00:00 Pain and Add-Ons
01:15 What Mindfulness Is and Is Not
05:20 Remembering vs Ruminating
09:10 Time Traveling and the Grieving Brain
14:00 Mindfulness and Compassion
18:40 The Flashlight and Lantern Metaphor
24:30 Pain vs Suffering
30:15 Rumination Loops After Loss
35:20 Breath, Body, Sound Practice
41:10 Body Scan and Feeling Tones
49:30 Mindful Crying
55:40 Grief Anniversaries and Both and
1:00:10 Returning to Wisdom

Episode 60
From Rumination to Wisdom:
Mindful Awareness in Grief (Step 2)

Heather Stang: We’re going to start with the conversation Amanda and I just had about showing up as we are as we embark into the second step of the Mindfulness & Grief System, which is mindfulness, or mindful awareness is the technical term. But it’s really all about mindfulness.

Right off the bat, let’s clear away some myths around mindfulness before we get into what it is and how it helps with grief.

I think it would be really helpful to remember what it is not. It’s not perfection, and it’s not a completely blank mind, although that might be nice if you can get there. But really, most of us with a human brain aren’t going to get there, at least for a long period of time.

So if mindfulness is a term you’re not familiar with, and it seems intimidating as it did for me when I was first learning it, I just want to wrap around it that it is a practice, as Amanda and I are often talking about. A practice means we are aiming to be mindful, and we are compassionate to ourselves when we are not. And then we begin again with mindfulness.

What about you? What do you feel mindfulness is not?

Amanda Palermo: I don’t think it’s pretending that you’re okay in terms of grief. It’s about showing up as you are and honoring what’s going on with you in the present moment, which can be really hard when you’re grieving.

But I think it’s being aware of what’s going on with you on purpose. You’re purposely being aware, so we’re not pretending that everything is okay.

Heather Stang: I think that’s really important, and we’re not spiritually bypassing our fears, our anxieties, our pain by saying, “Oh, I’m just going to be mindful and not worry about this over here.”

In fact, in a later step, we’ll talk about how to turn toward difficulty in a mindful way.

There’s a part of me, just thinking about how, as a teacher, you want to give everybody everything right away. Here are all the tools. But it’s just like riding a bike or learning to drive a car or learning any other skill where you learn step by step. You don’t learn it all at once.

So we gave you conscious relaxation in the last episode. We give it to ourselves as well, which is about focusing, and that helps you steady your mind on one point.

Then we move into this mindfulness, which is about opening up to what is real and true. As you were saying, it’s not about pretending you’re okay, but honoring where you are.

Then there’s another layer to it, which is the third step. So here we are moving ahead a little bit. The third step is about compassion and self-compassion.

You cannot separate mindfulness from compassion.

One of my favorite quotes, not just for mindfulness, but for anything, is from Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, the creator of mindfulness-based stress reduction, which is the thing that really jettisoned mindfulness as a tool for health and well-being in the West.

He said in an interview, “In Asian languages, the word for mind and heart are one and the same. So if you are not hearing mindfulness as heartfulness, you’re missing the point.”

Powerful, powerful statement.

So as we talk about what mindfulness is, remember you cannot separate it from being compassionate. Just once you put tea in water, you can’t separate the two out.

I had a friend who once said to me, “Heather, I could be present. I’m mindful. I’m present to my anger at you.” Or, “What if I’m screaming at you and I’m paying attention?”

That might be awareness. It might be presence, but it’s not mindful.

So mindfulness has a quality of kindness and understanding and tenderness to it, but it also has some, I don’t want to use the word tough love because that’s too much, but it’s also not about excusing hurtful behavior by saying, “Oh, I was present when I did this to myself. I was present when I caused harm to myself.”

Nor do we have to sit around and judge how we are. Once we catch ourselves maybe not taking care of ourselves or being hard on someone else, we can just begin again and start over. That’s a big part of it because we aren’t going to be perfect at it.

Amanda Palermo: And I think in terms of grieving, it makes me think of situations where I haven’t really reacted to a situation in the best way.

Then I would reflect on it later and say to myself, “Okay, Amanda, that wasn’t maybe the best reaction. Maybe you didn’t show up as your highest self.”

But then also being aware, being mindful, and noticing and saying to myself, “I’m doing my best. I’m a human having a human experience. And next time I’m going to do things a bit differently.”

