Uncensoring Grief, Centering Aliveness, and Navigating Loss with Lisa Keefauver, MSW

How can we center aliveness in a world full of loss?

In this heartfelt conversation, host Nina Rodriguez and grief activist, TEDx speaker, podcast host, and author, Lisa Keefauver, MSW dive into the complexities of grief, offering insights on grief literacy and the personal experiences that shape how we process loss. They explore the emotional impact of grief, highlighting the gap between learning about grief and living through it.

The discussion unpacks the nuances of emotions, feelings, and moods, shedding light on how understanding these distinctions can support healing. Lisa shares powerful tools from narrative therapy, emphasizing the importance of reframing our grief stories. Together, they explore how self-compassion, mindfulness, and community can help us navigate grief — while still finding moments of joy and connection.

The episode offers practical strategies for cultivating aliveness, delivering delight to others, and embracing our shared humanity in the face of loss.

*** Click here to watch on YouTube ***

Takeaways:

• Grief is a universal experience that affects everyone uniquely.
• Grief literacy is essential to reduce unnecessary suffering during grief.
• Grief is not just sadness; it encompasses a wide range of emotions and experiences.
• Anticipatory grief can be just as profound as the grief experienced after a loss.
• There is no timeline for grief; it is a nonlinear process.
• Seeking support for grief should not be limited to crisis moments.
• Understanding the difference between emotions, feelings, and moods can aid in processing grief.
• Narrative therapy can help individuals articulate their grief experiences.
• All forms of loss are valid and deserve recognition and support.
• Grief is a language that requires learning and understanding. 
• Reframing narratives around grief can transform our experiences.
• Self-compassion is essential in dealing with difficult emotions.
• Mindfulness practices help create space between experience and story.
• Finding joy in small moments can counteract feelings of sadness.
• Delivering delight to others fosters connection and joy.
• We are all interconnected, and our suffering is shared.
• Happiness is not a destination but a fleeting state.
• Starting close in can help manage feelings of overwhelm.
• Community support is vital in times of grief.
• Practicing gratitude and beauty-seeking can enhance our aliveness.

Connect with Lisa Keefauver:

• lisakeefauver.com
• AFGO Substack
• Get the Book
• Listen to Grief is a Sneaky Bitch Podcast
• @lisakeefauvermsw

Connect with Nina Rodriguez:

• IG: @griefandlight
• griefandlight.com
• 1:1 Grief Support
• Join Grief and Light: The Community

Disclaimer: griefandlight.com/safetyanddisclaimers

Chapters

• 0:00 Preview & Intro song
• 0:37 Excerpt reading from "Grief is a Sneaky Bitch"
• 1:56 Meet Lisa Keefauver
• 4:05 Grief Literacy: The Importance of Understanding Loss
• 8:44 Personal Stories of Loss and Grief
• 15:22 Navigating Grief: The Difference Between Knowledge and Experience
• 18:34 The Nonlinear Nature of Grief
• 27:38 Emotions, Feelings, and Moods: Understanding the Language of Grief
• 31:16 Understanding Narrative Therapy and Grief
• 35:43 Should is a dirty word
• 38:21 Reframing Identity in Grief
• 42:31 Centering Aliveness Amidst Loss
• 45:56 Tools for Cultivating Joy and Connection
• 53:10 Daily Rituals to Build the Musculature of Aliveness
• 55:16 The Story of Aliveness
• 56:23 Connect with Lisa Keefauver
• 57:41 AFGO
• 58:24 Lisa's advice to younger self

Transcript

Speaker 2 (00:00.182)
I think a lot of people have experienced profound losses, have had the right to grieve, but haven't, because of our grief illiteracy, haven't been able to even name it as a loss worth grieving and then given themselves permission. So then they're walking around sort of pathologizing themselves or other people are pathologizing their thoughts and behaviors when really it's just grief.

You just lost your loved one, now what? Welcome to the Grief in Life Podcast where we explore this new reality through grief-colored lenses. Openly, authentically, I'm your host Nina Rodriguez. Let's get started.

Grief happens when the manuscript of your life is torn to shreds. Your life story includes people, relationships, abilities, dreams, and a sense of home. When you lose one of those things, you grieve. It's a normal response to loss. Grief impacts your physical, cognitive, emotional, spiritual, and relational well-being. While grief is experienced by 100 % of the population multiple times in our lives,

you will experience grief in your own unique way. There's no timeline or formula for grieving. There are some skills, resources, and supports that will ease your suffering and make grief suck less. You will not move on from your grief. You will move forward with it. Grieving is learning, and you will integrate the knowledge you're gaining along the way into an emerging story of your life. Your loss and your grief

become a part of your story, not the whole story.

Speaker 1 (01:43.575)
Welcome back to the Grief and Like podcast, everybody. My name is Nina Rodriguez and I am your host. You just heard an excerpt from the recently published book, Grief is a Sneaky Bitch, An Uncensored Guide to Navigating Loss by today's incredible guest, Lisa Kiefover, the brilliant mind behind the top rated podcast, Grief is a Sneaky Bitch. Her wisdom on grief and loss has been shaped by decades as a grief activist, social worker,

narrative therapist, educator, TEDx speaker, and world speaker, so many roles, and also by her deeply personal experiences, including the loss of her husband Eric to brain cancer when she was just 40 years old. Today, we'll delve into what it means to center aliveness in a world full of loss and how this concept took on a new meaning after her own breast cancer diagnosis in 2023.

Lisa's mission and work is a guiding light for so many, including myself personally, and I cannot wait for you to hear her wisdom today. So let's dive in. Welcome to the Grief and Light podcast, Lisa.

Nina, thank you so much for having me. I've been truly, truly looking forward to this conversation for a while now. So I'm excited to dive in.

Gosh, it's such an honor. To many, Lisa does not need an introduction. She is a pillar in the grief space advocating for more grief literacy and mission accomplished in that this very important book you have burst into the world, Grief is a Sneaky Bitch, which I just had the pleasure of finishing recently. And if you're seeing on YouTube, it is full of notes and highlights and all the things because it is so what I needed in my early grief, to be honest.

Speaker 1 (03:25.128)
for those of us who want to learn about grief. So thank you for the gifts that you just gave the world through your book.

