Grief Isn’t Just Pain: Reclaiming Joy After Death

How Do We Find Joy After Death? A Conversation on Grief, Parenting, and the Return of Happiness

This profound episode of Lift One Self with host NatNat welcomes grief advocate Marie Alessi, who faced unimaginable heartbreak when her husband suddenly passed in 2018 while she was raising two young sons.

Rather than accepting grief as a life sentence or a hole that never heals, Marie shares a radical yet tender perspective: grief is a visitor — sometimes present, sometimes gone, always allowed, never permanent. "Sometimes Joy goes to the markets when Grief visits," she shares, "and sometimes they sit together."

Through the lens of personal loss (including the death of her father at age 20), Marie opens up about raising emotionally safe children, creating rituals of remembrance, and allowing herself — and her family — to feel everything without shutting joy out.

From laughter at funerals to annual family celebrations honouring her late husband, Marie challenges cultural taboos around grief. She reminds us that healing is possible and joy is not disrespectful to love.

If you're ready to reframe your relationship to grief and soften into joy without guilt, this episode offers profound wisdom.

→ Visit Marie at mariealessi.com to explore her books, TEDx talk, and personal coaching.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to Lift One Self
• 5:32 Marie's Journey Through Grief
• 11:54 Parenting Through Loss
• 22:51 Reframing Grief Language
• 32:03 Grief as a Visitor, Joy as a Resident
• 41:10 Finding Joy Again and Final Thoughts

Transcript

NatNat: 0:00

Welcome to the Lift One Self podcast, where we break mental health stigmas through conversations. I'm your host, nat Nat, and we dive into topics about trauma and how it impacts the nervous system. Yet we don't just leave you there. We share insights and tools of self-care, meditation and growth that help you be curious about your own biology. Your presence matters. Please like and subscribe to our podcast. Help our community grow. Let's get into this. Oh, and please remember to be kind to yourself.

Marie Alessi: 0:36

Welcome to the Lift One Self podcast. I'm your host, nat Nat, and today I am delighted to have a guest and we're going to talk about the other side of grief, where there can be some joy, in that. I know grief has a very heavy, dense connotation, energy around it, Yet there's many that don't realize there's a joyful part, that you can allow yourself to feel joy again, even though it can be some work and it takes shifting some perspectives out of the paradigm that you've once known all the time. So I am in a real delight because many of you know I'm in the season of grief right now, with Natalie transitioning a few months ago, and I look forward to this kind of conversation. So with us is Marie Alisi, and she is going to introduce herself to myself and the listeners and then we're going to go and play in some conversation. So, marie, could you introduce yourself please?

Speaker 3: 1:39

First of all, natanat, I just want to say my heart goes out to you and thank you for having me in this time. I think it's divine timing to see you and I both. I feel like we're both on that same wavelength. You know, people connect at the perfect time. So I'm an author, I'm a speaker, I'm a TEDx speaker, I'm a grief advocate and I'm also a coach and a memorial manager. So, in a nutshell, everything I do is about bringing lightness into grief. I'm very, very honored to be here for this conversation today. Yeah.

Marie Alessi: 2:11

Before we dive into this, would you join me in a mindful moment so we can ground ourselves in our breath?

Speaker 3: 2:18

I'm so looking forward to this. Yes.

Marie Alessi: 2:20

And for the listeners as you always hear, safety first. Please don't close your eyes. You need your visual if you're driving, Yet anything else you're able to follow in the prompts. So, maria, I'll ask you to get comfortable in your seating and, if it's safe to do so, I'll ask you to gently close your eyes and you're going to begin breathing in and out through your nose and you're going to bring your awareness to watching your breath go in and out. You're not going to try and control your breath. You're just going to be aware of its natural rhythm, allowing it to guide you into your body.

Marie Alessi: 3:11

There may be sensations or feelings coming up. That's okay, let them surface. You're safe to feel. You're safe to let go. Surrender the need to resist and just be, be with your breath, drop deeper into your body. Now there may be some thoughts or to-do lists that have popped up, and that's the mind doing its thing. Gently bring your awareness back to your breath, creating space between the awareness and the thoughts and dropping deeper into your body, being in the space of being. Again, more thoughts may have popped up.

Marie Alessi: 4:09

Gently bring your awareness back to your breath, beginning again, creating even more space between the awareness and the thoughts and completely dropping into the body, being in presence, in your being, now coming back into your senses at your own time and at your own pace. You're going to gently open your eyes while still staying with your breath. How's your heart doing?