So I think that is the mindful piece of it, is also the accountability factor a little bit, but being compassionate with yourself.

Heather Stang: It’s wisdom, isn’t it?

Because it’s not just being present to be present, although that is lovely. I love it when I can wake up and do my morning meditation, sit, and I’m just present.

I had an experience this morning where I woke up, took care of the pup, made my coffee, sat on my cushion, and I was present. I heard birds. I heard birds for, I feel like, the first time in months because it’s winter and I’m starting to hear birds. I just noticed that I was hearing the birds, and it was quite lovely to be present.

Those moments are wonderful, and there wasn’t anything that came out of that. I don’t have to do anything about the birds. It didn’t teach me anything. Maybe it taught me to savor.

But what you’re talking about is looking back on actions of the past or attitudes of the past, consciously saying, “Oh, that wasn’t so skillful,” which is a much gentler way than saying, “I’m bad or wrong or horrible.” Just, “That wasn’t skillful.”

And what can I do in the future to be more kind, compassionate? That is wisdom.

The tradition of mindfulness I’m trained in, which is vipassana, means wisdom. While we would love it if most of the time we could just sit and be present to savor the moment, in these difficult times of grief, a lot of times our sitting is either to unhook from a story or unhook from something incredibly difficult or to get to truth.

Amanda Palermo: I really didn’t know a lot about mindfulness practice, to be honest with you, until I joined Awaken and started doing some of these practices. So I was really practicing mindfulness and understanding what it is through my grieving process.

Before that, I really was only familiar with focusing meditations, so a lot of the practices that we do in Step 1 in conscious relaxation, mantra practice, focusing practice, focusing on the breath, counting, things like that.

I remember a few years ago, I heard a colleague talking about mindfulness practice and getting certified as a mindfulness teacher. I remember I scoffed at it a little bit, and I said, “What do you mean? We’re being mindful all the time. What do you mean? You can get a certificate in learning how to be mindful? I don’t understand. This is a thing that you can train in?”

And he said, “Yeah.” It blew my mind because I didn’t realize that mindfulness was about letting a little bit more in.

I had been practicing so many focusing practices, focusing on the breath, focusing on the counting, and what I’ve learned about mindfulness is that it’s about allowing, being aware of what’s happening around you a little bit more, and also noticing when the present moment slips.

So that was a huge practice. When I’m sitting doing mindfulness and then I’m noticing, “Oh, my mind went somewhere else. Okay, I am going to bring it back,” that’s noticing when the present moment has gone away.

And then again, allowing in sound, allowing in sensation, allowing in a little bit more into my present moment.

That was a big thing for me that I learned, that there’s the focusing, but then there’s the allowing of a little bit more coming in of what’s happening around you without it taking you down a rabbit hole.

So not building a story around what you’re hearing or what you’re feeling, but just staying with what’s happening around you. And it’s tough. It’s very difficult. It’s hard to even explain, but it’s a challenging practice.

Heather Stang: That makes me think of my favorite definition of mindfulness, which is actually an image.

I use this in Awaken often. It’s an image of two people walking down a forest path. The person on the left has a thought bubble over their head, and inside that thought bubble is exactly what is on the forest path: the path, the trees, maybe a bird.

The person on the right has a thought bubble over their head that has symbols that we all recognize as cell phones, money, arguments, stress, maybe some asterisks for curse words and all sorts of things. That’s not what’s happening now.

So the person on the left, who’s seeing the trees and the forest, is present to what is real and true. Even though they’re in the same physical place, they’re having completely different experiences.

I think most of us are somewhere between those two most of the time. And it’s not about, again, perfection. It’s normal as a human with a thinking brain that is wired to seek out opportunities and protect us from threats to think ahead or to think back.

But when we can come present, we get to wake up, awaken to this precious life, which is exactly why Awaken Grief Support is called that. Because I have experienced, and many people experience, an awakening during the most difficult moments in our lives. It forces us to awaken to what’s happening in front of us, and then we can make wise choices and skillful decisions.

I’m also going to weave in another image. Hopefully stacking two images on top of each other will work. I think it will.

I often talk about how focusing practice is like a flashlight. So imagine you’re at a campsite and it’s nighttime. You have a flashlight, and you can point that flashlight and see a pine cone or a rock or a marshmallow that fell on the ground or whatever. That’s focusing practice. You’re looking at one thing.

