Welcome to Ritual Sisters, the podcast where your hosts and fellow travelers, Michelle and Kelly, explore the ways that ritual can help you feel better through the ups and downs of life. So let's take a deep breath and start this journey together.

We are so excited to be back on another episode, and today we have Lisa Cheney fil on the podcast. Welcome Lisa. And Lisa is a grief practitioner, death doula, creative facilitator, artist and river guide who belongs to the world as one who rewrites history. One who dwells in River Canyon and one who dreams of the river meeting the sea.

As the founder of Women of the Water, she braids together her skills, training and lived experiences to help us remember the ways and wisdom of water so we can well tend experiences of death, dying, grief, loss, and love, and restore life for generations past, present, and future. Today we'll dive into the role of death Toula and the role of community for grief and loss.

So again, welcome Lisa. And we wanted, Michelle and I were thinking we could start with, you know, especially for listeners that might not know, um, if you could help us understand what is the role of a death doula, just the field in general around transitions and endings and your place in that field.

Mm-hmm. The role of a death doula is. Old and new. The term death doula is what's new about it, but the actual activities that a doula is performing for somebody who's in transition are, are quite ancient, but it's a non-medical provider that person or a family can hire to support someone at end of life.

They're doing, they're, they're providing a holistic care approach, so they're supporting the family physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and practically, which often case is filling in some gaps of what our medical system and insurance systems recognize as. Baseline end of life support. So we do a pretty good job of tending to the physical and the practical components of end in life.

But often the mental, emotional, and spiritual are under tended, I would say, so the death doula can provide a very, hmm, hands-on support and can touch all of those areas. In a very compassionate way, but one that, that's in your home. You get to choose the provider. It's, it brings a lot of uncertainty when, when so much is uncertain.

Wow. That sounds like a very important gap in the field to, to fill. Yeah, I mean there are so many providers that do different things and, and hospice is certain part of that, and I don't wanna undervalue sourcing to professionals in any way. And sometimes there's still more that's that needed just of empowered, like letting the families feel empowered, have robustly well, and to bring those rituals, those closing ceremonies of life.

Closer to home and closer to the community and re-empower to provide neutral third party support in a highly charged, oftentimes emotional environment where people that are the closest in are wanting to be with their person, be with the ending that's in front of them, but are also being asked to wear all of these other hats or, or be in these other roles as well as.

Facilitator and resource navigator and decision maker. So bringing in someone that can, that can hold space, really, that can hold a really firm loving container for the most important pieces of that crossing to take place and to hold. To hold for a while. Some of those pieces that are still necessary but maybe aren't the priority in the moment while, while the real life and death exchange is, is occurring, I guess, what does that involvement look like?

Is it, you know, a short term, because I am thinking about birth doulas. Mm-hmm. They're, you know, primarily there during birth. I think Kelly, I don't, don't quiz me on this. Is that like, is it more of an extended period Sure. Or is it more like short term? It's, it's any and all in every space in between. Okay.

Uh, really the, the death doula, the rise of the death doula as a profession is on the tails of. The return in the rise of birth doulas, so they operate very similarly and can serve before, during, and after birth or death. I kind of use a unique application of, of the skills and training that I learned to become a death doula, and I try to get as far upstream with people as possible, trusting that all of the.

I'm gonna like use air quotes here and say smaller deaths or metaphorical deaths and endings that we practice all throughout our lives, uh, are the ways that we practice and prepare for bigger, more significant losses and endings. So I'm really interested in helping people learn how to, well tend an ending are before they're reaching the most significant ones that they'll experience in their lives or similarly.

I feel like on the tail end we might have endings or losses that we've experienced in our lives that are very old, and yet we're still carrying them with us because something didn't go quite right. And I like to say they were either under tended or unintended endings. And so there's residue that we live with and that takes a certain amount of our resources and capacity to.

Live with them or carry them with us through to our next cycles of life. Uh, and I'm very interested in helping people look back at those, find out what's, what's still undone, what's unresolved, what's unsettling or unsettling in the body, and weaving in those ends. So I feel like it's, it's never too late.

And why wait both at the same time? That's a very long answer to your question, but the more traditional role of a death doula is likely getting in in contact with the client very. Close to the end of life, they might have received a diagnosis that makes them eligible for hospice, which would give them about a six months to live sort of prognosis.

Uh, so you might be working with a client anywhere in that window, possibly more likely less than that could be days even to support that very active dying process, which similar to. Active labor at birth can be one to three days. Uh, and then the doula might provide postmortem support the way birth doula would provide postpartum support, which could be for the family and caregivers to help with bereavement support or memorial services, sorts of things in the.