Speaker 3: 4:54

Really fine. I'm quite happy. I'm going to give that up front because we'll definitely talk about this. I do breath work on a daily basis and I'll see a breath work coach once a week, so it's so beautiful. Once you guide me into that, I'm instantly present and I love it. Oh, I've only started this about six weeks ago and it's phenomenal, the changes that have happened in my life.

Marie Alessi: 5:18

It's amazing yeah, that regulating of the nervous system and really just honoring the body instead of not just being neck up, that you can go neck down and really integrate that mind and body together and feel the emotions makes such a difference. So I have to ask what brought you into the space of grief?

Speaker 3: 5:46

As what brought you into the space of grief. I first dropped into the space of grief when my dad passed away when I was 20 and I had no idea how to handle it, and then really delved very, very deep into that topic after my husband passed very unexpectedly in 2018. So we are talking, like you know, a 20 something year gap. I don't want to do the math right now, but it's been a very, very different experience losing my dad and losing my husband polar opposite actually, and I always feel that, through losing my dad so early and not knowing how to deal with this, with grief, with talking about it, with asking for help, with allowing help in I call them the hidden gifts in adversity.

Speaker 3: 6:33

I often say it almost felt like a wedding present from my dad to have such a present life with my husband Rob, and even though we only had 12 years where we were married with my husband Rob, and even though we only had 12 years where we were married, they were so present and conscious and very deliberate and intentional and so full of love, and that, to me, was also where Rob and I had this positive conversation about three years prior to his passing very theory conversation based on a fatal accident that happened that day and it hit home for us because our kids were so young and it was a young dad who lost his life.

Speaker 3: 7:11

And when Rob and I had this conversation we went what would you do if that would happen to us? You know, we both sort of ended with this I would want you to go the happiest life possible for you and the boys, because that's what love is. So that completely changed, you know, like our whole outlook on life and also being so intentional with everything, and exactly that became my North Star when I received the news of Rob's passing.

Marie Alessi: 7:40

So, you know, grief hits in such a shocking way because the reality that you once knew is no longer there and we tend to want to grasp at what we had rather than accept what's here now of the as is, and it takes some, you know, navigating and processing through, yeah, through. It sounds like you had a really intuitive pull of allowing yourself to receive joy, to feel joy. So what did that look like in the beginning for you?

Speaker 3: 8:17

I don't think that this allowing myself came naturally and very quickly to me myself came naturally and very quickly to me. However, the decision to make this my destination was almost instant. So when I received that phone call, I had a few seconds to prepare to share those news with our young sons. They were only 10 and 8 at the time and I remember walking down the stairs from my bedroom to our living room because I was in my bedroom when I received the phone call from the sergeant from the coroner's office and the boys were waiting in the living room in their martial arts uniform for me to take them to have keto training. And I walked downstairs and I'm like there is no sugarcoating a message like your dad just passed away. You cannot sugarcoat a message like that. You pretty much have to say it out straight.

Speaker 3: 9:07

And for me, I remember when I held them and they were crying and screaming that's what I heard in my mind Rob's voice saying I wanted to create the happiest life possible for the boys. It was so bizarre being in this moment of having all of that. It was so surreal. It's hard to explain a situation like that. Yet this became a north star. I had no idea how to get there, but I knew that was my destination, so that was pretty much within the first few minutes of hearing the news yeah, what came to mind in that incident was also you know you understood what it was to lose a parent, because you said you lost your dad.

Marie Alessi: 9:48

Well, not lost, it's, he transitioned beforehand. I love that you say that, yeah. Yeah, it's not a loss, it's a transition. And also it's seeing that you were meeting parts of your younger self while holding your own children, and parts that didn't have language or experience. Could you relate to that or have you reflected on that?

Speaker 3: 10:14

I never thought about it that way and I love that you say that, but I do remember thinking they aren't even combined as old as I was when I lost my dad Losing a dad and I'm saying lost now too.

