Healing Grief with Audra Boyd

Today's episode dives deep into the emotions as we explore grief with coach extraordinaire, Audra Boyd. I'm your host, Dr. Sarah Marshall.

Audra’s Bio

Audra was born in Wisconsin and grew up in a funeral home. Yes, that’s right. Funerals were the family business. She grew up surrounded by grief and to her; it’s a natural part of life. Early in life she developed the ability to talk to anyone about anything. And to listen…really listen. This ability became the foundation for a career in training and development. Audra herself encountered grief in several areas of her own life including the loss of her health. This experience with grief was the catalyst for her current passion; helping others grow through grief. 

Connect with Audra on Instagram @audra.boyd

Full Transcript

Sarah Marshall, ND: Welcome to heal. Today's episode dives deep into the emotions as we explore grief with coach extraordinary, Audra Boyd. I'm your host, Dr. Sarah Marshall.

Audra Boyd: Hi. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: Thanks for being here, Audra. It's awesome to get to go into this topic: grief. You know, this is like inside my intention around why the healing project is to start to highlight and bring forward some of those tougher places that is what it looks like to heal. You know, physically it can be vomiting and diarrhea and discharges and rashes and very uncomfortable symptoms for periods of time that we tend to make those things wrong when actually that's the body restoring itself back to balance. And emotionally, grief is one of those big ones that like, as you and I have talked about, I love to avoid that one. 

Audra Boyd: most human beings do. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. Thank you for being here to, to open up this topic and like just share from, you know, your own experiences and everything. So thanks. So we've got, yeah. Audra Boyd, the famous, the amazing, the beautiful, the illustrious one of my favorite people on the planet. And, yeah, I just would love to kind of get started with like, how did you get into, I'm going to work with people on grief and grieving? 

Audra Boyd: That's an interesting question. The funny thing is, is that, I grew up in a funeral home that was the family business, and I had a father who kept asking myself and my sister, so you're going to go into the family business?

And we're like, Oh no, we're not. And, here I am several years later and I find myself in a really similar business, you know, coaching people on the process of moving through the grief that they experienced following loss. You know what you said earlier about you being someone who wants to avoid that.

Yeah, I was too, and it almost surprised me a little bit. You know, I've been in self-development for years. I've been an executive business coach. I, you know, all the things, all the training things. I've lived in the business called a funeral home. So I was around death my almost my whole life, and still I found myself faced with a series of losses and several of them unexpected, struggling with how do I move through grief?

Like I didn't want to go there either. In fact, I threw myself into work. Which seemed like it worked for a little while, at least distracted me, but, you know, it was, there's not really an overall good thing to do, which then, you know, led to physical, you know, the physical stress on my body that was combined with it… So, yeah. Yeah. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: So going through some of your own stuff, and then you have this ironic, not ironic history of where your childhood home was. 

Audra Boyd: I know. Isn't that funny? It's literally funny. My, my place was the favorite place to do sleepovers. Right. All my girlfriends wanted to do sleepovers at my funeral home.

Yeah. I mean, I guess that makes sense. You know, it's pretty funny. Yeah. And the, you know, for myself, I felt, gosh, it was about a year.. maybe a year and a half, I found myself going through a number of losses. You know, there was the loss when I actually discovered I was dealing with a chronic illness that didn't have, you know, a treatment or a cure, not, not, not one that's like, Oh, here you go. Formulated, here's what it looks like, as you know. but not only that, I, lost my mother unexpectedly. She passed away that same year my house flooded, lost a number of possessions, and ultimately ended up, you know, getting rid of the house. In addition to that, I had, I lost really good friends and my godchildren to a murder suicide, which was, it was kind of a, it was a challenging year.

