It felt like a prison.
I felt like a prisoner in my own body,
betrayed by my own body, grieving ease, grieving peace,
grieving non-paying.
When I would tell people,
it was like, "Oh, but you look good, Paul,"
and I'm like, "But I don't feel good."
Yeah. My body, yeah.
(gentle music)
- Hi there, grief growers, and welcome back to Grief Grower.
I am so delighted to be sharing space with you again today.
If you've been growing alongside me in my work for a while,
welcome back, and if you are new to me in my work, hello.
My name is Shelby Fersithia, I am a three-time author
of Grief Coach and the founder of Life After the Lost Academy,
which is an online course in community
that has helped dozens of grieving people stop feeling lost,
stuck, broken, and alone,
and start building lives that they genuinely love
from the lives that lost, force them to live.
This includes, of course, not only death-related losses,
but also losses like divorce and breakup,
major diagnosis, and every single other loss
that changes your life.
Here on Grief Grower, we believe that grief
is not something to get over.
It is something that we grow with and alongside,
and that when we stop treating grief like a problem
to be solved and start treating it like an invitation
to live more deeply, we can create meaningful lives
rich with the memories that we carry,
the struggles that we faced, and the preciousness
of what it is to be here right now.
Today on Grief Grower, I am so honored to be joined
by grieving spouse and cancer survivor, Lisa Kefauver,
to talk about grief and the body,
not just how grief impacts our bodies,
but what it's like to grieve changes in our bodies,
brought on by things like diagnosis, trauma, surgery, and age.
We discuss what it's like to grieve a body
while being simultaneously trapped inside of it.
This is our only home on Earth.
It's the thing we are grieving yet it is the only place we live.
The pressure that society often lays upon us
to just be grateful you're still alive,
and how to feel centered and grounded in a body
that has been racked by loss after loss.
Before we get into this conversation with Lisa,
just a quick reminder that release day
for my third book, of course I'm here right now.
Three actually helpful things to say to someone grieving
is less than 50 days away, and it's coming up on March 31st.
This little guidebook teaches you how to support
a grieving person in your life with the best free tool
that any of us has, and that is our words,
so that you will never enter another conversation
with someone who's grieving, wondering,
what on Earth do I say to comfort them?
Pre-orders are super helpful when it comes
to getting the book seen by bookstores
and the marketing powers that be.
So please find a link to pre-ordered your copy
of, of course, I'm here right now in the show notes.
If you have already pre-ordered the book,
thank you so very much.
You can submit your receipt number from Bookshop, Amazon,
Barnes & Noble, or your local indie bookstore
on my website, takes less than a minute,
and get access to my free six week book club
where we read, of course, I'm here right now
in its entirety and discuss it together as a group.
This book club will kick off in early April,
so do submit your receipt.
Again, it takes less than a minute to do so,
and make sure you have the book in your hands by then.
And if you would like to celebrate the launch
of this book with me, I am hosting two launch parties
that I would love for you to attend.
The first one is taking place,
the eve before the book comes out on March 30th
in Chicago, so if you want this book in your hands,
the night before the rest of the world gets it,
please come to this party.
The second launch party happens on the day
the book comes out, which is March 31st, on YouTube.
So no matter where in the world you live,
you can tune in to hear more about the clients
and interactions that inspired this book,
and I'll give you tips and scripts for what to say
to someone grieving, and you will hear me
read some excerpts from the book as well.
And of course, the replay of that virtual event
will be available if you can't attend live.
I know so many of you are listening in other countries,
Europe, Australia, the Czech Republic, Japan,
we have listeners from all over the world,
so please do RSVP for the virtual event,
and you will receive the replay,
even if you can't make it live.
Now let's get to my conversation with Lisa
about body grief.
Here's a little bit about Lisa Kefauver.
Lisa Kefauver is a narrative therapy trained social worker
and widow turned grief activist.
She has transformed her personal and professional experiences
with loss into a mission to re-imagine grief.
For more than 20 years, she has dedicated herself
to the healing power of holding space and bearing witness,
helping people transform their relationship with grief.
As the host of a top-rated grief podcast,
TEDx and keynote speaker, Professor Grief Guide,
Grief Smart Workplace Consultant,
and author of the acclaimed book, Grief is a sneaky bitch,
an uncensored guide to navigating loss.
Lisa is expanding our collective understanding of
and experience with grief.
Let's get to it.
Lisa, I am so honored to have you here on Grief Growers
because you recently wrote about something
I think that a lot of grieving people experience,
but nobody really wants to talk about,
which is grieving the body.
And so as we get into it, I would love for you to talk about
what is it like to grieve a body
while also being forced to live in a body,
because we have no other homes on Earth,
your personal experience, but maybe also experiences
you've seen or observed in other people
who are grieving bodies that have changed
or are changing or unpredictable as a result of loss.
