Gyani Richards M.A.: 0:00

When Pete died, there was a part of me that was holding both this incredible loss and I was also present to my love. The love did not get deleted by the loss. If tomorrow starts without me, there's something.

Show Intro: 0:17

While I hold you close, never let you go. Hello and welcome to The Broken Pack, a podcast focused on giving sibling loss survivors a platform to share their stories and to be heard. Something that many sibling loss survivors state that they never have had. Sibling loss is misunderstood. The broken pack exists to change that and to support survivors. I'm your host, Dr. Angela Dean.

Episode Intro: 0:49

Today, I'm joined by Gyani Richards, a California grief practitioner who lost his younger brother Pete to cancer five years ago. Pete was the heart of a family of five brothers and a figure who lived large. We talk about absence, presence, and the conversations they never got to have. Take a listen.

Dr. Angela Dean: 1:13

Alright, so welcome to the show. How would you like to introduce yourself to our listeners?

Gyani Richards M.A.: 1:20

My name is Gyani Richards. I'm a grief counselor, and I live on the West Coast. And I work with people both locally here in the Bay Area, as well as remote via Zoom around the country.

Dr. Angela Dean: 1:33

Oh, wow. So are you licensed everywhere?

Gyani Richards M.A.: 1:35

I'm not licensed. So that gives me a little bit, quite a bit more geographic leeway, as it were.

Dr. Angela Dean: 1:41

Okay as a licensed psychologist i.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 1:45

I know it's.

Dr. Angela Dean: 1:45

Tricky i understand that yeah it's a little bit tricky yeah all right well so thank you for that before we talk about grief and loss of your brother i was wondering how you would like to introduce pete to us.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 1:57

Pete uh beloved pete i come from a family of five brothers now four and i was number four pete was number five so.

Dr. Angela Dean: 2:07

We were just.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 2:08

A couple of years apart. And then there was a bit of a delta between what we called the older three. They were like maybe six or seven years older than I, and then they went up another five or six years from there. So Pete and I were the younger two. So we had a special bond and we're referred to as the younger two. We had sort of a separate group of protocols and regulations and expectations versus the old guys. Pete, just a lovely being, just a man of heart, a man of passion. Really, when I think of him, I think of Zorba the Greek, if you're familiar with that story and that ethos. Yeah. Pete was a real Zorba figure with all that that entails, the entire spectrum of the full catastrophe, as it were. He loved to live large. Those of the four of us have different kinds of connections. We're all close, but Pete held the family as sort of an energetic focal point. And whenever we were all together, He was sort of the guy around which it all sort of occurred.

Dr. Angela Dean: 3:08

Yeah. Which is interesting as the youngest person in the family, that he held everyone together.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 3:17

Yeah. Yeah. I know in terms of family systems and theories and concepts, it is unusual. But just as a group of five beings, when we were all in a room, it was sort of Pete who quietly, humbly, but palpably sort of held the greater matrix sort of together. We all connected with him in our own way. Yeah but a lovely guy i miss him deeply.

Dr. Angela Dean: 3:44

Yeah how was your relationship throughout the lifespan.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 3:47

It was uninterruptedly sweet uh we we grew up here in northern cal i like to describe our family scene is sort of like the this might predate you but this was like back to the leave it to beaver days where yeah ward and june cleaver and the kids and family ecosystem had a bit of a kind of a tom Sawyer sort of vibe to it. We lived a little bit out in the country, so there was land and lakes and, orchards and stuff and with five brothers there was always, there's always something happening right there was either football in the front yard soccer in the backyard something else frisbee on the street so there was always lots, brewing and lots of cooking but pete and i because we were the younger two just a year and a half apart just have an archive of of young boy early man stories that really bonded us kind of went everywhere together ended up going to college together in Southern Cal. We've stayed very close over the years. Yeah.

Dr. Angela Dean: 4:48

Yeah. What would you like to share about losing him?

Gyani Richards M.A.: 4:51

You got a couple of days? No, just kidding.

Dr. Angela Dean: 4:53

Sure.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 4:54

Well, wow. It's always so interesting and valuable to revisit that question, revisit that inquiry each time I get to. And so in this moment, as you ask the question, I'm aware of the physical absence of him. Oftentimes, I want to pick up the phone like it's a weekend and, let's go for a bike ride or let's go play tennis or something that sort of physical missing but as I've worked with it and as I've spent time just being with the loss he's such a part of my soul he's such a part of my heart, that that has now become the larger sort of, ocean of experience inside of which the absence occurs. And in the beginning, it's often, as we probably all know, it's just the opposite, where we're kind of swimming in this ocean of grief or loss. It's powerful and interesting to revisit that inquiry often after we've lost somebody. And as I revisit that moment now with Pete, what I'm aware of is sort of the parallel presence of the missing him on one side and a deep sense of connectedness to him as well. And however we frame that in our language or our particular paradigm whether it's our soul or psyche or however people hold that but i'm quite aware that there's the sting of absence and yet it's held within a, a larger sort of soul knowing that he lives alive sort of with me in my heart. It's a beautiful, important place, I think, as grievers to sort of revisit, see how that feels in this moment, what may have changed or modulated or, It's really this experience of holding both, right? My sense of the grief path is it's this continual journey of enlarging, enlarging, enlarging, like holding more and more. And with Pete, just holding the absence as well as the presence.

