[00:00:00] Ogun: Anything that allows us to ask deeper questions and probe and open up to our n innate divine self is a spiritual practice, and grief will do that.
[00:00:11] Jill: Welcome back to Seeing Death Clearly. I'm your host Jill McClennen, a death doula and end-of-life coach. On my show, I have conversations with guests that explore the topics of death, dying, grief, and life itself.
[00:00:24] My goal is to create an inviting space where you can challenge the ideas you might already have about these subjects, allowing you to open your mind and consider perspectives beyond what you currently believe to be true in this episode. My guest is Reverend Ogun Holder. Reverend Ogan is an ordained unity minister and an award-winning author.
[00:00:43] He holds certifications in spiritual coaching and grief and bereavement counseling. Reverend Ogan has experienced the challenges of grieving multiple losses over the last eight years, starting with the passing of his wife due to cancer. I came across Reverend Hogan's article titled Grief as Spiritual Practice.
[00:01:01] His wisdom and perspectives on this subject compelled me to reach out and invite him to be a guest on the podcast. Our conversation just touches on so many important topics, and I'm working on getting him scheduled to come back for season two of seeing death clearly. Thank you for joining us for this conversation.
[00:01:17] Welcome to the podcast, Reverend Ogan. I am so happy to have you. I found you originally by reading an article that you wrote. Titled Grief as a Spiritual Practice. And then I went to your website and once I read through your website, I really wanted to have this conversation. So I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me.
[00:01:37] And of course for my listeners as well.
[00:01:39] Ogun: I am thrilled to meet you. Thrilled to be here. Good to know. Some good is still coming from my writing. Uh, it's getting me here, and happy to talk about this topic. Grief is a thing that we, especially in the Western world, we don't spend a lot of time not just talking about it, but being in it collectively and as a community.
[00:01:59] It's often a thing that we try to. Push others into a private experience of they are grieving you are grieving. You go over there, do that, and when you're ready, come back, join us. Oh, by the way, what's taken you so long? It's sort of that experience and through my own journey, of really experiencing grief and ongoing grief for the last almost eight years.
[00:02:24] Losing multiple people in my life. It's really taught me a lot about how to, as my article you referenced, really see grief not as something we apply our spiritual practice practices to, but grief itself be the practice. Because when I try to apply it in my practices, Dealing with the pain, the discomfort, and the struggle of grief.
[00:02:48] They weren't working so well. Rather than try to force it, I surrender to the grief in a big way and realize, oh wait, no, no, this, this is the practice. This is it. It's been quite a journey. Hmm.
[00:03:00] Jill: And you lost your wife to cancer? How many years ago was that now?
[00:03:04] Ogun: So it'll be eight years in June. We're coming up on an anniversary and she wasn't the only one.
[00:03:11] She died, yes, 2015 from cancer related complications. The following year, it was my grandfather. The following year, my grandmother, and actually before two of them, was an aunt that I was very, very close with. I'd actually lived with for a while while I was in college. She also died of cancer related.
[00:03:31] Issues. And then there was also a childhood best friend of mine who in 2020, during Covid didn't die of Covid, she had a brain tumor and like she literally was doing fine, collapsed one day at work and about two, three weeks later she was gone. And then I think no one died the year after that. So on average it was like a person a year.
[00:03:57] And then my dad died about a year and a month ago. As well. So it's, it's, it's been a lot of people in a relatively, that's a lot relatively short, short space of time. I always hesitate to say, yeah, it was a lot of people in a short space of time because it's not a competition and we should never do like trauma comparisons.
[00:04:14] Mm-hmm. At all. There are people who have lost many more people in much less space of time. There are people who've lost less people in longer spaces of time, but how it affects us all is, Still intensely individual and how we walk through the process of grieving and mourning and bereavement is also intensely individual.
[00:04:36] So I don't mean to set up a comparison sort of situation.
[00:04:41] Jill: I think that's a good point, but also losing that many people back to back to back. You don't have time to get through the grieving process. Not that there ever is an end to the grieving process. Mm-hmm. But that first year of losing somebody, especially your wife, and then to have somebody die on top of that, it's like I was just starting to get a little bit ahead and now here I am back again.
[00:05:04] And then it just happened over and over and over. So yes, there's no comparison, but also that is a lot on your body. It's a lot on you mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. That's a lot.
[00:05:17] Ogun: Yes. So yes. All, all the things. All, all the things. In many ways it was because, They were relatively close to each other, especially the first three four deaths because they were so close and because it was sort of like it kept piling on.
