Nurturing Habit

On an otherwise normal summer day, Megan Devine's partner Matt drowned in front of her. Immediately, she was thrust into a world that she thought she knew, from her work with grieving people as a psychotherapist, but quickly discovered she didn't understand at all. And it was so much worse than she'd ever imagined. That experience became the root of Megan's current work, because in her deep grief, she came face to face with the realities of how our culture just cannot face pain and suffering in any supportive or healing way. Around grief, she came to see, our culture is badly broken. But she believes we can begin to fix it.

Megan is a psychotherapist, grief advocate, and author of the book It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss In A Culture That Doesn't Understand (affiliate link). She's on a mission to help people love each other (and I'd add, themselves) more.

In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss how we handle grief so badly in our culture and how to take steps towards improving, how to build a practice of nurturing yourself, creating small moments of personal agency even in out of control experiences, and some deeply thoughtful ways to approach the holiday season. Although Megan mostly works with people facing out of order grief - that is, having lost someone to an accident, violence, or other unexpected circumstance - her ideas apply to all of us, even those of us not grieving a loss.

Find detailed show notes at www.nurturinghabit.com/episode7

In this conversation with photographer Jen Downer, we talk about how to talk to someone who is grieving with the goal of deeper connection and solace, and how to help others talk to you when you are grieving.

Jen has walked through a lot of grief, including the death of both parents and living with a son who is autistic. We cover how to create real and authentic connections in times of sudden or ongoing, cyclical grief, and how the same words can be both connecting and disconnecting - the art is in how and when you use them.

Find show notes for this episode at www.nurturinghabit.com

Find out more about the Holiday Nurturing Letters, mentioned at the beginning of this episode, at www.nurturedmama.net/holiday

An interview with Nancy London, LCSW, writer and teacher, about how to turn toward grief and learn to embrace it, as a way to gain wholeness and the ability to be with others who are in pain.

April Johnson Stearns is a writer and the founder of Wildfire Magazine, a reader-generated digital magazine for young women survivors and fighters of breast cancer. April launched the magazine, and the community that surrounds it, after surviving cancer herself, and then nursing her father through his own battle with the disease.

In this episode, we talk about how healing it can be to give back to your community, especially to people walking the same path you have. Find episode show notes and a list of books for children about grief and cancer at www.nurturinghabit.com/episode3

This episode is an interview with Jamie Van Zanen, LCSW. Jamie spent a decade working in hospice before transitioning to working with pre-natal and postpartum women. She offers ideas for caregivers and those grieving a loss of a person or season of life.

Nurturing Habit is a a bi-weekly show where we talk about all the ways to nurture yourself deeply. In this episode I introduce the season topic, grief, and why this is so important to talk about.