THE FIRST EPISODE IN OUR MULTI-EPISODE SEASON FINALE! With music being so integral to this podcast, running in parallel to the conversations and correspondence we feature, it’s not surprising that the conversations themselves start to sound like music in their own way. They flow like the components of a song. Verses, choruses (etc) repeating. The more you listen to these stories, the more you can’t help but see their intersections—where they share space, and where they diverge. We’ve...

This episode specifically roots us in the sciences of process. A conversation with a molecular biologist invites us to probe deeper… smaller… into our very cells. To find what they have to say about release, surrender, context, and adaptation. How we’re sustained by the things we let go of along with the new things we grasp. In commitment to process, the patterns of evolution emerge — weaving unities within diversities, and teaching us about how our experience changes us.

It’s easy to view our growth as a separate thing from our grief. …Impatiently, we might perceive the process of grief as something that we need to “get through” so that we can “move on” to growth… But in reality, growth is happening alongside grief as we adapt. There’s some comfort to be found there. People a bit further down the line will tell you how much they learned in grief. And if you’ve had a harder season, where grief has seemed all-encompassing, it’s good to know that you aren’t...

One of the key benefits to embodiment is that it’s substantial by definition. In a room (sanctuary) or a nation where many people are prone to detachment and disembodiment, a lot of hollow ideas and promises get promoted as answers, and hope is placed in vapor. A community in which on-the-ground advocacy is discouraged while prayers for intervention abound is no place in which to be fully alive.  Maybe you are the miracle you need to see.  This episode, we continue with a meditation not...

Part 1 (of 2) in our return to the theme of full embodiment, which is central to recovery and reconstruction.

There’s a Sufi proverb from Rumi which says, “I SEARCHED FOR GOD AND FOUND ONLY MYSELF. I SEARCHED FOR MYSELF AND FOUND ONLY GOD.” Whatever a ‘divine spark’ might be, it seems to be carried within our humanity. And yet many of us are healing from teachings and communities which suggested otherwise—which sought to divide us from ourselves, and to keep all the good things in external compartments… So we couldn’t own them. Couldn’t feel their affirmation or their embrace or their warmth....

Reconstruction is complicated. The length of the process we’re in can sometimes leave us longing for simpler times, or at least more simplistic ways of seeing the world. Not so much in missing the ideas themselves that we used to hold, but in nostalgia for that sense of clarity we used to feel (or think we felt) while holding them.  It’s not the same for everyone, but there’s a particular tension which can exist when you find yourself A) no longer attached to these former certainties, and...

Many loves might come and go from your life, but you’re kinda stuck with yourself. Partners, friends, even family members… any time there is loss, the dust settles, and there you are. And that being the case, for those of us with some toxic theology and religiosity in our backgrounds, one of the most important things to grasp might be this: You aren’t tarnished. You aren’t hopelessly broken. You aren’t born guilty and somehow cosmically at fault for death and entropy itself. You’re just a...

are you tempted to believe that you don’t have a choiceyou’ve been screaming off your head and now you’ve lost your voice that you inherited the curse and everything your daddy said compounding like a chorus or the interest on your debt and it’s not funny how momentum can tell a lie to your face and before you know it there’s a bet on every horse in the race and sunk costs are loading up your gun it wasn’t wasted timenot a wasted dime or a tearit’s such a sweet reliefsuch a good, good...

There's knowing we need change... and then there's boldly moving into it. In the process of our Becoming, we take on new space, which gives way to new substance… which is only possible from within that new space.  Five considerations for this episode and its conversations: 1) The false promises of fundamentalism are still false promises outside of it. And it can be all too easy for fundamentalism to merely adapt and take on a new form, tricking us into clinging to it even longer in the...

There’s a particular contentment that comes in our falling in love again, dreaming again, hoping again. In our moments of rediscovered innocence, and in our informed and yet defiant idealism. Whatever suffering we endure, there’s always the chance we might shut down to protect ourselves and avoid further pain (which is natural). Any vulnerability we show to the people, institutions, or whatever else caused us trauma… is tough. It takes courage. But as we reconstruct life on the other side...

In certain religious ways of seeing the world, it can be easy to mistake presence for transcendence. We struggle to fully embody our own experiences in the ‘here and now’ when everything is made to be ‘the somewhere else and the not yet.’ There’s music happening, and all around us is a great symphony… but we treat it like echoes. It turns out that being fully intimate with our own experience can be difficult when we have to filter everything through an “eternal” worldview. When that’s you,...

For our season premier, we pivot from where we’ve been to lean more on where we are, and where we’re headed. In three stories of birth and rebirth, we look to the attribution of our targets once we’re on the other side. This is an episode of children, of parents, and of middle space. Of generations… and emancipations. The Airing of Grief is back, folks. Season 3 is here.

Season 3 of The Airing of Grief is coming very soon. Here is everything you need to know!

The Airing of Grief Season 2 has been long and dynamic and varied. So the question arises: How do you “end” a season like this? We’re not sure you really can. So maybe this is more of a pause. An array of voices in a flowing conversation – meandering together like objects in shared, resonant space. A coda to embodiment and finding ourselves within each other’s stories.

This is the third and final installment in a series of experimental discussions featuring the producers of The Airing of Grief. In this episode, Kevin shares his story – along with his answers to the "three questions" covered previously by Jamie, Derek and Jon. You can spend a long time reforming and even reconstructing faith before you ultimately encounter some of the biggest and hardest questions. Sometimes gravity takes a long time to catch up. 

We continue this week with another experimental episode in the form of a conversation between longtime friends. This time, our producers Kevin and Jon explore the "three questions" introduced in our previous episode, "The Meaning We Assign." 

With just a few more episodes left to come in Season 2, we're taking a moment for a more experimental conversation within our format. Three questions. Pause. Take stock. Mark the time. That's what our producers Jamie and Derek are doing in this discussion they recorded together – in which they field some questions that many of us are experiencing our own answers evolving in response to. 

From repressive constructs which drag us down and hold us back... some men are fighting the better fight to emerge newly embodied and in touch. 

So much of our spiritual baggage concerns how we perceive ourselves. Perhaps above all other aspects of reimagining our beliefs, there is an incredible amount of work to be done in reframing our biases and attitudes towards the person in the mirror. There are new places to find rest and new places to finally engage.

This episode is one that spans many issues and covers an incredible amount of ground thematically. It is a story of childhood disconnection and fragmentation which detaches a person from any confident sense of self. It is a story of the resulting search for identity that can cause a person to place herself in the hands of abusive authorities and institutions. The need for approval, to have purpose, to be accepted, to be closer, to be ENOUGH... all of these things exploited by a system which...

Suspended and waiting and not knowing... It is a place of transition. And if we can learn to embrace the wait, we will also learn that we are being newly formed. Liminal space is where our transformations take their shape.

Here’s to the unexpected devastations and rebirths – the fires which brought us to the ground and then remade us. And here’s to the slow process of grief which yields a steady assent towards something better... It's ironically kind of biblical: From the ashes, we rise. 

Our freedom isn't merely a detachment from the thing causing pain. It's freedom to live wholly, to channel our passions fully, and to work towards creating the kind of world we'd like to live in. When we aren't stifled to the very core, we can see this clearly. The Source we once felt so distant from... is us. It's always been with us.