When grief brings up difficult emotions, it can be hard to know what to do next.
Do you lean in?
Do you step back?
Do you let yourself cry, or do you take a break from the intensity?
In this episode of the Mindfulness & Grief Podcast, Heather Stang and Amanda Palermo explore how to tend to difficult emotions with more wisdom, discernment, and care.
This is Step 4 of the Mindfulness & Grief System: Skillful Courage.
Skillful courage in grief is not about force or fearlessness. It is about learning how to listen to yourself, knowing when to approach what hurts, and knowing when to rest. Heather and Amanda talk about the pressure to “be strong,” the fear of being overwhelmed by grief, and why vulnerability is not weakness. They also explore how grief can show up in many forms, from crying and anger to numbness, confusion, and withdrawal.
You will learn:
- What skillful courage means in grief
- Why difficult emotions are not the enemy
- How to discern when to lean in and when to step back
- The difference between intuitive and instrumental grieving styles
- Why being called “strong” can sometimes feel like pressure
- How the R.A.I.N. practice can help during a grief wave
- A mindful movement practice for vulnerability and strength
- A journaling prompt to help you reconnect with your inner courage
This episode is not about pushing through grief. It is about learning how to be with what hurts in a way that is honest, grounded, and kind.
If grief has been feeling overwhelming, or if you are unsure how to respond when difficult emotions arise, 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: Great. First, I want to welcome back my co-host, Amanda Palermo.
Amanda Palermo: Hi there.
Heather Stang: Hi. For those of you who are joining us again, welcome back. For those of you who are new, I just want to recap.
Right now, we are talking about the Mindfulness & Grief System, which is a process that I put together grounded in Buddhism, Hinduism, and principles of thanatology, which is the study of death, dying, and bereavement.
We have made it through three of the steps. The first step was conscious relaxation, which helps us settle our nervous system. The second step is mindful awareness, which helps us expand our view beyond just our suffering, but it also helps us find some stability in the present moment. Then the third step is compassion for all, but we really focus on self-compassion. I really think of those first three steps as our foundations for mindfulness. These are the three things that are classically taught when you go to, say, a community mindfulness class, and they work really well for grief.
And here we are in Step 4, which I call skillful courage, which is really about learning how to be with those difficult emotions that can feel really scary.
Amanda Palermo: Yes, and I think this is where the real work begins.
Heather Stang: I agree.
Amanda Palermo: Because...
Heather Stang: Although it takes some work to be present to your grieving body, to be in the present moment, and to treat yourself with kindness, especially if that’s not something you’re used to, this is where we really start to dive deep.
Amanda Palermo: Yes. Yes. I think it can be a little scary. And I think the work, at least for me, is the feeling of knowing when to go toward what’s uncomfortable and when to move away from it. Maybe it’s not the right time to move toward uncomfortable feelings or vulnerability, but sometimes you may want to test the waters and see how it feels to lean in toward those feelings. That oscillation requires a lot of investigation and self-inquiry.
Heather Stang: And listening to yourself when you have that inquiry, because there isn’t a right or wrong.
I have one story that I often share about a member of my online grief support group, Awaken. This is from many years ago. He came to the group and said he was in a widows and widowers group in his community, outside of our community, and the grief counselor running the group told him that he wasn’t spending enough time with his grief and that he needed to spend a half hour in his bedroom every day crying.
And I asked him, “How do you feel about that?” He said, “That sounds horrifying.” And I was like, it does. Number one, that’s not coming from him. That’s not coming from his inquiry. That was someone else’s agenda.
If we look at grief as a natural reaction to loss, it means that you are the authority of your experience. As professionals, we’re here to guide you, to give you some tools, to help you figure out what questions to ask and what to do. But it’s so important to learn how to trust yourself.
Amanda Palermo: I’m so glad you said that because I think sometimes people may think that we are there as the grief professional to tell you what to do, or to give you the answers about how you are feeling. But really, I think our job is more to guide someone to ask the questions for themselves so that they can turn inward and say, “How am I feeling? What do I need right now?” And that’s skillful courage, knowing what it is that you need. But that’s up for the person to decide. That’s not up to us as grief professionals to decide how someone is feeling. The griever is doing that.