Speaker 3: 10:28

But yeah, I'm absolutely with you with that the transition. However, saying that it did feel like a loss when my dad went, I completely had a different perspective for that when Rob passed away. So having that experience at the age of 10 and 8 is so different to having that experience at the age of 20. And you know you are an adult at 20 but you're not. You know you're still, you're officially an adult but you still really want and need your dad around. And I had such close relationship with my dad and I know the boys did that too. They had. They were so close and being boys in particular as well, you know they were really really close to Rob and, yeah, having to go through that experience at such a young age, I just knew that I wanted their experience to be vastly different to the one that I had. I didn't want them to feel lost, because that's what I felt. I felt really lost when my dad passed away and I didn't want that for the boys, I made sure that I was as present as I possibly could be, as well as being present to my own grief, which completely took a backseat for the first couple of weeks where I was in organizing mode. You know, being there for the boys, being present for them like watching them, like a hawk, then flying across the country because we passed away on a business trip, so we were five hours' flight away and we flew across the country to identify his body and all of that was such a bonding and deep experience for us. Coming home together to an empty house, all these things. It was just a very, very intense journey organising the funeral and there was a breakdown moment when all of that was over. You know all these tick boxes you need to go through in the first two to three weeks and Rob's celebration of life was on a Wednesday and in the same week, on a Sunday, I walked Jed, my younger son, down the aisle to his first Holy Communion on my own. But that all happened in the same week. On a Sunday, I walked Jed, my younger son, down the aisle to his first Holy Communion on my own. That all happened in the same week and the emotional waves and different layers of emotions that I went through in those weeks and probably my boys too, not just myself were quite intense. There were a lot of clashes from an emotional level. You know that Holy Communion was supposed to be a celebration of joy and you know and Rob was supposed to be there and his celebration of life. There were all these emotions that we talked about very, very briefly. Before we went live on camera here, so much happened at that. Before we went live on camera here, so much happened at that.

Speaker 3: 13:04

I did not expect my husband's celebration of life to be so full of joy and fun and people laughing and sharing stories about him and I'm like, oh, you know, my heart was wide open. This couldn't have been in any better way, because that's what I felt was really honouring who he was. And I had this moment where I thought Rob would really love this. You know how people are all being together and sharing all these fun stories and plenty about who he was as a person and what their connection was to him. So it definitely left a massive impression on the people that were there. There were about 500 people in a midweek funeral. You know it was amazing, yeah.

Marie Alessi: 13:50

I want to go into the perspective of parents and children.

Speaker 3: 13:55

Yeah.

Marie Alessi: 13:56

How was it for you to hold space for all those big emotions for your boys?

Speaker 3: 14:05

There was I want to call it a sort of knowing from my own experience the depth that you can go to, the depth that you could potentially fall into.

Speaker 3: 14:18

So I instinctively just held this space for them, not wanting them to fall that deep, and understanding and acknowledging, acknowledging their emotions is so big from a parenting perspective, because we tend to want to fix things. As parents, we tend to want to make them feel better, we want to, you know, keep them safe from harm and from hurt and all of that. And there is this moment where you just need to acknowledge that it freaking, hurts and it goes steep and it does feel like a big loss to them, because at that age I don't think they were really ready to understand that transitioning versus loss, because I didn't and I was 21 when my dad passed away, but I had quite a lengthy, very deep spiritual journey which they hadn't been through yet. So I did my utmost best to bring all of that together in this space that I held for them, acknowledging, sharing, teaching them and holding space for everything that came up. It was big, big doesn't even cut it, it was enormous, yeah, yeah it's big emotions, and you know when I say the.

Marie Alessi: 15:40

You know the highest spiritual practice I think you can have in this journey is being a parent and seeing the reflection that your children are showing about you, because you can learn so much from looking through them, about you, because you can learn so much from looking through them, and I think the biggest thing that we're not taught as parents, is the most painful, is witnessing the pain in our children and there's nothing you can do about it.

Speaker 3: 16:04

It's the deepest pain you can ever experience. I feel that watching my boys, in particular my younger son, I think he really took it the hardest. Watching him in pain was a way deeper pain than my own, because it's a pain that you cannot fix. This there's no fixing it, there is just going through it with him. There's just holding space, there's just holding him and crying with him or letting him cry. There is nothing that you can do to fix this pain and it's not there to be fixed, it's to be felt, it's to walk through and it's to be nurtured. And it's like a physical wound. You have to give it time, you have to air it out, you have to make sure that it doesn't get infected, you have to make sure that you actually allow it to heal. And I think we're right on the topic here, because that's exactly where I feel that society goes wrong.