- Yeah, well, Fred, and first of all,
thank you so much for having me on the show.
It's so lovely to be with you online.
Sometimes we get to do it in person.
- Yeah, this is certainly an area that I've reflected on
thought about and worked with people about,
because certainly as you mentioned,
I've worked with clients over the years
who've experienced catastrophic injuries
and chronic illnesses and so really working with it.
And like for many of us, just like when I had to learn
about grief all over again, even when I was a clinical director
when my husband died in 2023 when I got cancer
and started to go through the impact
of all of the physiological losses,
I was like, oh, now I know something in a different way.
When it's in your lived body.
And the losses cascade, we'll probably talk about it
in our time together today, but not surprisingly,
the first loss was really when I lost all my hair
in preparation for chemotherapy.
And hair, you think, oh, hair, whatever, it grows back.
And it did and I'm grateful for it.
But it makes you begin to realize the connection we have
to identity and the body and the way that we are
showing up in the world and the hair that I had before,
if you're watching me, used to be long blonde hair,
which was its own shift in representation
from a version of me that I was before I became a widow.
So that blonde hair represented a version of me
that survived something.
And then when it all came off, it was shocking.
Yeah.
- Yes, I remember.
So for people who are listening to this podcast,
I'll link it in the show notes, but Lisa wrote
a sub-stack article called Who the Fuck Is That in the Mirror.
And it's an article about body grief.
And I read this and it brought up for me so much of,
not necessarily what I didn't remember,
but what I don't usually remember about my mom's.
Cancer experience and then gradually dying experience.
But it's something that I think as people adjacent to grievers,
we don't know how to be there for.
Because I remember my mom getting her breast cancer diagnosis
also, and one of the things that she grieved most
was her hair, her nails, which she did or polished
on a regular basis, the fact that her body was now
the site of a medical event that she could not escape.
She couldn't outsource it to anybody else or say,
you know, will you take this for me or I'll face somebody else
to go through this procedure?
So I don't have to.
Losing parts of her body, losing nerve sensation.
And I remember her reeling these things to me as a daughter.
And I was not a grief professional at the time.
Absolutely, my mom's death I referred to as the first in the worst
for me, because that's the intensity that I felt it at.
But I have so many memories of not knowing what to say
to her as she grieved her body to me.
And I think we don't recognize just enough in our society
how significant our bodies are for moving around in the world
and when they change, that really fucks with our heads.
'Cause it's like, I live here and I'm not in control
of the excavations, the renovations, the demolitions.
I'm not in control of what's happening here.
And I can't escape it when the home that is my body is,
is also the torture of my existence.
Yes, I have no choice but to be here.
So I wonder, this is not really a question,
but I wonder if you can speak more on that idea
that I can't escape this group.
Just like we can't escape other forms of free,
but it's literally you live in the place that is changing.
And have no choice but to stay there.
I do wanna explore that.
Something came up as you were talking
that I wanna name for my experience of grief and the body
that I can imagine are for a lot of people
which was the betrayal that I felt
because I actually knew something was wrong
for an entire year.
I had a lump and I went to six different doctors.
I had mammograms that told me we were fine.
I had ultrasound that told me we were fine,
but I knew there was a pain and a lump in my breast
and that something wasn't right.
And so part of what the grief has been is this,
can I even trust my body?
Can I trust what I know about my body?
Can I trust the people whose job it is
to know something about my body?
And then when they finally did do a biopsy
after a year and so many, as I said,
more than six doctors who dismissed me
and they called me to tell me who in fact it is
triple positive breast cancer.
I now had to entrust this body to a system
that had so consistently betrayed me and let me down
and just as a note for those who don't know me,
my husband went through an entire year full of doctors
who were just telling him all of his symptoms
and issues were mental health only to find out
he had a great fruit size brain tumor
and he died in my arms two and a half weeks later.
So I just name all that to say there's this relationship
you have with your body.
Can I trust what I know?
Can I advocate for myself?
Can I trust the people to take care of me?
And that connection and betrayal by other people
and even my own dismissal, like I looked back
and thought like why didn't you fight harder?
Why didn't you yell more, although I did.
I kept going to doctors.
But anyways, so the betrayal, the connection to my body,
the trauma that happens in a medical system
that has betrayed you lives in my body.
But then I have to serve up my body.
- Yes.
- To be treated, to be seen, to be examined, to be cut open.
So I think I just named that, that was the baseline
for which I had to come to this reckoning
of being in my body as I went through treatment.
And then there was the physiological cascade.
So I underwent surgery, a lumpectomy.
So they removed the whole front part of my left breast,
ariola nipple, the whole thing,
just chopped it right off in the front
and then they removed the sentinel lymph node
under my left arm.
That was followed by 12 straight weeks of chemotherapy,
30 days of radiation and a year of immunotherapy and fusion.
