Grief Unleashed: Finding Healing, Resilience, and Meaning with Dina Bell LaRoche
What if grief isn’t a problem to fix, but a doorway into healing, resilience, and deeper connection? In this episode of the You World Order Showcase Podcast, Jill Hart sits down with grief doula, author, and leadership coach Dina Bell LaRoche. Dina shares her powerful journey and the work she’s doing through Grief Unleashed and The Grieving Place to normalize grief, transform loss into growth, and equip coaches, professionals, and families with compassionate tools for life’s hardest transitions.
Together, they explore:
- Why grief is a natural human response—not a disorder.
- The connection between grief, sports, and resilience.
- How the “Petals and Pebbles” practice reframes life’s highs and lows.
- What it means to be a grief doula and how to truly “witness” someone in pain.
- Why workplaces and policies must evolve to better support the grieving process.
If you’ve ever felt the weight of loss—or wanted to better support others in theirs—this episode will leave you with hope, language, and a deeper understanding of how grief can shape us into more compassionate humans.
🔗 Learn more about Dina’s work: griefunleashed.ca
🔗 Join her Substack community: https://substack.com/@thegrievingplace
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Transcript
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: What if grief wasn't something to fix or suppress, but a doorway into healing, resilience, and deeper connection?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Today's guest has dedicated her life to normalizing grief and helping people find hope through life's most difficult transitions. Hi, and welcome to the UWorld Order Showcase Podcast, where we feature life, health, transformational coaches, and spiritual entrepreneurs stepping up to be the change they seek in the world.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I'm your host, Jill Hart, the coaches alchemist, on a mission to help coaches
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: and entrepreneurs amplify their voice, monetize their mission, and get visible, leveraging Substack and podcasts. Today, we are speaking with Dina Bell LaRoche.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And Dina is a PCC ICF-accredited coach with over 2,500 coaching hours and a certified ethanologist specializing in leadership, grief, and change management. Through her work as a grief doula, author, speaker, and founder of Grief Unleashed and The Grieving Place, she helps individual coaches and organizations
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: understand loss in a way that is compassionate, hopeful, and deeply human. Her Grief Companion Program equips coaches and mental health professionals to support clients through transitions.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And while her book, Grief.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Unleashed, and workshops continue to ripple comfort and wisdom across the globe. Her mission is simple, yet profound, to alleviate suffering one tier at a time. Welcome to the show, Dana, it's great to have you here.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Oh, thank you, Jill. It's great to be with you.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Okay, so I'm gonna ask you the big question, are you ready?
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): I'm ready.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: What's the most significant thing, in your opinion, as individuals, we can do to make an impact on how the world is going?
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Mmm… Well, I think, … You know, one of the things that we have control over is ourselves.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And I contend that so much of the pain that's in the world is because people have been conditioned to suppress, not express, you know, their grief, their anger, the natural emotions that arise in us. So I believe that if there was a lot more compassion in the world, if there was patience.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): afforded to people who are navigating life transition. And if we had policies and procedures and systems that were socially just, I think we would see a radical reimagining of what's happening in the world right now.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yep, I agree, totally. And I… I'm going to bring this up, because we were talking about it a little bit beforehand. You also have another business, Sports Law.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And we were talking about how well the two go together, because sports…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: In some ways, it's not so great, and in other ways, it's, like, so perfect, in that
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: In sports, we…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: have young people who train, and there's the grief that comes from loss, or not achieving the things that
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: are perceived to them as loss, though, you know, I admire people that are willing to dedicate so much of their energy to perfecting a skill, and to
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: To be able to overcome that grief with