One to 12 month period following the death. It just, it all depends on the doula, which pieces they're most skillful at, what, what sort of beginning and timeframe they're interested in offering a family. And a family will choose a doula that meets what they're looking for in that timeframe too. Yeah, that's very helpful to contextualize it and Yeah, and understand how.

You apply it and, and you're a work. So we also like to ask everybody about, you know, where you are at in life right now. Where, where would you describe your phase of life currently? Mm-hmm. When I hear that question, it makes me think of the maiden mother crone arc of, of a woman's. Archetypal life, and I'm very much right in the center of my mothering stage or phase of life.

I have a 9-year-old daughter at home, new dog in our life, and Oh yeah, and me and my husband are both. You know, playing active roles and taking care of aging parents, so very much in the throes of a wildly wild domesticity, I might call it. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Powerful term. Mm-hmm. I also like to ask Lisa, your relationship to ritual and ceremony and, and even thinking about, I love how you're saying you're passionate about female endings, right before mm-hmm.

Deaths at the doorstep. Mm-hmm. Essentially. And so for you, what is your relationship like to ritual and ceremony and. How did this passion for endings you? Where does that come from? Mm-hmm. Start with the latter and come back to the former. I mean, my interest in this work comes from my life experiences.

One of the most significant events in my life was my mother's death from breast cancer. She was 45 years old and I was 15 years old at the time of her death. Here I sit nearly the age that she was when she died, which is, has been a, a relationship that I've been tending ever since. That loss of how am I in relationship with mothering?

Uh, how am I in relationship with my own mother? How am I relationship with grief? Uh, because in the beginning I, I grew up with it. Stoic German family where you keep calm and carry on and be strong and we don't talk about things and emotions are not something that are really on the table very often, or certainly not talked about and, and encouraged.

Uh, so a lot of the way that my mother died and how we behaved as a family and the aftermath of that was causing me a lot of. Pain in my life. Not that I understood it at the time, but looking back, I can see I, I held. The grief for a long time and, and didn't know how to process it and didn't know how to move it through my body and to make sense of it and to find meaning with it.

So I had a, about 15 years after that loss, you know, a pretty normal life path where I was. Finishing high school and going to college and choosing majors and finding first jobs and, and, and all of that. And, and in the backstory, this loss was kind of catching up with me until it eventually grabbed my attention in a more tangible way, which happened really around the time that I was 30 years old when I sat on that cusp of.

Being closer, moving closer to the age that she was when she died than I was when she died. I started to get more curious about what her experience was in that life story. Uh, mothering teenage kids receiving a, a terminal diagnosis and all of that. So I, I started to take steps and actions to get closer to her and to understand her story and.

In that arc, I had to reckon with whether or not I wanted to try to become a mother myself, which was actually the harder path for me to choose me and my partner to choose. It wasn't a given in our relationship, and I had a lot of reservations about. Trying to be a mother with without my mother in her body to help me.

And then on my path to becoming a mother, I had a miscarriage. So I had this death on both sides, story of what am I doing here in the middle, still alive, trying to make sense of these losses. Uh, and it was. Moving through that experience and, and having left my home place of origin in, in St. Louis, Missouri and moved to Colorado where I found just a different wealth of resources and access points for touching these topics in a more, uh, nature based, creative, intuitive way that allowed me to.

Kinda come back and do a lot of the grief work that I hadn't been able to do in my younger life, and seeing what impact that had on my life moving forward. The, the things I was able to clear from my system or, or integrate. So that I could have more capacity for my life. Uh, it just felt like such meaningful work that I wanted to share that with other people.

I found my way into a death doula training, not because I was seeking necessarily end of life. Training. Mm-hmm. I was seek, what I was Googling was conscious closure. Oh. Because I was seeing, I was having these really challenging endings with relationships with women that were in some kind of mentorship or there was a power differential and I was.

Like the power down person in the relationship and they were in a power up position like a mother is, you know, someone that you're learning from or seeking guidance from. And I kept struggling in these types of relationships. Throughout my life and, and the endings were so painful, I was like, how can we do this better?

Like, how do we close a relation? It's not that we need them to last forever, but, but they can be, they can feel better than this. I'm pretty certain. So that's, that's how I got their conscious closure. And I found the Conscious Dying Institute in Boulder. And at the time I was in my life, I had a young daughter at the time, she was about 18 months old, and we were going through weaning and I knew she was likely my only child.

Uh, so that ending was one. That was challenge for us because we needed to stop before either of us were ready. I was having some physical complications and that ending became like, how do I do this? Well, neither of us want it to happen, and yet here we are at the threshold of a death of an ending of something that will never happen again.