[00:05:34] It was actually what pushed me into this realization of it being such an overwhelming struggle that there wasn't a getting ove, there wasn't a getting through. My terminology has changed a lot. My metaphors have changed a lot. I used to say grief and I were like in a boxing match. In a ring and grief just kept pummeling me to the point where I decided to tap out and then realize that grief wasn't actually my enemy but my friend. And then we walked out of the ring together and we are still walking side by side with each other all this time later. It's not a process, a struggle against, it's a struggle to surrender to, to befriend.
[00:06:16] And again, that word process. Implies begin, middle and end. There's definitely a beginning when the loss happens. I don't know that there's a middle and an end there. There are just certain touch points that you go through and things will hit you differently. I mentioned I'm coming up on the eighth year anniversary and it's been interesting to notice.
[00:06:37] When anniversaries and special occasions pop up, sometimes they hit me really hard. Sometimes I forget about them. And I remember for example, the very first time after she died that I forgot our wedding anniversary date, and I felt so bad, you know, I was like, oh my God, what kind of person am I forgot this happened, and I've come to realize, Over time that in many respects, that is a, a healthy embracing and moving on.
[00:07:08] And at the same time, it doesn't mean, as I realize that the following year or two years later, you won't be absolutely bereft to when that anniversary rolls around again, which, Has been the occasion, sometimes the anniversary of her death. That hits me weeks or a month before. And then when we get to the day, I'm, I'm in good space.
[00:07:30] You know, this happened with my father's death. He died, like I said, about a year and a month ago, and it was the month before. On the anniversary of this passing, I was really triggered by an episode of Succession of all things, and I'm not gonna spoil it for anyone in case you haven't seen it, but you know what I'm talking about.
[00:07:49] If you watch Succession, I was triggered by, and it was a month before and it was just an overwhelming rush of emotion. I'm watching the TV show and I am just bawling and crying and all these things are happening. Fast forward a month later when it's the actual anniversary of his. Death. I woke up that day and did not remember that it was the day of till.
[00:08:14] My mother texted me a fairly cryptic message, and I was struggling to understand what her message meant, and then I was like, oh, oh, oh, oh my God. Today's, today's today. I, but I just had the emotional overwhelm of the experience weeks before, so I've also learned to not make that mean anything. We are meaning-making machines as human beings, especially us spiritual folk.
[00:08:38] 'cause we, we wanna assign like a higher power meaning to, to any and everything that happens to our life. And we have to remember that we always assign meaning coming from the context of our experiences and our beliefs. So the meaning of anything is what we give to it. It can come from all sorts of different places.
[00:08:58] It can come from our trauma experiences, our joy-filled experiences. I learned more and more not to assign meaning, just to simply say in true Zen Buddhist tradition, oh, that happened. Okay. Yeah.
[00:09:12] Jill: I love that. Were you a reverend already when your wife died?
[00:09:17] Ogun: Yes. And it was interesting because we were both ordained Unity ministers and if you're not familiar with Unity, it is not Unitarian, uh, it's more like Unitarian adjacent sort of similar theology.
[00:09:32] Unitarians tend to be a little bit more socially justice oriented. The Unity folks and be a little bit more contemplative in that space. My running joke around Unity is former Christians who want to be Buddhist, but they're not ready to give up God yet. Noodle that through for a little bit.
[00:09:52] So we were both Unity ministers and for a period of time we were actually working in the same church. It was a church here in the metro DC area. That's where I happened to be, right at this moment. But I'm a nomad, so you could have caught me in some other. Locale somewhere in the world. We were ministers together.
[00:10:09] She was a senior minister. I was a part-time associate. And this is something we had dreamed about when we were in seminary, being ministers of the church together. Turns out, um, we were not one of those couples who worked well together okay. As we thought we were. So it was actually a very stressful and strained time in our marriage, and I felt in order to try to maybe salvage what was.
[00:10:35] Probably going to break us apart. I went to find another job, so I was actually working at a church in Massachusetts and sort of commuting back and forth between Massachusetts and DC. What made it interesting about the timing of her diagnosis and her passing? Was the fact that we were not in a good place in our marriage.
[00:10:57] So it really complicated how we reacted and responded to and with each other during her illness and during her death and the aftermath of it. I highly recommend if you have the resources, Those of you listening, if you lose someone that has been close to you or you find it has affected you really intensely, get yourself a good therapist, maybe even a grief counselor, of which I am one.
[00:11:25] Shameless plug. Yeah, please. Of which I'm one, and because it's very complicated. I remember going through a myriad of feelings, some of which were, I am so overwhelmed with the grief and sorrow that she has passed. And I am also sort of really relieved and happy that the marriage is over because it was really going through a tough time.