Dr. Angela Dean: 6:55

Yes.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 6:56

One of these both and sort of human inquiries.

Dr. Angela Dean: 7:00

I was just at a training with Bob Neimeyer, and he was talking about his father, which he talks about when his father died when he was young. And just very much how that relationship has continued to evolve from 12 until whatever age he is now. And you're right, like a lot of their absence and their presence coinciding, living in us, right? But thank you for that.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 7:26

Yeah.

Dr. Angela Dean: 7:26

Yeah.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 7:27

Yeah.

Dr. Angela Dean: 7:28

How long ago did you lose him?

Gyani Richards M.A.: 7:31

Five years. He was 63 when he died. He got skin cancer on his head and it sort of traveled down the lymph node and it began to do its dirty work and, you know that stuff sometimes moves way too quickly and by the time they could kind of do much that, tumor had grown they couldn't really remove it because it would have hurt the neck and the voice cords and arteries and stuff so they tried chemoradiation, nothing worked and from diagnosis to departure so to speak, I think it was under 18 months.

Dr. Angela Dean: 8:06

Oh, wow.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 8:07

Yeah. And it was weird because he really was a very physical guy. He worked outside. He ran a tennis court construction business, played tennis and went surfing. Southern Cal guy. No foreshadowing of sort of ill or whatever. Oh, yeah, I got this little thing on my head. All the brothers were like, well, we should get that checked out. And a few months went by. And I mention this because what his story sort of reverberated within the family system, I found very interesting and upsetting and concerning because obviously we all deal with another's, bad health news differently.

Dr. Angela Dean: 8:45

Some people are like.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 8:45

Oh, yeah, he'll take care of it. The doctors know what to do. And a couple of other of us were like, yeah, I'm not so sure. He was a little laissez-faire. That would be another sort of parallel storyline or my own storyline that I have about. As I recall, his journey through illness, one other brother and I in particular would have conversations sort of offline. And we would often sort of reflect and go, do you think he's really taking care of this like quickly, like diligently? And we would both go, no, he's kind of casual. Yeah, I got another doctor. I think I'm going to see him next month and see what he thinks. And, you know, for more on, we're like, dude, you got a bump on your neck. Handle that thing. And so it was interesting to just note how the four brothers, some had more reaction to it, others were more casual, just as a psychological commentary on how the family system vibrates when someone goes through a tough time.

Dr. Angela Dean: 9:41

So that's a pretty rapid descent. What was that time period like for you?

Gyani Richards M.A.: 9:47

So, kind of from diagnosis to death, yeah, probably a year and a half. Well, Pete's worldview was, again, like Zorba, the Greek. Like, it all stuff kind of works out. And it always did until it didn't. Or maybe it did from some transpersonal perspective. We don't know. But from his world, it was like, yeah, the doctors will do. But what I found interesting was, and this said more about Pete, I think, than anyone else. There was very little discussion, which I found frustrating, about once it was pretty much determined, not that he was going to die, but that it was not good. It's like the fulcrum move, the direction it was moving in clearly was not toward health and recovery. But the conversation around it was never like, dude, can we talk about where this might be headed? This could be it? Like, wasn't his sort of way of communicating? He was an interesting amalgam. If you look at a human being, big heart, welcomed everybody, but at the verbal sort of communication level, and at the level of really revealing the vulnerability of where he clearly was in the last six or eight months, that didn't come forward much. That part was frustrating. I was holding a couple of different experiences. On the one hand, I would have loved to say, Pete, if this doesn't go well, meaning if you're actually heading toward... The Grand Portal. Can we talk about that? Can we presence that as a meaningful conversation if that's what's occurring? We don't know, but if it is. And it just wasn't kind of where he would want to go.

Dr. Angela Dean: 11:30

He was so comfortable.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 11:31

Yeah, he was uncomfortable. And so the weird part, you know, in communication, whether it's particularly with family members, is that, it left me and a couple of other brothers who wanted to have that level of vulnerable conversation in sort of this proverbial land of helplessness. Because on the one hand, you want to respect the boundaries and be a good listener and all that sort of stuff. I didn't want to push or pull. Every now and again, I would lean in that direction and pretty clear the message was, yeah, I got this. And then I'd get off the call feeling like, oh, I'm not sure he does have it. And it would be nice to sort of talk with him from a place inside of him that was clearly scared, afraid of what might be happening. He was a family man, had a wife, two great kids. So I never got to have that with him. And so in my own way, and even up until the end, in the last month I went to, in the last few weeks, we saw him. It was clearly, I don't think he was on hospice formally yet, but he was in bed a lot. And this was clearly not going to be a story of return and the phoenix rising from the ashes. He was heading toward the great window. Part of my process has been just making peace with that, sort of honoring that's how he wanted to depart, right? And honoring that. Thank you. And again, it's another one of these situations where we hold at least two or more experiences at once. On the one hand, I wanted to have more contact. On the other hand, I didn't get that. And so how can I be okay with that? Because that's the truth of what is.