And for me, unfortunately what happened is I just used those fallacies or those strategies that a lot of people do, like keep myself busy or, Oh, it's just gonna take time. I thought that I was dealing with it in a pretty good manner, but really what ultimately ended up happening is like the, the wounds, it was cumulative, each of those losses kind of built up, and just had me be ultra vulnerable and sensitive. And, until I finally did realize, wait a minute, this maybe isn't the best way to deal with loss and the grief that follows by fighting it. So kind of forced into, not really forced, but it's like I've looked at, I'm like, wow, okay, this isn't working. There's gotta be something I can do. Yeah, 

Sarah Marshall, ND: yeah, yeah. Well, and that's one of the things I, you know, in our conversations up  until now, what I've learned from you, like to me, loss was death. That's what grief was for. Right? So that like made sense to me. And I was like, well, nobody in my life has died. I haven't, I mean, I'm really lucky.

Like I, my parents are alive and healthy. My sister's alive and healthy. I haven't had a major, you know, my, both my grandmothers passed away in my twenties but it was like the right time and it was appropriate and they'd been sick and we kind of knew and it was hard. But like, and to be completely honest, I wasn't super emotionally close with either one of them, although they were involved in my life and both my grandpa, well, one grandfather died when I was nine, but I like almost don't remember it. My other grandfather died 30 years before I was born, or 20 years before I was born, so that was one of my fallacies was like, yeah, grief, you can have grief if somebody’s died. Otherwise. It's off limits. 

Audra Boyd: Yeah. Which you know, is, is really common for people to think that. And you know, if we really looked at life, life is a series of, well, I don't want to say it's a series of losses, but really it's natural loss is natural in life, right?  We, we grow up, we changed schools. We outgrow a toy.

Which might laugh, but really that's, that can actually be a traumatic loss for someone when losing a special toy or a special Teddy bear, that kind of a thing or moving. There's so many different ways that we experience loss. You never know how it's going to impact you and how it impacts you isn't going to be the same as it impacts the next person.

So the best that we can do is have compassion for and really start to kind of embrace it with a discovery. You know, like an inquiry, discovery, bent so that we can move through it. Cause you know, I hate to say it, but really the only way you get through the journey called grief is through it. And sometimes that requires like exploring the nooks and crannies in the corners of it to really get what's, you know, what may be at the source of those unresolved feelings that are often coupled with grief so that we can grow from it and expand.

Sarah Marshall, ND: So how do you get access to that? I mean, cause that's always been like, like. What I see in my life was a series of expansions and creations, and it was like, well, yeah, sure I moved from that city, but then I went to the new one and then it was doing this new thing, and I always focused on like the new, bigger, better thing, and I just ignored that I just left a community or a relationship ended and that's why I went back to school or you know, whatever the pattern was. Like, I just kind of would like put that in the past. The past is the past, move forward and then create an the next future. But like when, when you and I started talking more about this subject, I could see that I had this like. It's like a Pearl of incomplete losses where there was a little piece of sand and then wrapped around, it was the next one and wrapped around it was the next one and wrapped around it was the next one. So like, how can we, I, anyone start to get access to those unresolved feelings when like for me it was like one of my main strategies was I'd numb to it. I didn't even know it was a loss. So what do you do there? 

Audra Boyd: Yeah. Well, that's a really great, it's a really great question because most of us tend to do that. It's like, Oh, okay, get over it and move on. In fact, that's something we say to each other, right? It's like, Oh, you know. It'll just take time, or I'll come on, get over it. It's time to move, you know, like heaven forbid, but it's actually looking at, okay, so with grief, the loss comes from the loss of relationship, whether it's with a person or a thing. So you had yourself identity, whatever that is, prior to the loss, and then all of a sudden it's a, an abrupt change to things.

The way you view yourself, the way society views yourself. So you've got to look at that. Not that it's bad or anything, but you know, when you go from being a wife to being a widower, I mean, that one's kind of obvious, right? Like, Oh, wow, wife, widower. but even that, just because it's obvious what the difference is, doesn't have you necessarily deal with, okay, what's actually at the source of the loss?

Is there something that's unresolved? Is there some way I was in the relationship that. I really isn't true to who I am, that now I want to be a complete with like that's where regret tends to come in. Or is it just a matter of I just don't even know how to be in the world any other way than wife for daughter, whatever that relationship might be.