Heather Stang: Now that being said, there is a technique that I believe comes from hospice care called dosing yourself with grief that can be helpful.
For instance, if you need to go to work because you need money, because things cost things, and maybe you’ve realized that you’re trying to stuff down emotions before you go to work, it can be helpful, if it’s right for you, to maybe let yourself cry before you go to work. Let the tears come. Give yourself that space. So I’m not saying that’s never a great idea.
But skillful courage is about that oscillation, and it is where we really start to listen to ourselves.
Part of why we have Step 1, conscious relaxation, which really is more about grounding and safety than anything, because you can’t relax and you can’t regulate your nervous system if you don’t feel safe, is because here in skillful courage, that oscillation might be back to those grounding and safety-oriented practices that give you a skillful distraction from the intensity of the pain.
But this is the place where we also want to start empowering you to hold and nurture the grief that’s showing up.
Amanda Palermo: I think there are times when going into your room and crying for however long can really be beneficial for somebody, or even for me at some point. Sometimes if I have a grief wave that comes up, I might just say, “You know what? I think what might be good for me right now is to go in my room and just have a good cry, like a good ugly cry. That’s what I feel like I want to do right now.”
But then other times I might say, “I don’t want to do that today. That doesn’t feel right for me today. I have to make another choice,” or, “I just can’t tend to this right now.”
I think that’s what skillful courage is teaching us, when to make those decisions for ourselves.
Heather Stang: And there’s a nuance too about being with the emotion.
By the way, I am a go-in-the-room crier. That is totally my grieving style. I go through so many Puffs Plus with lotion. That is the only tissue I have in my house. I will not deviate, because allergies and grief, I cry so hard when I’m grieving. It’s very embodied.
I think it’s important to say that for some of us, at times too, there can be a fear of letting go into those emotions because, I often say, it feels like you’re going to spontaneously combust or you won’t come back from it.
Amanda Palermo: Yes, I agree.
Heather Stang: Yeah. If I let this out, it will consume me and I won’t make it back.
And the reality is, you do. People don’t combust from it. You go through the pain, and tears are the body’s way of releasing. There can be something really cathartic in letting those tears flow through.
Then there’s another piece to that vulnerability as well. So we’ve got crying on one end, taking a break from crying on the other, and then there’s that place of being with the actual emotion that’s showing up. Because grief is an umbrella term for a whole bunch of emotions.
What are some of the emotions you’ve experienced as part of grief?
Amanda Palermo: I’m so glad that you said that because it can look like so many things, not just crying. Crying is one of the ways. It could also mean silence, not talking, withdrawal. It could mean feeling empty, numb, feeling no emotion at all. Not crying. Just saying, “God, I don’t feel anything right now. I feel empty.”
Anger. Brain fog. Confusion. Feeling frozen. Feeling scattered. Fear. There can be fear. I think there can be tremendous highs and then tremendous lows. Hostility can also be another part of it. Sometimes feeling like you don’t want to engage socially, feeling antisocial. There are so many things it can look like. So many things. Overeating, undereating.
Heather Stang: Yeah. It’s all the things. There can also be guilt. There can be self-criticism. There can be doubt.
So I guess we’re just listing off so many words, which, if you didn’t hear yourself in there, doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It just means the list is huge.
There can be wisdom in discerning what you’re feeling, spending some time with that feeling, and knowing that the feeling is a messenger rather than an enemy. I think that’s a big lesson from Buddhism that we can take. These feelings that we are scared of are really a guidance system. They are information and data that something is wrong, that something needs to be tended to.
Then we lean back into Step 3, self-compassion, and let the part of us that is hurting be cared for by the part of us that cares about our suffering.
This step has some techniques to help you do that.
Before we go into this, I do want to drop in a little conversation about grieving styles, as my advisor and professor, Dr. Terry Martin, and his colleague and great thanatologist Ken Doka wrote about in their book Grieving Beyond Gender.