[00:11:47] Mm-hmm. And we would actually begin to have conversations around, I don't know that this is really gonna keep working. Right. It took some good time in therapy. To disentangle those two, to reconcile this complexity of feelings, and a lot of people need to understand that that's okay for you to have a complexity of feelings, right?
[00:12:10] How many caregivers feel immense relief, especially if they've been taking care of someone for a very long time, like an elderly parent or someone for a very, very long time. The immense relief when that person passes and then they feel guilty when they beat themselves up about it. This doesn't mean you love the person any less, right?
[00:12:28] This does not mean you're any less connected to that person. It simply means that you and your body are acknowledging the strain that you are under. As a caretaker 'cause it is a lot of work. So it's okay to feel that. And it doesn't, again, negate the feelings of loss and sadness. We are complicated people.
[00:12:52] We can have a multiplicity of feelings at the same time. Despite what you see on TV and in the news, we can do nuance. It is all we do. We live in the gray. We don't live in black and white. We live in the gray. Sometimes because of the overwhelm of emotion and sadness, it's really hard on our own to sparse those things apart from each other and deal with them and respond to them.
[00:13:14] Each in their own appropriate way. Sometimes you need help, and it's okay. And I wish we lived in a society where if you work for a company or an organization, the priority is your health, your mental health, your emotional health, your spiritual health at these times, and you are given all the time that you need rather than, hey, just take two weeks and then you gotta come back to work.
[00:13:37] You're barely just beginning to find yourself. Again. Mm-hmm. In the midst of everything. And then we also can't ignore that. The grieving experience is completely different depending on your race, on your ethnicity, on your class, on your ability. All these things. Affect how you grieve simply because of the environment and the experience that you are in.
[00:14:05] If you're a black or brown person in America, you are already dealing with a lot of microaggressions. You're already dealing with a lot of systemic obstacles. To add grief on top of that just makes it that much more of a burden. That you have to carry. It's something we don't think about a lot is something we definitely don't talk about a lot is a great book I'd like to recommend.
[00:14:27] It's called Grieving While Black.
[00:14:30] Jill: I was just gonna say the same one and I couldn't remember the author's name. What is it?
[00:14:32] Ogun: It is Breeshia Wade.
[00:14:36] Jill: Yes. Yes, yes, I read that book. And really, for everybody listening, you are not lying that we grieve differently depending on a variety of different things, but especially our race and read that book, it's very eye-opening, especially for us white folks that don't.
[00:14:56] Mm-hmm. See the same experience. We just really don't experience the same thing that black people experience. We can't, yes, that's just part of life, but what we need to do is read and learn and try to understand. And that book is amazing. So I'm so glad you brought it up 'cause I couldn’t remember her name.
[00:15:15] So thank you.
[00:15:15] Ogun: You're welcome. The same applies for gender as well, especially if you are in a situation where you are living by more traditional gender roles. For example, you are a mother and there's children involved. There's this expectation that you still continue to do all those things as well.
[00:15:35] So all these things have to be factored into your grief experience. And now when it comes to the context of spirituality, I define the spiritual practice as anything that allows us to get a clear connection with our divine innate being. I say spiritual practice. Most people think of things like meditation, right?
[00:15:59] How does grief be considered a spiritual practice? Again, grief and loss. Loss and grief. It's an experience that if you let it sort of rip your heart open, right? Just the immensity of the emotion that floods in. When there's this loss, all the emotions come in, sadness, and anger could be a relief, and joy could be all this multiplicity of things, but what also happens is if you let it and you allow it to take you to a deeper understanding of yourself, mm-hmm.
[00:16:33] Right. Why am I responding this way? What is happening? How am I gonna choose to respond to these feelings? My worldview is now shifted from it wasn't supposed to happen this way. We were supposed to live happily ever after. How that person dies also affects you. Did someone have a prolonged illness and I've sort of had time to prepare for this was this person suddenly randomly taken from me? We live in a country where with a proliferation of gun ownership and gun deaths every day, people experience random loss. I. Random, sudden traumatic loss and it's not even about guns happen, car accidents, all these things happen.
[00:17:17] Sometimes The shock of it is so overwhelming that if we let it, it forces us to ask deeper questions about life, about ourselves, about our relationship to the divine. For some people, it sends them into a deeper appreciation of their faith. For some people, it actually causes them to reject their faith or some measure of all the above.
[00:17:40] My relationship with my divine self and my faith is fundamentally different. It's not better or worse, it's just different because of that grief experience as well. So anything that allows us to ask deeper questions and probe and open up to our innate divine self is a spiritual practice and grief. Do that.