Then your friend comes along and they have a high-powered lantern, and it lights up the whole campsite. That’s mindfulness, where you see many things. You see all the things, and you might not be able to take them all in at once. Some things are going to rise and fall, and rise and fall. That’s the practice.

It’s not binary where you’re either focused, completely distracted, or completely mindful. It’s all this continuum.

And as we talk about grief, those of you listening who have experienced grief, it really narrows your focus, doesn’t it?

Which makes sense. It hurts. You miss your person. That’s the focus. The focus is on what is absent and what you’re feeling, and that’s normal. We hang out with that for a bit. That’s just part of it.

But then you want to reconnect with your friends and family and support systems. You want to be able to take your dog for a walk and enjoy the sunshine on your face, or be able to work, be able to listen to music again. You want to eventually get back into life. That’s the hope.

Mindfulness is the pathway to that because you open up your awareness to other things, which doesn’t mean you have to cut out the hurt or the sadness.

I often think of it as an ampersand. It’s the and sign. It’s this and that, not this or that.

I think that’s a hard thing to grasp until you’ve practiced mindfulness, that you can experience a myriad of feelings at once. Pleasure and pain. Longing and gratitude that they existed. Even things like love and anger, which happen for so many of us. I love him so much. I’m angry he’s gone.

Those can all exist in the same space. Now, one of those causes suffering, right? Love is love. Anger leads to suffering. And the only way we can really tend to something like that is to know that we’re experiencing it.

That’s the tricky part of Mindfulness & Grief. Sometimes people are like, “Why would I even want to be present when I’m feeling this bad? Why on earth would I put myself through this? I just want to hide.”

This is part of why I put conscious relaxation first. That gives you that break because you don’t need to force yourself. You’re going to learn how to move back and forth between what serves you in the moment.

Amanda Palermo: I also think the numbness and the shock that some people can feel in the beginning, particularly when they’re working on Step 1 with conscious relaxation, eventually some of that starts to go away, and then you’re feeling everything.

That’s when the mindfulness practice, or Step 2, can really help you know when it’s okay to feel and lean into some of those feelings and when it might not feel safe, and when it might not be the best time.

But you can’t make those decisions unless you become aware of what’s going on in the moment with yourself and you become a little bit more truthful with yourself about what’s going on.

Because it’s very easy to just say, “No, I’m fine. I’m fine. Everything is fine. I’m doing great. I’m fine.”

But mindfulness really allows you to sit with what’s really going on. It makes you be more truthful with yourself.

I don’t think you can go on to the other steps if you haven’t really perhaps come to terms with what’s going on, in a sense.

Heather Stang: I agree. This is why we have mindfulness here. It’s the gateway to everything.

There’s also a piece in that truth. If we go back to the person in that imaginary image that you’ve all conjured up in your mind, the people walking on the path, the person on the right with all that junk up in their thought bubble, that isn’t actually happening in front of them. They’re walking down the path. Their bills are not there. Their dog is not barking, although maybe their dog’s with them barking. That doesn’t bother me.

The things that are bothering them are in the mind. A lot of times the things that bother us are either things that have not happened yet, fears of the future, or things that happened in the past that we cannot change.

I call this time traveling, which we do a lot just as humans, especially grieving humans, but really any human.

Mindfulness helps us know, “Oh, I’m afraid of losing everything I have because my partner is the one who handled the bills and I don’t know what to do with them. I’m scared, and I feel paralyzed and overwhelmed. My brain is grieving, so my executive functioning is way off, and I’m going to wind up penniless on the street, and nobody’s going to talk to me.”

This is a whole story that hasn’t happened.

Sharon Salzberg, the great meditation teacher, calls these add-ons. A simple word. These are the add-ons. Mindfulness helps us tease out reality.

The reality is, I don’t have the skills yet to know how to handle my finances.

The story is, I’m going to be ruined.

The wisdom is, I need to find someone who can help me with this.

I remember teaching my grandmother how to pump gas after my grandfather died. It was such a sweet and painful and sweet moment. She didn’t know how to pump her gas because my sweet granddad would drive her car to the gas station for her and fill it up.

Could I find someone like that, please? What a good man.

