Heather Stang: Welcome back to the Mindfulness & Grief Podcast. I think I want to start today with a question, and there’s no right or wrong answer. I imagine both of us are going to have a different answer depending on when it’s asked.

But what’s one of the most cringey things that you think grieving people are told by others?

Amanda Palermo: Oh, I think about this all the time. I have a list.

I can only speak from experience. I think one of the cringiest things someone has said to me, or multiple people said to me, was, “At least she’s not suffering anymore.”

And I feel like although that was extremely well-meaning, with such gentle and wonderful intention, it just never made me feel better when I heard it.

The other thing too that was up on my list is because she was 90, so sometimes people would say things along the lines of, “It was her time. It was just her time. At least you got to spend a lot of time with her.”

And I know where that comes from as well, because some people don’t get that, and I’m sensitive to that perspective as well. But for me personally, that just never felt good to hear.

Heather Stang: One of my friends has said the word “at least” never works well with grief, and I tend to agree.

So today we’re talking about something that I think can be cringey if it’s not presented very delicately.

Before we get into that, I just want to say I see your compassion in understanding why people say those things that aren’t helpful, but it doesn’t mean it hurts less, right?

One of the things that can be really hurtful is this idea of grief as growth. I’ve had people say, “Oh, just think how many people you’re going to be able to help after going through this,” which is not what I am thinking of, even as a grief therapist, when somebody I love dies.

It’s very cringey.

The reality is I’m not comfortable with the idea of grief as growth, just in general or personally. But at the same time, I cannot argue that I do the work I do because people in my life have died.

And so I like the idea that meaning isn’t necessarily part of grief in terms of there’s no meaning why it happened, in a lot of cases. But as humans, we tend to make meaning from things, if that makes sense.

So separating those two ideas so that it’s really clear that we’re not saying this is welcome, desired, or transactional.

We would not trade our people and our pets for growth. But understanding that mindfully navigating grief by paying attention to your own well-being, by learning the skills of mindfulness and compassion, by fostering those continuing bonds we’ve talked about, that there is often a sense of, “I have changed, and not all of it is bad.”

I hope that did not sound cringey. It’s such a delicate topic.

Amanda Palermo: It is a delicate topic, and I think where we have to be careful is that it doesn’t go into that realm of toxic positivity.

Because I do think that sometimes what happens is these cringey things are said because the person who’s trying to support the grieving person is trying to somehow make them feel better.

And that’s a nice intention. They want to comfort. They want to make the person feel better. Perhaps it feels so dark to that person, so they want to shed some light or put a positive spin on things.

And although that may, in theory, sound delightful, it doesn’t help the person who’s grieving.

That’s where toxic positivity comes in, right? Because we’re forcing someone to be positive, or to think positive, or to get some kind of positive meaning out of loss.

So that’s where you have to be very delicate about that.

Because there’s no doubt that there can be so much growth and change that can happen when you’ve lost someone and you’ve been grieving. You do change. Your whole life changes.

But when we force people to put a positive spin on their loss, that’s where I think we run into trouble.

It has to be within that person, the griever. They have to go on their own journey with that and make meaning out of it however they want to, whenever they want to.

Heather Stang: That’s so important. It’s the autonomy of the person who’s grieving and the timing of the person who’s grieving.

I want to speak to the, dare I say, evil twin of toxic positivity, which is spiritual bypassing.

Which can be that you’ve been given this as a chance to grow through it, or you’re being tested in a way that’s going to allow you to be stronger, or to just quickly go to, “They are in a better place, and I just need to be okay with it.”

Whatever it is, that spiritual bypassing where you aren’t having to do the work of actually looking at what’s hurting and tend to it, it’s understandably attractive, right?

It would be nice if we could just skip over all that pain. But it’s not realistic, and it’s not sustainable.

So both of those are things to watch.

And you’re right. It’s all about your experience.

I’ve seen a couple situations, more than a couple, where a well-meaning friend or an uneducated therapist perhaps has tried to push somebody into meaning.

They have literally said, “This person in your life died. You need to figure out what it means, what the meaning is. What’s the good? What’s the bright side of this?”

And I haven’t had a single person who’s had that happen say that was a very good experience.

When you’re in early grief, this idea of meaning is just a bridge too far.