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: the tools that you provide, but also, on the other hand, people who are grieving loss over other things in their lives when they get involved in athletics, it tends to help them have a space that they can release stuff. So I love the yin and the yang of what you do. It's so beautiful.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Well, thank you for that. Yeah, I've been working in sport for about 34 years now, and I, along with my business partner, make it possible for about 20-plus humans now to do the kind of work that we do, so we offer consulting.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): From legal, to leadership, to good governance, risk management, and as a leadership coach.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): long before I was doing and specializing in grief and loss, I was advocating for a more humanistic approach to the design and delivery of sport. And so, I've served on 5 Olympic teams, so I've been at the highest level, and as a parent of now three adults, but when they were younger.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): my husband and I would be, you know, volunteering on the field of play, to support a, you know, a really positive experience for these young, young minds and bodies. And…
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): as I was deepening my practice as a coach to go deeper in the realm of grief and loss, the field of play offered me a
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): perfect living laboratory to explore people's attachment to an outcome. And that's what grief is. You know, when our attachment is severed, the natural, universal, response
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): is grief, is to grieve something. So we condition people at a very, very young age on how they ought to behave, what is their relationship with loss. And sadly, I can locate this in our North American culture, we tend to have an aversion.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): to any form of emotional expression that we might deem as being excessive or not excessive enough. So it's very fascinating to kind of look at the world of sport and understand
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): our relationship with grief, you wouldn't normally hear people in the context of sport talking about grief. They wouldn't say it that way, right?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: No, they don't, but we really should, because it's all about grief. One side is going to experience grief. They're not going to get the outcome that they wanted, and we need to work and be better at helping people
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: As you said, Accept whatever outcome comes, and not be like, It shouldn't be so personal.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Right. I guess is…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yes, I know there are people that get paid to… to perform, and their performance… this works in, you know, not just in sports, but across the…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Across the board, in terms of, like.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Generating an income in life, and… and having to be really…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You're best at everything, and every day you have to bring your very best, and, you know, that's just not…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: As humans, we're not capable of that.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): They're gonna be up days and down days.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Just the way that… nature works.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Well, I think it's interesting that, you know, we're landing on, you know, the world of sport. My high hope would be, as more and more athletes are reclaiming their agency, and they're speaking about mental health, mental health includes being able to express
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): our grief after loss, right? It's to be able to talk about the cost or the toll it takes to perform on demand. And my sense is that, you know, as we start to normalize this, and we have people that we look up to as grief advocates.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): for a healthier expression of grief, we're going to be able to then condition the younger people, and maybe some of the older ones, too, to say, oh, you know, I'm not being weak. In fact, if I'm expressing my emotion and crying, that might actually be the more natural way for me to process this loss.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah. Animals shake.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: humans don't… I mean, if you walked up to somebody and they were just standing there shaking, you… you might have, like.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: thought they lost their mind. But we… we have natural responses to situations, and when we start trying to
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: make them something that they're not, or trying to suppress them. It has… Profound effects on our bodies.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Yeah, exactly. You know, most of the time, people think that grief is only an emotion.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): When, in fact, it's an omni-experience, right? There's the bio, psycho, social, spiritual, right, moral kind of review of our entire, entire life, depending on the attachment we have to
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): the person, or in many cases, you know, grief accompanies non-finite losses. So think of when your children leave home.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): There's a lot of grief at the reordering of the family unit, as you knew it for, you know, decades, right?