What a great question. Like how do I do this ending well, right? Mm-hmm. Because I think for, I mean myself, for I'm sure so many listeners. We often think of endings that did not go well. Mm-hmm. Like our brains are often wired to think about that versus how do we do it well, how do we do it in a way that feels aligned?

And we have such an innate understanding of when it's a good one and when it's a not good one. 100%. One of my. Mentors that I learned from it through his writing is Steven Jenkinson. He's an author of a book called Die Wise and several others, but he talks about it as how we do death is either village making or village breaking.

And so even more so than good death, bad death, it's like, is this experience one that's making a village or one that's breaking a village? And very clearly in that context, which is a pretty neutral language, it's not charged as good, bad, positive, negative. It's like the way that my mother died and how it had impacted my family and my life and the aftermath was one that the village was breaking.

It was not coming together. It was falling apart. And, and in that context, it, it, it feels much more just real life. It feels like part of the human experience. And if we care about village making, like it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to do a death. Well, uh, it takes a village to die as much as it takes a village to grow life.

Uh, it's all, it's all the same thing.

All right, so we wanna ask you a little bit more about your experiences. In this field of helping people through transitions and endings. So what stories really stand out to you through this time? Hmm. Well, as you're asking this question, I'm thinking back about what my relationship to ritual and ceremony is, and there's some, some weaving between the two that I think is useful when I, when I work with people around grief particularly.

And are trying to move grief, which is typically how I, I'm meeting people. They've either are stuck in a loss that, that they don't know what to do with, or it's too hard or overwhelming to think about, or there's this layering of. Of loss upon loss upon loss, and all of a sudden it's overwhelming. I could handle it when it was this one thing, but now there's been three in a row in a very short time period and I'm drowning.

I can see that. Yeah. The layering. Right, right. So often we're trying to find ways to move the grief, and what I see come through, I think of them as the three Ps. I hear grief practices, things that we come back to again and again. Same practice, but we're a different person each time we come to it. Our grief is different each time we come to it.

Grief projects, which are so many shapes and sizes, I can give a couple examples, that would be wonderful. Uh, and the third is grief pilgrimages. Sometimes we need to go to a place and do a thing to move the grief. So there's a variety of, of ways and it's so unique how people meet grief and what those.

Practices, projects, or pilgrimages look like, but the practices are rituals. As soon as we, in my opinion, my, you know, my, my way to understand ritual is when we do it intentionally and, and when we invite in more than our human experience to participate. So practices are, are rituals and projects and pilgrimages are likely also ceremonies that are, you know, of a kind of grander scale that have a very distinct beginning, middle, and end.

You might only do them once. Uh, so I can give a couple of examples here by way of grief practices. Uh, there's a couple things that I teach, uh, and one is simply acknowledging loss and remembering love. So naming what has been lost. Sometimes it's really obvious it's a person who has died, but sometimes it's not quite as tangible.

It might be a loss of innocence, a loss of a sense of security. You know, like things that we don't realize we can name as losses and that we're not supposed to need or want or feel like we need to grieve. So getting specific about what's been lost, being able to say it and pinpoint exactly that, that's what's hurting.

Oh. And then remembering three or more things that we love about what's been lost. Often there's like, nothing's gonna bring relief to this experience of loss unless I have that thing back, which often is impossible. But when we can start to speak to the love of what's been lost, then we can connect to what our values are, what we love, and then can find other ways to channel.

That love in ways that are, you know, meet the, the circumstances of the present. Uh, so that's one simple practice and I often have people do it with rocks and water. So incorporating the elements and then recognizing the role that nature plays in us as part of nature in, in this process. Grief and water I think, are very close allies and move very similarly.

So in this example, I would have people choose a stone from a basket that that looks or somehow exemplifies the loss that they're naming, and they hold it in their hand while they're speaking their love for it. And then once they're complete, they'll put it into some kind of vessel. A clear glass of any shape or size or a small bowl.

And then once they have shared what they've. Want to say about it, I ask them to pour a little bit of water over the rock in the bowl to, oh, that's beautiful. To acknowledge that when we, remember, when we speak out loud, when we take those simple acts of, of moving the grief through our voice, through our body, through the rock that we chose and pouring the water, that we're moving, the grief and water and grief, both flow and want to find their way to completion, to integration and that.

And that quite frankly, grief in most circumstances is not like it can be clean. Grief can be clean just as water can be pure, and it's the other elements, resentment. If there's abuse in the relationship, like there's all these other things that can kind of muddy the waters, but grief in and of itself isn't.

Something that needs to be feared or isn't something that's poisonous or isn't something that's here to harm us. It, it's something that wants to flow and find its full cycle to completion. Yeah, that grief practice sounds very meaningful. And for listeners, Lisa, you're holding. Is there a meaning behind the one you're holding?