Dr. Angela Dean: 13:15

Right. And I think it's an important thing to consider is that just because we have the information or want to have the conversations that are difficult, because we think that they'll help someone. Sometimes that wouldn't be helpful to them or they wouldn't be ready sounds like.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 13:31

Right maybe that was true for him yeah it's hard not to sort of overlay and project my particular way of doing something in this case talking about one's demise sort of overlaying that on him and that just wasn't his style like okay, how hard was it for.

Dr. Angela Dean: 13:47

You to know that he wasn't willing.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 13:49

To engage.

Dr. Angela Dean: 13:49

In those conversations or able to engage.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 13:52

When i feel into it it wasn't inconsistent with how i knew him to be, so it wasn't as though we had like 60 years of deep spiritual sharing and then right on his deathbed or near abouts he's like yeah i don't want to talk about this so the way pete and i knew each other was much more, uh i won't say non-verbal and we talked forever from the time we were zero to 62, I was clearly the more designated talker in the conversation, more the generator of conversations. And he'd reply, but sort of in his loving, accepting, but not quite following the lead. Again, it's one of these stretching moments, stretching chapters where, yeah, I would lean this way and he's leaning that way. And I guess we will make room for it all, just making room for it all.

Dr. Angela Dean: 14:45

Mm-hmm.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 14:48

That's how it is. That's how it unfolds.

Dr. Angela Dean: 14:51

Yeah. How are you doing? I know that five years can be a difficult year. Not that there's any timeline in grief, as you know, but it feels like there's this heaviness around certain milestones, if you will.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 15:05

You know, I don't have any particular association with the year necessarily. I think when I begin to feel, so he died in March five years ago, so that was just a couple months ago. And where his life and death were, again, presenced were his daughter, who not surprisingly, but surprisingly, is a grief therapist. And she invited the family, meaning the brothers, and Pete's wife, this daughter's mom, to do a family Zoom to sort of honor Pete. So that was really sweet, right? All the brothers, because we live in different areas. All the brothers and Pete's wife and his daughter himself. That certainly, and we all, you know, there's nothing therapeutic about the gathering. It's more like we just want to honor Pete, right? It's been five years, within a day or two. Are there some stories, memories, reflections? It was beautiful to hear in the context of story, because I like story as a, mode of holding experience and phenomena, that each brother shared different stories that all for them had a certain very animated quality. Some funnier, some a little more serious, some a little more philosophical, but we each sort of contributed. So to your point how is it now that was beautiful because we all got to sort of drop into this. Heart place but that was a function of his daughter sort of deliberately creating an invitation right like here's a venue, no expectation where you know nothing needs to happen but everything can happen so who who wants to share a story first and someone shared and like that so, for me it was another example of. How just profoundly important it is. Ongoingly five years ten years however many maybe add in an item that we get to share story because story, allows us to drop into these places that for me are beyond the story like in a way the story gives us access to places in ourselves that yes, begin to open up new terrain terrain often that, we i may not have discovered before like oh Well, that's interesting. I kind of feel the nuance of something. I didn't really get that before. Because with story comes image, comes recollection, comes memory, comes the whole, sort of floral dimension of the psyche and everything comes alive. And that's powerful, right? That's a beautiful part of the grief path.

Dr. Angela Dean: 17:39

Yeah, I use a lot of narrative meaning reconstruction approaches to grief. And so I think this is, you know, very much on par with what you're talking about. We understand our lives through story. We're inherently storytellers as human beings.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 17:53

Yes.

Dr. Angela Dean: 17:54

And so I'm curious, as you had those different stories, you were hearing your other brothers talk about this and probably his wife and daughter as well. What did you learn about your own story or about Pete, who he was, from all of these different perspectives?

Gyani Richards M.A.: 18:14

Well factually i heard i had heard all of the stories before because our family the brothers were just a storytelling archive i mean i often think somebody should have recorded this for 60 plus years because there's a lot in there a lot that would never or should never be published to the greater world but amongst us, wow there's an infinite treasure trove of remember when, yeah, I'm glad that was over. So I didn't learn anything factually necessarily new, but. What I felt was as though each storyteller, each brother, sort of communicates their own vibration, right? Their own sort of heart vibration of how they knew and continue to know Pete. So that was very sweet. And that was consistent with how I know all my brothers. Like, he would say it that way. Oh, that's right. But that's kind of how he would, I know that story because they were, got lost in the desert when the car broke down, you know, kind of funny stories. And so each story, each brother shared stories that sort of revealed how they knew Pete. And the overall sort of vibe was he was just so beloved, right? And one brother in particular observed, as I did earlier, which was, it was quite amazing how Pete served as sort of this familial epicenter that each brother could connect with easily with him. Whereas with some of the other brothers, not all the vectors, but there's a couple of vectors that are a little scratchy, unlike with Pete. Pete was, again, this sort of very open, accepting being. It was beautiful to have that family venue to share those stories. Yeah, I think we, and I think at the end of it, we were all like, do we have to wait a year, like on some death date to have this sort of thing? And no, we don't. His daughter just invented it on that date. But so hopefully something like that will happen sooner than every year, because it's nice to get that family together and connect that way, either just with Pete or with others that have moved on. Yeah.

