Mindy Relyea is a certified end-of-life doula, grief facilitator, and the founder of Utah’s first grief and end-of-life symposium. After spending 15 years in nonprofit marketing, Mindy was called to this work through deeply personal experiences with grief, including the sudden loss of her brother at a young age and being present with her father as he died. Along the way, she trained at the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco and discovered the works of grief expert Francis Weller. Through her Grief & Gratitude Retreats, grief circles, and individual family support, Mindy helps people find connection, healing, and meaning in the face of loss. She believes grief is not just emotional—it’s physical, spiritual, and communal. And that the way we engage with grief can also teach us how to live. r Grief is something we all experience, but we don’t always know what to do with it. In this episode, we sit down with Mindy Relyea for a conversation that really stayed with us. We talk about grief not as something we’re supposed to “get over,” but as something we learn to live with, listen to, and tend to. Mindy has a beautiful way of talking about grief because so much of what she shares comes from both lived experience and years of being present with people at the end of life. As a certified death doula, Reiki master, and grief facilitator, she’s supported people wo are at the end of life and their loved ones, breast cancer survivors through Image Reborn retreats, and people who are simply trying to find their way through loss. We talk about why grief can live in the body, how shame and the pressure to “move on” can make things harder, and what it means to actually be with our emotions instead of trying to fix them. One of the things we kept coming back to was the power of community. How different it can feel to share your grief in a circle with other people who understand, rather than feeling like you have to carry it quietly on your own. Mindy also shares simple practices for checking in with your body and emotions, including a question we loved: “What does my grief want me to know today?” We talk about tears, tenderness, vulnerability, and the possibility that none of these things need to be fixed or apologized for. And because Mindy’s work centers so deeply around death and end-of-life care, we also get into the sacred and very human reality of being present when someone is dying. There is something about that work that can’t really be put into a neat formula. It asks us to slow down, listen, and be present for something we often spend our lives trying not to think about. Mindy is also building One Wish World, a marketplace, gathering space, and resource hub designed to make support and hard-to-find services, including death doulas, more accessible. This conversation is for anyone carrying grief, anyone loving someone who is grieving, and really anyone who wants to learn how to show up for the hard things in life with a little more compassion. We hope you’ll listen with an open heart. You might come away thinking about grief, death, and even your own emotions a little differently. Follow Mindy on Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/mindyrelyea?stkn=d3I2cWMxYnlrZWE5&utm_source=q
