The last three years have been a whirlwind of education, grieving, excitement, connection, writing, and expansion within the offerings from Restorative Grief. This is the three-year anniversary of the podcast, and there are many opinions about what an anniversary podcast episode should be. I promise I considered multiple ideas before landing on offering you a brief recap of why Restorative Grief matters as an approach, an offering, and an opportunity for every one of us to continue to pursue the language of grief and healing together.
The Approach
First, let’s revisit the approach built into the Restorative Grief model. It is my own work, developed over years of education and anecdotal experience both in my life and my clients’ lives. Restorative Grief is based on an integrative mind-heart-body-spirit approach to healing work. This holistic understanding of our very important parts allows us to gather all of that scattered sensation in our bodies, hearts, minds, and souls when we grieve.
Grief throws our entire personhood into disarray. In the Restorative Grief model, we are provided with options to explore that which lies ahead through a lens of alignment in every aspect of our being. It literally does not matter where we start. When we approach ourselves with awareness and openness toward strategies and techniques that support our cognitive, emotional, somatic, and spiritual needs, we are agreeing with our parts that something hurts and something deserves attention.
Grief is not a journey we must begin and find an end to. We know that grief is an ongoing conversation in our lives, and the more we learn the language and the way grief shows up in our holistic parts, the more we will lessen the intensity and overwhelm of grief. Not because we make it smaller or we get used to grieving, but because we are equipped, prepared, and ready to embrace this natural and expected part of life instead of trying to insulate ourselves against feeling and healing work.
The Restorative Grief model teaches us how to approach ourselves with softness, curiosity, and tenderness that we may not even believe we deserve until we are face-to-face with someone who validates our grief experience and helps us find a new way forward.
The Offering
Initially, I built the Restorative Grief model for my book. The 31-day guidebook by the same name is the story of my grief experience and different strategies and holistic approaches to me through my lens of faith that served my healing process for grief. There is a little bit of memoir storytelling within the book, but on the whole, this offering has been described as grief insurance.
If you have been part of a faith community, you are familiar with the idea of a daily devotional. These are books with short letters and invitations into reflection and journaling meant to deepen our understanding of a faith practice. And my book is exactly that for grievers and people curious about grief! The language of grief is often limited to the five stages model that is ubiquitous in entertainment media but lacks the nuance, depth, and lived experience of grievers. My book is an offering within that framework loosely so that it feels familiar enough to create safety while you begin the work of grieving with intention.
Whether or not you are part of a faith community or practice, my book has opportunities to explore how grief is presented culturally, socially, spiritually, and personally. You can buy a copy of my book on Amazon or request a signed copy from me directly, of course. If you would benefit from a copy of the book but can’t afford it right now, please reach out. The entire purpose of my grief offerings is to become an accessible resource for people living in care deserts. That means if you need the support, I will do everything appropriate and in my capacity to offer it.
Beyond the book and the podcast is the Restorative Grief Project. This quiet and calm online group is hosted on Facebook with weekly journaling prompts, questions to engage in the group, and permission to simply witness what meaningful grief support can look like. Support groups are a phenomenal point of access for grief support when we feel isolated. If there are no physical face-to-face grief support groups near you or you feel awkward or uncomfortable attending, the Restorative Grief Project is a very low-expectation space for you to practice grieving with an audience.
If you are new to my work, then this is your first opportunity to find out I believe strongly in the power of a witness for your story. When we grieve, we are searching for the words to describe the pain and weight of our experience, and often we do not realize we carry it without partnership until we say the painful thing aloud. We are not grieving alone, but if we remain isolated and withhold our honest experiences and stories, we will not experience the healing energy available in being seen, heard, and known.
It is a common misconception that grievers must find a person who knows their exact loss or experience in order to relate or help them feel seen. Any grief professional working one-on-one with clients will tell you they have not experienced loss in the same way their clients have experienced it and yet, their clients report great levels of attunement and connection. How is this possible? Our role as grief educators and counselors is not to tell you everything will be okay, but to model what it looks like to live amid grief-filled moments without imploding or falling silent.
So whether you opt to join the Restorative Grief Project hosted on Facebook or you consider one-on-one coaching with me, you are giving yourself the gift of connection and safety. No matter the type of grief we carry, we can find healing opportunities in relationship with others. Some of our most powerful moments can come from a silent witness remaining with us while we weep. They don’t need to cry with us. They do not need to soothe us with platitudes. And they don’t even need to have a background in grief education. We were created for relationship with one another and healthy people generate safe connections. Think about the last time you were around someone that felt soothing and safe. That environment is available to you, whether you choose an offering from Restorative Grief Coaching or not.
The Opportunities
The last thing I want to talk about with you on this three-year anniversary podcast episode are the opportunities lying before us as we move into year four. I’ve enjoyed telling people that the majority of podcasts have fewer than 10 episodes, with nearly half of all new podcasts only making it to episode three. My friends, this is episode 158. There have been a handful of additional bonus episodes, Patreon-only episodes, and live conversations as well, so technically I’m well into season four. So what could we possibly continue to build from here on out?
Part of that is up to you. Since the beginning of the show, I have enjoyed a passionate and dedicated group of financial supporters backing me in this work and keeping these episodes on the air. Not only is there a lot of time invested in writing and producing a podcast, but the cost of putting it into the world is not free, either.