Thank you so much. It is also the book I wish I had when my husband died. That's why I wrote it the way that I did, yeah.

Yeah. And so mindfulness is a theme throughout the book. So we'll begin with that. How are you doing today?

Today, I am feeling really grounded and centered and connected to what matters most in life. That's kind of the place I'm coming from. Thank you for asking.

What a powerful, yeah, what a powerful place to be. I love that. This book empowers people to be grief literate. So let's start with just a broad concept of what these words even mean in your own words. What is grief? What does being grief literate mean and why is that even important?

Speaker 2 (04:14.242)
I think the answer to all of those are sort of intertwined because what we think grief is, is it's feeling sad for a while over the death of someone you love you were very close to. You feel that for a while and then you get over it. And that's our grief illiteracy. Those are the myths and stories that we move through the five stages as some sort of to-do list, and then we get to the end and voila. And grief is so much more expansive as I explored in that little segment that I read earlier from the book.

It is a normal response to all forms of losses, death, illness, separation of a relationship, the death of a dream and possibility, so many things. And then it impacts not just the sad emotions, that it impacts all of our emotional wellbeing, our cognitive functioning, which we might dive into today as Mary Frances O'Connor helped us understand in the grieving brain. Our relationships, our existential crisis for many, et cetera.

And the reason grief literacy is so important, why I'm on such a mission, why I get on every soapbox and platform that I can to talk about it is grief is hard. It's, of course, tremendously painful to experience the loss of a love of relationship, of a person, of a dream, right? Of a place, I think, about the people in the memories, the people experiencing the LA wildfires right now. But it's made so much more unnecessarily difficult.

I call that the unnecessary suffering that we experience in grief because the stories that we have in the world about what grief is versus the lived experience that we all have of grief is so mismatched that we then take on a tremendous amount of self judgment and self criticism. We don't know how to navigate seeking support and others don't know how to navigate giving us support.

because of the sort of myths or what I call illiteracy. And that's why grief literacy is so profoundly important. It connects us, reminds us of our interconnectedness, which is our belonging is our most core fundamental need, as my friend John Powell at the Othering and Belonging Institute often says, and that grief literacy allows us to reduce that suffering and show up for one another in a really more meaningful way.

Speaker 1 (06:33.112)
Thank you for that because that's something I experienced personally with, for example, the loss of my brother. The loss was one form of pain that just reverberates throughout every aspect of our lives. Like you said, mind, body, spirit, all the things, which side note, that was a surprise for me. I did not know grief was physical. was a new thing. And at the same time, the suffering also comes from those external expectations. The experience of the loss is so at odds with

Yes.

Speaker 1 (07:02.552)
how we're expected to grieve. And so that gap is where a lot of the, like you said, unnecessary suffering exists.

Yes, absolutely. That gap is kind of the target. That's where I'm laser focused, is on closing that gap between the expectations we have for ourselves and one another in our grief and how we experience our grieving and try to close that gap as much as we can so that just improving the quality of our lives. Because as I again read, 100 % of us are experiencing grief multiple times in our lives.

sometimes compounding, sometimes consecutive. And then of course there are the secondary losses that happen from those primary losses. So we've got, this isn't like just for you in order to grieve your brother or for me in order to grieve my husband. This is for all of us because it will come knocking on our door. And actually I think a lot of people have experienced profound losses, have had the right to grieve, but haven't because of our grief illiteracy, haven't been able to even name it.

as a loss worth grieving and then giving themselves permission. So then they're walking around sort of pathologizing themselves or other people are pathologizing their thoughts and behaviors when really it's just grief.

Right? Yeah. And that permission is so key, that self-validation first and foremost, because if you don't think of yourself as worthy of grieving, then how do you expect to be supported? And that's something you name so loudly in your book about realizing that it's okay to receive support in your grief and throughout your journey. But before we delve into that, I do want to touch on your personal story of your losses. And I would like for you to begin wherever feels good for you today. However it wants to be expressed today, what is your relationship?

Speaker 1 (08:46.728)
grief personally? When did it start and how has it evolved? Big questions but we can answer.

Well, you know, I love the big questions. That's what I dive into on my own podcast. So it's kind of a treat and interesting to be on the other side of the microphone. You know, today I think I want to just name one pre-dating thing to the loss that most people know me for, which is the death of my husband, Eric, when I was 40. He was just 44. But when I look back, I really recognize that after I survived a very violent assault when I was 15 and

the people in my life didn't quite know how to show up for me. I was raped at 15. This was the 80s. know, compassionate care and trauma-informed care was not a thing at that time. And so I really just want to name that because that's an example of a kind of like, so I lost a sense of safety in the world, a sense of innocence, you know, that began my lifelong journey with hypervigilance.

and working against hypervigilance. And it really took me a long time to really begin to process the losses that I experienced with that grief. And I just wanted to name that, not that you listeners had to experience that kind of loss, but we do grieve, we do experience loss even around non-death losses. So that's just, wanted to sort of add that in today that felt on my mind and in my heart as I prepared for this interview. Yeah.

Thank you for that.

Speaker 2 (10:14.22)
And then I think really the profound thing that happened to me, I had the good fortune, I still don't know how it happened, of loving and being loved by the most incredible man who I didn't meet until my late 20s after a different failed relationship. I think I recognize now because of not having processed what happened to me when I was a teen. And we had an extraordinary relationship. I was a social worker. I was actually a clinical social worker. And I think the thing that makes this

All losses, as we talked about, all grief is valid. All losses are important. There's no room to compare. We do not need to compare and contrast our grief. Grief and bix, right? We don't need to be a grief thief to one another. But I think what's important for me to name about my loss was I lost Eric a year before he died. So he ended up having some real physical manifestations and certainly behavioral manifestations of what turned out to be a grapefruit-sized brain tumor.

No Grave-a-lump-ay. Grave-a-lump-ay.