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): There's grief related to the ending of relationships in divorce, for instance. There's pet loss. There's the loss associated when we move from our family home. So there's all kinds of losses, both
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): The finite losses, death-related, and then there's the non-finite losses, and it's really helpful for people to understand that over our lifespan, we accumulate all of these losses, and if… and if they don't know that what they've experienced is grief-worthy.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Where does that?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I agree.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): go, right?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And it says a lot about our society that we have to be told that it's pain-worthy.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: If you're feeling pain, that's grief. It's okay, it's natural, and we need to be able to express it, and we need to learn how to receive information about people in pain or in grief.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I know you're a grief doula. What does that look like, and how does that…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Help facilitate these kinds of conversations.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Well, it's so interesting, you know, you're a coach, I'm a coach. In the early days of me doing this, I'm taking you back almost a decade now.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): I was using the word grief coach, and if you look at the ICF on the drop-down menu, there isn't the word grief and coach combined. So I think I… I was on to something, if you will. They… they talk about life coaching.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): But that's a panacea of different, you know, life experiences, if you will. I am a subject matter expert in the field, in the domain of grief and coaching.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And the word coach, though, and a lot of us as coaches are starting to reimagine, even that container feels too small to talk about the nature of the work that we're doing. So I kind of traverse the coaching, so I will ask people, do you have a goal that you are hoping to, either accomplish or experience with me
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): In this work.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And I would find that certain types really respond to that.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): But other types need a more… a softer approach.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): So the word doula came to me because doula means to be a servant, too. And we have birth doulas, we have death doulas, and my specialty, my passion, is really working with people in their grief experience. It could be supporting people who are dying, and the grief that is a natural part of their experience as they see the…
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And coming near.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): it's also supporting their family and friends in that process, and then the postlude, right? Like, what happens after your person dies? And because, and I'm going to stress this, because grief is a natural human
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Normal, healthy expression of our attachment that's lost.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): It doesn't find itself into, often, therapy and other mental health providers are not trained often in grief modalities, because it isn't a pathology, except for a very small portion of the humans on the planet that might have additional complications in their grief.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): So there is a diagnosis in the DSM called prolonged grief disorder.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And those of us who are certified thanatologists and a growing group of people.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Kind of bristle at describing grief as being disordered.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Much like we wouldn't describe complications in childbirth as being disordered. We would say there's
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): complications, but we wouldn't necessarily pathologize it. So I think there's some tension now with the addition of grief in the DSM. It affords people the legitimacy to go to therapy.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): But if your therapist isn't trained in grief and loss because it hasn't been pathologized, they're like, I'm not sure, I'm gonna go back, and let's go revisit your childhood, which is what most therapy does, is it wants to understand your foundation, right? Your meaning-making, your attachments, how many losses you've gone through, if you've gone through adverse childhood experiences.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): As coaches, we know.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): our focus, typically, is in the now and in the future. But when you go to a therapist, they're taking the pain that you're bringing, which is now pain, and having you go back so they can map, you know, your system. And so it's so often when people come to me, Jill, they're coming…
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And feeling so relieved, I often get the, well, an hour with you feels like 10 years of therapy, because I'm helping them deal with the pain in the present, which is located in their heart, their head, their bodies, right? And giving them, like, practices, witnessing their experience.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): often after a few sessions. I mean, I've had clients who have had 6 to 10 sessions, they're feeling so much better, and then they come back.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): 2 or 3 years later, feeling, like, off-kilter. And they often feel like they're going insane, because they're like, I felt so much better.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And my response to them is, you will continue to grieve for the rest of your life.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): For instance, if your partner dies, your children are grieving the loss of their parent, right?
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Well, when they get married, do you not think they're going to have a sudden, temporary upsurge in grief or a stag?
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Because now their parent isn't going to walk them down their aisle or be present to them. So if we can understand and normalize the fact that this pain that you're feeling is something that you will learn to carry.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): For the rest of your life, then you lose this need to have an outcome and to have it be done on time.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Does that make sense?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Makes total sense. I've witnessed people losing parents, and…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And there's, like, this expectation of, are you crying? Are you crying too much? Are you not crying at all? Are you mad?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Are you irrationally happy about something? I mean, it's like, there's supposed to be rules for grieving.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: aren't any rules. Everybody ex… goes through these experiences
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: individually, just like birth, and I… I love that you're a doula, because I… I was a… I was a…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: goat doula.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Oh, I love that.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: for a lot of years. I actually was trained to be a people doula, but I ended up helping goats give birth. But it just means to come alongside of, and, you know, we live in a culture that doesn't have
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Friends in the way that maybe friends used to develop over years in… in other societies in….
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Hmm.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: In the countries that we live in, as a society, we've dealt with each other differently.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: we're so transient now, and have been for the last 40 years, that it's hard for those kinds of relationships to grow, and then you don't have somebody that can just say… that can just be present for you. And a lot of times when people are grieving, they just need somebody to be present.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Oh, absolutely. The word I use is, witnessing.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Can I witness you? Can I create a brave space where you feel seen, heard, met, acknowledged?
