Ep.8 What needs to be Grieved?

In this episode, Katie talks with Mike Holton, COO of CRR Global, about the importance of grief when dealing with a myth change. Across this conversation, they discuss:

•  The value of grieving an old myth before embracing a new myth
•  Some of the challenges that show up when we rush through the grief stage
•  How grief can be an ally for change
•  The importance of slowing down
•  And some ways we can learn to prioritize this important stage

Mike Holton has a lifelong passion for working with and developing leaders across the globe. Alongside his roles at CRR Global, Mike has spent a career working to develop organizational capabilities within the Global 2000. In the coaching field, he has worked as an agile, leadership, couples, team, and organizational coach. Over the last few years, he has transitioned his focus to working with clients in the space of trauma. The most important role Mike plays is being a husband and father to four amazing children. This role has shaped him and continues to develop him as a person today.


For over 20 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to build stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time

We believe Relationship Matters, from humanity to nature, to the larger whole.

Transcript

Key 

KC – Katie Churchman

MH – Mike Holton 

[Intro 00:00 – 00:06] 

KC – Hello and welcome back to the Relationship Matters podcast. We believe relationship matters, from humanity, to nature, to the larger whole. I’m your host, Katie Churchman, and in this episode, I’m talking with Mike Holton, COO of CRR Global, about the importance of grief when dealing with a myth change. Across this conversation, they discuss: the value of grieving an old myth before embracing a new myth; some of the challenges that show up when we rush through the grief stage; how grief can be an ally for change; the importance of slowing down; and some ways we can learn to prioritize this important stage. Mike Holton has a lifelong passion for working with and developing leaders across the globe. Alongside his roles at CRR Global, Mike has spent a career working to develop organizational capabilities within the Global 2000. In the coaching field, he has worked as an agile, leadership, couples, team, and organizational coach. Over the last few years, he has transitioned his focus to working with clients in the space of trauma. The most important role Mike plays is being a husband and father to four amazing children. This role has shaped him and continues to develop him as a person today. So, I bring you Mike Holton talking about what needs to be grieved. 

KC – Mike, welcome back to the Relationship Matters podcast. I’m so happy to have you on the show. 

MH – Awesome, it’s good to be with you again, it’s always delightful. 

KC – Today we’re talking about the importance of grief when dealing with a myth change and I want to start by asking you why you feel it’s important to grieve when you’re going through some kind of life change, however big or small. 

MH – Yeah, I think for me, I just had marginalized grief so much in my life. In my life it was pretty much like, suck it up buttercup was a term I heard a lot, or pull your boots on and live by your bootstraps or whatever. So, when I’m present with this I never really grieved for a lot of my childhood or my early adulthood and it didn’t take me until, I’m middle aged maybe or at least I’m in a third of my life at this point and I’m just learning to grieve. I’m now learning to think wow, there was something there that I needed to be with, I needed to grieve, I needed to feel sad, and for the sake of really allowing completion so I can create something new. It’s like I was hanging onto a lot of stuff, and myth change happens all the time, whether that’s in relationship, whether that’s in the work that I’m doing, there’s just always a constant cycle. Even if I think about, you know this might feel a little woo woo but nature has this continual cycle of grief. We have spring, things are born, we have summer, things are growing, fall, there’s harvest and then there’s this dying out in fall to winter and so there’s this seasonality of life that is like a natural rhythm of the world that we kind of check out to. We’re always like what’s next, what’s new, what can we grow, what can we start, but we never take that time, or at least in my world, I never really took that time to like… after I’m done harvesting how do I grieve? How do I honor what was here, what I experienced, what was going on for me? What I hoped and really giving that time to be in that place of sadness, joy, you know. And we all grieve differently too, so that’s another tricky thing, there’s no one way, it’s like actually, yeah, everyone grieves this way, everyone cries, that’s how you do it - sometimes people grieve very differently and culturally too, from what I’ve read. I’m not an expert at that at all but man, different cultures really grieve very differently for different purposes. 

KC – And I think over here in the UK we have a saying ‘sweep it under the rug’, that’s our way of not grieving. I wonder, because you mentioned about how sometimes we’re just moving from the harvest into the next thing and that pace seems to work in opposition to this grief phase, and so how do you help yourself to pause and really take stock of where you are, what’s happened and where you’re going? 