Speaker 2 (11:11.49)
But we went from doctor to doctor to doctor who kept dismissing it, telling us it was a mental health issue, putting them on meds, taking them off meds, ignoring all of our pleas for help to the point where I was making safety plans in my own home. This is a man who used to carry a spider outside the house, right, instead of killing it and went to having some pretty threatening and outrageous behavior. Our daughter was six turning seven at the time. And so I didn't name it at the time. I was in hypervigilance. I was in trying to figure out what was

wrong with him, I was trying to save our marriage, I was trying to save him, you know. And it wasn't until years after he died that I really recognized that I have sort of experienced two losses. There was a loss of the Eric I knew, who was standing before me, completely unrecognizable, and then there was the actual death. And as I've shared in many places, you know, unlike I think other people who've walked with family members who've experienced grief, excuse me, who's...

I've walked with family members who've experienced cancer. That wasn't my experience. We were just in survival mode going from doctors to doctors being dismissed until finally he begged a doctor to run a scan because we kept saying like something is wrong even though we had done it all along. And that was July 31st of 2011. That's when they found the Grapefruit-sized brain tumor. He had a surgery on the eighth, a 14-hour brain surgery, woke up for an hour to say hello to me post-op.

By the time I made it back to the hospital the next morning on the ninth, he had slipped into a coma and another surgery and testing revealed that he had a series of catastrophic strokes across his entire brain center. And so I had laid with him, you know, on the evening of the 15th until the morning of the 16th, till he passed in my arms. And that grief, of course, if you're listening, whatever your own loss experience was so profound,

and we can dive more into the details of that. Again, it was just on my heart and mind today for everybody who's experiencing somebody with Alzheimer's or dementia or addiction or some other kind of maybe mental health or behavioral where the person you love is standing right in front of you, but they're gone. The person you knew was gone. I didn't wrap my head around for years. Even though, as I said, I was the clinical director of a nonprofit acting as a social worker and therapist at the time. And that's when I realized

Speaker 2 (13:34.594)
how grief illiterate we really were because even my peers in the social workspace who were lovely human beings had no clue how to show up for me in the wake of that profound loss.

Thank you for sharing the way in which you did. I can almost envision it and I know you've done some work around that and you know what you know and you are who you are and at the same time, the human side of me just feels for that version of you that was like laying next to him and that year of not knowing and the anticipatory grief because grief is not just the actual loss, it's these series of losses, especially with diagnosis. In my case, my brother suffered from addiction. So it's like grieving that.

I will never have that traditional sibling relationship. It became more of a caretaker, constant worry and agony and not knowing that just living with uncertainty that could have potentially dire consequences is a type of grief I don't wish on anybody.

Yeah, it's a type of grief and it can be a type of trauma because it really forces our nervous system to be in that hyper arousal hyper like, you State and so I'm sorry that you had to experience that but yeah, I think it's that loss that you are experiencing in a way is somewhat anticipatory when we're not sure exactly if there's gonna be a death or whatever, but it's certainly an ambiguous loss and we know from like the work of Pauline boss and even our friends Stephanie Sarah's in that

the ambiguous loss is really its own kind of, again, we're not comparing, it's not grief Olympics, but it's its own kind of complicated. It's complicated. Yeah, it's a complicated way. There's not the ritual, there's not the, even the myth of closure. There's sort of nothing. It's just sort of an ongoing experience. yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:08.782)
You're naming it. Yeah, wow.

Speaker 1 (15:23.084)
And you also touched on the difference between, you know, learning about grief and teaching grief on a more academic plane and then experiencing it and how that is so different. And I'm sure you've spoken with plenty of people on your podcast about that difference that you could, in essence, yourself and read the literature and speak to other people and even be a witness. And when it's your turn, that is a whole other.

So I'm curious about your take on that.

Yeah, well, know what's interesting? Yes, 100%. I wrote about that in the book. You cannot think your way through grief, though I tried, believe me. And if anybody could have done it, I could have done it. And we just can't. I think what I discovered, and the reason I sort of switched my mission over the years as a social worker to focus exclusively on grief, is that when I was laid low by the death of my husband and then just a few years later by the death of my friend Joe, I didn't have this knowledge.

I didn't take one single course in my master's in social work program on grief. It was not taught, even though I was working in foster care, adoption, crisis intervention. I mean, you can imagine every client that I saw, refugee resettlement, like I was working in populations that were profound grief. And I think that's what enraged me when I found myself on the other side of being a part of being the grieving community.

was that even the people who are supposed to help us, AKA me, social workers, therapists, et cetera, largely, not everybody, were really grief illiterate and were buying into the myths that grief is death laws, that grief is five stages, all the things. I didn't have the pressure of I'm a social worker, I should know how to heal myself, but I didn't have that pressure of just because I know grief literacy, I should experience it. That came from my own education after the death of my husband, really diving into all the literature

Speaker 2 (17:17.228)
all the work and then working with clients of my own over the years. Although going through cancer over this last two years was its own grief experience and there was that sense that thankfully this time I had a very different expectation of myself. I knew the things I needed to know to resource myself, but other than that, I had let go of the idea that I could sink my way through the pain and through the grief. And I do think that is

That is the difference and that's what I try to write in the book. I think having the knowledge and more importantly, having the resources and skills doesn't make grief go away. That's not the goal. That is not possible. You have to move through it. But what we can do is, as I said sort of cheekily in my Ted Talk, knowing more can make grief suck less, meaning we know how to ask for help. We know how to say no. We know how to resource ourselves. We know how to do the things to buoy us and to cut.

provide a bomb to the weight of grief. That's different than being able to sort of think our way through it or, you know, skip ahead to the head of the line. Unfortunately, I don't know any resource like that.

No, it's so unique and you do repeat that just to get make sure that people truly understand. You repeat that in your book that it's different for everybody. There is no recipe. There are no timelines. Have you an asterisk on that? there are no timelines for your grief process. But there are some skills that we can learn to help us navigate through. so touch please in any way you can on those two things. So.

the timelines, the clinical ones, let's just say, the actual lived reality, where do we draw certain lines in the sand between I'm just grieving or I need help, and some of the gills that we could use to navigate grief.

Speaker 2 (19:06.316)
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:12.462)
Okay, I might have you come back around and remind me of a few of those, but I will. I wanna start with kind of, think, again, this is my work is always sort of debunking or demystifying the myths that we hold. And of course, many of us have, if we know anything about grief just passively from our culture and from our media, we might've heard of the five stages, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, I'm sure your listeners have heard from other guests that that was not designed to be a model of a linear process that we go through when we're grieving. was actually created to

What the f-

Speaker 2 (19:41.14)
explore how people come to terms with their own deaths. That's the source of that. But we love a top 10 list, five ways to march through, check things off list in our culture. And I say that cheekily, but I also say like, of course, if we could have a list, better believe I'd be first in line to figure out how to march through, write that list. It feels horrible to be in deep emotional and existential pain. So I don't say that lightly. And that is not the way that grief works. It's nonlinear.