And yet the research that Dr. Robert Neimeyer did on bereaved parents looked at why certain parents, actually the majority, assimilate grief into their life and continue to live on.

Why do they fare better than the group of people who do not assimilate grief into their life, but adapt to this big change in a way that’s healthy, that maybe doesn’t involve turning to an addiction or self-harm or those kinds of things where there’s really deep suffering?

Not to say that the other group isn’t sad and hurting and suffering in their own way, but they are able to live on.

And the big difference is meaning. And the majority of people do find it.

But they’re not finding it because they’re told, and there’s not one specific thing.

So I’ll give an example of a woman who had a child die, and people immediately were telling her, “Oh, you just need to start a foundation. You need to do advocacy,” like at the funeral.

That is not okay.

It was really hurtful. It made her feel like she had to pretend like she was ready to do this. She’s like, “I don’t even know if I’ll ever want to do that,” right?

So I feel like we’ve hopefully made it really clear we’re not talking about this in that way. But it is important to talk about.

Because of the fact that it is that adaptation to life after loss and meaning reconstruction that helps us hit that fourth task of mourning that Dr. William Worden talks about, which is to embark on your new life while maintaining a continuing bond with the person who died.

Amanda Palermo: I think sometimes the well-meaning individuals say things like that, and I’ve thought about this quite a bit actually.

I think sometimes, for a lot of people who maybe haven’t experienced a loss or something that’s really been polarizing for them, and real deep grief, it’s uncomfortable.

It makes them feel uncomfortable. It makes them feel nervous. They don’t know what to say. They want to say something nice and supportive or be polite.

And so I think in saying these things, these quote-unquote “cringe things,” I think it makes them feel better, to be honest.

Because they’re like, “Oh, thank God I said something. I needed to say something. The silence is uncomfortable.”

Or, “If I’m polite and I say the quote-unquote correct thing to say to a person when they lose someone, that’s better. I feel better now.”

So it’s really, I don’t want to say selfish, but it’s really making it more about appeasing their own feelings around death that may be unresolved or uncomfortable or scary.

And I think that when people have said that to me, maybe that’s where that compassion element comes in, because I think they’re just uncomfortable with all of this, and they don’t know what to say to me. They don’t know how to act.

And that’s kind of their work, maybe. I have my own work to do.

Heather Stang: And you don’t know what you don’t know.

I’m sure I can think of a few times where I’ve said the wrong thing before I knew what I know.

So we could just say for the rest of this episode, we’re going to wrap everybody in compassion, whether it’s a grieving person who’s had icky words tossed at them or whether it’s someone who’s said the wrong thing, and talk about the reality that we don’t know what any one person really needs when they’re grieving.

In fact, I was even thinking as you were talking, just me saying I don’t see grief as a gift, that’s my point of view.

There are also people who know very quickly what they want to do for meaning. So I want to have that understanding too, that my view is one view and my view might be the majority of people, but there are some people out there, and I have run into a few of them, where they said, “No, my grief was a gift.”

And while that doesn’t land for me, that landed for them.

Going back to that idea of the griever gets to drive this, I think that’s important as well.

So wherever you stand on this idea of grief and growth, whether you are like, “No,” or you are like, “Oh, I already am there,” I think the goal of our talk today is to look at the different ways people experience change after their world has been completely shattered.

Amanda Palermo: Yes.

Heather Stang: We call this the assumptive world that we live in, where we assume that tomorrow we’re going to wake up the same way we woke up today.

We’re going to drink our water, drink our coffee. Who am I kidding?

We’re going to talk to our friends the same way. Everybody’s going to be alive. Everyone’s going to be around us.

And even, I think, if you’re a caregiver, there’s still kind of an assumptive world that your person’s going to be there tomorrow, and you’re still going to be caring for them, even if they have a life-limiting illness.

Even though we all cognitively understand that we are all going to die and the idea of impermanence, that is not a mindset that we’re all walking around in day to day, because that would be very hard.

So we walk around in these assumptions, and when something big changes, that worldview gets shattered, and it takes a lot of adapting to it.

And that adaptation, which we’ve been talking about in all the other steps, leads to rebuilding or even building a new world.

There might be some pieces of scaffolding you can pick up from the rubble. There might be some parts of you that are still the same. Maybe you still have the same job or the same support systems.

But there’s going to be a lot that changes as well.