MH – Well it’s interesting. My coach, a couple months ago, really challenged me to slow down to the pace of feeling. 

KC – Oooh. 

MH – So I have a little sticky note that I have on my desk, and I check in with myself - can I feel? Am I moving slow enough to feel because I have a tendency to speed up, even when I talk, I have a tendency to go fast and so I just get into my head and I cognately just start talking faster and if I get excited I go into my head and I start yammering about whatever, and so really to me it’s this constant work in my body around can I slow down to the pace of feeling? Am I feeling my body, am I feeling my toes and my legs? And then from that place I know I have the space to grieve. But it’s a constant, it’s a practice for me to really slow down, check in, can I feel? Great. Ok, what’s here for me and then what do I need to grieve or mourn or celebrate that allows me to then move on to the next in a way that’s powerful and grounding. 

KC – And so what happens when we don’t grieve? Because many of us are running through our lives at 150mph, what happens when we’ve rushed into the next stage and completely forgotten to grieve the previous stage? 

MH – Yeah. Well, if you’re a little bit like me, I numb. So, it’s kind of like it’s still there and then I disassociate from it, and then it just builds up. So, as I’m doing my own personal work over the last couple years it’s a little bit like kind of breaking down the dam of all these ungrieved, un-things that I haven’t really been in touch with my emotions or feelings, so for me it was like we just put it on a shelf, right? Like oh just put it on a shelf, it’ll collect some dust, we’re fine, we’re moving on. And at some point your shelf becomes a bookshelf and then your bookshelf becomes a library and then it’s this history that you really have there. So, for somebody like me, I stopped feeling and as I think as a coach so much of what we’re working with is feelings and sensations and emotions, and if I spent, if I have all of that stuff that I haven’t really dealt with and we just keep moving on, man that’s a lot of stuff that I don’t really have access to and I can’t even support my clients. Whether that’s, even if it’s not just in coaching, it’s in leadership and working with leader, it’s like you’ve gotta believe that your people that you lead have feelings and they’re feeling something. So if we have the capacity in ourselves to be with that and work with it, that really allows our people to have it and again, they’re not numbing, they’re fully online and involved for the sake of wherever you’re going, or if it’s a coaching client they’re really bringing these emotions online so they can work with and create from instead of just kinda like, you’re working with half of who you are. 

KC – And I think with some change it can be quite easy to marginalize that grief, particularly if it’s seemingly good, the change, it can seem like why are you grieving? And I remember when we had quite an unexpected move back from the US to the UK, everyone in the UK was so excited that we were back but everyone in the US was so sad that we were leaving and I went into my action-orientated mode to organize everything and then I went straight into this new narrative of oh it’s amazing to be back, but I hadn’t grieved the fact that yes it was both happy but it was also both sad. And I think sometimes those conflicting emotions can sometimes, well we can feel guilt around actually I can’t grieve this because I get to go see my family again and see my friends, how can we hold both because both can be true in those big myth changes and those small ones too. 

MH – No, I love that. Because sometimes our feelings are in conflict with each other. And it’s onto us to build the capacity to hold both. You’re also sparking for me, a lot of times.. I’m an enneagram seven for any of those who know enneagram and so I spend a lot of my time marginalizing anything that’s uncomfortable and negative feelings, so I was always like glass half full on everything I did, even in my early coaching days, if you ever heard a recording, I was always in a place around somebody could say something really sad and I’m like ‘oh that’s awesome!’ I was like it’s not really awesome, looking back at it it’s a bit cringey, but this is where I started as a coach. But what I’ve really discovered is if I really want to feel joy I also need to feel the sadness and it’s that beauty around the range of emotion about bringing in both sides of the coin, it’s like I’m grateful that I can feel the joy because I can feel the sadness. I’m grateful for the sadness so I can feel the joy. And it’s that juxtaposition you’re talking about, I’m feeling sad and joy, but it’s that range and that complexity of self that allows you to feel both of those things, and for somebody who lead most of his life in just the glass half full and only the positive, you’re not really feeling the joy without feeling that sadness because there’s a depth in the joy that belongs to the sadness, you need both. And it’s kind of weird to say that but it’s just a really true place for me right now in my journey. 

KC – That is certainly something I can relate too, and it makes me think a bit about the idea of toxic positivity, and how when we’re so focused on being positive and seeing the best, and I’ve definitely got quite a bit of that in in me but actually we’re marginalizing those other feelings and eventually those feelings will be felt. It’s interesting that we marginalize those things because they’re seen as bad or wrong, and how can we hold them as equal and just information? 

