00:00 You Can’t Think Your Way Out of Grief
00:42 Welcome & Why the Body Comes First
02:10 Shock, Numbness & Brain Fog After Loss
05:30 When the Numbness Wears Off: Anxiety & Grief Waves
08:45 Why Grief Overwhelms the Nervous System
11:10 The First Step: Conscious Relaxation
13:40 Focusing Practices (Breath Counting & Mantra)
18:50 The Relaxation Response Explained
23:30 Movement as Meditation
27:40 Sensory Practices: Sound, Touch, Scent
30:20 Creating a Sleep Sanctuary After Loss
37:15 Reimagining the Bedroom After Losing a Partner
44:10 Journaling as a Body Practice
50:30 Giving Your Body a Voice (Writing Prompt)
55:40 The Puzzle Metaphor: Putting Pieces Back Together
58:10 This Is Your Home Base in Grief
1:01:30 Closing Reflections

Episode 59
When Grief Overwhelms Your Body:
Conscious Relaxation (Step 1)

Heather Stang: Today we are continuing our conversation about the Mindfulness & Grief System, and Amanda Palermo is joining me again.

Amanda Palermo: I’m back.

Heather Stang: I’m so glad you’re back. Today we are talking about what you say is your favorite step in the Mindfulness & Grief System. It is the first step, and it is a foundational step.

I want to start it off. For those of you who are listening, if you are in really early grief or you are further down the road but are experiencing a grief wave, this is the step for you because it’s designed to help calm our nervous system and soothe us.

So I thought we could start this off maybe by you and I thinking back to one of our losses and remembering what it was like in the body, the mind, and the heart.

Do you want to start, Amanda?

Amanda Palermo: Yes. I was thinking about this in preparation for this episode.

I remember feeling a lot of shock, even though I knew that my mom was going to die because she was in hospice. She had been sick for a really, really long time, so I knew that she was going to pass. But when it happened, it was still a shock.

I was very numb. And then something that I didn’t realize, because I think there’s a part of my brain that did block out, because I was numb, I don’t remember a lot around that time period.

But I do remember having a lot of brain fog. I was very forgetful. Dates, I can’t remember dates. Even sometimes the year. At one point I forgot what year she passed. That year is just a hole, a black hole.

I remember also feeling like I had a lot of difficulty concentrating on tasks, particularly reading books. I love to read. I’m a big reader, and I couldn’t even sit down to read a book. I had a very hard time concentrating.

After tending to myself and going into grief support group and things like that, I started to realize that I think those were a lot of symptoms of this shock of losing my mother, who was so important to me. She was my best friend. It was the biggest loss I’ve had. I had losses before that, but my mother’s loss turned me upside down. Totally devastating.

Heather Stang: Yeah. Brain fog and cognitive struggle. It’s not something people expect, and a lot of times you’ll feel like you are losing your mind.

So we often say you’re not. You are not going crazy. You’re grieving, and this is what the grieving brain does because it’s trying to figure out what happened.

You have the emotional piece too, where you have the stories of the fear and the anxiety, but sometimes that doesn’t even come right away. Like you said, there’s that shock and numbness that many people, not everybody, but many people feel, whether the loss was expected or not.

I think what you mentioned is also surprising to people. After a life-limiting illness, working with hospice, you are cognitively aware that this will happen, but there’s so much going on in your subconscious mind, in your attachment system, that you aren’t aware of. It takes us a lot of energy to make sense of it all.

And I don’t mean make sense, come to terms with it, but just to even understand that this has happened, there can be a delay.

Thinking back to our last conversation about the Four Tasks of Mourning and William Worden’s work, and how the first task is accepting the reality of the loss, many of us have those few days or weeks where you just expect them to call. You expect them to come through the door.

With the losses I’ve experienced, that has always been the case.

The one we’ll pick for today, I know we were working with my stepfather’s death last conversation, I’m going to continue with that because his death happened while I was getting my master’s in thanatology. So I had so much awareness around grief, and I’d had many other major losses throughout my life.

But there was so much awareness with his, and he died suddenly and unexpectedly after surgery, which was shocking.

Just to hold our two stories side by side, very different circumstances, but that same numbness and cognitive confusion and struggle. And then that wears off.

