Με αφορμή το φετινό TEDxAthens που θα γίνει στο Κέντρο Πολιτισμού Ίδρυμα Στάυρος Νιάρχος στις 28 Μαΐου, 2022 με θέμα The Great Unknown, σας ετοιμάσαμε ένα bonus επεισόδιο γύρω από το θέμα του μεγαλύτερου unknown της ζωης μας, του θανάτου. Η καλεσμένη μας Dr.Ioanne Cacciatore βρίσκεται στην Αμερική, είναι ψυχολόγος και κορυφαία σύμβουλος διαχείρισης πένθους. Θα τη βρείτε και στη σειρά The Me You Can't See με τους Prince Harry and Oprah.
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Produced & Hosted by: TEDxAthens
Track Title: Time Again
Artist Name: Aaron Sprinkle
Sound Editing & Mixing: Matrix Recording Studio
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
Joanne, I'm so excited to have you with us here today, and I'd like to officially welcome you to our podcast, The Tap by TEDx Athens. And the entire team is so excited to have you here with us today. So welcome.
Joanne Cacciatore:
Thank you to you and the entire team. I'm excited to be there with you virtually.
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
Yeah, absolutely. And you're live with us from Arizona.
Joanne Cacciatore:
Yes. From the Selah Care Farm in Arizona.
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
Fantastic. And our theme this year because this is a very special episode. Our theme for our main event is the Great Unknown. And once I heard that theme, I couldn't think of anything more unknown than death and grief. And you were the first person that came to mind. So, as you know, I wanted to invite you and share with our audience how your entire work and life is based on this. Can you tell us how it all started and why did you get into this field?
Joanne Cacciatore:
Of course. Well, I was a mom back in 1994, pregnant with my fourth child, and I went all the way to term to her due date and went to the hospital to have her. And she died the same day she was born. And it was an excruciating grief that sent me into a very deep spiral into the darkness. And it was a darkness, honestly, that scared me. I was young. This was going on 28 years ago, right? So I was young then and didn't have a lot of life experience. This is my first experience with death. And it was my child who died. I wasn't coping very well. And others around me didn't really understand what was happening for me, didn't understand my grief, didn't understand the depth or breadth of my loss. And so it really created a sort of a sense of existential loneliness within me because others thought I should be, quote, feeling better by now. I needed to get over it. I needed to focus on the good. I needed to not feel that's all the messages I was getting from just about everyone was don't feel this. And even therapists. I went to almost a half a dozen therapists or counselors after she died trying to find some good help. And I really struggled. There was really no one who could connect with me at that deep level. Everyone was quite superficial in their sort of approach. And I never went to a therapist or counselor more than once. And in fact, several times I just walked out in the middle of the session because it was so awful. I just thought, this is amazing to me that we aren't doing this well. What I sensed was an incongruence with what I felt inside versus what the outside world was telling me. And that incongruence was really contributing to my deep suffering and loneliness. So I lost a great deal of weight. I weighed less than £90 at one point and I didn't want to live. And yet I did want to live because I had three other children I loved very, very much. But everything in my body remember I had just given birth and maternal messages. Maternal hormones are flowing through your body and your body's producing breast milk. And everything in your body is saying, Feed your baby, take care of your baby. And there was no baby to take care of. And so it was a paradox. It was a biological paradox for me, too. So there was the emotional piece, there was the physical piece, the physiological piece, there was the existential or spiritual piece, and then the social piece, which was really kind of messed up because socially we don't do grief, especially when it's traumatic well at all. In most cultures, we do not know how to hold space for people who are traumatically bereaved. So that's how the work started was really there. The seed was planted there. I went to the library. I started to research. This was before the Internet. So I went to the library, and I started to research what was going on with me. And was there something wrong with me? And I couldn't find much, but I did find the work of a researcher who was conducting research on traumatic grief back in the his name was Dr. John Defrane. And so I started reading his research, which was about as close as I could come to what I felt. And then I read the work of Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross. And though her work was really about dying and not grieving, her work also resonated with me. So I found two sort of little pieces that kind of inspired me that I wasn't crazy, that I was feeling normal things, that the world was really incongruent with what I was experiencing, and that part of the suffering was contained within that incongruence. So then I just had a sense that if we could help each other through this, if other people who had had the experience of losing a child to death, if