Hey everyone, welcome back to Podcasts in the Car. This is Gris Alves, your host, and as I'm driving to Los Angeles again, these ideas start coming up and I always think I gotta write them down for the podcast and then, well, I'm driving, so I can't write it down. So I thought, well, just pick it up. These phones have incredible microphones.
It might not be as sharp as the new studio that we set up. Thank you very much to Paula Alves and Julio Alves, who have been so helpful in Julio setting up all the electric parts. And Paula is a new videographer. Yes, she is. Photographer, videographer. You can follow her at Twisted Rotten on Instagram and just check out her link there because she does really beautiful work. Very powerful artwork. work.
So, you know, I've been thinking a lot about what I've been sensing in this grief part of my life where my dad just passed away last December. And, you know, with all the grief circles and grief practice and my awareness of what grief does to the body, I know, you know, somatically is sometimes the body takes you by surprise. And we, as a culture, have associated shaded grief as, well, I'm going to be sitting here crying and weeping.
But really grief takes its own journey when we're not 100%, I suppose, embracing it. And it's a hard thing to embrace. You know, it's one thing when I'm leading a grief circle that I'm helping others embrace it and maybe I get into mine for a bit. But after my father died, the first, the month before he died was so intense for me somatically in my body. Like I broke down a couple of times, literally had to lay down on the floor. My stomach was upside down, my shoulders all the way up to my ears.
I felt as if I was getting really sick and that I wasn't going to be able to sustain it. And then it would pass and I would be able to sustain it, right? And I kept going to practice yoga and helping, you know, staying in community and staying connected. But in a way, it's almost like you're on the go. Because there's this plan. You have to help him. You have to help him. You have to help dad and everybody else. And you have to have the fire and get the peyote and bring the musicians.
And so there's this speed inside of the body that's keeping me going. And I would cry with him and weep with him. And it was very aware and very okay with my emotions with him. Open, open-hearted. This sucks. This is horrible. And when he died, it was so, you know, it was very sad, but we were also on the go, right? Like the funeral, this, the viewing, the dry eyes, because people are coming, telling everybody about it.
And then we buried him and, oh my goodness, the day of the burial was so intense for me. I saw the body again and I just didn't want to let go of it. And that was like beginning of December. And then everything else, like Christmas, New Year's, all of those events where he would have normally been with us were weird. I was not a hot mess crying, but it was weird. I wanted the night to be over so I could just go to bed.
People to leave so I could just clean up the house and just sit in silence out in the porch where I sit with Julio every night to just watch him or have a tabaquito. Sometimes I'll take a drag of a little tabaquito as a prayer. That's like my safe space. There's an owl across the street that we listen to every night, and we catch up, and there's a sense of my body there that it's okay. There's nothing else to do. I'm going to go to bed soon.
And I couldn't wait for those moments. I just didn't want to—I couldn't be 100% engaged in the day-to-day. And two months into it, after my dad died, I did sit with some mushrooms, thinking that I was going to have fun. And all I did was cry intensely for a couple of hours. And I saw my dad, I saw my mom, I saw, like I understood for all the arguing and annoying and craziness that they went through in their marriage that I always complained about.
I thought, well, you guys stuck it out and now you're both in the same grave. I even wrote a song in the middle of the mushroom journey. I don't remember. I think I wrote it down somewhere. And the last part was, hasta solo una tumba que visitar. Even in the end, there's one tomb we need to go visit. Like, you didn't get buried over here and somebody else over there.
Because, well, if you listen to the podcast about my dad's last days, you can remember that, well, my brother insisted on burying my mom's ashes inside my dad's casket, which she didn't really want, neither did he. But in the end, he convinced them, and they did it, and there they are, arguing till eternity in the cemetery of... Down in the middle of San Diego. But in my journey, I saw, because what the mushrooms, of course, do is they help you see the part of the love, right?
The part of love, the connection, the things that actually helped move towards the direction of love. There are things that don't help move towards the direction of love. There are things that cause trauma and dissociation and blocking your nervous system from feeling because it's too intense, too much, too fast. That's what trauma is. And being alone, of course, during the process. But then sometimes there's also good things that happen.
And my parents stuck it out. They were always with the family. No matter what, we knew that they would be available to babysit, to come help out, to hang out. And when we were all together, it was fun. Because as I got into recovery and therapy, there was several talks about, if you're all going to be arguing, you can't come over. So for many, many years, they were pretty well behaved in front of the grandkids and us.
