You are listening to that Mystic Podcast, and I am your host, Reverend Joya. This is a show where we talk about all things spiritual remembering, embodying the true nature of who we really are, and talking about the very wild, messy process of rebirthing yourself through grief, loss, or that holy longing that's calling you home. Enjoy the show. Hello, beautiful lights and souls. Happy November. I can't believe we're rolling into the holiday season so fast already. And on this podcast episode today, I'm going to be talking about the awakening power of grief because this is my calling. As I have humbled myself and said more and more yes and yes, to what my soul came here to do instead of what my ego wants it to be about, I can see so clearly that awakening through grief is the work I came here to do, not only from the spiritual preparation I've undergone, but also my whole astrology chart says so. And so I'm going to start talking more about awakening through grief and telling you the truth about what grief is because when I went in and began my grief journey, I had no idea what grief really was. It's not sadness, it's not sorrow. It's so much more than that. It is a process of becoming. It is a process of becoming. And it cracks you open to depths of yourself that you don't even know exist. That's what it did to me. That's what it's done to me. And as I've sat now in eight months, rolling into the ninth month now, of unbearable grief. This pain that lives in my heart like a burning flame, like a burning fire, a cauldron, constantly heated in my heart. It cracked me open like a geode broken half. And I found God living in the wound. It's like everything that I had been looking for was there. And so that's what we're going to talk about today because this is the work that I'm here to do is helping you awaken through grief, helping people awaken through grief. Because grief is a process of becoming, and you can have a say in that becoming, in who you're becoming through grief. And in our society in the West, we think that grief is something that you just are supposed to get over, return back to who you were, get back to normal, get back to your baseline. But grief doesn't work like that. Because grief shatters you into a thousand pieces, and it's not something that you get through, so you can return to your old life. I honestly know it's an initiation. It is a sacred fire that burns away everything that isn't real, so that what remains is more awake, more alive, more you than you've ever been before. So I'm not here to talk about how to cope with grief or how to manage your grief or how to even process your grief. There are wonderful, amazing therapists, coaches, counselors, and grief groups that do that. I'm here to talk about awakening through grief. Because grief cracks you open in ways that nothing else can. And if you're willing to walk through that fire consciously, with practices, with support, and definitely with a lot of courage, you transform and capacities come online in your body, in your nervous system that were dormant before. You become someone who can hold what used to break you. And you transmit healing, love, calm, peace, strength just by walking into a room. And I'm not talking about bypassing the pain at all. This is messy, mystical, embodied work of letting loss initiate you into a more luminous way of being in the world and in your life. So today we're going to explore what does awakening through grief actually mean? And how is it different from just getting through it? And why is grief even more so than, or maybe faster I should say, than meditation or therapy or plant medicine journeys, unlock capacities that stick, that last, that become permanent state changes when nothing else can. So let's dive into this conversation. So, first things first, let's get clear on what I mean when I say awakening through grief, because this is not the same as what grief counselors are talking about. Traditional grief models say you're going from broken to fixed, or from a dysregulated self to a regulated self, from acute grief to integrated grief. The goal in most grief therapies is adaptation, getting you back to functioning, back to a baseline. And that's not wrong. There's nothing wrong with that. I just feel like it's incomplete. Awakening through grief says you're going from your small self to your true self, from your ego defended to your soul-embodied self, from contracted to expanded, definitely from asleep to awake. And the goal is not to return to who you were, because you can't, in some cases, but to become who you've always been beneath all the layers of armor. And there is science that backs this up. Research on post-traumatic growth, and I'm talking about a 13-year study, showed that people who went through profound loss didn't just back bounce back, they actually transcended this loss. And they documented five domains of transformation. Relationships deepen, where we have increased compassion and emotional intimacy. And think about it, right? If everything comes within, it starts within, and then it and then it carries over into our external world. Number two, new possibilities open. Changes in career, creative pursuits, following a calling now, finding more meaning in their life. Third, personal strength emerges. If I survived this, I can survive anything. And boy, that is true. Fourth is your life appreciation intensifies. Present moment awareness comes online because you have mortality consciousness, meaning you are now aware that you are going to leave this physical incarnation. I was told to stop calling this my life and to call it my incarnation