Episode 130 – The Body of Grief (with JS Park)

Summary

Joon Park, author of “As Long as You Need” discusses grief and its impact on bodyworkers and their clients with Til Luchau. Park, a hospital chaplain, shares his experiences with grief, trauma, and the importance of acknowledging and integrating pain rather than suppressing it. He emphasizes the role of the body in grief, the concept of “letting in” rather than “letting go,” and the significance of rituals and community in processing loss. The conversation also touches on the idea of the “intimate stranger” and the therapeutic power of touch and presence.

Key Topics:

Episode Transcript

 

SPEAKERS

Joon Park, Til Luchau

 

Til Luchau  00:01

Welcome to the thinking practitioner podcast, a podcast where we dig into the fascinating issues, conditions and quandaries in the massage and manual therapy world today. I’m Whitney Lowe and Tae Luca. Welcome to the thinking practitioner the thinking practitioner podcast is supported by abnp, associated bodywork and massage professionals. ABP membership gives professional practitioners like you a package including individual liability insurance, free continuing education and quick reference apps, online scheduling and payments with pocket suite and much more. ABN PCE courses, podcast and massage and bodywork magazine always feature expert voices and new perspectives in the profession, including Whitney Lowe and myself, teluca, picking practitioner listeners can save on joining a B and B at a bmp.com/thinking Are you ready to take your skills to another level? Come check us out at advanced trainings.com. Whether you’ve been practicing for decades or just starting out, advanced trainings offers a wide range of online and in person programs designed to boost your effectiveness, deepen your understanding and inspire your professional creativity with innovative, self paced programs ranging from one hour certificate courses on the Most common client complaints to our comprehensive CAMT certification program, we offer practice changing learning events with industry leading instructors at a supportive learning community that will take your work to another level, plus for a limited time, thinking practitioner listeners like you can enjoy a special offer Sign up today at advanced trainings.com and get a free month of our amazing at subscription, explore extensive library of courses. Cancel anytime and keep your credits all from just $20 a month with the first month free for TTP listeners like you, enter a thinking subscriber at checkout or this limited time offer at advanced trainings.com thank you, June Park, I’m so happy to have this time with you today as my guest. You’re the author of The Amazing book, as long as you need as well as other things, thanks for joining me today, till

 

Joon Park  02:15

I’m very happy and honored to be here. Thank you for allowing me space on your platform. It’s

 

Til Luchau  02:22

such a pleasure because your book, on the personal level, your book came to me at a really good time. I lost my wife four and a half months ago now, and within the first week, I was looking back and seeing my notes from reading your book, when the first week, someone shared it with me, and it was a very helpful guidepost in my journey, and continues to be that. And I love how you talk, how you ground a lot of your descriptions of your work in the body. And I want to talk about that. And I want to talk about how that might be helpful for bodyworkers, our audience and their clients, as well as their own grief. But before we get to that, could you tell us something about yourself and your work?

 

Joon Park  03:05

Sure, yeah, can I pause for a moment and say, I’m very sorry to hear about your wife, and thank you for trusting the words of the book, for diving into that. And you know, there are no words ultimately to make that better. Some very sorry till, and I know that her memory, her goodness, is living through you. Yeah. So I am, I am a hospital chaplain, and that’s what I do, death, dying, grief. I work at 1000 plus bed hospital, and the chaplains we attend every single death, every code blue, and it’s a level one trauma center, so we tend to every trauma that enters level one. Traumas include gunshot wound, stabbing, Firefall, car accidents, stroke, drowning, all the really hard things. So I’m often meeting people on the very worst day of their lives. It’s a lot of Crisis Assistance, grief support, and we assist with end of life planning, and also I’m the one who makes the phone call saying, sorry to tell you this, but your loved one is here at the hospital for those emergencies. So as you can imagine, it’s a tough job. It’s been over nine years now. I love what I do, and it’s incredibly difficult. I’ve been married now it’s going to be 10 years in December, and I have two kids, four years old and seven months old. And so life is full and life is busy. And yeah, my my work, I. Let’s see. Nine years later, now, I’ve sat with hundreds, if not 1000s of deathbeds and assisted and supported many transitionings of many souls. So it’s tough and needed work, and I’m glad to be doing it

 

Til Luchau  05:17

well again. Personally, I’m also really glad you are, and the eloquence that you write about your stories, it’s part memoir. It’s part rumination, thinking things through. It’s part advice, and it was very helpful, again, your experience and you sharing it the way you do. And I wanted to read you your introductions. Amazing, by the way. I’m just curious as a writer, fellow writer, did you write that first, or did you go back and write it

 

Joon Park  05:52

the introduction? I did write that first? Yes, yeah.

 

Til Luchau  05:59

It was so point in in so many ways, I did the opposite when I wrote a book. I wrote it and realized I need an introduction. I like the power that you brought by bringing your into him first. There’s a piece in there, again, I wanted to read you said grief at Satan’s is not about letting go, but about letting in. That’s you know, that’s one of the highlighted places in the book. Can you tell us some more about that way of thinking about grief? Not something to let go, but to let in.

