(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) I know I've been talking a lot about
grief lately, but there's a good reason for
that.
And the truth is, the reason is because
we don't talk about grief enough.
And when we do, we tend to silo
it into very specific types of grief and
very specific forms of grief that match certain
narratives.
And the truth is, grief is far broader
and far more common in our lived experience
than we'd like to think it is.
And grief can come from a lot of
different things.
So in this episode of Feathermane Soul Wisdom,
I thought I would dive into the definition
of grief, some grief that we don't talk
about very often, and how that connects with
my work for wild spirit storytelling.
You're listening to Feathermane Soul Wisdom, a podcast
for those looking to rediscover their wild spirit
in spite of life's challenges.
If you're living with a chronic illness or
neurodivergent or consider yourself disabled, and you're looking
to connect with your own inner untamed essence,
then this show is for you.
Your host is Kit Kaelstoe, Wild Spirit Storyteller.
Thanks for listening.
And now on to the episode.
Hello, I'm your host Kit Kaelstoe, and this
is the Feathermane Soul Wisdom show on the
Muse Charmer radio network.
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So today we're going to be talking about
grief, the different forms of grief, how that
grief does and does not show up in
our conversation, and how does this grief connect
with my work as a grief pathfinder, but
also with wild spirit storytelling, because I believe
the two things go hand in hand.
I want to start, as I often do,
with some definitions.
So looking at the Merriam-Webster dictionary, when
I look up the word grief, the definition
is a deep and poignant distress caused by
or as if by bereavement.
And I want us to kind of put
a pin in that because bereavement is one
of the very commonly discussed sources of grief,
but it's only discussed in the terms of
death, death or loss.
And there's many other ways to be bereaved
as we're going to discuss.
The flip side of that is a cause
of such suffering.
So the definition gives the example of life's
joys and griefs.
And so we could look at grief as
anything that causes suffering.
That broadens our window of grief.
That broadens our definition.
And I think that gets us closer to
what we look at when we talk about
some of the other forms of grief that
don't get discussed so often.
The other definitions are more troublesome or annoyance,
a playful criticism like getting grief from your
friends, a disaster, a mishap or a misadventure.
And those I just don't feel really get
to the heart of the real grief work
that is at the heart of our lived
experience as neurodivergent people, of living as chronically
ill or disabled, or of being queer in
this society, or even the grief of having
a food allergy or a food intolerance or
even climate grief.
So I've given you a little sneak peek
there about what we're going to be talking
about.
But when it comes to grief, I think
on one hand, most psychology papers, most definitions
really agree that grief is a deep, intense
sadness or emotional distress.
It's not a pleasant emotion.
It is a sadness or distress.
But what isn't discussed, except in the abstract,
is that in order to grieve something, we
have to have loved or appreciated something or
someone.
And there's a flip side there.
There's a almost a yin and a yang
or a kind of a wheel of fortune.
We love, we grieve.
That exists in our lives.
Now, to be fair, a lot of the
psychology comments, a lot of psychology papers do
say that grief happens when you lose someone
or something important to you.
But the examples that they give are the
death of a loved one, a divorce, a
job loss, or a major life change.
Now, the one definition that I happen to
be looking at also mentions a health change.
And so that, again, gets us closer to
the type of grief work that I work
with.
But grief, at least in this context or
the context of a lot of psychology and
a lot of self-help documents, there is
an assumption there, whether spoken or unspoken, that
grief goes away after a while.
There is an assumption that grief can be
fixed.
That much like when you get that paper
cut or your cat accidentally scratches you and
you think, oh, I need to put a
band-aid on that, you know, some period
of time later, obviously for a minor wound
like that, it's a few days.
Grief can take much longer to kind of
be incorporated into your life that, you know,
it goes away.
And I feel like that that's a very
common misconception about grief and that really colors
our conversation about grief.
Grief does not completely go away.
What happens is we learn to live with
the grief.
We learn to live with the loss.
We start to look at what does our
life look like now that we have experienced
this loss or that we are experiencing this
loss.
Because anticipatory grief, such as when a pet
or a loved one is in a hospice
type situation or you can see that somebody
is getting older and you know that you're
going to lose them because that's what happens.
You know, we all succumb to death.
And by narrowing grief down to that one
thing, I think in some ways that lessens
grief because grief is a very broad, very
complex emotion.
And grief can happen, you know, for many
different reasons.
Like I said, a lot of the grief
workers that I encounter tend to do so
from the standpoint of you have had this
experience and I can help you not feel
bad about this experience.
So it's very much from an open shut
type situation.
And I know we don't want to hear
that grief does not get resolved, but it's
true.
Because if somebody passes away, I mean, you
know, my great grandparents passed away when I
went in the 90s when I was in
high school.
They have not been a part of my
life for longer than they were a part
of my life.
And yet I still have very fond memories
of visiting their family farm.
I still, you know, I miss them.
I still think about, you know, what, what
would they think?
What kind of conversations would we have, especially
as I have embarked on having a small
farm here where we live.
Now, I don't break down and just become
incapacitated with grief.