because life is eternal. And fifth, our spiritual existential reconstruction happens, which means our entire world view, how we view everything, reorganizes. But what's really, really wild, what I thought was so fascinating, is that the research shows that less inherently resilient people sometimes experience more growth than highly resilient people. Why? Because resilient people bounce back to the baseline. But people who shatter, they have to reconstruct their lives from the ground up. And in that reconstruction, when it's done consciously, it creates a fundamentally different person. Not a better person, not a worse person, just a different person. With more capacity, more bandwidth, and deeper roots. So let's talk neuroscience for a second because you know I love the neuroscience. But this because this is also where it gets so fascinating to me and so interesting, because you know how people who do psychedelics talk about an ego death, the dissolving of the separate self, and they experience a sense of unity with everything. Well, guess what shows up on brain scans during mystical experiences? Default mode network deactivation. So, what does this mean for a person in grief? The DMN is the part of your brain that maintains your sense of separate self. It's that narrator, the storekeeper, it's the one who's always saying, I mean mine, all day long. And when it quiets down, whether through meditation, psychedelics, even a near-death experience, people report loss of self-boundaries, a sense of unity with everything, timelessness, ineffable experiences they can't put into words, and finding profound meaning and significance. But what I'm here to share is that grief does the exact same thing. Our default mode network gets unplugged in grief. That self-referential part of the self that says, I, me, mine, and the world is gone, which is why everything feels so chaotic. So when you're in the depths of grief, and I'm talking in the kind where you can't tell where you end and the pain begins, your default mode network is offline. Your sense of separate self is shattered, and the story about who you are and how this world works is gone. Because now you're in this void where something else can emerge. And Dr. Lisa Miller at Columbia found that people who experience a spiritual awakening through crisis, including grief, show increased thickness in the brain regions associated with spiritual awareness and decreased activity in the default mode network. Permanent changes, not temporary states, but trait-level transformation. So awakening through grief means that you're not just processing an emotion and moving on. You are literally undergoing an ontological transformation. It's a reorganization at the level of your very being. Your nervous system rewires. Your heart breaks and it reconstructs into something even bigger. Your energy field clears and becomes coherent. Your intuition sharpens. Your capacity to hold paradox, to be with suffering and peace, all of it comes online. But, and this is crucial, this does not happen automatically just because you've lost someone. You can go through grief and come out bitter, contracted, defended, depressed, numb, and a lot of people do. Because that's trauma without transformation. And grief, when you experience grief from a sudden loss or any kind of loss, it is a trauma that's happening to you. But you can go through grief consciously, with practices, with witnesses, with intention, and come out initiated so that you are awake, embodied, and luminous. The difference is how you walk through the fire. Are you running from it, numbing it, bypassing it with spiritual platitudes? Or are you turning toward it with breath and body, with presence and the willingness to let it crack you all the way open? And that's the difference between coping and awakening. When Weston died, I was in the process of feeling like there was an initiation, a threshold, something massive coming my way. And I knew it would be something that there was going to be no coming back from. And I kept talking about it on my Instagram. A couple of months before he passed, I said, there's something coming at me. It feels like I'm standing on a train track, blindfolded, and I can hear and feel and sense something coming. There's a train coming at me, but I can't see what it is or where it is or where it's coming from. And in the beginning, oh my gosh, I realized immediately the importance of staying present and not telling myself a story about the grief. And in that moment, when I realized that this was the threshold I had sensed coming, when I realized that this was a spiritual calling, when I realized that this was a soul contract between Weston and I, and when I realized the importance of staying present and turning toward, not avoiding, not running, not numbing, that this was the beginning. It was the beginning of my true awakening. I had been awakening before, but this hurled me deeply into myself. When your separate sense of self dissolves, when the story you've been telling about who you are just stops, then there's this terrifying, unbearable openness that happens. And at first it definitely feels like you're dying too. And as I went through this process and was learning to trust myself, learning to trust messages that Weston was sending me from the other side, learning to trust and listen and move in a different way. It was terrifying. And as I obeyed and listened and trusted this new deeper self to come online, I started experiencing my ego as it was dying and burning in the fiery cauldron of my grief, throwing a major fit. And this is the dark night, what the mystics call