Move Your Body Through Grief

< Full Episode

Transcript: Move Your Body Through Grief

Season 10, Episode 11  | April 15, 2025

[MUSIC]

Welcome back to another episode of Life Time Talks. I’m David Freeman.

And I’m Jamie Martin.

And today’s topic is about moving your body through grief. So grief is something we all have experienced at some time in our lives. So whether it’s due to a loss, loved one, scary health diagnosis, a breakup, change in life circumstance, or some other circumstance, grief can visit us for many different reasons.
So when we understand this feeling coming along, we need to be able to learn to live with it. And in this episode, we’ll be talking about an approach of physical movement that can be used as a tool to help transform the grief in your life. And we got a special guest. Jamie.

Yes, I’m so excited. We have Ms. Maggie Fazeli Fard back with us today. Maggie is Experience Life’s fitness editor. She is also a certified strength coach with specialty education and kettlebell training, intuitive training, trauma —informed movement, and grief movement, and just an amazing colleague to work with. So hi, Maggie, how are you?

Hi, I’m good. I’m so happy to be here. It’s good to be back.

Coining the phrase itself, just grief movement, something that came into your life, and be able to talk us through the past couple of years, and if you’re willing to share exactly grief movement, and what that means to you.

Yeah, absolutely. So I had not really given much thought to the relationship between grief and movement until — gosh, it was a year ago now. It felt like there was just like a series of things that pushed me into this deep, dark hole, emotional pit, that I could not pull myself out of.

One of my beloved cats died after a long illness, and I’d been taking care of her. Various projects that I had in the works just weren’t coming to fruition. I think, the winter, my dad was getting sick.

There were just a number of things happening in life that made it feel like I could not do more than the bare minimum. And I knew that moving my body was good for me, that it was good for my mind. But for the first time in a very long time, I could not get myself to go to the gym.

I could not get myself to do the workouts that I knew made me feel good. I couldn’t even bring myself to go for a walk. It was just like, what are the boxes that I can check off so that the people around me don’t freak out and worry? Because I also couldn’t manage taking care of other people worrying about me.
And then one day, just on a whim, I did a Google search for the phrase, mourning movement, mourning as in M-O-U-R-N, mourning movement. And something that came up was this idea of grief movement, which is a modality that was developed by Paul Denniston, who is a grief coach and a trauma-informed yoga instructor.

And he developed both grief yoga and grief movement as ways to help almost as interventions when you are experiencing grief that needs to be processed.

Yes. And you’ve been writing about this in your column in Experience Life, in the Strong Body, Strong Mind section. It’s in our Jan, Feb, and March, April issues. Really beautiful work that you’ve done in that column, Maggie. And I’m so grateful for you being willing to share that experience that you’ve had with that.

So let’s talk about exactly what grief movement is. And I know you do explain this in your column, but we want people to hear from you today about what it is and how that might look like in practice.

Yes, absolutely. So grief movement is the use of breath, movement, and sound as a way to transform pain into something that feels more positive, love, gratitude.

Something that is important to understand is that grief is not a standalone emotion. It is a complex emotion that is made up of many different feelings. Those can be sadness, anger, anxiety, irritability, confusion, even relief. We’ve all experienced the a loss that might feel like a sense of relief afterwards.

And so the goal is not to get rid of grief by moving. It’s not exercises to squash your grief. It is truly meant to be a processing practice.

Well, processing, I want to dive in on that word, processing. As we know, movement is so essential and so helpful as far as psychologically. And it almost lives in that same vein of what you’re saying with grief movement.

And then when you put those two together, understanding how this is a useful tool for you to have, but understanding how to process it and using the words you just said, breath, movement and sound, how to process those elements, if you will, and having it in your toolbox, can you tell us the value of having that in your toolbox and knowing how to bring it to life?

Yeah, absolutely. So there are many different tools that we can access when we are going through a difficult time. That can be within our relationships. It could be talk therapy. It could be really as simple as just going and getting some fresh air.

What happens with grief, and emotion in general, is that all of our life experiences are sort of held in our bodies. Our bodies store memories that we might let go of. And it’s really difficult for the conscious mind to access what is stored in the body.

And if anybody is interested in the mechanisms behind that, I highly recommend looking into trauma —informed movement practices because it’s so easy to say, I’m going to talk about this thing that’s hard, and I’m going to feel better. But as we all know, it’s never quite that simple. It’s never quite that linear.
And so this is a tool that allows you to, one, take advantage of resources that are in your immediate possession. You have a body. You have a voice. You have breath, presumably.

