Stop. Will you pause for a breath?

When I pause and notice, it reminds me that I am alive and I am being lived. What do you notice?

This week’s Grief Heals episode is an offering, not a lesson. A slow, 25-minute walk with breath, grief, body, voice, and the quiet ways emotions try to set us free.

I don’t know what you’re holding these days. If you’re like me, it's more than you can even see.

So, this is for us because it’s about:

• The link between suppressed emotion and chronic illness
  

• The difference between anger and violence, and why I now believe anger is one of the many voices of love
  

• The ache of emotional poverty and the path to becoming resourced
  

• Why we’ve confused numbness with being nice
  

• The generational cost of withholding truth
  

• What happens when we finally scream aloud, witnessed and unedited
  

• And how love might move through us, as us, if we let it
  

This is for anyone who’s ever felt shame for feeling too much, or for not feeling at all.It’s for those of us who want to do better by our neighbors, but have been taught to ignore our own pain.It’s for those who long to breathe fully and live fully especially when it hurts.

After you listen, I invite you to ask yourself:

What part of me has been waiting to be heard?

Let that question breathe with you awhile because what speaks may surprise you.

P.S. Here are the people and practices referenced: Rachel Sachs and her Mind Your Body work (I’m on Day 137 of journal speak!)Francis Weller’s In the Absence of the OrdinaryGabor Maté’s When the Body Says NoHaka, a powerful reminder that emotion belongs in the body, voice, and community.

Let’s keep learning how to feel all the way through, so that we come home to ourselves and one another.

Release Jan 5, 2026

Subject: Salt, then sour, then sweet… and a sky wide enough for all of it

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/yh2OfgeebmYqBgABc7e27er79a9zPg3yQMXH2XMJc59SnpGjNSUNJPQpHNH4vE0g.n0fvOWXE_jnEz3RF?startTime=1764002383000

Passcode: 91&M!QN5

Before I recorded this, I listened to Salt, then Sour, then Sweet, which plays at the end of Come See Me in the Good Light.

It surprised me when I slid down the wall, feeling the weight of my body too heavy to stand upright. Squatted down, my hand over my heart, I could feel the ache, the beauty, the memory, the love… all of it living in me at once.

Like life, this episode isn’t linear. It weaves and connects through pain, shame, old church doctrines and new kinds of dignity.

I used to despise my weakness, especially the parts of me that didn’t feel smart enough, composed enough, good enough. Becoming a ‘christian’ helped me cover grief with Scripture and performance, to wrap pain in Bible verses and shoulds.

Now, I believe that what love does is notice.

Maybe grief is LOVE, noticing.

Today, I share old stories in new ways – The divorce that felt like failure. My naked body in the mirror, never again to be touched by a lover. Shame when I accidentally posted something too vulnerable and felt stupid and exposed.

How I softened to the despised and rejected in me.

In a world that prizes the hero, the strong, the conqueror, it is so good to feel grief that holds, instead of hides.

Healing is not born on the battlefield, but in the mirror, the backyard, the breath, the body that won’t be ignored anymore.

So, if you feel like you’re too much, or not enough… if you’re tired of trying to outgrow your wounds… if something in you is slowly being smoothed like river stone by years of holding and noticing and being held…

Come listen.

P.S. A few things that held me as I recorded this:

Salt, Then Sour, Then Sweet ~ song.

Come See Me in the Good Light ~ the new doc on Andrea & Megan’s love story.

The Beast in Me on Netflix ~ a living example of that Gospel of Thomas line: “If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.”

Before I recorded this, I listened to, Salt, then Sour, then Sweet, which plays at the end of Come See Me in the Good Light.

It surprised me when I slid down the wall, feeling the weight of my body too heavy to stand upright. Squatted down, my hand over my heart, I could feel the ache, the beauty, the memory, the love… all of it living in me at once.

Like life, this episode isn’t linear. It weaves and connects through pain, shame, old church doctrines and new kinds of dignity.

I used to despise my weakness, especially the parts of me that didn’t feel smart enough, composed enough, good enough. Becoming a ‘christian’ helped me cover grief with Scripture and performance, to wrap pain in Bible verses and shoulds.

Now, I believe that what love does is notice.

Maybe grief is LOVE, noticing.

Today, I share old stories in new ways – The divorce that felt like failure. My naked body in the mirror, never again to be touched by a lover. Shame when I accidentally posted something too vulnerable and felt stupid and exposed.

How I softened to the despised and rejected in me.

In a world that prizes the hero, the strong, the conqueror, it is so good to feel grief that holds, instead of hides.

Healing is not born on the battlefield, but in the mirror, the backyard, the breath, the body that won’t be ignored anymore.

So, if you feel like you’re too much, or not enough… if you’re tired of trying to outgrow your wounds… if something in you is slowly being smoothed like river stone by years of holding and noticing and being held…

Come listen.

P.S. A few things that held me as I recorded this:

Salt, Then Sour, Then Sweet ~ song.

Come See Me in the Good Light ~ the new doc on Andrea & Megan’s love story.

The Beast in Me on Netflix ~ a living example of that Gospel of Thomas line: “If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.”

Wherever you are, however you are, please know that all of it is welcome here.

I just watched The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper and whoa. So timely because it put faces and history to my longing for communal grieving for our collective losses.

I wept, laughed, cried, and its lessons are continuing to grow in me. Please watch it – season 3, the episode on the Simril(l) family, one branch spelled with a single L, the other with two. One side of the family Black, one white.

It started with a man tracing his family roots and discovering that his ancestors enslaved people who share his last name. What unfolds is the story of two families, bound by blood and history, who choose to face the truth together. My heart is contracting like it’s ready to give birth as I remember.

They meet across the lines of race, pain, and time. They gathered side by side in the same church their ancestors once shared – then separated with blacks in the balcony, and slave owners below. Now integrated as family.

They walk through cemeteries, naming what was hidden. Instead of sugarcoating, they name the pain, the privilege, and feel the loss. And ten years in they keep showing up.

This is a picture of communal grief. Losses met with courage and love, transform us. Naming what has been silenced doesn’t divide us. Instead, it roots us deeper in truth, in belonging, in love big enough to hold it all.

I wonder, how many of us are living with inherited silence? Stories of harm, separation, survival. And what happens the moment we tell the truth?

Since I believe we are one, I’m also reflecting on:

What stories in our family lineage are ready to be named?

Where has silence kept us separated from ourselves, others, our communities, our world?

What would it mean to approach our history with love instead of shame?

If you can, watch the Whole Story episode on the Simril(l) family and listen to this week’s Grief Heals conversation. We belong to one another, and the truth, even when it hurts. What now constricts us may not permanently constrain us. What if it has the power to set us free?