Episode 125 – Moving with Grief (with Til Luchau & Whitney Lowe)
Episode Transcript
Summary:
Key Topics
- Introduction to the podcast and sponsors (0:00-1:20)
- Til Luchau’s personal experience with grief and loss (1:20-5:30)
- The importance of self-care for caretakers (5:30-8:30)
- Lessons learned from the grief process (8:30-14:55)
- Balancing work and personal life during grief (14:55-18:00)
- The importance of acknowledging grief in client interactions (18:00-21:00)
- Understanding the stages and timeline of grief (21:00-23:30)
- Strategies for supporting others dealing with loss (23:30-26:30)
- The impact of grief on cognitive function (26:30-31:51)
- Final insights and reflections on grief (31:51-37:00)
- Closing remarks and sponsor acknowledgements (37:00-39:00)
Whitney Lowe:
And welcome to the Thinking Practitioner Podcast, where we are supported by ABMP, the Associated Bodywork & Massage Professionals. ABMP membership gives professional practitioners like you a package including individual liability insurance, free continuing education, quick reference apps, online scheduling and payments with PocketSuite and much more.
Til Luchau:
ABMP CE courses, podcasts and Massage & Bodywork Magazine always feature expert voices and new perspectives in the profession, including articles with myself and you, Whitney Lowe, and you Thinking Practitioner listeners can save on joining ABMP at abmp.com/thinking. So it was good to be back, Whitney. Thanks for inviting me back, reaching out and inviting me to come in. How are you doing?
Whitney Lowe:
I’m doing well, and it’s wonderful to see you back behind the microphone again and get to share some time and space with you here again and just want to welcome everybody back into the fold with the two of us here again.
Til Luchau:
Yeah, I was gone for a while because I was both caring for my wife who was dealing with a long-term cancer illness, and then her passing. She passed away about two, two and a half months ago now, so pretty recently. Just taking time off to be with that, and then yesterday when you and I were catching up, we were brainstorming topics over the podcast here. And I said, really, the only thing that’s meaningful for me to talk about now is that experience. And you, radically, freaked me out by saying, “Well, okay, let’s talk about that. Maybe let’s talk about what you are learning and what’s going on for you.” And I can talk about that. That’s what the invitation was, and I can do that and then we’ll talk about, as I understand it, what this process has been for me as a person, but then also how it connects into my professional life and cleanings that you the listener might be able to take with it, whether or not you’re dealing with something like this.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah, that’s wonderful. Well, first of all, just want to say that our thoughts are with you and the family and everyone there for the challenges and things that you all are working through. And I just want to acknowledge, too, the difficulties sometimes and the openness of letting us into your life in this way to share these things with everyone for their benefit of learning a little bit more about that experience as well. So thank you for taking the time to be open to doing that.
Til Luchau:
Thank you. That’s a big piece of it. I’ll probably cry at some point in the conversation.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah, that’s cool.
Til Luchau:
The only thing that’s made it bearable really are the connections I have with people both in my professional and personal lives. And the only way to show up, to do the work that needs to be done is to bring all of these feelings with me essentially. It doesn’t mean I need to tell the whole story every day to everybody at all or even acknowledge what’s going on personally. But yeah, if there’s anything that I’ve been working with, I’m learning it’s the fact that denial only helps for a little bit. And the way out is the way through or the way through is the path or something like that.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Those things are interesting. They’re academic when we learn about them, the stages of grief and all those kinds of things. And it’s again, a completely different thing to be in the middle of it and see it all happening there.
Til Luchau:
Yes, that’s right.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Til Luchau:
Well, where should we start?
Whitney Lowe:
Well, anything that you just want to share a little bit about the whole framework of the process first, and then maybe we’ll look into some other things about more your-
Til Luchau:
The framework of the process like, the historical events there?
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Til Luchau:
Yeah, I mentioned that Loretta, my wife, was dealing with breast cancer diagnosis she got 12 years ago now.
Whitney Lowe:
And just a brief reminder to people too, she was on the podcast, I don’t remember our episode number, but you had her on to talk about that experience a bit as well.