That is what we’re really going to talk about today, what happens when that wears off and you start to become really aware of the things that are happening in your body, somatically, in your mind, in your behaviors.

For me, anxiety, restlessness, worry, rumination, all the things. How about you?

Amanda Palermo: After the shock wore off, the numbness kind of went away and I started to get back into my body. That’s when I started to notice that my concentration was so off.

Then what started to happen was I would start to get a grief wave. But what would happen before the grief wave is I would start to have a full body ache, almost like I felt like I had the flu. All of a sudden my whole body would just feel achy everywhere, like I was getting sick. But it wasn’t that.

It was perhaps that numbness wearing off, that sensation of my body coming back. Then all of a sudden I would have this grief wave.

That was a cycle that would happen for maybe a year, two years. It still happens, but not as often.

Heather Stang: What’s happening there with that flu-like feeling? Muscle aches, joint aches.

Amanda Palermo: That’s exactly what it was. Yes. Muscle ache, joint ache. My head would hurt. And the feeling of, I want to go lie down.

Heather Stang: Other symptoms, nausea.

Amanda Palermo: I didn’t really have nausea, but headache and just this overall feeling of, I need to go lie down. I need to get under the covers. I don’t feel well.

Heather Stang: Some people do experience nausea. Some people experience insomnia. There are so many different ways that grief can manifest somatically.

What happens is because grief is one of, if not the most stressful thing you will experience, depending on what your life is, it creates inflammation in the body. Inflammation, we know, leads to stress-related illnesses. It exacerbates symptoms you might already have.

I remember working with one woman who had arthritis before her husband died. I met her in a hospice group and I taught the techniques we’re going to talk about today, the conscious relaxation techniques, which is Step 1 in the Mindfulness & Grief System.

After about a 10-minute practice, she looked up and she said, “My joints don’t hurt.” She thought her arthritis was flaring up.

I would never presume to know what’s happening in someone’s body. I’m not a medical doctor. But for her, she noticed a correlation between calming her mind and the pain in her body, which may or may not happen for everyone.

But I do see it happen often, where when people learn how to do the practices in Step 1, they do notice a shift pretty quickly. It might not last the whole day, but it’s a glimmer of hope that maybe they can get some rest, or maybe that headache will go away, or maybe the muscle tension will subside.

We start here for a couple reasons. One is that these are very common symptoms of grief that we can actually do something about.

I guess the inverse of that is this: you can’t think your way out of this. You can’t just say, “Oh, I understand that this loss has happened, and I’m ready to not feel the symptoms of grief.” You just don’t. That’s not how we’re wired.

When you can start to take a little bit of your power back, because it gives you some agency, it gives you something to do with what’s happening, you feel a little more in control.

Hopefully, you’ll start to feel like you can get some sleep again, or at least a little bit of rest. If you are experiencing things like nausea or digestive issues, also related to the stress of grief, it will help you start keeping food down.

Little by little, it makes your body your ally rather than your enemy.

Amanda Palermo: Yeah. And I think that in the beginning, in the acute stage, it’s such an onslaught of sensations. It really does feel like your body is betraying you in some way.

You might feel like, “I feel like I’m going crazy. What is going on?” I think that these practices in this step really do help you get some kind of control over what you can do, like you were saying, over your body, sleep, all of it.

Heather Stang: So let’s talk about how we get there.

We’ve got the why. The why is we want to give you back some control, and we want to help you get some sleep, and we want to help you not feel so anxious.

We do this by something that many of us say we aren’t good at, which is focusing our attention. So there’s a paradox there. I’m not sure what the right word is, but you feel scattered and like you can’t control anything, and so we’re going to ask you to control your attention.

But what we’re going to invite you to do is focus on just one thing that is neutral or maybe pleasurable. That can be a really uncomfortable word with grief.

This isn’t about focusing on a mantra that makes you feel happy. It’s not about making you feel other than how you are. We always want to respect the fact that grief is painful and real, and we are allowed to have the feelings that we feel.

The reason why we work with focusing your attention is because it actually works to interrupt the cycle of stress by taking you out of rumination.

Amanda, I’m going to put you on the spot and invite you to share an example of one of your favorite practices from this step, and maybe how it helps you.

Amanda Palermo: This is great.

One of the practices that I still do is counting my exhales. So it’s about focusing, like you said, but it’s also about focusing on something that’s neutral or doesn’t cause stress.

