When grief softens the initial shock, other feelings often rise to the surface.
Guilt. Regret. Resentment. Self-criticism.
In this episode of the Mindfulness & Grief Podcast, Heather Stang and Amanda Palermo explore how compassion can support you when grief feels complicated and overwhelming.
This is Step 3 of the Mindfulness & Grief System: Compassion for All.
Compassion in grief is not about fixing pain or pretending everything is okay. It is about recognizing suffering and responding with care. That includes care for yourself, care for difficult people, and care for the grieving heart that may feel raw, overwhelmed, or alone.
Heather and Amanda explore the difference between empathy, sympathy, pity, and compassion, and why self-compassion is often the hardest place to begin. They also share how common humanity, simple practices, and compassionate language can help soften guilt and self-judgment.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
• Why grief can trigger guilt, resentment, and self-criticism
• The difference between empathy, sympathy, pity, and compassion
• How self-compassion becomes care in action
• What Kristin Neff’s three elements of compassion look like in grief
• Why common humanity can soften isolation
• How to create a self-compassion mantra
• What metta meditation is and how it supports compassion
If you have been feeling hard on yourself after loss, this is a gentle place to begin.
About the Hosts
Heather Stang, MA, C-IAYT, is a thanatologist, yoga therapist, author, and the creator of the Mindfulness & Grief System. Her work focuses on helping people reduce suffering and live alongside grief with compassion and practical tools.
Amanda Palermo is a grief counselor and mindfulness practitioner who brings warmth, clarity, and lived experience to conversations about loss. Together, Heather and Amanda offer grounded guidance for navigating grief step by step. Find her on Instagram.
Episode Transcript
Heather Stang: Today we are talking about Step 3 in the Mindfulness & Grief System. For those of you who are returning, welcome back. If this is your first time listening to the podcast, my co-host, Amanda Palermo, is here.
Amanda Palermo: Hi.
Heather Stang: Hi. We are walking you through the eight-step Mindfulness & Grief System. So tell me, Amanda, how do you feel about Step 3, compassion for all?
Amanda Palermo: Well, I’m really, really excited to talk about this today. I was taking some notes yesterday and thinking about just how loaded this whole step is. I think I mentioned this in grief group recently, that this is where the real work started for me personally with grief.
Heather Stang: It’s very important to me, and I actually realized I even misspoke, because technically this step is compassion for all, since we extend it to all beings. But a lot of times with grief, we really focus on the self-compassion piece because we can be so hard on ourselves. Even in this time where our heart is so tender and we’re missing our person, we can beat ourselves up with the shoulds and the coulds.
When you think about the list of things you were feeling when you came to this step, what did it do for you? What was the benefit?
Amanda Palermo: The benefit was that it helped me understand my feelings of guilt. I wouldn’t say resolve, because I think it’s still a work in progress, but it helped me understand them.
There were things I was feeling after my mom’s death, after the numbness kind of wore off and I started feeling back into my body. Then all these feelings started coming up, and I started processing a lot of family history and thinking about my own childhood. All this stuff started coming up, and there was just a lot of guilt.
It helped me realize that I’m human. I’m having a human experience. I think I mentioned this before. And my mother was also a human being. As close as I was to her, I also had some residual resentments about things from the past, and then I felt guilty about having those feelings.
Heather Stang: You don’t get to control what feelings you have. We often say grief is the uncontrollable response to a loss. We don’t decide how we’re going to feel, but what we’re learning to do here is respond to those feelings in a very different way than how a lot of us are conditioned. Is that fair to say?
Amanda Palermo: Absolutely. And it’s unexpected. Those feelings were really unexpected when they came up. I thought, what is this?
The other part of it was feelings around other family members. It’s so interesting how grief, when there’s a loss within a family, starts to affect everybody. Those family relationships can get sticky sometimes. I started to feel hostile toward people, and I had to work on compassion toward other family members. It was like, okay, they don’t understand what I’m going through. There was a lot of frustration with that. They don’t understand what I’m going through. They don’t understand what I’m feeling. So I would feel hostile or resentful toward them, and then feel guilty about that.
Heather Stang: It’s a vicious cycle, isn’t it? And the reality is they’re probably feeling something very similar, like, “She doesn’t understand how I’m feeling. I’m all alone in this.”