[00:18:04] Part of the grief experience is, is around acceptance. Another great reference book, and I did do a series of talks on this book is Tara Brock's Radical Acceptance. That process of acceptance doesn't mean you agree. Acceptance simply means that you no longer keep resisting and struggling against what is coming up that is begging to be healed, and that's what grief often does.
[00:18:31] Grief. Often allows you to open up to things that are buried deep within, that have been begging for healing for years, have been showing up in your life in different ways that have been driving the car without you even knowing it. You have these Tesla self-driving cars now, right? A lot of times are deep traumas.
[00:18:50] Ourself driving the cars and we don't even realize. Yeah. For me, the grief process really caused me to go in and look at who was really driving the car, and when I say who I'm referring to, what beliefs, conscious and unconscious. What thoughts did I buy into? It made me question everything in life, especially about myself and how I thought of myself, how I thought about the way I do relationships, my sexuality like everything over a period of time came up and came into question, and I think as a result, I am a much more whole and content person.
[00:19:30] But it was a painful journey to get here. The thing about US human beings is that we are pain-averse people. We don't like pain. We don't like to be uncomfortable. We would rather reject anything that makes us uncomfortable right away rather than I. Be curious and be open to it. And a lot of that happens with, with grief 'cause grief hurts so much and loss hurts so much.
[00:19:54] So we tend to wanna rush through it, pretend everything's okay, get back to normal, not realizing that A, there is no normal, and B, there's no going back. You are irrevocably changed when there's a major loss and you have to even a minor loss and you've got to accept that. Embrace it and realize that it's going to hurt along the way, and it's okay.
[00:20:17] Two things Tara Brock says in the book that I love is Pain is just pain, right? But we assign a meaning to it. The meaning we assign the pain is, this is bad. We gotta avoid it at all costs. So what if we assign the meaning of pain as an invitation to inquiry? Something doesn't feel right. Let's look into that and see what that's all about.
[00:20:37] And then she defines fear. As the anticipation of future pain. Yeah. So now it's like, oh, this thing might hurt me in the future, therefore let me already set up the blocks to it. Let me already decide how I'm going to react to it even before it happens. And it might not happen. But once again, it's our tendency as human beings to conjure up the worst-case scenario.
[00:21:01] There was initially a survival aspect to that. Right. 10 thousand years ago, we were out hunting in the forest. We had to anticipate that some wild creature might come and snatch us Biologically we're engineered to sort of be on the lookout for dangers. Well, we live at a time right now when we don't have some of us.
[00:21:20] Back to our racialized experience. Some of us don't have those day-to-day dangerous experiences. And also pain, especially pain that comes from actual and potential loss is not one of those experiences that could cost us our life. So we still think of it that way. We still respond to it that way. What if we accepted that?
[00:21:42] We live more from a place of fear because we're trying to avoid imagined pain. How about if we live from a place of going, pain is gonna happen, it's gonna hurt, and I'm gonna be okay because innately, I'm a divine being. I have all that I need already within me to embrace, befriend and walk through that pain.
[00:22:07] So let me not live from fair. Let me live from openness. Yes.
[00:22:11] Jill: Yes. I'm like, there's so much good stuff there. Oh my gosh. And I think, you know, you kind of mentioned Buddhism a little bit earlier. Sometimes when I talk to people and they're like, oh, in Buddhism, Buddha said life is about suffering and like, I disagree with that.
[00:22:24] And I think it's more, the way that you explained it is that yes, we're gonna have pain in our life. It's not that that's all that there is, but the more that we can just open to it, allow it and accept it, the less suffering we'll actually do. It's not that you'll not still experience the pain, but you just won't suffer quite as much if you could just open up and accept it.
[00:22:49] But instead, we freak out and we shut down, and we try everything we can to just protect ourselves from any type of pain.
[00:23:00] Ogun: Yes. And we're also very attached to a timeline of things and, we tend to wanna be in a hurry to quote-unquote get over it now. Now to be clear, if you are experiencing a very prolonged case of deep, complicated grief, that's not necessarily a healthy thing. What we define prolonged as is all relative. But I'm talking like, you know, the person whose spouse died and like seven, 10 years later, they still can't clean their loved one's clothes out of the closet or child dies and is 10 years later and the room is like a live-in mausoleum.
[00:23:37] Like there's mm-hmm. There are things that are markers. Of not great emotional and mental responses to loss. It's quite normal to be paralyzed by intense loss for days, weeks, months, couple years afterward. It's all relative, but this is why it helps to be connected to other people, especially professionals.