 

Joon Park  06:33

Yeah. I think if we look at it from a big lens, we are told socially, culturally, historically, that when we feel pain and when we feel grief, which is our response to loss, that this is something that we need to avoid or suppress, somehow make go away, to bury, to hide it. And it makes sense, because pain is painful. It makes sense when we see someone in pain that we would want to do something to cheer them up or to try to make them forget. Medication is meant for that. And so for me, I see that with a lot of empathy, that those who say things like just be strong, or don’t cry, or you’ll be okay, or it’ll be all right. Those kind of things are callous and insensitive and at the same time, I think they come from the motivation of trying to help, of trying to offer some sort of compassion. So we are taught then that grief is something we need to let go of. The person is gone. Forget the past. Don’t keep bringing them up. It’s just going to hurt you. You know, don’t ask for smaller trials. Ask for a stronger spine, or other things like, you know, everything happens for a reason, or God’s refining you through the fire. We say all these things, and maybe there’s truth to a lot of these things, but we say them as a way of avoiding pain, which to me, makes sense, and at the same time, when we avoid pain, when we avoid grief, we then create a second or additional pain. We create a second burden, which is the pain of suppression, the pain of actively trying to forget, which in itself becomes a Festering Wound. And so I worry for those who are actively trying to suppress, because the body and the heart cannot operate and function by continually suppressing and continually denying. So when I say, instead of letting go of grief, letting in is allowing the pain of that loss to find almost its home inside of us and to honor and cherish the memory of that person that we had, or the loss that we’ve experienced, because it hurts that much because that person really, truly meant something to us. It’s meaningful. So instead of jettisoning them, severing them, putting all their stuff in a garage sale, burying them six feet underground, all the ways in which we shove aside, how do we instead, with their memory, allow that to enlarge us and expand us, and we carry them with us. I say another thing, I think, in the intro, and it was inspired by Megan Devine’s book, it’s okay that you’re not okay. She says, we don’t move on. We move with and that’s going to be true regardless of how we choose to respond to our loss. We’re going to move with it. We can’t move on. So there is something very hard about carrying that pain and keeping it in the forefront, but there’s also something healing about it as well, something very freeing my friend John who. Now he’s been gone for five years. My very best friends, I still talk to him out loud. I still carry this voicemail from him, I think the one and only voicemail that I got from him, and I listened to it once in a while, and sometimes I see through his eyes, because he just had such a curiosity and wonder about him. Everything was such a big deal to him all the time. He’s always so excited. So excited and enthusiastic, even when I look at old text messages, it’s all caps or it’s exclamation marks, and they’re so endearing about him. But that doesn’t make it’s not a dangerous thing to look back at the past or look at the people we lost. It’s not like it’s opening a wound, even though it may feel like it

 

Til Luchau  10:45

you’re describing a scenario where grief isn’t toxic, right?

 

Joon Park  10:49

It’s, as Martha W Hickman said, in healing after loss, their memory becomes a blanket, which we can wear, a companion. It’s not what we would have chosen, but it can become its own blessing. That’s a difficult thing, and that takes time for everyone in a different pace. But I think that’s what I mean by letting in is their memory expands us.

 

Til Luchau  11:16

I’m certainly experiencing that, by the way, and it’s also excruciating and really hard to stay with. That’s a painful it’s such a mixed bag. There’s so much sweetness and so much pain at the same time. But that shift from thinking about as something to get over or let go of or to move on to something to let in and move with, really helpful for me going through this,

 

Joon Park  11:43

yeah, and it is excruciating. I’ve heard the metaphor grief is like waves, you know, comes and goes, and sometimes you ride the wave, but when is it too much? And sometimes it’s so much, it’s overwhelming?

 

Til Luchau  11:59

Yeah, there’s certainly times for relief. The ways to get relief that helped me stay with myself. Yeah. So this is, I mean, going back to the professional for a second, this idea that grief isn’t something to be gotten rid of, or isn’t itself toxic, is there’s a lot of parallels to how I think about trauma. For instance, there’s traumas talked about something in your body, but often it’s treated in a way that it’s not to be bad or harmful or toxic and certainly no fun. But a lot of the healing around trauma comes from opening around that as well and from the experience of pain. So how much we as body workers try to get people out of pain? And that’s, of course, why they come but that’s how that attitude can be so hurtful with something like grief, when we’re trying to get people out of that experience or even make them feel better. And it’s subtle. You gave some pretty overt examples, but I I’m lucky enough in my circle not to have heard those, but I do hear a lot. So what makes you feel better? What gives you relief? And that’s subtle, because it is really an attempt to help, but it ends up reinforcing that view that need to change it. Yeah, because even harmful to stay with, yeah?

 

Joon Park  13:23

Because I think if we see it in two extremes, both I feel like which are unhelpful. On one hand, it’s, how do we avoid the pain, or how do we make it feel better, that that can go get so extreme that it becomes almost an intentional numbness that looks away. But then, on the other hand, if we say pain is a gift, and God is doing this to you for a reason, you know, and oh, you can use this pain to make something better of your life, or it’s teaching you a lesson that extreme, theologically, spiritually, physically, can be extremely, extremely harmful as well. And so I think there is a healthy way to look at pain where we’re not looking at pain for its own sake, to say, Oh, this is something that I can use in order to fuel myself, that can create a very false, difficult, almost anti motivation.