Speaker 3: 17:04

We treat emotional pain complete opposite, very often, to physical pain. We almost put salt in the wounds. We're like it has to hurt and it has to and it cannot heal. And I don't believe that. I feel that you can heal grief, yet we have not learned how to do that. We are under this impression that grief will last forever. That grief will stay with you forever. People are using language like there'll always be a hole in my heart. Everything is like all pain, loss. You know, and you and I we have a different language. You know we talk about transitioning and healing and holding space for all the emotions, and I much prefer to say there'll always be a space in my heart for Rob. I don't talk about a hole in my heart because I don't have that and I don't feel that's the right language for me. So I have really learned to reframe things, to use different language, use more nurturing in my eyes, more accurate language and offer people the same.

Speaker 3: 18:02

I'm not a big fan of my condolences. I feel personally, to me there is no more empty sentence when it comes to the space of grief. I prefer things like you know I'm with you or I'm here for you, or my heart goes out to you, whatever it takes, whatever feels right in the moment. But my condolences is almost like pushing the person away and closing the door. It's not opening a door to exchanging emotions.

Speaker 3: 18:30

Holding space, sitting in a space together. It's almost like I've done my part and that's it. That's what it feels like to me. Everybody's different. I have had conversations with people who said actually it feels good to me when people say that I never had that feeling. I remember being said to me hundreds of times when my dad passed away and after the 10th time I was so empty and I still had to endure another. I don't know how many hundreds of people in that condolences line who said the same thing to me over and over and I felt I don't want that for my children. I said no to a condolences line at Rob's celebration of life.

Marie Alessi: 19:08

So you mentioned that you had the celebration of life for Rob and then that Sunday there was that first communion. So my question is what did the tussle with God look like?

Speaker 3: 19:24

That's a really huge question for me because I am looking at things more from a spiritual rather than a religious point of view. So God is a name that I don't use very often, although I have very deep spiritual beliefs. And for me I had a very deep spiritual epiphany only a couple of weeks after Rob passed away not before the Holy Communion, I have to admit, but I had this very deep spiritual epiphany that Rob and I had a soul contract and that was part of it. We chose that from a spiritual level, from a soul level. Rob and I chose that.

Speaker 3: 20:03

When I walked down the aisle with Jed that Sunday, I felt a hint of emptiness, a hint of he should be there with us and I could feel all eyes on us. Because we live in a small country town, everybody knew that rob had died and the worst part for me, in a way, was that we were seated in the last row and I'm not sure if they wanted to make it easier for us so we could hide away, you know which, which did happen afterwards. I was glad that we're not. You know everybody looking at us and we're sitting in the front. So with my surname, alessi they usually do that alphabetically, we were usually always seated in the first row because of our surname. We were in the last row and I'm absolutely certain if I asked them because it was too much on my mind that that was deliberate. So we you know.

Speaker 3: 20:53

However, what happened through that. What probably nobody thought about was that it made it the longest walk possible, and it was hard. I had tears coming down. I was really trying to keep it together for Jed. I wanted to make it a joyful moment for him and he is such an empath.

Speaker 3: 21:14

He was born that way, not just through Rob's passing. He was born that way. So he kept checking on me and I'm like you shouldn't be checking on me, I should be checking on you. You know, there was this moment of deep connection with Jed as we were walking down that aisle that really long aisle, and all eyes on us felt really uncomfortable. Long aisle and all eyes on us felt really uncomfortable. I could feel their empathy and that felt, in a way, good, but I could also feel the sympathy and that did not feel good at all. So there were so many different emotions in that walking down the aisle that it wasn't actually so much about what he was actually supposed to be about. It was more about how can I get through this and how can I keep him safe, which is a shame, because that's not what he was supposed to be about that day.

Marie Alessi: 21:59

Yeah, yeah, and it was honest.

Speaker 3: 22:05

Yeah.

Marie Alessi: 22:06

You allowed yourself to feel and not be in protective mode. Yeah, but also, you know, show your son what it is to be human, not always just have this mask of. Okay, we're joyful and it's all about because they feel energetically. Yeah, yeah, kudos on you, thank you, you really modeled what vulnerability was?

Speaker 3: 22:32

Yeah, thank you. I was so grateful I had rob's best mate was there as his uh godfather, and they held a celebration for jed afterwards. Um, I was so glad because I did not feel ready to have anybody in our house. Our house, as soon as rob passed away, became sacred space and it took a long time to allow anybody back in. So, yeah, that was big for me. I was so grateful for them to be there, like literally be there for us in such a beautiful way.

Marie Alessi: 23:06

So there's a big aversion in society to talk about grief and I'm one that I am like. I want to engage people to talk about grief. I've one that I am like I want to engage people to talk about grief.

