Grief Heals

Lisa Michelle Zega | Jump Up and Down Productions
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Mental Health
  • Updated Weekly

We live in a grief-phobic society which tends to minimize loss and avoid the grief that leads to healing. Lisa Michelle Zega, a professionally trained and experienced grief coach, discusses loss and how to experience the natural consequence of grief, leading to healing and wholeness.

  1. 4d ago

    Journey to Internal Unity

    Lisa explores the profound concept of unity and its intersection with personal healing, sparked by a powerful passage from Neil Douglas-Klots' book, The Hidden Gospel: Decoding the Spiritual Messages of the Aramaic Jesus. The quote, "You cannot seek unity without being unified," serves as the foundation for a deep dive into the nature of human suffering, self-compassion, and the transformative power of the "witness". Lisa discusses how observing our own experiences, emotions, and pain through a neutral, compassionate lens—rather than trying to constantly "fix" ourselves—fundamentally changes our relationship with our suffering. She shares reflections on major life transitions, including a past divorce and changing dynamics with their children, as pivotal moments that ultimately forced a reconciliation with self-belonging and naked vulnerability.

  2. Jul 13

    Beautiful Gayle

    When I found out Gayle was in hospice, I began talking to her in my morning meditations. Somehow, I knew we were meeting in the spirit world and didn’t question the experience.  That changed when she let me know she’d be leaving her body on Father’s Day. I had to be making it up, romanticizing her reunion with her husband of more than 50 years, who exited his body on Mother’s Day. I became critical of my experience – even ashamed of my silly mind.  On Father’s Day, I confessed my foolishness to Sissi, who made space for all the feels and once again I was at peace. I laughed with Gayle at my silliness on my morning walk, and felt her spirit reaffirming that she was indeed leaving that day.  Then my hubby and I left to my cousin’s for a Father’s day celebration with the family. By the time we got home, fed the dogs,and began settling for the night, I’d forgotten all about the morning – I wasn’t thinking about it being Father’s Day because all the festivities were behind us.  Then my phone dinged with news of Gayle’s passing. I sat frozen in disbelief, then my body began to tingle as if connecting the dots. Tears mingled with joy, wonder, and the need to share all of it with my hubby.  More mystical experiences have continued to happen since then, some that you can hear in this talk.  The most recent was yesterday, when I sat down to journal. At some point I began writing to Gayle, which surprised me, and then I spoke out loud, “I need more play in my life and wonder if you would like to play with me”. This time I didn’t doubt her answer, knowing she said yes.  When I got an impulse to climb the tree I meditate under each morning, I wasn’t thinking of Gayle. That is, until I was perched up high laughing that I really did it and there she was. I sensed her presence, saw her smile in my mind’s eye and knew we were playing together.  It was so magical that I climbed down, got my phone, climbed back up, and sent a video message to Gayle’s daughter telling her about the experience.  So enjoy this tribute to my dear friend and notice what newness awakens in you toward your loved ones.

  3. Jun 29

    The Resilience Paradox: Finding Joy in Discomfort

    In this episode, Lisa explores the concept that "grief is love" and how reframing our relationship with discomfort can lead to deeper resilience and joy. She discusses how societal conditioning often leads us to reject "bad" feelings, ultimately limiting our capacity for true connection and peace. Key topics include: Reframing Grief: Understanding grief as a "great disruptor" that offers empathy and a new way to be with oneself.The Resilience Paradox: Why the capacity to stay present in discomfort and uncertainty is a prerequisite for experiencing joy and happiness.The Power of "Containers": How community circles provide the necessary space to hold complex emotions without the need to "fix" or apologize for them.Sensing Safety: Moving beyond survival-based "resilience" to find true safety by gradually tolerating the unknown.The episode also highlights upcoming "disruptor circles" focused on reparenting and reclaiming humanity, starting July 2nd. For more info: https://legityou.com/disruptors-circle-home-page

  4. Jun 9

    The Wind Knocked Out of You

    What does it mean to be made whole? Made whole not by acquiring something missing, but by returning to what's already here? In this episode, Lisa explores the surprising connections between grief, sacred breath, and unity, drawing on Neil Douglas Klotz's Aramaic rendering of the Beatitudes in his book The Hidden Gospel. When Klotz translates "blessed are those who mourn" as "ripe are those who feel at loose ends, coming apart at the seams — they shall be knit together within," something opens up. Grief isn't a wound that leaves us permanently broken. It's an invitation to soften, to breathe, to return. Lisa shares from her own experience of loss, the years of painful disconnection from her sons after the end of a 23-year marriage, and how that grief, entered fully, became the doorway to a depth of love and connection she had never known before. For anyone who fears that loss will leave them forever less than whole, this episode offers something real: not a promise that the pain goes away, but that the pain itself, breathed into and stayed with, can knit us back together in ways we never anticipated.