I don't break down and cry and I'm
unable to function because enough time has passed
that that pain has lessened.
And so while the pain is still with
me, in a sense, I have companioned it.
I've learned to live with it.
I've learned to build my life with this
new reality.
And so that is something that happens with
grief where it doesn't, it's not a light
switch.
It doesn't just turn off and on.
It kind of, it fades.
It fades to the point where we can
carry it easier.
It becomes easier to carry, but it's still
a part with us.
And that's why I think when we look
at grief, especially around like chronic illness, acquired
food intolerances, allergies, even ones that we didn't
acquire as an adult, ones that we've lived
with.
If we think about this grief as a
way to carry things better, a way to
make things easier to carry, I feel like
that's a much more realistic and much more
lived experience of grief.
So the common assumptions about grief are that
grief happens after a death or after a
major life change.
But there are other forms of grief.
And again, holding in our head the thought
that grief comes because we love something or
we love someone.
I think it makes it easier to look
for these other sources of grief in our
lives.
As somebody who is trained in pet loss
and in pet bereavement, one of the forms
of grief that I think that we experience,
even while the individual is still with us,
is there is a grief of not doing
enough.
And let me talk about that just a
little bit.
And I'll try not to get emotional because
I'm actually, this is a grief that's very
near and dear to my heart right now.
So my senior mare will be crossing the
Rainbow Bridge before winter.
She just turned 27.
Her arthritis is getting very bad.
So while the spirit is willing, sadly, her
body is failing her.
And I'm going to make the compassionate decision
to let her pass before winter.
I had big hopes for this summer, for
how we were going to spend our last
time together, for what we were going to
do.
And then I got very sick.
Now, your grief about not doing enough may
not be that dramatic.
But I think especially when we're faced with
a senior companion animal that we cannot have
that conversation with, to make sure that they're
okay with what we're doing.
There is a fear or a worry that
we're not doing enough.
And that lends itself to grief.
We feel regret, we feel remorse, we grieve
because it's a great pain that we're not
doing enough.
But the grief of not doing enough.
I've also seen that in my discussions with
people who are parents, parents worry that they're
not doing enough for their children.
When we talk about the climate or our
political situation, there is grief that we're not
able to do enough.
And like with recycling and conserving energy and
trying to do all the right things to
help save our planet.
And a conversation that my spouse and I
have quite often is, we can do as
much as we can do, but we are
only two people.
Whatever we do will never be as much
as what corporations or governments could do.
So while yes, we need to do what
we can do.
We also need to understand that are not
doing enough, pales very much in comparison to
a company or a government not doing enough
or not doing what it's supposed to be
doing.
So the grief of not doing enough, the
antidote to that a lot of times is
understanding that you're doing the best you can.
And when you do the best you can,
there are no regrets, no remorse, only appreciation
and gratitude for being able to do the
best you can.
And when it comes to like our companion
animals, they for the most part, do not
stress over whether they get the extra fancy
treats or whether they get regular treats.
They just know they're getting treats, they're getting
attention, they're getting love, they're getting affection.
And so the grief of not doing enough
really ties into the grief of us not
feeling like we're enough.
And that often comes from external messages.
And you're going to find that actually, when
we talk about grief, that a lot of
grief that we feel, especially when it's not
related to bereavement or to major life changes,
is that it's coming from external messages and
things that we're told we should do or
we should be.
And because of that, that is why we
feel like we're not doing enough or we're
not good enough.
Or again, you can sense a theme there.
As somebody who is extremely late diagnosed neurodivergent
and who through this summer, and getting some
some answers, like finally has answers for like
decades old health issues.
One thing that I have really faced is
grief for others.
And grief for others comes because we grieve
when other individuals maybe did not have the
chance or the opportunity to get the answers
that we have.
We also have grief for others because they
maybe have lived or did live with a
condition or with a neurotype that they were
not aware of.
And so they did not get the support
and resources that they need.
Grief for others comes from the we love
them.
And so as this has come up for
me, what is, you know, what has come
up is that I love my family members.
I see echoes of what they dealt with,
what health conditions they have, and what I
have.
And I grieve that they did not get
the answers that I have.
And so we grieve for them, because you
imagine how you want better for them, how
much different their lives might have been, if
they had had the answer sooner, or if
they had had the answers at all.
And you think about just the way that
maybe they thought about themselves, or that they
struggled with things.
And you know, we love them.
So we don't want that for them.
We did not want them to struggle.
We did not want them to experience the
pain that they had, because they did not
have answers.
And a lot of times, that grief and
not having answers, simply is because, especially around
like neurodivergent brains, or certain health conditions, that
we just simply didn't have the answers or
the information at that time that we have
now.
And so it's a case where I don't
think that there was a way for them
to experience the knowledge that I have.
But yet we grieve that they didn't, and
we grieve about how that impacted their lives.
That comes kind of hand in hand with
the grief of what if.
The grief of what if, it impacts us
and it impacts other people.
On one hand, the grief of what if
could be considered a thought experiment.
What if I had been diagnosed as a
child as multiply neurodivergent, and received the support
that I definitely needed, but never received?
