0:00:03 - Briar
Hello everyone. Welcome. I am Briar Harvey. This is the Neurodiversity Media Network. Today, we are here to talk about how to have hard conversations. If you've joined us, in the previous episode in this series, we talked a lot about how grief plays a part in us not being able to carry on conversations. So today we're going to dive into grief and how it's the thing that we don't talk about, how it plays into our conversations and how we get better about talking about it. Yes, That's what's key, right? Is that people get better about talking about grief because they're terrible?
0:01:01 - Dr. Bird
Yeah, Well, i think more than that. It's that we get used to being willing to talk about grief, right? I think one of the things that I've really been thinking about recently is that in the last six months or so is that if you've lived past the age of five, you're grieving something. You have experienced some sort of loss that has led you to some sort of grief. It's likely that that is unresolved grief. I think this idea is so interesting. I'm so glad we're talking about it because it all came about. For me. It really hit home during the pandemic. So I've done grief and loss work almost my whole adult life. My dad committed suicide when I was six, and so that started my grieving process. My mother started the first suicide survivor support group in Utah shortly after. I think it was like 1982, i think, when she started Season Suicide Support Group And no one was talking about suicide here at all. I mean 1980.
0:02:16 - Briar
Right.
0:02:17 - Dr. Bird
My dad was an LDS man, mormon. For those of you who don't know Latter-day Saints, right, he was Native American. And the pressure is so heavy here in Utah Actually, i'm sitting here in Utah because I'm here for my Goddaughter's graduation And the idea of grief is so complicated, and especially when you're grieving something that is taboo, right, and it really struck me during the pandemic that part of what was happening. Number one is that we had been our regular ways of grief had been stripped from us, right? So people are dying of this horrible disease And we couldn't usher them out And we couldn't gather, right, right, you couldn't gather, you couldn't be there.
And for so many people around the world, what happened is we all of a sudden entered in this energetic, collective grieving process And Briar this energetic, complete lack of willingness to talk about the fact that we were all collectively grieving together, and so I started doing a lot of writing about it and thinking about what's going to happen when this is over and how are people going to respond when this is over, and what's it going to mean for us as a society when people have all this unresolved collective, communal grief, Because people were grieving not just the illness and the death of their potential death of their loved ones. They were grieving the fear of their autonomy being pulled away. You had a whole bunch of people all of a sudden throwing these huge tantrums because they had to wear masks or they didn't want to or they couldn't hug people, whatever it was what. It was so fascinating to me as a social worker and someone who's been helping people facilitate grief. Now we have a term for it. It's like death doula, where you actually help people facilitate death, right? But I think it's so fascinating and I think part of what we're experiencing right now is a communal, energetic, grieving. Yes, that is compounded That we're not acknowledging. Yes, that we're not acknowledging, and that is compounded by our generational unresolved grief because we just don't talk, particularly for those of us who are in middle age. Right, we really got, we learned in the 80s and 90s that you don't talk about death, you don't talk about grief, you don't talk about hard things, right, you just kind of shush, shush, shush them under the rug, right. And so I really feel like we are at this beautiful moment in time and in history where we can start addressing grief, because I think that is the underlying issue for all of the other things that we are experiencing communally.
It's so interesting being here in Utah because there's this huge billboard movement to get people to stop committing suicide. It is fascinating, like all hold your pills until you feel better, lock up your guns so that your kids don't have access to them. And it's a suicide prevention measure, because the suicide rates have gotten so high here in Utah, and they've always been high. We've always been one of the worst states in the nation, but it really. What I think is so fascinating is that we've also got we still have this illness.
We're also grieving what coronavirus has done to our bodies. I know I am, but I'm sitting here. Jim was trying to remember something the other day in the car and he was like God, i hate this, like I hate that I can't remember what I'm trying to say to you And then, like a couple minutes later, it comes right, but there's like this delay, and so we're grieving the use of our brain cells, we're grieving our bodies. It doesn't matter, there's not a human being I've talked to, from my little kiddos, who were young when they got COVID, to adults, grown adults. Like the impact of COVID is also, in and of itself, a grief process And, quite frankly, i think that's why we've had this mass exodus of people not working anymore, because they're like I'm going to take care of me.
0:06:56 - Briar
You know, someone said to me yesterday that we are still in the middle of the Spanish flu pandemic And I was like, oh yeah, that too is correct. Like we've never. We've never not been in these kinds of situations societally, globally, for more than 150 years now, and the collective response seems to be to ignore it.