MH – Yeah. And you know, it’s interesting, it kind of sparks for me that all of this lives in our bodies and so a lot of times these sensations are pre-verbal, right? We’re feeling uncomfortable with this, we might be feeling a tingling in our body. Then we get wise too it by putting language too it and we classify it as joy or sadness. But just coming back to I guess the commonness, it’s like we do marginalize that and I guess where I’m sitting is it’s like bringing those feelings back online, how there’s such a richness in them and there’s so much wisdom in that. I had a friend who spent a month of grief. There was a significant person in their life who passed away, they had to help their kids go through this emotional process of this person in their life and the moment that she had an opportunity to pause she got sick, and it was the first time in like 30 days, probably no less, that she was able to actually pause and her body caught up and it was almost like her body, you know, the conversation that we had was her body needed to get sick so that she would slow down. So she would just be in her bed for 3 days not having to take care of anybody else’s needs. And so there’s this wisdom that her body is signaling too us around slowing down so we can feel. And often, how often do we just drug ourselves up, push through the sickness and keep working versus pausing to feel that. I guess I’m trying to think like how does this go back to grief, right? We have this pattern, at least in the West, around numbing out the stuff that’s uncomfortable, whether that’s grief, sadness, being sick, anything that’s negative, that toxic positivity you’re talking about, we just kinda disassociate, marginalize that instead of leaning into it and there’s probably a balance too, like some people I’ve met, they over lean into this place as well, right, it’s like there’s toxic positivity and then there’s probably toxic negativity, I don’t even know if that’s a term, but there’s a leaning in the other way as well.  So often, at least when I work in the West and what I see with clients is it’s like we just don’t have access to grief, we don’t have access to these negative emotions and we don’t know, even when we start to access it we we’re not even sure what to do with it.  

KC –I think you said this before around, really when we’re not holding both there’s kind of an emptiness to the positivity, and I remember in our move back I was really pushing this positivity and it probably felt quite forced and at one point my husband said it’s not like I’m not happy we’re home, but I’m sad that it happened because we lost our visa quite unexpectedly, and that really struck me because it was like yeah we can be both and I was only allowing for the positivity to be present and I think we can really push that to the point where it’s actually so unhealthy and unhelpful for that shift, and it only makes the transition longer in terms of moving into that new myth. 

MH – Or we never fully translate into the new myth because we’re always holding onto the past. So, it’s like we can never really move onto where we’re going because we’ve never let go of the past and then eventually the past starts slowing us down and then we just start stumbling over the past and that’s the beauty of grief! It gives us that time to complete. We really can just slow down and grieve and feel and create a little bit more capacity, maybe it’s just 10% more capacity to be in a place of ‘man I’m sad that I have to move’, or ‘man I’m sad that I have to go through this experience’, and just feel that. And then, when we’re ready we step into that new place and create from that and man, it’s like fertilization, I think. It’s like that new spring. It’s like wow you’re really creating a lot of amazing fertilization that you can bring both the joy and the sadness with you for the sake of what’s next. 

KC – It really allows then you to cross over that edge from primary to secondary. It seems many of us, when we don’t grieve, we’re kind of stuck in a primary still and we’re pretending that we’ve made it across the edge but not really. 

MH – Yeah! It’s interesting, the more work I do with people in coaching in sematics and their body, what I’ve realized is for a long time I would do a lot of what I call cognitive coaching, and so like people are like oh yeah, I get the secondary, I get how to cross the edge, like it’s almost like I get how to lose weight but I don’t ever lose weight. Because it’s living in your body, you’ve gotta begin to work with the emotions and the feelings and that grief to really let go and it’s gotta be here, it’s gotta be in your chest, in your body, in your legs. Sometimes I think in Western society we function head up and we cut off everything below the neck and that’s how we operate, we’re just a bunch of people with head’s floating around, doing stuff and it’s like, we’ve gotta tap back into that body so we can really begin to grieve and be with what’s changing, so we fully can transition from primary to secondary because if not we’re just kind of like, our head’s over in the secondary but we’ve left the majority of who we are behind. 