And it’s filling in that piece and rebuilding that piece that is what ultimately leads to meaning reconstruction, the rebuilding of your new assumptive world, and the noticing the many ways you’ve changed, some of which you might not be happy about.

But I know for a lot of people who come through Awaken, and again, they’re not happy their person died or that they had to show up, but they’re like, “Wow, my ability to be with my difficult emotions has really shifted,” or, “I’m really able to savor these relationships. My goodness, when my boss yelled at me the other day, I was able to be like, ‘You know what? I made it through grief. I can make it through this.’”

Again, not transactional, but still a shift.

Amanda Palermo: And this part, allowing transformation, is about beginning that investigation of what’s changed in my life.

What ways have I changed?

And I think if we look back and we go back to the beginning, if we circle all the way back to the second podcast, to Step 1, conscious relaxation, there’s no way with acute grief you can even begin to ask those questions of yourself or even think about anything farther than what’s happening in the moment.

You can’t even think far out, “How am I going to feel in a week or a month?”

So it takes going through all of those steps and the four tasks of mourning, if we talk about that, that helps to arrive at this place where we might feel like we’re ready to ask ourselves these questions.

How have I changed?

What’s changed in my life?

How do I feel now compared to the beginning of the loss?

But again, like you said, that has to happen in the griever’s own individual time.

That can’t be forced. It’s more of a gentle questioning that has to happen naturally.

Heather Stang: And this questioning doesn’t have an endpoint either, because we’re always in the process of becoming.

So it’s not like you hit a point where you say, “This is the one thing.”

It’s layers that unfold.

So for people who are learning mindfulness for grief, I always say we stack the deck in favor of meaning, because learning how to be mindful and learning self-compassion naturally creates a change that feels like growth.

And so even in an eight-week program, when I get to Step 7, which is allowing transformation, which is what we’re talking about right now, I can say with confidence that people are going to have seen some sort of shift in that period.

Whether it’s from Step 1, where they say, “What I’ve learned is that I don’t have to let my thoughts take over 100 percent of the time. Some of the time, I can refocus my attention onto my breath or my body or counting, and that gives me a break, and that makes me feel more in control.”

Or I think what happens most of the time is, even in that short period, the self-compassion piece tends to rise to the top.

When I ask people, “What has changed that feels meaningful to you?” even in those early days, sitting around in this circle and recognizing I’m not alone has helped me be a little nicer to myself.

And then a year later, five years later, 10, 20, 30 years later, something else might come up.

And my own story is part of that.

My uncle died when I was seven, and it wasn’t until a health crisis when I was 30 that I started learning mindfulness and yoga that put me in touch with my grief. That was a big part of my allowing transformation, and that was 30 years later, basically. Maybe a little less.

So it’s not just one moment in time.

But it’s many moments, and who knows what’ll happen in five, 10 years with me, with anybody else.

It’s like we’re constantly reassessing whether we know it or not, and constantly relating to our grief in a different way.

And it could be as simple as, and I say simple, yet extremely powerful, as that cringey suggestion, “Just think how you’re going to be able to help people later.”

When you’re able to sit down across from someone and really understand the suffering they’re going through, and to be able to just listen and hold space, that could be meaning too.

Amanda Palermo: Before we started today, I was thinking about the two losses that I’ve had.

And this is an interesting thing because, just from being in a grief support group, there are people who have had multiple losses. Every loss is different, and every loss affects you differently.

When my father died, maybe just a few months after he passed, I remember feeling like, “Yeah, I just want to go out, and I feel so powerful and strong now. I went through this bad time, and now I feel great, and I’m going to become a yoga teacher, and I’m going to do the thing that I always said I wanted to do.”

And I did that. I went into a teacher training, and I became a yoga teacher and was teaching a lot. I felt like that was somehow this meaning-making from the experience of losing my father, which was wonderful. It really was really wonderful what came out of that.

But then, with my mom passing 13 years later, totally different situation.

I remember thinking at one point, “God, how come I’m not having that feeling that I had before when Dad died? I don’t feel that meaning-making experience.”

And it’s because it’s totally different. It’s hit me in a different way. I’m at a different place in my life, and I don’t want to force it.

So even this idea of allowing transformation is going to be different with different losses, with the different people that we have.

Heather Stang: That word allowing.