And if it's a profound loss for you, if it's someone you loved or if it was dream that you held or if it was a sense of safety, whatever the losses that you're experiencing, you're likely to be grieving for the rest of your life. Now, asterisk, that does not mean a year from now or five years from now your grief is gonna look and feel, your grief expression is gonna look or your grief experience is gonna feel the same, very unlikely. Though,

When we have big deep emotions, which most of us haven't learned how to cope with in our life of, you know, in our culture of numbing and avoiding and dissociating, it can feel like big emotions can be tricky. They're sneaky. They can make us feel like you've always felt this way and you're always gonna feel this way. But generally what we're looking for when someone's grieving is that on the art, over time, the intensity and the frequency of your grief experience is gonna lessen over time.

Now, on the death anniversary, on a birthday, on a special positive occasion, a wedding, a graduation, lots of different reasons these grief waves or grief triggers can come. And we might go back to having a day or maybe even a week where we feel the kind of intensity that we did week one. And I name that because so many people come to me and are like, my gosh, I'm back to square one. I've started all over. I've slipped backwards. No, you didn't.

You're just tapping into the deep well of that grief in that moment. So what we're looking for is that over time, the frequency is diminishing and the everyday intensity is diminishing. But our goal is never for the grief spikes or the grief surges to not come up. That is an unrealistic expectation. A passive friend that you maybe had in college that you didn't know that well, yes, maybe you won't actually notice kind of any lived experience of grief.

Speaker 2 (22:06.286)
10, 20 years from now. But if it's a profound loss, you're going to experience it, yeah, for a long time. Does that answer the timeline part of the question? Yeah.

Absolutely. And I was a guest on somebody's podcast who lost her mother about 15 years ago or so. And she said, you know, last year I had this episode where I regressed in my grief and it was her birthday and I cried like it was the first time. So why do you think that happens? And she was so puzzled by this. Yeah. And so my immediate answer to her was you miss your mom. miss your mom. You're a daughter missing. That doesn't mean you're regressing. That doesn't mean something's wrong with you. just, it's her birthday and you miss her.

Yeah, that language, and that's that language of pathology. That's how grief has become sort of a pathologized, disordered, I don't believe it is, but I'm saying culturally, and even now with the DSM, new addition to the DSM diagnosis, right, is disordered. And so then we think there must be something wrong with us, instead of thinking there must be something wrong with the cultural story and expectation that we're never supposed to feel. Those grief waves, when it's a profound loss of someone we love,

is a reminder, a deep connection to the absence. And I think what's often most surprising is when it's a happy occasion. I think that's when we're really surprised when the grief waves come. I was on my book tour this summer, and I had just survived cancer and just finished treatment as on my book tour. And I had so many waves of grief because I kept looking around to just wanting to see Eric in the audience, because he would have been the biggest cheerleader there was. And so I think...

to that person who was interviewing you and to anybody listening to just, yeah, it's a reminder of our love, our connection to that person and them showing up. I sometimes think about it as them showing up to remind us that they still love us too, right? So we might think about it that way. I'm remembering you asked sort of like, how do we know if it's too long or do we need help? Again, I don't know that there's a clear like, this one behavior happens, but I would say, first of all,

Speaker 2 (24:10.422)
I think it can never hurt to have support. If you don't have people in your personal life or support groups or people in your personal life who are really good at holding space and bearing witness for your pain. If you don't have people in your life who aren't able to, who don't try to change the subject, who don't try to toxic positivity your way out of it, who don't start sentences with at least, which agrees. Don't ever start a sentence with at least.

or not.

Speaker 2 (24:37.986)
You might just benefits from seeing a grief guide, being a part of a group support group, just someone who can normalize and reflect back to you that all the complexity of what you're experiencing is normal. I think there's such a value in that. I don't believe in waiting till you're at crisis to seek help. That's my personal opinion. And that's for all kinds of issues, not just how we move through grief. So I just want to sort of name that from the start. You don't need to wait till you get to some point where you think, now I've really crossed a threshold.

I think if you just don't feel as supported, if you feel like you have questions, you want some clarity, you want to feel seen and held in your grief, that would be a great time to see a grief-informed practitioner. Other signs and symptoms are if it is really, and we're not talking in the weeks and months, but if we're talking in the year mark or the post-year mark, your activities of daily living, your basic functioning of self-care, right, of showering and bathing and maybe

caring for kids or other people is not where it was, because we're not going back, but it's causing you or the people that you love safety harm, physical harm, emotional harm, that kind of thing. If you feel like you're at that place where there hasn't been any sort of ebbs and flows, that it's just been a constant, the intensity and the frequency is the exact same, whatever, six, eight months, a year so later, that might also be an indicator.

that maybe there's some stuck thinking, there's some inner narrator issues going on, that maybe there are some resourcing that you haven't done to your body, to your cognitive functioning, to improve your nourishment, et cetera. And that also might be a good time to go see somebody who is grief-informed, whether that's a grief guide like myself, a traditional therapist, a psychiatrist, know, other kind of healer. By the way, I think other kinds of healing work from acupuncture and massage to

craniosacral, et cetera, can be beneficial too. But those are kind of maybe some key indicators. Not everybody will need a professional person to support them, and you don't need to wait until you're at some key crisis point in order to be worthy of going to see somebody or finding benefit in seeing somebody, even if it's for six weeks or just a few months.

Speaker 1 (26:58.264)
Grief is already complex. much, at least for me, it was at the beginning. was like, I don't even know what I'm feeling. I don't have words for what I'm feeling. I could look it up. Nothing made sense. So if you have that support that helps you learn the language, grief is a language, and learning how to move through that, understanding what's happening, being in the company of others who are going through something similar.

speaking with everybody you mentioned or moving it physically. So sometimes we get so stuck in our minds and in order to get out of that loop we need the body to move.

Emotions live in our body. We have to move them that way. Yeah.