we could support each other, that would be one sort of place where people could find solace. So I started the Miss Foundation. It was about two and a half years later when I started the Miss Foundation, and we decided our mission was going to be to help families who experience the death of a child. And I just started a little small support group. I just thought, okay, well, I'll just invite people. At the first it was at my house. I'll just invite some people to my house, and they came, and then it grew. And then we had 15 people and then 20 people, and then 30 people, and then 50 people. And so it soon became like a conference. And so we had to find other space. And then the Miss Foundation really grew from there. We had to divide the group. I had to train other facilitators in what I was doing. And I was using the research. Lots of trips to the library, lots of reading, lots of books, self study. And then I went back to school. I went back and I didn't even have an undergraduate degree at that point, if you can believe that. So I went back to school and I got my bachelor's degree and a minor and my master's degree and then decided to continue for my doctorate. And that's how it started. And Meanwhile, the foundation continued to grow and grow and grow, and we built new chapters. And now we have 70 some chapters around the world. And we do really good and meaningful work. And it's hard work, too. It's emotionally laborious work. And it's excruciating to hear some of the stories that we hear about children who have been murdered and partners who have died by suicide and little children who get cancer. It's excruciating grief, but it's probably the most meaningful work that a person can do.
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
Wow. I have so many questions, and I'm in awe that you do this work. How do you deal with this excruciating pain and holding this space for others that are grieving?
Joanne Cacciatore:
Yeah. How do I do it personally is that I have a really strong practice of my own. So what I mean by that is I have these very clear things. I do. I practice mindfulness. I'm a meditation teacher. I'm a yoga teacher. So I have my yoga practice in my Zaza and my sit practice and my bibliotherapy. I read a lot. Reading is therapeutic for me. I have 51 rescue animals who tend my heart in a way that I cannot describe. And I did a research I conducted a research study. I'm a tenured professor at Arizona State University. And so one of the things that I'm charged with is with research. And so as a researcher, I'm curious about all things tangentially or directly related to this area, to this field. And so I conducted a study on good grief support. And it's an open access study. You can actually read it. It's called what is Good Grief Support? It's published in Plus One online. And I looked at the difference between different human groups who interact with people who are traumatically bereaved. And I looked at medical staff, nursing staff, social work staff and hospitals, mental health clinicians, family, friends, colleagues, first responders, funeral directors, pretty much Hospice workers, pretty much anyone who would interact with those who were traumatically brave. Right. So I asked how much were you satisfied with the degree of support and compassion you received from these different groups? And the human groups didn't do very well. But I also asked about pets and animals. And pets and animals ranked so far beyond every human group. The closest pets and animals ranked in 89% satisfaction, and the closest human group ranked 67%. And that was support groups. Wow. Yeah. And the rest were somewhere in the 30%. Somewhere in the 50%. But most all other human groups were around 50% or lower. And that's indicative of the problem that we have in our cultures today is that we don't know how to provide support to grieving people, but animals do seem to do that. And so my animals are a great source of emotional support for me. We have donkeys and horses and pigs and dogs and cats, of course, and sheep and goat and cows, and they've all been rescued from varying levels of abuse and even torture. And that, for me, is another way that I practice, if you will. That's another way that I turn my heart, pull my energy inward, turn my heart to myself and really tend to what's happening inside my heart. So my practice is what really helps. Oh, and I hike barefoot, too.
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
That leads me to a question, actually, that one of our team members asked is how do extreme adventures so people that are extreme climbers and that seek this adrenaline, how do they relate to death? How do they perceive death, and how does that lead them to live this type of lifestyle?
Joanne Cacciatore:
Yeah, I don't actually know anything about the psychology of extreme risk takers, except to the extent that I hike barefoot, but I don't consider that. But what I would hypothesize is that there's something in their brain that might be a little bit different that might help them to confront fear in a different way. But that would be actually an interesting study. Do people who engage here would be the question, do people who engage in those extreme sports fear death in the same way that those who don't fear death? I don't know the answer to that. It would be an interesting question.