Dr. Angela Dean: 20:27

And thinking about that, all the brothers and he was the glue. I don't think that's the word he used, but he was the epicenter. How have your other relationships, your other sibling relationships changed since he's not here?

Gyani Richards M.A.: 20:39

You know, I'm not sure I can draw any definitive sort of causal lines between Pete's death and this is how the other relationships changed. And I'll tell you why, is that we've all been really close, like, forever. And so, we sort of walked the terrain of Pete's death on this pre-existing ground of deep relatedness and deep connection. So there weren't a lot of sort of like seismic, I mean, other than the event of his death, but, our relationships, each of us, each individual vector has remained so intact, so connected and close, some more than others, but there's been no really primary fissures that perhaps a death could reawaken. I mean, I can only speak for myself, but I know the other guys. I know how they often or how infrequent they connect. I'm not sure his death, necessarily changed any of the particular relationships that way. Again, as a function that we've, you know, it's been a close family for a long time.

Dr. Angela Dean: 21:45

Were you a grief therapist before he died?

Gyani Richards M.A.: 21:48

No. No. And the next question is probably, well, did that affect you becoming a grief therapist?

Dr. Angela Dean: 21:56

Exactly. So how did you get from the stick grief counselor?

Gyani Richards M.A.: 22:00

Yeah, right.

Dr. Angela Dean: 22:01

Yeah.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 22:02

Well, so this will, I'll have to add in a couple additional tributaries.

Dr. Angela Dean: 22:08

Absolutely. Whatever you need to add.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 22:10

And we'll kind of in this timeless spaceless podcast world we can be stitched together so a little bit about my my background i'll back up just for a minute or two so. My father died as the first grief event when i was 13 and so that had its own impact, reverberations and as i look back on that i think the primary i i'm guessing i'm sensing but a profound impact of that, apart from just, the earthquake-ness of it all as a young man at 13. Four or five years after that, I found the world of meditation and mindfulness and the healing arts and threw myself into that world of studying and practicing, the great wisdom traditions of the world. And it began an entire arc of my life that sent me back and forth to India over the course of a decade or so, oftentimes I look back and I think, having lost a father, some part of my young psyche was almost in the inquiry that one could call, is there anything that can't be taken? Is there something deathless? Now, as a 13-year-old, I wasn't thinking that, but I can't help but think that was brewing somewhere deep inside, and it took four or five years to sort of that to arise. So I mentioned that because that sort of directed my life on this whole path and. I don't know how much of that was a direct response to losing a foundation such as a parent. I sense it was, but it's hard to draw those sort of causal connections. But regardless, it happened. That's how my life went, and I followed it. And then it was a decade or two after that where I went back and got my master's in transpersonal counseling with the intention of going on to be a clinical psychologist with sort of a transpersonal veneer to it. With a spiritual kind of holistic feel, which is what drew me to it. So I did that. That was 20 years ago, 25 years ago. But that arc never happened. Like I completed the training, never went on and did all the licensing and all that. My life sort of took another route. But the embers of that, meaning the desire to work with people. I think never went away and actually what that trainee did was i went on and spent 20 or 25 years as a career counselor as a career consultant helping people sort of navigate that world, and then fast forward a few years ago it began to dawn on me that that wasn't quite feeding me the way that i i really wanted and sort of these moments of recognition when when you notice that, there could be there can be a new a new chapter and this recognition that like, some voice said well you're you're clearly in your fourth quarter age-wise we don't know whether you got over time or how much but if you would make any changes that would be a good time and so i began to sort of just, inquire and reflect and, somehow the world of grief and loss began to speak quite loudly to me again as a place to go and use my training and my interest in the mindfulness practice and so forth. And so it was just, yeah, probably two and a half, three years ago that then I went back and got some more grief training in particular. So that was after Pete died. So I don't know how, again, how those things hooked up, but something happened that drew me quite passionately into this field. So here we are.

Dr. Angela Dean: 25:57

Yeah. Well, there's this idea that meaning can come out of our losses, right? And it sounds like in some ways you finding your way back to helping people was some of the meaning making that you've done from losing him.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 26:13

Yeah. Yeah. I can say this. At the end of the last career that I was doing, it became abundantly clear that there was a new, new thing that wanted to happen. But, you know, there's often these in-between periods where we just have to hang out in the gap, if we can, and hopefully stay open to, to something deeper and, in your words, more meaningful that wants to come through and sort of inhabit your life. And so there was a couple of years there where I was in that uncomfortable sort of waiting, not quite there. But then when it began to become clear, it showed up loud and clear. I honor the mystery deeply, and I listened to it. And this clearly came from someplace that did not come from Guyanese's brain or Guyanese's like, what would be a good career track for that? There's nothing about that. This bubbled up from someplace. Here's another way I've described it. I feel like early in my life, the seeds of grief and the seeds of meditation, the seeds of mindfulness were planted in this then young man of 13, then 17 or 18 when I started to practice. And these two very deep soul seeds began to. Grow in their own way and then i'm endlessly amused at how long sometimes some things take and other things take short but this took a long time for these two to kind of go, hey i'm over here yeah i'm over here oh well why don't we meet and see if there's some way that, that these two streams of my deep passion can come together in a way that can be of service, That's sort of the simplest way to say it. And I'm infinitely happy that they have. And it's a work in progress. You know, just endless learning of how we move in our life. Like, what is this phenomena of grief, of loss? How does this trickle through a body, mind, and a heart? And how can a mindful orientation help give space and light to that? It'd be just endless inquiry and endless learning. So that I'm happy about because I hadn't really, really hung out in that passionate sort of place with the other work I was doing for a while. So it was very refreshing. Like, oh, my God, I get to wake up and actually wake up into something with which I'm deeply engaged. And yeah, so it's good.