Marie Alessi: 23:14

I've been suggested to be a death doula because I hold such beautiful space around it, because I see it in a different way, that energy doesn't die, it transforms, and we're just really not having proper communication and dialogues around death, around what grief is, and really in a spiritual aspect. So when there's this loss, it's recognizing well, that's your human aspect that's holding on to the lack, that it's not able to feel the bigger dimension of our spiritual and our soul spirit.

Speaker 3: 23:52

I'm so glad to hear back when you say that it's so beautiful. Yeah, yeah, I'm just here grinning. Sorry, I just need to share this quickly. I'm sitting here grinning at such a topic because this morning so we have a basket hanging in our living room with Rob's urn, so there's still some ashes left. We spread most of them where he wanted it to be and we kept some because this is what my older son requested and I said we will only spread all of the ashes when all three of us are ready. You know, there is no timeframe at all. So seven years later, I still have some of his ashes hanging there and this morning, twice I whack my head on it and it never happens. It's been hanging there forever and I'm like what are you trying to tell me? I'm like it felt so cheeky. And now that you're talking about them, I'm like now I know why. Because you're coming into this. Of course you are, you know. I just had to grin because it never happens. It hangs all the time and twice I ran into it today.

Marie Alessi: 24:47

I'm like what is going on. So how, if those that have such an aversion for it, how would you engage with them to befriend grief and what can you share? How it's taught you about love?

Speaker 3: 25:04

yeah, oh, my goodness, um, I believe that people are so avoiding that topic because they instantly fall into what society teaches us about grief it's dark, it's heavy, it'll stay with you forever, and they feel confronted with their own mortality. People don't like that, they don't like to think about it, they know it and we all know that sooner or later we'll all be affected by grief. Because that's the two things we all have in common we are born and we die.

Speaker 3: 25:41

And people don't want to talk about or think about the second part. You know, we talk about birth, we talk about life, but we don't really like talking about death because we are scared of the pain. We are scared of how we go when we go. We're scared of the pain, we are scared of um how we go when we go, we're scared of the uncertainty. They're not knowing when it's going to happen. And that's why I feel it is just such an important topic to normalize, to say, like you know, it's part of life. Why don't we? I actually think that if we were to talk about it more often, then the fear would actually subside. It would become so normal to talk about it.

Speaker 3: 26:22

And you know, I don't know if you have this experience or not, but even though I am a grief advocate, I talk about it all the time when I go to a party and I'm Marie the human, the friend, not in my business persona, although to me it's quite similar, to be honest, because I live and breathe it. However, when I go to a party not as in to come in as a speaker or as an advocate there's almost always the question so what do you do? That's just a normal conversational question and then I have had so many different variations of how to explain what I do without people instantly dropping their energy and going oh you know, I'm so sorry because eventually, when I say what I do is, I was like, how did you get into that? And then I tell them that my husband passed away. And then there is this drop and I'm like I don't want to be the party poop, I don't want to be the one who brings the, but I'm not going to lie either about what I do. You know, it's that that, to me, is a constant training ground around. How do I even address that, although I speak about it all the time without stepping into coaching mode, advocacy mode? There needs to be a smoother transition and, quite frankly, I still have not found the perfect way to share that with people. It is really interesting, you know, and yet when you do go into the conversation, it does smooth out after a while.

Speaker 3: 27:54

And yet I always feel like I'm the one who has to do the educational work, the advocacy work, the coaching work, the trying to make them understand that it is okay, that I'm okay, that I'm in a good space, that I'm happy, that I'm joyful, that I'm loving my life and people just tiptoe around you as in oh, she's lost her husband. And then women even become very awkward around their husbands and I'm like I talked to their husbands, completely normal, before Rob passed away, and then all of a sudden, it's not that you become a threat to them, but you know there's this oh, she's now a single woman. It changes the dynamic which I don't like. I want to still be talking to guys, just like I did before, without having this. Oh, you know, is she after my husband now? Not even the husbands in general, but you know, you get back into this single mode. I'm like, oh, that overcomplicates everything. I just want to be able to talk to people because they're people, not because they're women or men or because I have to think about it differently.

Marie Alessi: 28:51

you know that element comes into it as well and it's not often talked about. Thanks for bringing that up, because I'm sure there's a lot of people that like finally somebody's giving voice to what that feels like and how I'm being analyzed and received and, you know, in the spaces and everything else, because we're feeling bodies that think our nervous systems. We feel these vibrations. It's not just all like, some of it is in our heads because of our own way that we've experienced.

