Riding the Grief Wave: How We Hurt, How We Heal

💌 Dear friends of the California Grief Center,

Living through a time of collective trauma is no small thing.

So much of what we’re witnessing — the chaos, the cruelty, the steady drumbeat of crisis — seems designed to terrorize us, to keep us isolated and afraid. It’s a strategy as old as power itself.

But we also carry more than a century of hard-won knowledge from psychology, mental health, and trauma healing. We know what helps: compassion, connection, community. A felt sense of safety that allows us to soften, breathe, and begin again.

Some days it feels like we’re stumbling from heartbreak to heartbreak, each sorrow stacking upon the last. And yet — even here, especially here — we uncover what truly matters.

We find hope in each other. In the quiet miracle of simply showing up. In kindness that dares to stay present. In communities that gather to hold burdens too heavy to carry alone.

Grief may be inevitable, but so is our boundless capacity to care. When we meet each other with open hearts and tender curiosity, willing to bear witness, something beautiful happens.

✨ We remember we’re not alone.
✨ We remember love still lives here.

🔦 In This Issue

📜 The chronicler of our democracy: Heather Cox Richardson
💔 Why we’re now The Grief Wave
🕯️ Grief 101: Continuing Bonds
🎭 Upcoming gatherings for collective healing:
 🌱 Dr. Jennifer Levin: Shattered and Still Standing (July 14 & 15)
 🕯️ HOPE Group: mindfulness & disability (July 26)
 🎨 💫 Catharsis Theater: The Art of Loss & Living Through It (July 26)
✨ The Tangled Net (Issue #2): I think, therefore I am — and the globalization of the mind
🌊 Coming home with California Grief Center

📜 The chronicler of our democracy: Heather Cox Richardson

Historian Heather Cox Richardson helps us make sense of where we’ve been — and where we might yet go.

Heather Cox Richardson seated in a warmly lit study, surrounded by shelves of history books, pen in hand — a modern witness to America’s unfolding story.

This week, we honor the steadfast insight and moral clarity of Professor Heather Cox Richardson, author, professor, and the voice behind Letters from an American.

Like a modern-day Tocqueville, Richardson chronicles who we are, how we govern, and the contradictions that might still undo us. But unlike Tocqueville, who looked on from afar, she writes from within our own beating heart — day by day, capturing history as it breathes.

A professor at Boston College and author of works on Reconstruction, oligarchy, and the long shadow of white supremacy, Richardson has become one of our most trusted guides through democracy’s fragile state. Her daily letters offer perspective, context, and a reminder that history isn’t something behind us — it’s something we’re living, shaping, and sometimes fighting to save.

We lift up Professor Richardson for her scholarship, courage, and commitment to truth. May we read her, support her, and carry forward the lantern she keeps lit for us all.

📬 Subscribe to Letters from an American
📚 Learn more about her life and work

💔 A new name: The Grief Wave

We’ve renamed this weekly letter from Mindful Grief to The Grief Wave.

Why? Because we’re living in an Age of Grief — waves rolling over us all the time. Personal, professional, political, planetary.

Can we learn to ride them? Will we fall sometimes? Of course.

But we can face these waves together, so we don’t get pulled under by the painful undertow.

Welcome to The Grief Wave.
🌊 Facing the tides — together.

💔 Grief 101: The Continuing Bonds of Grief

We’ve learned a great deal about grief in the last century. In the 1960s, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross gave us the five stages of dying, which quickly became a blueprint for grief support — even though it was meant to describe facing our own mortality. For decades, this was the map for how grief was “supposed” to unfold.

By the 1990s, something shifted. Grievers and researchers alike saw that we don’t simply “move on.” Grief weaves itself into the fabric of our lives, changing and deepening over time.

This insight birthed new understandings, like the Dual Process Model and, most beautifully, Continuing Bonds.

Continuing Bonds invites us to stay connected to those we’ve lost — not by letting go, but by carrying the relationship forward in new forms. Through stories, meals, a favorite song, living out values they held dear. Even just speaking their name.