Dr. Angela Dean: 28:43

So when you brought these things together, and I know that I think it was in your Substack that I was reading, maybe it wasn't there. Is it Aikido that you brought together?

Gyani Richards M.A.: 28:54

Aikido. That was in the Substack article.

Dr. Angela Dean: 28:56

Yeah. Yeah. Do you want to say more about that? Sure. And how the role of that in your work and your grief?

Gyani Richards M.A.: 29:02

Sure. So, just briefly, for those who have not heard of Aikido, it's a Japanese martial art that is based upon the principles, not of violence or combat, but it's based upon the principles of how do we connect with another person. So one might think that's an odd martial art most of the things I see on TV are the people like me well how could that be well the short story around that is the founder, had this we'll call it enlightenment experience and he had spent the previous 50 years doing all the hard martial arts karate, jiu-jitsu and all that stuff but he had this profound life-changing experience, in which in a sense sort of a keto, sort of appeared as kind of this Mozartian download. It was like, wow, there's actually a way that we can use the principles of martial art to promote peace, connection, harmony, blending, belonging. So it was a radical departure from traditional martial arts. And that was not that long ago in the world of martial. This was like the early 60s. Anyway, so I found my way to it about 30 years ago. And I'll never forget the first time I walked into the Aikido dojo. I thought I was walking into a temple.

Dr. Angela Dean: 30:23

Hmm.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 30:26

Yeah, that was powerful. Open the doors. And it wasn't people fighting. In Aikido, you're always working in partnership. So, and it was silent, right? There was no grunting, no growling, because I'd been to other dojos. I thought, this is not my vibe. But in this Aikido dojo, there were people moving, and you're always working with a partner. And from the outside, it looks like a dance, right? And there is a designated sort of attacker who in the beginning has moved slowly, so your nervous system can learn how to respond to a fist or a strike coming at you. But it's based upon the principles of how do we actually connect with another person? And how can we move in harmony with this other person, not in conflict? So a lot of the practical exercises set up physical scenarios in which you are for instance grabbed and i mentioned this in the subsection so the first time your wrist is grabbed it's sort of unnerving, we don't normally go through like with people grabbing our wrists you know you're in the shopping mall, but you notice how your whole system begins to shake and. So these these are some of the principles and the principles invite us to relax, open sort of ground feel our feet on the ground, open our posture towards our partner. This is the segue into how it integrates with grief work. You notice very quickly how that is not how our system is designed, right? The system is designed just the opposite. The system is designed to either fight, flee, or freeze on those moments. And so that occurs. And that's physically played out in the dojo. And you feel all that. So the Aikido training gives us endless opportunities to learn to open, relax, redirect energy, blend with energy rather than fight with energy. So a lot of these principles I found deeply applicable to just dealing with, a human life of suffering, but a human life particularly of grief suffering. Since my experience in grief, personally, is that the first impact, the first level of reaction is we will fight, flee, or freeze. Anything to distract us from relaxing, breathing, dropping in, and seeing, in fact, what is in front of us. So those principles are deeply applicable to begin to help people on their grief journey. Notice where the sort of reptilian or limbic reactivity arrives. Is there a way that we can begin to drop into another place in ourselves? And with baby steps, we can begin to develop these new capacities over time. This is the piece. I'm sure you know this in your work that grief is a practice. I mean, I hold grief work like a practice, like going to the gym or meditation or learning Aikido is something that happens over time. And it's required that we put the reps in because the reps are the very action that develops these new capacities, these new ways of being resilient. And without that, it's, you know, kind of a one and done or, oh, that was a good, I felt good in that moment, but I'm not building something. I'm not building a container that over time can allow me to accommodate deeper, and more intense vibrations of grief and loss in terms of how the body might respond to these things. So that's a little bit of a roundabout way of saying how I have done.

Dr. Angela Dean: 34:21

Right. I mean, there is a physicality to grief that I don't think people often assume is there. There are physical responses to grief. And so I love what you're doing there. You're connecting the mind and the body intently. And as you were talking about that i i was actually envisioning this beautiful uh dance with grief like you were having in aikido there was a training i went to last, summer two presenters had us doing this embodied movement where there were three people involved four actually there was an observer and then there were, two people you're playing the grieving person and the person that was lost and then grief was its own person and it was this unspoken unintentional way of moving with grief and it was it was a training so it was you know we were assigned roles but you made the grief very physical and like how people interacted with the grief and where they put it, and placed it was really fascinating to watch but that's what i was picturing as you were talking about the ikido i do remember you talking about, settling into the grief i don't remember your exact words in the substack. Do you want to say more about that?