And speaking of emotions, I love the section you dedicated in your book to emotions versus feelings versus moods. So people can, you know, confuse those. What is the difference and what is, I think you call that narrative therapy. Talk to us a little bit about that and the stories we tell ourselves, how can they be helpful or not helpful?

They're not helpful, yes, for that matter. Yeah, so that's the chapter. I was just fanning through it in my book just to have it in front of me, but I called it Emotions and Feelings and Moods, My, a la Wizard of Oz nod there. And I think it's important to understand, first of all, just to normalize that emotions are a neural impulse. You have an emotion. There's nothing you can do to prevent the emotion from coming. The emotion is a neural impulse that is designed in our

Speaker 2 (28:24.618)
amazing humanly designed bodies to get us to act, right? The emotion of fear gets us to act to move ourselves into safety, invites us to seek connection. Like our emotions are not good or bad, they're a neural impulse and they happen.

I love how you say they're just data.

They're just data. So emotions are raw data. They're automatic. They're just information. Whenever I hear, it kind of makes me a little crazy when I hear other people in the mental wellness space talking about good feelings and bad feelings. With maybe the exception of shame, although I think it's just still useful to listen to what shame has to tell you and then get rid of it. Cause shame is one of those emotion states, but shame also is part story, right? So yeah, emotions I say are raw data. Feelings,

are data's with stories. So an emotion, it lasts, I think the scientists say 60 seconds. Anything you're feeling beyond 60 seconds is feelings. And it's because you've attached a story to your emotion. So for instance, you feel a sense of loneliness, you know, for your person, a longing, let's say. That comes and that's meant to get you to move towards the connection of being with somebody.

particularly that person, but just in general. You're still feeling that an hour later, two hours later, chances are there's an inner story happening in your mind about your longing. It's usually got black and white thinking in the story. I'm never always gonna feel this way, be this way. The absolutes, right? There's those stories. And it's kind of adding to a...

Speaker 2 (30:05.142)
you know, sort of swirling up in a circle. And then I just say moods are what happens when the stories take hold, right? And that's when we're in these prolonged states where we are having this emotion and that the emotion isn't necessarily there. We are just sort of, I always mix my metaphors, so forgive me, but we're sort of like fanning the flames of our feelings by repeating this, I'm always gonna be alone and it always happens. And then we're making meaning of things.

filtered through that story. See, nobody ever calls me. I'm always alone. I'm the last one to be invited to things and it's because of this thing. And so we're telling a story now and it's lingering and lingering. Our feelings are expanding and now we've sort of set into a mood. Now I see all this not to like, this is your quote unquote fault or judgment. All of this is information. So that, and that's really sort of what narrative therapy helps us understand. Narrative therapy is sort of premise and a sort of postmodern

way of thinking this is what I studied back in the days, 20 something years ago back in my master's in social work program. It's a little bit of time ago. I'm proud.

incredibly helpful because it helps us reframe and pattern interrupt and how do we tell new stories in the context of loss without saying like this happened for

yeah, nothing happened for, we don't need to make meaning and nothing happened for a reason in terms of your loss. That is complete BS. And the narrative reframing that I learned all those years ago that has helped me with my clients when I served as a more traditional therapist, that serves me now as I work as a grief guide, that serves me in my own losses and as a friend to so many who are experiencing their own losses, is just that what you said is just really a reframing that noticing that our lives are built by the experiences that happen.

Speaker 2 (31:51.352)
but they don't have a story to them. And that's why that manuscript metaphor I use so often is really an, that's an exploration really of a narrative concept which we humans are storytelling creatures. The thing happened and then it's the story we tell about the thing happening. Now, let me pause to say I am not toxic positivity our way out of like, we can just tell a story that it's happy go lucky that our person died. No, that's not what I'm saying.

What I invite people to do throughout the book in my work, what I invite myself to do, because by the way, I practice every darn thing I preach, is to recognize what are the stories I'm telling myself about my emotions, about my lived experiences, about my choices. Are those stories helpful or hurtful? Are those stories mine, by the way? Are they cultural stories? Are they stories of my parents, of my ancestors?

And are those stories helping me move in a way that is healing or transformative? Or are those stories keeping me in a stuck state? And so I'm always inviting people to be what I call in the book a should detective. And I often do workshops on how to become a better should detective. And that really just helps us reframe. Why is that important? Well, when we have stories that sound like I've always felt this way or I'm always a loser, I can never.

do X, Y, and Z, the possibility of a different future or a different outcome, there isn't one, right? Right. But if we say to ourselves with that self-compassionate language that Kristin Neff reminds us that we are all human, I had a meditation teacher who once would say to me when I would have feelings and then have feelings about my feelings, you know what I'm saying? Feelings about the feelings.

The feeling of that feeling.

Speaker 2 (33:39.99)
and have some kind of self judgment about the fact that I was having that feeling, whether it was jealousy or guilt or sadness or whatever. She would invite me and I invite folks in the book and when I work with people all the time to place a hand over your heart and to say to yourself, of course you do, sweetie, how could it be any other way? And if we can reframe with not coming from a place of judgment or defensiveness about our experience, but to get curious, why am I feeling this way? And is this feeling connected to story I'm telling myself

that isn't really true or isn't really helpful, then new doors open up. And that all is sort of a way in which you might understand how narrative therapy works. We are in relationship with ourselves and our stories. We aren't our emotions. We aren't our stories. But so often we, and that's one of the tenants of self-compassion, is not over-identifying, right? And we over-identify with our feeling, our story, our emotion.

So all mindfulness practice does, all my narrative reframing practices do, is gives us a little space between the experience and the story we tell about the experience. I once wrote a poem about that, think I included in the book too, as just an invitation. yeah. Yeah, to have that space between the stories. that's how narrative therapy, although you don't have to call it therapy, but that's how narrative practices and reframing helps us in our grief. It's another tool.

to reduce the unnecessary suffering. Does it get rid of the sadness? No, but it gets rid of the unnecessary sadness or the sadness that lingers into a mood state that lasts, that is sort of too crystallized.

Thank you for that. that's an overarching view of this nuanced area of dealing with life and loss and all the things. And if you resonate with any of this, I really encourage you to read the book because Lisa deep dives into everything we just touched on in various chapters. Love the bad words chapter, the should and shouldn't. Don't should on yourself.

