- The Grief Wave
- Posts
- The Grief Wave: Reaching for What’s Gone
The Grief Wave: Reaching for What’s Gone
Honoring grief, truth, and 80 years of presence from Jack Kornfield & Trudy Goodman.
Brian Stefan
August 05, 2025
🧭 TL;DR | This Week at a Glance
🌟 Rebecca Solnit: A Voice for Justice
Truth‑teller. Story‑shaper. Catalyst for change.
🎭 Virtual Catharsis Theater — This Saturday, Aug 9, 1–2:45 PM PT
A psychodrama‑inspired space for grief & presence.
🕯 Grief 101: The Phantom Limb of Love
Why our bodies keep reaching for what’s gone.
🕊 Echoes & Endings: Stella Rimington (1935–2025)
MI5’s first female Director General—a quiet revolution.
🧠 When Compassion Is Compelled
March 2025 executive order expands involuntary treatment—what it obscures and why grief is at its center.
🏚 Homelessness & Suicide in Australia
Structural grief born of housing insecurity and invisibility.
🛰 When Watching the Air Feels Like Mourning
NASA’s OCO‑2 carbon satellite may be decommissioned—if we lose the data, we lose our grief map.
🎓 Professional Grief: “When the Work Ends”
Virtual NASW‑CA session for clinicians—Aug 8.
🌲 Stillness in the Canyon with InsightLA
Nature‑based nervous system repair retreat—Aug 16.
🕯 HOPE Group: Mindfulness & Suicidal Struggle
Zen presence with Patrick Park—Aug 30.
✨ Celebrating Jack Kornfield & Trudy Goodman
Two beloved mindfulness elders turn 80—join the joy.
🌊 CGC Therapy, Groups, & Training
You don’t have to grieve alone.
💌 Dear friends of The Grief Wave,
Facing the hurt — together.
Some weeks feel heavy before they even begin.
This one carries the weight of justice long pursued, data quietly erased, and grief that refuses to stay in its lane. It’s the grief of vanishing languages, the ache of unhoused deaths, the phantom presence of someone no longer there—and it’s the whisper in all of us that says: “Don’t look away.”
And yet: alongside that ache, something else rises. A truth. A tremor of hope. A gathering of voices who say, “Let’s face the hurt—together.”
Welcome to this week’s wave. May you find something here that steadies you.
🌟 Honoring a Voice of Justice: Rebecca Solnit
Writer. Activist. Witness. Weaver of cultural clarity.
Rebecca Solnit, whose writing continues to reshape how we understand violence, silence, and the stories we inherit.
Rebecca Solnit has spent decades reshaping how we speak about power, silence, and the stories women inherit. Long before #MeToo, she gave voice to those ignored—and helped us see patterns hiding in plain sight.
From Men Explain Things to Me to her recent pieces on Epstein and structural violence, Solnit has not just documented injustice—she’s demanded we name it.
“These aren’t isolated incidents,” she wrote.
“They’re structural. Systemic. Global.”
Her essays pierce the veil of normalization. They ask us to reckon with complicity. To imagine better. And to reclaim the act of storytelling as an act of justice.
🙏 Thank you, Rebecca. Your voice reminds us that grief and outrage can be portals—not just to pain, but to possibility.
🎭 This Saturday: Virtual Catharsis Theater for Grief & Healing
🗓 Saturday, Aug 9 | 1:00–2:45 PM PT | Online
A stage for sorrow. A space for healing.
You don’t need a diagnosis to grieve.
And you don’t have to grieve alone.
Join us for a virtual psychodrama-inspired gathering for truth-telling, emotional release, and communal presence.
✨ What makes it powerful:
– Not performance, but presence
– Not scripted, but emotionally safe
– Not clinical therapy, but deeply therapeutic
💻 Join from anywhere. Speak if you're ready. Be quiet if you need. Just show up.
🎟️ Limited capacity | Tiered pricing available
🕯 Grief 101: The Phantom Limb of Love
Why the brain keeps reaching for what the heart can’t let go.
The hole they left behind doesn’t vanish with the tide. The body remembers. So does the sand.
It isn’t madness. It’s memory. It’s love etched into neural pathways.
Some losses echo like footsteps in an empty room. Others ache like a missing limb.