[00:23:59] 'cause then they can give you feedback and help you realize that we move on over time and, and the time it takes for an individual is. Just that individual. There's no like, oh, two years later you should be X, Y, Z, and at the same time, 10, 15 years later, you probably shouldn't still be in a place of, this feels as intense as if it happened yesterday.
[00:24:24] It'll take time. Of course, it'll take time in the midst of the pain, especially soon afterward. Sometimes it feels like this pain will not subside, that it'll never get better, and listen. Been there. That's legit. And part of the experience is knowing that even though it doesn't feel that way, yes, if there's a healthy approach to grief, the pain will subside.
[00:24:51] The pain will never, ever, maybe disappear altogether. But it might be the difference between the pain of you having a broken limb versus uh, you stubbed your toe. I remember after my father passed away, My mother still, maybe a month or two afterward, says to me like, it still hurts so much. Will this ever get better?
[00:25:11] And I said, Y yes, it will hurt less over time, but it's never ever going to go away. I'm a. Spiritual counselor as well. One of my clients is working through his wife's imminent passing from an illness. All the markers are triggers of my own experience, memories of my own experience, and I don't know if it's because it's in a counseling relationship.
[00:25:35] I wouldn't say affecting me, but it's not triggering me. It's not triggering me in my own loss. I can stay present to him and his journey and his pain and all these things. And then a few days later, I'll be outside walking and I see a bird with a broken wing struggling on the ground, and I am just crying.
[00:25:53] Tears, tears are flowing, you know, for like 15 minutes. I am just weeping over this injured bird and it's an injured bird. It's the cycle of life, right? It's like there'll always be injured birds and stuff. You are always going to be in a bit of a, of a tender, tender hearted space. And that's a good thing.
[00:26:12] And do we live in a society that encourages spontaneous crying? No, we don't. Nope. Not at all. Not at all. Especially at work in your workplace, or even unfortunately sometimes in your spiritual community space. So we tend to wanna like squelch these emotions down. If there's anything, as a person who was once a professional emotional squealer, if there's anything grief did for me was taught me that, yeah, that's not going to work anymore. So now I like cry at the drop of a hat and I wear it as a badge of honor and encourage people to have good, healthy cries as much as they need to whenever they need to however they need to, because that's not just release, but it.
[00:26:59] Again, opens you up to being deeper in touch with yourself, honoring yourself, not allowing the emotions to be stored up in your body. Like crying is an embodied release and so much of the emotion and the pain of loss we hold onto in our bodies and that's not healthy at all?
[00:27:21] Jill: No, it's not healthy at all.
[00:27:22] And it will come out eventually. But it will come out as anger. It'll come out in all these really unhealthy ways projected onto other people if we don't allow ourselves to let it out. Yes, and I'm the type of person too, where I spent, I. Many years not crying because I was so shamed about crying when I was a teenager that then I was like, you know what?
[00:27:48] You are right. I'm just gonna turn it off. Well, once you turn it off, it's not that easy to turn it back on. Exactly. You spend a lot of time trying to not cry that then eventually, You have to spend time trying to cry. You gotta kind of go the opposite way. But it does make people really uncomfortable because as humans we want to try to fix and make it better.
[00:28:10] Yes. Rather than just sitting with our own discomfort and allowing somebody to go through the process that they need to go through. And so, yeah, like if you're hanging out with a friend, especially if they're grieving and they're crying, that's okay. You don't have to fix it. You don't have to do anything other than sit and be with them and hand them a tissue and maybe say, you know, I'm here.
[00:28:35] What can I do to help you? And they might say nothing. Or they might say, you know what? Let's have a conversation. Just allow them to go through their process. But I am working as well on trying to feel more comfortable. Because it is uncomfortable for me, even if I'm alone, even if nobody's around. When my body starts to feel it, I tense and I just like, I'm like, no, no, I gotta let it out.
[00:28:58] But it's not that easy. And that's why sometimes the birds with the broken wings are those like things that allow us to have that release. And yeah, movies can do it. Songs can do it. For me, sometimes it's like a, yeah, a if I hear in movies, somebody singing or I guess even in person, if somebody sings really like just beautifully, where like I could feel it in my body.
[00:29:21] I. It will trigger tears for me. And I used to, again, feel really embarrassed and feel really ashamed about it. And now I'm just like, no, this is my body's time to let it out. So whatever it is that allows you to, it's important. You gotta get it out.
[00:29:36] Ogun: And some things said, two things you said that I wanna circle back to when you said about being with a person and they're crying and you handing them a tissue.