Speaker 3: 29:22

Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.

Marie Alessi: 29:24

Yet there are times where you can feel that you're being looked at and there's insecurity and there's, you know, an edge to it. Yeah, I want to ask, ask you know you mentioned with your sons and for the ashes and it wasn't going to be spread until all of you were ready. What has that journey look like to all of you guys moving forward?

Speaker 3: 29:51

in general. Are you talking about um, about the ashes in particular, or in general?

Marie Alessi: 29:55

just in general, with the grief because you know you could be ready for something, yet your children aren't ready and and holding that space, or you may not be ready and they are, you know holding that as a family dynamic and respecting without dimming yourself, and that those are a lot of ebb and flows to you know, nobody gets left behind.

Speaker 3: 30:18

Yeah, exactly that. I love that. Um, that's exactly it, though. That's. That already sums it up. Nobody gets left behind.

Speaker 3: 30:25

What was my absolute focus in this entire healing journey was to always keep the conversation open. To always keep the conversation open, and it's not always easy, you know, because my sons were already very, very different before Rob passed away, so they all breathed very differently and sometimes I felt like it was literally switching, as in. You know, at some stage my little one took it a lot harder and wanted to talk about it every night, mostly at night, because that's when all the emotions came up, when he went to bed and my older one didn't want to talk about it. Then it switched completely, like my little one shut down, my older one wanted to talk about it all the time and I felt like there was hardly ever a space where both of them wanted to talk, because to me, I think there's nothing more beautiful and healing and bringing that lightness in opening up that space, as when all three of us sit in that space of let's talk about this, either by sharing memories or by sharing about our emotions, by asking questions.

Speaker 3: 31:31

And I deliberately chose Rob's passing anniversary every year to take some time off and go away with him, not to mourn but to celebrate Rob's life, to celebrate our lives, to do something special, to acknowledge that day, to acknowledge Rob and I do that on a daily basis that I mention him. I talk about him all the time. It's not that I force myself to do it so that I don't forget their dad, or that I try not to talk about it so I don't offend them. I do it as it comes up, naturally. I really just trust my intuition on that, or sometimes just do it naturally. I don't even have to tune in, I'll just do it. But that day has really become a day where I deliberately go like okay, what do you want to do?

Speaker 3: 32:13

Let's do something, let's do something as a family, and quite often it also brings up conversations about it, you know, or we share memories about another celebration day that we had, or we look at photos or like there's no agenda ever, it's just this is a special day for us and I want to honour that, and that has been a journey that I really try to keep ongoing, just to keep that space open. And I actually feel that lately I'm talking about roughly the last two to three to five months there has been this wave of healing coming into a family as in there was another layer that was coming up that needed to be seen, acknowledged, sat with and healed, and I feel that this is only possible when you've done a certain amount of healing. Then there is this next layer and the next layer, and I can understand, from a different perspective, that some people see that as grief never ends. I share my perspective with you. To me, I do family bereavement sessions and I had a beautiful family with two girls they were 10 and 12, and there was a loss of two babies in that family and the whole family came and sat and we worked through this for like four and a half hours. It was really intense, really beautiful, and then I shared a story with them because it came to me as a story, something that I have shared many times before, and the story was about three girls in high school being friends and, you know, one hanging out with one friend a lot more all of a sudden, and the other one got a bit more and more left out and then she even moved in with her, and it was this entire story of how, when you have that triangle, one sometimes can get separated, but then she comes back in and then the other one sort of drifts away, and at the end I share that.

Speaker 3: 34:16

You know, one is joy and one is grief, and there was this decision that joy can live with me forever, but grief is a visitor. So my philosophy is always I treat grief like a visitor. She still comes in every now and then after seven years, close to seven years now, and when I have time I allow her to come in, I sit with her. Sometimes we talk, we cry together, we laugh. I mean, griff and I have been so intimate. We sat in a bathtub together and bawled our eyes out, you know so her and I know each other really, really well, and she also knows that she doesn't live here anymore. You know, she's moved out and Joy has moved in, and I'm always telling this story because sometimes Joy goes to the markets when grief comes for a visit, and every now and then the three of us sit together and that's okay too. But this is the sort of perspective that feels so close to my heart. This is how I treat grief, because, yes, she comes and visits and, no, I don't try to avoid her.