  5. May 25

    Grief in Context

    In this episode Lisa reflects on loss that isn't death, the disappointments, broken promises, and unmet needs that shape us long before we have language for them. Drawing on a story from her coach Billy Soule about imagining his mother's childhood losses, she revisits her own experience at a Hoffman Institute retreat years ago, where she was asked to imagine her way into the early lives of the parental figures who raised her. What opened there, and the conversations it later made possible with her mother, became a turning point in how she understands inheritance, blame, and the resources our caretakers had — or didn't have — to give. Lisa moves into the larger question the episode keeps circling: mothers mother in a context. So do all of us. The contempt so often directed at mothers, the isolation of grievers waiting to "get better" for everyone else, and the coping we do alone are symptoms of a culture that pushes grief to the fringes rather than holding it in common. Grief, she suggests, is one of the most universal human experiences and one of the most abandoned. This episode is an invitation to bring it back into the circle, where it can do what it's meant to do: humanize, integrate, and make whole.

  6. May 11

    Welcoming What Is

    Lisa returns to the question she's been turning over for a few episodes now — the relationship between healing, wholeness, and being human — and finds her way into it through her own preparation for her oldest son's wedding. What surfaces is an identity she'd been quietly carrying since her divorce: that she'd forfeited the right to claim "mom." Working the thought through Byron Katie's inquiry, she arrives at a simple turnaround — without her, there is no wedding, no son, no day. She was chosen for this. From there the reflection opens outward. If to grieve is to love, then grief is what makes space for everything — the loss, the longing, the parts of ourselves we'd rather not claim. Lisa names the parallel between our cultural refusal of grief and the disintegration we see around us, and closes with an invitation to step outside the impulse to fix or advise, and instead to ask: may I sit, may I listen, may I be with?

  7. Apr 28

    Gardens and Grief

    In this episode, Lisa reflects on the surprising parallels between gardening and grieving and what her first sprouting bell pepper seeds taught her about wholeness. Drawing on the wisdom of "lazy gardener" Ann (a Tennessee gardener Lisa has been learning from), she explores how plants grow more robust root systems when they're stripped back, not in spite of the loss but because of it. The metaphor opens into a deeper meditation on grief as a force that disrupts unnatural patterns, breaks hearts open the way seeds must crack to sprout, and ultimately humanizes us by returning us to our interconnectedness with each other and the world. Lisa also shares a vulnerable personal discovery: a pattern of reaching for old comforts (specifically, food) whenever she steps into a new, more visible identity. She offers a gentle practice she's been working with — pausing for just two minutes in the moments she'd normally leave herself — as a way of honoring the tender in-between space where one self is dying and another is emerging. Join Lisa as she invites listeners to consider their own questions: Where do your losses connect to your root system? If grief is love, how is that true in your life? For Further Reflection: What connections do you see between human and heal, between being humanized and being made whole? Where in your own life have those words pointed to the same thing? Think of a time you were stripped of something precious. Looking back now, can you see where new roots grew? What in you became more connected, more alive, because of that loss — not in spite of it? If grief is love, where is that true in your life right now? What are you grieving that you wouldn't grieve if you didn't love? Lisa describes catching herself at the refrigerator and saying, this is where I normally leave; I'm going to stay with you for two minutes. Where in your own life do you tend to leave yourself? What might it look like to stay, just briefly, just gently? Is there a new identity sprouting in you right now — something tender, unfamiliar, not yet stable? What would it mean to tend it the way you'd tend a seedling: a little water, not too much sun, patience with how small it still looks?

  8. Apr 13

    Grief Humanizes

    Lisa reflects on a question that's been sitting with her: What if we renamed this podcast? From Grief Heals to Grief Humanizes because maybe that's the truer thing grief does. She traces the thread from her peepaw's death by suicide when she was 13 (and how quickly life moved on around her, and within her) through her divorce after 23 years of marriage — the moment she first became "ripe," as she puts it, to actually enter grief. What the divorce took wasn't just a relationship; it was a whole stack of identity cards she'd been carrying: wife, mother, life coach, Christian, pastor. Stripped of all of them, she found herself face to face with something she'd long questioned about herself: whether she actually knew how to love, whether she was even real. She also shares what spurred her to record this particular morning: waking up covered in hives after breaking weeks of clean eating, looking at herself in the mirror, and, instead of panic, feeling something close to joy. Her body said no. And she laughed. Because that's a relationship. Along the way, Lisa touches on: Growing up in a colonized, industrialized world that treats people as commodities and how that gets internalizedWhy grief is such a powerful disruptor of the numbing strategies that "work, until they don't"The obsession with being "one of the good ones" and how that very obsession keeps harmful structures in placeWhat it means to contribute to our collective humanity, not just personal healingA closing reference to Pádraig Ó Tuama's poem The Facts of Life: that the structures that constrict us may not be permanently constrainingCurrently reading: The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee

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About

We live in a grief-phobic society which tends to minimize loss and avoid the grief that leads to healing. Lisa Michelle Zega, a professionally trained and experienced grief coach, discusses loss and how to experience the natural consequence of grief, leading to healing and wholeness.

Information

  • Creator
    Lisa Michelle Zega | Jump Up and Down Productions
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    93
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Lisa Michelle Zega | Jump Up and Down Productions
  • Show Website
    Grief Heals