Then when he died, she didn’t know what to do, and she asked me. I don’t know how long she went panicking about the gas before she did that, but that’s an example of what mindfulness does. It lets us take the story that we’re telling ourselves, get to the essence of what’s the real trouble here, and then the wisdom to get support.

Amanda Palermo: It makes me think of, I’m going to nerd out for a second, but it makes me think of the Yoga Sutras.

The first yoga sutra is Atha yoga-anushasanam, which is yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. When I was new to yoga and meditation, I took that quite literally. I thought, okay, so yoga and meditation are going to help me stop my thoughts and my brain entirely. How does that work? I’m going to stop thinking?

I do think this is a false narrative that gets perpetuated. A lot of people say, “I can’t do any of these practices because I just can’t stop thinking.”

But that’s not really what we’re doing. That’s not really what it is. It’s actually about allowing our minds to empty a little bit and then just being aware of that and being mindful and aware of what the thoughts are, what the feelings are, and letting them flow in and out.

I think practicing mindfulness has helped me understand that sutra in a different way, in a deeper way, a little bit. It’s about noticing, like I said before, when the present moment has slipped. What’s happening in the present moment?

Heather Stang: I love that you brought up that sutra because it shows how Hinduism and Buddhism are so similar, just different words, different but the same practices.

I’m glad you brought up that idea of clearing the mind. That is the number one reason people tell me they cannot meditate. “I cannot clear my mind.” Nor can I most of the time. I’ve had a couple glimmers of it. It’s lovely. May I get there more often.

But what happens is we can see our thoughts as objects of mind. That comes from ancient mindfulness teachings.

So you aren’t your thoughts. They are just something that is happening. When you can objectify your thoughts, that’s how I see it.

If I am sitting in meditation, mindfulness meditation, and a thought train comes along and I hop on it, and it hooks me for a while, then I realize, “Oh, I’ve been fantasizing, or time traveling, or daydreaming,” it’s just like I could set down my cup of coffee. I can set down my thought now.

In grief, there are times where we are so taken away by our thoughts, where the feeling is so big, so painful, so heavy, that it’s appropriate to actually turn your attention in a mindful way to the experience of thinking so that you can tend to it.

There are times where, I’m getting a little advanced here, but there are times where you can simply unhook from your thought, especially the minor thought, like you hear a horn honking outside, you can move away from that pretty quickly.

But if it’s a painful memory, that’s where we can use mindfulness to say, “Oh, this is too big to unhook from, and so I’m going to turn to it and tend to it.”

I am going to tease this a little. This will come later, right? Sitting with difficult emotions comes in the system on Step 4. Skillful courage comes after compassion. But like you said earlier, we can’t even know that we can do that without the mindfulness first.

Amanda Palermo: Yes.

Heather Stang: I hope that gives hope rather than overwhelm. Because again, why would I even want to turn to the present is one question, and why would I even want to hang out with a difficult emotion is another, but the ultimate answer to both is the cessation of suffering.

Amanda Palermo: I am somebody who really gets into rumination. So when my mother passed, I found myself ruminating, not just about the death and everything that happened, but then other things. I get stuck in a wheel, but I didn’t know what it was.

What would happen is I would sit down to do some type of mindfulness practice or meditation practice, or just lying down and doing a body scan or something like that. Then I would start ruminating and ruminating.

Finally, after doing these practices for a while, I realized, “Oh, this is what’s happening to me. Sometimes my mind gets stuck in a loop. I start playing these thoughts over and over again.”

I think it was just realizing what it was in the moment. Then, like you said, I would think to myself, “Okay, how do I get out of this? I’ve got to unhook. I know what you’re talking about when you say unhook. I have to unhook this somehow.”

Then I continued to do a lot of the practices, and that became the practice, feeling the rumination come up and then using the practice to help me unhook from it.

Heather Stang: How did you unhook specifically? What techniques work for you to unhook? The listeners, I’m thinking.

Amanda Palermo: Yes. I’m thinking very quickly. The first thing that comes to mind is one of the body scans, I think it’s the breath, body, sound meditation.

Breath, body, sound. So you’re focusing a little bit on breath, and then you’re feeling your body, and then you’re aware of sound. That really helped me.

The other thing is journaling. I said in the last podcast that I had such a hard time with journaling. And look at me now.

But I think to actually write down some of the thoughts when I’m ruminating, and turning toward those journal prompts, really helped me.