0:07:30 - Dr. Bird
Well, and I mean, if you think about World War Two, right, like you think about the end of World War Two and all these soldiers coming back, women were expected to be ready to set up the household We have, and we're not addressing their grief for their PTSD or any of that.
I mean, i think it's so interesting we're doing this right after Memorial Day, which is was actually a day created to honor the dead soldiers, right, and, but people don't know that And and it's become a thing where we honor all of our dead And I think we don't have a lot of rituals around. We have rituals around death, which we don't perform very well, sometimes Not at all. We don't have any rituals around grief societally as a whole. No, and I think that that is one of the things that is causing anxiety and stress and depression and all of these other things that people are wrestling with. I think a lot of that is that the grief over who we are as individual human beings. It's over our autonomy, it's over whatever experiences we had in childhood, and I find it, i find I think it's the easiest sweet spot to start change. I feel like if we started to address the feelings of loss that we have experienced. It would completely shift the way we operate in the world.
0:09:11 - Briar
So let's talk about that. How do we not you and I, obviously these are conversations you and I are comfortable having and sit in the gap for right, like there are not a lot of people willing to hold space around these kinds of issues And that's just what we do How do we get the rest of the world to even start?
0:09:39 - Dr. Bird
I really I feel like the very first thing that all of us collectively could be more open to is just identifying the spaces where we've experienced loss, If we just become more personally aware of the spaces and we stop trying to police the language around death. So I say that my father committed suicide because my father engaged in the action of taking his own life. We have this whole movement towards saying they completed suicide, they died by suicide.
Died by suicide is one I saw recently Yeah Right Like we're trying to make it feel better, And I personally don't believe suicide should ever feel better.
0:10:29 - Briar
It's, it's I prefer not to normalize suicide too, right, right.
0:10:34 - Dr. Bird
And and so. So one thing is to is to stop trying to make death so soft. Death isn't soft And I think that's the first thing we could do is really own the feelings of loss that we've had, like, own the losses that we've experienced and not try and minimize them in their impact on us. So I feel like we do that a lot right, like the, the. We really try and I hate using the term politically correct, but I feel like we do it with death all the time or loss, like divorce, any loss, the loss of a pet, a divorce, the loss of a you know a million different things that we lose, right, we try and minimize that and make it soft. And grief isn't meant to be soft If you look at old, old rituals around death and grief, like, like Irish wailing, the wailing wall in Israel, the mourning, the, the, the time of mourning in indigenous cultures, the need to return people, the people's bodies, the ritual of having the vultures come and take the soul away. Like it is, it's not meant to be soft. Lost divorce is not meant to be soft. It is a loss of an identity to become divorced And I say this is someone who has been married and divorced, but to both men and women. Each time it was a grieving process. Each time it was who am I Like, what? what? what do I do next? Like who am I now?
And I think that I used to run grief support groups for teenagers who had lost. Like I volunteered with my mom's support group to help teenagers who had lost their parents to suicide when I was like 18, you know and or 17. And you know the the anger that teenagers feel, that young people feel over loss, divorce, like all those things. That's such a normal way to grieve for young people. And because we don't do feelings well, like big feelings, i think that's the other thing people could really start to do is just acknowledge like, look at your big feelings. Like when you're aggravated or angry or sad or despondent, look at what it is that is driving you in that direction. Like what? what are those feelings that are coming up? Oftentimes they're unresolved grief. I saw it in my clinical practice all the time. Like I was, like I think you're deferring grief. Like you're just, you're mad at your partner. But what are you really mad at? Like what is really coming up for you? What it? it's like an upwelling right. Like it comes from your stomach, comes from your gut and your the middle of your stomach. Oh yeah, if they're smart, right, Yeah. So I think that if we start to acknowledge those whoo, the, the rush of the feelings that makes us our hands hot, makes us just break down. If we just started to stop softening grief, i really feel like it would give us permission to have the conversation about Oh hey, i know my dad died 42 years ago, but this is really hard for me. Or, you know, i, i know my grandma and grandpa were old And so it was okay for them to die. Like that's the other thing, like they're in a better place now. Don't say that to people, Please, don't. Please. Let's watch what we say when people die, right, i just did a whole speech about this.
