When grief feels like it’s coming back, or not moving at all, it can leave you wondering if you’re stuck.
You may have moments where you feel like you’re doing better. You’re getting through the day. You’re sleeping more. You might even feel a sense of steadiness returning.
And then, out of nowhere, a wave hits.
It can feel like you’re right back where you started.
In this episode of the Mindfulness & Grief Podcast, Heather Stang and Amanda Palermo explore what it means to feel stuck in grief, and why that experience is more common, and more natural, than you might think.
This is Step 5 of the Mindfulness & Grief System: Getting Unstuck.
Getting unstuck in grief is not about forcing progress or pushing yourself forward. It is about learning to see your experience in a different way. Heather and Amanda talk about the “boomerang” nature of grief, why waves return even after periods of relief, and how the belief that you should be doing better can add another layer of suffering.
They also explore practical ways to create movement when things feel heavy or stuck, including working with the five mental hindrances, expressive arts, and journaling practices that shift perspective and support emotional release.
You will learn:
• Why grief can feel like it’s going backward
• What “being stuck” in grief really means
• How to shift your perspective when nothing seems to change
• The five mental hindrances and how they show up in grief
• How expressive arts can help release what feels stuck
• A journaling practice using different points of view
• Why appreciation may feel more supportive than gratitude in grief
This episode is not about fixing your grief or forcing yourself to move on.
It is about understanding your experience with more clarity and compassion, and allowing space for movement, even when things feel stuck.
If you’ve ever found yourself thinking, “I was doing so well, why does this feel so hard again?” 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: I’d like to welcome you all back, and “you all” includes my co-host, Amanda Palermo.
Amanda Palermo: Hi. I’m so happy to be back.
Heather Stang: We are in our exploration of the Mindfulness & Grief System, and in this episode, we are talking about Step 5: Getting Unstuck.
This is a step that is named in a way that resonates with the experience of what people feel, though I really believe that most of the time, when we feel stuck in our grief, we’re not actually stuck in our grief. We’re just really not enjoying it. It’s taking time, and it feels awful. So that feels like stuck, but really, it’s part of the grief experience.
I’m wondering if you felt that at any point along the way, Amanda.
Amanda Palermo: When you were talking about the stuck part, I got an image of a boomerang.
As you are going through your own grieving process, there are times where a person may feel like they’re “getting better,” or feeling better, or making strides toward moving on with life. Maybe we haven’t cried in a while, or maybe we haven’t thought about our person in a little bit.
Then all of a sudden, one day, out of nowhere, we get hit with this overwhelming sense of grief. It’s like a tsunami wave that comes over you, and you feel like you’re grieving the person as if they just died, even though some time has passed.
That’s why I like to think of it like a boomerang. Those feelings that you thought had left come back, and it can make us feel like we’re stuck.
Heather Stang: I think that image of a boomerang is perfect, and it’s exactly that experience that I hear so often. These words, almost verbatim: “But I was doing so well.”
With that is not only the felt sense of being sad, angry, missing the person, and all of that, but there’s another layer on top of it that implies, “I should be doing better. I’m doing something wrong. I’m not grieving right.”
This step is really designed to help create some space around that feeling of stuckness, and also to remind us that self-compassion is going to alleviate some of our suffering. Because out of anybody who has ever come to me, myself included, it’s not that you’re doing something wrong. It’s that grief isn’t linear, and it’s going to come back in waves that are at times expected and at times unexpected.
What you said in there too, about this moment where people feel like, “I’m able to manage my emotions better. I’m getting more sleep. I’m able to go to work and actually focus. Maybe I’m starting to have coffee with my friends again.” Even though there’s that missing in the background, you’re more present.
And then boom, something hits, and you just want to stay in bed and cry and feel. So I think your explanation is perfect.
Amanda Palermo: What you said about grief not being linear, I think somewhere in our society we’ve been taught that we always have to make progress with things in our life, our job or whatever it may be. And when it comes to grief, people think there has to be some sort of progress that needs to be made.
I think that’s a mental shift that needs to happen at some point, where you realize it’s not really that I need to make progress with this. It’s a boomerang. It’s like a circle. I always say it’s fluid.
There’s no endpoint where you’re finished with grief and you’ve progressed to the end and you’re at the finish line. It’s not like that at all.
I think that’s sometimes why people feel stuck if those feelings of grief, and those acute feelings especially, start to come back when we have these grief waves.
Heather Stang: And just to put people’s minds at ease, it doesn’t mean you’re going to feel awful forever.
I was thinking about that metaphor that is so common and so used, of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. The butterfly doesn’t look anything like the caterpillar, but that’s progress in a strange way.