Heather Stang: It externalizes them. It puts them out. It lets the conscious mind know what the subconscious might be thinking. There are a lot of things that happen there.

But let’s go back to breath, body, sound. That’s one of my favorite meditations, and that’s a practice where you’re weaving in three different experiences simultaneously. You’re noticing your breath, physical sensation, and sound.

What that does, going back to this idea of focused awareness on one thing, which could be skillful, where we’re focused on breath or counting, or it could be unskillful where we’re focused on rumination, we are adding in something else. We’re expanding our view.

Notice your rumination and the temperature of the room. Notice your rumination and the sound.

That way, we’re not saying stop ruminating because how well does that work? That’s like someone telling you to calm down or stop being angry. It just makes you more so.

It squeezes out part of the rumination and takes your attention somewhere. Little by little, you can add in noticing scent, noticing taste, noticing the fact that rumination is just a construct in your mind.

This leads us to the concept of pain versus suffering because I don’t want anyone to think that the point of mindfulness, whether it’s in meditation practice, where you’re sitting intentionally trying to be present, or whether it’s in your day-to-day life when you’re having a conversation with someone or trying to do your work, whenever you’re being mindful, it’s not about overriding the fact that you are hurting.

The difference between pain and suffering is the pain is the objective situation. The fact that someone you love is missing is pain.

The suffering, to go back to the earlier example, is: “I’m going to lose everything and all my friends, and I will never be okay again, and my life is over.”

That suffering has not happened. Add-ons lead to suffering.

This mindfulness practice takes us to where we can have an awareness of our pain. Someone is missing, and I’m also drinking this cup of tea.

Which might sound like, “Who cares?” But in the moment, it can create a lot of space for you to feel more present, maybe more hopeful, maybe less stuck, maybe more energy to reach out for help. It creates possibility.

Amanda Palermo: The other practice too, I think, is when you’re doing a body scan and then noticing the pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. That also was helpful for me because it allowed me to drop out of my head a little bit and focus on my body.

There was almost, I don’t know how to explain it, you’re noticing what’s pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral in your body with a lot of objectivity. So you’re not sucked into building a story around the sensations in your body. You’re just gently noticing how your body is feeling without thinking.

There’s not a lot of thinking. It’s just feeling your body, and that also was very helpful to me when I would find that my mind was going down this path of rumination.

Heather Stang: Let’s back up and talk about what a body scan is, because not everybody knows what that is.

Amanda Palermo: That’s true.

Heather Stang: Would you like to teach us what a body scan is and then talk about those three feelings?

Amanda Palermo: So a body scan is basically when you feel your body. You start with your toes, or you can start with the top of your head, and you just feel all the parts of your body from the top of the head, let’s say, down to the face, the shoulders, the chest, the arms, the legs, all the way down to your toes.

You can scan back up, going from the toes up to the top of the head, and you’re just feeling the body. You’re not thinking about anything. You’re just feeling the sensations that are happening in the body.

Any sensations that you do notice, you’re just simply labeling them as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. And that’s it. It’s pretty simple.

It can be done lying down with the eyes closed. It can be done sitting. It could be done with your eyes open too. I’ve actually done it in a yoga class in a standing position at the top of the mat, having students close their eyes and just scan their whole body from the top of the head to the toes.

You can also do this while you’re out walking. You can actually scan your body while you’re walking and feeling all the sensations that are happening while you’re walking and noticing all of the feeling tones.

Heather Stang: This is happening in the present.

One of the things that is a key element of mindfulness, sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and even thought, awareness of thought, is happening right now.

When you feel your body and you notice the sensations, you are noticing it in the present. You are here, and that is the gateway to that wisdom, being here.

You’re not trying to change your body or judge it or diagnose it or even relax it.

That’s what’s so interesting about a mindful body scan. You’re not trying to relax.

Now, you can do the same thing in conscious relaxation, where you’re softening the face, softening the shoulders, softening the belly. You’re trying to unwind, unfurl, and that is a relaxation body scan, which has the intention of calming your nervous system and resting.

Then you have a mindful body scan where you’re just taking in information.

Paradoxically, even though you’re not trying to relax or trying to calm your nervous system, in many cases it still does because you’re not time traveling and you’re not worrying and you’re not ruminating. You’re here and you’re present.