KC – Well I think about a real impactful example of grief that we’ll all experience when we’re grieving the death of someone, and it’s interesting how in the West quite often there’s this sort of funeral and then it’s done, swept away under the carpet to use that British term, and when I lived in the Philippines - I volunteered there for several months - it was a whole celebration that lasted several weeks and it wasn’t just about crying it was about dancing and there was a karaoke and then on one day we had a picnic on the grave and it was very much present and alive, and I think over here, at least in the UK it feels like we shut the door and it’s like ok, now you should move on, and I don’t think that’s how grieving works. 

MH – Yeah, we did the funeral, moved on, we checked the box and now we’re off and running. 

KC – Yeah, and I think we’re not allowing our bodies the time to process what we have to do because it doesn’t match our time scale that we think we’re on, because we’ve got you know work to do or something else to jump on, and I think maybe we need to slow down to allow that to really happen in the way it needs too. 

MH – Yeah. It makes me think like how do you, how do we create the space for that? The curiosity I have is how do we do that systemically? That we make that ok? When I used to work for a big company we’d give people one week bereavement, that was the standard benefit, right? So, in one week you’d have to figure out how to bury your dead which is complicated enough, at least in the US, it’s expensive and complicated and there’s lots of phone calls. You’ve got one week to bury your dead, figure out how to deal with their assets and the estate and then in turn they’re like we expect you back Monday morning to keep going. You can’t bury somebody in a week! 

KC – No. 

MH – So we give barely enough time for even the consensus particles around doing that, let alone, man, what’s the space we really need to allow ourselves to just be? Like wow, this energetic life force has moved on - what does that mean for us? We don’t, we can’t touch them anymore - what does that mean for us? We can’t breathe the same air with those people anymore - what does that mean for us? 

KC – Yet how can they still be present with us in the secondary, what does that look like in terms of our rituals and how we discuss them as a family? 

MH – Yeah. 

KC - I’m curious, you used a word offline before we started recording around sustainability. I’m wondering about the role that you feel grief plays in terms of creating sustainability within systems. 

MH – Well, I think we’ve kind of touched on it a little bit. A lot of times what I see when I’m working in organizational systems and probably even family systems, we’re always moving onto what’s next. Like what’s next? But we never pause in-between the now and the what’s next to acknowledge and grieve with what we just did. And it’s sometimes it’s not always grieving, sometimes it’s honor, what do we need to honor here? Sometimes grieving always has a negative connotation so sometimes I’ll use the word honor because, again, grief seems like a dirty word sometimes, it’s like oh you have to grieve? Oh, I’m sorry for you. But what do we have to pause and honor/grieve/celebrate, do whatever we need to do before we move onto the next thing? And we just skip over that step, it’s like oh we’re done, we’re moving on. And I think from the sustainability point of view, that honoring or that grief gives some richness and fuel to what’s next. That honoring around, just grieving and letting that emotion out, letting and being with that, to me, from my felt experiences, it actually charges me up a little bit. It gives me that nourishment I need to kinda step into my new secondary. It’s weird to say that as I think it out loud. Every time, and I’ve spent a lot of time lately grieving, it helps me get grounded in a really positive place and it really just helps me ground my myself, where am I at? Where am I coming from? And that place of ground allows me to take that energy forward vs like if I’m always skipping over that grief I’m having to tap into different energy, I’m having to keep creating energy, so the sustainability pauses and allows that kind of recycling and allowing the move forward - if that makes any sense at all! 

KC - It makes me realize how this could be very much a micro practice that we bring to our every day, because in many ways we’re always experience endings and I remember a mediation teacher I worked with said be aware of endings in everyday life. So, the ending of a conversation, the ending of a drink, the ending of a meal, you can think about each of those as edge crossing and there’s a moment of grief, probably, with each one, but we’re not, we’re often just rushing through our lives and I think maybe this is a mindful practice, it’s a mindfulness practice because it brings us back to the now as opposed to jumping ahead to next. 