Sometimes I have to be in a certain mindset to focus on my breath, but even the breath can sometimes start to cause a little stress. So sometimes the counting helps me focus.

What I’ll do is I’ll just start to connect with my own breath naturally. Then every time I exhale, I will count. I think we’ve done this in grief group before. I’ll start with 10, and on the exhale, 10. Then the next exhale, nine. Then exhale, eight. I’ll just go up and down the scale of 10.

Sometimes I’ll do 50 and start there. 50, 49. Sometimes it’s great for me to do it at bedtime because it helps me fall asleep. Sometimes I’ll do it during the day after my yoga asana practice just to focus my mind.

As I said before, I was so confronted with the idea that I couldn’t concentrate after my mom died that first year. I had so much difficulty concentrating. I thought, “My God, I can’t even sit down and read a book. I love reading. This is really shocking to me.”

So these focusing practices that are in Step 1, I did a lot of those over the course and still do them. I noticed that this past Christmas was the first time I was actually able to sit down, read a book, and finish it. This is three years later, so it didn’t happen overnight.

But that ability to have less brain fog, to be less forgetful, to be able to concentrate on something, I really truly believe that it’s from doing those focusing practices. And for me, it was the counting.

Heather Stang: I like the counting too, but I also like using a mantra. If that word isn’t familiar to you, that’s okay. Mantra is just a word or a short phrase that you focus your attention on.

It comes out of the Hindu tradition and transcendental meditation, and it’s used in Buddhism. You can find it in Christianity. All religions are going to have something like this, and you can use it in a secular way as well.

The research that Dr. Herbert Benson did back in the sixties, that I love to go into detail about, and we’ll probably touch on it a little bit later, showed that the word you focus on can really be anything as long as it’s neutral or pleasurable. It can’t be negative.

We do recommend not using names of the person who died or really even anyone, because that makes you think. The idea here is non-thinking, just focusing.

The other part of the research, and this is super important, is that you don’t have to be good at it. You don’t have to remember every single number without getting distracted.

Your mind might wander off. You’ve made it from 10 to nine to eight to seven, counting your breath, and then you’re thinking about, “What am I going to have for dinner?” Or you start thinking about the memorial service you’re planning, or wherever your mind goes.

It’s just gently bringing your attention back and starting again like it is no big deal.

Right in here, we’re starting to work with self-compassion, which is later down the road. But just to be able to say, “My mind wandered. That’s not a problem. I’m just going to keep counting.” That’s all you have to do.

Or if you use a word, which I like to use “one,” which is also a number, I recognize, but you could use a color. You could use the word relax, rest, peace.

Somebody in group used the word ocean because that brought her a lot of peace, and she would do it a little differently.

For me, I like to say my mantra silently to myself each time I exhale. Like you’re doing 10, nine, eight, seven each time you breathe out. I’m going one, one, one with each breath.

She would do “o” on the inhale and “cean” on the exhale.

Amanda Palermo: I love that.

Heather Stang: She made up her own mantra.

Amanda Palermo: Which is so cool.

Heather Stang: And you can totally make up your own mantra.

I had a woman in a group who was, I think, an accountant and works with numbers all day. She made up this thing where she was doing the Fibonacci sequence in her meditation because she was such a number nerd that for her, counting like normal people was not sticky enough. It wasn’t holding her attention enough.

So she made up what worked for her. I think that is such an important thing for us to talk about early on in this series, that it’s the essence of what we’re offering. It doesn’t have to be exact. If you find a way of doing something that works better for you, do that.

This is your practice.

Amanda Palermo: Yes. I also think that it can change based on where you’re at. It’s like the practice of checking in with yourself.

Sometimes in your guided meditations, there’s the three-part breath. If I feel connected to my breath on a particular day and I feel like focusing on that is really going to benefit me, then I’ll do that.

I want to speak to something you said before, that it isn’t about perfecting it. It’s a practice.

I remember when I started a meditation practice years ago, I don’t remember where I heard this, it was from a yoga teacher or a meditation teacher, and they said, “Even if for five minutes you do this practice, whatever meditation practice you decide to do, and if your mind is all over the place, you’re still getting a benefit.”

