Marigolde Grief Gathering Nourish Your Grief

Hi, everyone. Welcome to around the table with Marigold this morning. I'm so happy to be with you, and I hope you're having a nice Friday morning. And even if you're not, you're welcome here. However you're showing up this morning, I wanted to talk today about nourishing grief. It's something that we bring up a lot in Marigold, and if you don't know about Marigold, we're a grief wellness platform rooted in culture, rituals, and storytelling. And I think a lot about that, because nourishing grief comes on a spectrum, I feel like, and I'm really experiencing this in my life right now because we recently lost my father in law.

So being very close with my mother in law, and of course, with my husband, I've seen this spectrum of grief really come alive. And I think that while we always want to nourish our grief and bring deep care to our grief, what does that mean in the initial stages of loss or change that is bringing up the grief in our life, you know? So I like to think of the word nourish or nourishment as something that brings a deep repair. I think that nourishing grief in the very early stages, after losing someone or perhaps changing a job or finding yourself in an unexpected situation in which you're grieving, you're going to approach that with some very subtle ways, like utilizing your senses and your intuition, rather than the more physical ways, like actually feeding your grief, you know, using comfort foods and using maybe more textural sensory items, like a comfy blanket or a warm cup of tea.

Maybe those things might not work as well in the initial stages because brand new grief can feel a lot like an open wound, and it feels strange to nourish an open wound. Right. We want to kind of titrate the care that we provide and find a way to be present and be available for what our griefs wisdom is showing us. And I think that in the initial stages of grief, that level of nourishment comes in allowing our intuition to speak to us. So, for example, I've noticed that my mother in law, in these first couple of months, after losing her husband of 53 years, she wants solitude, she wants to be alone.

And she's actually said some things to me like, I want to be in the pain, because being in the pain feels like I still have a bit of him. And I can understand that, because once that intensity lessens, it feels like another level of loss. Right? So I think that it's very wise of us to pay attention to what the body is telling us, what the heart is telling us, and where it wants to be, how it wants to be comforted. And a guiding question that we utilize in our work in Marigold is, what is your grief craving?

I ask you to sit with that for a minute and just feel it in your body because it's usually not a mental response and it's usually not an intellectual response, although we could create that right? But if you quiet your mind and let your body answer, let your grief answer as if it was another person, it might tell you something surprising. So if you're watching the replay, I would love for you to let us know, like, what is your grief telling you today? What does it need? What's a simple way that you can attend to that?

And if it feels too raw, what are you feeling that your grief wants? Does it want to be cocooned and covered and protected? How can you nourish that cocoon? Have a great Friday, everyone. Talk soon.