The Becoming Podcast | Season 4; Episode 4 | Shauna Janz on how grief can elder us through times of transformation

Welcome back for another episode of The Becoming Podcast, friends! I'm thrilled to bring you this deep and thought-provoking conversation with Shauna Janz. Shauna is an educator, facilitator and ritualist at the crossroads of grief, trauma, embodiment and ancestral healing work. For the past 15 years she has worked in both private practice offering 1:1 support, and with national and international organizations offering trauma-informed facilitation training, grief literacy and curriculum development, and ancestral healing rituals to diverse audiences. I wanted to have Shauna on the show because grief work continues to play a huge role in the work that I do:  it's an inextricable part of what it means to traverse change in our lives. Our conversation begins with Shauna's intimate insight into the grief journey that she's traversing right now.  Relatedly, we talk about what we have "permission" to grieve.  Shauna offers profound wisdom around the conditions and capacities that support us in our grieving process, as well as how grief can be an elder that ushers us into who we're becoming.  We talk about the cultural influences on grief and who "gets" to grieve, and how to have agency with what can be an all-consuming experience.  We continue on in a conversation around somatics and embodiment, the loss of community witnesses for our grief, and how we pathologize grief.