 

Til Luchau  14:22

It’s not like it’s good for me or strength, right? Because it’s a list or something like that. Because,

 

Joon Park  14:27

yeah, trauma that you know is the imprint of a negative event. That’s not something that anybody should ever have to endure, you know. So I’d hate to say, Oh, this trauma happened to you and now, oh, now that equals resilience. That shouldn’t be the formula. That shouldn’t be something we ever prescribe or make some sort of good thing. And when trauma does happen, in the midst of that debris, what can we do then, to build a strength that we didn’t ask for? What can we do in that moment? To work out the loss that we’ve now are experiencing. So it’s a very fine and subtle distinction, but it’s important. I think it doesn’t look like there’s a big difference, but it makes all the difference in the world. It’s It’s

 

Til Luchau  15:16

my working tell me if this fits it all, but my kind of working approach to chronic pain, which I think about a lot and have encountered a lot, is that it’s if we could make it go away, we should, but when we can’t, then it’s the process of being with it and opening around it, and not that it’s gonna help us, but that it’s something that, as we learn to live with changes our life changes at least, even if the pain doesn’t always,

 

Joon Park  15:53

yeah, yeah, what a tough and subtle distinction that that is, and it’s so important to keep looking into it and exploring it, that that’s so important and vital. And

 

Til Luchau  16:04

then as a practitioner, working people in pain, how easy it is for me to buy into the mercenary approach. Almost something hires a mercenary, sometimes to kill the pain. And when that, when there’s things when we can’t do that, when we run up against something that doesn’t let us get rid of the pain. Being a mercenary isn’t a very helpful role is in a way that gives me an alliance to help them be with it.

 

Joon Park  16:33

Yeah, I can. I can say as maybe this is almost a side note, but having done martial arts most of my life, you know, I think one of the mercenary approaches is pain is just, it’s like fear leaving the body, or something like that, you know, yeah. Or pain is weakness, leaving the body, you know, yes. But at some point it’s, like, it actually just my joints hurt. I gotta stop. I can’t, Train for six hours without my body breaking down, you know. So should we make the pain stop? If we can, I think we should. You’re right. You’re right. What a what a fine it’s a needle to thread, you know, very fine point.

 

Til Luchau  17:18

And I’m just thinking this. I think this was in your book, but it was also, I know, in your conversation with Lisa Kefauver about grief being an experience to be tended rather than a problem to be fixed. Yeah, as a as a caretaker, I was fairly intensively my wife caretaker for the last period of time. That was actually super helpful to realize that my tending capacities were pretty they were in good shape, and yet the thing I was tending changed.

 

Joon Park  17:54

Yeah, can you say more about that? Well,

 

Til Luchau  17:56

I was tending to her and her well being, and then when she passed, it was tending to my own grief, to my own, just little things like the logistics of our life, you know, yeah, just taking care of guarding literally, or tidying up the house. That was something that she did while she was well enough. I’d be off working, she’d be tidying up the house. And so just to take that on as a as a way to honor the role she played, but also as a way to take over the tending capacity and getting better at doing that. Yeah, my home also for myself.

 

Joon Park  18:46

Yeah, that sounds like that’s been healing and help for you. I think in the midst of That’s right, yeah, yeah,

 

Til Luchau  18:56

okay, so is getting over grief the same as acceptance?

 

Joon Park  19:02

Yeah? I I have such difficulty with such hard edge language, like even the word acceptance, right, getting over or there’s one part in the book I think I say, and this is something that’s always bothered me, the word overcome, or victory, those those kinds of hard edge words that are a little bit close ended and have a sense of finality to them, as if a once we accomplish this thing, then we’re done with it, and then we close the door in that chapter, because, because loss is one of those things that even if we would do find relief through it, years later, we will find a way to manage and move on with it. I don’t know if the door is ever closed on it. I don’t know if acceptance is ever final. I don’t know if we get over it. I don’t know if we overcome that. I find that very, very maybe there are people in the world, throughout history, who can say that they’ve successfully done that. I. I have coworkers who they can leave work at work, I’m not one of them, and I’m jealous of them that they have that sort of skill set, and maybe they really can’t, and there’s a different way they’re coping with it. But all that to say is there a difference between getting over and accepting. I do think one of them, the getting over part, is fueled by that false narrative of the goal when I experience grief is to make it go away, to solve for it, for it to finally dissipate, and then I move on into the next chapter of my life free of this loss. I think that’s a that’s a myth that we have been indoctrinated with for possibly a lot of positive intent, because it makes sense to us that we wouldn’t want this loss to keep us from living our lives, but then getting over and actual acceptance, acceptance and the real, I don’t think are the same thing, because when we accept, when we embrace. I think acceptance, for some people may be defined as now I’m free of pain, but acceptance, I think, at least from what I’ve seen and how I’ve experienced it, is living with the pain in a way that we’re not hiding from it, but fully feeling it as it is, and then living with it. And that’s a totally different thing to be able to live with the pain of that loss. And that sounds vague and maybe too general, but I do tell a story in the in the book, I got this story from the grieving brain by I believe the author is Dr Mary Frances O’Connor. She’s a neurologist, I think, and she writes about this widow who, after her husband died, she continued to cook two meals a night, one for herself and one for her late husband, and after she ate her dinner, she would throw away the other meal, and she did complicated grief therapy. CGT, I think, which is kind of new in the field. But now traditional therapy would have said, Well, eventually you want to wind down until you stop cooking two meals. You know, eat. You know you’re healed and you’ve overcome, you know you’ve gotten over it when you just cook the one meal, so maybe just stop trying to cook the other meal, right? You’re wasting ingredients. You’re wasting food. But instead, this therapist said, you know, you may eventually want to think about this second meal. Is there somebody that you can just give that to? You’re cooking two meals a night. You know, it was almost a way of sublimating or transmuting her grief into a way that tended to herself. And so she eventually found a local church that she was able to give that second meal to to people who may need meals, for example, people who are not able to leave their homes and things like that. And she still continued to cook those two meals. And what I like about that is the the therapist didn’t say you need to cut off this impulse to do that, because it’s dysfunctional. And, you know, the healing is found in when you stop or get back to who you were, somehow, right, right? Yeah, right. Get, you know, take a shower, go back to the gym, go back to work, live your life, you know, produce, consume all that, right? That’s, that’s kind of our modern, maybe Western, sense of productivity. But instead, he saw what she was going through, and said, Well, this is now who she is. She’s cooking two meals a night. So what do we do from here? And I think that is what accepting is, is how do we move into this world now, with this huge vacuum, with this loss, and somehow make it bearable.