[00:29:44] I always caution people not to be quick to hand the tissues. Okay. Because when we hand people tissues when they're crying, I. Part of that message we are sending is stop crying. We're sending sometimes the message of Here, clean yourself up. You're looking messy. Clean yourself up. I know we think we're doing a good thing.
[00:30:04] You're crying, there's snot, there's tears. Let's get a tissue so that you're not getting messy all over yourself. There is sometimes that. The unintended message of “change this” when we hand tissues. Right. I know it's not what we mean, but yeah. There's a difference between intent and impact. Yes. And I talk about this all, all the time.
[00:30:25] Your intention might be to, I want you to clean the snot off your face, but what it might hit the person as unconsciously is I need to pull myself together. Right. And we should never be too quick in situations like that to pull ourselves together or implicitly, ask people to pull themselves together.
[00:30:45] Let 'em cry. Get snotty, get tears. It'll be okay. Take the shirt to the dry cleaners later. Let it out. And don't imply that you should be letting it out in a clean, tidy way. That's the other piece of it. So don't be rushing with the tissues. Most of the counseling I do right now is not, most, all of it is on Zoom, uh, you know, started with Covid and now that I am again nomad all over the place, I maintain these connections on Zoom.
[00:31:13] But when I used to do it in person, in my church spaces, there would be a box of tissues sitting on the side, off the table. And if that person started crying, I never ever reach for the tissues and hand them to them. If they want them, they can go get 'em. Right. Let 'em cry. It's really Okay. So the other thing that you mentioned early a few sentences ago was about anger.
[00:31:37] And I wanted to spend a little time specifically talking about anger, because anger, especially in spiritual spaces, has been given such a bad rap. Mm-hmm. Right? Anger has often been looked at as a failure of spiritual progress. Because if I was progressing spiritually and I was unfolding in love, peace, and joy, those things aren't gonna get to me and I'm not gonna get angry.
[00:32:04] Mm-hmm. Right. And it's a very subtle and unconscious message that is sent. And I'm guilty of sending it too. And I was a church pastor, you know, and I'm preaching on Sundays. It was a message that I often implicitly sent as well. I used to say things like, we can't control what happens to us, but we control how we respond to it so we can respond with peace and we can respond with love and all that sort of, I'm like, now I'm like, no, sometimes we gotta get angry and, and anger.
[00:32:34] Anger in and of itself is just an emotion. Right? And again, the meaning is what we give to it. Mm-hmm. And how we use it. We can harm people with our anger. Guess what? We can also harm people with our love. We can take love to an extent where it becomes an obsession. Yes, right, and any emotion we can use for good or we can use for ill and we can turn it on others and harm them or we can use it to lift others up.
[00:33:02] I was a person, again, in spaces where, where anger was, um, uncomfortable for me. It was uncomfortable for the people around me. Let us also acknowledge. Also in predominantly white spaces, a black man getting angry has a whole different energy and tone to it in that space. Mm-hmm. Right? Because of all these unconscious tropes about the angry black man and the angry black woman, so, so how others respond to anger is very also unconsciously racialized.
[00:33:31] But what's challenging for a lot of folks in terms of the grief process is when. They become angry at God and then when they become angry at the person who's died. Mm-hmm. And people struggle with that like they feel they shouldn't be angry at the person who died. They're dead. It's not. Something's wrong with me that I'm being angry with them.
[00:33:56] No, no, it's, no, it's not. Mm-hmm. Uh, especially around the circumstances of their death. It's not wrong to be angry with God, and it doesn't matter how you understand or interpret God or how you define God. God can handle your anger. Trust me, God's God. God's not worried about your anger, but for me, anger is simply my body, letting me know that I am not in alignment with what's happening right now.
[00:34:23] Anger lets me know that there's a wound or a place of healing that's still in process that is being touched right now, and I don't like what's happening. Anger is simply a big arrow pointing you need to take a look at this. You need to take a look at this now and that's a good thing. A lot of my work is, is changing people's, especially in spiritual spaces, changing people's relationship with anger and not being afraid of anger, befriending anger, loving their angry selves, to bring race back into the issue again.
[00:34:58] Mm-hmm. For so long as a survival mechanism, black folk in America learned to suppress their anger because expressing their anger meant death. And we still see this today, right? The disproportionate amount of people killed by law enforcement or being harmed when expressing any kind of anger. It triggers fear in other people's bodies, in white bodies, so, so we've learned to suppress our anger as a survival mechanism.
