How Self-Compassion Helps The Grieving Process, Lydia Lombardi Good Ep. 22

Lydia Lombardi Good is a licensed clinical social worker. She shares the importance of self-compassion, what it is, and how to get comfortable with it and how it helps the grieving process. Note: A Life and Death Conversation is produced for the ear. The optimal experience will come from listening to it. We provide the transcript as a way to easily navigate to a particular section and for those who would like to follow along using the text. We strongly encourage you to listen to the audio which allows you to hear the full emotional impact of the show. A combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers generates transcripts which may contain errors. The corresponding audio should be checked before quoting in print. Contact Lydia Lombardi Good, Pier View Counseling Transcript How Self-Compassion Helps The Grieving Process Dr. Bob: Yeah. That's my pleasure. This is a Life and Death Conversation, and we talk about things that we can do to enhance life and bring more joy and peace to life, and of course, we talk about death. We don't shy away from the topic of death. We always explore a bit about how our guests feel about the whole end of life, death and dying, what experiences they've had, how the awareness of death seems to show up in your life. For people who come on and have these conversations, most of the time they're pretty comfortable speaking about death and sharing their experiences and thoughts about it. I'm just going to open it up and let you share a little bit. I know that you do a lot of work in grief and loss, and you've been in hospice, and have a lot of experience. So share a little bit about what the idea of death and dying means to you, and how it shows up in your life. Lydia Lombardi Good: What I learned from my experience with death and dying, working with clients, having my own personal experience losing close loved ones, is the more we think about death and understand that it is inevitable, and we are all dying a little bit every day, I think the richer a life we are able to live, and we are more mindful of the choices we make, and the people we choose to surround ourselves with, and the life we want to live, knowing that nothing is permanent. Everything is impermanent. And if we live a life without regrets and can be more present to our lives instead of staying maybe stuck in the past, or focused too much on the future, we can look back and say, "You know, I fully experienced all that. I don't wish to be back there again. I wish to be right here, right now, to live my life fully," knowing that we really only have one shot at that. So that's how it's changed me a lot in terms of my own choices, the way I live my life, the way I try to stay compassionate. A lot of it's talked today, and what I really am passionate about is teaching people to embody self-compassion and treat yourself kindly, the way you would treat a close friend. And the more we can do that, the better life we can have. The more chances we take, the more we can just fix up things as they are, instead of always wishing things to be another way, or for us to be another way. And when we do that, we're missing what's happening right now. Dr. Bob: Yeah. That's beautiful. And I think it's pretty common to hear people share that when they contemplate death, when they recognize, like you say, the impermanence of everything, it really allows us to stay more focused on what's happening right now, and feel gratitude, and just feel very present. I want to talk about the mindfulness, the self-compassion, and the mindfulness, because mindfulness meditation, self-compassion have figured prominently in my life and I've done my work there, I've gone through courses in mindfulness. And it's so interesting what you said, to treat yourself the way that you would treat a close friend. Do we do that? I mean, do we really do that? The stuff that we lay on ourselves, and the way that we diss ourselves, which is so common. Like, if we were doing that to a friend, would they stick around? Would we still- Lydia Lombardi Good: We wouldn't have any. Dr. Bob: We wouldn't have any friends. Share a little bit more about that, about how you came to that, what your journey has been to become a teacher of self-compassion and mindfulness. Lydia Lombardi Good: Yes. Yeah. So, I was working in hospice since about 2007, 2008. Right out of graduate school I started this work, and I think I understood it to the best of my knowledge. I'd had a lot of loss in my past, and a lot of trauma that I thought I had worked through and had done a lot of healing around and was in this work. And I think I had as much compassion for the experiences of my clients and patients as I could have at the time, for that point I was in my life where I was at and what experiences I had been a part of at that point. And then it was 2012; I lost my dad to cancer. He died of prostate cancer...