Now, you might have thoughts. Of course, you probably will have thoughts. It’s inevitable that you’re going to have a pain in your knee and think, “Ugh, I’ve got to get that looked at,” or, “Ugh, I worked out too hard,” or whatever the story is.

Just like in any other meditation practice, you notice that you had that thought, no big deal, and then you come back to the sensation.

That’s why I like those three feeling tones, which, again, come out of Buddhism, pleasurable, unpleasurable, neutral. That can help us step away from the story.

Instead of saying, “My knee hurts because I had surgery and it’s cold out and it’s inflamed. Oh gosh, tomorrow I have to go to the grocery store. How am I going to get up the stairs? Lord, you know what? Maybe I should do Instacart.”

Right there, you’re out of the present. Then you go, “Unpleasurable.”

Amanda Palermo: Yeah.

Heather Stang: That’s the practice right there. That’s it. Then you go down to your knees and your calves and these kinds of things.

I love this practice because, to me, it is a bridge from focusing to mindfulness. You are focusing on one part of your body at a time, but it’s a moving target, and so you’re opening up at the same time.

This is often taught as one of the first mindfulness practices. MBSR, Jon Kabat-Zinn’s program, teaches it. It’s one of the first things I teach when I’m just doing mindfulness 101.

It brings you home to what, in traditional Buddhist teachings, is the first foundation of mindfulness, your body. Because it is always with you. It is always here. It is always a place where you can land and become present.

Amanda Palermo: It really is such a powerful practice because what I’ve found, in my experience, is that it starts to bleed into other areas of my life where I realize I’m practicing mindfulness, not intentionally, but just realizing that these techniques start to go into other areas of my life in a good way.

For example, as it pertains to grief, it made me very aware of how I’m reacting to my grief and the decisions that I’m making.

For example, when I sit down to eat, am I present with the food that’s in front of me? Am I on my phone and just doing other things? Or am I sitting down and really present with my food and the taste? How does it feel? The texture in my mouth? What is the smell of the food? What’s the taste of the food? How much food am I eating?

I’m just using that as an example, but it starts to go into all these other areas of my life. That’s what I’ve found it’s done for me.

Heather Stang: I think it’s important to pause here, and maybe I said this earlier, but mindfulness is not just a meditation practice.

We have formal mindfulness, where you sit down for a certain period of time and you attempt to be as present and open and kind as you possibly can be for that period of time.

But you just described mindful eating, which is practice. There’s mindful walking, mindful conversation, mindful knitting, mindful driving, mindful anything. It’s being present without those add-ons and with the compassion.

That ultimately is what we start to naturally move toward without even knowing, once we start a meditation practice, for many of us.

Amanda Palermo: I was just in Sedona this past weekend, and I was hiking. What a great time to practice mindfulness, while you’re walking and hiking.

I remember at one point of the hike, I just said to myself, “Take this in. Take this in. It’s beautiful.”

What’s the sound? The birds. It was raining, so feeling that, the temperature, the smells, being present with what’s happening with my dogs while they’re hiking with me, all these things.

And then it opens you up to receive also, on that end, to receive life and what life is putting forward to you in that moment.

So I think of it also as receiving.

We were hiking in one of the vortexes, and there was a moment where I just stopped and I could feel the energy of my surrounding environment, which was on top of this mountain with these trees and the weather and the temperature and the smells.

All of a sudden, I just started crying. I thought of my mother and I also was feeling the beauty that was around me too. So it was those two things. She just popped into my mind and I had this welling up of emotion, and I was thinking of her in this beautiful surrounding area.

But I don’t know if I would have had that experience if I didn’t allow myself to be present with it, if that makes sense.

Heather Stang: It’s the definition of that and that we were talking about.

You were thinking about your mother, and it was a special day for you, right?

Amanda Palermo: Yes. It was the three-year anniversary of my mom’s passing. It was the day we went on this hike, the day that three years ago she died.

Heather Stang: Which is significant.

For people listening who might be early on and thinking, “How on earth could I ever hike and experience the presence and the joy of being in this beautiful space and missing someone too?”

You just embodied it, didn’t you?

Amanda Palermo: But also, like you said, I think it’s more that I’m present to what I need now. I needed to do the hike then. But two years ago, no. I just wanted to be curled up on the couch in a ball, not doing anything.

And maybe next year it will be different also. I may not feel like I want to do anything. I might feel more depressed. Who knows?