We know human relationships are complicated anyway, and then you put grief into the mix where everybody is extra irritable and exhausted. You’re just a raw nerve walking around. It’s where we really do need to show up for ourselves, which is something we’re not all taught to do. It’s also where we need good boundaries, because compassion has good boundaries, and self-compassion has good boundaries as well.
I think it’s important for us to define what compassion is, and maybe what it isn’t. The word compassion is really about being with suffering in a way that has an active component.
Let’s start with empathy. Empathy feels what someone else is feeling. End of experience. That’s it. It’s just feeling with somebody, which doesn’t necessarily lead to wise action. If you stop right there, and if anybody has ever felt that emotional contagion that is so easy to pick up on when someone you care about is feeling irritable, hostile, or upset, you can just kind of get in that pool of despair and swim with them, right?
Amanda Palermo: Right.
Heather Stang: Sympathy has more distance. It’s like, oh, they’re hurting, but it’s not necessarily my problem. Of course, we could split hairs semantically. Some people might use the word sympathy as compassion, but I like words, and I think it’s good to have these categories. There’s maybe a little bit of, “Oh, that’s not happening to me, but it’s happening to them.”
Pity is looking down on someone like they are less than you. But compassion cares and responds. Compassion starts with empathy, where you feel with someone, and it is followed by some sort of care.
This also applies to self-compassion. Self-compassion starts with empathy, a feeling, a stress response, a big emotion, and follows with some action that leads to care.
So what does that even mean? Because we know we cannot fix this. We cannot go back and change the story. We can’t go back in time and do all the things we feel like we could have done. So what does that action look like?
Amanda, I’m going to invite you, if you’d like, from your own experience. What does compassion look like for you? Maybe give one example of self-compassion in your life and one example of compassion in your life, and I’ll do the same. When you’re feeling a big emotion within yourself, how do you respond?
Amanda Palermo: I respond with what I kind of said earlier. It’s like a personal mantra. I say to myself, “I’m a human, and I’m having a human experience. I’m doing my best.”
Heather Stang: And for other people?
Amanda Palermo: For other people, I try to say the same thing. They’re human, they’re having a human experience, and they’re doing their best. That’s the only way, for me personally, that I can make sense of it. It’s the same mantra, but I put it toward myself and then put it out toward someone else.
Heather Stang: Because we’re not that different from other people, are we?
My practice is really similar. When I’m feeling a strong sense of overwhelm, whether it’s sadness, grief, regret, or guilt, and I can catch it without going down a rabbit hole, a lot of times for me it looks like placing my hand over my heart and just recognizing I’m having maybe a trauma response. Maybe sometimes I’ll just say, “Oh, I’m having a grief response.”
There’s a seeing in that. Even though it might sound, on the surface, like it’s just a feeling, it goes a step further by actually caring about it. That hand over the heart, or that mantra, and mantra is just a short phrase we can focus on that can interrupt the stress cycle internally, might look like making yourself a cup of tea, realizing you need to exit the room, or deciding you need to phone a friend.
There are a lot of different things that care can look like for each individual, but the key part is that we recognize either there is a person or a part of ourselves that is suffering, and there is a part of us that can care deeply and respond to that suffering.
Amanda Palermo: Yes.
Heather Stang: I actually have this image in my head of a little Heather that’s suffering and a big Heather that’s comforting. It’s very visual for me, and I can kind of see the compassionate Heather putting her arm around the suffering Heather.
Amanda Palermo: Right.
Heather Stang: That image, for me, can really soften self-criticism and blame and shame.
Amanda Palermo: Let me ask you a question, because for me, this is where the real work for me personally stems from. When you say the action component tied to compassion, is that the self-care component tied in with compassion?
Heather Stang: Absolutely.
Amanda Palermo: Okay.
Heather Stang: But now I’m going to ask you a question. When you say self-care, what do you mean?
Amanda Palermo: Well, I mean a variety of things. It could be something as simple as taking a bath or letting myself off the hook about something. It could be yoga. It could be going outside.
What’s coming to mind is that phrase bereaved individuals may repeat to themselves: “I should be over this by now. I should be over this already.” I think of a self-care action that would help that thought pattern. When I say let myself off the hook, I mean allowing myself to say, “It’s okay. There’s no timeline. You don’t need to be over this.”
Heather Stang: I think sometimes when you’re feeling that “I should be” or “Why am I not over this?” it can help to remember the weight of loss. Someone you love dearly is not here, and that matters. It would be very odd for us not to care about that.