And now followed by a hormone blocking medication
that I take daily and have for two years,
well for three more years.
And along that way, the pain of my body
and being a prisoner in my body is something
that I've never experienced.
There's two things, there's the like,
being a prisoner in your body when you're in pain
and then there's the identity part of your body
that you live with forever.
Like when I look in the mirror still to this day,
I don't quite recognize.
That head shaving thing I mentioned at the beginning,
it wasn't just, oh my gosh, now I'm a bald person
which thankfully for a minute there,
I felt like I rocked the bald look.
I wasn't with that, right?
But then came the head sores
that happened as a result of treatment
and being shaved and my body falling apart.
And it let me to not sleep at one time along the way,
I didn't sleep for more than three days
because there was literally no position
in which I could lay my head.
And it felt like a prison.
I felt like a prisoner in my own body,
betrayed by my own body, grieving ease, grieving peace,
grieving non-paying frustrated by the world
just like for other kinds of losses too
that they were going on as if, you know,
when I would tell people, it was like,
oh, but you look good bald and I'm like,
but I don't feel good.
Yeah. - My body, yeah.
- Yeah, and you are talking to someone,
you are talking to me when I do not feel like myself.
I'm not like, I don't know if this is true for you,
but I know for me after my mom died,
there were parts of myself that I didn't recognize
and I was like, I'm not all here.
Like, I'm not fully inhabiting myself
in the way that I used to before my mom died.
There's a sense of being trapped and not being able to escape,
but then there's a sense of almost association
or removal from oneself.
Also, I tried to name it my first book,
I called it self-abandonment or self-distancing,
but there's this sense too of like,
you are talking to me, you are speaking to me,
I am upright, I am saying words,
but I'm not all the way here.
- Yeah, I don't think you can see me
because I don't know who I am anymore right now.
- Mm-hmm.
- Yeah, and I think that was profoundly confusing.
And I think, you know, for me, this was,
in a course, the first loss that I went through in my life
and I've experienced a physical trauma loss in my teens.
I was raped when I was 15.
So I know what it's like to be a prisoner of your own body,
to be trapped in your body,
to feel betrayed by the world
and not feel safe in the home that is your body.
This wasn't a new experience and yet,
it was deeply transformational again
because this was something I was,
I'm gonna use this word with an air quotes,
choosing to go through meaning I didn't choose cancer
but I was choosing the treatment.
So all of the side effects of what was happening
was tearing my body down and it was just deeply,
out of body.
I mean, it's like, I tried to be in my body,
it was out of body.
There was not a lot of agency.
I do wanna talk about the,
I think the positive attributes that I brought to,
trying to live into and make peace with the body that was,
even though it wasn't the body that I wanted.
For sure, and there was a lot of practices
that other grief experiences had taught me
that helped me navigate it.
I'm like, we'll get there.
I gotta sit here for another minute or two.
(laughing)
But yeah, it was,
I'm not sure if that I'm tying together that,
if that is making sense to you,
but it wasn't the first time,
but it was a,
there was something I guess that what I'm trying to get at
around where do I have agency in this,
in terms of how I'm navigating treatment,
what are the supports I'm putting in place,
how am I asking for and demanding palliative kinds of supports
though I was not offered any palliative care formally
throughout this entire treatment.
And that felt important to me.
It didn't keep me from dissociating from my body.
It didn't keep me from wanting to crawl out of my skin
and escape,
but when I felt the most either a hostage in my own body
or disassociating from my own body,
I definitely turned towards what do I have agency
over even if the agency was loving kindness meditation
or a surrender acceptance kind of mindfulness practice,
even if it wasn't about doing something in the conventional way.
- I'm gonna put a pin in that 'cause I wanna get there,
but I think I wanna pick up on one more thing you said.
And you talked about this a little bit in your article,
but what would you say to people who suggest
or in a society that suggests
you are not allowed to grave your body
because either you chose this path for it
or you survived, you didn't die.
- Ooh, that's where all the expletives come in.
That's where all the expletives come in, you know, yeah,
exactly.
That's where I wanna use every iteration of the word fuck
because it has so many beautiful uses.
I think there's what I would say to either the person going
through an embodied grief experience
or to the people who love that person,
stop mistaking that it is either or.
It is both and.
I was deeply grateful that there was something
that they could do to try to treat my cancer.
I was deeply grateful and present and aware
as I was navigating it, that the predicted survival rate
for me based on this whole concomeration of treatment
would be in the 90th percentile.
Like my predicted survival rate from this cancer was good.
I was very present to that.
I was very aware of that.
I was grateful that I had health insurance
even though it cost me an arm and leg
to be able to do this with the outer pocket cost.
- It cost you a boob and some hair.
- I've got my boob, my hair, I don't, you know,
I'm missing this.