We aren’t the same person. There might be parts of us that are the same. We might have some of the same values. We look the same. We may have the same friends. There are elements of your life that may not change, but there are elements of your life that are going to change, that are not going to go back to the way they were.
When you were talking about progress, I think a lot of times that idea of progress is measured along the idea that we are going to return back to who we were before the loss happened.
Now, not all of these changes are going to be bad. Again, I am never comfortable with grief as a gift, so I’m not saying that. But so often, when people embark on some sort of intentional, mindful grief work, such as in the Mindfulness & Grief System, they might find that on the other side of doing that grief work, they’re able to be more self-compassionate. They have better boundaries. They’re more clear on what matters to them. They’re able to savor certain relationships.
Some of the changes that we have, and this is something we explore in a later step, start to lay the foundation here. Because it’s in Step 5 that we learn to look at our grief experience in a different way.
That’s really the key element of getting unstuck. When I keep looking at the problem in the same way over and over again, it rarely has a different outcome. So I need to change my view.
The practices in this section are primarily around looking at things differently. We already started that a little bit in the last step with skillful courage and working with difficult emotions by looking at our suffering through our physical body. Remember that RAIN practice? That was a different point of view too. But here we’re going to start adding in some other tools.
Amanda Palermo: Yes. I think there’s also a feeling of surrendering to grief as a process. I say surrendering a little loosely, but it is an ongoing process.
I always tell myself to remain open to that process because it’s always going to change. Like you said before, the way that you grieve or respond to your grief when it comes back, or when you have those grief waves, might be different. It might feel more painful or less painful. It’s always changing.
For me, when I really thought, “Okay, I’ve just got to let go into this process,” that’s when a lot of acceptance started to happen. But that’s not for everybody. Every situation is different. It’s more about acknowledging that it’s an ongoing process.
Heather Stang: Part of that acceptance you’re talking about, and you can clarify if this is what you mean, is not acceptance that you’re okay that this happened, but that you’re not fighting against that natural reaction to loss, which is grief.
You’re accepting that grief is here. All the fighting, struggling, avoiding, and trying to run away from it isn’t going to make it go away. Accepting that it is a process, and that it isn’t a cognitive activity where you can just decide, “I’m not going to feel that way anymore,” is the practice.
Amanda Palermo: Yes, that’s exactly what I meant. Not acceptance of the death itself.
I think sometimes people feel like they have to accept the death somehow, and that’s not what I meant. I think we’re on the same page about that.
Heather Stang: This also speaks to the difference between the stage approach to grief and the task approach.
Deep gratitude to Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Her observations of dying patients have been translated into five orderly stages, which are often misused. That last stage is listed as acceptance, so in popular culture, there’s this idea that you just need to accept the loss and move on, which isn’t what she was saying.
When we look at Dr. William Worden’s tasks of mourning, which is what I like to use, and what the Mindfulness & Grief System is built on, the first task is to accept the reality of the loss. That just means the factual acceptance that it has happened. It’s not emotional or spiritual. It’s simply acknowledging that this person has died.
The second task is to cope with the pain of grief.
The third is adjusting to all the changes since the person has died.
The fourth is embarking on your new life while maintaining an enduring connection with the person.
The idea behind these is giving you things to do, and you get to figure out how you’re going to do that.
When I think about getting unstuck, it really speaks to adjusting to change and beginning to move into your new life. It’s about seeing things differently and creating some movement.
Amanda Palermo: I’m really glad you clarified that because the stages of grief get thrown around a lot. People say, “I’m in this stage,” or “I’m in that stage,” like there’s a step-by-step process they should be following.
But everybody experiences grief so differently. There’s no one-size-fits-all.
Heather Stang: Exactly. That’s why we have so many different tools.
Let’s talk about some of the tools in this step.
We use meditation practices. RAIN is just as useful for getting unstuck as it is for working with difficult emotions. Feeling stuck is a difficult feeling, so it applies here too.
We also talk about the five mental hindrances from Buddhist psychology. These are common roadblocks to being present and engaged in your life.
The first is desire or craving. In grief, this shows up as longing, yearning, wanting the person back. Completely human.
The second is aversion or resistance, not wanting what’s happening, trying to avoid it or push it away.
The third is restlessness or worry, which includes anxiety and rumination.
The fourth is sloth and torpor, which means exhaustion. Sloth is physical exhaustion, torpor is mental exhaustion.
The fifth is doubt. This one can be particularly difficult because it can lead us to give up on our practice or lose hope.
The way I work with these is to name what’s showing up, have self-compassion for it, and then respond with a supportive practice.
Amanda Palermo: In yoga philosophy, we have something similar called the kleshas. They are mental afflictions that cloud the mind and create suffering.
They include ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion, and fear of death.