And so, perspective. I don’t mean perspective where we pour fuel onto the fire and make it bigger than it is in the moment, but just to honor the gravity of somebody you care about deeply not being here. This is not like a paper cut that you put Neosporin and a Band-Aid on, and in three days it’s gone. This is grief. That wound gets opened again throughout time when different things arise.
Now the severity of that wound, the intensity and duration, shifts over time because you become more attuned to your ongoing relationship with them, or you have more self-soothing skills, or you’ve had more experience being able to live a normal life while still missing someone.
So to go back to your question, yes, that action is self-care, and that word self-care is huge. Like you said, it could be going outside for a walk. It could be letting yourself cry. It doesn’t even mean stifling the emotion. It could be writing a letter. There are unlimited possibilities for what that looks like.
It’s what do you need in the moment, not what does someone else think you need.
In fact, that’s a big shift many of us experience through grief, especially if we’ve been caregiving or have been in some sort of pattern our whole life, or with the person, and suddenly we have to decide: What do I need? That can be really hard, but also really important. How do I celebrate a holiday? How do I decide where to go on vacation? How do I decide what to eat? Everything is impacted. Your relationship to yourself and your relationship to others is really what self-compassion is about.
Amanda Palermo: Yes. It makes me think of this from another standpoint too. I’m a yoga teacher, and I’ve been leading teacher trainings and always trying to help teachers not exhaust themselves or burn out. It’s that learning of compassion, not just for the students, but turning that compassion back toward yourself. That helps with burnout or depletion, those kinds of feelings that teachers and clinicians can experience sometimes.
So for me, this step is full of work on myself and my career. It really opened up a lot for me.
Heather Stang: This was a huge journey for me too. I actually started really focusing on compassion as a personal practice when I realized how challenging my relationship with my father was. And not realized, because that’s kind of silly. I’d known my whole life how challenging it had been. But when I had the awareness that it wasn’t necessarily healthy for things to continue the way they were, I picked up Dr. Kristin Neff’s book Self-Compassion, which is really what this step is focused on, along with the Buddhist practice of metta meditation. We’ll talk more about that in a minute.
In Dr. Neff’s book and research, she isolates three different elements of compassion that are really helpful for learning how to apply it when you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve been self-critical my whole life. What do you mean I need to be nice to myself? What does that even look like?” And what does that look like when I have all this new guilt and shame and blame because of this loss?
Those three steps were super helpful for me.
The first one is mindfulness, which is simply being aware of the difficult emotions you’re carrying and your relationship to yourself, the negative self-talk that’s showing up, and deciding to have some equanimity, which we talked a lot about last week, a calm, steady mind in the presence of difficulty.
The second piece is common humanity, and I found this particularly helpful. Common humanity is understanding that all humans face challenging experiences. All humans go through grief. All humans feel like they didn’t do enough, or have hard days, or yell at someone they didn’t mean to yell at. It’s just part of being human that we are not going to have it together all the time. So there’s nothing wrong with you. And with grief, it is so human to grieve.
Again, I’m very visual. I actually see this globe in my head and it has these cartoon characters of Heathers all over the world. There’s a little Heather in Asia, there’s a Heather in Hawaii, there’s a Heather in Australia, and all these Heathers are experiencing whatever the trouble is, whatever the suffering is. These are all Heathers that are missing someone or didn’t do something skillful. And I can just be like, okay, okay, Heathers, we’re in this together. We’re not alone.
They aren’t really about me. It’s about other people who are experiencing maybe a challenging relationship with someone. That’s common humanity. Another way of thinking about it is we’re all in the same boat.
And then the final piece, this is the hardest for many of us, so it’s a practice, is self-kindness. These aren’t taught in any particular order by her. I teach them in the order I think I learned them.
Self-kindness is how we talk to ourselves, how we show up for ourselves. Do we take time to get some healthy food into our body, or do we just cram something down that’s going to make ourselves feel worse? On a small level, on a big level, do we say, “Oh, you’re such an idiot. You really got that wrong,” or do we say, “Oh, you are grieving a huge loss. Of course that happened”?
The way I see common humanity and self-kindness coming in together is this: how would I talk to one of those other Heathers, the Heather in Australia? You have to do a cartoon of this, draw it out. But if I were a grieving mother, how would I talk to another grieving mother? Would I talk to her the same way? And then bringing that back to me.