I have a keynote speech that I do about grief and loss And I just gave that speech at Oregon State University, talking about LGBTQ folks and and the way our community grieves. Because we're in constant grief, right, we're in constant grief over our own autonomy. We're in constant grief over our, our own community. Not like I say this as a bisexual woman like bi-erasure is real And I mean like I'm watching Pride start right, like I'm sitting here going Oh, here we go again, right, like like the loss of identity. I think is also a conversation. People, really I would really encourage people to start talking about identity and how your own invisibility has has contributed to your grief. I think I'm rambling. Give me a question. I feel a little rambling.
0:15:18 - Briar
No, I think you're hitting some really good stuff, What I want to touch on here. So killed by suicide.
0:15:31 - Dr. Bird
I think also died by suicide.
0:15:35 - Briar
I've seen killed by suicide, though, yeah, and I think the idea is that the killer was mental health, right Oh interesting, but I also think that then normalizes poor mental health. And we're all in mental health crisis right now, like literally everyone. That's a thing that we don't want to discuss. How do how do we have the conversations about grief and also not minimize that these are going to be ongoing problems until we fix some shit societally?
0:16:25 - Dr. Bird
So I would challenge you to say that I don't think all of us are going to mental health crisis Okay, i'm not, so I guess there's one of me But I think what we are all experiencing is, i will say, all of us are experiencing deeply held emotion that we do not know how to process. We have not been given the capacity to process deeply held emotion. I see it a lot, especially in people, with people who say I'm really triggered. Triggered is actually a mental health term where someone does creates an action that is similar to a trauma that has been experienced. I would actually challenge all of us to think about the fact that we're not all walking around triggered. We're all really uncomfortable with big feelings and big emotions and the acknowledgement that we do not have control over anything. That's one of the things I think COVID really did well is it told us? oh, by the way, mother Earth is in charge. We are not in charge. There's something bigger going on and you have absolutely no control. I think part of what's happening with people that is that I think people are having situational mental health issues. I think a lot of people when they recognize that they don't have control, which is so hard. There's a reason. It's one of the steps in AA. When you're in recovery, acknowledging that you don't have control is the very first step to recovering.
I think for so many people we are uncomfortable with what we have been forced to reckon with. I feel like with grief and loss, the reckoning doesn't come easy. It's like a straight fight. It's like we're constantly battling. Well, is this really what I'm feeling? Is this really what I've experienced? Is this grief? Because we also minimize grief into three-day. You have the three-day bereavement leave and then you're supposed to be miraculously better If your pet dies. It's not that big of a deal, but it's like your pet is, like this constant companion that some, for many people, keeps them alive. We have taken this whole concept of grief and loss and we have prescribed rules around it. We've tried to put it in a box and bury it. By the way, we've really tried to take grief and go okay, you got three days of bereavement leave, then you got to come back to work at this Fortune 500 company and you got to be on it. You got to be back man And then grief is forever. So let's unpack the difference here?
0:19:31 - Briar
What is grief versus trauma? We exist very much in the online world where everyone's got trauma now right, And there are trauma coaches and trauma experts. What's the difference between grief and trauma?
0:19:50 - Dr. Bird
So I love that you take me all the way in the Briarwoods It's your name, it's what you do. Grief occurs as a result of a traumatic event. So an event happens and two things happen We go into fight or flight as a result of that trauma And we experience grief as a result of the loss of whatever that trauma, whatever we lost as a result of the trauma. So when I was working with child abuse and neglect victims one of the things that I now looking back, first of all, no 20 year old person should be working with an abuse and neglect victim, because the way we have no concept of the complication and the difficulty of those dynamics, particularly between parents and their children I just really I should not have been doing that, for it was way too early in my life.
As I look back on it, and one of the things that I find so fascinating, particularly around trauma that has to do with abuse and neglect, is how much we demonize the, the, the person who did the abuse right, and what I think we don't do is recognize how much grief and trauma those people have experienced in order to be able to behave in such an abhorrent and horrifying way towards children, right towards helpless children.
I think what's really interesting is that the dynamic we don't dig into is the gender.
We talked so much about generational trauma, but you know, what we never talk about is generational surviving and thriving, because we love to focus on the bad, and I think that, as a result of unresolved grief, because we can't, there is this whole stigmatization that you can't possibly feel this good If you're supposed to be in some form of trauma and healing something like.