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
I'm going to go back to you. When you were describing your experience and how it was your environment and our cultures, they don't teach us how to deal with grief. They don't teach us how to deal with death. How can we teach our children and future generations to be better at that? And what can we do about this now?
Joanne Cacciatore:
Well, that's a great question. And this is one of the things that I've been sort of talking about at every opportunity I have. I think we need to be teaching children higher emotional intelligence in grade school, starting early, teaching them how to feel sadness and how not to sort of try to trade sadness for a good feeling. We have a propensity to that because we don't like to see people we love or care about feeling sad. So we have a propensity to try to fix people's sad feelings. But if we meet people there and by people, I mean, broadly speaking, any age child, if we meet them in their sadness and say, oh, yeah, you feel sad, what does sad feel like? Where do you feel sad in your body? What kind of things do you think when you're feeling sad and help them learn to cope with those, quote, smaller sad feelings when they're young, then as they age and they experience the bigger sad feelings over more significant events, then it's probably going to be easier because they've built up some emotional resilience and emotional muscle to carry that sadness. And then when they're feeling sadness, then they know what to do with it. But we don't, we don't teach that. We teach children, oh, you feel sad. Don't be sad. Don't cry. Think about this happy thing or let's go shopping or here's a lollipop or let's watch your favorite TV show. We don't teach children how to create space for the painful, the hard emotions. And I think if we started teaching them to do that younger, then we would have an adult population at some point who has some emotional intelligence with the emotions that are hard, that feel hard and difficult. I know everyone wants to feel good all the time, but that's not realistic. We can't feel good all the time. It's not what the human experience is about. We can't always feel happy. We can't always feel joyful. We can't always feel connected. And so we need to know how to have the emotional resilience in us that when we feel these other things, we know that we know, A, they will shift and move. Sometimes they'll intensify, sometimes they'll deintensify, and B, that we trust ourselves with those emotions, that we know how to hold them. We know how to carry them. We have the muscle to take them from one place in our lives to another. And then when they're ready to move, we allow them to move.
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
I wish I knew that growing up, but also I was able to learn it. That's what is helpful for me. It's never too late for us to learn how to process that's absolutely true. Yeah. And this reminds me of a story my grandmother told me that I wanted to share with you. She grew up here in Greece in a village. She was ten years old. She's 84 years old now. And she was ten. And her mother was dying of cancer. And she was in the same room. She was very young, and she was in the same room with her mother that was dying. And my grandmother told me all the other ladies around her, the aunts, everyone there, they had to tell her, take the little girl. My grandmother take her outside because her mother is not letting go and is not dying because she sees her daughter there. So they had to physically remove my grandmother from the room. And then her mother died. And then my grandmother, when I asked her, like, sometimes she tells me I feel like I'm ten years old, sometimes I feel like a little girl. And I don't know if that connection, if you can talk about that traumatic grief and that trauma and that connection to how we experience that.
Joanne Cacciatore:
Yeah. I mean, I don't know your grandmother, but it's not unusual for me to see people who have, in a sense, frozen inside. Right. Because flight, fight, freeze response. So inside of us, we kind of freeze at an age where we have a trauma inside of us, and it feels like we can contact that place in us that's frozen if we're aware. And it's not a bad thing, quote bad thing. It's an interesting thing, and it's something we can work with. I mean, there's a good reason your grandmother froze because that was probably the seminal moment of her life. Like the most important woman in her life at that moment was gone. And there are few things more traumatic to a child than to lose a parent or sibling. And so for her, that's sort of ensconced in her mind, body, soul, existential self, whatever you want to call that. And as it's ensconced, it's frozen. Now the question is, how do we work with that ten year old when she asks to be seen? So when that ten year old knocks on the door and says, Hello, I'm feeling really vulnerable. I'm feeling really afraid. I want my mom. Unconsciously, then how do we nurture that ten year old? How do we take care of the emotions that come when that experience reemerges and that really matters? And that's why we really need skilled clinicians and even a skilled society, because you don't necessarily have to have a counselor to work with things like this. You can have a really good spiritual leader or a really good friend or a really good neighbor. We can do these kinds of things for each other, but we really need to be educated about them. I am emotionally educated, emotionally intelligent. Being book smart is one thing. Being emotionally intelligent is an entirely different thing. I know plenty of very book smart people who are emotional zygotes. Their emotional capacity is akin to not mature at all. So those are the kinds of things that we can train ourselves for. And that's the kind of work that a lot of people do as adults, once they awaken to this and they go, oh, that's what's been happening through generations in my family. Sort of this repetitive pattern of a loss or grief or a trauma and then sort of suppressing it and freezing or running or coping in an unhealthy way, then that gets integrated as a pattern in a family system. And you wake up, somebody wakes up in one generation and says, oh, I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm not repeating that. I'm going to do it differently. And they make the choice to start doing the work. And the work is, in a sense, the practice. The practice of being with what is and building the emotional capacity and processing things that we've previously sort of suppressed or inhibited. It is powerful when that happens and when that awakening happens and to break that pattern in that cycle. Yeah. It's so much it's a reclamation. Right?
