Dr Pedram Shojai
Today I share a conversation about grief and how to properly feel it to heal it.
Listen to the episode on Spotify here or on your favorite podcast platform and check out the Urban Monk Academy here.
Podcast transcript:
[00:00:00] Hey, welcome back to the Urban Monk. Dr. Pedram Shojai. Excited to share a conversation that I think is important. It’s about grief. Uh, what happens is inside the Urban Monk Academy, I have all these students that have these things happening in this thing called life. And so I’m always asking, Hey, what’s up?
What’s bothering you? Where are you stuck? Because I want to be useful. To the folks in my community and so, uh, multiple topics come up. We’ve talked about a lot of stuff over the years, but this one’s about grief. And I thought that it was important enough to share broadly here on the podcast because so many people I think grieve incorrectly and so many people hold it in so many people don’t properly metabolize the emotion and allow for the energy of grief to act as a teacher.
So, without further ado, let’s listen to that conversation.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Today I want to talk about grief. Uh, I want to talk about it because [00:01:00] a few of you wanted to know about it.
It’s a really important topic. It’s a topic that I think is. Not talked about enough in our culture. And so I want to start by acknowledging that it is a universal human experience, right? Yeah, deeply personal. So your grief is obviously different than my grief because your loss was a human that was very different than the human or the dog or the parrot that I lost.
Right? Um, but there is a lot to say around this, namely because
it’s a profound teacher and it’s not something that we are, we are supposed to just get over. It’s something that we’re supposed to get under or something. We’re supposed to get around. It’s something that we’re supposed to get our, hearts and our minds wrapped around, it can affect us on all levels, obviously physical, emotional, mental, spiritual grief just sucks.
It sucks the, the, the air right out of your lungs. Right. And so I want to talk about that because in Chinese [00:02:00] medicine, in Taoist, all chemical traditions, it belongs to the metal element and the metal element is the lungs and the large intestine. And we often say that, the spiritual attribute to grief is propriety, which is a weird word.
Good boundaries, good propriety. Um, best way I could kind of describe this is if my somebody died, let’s just, let’s go, let’s go even a little simpler, right? If my dog died and you know, it sucks, right? I’ve lost a lot of dogs over the years. Um, and the next morning I run out and get a puppy that might be a little too soon.
Right? But if my dog died and four years later, I’m wearing black and still crying about it. I may be hanging on a little too much, right? So what is the appropriate level of grieving for a death of a dog? And that’s a deeply personal question, right? I’m not, I’m not here to answer that. That’s weird, right?
But [00:03:00] what is the appropriate level of grieving given the relationship you had with this animal, this person, this thing, fill in the blanks of what the loss was and what is the amount of grieving that was involved. necessary to honor the life of this thing, move on, but never forget, right?
And so grief is actually a form of love, right? It’s, uh, it’s the price we pay for caring deeply, and that in essence is the problem. You care more deeply for someone, something, the loss of that hurts more. The problem is it doesn’t follow a linear path, does it? It comes in waves. And there are different cultures that deal with grief differently.
Um, I think some deal with grief better than others. I think [00:04:00] the, you know, stiff upper lip and move on and cry at the wake. And, um, that’s all you get. Culture might be a little too little. And, there are cultures in the Middle East in particular world, they’ll sit there and like, you know, flog themselves and whip themselves in the back because they want to, uh, make the pain.
Go away, right? And you know, that could go on for a day. But if that goes on for months, maybe that’s a little too much. I don’t know. I don’t know. What do you need? Right? But there are all sorts of cultural perspectives like, you know, the whole vigil over the body. You wear black for a month. You don’t shave your face.
We fill in the blanks and all the different cultures that have a protocol around grief, right? Right. It’s pretty damn predictable. If you know humans, you know they’re going to die. And so over the years, the religious traditions have really built structure around this because this keeps happening, doesn’t it?
Right? [00:05:00] People do die. People do leave us. And so, a lot of it from. the perspective all come about, right? And I’m not here to preach on Judaism or Christianity or Islam or any of that. And I think there’s people better, better to do that than me. I will speak from a Taoist perspective because I feel like that, um, could be relevant to what we’re doing here.
And it has a lot to do with letting go versus holding on. It has a lot to do with the inhale and the exhale of the metal element, right? The processing of this, Energy, which has physical impact, emotional impact and all of it. Right? So when grief hits us in its appropriate amount of grief, and of course you’re going to feel sad, right?
Sadness and grief go hand in hand with bedfellows. But what that does to our nervous system is it also shocks us into a state of. [00:06:00] catatonia, if you will, right? Like we’re not able to move. Our stress response has us moving slower, has us brain foggy, and it has very specific manifestations of fatigue, sleep disruption, immune changes.
You can, these are all recorded in people who are grieving. Surprise, surprise, right? It’s also associated with shallow breathing. So when you are in a of grief, deep grief, if you will,\ you start to cut your breath. And so And I want to be very careful as I give this advice because I don’t want the therapeutic application of what I’m saying to then become the Advil for the tequila mentality of saying, okay, well, I’m just going to do this and make the grief go away.