Amanda Palermo: The common humanity piece is so big because grief can feel so isolating. I remember feeling, and still at times feel, very alone in it. When you can connect with other people that understand the grief experience, it’s powerfully healing in so many ways.
The grief support group is obviously what I’m thinking of, but it’s also just sitting with people who aren’t judging you. They’re listening and holding space for you, and they’re going through similar feelings and challenges. The losses are different, but it’s the same sort of experience. It’s the one place where I can say, “Oh, they do understand what I’m going through.” This is a place where people get it. They really get it. That can feel very validating. It’s a place where my grief can be heard and witnessed.
Heather Stang: Even if it isn’t the same story, or even if one person had a difficult relationship and another person had a great relationship, there are going to be overlaps and differences. I actually don’t think the differences are a problem, because that can take us into really stretching our compassion skills. We can be like, oh, this person, maybe we aren’t aligned 100 percent on everything, but we’re actually more alike than we are different because we’re missing someone.
Amanda Palermo: I was just saying this to somebody the other day, that when I listen to other people speak about their grief, it helps me see different points of view. There may be differences, but there’s so much good in that because you can see something in a way that maybe you never would have seen before. I think that’s really wonderful. It helps open up your mind a little bit.
Heather Stang: This is part of why I love groups. You can know you’re around people who do understand, and sometimes somebody says something and you’re like, wow, I never thought about it like that, and I see how that shows up in my life, or doesn’t. It still deepens connection, because connection doesn’t have to be between two identical people.
That loneliness we feel, that deep, cold, icy loneliness when we want that specific person back in our lives, can often be warmed up when we are in community and with compassion. It doesn’t have to be that you’re alike. It doesn’t have to be that you’re homogeneous. It is the desire for suffering to be alleviated, no matter what the story.
Amanda Palermo: I think this is the step where, in the meditations, there’s one where we make up our own, is this the one where we make up our own meditation? Or one of them? Like we do our own...
Heather Stang: You make up your own mantra.
Amanda Palermo: Yes. It’s metta, right? Or am I...
Heather Stang: Well, there’s one practice, and anybody listening can do this. It helps to sit with yourself in quiet and think about mindfulness, common humanity, and self-compassion, and come up with your own self-compassion mantra. What are you going to say to yourself the next time you catch yourself being self-critical? Is that the one you’re thinking of?
Amanda Palermo: Yes. Yes, that’s the one I’m thinking of.
Heather Stang: I think that is the most pivotal practice in the program because it paves the way for you to be more gentle with yourself through the whole thing.
Amanda Palermo: Yes. When I feel self-critical and there’s a feeling I’m struggling with that pertains to the loss of my mother, I think my self-compassion mantra was, “This isn’t permanent. This feeling isn’t permanent.”
There’s something about that, and of course this goes back to yoga a little bit, but this idea of impermanence, that these feelings change. Like I always say, grief is fluid. It’s always changing shape. It’s always changing when it shows up. So in this moment, I recognize what it is I’m feeling and then I say to myself, “This isn’t permanent, this feeling,” because tomorrow it will probably be a different feeling. A half hour later it will be a different feeling.
For me, when I’m in a feeling that feels very negative or dark or heavy, there’s this unrealistic thought in the back of my mind that says, “This is the way you’re going to feel forever. This situation is going to be like this forever,” which is not true.
Heather Stang: But it sure feels like that at the time, doesn’t it? I’m sure people who are listening are going, but I feel like this is forever, because we know that feeling. We know it so intimately. When you are in deep pain, it does feel like it’s going to be there forever.
Amanda Palermo: And it’s not to say, “This too shall pass.” I don’t want to make it sound trivial like that.
Heather Stang: Thank goodness.
Amanda Palermo: It’s so cringe.
Heather Stang: Well, it’s how you say it, I think, and the intention. Same with impermanence. Any of these beautiful words can be weaponized. They can be used in a dismissive way, and that’s not the point of compassion.
Back to the whole what compassion is and is not. Compassion is not fixing, rescuing, or making pain disappear. It’s not pretending everything’s okay. It’s not spiritual bypassing, which is that “this too shall pass” thing when really deep inside you’re like, oh my gosh, I’m crumbling. And it is not even a skill that we perfect. It’s a way of being.
I remember, this wasn’t a death loss, but when I was going through a horrible breakup and had been cheated on with my best friend, somebody said, “You should just be grateful for the lessons you’re getting from this.” I was sitting there crying in the chiropractor’s office. It was a chiropractor, and I never went back. I felt so dismissed.