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
It is. I wonder what you know about religion and our perception of spirituality and the paranormal. Let's say we live in a society where we believe some of us think that there's spirits walking around us and no one can prove otherwise. We don't know this affected our way of dealing with death and grief.
Joanne Cacciatore:
Well, I mean, listen, people who have a belief of an afterlife, it seems in the research, do better in terms of adjustment. And part of that might just be the person you love most in the world died. You want to know you're going to see that person again. And there is some solace in that for most people, it's not enough. Because if your six year old dies, all you want is your six year old. You don't want to wait your entire lifetime to be reunited with your six year old. Spirituality can also be used as a bypass. And so it's important just to be careful and aware of when we're using spirituality to take us out of our grief or out of our pain. Spirituality. In my own practice of spirituality, spirituality is a way into my pain. Spirituality is what helps me go into the pain and into the center of the pain, into the hottest part of the pain and endure the pain and trust that it will move. It will shift. It will change. If I stay with it, it will come back again. But it's always moving. That's the word emotion, emotion means in motion, something that moves through. Okay. And so if we allow our emotions to move, to use spiritual practice to take you out of the emotion forcibly, prematurely, before we're ready for that emotion to move or as a distraction or a way around it rather than a way through it, then I think religion can be or spiritual practice can be a detriment to our emotional maturity and our capacity to really cope in a non superficial way, in an in depth way to cope with our suffering. Does that make sense?
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
It does make sense, yeah. And it kind of goes back to how we're not taught to deal with sadness and not taught to deal with these emotions. So it's like it's something that can offer comfort but can become a spiritual bypass tool, which is harmful and it's not helpful.
Joanne Cacciatore:
Right. It can certainly be harmful. It can certainly at least stunt our growth in the process of becoming who will become in the aftermath of loss. I mean, I found that when I allow myself to feel that desperation, the questioning in the moments of intense grieving is what I call it because it's been 27 and a half years since my child died. And I do have moments of deep rage. I had a moment yesterday morning. It was Mother's Day, and I missed her. And so when I have those moments, I let myself feel it. And I do have my own spiritual practice, and I use my spiritual practice to actually help me feel deeply those things. And then what I notice is that it moves more fluidly and my heart, instead of closing and instead of contracting, actually feels like it's opening and expanding.