[00:35:28] But what harm is that doing to us when we are suppressing our anger? So when we are grieving as black bodies especially, but all bodies, when we are grieving and there is anger, we have to find healthy and safe ways to let that anger come up. Through and out and not suppress it, not feel ashamed for it.
[00:35:51] Mm-hmm. Uh, I'll use my situation with my wife. She was experiencing many health challenges leading up to the diagnosis, but because of her fear-based relationship with Western medicine, she did not go get a diagnosis for quite some time. Yeah. Then by the time she did it was, it was too late. Stage four, it's all riddled all over your body.
[00:36:13] There's practically nothing we can do, and I was very angry with her for taking so long to get diagnosed. Would it have changed the outcome? Who knows. There's no way to tell. Right, but the anger was there and it pointed. Me to the fact that I am holding resentment because I at some point believed that there was some way we could have controlled this so that she did not die.
[00:36:42] Yeah, there's absolutely no way to know if that's true or not. Absolutely no way. But that's what I believed at the time. So the anger really led me once I go like, I'm angry. I'm angry at her. Why am I angry at her? Why am I holding onto this anger? What is the anger telling me about what I believe about her and this situation?
[00:37:03] And it took me a little time to unravel that. That's what it was. I was blaming her. I was holding her responsible and by extension myself, because maybe if I pushed her a little harder to go get some things checked out, we might've been able to save her. So now I'm blaming her. I'm blaming myself.
[00:37:20] Really all it was, was simply me, me struggling to accept that we were not in control here, and there's no way that we may or may not have had a different outcome. She might've still been with us. She might've died two years later than she actually did. Who knows? The possibilities are endless, but when we are so attached to having a particular outcome, every other outcome is a failure.
[00:37:45] And that triggers things in us. So back to that acceptance. Can we accept all the outcomes? Any outcome? Can we accept the choices that an individual makes concerning their life, their health, and their death? Can we accept the randomness of life? Can we accept a loved one who is taken forever to die? And that sounds cold and harsh.
[00:38:09] But that's a reality for people who've been, for example, caretakers of their parents going on 10, 15 years, or their elderly loved one is struggling with dementia and Alzheimer's, and they don't remember who you are and they're angry with you, but you are in this place of taking care of them and that responsibility, and that's such a heavy emotional burden and.
[00:38:30] All the things. Yeah, of course you're gonna be angry. This is not the life you planned. Yeah. This is not how you saw yourself when you were in your ideal least idealistic twenties and thirties, or even settled into the reality of life in middle age and forties. Mm-hmm. Like for a lot of people, this was not how life was supposed to unfold.
[00:38:50] So, of course there's anger, of course there's resentment, and the antidote to that is the acceptance of, okay, this is not what I had planned, but this is what is and it's okay, and this is my life, and what is the journey I can make towards accepting that and seeing, seeing the gifts. Of what's unfolding in front of me, and this time with these people that I still have now, it's becoming a spiritual practice again, right?
[00:39:19] Because it's causing us to shift our relationship with ourselves and life and all things divine and creation. Oh, and then one more thing. Yes. Anticipatory grief is a real thing. Yes, it's right. It is a very, very real thing. We have to be mindful of those who are going through anticipatory grief. It is not the actual grief.
[00:39:40] The real thing. However, give yourself the extra space and grace to feel that anticipatory grief and to be mindful of if we are acting out from it in order to avoid the pain of it and the pain of what we imagine might be coming our way. The truth is nothing prepares you for. For loss. Accept the loss itself.
[00:40:04] Mm-hmm. So the best preparation we can make is to know that we're never really fully prepared for it. We need to just accept what arises and just know going in that all the inner resources we need, we already have. And it doesn't mean it's not gonna hurt. Mm-hmm. It's gonna hurt and we're gonna be okay.
[00:40:24] Jill: Yes. This was so amazing and it is about our time to wrap up, but I would love to have you on again sometime in the future because I feel like there's so many things we could have talked about deeper and further, and this was really wonderful. I will link in the show notes to your website to anything that you want to share with us.
[00:40:47] Ogun: So as I shared earlier, I am an ordained Unity minister. I am not serving in a church currently. In fact, my main work right now is I, I'm partnered with another Unity minister, Reverend Kelly Isla. We started a platform called Project Sanctus, and you can find that online project sanctus.com. And our work is around addressing racial injustices.
[00:41:11] And doing a lot of racial based spiritual transformation work. We have workshops, we have groups that meet a couple times a month online to have discussion spaces around that, or tagline is, let's get our holy on because we see holiness as that place of live in from our true, innate, authentic divine self, which is not a racialized.
