional help for accounting or taking a cooking class.

I remember someone in a group a long time ago whose partner had died. The partner was the one who kept him fed, did the grocery shopping, and when he came to the group, he was just eating cereal for every meal and losing weight. It was not good for his body, and he knew it.

The practical step he took was to sign up for a meal delivery service. He was getting some greens and starting to get some broccoli in. Much later, he wound up reaching out and said he was learning how to cook.

These are those adjustments you have to make that seem so simple to someone who hasn’t been through grief, but the symbolism of having to get meals delivered for him was very hard. It was also necessary.

Amanda Palermo: It makes me also think of suddenly becoming a single parent. That’s a huge adjustment to make in your life, to raise children on your own. Maybe your partner passed or your spouse, and that is really difficult.

Heather Stang: That’s part of why I really encourage parents to seek out grieving parent groups. I will put in the show notes a link to a couple podcasts for that, because there are certain types of losses where I think it’s really helpful to have someone who is going through it, whether you’ve lost a child, whether you’ve had a traumatic loss, disenfranchised loss, suicide, homicide, or you’re suddenly a single parent.

This is where communal wisdom, I feel like, with task three, learning to make these adjustments, part of that is reaching out to a community that is going to understand you and give you help, give you the practical advice.

Awaken is a wonderful group for all types of losses. What I am teaching are coping skills and mindfulness-based skills. I encourage people to also find your group. Both are important. Learning how to sit with difficult emotions, learning how to accompany yourself on the journey, learning how to be compassionate to yourself, that is what we do wonderfully in Awaken.

And also, I can acknowledge I haven’t gone through that. I don’t have children. I’m not a single parent, so I don’t know all the things. And by the way, if you run into any grief therapist or counselor, or anyone who says they know everything, they’re not going to know it.

At the end of the day, you have to trust yourself. That is a big part of what Awaken teaches you too, how to listen to yourself.

Amanda Palermo: Yes, because every grief is different. There’s no right or wrong way to grieve, and the common piece is that loss is loss, right? Everyone can relate to that feeling of loss.

However, how that loss happened, sometimes it’s very specific, and sometimes it’s nice to talk to somebody else who really gets your personal experience. So I agree with that 100 percent.

Heather Stang: Then we’ll go on to the fourth task, which is embarking on your new life while maintaining an enduring connection to the person who died. So that continuing bonds piece is in there. The living your life is in there, which, if you are early in grief, might seem unfathomable.

Try to say that again.

It can be really hard to imagine what your life will look like. So if you’re right now going, “That doesn’t seem possible,” I’m going to just say, don’t worry about it right now. That will come. It always comes. It always happens. We don’t always know the exact way it’s going to show up for you, but we do have a pathway to help you get there. But one step at a time.

Worden’s Four Tasks put that down beautifully.

I want us to get to a very brief overview of the eight steps because you and I are going to talk about this in the next eight episodes. We’re going to focus on each one of these steps.

Since you passed the test, what’s the first step?

Amanda Palermo: Conscious relaxation. I just passed the test. That’s right. I just took the exam and passed the test.

Conscious relaxation is Step 1. My favorite.

Heather Stang: Do you want to share a little bit about what its purpose is and how it helped you?

Amanda Palermo: This one, to me, is the most closely related to yoga because conscious relaxation is designed to calm our nervous system, which is what yoga aims to do also. It calms the nervous system.

When we’re going through the beginning stages of grief, or not the beginning stages, because it comes and goes, it hijacks our nervous system. We tend to go into fight-or-flight mode, and conscious relaxation provides a little bit more emotional safety by grounding and getting into our body a little bit more.

Some of the practices help to calm the nervous system in this particular step.

Heather Stang: Yeah. Things like anxiety, rumination, insomnia, and even things like nausea and muscle pain, these physical, somatic symptoms of grief, are really addressed first.

I feel these are the things where we don’t have to think about it. We don’t have to process. We don’t have to figure it out. We don’t have to come up with a meaning. We just do the things, and our body will start to come back into a state of equilibrium much quicker than if we didn’t do that.

This is really important in early grief because your immune system is challenged. It’s really easy to get into accidents. You’re exhausted. You need sleep. So right off the bat, we take care of your body.

Amanda Palermo: Yes. I’m sure you’re going to go into this when we discuss it more in depth, but my favorite thing was learning about the relaxation response.

I think creating a sleep sanctuary was probably so beneficial to me in my early stages of grieving because you’re just so tired, and then you can’t sleep at night, and you’re anxious. So the sleep sanctuary is a really great thing.

Heather Stang: We will talk about that next episode, for sure.

Then we have mindful awareness, and a lot of times mindfulness is thought of as clearing your mind. That’s not really what it is. It’s about learning to be with what’s really happening.