Even if you’ve thought about work emails and you thought about your laundry list of things to do, even the five minutes of just trying to focus, practicing the focus, you’re going to get a lot of mental and physical benefits from that.

I thought that was such a relief to me, somebody who was new to it. It’s the idea of practicing it. It’s not about your mind being completely blank and void of thought because the brain can’t do that. It’s always going to want to think. That’s what it’s designed to do.

So I think it’s more about this idea of harnessing your mind and focusing your mind on one thing. Every time it slips away, you just gently bring it back. That, to me, is where the benefits are.

Heather Stang: That’s what Dr. Herbert Benson’s research showed.

His story is he studied a group of people who were practicing transcendental meditation because the Beatles had started practicing transcendental meditation when they went to India. When that happened, meditation got exposure in the West that it hadn’t had before.

This group of people approached this Harvard cardiologist because they believed they were healthier than their cohorts who did not meditate.

When he studied them, he found that after practice, their body went into the exact opposite of fight, flight, or freeze, which we know is a stress response.

Everything that gets switched on or off when you’re in a state of stress would go in the opposite direction after they did this meditation. He coined the term the relaxation response.

That is what Step 1 is all about cultivating, helping you find the practice that is going to switch your stress switch from on to off.

There are other ways. If sitting down and meditating is not your cup of tea, there is very good news. You can do this while you’re moving.

I do this while I’m walking. You were talking about how certain days you might switch up the practice. If I am feeling so anxious that I am crawling out of my skin, if I’m angry or frustrated, spiraling, or ruminating, and the idea of sitting down seems a bridge way too far, that is my signal to get outside and to focus on movement as the repetition.

Maybe instead of using a mantra or counting, it will be feeling the left, left, left and paying attention to that in my footsteps.

Dr. Benson tested that. Many other researchers have tested many other practices, yoga, tai chi, even knitting. I’m a knitter, so knit, purl, knit, purl. If you just focus on that, it can elicit the relaxation response.

The two things that matter here are, one, finding something you can focus on that is repetitive, and two, having a passive disregard for that distraction or being pulled away. In other words, just saying, “No big deal. Oh, I’m going to start again.”

What his research found was that it didn’t matter how often people had to begin again. So what you were saying about five minutes of practice, even if your mind is wandering the majority of the time, which is what human brains like to do, the fact that you are attempting to bring yourself back creates the benefit.

Amanda Palermo: Yes, and I think it’s so simple. These practices are hard. It’s not that it’s easy, but they’re simple, and you can incorporate them into your everyday life.

Even sometimes if I’m doing things in my house, washing the dishes or just doing my normal chores, I’ll repeat to myself, “inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.”

If I feel that my mind is getting too noisy, or there’s some type of thought that’s not really benefiting me, just to bring myself back into center.

You don’t always have to be sitting. That’s the other thing too. I found that I had a lot of difficulty in the first year of grieving with sitting. It was just hard for me to sit on a meditation cushion.

Some of the practices I would do lying down, like progressive muscle relaxation, was one of my favorite ones because I could just lie down and focus on my body a little bit more. Those are beneficial too.

Heather Stang: Yeah. Curling up in a ball and having a good cry, and staying in that safe little ball under blankets and noticing your breath is a practice. Showing up for yourself in that way is a practice.

It doesn’t have to look like the cover of Yoga Journal or a meditation magazine. Grief is messy. It’s sloppy. It’s ugly crying, for me anyway, so don’t worry about posture here.

Just take care of you.

It can be movement. It can be lying down. It can be sitting. It can be standing. Listen to your body.

Again, that is back to what I said earlier about this being where self-compassion begins. You’re showing up for yourself and giving yourself something that is going to nourish you during this incredibly difficult time.

It doesn’t have to look like a focusing practice either, in the way you and I have just talked about it. It can be listening to music. It could be listening to the rain outside. It could be listening to your dog breathe, which is one of my bedtime practices sometimes if she’s curled up next to me. Just focusing on her breath makes me feel connected to her, but it also focuses my attention, so I’m not thinking about the day.

Oh, it just made me think of visual practices, gazing at flowers, gazing at a candle, smelling aromatherapy or incense.

Amanda Palermo: I was also thinking of tactile. Having a comfort blanket felt so good to me. A special blanket that I would always put on top of my lap that just made me feel comforted, or having a cup of tea in my hands, sipping something warm.