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): witnessed. And we know from the grief literature that the reason why
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): It works to… to… to be witness, not to… not to solve my problem of grief, because it is this natural, you know, human experience.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Well, when you… It's not a problem.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Exactly, it's not a problem. When you're witnessing me, I am seeing you, and I'm feeling mirrored in my experience.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): That is the cathartic moment. So I can cry on my own, and the crying is helpful, but it's partial. When someone else that I trust can actually create that safe space where I can show up.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And cry, or rant, or rage, right?
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): That is the sweet nectar. So, part of what I do is I teach people how to tap into their compassionate muscles. If you're a coach, you know, it's helping you understand your own life losses, because we cannot accompany someone where we ourselves dare not travel.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): So therapists know this, right? And coaches, you know, who are interested in this work.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): who are being drawn to this idea that they can actually companion someone through their grief experience, the first thing I do is take them through their own loss map.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Have an inventory of all the accumulations of your losses, and have clarity on all that you've, you know, you've packed into your invisible grief backpack.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And there's so much more compassion available to us when we start to make this inventory of my parents. Maybe there's the death of a parent, for sure, grandparents when they're younger, right? There could… likely a divorce, 50% of the population doesn't stay together.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): sibling loss, right? Parents who've moved a lot, so there was this unstable environment.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): pet loss. So kids go through a lot of these life losses.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And we tend to diminish them. They're invisible for most of us, but they do impact
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): how we relate to future losses. It's a predictor, actually, right? So it's helpful for us to have some of this, you know, grief language that normalizes our experience and humanizes it, right?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, it… Nobody gets through childhood without being traumatized.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Right? This is just, like, it just doesn't happen. And I… I think…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: what I love about coaches is that they focus on helping you deal with the now, to get…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: to become able to function. Because at some point, we can get so crippled by all of the trauma and the grief.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: That, you know, trauma generates grief.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: no matter big trauma, little trauma, there's… there's a grief component attached to it that a lot of us don't understand how to process together. And…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And when you're talking about that, it's like, if you don't take care of that for yourself.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You can't help others, and if you're a therapist, and you're just like, here, let's rummage around and all this stuff…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I honestly think a lot of times therapists make things worse for people.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Than actually helping them Cope with where they are at, where they're in so much pain.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: That they can't really function, because that's usually when people end up going to a therapist.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Yeah, you're so right. I would say that, you know, therapists have supervision, they learn the art of reflective practice.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Huh. ….
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And they understand that they're human, so is the therapist healing themselves by doing the necessary work, ensuring that they have these really healthy boundaries in place so that they're not, you know, at risk of
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Transferring, right? Or countertransference is what we say in the therapeutic world.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): So, our shadows that we have inside of us are not coming up in therapy if I'm the person who's supposed to be creating that safe space, right? I would also say Henry Newman's work, Newman's work is really beautiful, because he talks about wounded healers.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And I love that term, Jill, because it speaks to my why.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): You know, as someone who carried a life loss, my younger sister died, tragically, 24 and a half years ago. We were both young moms, and that death experience really changed everything for me. There was the before Tracy had cancer and the after. There was the before she died and after she died. And…
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): That has inspired my work in this space. So I would say, those of us who come to the profession of wanting to be doulas, or companions, or coaches, or healers.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): we often are inspired by a life experience that changed us, that cracked us right open. And so, I… I do believe that when…
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): what I always ask people, what's your intention? What is bringing you to me? And I do explain my scope of practice. I love that you said all trauma carries grief, but not all grief is traumatic. So I can work with someone
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): at two levels, someone who is not traumatized by their grief, but still feeling stuck and lethargic and, who am I now, and doing some of that deeper work.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): I also, because of my training, feel very comfortable accompanying people who've been traumatized by their… the death experience, or by the grief experience.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): But I would say most coaches or therapists, for instance, who aren't trained in that, it's good to know who to refer to, right? There's lots of trauma-informed and grief-informed mental health providers, and there's a growing community of grief coaches who feel comfortable
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): you know, traversing the therapy landscape, the grief landscape, into this realm that is now growing. It's not just the domain of therapy, and therapy is looking at coaching and saying, oh.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): we're going to borrow some of the practices from coaching, because it's actually healthy. So it's more of a mixed bag now, I'm seeing. I think both domains are looking at each other and saying, hey, we should be able to link arms
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): to support the person, we don't have to compete with each other, right? But ontologically, I think it's important for us to know what our personal why is, and what drives us as
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): care providers, and then to be really clear about what is my training, what's my competence, and do I feel skillful in dealing with this human?
