#18 Grief as Portal to Life with Iola Kreizman & Olivia Wood

What if grief is not something to overcome, but a gateway to deeper life?In this episode we uncover the wisdom of The Grief Retreat, founded by close friends Iola Kreizman and Olivia Wood. Born from their shared experience of parental loss and a deep knowing that grief deserves more than silence or surface-level support, The Grief Retreat creates spaces that truly meet the embodied, emotional reality of grief.This is part one of a two-part episode where we debunk the taboo around grief and bring the deeper wisdom of ancient practices of grief into daily life to support us to heal and move forward. We discuss the importance of death rituals in other traditions and speak to the taboo that exists in many Western cultures today.This conversation comes at a pivotal time—a time of deep collective shedding as we close the 9-year cycle at the end of 2025 and begin the year of the Fire Horse. It is more important than ever to reorient our relationship to grief as a gateway to more life.