I had a, you know, I still have a scar here
of the port catheter and it cost me a lot of money
for sure, even with health insurance.
And so grateful for all of those things,
honoring of all of those things,
walking alongside two other women in my life
who had different forms of breast cancer at the same time,
some of which were not as treatable
in the way that mine was.
They had a different path, triple negative,
not triple positive.
And yet, if I don't honor the truth of the grief,
of my hair, of my breast, of my womanhood,
that's how I thought about it at the time
of the pain levels in my body,
then I'm not me either.
Like I'm not a, don't ask me to dance, monkey dance, you know?
And so I would say, it's not up to you,
the person showing up, and I know you can appreciate
this so much with the work that you do in your upcoming book.
It's not for us to tell you, to lead you,
where you need to be in that place with the both
and of being grateful for what you have
and grieving what you've lost.
It's for you to show up and listen and follow the lead.
I desperately, I desperately, I mean,
thankfully I know a lot of amazing people
who get grief pretty well since I do this work.
Yeah.
So I was lucky for some people in my life
to really get showing up and I was like,
I'm gonna go up and saying, maybe not in this phrase,
though I would love it if they would,
like on a scale of one to 10,
how is your grief over your cancer today, you know?
Or could say like, you know,
would show up swearing at cancer and then say,
like, how are you, what's your relationship
with cancer today or your body today or your treatment today?
But there was so many people as I wrote about in that essay
on my sub-stack,
is that, yeah, did that at least fill in the blank.
You're so lucky that fill in the blank.
And all the platitudes that allowed them to distance themselves
from the fear and the pain that they were seeing on my face
and hearing in my voice.
And I would say to those who do that,
again, maybe from a good place,
good intentions, you and I have talked about that before.
All you're doing is all I felt was distanced.
All I felt was dismissed.
All I felt was othered.
And all I felt was you were not a safe person for me
to talk to my grieving body about.
Yeah, yes, exactly.
What you have just indicated is that you are not a good home
for the home that I'm grieving.
Yes, yes, exactly, exactly.
And that happens.
That happens especially, I think,
for folks who haven't done their own work.
I'm using that in air quotes too, sort of,
who haven't been in their pain of themselves in an embodied loss,
who haven't walked alongside somebody they love in an embodied loss.
Somebody who often the people in the medical field
that I was coming into contact with was, you know,
not all of them, but many of them.
And it
kept me from feeling full permission
to be devastated by what I saw and felt in the mirror.
I had all kinds of complications.
I had a
trauma that developed in my breast after the surgery.
I had two basically anaphylactic stop breathing reactions
in two of my 12 chemotherapy infusions,
you know, where they had to put oxygen tube and slow things down.
Infection, you know, you name it.
As I said, I had a lot of side effects on top of the
pain of the treatment.
And if for anybody listening who's gone through chemotherapy,
you know, I see you.
I know.
And I desperately just wanted to
rail and rage about it and feel not hemmed in.
I already do that to myself.
I'm already a kind of, you know, I mean,
I was asking myself early on, you know,
my sort of principled idea of, is this another fucking growth opportunity?
Like, that's what my sub stack is called.
Like, what am I here to learn?
And yet, I realized at the six week mark in my chemotherapy,
when everybody was saying, "You're halfway there.
You're halfway there.
Congratulations.
You're halfway there."
I remember feeling flooded.
I think I even got my camera out because I knew something was coming.
And I thought, "I'm only halfway there."
I'm only halfway there.
It's not, I'm halfway there.
How can I survive?
How can I do this on my own?
And I will say that the embodied grief of this experience brought back
as does often new grief, so much old grief.
Yes.
So I was here in the middle of the night,
not sure if I was going to make it.
And there's no husband in the room because he's dead.
You know, there was nobody to mull my dog,
not nobody, sorry, Miss Frankie.
But there was no human to hear my cries and my fear
and to help soothe my body when it needed it.
And that new, that bringing up of old grief was also directly tied
to the sort of intense physical losses that cancer was bringing me.
Yes.
It may be, for a group or two, having this experience,
if I'm having some kind of embodied grief in the person I would normally go home to,
or could see my body as a home where I could find home in their body,
is now no longer here.
I'm a million percent resident with that,
and it can give you another reason to be mad at them,
or to re-grieve them, or to say,
"I have another reason I'm mad at you about.
How dare you leave me here by myself to deal with cancer
or deal with a chronic illness or deal with, you know,
this diagnosis for the rest of my life and not have you to hold me
or to carry me to the bathtub or to make soup
or whatever the case may be.
I never missed my mom more than the first time.
I got, I think I got like an eye infection
or, oh, I got a really gnarly case of strep throat.
And I was like bed ridden, it was so bad.
And I remember I was away from home,
I was doing an internship in college.
And it was a sales internship in all the toxicity
that comes with that industry.