Speaker 1 (35:48.416)
You've heard the podcast before. say that a lot as well. So when I saw that in your book, I was like, yes. Absolutely. That's such a powerful tool to help you navigate grief and loss because life just is. It's very impartial and the meaning that we give it can help us or hurt us. One thing that I noticed with a lot of the conversations that I have is I used to be a happy person and now I am this bad person. I don't know what's wrong with me. And so instead of

tending to your grief if you believe those statements about yourself. You focus so much on the loss of your perceived happiness and this new identity as a sad person, I will forever be a sad person. So talk to us a little bit about how to maybe reframe that type of narrative.

it.

Speaker 2 (36:37.814)
Yeah, so that's another core tenet of narrative therapy. And I think it really, again, pushes back against the way in which our culture, our modern culture, maybe our Western culture, maybe our capitalistic culture, all the things, is we really have this strong pull to identify either with our profession or our mood or our skill set, right?

And so one of the tenants of narrative therapy is to sort of interrupt with a client or we can do this for ourself, this reframing. When we hear ourselves saying, am, I almost always want to interrupt somebody. I am sad, I'm a sad person, I am a miserable person, I am a whatever. Well, an alternative is to say, I notice I'm experiencing sadness right now. I notice I'm feeling or I am experiencing this. It's a really dangerous and in

valid assumption to make that we are one thing, whether it's an emotion, a skill set, a professional identity, we are so much more fluid than that. And the reason that's harmful is, again, as you said, then if we say, now I am an unhappy person, first of all, what doors does that open and what doors does that close? But also that keeps us in terms of visioning a future that's different than this moment. And

It closes the door to us being able to tend to the parts of us that are validly feeling sad and unhappy. Happiness is a myth. It's not a place we get to. It's a place that we can kind of visit. I think I encourage people to more think about aliveness, joy, awe, wonder. These are states that we can kind of drop into and out of. But that sense of, to your point, that sense of I am this person and I was that person, I think

natural, normal, done it myself, guilty as charged. That's the kind of language or an inner narrator I wanna encourage, I knew in the book, encourage people to look out for. And that reframing just simply opens a door again. That's it. Does it mean you're not gonna feel sad in this moment? No, but actually our goal is to feel sad when we need to. The reason sadness or other hard emotions, I'm not calling them good or bad, they're just hard to deal with emotions.

Speaker 2 (38:58.624)
is that we try to shut the door on them and they need to be able to move through us. So the more that we can say, I noticing I'm experiencing and let it flow, the sooner it will be gone. And the more chance you'll have to open the door to something like maybe you're not ready for joy, maybe you're not ready for happiness, but maybe you might have more access to ease, right? Sometimes ease is our goal and that's enough. That's enough.

You talk about in your book about the next immediately accessible steps.

I borrow from poet David White who wrote a beautiful poem called Start Close In. It's the next best step. Is it the perfect step? Is it the right step? Is it the step that somebody else is gonna take? Absolutely not. That can help us whenever we feel a sense of either stuckness or overwhelm that I'm always gonna feel this way or we look, you we cast our gaze into what I call horizon time, some future far off.

And that's where we can feel that sense of overwhelm. And we know our nervous system, when overwhelm happens, we either get into hypervigilance and our brain goes sort of offline because we're in a stress state, or we shut down and freeze. And so my invitation always to myself too, I practice, I might say start close into myself at least once a day, by the way, on all kinds of topics. This is useful, not just in grief, it's just useful in the busyness of our lives, is to not get into that place of overwhelm where you are frozen.

or you are in hypervigilance, start close in, just ask us to pause, to listen inward to our body, to our mind, and think, what is the next best step for me? Which might, by the way, be doing nothing. The next best step might be take a nap, meditate, know, pet your...

Speaker 1 (40:45.786)
It's counterintuitive because we think we have to do more. We're so conditioned to do. And I remind people we're human beings who are not human doings. Like your existence is enough. And sometimes that's all we need to lean into, especially grief.

It's very countercultural. It's a very countercultural concept. I said that in my end well talk too, right? And I learned that the hard way when the chemo brain and the chemo body took over me and I couldn't even do anything but stare at the wall and I just let myself and the power and the ease, did it make the chemo brain and the chemo pain go away? No. But it made that suffering that I was experiencing because I was telling myself a story you should.

be getting up and recording your podcast, which I did manage to record throughout the treatment overall, but in that moment, right, or you should be doing this or you should be doing that, you should shower, you know, it took everything I had to shower in that time. And that reframe of just saying, of reminding myself, actually what I need most in this moment is to do exactly what I'm doing, which is nothing. It's just to stare at the wall, right, or to stare out the window and to be a human being. And that is a profound gift.

And it takes so much like muscle building practice because it is so counter-cultural to our own experience. And because I think neurophysiologically, we always want to, like when we feel bad, we want to go. Like, yeah, yeah.

And touching on your amazing and well speech, which I took some notes on and it was so powerful and I'm still, there's always something I get from it. Every time I read the notes that I took from, from your speech, I believe and well still has it on their website. So if you want to check that out, I might link it in the show notes if I find the link. But the topic was centering aliveness and what a powerful concept. And this happens to be so close to

Speaker 1 (42:39.85)
your own experience with the cancer diagnosis and the treatment, which also, because we live in the end, coincided with the launch of your book and your tour and all these things, like everything happening at once. So what is centering aliveness? How did you do it in that moment in your life? And yeah, we'll go from there.

Okay, yeah. I know, I wrote an essay early in the midst of my treatment, because it was right at the time when that movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once, came out. And I was like, I'm having an Everything Everywhere All at Once moment of my life. It was like, I got my dream of giving a TED Talk, of getting my book published, but also in my ceiling flooded. And yeah, and I had to evacuate my house right when I was going in for surgery.

my goodness.