Um, I'm holding, it looks like a glass marble that you can see through I practice shamanism or connecting with, uh, the spirit world. And, and I've done a lot of work doing ancestral healing. And one of the ways that they've asked me to materialize that relationship is by finding this sort of stone. So it's, it's a quartz marble, but it helps me just.

Acknowledge, I'm bringing my ancestors into the room with me today. I'm choosing to want to connect with them while we're in this conversation and calling on their support as we're talking. Uh, so this is, I mean, like a grief object. I wouldn't have found my way to ancestral healing work if it weren't for the loss of my mother and my inquiry and how to connect and heal that relationship.

And now going through that experience, it's opened me up to other ways of practicing well attended endings in this world with. You know, living humans right now, but also in the spirit world with those that have already passed or, or other types of beings. Hmm. So we have the grief objects, grief practices.

Could you give an example of the grief project in grief? Pilgrimage, like I'm imagining? Mm-hmm. But I'm like, Ooh, those are very intriguing. 'cause I think you hear less about those too. Yeah. I'll share two, one that's personal and one that's from a. From a friend that I've been supporting. The first is my own, and it's both a project and a pilgrimage.

I guess this happened in the last five years or so, but I had been haunted. I, I use that term quite honestly. Like it had been nagging at me in, in the back of my mind for several years that, uh, when my mother died, all of her things were moved from the main floor of our house into like the unfinished basement.

Her clothes, uh, all the flowers from her funeral. It was just like out of sight, out of mind. After, after this, the traditional ceremonies had taken place. My father now lives in that house alone, the house I grew up in back in Missouri, and, and along with all of, all of the things from my sisters, a nice childhood.

So like anytime we were just done with something, it got packed away neatly. It wasn't like a throw it all down there, who knows what's there, but it was like. Save it for later, or like that's where we put things when we're done with them into the basement and the out of sight. How you said that, the out of sight outta mind.

Right, right. But when we talk about like emotional baggage, it's like literally it's all the, we never got rid of anything. It just got moved underground. So the idea of what's gonna happen to all this stuff that's down there had been haunting me. It was like my dad clearly has no interest in going down there.

It's kind of too much for him and my sister. It's just not in her mentality to, to wanna clean that stuff out. So I was like, this task is gonna fall to me no matter what. No matter how much time we wait. Like no one else is gonna do this but me. Mm-hmm. I asked my dad if I could go to the house by myself for a week and order a roll off dumpster and clear out the basement.

So this was quite a pilgrimage. I had to, you know, make arrangements to leave my family for seven days. I had to drive the 12 hours across the country to get there. I had to order this dumpster, and then I had one week, so many moving parts right to touch every box in that basement, to look inside every single box to.

Make choices about what stayed and what went and what was mine to do, and what was other people's to do to move through it, to actively move my body. I mean, I had to work hard. I was like sweating, carrying those boxes upstairs, putting stuff in the dumpster. But the ceremony really is that I was asking for support from the spirit world.

I wasn't alone down there. It wasn't just me and my own anxiousness to, to be rid of this task. Uh, and, and one of the ways it played out is that all those. Dried flowers from her funeral that had was 25 years prior to this point. And they were still down there. They were still down there. I, you know, got a mortar on pestle basically, which was like an old mixing, plastic mixing bowl that we used to make brownies in growing up.

And I ground up all the flowers into small pieces, into like flower dust, and then I drove it an hour to the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi River. Then I. Release the flowers to the water so that they could flow down the Mississippi and reconnect with the ocean, like to find a completion the way the water cycle finds its way back home.

Oh, that's beautiful. Mm. And I had no plan for that when I went to clean it out. But that was, you know, what was asked in the moment, in the way to like, process and release something that had no business being held onto for that long. Uh, and when I came back, I, I was, I wasn't sure I was gonna share that part with my dad.

I wasn't sure if he could. How he would be able to receive it. And when I told him that I got rid of the flowers, you know, it was so much relief. What he was able to say was like, oh, thank goodness. I thought they were a fire hazard. And I've been worried about them for that reason, which was a surprising response to me when it was like, however, however we can meet the moment I'm okay with.

Yeah. But there was such clear relief, like it had clearly been weighing on him and he probably didn't even know it, but something. Something got cleared there in that action, and it certainly did for me. I wasn't sure if it would extend to my family members as well, but it did. And then before I left on that experience, I, I drummed in every room with the house, I opened every window that would allow itself to be opened, which I'm not sure has ever happened.

All of them open at the same time. And I was, you know, using Sage and using sound. Sprinkling rose water everywhere just to give the house a lift like it had been holding this grief story and all of this stuff that wasn't, hadn't been touched, hadn't been loved, hadn't been acknowledged, remembered, honored.