It's such a huge responsibility to heal generational trauma, right, but what if? what if we started to recognize that as we process our grief and loss and allow it to be a piece of our story and a part of our puzzle, then what eventually ends up happening is the trauma heals itself And and we end up doing what our ancestors wanted us to do, which is to thrive. They don't want us to be miserable. I do not believe that my great, great grandparents, who both died in southern Utah because they were indigenous people, really, truly wanted me to suffer. I think they're very grateful that I'm here doing this work. Honestly, i feel like if we start to look at our traumas as events that take place that resulted in grief And we allowed ourselves to process the emotions around grief, then we would get past that edge of sorrow and move into thriving.
0:23:17 - Briar
Well, because at a certain point in time doing the work becomes the job. right. It's never ending, and if you can't ever heal, there is no better.
0:23:36 - Dr. Bird
Yeah, i don't. You think that's a huge myth that we have created here in this country, though, because I feel I feel healed in so many ways Like I have experienced. Listen, my life is a lifetime television movie for women. It really is like it is just. I could go into great detail and we could trauma, masturbate all day long, which I think is another thing that that really keeps us in this perpetual cycle of trauma, and I used to do that, and I think that this wisdom of mine that I'm really trying to impart on other people is this idea that what if we considered doing this different? What? what would happen if we considered addressing our trauma in a way that doesn't perpetuate, having to over and over and over regurgitate the trauma itself, but that we got into the emotion behind it? I created actually have a YouTube video about this.
I was working with a client one day and this whole download just showed up And I was asking them about the feeling around the trauma, right. So they had had a traumatic experience and I was like I'm not going to get. I'm not your therapist. If you need a therapist, go get a therapist to resolve this. But I said What are you feeling right now as you're talking about this, and they were like one feeling fear and I was a great And we did a mind map prior where we put fear in the middle and I'll find the YouTube link so you can link it to people for people where you put the word fear in the middle and then you do five circles out from that fear and you do five more emotions, that that from that fear, and then you take those five emotions and you do three bubbles for each of them, so you've got like 15 bubbles on the outside.
That third level of emotion, the third level of feeling, is the stuff that is unresolved, that keeps us in a constant fight or flight cycle. And once you start to acknowledge that third level, the healing takes like it's bananas how fast things start to resolve themselves when you are acknowledging the third level feeling. Because that's the thing we keep really hidden, that's the thing the eight year old goes I'm not doing, i can't do this, i don't have any capacity to handle what has just happened to me, and those emotions just circle back over and over and over and over and over and over and over until you have the adult brain that can function and handle addressing those third level emotions.
And then you can imagine what would happen if everybody started feeling and allowing the feelings to move through the third level feeling, not the fear, because I think fear is a myth to I think we've answered primordial fear and turn it into us having to constantly be in fight or flight And I honestly believe we talked about this. I don't think we all have to be there.
0:26:33 - Briar
I think part of the issue and this is so clear to me as a parent, especially one who homeschools we do not give our children the language of emotion, we don't teach them about their feelings. An eight year old has no words for those third tier feelings because they've never been taught them, and so they get smushed down because they have nothing to verbalize the thing that they're feeling.
0:27:05 - Dr. Bird
Yeah, i think that that is so true, and I think we don't even give adults the permission to understand.
We don't allow ourselves to do these things. I mean, we do not. We don't allow ourselves to go. Oh, i'm feeling super irritated right now. I wonder why I'm feeling irritated. Let me think about what's going on right now that's bothering me so bad. What would happen if, in those moments of overwhelming irritation, we sat back, went? Hmm, well, this is interesting. I wonder what this is bringing up for me. I wonder why I'm feeling this way. You know, do I feel like I don't have control right this minute? do I feel like my partner is being an idiot right now? do I feel like there's too much pressure for me to perform this task at work? I wonder what is it that's making me feel this feeling of overwhelm? Oh, oh, i see, i see what that is, whatever it is. And then we go. Oh, yeah, makes sense that I'm having these feelings.
0:28:04 - Briar
The flavors of rage are, i think, inextricably tied into grief and grieving and loss, and for women in particular those are bad, taboo feelings to have, so we just simply don't talk about it at all. That is, that's what's come up for me so many times in my process the rage, sheer, unadulterated flames at the side of my face, kind of rage.