What if the diagnosis that I had gotten,
and the help that I'm getting now, had
come 10 years earlier?
What if a guidance counselor had sat down
with me, and actually explained a little bit
more about my options, and my interests, and
how that might relate to my college career,
when I was actually, you know, leaving high
school, going into college, rather than figuring these
things out when I was 50 or almost
50.
The what if can be a thought experiment.
And I want to say that it's an
important thought experiment.
There's so many questions that you can play
what if with.
And as an author, I think a lot
of what drives our stories, what drives our
inspiration, is the idea of what if.
That is, you know, Marvel did a whole
series called What If, and then started messing
with their characters, and doing different things with
them.
And some of it was okay, and some
of it was absolutely fascinating, and we wish
they'd done more.
When we look at that, we don't necessarily
see the grief that's there.
But if we allow ourselves to dwell on
it, then we would actually allow ourselves to
experience that grief.
The grief of what if has to do
with mourning a life that did not exist,
but had the potential to exist.
Now, I admit, one way that I try
to kind of abate this grief, or deal
with this grief, is that I would like
to think that there is an alternate universe,
or several of them, where the things that
I didn't get in this life, or the
grief that comes from the what ifs in
this life, actually were resolved.
And that that version of myself got the
support, got the help, and is living an
amazing life.
Now, that doesn't necessarily change my life for
the better.
But it helps me to kind of understand
and believe that everything works out, and that
there's a balance to the universe.
Now, again, when it comes to grief, you
know, things like that can be construed as
a little bit of gaslighting, or toxic positivity,
depending on how it's approached.
It's very helpful for me.
It may not be helpful for you, I
acknowledge that.
The best way to focus on the grief
of what if, is to be in the
moment, to practice mindfulness, and to know that
yesterday is gone.
We can't change yesterday.
We can mourn yesterday.
And that mourning is very, very appropriate, and
can be very, very deep and powerful.
We also can't worry about or mourn for
a future that may never come.
We don't know what tomorrow brings.
I have an idea of what I'm going
to do tomorrow.
But who knows, things could happen and tomorrow
could not go out as planned.
Maybe it's a lot better.
Maybe not so much.
We don't know.
And so by focusing on this moment, what
can I do to support myself in this
moment?
If what part of my what if grief
is not having supports or not having resources,
what can I do to cultivate those things
in this moment?
Not only does that help comfort the past
version of myself that you know, my body
remembers, my mind remembers, that there's a version
or a time of me where I didn't
get something or the what if, you know,
didn't happen.
I can actually actively work to make that
happen.
Yeah, so I think that the what if,
that really reminds us to come back to
the moment.
And after talking about all these different versions
of grief, and the ways that we don't
discuss grief within our culture.
One of the things I really want to
say is that grief often comes from things
outside of ourselves, the loss of a pet,
the loss of a family member, the loss
of a job or an opportunity or the
loss of supports.
And grief takes that external event and brings
it in internal.
We don't feel that grief is like some
nebulous thing floating in front of us or
surrounding us.
We feel that grief deeply in our hearts,
in our souls, in our bodies.
We feel that grief inside of us, those
tears come from inside of us.
Nobody splashes water on our face.
And that's what tears are.
They actually come and are driven by our
embodied life, our embodied experience, our embodied being.
And so the biggest change that I would
love to see, when it comes to discussing
grief, and how we think about grief, is
that we no longer think about grief as
something external that can be fixed or something
superficial that can be fixed or wiped away
or healed or covered over.
Instead, we need to understand grief as something
that is internal, that is embodied, and that
comes from the very core of ourselves, stretches
through our tissues, our cells, our muscles, our
fascia, our skin, our sinews, and fills our
entire being.
And that is how we need to look
at finding our new path forward of telling
our stories of working with grief to bring
that back into a more communal and a
more embodied experience.
I hope this podcast has been helpful.
I've got some other topics on my list.
So I assure you, not every podcast going
forward, we'll be talking about grief.
But I do think it is important that
we have these conversations, and that we work
with these conversations.
If you would like to work with me
more on grief, or wild spirit storytelling, or
how you know how to get in touch
with your wild, untamed nature, just if you'd
like to work with me more, I want
you to reach out through feathermanesoul.com.
Click on the contact link, book a discovery
call, or just send me a quick email.
I also have a newsletter and several free
resources for people.
And you know, the topics of my podcast
going forward, we'll be talking a little bit
more about those resources.
Thank you so much for sharing this time
with me.
Thank you so much for listening.
And until next time, the wild in me
sees the wild in you.
You've been listening to the feathermanesoul wisdom podcast
hosted by Kit Kelstoe.
Learn more about feathermanesoul at feathermanesoul.com.
As a wild spirit storyteller, Kit is passionate
about helping those who are neurodivergent, disabled, or
living with chronic illness rediscover their own inner
wild spirit.
Visit feathermanesoul.com to receive free gifts or
book a free call with Kit to discuss
how wild spirit storytelling can help you.
Music is Running with the Horses by Purple
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