Maybe someday I’ll get picked up by Lemonade Media or some other incredible podcast platform group, but for now, it’s just little old me trying to keep beautiful you encouraged and engaged in your grief work. So maybe this season is the one where you partner with me as a financial supporter. Each episode has a corresponding workbook available to you that helps make the concepts a little more concrete. I would love to say that I make a profit from all this work, but truthfully, I would be sharing these episodes no matter what. So your contributions just help me ensure quality productions for people who don’t have access to grief support in their lives. Where a support group might be too intense, a podcast and journaling prompt might be an incredibly accessible and safe approach to begin a person’s grief work.
Another opportunity we have together in the coming year is to begin looking a little more intentionally at how grief affects us in our bodies and our communities. As I write this, we are still deep in the middle of a political presidential voting season. As for me, the grief in my body and my community is palpable. The violence of the last decade is holistic, too—heart, mind, body, and spirit—we are carrying burdens we were never meant to face alone.
So whether you decide to get the workbooks and come along on my guided journey, I want to invite you into the intentional and personal work of grieving in a more communal way in the coming year. Our individual internalized grief work is crucial. If we are not settled and open to what surfaces within, then what surfaces around us is an immediately dysregulating experience.
By doing our individual grief work from our stories, to our present-day losses, to the anticipatory grief we face, we can strengthen our ability to support one another through the ongoing communal grief events.
This matters significantly. Events happening globally that do not directly impact my individual life absolutely impact my life on a social, cultural, political, emotional, and economic level. It is naive to believe otherwise, but it is often incredibly difficult to see how a collective grief experience impacts our individual lives when we are insulated from the direct impacts. We can be insulated from grief collectively through financial security, the color of our skin, the neighborhoods we live in, and so many other protective factors that we just do not even comprehend or think about on a daily basis.
Within those privileges and protective factors, we have a collective obligation to understand what it means when we put ourselves on the line on behalf of someone else. It does not mean I am centering myself in their grief stories or trying to relate to something that just does not apply to me and my lived experience. But this is where witnessing and honoring the stories and the pain of another person matters. When we enter into a scenario that does not directly appear to affect us, we can begin to see the way our lives are interwoven with one another no matter where we began life on this planet.
We have an opportunity to become so much richer and healthier collectively if we will allow our hands to intertwine with one another and experience grief and life side by side instead of remaining insulated and hidden away from the difficult, discomforting, dysregulating experiences that some of us live with on a daily basis.
This is your opportunity to get uncomfortable and learn how much healing is available in that growth zone on the outside of what you’ve always known.
I think you can agree with me when I say this is really exciting! Season four of the podcast is here, and we are absolutely holding nothing back. My guests coming up this season are powerhouses of writing, speaking, creating, and healing. They are all breaking down barriers and binaries, and harmful narratives, and dismantling the fear of death that so many of us feel limited by on a daily basis. And while my interviews are lined up and handled for the year, my essays are not yet set, so if one of these sentences triggered a thought or inspired a question, this is your opportunity to craft part of the narrative of season four of the podcast. Please reach out and help me shape these stories into a tool that serves you well right where you are and equips you well for where you are heading.
Thank you for listening to episode 158 of Restorative Grief. This is the first episode of season four, and I hope you can tell how excited I am and honestly how proud I am of all of you for being here and keeping this show going for three years! We are just getting started redefining what grief work means and reengaging the language of loss in a way that eliminates hesitation. We are becoming people who look grief square in the face to say, “We see you, and we are not afraid.” And if that phrase makes you feel a little anxious right now, then you are amongst friends and in the best possible place you could ever be.
If this is your first time listening to the show, I am so excited that you are here. Diving into a podcast this far into the show can be overwhelming because you have a lot of catching up available to you. In the show notes, I’ll link to the transcript for this show, and it will include a list of the most popular interviews and essays from the last three years. Hopefully, that will give you a good place to start, but if you’re looking for a specific topic, just ask me. I’m sure I’ve covered it…but if I haven’t, then I’ll have a great new topic for the new year, too.
Please remember to subscribe to the podcast, leave a shiny five-star review, and invite a friend to also listen. If we are going to change the way the world approaches loss, we have to invite others into the difficult and uncomfortable conversations. Check out the show notes for a link to my Patreon as well as the transcript for this show on my website. Reach out to me on social media @MandyCapehart because you know I love to hear from you all, and as always, one last thing before we go: Please remember, the only solution for grief is to do the work of grieving. Thank you for listening. I’ll see you next week.
Links + Resources from this episode:
- Patreon.com/MandyCapehart
- Learn more about coaching
Most popular episodes from the first three seasons of Restorative Grief
Interviews:
- 69. Honoring Our Souls & Stories with Lisa Espinoza
- 77. Redefining Rest with Dr. Amy Novotny
- 85. Rediscovering Resiliency with Dr. Lucy Hone
- 67. What Happens When We Die with Jesse Dice
- 87. It’s A Fully Human Experience with Jan Owen
- 129. As Long As You Need with J.S. Park
- 125. Finding Our Flow of Strength with Aundi Kolber
- 79. Overcoming Community Loss with Micah Morgan
- 59. Human Flourishing with Josh Scott
- 133. How We Can Heal Together with Kimberly Dudley
Essays:
- 74. We Aren’t Telling Sad Stories
- 78. Why You’re Not Healing as Fast As You’d Like
- 88. The Six Needs of Every Griever
- 66. Our Forgotten Grievers
- 82. What It’s Like to Feel Joyful Again
- 94. If It Matters, Let It Matter
- 132. Okay, So They’re Disappointed
- 120. Practicing Your Own Power
- 102. What Do I Really Need to Know?
- 104. Anticipating Divorce & The Aftermath