0:28:41 - Dr. Bird
But one of my favorite books in the whole world is written by my friend, sirash Mali, called rage becomes her, and it is, truthfully, one of the greatest books that has ever been written in the history. Of all the things about rage and women, and one of the things I love about talking about rage is that is that rage is such a normal human emotion. It's why I love the wailing wall, like I love a good Irish wake, because that's not just about that deep grief, but it's also about the anger and rage and the deep emotion of loss And and how intricately woven the anger and rage is with loss and women not being able to express that, children not being able to express that right, like, like it is such a normal human emotion to experience rage and anger And yet we repeatedly stop allowing people from engaging in that emotion and I think it's what's leading to all this violence, because there's so much pent up rage. Like, if we just allow one of my most favorite things I did.
I think it was like right in the middle of the pandemic, like like 18 months in, like mid 2021 or something like that, i was losing it, like I was really having a hard time and I went and got in my car and my car is a soft top Camaro, right so convertible Camaro. I went and got my car at like one o'clock in the morning, turned Metallica up as far as I could and would just sat in there screaming bloody murder. Jim comes running out of the house. He's like you're gonna wake up the entire neighborhood and I was like I did not care, i was, so I just needed five minutes to just scream it out. My neighbors like the next morning they're like okay, miss, i'm like, i'm just tired of all of this. I'm just tired of peopleing, i'm tired of human being, i'm tired of all of this. I just needed to get it out of my system. I feel great.
There was one point where I was I had to weed, right, because the weeds were coming up in my garden and I started throwing the weeds at the house like I was like, but I wasn't harming myself and I wasn't harming anybody else, and I think if more women would give themselves permission to just look at their families and go, you know what? I'm just gonna have a moment like the. Sariah has this story in her book where she talks about coming home and her mother throwing the good china plates down on the cement and breaking all the good china, and just like, and not speaking, not screaming, just throwing these plates down and breaking the good china, and then going back in the house and not and making dinner, not saying word, right, like, we have so much rage and it's okay. Like, if, like, could we just normalize the fact that we have a myriad of emotions and one of them is anger and rage, like full blown hair on fire, violent, vile rage.
0:31:53 - Briar
You know and we say for women, but men right now are also catching the brunt of this, because if they're angry, they're violent, and the rate of violence has skyrocketed in the last three years. Yeah yes and I think?
0:32:19 - Dr. Bird
I think this goes to us not allowing men to grieve. We do not allow men the process of fear and weeping and sorrow. It's the opposite, right? So women are expected to cry and weep and grieve and wail and all that thing. Men are not allowed to express themselves in such a compassionate, sad way. And and the more we push men to suck it up and hold us all up like I think that's that I'm really seeing it in Utah. But it's so fascinating being in Utah, right like right, my husband and I are having all these conversations about how fascinating it is to be here, because what he's observing in people I grew up with and he's like, did you see how that guy was like blah, blah, blah, and I was like, oh, like pent up it. it's like they're driving, holding the steering wheel, like you know, and it's because they cannot be compassionate towards themselves in their own grieving process. And and it takes me back to this idea of the three-day bereavement leave, of course we only have three days of bereavement.
Men have been in charge of corporations forever and if they are not allowed to grieve for more than three days, none of them know what else is either and I think part of the part of my hope in talking about grief and loss is that we we really start to look at how are we being, how are we really connecting with the men in our lives and saying, are you okay? you've experienced a great deal of loss, you've lost your autonomy. I will say I think this is a lot of the rage that we're seeing on both the left, the extreme left and the extreme right, this anger and violence. Nobody's ever gone up to those men and said, hey, are you, are you okay?
0:34:21 - Briar
I was in one of my autistic women's groups the other day and we were talking about the autistic male to in-cell pipeline, because it is so easy for that rage to be passed on to young men and boys who know that they don't see the world in the same way, are socially inept, are never going to have a girlfriend because god who would date them right now? and so being an in-cell is the easiest path and it's devastating to me yeah, it's so.
0:35:10 - Dr. Bird
It's so fascinating. When Roe vs Wade was overturned, i was sitting with all three of my children. My daughter happened to be home from college and Gwen and Caitlin immediately got angry, like violently angry. Sean just started sobbing and he said mom, what is this going to mean for my future partners? what will this mean for me? and he's bawling. I mean he was so sad and the girls were just living and it was such a fascinating thing to watch because I watched Jim get super. Jim was like what's happening?
0:35:56 - Briar
how do I deal with this? what do I do?