So now I've got to discover it. Not only do I get to complete it and look at what an amazing thing was that, but now, okay, now who do I be in the world? Like, what's my, what's my like, where am I grounded? Who do I be? You know, I think a lot of times when we lose someone due to death, that's close to us there's this, confusion around what do I do with all this? Love. Right? Like, all this love that I have at the same time, dealing with potentially a loss of love, right? Like, wait, you know, one of the greatest things a friend ever said to me is, you know, just because this was when my dad had passed away.

She was just because he's gone doesn't mean you have to stop loving him all of a sudden, It was like, Oh. It was so simple, right? Such a frameshift thing. I was like, Oh yeah, you're right. Right. And it was just, it created just a sense of ease for me. It's like, Oh, okay. I don't have to figure out what to do with it.

I can still love my dad. I got it. There's no body here now called my dad, but yeah. So you know, you've got to look and tell the truth. And the best thing that I've found is really to do that work with someone with someone that you trust. There's lots of resources out there. You can do the, you know, looking and talking with a close friend.

A lot of people, if they're really struggling with loss, they'll find themselves, you know, working with a therapist or maybe even a coach. You know, someone like myself who, you know, I'm not a therapist, but I'm a coach and I can focus with people on, you know those areas of life that tend to become limits for them. It's like that you said that that fall, that was there. There was a level of unworkability that it just provides in life, and usually it's like tied to a loss of freedom or, you know, something that holds us back from really fully living our life. So it's, it's, it's through, it's looking at, okay, what's down? What's, what's over here? What is that? Yeah. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: yeah. And you know, to put myself on the court and honestly get kind of vulnerable here is like, what I saw was the way the grief presented itself was actually resignation, like an area of my life and in relationships and dating where it was like, yeah, that's probably just going to be the way that is, and I'm going to be really great as a doctor and I'm going to contribute to people's lives in other ways, and I've got this great family and I'll find these great friendships.

And it's just like the relationship thing. And I didn't even recognize that resignation as unresolved grief. And the other one that got me was if I was the one that left the relationship, I didn't deserve to grieve or it wasn't allowed or I shouldn't. It was like, you know, like I had somebody say to me something to the effect of like, well, you got what you wanted, what are you upset about? Now, there was a specific moment that that communication happened in, but it like, but that illuminated something for me that was true for me, which is like. I am. That's why it never even occurred to me how much was unresolved until you and I started talking more about it, you know, in that area of like, like there was this series of relationships where I'd gone for it and I, you know, was playing full out and then it would end and, and then it was like, okay, well I just got to dust myself off and pick up and move on. You know? And there wasn't like, especially if I was the one that initiated ending the relationship, it was like new. That's definitely not, that's off limits for, you know, a big grieving experience. 

Audra Boyd: Yeah. We tend to have that be off limits, right. In life where you're, you're, but really it's, it's the way you want to go so that you can look at, you know, give yourself the freedom. Of course, of course there would be grief there. It's your loss as much as it was there is, yeah. Okay. You were the person that actually was courageous enough to say, Hey, you know what, this isn't working for either one of us and ended the relationship. Sometimes that's more courageous than not ending a relationship.

It's still, Oftentimes leads to a loss that then is followed by grief in life. So, you know, for myself, I think one of the most surprising ones for me was with my health. You know, it wasn't so much getting the diagnosis of a chronic illness, but it was the experience of that and for me, just this, it was really a loss of security and a loss of a future.

You know, I had an idea what my future was going to be, and then there I was with a physical condition that literally had me in bed. You know, I'd cancel things with friends. I would just not schedule things cause I just didn't know if I was going to have the energy to go and be with people. Yet there was nothing more I loved in life than to be with people. And that loss, you know, it just really had me, take a look at, okay. One I got, there's a loss of a future. Well, let's complete that future and let's create what the future is going to look like. It gave me an opportunity to create each one newly and complete the defeatedness of the loss, if that makes any sense and then, you know, start putting in structures that we're going to work with, what my life looked like now, not what I thought it was going to look like someday. And in fact, these glasses are structure that I specifically put into place is I thought, you know, these glasses are. They're bright and they're happy and they, you know, they're alive. So I can either be a match for my glasses today or not, but either way I got to put them on, so, yeah.