Uh, for, for decades. So that's, that's one example of a pilgrimage and a project. Um, thank you for sharing that with us. El Lisa especially, just Yeah. How personal that story is. Thank you. Yeah. And I think that the objects that are left behind, I think that's a really big part of grief and what you do with them and how you respond to them is really part of that process.

Mm-hmm. And I had been living with this story, like, did she leave us anything behind? I was thinking there was nothing that she had intentionally left behind for us. And as soon as I started opening those boxes, there was every single tool that she had used as a mother, like sitting there waiting to be used again as me or my sister maybe became mothers ourselves.

And most of them my daughter had already outgrown being able to use. So I was sitting there looking at my gosh. She wanted to leave us this crib to use or these baby clothes to wear, and I didn't even know they were there. So there were ways that I could have been connecting and mothering through and with her, uh, through the things she had left behind, but without.

Without even knowing that they exist or that they're there to be used, you know, it, it just felt like a whole new loss. And it was like, I need to know what's in all of these boxes. Like what is usable now? What, what, how can we connect through these objects and, and maybe we can, and maybe we can't. It's not about the objects themselves.

It was, it's about the intention that's connected to them. And then I'll share my friend who's moving through a really significant ending right now, uh, the death of her. Her partner, her spouse, she and her partner loved to travel and so she was, she's been able to identify nine, I think it's nine, nine trips that they had planned to take, but now will not get to take in the form that they had originally intended, but her.

Brief project and certainly pilgrimages, is to take his ashes to each of these locations, either alone or with other people to support, but to still follow through on each of those trips and to bring some piece of him with her, uh, to acknowledge what one of the things that they loved the most as part of their relationship.

It's really, really meaningful. Mm-hmm. I also just learned, I was visiting Armstrong Woods National Forest. I'm not sure. Mm-hmm. Look it up. But they were, um, they were saying that you can't just like bring remains and just kind of do whatever you want, but that they do have, like, if you reach out to them, they have like specific places.

That you can bring remains. Mm-hmm. So this, that's just a, I guess a PSA if this is something you're interested in doing that kind of look into, like a lot of places probably do have. Protocols for how to do this in, in a, you know, oh, I wouldn't have even thought. Yeah. I'm glad you're bringing that up, Michelle.

I wouldn't have even thought about that. Yes, that's true. There's a lot of things you can and can't do with remains. Places that can and cannot go. We we're getting more creative all the time in the ways that you can dispose of remains, uh, ways to commemorate them. And jewelry, uh, you can plant trees with remains.

Mm-hmm. You can. Turn bodies into compost now, or, or there's water cremation. There's just so many options. Things got really narrow for a little while to cremation or a traditional embalming sort of burial. But now we're starting to grow and expand the things that are, that are possible. Mm-hmm. Lisa, you, you've mentioned this a few times, but maybe if you could elaborate a little bit on this connection with water uhhuh, water, grief, and loss.

Your business name of water? Just, yeah. I, I wanna hear more about that. Mm-hmm. It has a really long trail that I can see as I look back on it. Uh, but I think I got a very. Hearty orientation with what it is to be with water. When I worked as a river guide, uh, for three summers in college. Okay. Wow. Michelle, Michelle wanted to be a river guide.

I know. I I just wanna spend more time on the water. Able to be a river guide. You are able, and you can have a relationship with water without being a river guide. Yes. Yes. But it has, it has fostered really a strong, uh, desire in me to help women in particular learn how to be in relationship with water because.

The, the rafting and, and river industry has a pretty intense male dominance in it and that, and is, and is more aligned with kind of a high adrenaline experience. Water. Well, I remember that Michelle and I went whitewater rafting last summer. Yeah. And I think there was maybe, yeah, there was one woman. Yeah.

But there it was mostly, yeah, it was very male dominated. Mm-hmm. Which is a very common orientation. Even if you've been on the water, you've likely been a passenger while there may have been a man at the, on the oars or shouting, shouting the commands. Uh, so I think there's something really important about women as stewards of water and learning not to fear their ability to be on water and in relationship with water.

That's certainly part of the bigger vision, but that's where it's got its start. I spend three summers as a river guide on the upper Colorado River. I was actually just there this morning. Oh wow. Um, I've been guiding privately, uh, kind of co-leading. Trips on flat water, mostly flat water or low consequence rapids, helping women return to the water in community.

So all, all female trips on, on the upper Colorado, on the Green River in Utah that connects with the Colorado River. So early experiences and, and again, I was. I was working there in the years that I was not actively grieving and, and I can see now the ways that water was trying to help me with that grief in ways that I couldn't really say yes to or understand at the time.