0:36:00 - Dr. Bird
navigate all three of our kids just responding in a way that that was so fascinating, right, like it's such a little bubble of. I'm a qualitative researcher so of course I'm like all going ethnography about it. Right, like this is fascinating behavior. But What would happen if we allowed these autistic boys the connection to what they can't identify? Right, like watching my tender hearted son weep for the loss of bodily autonomy while I'm watching my beautiful, fierce daughters just be full of speaking of rage? like, right, what would happen if we allowed the breadth of conversation around what you're talking about it?
I can't even fathom what would change for us, right, as a society, and I just this is why I want people to start talking about grief and loss, because when we identify our own feelings within ourselves, that helps other people identify their own feelings as well. Right, and I think, particularly when you're talking about people with autism, i remember when I worked with little little preschool. I worked with with preschool kiddos and some of them were autistic and, like, helping them understand what was going on in their little three-year-old bodies was such a fascinating pride, was such a beautiful process, right, and I just I want to invite anybody who's listening to this to just really start to just take a step back. Just literally step back, take a nice big deep breath into your nose and out to your mouth, get yourself located back in your body and go. I wonder what would happen if I actually acknowledge time feeling right now there's really a grace in being able to extend that space to others.
0:38:13 - Briar
How do we get better about doing that?
0:38:19 - Dr. Bird
oh, grace bless it, i think. I think it goes back to being willing to be uncomfortable. I think that the the pathway to grace is to first acknowledge it for ourselves. This is what I teach in the art of the graceful revolution that grace, self-love, self-compassion and grace is the starting point. It's not about giving all of that to other people and then coming back to yourself, which is what we've been trained by the patriarchy right, like you give a give, give, give, give and and then you give it back to yourself, or what happens is we, we give, give, give, give, but we find it really difficult to receive grace and compassion from other people when they extend it to us. Like we can give, give, give, give, but to receive that into our bodies is really difficult for people, and and so I really would love to start encouraging people while I already do it. I I would really love all of the people that are listening to this to think ask yourself, how can I be more compassionate and graceful towards myself right now, at this moment? what? it's not about self-care, it's not about any of that crap. It's literally about what would feel like loving grace right now, because we are love and we are loved there. There is no other reality, there's no other. We are love and we are loved. We are connected to this earth. We are naturally occurring part of creation, like we are created of this earth. And if that is true and we love this earth as much as we say we do, then that means we get to love ourselves like we love the trees and the birds and the flowers and the water and the mountains and the rain. We get to extend that love to ourselves as being woven and connected together and the more we connect with that knowledge, the easier it is to give ourselves grace in difficult and trying situations. And we are going to react that the we are humans being. I've started really using that term a lot in the things that I've been talking about. We are humans being. That's what we are doing here, and I feel like the more we just get react okay, be mad, whatever it is, and then go.
I wonder why I'm feeling like this. How can I give myself more compassion right at this moment? how can I shift out of this right versus wrong binary thinking like like to? everything is just information? I was working with a client the other day, brian. It was like the light bulb that went off. Because they were like I can't do this, this module that you sent me because I'm not doing it right, like I can't, i don't have any answer, and I'm like, well, what if the non-answer is the answer? and they were like you know, oh my god, i've internalized everything I know, right like all. It wasn't that the family was reactive, it was that she learned how to internalize and eat the feelings and eat the reaction right, and I was like, oh right.
0:41:38 - Briar
I can't have grace for other people, especially not the people I am closest to, if I am unwilling to extend that grace to myself first amen, like that is just a fact, like we have got to be more loving and compassionate towards ourselves.
0:41:59 - Dr. Bird
I really think that's the revolution and and I was just talking about this the other day like the revolution is not, my prayer is that the message that people are receiving from me is that the revolution is not about fist pumping, protest and resistance. The revolution, that is a piece of it and it's important. And and imagine if we allowed ourselves a personal revolution where we opened ourselves up to acknowledging the truth of our human existence the love and compassion that we have for ourselves first leads to love and compassion for other people, and that is revolutionary. That is a circle that just gets. It keeps us going in the spiral and it keeps us moving through this human experience and it gives us wisdom, which is what we're here to do. We are here to learn, we're here to experience. We're not here to control and predict no, and it's letting go of control.
0:43:07 - Briar
We're right back there. So how do people do that?