And they were basically like, "Power through it, you need to attend this lecture
or else you're not going to be able to go out into the sales force
or be whatever boots on the ground you need to be."
And I was like, "I literally cannot move."
And the only thing I wanted was to be taken care of by my mother
who was dead.
And that's a very small experience of an acute illness
that I can imagine and extrapolate out over months and years
of something like cancer or another chronic illness
that has tons and tons of ramifications.
So yes, I can tell it, I didn't even think of that
when reading your article.
Yes, I can see that as another reason to grieve.
Old losses of like, "How dare you not be here for this?"
Like, "What the hell? What the hell? A million percent."
A million percent.
I wrote down, "I want to get into now like, what did you do to cope with the fact that I am..."
And I've never heard the term in body grief before.
So thank you for teaching me that. I'll be writing about that later.
"To do what did you do to cope with grieving in your body or embodied grief?"
And if we can hold two thoughts in our mind simultaneously,
if people are not able to access their bodies as sources of grounding,
I'm thinking people who do not do breathing exercises anymore
in the aftermath of COVID.
Like, I do not want to ground through my body or my toes
because I do not want to feel that.
What are some tools or exercises for people who are like,
"I don't want my body to be the doorway through which I try to find peace
because that is the source of my suffering."
So like, "What did you do individually?"
And then what can we offer people that are like,
"I can't use my body as the doorway because that is the unsafe place."
No, I so appreciate you naming that so much.
And by the way, I mean, I named it embodied grief.
I don't know if this really determines somebody else might have named it.
There's, of course, the grieving body that we know from our friend,
Mary Franceso Conner.
Yes, but that's just how I described what all of the cascading losses
that I was experiencing as I went through cancer.
So that's the term that I named.
And what I wanted to say to you, Shelby, too, I appreciate so much,
is I think this is the tricky dynamic of any kind of trauma
or traumatic loss or sort of embodied grief,
is that often the practices or the places that we might lean on
to sort of sue our nervous system and to find some relief
are the exact places where we don't want to go.
Or we're not ready to go yet.
I would use yet for now or for now.
I don't really like the sort of totality.
Yes, exactly the sort of totality of it.
And so that was hard.
And I've been a long time meditator for, I don't know, a decade or so,
more than a decade, maybe two now.
And there were certainly kinds of practices that I couldn't do,
especially like those days when I wasn't sleeping
because of the head sores or when the, in the 12 weeks when the chemo
literally made my body feel, I don't even want to describe the details
of what that felt like.
So for me, what it was was about connecting my body with the bigger home.
So a practice that I used, that I had developed after the death of my husband
and then really amplified after the death of my friend Joe, were beauty walks.
So how can I recognize that no matter the fact that I don't recognize my own body
that I don't feel at home in my own body, that on some days my body feels
like a very dangerous place to be.
I'm still a part of a home that is so much more dynamic and beautiful.
And so beauty walks are a thing that I took on, as I said, you know,
it's Eric's been gone 14 years, so it's been more than a decade that I've been doing this.
And it can look like of a lot of things, but for me, it's usually no music,
no podcast, which is hard for lots of us.
If you can, but also don't do that, if you can't, maybe something.
And take off on a walk. And by the way, there were times where my beauty walks were driving myself
to the park bench that overlooked the ocean and sitting on the bench and doing this.
Because for many of us, if you're listening, walking is not, I don't want to be able to walk.
It's like walking is not accessible.
It's less, I mean, movement, certainly we know if you have the capacity to move physiologically,
helps soothe things, but it's really less about the walk and more about the putting your,
the home of your body in the home of nature.
It's, I know we've shared this phrase before that we love so much by Cheryl Stray,
sort of putting yourself in the way of beauty, right?
Or I think about Dacker Keltner's work and the work of awe.
I was just doing all this before I knew there was like science and data around the impact
of awe and wonder and delight.
So that was a practice that I did.
It was less about turning inward.
I hear you saying like nobody wants to ground their feet or turn inward to their breath when this home feels so difficult.
I mean, my best friend has been living with advanced Lyme disease for a long time in our home as a battlefield.
So we talk about this often.
Nature, beauty, and whatever form it is.
Noticing if a butterfly is flying, I happen to live somewhere where there are butterflies and hummingbirds,
kind of 365, or the way the birds kind of soar and dip into the water over the ocean.
But doesn't matter, I did this when I lived in Austin in the dead of summer when,
whenever they felt like it was on fire.
It's about bringing some intention outside of your body.
So can you notice the way the breeze moves that tree?
Can you notice the way that kind person picked up that kid's toy and handed it back to them?
Is it the flower that's growing through the cracks in the sidewalk?
That was one that helped me.
I called this, I gave a talk last year, I guess, at Endwell,
called Centering Aliveness in a World Full of Laws.