We are not the ones who were lost. We lose our loved ones. We are grieving them. But our bodies and our breath are reminders that we are still here.

And so in that way, accessing those elements, either on their own or put together in some form, gives us a chance to reconnect to ourselves, reconnect to our place in this world, and process the pain of the loss so that we can learn from it.

Yeah. It’s so interesting because you said it’s not linear. It’s so true. And I think, when you think about grief —as you said, David, we all go through this or will go through this at some point in our life and something —and having been through some pretty acute things at different points, it’s like there’s that sharpness of grief with, potentially, the initial loss.

And grief does transform, even on its own over time. But if you’re really stuck in it, it’s like, how do you keep going and keep moving through it? And it is shape shifting. This is something that you wrote in your column, Maggie, in the Jan/Feb issue.

“No one is stranger as a stranger to grief.” But you said, “Grief may show up as anxiety, anger, irritability, numbness, sadness, fatigue, detachment. This emotion is universal, challenging, and complex.” So I know we touched on that a little bit, but let’s talk more about it because I do think that shape —shifting piece of it — because time continues to march forward, whether we like it or not. Things continue to go. How have you experienced, as a result of grief movement, that shape shifting?

That’s a really great question. So I started my grief movement certification training last spring. And at about the same time, my dad got a very scary cancer diagnosis.

And I was processing the information that was coming from his doctors and from him while going through this training. And a few weeks after I completed the training, my dad actually died.

I’m so sorry.

You say something that is true —and you can say it as many times as you want. But there’s always that hard-boiled egg in your throat.

At the end of August, my dad died. And having grief movement as a tool, It was almost like being able to just reach out and hold my best friend’s hand, having the awareness that I could take an active role in my own healing, if that makes sense.

I’m historically a person who’s really good at compartmentalizing. Right now, my person is sick. I have to take care of him. I have to take care of my mom. I have to take care of — I have to keep working. I have to keep doing my workouts.

Everything has its place, and I have to keep doing it. And then, who knows how long later the grief hits you like a bus to the side? And this time, I was able to stay with it, which is to say, I was able to stay with myself and stay connected to myself through a really difficult transitional period for my whole family.

The timing was certainly coincidental. I didn’t expect —I signed up from a place of curiosity to learn about grief movement, not necessarily practicality. But it ended up being very practical for me. I don’t know if that answers your question.

I think it does. I think you were able to actually take this thing again from a place of curiosity, and then use it in real time. And you had the resource right there for you. Many of us don’t have it there for you.
So I think, for you, that shape shifting, it was a different way of processing grief of a different type for you. You maybe didn’t have that right away. When you lost your cat, you had it at your hand.

So you were able to shape shift maybe in different ways sooner. I don’t know that you need to go through things sooner with grief. But it’s just in a different way, differently.

It was one more —to the earlier point, it was one more tool. And I could stay with it and realize that if I was feeling —obviously, I was feeling sad, but I was also feeling angry.

And anger is not an emotion that comes up for me a ton. And so instead of trying to squash it, actually asking myself, what am I feeling? Can I state what I am feeling?

And in the time since my dad has died, confusion is one of those things that — the sense of surprise is something that keeps coming up like, where did you go? And again, that is another emotion that is built into grief.

Grief being an emotion, and what you just said — and I don’t want to speak for everyone, but early on, we get exposed to all these other emotions, happy, sad, anger.

And the ones that we don’t get a lot of touch points with — and like I said, I can’t speak for everyone. Everybody might have different experiences. But for the most part, when you go back to childhood times, you have these memories, happy memories, some sad memories here and there, some excitement, pivotal moments.

And what you don’t necessarily prepare for is things like the diagnosis, the death, or the breakups, because you go through those experiences for the first time — and you just said — it’s a lot of these intertwined emotions all into one.

So when you said, the month of August, and the moment happened just a few minutes ago, it could have been a happy thought about your father, sad that he’s not here, so there’s so many different things that happen in the moment.

And to have an individual go through that and speak to that experience, the way you handle that is going to probably be different from the way Jamie handles it because of her experiences and her emotions, and myself.

So to be able to have this tool, to your point, and knowing how to activate it in these times. Because if you don’t address it, it can put you in this dark place and how to pull yourself out of it.

So now, knowing that you have gone through the experience — and I know you hit on it a little bit earlier. When you were in that dark place, how did you pull yourself out of it?