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
When people say you should be over it by now, like you said, it's been 27 and a half years. I despise that phrase. I'm going to use that. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Joanne Cacciatore:
Sure. Yeah. There are lots of platitudes about Angels tending gardens and about they're in a better place and about that you should be over it by now. It feels really assumptive to me. And I think what we would need to do is operationalize. What do you mean by over it? What does that even mean? Does that mean I'm not sad anymore? Because if that's what you're expecting for me, I would resist anyone even trying to change this for me. I imagine I'll have moments of sadness for the rest of my life, that my child isn't here on this planet with me right now at this moment. And I strongly resist the colonization of my emotional experiences of grief and loss. And so I think for me, that usually comes from someone who's uncomfortable bearing witness to someone else's pain. And one of the most dangerous practices I see here in the US. I don't know what it's like in Greece, but when someone is trying to support someone who's grieving, I often hear people when they talk about, for example, I had a person here at the care farm last week who recently lost her son. He was 16 years old. He died by suicide. And she called a friend because she was very sad one night and her friend came over and said, let's go get a drink together. Let's go to the bar to have a drink. And to me, this is a very dangerous practice to engage in as it relates to someone who you love, who's grieving, sort of programming them or intimating that they should use alcohol or drugs as a means of coping with their grief and loss. This is what leads to addiction. We have a real addiction problem in the US, addiction to drugs, addiction to alcohol, addiction to prescription drugs and painkillers. The reason is because drugs numb us out. And so the intimation is don't feel numb out. That's a better option. And why do people say that? Because it makes them more comfortable. And it's the same reason they say things like, aren't you over it yet? Or you should be over it yet, or God needed an angel to tend his garden. It's a kind of attempt to anesthetize someone's pain. And I think not only is it dangerous, but it's assumptive. And for most people, it's just not helpful. There isn't a time limit on grief, especially when it's traumatic. What I feel is perfectly normal, given the magnitude of my own loss and what that relationship with my child meant and means to me today meant to me, then it means to me today. So I don't love platitudes when I'm teaching to professional audiences, when I'm doing grand rounds, when I'm teaching a group of therapists or psychiatrists or nurses or other physicians, what I generally say to them is just take all the platitudes out of your language and just meet them where they are. And you don't even have to say anything wise. Your presence speaks loudly enough. Cry with them. Remember with them. Look at photographs. Ask about the person who died. Ask what they missed the most. Asked for stories. Share stories. If you have stories, if you're a story holder, share the stories. It's profoundly meaningful to people who are grieving, to remember in this way and to have people who kind of come to their sides, gather around them, encircle them with compassion and a willingness to confront the things that we fear the most, which is that we, too, will lose someone we love very much to death.
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
That is so hard to accept, as is our own death, as is our own death. How do we live knowing that we're going to die? How can we cope with that? Because we know we're going to die, or I know I'm going to die. I know I'm going to die, but I don't know I'm going to die. And that is so hard it is to wrap my head around that.
Joanne Cacciatore:
Well, I mean, there's a great book, Ernest Becker Denial of Death. It was published. I think it's 72. But I think what I see more in a lot of people is more than a fear of our own death, a fear of, for example, your mother. Her greatest fear would be to lose you even more than her own life. So I think there's a fear of death. Certainly. I think there's an even bigger fear of grief. And I think that's going to be a bigger sort of, if you will, that fear is a bigger monster as a society for us to contend with, because no one wants to think about the possibility that their child would die or their, you know, their beloved would die because we're the ones left in pain in grief. So Ernest Becker's book is really good. And basically in one part of the book, he's talking about how he believes that human neurosis has its roots in fear of death, of course. And I think that's probably true to an extent. And I also think that fear of grief is probably even bigger than that.
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
How can we support someone that's grieving, someone like, I'm not trained, I'm not a clinician. I don't have the knowledge. But is there something that I can do to support someone who's grieving around me?
Joanne Cacciatore:
Sitting with them, staying with them through their grief not trying to fix them, not trying to cheer them up, literally meeting them where they are, coming into their space of suffering and being with them in the abyss and asking questions about the person who died remembering, asking to see photographs or videos, remembering special occasions. I mean, it's Mother's Day, and yesterday I reached out to three dozen mothers I know whose only child died because they probably aren't going to get recognized as a mother, but they're all mothers, despite that their only child died because I knew other people weren't going to reach out to them on Mother's Day. I knew that I needed to do something for them. So those are the kinds of things that are profoundly meaningful for people and are important for people. We need to come alongside grieving people and just walk with them. And we don't do that very well as a global culture.
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
We don't do that well at all right now, but hopefully it'll get better with teachers and guides like you in the world.
Joanne Cacciatore:
Thank you.
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
What does the Great Unknown mean to you?