Sarah Marshall, ND: Yup. That's like my golden retriever. I mean, Henry is like, he just looks at me all the time. He's like, want to play, want to play, what to play, what to play? And I'm like, no, I don't want to play, but you do. So we're going to. That's so cool. We can talk about grief and we can say, you know, but like, especially inside of the dirty work of healing, right? Like, so what. Cry for 20 minutes. We're good. Like, well, like what does grief look like? 

Audra Boyd: Like literally that simple. I would give it to you, Sarah, I promise. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: Prescription. Five minutes a day for three weeks. You're complete, right? Like, so what have you seen or, or what can you share about that? 

Audra Boyd: Well, I think, you know, I've seen a lot, right? People we try, that's what we want. We're used to instant gratification too, in our society. So it's like, okay, give me, give me the solution. Right? You know, I can look up on the internet and in less than a minute, I can find, tell you what the gross domestic product, gross domestic product is in Kazakhstan.

Right? But I can't, I can't tell you how to deal with your grief. Now I can give you access to it. I can tell you look the way through it is the way through it. Is, you know, it's really to allow yourself to process. It's allow yourself to feel your emotions. You know, I think we live in a society where negative emotions we try and avoid at all costs.

Right? I mean, they're, their songs tell, don't worry, be happy. Right? Which not that I love that song, don't get me wrong, but what if you allow it? Right? What if you llowed yourself to actually feel your feelings. One of the things that I've noticed, and I like to tell my clients, it's like, look, allow yourself to feel that emotion. Emotions are like waves. They come and they go, but resisting them will likely have them keep smacking you.

You know, I had a, a gentleman from India tell me one time, he's like, well, you know, we were having a conversation about grief. And he's like, yeah. Eat, you know, eat a jalapeno. Is it not hot? No. I mean, loss is sad. There's sadness that goes with it. But allow yourself to feel that emotion so that you can look at and see what the real opportunity of it is for you.

And there's no expiration date. It's not like, Oh, I dealt with that, that I'm done with that. When it comes to grief, whether it's a loss of someone through death or a relationship, or gosh, it could even be a failed business or a bad investment. I mean, that's a loss too, that we don't often, you know, grant the… forget graciousness around people having grief around those things. You know, you could be driving down the road and I dunno see something that brings it back to you. It's like, Oh, okay. Yeah. Then in that moment, you have the opportunity to allow yourself to feel that feeling, and then you can start to look and see if there's something that's unresolved associated with it.

You know, I was, yeah, this, this wasn't my client, but it was someone who was looking back at a moment for themselves. And, they were really upset when their grandpa grandfather passed away. Well, when he looked at it, you know, and it was one of those things that kind of kept coming up. Things, something would happen.

And he would all of a sudden, you know, have this grief or have this emotion. And what he realized is he never, so his dad worked a lot when he was little. So his grandfather was the one who taught them how to fish and ride a bike and you know, like do all those things. And we never told his grandfather how special he was to him. So that reoccurring grief was there until he actually realized that and could then tell his grandfather that yes, his grandfather was passed that, you know, write it in a letter to his grandfather. And then he was able to, for himself, take on the practice that I was like, okay, I'm going to let people in my life know how important they are, why they're important to me. So it gave him, you know, a new relationship in life, like how he gets to be with the people who does have it as like, so, yeah. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. So you can't give me the prescription then the like, 

Audra Boyd: I would if I could, you know, they've tried, right? Like there's all sorts of, you know, resources out there that, you know, like, okay, this is the process. Go through these things and you'll be good. And, yeah. Yeah. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: And I mean, and that's, that's been, you know, I mean, I, it started to become obvious that you and I have done work together around this and it's been a huge contribution to me. And that's been one of the things is like it, the sh there's no expiration date like happened that happened so long ago.

Really? It's either resolved or it's not, you know, and like as I've gotten older and I'm in different spaces in my life, things that, it's not like things that didn't bother me then bother me now, but like I see it differently. It comes through a different lens now than it did then you know, my going through my divorce and other things.

And then the other big one that you and I talked about, which actually kicked off the whole conversation, is the, the loss that happens when you fulfilled a dream. 