Speaker 3: 35:15

Every now and then, when I have too much on, I simply don't have the time to sit with her, and that's okay too. You can come back later. Let's make another time where I can deliberately sit with you, because obviously you've got something that you want to chat about, you know, so let's do that, but right now it's not possible. So that's the sort of philosophy that I'm trying to teach my children as well. It's okay to cry, and it's also okay to not want to cry in certain situations with certain people, when you don't feel safe enough to do that, to open up.

Speaker 3: 35:46

But teaching young boys to open up about their emotions is very, very big and not easy, if I may say so at times, and finding the right people to support them as well that might be outside of the family. So I do whatever it takes. Whatever it takes based on the situation, based on my intuition, because intuition has become my biggest companion in all of that. And, as of very lately, I'm going to share a little secret with you also chat GPT. I would have never, ever thought to ask parenting questions to chat GPT and I did it for the first time last week and I was mind blown. I'm like why didn't I think of that earlier? It was so helpful. And you know, at the end of the day, you still make it your time and still trust your intuition on what you share about that, but it really gives you very good prompts, I have to admit.

Marie Alessi: 36:36

Different perspective that you may not have seen, like I just showed you about. Oh, did you see how you're walking through your own grief, as you know, with your father and having to hold space for your own children that you may not have even recognized? And I really appreciate, because that's the same thing. I, in my perspective, I'm like grief will always be with you. It's just something. That is an experience. It softens your heart. It softens your experience.

Marie Alessi: 37:11

The reason why people can get very dense and constricted with it is because, like you said, it's a visitor knocking on the door and people think, well, I'm all enjoying. Now Grief is starting to come in and you're going to make joy go away. Where it's like, if you shut the door to grief and don't allow it to come in at all, that's where you're going to get the denseness, because you're separating parts of yourself. Grief still has the information, the tenderness, what really love feels like, feeling love on the other side of love. And as you said you said it so beautifully no, just because we feel emotions in the present moment, it doesn't mean that you can process it and have it out.

Marie Alessi: 37:57

Yet what a lot of people do is they don't come back to it to ask what were you trying to signal to me? Because grief is information, it's information and sometimes it's just do you remember what it felt like, the essence of opening your heart in this perspective? And don't forget about that, because we can forget about it. So it's different tenderness, but we get so hardened with grief we think we have to be hard and armor ourselves where it's like soften, soften into that vulnerability which is warrior work, because you just want to get rid of you when there's pain and it's like wait, soften, see what the capacity is, see how you can be held in it but you know that whole, you want to get rid of pain.

Speaker 3: 38:46

It actually it's. It's funny that he brought me to the birth moment. You know, because rob said it so nicely, that it's a fear, tension, pain scenario. When we fear the pain, then we tense up and then the pain gets worse. You know, and I believe it's not just a metaphor for birth, it's also a metaphor for grief, which is again another transition, you know. So it's actually very similar and also different at the same time. Yeah, and when you think about the fear, tension, pain scenario, I actually, when I feel that grief coming on, I don't try to get rid of it, I don't turn it up, I just allow it to just flow out of me and it's almost like it's like, you know, when you have a full on downpour and then everything feels so much fresher and juicier and green, when we had like a massive rainfall.

Speaker 3: 39:35

And I feel the exact same when I have a cry.

Speaker 3: 39:38

I actually want it to be a good cry because I know it's going to cleanse my soul, my body, my attention, my everything just goes away. And sometimes, when I don't have that moment, you can't force it either I might run around with like a knot in my throat for a couple of days where I'm like I really need that release because I can feel it there. I can feel the sadness sitting there. It's something that I don't express because you know you feel it in your throat, chakra. It's like you need to communicate it, you need to cry it out or talk about it and if nothing else works, I sit down and watch my girl. It's my go-to movie when I need a big cry and it gets me every single time when she comes down the stairs, when her best friend passes away and they're doing the funeral for her. It gets me every time and literally whatever it takes. If that's just a sad song or if it's talking about it, I need to allow that release because otherwise it actually starts physically hurting.

Marie Alessi: 40:36

Yeah too, emote Grey's Anatomy is mine. When I know that my body needs a good emoting and it's holding on to a lot, it's like, okay, Grey's Anatomy will let that nervous system surrender and just emote. I've learned in a long time I'll take that on. Yeah, yeah. So it's finding those ways because we're in a society that has a big aversion to tears, has a big aversion of allowing the melancholy and some sadness, and it's like, well, it's not identifying with it yet. This is a healthy way for the body to release so many toxins and stress that it deals with day to day.