Til Luchau:
That’s right. To talk about what it was like to be a client of body workers and then to give us some guidance. And we met with Janet Penny, and I’m liking on her co-author’s name, but there wrote a great book about working with cancer patients and we got Loretta on the show and talked to her about that. We’ll put that link in the show notes.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Til Luchau:
So yeah, all along it was a process of learning together both personally and professionally. And I remember the moment she got the diagnosis, I was like, oh shit, of course. And it was also, okay, so now we’re both going to have to get really serious about health and living a fulfilling life. And of course in 12 years, there were many phases and many ways to think about it, but there were six rounds of treatment and it was 12 years and everyone was a different deepening into from, yeah, we’re going to beat this to like, oh, I guess it’s still coming back to then, okay, so how can I really live well for whatever I have left? When it was clear there was going to keep coming back.
Whitney Lowe:
Mm-hmm.
Til Luchau:
And then for me as her partner, I had been through a chronic illness myself, Lyme disease maybe 30 years ago. And she really showed up for me at that time. It was a tough time, we had a new kid, all kinds of things were going on, but she really showed up. So it was a privilege really to be able to hold her and hold her process through that. And very connected into our professional community, it was very much out in the open what we were dealing with. There were us having to cancel various events to go be with her in various kinds of treatment. And, of course, there was this process of what shall we plan for? Because it was hard to know. And the default became, let’s just plan as if things are going to go on, because we don’t know. And that’s a better assumption for us. So that meant we planned trips, I planned work, and then would have to pull back and I got better at canceling than anything else.
Whitney Lowe:
And so what would you say, I’m sure there are all kinds of things that you really learned out of this experience, both about yourself, about the process and about the people around you. What shows up as the big learning experiences for you?
Til Luchau:
That’s a huge question. And really, I’m a work in progress. It’s only been two and a half months.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Til Luchau:
There’s places I want to go with these things.I’m learning and deepen them and developing them. And this is a great first pass, and I’m happy to share where I’m at now. But it’s still very, very much a work in progress. But I’d say, in that phase of the caretaking and illness phase, I think one of the things that jumps out at me is, this image I had at one point, I had kryptonite in my pocket. If you were a kid, I was who read Superman comic books. Kryptonite was the element that would make Superman wilt. He could do anything, he was invulnerable unless there was some kryptonite around and someone could just have it in their pocket and he would be totally affected. And, excuse me, Loretta’s cancer diagnosis was like that.
That there was something in my pocket that people, especially if they found out about it, I get to see people visibly wilt or go into a bit of shock or awkwardness, not know how to talk about it or weather to acknowledge it, that kind of thing. And it was, of course, I mean, there’s a lot to say about that, but it was of course that inflation we do between cancer and death. So anytime we hear the C word, the cancer word, we think, oh, this person’s dying. Which in this case was eventually true, but 12 years was a long time to live with that, see death in people’s eyes when they hear cancer.
Whitney Lowe:
And there seems to be just culturally in our country, not a lot of comfort around talking about that process at all. And so there’s, I’m sure a lot of avoidance there.
Til Luchau:
Right. The ways we deal with illness loss and death are to put them away somewhere and to change the subject or to talk about something else or to not even let the thoughts in for fear that I might create them or all those kinds of processes that basically keep it out of our day-to-day awareness. And there’s something to that. Who wants to live with the feelings around loss and mortality.
Whitney Lowe:
I think that is true. And also there’s a number of other, I think I see this as a common theme in a number of the other spiritual traditions, but there is certainly the talk about recognizing, and I think this is one of the things, this kind of illness brings you face-to-face with your own mortality in a way that makes you live life a lot richer and a lot more aware of the fleetingness of every single moment and the value of every single interaction with the people around you in a way that just is hard to do, when you’re not thinking of those things.
Til Luchau:
Absolutely. Absolutely. And every time we mention one of these gifts, and there are many, I should also just say it sucks.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Til Luchau:
Yeah. It’s just sad and it’s just hard. And there are many gifts in that process. Have been for me.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. And I’m sure that has just the whole thing, like you said, with having to, both your personal life and professional life, having to cancel things and note and watch this process and be the caretaker and be there for her has taken over your life in a tremendous number of ways. So how did you deal with this in terms of, we always hear about the necessity, importance of the caretaker also taking care of themselves. So how did you sort of manage and work with that process?
