This is Healing — Keep Your Heart Open

This is Healing — Keep Your Heart Open

What does it actually mean to keep your heart open after the worst thing? Not as a platitude. As a survival strategy. This episode goes there. I just got back from a writer's retreat in the mountains of Colorado. I went to write. I came back with something I didn't expect — a realization I could no longer avoid. This episode covers what I learned about grief, wavelengths, the nervous system, why you don't need more discipline, why you need connection, and what it actually means to keep your heart open when every instinct you have is telling you to close it. We also get into talking to dead people, widow's fire, Patrick, the book I'm writing, and the avoidance that showed up the minute I claimed I was going to write it. An hour of the real thing.

This is Healing — The Backlash of Feeling Alive Again

I finally felt something good again—and then it hit me. In this episode, I talk about the emotional backlash that follows moments of feeling alive, how my relationships are changing, and what Patrick’s birthday actually felt like. This is an honest look at grief, the body, and continuing to live after everything changes.

This is Healing — How Do You Cope?

How do you cope with a timeline you want no part of? It's the question everyone asks and nobody answers with any honesty. In this episode of This Is Healing, I go deep into what grief actually is — not a problem to be solved, not a stage to move through, but an ocean you learn to live beside. I talk about the difference between coping and building capacity, why the five stages of grief fail the moments that matter most, what the nervous system is still reaching for when the person is gone, and what it means to continue moving through life when the person you loved is not. This is not a recovery story. There is no resolution here. There is only the truth of where I am — in time and space — and an invitation to anyone carrying something to recognize themselves in it. If this episode finds you at the right moment, send it to one person who needs to hear it.

This is Healing — Liminal Timeline

I went to turn on music before hitting record and it logged into Patrick's account. Not mine. His. And I just sat there — because that is exactly how grief works. Not in the dramatic moments. In the quiet ones that slip in without warning and take everything for a second. This episode is called Liminal Timeline because that is where I am. The in-between. Not who I was and not yet whoever comes next. This week I flew to Cincinnati for the second hearing of the Reagan Tokes Patrick Heringer Act — the legislation that carries Patrick's name — and then drove twelve and a half hours to Omaha with no space in between. By Friday I had nothing left. My nervous system was done. I couldn't show up for Rae the way I wanted to. I couldn't fake being okay. And I stopped trying. In this episode I talk about what it actually costs to be functional in rooms that require it. I talk about walking back into Cincinnati — a city that holds the version of my life that no longer exists — and not being able to cry there. I talk about the jaguar mask I got tattooed on my body in Omaha, what the shaman heals first, and why that mask has been living in my mind since Patrick and I went to Costa Rica together. I talk about how grief has changed my sacral authority in Human Design, why hotels will never feel the same, what MDMA opened on a Wednesday when I was looking for relief, and what came through when it did: love yourself the way that Patrick loved you. And I talk about spring arriving early in the Colorado mountains — the most beautiful spring I can remember — and how beauty doesn't soften grief. It sharpens it. Every beautiful thing is a reminder of what exists. And who isn't here to see it. "Still being here isn't the same as being okay. It's just still being here. And sometimes that's enough." This Is Healing is my real-time account of navigating grief and loss. I am not the gold standard. I am not doing this right. I am learning the shape of it by impact. If you have been putting words to something you've been carrying for a long time — I think that thing might be grief. This episode is for you. Subscribe. Leave a comment. Send questions — I'm answering them in the descriptions. #grief #healing #thisishealing #liminalspace #grieving #widowsfire #humandesign #mentalhealthpodcast #loss #podcast

This is Healing — How Not to Disappear

What grief does to the body and how we build the capacity to stay alive inside a life we never chose. Have you ever wondered what grief actually does to the body?Nine months ago my husband was murdered in our home. This morning I finished the CrossFit Open ranked in the top ninety four percent in the world. Which raises a strange question.How do you keep living after everything changes? In this episode I talk about trauma, grief, nervous system capacity, rage, recovery, and rebuilding a life after catastrophic loss. It is about learning how not to disappear.