And I talked about some of the practices, sort of seven practices.
That was one of them, sort of beauty walks.
Random acts of kindness.
So I gave away flowers.
The started before my cancer treatment, but I doubled down on it during my cancer treatment.
I would buy and give away a bouquet of flowers at my local farmers market every week.
I've been doing it for a couple of years now.
That outside of yourself thing, the capturing beauty with a camera.
Like I would just decide I'm going to go out and look for the color orange.
To try to capture as many orange things as I could.
So I was still, my body was still a vehicle, but I was getting outside of myself,
placing my home that is a body in the home of all things.
And for me, it was important to be on the lookout for the, to be in,
put myself in the place of wonder or awe.
And yeah, to just be in that place.
I'll say for myself is somebody who was raised by a performing arts mother and loved performing arts.
I might go see some art or go see a show or go see a concert or go see go to a museum.
If you can put yourself in those places or and or.
I remember as my mom was dying, my girlfriend and I at the time had no idea what else to do after her memorial.
So we went and saw a movie and it ended up being like a storyline of a wounded child making art from her pain.
And I didn't know it was going to be this.
We just picked a random movie.
And then it turned into there were like some musical components.
And I love music and it ended in this place that was like painful but nostalgic, but ultimately good.
And in the midst of my grief, I was like, oh, I am a part of a larger world that makes art from pain.
And even if I don't know how I'm going to make art from this pain because my mom literally died five days ago.
Yes. I remembered that I live in a world where that happens for other people.
And it just opened a door of possibility where I thought that maybe there was done that early in my grief experience.
And so even for grieving people, a lot of times I think grieving people shame themselves for sinking into sitcoms or movies or, you know,
scrolling through uttering their phones or making dumb clay things with their hands or whatever they're able to do.
And I'm like, with the right mindset, it is literally you not escaping from the world but immersing yourself that much more deeply inside of it and not through the vehicle of your body.
And that's a pretty incredible thing to do.
Yeah. I mean, I think of Sue Lekas written, of course, about this a lot.
I mean, creativity as a resource, especially when the location of your grief is in your body is remarkably really powerful.
And the cool thing is it can be just as powerful consuming it as creating it.
So it doesn't require you to get out, you know, your watercolor set or, you know, to do, you know, compose some music.
You can be a consumer of it.
But I think that to me, the key was kind of connecting me to a bigger something outside of myself that I was a part of something even when I didn't recognize my home.
I also did, I will name, I tried. I think it was useful.
It was challenging.
Later on through my treatment experience and even still to the day, I try to do periodic standing in front of the mirror and acknowledging the way that my body even through its pain, even through its, you know, deformity.
The way that it served me. So I'll stand in front of the mirror and place to hand over my heart and say, thank you, body.
Thank you, body, even as I'm sometimes tearing and even as there's a part of me that's looking in the mirror repulsed by what I see.
But there was something really important to me to both and my body is not a home and also thank you, body for.
I'm here today.
Yeah, you know, I'm breathing.
So I tried to and still do to this day, really tried to tend to the both and of my body as a place of betrayal, but also my body as a place as a resource or a source of my aliveness.
And that is meaningful and to those listening who are in the depths of their chronic illness or their pain or somebody they love or wherever their grief is.
It's all around being curious and the invitation to try.
It's not about accomplishing or looking in some way that you are doing or achieving these things.
And I binge watched so many TV series and dissociated and also checked out because it's about the kind of titration and pendulation.
It was I was really clear to me that I had to just allow myself.
I mean, there were days where all I could do was stare at the wall for hours and I let myself stare at the wall for hours.
I think one of the things grieving having an embodied grief or going through this cancer journey taught me or reminded me, and I'll think it's taught me, but I think we all need this reminder in the culture that we have is that we're human beings, not human doings.
And when you have limitations from whatever it is you're going through you're just cutely aware. And I think so much of the identity crisis or the pain and the suffering that I'll just speak for myself that I experienced as somebody who's a very productive do it, do or creator, you know, podcaster writer, whatever speaker was finding value in my identity as a human that was just being.
And shifting where value comes from yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's beautiful.
I wonder if we're wrapping up. I didn't know if I was going to mention your book today, but I am.
Lisa's book also the name of her podcast grief is a sneaky bitch. We did an event together in Chicago. I think about a year and a half ago now.
To promote her book, but one of my favorite sections is on page 185 and it talks about the grief of feeling lost and homesick and feeling homesickness as a symptom of grief.
And you talk about it more in the lens of like the death of a loved one, you have lost your home on earth in another person, which I kind of talked about with my mom.
But I wonder too, if you could speak on feeling homesickness over your body and then maybe for folks who are listening like what are a few ways that you have found or discovered or learned to gradually be able to come home to the being of your body, even in the midst of great loss and grief.