Yeah, no, it was like, and somebody broke into my car, and I had radiation and chemotherapy and surgery, and yes, it was such a bizarre time, right? All these big dreams coming true, and that happens for so many of us. It's the both and, right? We don't go in these sequential, unfortunately or fortunately, neat orders of things. And so I really made a commitment to, and I didn't know it turn into the talk that it turned into, and I've written it as an essay, which is also available on my website.

of centering aliveness in a world full of loss. But I really thought, how can I, how do I want to approach this season of my life differently now that I knowing what I know and what I've learned through all the losses I face, plus all the work that I've done as a grief activist and a guide and an educator. And I just really kept coming back to my real strong principle, which is that we don't get to have our emotions a la carte and that to choose

Speaker 2 (44:22.7)
you know, to deny our pain, our heartache, our suffering is also to deny our ability to delight. So one of the phrases from my talk that I think has resonated from a lot of people, which I'll share if I can pull it out of my memory bank here, since that was a memorized talk last November, was that if we don't allow delight to dazzle our senses, if amazement doesn't make us breathless from time to time, if the only stories we tell ourselves and one another

include the hardness and depravity of this world, then we lose.

Wow. And I really, though I didn't have the language then at the beginning of my diagnosis, I understood very clearly that I would need to lean into the pain and the rage and the heartache and the fear and all the things that came up from my cancer journey, because by the way, my cancer was also misdiagnosed for more than a year. So I knew really quickly that I couldn't toxic positivity my way out of like,

being Suzy Sunshine, though I knew a positive attitude was important, I didn't want to use that as a bypass to not feel all the very valid feelings that I had about having triple positive breast cancer. And I knew that me, along with every other human being, has...

a negativity bias and that my musculature to look for the hard things is already built. I'm swole in that area as the kids say, right? Like I know how to do that, we all do. So I knew I would need to bring this joy seeking skill to bear, that I would need to be in search of awe and wonder and beauty. I've taken beauty walks for more than 10 years. So that's one of the skills that I used during cancer and I've used.

Speaker 2 (46:13.942)
really for almost since Eric died, which is to really, and it could look like a lot of forms. I happen to now live in Southern California, so it's kinda easy to do a beauty walk. But I did it when I was traveling in cities that weren't so beautiful when I lived in this dead heat summer of Austin, Texas for eight years, right? It's really about walking with intention, without distraction. You could have on a podcast or music in your ears, but it's about walking. If you can do it outside, great. Even if you have to, I've,

in during my cancer journey, I sometimes took beauty walks around my little apartment. But it's about bringing mindfulness attention to the present moment, feet on the ground, feeling the wind, noticing the sense in the air and being on the lookout for anything beautiful. Remembering that sometimes the beauty has fallen to the ground or you might pick something specific in your beauty walk. Sometimes I would be on the lookout for the color yellow or things that had rough textures, right? So that's

one concept that I used and thankfully I had that tool in my toolkit. So I always encourage people to practice this even when times are quote unquote good, because the more you have a muscle memory for that thing, I didn't have to really bring intention to it. I just knew like, I'm gonna go for beauty walks. My beauty walks were a lot slower because my energy was slow and the pain was high. That was one. My mindfulness practice, which again, thankfully I had built over time so that it came.

more naturally to me, but mindfulness helps us. Part of where our suffering is is because we're fast forwarding to the future, the unknown future, and we're making assumptions, or we're ruminating in the past, reliving things that we can't change. And so mindfulness really helps reduce that suffering because it closes the gap between the imagined state and where we are in this moment. And I think maybe I'll just mention a third, one of my favorites that I used, again,

before treatment, but definitely through this time of how we center aliveness in a world full of loss is to deliver delight to others. I think we cannot overemphasize how important it is to act with agency when we are experiencing some kind of suffering, whether it's our own suffering or we're suffering by like we are right now as we record this podcast, viewing all the suffering in the world. It's so...

Speaker 2 (48:36.62)
We don't ever want to bury our heads in the sand and deny other suffering our own suffering. And we can have an empathetic overload, compassion as a more useful tool because it invites us to act. What happens when we suffer, when a loss happens to us, when a death happens, you know, or some other tragedy happens in our life, we lack agency. Something happened to us. And I'll just speak personally for myself, but I think this applies to all of us, especially as we walk through this.

hate to use the word again, unprecedented times, but these very challenging times is to not be frozen in overwhelm by the suffering, but to take small steps. And when I say agency, it's about an action, it's about a movement, it's about taking that emotion and transmuting it, transfiguring it, alchemizing it in an action. For me, a standard practice I've had for a couple of years that brings me so, that really moves my

empathy and the distress I feel towards something akin to delight and wonder is I buy a bouquet of flowers at my local farmer's market every Sunday and give it away to a random stranger every week. Sometimes two, depending on how my week is going.

You mentioned that in your annual speech and I just love that. It is thinking outside of yourself and the bigger picture sometimes.

It is so powerful. Somebody be like, that's so nice. I'm like, believe me, this is more a gift to me. I mean, I'm supporting a local grower and the people who get to have the flowers do enjoy it. And it's so much more powerful to me. The thing about their research is that other people's happiness can be as just as infectious and positive and rewarding for us as that. So delivering delight to others, but it could be a compliment to a stranger.

Speaker 2 (50:22.74)
It could be just a random act of kindness. It could be somebody you know, could be somebody you don't know. But I would say of all the tools I use, I think in my talk I listed, I don't know, eight or nine. Those three I think really are accessible. And by the way, delivering delight to others is free. You can buy flowers, but you don't have to buy flowers, right?

It can be, as I said, a compliment to a stranger. try to always offer people a really specific compliment, by the way. Like, I really love the embroidery on your jacket or something like that. Does it make my cancer go away? No. Does it make my grief over my husband go away? No. And it's a reframing. It's a reminder of our interconnectedness. It's a reminder of aliveness. It's a reminder that you humans suffer as do I humans suffer, and that there really isn't any difference between us.

And I think so much of our suffering in grief in life is because of the myth, which is maybe a whole nother topic for a whole nother research project for a whole nother day, is the myth of our individualness.

resonates so much especially right now.

Right. And so I think those tools that self-compassion, mindfulness, the beauty walks, the delivering delight to others is such a powerful experiential reminder that actually we are all interconnectedness and that it's the cultural context of our modern times that has made us think that that isn't the case. But that is not the case. The case is we are all more interconnected than we give credence to. And if we can lean into that, then

Speaker 2 (52:02.782)
That's where aliveness happens.