Til Luchau:
Yeah, that’s another thing that got clear up, it’s like I got to figure out, I’m in this for the long term, long haul and felt… There was things I found that really helped me moving movement, my running practice, I got faster, my miles got faster, my number of pull-ups got higher. And then in the last couple of years it’s been movement practices that involve other people. I did an interview with Alicia Grayson about contact improv, a dance form that has a lot of focus and mindfulness and attention to one’s own body, but also then through contact with another person. And those basic practices, boy, if there’s one thing, it really was that. It was the moving and working with the present moment in the context with other people. The touch aspect itself, just giving someone weight or there’s some at different levels, there’s lifts and things like that where we’re flying up in the air and just the actual experience of weight and movement and contact bodywork, receiving bodywork, myself doing bodywork. All those grounding in the moment, somatic things were huge parts of my self-care, as you could say.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Til Luchau:
That phrase is a funny phrase. I wish I had a different phrase, because it’s such a cliche. And we put so many associations into it, and then it’s like, we all know we need self-care and none of us do it enough. And all those kind of tropes come in along with that phrase, but it is basically living well. And as her caretaker, of course, I needed to find that balance of being there for her and living well myself..
Whitney Lowe:
I’ve heard a lot of people who are in that caretaker role with a significant other or close family member or very close personal friend, and they’re the ones giving that care, talking about the difficulty of the feeling of it’s important to take care of yourself, because there is some degree of I should be focusing on this other person who’s not well, not focusing on myself. But there is always that thing, if you don’t take care of yourself, you will not be there for them as well.
Til Luchau:
That’s right. That’s right. And statistically, people in helping professions rate themselves much worse on all kinds of self-care scales and stress as well too. It’s really easy to get focused on just the other person, I mean, that’s just what we do. Since she passed and is gone, I’m really doing an ongoing inquiry into the act of tending for something or caring for something. Because now it’s my home or our home. It’s houseplants our dog, it’s our garden, it’s the bank accounts, it’s all the different things that get tended. And of course, we did that as a team, the two of us, and now it’s on me. So it’s a whole different organization about having to take care of things. But it’s really actually meaningful and powerful to just go water the garden. That act of tending and I know you do lots of tending with the birds and different things you have in your life, but it’s opened my eyes to how much tending for other things or other beings is part of what makes our days meaningful.
Whitney Lowe:
And have you sort of carried on that attention to self-care process in this time since she’s been gone as well? Does that feel like something that will stick around a bit more?
Til Luchau:
Yeah. Yeah. So far so good, knock on wood. It’s been everything all along the way.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Til Luchau:
Yeah, especially the contact improv practice, the running practices, doing things with other people, just physically moving, that’s a part of my life that I don’t have any trouble doing that. I don’t really want to go be on hold with the Social Security Administration for three hours like I was yesterday trying to finish up some of her affairs.
Whitney Lowe:
Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Til Luchau:
There’s lots of that kind of stuff, I just really have to hold teeth to get myself to do. But if there’s a chance to go move with somebody, I’m right there, that’s not hard to answer.
Whitney Lowe:
I think that’s an experience that would probably be very common amongst the people in our arena, in our field, because we are more into that whole movement process and embodying those things on a day-to-day basis.
Til Luchau:
Yes. And the bodywork I’ve received along the way, especially the, I think my tastes in bodywork are shifting as I age, but also in this process, it’s very vulnerable, the raw process. It’s the attentiveness of the bodyworker becomes really important. I love deep focused work that’s fairly intense, but it’s also my discrimination around someone’s ability to really attend to that and follow my signals has gone way up too.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Til Luchau:
I need that more.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. And those are some pretty challenging skills necessarily to develop, and that’s part of what makes a person really good at what they do, I think.
Til Luchau:
Well, just thinking more takeaways, they’re both during the caretaking time, but then also around her passing. It’s such an amazing study in people’s expressions of caring. Loretta was really social, really connected out in our communities. She had several communities she was a big part of, and hundreds, we had literally hundreds of people reaching out when they heard she was ill. And so it was such a spectrum of expressions of care, and I am still putting it together. I don’t have a grand unified theory of caring expressions, but I got so much data there on all the varieties of how that happens.