MH – Yeah. Oh, I love that. There is something about that, it’s like you know it’s interesting, it reminds me of my old meditation practice and I struggled for years to figure out how to meditate and I always thought I was doing it wrong, and now I think I’m sort of getting it. Probably not, but let’s assume I am. And it’s interesting, what I love about when I have an opportunity to meditate every day is it’s a letting go of, there’s a micro breathing process in my meditation, because I’m sitting on my zaphu and I’m just sitting dropping into it and then all of this stuff comes up and I’m like I’ll just let it go, let me just drop it into my rhythmic breathing, and there’s that letting go, there’s that micro moment of breathing around oh yeah, thank you for that, and let it go. And that is so amazing because I feel so spacious after I’ve done mediating because I’ve let all that stuff go, I haven’t let it build up, it’s like whatever happened in the last 24 hours between when I meditated last, it’s like, there’s just amazing. It’s interesting, this app that I use, it’s always like how do you feel now and how do you feel after you meditate, and I always feel better because I don’t have so much I’m holding on too! But I think you’re absolutely right, it’s such a beautiful micro practice if we begin to adopt grieving, letting go, completing, so we can get grounded and move forward. 

MH – Yeah. Well, it makes me think as well about how we probably don’t grieve things that we also want to move past. So, I’ve read a lot about people who’ve got over cancer, cancer survivors, and apparently they really struggle with the other side because they’re given their life back but they haven’t necessarily grieved or really honored what the cancer taught them, and it is interesting that because they’ve got this dream life now and they’re healthy and well and they’ve got everything they hoped for from the treatments there’s this assumption that it’ll all be great, but I think there’s also a grieving period that’s needed there, or a grieving period when we’ve got over a certain pain in our bodies. Even though we’re happy that it’s gone, I think we don’t really let it go until we honor it in a certain way. 

MH – What you’re bringing up and sparking for me, and I love this, is sometimes we hang onto things and it’s almost like what I’ve seen in my life and with some of my clients - we hang onto them so much we actually re-manifest them in our life. So I’m just thinking about like toxic relationships, I can’t let go of this relationship that I had with somebody, or in this case it was cancer and I don’t have an understanding of that much but it's almost like what I’ve seen with people who are sick or in relationship, they hang onto that sickness and even when they’re better they hang onto it so much that it feels like they repeat the sickness and they can’t ever get out of this constant state of sickness, I’ve seen that with some people in my family, and it disagrees with me because it’s like you’re healthy, just be that place of help, embrace that, and I see it in relationships as well when I work with people coming out of traumatic relationships, it’s like without that grieving they actually go, they go right back, they find somebody else with that toxic pattern because they can’t, to your point, there’s a wisdom that they aren’t tapping into or honoring to really feel that or let that go. And I think there’s a joke that my friends and I were talking about the other day like wow, when you get to a healthy relationship and you’re not used to it it’s like you almost sabotage it, you have to check yourself a little bit around ‘oh my gosh, is this what a relationship’s like?’ It’s like yeah, ok, well, let me not sabotage this because I’m so used to the unhealthy aspects and being in that place - what do I really need to grieve to give myself this space over here to be in a healthy relationship, whether that’s with a life event or something like that, but man we just hang on. And it’s interesting that we do that. 

KC – Yeah, it’s a fascinating point because in many ways we might be fooling ourselves, kidding ourselves that we’re actually over that edge but actually we never are. I always see with a lot of my clients they end up in the same destructive relationship pattern over and over again and they’ve never made it over that edge, even though they presume they have just because they got out of the relationship. Maybe the grieving is what really allows us to cross edges. 

MH – Yeah. And I think we can’t get to the grieving without, you brought it earlier, it’s the slowing down. We’ve gotta slow down to allow the grief to happen and that’s uncomfortable for a lot of us. Like, pause. Just feel. It’s funny, in some of the work I’ve done I was following some facilitators, I was watching them coach somebody or work with a leader and they’re like ‘just pause’. And the person would like, they wanted… ‘no, pause’. And I started doing that with my clients. I was like ‘pause, feel’. And they wanted to talk, ‘no – pause’. And actually making them drop into their body to really pause and feel what’s here and be with what that emotion is, man that can be hard for a lot of us. Gosh, you mean I gotta sit in this uncomfortable…? Or you pause and for me it was like, I’d get paused and it took me a while to really feel, like months, to begin to open up a little bit of that feeling in my heart, like oh it’s ok to feel. But just pausing like ok, what am I feeling, what are the sensations I have, and it took me months to start feeling like oh yeah, I’m feeling some sadness. Ergh, now I’m feeling some grief, and now I’m feeling lost. It took months of like pause, pause, slow down, pause, what are you feeling? I’m not feeling anything. What are you sensing? Nothing. Ok, just pause, breath. I think from a systemic point of view it’s like we’re so taught to speed up and move on, ok you’re done? What’s next. What’s next? Even in the work I’ve done it’s like we go from one project to the next, one project to the next from the get-go. And it’s like if you’re not working on a project or you’re not working on the next body of work that you’re having to do, it’s like what are we paying you for? 