You and I talked a lot about crying, and that is a hallmark of the intuitive griever. There’s a continuum here. We’re not 100 percent intuitive. We’re on a scale. On the other end of the scale is an instrumental griever.
So if you’re listening and you’re someone who says, “I don’t cry, I care, I’m grieving,” but your grief is expressed through action, like running or building something or buying books on grief, not to express emotions but to learn about the science behind it, you’re more cognitive than emotional. That’s on the other side of the spectrum.
Neither is right or wrong, and neither is good or bad. We’re just different.
The reason why their book is Grieving Beyond Gender is because back in the day, the book was tongue-in-cheek called Men Don’t Cry, Women Do. That was the stereotype. But their research showed it’s not a man or woman thing. We just associate culturally masculine and feminine styles. I like that they gave it a different name so that we can be gender neutral.
Again, intuitive is very emotional. Instrumental is very active and cognitive. We’re all somewhere on that spectrum.
In fact, Amanda, you and I, here we are studying grief. That’s our instrumental side coming out.
Amanda Palermo: Yeah, I definitely think I’m both. I connect to both because I’m like you, I’m a crier. I’ll just let it out. I’m not ashamed of it or embarrassed. I’m like, this is happening. Everyone, go with it. It feels good for me sometimes to just let it out.
But then other times, I really like to study this part, the grieving mind and the brain and the cognitive side and all that stuff. So yeah, it’s definitely a spectrum.
Heather Stang: Yeah. They would say you have a primary and secondary style.
Amanda Palermo: Do you think stoicism falls under that umbrella, maybe a little bit of an instrumental griever?
Heather Stang: Maybe. That’s a really great question.
Amanda Palermo: I ask that because I feel that’s something I see quite a bit of. It could just be me, but I feel that a response sometimes to grief can be this idea of stoicism, of just keeping a stiff upper lip and being tough. You’ll get through it.
Heather Stang: So if you’re defining stoicism as stiff upper lip, I would say no.
Again, unfortunately, Dr. Martin died many years ago, so I certainly can’t ask him, though you could ask Dr. Doka. But here’s what I’m thinking. An instrumental griever isn’t necessarily a stiff upper lip person. They’re still feeling. They’re still grieving. They’re just showing it in a different way.
So maybe there are more instrumental grievers who tend to be stoic, but I don’t know that I would put the two together all the time because it doesn’t mean they’re intentionally adopting that attitude. It’s more embodied. It just shows up differently.
Amanda Palermo: Got it.
Heather Stang: It’s a good question, though.
Amanda Palermo: Yeah.
Heather Stang: I don’t know enough about stoicism. If you’re a stoicism expert, you can reach out to us and let us know, because that is very interesting.
Amanda Palermo: It makes me think of how our society can be a little death-phobic.
Heather Stang: The instrumental griever isn’t necessarily death-phobic. They’re just processing it differently.
Amanda Palermo: Differently. Yeah, that makes sense.
Heather Stang: Yeah. I could see either side of the spectrum suppressing feelings, where they’re stuffing it down to appear a certain way, however internally they feel, whether emotional or instrumental.
Now that we’ve talked about that, because I think it’s really important, I don’t want to make anyone who isn’t a crier feel like they’re grieving wrong, because you’re not.
I’ll give another quick example. I was giving a talk where I explained instrumental and intuitive grieving, and a woman said, “Oh, this explains my son. I didn’t think he cared about the fact that his dad was dead, but as soon as his dad died, he started jogging five miles every day, and he never jogged before.”
So he’s moving his energy of grief. That’s how I see it. Crying is moving the energy of grief. For him, running was moving the energy of grief, just in a different way.
Amanda Palermo: I think that’s a beautiful way to explain it.
Heather Stang: Yeah.
Amanda Palermo: Moving the grief through the body in different ways.