But one of the factors that became clear really early, and I could see it in her responses to people was are people coming from their own pain or are they interested in her? It sounds so obvious that when someone’s going through something hard, we want to attend to them rather than bring them our pain. But it’s subtle, and I said, there’s so many different ways that we hear something we care about is ill, and we want to reach out. The question is why and what do we want out of the interaction? Is it reassurance for myself? Is it to bring them my grief, which they’re not always the best recipient of it. I saw so many people basically laying their own grief at Loretta’s feet, and she was so good with that for so long, but eventually that wasn’t right for her either.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah, I think for many of these people, just the idea of a shared experience of being able to finally take the lid off and be able to express something that’s inside them and they see, “Well, this is an opening for being able to do that.” That’s probably where that’s coming from for a lot of people,
Til Luchau:
Especially love and connection. I didn’t tell her I loved her. So of that coming in, which was really beautiful and really helpful.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Any other helpful things that you found for either yourself or the people around you about moving through that grief process that you think would be interesting or helpful things for people to know about?
Til Luchau:
Well, I hope to actually bring some guests on to talk about this, just a beginner in it, but there’s this idea of moving through a grief process that itself, there might be other ways to think about it that are more helpful. That many of the questions I get or the ways I was thinking about myself really are about moving through. In other words, coming out the other side, getting it over with, and that, the grief is a problem to be solved. And of course, as soon as I say that, people get it like, oh, okay, so maybe grief is not a problem to be solved, maybe it’s an experience to be tended. I think, at least the key follower, your idea that we move with grief, not through grief. And I’ve sought out people who had lost their partners, their spouses, just to talk to them looking for the secrets, was like, how do you deal with this? What’s this? And they’ve all said, “You don’t get over it.”
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Til Luchau:
It’s not about getting through it. It’s not about-
Whitney Lowe:
It’s not another side where it’s all-
Til Luchau:
It’s not another side.
Whitney Lowe:
… where it’s done.
Til Luchau:
And some of the best advice I’ve received from them, but also from these people I hope to talk with more on the podcast here, is about really giving ourselves to that process. And maybe there’s a lot of parallels, I’m not sure how to unpack it right here, but there’s a lot of parallels with physical pain that there’s a shift from thinking of pain as a damage signal to being a protective signal. And maybe grief is not damage either. Maybe grief is actually trying to slow us down or drop us into another level. And that by focusing only on distracting ourselves or getting rid of the grief or getting beyond it, short circuits that process.
Whitney Lowe:
And one of the things that I see people trying to do a lot, and it seems like in a lot of instances where they’re not letting themselves move through that grief, but really trying to keep it away from themselves by, for example, filling themselves up with something else like, “A person’s gone, so I got to go do something else to fill up that void or lost of a loved one or the beloved pet or whatever it is. Then I got to fill that in, so that I don’t feel this kind of thing or this doesn’t really get to me.”
Til Luchau:
Yeah, right. Yeah, no judgment on that because there are so many different ways to deal with that. The pain is just too much. The pain is too much to sit with sometimes. And thank God for the ways we can fill the void or the ways we can distract ourselves and the people that help us in that. And maybe that’s not the only strategy I want to have for myself. There’s analogies of the grief being like a river and it takes you downstream and you go under and you get a mouthful of, and you cough and you choke. Eventually, it spits you out, but you’re still there in the river. You’re still wet, but you can breathe and you’re in a new place. It really feels like I’m in the white water in many ways.
Whitney Lowe:
That’s a good analogy, indeed. Along those lines, one of the things that I think is particularly challenging for a lot of people is, if they have to go through something like this and they have to keep doing the things that they do in their lives, “I’ve got to go to work, I’ve got to take care of the kids. I’ve got to do whatever it is.” From what you learned through this experience, what kind of advice would you give to people who have to find a way to balance that with what else is going on in their life on a regular basis that they have to keep everything going?
Til Luchau:
The first, I guess first thing that comes to me is to really ask that question, do have to keep going? And I have been fortunate enough to be able to slow down on the work. I stopped seeing clients a few months ago, canceled a bunch of teaching engagements. I’m really, really grateful. Unfortunately, I got a great team of administrators here. I got a great partner, and my podcast basically kept things going. So I had that privilege of being able to step back. But I think for all of us that we need to keep going might deserve questioning. Because if there’s a hall pass in life, it’s this kind of loss. If there’s a time to opt out or sit back or excuse me, ask for help or say, I can’t, it’s really in this process of loss.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Til Luchau:
Go ahead with.
Whitney Lowe:
I was just going to say, it seems like some people may have a hard time asking for that kind of help because they don’t feel like they should be asking for the help because the other person is having the challenge or whatever, and I think that can also be a hard thing for some people to figure out.