But I think it’s more about practicing the mindfulness and allowing it to tell you, “You know what you need.” You know in the moment what you need because you’re paying attention.

Heather Stang: Right. The mindfulness isn’t about, “Oh, I have to force myself to go be on this hike and savor the present moment.” It’s not.

It’s about saying, “I need to curl up in a ball, so I’m going to curl up in a ball. That is my truth right now.”

Or, “This year I felt like I wanted to go somewhere and take my mother with me in my heart,” and you did that.

I think that’s the most important takeaway when we talk about mindfulness for grief. It’s not about faking it, transcending it, spiritually bypassing it, toxic positivity, or any of that stuff.

I really wanted to read a passage from my book Living With Grief, which was originally called Mindfulness & Grief, but the publishers changed that. So here we are. Same book, just newer version.

This is just a section called Mindfulness Acceptance, early in the book, When the Unthinkable Happens.

“Mindfulness Acceptance invites you to honor yourself and your experience with dignity and kindness. Rather than turn your back on your own suffering, you treat yourself as you would a beloved friend. You take the time to pay attention to the physical sensations, thoughts, and feelings that accompany your pain. This kind of acceptance means that you choose thoughtfully how to respond and temper your response with compassion. You will know you do not need to numb your pain or run from reality, nor do you need to punish yourself through blame, guilt, self-loathing, or feel a sense of unworthiness. You can find the middle ground of equanimity.”

That word equanimity means a calm and steady mind. It doesn’t mean pretending everything’s okay.

Amanda Palermo: When you use that word equanimity, which is one of my favorite words, it speaks to the heart of yoga practices.

I used to say when I was teaching quite a lot, when you’re doing a posture, approach each posture with the same value, with an equanimous mind. Just go into the pose and just breathe there, and that’s it. Then go to the next pose. It has the same value. It’s not more advanced. It’s not beginner. It’s just the same posture.

You get into it, and you just breathe there, and you notice where your mind is in that moment. When it goes away, you just bring it back to breath in the beginning.

That’s extremely difficult to do. But again, it’s the practice where students continue to practice this over and over again. Then yes, you start to become more equanimous and have more equanimity.

So I think that when it pertains to grief, that’s just such a beautiful place to think about going at some point, at times.

Heather Stang: Except for when you can’t.

Amanda Palermo: Exactly. Exactly. It’s hard to be that and cultivate that when you’re ugly crying.

Heather Stang: Although you can have equanimity for your ugly tears too.

You’re allowing it. You’re allowing it. You’re not judging it. You’re not saying, “Oh, I shouldn’t be doing this.”

There’s some huge relief when you can mindfully cry.

In fact, that is everybody’s homework. If you are a crier, the next time you have a grief wave, rather than trying to stifle it, assuming you’re in a place where you can let yourself go with it, notice yes, you’re having a thought probably about missing the person that is inviting those tears to come.

But simultaneously notice your body. Notice the sensation in your chest. Notice what it feels like to have the moisture on your face. Notice the sounds in the room. Notice the warm blanket around you.

Let your experience of sadness be a mindful one.

That will be much more compassionate to yourself. That’s showing up for yourself. That’s allowing yourself to be just as you are, rather than trying to cut your heart off at the source.

It’s a very powerful practice.

Afterward, when the crying has subsided, which it will, then offer yourself some compassion, which we’ll talk more about in the next episode. But right now, remembering that we can’t separate mindfulness from compassion, what you could do is just place your hand over your heart and offer yourself words of comfort.

Amanda Palermo: I agree 1,000 percent.

Heather Stang: Amanda, as always, I am so grateful to have you on this journey with me, exploring these eight steps and hearing your experiences both as a teacher and as a daughter.

Amanda Palermo: Thank you, Heather.

Heather Stang: So let’s end with where they can find you.

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

Heather Stang: And you are a Mindfulness & Grief certified coach?

Amanda Palermo: Yes. Yes.

Heather Stang: People can reach out to you that way.

Amanda Palermo: Yes. You can send me a direct message.

Heather Stang: Next time we’re going to talk about our favorite step. We say that about all of them. Compassion for all.

Amanda Palermo: Compassion.

Heather Stang: So I look forward to seeing you all back, or hearing you all back, or speaking at you next time.

Amanda Palermo: See you on the next one.