Also meditating on that feeling of having the blanket on me, or my dogs on me, on my lap, their weight on me. Like a weighted blanket. That feels really good. Just meditating on the feeling of their weight on my lap and their fur.

The sound of them snoring is also, believe it or not, pretty meditative for me.

Heather Stang: We just went through senses, didn’t we? Sight, smell, sound, taste, touch.

So you find which sensory experience is more pleasurable for you or is easier to focus on, and find something that works for you there.

Maybe this is a good time to bridge us into a topic that you had suggested we address this week, which is the sleep sanctuary.

Part of the Mindfulness & Grief System are what we would call informal practices or practical practices that go beyond just meditation or movement, but into being mindful of your space, your interactions with other humans, and the food you put into your body.

One of the most important practices for people who have lost a partner or spouse, if they shared a bedroom with someone, and even if you didn’t share a bedroom with someone, is visiting your bedroom with a fresh perspective and making some wise choices to help you get better sleep.

Sleep disruption, I won’t say it happens to everybody, but most people have some sort of sleep disruption after grief.

So share what for you with the sleep sanctuary?

Amanda Palermo: I think creating a ritual with repetition, a ritual that I would do every night.

I think you talked about it in Step 1, and there’s a video about creating a sleep sanctuary. But for me, I have to prepare. That means maybe even a few hours before bedtime, I take a bath. So there’s a preparation to actually closing my eyes and going to sleep.

I take a bath with magnesium salts or Epsom salts. When I finally get into bed, I always have to have my lights dimmed a little bit. I like candles. Then once I’m in the bed, maybe an hour before I go to sleep, I start to turn off all the lights. It gives my brain some time to adjust.

There’s this slow preparation for when I actually close my eyes to go to sleep, and it’s something I repeat every day. For me, it’s more about creating a ritual. I’m not just getting into bed and then right away going to sleep. There’s a preparation for going to sleep.

I wanted to ask you, actually, I was thinking about someone who has lost a sleep partner. My situation is specifically because I lost my mom, and that did interrupt my sleep, so it was helpful to do the sleep sanctuary. But for somebody who has lost a sleeping partner, what’s something specific that you would say to them or recommend that they do with the sleep sanctuary?

Heather Stang: The sleep sanctuary has really two parts.

One is the bridge, which is what you defined. It’s the bridge from wakefulness to sleep. Rather than thinking of it as a moment in time where we go from doing to sleeping, there is that wind-down period. Being conscious and mindful of lights, being conscious and mindful of the rituals you want to do, whether it’s meditation practice, journaling, list writing, all of that is one piece.

But the big piece for people who’ve lost a sleep partner is during a time not right before bed, but during a time when you’re awake and you’re feeling relatively open and ready to do this.

I want to wrap this in compassion. You might not be ready for this right away. This sometimes comes later.

But it’s incredibly helpful to go into your bedroom with all of your senses. With sight, you look around. What in this room brings you comfort and what brings you distress?

It might seem like that is obvious, but it’s not.

I could probably walk into my bedroom right now, and I am, by the way, the queen of the sleep sanctuary. My bedroom is set up for sleep. Yet because I’m human, there might be some piles of things that need to be dealt with.

But when you have gone through a loss, I’ll give an example of somebody I worked with whose wife had been battling a life-limiting diagnosis of cancer and was at home on hospice for a long period of time.

It was probably six months after she died, and my client joined Awaken and did the sleep sanctuary. She walked into her bedroom and saw her wife’s medical equipment still in there and hadn’t even thought about it because she was grieving. You’re just trying to make it minute to minute.

She realized, “Oh, maybe this is not helpful.” And she got that out of there.

So you have sight, what do you see? What do you smell? What do you taste? If you are someone who likes nice tea before bed, that can be part of it.

Sound is important too. If you have busy street noise, do you want to get noise-canceling headphones? Do you want to play sleep music? Do you want a white noise machine? Do you want to turn your ice maker off at night, which is something I recently realized I wanted to do?

Then you have touch, so your blankets, your sheets. Are they comforting?

This is not a mandate to go in and completely remodel your room and remove memories at all. When this client sent me a picture of her bedroom afterward, it was beautiful. She had a wall of photos of her and her wife that she had added, that weren’t there before. She had this beautiful cutout wooden art piece that said love.