0:43:13 - Dr. Bird
I don't know, but if you find out, tell me okay, okay, um, i really think there there's this idea of a noodling a little bit about faith and about acknowledging my teacher, the teacher who taught me Claire Voyants, her name is Eileen. One of the things she she said to me about a month ago. She said there is literally absolutely nothing on this planet that needs to be controlled. And I had to like take a nice big deep breath and go, okay.
So if that is, if that is true which it is, i, i know that's true, i know that in my heart, my soul, i know that's true. That means that I can have faith that the way my world is turning out, that that everything is, it's not that like love and light bullshit, but like that everything that occurs occurs in my best and highest good, because I'm gonna learn from it, i'm gonna get clarity from it, i'm gonna become more confident from it. I sat on my sunglasses yesterday and they were these sunglasses I bought with my goddaughter, so they were like we both got soccer mom sunglasses and it was like this bonding moment with me, my goddaughter and I sat on them and I broke them yesterday and I was like, oh, my god, i had a collar.
0:44:45 - Briar
I was like Lily.
0:44:46 - Dr. Bird
I broke the glasses right, like and I have to tell you honestly, three years ago, me would have lost my shit, i would have been devastated. I would have thought I broke this bond with Lily, i would have thought Lily was gonna judge me for not taking better care of my sunglasses. Doesn't sound ridiculous? I'm 49 years old, like come on, people like. But I literally like I had this moment where and Jim looked at me and he's like damn, you've changed a lot, right like, you have altered the course of your reality through the work that you're doing. And I thought I'm just gonna get a new pair of sunglasses, like hopefully they'll have the same pair and, if they don't know, get a fancier pair. And I did. I got the most favorite, i got two pairs, i got the ones I love, and then I got a new pair right and I took Lily with me and she got these sunglasses right, like when we don't.
I know that sounds like such a ridiculous example, but I think what I want people to hear is it's in the little tiny things that the changes are made. This is not explosive. I'm gonna blow up my life, you know. I'm gonna finally make the decision, do the deal, blah, blah, blah. That's not what it is. It's little tiny moments and this is really what I try and help people understand. It's that it's the little tiny things. When you give up control of the little tiny things like thinking you have to control the little things, the big things, you it's so much easier to give up control of over the stuff that is huge. We are not meant to control each other. That is a white supremacist, patriarchal doctrine of discovery, manifest destiny, take over the world, colonizer idea.
0:46:28 - Briar
We are literally not meant to control each other and we have no control over the people trying to control each other either. My husband was talking about the primary season and I'm like I can't. I can't spend the next 17 months of my life concerned with something that's going to end up being two of the least suitable people in the entire country to rule, to govern our country. My choices will be bad and worse, and I can't bring myself to care about it right now. Closer, maybe I'll be a little bit disappointed then, but that's all. I have no control over any of this, and the more I let it go, the easier it is to stay in my fucking lane and do the things that I do have nominal control over and affect the things that I can affect, and that's where power is yeah, that is absolutely where power is and you know, i just did a training for the Oregon legislature and one of the things that was really complicated for these people to understand was there's really literally nothing you can control.
0:47:54 - Dr. Bird
We have behavior and we have action. And when we take inspired, intentional, intuitive action, we get inspired, intentional, intuitive clarity and inspired, intentional, intuitive confidence. And the more we do that and we listen to our own internal, intuitive compass, the more we listen to our purpose in this world, our individual, all billions there's billions of people on the planet. We each are here with a purpose. The more we listen to that, the easier it is to go. Oh, really, i really don't have it. This is about faith. This is about not hoping for something better Right But really releasing and acknowledging our feelings and having faith that something else is going to come tomorrow. And as long as we're waking up every morning, this is, this is where you change the ritual. When you wake up every morning, ask yourself I wonder what's going to happen today, instead of going through the to do list, because when you ask yourself I wonder what's going to happen today, you move into a space of faith, wonder and curiosity. You allow yourself to acknowledge that feelings are going to come up when you're going to feel those feelings, because you're not trying to control and predict what feelings are going to come next.
When we get into the flow of that, there's a little bit of a fall apart Sometimes. For a lot of people it's a big ass fall apart, right. But then things start to click and they fall into place and you start to listen to your intuition and you really start to follow the, the nudge. And when we that is what we are doing right now the things that are happening with our government are supposed to be happening, because, you don't, democracies collapse every couple of hundred years. We just happened to be watching this in real time. Yeah, sorry, it's not ancient Greece. People like this is what we're doing right now and it's okay. Is it going to be nasty and ugly in some ways? Yes, and we have no control.