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): who's in front of me, who's in pain? Because that's typically what is bringing them to therapy. For us as coaches, it's not always that. It's this, I'm yearning to go over there, and I'm feeling stuck here, can you help me? Right?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It is a beautiful thing in my worldview that.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): That there's kind of a blending of….
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Of healers across the board, even in the health realm, like the physical health realm.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: with, naturopaths and regular MDs, and they're… you can see the blending. There's still, you know, staunch people that are just, like.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's one or the other, but more and more we're starting to see there's… there's a blending of practices, which I think is beneficial for everyone.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You know, everyone is gonna experience times when they need a doctor, or they need a therapist, or they need somebody to just help them move beyond where they're at, because they just don't see the other options open to them.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And it's not….
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Not because of some defect on their part, it's just that sometimes we… we have…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Done as much as we can, and we just can't see that next step.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And I think that, you know, coaches and therapists and doulas and people that come alongside you can help you explore and expand your options, which is often
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: what people need.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Exactly.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Can I ask you a question? And this is going to show my ignorance, but what is thanantology? I have actually never heard that term before.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): It is not showing your ignorance, it is a very frequent question. I didn't know what thanatology was until I started to immerse myself in the wild, wonderful world that is grief and loss.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): So, Thanos is the god of death, and ology is the study of. So, when you put it together, it's really the study of death and loss, and I would offer life and living. Because when you awaken to…
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): The impermanence, right, of our being.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): you know that you start living much more purposefully. And this is why people like Viktor Frankl, that I cite in my book, and other giants, you know, in the field of psychology, but also ancient wisdom. You know, in our more modern expression as North American culture, influenced by European, you know, culture and
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): and policy.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): We have this tendency of wanting to be linear, and wanting to solve problems, and wanting to be productive.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): But when we start thinking about the conditions of the human heart, And things like…
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): oh, this is impermanent. We are not going to be here forever. I'm going to die, you're going to die, my children are going to die, my children's children are going to die. So what is my relationship
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): with loss.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And if I don't meditate, or practice or start to be more mindful of that, no wonder, you know, when loss rips off the veils of the heart, right? We start wondering, like, who am I now, and how do I function
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): In a world that wants to have me deny my experience, that wants me to go back and be a good girl and produce and consume.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): This is the quandary we're in. So when we look at other cultures, I'm thinking of Mexicans and the Day of the Dead, their relationship with grief and loss
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): is vastly different than, I would say, what we as North Americans have been conditioned to adopt as our dominant mindset.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): So the field of thanatology help, you know, invites us to explore everything from as ancient to Aristotle.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): You know, first, know thyself, to more current contemporary grief and bereavement strategies that helps us understand
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): That we don't have to deny and move on from our laws. We can learn to grow alongside it, incorporate that story through continuing bonds, right? Which is such a beautiful theory.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): and allow…
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): our life to be enriched, not in spite of the loss, but because of it. And that requires a community. So what I'm seeing now is a general, like, lens of, of, …
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): of, isolation.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And that, to me, is like during the pandemic, you know, when people were having to say goodbye to their person online, on Zoom, people weren't allowed to go to the funeral, which is a ritual that is full of meaning, right? Because we have community
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Linking arms with us when we are at our most vulnerable, which is in the acute days after someone dies.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): So, unless we, you know, we start to ask ourselves.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Are these policies, do they make sense? Think about the bereavement policy. Most of them in Canada, we've been fighting against this, but 3 to 5 days, right? You get 5 days for a child and 3 for a sibling.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Who made that up? It doesn't make any sense to think that 3 to 5 days… why did we make it up? We made it up because we want people to go back to producing and consuming.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): But life doesn't work like that. Attachment doesn't work like that. Our hearts don't work like that. So the real risk, especially when I'm dealing with executives, is
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): you say you have these values of equanimity and compassion and respect. Well, how are you using those values when people are at their most vulnerable, which is when they are bereaved?