KC – Well I think this is why we’re so obsessed with the busy narrative and how we almost link our success in life, not just our work, with being busy, because I think when we slow down and pause we have to face what we’re probably running away from which is the fact that we’re finite, we’re not here forever, and I remember, so I was a bit of a strange child but on my seventh birthday I remember really grieving the fact that I wouldn’t be six again and it was probably what you’d call an existential crisis, but if you think about all of us, we’re all every single day moving a little bit closer to the end, whatever that means to you. And that’s scary. And I think when we pause, we kind of have to face up to that which is kind of huge with potential but also could be quite paralyzing with fear. 

MH – Yeah, when you said that it just kinda hit me, death and taxes are the two things that one’s promised, right? It’s like how much are we in touch with the finality of our life and it’s been so interesting, I know a lot of the listeners probably know Faith really well because of the podcast and talking to her and where she’s at around her journey around that and just, even when you’re talking it’s like, listening to her talk about the end of her journey and how amazing where she’s at, I don’t think I ever relate to my end of my journey as like oh yeah that’s her, she’s another 30 years on me, we’ll deal with that when I get there, but there’s never like the pausing the now, yeah, I’m not guaranteed tomorrow what I’m going to do today? What am I going to do too really be present today? What do I need to grieve to allow today to be the best it can be? And again, that slowing down. That pausing to feel and be present. 

KC – I had no idea before this conversation that we were really going to home in on mindfulness and what you’re saying made me think about this mantra that I come back to a lot, that today is the tomorrow that you worried about yesterday. And I think we can never really get to that today unless we grieve properly what happened yesterday. We get stuck in the past or get stuck in the future. And what a beautiful practice to keep coming back too now. 

MH – Yeah, well it’s interesting you bring that mindfulness practice because I think when you start going down this journey, at least for me when I first started coaching it’s just a matter of getting from point A to point B. Coaching was this amazing vehicle to really tap into this cognitive place for me, and even as I talk about it I’m speeding up, I’m talking faster, I’m in my head. But it was this beautiful place around how do I get to point A to point B faster and now that I’ve been on this journey for quite a while now, it’s less about getting from point A to point B and it’s more about the being. What are the practices I can put into my life that allows me more joy? That allows me to create more capacity for the sadness and the happiness? That allows me to hold more complexity to be with my clients for the sake of their journey and for the sake of my journey. I think maybe that’s where you’re pointing too, like you’ve coached for a while right? And at some point it’s not about getting from point A to B, it’s about what are the practices we’re bringing in that just kind of expand, create more presence, more being, more feeling, more sensation for the sake of whatever we’re up too in our lives. 

KC – That’s beautiful. The journey along the way. That’s certainly how this conversation’s felt today. I didn’t know where we were gonna end up, I didn’t know what point B looked like but I’m certainly gonna grieve the end of this conversation and luckily, I get to go back and listen to it when it comes out. Thank you, Mike, this was really, really inspiring, lots of lightbulbs going off for me right now. 

MH – It’s always a pleasure, thanks so much for having me. 

[Music outro begins 31:30] 

KC – Thanks to Mike Holton for that really interesting discussion. Here are my key takeaways. Become aware of where you might be marginalizing grief in your own life. Where can you slow down to the pace of feeling in order to fully process and honor what was present for you before. Through grieving we create a space for something new to emerge. Building on the capacity to hold conflicting emotions can help us to embrace grief. Whist we might be facing a seemingly positive change there may still be something important to grieve. How can you hold both the joy and sadness around a certain change? Without grief it can be hard to fully move on into a new primary because we may still be living in the old myth. When we grieve, we allow ourselves to let go, and from there we can begin to cross the edge into a new myth. Grieving can often have a negative connotation, but it can provide a powerful space for reflection, honoring and acknowledgment of what has come before and this stage can provide nourishment, fuel and grounding for us as we step into a new phase in our lives. For over 20 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time. CRR Global’s unshakeable belief is that relationship matters, from humanity to nature to the larger whole. For more information please visit CRRGlobal.com. 

[Music outro 33:28 – end]