Til Luchau:
It makes me realize, too, that I’m talking, of course, about my own story of losing my wife. That’s a pretty big deal. But we all grieve.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Til Luchau:
There’s a whole spectrum, and the level of grief is not proportionate to the event at all. It’s like, I remember watching the grief space get richer and bigger. So many people talking about grief, writing about grief, so that’s good, that’s good that we’re gaining more collective wisdom about grief, but never really, in spite of caring for my wife for 12 years, never really dove into that field until I’d lost my wife, and then it’s like, okay, I need to know more about this. And I think, I don’t know if it could have been any different for me, I don’t know if I would’ve had the focus or interest to learn more about grief before I was in it. Maybe that’s going to be true for everybody. But it’s really, I wish I had, and it was a message, it’s like we could all deal with our loss or the micro griefs or the everyday griefs in such a better way that really brings richness, fullness, care to ourselves and the people around us.
And some of that’s acknowledging it, some of it’s understanding that it’s a part of the deal. I mean, we lose, aging is a grief process. We lose our youth.
Whitney Lowe:
That’s true.
Til Luchau:
We lose our abilities. We lose dream as times goes on, there’s dreams or possibilities that close off to us. We lose people, we lose animals we love, we lose things we love. We’re losing the planet, the country we’ve known. In life, we lose friendships, we lose loves, there’s always loss.
Whitney Lowe:
So the difference is sort of like a spectrum of those kinds of things. And then you get the really big whammies like this one here.
Til Luchau:
Yeah, the big whammy makes me pay attention to it, but it made me realize too how much loss is in everyone’s life. And how many strategies there are for dealing with that and being with it, moving with it helps me. And then also the people around me, it’s a different approach. It’s given me to really being curious, understanding that it is just the simple connection sometimes, it’s the most helpful. And that my assumptions about grief could be not helpful if I haven’t examined them and haven’t really found a place in myself where I’m comfortable to some extent.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Right. Taking this for a moment back to what we might be doing with some of, for example, the practitioners who are working with clients on a regular basis, and you mentioned you had still been doing some work with clients for a while into this. So how important is it, do you think for practitioners to acknowledge this grief process when they’re working with clients or maybe just interacting with other people in their community in the sphere of influence, et cetera?
Til Luchau:
I have a bias based on my own experience, and this was something I really struggled with when I had Lyme disease. Because we had a young kid, I was the breadwinner, we had a mortgage. I felt so much pressure to keep that income flow coming in. I had a bunch of work lined up and teaching jobs, and yet the identity I had as a healthy person didn’t give me the room to talk about being sick in that context. I didn’t want to worry my clients, I didn’t want it to be about me. I didn’t want them to question whether it was right for me to be doing the work I was doing with them. I had all these fears or assumptions about what that would put them through to acknowledge to them I was dealing with an illness. And some of that’s totally appropriate, we don’t need to burden our clients with our own process. And we do want to create a context where the focus is on them and they’re not worried about us.
But, at some point, I remember co-teaching with a good friend of mine, Stephen, Skate of Order. And he, after the first morning, he literally took me by the shoulders and looked me in the eye and said, “Til you are sick. Stop, stop, just stop.” Stunned I’m like, “I can’t stop. We got to finish this workshop,” or whatever. It took me six months, a year to really shift out of that place of like, no, let’s just get through this. Let’s put my head down no matter how I’m feeling or how. So at some point, in my process, it was really important to acknowledge what I was dealing with. Because it was obvious to everybody else in that case. And then to, I did end up actually in that case, stopping work for most of those three years, maybe that first six months I was still pushing through.
But I realized too that, not relating to it in myself by keeping it upside so I could keep on going the direction I wanted to go, it wasn’t helping me do better work, it wasn’t helping me get better. So I think that was the groundwork in my 30s and then now in my 50s and 60s as my wife’s been going through this, I need to tell everybody. But certainly when I have a meeting with my staff, I needed to acknowledge what I was dealing with at home, because sometimes it was really intense.
Example, or when I am starting to see clients, they all know what I’ve been going through and they know that I’m just gradually going to start taking clients again probably, so their expectations are a little flexible. But in the situation you’re describing about, let’s say I’m dealing with loss and I still feel that pressure to keep the income going, I would look, if I was doing my 30s again, knowing what I know now and I was dealing with this, then it would be, I would look for the times when I didn’t even have to acknowledge it. I would want, as long as I was physically and emotionally able to be present, I would look for times and spaces to take a break from needing to tell my story.