Grief isn’t about moving on. It’s about moving forward, hand-in-hand with memory, meaning, and enduring love.

So how might this help us now, in families and communities grappling with personal, national, even planetary grief?

It means we can keep our bonds alive by honoring what we’ve lost and letting it shape how we show up today. Turning remembrance into action. Planting trees. Sharing stories. Building a kinder world in their honor.

Grief doesn’t mean forgetting. It means remembering — and letting love keep flowing, even through heartbreak. Especially then.

🎭 Upcoming Gatherings

🌱 Dr. Jennifer Levin & Shattered and Still Standing

July 14 & 15

Join internationally recognized grief expert Dr. Jennifer Levin, PhD, LMFT, FT for a free webinar on living through traumatic grief and sudden loss.

You’ll gain:

• A clearer understanding of how trauma and grief shape mind, body, and daily life

• Words to express your experience

• Tools for moments of emotional overwhelm

• A renewed sense of direction, even when the road ahead is uncertain

📅 When:

• July 15 at 4:00pm PT

• July 16 at 11:00am PT

Can’t join live? Register to receive the replay.

📝 By signing up, you’ll also receive Dr. Levin’s quarterly newsletter filled with resources on coping with traumatic loss. (No spam — ever.)

🕯️ HOPE: Mindfulness & Gentle Healing for Deep Suffering

July 26 | Virtual

This month’s theme: mindfulness, disability, and change (with guests from ArtsUP! LA).
Includes meditation, a short teaching, sharing, and a grounding ritual.

💛 Donation-based (pay what you can).
🕰️ Saturday, July 26 | 10–11:30 AM PT / 1–2:30 PM ET | Virtual (Zoom)

💫 Catharsis Theater: The Art of Loss & Living Through It

July 26 | Blue Door Theater, Culver City

This is for everyone — not just artists.

Grief doesn’t care what you do for work, how much money you make, or what stage of life you’re in. It finds all of us. And when we have enough time, safety, community, and compassion, grief can become more than just a wound — it can become a passageway to growth, deeper love, and renewed meaning.

This gathering is a place to explore your grief and tender humanity together.
A space to move what hurts, breathe where it’s tight, and let your story be seen.

Because right now, artists in Los Angeles and across the country are hurting in unique ways — from the LA fires, COVID, the long strikes, to the economic tremors that continue to ripple through the creative world. We’re widening the circle to make sure our artists are especially held and protected too, because when they suffer, entire communities lose color and breath.

But this space is for all of us.
If you’ve loved, lost, struggled, or simply lived — you belong here.

What you’ll experience:

• Exploring the “here & now” of your grief

• Body-based techniques to reduce pain and suffering

• Group processes that remind you you’re not alone

• Leaving with more courage, possibility, and creative breath

💗 Intimate (~40 spots), shaped by the collective heart.
📅 Saturday, July 26 | 1–4:30 PM | Blue Door Theater, Culver City

🎭 The Tangled Net (Issue #2)

I think, therefore I am — and the globalization of the mind

Four centuries ago, René Descartes tried to rebuild the world from scratch. He stripped away tradition, religion, even his senses, until only this remained:

That idea didn’t stay in France. It became the spine of modern science, medicine, psychology — even our grief — teaching us to live in our heads, to trust thought over feeling, certainty over connection.

It also left us lonelier, trying to think our way out of a world we thought our way into.

Maybe there’s another globalization waiting.
Not of goods, capital, or abstract reason — but of belonging.

A tangled net that holds us in compassion and awe for what can’t be fully known.

🌊 How We Help at California Grief Center

Grief isn’t a problem to fix.
It’s a truth to honor — together.

💬 We support individuals, families, and groups navigating loss.
👥 Grief groups build spaces of shared understanding.
🎭 Catharsis Theater invites you to explore your story, your body, your grief — in community.

✨ Always free consultations.
Reach out when you’re ready.

💛 With heart,
Brian Stefan, LCSW
Founder, California Grief Center
🕊️ Facing the hurt — together.

✅ P.S.
Know someone quietly grieving?
👉 Forward this letter. Everyone belongs.
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