Joanne Cacciatore:
Wow, that's a great question. My initial my impulses, the Great Unknown is sort of “Why am I here and where am I going?” Right? For me, the answer to the first part of that was made clear in Why am I Here? It didn't take me a while to realize why I'm here and to make that happen. But I'm living that question now. I lived my way. As Rilka says, I lived my way into that answer. The other one is not as clear, which is Where am I going? Because even if you believe in an afterlife, what that afterlife is, we may not exactly know and be able to define that. And to me, that's really the Great Unknown. I've done so much self exploration here on this Earth for me. I think for most people, when they have a catastrophic loss, I think that's the Great Unknown for them, the Great Unknown for them is what's the purpose of life? Why am I here? My only child, my four year old, died of cancer. Why am I still here? My beloved partner, who I married six years ago and loved more than anything in the world, just died by suicide. Why am I still here? And she's not or whatever experience it is that we're having with catastrophic loss. It's really the great existential question of all, because we don't know. And not knowing the Great Unknown. So not knowing takes an incredible amount of emotional maturity. Being comfortable with the unknown is one of the great feats of the human experience. There are so many things we don't know. We would rather tell ourselves things and sort of buy into illusions than be able to sit with the discomfort of I don't know. I'm not sure. And this is part of the practice of the Selah Care farm is helping people stay with those questions. Until they live their way into the answer again, as Rika says, living their way into the answer. For some people, it becomes very clear months later. But for most people, it takes years to get there. And we're not very patient. We are a little bit of a fast food society. We don't want to wait for that big existential purpose or the big existential answer to the question of the unknown, the great unknown. Now, many of us realize that we won't know. The second part of the question for me is I know that I won't know the answer to that until I'm dead. What is it like when I die? I don't know. I won't know that until I'm dead. Not really. In an indirect way. I have some ideas, but directly I don't know and I don't know with certainty. So being able to tolerate the great unknown, I think, is one of the great feats of the human experience. It's a big one, isn't it? What is it for you?
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
The Great Unknown for me is just keep going and not knowing, just going through the whole process. And I don't know, but I'm going to go anyway. I'm going to keep going, but I don't know what's happening. And it's scary. It's terrifying. Yes. And it's hard.
Joanne Cacciatore:
Yes, it's hard. Yes, it's hard. It's very, very hard. And I think, like I said, I think it's one of the most challenging, one of the greatest feats before us. And the human experience.
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
Yeah. The human experience is hard.
Joanne Cacciatore:
Yes. So is the animal experience on this planet. The animal experience is extremely hard. Well, and they feel grief, too, right. The pilot whale carried her baby's body around the ocean for seven weeks with the help of her pod. That's an expression of grief. That's an expression of ritual. That's an expression of protest that they feel. And so this is not unique to human beings. The difference is, I think animals are less encumbered by the Neocortex. They're much more in the moment. They're less likely to what's tomorrow bring, what's the next day bring. They're just living now, human beings, of course, we're encumbered by the Neocortex. And so while animals have fear, they have fear in the moment. They're not thinking about tomorrow. They're thinking about their fear now. We're thinking about fear tomorrow, next week, a month from now, a year from now, ten years from now.
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
If you could say, what has death taught you about life or what has death taught you and grief taught you, what would you say that is?
Joanne Cacciatore:
Well, whoooo there's a book about that? There needs to be a book. It's in my head. I need to put it on paper. I mean, everything. It's taught me everything. And grief has made me who I am today. Everything. Probably, perhaps most importantly, to appreciate life and what I have and I do with a ferocity that has so far in my life been unmatched. I cry very easily out my window right here, I see a weeping Willow tree. It's this gorgeous tree. And when I walk by it, I don't walk by it mindlessly. I walk by it and I admire it. And I tell the tree in my mind how beautiful it is and how much I appreciate the beauty because there's so much pain in the world that without beauty, it would be truly unbearable. I cry at sunsets. I feel everything. And I think that's the gift that grief has given me is the capacity to feel it all and to appreciate what I have.
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
Yeah, that's really powerful. Your latest book is Grieving Is Loving, right?
Joanne Cacciatore:
Yeah. Well, I have an Audible book coming out, too, but I don't think it's out yet.
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
So Grieving is Loving, and it's like that heart opening that you talked about earlier, where we don't want to deal with grief, we don't want to feel these emotions, but it's actually a difficult pathway to feeling deeply and more and everything when you let the bottom fall out, which really that's what allowing yourself to feel full.