I know that can sound a little daunting because you don’t necessarily want to be with what’s really happening. This is where you start to learn how to move back and forth between the focusing practices, where you can rest your attention on something neutral from the conscious relaxation step, to widening out your awareness to “How am I really feeling?” in this mindful awareness step.

Then you can decide how you want to take care of yourself in the moment. It’s not being present just to be present. It’s being present so you can tap into your resources and your wisdom and learn things to do to reduce the suffering.

Amanda Palermo: I think also, because our mind tends to pull us into the past with grief, so you’re thinking about the past, and then there’s this anxiety about the future, it’s very hard to be present. It’s almost unrealistic to be present.

So I think this idea of just focusing on something that doesn’t cause stress, practicing one of those focusing exercises, is really beneficial.

Heather Stang: Yeah. We time travel a lot, and Step 2 is about coming into what’s really here.

Step 3 is probably one of my favorites, and that is compassion for all. A lot of times we really are focusing on self-compassion because, for many of us, it’s easy to be compassionate toward other people, but not to ourselves.

And yet, in grief, you really will benefit from self-kindness and common humanity, and from being able to be with your pain in a way that no one else can because they’re not with you 24/7, 365.

Amanda Palermo: I’m excited to talk about this one when we get to it because this was actually quite eye-opening for me as a yoga teacher.

Throughout the years I’ve been teaching and practicing, you hear that word used a lot, compassion and empathy. I have found that people switch those two and use them interchangeably, and I don’t think there’s a solid understanding that there is a difference between the two.

Heather Stang: Empathy is the first step in compassion. Compassion is what gives you the action to actually ease the suffering. Empathy can keep you stuck in feeling, whereas compassion can help you soften and tend to the feeling.

It’s very powerful.

Amanda Palermo: I think this one is going to be really great when we get there, to dive into it and bring clarity around that, because it was confusing for me even. Learning to practice compassion toward myself wasn’t as easy as it sounds.

Heather Stang: And then the fourth step.

Amanda Palermo: Skillful courage.

Heather Stang: Skillful courage. This is about being able to balance vulnerability and the ability to stay, the ability to be strong, and to understand that you can’t really separate the two.

It takes a lot of courage to allow yourself to curl up in bed and cry really hard and feel the feelings. That takes so much courage. And yet you’re also being vulnerable.

It takes a lot of vulnerability to stand up for yourself or to set a boundary.

Amanda Palermo: Yeah, that was a big piece for me in skillful courage. Absolutely. And vulnerability is strong. It is strength.

Also having faith that the feeling of being in a difficult place is not going to be there forever. That feeling of grief is going to stay forever, but it’s always changing.

Heather Stang: Because grief isn’t a feeling, is it?

To me, grief is an umbrella term for countless feelings. In grief is love, happy memories, the devastation that they’re not here, fear, hope, all of that is under it.

When you allow yourself to feel the difficult feeling that’s showing up right now, longing, yearning, regret, guilt, whatever, you’re not going to be combusted by it, even though it feels that way in the moment.

That’s what skillful courage is all about. It’s learning that you can let yourself go into the feeling and into the dark and into the hurt, and that by letting yourself do that, you’re going to emerge out of it.

Whereas if you carry that around all the time, to use a phrase I don’t know who originally said, emotions that we don’t tend to go down into the basement and lift weights.

Amanda Palermo: That’s my favorite. I wrote that down when you said it. I don’t know when you said it, but you did say it, and I wrote it down. I said, “This is it.”

Heather Stang: Think about going into work again. A lot of listeners might have this experience where you wake up and feel like you need to power through the day because you have to get that paycheck and you need to act like everything’s okay. So you don’t let yourself cry or feel, and you go into work and feel like you’re stuffing it down. Then you wind up having this outburst at an inopportune time.

I’m not saying that’s good, bad, right, or wrong. That just is what happens.

Whereas sometimes allowing yourself to let the feelings move through you means you can then move a little more freely.

Of course, by the way, I’m the girl that just cries spontaneously in public during meals if I get triggered. If I’m in a grief period, I am. So there’s absolutely no judgment, just camaraderie in that.

Let’s go to the next one, which is getting unstuck.

There are things that I call the inevitables, the things that I hear most often from clients. Not all the time, and again, this is not empirical.

The first inevitable when I usually first meet somebody is, “I don’t know how I’m going to get through this.”

There are three of them, really. Another one is, “But I was doing so well.” This comes after many months, or a year, or two, or three, where somebody feels like they have been able to work the system and, I’ll say manage emotions in a generous way.

Again, we’re not trying to make us all Stepford Grievers, where we’re just, but where you feel like you have a handle. Then you get hit with a grief wave and feel like you’re back at day one.