So it became a reimagined space for her to stay connected to her wife, but where she felt peaceful. She had agency, back to that taking control. I gave her something to do.

I’ve had people do things as simple, maybe not so simple, as wash curtains because the curtains had some smell in them. Some people have painted rooms. Some people have gone and bought a fuzzy blanket.

Again, it is your choice, but the idea is you’re bringing that mindful awareness through your senses, sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. Then you look at, how do I think and feel in this space?

That is one of the most helpful things people can do if they’ve lost a sleep partner.

Amanda Palermo: I think that is amazing. When you talked about the medical equipment in the room, it gave me a memory that I forgot.

See what happens? You forget things.

Because my mom was in hospice and she was so sick. She had cancer, and it was at home in our house, so there was her room, obviously the bed and the medical equipment.

After she died and they took her, I remember going in there and there was just all of this medical equipment and this hospital bed. You forget the smell of it, because it does have a smell. Seeing it, the whole room had a feeling of sickness because she was sick.

I remember thinking immediately, “I have to get rid of all of this. I don’t know if I can continue to live with all of this.”

I never thought of that outside my own experience. Not that I don’t know that other people go through that, but to hear that was very helpful.

Heather Stang: It does need to happen in your own time, and I highly recommend having a friend with you, having somebody with you who will be there to hug you and hold you because it’s emotional.

It is not clinical. It is very emotional to go in and take stock of a room you shared with somebody.

And it gives you an opportunity to make a choice about the room you are going to spend a lot of time in. It doesn’t mean that you’re getting rid of them.

In fact, as the story illustrated, you might bring more of them into the room. There was a lot more of her wife in that room after she did that, that she wanted to remember, and a lot less of the things she didn’t want to remember.

I recommend this for people who aren’t grieving as well, by the way, because we as a society, as probably a planet, I’m not even going to say it’s just in this country, I think sleep deprivation is human-wide. Maybe not everywhere. This is not scientific.

But it is amazing how many little lights we have. Part of the sight piece, by the way, I want to pull this one out specifically, is we know from research that light, particularly blue light, can activate our brain and prevent us from sleeping.

Putting electrical tape over your speaker light or whatever you can do to darken the room as best as you can, if that works for you, light-blocking curtains, this might seem like just fluff, but it can make a huge difference in the way you sleep.

This is a good practice whether you have grief-related insomnia or not.

Amanda Palermo: I agree. I think sleep is like a practice a little bit. I’ve had friends tell me they have difficulty sleeping, and if it’s something you’re not used to, creating a ritual around sleep and doing all that with your room and taking stock, it’s a new practice. It’s a practice like anything else, so it takes time.

Heather Stang: It’s a practice with huge health benefits and mental and physical health benefits.

This can be your opportunity not only to tend to yourself in grief, but to help yourself for the rest of your life, which I think all the steps do. They all apply to everything.

Because we have been forced into this very painful season of our lives, we know that grief is going to rise and fade, and rise and fade throughout our life. It’s not going to completely go away 100 percent, nor are we going to be free of other stressors in our life.

This is an opportunity to learn some skills in terms of self-care and coping, living a mindful lifestyle, that starts now while you’re grieving but benefits future you as well.

Amanda Palermo: One more thing that came to mind when you were saying that is sometimes, because there are such great journal prompts also in Step 1, before bed, what helps me fall asleep and prepare me for sleep is I will write down a list of everything I have to do the next day.

What happens to me is I will lie there and go, “Oh, don’t forget to do that. Oh, don’t forget about this.” Then I’m having difficulty falling asleep because I’m thinking about the list.

So if I get it out on paper or wherever, and I write it down, then I go, “Okay, I don’t have to even think about it because tomorrow I’ll just look at my list. It’s all there.”

Or sometimes a little journaling before bed too. Like, I’ve got to get this out, this feeling, this thought, whatever. A little journaling before bed so that it’s out of my mind. Then when I close my eyes, I can just go to sleep.

Heather Stang: I’m so glad you brought up journaling because really the three embodied practices of the Mindfulness & Grief System are meditation, movement, and self-care. But journaling is part of it as well.