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): You want to see loyalty?
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Start treating your people really well, and ensure that your bereavement policies are matching your values. That will breed a level of loyalty that you cannot buy. That's why this field is so important.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It really is. People don't realize how expensive it is to lose employees, and if you fought somebody who's grieving, they're not productive.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: They may show up, but their brain is just, like, not there.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Exactly.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You have so much emotion, you just have to process, and best done
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: In… in a safe environment, not… Not having to make decisions
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: When your… your whole soul, and it really is a soul-level experience when you lose somebody, it… you just…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's worse than being really sick. Your brain just isn't able to process stuff.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Yeah, there's actually a great book, for your listeners, called The Grieving Brain by Mary Frances O'Connor, and she talks about what happens to our brain. Like, we have to rewire a lot of these routines
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): You know, I've been with my high school sweetheart now, we're married and have 3 children, like, 38 years. When he dies, it's gonna be a whole…
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): or I died before him, is going to be a whole reordering of everything, because we've learned how to be with each other for 38 years on the planet, right?
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): So, the understanding, the neurobiology of grief and loss, and the implications of bringing someone too soon, so what typically happens? They get a doctor's note, and they're off for 3 months.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And they're feeling even more isolated and rejected. But if we flip the script, and we created caring cultures that equipped people with the language to say, you know, Jill.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): I just want you to know I'm really sad on your behalf. I was… went to the funeral, and I just want you to know that I'm here for you. So I'd like to know, is there anything I can do for you today to help you in this moment? Right? Like, give people the language.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Understand, I use the Love Languages by Dr. Carrie Chapman as an example of understanding people's behavioral preferences, their love language. And it's a really fun way, fun.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): to help people understand, like, what would be most helpful to the person who's grieving. So you can do that love language, you know, little map, and get people to…
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): feel a little bit more comfortable saying to people, here's what I need from you. You bring me flowers, that doesn't do anything. It's my basement love language. But if you mow my lawn, you are gold to me.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): So it's just kind of helpful, because we don't have this language, and Black now, when we were Black, well, it doesn't mean anything, right? It used to mean that this was… this person is black.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): We don't have these little hacks, if you will, that communicates to people
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): that I'm sad. Instead, we turn to social media, and we know that that tends to exasperate the problem, not help it. So, I feel, like, really strongly that as coaches, especially if we incorporate this lost literacy into our practice, it's like another lens.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And once you have this lens, Jill, it opens up your heart, and I feel we are so much more skillful in helping our clients navigate change, which is what we do. But we also know that our clients come to us, and then they're in the arc of the change, and then they roll back in. Why?
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Because they are attached.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): to their beliefs, their practices, their rituals, their habits. And if we can teach them and do a ritual around that, help them unattach from some of those limiting thoughts and beliefs, that's the world of coaching.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): I believe that coaches can then, like, expand their capacity if they learn the language of grief, because they can work with clients in a much more agile way and express
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): like, deep compassion for how difficult it is to move from this way of being to what you're longing to do. And I can tell you, as someone who's worked with athletes, it works!