I use them to check in with myself when I feel stuck. I ask, “What’s coming up for me right now?”
And going back to something you said earlier, grief can feel like energy that gets stuck in the body. These practices help move that energy through and out.
I also love the word “season” that you use. Instead of stages, thinking of grief as seasons feels more accurate because it changes.
Heather Stang: Yes, and sometimes those changes are gradual, and sometimes they’re abrupt. Sometimes it even feels like it goes backward. When we look back, we can often see different seasons in our grief, even if we couldn’t see them clearly while we were in them.
That brings us to some of the other practices that can help us get unstuck, including expressive arts and journaling from different points of view.
Amanda Palermo: The arts have been one of my favorite ways to work through my own grief.
Heather Stang: One way we shift perspective is by moving from words into art. Not art that has to be perfect or something you would hang in a gallery, but therapeutic art that focuses on the process rather than the outcome.
This can include collage, watercolor, or even just scribbling with crayons. One of my favorite practices is drawing your “grief landscape,” or what I sometimes call a griefscape.
The idea is simple. After a period of reflection or meditation, you ask yourself: “If my grief were a landscape, what would it look like?”
Is it daytime or nighttime? What’s the weather like? What colors do you see? Is it on this planet or somewhere else?
Then you give yourself time to create it.
Amanda Palermo: I loved this practice, but I approached it a little differently.
I used large canvases. At first, I tried to paint an actual landscape that reflected how I was feeling. After spending a lot of time on it, I realized it didn’t feel right.
So I tried again, and again. Each time, I got a little closer.
Eventually, I stopped trying to make it look like anything and just let it happen. I started using colors and shapes, and finally, I wrote the words “wish you were here.”
That was it. That was the feeling.
I added elements that reminded me of my mom, like sparkle and a pin she used to wear. When I stepped back, I realized it reflected both her and how I was feeling.
The process helped me get to the root of what I was feeling.
Heather Stang: That’s a perfect example of why giving yourself time with these practices matters.
Sometimes it takes going through what doesn’t feel right to discover what does. It’s not about the end result. It’s about listening to yourself more deeply.
Amanda Palermo: Yes, it felt like peeling back layers until I got to the core of how I felt.
I remember crying at the end. There was a release. And afterward, I felt a sense of relief and even accomplishment, like I had finally expressed something that needed to come out.
Heather Stang: That release is often a sign that something has shifted.
And it’s important to say that sometimes you won’t be able to name exactly what was stuck, and that’s okay. The movement itself is what matters.
Amanda Palermo: Yes, and looking back, I think it was a sense of longing. That feeling of “I wish you were here.” That’s what came out.
Heather Stang: And through that process, you were also nurturing your connection with your mom.
Even though this isn’t specifically a continuing bonds practice, those connections often show up naturally. That’s part of the healing.
Amanda Palermo: I also love that this practice can apply to so many types of loss, not just losing a person. It could be any kind of grief.
Heather Stang: Absolutely.
And for those who prefer words, journaling can be just as powerful, especially when we shift perspective.
Most of us write from a first-person point of view, using “I.” But when you write from a different perspective, like “you” or “she,” it creates space.
It can help you see your experience differently and sometimes bring in more compassion.
One of my favorite examples was someone in a grief group who wrote from her mother’s perspective. She imagined what her mother would say to her at the end of her life.
It was incredibly powerful and emotional, but also deeply healing.
Amanda Palermo: I’ve done that practice, and it really does shift how you see things. You start making connections you didn’t see before.
Heather Stang: A simple journaling prompt you can try is this:
“Dear [your name], I see how hard this is. I want you to know…”
You can write from the perspective of someone or something that feels like a caring presence in your life.
And if you’d like, you can write a response back.
Another piece we begin to introduce here is appreciation.
I tend to use the word appreciation rather than gratitude, because for some people, gratitude can feel heavy or even forced during grief.
Appreciation can feel a little more accessible. It might be noticing something small, like someone showing up for you, or a moment of support.
Amanda Palermo: Yes, I agree. Sometimes being told to feel grateful doesn’t feel supportive when you’re grieving.
Heather Stang: Exactly. We want this to feel supportive, not like pressure.
So appreciation becomes a gentle way to notice what is present, without forcing a certain emotional response.
As we begin to feel less stuck, this naturally leads into the next step, which is continuing bonds. That’s where we explore how to maintain a connection with the person who died in a meaningful way.
Heather Stang: Thank you, Amanda, for bringing your experience and your heart into this conversation.
Amanda Palermo: Thank you for creating the space for it.
Heather Stang: Where can people find you?
Amanda Palermo: On Instagram, at AmandaPalermo108.
Heather Stang: Wonderful. I’ll see you next time.