Audra Boyd: Yeah. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: Like we tend to think of loss as something bad that happens. We lose a job, we lose a business, we bad investment, we lose a relationship, a person in our life.

But then there's also like what you and I were talking about initially is. You know from the time I was, what I can recall is about 13 when I was going to go to high school. I remember the point where then it suddenly was like, this future gonna go to high school. And then it was, what do I need to do to have high school turnout?

And then in high school, what do I need to do to have college turnout? And then in college and then med school, and then becoming a doctor and starting my practice and my business. And now I'm 11 years in and there's like this 25 year history, that has gotten fulfilled. I've been on this general trajectory and for whatever reason, and it's probably just the cultural script when I bought this house, and actually was successfully paying all my bills on my own and I was a homeowner and I have the SUV in the driveway and the golden retriever in the backyard, it was like, Oh crap. Like it literally for awhile I thought I was depressed cause I was like. I'm bored. This is weird. I have a great life and I'm bored.

Like what do I do now? And I couldn't be like, Oh, what do you want to be up to? I like couldn't create anything. I mean, only now what, four or five months into our process, I'm just starting to like get my creative juices flowing again, where I feel like I can actually start to come up because I needed to complete the fulfillment of making it.

It's like mind boggling to me if you had said that, that that was going to involve a grieving process, you won the prize. Now you know, but there is such a thing, like, I don't know the exact phrase, but like the, you know, the gold medalist syndrome, that their whole careers have been towards reaching the certain award or certain pinnacle, and then like.

Well, and actually this is an interesting story. I happen to know the gentleman at least two years ago, who he beat the world record of the number of, feet climbed and skied under his own power. So there's like a world record of who has skied the most vertical feet in the world, and he's like 24 year old kid from Vermont and he did it. And I was there the month he completed it. Right? And when he was tired, he just skied a lot for 365 days. But there was this other space where it was like... Cause it had been a four year journey cause it wasn't, it was four years earlier that he even realized that he might have a shot. Then he trained, then he got close and then he actually did it in the fourth year. And so it was like this four year process that he'd been on, where his whole life had been about that. And then he actually beat the world record. He's a world record holder. And there was this kind of interesting like, I don't want to speak for him, but what I saw was like, now what do I do? 

Audra Boyd: Yeah. There you know that it's a common thing. I mean, if you think another one that's really typical that's similar for what you're mentioning is empty nesters. Parents whose kids are now grown and off to college, and you know, also so many times I'll hear, especially women, although I'm sure men too, but you know, moms are like, I don't even know what I'm interested in anymore. Right? But it's the same thing. It's the loss of their relationship to their kids. It's a loss of the relate your relationship to your dreams or to your goal, and then once you've achieved it, right, then it's, there is that moment of, okay, well now what? And like you said, you know, you've got a great life, you've just accomplished this major thing.

Usually it's like you don’t want to tell people you're grieving. You'll probably even don't even see it that way, but it really is. You're grieving the loss of your relationship in life. Like what's your self identity, what gives you who you are and what gets you up in the morning? And you know, for thatI don't have like a magic pill, but I, you know, I can definitely say that, what do you want to look at? Well, what was it all about that that really worked for you and acknowledge the things, all the things that work, all acknowledge all the things that didn't work in a way that really gets you present to the accomplishment of the whole thing and in a way so that, that you can complete that chapter of life, right? And then, then you can, then you can create newly cause when you complete all of that, that leaves you at a place where you know there's nothing there anymore. You've acknowledged all the great things, all the struggles, all the triumphs, all of that. At least what I've found for myself being able to do that is then, only then can you really create, you know, for me it was, again, around my health. You know, I, I completed a career that I had had for a number of years and in completing that, it wasn’t until I actually completed it so I could even see what I wanted to create next. And from there I could acknowledge everything that worked and didn't work about that, but then really tell the truth about, okay, well what I, what do I want this next chapter to look like. And it was completely different. It's like, okay, I want the flexibility to be traveling around the world, you know, you know, go visit friends for three weeks, spend three weeks watching a fabulous golden retriever in the snow for two, you know? But had I not done that work to really acknowledge the accomplishments of that, I don't know that I ever would have saw what I really wanted now. I think, and I think that's where people tend to struggle and we don't, we aren't really great about acknowledging ourselves either. So yeah, that's...