I know people who are grieving the death of someone get those kinds of comments from people too, whether it’s someone who sees themselves as a healer or someone who is really uncomfortable. That is diminishing.
Now, if I myself am sitting there going, wow, I have learned a lot from this, that’s totally different.
Amanda Palermo: Yeah, totally different.
Heather Stang: So back to cringe, we can be cringey with ourselves and other people can be cringey with us.
Amanda Palermo: Right. Right. Yeah. I think that’s how I deal with difficult emotions. They’re like clouds passing through me. It’s like water. It’s fluid. My feelings are fluid, and they change from minute to minute, hour to hour. If I trust that for myself, then I know tomorrow I’ll feel something different. That’s my mantra. That’s what helps me get through sticky feelings.
Heather Stang: There is one thing that I feel is not impermanent, and that is the love. That is the through line. You cannot take love out of grief. It is in there.
While the idea of impermanence can be comforting at times and terrifying at other times, because I don’t want my person to be impermanent, I don’t want their life to be impermanent, I don’t want our connection to be impermanent, it is that through line of love and that continuing bond, that continued connection, that can be the thing you lean on when the idea of impermanence is scary.
I also think thinking about your person can, in many cases, be a gateway to self-compassion. Somebody said in group a few weeks ago, and whoever came up with this, we’re giving you credit even though we don’t know your name, that the way I am going to honor my mother is to take care of her daughter the way she would want me to.
Amanda Palermo: Yes. The way I can honor my mother is by taking really good care of her daughter.
Heather Stang: Yes. And that is a gateway to self-compassion, if you had a decent relationship with your mother, of course. If you didn’t, it may not work for everybody. But I thought that was really powerful.
Amanda Palermo: Oh yes. When I heard that, it really spoke to me, definitely, because I always think, oh, my mom would want me to do this.
Heather Stang: Right. Self-compassion is almost a precursor to continuing bonds. Not required, but if you are more comfortable with yourself as a human, I imagine in many cases it might be more readily available to feel that connection with your person because you’re not cutting yourself off. You’re fully yourself. You’re fully open to yourself. That might be a little heady, but that’s something that came to mind.
Amanda Palermo: It makes me think of individuals who had a difficult relationship with the person who passed. Compassion in general would really be needed because I imagine there would be so many conflicting feelings around the loss.
Heather Stang: Working with a difficult relationship in grief does invite us to do more self-parenting, more reparenting of ourselves, and really work on our relationship with ourselves. Compassion is a big gateway to that too. Not gateway, it is the thing. It is what we are doing. Because if your parent or your partner or whoever died was critical of you and you’re embodying that, you have to unlearn that self-criticism.
Amanda Palermo: That sounds really hard.
Heather Stang: Well, I have been working on it for probably about 10 years now, and I’m here to tell you it does work. It’s a practice.
Amanda Palermo: Yeah.
Heather Stang: But it can be done, and self-compassion is the way through.
Again, that’s why I picked up that book. Then we can move into compassion, because compassion for the person who died can also be hard if it was a difficult relationship.
If you had an easy relationship, it might be very natural to bring up the image of your mother. When you talk about your mother, you light up. You two were so connected. I wish I could have been in the room with the two of you. I feel like we’d have had such a great time. It’s probably easy for you to think about your mom during hard times in her life and feel compassion and care, and that desire that she didn’t suffer, even if she did.
But if it is somebody who was difficult, that can be hard to access. Or if it’s somebody in your family system or grief circle who you feel is just not hearing you or not getting it, that can be hard to have compassion for. But it can be incredibly helpful to understand that compassion for another person, or for yourself, doesn’t mean letting them off the hook for bad behavior, condoning it, or excusing it. It means not carrying around that heavy weight for yourself.
One way that has really helped me see this clearly comes out of the Buddhist practice of metta. If everybody were free from suffering, we wouldn’t have conflict. So it is wise to hope that our enemies or our difficult people could be happy and safe and free from suffering, because then we would all get along better.
Amanda Palermo: That makes me think of dealing with difficult people when there’s a death and how that really shakes up families. Sometimes you do have to deal with difficult people around that event. I’m thinking of my own family and having to deal with siblings and things like that. Sometimes it wasn’t very easy.