I love journaling. My first journal was started when I was in 10th grade in English class. It was an assignment. Ooh, homework. Although I loved English. Hello, I’m a writer. I probably loved it because of the teacher. I don’t know if I loved it before Mrs. Freimuth or not.

Mrs. Freimuth gave us an assignment. We had to get a spiral-bound notebook, and we had to fill two pages, front and back, each day. She would not read the journal, but she’d go around and we’d have to open it and they’d be dated, so she could see that we’d done the journaling.

I was probably 14 or 15. I don’t remember how old you are in 10th grade, but we’ll just run with that.

My uncle had died by suicide when I was seven, and that grief did not get dealt with, processed, discussed at all, really. Maybe a little bit here and there, but it was this undercurrent of my existence. It was very present inside of my brain, but I didn’t have anywhere to talk about it.

That was my first grief journal. It wasn’t assigned as that, but me at that age, with that life experience, handed a blank piece of paper, what was going to come out were my feelings around my Uncle Doug and his death, and my questions about life and the afterlife and all these existential questions that I didn’t have anywhere else to ask.

It was incredibly powerful, and it’s why I think journaling is such a big part of this work and the practices.

You listed one, making a list of the things to do tomorrow. There is evidence-based research that helps people sleep.

Some people like to do a gratitude journal, and when you’re grieving, you might feel like there is nothing to be grateful for, and that is okay. But sometimes it’s about being grateful for the casserole that showed up, for the friend you could cry on, for your ability to be with yourself.

So if gratitude journaling is something you like to do, you could do that.

It can be dumping that heavy load you’re carrying out onto the pages so that you can stop ruminating about it. There are many different types of journaling, and we talk about that a lot.

One of the researchers that I look to is thanatologist and colleague Wendy Lichtenthal, who did research on journaling prompts, writing prompts versus free writing after a loss. She worked with, I believe, parents at Sloan Kettering. I hope that’s accurate.

They found that writing prompts that directed the writer toward meaning reconstruction and processing the loss were much more helpful than just free writing.

So if you’re somebody who hates journaling because a blank page is very intimidating, know that there are writing prompts out there. My book From Grief to Peace is full of them. It’s all the writing prompts from the eight steps. You could also create your own writing prompts as well.

Oh, I’m going to give a writing prompt for each of these. Let’s do that.

Amanda Palermo: Yay. I think that’s such a great idea.

I also want to point out that journaling is also a practice. And it can also be a focusing practice. We’re talking about focusing practices. When you’re journaling, you really have to hone in on the journal prompt if you’re using prompts.

So yeah, I think that’s a great idea. Give us our first prompt.

Heather Stang: Ooh. I’m going to give two because you just made me think of something.

As a focusing practice, you could pick an object in the room and describe it. There is nothing in there that asks you to go in an emotional direction unless you pick something that evokes emotion.

You could pick your coffee mug. You could pick your computer mouse because that’s what’s right there, and you just describe it. That’s it.

Don’t take long doing this, by the way. If you are not somebody who journals regularly and you’re new to it, set a timer for three minutes and then be done with it. Unless you decide you like it and want to keep going, then you keep going. But let’s not put this huge time limit on something when you’re grieving. A little bit can help.

So there’s a focusing practice: pick an object in the room and describe it for three minutes.

The other one that I really like from Step 1 is giving your body a voice.

The prompt is, “I am your body, and this is what I want to say to you,” something like that. You can do this in letter form.

“Dear Heather, I appreciate that you gave me some delicious coffee this morning, but maybe tomorrow, let’s stop with one cup.”

“Dear Heather, I’m feeling this pain in my lower back, and I’m wondering if maybe you could do a little bit more stretching. Please know that I’m not trying to make you hurt. I’m just responding to the situation.”

There is my vocal journaling for the moment.

It can be anything, but it’s really powerful to listen to your body in that way. It is very aligned with Step 1, conscious relaxation, because this is all about tending to the physiological reaction of loss and the somatic symptoms.

Amanda Palermo: For me, the journaling was so hard in the beginning. I really had a hard time with it. I remember doing only three minutes, and that was helpful because I felt like I had to work up to a longer period of time.

Those specific questions, those journal prompts, really get to the heart of what’s going on.

So I just kept practicing it, because it’s a practice. I was like, “Okay, journaling’s not my thing, but I’m really going to practice this. I’m going to try it.”