That word allowing is really important in Step 7, and it’s there very intentionally.

There were other things that I could have called it. I could have called it embracing transformation or nurturing transformation, but it’s allowing, which means not resisting.

And not resisting also doesn’t mean forcing yourself into that place of embracing.

It’s a mindful noticing of the ways that you have changed.

And there are practices that can help you do that without someone asking you, “How have you transformed?” Which I think takes a lot of thought. That’s a cognitive question for an embodied experience.

So it might be helpful for us to talk about some of the practices that we do here.

Amanda Palermo: There are a couple of really good practices. And I’m thinking right now, what’s coming to mind is I love when you have us go back and read our journals.

Heather Stang: Oh. You’re so good. That’s exactly what I wanted to talk about.

Amanda Palermo: Yeah, it’s a good one.

Heather Stang: I love that practice too.

So I call this journal review. Very fancy name. I’m sure anyone could call it that.

This is not something I’ve made up, right? This is something anyone can do, and it is the answer to a question that I get a lot when people start journaling.

“If I start a journal, what do I do with it? Do I just throw it away? Do I keep it? What do I do?”

I know a long time ago, I used to be like, “Oh, you do whatever you want.” And that’s true to some extent. You do what you want to do. You could rip out a page every day and burn it if you’re worried about someone finding it.

But once I started learning about grief and meaning reconstruction and teaching people how to journal for grief, I realized that keeping that journal and going back to it regularly is really revealing.

Amanda Palermo: I’ve done it twice, I think, in the past couple of years.

The early entries are very interesting because it was very clear that I was in the beginning stages of grieving, and I was very raw. I was very hostile, it seemed, in those early entries. I was very bothered by everybody.

And then it was always changing, what I was going through as far as my relationships and my relationship with my mother, and just to go through that journey.

I will say it can be a little intense because you’re reliving a lot of painful memories. So it can be a little intense.

But at the same time, I could see where I was going, the changes, where I had come from and where I was at that time.

You definitely can track and see your own changes that have happened within yourself, for sure.

But it’s very intense.

Heather Stang: Do you remember the first time you did it, how long you’d been keeping that journal?

Amanda Palermo: It would have been probably about a year.

Heather Stang: Yeah. It was about a year. I think a year is a good timeframe to go back and look.

Do you remember what it felt like on the other side of reviewing it, what you noticed about who you were becoming?

Amanda Palermo: I think what it did for me personally was it actually, I had more questions.

Heather Stang: You mean it wasn’t just all tied in a nice, neat little bow?

Amanda Palermo: No. There were definitely more questions that I was asking of myself.

Heather Stang: Yeah.

Amanda Palermo: But I will say there was more clarity. It was clear in the beginning that there was a lot of, I don’t want to say chaos, but there was a lot more turmoil going on.

And it did seem that there seemed to be more clarity starting to surface with a lot of things, which I think is why there were more questions.

Heather Stang: One of the things I give people to do is a key, a way to mark up the journals. And I don’t know if we had that when you were doing it because it’s pretty new.

Amanda Palermo: No, but I know what you’re going to say. Yes. It’s a good exercise.

Heather Stang: Yes.

So if you do decide you want to go back and review your journals, then this is a little key code that you can use, because obviously remembering it all is a lot.

I used to tell people to go back through and underline the things that stood out to them, and that can work too.

But I came up with this little code.

You put a star next to it if it feels like a moment of strength or endurance. You put a teardrop if it’s tender, painful, or heavy. You circle insights, clarities, shifts in understanding. A heart by memories or continuing bonds with people you love. And an arrow for moments that feel like they’re pointing you forward, like a new interest, a new possibility, or you’re feeling different, your values shift, something like that.

And you do that, and then you can go back through and skim it again if you want.

I actually have a whole worksheet for this in Awaken called Who Am I Becoming? Journal Review and Empowering Action.

Because after you review the journal, you can consider what stood out for you. In your case, you had questions, which isn’t that uncommon, because you’re not done. You’ll never be done.

There’s always going to be questions about your grief, about your person. That’s just natural human ways of making sense of things, to be open to it, right?

But follow it up with some sort of action that either celebrates what you discover or helps you maybe get more curious about that question and do a little more discovery.

So if the question might be around maybe how your person viewed you. I’m just making that one up, but I imagine that could come up where you’re like, “What was our relationship to them?”