Gyani Richards M.A.: 35:30

I think the phrase you're referring to is relaxing under pressure.

Dr. Angela Dean: 35:34

Yes.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 35:35

Something like that. For me, that principle, as a principle within Aikido, And certainly as a principle within my observations of walking the grief path, a guiding principle could be this notion of how is it that we can relax, not collapse, but relax, meaning relax with some ground, some center of alertness under pressure. Because the grief experience viscerally exerts, at times, immense pressure on the system, on the body, the mind, and the heart. And generally speaking, we don't have training for that. It's not in the family system. It's not in the educational system. If you want that sort of training, you need to go looking for it, whether in the world of meditation or martial arts or in some other sort of contemplative, but specific methods and tools that can help us train, to accommodate and relax and stay alert under pressure, whether it's external pressure or whether it's internal pressure. And so for me, it's a very alive image in the world of grief because as I work with clients, they are endlessly experiencing what it feels like to be under pressure. For example, under pressure of what their inner critic is telling them and the host of, the negative cultural symphony around let's get over it it's been 10 months it's been 12 the all of that whole that whole, layer of stuff that it is i feel necessary to begin to, notice and name and find some space from otherwise we're trying to stay true to some untrue timeline and as we know grief does not emerge that way Right. Also, the pressure exists deeply in the body. Someone said, and I don't know who it was, but I love this about grief, that the issues are in the tissues. And if you give people, and I work with guided visualization sometimes with my clients, it's quite uplifting for people who may not have even done stuff like that before. But the psyche is pretty malleable. It's pretty open to, oh, where is this experience? Where does grief in this moment live? Is it in my heart? Is it in my belly? Is it a tight back? It can oftentimes be identified as a palpable sensation. And we began to look at that and work with that. So I think it's a very powerful sort of mantra or principle how to relax under pressure as we hold that as a way to navigate this ever mysterious grief terrain.

Dr. Angela Dean: 38:19

Do you want to say more about how you've done that with your own grief with Pete?

Gyani Richards M.A.: 38:24

Yeah, I will. One thing I really noticed, because there was many, many decades between my dad's death and Pete's death, and I'd grown up a lot. And I'd spend a lot of time attending to this body-mind phenomenon called a human. And very different than as a young 13-year-old. It just felt like a grief bomb dropped on me and the family. It was just like a bomb that dropped, and none of us had any training whatsoever. We had no idea, through no fault of our own, but again, no one's trained for that sort of stuff. So we just all kind of got hit by the shrapnel and made our way through, and yeah, thankfully, family and love and connectedness sort of. Allowed us to limp through and onto our lives. But in the preceding or in the following many, many decades, I had spent a lot of time in my own practices, whether it's mindfulness or meditation or martial arts. And I wasn't doing that to prepare for some future catastrophe or loss. I was doing it because that's what I'm interested in. But as it turns out, But Pete's death, apart from being another grief bomb dropped on the family, I experienced that quite differently. It was as though there was a both and, whereas with my dad, it was just a blop. It was just the bomb and there was no space around it. And I was much younger. I was 13. When Pete died, I was 60, early 60s. So my point is that some part of me was deeply, I won't say relieved, but I was interested and maybe relieved would be that there is a way to train the human body mind that it can make room for these events and these tragedies. That initially seem never overcomable, that initially seem and feel like there's no way these clouds are ever going to part. And I'm going to be drowning in this ocean forever. And the felt experience when Pete died for me was there was a part of me that could hold it in a way I could not earlier. It was holding both this incredible loss and I was also present to my love. Like the love did not get deleted by the loss, so i think that was a deep learning for me and to me it was a real testament to we can train our body mind heart to develop to accommodate, bigger and bigger amounts of life experience right both joy and loss let's not forget about the happy part of the spectrum here absolutely so the spectrum of grief and gratitude hopefully stretches forever ever and ever. And I think it makes sense as a good human to do that dance, right? To do that one. At least for me, personally.

Dr. Angela Dean: 41:26

Yeah. There's this concept in grief that you may be familiar with called re-grief, in which we reprocess the same loss repeatedly over time. It's often talked about with children such as yourself that lost someone, and then developmentally, you start to understand it. But it is true that as we go through other milestones and parts of our life, we will also reprocess those losses again. And I'm curious if losing Pete, I think I heard a hint of it. That's why I'm asking. But I wonder how you reprocess, the loss of your dad and also losing Pete, if you did.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 42:06

Yeah. Again, I pause because there's not an immediate sort of corollary. I mean, I'm well aware of this observation and this model of, and it does make sense. And it often does happen. I don't know whether Pete's death necessarily sort of regurgitated parts of my father's death that I hadn't dealt with. You know, it's interesting. I often experience personally that when you're really in the ocean of grief, it's very hard, and maybe this is as it should be, to sort of demarcate. Oh, this is from that one. Oh, that's from a love affair. Oh, this is from Grandma Joe. It's just sort of the soup that we swim in. And for me, just given my makeup, I sort of trust that the soup is way more intelligent and wise than I am. And I may not necessarily have to draw these sort of lines between what's affecting what. I just mush around in the grief soup. I'm trusting that dad in that way knows how to digest that and peed. And it's sort of a long winded, quasi lyrical way of answering. I'm not quite sure whether it was not a formal recognition. Let's put it that way. It's not a formal recognition like, wow, I just lost Pete. Oh, wow. There's dad again. Yeah.