Time. And something that I think that has been useful for me is learning to do constant check ins with myself and not assuming that how I feel in one moment is how I will feel forever.

When I was a teenager, and I would feel depressed for whatever reason, there was that inability to — it’s like tunnel vision. You think this is the worst I could possibly feel, and I will feel like this forever.

And now at 41, I have learned that it’s like you’re just riding waves, and somebody else is also riding their own waves. We’re all like surfers. We’re in the same ocean, but we’re riding different waves.

Somebody’s going to get clobbered by a wave. Somebody else is going to catch the wave and ride it to shore. We can help each other up.

Even last year, when I was in the pit of it, I knew that I wouldn’t be there forever, that eventually something would shift. The question for me then was, can I support that shift? Can I precipitate that shift to happen sooner?

And part of that comes from — as human beings, we are programmed to avoid pain. We do not want to do or feel pain. And that’s a survival thing.

But grief is also, I think, a survival mechanism because when we lose something, when we lose someone, we have to learn to live in the world without it. That is the only way to survive.

So you have these two competing survival instincts, if you can call it that. This is certainly — you want to avoid pain, and you have to face the pain. You have to feel the pain to stay alive, to recognize that that person is gone. I’m still here. That opportunity is gone. I’m still here.

Yeah. I got to go on that. Pulling yourself out, I pause for the moment because you never were alone, but maybe felt like you were alone because you’re the one going through it.

And when you think of movement, I say, the great theologian, to lighten it up a little bit, my man, Neo, he said, you’re a movement by yourself. But we’re a force when we’re together. So the importance of having community and connection to help in that situation, can you elaborate maybe a little bit on if you had.
I’m very lucky that I did have. I had community of my family, friends, my partner, my coworkers. And just because somebody has those things, doesn’t mean you can see them.

When you are going through it, reaching out, and saying, hey, I need — fill in the blank. I need anything — is so hard and for, I think, a lot of us, impossible. I was more concerned with using my energy to hide what I was going through than to ask for help.

And I don’t think I’m alone in doing that, because you do feel like there’s a piece of, I don’t want to be a burden. I don’t want my emotions to be a burden on somebody else. And when people worry about you, sometimes that worry can feel like a burden on you that you can’t carry.

One more thing. It’s one more thing.

The reality of the community support is support. The story that we can tell ourselves when we are going through a hard time is very different. And so I do think that where certain tools like grief movement come into play is that it’s you first. It’s you connecting to yourself first.

And it’s like a chicken or egg thing. You can find — I can connect with you, and through that connection, connect to myself. Or start with the self and find ways to rekindle the connection that I have lost for whatever reason. And that allows me now to connect to you. And it is a cycle that we have.

Reciprocity.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And something else you said, Maggie, you mentioned asking for help. And I think for a lot of people, asking for help is admitting a weakness or a failure.

But that’s not what it is. It’s a willingness to be vulnerable. But it’s really hard in the moment when everybody else’s life seems to be going on. It’s like, oh, their life is just continuing on, and mine has been shook to the foundation, in some cases. So how do you process that?

With that in mind, what did it look like? As you started going through this training, what was that first early experience of the training like? And when was there a moment — was there a moment for you that it clicked, maybe?

When I started the training, I was afraid that it would be cheesy and that it would not have the depth that I was craving, that I was searching for when I searched that phrase, mourning movement, because it’s very easy to just spurt out platitudes about finding love, and finding connection, and leave it at that.

Within the first class, it was clear to me that is not what it was. It was not surface level. And that was simply by virtue of the instructor, Paul, who is just so kind.

It was virtual, but his kindness and openness came through and allowed all of us in the class to be open as well. And then it was very practical in the sense that we practiced.

It wasn’t just a lecture, somebody saying, like I’m doing now, this is a thing. Believe me. It was, here, let’s go through this, through all these exercises together. And let’s observe how we feel.

I wonder if, maybe, as an example of that — I know in the column that’s in our Jan/Feb issue, we have some simple movements that are seated that we could go through. I’m wondering if maybe you could walk us through what that looks like. Or how would you talk through that too?

Absolutely. Absolutely. So the beautiful thing about grief movement is that the exercises are designed to be able to be done seated or standing, if you want. I think that sometimes people wonder, what if I just can’t do anything at all? And this modality allows you to meet yourself exactly where you are.