Don’t make the grief go away. Honor the grief. Now there are appropriate times to be grieving [00:07:00] and maybe while you’re giving a lecture or talking to the parent in the, in the line to pick up your kid, it’s not the moment to lose it. Right? And so therapeutically you lengthen your breath, you feel what you’re feeling, but you lengthen your breath and you can say, I, And this is a piece of it that I think all of you, and we talked about this in healing emotional trauma and a few of the other courses we’ve done in the academy, which is honoring that.
Right. Okay. Whoa, whoa. Okay. I am feeling really sad right now and I want to acknowledge that. And I am going to take a couple deep breaths, lengthen my breath because now’s not a good time. Right. Now’s not a good time, I’m standing in front of these people, I’m at the bank, whatever it is. Now’s not the time, but I am going to allow the water to flow when I get into a place where I feel safe to [00:08:00] grieve.
The problem with the now’s not a good time narrative slash strategy is that when the hell do you allocate the time in the world that we live in? Well, I’ve got this tomorrow, I’ve got a meeting tonight, I’m, you know, dinner with Susie. When do you do it? And so the flip side of kicking the can or punting the grief ball is you do have to take the time to honor that feeling so that it doesn’t reverberate in your energy field.
Because we talk about this a lot in a number of the courses, right? But you know, kind of urban monk review 101 here is that an emotion or an energy unexpressed reverberates and becomes chaotic chi inside your body. So just as an act of self honoring self preservation, you got to feel this thing. You got to breathe with this thing and you have to honor this [00:09:00] thing, but you don’t have to do it at the grocery store, right?
So where the rubber hits the road is you’re allowed to punt so that, you know, the show must go on kind of thing, but you can’t get away with avoidance. So movement and breath can be your allies in processing grief, and there’s all sorts of gadgets that can help you kind of release energy and all that.
But I’m just, I’m not into that as much as I am the raw, unfiltered expression of emotion in a place where you are safe or with people that make you feel safe to allow you to go there. Then, yeah. You know, we have this like shaking qigong, if you need to dance, if you need to wail, if you need to cry, if you need to punch a pillow, if you need to go run through the forest and howl, go get it.
And don’t stop until you feel like you’ve emptied yourself and then fall over from exhaustion. Then go eat [00:10:00] some food and maybe do it again and do it again until you feel like the expression of that emotion has run its course. Now does it mean you’re going to forget that mom died? Of course not. But you’re going to just honor the grief and discharge the energy that has locked you in this stunned state of being stuck in grief, right?
There’s nothing wrong with grief. It is healthy. It’s important. It is therapeutic. It is an essential part of, of, of loss. It’s when we. ignore the feelings because they hurt too much and harbor them and bury them and drink beer to hide them or whatever the hell we do. And then 20 years later, wake up realizing that we are just a repressed asshole because we never processed the grief of our mother or our father dying.
Whoops. That’s [00:11:00] where it goes wrong. So gentle Qigong movements can really help moving the Qi. and dislodging blocked energy and then allowing yourself to feel and breathe. It’ll feel like you’re dying. You’re not dying. Go there. You can do deep abdominal work and connected breathing. Leonard Orr taught a lot of this, um, in rebirthing.
Stan Groff picked this up when LSD went illegal in the 60s and 70s, and he started doing holotrophic breath work, and this connected circular breathing of inhale to exhale, inhale to exhale, and it dislodges emotional stagnation, and next thing you know, you’re crying. Good. How long have you gone without allowing that?
Sacred dance, like I mentioned, the shaking, she gone, like I mentioned, but one of the things I really need to [00:12:00] emphasize here, and I cannot overemphasize this is create a sacred space, whether you’re alone or with people that you trust for this grief.
If you’re worried about the person who’s there seeing snot come down your face, it’s the wrong person. Okay.
You’re going to be at your most vulnerable and ugly moments. You’re going to be howling like a wounded wolf, and that’s beautiful. Just understand that you need to be in a place that’s safe to molt that hard. And then, and then I’m a big fan of meditation, right? I’m a big fan of integrative therapies where you And this is where I think a lot of my colleagues get it wrong.
So I want to, I want to kind of draw a line in the sand around this. Is people go to [00:13:00] this like Zen stoic place of like, Oh, you’re a monk. You don’t feel. Bullshit. That’s the most silly read of all the scripture I’ve ever seen. You’re depriving me of my, my right to be a fully expressed human being.
By saying some stoic Zen monk never feels the real skill is feeling fully and allowing yourself to be in that moment of grief or whatever emotion we’ll talk about in the following weeks. And then as you’ve done so, then when you sit on your cushion, you allow your breath and your body and your multi ceptual awareness to integrate.
And process, not just the release of those emotions, but the memory of mom. Things you could have said and you should have said. The person you choose to be on the other side of this experience and what regrets you have and how you’re going to change [00:14:00] the way you do things to never create those types of regrets again.