 

Til Luchau  24:08

There’s, yeah, it’s a wonderful story, and it does make me think about the different ways we think about healing, and one being getting back to who I was before this ever happened. Same dream, same person, same identity, same capacities, whatever. And then there’s another definition of healing that was really helpful for me during a chronic, long term chronic illness, which is being willing to be different because of this. And that’s such a helpful distinction for me, for myself, certainly, but also in working with clients, because I I asked myself, are they trying to get back to who they were, which is great that’s that’s the place that a lot of hope springs from, or a lot of willingness to fight, or willingness to really dedicate to. Ourselves to getting over something, or are they moving into the place where they’re willing to be different in whatever way this is being asked to them? Yeah, different process.

 

Joon Park  25:12

I think that’s great how you have approached our clients. I mean, I I talk about in chapter five, the loss of autonomy. That’s a big grief that we can carry, because those with chronic conditions, so many of the people that I visit who are diagnosed with cancer, they just had a car accident, literally, the life that they had before has now eroded around them. Yeah, when they, when they step off that bed, it’s a different life. And it is impossible to go back to, quote, unquote, Plan A. And is there even a plan B?

 

Til Luchau  25:52

And that’s a lot of grief right there, and that’s, that’s a grieving that future, yeah. And

 

Joon Park  25:59

when I do, like, end of life support and assistance. I think, of course, most people come in as a full code, meaning every attempt at resuscitation is made, but at some point it is really it can become torturous to the body. And then we had a chaplain who, God bless Amy. She was an amazing chaplain. She since moved to another hospital. She doesn’t she didn’t incredible work in palliative care. But sometimes a question that she would ask when resuscitation didn’t make sense anymore, she’d say, how can we relocate our hope? So then we move from resuscitation to how do we dignify your loved one’s death, how do we prepare for what it looks like, for dignity and for kindness and compassion as your loved one dies? And so we’re readjusting, we’re relocating what our hope looks like. And that can seem like it’s a consolation, or can seem like it’s crude. But you know, we age, we experience loss. The very act of living is living in loss, and we’re constantly relocating and readjusting. And so if we can make that autonomous choice within our own bodies to say, as I experience this loss, this is what I now choose, to me that looks like value and worth and wholeness. No big words, maybe words that we overuse. But really, what does it look like now to have dignity? And in chapter five, I talk about this ongoing journey with this patient who just kept losing autonomy, suffering from sickle cell disease, and every stage that he lost autonomy. What does it look like now to have dignity? Can’t walk anymore. What does it look like now you have so much pain and you can’t work a job anymore, you can’t play the piano like you used to. What does it look like now to be dignified in your own body, and as his body kept dying on him and wasn’t working like it used to, does that mean that he’s less of a person or less valuable, and I will never believe that that’s what it means we still have value. We are still cherished and treasured. We are still whole and significant lives apart from what our body may do. So what does it look like to choose to say this is now what helps me to feel valuable reminds me of this patient that I had who was bedridden. I wrote about this in the book before, who he felt like can work a job. I just feel like a blob. I’m not doing anything with my life. And so we talked a lot about what it means to have significance and value from a hospital bed. And that’s a lot of conversations that I have with people who have these life changing, life altering conditions. And he asked for me several times during his hospital stay. And I think the second or third time I came to see him, he said, You know, I can still use a phone. And with my check that I get every month, I order pizza for the whole floor, for all the nurses, for the whole care team. And he thought, that’s all I can do, but that’s what I want to do. And it brought a big smile to his face. Brought a smile to mine, and I thought, How amazing is that it was one of the last few things he got to do before he died, you know. And how do we feel the weightiness of our worth and embrace it in a way where it’s not tied and tethered to what our bodies are doing. And when I say what our bodies are doing, I mean based on a condition that we never asked for. So that’s so much of my work is dignifying and reminding ourselves of our inherent value.