And, you know, they focused on something else besides how much they annoyed each other. And during this journey, I saw the good part. The mushrooms showed me, and I cried and cried and cried. And una tumba que visitar was like the end of the story, right? Like one tomb to visit. And at least I was able to.
Sense, feel gratitude for whatever they had to do to stick it out or whatever they didn't do to leave each other, you know, but there is now I realize after going through some intense journeys in my own relationship with Julio, I mean, we've been together 29 years and to stick it out and, and to both be wanting to be better and expand our consciousness and heal our, our trauma so that we We can feel safer with each other and enjoy each other and trust.
Trust is a big one. So, you know, thanks, mom and dad, you know, for what it's worth. That's what happened to me in that journey. But then, of course, a week later, if you're still in the depths of grief, it's almost as if it just sucks you right back in. And I've been trying to negotiate it, right? Negotiate it. If I go to yoga, everything.
If I eat nutrition-dense food and meditate and see my compassionate inquiry mentor and therapist every 10 days, and if I have my community, and if I do this, and if I do that, then I won't lose my mind with the grief, right? That's my negotiating. As long as I do all of these things, it's going to help my body not crack down and get sick and explode and be a nervous wreck. But I'm noticing, I began to notice this negotiation.
You know, number one, it doesn't just happen with grief. We're constantly negotiating as humans.
You know, it began, I did a study a long time ago of consciousness and how, you know, the development of the history of humans and as, you know, the Paleolithic era homies walking around trying to just, you know, the hunter-gatherers were very in tune with their body and their gut and their connection to earth because they were constantly outdoors hunting and they had to know which plants not to eat, which if there's an animal coming to get them, where to, you know,
how to get away from it or find a different road. And then when they began to settle and agriculture started and farming began, negotiations began, because if it didn't rain, they wouldn't get their crop. And so this is when the negotiating or offerings, if you want to call them that, if we offer all of our prayers to whoever's up there in the sky, will you please rain on us so that we might have a harvest?
And, you know, throughout the history, the negotiations sometimes included killing humans or babies or something. I mean, there's so many ways that it got super crazy and then it all turned into religion. And, well, that's another podcast, but that's one of the beginnings of negotiating. And we as humans, even in this culture where we're not hunter-gatherers and we're not all of us in agriculture, culture, tend to quote unquote offer prayers if you please keep the mother away.
I mean, I do it all the time when I fly to a place. Please don't let any turbulence be in the plane. Well, actually, for that one, I just actually just asked. I'm so trivialist. There's really no negotiating there. But any other thing, you know, like when you were young and you're getting drunk and you're like, I will never do this again. Please, God help me. I don't want to throw up. Or negotiating with the kids. If you do this, you get a prize.
Or if you don't listen to me, you go to timeout. out. And there's all these ways of negotiating emotions that are in the subconscious that when they come to the surface, well, that's when the work begins. And so in my negotiating grief is I don't want to feel this too much. I am aware and I know it's going to come up. I know because it happened with my mom. For like a year, I was sort of on the go. And then a year after she died, It hit me.
I didn't put one and one together. I just got super sad, depressed for a couple weeks. I even got sick. And then I realized, oh, well, maybe this is grief. Go back to the grief circle. Go back to the sweat lodge. You know, consider it, feel it, embrace it. And it was helpful to talk about it, to recount the story of how she died and my story with her and all of our, you know, history of healing intergenerational trauma, you know, as Latin American women, Mexican women.
And it's, you know, and I know there will be a similar process with my dad. And so this constant, I will do something else so that I don't feel like I will go work out. I will control my food. I will look like Madonna again. I will blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, I'm not saying these things are bad.
If they're coming from a space of, I would like to really be strong and live as long as I can in a healthy body that can move and connect and hug my kids and not be a burden or a burden for me, not even for others, but for me, you know, like we're walking around in pain. So there are good things about that. However, However, if we're doing them, if I'm doing them, to avoid connecting to my body and this.
You know, this alchemizing of grief, well, then it's about, it might be interesting to reconsider it and to see. So what I've been doing is every time I sit down with, for my therapy session, the first thing I say is, I need to grieve. All right, what do you want to do? Well, I would like to complain. I would like to complain. For the first five minutes of my therapy session. And ba-ba-ba-ba, I talk shit about everything that happened and what I need to complain about.
And next thing you know, I'm being heard, I'm being seen. And then, of course, my heart softens, my skin softens, and out comes the weeping. And it's never 100% about my dad dying. It's childhood memories, teenager memories, something else about my kids, about my partner.