This often happens around an anniversary, or somebody says something, or you have a child’s wedding coming up, or who knows what it is. You feel like you are in those early acute days of grief again.

“I thought I was doing so well. I thought I was okay.”

This is so normal, but it feels so abnormal and so scary. This is where people start to feel like they’re stuck, even though they’re not really stuck.

Amanda Palermo: I was kind of laughing when you said, “But I was doing so well,” and I’m laughing at myself because I’ve repeated this to myself so many times. I’ve had that happen and said to myself, “Oh, you know what?”

Heather Stang: And you’re being so good.

Amanda Palermo: Same.

Heather Stang: Oh, and by the way, once you become a grief professional, there’s this idea that I should have it together. I know all this. But that’s not how it is because we are human and we love and we care. So we have to wipe that expectation out.

Amanda Palermo: Absolutely. Yeah. And you’re not getting stuck. It feels like that, but that’s not what’s happening.

I think sometimes too, people think there’s a timeframe on grief. “I should be better by this time. I shouldn’t be sad anymore. Oh, it’s been so long.” Then when you do have one of those grief waves, that thought might pop up.

Heather Stang: Exactly. That is a big part of it. It’s both experiential and temporal in a way.

The way we address this, actually, each step is my favorite because I really love this one too. This one is about shifting perspectives, and we have some journaling practices and things that we’ll talk about in that episode as well.

But most people aren’t stuck. Most people are just experiencing a difficult time that’s coming back around.

After we do these first five, conscious relaxation, mindful awareness, compassion for all, skillful courage, and getting unstuck, these five are really teaching coping skills and self-care.

The last three are helping you address the next inevitable, the third inevitable, which is, “Who am I now? I don’t even know who I am.”

Step 6 is you in relationship to the person who died, and it’s called continuing bonds.

Amanda Palermo: Which is one of my second favorites.

Heather Stang: This one is so sweet because it teaches you how to carry the relationship into your life, if it was a relationship that was healthy for you, or somewhat healthy, because some people have challenging relationships, difficult relationships, estrangements, ex-spouses, and so we have some space there too for you to really acknowledge what you want to let go of.

Or in some cases, like me with my stepfather, who had bipolar disorder, and I’m picking him today, I have other losses, but he’s showing up. Continuing bonds is right here. He’s here.

He had bipolar disorder, and he was very difficult sometimes, and he was so loving other times. There were things he did that at the time seemed unforgivable that I’ve let go of, and I hold the things that I want to now.

That did not come overnight. That came through actually doing the grief work. It came through learning certain techniques from other grief therapists while in training. It’s a really powerful step because it helps you get comfortable saying their name if other people are saying, “Why are you still talking about them?”

It helps you figure out ways to weave them into your life. It keeps that conversation going, which I know has been super important for you too.

Amanda Palermo: Oh yeah. This is one of my second favorite ones. I think continuing bonds has really helped me carry my mom with me differently, getting used to carrying her with me differently.

I think that’s the hard part, or has been the hard part for me. I wanted to carry her with me like when she was alive, like here. But I think that’s where this step is really powerful for me.

Heather Stang: Part of that relationship with them leads naturally to your relationship with you and how you see you. That leads us right into Step 7, which is allowing transformation.

We know that grief changes us. It can make us sadder but wiser, for sure. It can also teach us things. It can teach us about ourselves.

Since the Mindfulness & Grief System is really a learning system, it teaches you how to care about yourself and how to see the parts of you that are worth caring for.

Amanda Palermo: I think some of the journaling prompts that go along with this step are really good. They’re great because you can actually start to see it. They help you look back and see how things have changed, how you have changed, and maybe there is no change in certain areas, and that’s okay too.

It’s just allowing whatever’s there to be there. But those journaling prompts, I really enjoy doing them.

Heather Stang: We do a lot of journaling in this step because it is about looking back.

One of the things we do is a journal review, where you actually read back through your journal. When I first did this, when I was first creating this system, it was in an in-person eight-week setting.

Even though they had only been with me for eight weeks, the assignment was, on the seventh week they came into class, and then the homework was to go home and read through the eight-week journal they had kept.

That’s a short period of time in grief. I want to stress that we’re not saying that people are metabolizing all these eight steps in eight weeks at all. It takes a while, but they’re learning what they have available to them.

Amanda Palermo: Yes.

Heather Stang: A lot of people are maybe still in Step 1 or Step 2, or in acute grief, but now they know that they can look at themselves through this allowing transformation.

Even in that short period of time, people would go back through their journal and say, “Wow, when I first got here and I had a difficult emotion, I didn’t know what to do. I felt overwhelmed and scared that I even had it, and now I’m able to be with myself during it.”