Grief doesn’t just live in the heart — it haunts the nervous system.
We keep making coffee for two. Reaching for a hand that isn’t there.
The body remembers—even when the world has moved on.
🕊 Echoes & Endings
In Memory of Stella Rimington (1935–2025)
Stella Rimington, the director general of MI5, in 1993. (Sean Dempsey/Press Association, via Getty Images)
Spy. Trailblazer. Quiet revolutionary.
Stella Rimington, the first woman to lead Britain’s MI5, defied expectations not with spectacle, but with steady brilliance.
She rose through the ranks of intelligence at a time when women were rarely seen—let alone trusted—in the corridors of espionage.
In 1992, she shattered a centuries-old ceiling, becoming Director General of MI5.
And unlike her predecessors, she stepped into the light.
She believed that secrecy and transparency could coexist—and helped usher British intelligence into a new era of public accountability, operational reform, and equal opportunity.
Rimington later wrote novels, gave lectures, and mentored women across sectors—quietly modeling the courage it takes to lead with clarity, restraint, and grit.
She kept a nation's secrets. She changed its story.
May her legacy remind us that strength can be quiet, service can be feminist, and leadership—true leadership—does not require applause.
🧠 When Compassion Feels Compelled
Trump’s Involuntary Treatment Order & Why It Alarms Mental Health Advocates
The Department of Housing and Urban Development represents a vital intersection of government responsibility and human need. (Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)
On July 24, 2025, Trump signed an executive order making it easier to involuntarily commit people with serious mental illness—especially those experiencing homelessness.
⚖️ What’s at stake:
Loss of autonomy
Erosion of therapeutic trust
Systemic grief disguised as “help”
We must ask:
Is treatment still care if it comes without consent?
Who decides what “unwell” looks like?
And what gets lost when grief is treated as disorder instead of a cry for safety?
🏚 Homelessness & Suicide in Australia
Grief doesn’t only follow death. Sometimes, it predicts it.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare tracks the intersecting crises of homelessness and suicide, offering a sobering lens on where support is most urgently needed.
Studies reveal that 1 in 4 deaths among homeless Australians receiving support are due to suicide or overdose. The average age of death? 44. Often younger for Indigenous Australians.
The grief here isn’t personal—it’s systemic.
Born of erasure. Maintained by indifference. Preventable.
“It’s hard to find a reason to live when you have nowhere to live.”
That grief doesn’t need medication. It needs housing. Dignity. Witnessing.
🛰 When Watching the Air Feels Like Mourning
NASA’s CO₂ Satellite May Be Decommissioned. And With It, Our Clarity.
In 2019, a robotic arm welcomes OCO-3 to the ISS — a quiet sentinel sent to track Earth’s breath, now seeking new stewards.(NASA TV/NASA)
The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) offers vital, irreplaceable climate data. But recent directives could end the mission—and crash the satellite.
What’s being lost?
What | Why It Matters |
|---|---|
OCO-2 Data Series | Our clearest long‑term view of CO₂ emissions |
Accountability | Policy without data is guesswork |
Urgency | The air doesn’t wait. Neither should we |
If knowledge is the anchor of our grief—
what happens when the anchor is cut?
📅 Upcoming Gatherings for Rest, Reflection & Renewal
🎓 Free Upcoming Event: “When the Therapy Work Ends: Making Meaning of Client Departures”
Holding Space for the Ones Who Leave Us
🗓️ Friday, August 8 | 12–1:30 PM PT | Virtual on Zoom
One flame remains, the other fades—but both offered light. A reflection on the beauty and grief of therapeutic endings.
What happens when a client vanishes? When treatment ends on a high note—or heartbreak? What do we do with the invisible grief left behind?
This month’s NASW-CA Holding Space gathering is a 90-minute virtual session that explores a truth few social workers are ever taught to name:
Professional grief is real.
Whether a client departs through:
successful completion,
systemic interruption,
relocation,
sudden disappearance, or
death—
—our hearts hold the weight. And we often carry that weight alone.
🧠 What You’ll Learn:
Neuroscience-informed strategies to understand emotional reactions
A breakdown of 8 types of client departures and how each shapes the grief experience
A guided community ritual to process loss in shared space
Practical, trauma-informed tools to integrate professional grief with self-compassion
🌿 Who This Is For:
This is for anyone who’s ever said goodbye to a client with mixed emotions, unfinished stories, or unspoken sorrow. Social workers, therapists, case managers, peer supporters—you are welcome here.