 

Til Luchau  29:49

And so many of your stories are so stark. And as a chaplain working in a level one trauma center, working right at the moment that people are ending their lives. Your circumstances are so strong and powerful, the lessons you extract from them, the principles you’re talking about, though, I think apply all along our lifespan. I mean, we’re dealing with loss all the time. We’re dealing with loss of capacity, loss of identity, loss of people around us, also dreams. That’s one of my biggest takeaways in this process so far, is I didn’t really pay much attention to grief until I lost my wife, and now it’s like, of course, it’s all I want to talk about for myself, but it’s also I want somehow to share that so that people understand we’re always grieving. It’s always relevant. We’re always dealing with leads, issues, these losses,

 

Joon Park  30:46

yeah, yeah. I mean, uh, marriage is a hard deal, because when it comes to loss, you know, you watch me go, or I watch you go. Well, what a tough deal that is. And then now, as a parent, as a dad, I’m saying goodbye to all these previous versions of my children every day. Yeah, yeah. I mean, she went from she needed the whole baby to crawling to walking. You know, every parent knows Yes, and you just keep saying goodbye to all these children before, and I still dream about her, as you know, crawling on the ground, and now she’s running around and she’s doing homework and stuff. It’s just It’s wild, but it’s grief is one of those things where we experience in a big and small ways, and it’s significant in our in our in the way it impacts our body and our heart. Moving to a city, making even a choice closes the door to a lot of other choices, you know, so, yeah, all these things that, because in the in the book, I could have just written it on loss of a loved one, which I do believe is the most significant loss we can experience this eight chapters, and the eighth chapter is on loss of a loved one. The other seven are about loss of some things that may seem intangible. There’s not a physical proof necessarily, of some of the losses. But you know, loss of our mental health, loss of autonomy, loss of our own worth to abuse, loss of our dreams. These are all very significant things, and I just read recently, losing our job creates the same symptoms in our body as losing a loved one. It’s a significant health issue. It really does impact us and so yeah, just by living we lose. So how do we move into that loss and continue living.

 

Til Luchau  32:44

You got three sections in your book, losing spirit, losing body, losing heart. And I appreciated and was really interested in all of your body analogies. You talked about one of your phrases, chest bombs, behind your sternum and your loss of worth chapter or an ache in the rib cage. Can you say something about the body in grief? How you think about it? Role it plays?

 

Joon Park  33:14

Yeah, I can tell you that chapter specifically, and then widen out a bit. That chapter in specific was about the loss of worth that I experienced because of the physical and verbal abuse that I got as a child from both my parents. I’ve since reconciled with both my parents. I know that’s not for everybody. There’s a lot of work, but the physical abuse that I endured came to tell a tale about what my body was worth, because the bruises left on my skin made its way through my body, into my heart, and we tie so much of what happens to our body as to who we are as souls. And I don’t ever it’s, it’s such an intimate relationship. Because I think some people think the body is just a separate, compartmentalized thing, you know, and the soul is something else. But they do have this very, very close relationship, which I know that, you know, till I’m sort of preaching to the choir on that. But there’s a holistic relationship with our mind, body, heart, spirit, all of it. And so what abuse did was it weaved a narrative for me, that I must have attracted this, somehow I caused this, or I’m worthless, and that’s why I’m being beaten. So abuse really takes two things, you know, it it creates pain, so that it takes our peace of mind, but it also takes our sense of worth, our own value, and so there is a lot that happens in our body when we experience loss and it it’s almost a. Feedback loop that occurs between what our body is experiencing and what we experience on the outside. And sometimes when the body endures so much, we can enter into hyper vigilance or just constant fatigue. But I say that to say that the way I think our body and our mind operates in the way it experiences loss. We do need to take care of what our body is experiencing as much as tending to the things that are happening to us. So when I started therapy to tend to the narrative of my own worth my therapist, trauma therapist, I’ve had two now, my first one retired after three years that I was seeing her, and now I’m seeing another trauma therapist, but they I’ve done EMDR, And EMDR is such a specific thing, and that researchers don’t really know how it works, you know, except that it does, and if it works, it works. But it’s Eye Movement Desensitization reprocessing. So it’s you follow a finger, or you follow like this object they have on the screen or with the therapist, and as you start walking through the traumatic memory lane, something in your brain rewires or reprocesses what that trauma meant. And research shows, I think, after an average of about eight sessions, the literal physical trauma trigger responses reduce significantly. And what I was experiencing in my own body was, if I was triggered somehow and I had a disproportionate reaction, my body entered like a fight mode, you know, like a hyper vigilance, and that was tied to the abuse that I experienced, but the vigilance that I experienced became disconnected or removed out of context from its original purpose. Because when, when I was being abused, I entered vigilance is because my body was trying to fight against it. But now, if I see something that looks like it’s abused, my body enters vigilant. I’m not really sure why, and so EMDR working on the physicality of that is really helped. What helped me to move through it? So I’m being very technical and getting through the weeds of it, but I do think working with the body, through the body, in the body, is so important, because there’s the external here, all the losses that are happening, the trauma that I’ve experienced, but then internally processing here, what does it mean? What is it telling me, but then also how the body has become wired to respond in a certain way. Even the word wire, I hesitate to use it, because we’re not machines. But even though, yeah, even the way that our bodies have become conditioned to respond to something, I think there is a way that we can change that.