Dr. Angela Dean: 43:31

Yeah. Is your mom still living?

Gyani Richards M.A.: 43:34

My mom is not. So when my dad died, he was young and now way older than him when he died. My dad was 45. And 45 at my age, I'm like, dude, that's like, that was really young. My mom got a lot more life. I think my mom was 80 something, 81, 82. She died maybe 12, 15 years ago. Yeah, so mom, dad, Pete, the family tree is beginning to thin out. Just four brothers left.

Dr. Angela Dean: 44:10

Yeah, I ask that because there's a lot of siblings. We lose siblings and depending on when you lose them, there's the whole parental factor. Are there things that you wish that you had known about sibling loss or that you wish other people knew specifically about this type of loss?

Gyani Richards M.A.: 44:25

Well, I'm certainly aware in my own way, and now as a grief counselor even more so because I reflect on it and I write about it and I think about it, that there is certainly a unique nuance, a unique flavor to sibling loss, distinct from certainly parent loss. I have not had the experience of a child loss, although I'm a father. There's a unique piece to that. And with Pete, I noticed that, And I think they talk about this in the sibling loss sort of grief world. I sort of was under the same mystique as most of us siblings. Like, well, we're kind of kind of live basically the same amount of time forever. Right. We're all sort of moving forward together, different than a parent or a older friend or an older grandmother.

Dr. Angela Dean: 45:13

Right.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 45:15

I guess what I would say, what if I could sort of invent, I would say that keep trying, because as I mentioned earlier with Pete, I really would have wanted to have that last chapter be a chapter in which we could have deepened our, vulnerable brotherly communication. And I felt like I leaned into that as much as I respectfully could, and then I didn't. But for those listening, I guess the phrase that keeps coming, this is a short life. This is a very short life. So, you know, don't postpone. If there are those opportunities, those moments, be the one, as they say, be the change that you want to see in that relationship. If there's something that you want to say, or even if there's something you want to hear, be the one that raises your hand, take the risk. What's the worst that can happen? It doesn't happen or they're not up for that conversation. That's okay. But at least you don't have to have the feeling like I didn't even ask, right? I didn't even push. A little bit like hey dude can we you know what do you what do you what is this like because it's not looking so good uh so that that would be my, sort of suggestion or invitation don't don't postpone it's way too short with p nobody had any idea diagnose 18 months gone just like that so. Carpe diem seize the day don't postpone however that comes alive in your world but It's so important because then... Then they're, you know, and they're on the other side of the curtain and hopefully we stay in touch in our own way. But it's not the same as calling up on the phone and saying, hey, let's jab for a while. Right. It's just not like that.

Dr. Angela Dean: 47:04

Yeah. You have to really intentionally have a different kind of relationship with your loved one. Yeah.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 47:11

So much.

Dr. Angela Dean: 47:12

You've mentioned a lot of things that were helpful in this process. Were there things that were absolutely not helpful in grieving?

Gyani Richards M.A.: 47:24

With Pete, you mean?

Dr. Angela Dean: 47:26

However you want to answer that question.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 47:29

Okay. I'll answer relative to Pete since that'll sort of make it real. And I can remember certain things that didn't work. But still, I don't regret trying. But a note to future self, you don't need to go there. And one of those was, again, in my conversations with Pete, Pete was part of his family system. that had its own set of rules about what to share, what not to share, etc. And so I realized in my conversations with him that I was not only encountering, his worldview in terms of how he shares, but he's a part of his family worldview. And there's a certain loyalty to that, as we all know, on the healthy side or not the healthy side. We are loyal to that. We don't want to sort of break with the tribe. And what i realized was i had made certain efforts, to have conversations with others in in his family and the response was somewhat similar i sort of encountered not a lot of transactional dialogue right, and so pretty quickly i i got it i thought oh okay so this is how that family does stuff so i guess the learning for me would be uh. Make an invitation, maybe make a couple of invitations respectfully from your heart, not with a demand, not with any sort of criticism or shame and blame or not at all, but just an invitation. And as we know, in the world of invitations, they will either be accepted, greeted or declined. And I'm sort of all about making invitations because that's how new things arise. So that's one thing I learned. make invitations and listen to the feedback, that's the other part because sometimes maybe there was a an email or a conversation that maybe in retrospect i i didn't i didn't really need to make a third invitation it was pretty clear that we're not going to do this, so just listening right just listening to the energy of the of the situation that's sort of what i could it's hard.