Heather Stang: Yes. The energy. And that comes directly from Martin and Doka. Grief is an energy that needs to be moved, basically. I remember writing “yoga” in the margins when I was reading that book, because I thought yoga is a great way, whether you’re instrumental or intuitive, to move the energy through.
Amanda Palermo: Oh boy, is it ever. It’s a great way. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten on my mat just feeling like I’m not in a good place mentally, and then after my practice I think, “God, I feel so much better. What was I so upset about before? Why was that such an issue? I just feel great now.”
I think it’s something about moving whatever is there. It just moves all that out, through and out.
Heather Stang: And all the things that yoga and other types of movement do for your nervous system, for your hormones, they help you regulate. And that is something the grieving body needs.
So let’s also address, since skillful courage has that word courage in the title, the expression, “Oh, you’re so strong. I really admire how strong he is through this. He’s been through so much. He’s so strong.”
Amanda Palermo: Yeah. I remember hearing a story a while back, a long time ago. Someone was telling me about a woman whose husband had passed, and they had a lot of children. They were saying, “Now she’s a single mom, she’s raising these kids all by herself. She didn’t fall apart. She kept on going.” They kept saying, “She didn’t fall apart. She didn’t fall apart.”
And I thought to myself, would it be so bad if she fell apart? What’s wrong with falling apart?
It was another way of saying, “She’s so strong. She’s just so strong.” And I remember it didn’t sit with me very well because I think the strength is in the vulnerability. If somebody does fall apart and has the courage to allow themselves to be vulnerable and to fall apart, that’s okay. That takes courage. That takes strength. That is strong.
Heather Stang: And she may have fallen apart. And guess what? You can fall apart and still raise kids while you’re grieving. People do it all the time.
There are balls you have to keep in the air. You have to keep them fed. You have to keep yourself alive. There are some very hard things.
So while there is the fact that people do have to summon up courage, a lot of people who are grieving are like, “I’m not strong. I just have to do this.” I think it’s the way that it’s said. It creates distance and makes it seem like if you show any vulnerability, you’re going to be judged.
If I say, “Oh, Amanda, you’re so strong,” and then you call me up and say, “I can’t do it today. Can you just come over and make me a sandwich and let me cry?” it’s going to seem like I’m not a safe person to do that with, because then I’ll be like, “Oh, she’s falling apart.”
So if you are someone who has heard, “Oh, you’re so strong,” and you cringe at it, you’re not alone.
But what you just said, that piece about it taking a lot of vulnerability to be courageous and a lot of courage to be vulnerable, that’s what skillful courage is all about, understanding that you can’t really separate the two.
Amanda Palermo: Yes. And there’s no choice. You don’t have a choice when you’ve lost your person and whatever situation you’re in. You are trying to go on with your life and just do daily activities.
So then people say, “Oh gosh, you’re so strong. You’re getting through this,” and you just don’t have a choice really. What else are you going to do?
I also think it puts unnecessary pressure on someone. I know for myself, I didn’t want to feel like I had to be strong. Sometimes it felt like pressure. But that was just my experience.
Heather Stang: That being said, if you’re someone who feels strong, go with that. We’re not saying you shouldn’t feel strong, but it has to come from you, kind of like the guy crying in the room, that needed to come from him.
If you’re someone who says, “Wow, I am doing it.” Actually, you and I had that conversation before we started recording because I’ve had some losses in my life the past few weeks. There have been several. You asked me how I was, and I was like, “You know what? I’m taking care of myself. I’m doing it.” And that actually did feel like a strength to me, even though things are sad and hard. But that came from me.
Amanda Palermo: And also the discernment.
Heather Stang: Yes.
Amanda Palermo: To know the difference.
In Sanskrit, there’s a word for discernment. It’s viveka. I wanted to actually talk about this because this is a requirement, in yogic terms, for spiritual liberation, spiritual freedom. It basically means discernment. It means wisdom, judgment. When you put it into practice, it’s a way to see things as they truly are, with clarity. So when you can see things as they truly are, you’re able to make a clear decision and really discern what it is that you need to do for yourself.