But when I was away from that spot where I had worked for those summers and then returned maybe about a decade later. There was something that I had, I was missing, like, that I was longing for, and I couldn't really put my finger on it. And I was like, is it the people? You know? It's nice to see them, but I, I couldn't really draw the line in that direction and, and eventually I was like, it's the river.

Yeah, it's the river. It's the river that I've been away from, and that's wanting something for me. But it became more clear as I was. You know, in that stage of having Lost Last, had a miscarriage, trying to become a mother, curious about my mother's death and experience. And I, I watched this documentary, I think it was called Feminists.

What were they thinking? Um, and it was, it was talking through the, the wave of feminism in like the seventies and eighties, which was the time that my mother was, you know, having children and, and mothering us. And, and I was watching as women were carving off their kind of. I don't wanna call them female qualities.

It's more like the divine feminine. Mm-hmm. Creativity, intuition, these sorts of skill sets. Relational living and thinking. Uh, we were carving them off to, to look more like men and, and to receive this equality with men in the workplace or in other, other settings. I could see that story and how my mother lived, which all felt very much like, oh, how she moved through the world.

Mm-hmm. Oh, okay. Mm-hmm. Which felt like very fiery, uh, you know, the sun rather than the moon. It was like, let's put down our, our moon qualities to be more like the sun so we can be recognized as equals to the sun. And that was kind of like my mother's generation. That was the task at the time. And it, and it made me wonder like.

The task isn't quite the same, at least not here in America. Like some things have shifted. Some of those qualities have been moved toward, if not fully realized. It was like, what's mine now? As the inheritor of that effort, I think women are thinking about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And at the same time, I was sitting in a circle, like a council circle, and there was this statue of.

A woman, I, I look at her and see like someone of grandmother age and her eyes are closed and she's got like a river flowing down her front and out of her heart is this fish that's, um, coming out through this flow of water down her front. And she's, uh, got her mouth open wide. Like she's singing and I'm seeing this image, this statue, I'm holding it in my hands and I'm like.

I don't know what she is or what she is embodying, but it's everything I'm longing for. Like every, like mirroring to me what I needed and wanted and that I knew absolutely nothing about. It was like, whoever she is, she is got something for me and it's not in me already. Like I'm depleted. So put these stories together and it, it, it feels truly like I I I, there was no, um.

Water was missing from my constitution. Uh, like I understood fire, I understood Earth, I understood air. I'm an air sign. I'm a Gemini. I am like always in my head off shadow Gemini, but water was. Completely elusive to me. It was not tangible to me at all. And then, and then you blow it out into the bigger story of like, I'm a woman here in Western United States where we have very little water.

We are not drowning. You know, we're in drought, we're, we're like thriving and climbing mountains going higher and higher, like getting closer to the sun. Water's very scarce. You zoom out in like Western culture compared to eastern culture has the same deficit of water. So it became this pursuit of like, okay, now that some of these female achievements, we passed the baton from mothers to daughters in, in the things that we're trying to achieve as, as women, as females, as non males, as the non-dominant culture.

There's so many ways we could say this in a trying to, to, you know, purse it so we're not getting caught up in the semantics. Mm-hmm. But it was like, how, how now with some sense of, of empowerment and leadership, can we go back for those parts of us that we carved off so that we could be accepted? How now, from like closer to a place of equity, can we say, okay, I can do it all this way.

But what I'd really like to bring in now is my creativity. What I'd really like to call back in is my intuition and to lead with those skills intact and at the forefront. And at the time I was realizing just like I don't have connection to these things. So I drew this statue who I was calling woman of the water, and she quickly told me, it's not woman of the water, it's women of the water.

It's like there's an expression of her and all of us, right? Archetypally that knows of water, that has grandmother wisdom of the ways of water, uh, who sings at the thresholds of life and death and has, you know. Fish pouring out of her heart food that can feed the masses and, and so it became my personal pursuit to.

Learn from her or learn the ways and wisdom of water for myself. 'cause it felt like that was my, my path to more freedom, more capacity, more wholeness. And I, I presumed that I was not alone in that effort. So I made it something that was public facing to engage with other people with. Certainly you can't implement a vision called Women of the Water as a single woman.

So it's, it's been. Really an inquiry of what is this vision and how do I live it, and who else do I call in to practice it?

Okay. This has been. Very fascinating conversation so far, just kind of exploring your perspective on grief and transitions, and I, I really liked what you said earlier about that grief can be village making or village breaking that quote from. Steven John Johnson. Jenkinson, Jenkinson. I can't read my own writing.