Because in this work, we are human first—and it’s time we make space for the goodbyes we never had time to grieve.
📍 Details:
🗓️ Friday, August 8, 2025
🕛 12:00–1:30 PM PST / 3:00–4:30 PM EST
💻 Virtual via Zoom (Free)
🌲 Stillness in the Canyon: A Day of Nature & Meditation with InsightLA
Retreat Day | Saturday, August 16th | 9:00 AM – 3:00 PM | Benedict Canyon, LA
InsightLA’s Benedict Canyon Retreat House
A donation-based day retreat for nervous system repair.
🧘 Group meditations at 9am, 11am, and 2pm (optional)
🌿 Silence indoors; gentle talking outdoors
🥾 Bring layers, lunch, and your weary spirit. There’s room for all of it here.
🕯️ HOPE Group: Sitting With the Unbearable—Mindfulness & Suicidal Struggle (with Patrick Park)
Virtual (Zoom) | Saturday, August 30th | 10:00–11:30 AM PT
HOPE for all.
Since 2020, HOPE has offered quiet refuge from chaos—a space for reflection and presence.
🧘♂️ This month’s theme: Mindfulness, Deep Suffering, and Sitting with Suicide
With special guest Patrick Park, a senior Dharma teacher in the Zen tradition.
💛 Donation-based & open to all
✨ A Joyful Celebration: Honoring the 80th Birthdays of Jack Kornfield & Trudy Goodman
🗓 Saturday, September 27, 2025 | 2:00–5:00 PM PT
📍 First Presbyterian Church, Santa Monica + Live Online
Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman—beloved teachers, partners, and pioneers in mindfulness—sharing a joyful moment ahead of their 80th birthday celebration.
Join for a heart‑opening afternoon of mindfulness, storytelling, and embodied presence as InsightLA’s beloved teachers celebrate their 80th birthdays. Over decades, Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman have brought the Dharma to millions—through wisdom, compassion, and example.
What to expect:
Guided presence and meditative reflection
Stories and teachings from cherished teachers: Dan Harris, Sharon Salzberg, George Mumford, Joseph Goldstein, Tara Brach, Spring Washam—and more. Each offers a favorite insight.
Genuine connection, gentle laughter, and a shared offering of gratitude
Why this matters:
Jack and Trudy are not just teachers—they are community ancestors. Their lives have shaped what it means to carry grief with open hearts, to hold presence under pressure, and to teach kindness as a form of resistance.
Your presence is a gift: Proceeds support InsightLA’s mission to bring mindfulness into all corners of our world—through access, equity, and unwavering care.
🌊 Support from the California Grief Center
Brian Stefan, LCSW
Founder & Clinical Director
California Grief Center
You don’t have to grieve alone.
Whether you've lost someone, lost your way, or carry unspoken sorrow—there’s a place for you here.
💬 What We Offer
🧠 Grief Therapy
Individual, couple, and family sessions available in-person (Los Angeles) and virtually across California and nationwide.
Specialties include: traumatic grief, suicide loss, anticipatory grief, and disenfranchised grief.
🎭 Catharsis Theater
Monthly in-person and virtual psychodrama gatherings.
No performance. Just presence. Just healing. Just truth.
🌐 Virtual Support Groups
Facilitated, confidential spaces for:
– Suicide loss survivors
– Those navigating ambiguous or complicated grief
– People experiencing identity transitions, isolation, or emotional stuckness
📚 Grief Counselor Training – Fall 2025
Become a certified CGC Grief Counselor (coaching model).
Includes experiential learning, somatic tools, and trauma-informed practice.
💡 Our Philosophy
We don’t treat grief as a problem.
We treat it as a passage.
✨ Consultations are always free.
When you’re ready—we’ll walk beside you.
💛 With care,
Brian Stefan, LCSW
Founder & Clinical Director
California Grief Center
✅ P.S. Know someone quietly grieving?
👉 Forward this letter. You never know who needs it.
💌 To get these in your inbox, sign up for The Grief Wave Newsletter.
Facing the hurt — together.