That inner wisdom is deep. It’s within you. I remember taking a philosophy class and the teacher was talking about this idea of viveka and how it was an Indian philosophical idea.
I think that when we’re practicing yoga on the mat and we’re doing poses, that’s how we’re learning about discernment. We’re learning about viveka. We learn, how does this feel in my body? How is my breath? Do I need to do more in this pose? Do I need to do less? You slowly start learning that through the postures, and then hopefully what ends up happening is that in your life, you start doing that off the mat too.
So this is, for me, a big component of skillful courage.
Heather Stang: One of the points in skillful courage is to learn to discern when to approach and when to step back from painful emotions. So you nailed it.
What I love about what you said and the yoga philosophy is that you’re doing that so then you can make wise and skillful choices about what to do with it.
Amanda Palermo: Yes. Yes. It’s such a deep thing, but this is, to me, one of the reasons why someone would start practicing yoga. There are many reasons why somebody would want to practice yoga, but this is something that we’re trying to cultivate on our mat because when you can really learn to have discernment, to see things as they truly are, that’s where there’s a sense of freedom in that.
Heather Stang: And in the mindfulness world, that’s really why we are being mindful, so we can have clarity of mind. What is true? What is untrue? What’s a construct of mind?
There’s a myth in mindfulness that when a difficult emotion arises, you should push it away because it’s not this peaceful, pristine experience. But the reality is that the practice of being mindful with a difficult emotion is very important if we want to liberate ourselves from suffering.
That probably leads us into a good time to talk about practices for getting there.
You talked about how to use yoga postures as a way to get clarity. Do I move closer to the stretch? Do I move further away? And how that can be a metaphor for life.
What’s your favorite practice from skillful courage?
Amanda Palermo: RAIN.
Heather Stang: That was the answer we were looking for.
Amanda Palermo: Yeah. What’s great about RAIN is that the discernment, the viveka, starts to be practiced in the allow and investigate parts.
Let’s talk about what it is.
Heather Stang: Let’s talk about what RAIN is. I’ll start by saying what it stands for, and I’ll let you take it away with what it is.
RAIN is an acronym originally created by Michele McDonald and really refined, and probably made popular, by Tara Brach. It stands for Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture.
Amanda Palermo: The way it manifests for me personally is this.
When you are having a difficult emotion, the idea is to recognize, “I’m having a difficult emotion,” and to name what it is you’re feeling. Once you’ve named it, then the allow, to me, is where you practice that discernment. You can say, “I feel safe enough that I can stay with this emotion,” or you might decide, “I don’t want to lean into this right now. This doesn’t feel comfortable. I’m not ending it here.”
But if you decide that you feel safe enough and it’s a good time, and you want to lean into that difficult emotion, then you can start investigating. Where does this emotion live in my body? How does it feel?
Then you tend to it, which is the N for nurture. Tending to it a little bit. What do I do with this feeling? What do I do now? Do I need to lie down? Do I need to take a walk? Do I need to do a practice? And you nurture and tend to that emotion.
Heather Stang: That investigate piece is where the real work is done.
The way I like to see it is that I visually step out of my mind and turn into my body. Usually for me, it’s below my neck. I’ve had people say that the sensations are in their heads, so you might still be up in that space. But the idea is not to go into the story of what’s happening, but into the felt sense of the emotion.
How big is it in my body? If it were made of a substance, what would it be made of? Metal? Fabric? Leaves? Cloud? Gas? Does it have a color? Does it have a temperature? Could it move?
You’re really thinking of it in terms of the physical aspects of the emotion. In that, it makes it feel more manageable and less overwhelming because you aren’t in the rumination. It’s a different way of approaching it.
That nurture piece is huge. You’re not just experiencing it, but you’re taking action, which is compassion. We talked last time about how compassion always has an action to it. It’s not just empathy.
I often say phoning a friend sometimes is the thing afterward. It could be anything. You just listen, and a lot of times your inner wisdom is going to tell you.
RAIN is such an interesting practice because it is so powerful, but it doesn’t take a lot of time, does it?