Yeah. I'm like looking at it right in front of me. Um, so we're curious about what are some, some things that people could take away or implement in their life to create more community around transitions, supporting each other through transitions? Like what, what might that look like? Yeah, I mean, part of me wants to say often when people come to me and they're asking.

They wanna help somebody else. Uh, somebody's going through something and they don't know what to say or they don't know what to do. Mm-hmm. Or they're kinda going through the motions of, I'm so sorry for your loss. Let me know if you need anything. You know, a very textbook way to respond to somebody that actually is generally not terribly useful.

And so often it comes down to. Knowing yourself and how you meet endings in your own life. Like often people wanna help somebody who's dying from cancer, like, I wanna do X, Y, and Z, but they just won't listen to me. It's so common for us to wanna externalize the conversation and only think about it and only apply it when it's happening to somebody else.

But so often we learn how to meet other people by learning how to meet ourselves. With endings, so we gotta practice. We're really good at skipping over endings in our culture. We're really interested in the first half of the life cycle, right? Where we have ideas and then we actualize those ideas. But the part where we assess whether those.

Actions made us feel good, bad, uh, satisfied, dissatisfied, otherwise, harvesting the gifts and then taking breaks, rest and relaxation. Those are the parts that we don't do or we do in a very truncated way, and it's all part of our bigger systems of being in patriarchy and capitalism. It's not valuable financially speaking to, to give endings.

Credit. So to practice endings, I just wanna say it starts with the individual. A willingness to acknowledge all parts of the life cycle and it, and it can feel like a counter-cultural thing to do, like you're swimming upstream, which can be challenging when you're also trying to go with the flow. Yeah, that's truly, that's a lot going on.

So you just wanna name it, like practicing this. It's not necessarily hard, but it's gonna feel like. Like you're swimming upstream and, and going with the flow. It's like the water needing to complete its entire cycle from evaporation, condensation, precipitation back to the ocean, uh, while swimming upstream.

But it's really about finding any small place where you can notice that you are cutting off the cycle and trying to do it all the way through. So this could be. In your garden, uh, if you. Wanna focus more on making sure when the tomatoes are ripe, that you pick them when they're ripe rather than them rotting on the vine.

That you bring them in and wash them and, and eat them. Like you don't forget to eat them before they go bad and give them all away. Or it might be about pulling the plants out of the ground in October and composting them, cutting, taking the time to cut that vine into the little pieces to put 'em in that compost man, and then turn that compost.

It's all of those steps from harvest to compost to. Watering the compost pile for the next six months and turning in every here and now. That's all practicing and ending. It might be something like if you're somebody who likes to leave the party early without saying goodbye to anybody, you are like, I'll just sneak out the back.

No problem. No one's gonna notice that's cutting and ending short, uh, that's skipping over it or, or under attending it. What would it be to, uh, make, make a different choice? Pick those few people that you enjoyed talking to and you know, give them. Some small goodbye, or it might be saying goodbye to every single person in the room and making sure you give the host an extra big hug.

You know it, it's different for all of us, okay? We need to find our own way. And we know, right? When we go back and say like, was it a village breaking or village making? Was it a good ending or a bad ending? Like we have a sense of it when it's good enough or when something like should have happened, but we were too scared, too nervous, like didn't wanna do it, didn't have time.

All the, all the. All the things that get in the way. There's a million ways to practice. One way that I practice with my particular story is, uh, I have a hard time leaving my daughter when I go on a, on a trip or, or an extended time away from her. So. On the front end. I, we practice by having lots of conversations about how to stay connected even when we're apart.

Because I have the knowing that sometimes you think someone's coming back and they're not like you, you never know when the last time is. You're gonna see somebody. That one's very real for all of us all the time. We never know when the, the last time we're gonna see somebody. So taking that time to, to notice it, and for me there's always grief.

Like I get a little fearful. I, it's anticipatory grief. I'm afraid of what's happened before, might happen again, and I could, you know, try to talk myself out of it. Rationalize like, that's really unlikely to happen. You shouldn't feel that way. Don't be anxious. Everybody does this all the time. Or I can be like, oh, I'm afraid I'm gonna get on that airplane and maybe the plane crashes and I don't make it back home.

It's not likely to happen, but it's a possibility. And what I can do, since I can't control anything about what's gonna happen on the flight, is I can control how I say goodbye to my family members. Uh, I can make sure that the last thing I say before I leave is something that I'm comfortable being the last thing they might ever hear from me.

For the last action they might ever receive from me. And I, I don't mean that to be overly dramatic, it's just, it is kind of the reality that we're sitting with all the time as humans that we're very comfortable of forgetting. Mm-hmm. So there's something about remembering mortality, remembering that death is part of the cycle of life and finding any way, it might even be as simple as breath.