It really brought up a lot of stuff for me, in a good way.

Heather Stang: There’s a saying that the issues are in the tissues, right? That gets spoken a lot in trauma-centered work. The Body Keeps the Score, the name of Bessel van der Kolk’s book. There are all these phrases out there that we use because the body is with you 100 percent of the time.

Sometimes we are aware of it and sometimes we’re completely detached from it, but it is still there. It is still experiencing the stress and the yearning and the heartache and the love and the joy and all the things you experience.

So we start with the body because it is the thing that is going to carry us through.

If the body is compromised and is being placed under one of the most challenging loads of stress you will ever face, then the best we can do for ourselves is to tend to that grieving body.

Amanda Palermo: I think what this step helps to do is, when you were talking, I had this image of when you start a puzzle and all the pieces are just everywhere.

That’s how I felt after my mom died. The pieces of me were just everywhere, completely broken apart. I feel like Step 1 is like when you’re starting to put the puzzle pieces back together and you find a piece and you go, “Oh, this fits here, and this fits here.”

Then you stop and you look and you’re like, okay, I didn’t finish the puzzle. It’s not finished, but there are some pieces that are coming back together.

That’s what the first step is helping you do, getting your brain and your body to try to come back together. It’s not going to happen overnight, but it starts to happen.

Heather Stang: When we do puzzles in my family, we start by separating the pieces out into little bowls. You have the edge pieces in a bowl, and then you have the pink pieces, the pieces that are seashells, the pieces that are water. Then we put the edge together first.

That metaphor really lands with me because the through line is the body. It’s always going to be there. By putting that down first, you’re creating the structure for everything else that’s going to be filled in.

Thank you for that metaphor, Amanda.

Amanda Palermo: Yeah. In yoga, it’s the same idea. We start with the body first.

This is why when people start a yoga practice, they start with a forward fold, downward dog, put your right hand here, put your left arm up. Just starting with the body so people can get into their body a little bit.

Once people are more comfortable with their body, then you start working on the other deeper parts of yoga, like what’s happening internally. Maybe you start to realize it’s not just about the poses and all of that, but you have to start with the body first. That’s the baseline.

Heather Stang: Yeah. In early grief, you’re not ready to make sense of the relationship and what this means right away. You might be thinking that, but it’s so overwhelming and so hard in those early days.

So wrap yourself in a blanket and take care of your body, whatever that looks like for you, as best as you are able. That is a good first step.

Amanda Palermo: Yes.

Heather Stang: To close this out, I think one of the most important parts of Step 1, and all the steps, is it doesn’t mean that when you go into Step 2, you’re done with it.

I think of this as the home base that you return to anytime you feel overwhelmed. Anytime you feel like, “I just don’t want to go there,” or “I don’t feel like I can think about that,” you can always come back to focusing. You can always come back to relaxing your body. You can always come back to listening to music or smelling the coffee or going for a walk outside.

One of those things is going to help your nervous system settle. Just like the image of a jar with water and sand that has been shaken vigorously, and here we are setting it down and starting to watch that sand settle to the bottom.

That’s what this is about. Two metaphors for you: puzzles and jars of water and sand.

Amanda Palermo: Yeah. It’s the beginning part of learning to become more mindful.

Heather Stang: Which we will talk about next episode, Step 2.

There’s a reason this comes before that, because focusing is a contained experience, whereas mindfulness is going to invite you to open up. You’ll find that having this to come back to again and again, if the opening up starts to feel too much, is why this is the first step and not the second.

Even though, I need to say this, in my books, this is Step 2, but that is just a battle I lost with the publisher. When I work with my clients, conscious relaxation is always first.

Amanda, thank you for being here again, for sharing your story of love and loss.

Amanda Palermo: Thank you for having me.

Heather Stang: You’re bringing your mom here and sharing her with us, and I am grateful for that.

Amanda Palermo: Oh, I’ll be sharing probably a lot more because she is just such a big, huge part of my life. I’m sure for other people, when they lose their person, it’s significant.

Heather Stang: It is.

Amanda Palermo: So thank you for letting me share her.

Heather Stang: Thank you for letting us see her. So where can people find you?

Amanda Palermo: You can find me on Instagram at @AmandaPalermo108.