But grief takes the opportunity to cleanse all the other areas in our system that have not been 100% available to be felt because we were on the move, because we were busy with something else, because we were still in dissociate mode or frozen chosen mode, or because we were still believing that that was just not a good thing to do, that we just couldn't do it. And sometimes it's not even a conscious thought. The body just doesn't go there.
And when we're beginning to feel, it's okay to not have to feel it all at once. I say this over and over again in this podcast. We do not have to feel it all at once. And the thing that happens when you sit with mushrooms or ayahuasca or some psychedelics is that you do feel a lot all at once. You do feel a lot over a period of three to six hours.
And so it's exhausting and your body's left so open. And so, you know, it's about really being careful and prepared and taking time afterwards to integrate and be grounded. What do I mean by grounded? I mean that you eat good foods, that you're taking care of your body, that you take long showers, that you pamper yourselves, that you cultivate compassion because it is intense. And it is a lot to feel, especially because if you haven't been feeling for
a long time. and you don't have to do it alone. But the self-compassion part, the mind talk, it's kind of an alone journey. You can do it with others and you can have affirmations and you can practice in group settings, but it is a practice that in the end, I'm by myself in my mind. So I get to take care of myself in my mind and tell myself it's okay to grieve. It's okay to lose your mind, to lose your shit for a few hours here and there.
It's okay to feel nervous when you're around family because you don't know what to say and everybody reminds you of your childhood, you know. And the more that you do this work, the more alive I feel, the more joy and potential and just, I want to eat life up and it's so amazing. And to do it, you know, sober. however there also is a lot more feeling so there's a lot more tenderness to the skin.
And so, yeah, you know, the practices help you be with and prepare with, but they are not a negotiating to go without grief. There's no negotiating to go without grief. And whatever you're going through is, it's okay to touch into that tenderness and to stop beating ourselves up about not being strong enough and pushing, you know, pull up the bootstraps, keep on going. And we do that already. We do that already. So, yay for resilience.
That's great. however you know the softness is a softer way to get in you know into the heart and into living and you know you see a flower you see a tree you know they're soft their branches fall into gravity and they curve and they flow with the air they're not just sticking up straight up i mean some of them if they're dead and dry but we don't want to do that it's being alive it's softening into to the body.
I like to think about, yes, firm muscles, firm body, but very flexibly stretched in yoga and open heart so that I can cry and weep and allow life to move through me. Because that's what we're doing when we allow.
Is life moving through us? And this is one of the things that we talk about in the Mindfulness Magic program, which is a six-week intensive course of lots of information, but lots of practices, and a knowing of ourselves, a connecting to this wiring in the brain that we have for compassion. The group, we're in module four right now. We have two more weeks.
It's been amazing to see the transformation, the connection, you know, the eye openings, aha moments of really, I didn't know that that was actually a thing that was holding me back. You know, these belief systems or these negotiating with emotions. And we negotiate with emotions also because these are the adaptations that we come up with when we're little and something that happened or didn't happen to us was too much to hold.
And seeing that and then listening to others in the group, knowing that we're not alone is a very powerful experience. So I'm opening up a second portal for Mindfulness Magic beginning in June 2nd. If you are interested, send me a message. Go to my website. Check out the events page. There is a link on my Instagram profile that has a landing page with all of the modules and what what we go through. And if you want to accompany yourself through microdosing, there is that part of it too.
If you have sat with psychedelics, if you're going to sit with them, this is a beautiful way to prepare and integrate for that. Because yes, they're amazing, but yes, they leave you quite open. And we need the tools and the community and the wisdom of somebody that's been through it and done the work to accompany you, to give you the support that's really, really necessary and helpful. I don't know about necessary, but helpful. The registration is up on the link, griselves.com backslash events.
Please share this podcast with anybody and everybody that you think might be interested in this. If you would like this program in Espanol, let me know because I can totally open up a Spanish group if I have enough people.
And, well, may we become more and more aware of when we're negotiating negotiating, and that we can go inwards and be in this present moment with the inner light, the inner presence, our true selves that need no negotiating besides a good pat on the back and gratitude to do whatever the fuck we want in good consciousness and with an open heart, hand in hand with our loved ones in the community.
And if you don't have a community, community come join ours because it's a fucking cool one and everyone's doing the work and well, there's no you know no mean people are there if they're mean they'll realize why they're doing it you know the bullies are hurt people too so thank you again this is the tales of recovery podcast in the car series i hope the sound isn't too bad and i will see you guys next time.