 

Til Luchau  38:03

Well, certainly in the hands on work that our audience does, we’re asking for a different autonomic range. We’re helping people find something else besides just the sympathetic fight or flight place, and pretty effective, in most cases, at helping people at least round out their full experience. And there’s a lot of interest in the moments when those memories or experiences or feelings surface in a session, as we start to relax and let go, which is really a profound thing to ask of someone. Can you just let go here in my hands right now, that by itself, is huge. There’s often, maybe not every session, certainly not every day, even in most of our practices, but there’s times that people have feelings associated with that, letting go, letting go, into an experience that lets the pain surface, and so you’re grounding your analogies in the body. You’re bringing the body into your grief. Talk really made me realize, and think about how much my own body is participating in this process I’m in.

 

Joon Park  39:13

Yeah, yeah, you know, I did. So I didn’t write this in the book, but I am working on a sequel. Sort of. What I’ve seen is that when we first enter into loss, we have an emergent response, almost involuntary response, from our bodies. And in the book I do write about it can be screaming, shouting, dancing and singing. I’ve seen rolling on the ground. I’ve seen throwing chairs, things that are not always safe for other people, but our bodies even numbness, fatigue, cognitive fog. There’s a range of extreme reactions that our body will suddenly and spontaneously go through, rocking back and forth, pulling hair, things like that. And that is an emergent response. I. Our bodies almost can’t help but make that and we can try to stop it. And I’ve seen people beat their chests and, you know, you know, mash their hands and their face, ways to stop it, but our body will be racked with a bodily, physical expression, and then there’s eventually the conscious and intentional choice that we make in our grief, what some people may call mourning, as we mourn. And so we have the emergent responses that are going to happen, and they may happen for a lifetime, the sudden tears or the sudden in the shower we scream or scream into a pillow or fall to our knees. And then we have these intentional rituals that we make that are a way of living with managing, holding the grief, keeping it sacred, keeping the loss and the memory at the forefront of our mind and heart, and those are all related to the body and how we do that, very visceral and tangible, often with our hands, feet on the ground, feeling it and in our chest, feeling it in our face. And I get to do both with my patients. When we break the news to the family in the emergency room, your loved one died in surgery, or your loved one did not make it through the resuscitation, I’m making as much space as I can as possible for my patient’s family to vent, cry, rage, scream, all those sudden, spontaneous physical manifestations, no judgment, a non anxious space, validating what they’re doing, not telling them calm down, not telling them you can’t do that here, not telling them Don’t cry, be strong, validating that emotion, that expression, their body’s going to do, what’s going to do, and that’s what it needs. And then with patients who are maybe longer term have been there a while, or patients who are slowly grieving the deterioration of their own bodies, those sorts of stories. What can we do as a way of ritual, of honoring the loss in our bodies, of saying goodbye to those people and the things that we’ve lost, what concrete rituals can we have? And if you look at every culture in the world, almost all cultures have a death engagement. If you look at Mexico, Dia de los Muertos, see the shrines of remembering our ancestors. There’s a people group. And I know I’m going to get this wrong, but every summer, I wish I remember who they were called, but they exhume the bodies of their patriarchs and matriarchs. These are mummified bodies, and they have tea with them every summer. And in my own culture, in the Korean culture, we have Chesa, which is death Day, we celebrate not only birthdays, but death days, and we commemorate, you know, what this person meant to us? So these kinds of things are dignified. They have a liturgy to them. They have an order. They have a way of being able to be accessed that we can wrap our hands around this vacuum, and what that does for our bodies is almost like this unclenching, almost an egg sale. And it’s it’s needed, because so many of us walk around like this, clenched shoulders up, holding on, holding in. You know, instead of being able to wrap our hands around something physical or ritual. So I would encourage any listener to find out what that is for you find out what’s worked historically or culturally, and to embrace that in a way as needed, regularly, and to not run from it, but to run into it. If you can

 

Til Luchau  44:00

beautiful. My son and I are this weekend traveling to a place in the Utah desert. We used to go as a family to scatter my wife’s ashes, and that ritual process is coming together, I think, for both of us than mine. Yeah, that’s meaningful to me. And then I think about how much coming for a bodywork session is a kind of ritual for our clients, how that self care, or that time for me, or time to be with my body, time to be touched, is so much of its value comes from its ritual, like nature and its connection to loneliness. You write about loneliness in your book in a way that was also interesting and helpful for me as someone dealing with that and anything you want to say about loneliness,

 