If it was something a little more ambivalent. And part of your empowering action could be to go talk to a family member who knew what they thought.

Which, by the way, can be really interesting, hearing stories from other family members about your person. Of course, if they’re a kind, trustworthy family member.

Amanda Palermo: I think that you bring up something very interesting, because talking to other family members about that person who’s passed after they’re gone, I’ve had some very revealing, interesting conversations with people that I got off the phone and I was like, “What? Wow.”

Yes, that’s a very eye-opening thing to do.

Heather Stang: Yeah. And we see ourselves sometimes through their eyes.

So “who am I now?” can often become a choice between choosing what parts of that story we want to keep and what parts we want to let go of, which kind of hearkens back to that imprint meditation from continuing bonds that we talked about.

Their values, their hobbies, your career choices. You don’t have to hold onto those if you don’t want to.

And sometimes “who am I now?” and allowing transformation is about people recalibrating and maybe moving in a different direction than they were because they’re no longer trying to meet standards that aren’t still theirs.

I remember reading this book when I was really little. Not really little, but probably a preteen or early teenager. I was a ballerina by choice. I wanted to be. But this book was about a girl whose mother forced her into ballet, and her mother got cancer when she was young.

I don’t know who gave me this book. And I look back and I’m like, that was an interesting choice. I’d already had my uncle dying by suicide, so I could handle it. I think my dad’s secretary picked it out, and he had not vetted it. But that’s okay. Again, I can handle it.

But she wound up burying her pointe shoes with her mother. She put her ballet shoes in her mother’s casket, which is so powerful, and I think about that book. I don’t know the name of it or who wrote it or anything, but I always remember that symbolism.

And when we get to this “who am I becoming?” and allowing transformation, some people go in the direction where they amplify the way their loved one imprinted on them. They become more of an activist or take up a hobby. With my stepdad, I learned photography, that kind of thing.

And sometimes people let things go.

I no longer have to do this anymore.

So allowing transformation, what do you want to keep? What do you want to let go? It continues that conversation we started back in Step 6.

Amanda Palermo: Yes. I just wrote this down. What do I want to keep? What do I want to let go of?

When we were talking about it, I was thinking of that same journal prompt. I think after reading back through my journal, that was the journal prompt maybe. I don’t exactly remember.

But I remember journaling about having a conversation with a family member about something that my mother had said to this person about me that wasn’t actually positive.

And I remember getting off the phone feeling really polarized by it and kind of angry, if I’m honest.

I remember journaling about that. And then the question was, what do you want to keep? What do you want to let go of?

I remember specifically using that prompt to journal about how I felt about that phone call.

Heather Stang: And I guess the next step after what do I want to keep and what do I want to let go of is, who do I want to be?

Which ultimately is the question here, because grief changes us in ways that we don’t choose.

But then there are things we can choose, and we can start to choose things that move us in the direction of who we want to become, which takes us back to the “why have a system anyway?” conversation we had at the beginning of this, which is around choice, empowerment, taking back control, while also honoring the love that remains.

And at the end of the day, what remains is your connection to your person and this life that you have in front of you.

What do you want to do with that?

Not in that icky, toxic positivity way, but to get really clear on what really matters to you now.

Amanda Palermo: That’s pretty loaded. That’s pretty loaded.

But I think also within yoga, there’s a natural questioning that, as a yoga student, I’ve gone through. There are always questions. Yogis are always going inward, and there’s this idea of always self-inquiry.

That’s part of the yoga practice, to help you go within yourself and ask yourself those questions.

One of the big questions that has been asked of me by teachers, or I’ve asked myself, is this idea of dharma. What is your life’s purpose? What is your dharma?

And I think I’ve gone back to that question in relationship to grief, so it’s natural for me to have had more questions come up in allowing transformation.

That’s just part of my natural way of always asking myself, what is my dharma now? What is my life’s purpose?

And that’s an ongoing question.

Heather Stang: So I have a list of questions to add to your questions, because I think you’re very spot on.

This isn’t necessarily about finding the answer. It’s about learning mindful inquiry and that curiosity and that openness, because it’s always going to be moving and changing to some extent because nothing’s permanent.

So I like to work with the idea of post-traumatic growth, which comes out of some research by Calhoun and Tedeschi down at, I think, University of North Carolina. I always like to give credit where credit’s due, especially if it comes out of my family’s state.