Sarah Marshall, ND: just as much as we, I hide from grief. I hide from that acknowledgement too, you know, and it's like, and they're actually connected, which is like a weird thing to see.

But you know, like I will. You know, I notice when, when, you know, we've used the word complete a lot in this, and it's like, when something's bugging me or bothering me, it's like there's a repeated loop in my brain or a thought that happens. Or I keep thinking about the same scenario over and over and over and over and over again.

And like you've said, actually slowing down and taking the time. I've done it through journaling. I've done it with another person or I've journaled and shared with another person. You know, my sister and I are best friends and talk all the time and like close friends and it's like to actually get to acknowledge what did work about, say a relationship that I ended.

What did I love about that? What did I, you know, to be able to honor all those components and then acknowledge, and this is when I've been working on is, we have a cultural myth that all relationships that end are failed relationships. Like there's just this like, and then it's interesting though, if you actually go looking, but then all the relationships that are still together, are they all successful relationships?

Most people will be like, no. So I'm like, so where, where's the, do we ever get to have success in our relationships? So I, for myself, I've been reframing that, that a relationship ending is not got anything to do with the success. The success is in the accomplishment, the creation, the experiences that happened and you know, to some degree I definitely measure a level of my success is what is my relationship with that person look like now. We're not romantically involved anymore or whatever, you know? So like that gets to give me a different set of metrics than just like, well, if you're together, it's successful. And if you're a part, it wasn't, and it was a failed relationship, but I'm like, ah, you know? But so that acknowledgement gave me access to completion, being complete about it. Like, it doesn't have that loop going on in my head anymore. 

Audra Boyd: Yeah. That's really great. Yeah. You know, there's another, you mentioned journaling, which is a great one, but I'll just offer another one is creating its timeline, right? It's just like, look, okay, well what's the timeline of that relationship was the beginning of, what's the earliest thing you can remember? What's the last thing? And then you start putting everything in that, you know, like on the timeline that you recall about it. You'll recall the good things. You'll recall the bad things if you want. Put the good things on one side of the timeline that the things that you would consider not so good on the other side, and then you can really start to acknowledge the accomplishment of it, who you were in the relationship, who they were, what got fulfilled. Right? So you can do that with a job. You can do that with a relationship with any person or really anything. You can even do that with, a goal. Like, you know, you mentioned like, okay, get through high school, get through college, get through med school, get the successful practice up and going. You can use that tool to really communicate, right. Like to start getting it out of your head and in something that you can see and when you see it, you can then start to acknowledge the things that work, the things that didn't work. And like you said, and that ongoing loop. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. 

Audra Boyd: About whatever that might be. not that it's bad, but to be able to then, okay. If you end that loops like, okay, now, now what? We can actually focus your attention on whatever the next, you know, the next thing that that passion or adventure that you want to have in your life.  yeah, 

Sarah Marshall, ND: so when we look at connecting like, I mean, it may seem, obviously grief is a part of healing, but when you look at, like one of the things I've been exploring in this is. What does it actually mean to heal? You know, like many times you'll see definitions like to be made whole to restore back to wholeness, right? So when you look at your own grieving processes or things that you've been through, like how can you connect? What would you say about connecting grief and the healing process?

Audra Boyd: Wow. That is such a good question. You know, the one thing that I'll say to that I'll start with, you know, we say that grief is the emotion that follows a loss. We don't say how long it follows the loss or that it even starts right away and ends at some point in time. Right? So that's, you know, that's one thing that there is, I think for us to all embrace, it's like, you know, your experience with that might happen later, might not hit you right away. It could be later. but that, you know, you allow yourself to have that kind of flexibility. I've now forgotten what the actual question was. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: Is, is just you sharing about how you see healing and grief connected?