Like when we think about doing the first part of the cycle, not the end, it means we're always in the inhale and we never exhale. Like, is that a sustainable way to live? And just inhale, inhale, inhale, inhale. Like, no, we'll fall up. Like it doesn't work. Uh, we have to find ways to practice exhale. And sometimes for us, it is even in our breath where.

We're short on the exhale breath. We can't relax our nervous system, you know, it shows up in so many ways. So there's infinite ways to practice really, and just finding a place that is a shallow entry point because this isn't, you know, we've gotta meet ourselves where we're at and and to, and the beauty of it is to recognize the cycles.

A thousand times a day happening at micro and macro levels. 'cause that's the way we start to normalize it. When we can start to get close to grief in very small everyday ways, it gets a lot easier to know and practice move grief. When it's much bigger. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that's a really good point that it, we have so many little endings and kind of show how we show up for those endings.

And one thing that we've noticed throughout the podcast is when we ask people about their rituals. Almost everybody goes to the morning ritual and we kind of notice that there's that gap. Mm-hmm. People don't talk about their evening rituals and I think it is that piece that we orient towards beginnings more than endings.

Absolutely. One of the rituals I recommend most often to people, and we've had one live in our home for years now, is, uh, life and Death Bowls. So you can orient to this around New Year, which we call the new year, not the end of year. Favoring that new beginning over the The thing that's ending. Yeah. But it might be that time of year where it's natural to make New Year's resolutions.

What you wanna bring life to in the next. Calendar year cycle, but in the death bowl you put the things that are ending. What were the accomplishments? What were the things that you were working on last year that have come to fruition and that are now done and completed? Or what are the things that are, that are still dying and holding and giving them both equal place on your, or wherever you might.

Might hold these sorts of things. Our sit on top of our fireplace. So we have this like white and blue bowl, that's the life bowl in this black and, and uh, blue and white bull on the inside, on the other side. And they have equal weight, right? Oh. And they stay in the fireplace and they stay right above the fireplace.

Oh, I like that. So at regular intervals, we're having the conversation. What's living, what's dying? What needs more? What needs less? Is another way to ask it and, and get the same results. What's got rising energy and what's declining? There's ways to kind of take the charge out of it and look at it a bit more neutrally, and then we're able to take more of the tension towards death, which can feel like scary and taboo.

And the ones that are. Completed. You know, you come back a year later and you look at what's in the bowl and like what was dying might have already is now fully dead and ready to be, you know, reborn. So those slips of paper, the things that we wrote in there now go into the fireplace and are ceremonially burned.

Um, some things that started in the life bowl, the beginning of that year might now be moving to the death bowl of like, okay, like that hit its zenith and now it's on its way down. I'm not working on that anymore, or it's not relevant. It's just, it's a way to say like they're always there and an equal measure and like half of a life cycle is dying, while half of it is living.

It's not like this full circle. You draw all the way down from a point and there's one point that's death and the rest of it is life. It's a 50 50, like as soon as you hit the, the peak or the zenith of the cycle, the rest of it is decline. It's all dying and then death. The bottom and then rebirth. Uh, so to really find ways to hold them in that, in that balance of both, and there's no life without death.

There's no grief without loss and love to be able to hold them with equal weight and to honor them and to, to feed them and nourish them equally. I really like that as a grief ritual. As a family ritual. Hmm. Yeah. Couples could do it. Mm-hmm. Thank you, Lisa. Mm-hmm. Right, Lisa. Well, this has been amazing. I think people will get a lot out of this and have.

A lot of ideas for honoring transitions and endings in their life. We really appreciate you coming on and talking to us. Yeah. Thank you for giving me this opportunity. Aw, you're so welcome. Thank you so much. Yeah. And if people are interested in learning more about this work, where can they find you? Sure.

Uh, they can find me online at women of the water.com. Okay, perfect. Thank you. And we hope you enjoyed Ritual Fam. Yes. All right. Bye bye. Alright, ritual fam, we hope that you enjoyed today's conversation with Lisa. It got a little quiet there at the end. So that website is women of the water.com and it will be linked in the show notes if you are interested in checking that out.

Kelly and I really enjoyed our conversation with Lisa and we sat down afterwards to continue to process and share about our own experiences with loss. It was a really, really interesting conversation and if you want to check that out, it is. Available on the Patreon for $3, and you can also get all of the bonus content for just $5 a month, regardless of if you are interested in supporting us financially.

You can still join the Patreon for free and get email notifications about all of our episodes as they drop and additional bonus content. So even if you can't support us financially, that's totally fine. It still is a huge support for us just to have you over there, so we would love to see you there and wherever you are, whatever you're doing.

We hope that you're having a magical time. Goodbye.