Dr. Angela Dean: 49:40

To do especially when under pressure of loss or anticipatory loss right there's some pressure to I want everything to go a certain way.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 49:49

Yeah. And then post, like post-death, once we're all been catapulted into the grief ocean, then that's another sort of set of expectations and invitations. What do we do here collectively? I think as I feel into it, it always comes back, you just have to be true to your own way of being. You just have to be true to how you do this path. And my way is probably a bit more conversational or a bit more engaged than others in my family system and others. But I'm not going to change that. That's just how Gyani shows up in this incarnation. And I'll be respectful and kind, but I'm not going to sort of rearrange that to sort of overly accommodate. I'll be me and the invitation will be accepted. Right? So, that's another sort of learning. Like, just keep staying here. If I stay here, stay in my heart, stay in my kindness, not a lot of stuff goes wrong from there. It just gets funky when we start overthinking. And it shoulda, coulda, I think you might have, or it gets too heady. And people don't need that. And particularly in the throes of their oceanic grief experience, it's much more easier to stay in the watery ocean of the heart. Getting too mental about the whole thing.

Dr. Angela Dean: 51:15

Yeah, I love this visual of the ocean of grief that you've referenced a few times. So thank you for that language. Before I ask you my last question, is there anything else that you wanted to share that we didn't talk about that you wanted to?

Gyani Richards M.A.: 51:27

I would say for me that the working subject line as I both travel my own grief path and as I travel as a companion with others is for me, grief is not a problem to be solved, but a sacred opportunity to be embraced. And for me, that's an important paradigm shift that gives much more space and learning to the terrain than possible. Other models that we all know of.

Dr. Angela Dean: 51:55

Yes, that is so true. The contemporary grief models do not try to fix grief. The original foundational ones, some that are the only ones that people know about, did try to fix grief. So, yes, thank you for that reminder. We are here to companion people and walk alongside them in grief rather than trying to fix it. Because you can't fix it. As I famously said, shouted at my husband one day after my brother died. All I want is my brother back, and he can't do that, so there's nothing you can do right now. It wasn't that he couldn't do anything. It was just what I said in that moment. But thank you for this. And so my last question to you is, what are some of your favorite memories of you and your brother?

Gyani Richards M.A.: 52:42

Well, just a flood of visual archive. And there are many, just a bazillion. But one of the ones that just sort of gushes forth in this moment is we were in college together in Southern California in Santa Barbara. And one day, sort of being young college guys, we asked each other, hey, should we go to Mexico for a few days? And somebody said, yeah, let's do that. I said, okay. And back in the days when you had the old paper maps, we're like, yeah, it doesn't look too far. I don't know. Five hours, six hours. Didn't exactly work out that way. It was five or six hours just to get to the Mexican border. Anyway so we drove for hours and hours 10 15 hours in the middle of the desert down towards baja in the middle of the night the car break car just died. Uh and it was pete and i and a friend in the middle of nowhere no cell phones no nothing and uh kind of it gets chilly in the desert at night so we ended up sort of freezing and spending the night in the middle of the Baja Desert. Through some miracle of grace, auto mechanical grace, in the morning, the car started up again and got us to our destination on the bay. We hung out there for a week. It was just one of these let-go moments where you're just not maybe old enough, Yet to have encumbered yourself with too much of the shoulds and, you know, we were 20 or 21 about how it should happen. And it was just like, oh, I guess we get to hang out in this teeny little Volkswagen, be cold all night until something else happens. And it was just this moment that just was so, it's so revealed, just young guys doing young guy stuff that didn't make any sense, but we just rolled with it. And it gave us a certain sort of young resilience or added to our young resilience. That was certainly a memorable occasion. Another memory, this arises as more of a collage of memories. And it's interesting you ask because the only other time I've thought about this deliberately was in that family Zoom sort of commemorating Pete's death a couple months ago. And we were sharing and someone asked a question about that. And where i lived in northern california at the time was kind of semi in the rural part and we had acres and acres of mustard grass tall three four feet tall and they were all around our house, and so when i think of pete and our connection a lot of it arises as images sort of. Compiled together as sort of a composite aggregate visual story over, you know, from like four years old to 14, running wildly through these mustard fields and tackling each other, creating forts, getting lost, but just in this ocean of vibrant spring green and yellow, and the vibe was just belonging.

Dr. Angela Dean: 55:39

Yeah.

Gyani Richards M.A.: 55:41

Nature, belonging, brotherhood. Yeah, it's such an example of how one image can capture so much felt experience, right? Just two young little guys tackling each other through these mustard fields. And coming home with stained pants, my mom was like, not again. We're going to jeans and put them in the wash. You know, that whole thing, all the kiddie crazy stuff. But it really was just such an early time of creating brotherly bonding in such a non-complicated way. It was just sort of like two peas in a pod that moved together.

Dr. Angela Dean: 56:28

Well, thank you so much for sharing that and for this conversation today. It's been a pleasure.

Episode Outro: 56:34

Thank you so much for listening. Our theme song was written by Joe Mylward and Brian Dean and performed by Joe Mylward. The Broken Pack is more than a podcast. Visit TheBrokenPack.com to sign up for Wild Grief, our newsletter, and to explore everything else we're building. If today's episode resonated, you can send us fan mail or support the show using the links in the show notes. Information on Wild Grief, our social media, resources, and our guests can be found wherever you get your podcasts. Please like, follow, subscribe, and share. Thanks again.