It could be a real piece and an of just being in that room with someone. And I would want people that I worked with on an ongoing basis, including really regular clients perhaps, but for sure coworkers are people that depended on me to understand and to know what I was going through. And that’s really been my own inquiry is how to share what’s true, what I’m dealing with in a way that helps me do better work. Helps the effects of what I’m doing be better rather than turning into the focus or the distraction.
Whitney Lowe:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. So along those lines, do you have any sort of real prominent or significant lessons or insights that you feel like you gained that I wish I knew this, or I wish people knew this kind of thing going through this that would be particularly valuable or helpful to share with everybody?
Til Luchau:
Yeah. I got so much, such a long list here, but let me just see, has its own timeline. There are stages of grief. Even Elisabeth Kubler-Ross came back later and says, “Listen, the way I wrote those 5 Stages of Grief things made people take it as this progression you’re supposed to go through.” She later in her work said, no, it’s not like that. It could be anything at any time in the same day, and that’s been helpful for me just to understand that I can feel really good during this process. It’s not doing grief wrong, it’s just because I’m going to feel everything and in the same day I can just feel incredibly heartbroken.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah, that’s an interesting idea because I can see how somebody could get feeling if they were familiar with that whole model of those stages of grief. If they feel like they’ve moved past one of those stages and then something happens and they go back and have another early stage one experience, they’re like, “Oh, no, I’m regressing, or I didn’t finish this,” as opposed to just, these can all happen in random orders at random times.
Til Luchau:
And even more things at once. It can be both loss and relief, and it’s weird that grief rhymes with relief. After 12 years of my wife’s process, I didn’t even really admit that there was some relief there until after she had passed. And it felt there was some injunction in me against that acknowledging that feeling in myself, but I was relieved for her. Because it was hard road for her.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Til Luchau:
Yeah, A level of relief of that chapter being finished during the page. Grief, another one, grief, I’m writing this now, grief makes you feel discombobulated. Even the micro griefs, even losing your keys or whatever, it’s just like your brain and there’s some interesting research on that. I’ll see if I can get some of that into the podcast sometime. Your brain actually encodes the people in your life, the things in your life as part of your existence and identity, and one of them is taken out, it throws the whole system off. And the usual ways of constellating our self and our awareness and our assumptions are disrupted. It comes down to even attention deficit or confusion or forgetfulness that’s so common.
Whitney Lowe:
Anything else of key kinds of lessons or anything else that you want to share with us or leave us with?
Til Luchau:
There’s a piece of work around what we can do for the people around us who may be dealing with loss of various kinds, including our clients that I’m still putting together. I have a stack that’s several inches high of sympathy cards that Loretta and I got one of my fantasy projects. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to this, but I want to go through and read the cards and rank them or rate them in terms of their level of helpfulness. I’m horrible at writing sympathy cards and I’ve been blown away by people’s ability to express something succinctly and authentically, it just moves me to tears in that moment. And then there’s other expressions, not just in cards, but that don’t evoke a different response in me. I want to reverse engineer that somehow. I want to figure out what are these people doing? It’s so helpful.
Whitney Lowe:
And I think sometimes too, what may happen in those kinds of situations, a person might either, this could be a sympathy card or not. It could just be somebody talking to you, but saying something that might seem relatively innocuous and simple, but it just clicks at the right time of that is so much of a thing that resonates with a place that really connects it. I can remember that happening in a conversation with somebody after my mom had passed away, and it was some little anecdotal story or a picture I think it was that they shared that just said, “Oh, hey, I saw this picture of your mom, and I thought like,” that picture so encapsulated her entire persona and spirit in a way that just was like, it was a really powerful imagery that you never know when that kind of thing is going to have that sort of power.
Til Luchau:
That’s right. That’s right. There’s maybe a set of things that don’t help, too, that I’m getting better at understanding or list, but it doesn’t help to say, how are you? JS Park, who again, I hope to get on the show here, he says, “We’re allergic to that,” those of us who are grieving. Because basically what someone is asking when they ask me that is like, okay, let’s go to your grief now here me, and maybe I wasn’t there. And that’s a big ask. And it’s also, it’s such an impossible question to answer because in some ways I’m great, in some ways I’m heartbroken and never going to recover. And how do I express that on my way to pick up my mail from the mailbox and like that?