Audra Boyd: Well, you know, I would say with, when you experience a loss, there is an end to something and the process where you go through and actually identify the grief and look, at least for me, you know, I'll pick one that was kind of nontraditional with the loss of my house and the possessions that I had around that. Being able to look at and see what the source of the grief was there, right. That loss of financial prosperity, all the things that I thought it was, I was able to really look at and say, you know, it was a house and some possessions. And I was also in being able to look at that and identifying what had me uneasy at the end of it gave me access to ease afterwards.

And if that's not healing, to go from unease to gease. I don't know what is, and I'm not saying that, look, there's some point when you deal with grief that then things will be easy. That's not what I said. No, I really just meant ease. And sometimes that's ease with allowing myself to feel the emotions that come up about it.

You know, to allow myself the freedom to feel the, you know, embarrassment that, you know, somehow I should have known. Right? Somehow I should have known my house was going to flood, or, you know, I lived in a flood plain. So I actually did know there was a chance, right? A hundred year flood plain. But to allow myself to, okay, to have the thoughts that go with it, and then allow myself to feel the feelings and like I said, go from that unease with it to having some ease around it. It just gives you access to being able to live life. And for me, that's, I don't know. That's what healing is.

Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, I ha can actually see the majority of my clients, I would say really all of them have had to bump up against their healing, their bodies or healing the physical ailments they're dealing with takes confronting, letting stuff go. Like there's a point where for some of my clients, it's been a career for some of my clients, it's been, you know, a way of life revolving around certain foods and alcohol and social activities that now are going to look different because they need to eat differently and they need to drink differently and that there’s a successive series of losses because the life they were living was creating the symptoms they had and if they want different symptoms or no symptoms, there was going to be this shift. And we put so much emphasis on like the empowering change and I just woke up one day and I put the donut down and like, but like they're usually, I mean, I've gone through periods of time where like. Comfort food is called comfort food for a freaking reason because it actually works. There is a neurologic pattern to comfort food. There's actually a biochemical component too, like gluten connects into our opiate receptors, so we literally like self-sooth through these foods and when I really needed to knock it off and change my diet, I mean I grieved not being a vegetarian anymore.

I was born and raised a vegetarian in a household of, you know, my view through my childhood eyes, you know, my mom had her maiden name. My dad had, you know, his name. I had my dad's name. My sister came from a different marriage, so we, we didn't even have the same last name, you know, it was like, there was no tradition.

There was no continuity. There was no, we're the, the, this family, you know? And so, although jokingly, we now are the Russia, Rufus Wilshaw family, we've taken a syllable of every single person's last name and smashed it all together, but you know, creation of a new reality. But it was like. I remember I came home from my first seminar in applied kinesiology my first year of medical school, and I just, at that point, there was so much happening that was obvious that I was a carbon-tarion addicted to sugar and my body was starved for protein.

That was what I was doing with being a vegetarian since birth and I needed to knock it off and I went to paleo and it was a 24 hour, like switch, like the next day. And I spent three hours crying that night, a loss of an identity. Because I could say to people like, I've never had a hamburger. There was something special about not having ever had meat, and there was this achievement of 25 years and then what it meant about me and like, I mean, you could pretty much figure out my political views, my environmental view, like there was a whole world that I attached to being a vegetarian and it was like this huge change in my health journey was this confronting what I had to give up and that loss. So I think. What I've seen, you know, in, in the unexplored territory of physically healing. Grief is a really integral part of being willing to grieve, going into those places, confronting the losses, letting them go, like, I think it is integral. 

Audra Boyd: Oh, absolutely. You know, as you know from our work together. For me with my health, one of those things was actually leaving, leaving a company, a career that, you know, I, I absolutely loved, adore. I loved what I did.

Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. 

Audra Boyd: How I did it wasn't working for my body. My body just kept telling me, this isn't working. That's why I had, you know, how it was, you know, couldn't get out of bed days. Right? And, for me, I had to confront, that, that was the way I dealt with a lot of things. It's like, Oh, well let me just go make a difference for other people.

Let me throw myself into my work. My work made a difference for, you know, hundreds if not thousands of people. Right? And for me, I had to confront the level to which that didn't work because I wasn't making a difference for myself, at least not the difference that I needed to make for my physical healing. And that was, you know, that was as, as you know, it was a challenging, it took, gosh, I don't know. We talked about me not working for, at least the year before, actually, I 

Sarah Marshall, ND: was going to say six months, so, yeah. About that. Yeah. 

