The Alchemy Of Grief

Grief does not ask permission. It shows up in the middle of a normal morning and suddenly the world feels both unchanged and completely different.In this episode, I’m sharing a science-grounded, soul-honest way to understand what grief is actually doing inside you when loss rearranges your inner life.

Book recommendation: A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis. 

If you found this helpful, subscribe, share it with someone who’s grieving, and leave a review so more people can find support. What part of grief have you been trying to carry alone?

For more insights on psychology, neuroscience, and mental wellness, you can go to my website, www.natashasheyenne.com for my blog, events, courses, and to sign up for my newsletter. 

Thank you for listening to Life, Alchemized.
If something here resonated, let it settle before you rush forward.
Awareness is already movement

Transcript

Grief Rearranges The Soul

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to Life Alchemized, where science meets inner transformation. I'm your host, Natasha, a leadership coach and psychologist. A quote that I've always appreciated around grief was from Dr. David Kessler, who, after being asked which type of grief was the worst, he said, yours. For some reason, that has really helped me through all the grief that I've experienced in my own life. No one else's grief can fully prepare us for our own. We can know the facts, we can understand that loss is part of life, and we can say all the wise things and read the books, attend the funerals, comfort the grieving, speak gently about mortality, and still, when grief enters our own house, it rearranges the furniture of the soul. Suddenly, the world is both familiar and unrecognizable. The coffee still brews, the mail still arrives, people still ask about weather and traffic and what they're making for dinner. And yet something essential has been torn from the fabric. Grief is not a problem to solve, it is a transformation to survive. It is one of the great alchemical processes of being human.

Alchemy As A Map For Loss

SPEAKER_00 1:22

Alchemy historically was the study of transformation. And as we know, alchemists work with heat, vessels, substances, separation, dissolution, purification, and recombination. And they're often remembered for the dream of turning lead into gold. But the deeper symbolic image is this something heavy, dark, and ordinary enters the vessel, and through a long process, something changed emerges. Grief is like that. Not because grief magically becomes beautiful, not because loss is secretly a gift. Let's be careful there. Some losses are devastating, some losses are unjust. Some losses do not need to be made pretty in order to be meaningful. The alchemy of grief is not about turning pain into a lesson, it's about allowing grief to transform us without letting it erase us. It's about learning how to carry love after the form of the relationship has changed. So let's begin with the

Grief As Love And Absence

SPEAKER_00 2:32

simple truth. Grief is love responding to absence. And that's why it hurts so much. We do not grieve what did not matter. We grieve because someone or something mattered deeply. Grief is often associated with death, but grief is larger than bereavement. We can grieve divorce, estrangement, illness, aging, infertility, identity shifts, career loss, moving, changing bodies, lost safety, lost innocence, lost time. Grief asks us to live in a world where something beloved is no longer available in the way it once was. Psychologist Colin Murray Parks once wrote, The pain of grief is just as much part of life as the joy of love. And comedian Jimmy Carr said, the price you pay for love is grief. And because grief is tied to love, it sticks to us. And grief is title. It comes in waves, it circles back, it softens, then sharpens, it sleeps beside us, then wakes suddenly in a serial aisle because a song is playing. It can be quiet for weeks and then appear because we saw someone's handwriting, or smelled their perfume, or heard their laugh in someone else, or reached for the phone before remembering.

The Dual Process Model Explained

SPEAKER_00 4:02

Modern grief psychology gives us a wonderfully compassionate model. One of the most helpful is the dual process model of grief, which suggests that grieving people move back and forth between two types of coping. The first is loss-oriented coping. And this is when we turn toward the pain of the loss. We cry, we remember, we miss, we look at pictures, we talk about what happened, we feel the absence, and we let ourselves know the truth. And the second is restoration-oriented coping. And this is when we turn toward the life that must continue. So we handle logistics, we go to work, we pay bills, we make food, we solve problems, we learn new roles, we laugh at something unexpected, we begin adapting to the changed world. And the key to this is oscillation, that back and forth toward the loss, then toward life. And this is not avoidance. This is how the nervous system survives. No one can stare directly at the sun all day. Grief is too bright and too dark at once. So we need these intervals, we need mercy, we need movement between feeling and functioning.