[00:41:34] Self, and we are all racialized in some way, shape, or form. Uh, race is a construct, but this is a construct that has influenced how we do life and how we do policy and how we create the world around us. And we've internalized so much of it. White bodies, black bodies, brown bodies, all the bodies. Our work is the decolonization or paying attention to realize what we've internalized and shift. And if that's not spiritual work, I don't know what is. I also am, as I mentioned earlier, a grief counselor, and a spiritual coach. I have that private practice and I work with one-on-one clients as well. I'm an author and I write a column in Unity Magazine around spiritual and racial justice issues.
[00:42:18] My website is again, projectsanctus.com or for my spiritual counseling. And spiritual coach and work, go to revogunholder.com You just Google my name, Ogun Holder and stuff will pop up coming in soon. I'm working up the courage to start this soon is a men's group focused on, uh, Decolonizing our internalized patriarchy.
[00:42:42] We have the two ugly cousins, white supremacy and patriarchy, right? Mm-hmm. And they're so intertwined with each other, and patriarchy's, especially insidious, internalized by men. And when I say men, I'm referring to all male-identifying persons. So that's really been my personal work. Especially in the last year or two.
[00:43:03] As Reverend Kelly and I teach, it's not if we are maintaining systems of oppression, it's how are we doing it because it's so internalized we don't even know that we are. And I know for me it's been patriarchal stuff. I've been doing the work to really get clear about how the patriarchy's working in me and my thoughts, my actions, how I talk with people, how I view women, and how I behave in relationships, whether they're friend relationships or romantic relationships, or sexual relationships.
[00:43:32] And it's fascinating how much of the patriarchy has unconsciously informed what I do. Just fascinated, if I'm going through this, I know there are a bunch of other men doing it as well and need to do it. So I'm hoping soon to create a space, an online gathering space for us men to come together, be in discussion around it, and see what we can recognize within ourselves.
[00:43:54] But I think that's what's going on in my world right now. The last thing I'll plug are two podcasts that I'm a part of. One is through Project Sanctus. It's called With Love and Justice for All. We talk about how we create a new culture of love, justice, and equity, and we also focus on the particular challenges that spiritual communities have because a lot of spiritual folks, especially white spiritual folk, seem to believe that because they're spiritual, they don't have an issue around race.
[00:44:28] This is so far from the truth. So there's that. And then the other one I do is called Pub Theology, and it's exactly what it sounds like. It's me and two other ministers from other faith, and we drink beer while we talk about spiritual issues and current events. It's a lot of fun. So check those out with Love and Justice for All and Pub Theology, and you can find those wherever you find podcasts.
[00:44:52] Jill: Amazing. And all of that work is so important. Like the world needs all of that. And I can say that white supremacy and the patriarchy hurts us all. If we could do this work, we could heal so many things in our society. 'cause even if you're a white person, I promise you white supremacy is hurting you as well even though you're not seeing it, it is, I promise it is.
[00:45:20] Ogun: It could do this work. It's, and, and in the context of our conversation, things like white supremacy and the patriarchy especially influence how we grieve and how we Oh, yeah. Right. How we mourn as a man. How should I show up? When someone has died in my grieving, it's so subtle, it's so insidious, and it causes us harm because it does not allow us to really be in touch with our true, authentic, emotional selves, especially in male bodies, but in all bodies, because it's in, it's internalized and it's what has impacted how we define gender roles and so much of how we unconsciously buy into these gender roles.
[00:46:02] Is what influences how we do so much in life and we have to kind of really take the time to take a look at it and dismantle it and shift first ourselves, and then shift the laws and the world around us. That's how we do it. And to come full circle. Yeah. Grief is one of those pathways. If we let it, we've gotta be open to walking through the pain of it.
[00:46:26] Jill: Yes, and I'm definitely gonna check out, what is it, pub theology. I'm gonna link all of it in the show notes so everybody can find it. Yes. But beer and theology are two of my favorite things. So there. There you go. I am really looking forward to that one. Thank you again for taking the time today. I really appreciate it.
[00:46:44] This was such a great conversation.
[00:46:47] Ogun: yes, thank you. My pleasure. Please, please have me back. I'll be thrilled.
[00:46:50] Jill: I would love to. We'll definitely set that up. Thank you for listening to this episode of Seeing Death Clearly. My guest next week is Francesca Zag Leone. Francesca is the host of a podcast office Flip flops, which actually has nothing to do with shoes.
[00:47:04] It's an inspirational podcast with a lot of wonderful guests. She shares with us her experience with death and dying as a first generation American with parents that immigrated from Italy. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or family member who might find it interesting. Your support in spreading the podcast is greatly appreciated.
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