So yes, leaning on compassion for them and compassion toward myself, because I would feel bad if I wasn’t handling it the way I thought I should be handling it. The metta meditations are really, really great for that.
Heather Stang: They weave in self-compassion naturally because a metta meditation, and that’s M-E-T-T-A, is the meditation of compassion and loving-kindness. Compassion is the desire for freedom from suffering, and loving-kindness is the desire that we feel happiness and joy. It’s all woven in there.
The way it works is that you send well wishes in your mind. You kind of feel like you’re pouring out this sense of compassion and loving-kindness by visualizing a series of people and offering words of kindness.
For instance, I might visualize Amanda as part of my practice and think, “May you be safe. May you be free from suffering. May you be healthy. May you know peace,” although I would add on, because this is where the self-compassion comes in, “as I wish to.”
So, “May you be free from suffering, as I wish to be free from suffering. May you know peace, as I wish to know peace.”
Classically, you start with yourself. Then you go to a benefactor, a teacher, or a mentor, someone who feels like they charge your compassion battery. Then a friend or family member, then a neutral person, then a difficult person, and then all beings.
Woven into this is the practice of wanting all people, and all animals too, all sentient beings, to be free from suffering. It’s really hard for a lot of us to start with ourselves. “May I be free from suffering. May I be happy.” That can be hard when you first learn it, so sometimes we flip it and put the benefactor first. Sometimes I use my dog because my dog does not trigger me at all.
That’s what metta is, and it’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful practice. If you’re listening and interested, you could Google M-E-T-T-A, you could look for mine, or there are many out there.
Recently, with the Walk for Peace monks, Bhante Kusala did a metta practice that I got to go to about a month ago. What was so interesting about that practice is that I don’t know how much time actually passed, but I think we spent 20 or 30 minutes just sending compassion to ourselves. Then he had us send it to all beings for about the same amount of time. We didn’t do all the little steps in between. We just did ourselves and all beings for a long time, and it was powerful.
That’s actually what I’ve been doing in my own morning practice. When I do the all beings piece, I’ll picture my friends, a neutral person, the difficult person of the day, I’ll picture everybody and send it there. That’s been really powerful to weave into my daily practice.
Amanda Palermo: I’m thinking of “May all beings everywhere be happy and free, and may our thoughts and actions contribute to that happiness.” I used to end all of my yoga classes saying that because it’s so needed.
At the end of class there was always a silence. Everybody’s mind was a little stiller, the body was a little tired, and I would always think, when I was saying that, that I was putting something out into the world as a reminder that we all are putting out that intention. It’s an intention, and I always found the translation of it so powerful: may our thoughts and actions contribute to that happiness.
Heather Stang: It really takes the spotlight off of us as individuals and puts us into community, which is where healing often happens.
If you’re grieving and feeling that isolation and missing your person, we know from the research that social support is a great differentiator in how your grief experience is going to play out.
Now, for people who are listening and thinking words like happy and joy are really not palatable right now, that’s okay. You can make up your own words for metta if you like. You do not have to use classic words.
I’ve found that for some people, when they’re grieving, if I use the phrases I used to use, like “may you be happy, may you be safe, may you be free from suffering,” I might change happy to healthy, or just “may you know peace.”
It’s about finding words that are not going to make you feel like your feelings are disenfranchised. That’s really important. You can add in things like happy or joy if it ever feels right, because remember the intention behind any of these practices, all the practices we talk about in Steps 1 through 8, and here especially, is to alleviate suffering.
If the practice itself is causing suffering, we might as well not do it.
Amanda Palermo: Right. It’s counterintuitive.
Heather Stang: Exactly. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It just means it needs modifying.
Just like in a yoga practice or an exercise practice, let’s use the gym. If you went to the gym and thought, oh, I need to build muscle, I’m going to pick up this weight, and that weight is causing your tendon to tear or something, what is the point?
Amanda Palermo: Right.
Heather Stang: Same with yoga poses.
Amanda Palermo: Well, in yoga classes, I think that’s a really important thing to say. You should feel better to some degree. It’s not going to get rid of all your negative feelings overnight, but it should help you feel like you have tools and resources. You should feel a sense of empowerment and contentment.
If you’re going to a yoga class and you leave feeling worse than when you went in, it may not be the class for you.
Heather Stang: And if you’re doing compassion practice and you feel more self-critical, then you want to back it up a little. I find for a lot of people a good way to start dipping your toe in the lake of self-compassion is to start with common humanity.