Joon Park  44:55

you know loneliness is so hard, because when I sit with my therapist and I talk about. Depression or anxiety. You know, there’s grounding things, there’s medication, there’s ways of processing that. But loneliness is when we don’t have meaningful connection with people. And loneliness is a kind of hunger. It’s a gnawing hunger, and it hurts, but it’s hard for a therapist or anyone to say, well, go find more people. Is that an easy solution or cure to loneliness? You know? Oh, we’ll just find somebody else you know, or you lost that friend, or something like that, or you’re all by yourself. Because trying to find community necessitates that we risk and make ourselves vulnerable and open ourselves up to pain and so trying to find a way through loneliness, which is finding community, is very difficult for people, and the more that we’re lonely, the more it ends up actually isolating us, because we think we’re lonely for a reason, and it creates these difficult barriers to finding community, and it becomes this loop, this feedback loop. So what I’ve found is that the opposite of loneliness is not necessarily more people, because you can be in a room full of people and have no meaningful connection with them, and feel even more lonely than being by yourself, but the opposite of loneliness is really the courage to find people to make meaningful connection with, And that’s a lot that’s really tough to do. Because ironically, and I say this in the book, my thesis for that is to make community, to make connection, to find community. It actually requires an intentional boundary with certain people, because sometimes we make connections with people who are we’re not truly, authentically connecting with, but we compromise ourselves or give them a version of ourselves in order to not disappoint, in order to people please. But that in itself becomes a kind of loneliness, but to find meaningful connection, we reveal all of ourselves, and we’re essentially telling this person, as I’ve revealed myself, you can accept me or reject me, and if they reject us, that, of course, is lonely. But then we had the courage to reveal ourselves to this person, so that when we continue to reveal ourselves, we do find someone who will not reject us and we make a meaningful connection. I’d rather have that meaningful connection with that one person than with 20 people that I’ve given a half version of myself to. So it does take courage, but I do also write about objective loneliness, because what I just described was subjective. Objective loneliness is when you did not choose to be alone, but you’ve outlived someone in your life, or as you lose autonomy in your body or have a sickness, people can sometimes abandon you and leave those with mental health afflictions. Sometimes people just leave. But at some point, if we’re married, if we have family, we will experience that objective loneliness because that person that we’ve built a life with, that we’ve have all these meaningful memory fixtures and anchors and points in time where we share joy and sorrow, this avulsion has now occurred, And it’s torn away at every fixture and even thinking upon the joyful moments bring sorrow. How do we deal with that sort of loneliness? And I wish I had an easy answer for that. There really isn’t that sort of loneliness is a gnawing hunger that we will live with for lifelong and I think that goes back to how do we hold this grief and the memory of this person without letting them go? How do we hold them as a warm blanket, as a companion, as someone whose goodness is going to continue to live through us? And so I would rather choose the loneliness of holding them as a warm blanket than the loneliness of severing their memory and letting them go. Yes,

 

Til Luchau  49:15

your bell hooks quote you bring into your book too about, well, longing for community, but knowing how to be alone is the fundamental part of that too. Of being as you say, we don’t need to give up, then parts of ourselves to connect, but finding a way to be with myself that’s been very helpful for me. Thank you. And I’m also thinking, you’re I just I want to respect your time. I’m so glad for the time you’ve had with this. But this. But there’s two more ideas I want to touch on. One is the idea of the intimate stranger, where we can sometimes be more intimate strangers, and I think we get that a lot as hands on practitioners, people come to us with their loneliness or it emerges, or their grief, and there’s a safety they. Have with us. I’m thinking of an elderly couple I worked with as some of my first clients 40 years ago. And first the wife passed, then I continued to work with the husband in his process through that. And then eventually he passed, and I got to work with my own grief around both of them, but I was his intimate stranger in that way. It was bringing me his simple body grief, and I could just be with him.

 

Joon Park  50:33

Yeah, yeah. You know that intimate stranger idea I’ve heard, I’ve heard chaplains talk about both intimate stranger and wounded healer, both terms that are maybe self explanatory. I but I think the beautiful thing about an intimate stranger is especially when it comes to therapists, coaches, social workers, person in line at the grocery store, the next passenger in an airplane, the person next to you. You know, we find these random strangers that there’s no anchored history sometimes with people that we’ve known for a lifetime. The advantage is, is that they know us. They know what we need, they can give us wisdom and advice that’s almost customized to who we are. And at the same time, sometimes there are presumptions and assumptions that are made, and sometimes there’s a routine that happens with people that we know. And the thing with in the book I call this in chapter seven, mid road companions, people that we meet in the middle along the way. Because those judgments are not there, we can’t help to make those judgments sometimes or that anchored history isn’t there. We can easily enter into a trust space with a person that we have no background on that there’s almost suddenly, like this limbo connection in a very temple, like sanctuary safe haven setting, and we can trust this person that they’re not going to use our history against us. We can trust this person suddenly and quickly, because we know that they’re approaching us with the innate and inherent promise that they’re entering with compassion, not with judgment. And that’s not something that can be created with a lifelong friend. That’s only something really that can be created with, for example, a therapeutic alliance or with a chaplain. And so I often act as, sort of like, maybe this is a strange analogy, but like, you know, a Cinderella dance for a night, that sort of thing. You know, here’s my pumpkin carriage. And so yeah, I see my patient, and I may see them just for that one hour, and that’s it. And I may never, never see them again. They may never remember my name, my face or my voice, but what they can remember, even if it’s just at the bodily physical level, is this non anxious, comforting presence at that moment, who listened to them and validated them and did not judge them in that moment. The

 

Til Luchau  53:26

last idea I wanted to bring up with you was this idea of praying for people. So so many of your stories, you get requests to pray for them, and it made me and I don’t know anymore if this were my words and I wrote in my notebook, or there were your words I copied down, but the question I wrote is, what is it to pray for someone? Does that even require words? And it made me think that maybe we’re praying with our hands, that we’re just doing with our touch. We’re helping people not be alone this we’re reminding the body of that. And maybe what prayer is to the spirit, touch could be for the body.