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Because the athletes are so used to, like.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): the command and control, and you, you know, you just have to do it head down. But when I work with them, we… we are a lot more intentional, a lot softer, and we… we bring in
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Grief practices to help them unattach from their teammates, from their routines.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): from being known as, you know, Team Canada, and in that process, their ability to mourn the who they were before, you know, they stopped competing becomes more available to them, right? Does that make sense?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Makes total sense. It's probably why you see, like, professional athletes, they… they stop competing. They either want to hang on to it long beyond when they should, for their own health's sake, or they feel like
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: they're lost.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You can see it in… In famous people, it happens… quite often.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Actually, Michael Phelps, who is one of your, like, shining stars, right? The most winning, you know, human on the planet, with, I don't know how many medals he received as a swimmer, he talks about that very thing, about being lost.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): After he retired from the pool.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And we have to understand, like, these little people…
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): From the moment they were really small, they were vocationally devoting their life to the singular pursuit of making the Olympic team, or the Paralympic team.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): So no wonder it hurts, right?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's… It… It's like becoming divorced.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: When you divorce a spouse, There's… there's stuff that leads up to it.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: That causes the friction, but it is a small death.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Because now you have to rewire your brain. You're used to certain patterns. These people, they spend their whole life, I mean, from the moment they wake up in the morning to whatever they eat, whatever their recreational things are, which is very limited for… for…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: The athletes that perform on that level, it's just like their whole… their whole life, their whole being is devoted to this
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: One singular practice.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: They're like priests.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: you know, to the exclusion of, like, taking care of themselves. They have a team that.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Yeah.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: That takes care of them so that they can just be this machine at what they're doing.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And then when they stop, it's like… Who am I?
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Exactly.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: How do I live?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Because they don't know how. They….
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Exactly. And what you just said, that is true of anything. Like, when we retire, I deal with people who retire, and they're like, who am I now? I thought this was going to be a lot more fun, but I'm struggling because of the routine, and the people, and the paycheck, and the roles and responsibilities, right, that came with this title.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And so, what you're pointing to, which is really beautiful, it's like, how do I navigate life in transition?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: get….
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): That's the question, right? So how do you navigate life in transition?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You hire Dina.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Very… Read the book!
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Yeah, it's right here.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Tell us a little bit about your book, and also about, Petals and….
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Oh, the Petals and Pebbles practice? Yeah, so, so when people join my Substack, and there's a… like, most of my substack is free. The only time it's…
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): you know, there's a little cost for the year membership. It's really for grief professionals who want to, like, hone their coping practices, etc. So when people join, I've curated this little practice that was so helpful to me. I'm still a student at university taking courses in thanatology.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): There was this beautiful practice called Petals and Pebbles, so it just… it invites us to be looking at all these things on our… in our lifespan, so from zero to where I am now.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And being able to name all these things that I would consider a pedal.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): So these milestone moments, right? So for me, getting married, having my babies, right, graduating from university a couple of times, like, all of these things.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): But then there's also the hardships. What are the pebbles? And the pebbles, some of them were really small.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): like, not getting picked for something, but some of them were big, like the death of my dad, and the death of my sister, and smaller the death of my grandparents, but still present. So when we lay this out, and I show… I have an example of it, it's like, oh…
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Life is both. It's not just losses. It's the petals and the pebbles, and they each kind of enrich each other, right? So that's a really helpful healing practice. …
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And my book, you know, I wrote this really as a love story between two sisters. My own experience of
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): learning and discovering. I'm a journalist by trade, that's… that was what I learned in university, and wanting to help people understand what happens to us when we are bereaved, because the literature just really wasn't, out there
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): in an accessible way, right? I was having this experience where I was being rewarded for being stoic and strong and helping to raise money to, you know, keep Tracy's memory alive. And that was beautiful, but on parallel tracks, you know, the conditioning of just doing grief
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Ella Stoic and quiet and, you know, not too much.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): That, too, I found, very complicating. So, the book, you know, raises money for bereavement charities that are near and dear to my heart, and I hope it does bring a form of cathartic experience and a sense of, like.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Ugh, relief is usually what people feel, Jill, when they have a conversation with me.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So, do you coach one-on-one, or do you have a course, or how does all of that look?