Audra Boyd: Yeah. Well, I think I actually gave a six month notice and then didn't complete until six months.

Yeah. Six months after that, so I figured, yeah, probably a year. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that, you know, that not only was it the completing the, that's thought that I had about, you know, who I am, my identity associated with my career, but you know, just confronting like, gosh, that just, you know, that shone the light would have shined the light.

I don't know what the right word to say that is. Right? But on all of those places where I had similar things with the loss of something in the grief that followed, and I thought I processed it the way it, you know, and I'd never really did. I, you know, went to that, that strategy that a lot of, Oh, the time heals all wounds. Yeah, well guess what? Doesn't, actually it might...if we just 

Sarah Marshall, ND: if we just put this under a rock and leave it there many years later, mostly it's still under the rock. It's still under the rock. 

Audra Boyd: Yeah. I have. I have a burn on my arm and it's pissy and festering. If I cover up and pretend like, okay, let me get on with life. Does it hurt? Yes. It still hurts right there. In fact, it probably spreads and starts hurting in other places and we can get into a whole thing. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: Well. I actually do think we have some of the time heals all wounds because if you leave the body alone, it probably will heal a lot of things, but the body's busy doing stuff while you're leaving it alone. It's not like nothing's happening. Right. We can do another podcast on that, but we're not going to take that on right now, but yeah. Yeah. 

Audra Boyd: But it sounds like a good one for the funeral. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah.

So here's, here's the million dollar golden nugget. If there was one thing you wanted to stand on a soap box about grief, what would be that? Like if I could say anything to people about grief, it would be this. 

Audra Boyd: Ah, if there's anything I could say that is such a good question. look, it's natural and it's a part of life.

We, we try and pretend that it's not an avoided, like we avoid those negative feelings, but it really is. So if you could grant yourself right, the graciousness to allow yourself to look at the losses in your life and the grief and talk about it. Cause what I can see, as you know, in are, the thing that I really want to get out there is not only for yourself, but do it for the next generation. Do it for your kids. Show them that it's a natural thing. You know, they're growing up in a society where school shootings and mass shootings at concerts and things are, I have, sadly, 

Sarah Marshall, ND: oddly normal. 

Audra Boyd: Yeah. And they may not know someone, but they see that at some point they'll likely also have an experience of loss with grief following.

And if you can, you know, shine a light on and say, look, it's messy, but the best way is through it, and to look at it and explore what's in the corners of it, it's what you're able to then create. Going out of it and who you get to be is just, you know, is alive. You know? It's like a live in life. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. And the connections. The relationships, you know, like how, when you know, one of the things I learned from you is how much I have the, and if I am going to grieve, I will do it on my own by myself behind a locked door in the dark. You know, and, and sometimes I have actually improved my relationship with myself by allowing some of those emotions to move, but in where I've shared them with others and I've been with others where I've shared that it's happened with others, there's this bond. This connection because then their heart also wants that same thing of giving the gift to your kids and also will strengthen that relationship in families. When we, when we're openhearted and more openhearted, our hearts pour out all kinds of things. They giggle and they cry, and all of it. Yeah.

Thank you. So, so, so, so, so much for taking time out to share with us about all of this and, and diving into, you know, what can be a pretty challenging subject for people and you know, is, is part of this process of how we heal and what brings us wholeness and connection and love and intimacy in our lives that is actually what I suspect most of us are really going for underneath it all. So, and thank you for being one of those people that's contributed that to me too. 

Audra Boyd: Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. It's been, it's been a real gift to be here. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: Good. Awesome. Until next time. All right. Thank you. Bye.

Thanks so much to today's guest, Audra Boyd, for sharing her insights on authenticity and healing grief. You can learn more about finding your own healing by going to SarahMarshallND.com or following me on Instagram at Sarah Marshall ND. Special thanks to our composer, Rodney Nikpour and editor Kendra Vicon.

Thank you for being here. Until next time.