Yeah. The homesickness really is a quality of grief that's too often ignored. I was just flipping to that page for a moment.
And I remember discovering that as I was writing this book and it just felt like the truest thing I have ever known in that moment.
And I think it absolutely applies both when someone is physically present, but psychologically distant as in when you're looking into the eyes of a loved one who doesn't recognize you because of dementia or Alzheimer's or is different.
But I think there is a kind of homesickness to the sense of identity for myself, like who am I?
Is this a body that feels safe? Will I ever feel safe again? Will I ever feel comfort again? So also there's sort of the ambiguity that happens when you're navigating something like cancer or a chronic illness or something like that.
And what will a new state of home be? To me, my first place answer to people always is start with naming it.
I mean, I can offer some practices that I did, but I think we all want like, how do I get to the top five top 10 list of ways to like hurry up and stop feeling homesick.
But I think for me, one of the most important transformations in all the various losses, including this latest one, has been the time where I really named it and allowed that naming to sink into my bones.
And so not just at the intellectual like the sucks, but like at the embodied place and to weep and mourn for that that I'm never going to know a world where I'm not someone who's experienced cancer and are always going to be on the lookout now for, you know, living between scans and the whole
scan anxiety and all that that happens. So I think naming it has been and I do this with the work that I do with clients to name it, which isn't just a one time thing, but coming back over and over to the homesickness that we feel because I think that's the first place that you can.
That is the first step the start close in as I refer to, you know, that great line from David White's poem start close in is a place that then when you can acknowledge that then you have maybe some distance to be able to say so now what.
So what might it feel like to nest in this home what might this home look like what might it take what perspectives do I need to take on or what activities or ways of being or practices that allow me to find a sense of home not returning to the home that it was because it will ever be that home.
Yeah, what can I know about the fact that this is now a home that needs rebuilding I'm not getting rid of everything but not it's not going to look the same and so that's a place where I could then drop into I mean it come came back a lot to values over and over again what do I value most how do I want to live this life what matters to me.
And which I think in our ordinary lives we move along without ever thinking about those questions at all.
And that's not to dis us of course like how could you function you can't sit and you know be in your reflective space 24/7 and you do have to like grocery shop and pay the bills and do your job.
But I think that's what it has really allow me to do so feeling strong I got I got really clear that I though I wasn't able to control the weight gain and some of the side effects and the fact that I'm you know I joked but I need to make a teach that's called just one nip.
That I'm walking around in the world with just one nip you know I can't control the hat so what does matter to me about my body for me it's been I want my body to feel strong I want my body to be able to carry me to the places that I want to go especially nature being in beauty so I want my body to I want to figure out how I can make my body that way and I recognize that I have some.
Access that some people may not depending on there so it's what are the things that matter to you what are the values and then that is the gaze at which I am now looking towards how am I spending the energy of my body.
So that it can feel like a home that feels more often than not look I'm not out here being you know like I got my days y'all I got my days where I struggle.
But I feel more and more in at home with my body because I'm reclaiming what it means to be in my body by centering what matters to me by centering the values that are important to me at this point in my life which were not the values that I had at 20 or 30 or even the value that I had you know after surviving that horrific assaults when I was a teen.
So starting here now what is this body need of me and how can I be of service to it even accepting it is.
Worthy of being a home to me exactly as it is even if I don't change anything.
Yeah and a lot of that naming it is also without saying the specific words is allowing it to have changed and to almost yeah drop the the grudge against your body of it having changed I don't know exactly how to put words to this but.
If we were to have bodies that would never change we would not be people like we would be robots we would be human human correct yes so you're following me there and so saying thinking.
I am homesick for my body and then feeling I am homesick for my body translated to loop like another way is like my body has changed with and without my input consent participation.
That is a human thing and to grieve the reality of that.
And to name it and feel that through first and then do the values and then do the how do I shift it and then what do I have control or autonomy or agency over which you speak of so beautifully.
And then so what where do we go from here I wanted to go around to why I think nature has been so fundamentally important to me and putting myself in the way of beauty as it in the form of nature although lots all beauty is.
Beauty is nature reminds you of all of that you we watch the fields lay follow right we watch the leaves fall we watch the.
Crocuses come out even though it knows the snow is going to come barrier again in the spring in the Midwest or in the Northeast.
And so I think it's such a powerful reminder we live in a culture in which we think there's never ending upward trajectory into healing improvement and health.
And so then when our bodies vacillate and change and morph and we think we can arrive somewhere and stay there like happiness is a state that you can hold on to as an example of a myth that we all hold.
And so I think that naming thing coming back around to you seeing nature change evolve grow and and yet still be beautiful yet still be strong still come back in the spring those kinds of things is so.
It's was such a relief.
In a way because when I was stuck with the story that I have to clean grip tightly hold fast until because until I can get that old body back or that old life back.
I was resisting.