Amanda Palermo: No. I was going to mention that you can do this in a minute or two. When I was first practicing it, I felt that I needed a little more time, but then after a while I knew I could use it at any moment.
Particularly if a grief wave was coming on at an inconvenient time, maybe I could do RAIN to myself even if there were a bunch of people around. They didn’t know I was doing RAIN, but I was doing it to myself in that moment.
Heather Stang: It’s different than other meditative practices. You’re not necessarily sitting on the cushion planning to practice RAIN. It’s an on-the-spot emergency response to a big emotion.
I’ve done it in the grocery store while pushing a cart, with my eyes open, or pulled over on the side of the road. I had it happen at a funeral where I thought I was going to start either wailing or having a panic attack, neither of which were okay with me.
I did RAIN, and it probably took me about 10 seconds to realize in that investigation piece that I was holding my breath, which was part of the distress, and then probably another 60 seconds for me to come to the understanding that I was feeling a sense of overwhelming sadness that I was resisting. If I let go of the resistance to the sadness and just let myself breathe and feel that, I could stay in the pew and not run out, which was the next thing I was going to do. I was either going to wail, pass out, or run out of the church, and then I remembered I had RAIN.
So the hardest part of RAIN, we always joke about this, is remembering that you have RAIN.
Amanda Palermo: That’s so funny. I’m laughing because it’s so true. When a grief wave happens or something stressful is going on, you can forget that you have it. You can be like, “Oh my God, what do I do now?” You have to remember that you have it, that you can use it.
Heather Stang: I want to quickly say, because I always feel like when I tell this story, I’m not saying wailing in a church is bad. But I was not a close-circle member of this person. It was someone from a friend group from a long time ago, and I was more of a bystander. This person was just so great that it brought up this existential grief. For me in that moment, had I wailed, it would have been really strange for me. So just putting that out there. There are times when wailing would be perfectly fine. That just was not the choice I made. And I really think I would have more than likely passed out, which would not have been good either.
Let’s talk about a couple more practices. I wanted to bring up one of my favorites for skillful courage, which is dancing with strength and vulnerability. This is a mindful movement practice.
You can begin with either strength or vulnerability. If you’re doing it on your own, I would say go to the one that feels most accessible first. So if you’re feeling like, “I feel really vulnerable right now and I just want to feel safe,” then you would start with vulnerability. You move your body into a position that feels safe enough to be vulnerable.
If you aren’t in a place where you can move, I actually led a workshop yesterday where there was someone in a car on Zoom, and I said, just imagine it. I’ve had this happen too with people whose bodies were injured or who had mobility issues. You don’t have to actually move. You can visualize this as well, or do small movements.
The idea is to feel in your body what it’s like to feel safe enough to be vulnerable. So moving into a position of safety, which might be like child’s pose if you do yoga, or it could be covering yourself up with a blanket, or curling up in a ball, whatever it is for you, savoring the sensation and then making it even more so. You can turn up the volume on it.
If I were in a little ball and someone asked, “How could you make this more so?” I might ball up even more, hunching, hugging myself even tighter. If you could see me, I’m making a little ball.
Then you move into the next posture, which is, what would it feel like to be strong and courageous? Maybe this is standing up with your arms outstretched or overhead. I see a lot of people when I lead this in retreats and things, they go into this superhero pose. Although sometimes there are just all sorts of poses people do. It’s really neat to watch.
Then you savor that and make that even bigger, even more exaggerated. Then we spend some time moving back and forth between the two, experiencing the transition. What’s it like in the middle, between these two? We go back and forth, and then at the end, move into the one that feels most right in this moment for you, whatever that is.
Then we usually have a period of journaling, and a lot of magic comes out there.
Amanda Palermo: That’s great.
Heather Stang: You could also do this, and I love this practice, as an art practice. If expressive arts are your thing, you could draw yourself in the position of vulnerability or draw yourself in the position of strength, like you’re sketching out a statue. It’s a very embodied way to feel this, to move that energy, and to practice discernment.