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): It's multiple, so I offer… on my website, I talk about the different ways that I support people, so one-on-one, for sure. I also do families, and there's some levels of complication, because if one person dies in a family system.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): that family system is no longer the family system. So people have to reorient, and because our coping styles are different, right? Some people need to talk, some people need to run, some people need to bake, some people need to punch.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Right? A boxing match, like, everybody's coping style is different, so…
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): So I work with families. I also do a lot of training, so I have, you know, different training programs. More and more, I'm really on fire when it comes to being with other coaches like you, and I… that's just my tribe, so I have, you know, a few offerings that's more specific for coaches.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): My favorite one is the Grief Companion Program, where I take a group of coaches, it's a smaller group, no more than 12, and we take deep dive over, a five and a half month period, where we just explore the grief companion model that, that I've developed, and…
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And then I do other things, like life review. If someone's dying and they need the service of a grief doula, I help them
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): review their life story, and then help them write it. So it's a keepsake for, you know, the people that they love. I'm also connected in the US, there's something called HelpText, and so I'm one of their champions, and I would love for people to have immediate access, right? And we know that it costs money.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And someone's time to be able to support people.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): far outweigh the need that is there. So, help text is a really cool, modality.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): that allows people to sign up. It's very inexpensive, I think it's like $80 a year, and you can let people… let the tech spot know what kind of death or loss you're struggling with, and you start to have… receive texts on the loss, and I've… I tested it, of course, because I wanted to know if it was…
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): really helpful, and I found it, even though it was a few years after my dad's death.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): I found it really helpful to receive a text that felt very…
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): personalized, customized to my unique experience, and had me reflect a little bit more about the whole that was still in my heart, and also what I most appreciate about my dad. That's the gift of grief, right? There's grief on one side, and there's love on the other side of this coin, right?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: some memories. I… I had, …
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Simby, my husband's dad passed a couple years ago, and we had hospice who came to our house, and … but they still, two years later, are sending us… periodically, we just get a little note from them saying, you know, we were thinking about you, we remember your dad.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Yeah.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's hugely helpful to have support like that.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): And I think those text messages have got to be….
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: really helpful for somebody that's going through it, even further out into the experience, because we… we want to… we want people to just, you know, get your grieving done, and…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Be done! You've got a week!
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And you should be back and functioning. You know, we were talking about the clothing? People used to dress in black? It was for a full year. You wore your grieving clothes for a full year, and people knew it was a signal to society that this person is in grief. Be nice! They're going through a thing.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: We don't do that anymore, so, you know, just…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: In your mind, when you're talking to people, they're going through a thing.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Be nice!
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Right? That could be a hashtag.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Exactly. I really appreciate you coming and joining us today, Dina.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): I really enjoyed connecting with you, Jill, thank you.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: People can find you on your website. You want to give them both your substack and your…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Your regular website?
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Sure. So, for people who are not aware of Substack, basically it's people are migrating towards theirs so that they can share their newsletter. So, it's my newsletter, and you can…
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Find me just by going to griefunleashed.ca, and if you want to sign up to my newsletter, you just click and it'll bring you to Substack. As I said, there's a lot of… there's a free option, and … and that shares all kinds of information and knowledge.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Sometimes people want to…
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): have a free consultation, so I offer a booking, and people can reach out to me, and you can find that also at griefunleashed.ca. I take all, you know, calls. If people are courageous enough to reach out, I will…
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): have a little session with them. It's 20 minutes, I think, is what I offer, and to see whether or not this is a good fit, or if I think that maybe something else might be more suitable for them.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): So, those are some of the ways that people can reach out to me.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I love it, I love it. Thank you so much for joining us today.
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::Dina - The Grieving Place (She/Elle): Thanks for having me.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: To learn more about Dina, and to get her book, and explore more about petals and pebbles, the practice, please consider subscribing to her Substack, which you can find at The Grieving Place.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: at The Grieving Place on Substack, or her website, griefunleashed.ca, and we'll be sure to put those links in the show notes below. Thank you for tuning in with us today. If you have a podcast or you're interested in starting one, be sure to reach out to us at support at heartlifecoach.com. We love helping spiritual entrepreneurs.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And coaches amplify their voice and monetize their mission, and offer a variety of ways to do this, leveraging Substack. Join us for our next episode as we share what others are doing to raise the global frequency, and remember, change begins with you. You have all the power to change the world. Start today and get this.