For many of us, looking across a circle at another grieving person, or thinking about someone in our life who is going through a hard time, is an easier entry point. Feel that compassion for them, build that up, and then turn it back to yourself, rather than just saying, “I deserve to be happy,” or “I deserve to be free from suffering,” while inside you’re thinking, no.
Feeling is more important than the words always, which is true for affirmations too. That compassion mantra we talked about earlier, you need to believe it. It’s not fake it till you make it, or if I repeat this enough times. Anybody who has tried that knows that for the majority of people, it’s the feeling, not the words themselves, that matter.
So you can start off, rather than saying, “May I be at ease with what’s happening,” if you don’t believe that, with something as simple as, “I’m having a hard time.” That is compassion.
Amanda Palermo: Well, because you’re also seeing the truth of what’s really happening. It’s mindful.
Heather Stang: Yes. And it’s not faking it.
Amanda Palermo: Boy, I’ve said that a lot to myself. “I’m having an off day today.” “I’m not doing well right now.” That kind of honesty with yourself is so important.
Heather Stang: I’m thinking about a term that’s come up in group. I think one of our Awaken group members pointed me to a magazine called Grief, and this term came up where people would say, “I’m feeling griefy.”
Amanda Palermo: Yes.
Heather Stang: There’s something about that that’s kind of gentle.
Amanda Palermo: I love it.
Heather Stang: I do too. It is such a good description. I don’t know if it’s that y on the end that makes it a little softer. “I’m feeling griefy.” That has been one of those little aha words.
How are you feeling? Griefy. Which encompasses so many things.
Amanda Palermo: Sometimes you just don’t know what you’re feeling. You can’t always put it into words. Sometimes there are no words, but all you know is that you’re just feeling griefy. I used that term yesterday. I said to my husband, “I’m just feeling griefy.” I think it’s awesome. It’s a great word.
Heather Stang: And look at us. What’s so strange about grief is that sometimes you do laugh. You’re laughing at the common humanity of it all, the fact that you and I can connect over a kind of silly word, even though we’re talking about something sad and we’re both thinking about our people.
Even though we might be grief professionals, it does not mean we are immune to our feelings. There’s just something connecting and special and precious when you have that shared language and that shared experience.
Amanda Palermo: Yeah.
Heather Stang: In that moment of showing up for someone else, and you showing up for me, it does loosen the self-criticism and the fear and the shame and the regrets, because it brings you present, I think.
Amanda Palermo: Yes.
Heather Stang: So we’ve talked about self-compassion and we’ve talked about compassion. Our next conversation will be about Step 4. Are we going to say this is our favorite, because we say that for all of them? The next step is pretty pivotal as well because it is all about being with the difficult emotions that arise.
It is an extension of self-compassion. As I’ve probably said before, it’s not like each of these are little buckets. They all mix together. We’re going to talk about vulnerability and courage and how they show up in grief.
How do you feel about Step 4?
Amanda Palermo: Oh, it’s a big one. Yeah, it’s a big one. There’s a lot. I’m already thinking of a bunch of things. We’ll get into it next week, but I think it’s a very pivotal time for people when they’re working on this.
Heather Stang: It’s about learning how to sit with those big, difficult emotions with equanimity so that you know you’re not going to come undone. It’s about discerning when you want to turn toward taking care of yourself and going inward and being more vulnerable, and when you want to turn to being more outward and expressive and more courageous.
Just like you cannot separate grief from love, you cannot separate courage and vulnerability.
Amanda Palermo: It does take a lot of courage to sit with difficult emotions, to face them head-on. It’s so scary sometimes, and that’s what courage is, moving toward something that is really, really scary and working with the fear of it. So yeah, I can’t wait to talk about it.
Heather Stang: We need self-compassion first so that we are not beating ourselves up during this time when we’re being with things that are difficult. They’re really tied together.
I do hope you will come back and listen to Amanda and me share about the next step. In the meantime, Amanda, if people want to find you, where will they go?
Amanda Palermo: You can find me on Instagram at AmandaPalermo1018.
Heather Stang: Wonderful. That will be in the show notes.
I do want to mention that I offer a monthly free Living With Grief workshop that I don’t think I normally mention. You can go to HeatherStang.com and sign up for that. We do a little meditation, a little journaling, and you can ask me whatever questions you have about grief or mindfulness.
But for now, take care of yourselves.