Speaker 3: 41:13

I love that you say that it's the not identifying with it. It's. It's. Yeah, allowing it to come through, yeah.

Marie Alessi: 41:20

Yeah. So I want to ask you if you could whisper something to somebody that is right at the precipice and at the beginning of grief. Is there a truth that you'd want them to feel in their bones so?

Speaker 3: 41:38

one thing that comes up for me is love just wants you to be happy, and I'm saying that because we are not short of allowing ourselves to feel the depth of it, to feel the heaviness of it, to feel the sadness of it. Yet what society doesn't teach us is that that is also okay to be okay. We always get into the it's okay not to be okay. Yeah, and it's okay to be okay. That, to me, is such an allowing, such a softness, and I often say to people I don't feel as much that we need help with grief, I feel that we need a lot more help with allowing ourselves to heal, allowing joy back in, allowing that all these emotions can go hand in hand and sit in the same circle with each other. It doesn't have to be one or the other and, weirdly enough, we do understand that before grief. We do understand that.

Speaker 3: 42:37

You know, laughing, sadness, happiness, everything can happen all at once and can happen multiple times, going back and forth or in the same time during a day. But once we enter that world of, or that phase of, grief, that's when we got it announced it's inappropriate to laugh at a funeral. You know things like that. Yet there was so much joy and laughter. When I did the eulogy for Rob. I went beyond like a normal eulogy, as you can imagine. I just had this speech about love and connection and there were bloopers in there and jokes about Rob and there was laughter in the audience and I loved it. I feel we needed that. All of us needed that, because there is such heaviness. So if there's one message I want to share is that it's okay to have all of these emotions come in. It's okay to laugh at a funeral. Really, it's just beautiful actually when it happens.

Marie Alessi: 43:39

Yeah. So I know many listeners now are like okay, where can I find Marie? So could you let the listeners know where they can find you and your offerings?

Speaker 3: 43:50

Yeah, I'm pretty much on all the socials that you can imagine, but the easiest way would probably be to go to mariealesicom, because you can find, you know, all the socials and connections where you want to connect with me. You can find all my books on there, my TEDx talk, you know. You can find a book, a chat with Marie button, and I'm really there. It's me taking these calls and chatting with you. So I think that's always the best way to get started and have a look around. You can read a bit more about the work that I offer, the services that I offer, who I am, my background and it's all there.

Marie Alessi: 44:22

I want to ask you could you leave an intention for one of the listeners that is listening right now. Whatever's coming up in your heart, just give that intention to that listener that's listening.

Speaker 3: 44:37

That might be such a simple one one, but that was the first one that came up, so I go with. That is to reconsider next time you hear about somebody's passing, if you go with the usual go-to the my condolences, or if you maybe just be in the moment with them and trust your heart, what's the right thing to actually say? And people often say I don't know what to say. That in itself is so much better than my condolences, because it's real, it's human, it's not a phrase, a learned phrase, it's a complete human to human. I don't know what to say, I have no words. Can I give you a hug? You know? It's just being there, holding space, being in the moment. That is something I feel we all need to learn.

Marie Alessi: 45:24

Yeah, I want to thank you so much. This has been such an enriching conversation and it's near the end of my day, so it's a beautiful way to end the day. I want to thank you for doing the alchemy in your life, taking the impurity and turning it into gold, yet not keeping that gold only for yourself You're sharing it with others. So I want to thank you, marie, and I want to thank Rob for being in the space and your father also being in the space to enrich and allow us to know what living looks like. So thank you, marie, for the warrior work.

Speaker 3: 46:02

Thank you so much for having me, Nat. It was absolutely beautiful to sit in this space with you and have that conversation. Thank you.

Marie Alessi: 46:09

Please remember to be kind to yourself. Thank you, hey. You made it all the way here. I appreciate you and your time. If you found value in this conversation, please share it out. If there was somebody that popped into your mind, take action and share it out with them it possibly may not be them that will benefit.

NatNat: 46:32

It's that they know somebody that will benefit from listening to this conversation. So please take action and share out the podcast.

Marie Alessi: 46:41

You can find us on social media, on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok under Lift One Self. And if you want to inquire about the work that I do and the services that I provide to people, come over on my website, Come into a discovery call.

NatNat: 46:59

Liftoneselfcom. Until next time, please remember to be kind and gentle with yourself. You matter.