So if you are grieving, and you are lying in bed, can you sit up at the edge of your bed? Can you hum? Can you do belly breathing? Can you rock back and forth, find a little bit of movement? It is as simple as that.
There are two exercises, I guess we can call them, that I really leaned heavily on while my dad was in the hospital, and in hospice, and in the aftermath, and still today. So if I could lead you two through those?
Should we do it?

Yeah. So let’s just maybe sit away from the table a little bit. Hopefully, the sound will cooperate with us. So I’ll have you sit with your sit bones planted on the edge of the chair so you feel really stable.

Feet, flat on the floor. Hands, on your knees. Take a deep breath in. Deep breath out. And now, start making big circles with your chest, just rolling through at your own pace, thinking about opening the chest and the spine and closing yourself off again to the back.

For people who are just listening, we are essentially doing like a moving Cat Cow. But instead of just moving front to back, we are moving side to side as well to make big circles with our bodies.

When you feel ready, you can go in the other direction. And what worked about this for me is that I found myself really closing up and cocooning myself in my posture and closing myself off.

And I think that is, again, pretty typical in times of grief. And this gave me a chance to actually open my body. It would be a heart opener in yoga.

You can come to a stop when you’re ready. And it’s very simple but with the intention behind it of I am supporting myself, I am connecting to the Earth, I am settling into my body, I am taking deep breaths in and out as I form these spirals with my body, it just brings you back to Earth. It gets you out of your brain, gets you out of your worry, gets you out of your misery, and just back into your body.

And then this one is a lot less movement-y, but it’s something that I have really come to love. They’re called Love Taps. What you do is you take your fingertips and place them on your chest and just start tapping.

And while tapping on your chest, you state in “I am” form what you’re feeling. And so oftentimes, coming home from the hospital, I would sit at the edge of my bed and just use this as a way to connect so that I couldn’t say I’m fine.

This was just an opportunity to be honest with myself. And I could say, I’m worried. I’m sad. Or there were days when it was, I’m grateful. I am feeling a lot of love.

So it wasn’t always what we consider negative emotions. It was affirming to myself that I am having feelings. And sometimes that is the first step.

And it’s not about weakness. There’s no judgment. It’s not, I’m sad, and I need to get rid of it. It’s just, I’m sad. And that’s it, and it will pass. That’s almost a guarantee of life, even when it feels like it won’t. It might not feel better, but it will shift.

I would say, foundationally, the first exercise that we did, life began with breathing, and you started us with our breath. When you go all the way back to when we came into this world, breath to kick off life.
And then closely right after that, the second exercise, I don’t know if you did it on that order on purpose. But touch, what do they do with the baby? Once the baby is born, give it to the mother, touch, connection.
So granted, it was you doing it all to self. In those moments as you were talking, I just had this nostalgic vibe of birth. Then the touching, the words, affirmation, who am I? Identity, you look up to the first thing that you see. So that was surreal in that moment.

So what you did was you took a moment — you took an exercise, and within that moment, it created this reality of this outer body experience, but allowed me to reflect in that moment. So I just wanted to share what I went through.

That’s awesome. That’s beautiful. And I’ll note that the Love Tap is something you can do with people. The Love Taps are something that you can do in a reflective form.

So David, you and I would both be tapping. And you would give your “I am” statement, and I would repeat it back to you, “You are,” which is one more affirmation of your being, of your existence. And I really don’t think we can get enough of that.

That we’re here, that we’re still here. One thing you said also in there, Maggie, that hit me is this wasn’t even after you lost your dad. This was in the process of losing your dad.

So these are tools because grief happens often before a loss because in some cases, we know it’s coming because of a diagnosis or whatever that looks like, so knowing that we have these tools there to help us through those hard days because that is its own type of grief.

You’re grieving before the loss in that case, so having tools to help us move through hard and difficult times because we are all going to go through them. And I’ve talked about this, I think, a little on the podcast.

When my nephew was sick, it was also like we knew for a year that there was an inevitable loss that was going to happen. So what are those ways that we could have, in hindsight, processed that differently in those moments or worked through it differently in those moments? So it’s really amazing to know that these tools are out there if you’re open to them and want to use them.

It’s all an invitation. There’s nothing here that says, this is the way, the only way, the best way. It is an invitation that if you — like I said before, if you want to be an active participant in your own healing, you can be. You don’t have to be.

The adage, time heals all wounds, it exists for a reason. Time can heal most wounds. I would edge that a little bit. But time alone is not going to do it.