 

Joon Park  54:02

Yeah, you know, I have to say first that prayer is not something that I often. I won’t bring up with a patient. I don’t bring a religion or faith because I’m not an I don’t impose or proselytize anything like that. People think of Chaplains as you know, we’re there to religious representatives, right? But I’m there for what the patient needs. So prayer is a very sensitive thing, because if I ask my patient, would you like me to pray for you, sometimes they will just say yes to humor me. And so that power dynamic, I have to be really careful. So non consensual prayer, that’s a real problem. But when a patient does ask me explicitly, can you pray for me? Of course, I will. And what I do, at least in my prayers, is I will ask first, what’s the biggest thing I can pray about for you right now to kind of just zero in and three times out of five, maybe nine times. Out of 10, a patient will begin to weep when I ask that question, you know, because there is something on their mind, there is something weighing on them. And then when I pray, I am talking to the divine in a way that my patient can believe that someone is listening, that there’s a witness to pain, that there’s a witness to this loss, that the room were not stuck within its confines, that in the grandest scheme of the universe, loneliness is not at the center. Being alone is not at the center. And so what I do in my prayer is I will bring up specific points in the conversation and touch on that. And if they mentioned the name, if they talked about their children or their dog, if they talked about some issue that they had in their own body, I will lift that up in the prayer. And that takes a great deal of concentration, takes a great deal of listening, going back as I pray, but it helps this person to feel if they’re struggling with God, or they don’t believe in God, they just want prayer. It helps this person to feel that someone is listening, and I am, in some small way, reflecting what I hope is the spirit of the Divine, by bringing up these concerns that my patient has shared with me, and so I often weave this almost recap tapestry of what my patient has told me as a way of saying you’re important and your issues are important, and someone is listening. And I’m going to lift this up to the Great Spirit, to God, and maybe things won’t change, but there is comfort in this room. We’re not alone here, and I was listening, and I’m here for you, and in some small way, maybe I can reflect that divine love back to you. You’re

 

Til Luchau  56:56

helping me appreciate the skill, the skillfulness and the delicacy of that process. And I I think we do that non verbally touch therapists. I think we listen carefully. We help people hear themselves, we help them feel not alone. Help them connect to something bigger. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for the conversation. Thank you till. Yeah, any closing thoughts or suggestions for us?

 

Joon Park  57:24

You know, thank you for what you do till and again, I lift up your wife or memory as it’s as a blessing and a companion for you. And thank you for asking these questions, you know. But I can say, just evidenced by people wanting to read the book or, you know, engage with me on social media, that this is something people want to talk about, you know. And I’m seeing this almost running towards the topic or the area or the issue of loss. And so now we’re seeing almost like a reverse time, like we want to talk about it, the current is changing. Yes, yeah. And so that gives me a little bit of encouragement. I hope, as hard as it is to talk about I’m encouraged to see that we do want to talk about it.

 

Til Luchau  58:24

Your book, as long as you need permission to grieve, just published this year. How can people find out more about you and your work? How can they get in touch with you if they’d like to? Yep,

 

Joon Park  58:35

I’m on all the social media things, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and my book can be found at as long as you need book.com

 

Til Luchau  58:43

we’ll put those in the show notes, of course. Thank you so much for your time with us today. Thank you til our closing sponsor, books of discovery has been part of the massage therapy and bodywork world for over 25 years. Nearly 3000 schools around the globe teach with their textbooks, e textbooks and digital resources. Books of discovery likes to say, Learning Adventures start here. They find that same spirit here on the thinking practitioner podcast, and they’re proud to support our work, knowing we share the mission to bring the massage and bodywork community thought provoking and enlivening content that advances our profession. Instructors of manual therapy. Education Programs can request complimentary copies of books of discoveries, textbooks for review use in their programs. Please reach out at books of discovery.com. Thinking practitioner listeners save 15% by entering thinking at checkout and our rollout, thanks to the sponsors, find all the videos, show notes, transcripts and extras on our site, Whitney site, Academy of Clinical massage.com. My site, advanced trainings.com. If you have comments, questions or things you’d like to hear us talk about, just email us at info, at thethinking practitioner.com. Or look for us on social media. I am at til Luca Whitney Lowe can reach him through his name on social media. Please rate us on Apple podcasts as it helps other people find the show and you can hear us wherever you listen to your podcast. So please do share the Word and tell a friend. Thanks everybody. Thanks again. Jen,

 

Joon Park  1:00:19

thank you till You

 

Til Luchau  1:17:00

The books of discovery has been part of massage therapy education for over 20 years. 1000s of schools around the world teach with their textbooks, e textbooks and digital resources, books of discovery likes to say, Learning Adventures start here. They see that same spirit here on the thinking practitioner podcast, and they’re proud to support our work, knowing we share the mission to bring massage and bodywork community and livelining content that advances our profession. Check out their collection of E textbooks and digital learning resources for pathology, kinesiology, anatomy, [email protected] where thinking practitioner, listeners like you, save 15% by entering thinking at checkout. Thanks, books of discovery. Thanks to all of our sponsors. Stop by our sites for the video of this conversation, the show notes, transcripts and extras. Whitney site, Academy of Clinical massage.com. My site, advanced dash chainings.com. If you have comments, questions or things you’d like to hear us talk about, just record a short voice memo on your phone and email it to us at info, at thethinking practitioner.com, we might even play it on the air or look for us on social media at our names, at Whitney low or at Toluca. Rate us please on Apple podcasts, as it really does help people find the show and helps our sponsors know that their support is worthwhile. You can find us on Spotify, Stitcher, pod bean, or wherever else you Listen, please do share the Word. Tell a friend. Thanks for listening. You.