But what’s important is their five domains of post-traumatic growth.

They also say, “We’re not saying grief is a gift or trauma is a gift or hardship is a gift.” And their research is around all types of hardship: financial, relationship, displacement, unhoused people, all the stuff, not just grief.

And when they’re talking about post-traumatic, they’re talking about little T trauma. It’s not related specifically to post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. So it’s any kind of hardship.

And they propose the idea that the majority of humans who go through a hardship, on the other side, are going to see some positive changes. Not that they wanted the hardship.

And they have put five categories of changes out there. They’ve also been careful in one article I read where they said, “These may not be all the ideas. These are just the ones that come to us. These are the main clusters.”

And so I’m going to go through them now, and we’ll put these in the show notes, of course, in the transcript. So if you want to play around with these, you can.

I’ll give you each of the domains, and I’ll give you a question.

Amanda, if you want to, we could very briefly hot seat this, and you could give a quick answer. It doesn’t have to be accurate or clear, but just to have an idea.

Amanda Palermo: Okay.

Heather Stang: It’ll be like a post-traumatic growth quiz, if you will.

So the first one is appreciation of life in general.

What feels meaningful to you right now?

Amanda Palermo: What feels more meaningful to me now? Oh, my relationships. So particularly, the relationship with my husband.

Heather Stang: Oh, nice.

You also answered the next one, which is relationships to others.

How have my connections shifted?

Amanda Palermo: I think that I appreciate the small little day-to-day things more. I value that more than the bigger things.

And when I say things, I don’t really, I can’t think of anything specific, but it’s like the really small moments, day-to-day moments that I value more now with others.

Heather Stang: So like maybe just a little phone call.

Amanda Palermo: Yeah.

Heather Stang: It doesn’t have to be like they threw me a big party for my birthday, but it’s, I’m glad they’re here.

Amanda Palermo: Exactly. Or just, “Hey, can we have a cup of coffee together?”

Heather Stang: Yeah.

So the next one is sense of new possibilities.

What new things have I explored or considered?

Amanda Palermo: This podcast. It was the first thing that came to mind. That’s great.

I’m not saying everybody has to go out and do a podcast, but...

Heather Stang: But it’s true, isn’t it? You would not be on this podcast were it not for your loss history.

Amanda Palermo: And I would never, ever in a million years have thought, “I’m going to do a podcast about grief.”

Heather Stang: Personal strength.

What have I survived that shows my resilience?

Amanda Palermo: Taking care of somebody with a life-limiting illness. Being a primary caretaker for somebody who’s dying.

Heather Stang: Yes. That does take a lot of strength.

Something you can’t always see when you’re in it, right?

And I think that is one when we talk about those cringey things that caregivers often don’t want to hear, how strong they are.

Amanda Palermo: Yeah.

Heather Stang: For those of you who aren’t watching the video, she totally just rolled her eyes because I’m sure you heard it.

And finally, spiritual change or growth.

How have my beliefs or questions about the things that are bigger than me changed?

Amanda Palermo: I don’t think that my beliefs necessarily have changed, or the questions have changed. I just think that more questions have been presented.

I’m not a very black and white person. I like to live in the gray. And so I think there’s just more gray than there was before.

Heather Stang: And that’s a change.

Because a spiritual change or growth, it doesn’t mean things, some people get more into their religion or their spiritual views. Some people switch completely. Some people drop it all together. And it’s not any one thing.

It’s just that there is often a change or a growth.

Now, you answered all five, and you were tricked a little, although you probably know this. Not all five resonate with everybody, right?

Some things you’re just like, “Yeah, nothing. There’s nothing there. I haven’t thought of any new possibilities.”

And that’s okay. Nor do you have to force these. These are questions that you can always be curious about.

Again, I do find that if people embark on, say, mindfulness training or yoga training or something like that during grief, you’re going to find something. And yet you also don’t have to. It’s your own timing.

Thank you for playing that game and letting us know a little bit about you.

I found it really interesting that your first two were entwined, because for appreciation of life, you said, “I appreciate my relationships,” and then relating to others, it was like appreciating the small stuff.

So it was like they’re both really combined for you.

Amanda Palermo: Yes. Yeah. Definitely.