Whitney Lowe:
I think often that question gets asked as one of those things that people have no idea where to start. They have no idea how to touch base and connect, and so that’s the starting question.
Til Luchau:
This is so true, and it’s true for us as practitioners with clients too. What do we say? Should I bring it up? Should I not bring it up? That kind of uncertainty and awkwardness is really normal, and part of the beauty of human connection is even being together in that not knowing what to say or do.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Til Luchau:
And I think if there’s a principle from being on the receiving end of so much of that for the last years and now months, it’s that intent to connect, really. It’s that intention to really reach out. It’s very little about what they actually say. It can be as simple as I’m thinking of you. I’m having a lot of feelings now too. I don’t know where you’re at, but I’m having a lot of feelings, people tell me that. Or that people that just reach out and touch my arm, give me a hug. That’s something about that very human, just physical contact being a body person, maybe I’m biased in that way, but it’s just there’s nothing like a touch or a hug. There’s nothing that compares to that.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. I think many of us certainly can resonate with this from being in this field and knowing that we are all in this because we understand the power of touch and the power of connection. Well, I want to say again, just an incredible thank you to you for opening up yourself and your story to share some things with people. I think there’s some extremely valuable insights about this whole process, and as you said, we will probably revisit this with some other topics and things and some guests that you wanted to bring on to look into some of these things in detail later on as well.
Til Luchau:
That’s my hope. To be arranged, but can I leave this with a poem?
Whitney Lowe:
Of course. Yeah.
Til Luchau:
I haven’t cried yet, but let’s see how this goes. This is Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. She’s a Colorado poet, and this one came to me a few days after Loretta’s passing and it really spoke to where I was at. It’s called Watching My Friend Pretend her Heart isn’t Breaking. On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star, would weigh 6 billion tons. 6 billion tons is equivalent to the weight of every animal on earth, including insects, times three. 6 billion tons sounds impossible until I consider how it is to swallow grief. Just one teaspoon and one may as well have consumed a neutron star. How dense it is, how it carries inside of it, the memory of collapse.
Just that heaviness of grief and that gravity it has makes it unable to move sometimes, it really spoke to that for me. She says, “How difficult it is to move then how impossible to believe anything could ever lift that weight. There are many reasons to treat each other with great tenderness. One is the sheer miracle, we are here together on a planet surrounded by dying stars. One is, we cannot see what anyone else has swallowed.” Thank you, Whitney.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah, thank you. Thank you Til, and thank you everyone for hanging with us. I really appreciate, again, the tremendous gift you’ve given us in opening up a vision into your life and the experiences that you’ve had here. This has been very enlightening for all of us.
Til Luchau:
Thanks. Yeah, for the invitation, we’re going to have to do our sponsor rollout and life goes on, but it really is just making room for whatever losses, griefs, pains we’re feeling in our lives that helps us do this work with each other. It’s really important work.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Wonderful. All right, thank you dear friend. And do remember, Books of Discovery has been a part of the massage therapy and body work 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 and they find that same spirit here on The Thinking Practitioner Podcast and are proud to support our work knowing that we share the mission to bring the massage and body work community thought-provoking and enlightening content that advances our profession.
Til Luchau:
Instructors of manual therapy education programs can request complimentary copies of Books of Discovery’s textbooks for review and use in their programs. Please reach out at booksofdiscovery.com. Listeners can explore the collection of learning resources for anatomy, pathology, kinesiology, physiology, ethics and Business Mastery at booksofdiscovery.com, where The Thinking Practitioner listeners save 15% by entering Thinking at checkout.
Whitney Lowe:
Thanks to all of our listeners and to our sponsors, you can stop by our sites for the video show notes, transcripts and any extras, you can find that over on my site at academyofclinicalmassage.com And Til, where can they find that for you?
Til Luchau:
Advanced-trainings.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 or send us an email or send us a message on social. Look for us under our names. I am Til Luchau. Who are you, Whitney?
Whitney Lowe:
You can find me over on social under my name, Whitney Lowe, as well. If you would take a quick moment to rate us on Apple Podcasts, it does help other people find the show, and you can hear us wherever you listen to your podcasts. So please share the word, tell a friend, and we will see you in the next episode. Thanks again. All right.