Amanda Palermo: I think it’s also good for somebody who isn’t naturally kinesthetic, so that they can actually feel embodied or learn how to feel embodied.
Heather Stang: Absolutely. I’ve done this with all types of groups, and it’s always really moving to me what comes out of it in the journaling afterward, how people felt.
A lot of times when I’ve done this, or when clients have done this, there’s a comfort with the two that arises, an understanding of these two sides.
Then I want to follow it up with a really neat journaling prompt.
Amanda Palermo: Oh, tell us.
Heather Stang: Okay. This is one of my favorite journaling prompts ever. I believe it’s in my guided journal From Grief to Peace. If it isn’t, I’m going to go write it in there. I’m pretty sure it’s from there.
Reflect on a time when you did something that frightened you, something you weren’t sure you could do, but you did it anyway.
Amanda Palermo: I’ve done that journal prompt several times, and it’s one of my favorite journal prompts to do because so many things come out of it. It’s great.
Heather Stang: And if you are in that place where everybody is telling you how strong you are and you’re not believing it, it gives you a way to explore it without buying into the narrative that you should be strong.
Because I will tell you this, anyone who goes through grief is strong, even if you don’t feel it, because some days just waking up is an effort.
Amanda Palermo: Yes. I love that you said that, Heather. The simple task of just waking up and getting out of bed can be a big accomplishment for somebody.
Heather Stang: It can be a big accomplishment for me some days. Same with depression.
There are times when I’ve had a depressive period of time, and also grief periods of time, sometimes separate, sometimes together, where just getting up and putting on the socks and brushing the teeth is an insurmountable task. And then you surmount it and you’re like, dang, did it. Or you don’t even say that because you don’t have the energy for it.
So if you’re listening to this podcast, by the way, you’re doing something for yourself. You’re gaining knowledge. You’re taking action, even if you don’t do any of these exercises, though I hope you do. You’re dipping your toe in the water of tending to what hurts. And that is skillful courage.
Amanda Palermo: I also think, if you’re listening, it might be fun to explore that journal prompt on your own time if you feel up to it, because I think it’s a really good one.
Heather Stang: Yeah. I want to leave us on this note that skillful courage in grief isn’t about force or fearlessness. It’s about balance and knowing when to lean in, knowing when to rest. It’s that vulnerability and the presence that lead us to an authentic type of strength, not the forced kind, not the faked kind, but the kind that builds resilience.
Amanda Palermo: Yes.
Heather Stang: Be the bamboo, right? Bamboo is both very strong, strong enough to sustain typhoon or hurricane-force winds, and it’s strong enough because it’s flexible. It can bend and then it can pop up again.
Maybe that’s not what grief looks like. It’s not really popping back up. Maybe it’s a slower-motion pop-up, but still, another wind comes and another wind comes. I really think bamboo is an appropriate plant. That’s the plant of grief, as far as I’m concerned.
Amanda Palermo: Yes. That’s a great way to look at it. I love that.
Heather Stang: Any final thoughts?
Amanda Palermo: No, I think we said it all. This was a good one. I really like the work that’s done in this section. Skillful courage is something that I feel like I’m always still in every day.
Heather Stang: I think it’s a turning point. Each one is a turning point, but this is where we go from tending to our humanness to really starting to talk about and tend to the experience of grief.
We can’t leave out the person who died when we talk about the experience of grief, and that’s coming up in a few steps from now. So know that their narrative matters. This teaches you how to be with the feelings around that narrative.
Before we get to talking about the continuing bond with the person who died in a couple episodes, next podcast we will be talking about getting unstuck. Not that any of you are probably actually stuck. You might just feel like you’re stuck.
Amanda Palermo: Yeah. It’s a natural thing that happens.
Heather Stang: It does. So I hope you tune in next time for that.
In the meantime, if you need to find Amanda, you can find her at...
Amanda Palermo: Instagram, at Amanda Palermo 1 0 8.
Heather Stang: And you can find me at HeatherStang.com.
Until next time, be gentle with yourself.
Amanda Palermo: See you on the next one.