Thank you so much for that. And we are living some, you know, for the listeners or anybody watching, we're recording this at the beginning of February. So right now we're going through some very interesting times, very layered, very complex from natural disasters to the politics and how people are being impacted by that. And these skills, everything we just talked about, these rituals to build your relationship with aliveness, to center aliveness is relevant in.

every single one of these scenarios, whether you're grieving, whether you're just going through life, but especially if you're grieving and if you're feeling that collective grief. It's an idea that I've been trying to kind of digest and shape into something a little bit more concrete so I could speak about it with more clarity, but I'll give you the rough version of it. Yes, please. I'm seeing the shift from me to we. And any transition is messy. I used to work at Real Estate. If you are renovating a house, you know that like the demo.

before it gets better.

It gets hideous and awful and stressful before it gets beautiful and livable. And so we're in this very intense transition that is weighing so heavily in the hearts and minds of many. I do want you to read your daily rituals to build the musculature of aliveness, which was again in the speech. For the sake of time, I will read them quickly. So number one is seek community. Gather in sacred community, be present to the sweet delight of being held, listened and celebrated.

Speaker 1 (53:27.756)
Number two, bring intention to your attention. So mindfulness, which Lisa just touched on. Number three, beauty or wonder walks. Discover beauty everywhere. Four, be in nature. I always say let nature nurture you. Reminds us of the interconnectedness and rest is part of being alive. Five, become an amateur photographer. I love this one because it's that, like you said, you become a should detective, but also a joy detective.

You're a seeker, it forces you to be a seeker of beauty.

Yeah, and then share them. That's another thing, share them. Six, deliver delight to others in compliments, flowers, as Maya Angelou said, be a rainbow in someone else's cloud. And then the last one, tell yourself a story of aliveness because words matter, grounding words to orient you to the sacredness of this life. And these are all Lisa's words. These are my notes on her speech. So I didn't come up with this, but thank you for the gift of that list. It's something that I try to remind myself and at least do one of those things every day.

Yeah, and

And I noticed that sometimes in grief, because it's overwhelming when the world feels so heavy, when it feels too big and overwhelming, I realized, again, counterintuitive, start small, start with that immediate next step. Even if it seems silly or pointless, my mom always says like, this is so pointless. I'm like, but it's not. It is not. Does it bring you joy? Does it bring somebody else joy? Did it make somebody else's day better? Did it make your day better than it? That's all that you need to today.

Speaker 2 (54:59.244)
That's all we have control over, by the way. It's in our immediate circle. It's the starting close in. And I think it reminds, it moves us out of that frozen state into that state of action and interconnectedness. And it's so beautiful. I'm so glad to know that you do that too.

Thank you. And you have a mantra, the may I see love, if you don't mind sharing it with our audience today.

Yeah, so this is the story of aliveness. I've been telling myself every morning when my feet hit the floor, before I stand up, I encourage you to try this practice on your own. You can do it in the morning like I do or any time in the day when you need to reorient to the beauty of the world and to central aliveness. I invite you to place a hand over your heart when you say it and you can even say it out loud in your room. It's okay to talk to yourself or to your dog or whoever is there. And you say, may I see love?

May I feel love, may I radiate love, may I receive love.

Speaker 1 (56:02.03)
Let that sink in for a moment. Thank you so much. And we are at the end here. could continue this conversation for a very long time, but for the sake of respecting everybody's schedule, I would like to just ask you what's in store for you in 2025. Where can people reach you? Where can people buy your book and anything else that you feel like sharing to consider the conversation?

Yeah, well hopefully we'll have a part two someday at this conversation. I would love it. Thank you so much Nina for this was such a beautiful conversation. So you can get your copy of Grief as a Sneaky Bitch. I always try to start with at your favorite local bookstore because I love our independent bookstores. But if you can't do that, you can get it online on all your favorite retailers, know, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org and that one that starts with the big letter A.

If you like my voice, I also narrated my own audio book, so you're welcome to download it on Audible or wherever you get your audio books or e-readers. The best place to find me is lisakeefauver.com at my website. You can learn about my talks, my community gatherings, retreats, working with me individually, the speaking engagements that I'm doing. And you can sign up for my new sub stack there, AFCA with Lisa Kefauver. I'm going to be doing a lot more.

exploratory and essay writing and building some community there. I am on social media at Lisa Kiefauver MSW, but to be honest, I'm really looking in 2025 to lessen my presence on social media and to increase the community build around Substack and doing some more in-person community. So to be able to keep track of that, you can just follow me there, afco with Lisa Kiefauver. That's A-F-G-O with Lisa Kiefauver.

Thank you so much. I'll link everything in the show notes very quickly. What is an afgo because I love that concept.

Speaker 2 (57:47.406)
I just was like trying to be mindful of that. So AFCO stands for, I did mention that from the Endwell stage, thanks to the team at Endwell for letting me cuss on stage, but AFCO stands for another fucking growth opportunity. And it's just a cheeky way of us recognizing those seasons of our lives when something happens and we're having to grow and learn, which includes the seasons of our lives when grief shows up at our door.

You're allowed to do that.

Speaker 1 (58:15.79)
So I will be subscribing to your AFCO newsletter and reminder to everybody, lean into your community's virtual in person and all the things this is the time. Please lean in. As a final closing question, what would Lisa today say to Lisa after Eric died?

Yeah. Whoa. What would I say to that version of myself? A couple things come to mind right now. What makes me feel tearful? You're going to be okay? Lean into all the support that is being offered to you and then ask for more.

Speaker 2 (58:51.446)
And I would tell her to start close in. Just remember to start close in. You don't have to have it all figured out, nor can you. All you can do is maybe start with an inhale and an exhale.

Thank you so much, Lisa. This has been an absolute honor. You are such a light. Thank you for being you. Thank you for your work. Thank you, listeners, for being here and sharing this time with us.

Yeah, thank you, Nina, so much. This has just been such an extraordinarily beautiful conversation. I so appreciate you and the work that you're doing here.

That's it for today's episode. Be sure to subscribe to the Grief and Light podcast. I'd also love to connect with you and hear your thoughts and your stories. Feel free to share them with me via my Instagram page at griefandlight, or you can also visit griefandlight.com for more information and updates. Thank you so much for being here, for being you, and always remember, you are not alone.