0:50:04 - Briar
No. So I want to wrap us up today with faith, because that, too, is the thing that we are lacking. Dr Melissa Bird, we are on. We're in a faith crisis, right? Church membership is down across the board. It doesn't matter what church it is Belonging to. Organizations of faith is almost non existent for people who didn't grow up in a faith culture, especially here in the United States. So how do we get it back?
0:50:48 - Dr. Bird
I don't think it's a matter of getting anything back.
0:50:50 - Briar
I think it's a matter of how do we grow something new?
0:50:53 - Dr. Bird
Yeah, i think it's a matter of taking the negative connotation of having faith out of the equation. So I think people think they hear the word faith and they immediately go to a past religion, organized religion, like someone telling you what faith looks like. And that is not what faith is. Faith is the belief and trust in our internal knowledge and knowing that each moment of our lives we are here living out whatever it is we are supposed to be doing. And this is a very, very ancient, ancient, ancient thought. Right, we are here.
I know my ancestors believe that we are here. That Creator put us here on purpose, right, with a purpose, and that purpose is to honor the earth and honor each other. That's the purpose. It doesn't matter which side of my family I'm coming from. That is, that is the ancient tradition of both the Celtic side of my family and the Paiute side of my family, right? So if I know this to be true and all of us come from those ancient peoples, every single one of us comes from the ancient peoples, every one of us is indigenous to somewhere And if we start to acknowledge the ancient knowledge that we are here to connect and and and honor each other, then what happens is faith. Faith isn't about the this demoralizing God, that that allows people to dominate others. Faith is about believing, even when we're in the middle of the poop, that it's okay.
That it's going to be okay, yeah, and that even if we're in the middle of the poop, i it's still okay, because everything is information.
When we are devastated, when we are grieving, when we are on the ground not knowing how we are going to be able to get up off of it, when we believe or we ask for help, when we believe that we're going to make it to the next hour not the next day, the next hour and we make it to the next hour, then we have, we have proven to ourselves that our faith exists, and then you go to the next hour and the next hour and the next hour, and then you you've made it a whole day and then you've made it a whole week, like it culminates upon itself If we have faith in our purpose as humans being and I believe that is the true way we we connect to our faith.
It's not about a religious tradition, although I will say I love me in the Episcopal Church because six years ago I walked into one and now I'm preaching to one and nobody like you could have hit me with a feather and I would have fallen over dead if you would have told me this was going to be my existence, and I think it's such a beautiful acknowledgement of what happens when we completely surrender to the idea of control And, i believe, the more faith we have at just one minute at a time. I'm not talking about y'all visioning five years in the future and like trying to predict what that looks like. No, i don't even know what's going to happen in the next 20 minutes. I mean I'm hoping there's a bath in this big giant bathtub involved and like maybe a steam, but I don't know.
Anything could happen And you got to process your feelings. Feelings get down to the third level emotion. Let it out, See what happens.
0:54:47 - Briar
Okay, so this has been indeed a large circle that we have covered today, and I am so grateful that we got to sit in this space together. How can people do more work on grief and loss with you?
0:55:12 - Dr. Bird
Well, i have these really beautiful healing circles that I've got coming up over the summer, so June, july and August I'm doing healing circles for folks, and the first one's on June 11th and so I'm doing them once a month so you can get that information on my website. And the other really really good way is to sign up for my love notes, because I do weekly love notes and they're just this little boost and little reminder of your existence on the planet and how much love there is in the world, and those are two really really, really phenomenal ways to address grief and loss for sure.
0:55:50 - Briar
Thank you, my friend. I am absolutely delighted that we could have this conversation today, so next time we are going to be talking about, where are my notes somewhere? They're around Here. They are Nuance and non-binary thinking. Oh, that one's going to be fun.
0:56:16 - Dr. Bird
It's going to be so good.
0:56:18 - Briar
So much fun. Okay, thank you. Thank you for being here. This has been an excellent example of what we are cultivating here in this space. I want you to be able to broaden your horizons to bigger and better things, because we don't have to be stuck in this cycle of trauma and grief and loss. You can expect better. You have to choose better, though, first, and that's where we got to start.
0:56:57 - Dr. Bird
Thank you.
0:56:58 - Briar
Thank you. We will see you again next time for non-binary thinking. So much fun. Talk to you later.
Transcribed by https://podium.page
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