The truth that I don't have control over that and yet things can be beautiful again and that I can find ease and peace in a home again so nature is such a powerful powerful teacher.
And that's I would say nature and poets are kind of the teachers that have helped me find home again in this body.
Yeah, I mean that's beautiful. I am recording this in like the almost solstice time in Chicago.
It is 10 degrees feels like negative for I'm in like my puffer and my little hat and I moved here from North Carolina more than 10 years ago now because winter is one of my favorite seasons like I love winter in a way that not a lot of people do and even people who are lifelong Chicago ones are like fuck the winter.
And sometimes what I think of especially in seasons where I have been grappling with my body or some form of my identity as it relates to grief is oh it's easy for everyone to love me or to appreciate me or to shower praise upon me or to be there for me when I am blooming when I am a beautiful spring tree with all my blooms on a blah blah blah.
I am less as it takes you so we're appealing but I am less appealing to society or culture when I'm in my hashtag stick season when I am a stick with no leaves and not any anything.
And sometimes that applies to our identity sometimes that applies to our body sometimes that applies to our emotional state sometimes that applies to just like we're professional or professional absolutely sometimes we're in full bloom and sometimes we are sticks with snow on them and not everybody is excited about that.
And it sort of reminds me of like if we can approach ourselves from a lens of can I find beauty and even that or where is there already beauty here even if I can't see it yet is a really worthwhile place to start and I love going back to nature as an allegory for that because to some people I will be a reminder that winter comes and sometimes you're ugly.
So I'm sorry I'm a reminder of that I can't help it and other times I won't be but but it is a beautiful and a brave thing to look at that and to say I am finding ways to yeah to be next to that and eventually to accept that and to live with that and to continue to be a human being alongside that.
I want to name just as we wrap for listeners that this is what you're talking about for me anyways this is a practice this is not a I heard it on a podcast or read it in a book and now I live into that all the time this is a practice this is a sustained meditation that we must take to be present to I mean it's a phrase like the messy middle that was a chapter I talked about that's that place in the middle where you're not where you were but you're not.
Where you were but you're not where you're going and it's there's a lot of uncertainty yeah and so I just I think nature is such a good reminder of that and don't be fooled that you can come to a conclusion of that and then really know it in your bones because there for lots of reasons including which our culture is so saturated in the messaging of you just need to hurry up and get to this place of perfection or success.
And not recognizing that even the people who have gotten there who are on your screens as your scroll went through a messy middle they just show it to you.
But I think the messy middle I'm I'm in a creative blossom right now just emerged but 2025 was a big messy swamp middle let me tell you the whole year and I really worked hard to just I would say practical and a day for you to do it.
And I actually had a daily basis like well this is the messy middle I'm in you know when I would hit a wall or get knocked down and I would just be like.
Get really tired of the messy middle but here I am what can I learn so just to name to all of us to have so much grace with yourself and even naming it that like when you're feeling in that in between or you feel like you're vacillating or you're.
So taking two steps back what if you just called it the messy middle and that's something that we all spend time in and actually the messy middle is where creativity and beauty is born so.
Now if you can try to be try to be present to it yeah yeah don't know I know how I got here I don't know what's next.
A million percent is a place where a lot of creativity is but also where and I mean I know I'll put your resources in the show notes it's also where a lot of community can be found to.
Yes it's can be a place that's extraordinarily lonely but especially when we are having facing any sort of embodied grief or identity grief of who the fuck is that in the mirror.
Yes it is a place where a lot of other people are also asking that same question and so I invite you as we go forth from the show to connect with Lisa's work especially body grief is something that you're facing to connect with mine but to also seek out other people who were in their own winter tree stick season.
I love that and not knowing if or when spring will arrive. Yes no idea when that will come Lisa I am so glad to have had you on grief grower today and just talk about grief in the body because I know it's a thing that so many grievous face but don't have words for yet and I think there's such power in being able to put language to what we're feeling and then eventually when we're ready to to wrap values around it or ask what matters or even just name the thing that's happening and you've just given us a.
Plethora of so many tools today so thank you for being on and thank you Lisa's body for carrying her to this interview today.
Thank you Lisa's body I so appreciate and I so appreciate you Shelby thank you so much for being in conversation and for your beautiful questions today.
That's all for this episode of grief grower thank you so very much for joining me and Lisa today to unpack the concept of embodied grief you can find a link to connect with Lisa in the show notes.
If you're looking for grief support beyond this show you can find free workshops blog articles and my new what is your grief supporter strength quiz at shelbyforsethea.com/links and if you would like to get support from me for your unique loss experience join us in life after lowest academy my online course and community.
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Grief grower hosted by me shall be for sythia with the music by Addy Goldstein until next time grief growers I see you I am so proud of you and the work that you're doing in the world and I love you because even through grief we are growing.
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