One of the other things I want to say to this is there’s no timeline for this. Oh, it’s been three days. Damn it. You should be over this by now. What’s wrong with you? Sop. That’s what happens when a bunch of aggressive warlords take over and kill human emotional intelligence because the army guys are driving the culture.
It’s been happening since the middle, middle ages. It’s been happening since the Aryan tribes first started conquering the earth based tribes. Like this is an old narrative. It’s timeless. Stay there as long as you need and you can stay there forever if you go into a timeless space. This is where community comes in strong.
If you don’t have community you can find community or a therapist, right? But this is where other people can be very helpful in this endeavor. And this is also where
waiting for it to happen,
given [00:15:00] the traumatic histories or the tough parents or the, the aggro nuns or whatever history you came in with that, that made it hard for you to express emotion. Those, Experiences might make it very difficult for you to access your grief, and so one of the things I like for this is a lifestyle implementation of some sort of grief oriented practice on a daily basis, almost as a pressure release valve.
If you have 75 pounds to lose, let’s start with that first pound. If you feel like you’re going to explode because you have so much grief and you just can’t even get there because you came and feel it, it’s too painful. Let’s just do a little bit of soothing of our energy field and deep breathing and thinking about all the good times we had with mom,
and do that for five minutes a day, just chip away and honor it. And you’ll [00:16:00] find that that daily honoring of such energetic Chokeholds, if you will, will help loosen things up. And then you sit on your cushion, you integrate, you process and allow, right? You allow for whatever comes up to come up and then you don’t struggle and fight it and be like, well, no, I’m not a, I’m not a weak person.
I’m not a fill in the blanks, right? We have so much, we harbor and our self definition doesn’t allow us to be sad and vulnerable, but that’s the beauty of being a human. So I truly. Truly believe that grief is one of our best teachers. I think emotional resilience comes from stretching the, the rubber band and feeling the highs and the lows, and not just being a Zen stoic [00:17:00] bot.
And I think that a tremendous amount of personal growth comes from allowing the grief to show us the beauty, the lost opportunities and the powerful moments that maybe just maybe this go around. We’re not going to let go of, okay, I lost dad, but I still have mom. I lost my parents, but I still have my children.
How do I live in these moments? And allow for time to stop slipping by. Because, man, that decade between when mom got sick and mom was gone, I was so busy. I meant to visit. I meant to call. I got so busy.[00:18:00]
Bless her heart. Mom is gone now.
Where am I doing that for uncle or Sue or my friends or where am I doing that for the time I’m missing with precious moments with my children or my grandchildren, right? And those moments that, that learning comes, look, I didn’t make the rules on this deal, but the pain is a really good teacher and what’s, what’s gone is gone.
But what’s here and can be
enjoyed, nurtured, relished, appreciated. Those heartbeats are still downstream. So how are you going to do this differently now?
And that’s where our agency and our choice in our ability to drive this car differently comes into play. But I can guarantee you none of this happens if you just [00:19:00] hold a stiff upper lip and try not to cry. That’s not how we’re wired. , you gotta let it rip. You gotta let it go. And um, I guarantee you there’s people here on this call.
That don’t feel safe enough in their homes or their relationships or their immediate circles with many of the people that are around to let that happen. And so either you find a friend, you find a therapist, you find a priest, you have to find a situational awareness around where you can feel safe to let that go.
Okay, so this is where I cut out, go to the community, start talking about it, we get lots of questions, lots of people bringing up specific examples and just troubleshooting And talk about how to take action in their lives with some of the specifics which can get down in the weeds And I don’t want to share any of that publicly because it’s people’s stuff But you get the gist and that’s what I wanted you to get right first off if you’re [00:20:00] listening to this And it’s you or someone you know in your life that needs to podcast with them I promise it helps.
I’ve been helping a lot of people, uh, with the grieving process. I’ve been in end of life care, uh, in my doctor days for a very long time. And, um, it is a very, very important matter because when you’re lying on your deathbed, those regrets, man, they get, they get heavy, right?
They get real heavy. So, a number of resources that I could share with you. I did a ten part series on trauma. Masterclass called Healing Emotional Trauma. Uh, mind body work, um, if you go to theurbanmonk. com there’s the Temple Grounds, all this Qigong stuff that I’m talking about. It’s in there. and there’s obviously a ton of really great resources, um, out in the world at large that, , talk about grief and how to deal with it.
Um, and so, if you are stuck, there are solutions. If you are stuck, there is a way out. And the moral of the story is, the way out. is [00:21:00] in. So let’s not run from this. Let’s turn around and face this. Let’s not run from this. Let’s embrace this. This is what makes us human and a good percentage of your power is lost in the inertia and this reverberation of energy that is just not flowing correctly because of all of this repressed emotion.
You deserve better. Your family deserves better. Come back. Come back. Hope you enjoyed this. I’ll see you in the next one.
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