And I also want to say, piggybacking on what you just said, I do remember at one point, I remember going through a worksheet that you had that asked some of these questions.

I don’t think it was this one specifically, but it was similar.

And I remember thinking when I was reading the questions, “I can’t. I can’t answer these questions today. I don’t have it in me. I don’t know. I can’t do this today.”

It was too much.

And I think, like what you said, it’s okay to not have an answer to any of these at a particular time. It’s just where you’re at in your grief.

Heather Stang: The reality is, unless people are listening to this podcast or in another grief group or have exposure to the idea of post-traumatic growth, they’re not going to necessarily be consciously looking for it.

And yet they will probably find it.

So it’s one of those things that people do naturally come to.

I naturally came to it. I remember sitting in my thanatology program learning about this and being like, “Oh, I’m doing my post-traumatic growth right now,” and I had no idea.

My yoga therapy training was my post-traumatic growth. My volunteering on a suicide hotline was my post-traumatic growth.

I had no idea.

And so you don’t even have to know it, and that’s why I don’t want to put pressure on people to look for it or do a worksheet or that kind of thing.

It comes to you when it comes to you. And now you have words to use where you can be like, “Oh, this is what that is.”

I think what is really helpful to know is just going back to that idea of what do you want to keep, what do you want to let go?

That’s really helpful, not just with what your person gave you, but in your life in general.

What in your life do you want to hold onto, and what do you want to release?

Amanda Palermo: That’s a great question.

Heather Stang: This is really the step that’s about questions, isn’t it?

Amanda Palermo: And I think I’ve always heard it in yoga as, they say sometimes, I don’t know if you’ve heard this, “Let go of what no longer serves you.”

Or I would hear a yogi say that, “Oh, it doesn’t serve me anymore.”

But I like this better for some reason. What do you want to let go of? What do you want to keep? What do you want to let go of?

I think I like the way that sounds a little bit better.

Heather Stang: It’s probably also just a cultural thing of how that is said, that idea of what no longer serves me.

We’ve talked about toxic positivity and spiritual bypassing, and I think sometimes, “Oh, that no longer serves me,” can be used in both of those ways, but it can also be used really authentically.

I know I’ve said that in both ways, I’m sure, throughout my life.

Amanda Palermo: Yeah.

Heather Stang: So it’s probably context as well.

Amanda Palermo: Yes. Yeah.

I think this is really about having some agency over your own process.

I think that’s really important, that your grief process is your process, and it’s really not about other people rushing that process or telling you how you need to be grieving at what time and what you should be doing.

Heather Stang: And when you should be done.

Amanda Palermo: Exactly. Yes.

Heather Stang: So before we go, I want to go back to something that I think I’ve mentioned before, and that’s these questions that I’m inevitably asked, that I hear all the time.

I call them the inevitables.

The list has grown a little bit. I think I used to have two. Now I have three.

The first inevitable is, “I don’t know how I’m going to make it through this.”

The second inevitable is, “But I thought I was doing so well,” which is more of a statement. Why am I not doing so well?

And we talked about that in getting unstuck, right?

And then the third one is, “Who am I now?”

And there’s a lot of research to back up that question.

A lot of people ask that question when someone significant in their life dies because our role changes.

But this is what allowing transformation is about, you getting to answer all the questions, including who am I now, what matters to me now, what do I want to do in my life, how do I want to show up in the world?

And I think it is important that it comes in Step 7 and not in Step 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6.

All those other things need to precede it.

Although you might have already found it along the way in those steps, you just didn’t know what it was, and you’ll still continue to find it as you live your life.

Amanda Palermo: I think that’s perfectly said. Beautifully said. Yeah.

Heather Stang: It’s not a destination. It’s a practice.

It’s a way of living with your grief rather than trying to get over it.

I hope that as people have followed this series, they’ve started to see that the Mindfulness & Grief System isn’t about fixing grief.

It’s about learning how to be with grief in a way that reduces unnecessary suffering, increases compassion, and helps you reconnect with your life while staying connected to the person you love.

That, to me, is what transformation really is.

Not becoming someone completely different, but becoming more fully yourself.

And I think that’s a beautiful place to end today.

Amanda Palermo: Me too. I think this is a really hopeful step because it reminds us that we don't have to force anything.

We can simply allow ourselves to keep becoming.