Neuroscience Of A Missing Person

SPEAKER_00 5:29

And here's where neuroscience also helps us. The human brain is built for connection. Our relationships are not just emotional preferences, they become part of the nervous system's map of safety, identity, memory, and expectation. When we love someone, the brain learns them. Their face, their voice, their routines, their smell, the way they enter a room, the way they make you feel. It expects contact and it expects continuity. So when someone dies or disappears from our life, the brain does not instantly update the map. Part of grief is the brain repeatedly encountering the mismatch between expectation and reality. And this is one reason grief can feel so surreal. A person can be intellectually aware of the loss and still feel deep in the body that the person should be about to walk through the door. The mind knows the nervous system is still learning. Mary Francis O'Connor, a neuroscientist and grief researcher, has written about grief as a form of learning. The brain has to update the understanding of the world. It has to learn that the loved one is no longer available in physical space while still preserving the bond internally. And that is a delicate task. And it explains why grief can be exhausting. The grieving brain is working. It is scanning, remembering, predicting, correcting, aching, adapting. It is trying to reconcile love and absence. It's trying to locate someone who cannot be located in the old way. No wonder grief can affect concentration and sleep and appetite and memory and energy and decision making. No wonder a simple errand can feel mountainous. This is why we must be tender with grieving people, including ourselves. A grieving person is not simply sad. They're in a full system reorganization. Because grief often strips us of our preferred self-image. We may think we are patient until grief makes us irritable. We may think we're independent until grief reveals how deeply our lives was woven with another's presence. Grief humbles us, it returns us to the raw material, the unprocessed ore, the lead. Victor Frankel, who survived the Holocaust and wrote Man's Search for Meaning, said, when we are no longer able to change a situation, we're challenged to change ourselves. Inside grief, this names something real. There are losses we cannot reverse. There are doors that we cannot reopen. And there are endings that cannot be negotiated. But over time, we may still have some agency in how we relate to the loss, how we honor the love, how we continue, and how we allow ourselves to be shaped without being destroyed. Now

When Grief Needs More Support

SPEAKER_00 9:02

I also want to be clear that grief can become complicated. There is no timeline for grief. But if grief becomes so intense, so prolonged, or disabling that you cannot function, you cannot find moments of relief, you feel trapped in the death, or you feel like life is no longer worth living, support matters. Therapy, grief groups, spiritual care, your trusted community, and medical support can all be a part of the healing vessel. Getting help does not mean that you are grieving wrong. It means grief is too heavy to carry alone. And grief was never meant to be carried alone. Across history, human beings have created mourning rituals for a reason. We have wakes and funerals, memorials, laments, sitting shiva, black clothing, food brought to the grieving, prayers, songs, processions, anniversaries. Modern life often rushes grief. Many people get a few days off work and then are expected to return as if their inner world has not just cracked open. But the soul does not obey bereavement leave policies. Grief needs time. And not just chronological time, it needs meaningful time. William Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth, give sorrow words. That is one of the oldest grief practices, to give sorrow words. Words do not remove sorrow, but they keep it from becoming sealed inside of us. When grief has no words, it can become like a stone in the body. But when grief has words, it begins to move. This is where C.S. Lewis's book, A Grief Observed, is such a powerful companion. It does not give us a neat map, it gives us a witness. Lewis writes from inside bewilderment. He does not sanitize his doubt or pain. He lets grief be spiritually disruptive, intellectually disorienting, and emotionally raw. And that honesty is the gift of the book and something that I wish more people could embrace navigating when they're experiencing grief. What makes a grief observed especially meaningful for this episode is that Lewis practices observation as a form of alchemy. He watches grief, he names its movements, he notices its contradictions, he lets the experience work on him. And he doesn't emerge with easy answers, but he does move toward a changed relationship with love, suffering, and his spirituality. And that is grief work. Not finding a perfect explanation, not forcing peace, but staying present long enough for the soul to metabolize what it can.

Containment Rituals And Closing Truths

SPEAKER_00 12:16

As we close, I want to return to the image of the vessel. In alchemy, transformation requires containment. The material has to be held, heated, watched, given time. Too much force could ruin the work, and too little attention could leave it unchanged. Grief also needs containment, a safe enough place to feel, a steady enough rhythm to continue, a loving enough community to witness, a brave enough honesty to say this hurts because it mattered. And maybe that is the goal grief slowly teaches us. Not that loss is good, not that everything happens for a reason, but that love is real, that bonds shape us. That even when life breaks the form, something sacred still remains. So let grief be grief. It is how love learns to breathe in a changed world. Thank you for listening to Life Alchemized. If something here resonated, let it settle before you rush forward. Awareness is already moving.