the dark night. It is not poetic, it is not beautiful, it is hard, and it is brutal. But if you stay with it, if you don't run, if you keep breathing and feeling and letting it just move through you, in and out of you in a rhythm, something new eventually starts to emerge from those ashes. And I think it was sensitive before to other people, like to sense when someone's lying, or to sense when someone has the best intentions, or to sense when they don't. And before, rather than listening to those things and honoring my own inner boundary and my own inner reality, I would mold myself to blend in before the person before me so that I could hide in plain sight. That realization came through grief. It makes you so aware of yourself and of the roles and the masks and the false selves that you wore to cope through life. I started wondering what is happening to me. And that's when I started doing so much research. I've been a mystic my whole life. I've been seeking my deepest self, I've been seeking God my whole life, and I did not expect to find it through losing my son. But that's exactly what's happened. And I was so blessed because in the beginning, as I knew intuitively to do this embodied grief work, sounding, drumming, moving, devotional yoga, crying when I needed to cry, going to my car and just screaming, letting that rage out that wanted to come out, and not being afraid of the rage and the anger, as well as the sadness and the sorrow, that these were not just things that were helping me to cope. They were awakening capacities that had been dormant my whole life. I can definitely hold way more paradox now, and I loved paradox before, but now I say I am a walking, living pillar of profound sorrow and profound gratitude at the same time. I'm shattered and whole. And these are not something that, you know, these are not things that you learn in books. This is being forged in the fires of grief. My heart, literally, physically, energetically, is getting bigger, wider, and so much more spacious than it was before. Before Weston died, of course I loved. But now I hold. I witness. I can see with a different light. As I become more enlightened inside, it lightens up my world and how I perceive and see others. And all of this is because of grief, going through the fires of grief. When you've touched the edges of death and you felt the impermanence of everything in your bones, life becomes saturated with meaning. Every moment, every breath, every ordinary, regular second is filled with wonder. And people commented on it all the time with my energy. They did before, but now they really do. But you know what? I'm still the one who can hold the peace. But I wake up and I cry in the morning sometimes. I talk to Weston, I channel, I talk to him all the time. I'm driving in my car, I'm talking to my son, like he's sitting in the seat next to me. But this shattering is awakening. And it doesn't have to wait until you pull yourself back together. I'm because I'm in the breaking of it myself right now. I'm in the reconstruction process. Because what breaks isn't you. I'm not broken. The armor was broken. My defended ego was broken. My small self that was never the real me in the first place was what broke away. And what remains is what can't be broken because it was never separated from the whole. It's my soul, my essence, my luminous being. And we all have this luminous, indestructible, infinitely spacious self within us. And that's what we're all seeking and yearning to return to. It's incredible what happens when you turn toward grief. And this is what awakening through grief means. It helps you to move through this process every day, every moment, consciously, courageously, with practices and with support, until you come out the other side more awakened, more embodied, and more you than you could have ever imagined. It's just so powerful. So the the processes that I've discovered in my own grief journey and what I've created what I'm creating is, I call it the four pillars of awakening through grief. And the first one is people, and that is your community. And I never knew how much community I had until I was held. And I also realize people, not everybody has that. And my heart cares about that a lot. Because being witnessed in our pain, being held in our sorrow, without somebody feeding us platitudes or saying it's going to be okay or any of those things, the meaning, the well-meaning things that people say, we don't say any of that when we we don't need any of that when we're being held. And to hold is to simply witness. The second thing is process. Weston gave me an incredible process that I've used to walk through my grief from the other side, which I am now going to start teaching because it's time, and I'm writing it in my book, Awakened Through Grief, because I just feel like what I've been given through grief is so important. And as our world continues to evolve and split, where people are awakening, and when you awaken and you see the wounds and the pain of the world acting out, it doesn't make you feel like you're on a different planet. It makes it more intense that you can see it. And you're like, why aren't why can't people see this? The compassion in you grows tremendously, and it causes grief. And so this process of going through helps with that, and it helps you to actually embody a new way of being, to install your homo-luminous self. The third one is practices. And this was the other area I was so blessed in my grief to have was my inquiry practices I already did, my meditation practices I already did. And then, of course, all of the embodied, processed, practical, all