That’s huge growth.

Now, we would never trade that for our person. We’d rather have our people back. But given the circumstances, it’s good to know that you can do that for yourself.

Amanda Palermo: I think it’s important to say too that all the steps are choices. If you don’t feel ready to do any of those things, like the journal prompts in allowing transformation or the stuff that goes along with continuing bonds, you don’t have to do them.

I remember going through a couple of them and then thinking, “I don’t have the energy for this right now. I’m just going to stay with conscious relaxation for a while.” They’re all choices.

Heather Stang: Right there, what you said, “I don’t have the energy for this,” that is mindful awareness and self-compassion in action.

Amanda Palermo: Yeah.

Heather Stang: That is the practice. It’s not forcing yourself to do something you’re not ready to.

Then we have Step 8.

Amanda Palermo: Perpetual mindfulness.

Heather Stang: How do you describe perpetual mindfulness?

Amanda Palermo: The way I see it is, again, that thought in my mind of “keep practicing” comes into this.

That’s how I connect it. With yoga, you’re always practicing yoga. It’s not something that you’re ever going to be good at or perfect. It’s a guide. It’s a practice to support your life.

I’ve always said to students, “Keep practicing. You’ll understand more if you keep practicing.” I feel like perpetual mindfulness is the same. You’re continuing to practice all of this and implement the system into your life. You just practice at it and keep going because you’re learning how to live your life in a new way.

Heather Stang: That’s exactly it. Grief doesn’t end, and neither does your practice. It changes.

It becomes less about their death and more about their life. It becomes less about the acute pain of grief and more about how I remember them and honor them.

And yet those waves are going to come up, and other life stressors are going to come up.

You and I talk about this all the time, how these steps don’t just apply to grief. They apply to any kind of stressor, and they help you live more fully and connect more fully.

Amanda Palermo: And it’s the tools that you’re taking with you.

If you’ve gone through all the steps and you’ve learned the whole Mindfulness & Grief System, now you have these tools to carry with you. So when you’re having a grief wave, you can recognize it and say, “Oh, I’m going through a grief wave. What is it that I’m feeling?”

You know how to check in with yourself. You have practices you can do to get you through this grief wave.

It’s the same thing with the eight limbs of yoga. They’re tools. It’s a guide so that as you’re living your life, if you have stress that comes up, you turn toward those limbs of yoga that help guide you through that tough time in your life. Every day in your life. They’re tools for self-care.

Heather Stang: That’s exactly what it is.

So if I were to define it on the spot, the Mindfulness & Grief System is an evidence-based toolkit from Hindu and Buddhist traditions and thanatology that helps you cope with the pain of loss, care for your grieving heart, and learn how to live fully again without denying your pain.

Amanda Palermo: That sums it up. Definitely. I don’t have anything else to add because I think that explains it so well.

Heather Stang: I guess I can pass the test too.

By the way, there is no test for grief.

Amanda Palermo: There’s no test for grief.

Heather Stang: It’s just learning how to metabolize it into your life.

Amanda Palermo: Just going back to why have a system, a thought occurred to me. I heard a woman on social media, and I don’t remember her name, so I can’t give her credit, but she compared grief to a spider web.

She said it slowly permeates through your entire life. I thought that analogy, that metaphor, was so powerful because it starts with the loss of your person, your loved one, or whoever it was. Then it starts to affect not just yourself, but your immediate family. Your friendships might be affected. It might affect your job. It might go into all these areas, and you don’t really realize that in the moment.

I think that’s why it’s so important to have a system to really help support that, because it goes deep. It’s not just about sitting here crying. It’s so much more than that.

Heather Stang: I think that’s a beautiful metaphor, and I agree with you. It touches so many parts of who you are. I’m sure we’ll get to talk about that as we go through the eight steps more in depth over the next eight weeks.

I also really resonate with what grief researcher Mary-Frances O’Connor says about grief being a learning experience, that we are learning how to grieve.

If we look at grief through that lens, because we’ve been taught how to learn our whole lives, it makes it feel a little more manageable than if you’re just dropped in the middle of the forest with no map.

This is the map back to yourself, back to your person.

Amanda Palermo: Yes. Absolutely.

Heather Stang: Thank you for being here, Amanda.

Amanda Palermo: Thank you for having me along this journey.

Heather Stang: Would you mind sharing with our listeners where they can find you on your website or socials?

Amanda Palermo: You can find me on Instagram under AmandaPalermo108, and you can just direct message me on Instagram. That’s the best way to get ahold of me.

Heather Stang: Wonderful. All that will be in the show notes.

I thank you all for being here. I thank you, Amanda, and I look forward to future conversations.