Joanne Cacciatore:
I call it fully inhabited grief. When you allow yourself to fully inhabit grief, you feel like you're free falling, the bottom drops out, but also the top blows open, too. So you get this expansion, right? So you feel everything down here, of course. But it also allows you to open up here. And it's the reluctant gift of grief. I would give it back. Listen, I would give everything back. I'd give back the Willow. I'd give back everything if I could have my child. But I don't get that choice. So what am I going to do with it now? I have to do something with it. She can't just die. And then I become a shell of a human being who doesn't help people or animals or the planet. I have to do something with the energy of that love and that loss.
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
Dr. Jo, before we approach the ending of our wonderful chat, is there anything that you would like to add that you would want our audience to know? Anything at all?
Joanne Cacciatore:
Oh, gosh. When this happens to you, it will, and I'm sorry. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this. You actually know it, but it's hard to confront it. But when it happens to you, find others who can hold space for what you feel, when you feel it. And by others, I mean, if that means a dog or a horse or a cow, that's okay, too. That's mostly who holds space for me. So find support in the places that make sense to you, given your culture and your context and your lifestyle. Find people who uphold you and encircle you with love and compassion.
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
Should we do a short meditation practice?
Joanne Cacciatore:
Absolutely. I would love to. Let's do a little heart opening meditation. So find a comfortable position. Notice the way your posture is in the seat and gently close your eyes. Strong back, soft belly. Place your tongue on the roof of your mouth behind your teeth, and press upward gently and follow the sound of the Bell. Gently turn your attention to your breath, to the inhalation, to the exhalation. Notice the rise and fall of your chest as you breathe, and then start to slowly deepen your breath in a rhythmic motion. Slowly go deeper into the inhale and deeper it in the exhale. Slow your breathing down, slow the inhale down, slow the exhale down, and go even deeper. Imagine that you're sinking into the depths with your next inhale. Take a nice full breath in and hold it at the top. And then take two more sips of air, two more, and then slowly exhale on your next inhale. Resume normal rhythmic breath. And as you do, I want you to go to the place in your body that feels safe. And I would focus on your chest area if you can. And then I want you to place both of your hands one over the other, in that place at your body. And then I want you to notice what it feels like as you hold that place as you breathe inhale and exhale.
And with your next inhale, I want you to go into that heart space. And I want you to fill that with all the compassion that you can feel for any kind of uncomfortableness, any kind of loss, any kind of grief, any kind of hard feeling you've ever felt. I want you to wrap it in this bottomless compassion in this space.
Notice what comes and what goes. Notice how you feel. Notice any images or thoughts, memories or sensations that you feel. Let yourself feel them, even if they hurt, and just wrap them in some tenderness and compassion that you filled in that space.
Just notice. Don't judge. Don't pull anything in. Don't push anything away. Just allow whatever is to be.
Now imagine all the compassion that you've brought into this space, commingling with any discomfort or pain, any hard emotions, just sort of commingling swirling together.
Notice what you see. Notice what you feel. And with your next exhale, I want you to breathe that out into the world. That compassion. Imagine it moving through your house, with your family, with your friends. Imagine that swirl of pain and compassion moving in the world down your street, to people you know, to strangers in your area. Imagine extending it across the ocean and across borders.
Imagine it wrapping around the globe, around the planet, around the Earth, and also extending to all beings on the planet, to the animals, the four legged, the winged, the Finned, and to the Great Mother herself, holding all of the pain like Avalokeshvara, the God of compassion, who holds the world's sorrows in her heart, holding all of the sorrow and holding it with boundless compassion and tenderness
Your own sense of loss or pain is the source of the compassion you can offer to others in the world and very slowly turn your attention back to the hands on your heart space or wherever they are noticing the rhythm of your breath inhale and exhale noticing any images, emotions, sensations, memories. Just noticing coming back to the breath noticing the rhythmic inhale and exhale gently coming back to the place where you are knowing you can return to this exercise any time following the tone of the Bell to the very end and when you're ready you can open your eyes.
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
Thank you so much for that. That was wonderful.
Joanne Cacciatore:
You're very welcome. Thank you for asking,
Dena Argyropoulou - TEDxAthens:
Joanne it was such a pleasure and treat to have you with us today and on behalf of the entire TEDxAthens team, I would like to thank you so much for being here.
Joanne Cacciatore:
Thank you for having me. TEDxAthens team I'm very glad to be here.