of the work I do as a healing arts practitioner through voice, sound, embodiment, drumming, dance, devotional yoga, all of these beautiful practices that help to move the energy of grief up and out of the body. So important. And then the final key is purpose, purpose and meaning. And that's what you yourself create from your journey through grief. So I invite you to take a deep breath in right now. And just feel inside of your body, and this is inquiry. And in your body, notice where you're holding tension. Do you feel it in your jaw? If you do, just loosen it. Your belly, breathe into it. Shoulders, let them drop. Your hips, just notice. When you think about grief, loss, pain, these inevitabilities of life, inevitabilities of life, where does your body contract? What do you notice happen inside of you? Notice if your belly gets tight again or your shoulders clinch forward, or if you hold your breath. In order to return to our homoluminous self that we are designed and destined to be, we have to be willing to clear all of the blocks that are stored in our body in the form of unresolved grief. So what if you just for this moment allowed your body to expand at the thought of grief and loss instead of contract? To accept it as part of life. But if it's part of our life, there's a reason it's a part of our life. And it's to wake us up. Imagine if you lived forever on this planet, and if everybody lived forever, would you wake up? Would you change? Would there be a reason to change? These pains in our life of loss are designed for us to become aware of how precious every moment is when we're in it and we're appreciating it. And to be aware that every moment is passing when it's unpleasant, when it hurts, when you're in pain. Everything is arising and passing away in its own time. Notice this awakening response in your body with the willingness to let what is just move through you instead of around you or over you. Do you think it's possible to hold both at the same time? Contraction and expansion? Pain and possibility? That's the practice, not choosing one or the other, but we are stepping into the world of paradox as a mystic. It's holding the and. And grief and joy. Feel the rise and the fall of your breath in your chest. If you put your hand on your chest, see if you can feel your heartbeat. And I have been whole. I can be shattered and becoming. Take a deep breath. Let it out with an audible. And this is the work right there. The capacity to hold the paradox in your body. Not just understand it intellectually, but feel it somatically inside of us. And this is what awakening through grief requires. And it's not a one-time thing. This is a daily practice. It's a daily returning, a choice moment by moment to turn toward what is instead of away from it. And when things are amazing, this will make you appreciate those moments so much. So allow what is to crack you open. Let it burn away what's false. Let it reveal the luminous, indestructible, infinitely, infinitely spacious being that's been underneath your armor all along. So this is what I'm talking about when I say awakening through grief. It's not getting over it, it's going through it. Walking through the fire with practices and community and the courage to let loss transform you from the inside out. We are not spiritually bypassing our humanity anymore. It doesn't work. The kingdom of heaven is within you. You are the Who brings heaven to earth through you? And as you allow yourself to hold and to feel what is, you are increasing your own capacities inside of you to hold even greater joy and to hold space for grief. You're going to awaken capacities that were dormant, your abilities to channel, to be in tune with the other side, awakening your clear senses, awakening your sensitivities, awakening your ability to stay so present that you realize how sacred your life is every moment because it's not forever. And your soul came here with a purpose, and that purpose is to awaken and remember who you really are as a soul. Enlightenment is the purpose of life. And I want to invite you now, if you're willing, to walk through the fires consciously with embodied practices, with sacred witnesses, and with a community that gets it, where you will come out the other side more awake, more alive, more luminous, living in purpose than you ever imagined possible. I invite you to join the Held Circle. It's on Mighty Networks. I'm officially launching it. Our first gathering is going to be this Wednesday evening, November 5th, on the full moon. Health Circles are live gatherings every week. Come as often as you can. There is a library of practices in there that I'm building, as well as a community that I want to build for us to come together as women who are doing this work, who know that when we come out of these, of the other side of whatever we're going through, that we awaken as the wise wisdom keepers of this planet. We restore the divine feminine nature back into our embodied life, into our communities, and it starts within, and that's what this work is all about. You can go to the Heldcircle.com to learn more. And I hope to see you there. This is my purpose, my calling in the world. I'm finally stepping into it. It's an honor to do this work, to transmute grief into awakening. So until next time, my loves, next week, I'm Joya, and you are awakening. I'll see you hopefully on Wednesday night. Bye. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to like and subscribe, and please share this episode with anyone you think could benefit. And you can find me at the healthcircle.com, thehealthcircle.com, or at thatmystic.com. Much love.