Well, one thing also that I really love about this is that, for some people, movement is how they deal with life’s daily stresses. And so then to know that this is not just daily stress, but it’s an acute stress that can happen with grief, that you have that, you already know movement is a tool for you, an important tool.
We talked about this in another episode. Movement can help with mental health and well being and all these things. So to know that if you’re already tapping into movement in that way in your life daily, it helps you, to know that it’s also there.

But it doesn’t have to be in the same way that you do it on a daily basis. There’s other ways to use movement to bring it into your life. I really love thinking about these various ways that movement can support us through life’s inevitable waves, as you talked about them, the ups and downs that life will bring.

Yeah. I want to throw this one out there for our listeners that are out there on that ocean right now. And they fell off that surfboard, and the waves are crashing on them, and they’re in deep grief right now.
If you were to lend your hand — you’re up on your surfboard, and every now and then, you might fall off yours. But if you were to lend your hand to pull them back up out of this dark time, what words of encouragement, from your own experience — and I know it’s not a one size fits all.

But how would you connect with these listeners or that listener that might need to hear this right now of saying what you just said, you are enough. You have tools. You have resources to help bring them out of that dark place.

Yeah. I honestly don’t know that I would not offer words of encouragement. I think I would offer the reminder that they are still here because sometimes that is like the first piece of what we need. We can lose ourselves in a loss.

And so just the reminder that you are here. And then ask them, what can you do? Can you breathe? Can you take a slightly deeper breath? That can really do so much.

Can you hum? Can you sway? Can you rock? You don’t have to do more than recognize your presence.
Yeah. And that’s key, to be present with it.

Present is the gift.

Like we’ve said it before. Yes, for sure.

And we can use movement to disconnect from our presence too. I love movement in all its forms. I have written about it and talked about it.

It can be such a powerful tool for healing, for coping, for living, for changing our bodies, but also changing our minds and uplifting our spirits. And we can use movement to compartmentalize, to dissociate, to try, not successfully in the long term, to erase the things that are hurting us.

And so I would invite people to be aware of that as well. If you do use movement for your mental health and your mental being, how exactly are you using it? Maybe if you always go for a run with your headphones in and you’re listening to music, maybe do a run without it.

What are the ways that you can add just another element of presence into your movement practice, especially if you want to use it for healing?

I like that.

Yeah, it’s a great way to sum that up, I think. There’s other ways to do this. Maggie, did we cover everything? Is there anything that we missed when it came to grief movement? And anything you want to make sure we cover before we sign off today?

Mostly, I just want people to know that there is no right or wrong way to grieve. Whatever you feel, it just is. It is what you feel, and you don’t need to be stuck in it forever. Yeah.

Mic drop moment. You ready? Have you seen the movie Inside Out?

Yes, not the new one.

You got to go see —

I know.

Inside Out 2.

Well, you remember all the emotions?

You don’t make me name them.

No, no, no.

OK.

[LAUGHTER]

Well, now you got to know the emotion if you want to know the one that you want to champion out of those emotions.

I — that’s a really good question. I would champion sadness. Sadness was an emotion that was in the cast there? Yeah. I would champion sadness. I think that our sadness can teach us a lot. And we don’t have to be best friends with her. But it’s there. And what can we learn from it? Often, we’re sad because something’s been lost, and it was something that brought us joy and love and different things. I don’t know.

That was good. And everybody probably anticipating, she’s about to say happy or joy. No, I’m glad.
Sadness, that’s dope.

Yeah, it’s a good one. Every emotion has a place, and they work together.

They do.

I don’t know. It’s like a solar system. All the pieces are.

That’s why it’s such a great movie. You see how —

You need them all. They’re there for a reason.

They’re there for a reason.

Even if we’re uncomfortable, we shouldn’t try to erase any of them or pretend —

That they don’t exist.

— they’re not there. Yeah.

Yeah.

Be with them. I love it.

Alright. Maggie, well, thank you so much for coming in and talking about your column. I want people to make sure that they should read your column. It’s the Strong Body, Strong Mind column in each issue of Experience Life.

Most issues, I should say. They’re mostly there. But specifically, our Jan, Feb, and March, April, 2025 issues, you’re going to find those columns. You can also find them at experiencelife.lifetime.life. And if they want to learn more about grief movement, they can go to pauldennistontraining.com. Anywhere else,
Maggie, you want to point us?

I think that’s a great start. And people can always reach out to me. I’m easy to find online. So if you have questions or just want to share your story, I’m here.

There we go.

I appreciate you sharing yours today.

Yeah, thanks for being with us and sharing, Maggie.

Thank you so much.

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