Navigate grief by understanding the Dual Process Model. You'll swing between loss orientation (feeling the pain) and restoration orientation (living life). Both are essential, and fluctuating is normal. You are not broken. #GriefSupport #MentalHealth #CopingSkills #SelfCare
Grief isn't a problem to solve, but a seed planted within. What grows from it depends on how you tend it, leading to deeper compassion and a clearer sense of what truly matters. #GriefToGrowth #LossAndHealing #MovingForward #SpiritualGrowth #LoveEndures
What happens when the person you used to be doesn't exist anymore — not because they died, but because a diagnosis, a surgery, or a health crisis rewrote who you are? In this episode, Loni Fagel joins me to talk about a grief almost nobody names: the grief of losing…
Have you ever looked in the mirror and mourned the person you used to be — even though you're still here? In this episode of Grief 2 Growth, I sit down with Loni Fagel — a licensed professional clinical counselor, EMDRIA-approved consultant, and expressive arts therapist — to talk about…
What if the "guardian angel" you've prayed to and the "spirit guide" you've been told to fear are the exact same presence, just described through a different lens? In this episode, Brian sits down with Michael McAdams — a man raised in a family soaked in Pentecostal conviction who discovered…
What if the spirit guides you've heard about and the angels you grew up believing in... are the exact same thing? 👼 In this episode, I sit down with Michael McAdams, whose mother spent 22 years receiving channeled messages at her typewriter — messages that became the book An Angel…
What if the strangest moments at the end of life are actually the most meaningful? In this episode, Alexandra Grabbe joins Brian to talk about the seven months she spent caring for her 96-year-old mother, Bea, at home — and the deathbed visions that changed how she understands what happens…
What if the strange visions at the end of life aren't confusion — but connection? 🌿 In this episode of Grief 2 Growth, I sit down with **Alexandra Grabbe** — former Paris talk show host, Cape Cod innkeeper, and author of the new home care memoir *Seeing Joy*. Alexandra spent…
Dr. Adam Rizvi shares a profound insight: the physical body's death is not the final end. Modern society's lack of a spiritual framework leaves many lost, searching for meaning in a materialist world. #Afterlife #Spirituality #NearDeathExperience #Existentialism #DrAdamRizvi
Dr. Adam Rizvi recounts a touching moment where a dying patient, unresponsive for 24 hours, received a final message of love from his son. The room experienced unusual light phenomena afterward. #EndofLife #DyingPatient #Love #SpiritualExperience #Nurses #Doctors
What does an ICU doctor see when he's present at the exact moment someone dies? Dr. Adam Rizvi has spent his career in critical care medicine, standing at hundreds of bedsides during life's most sacred transitions. Trained as a physician but grounded early in comparative religion, Adam has watched patients…
Dr. Adam Rizvi has spent his career in the Intensive Care Unit, standing at hundreds of bedsides during the most sacred moments a human life can hold. He's trained in traditional medicine, but somewhere along the way, medicine alone stopped being able to explain everything he was witnessing. Rooms that…
Why can Earth, Wind & Fire, Enigma, Supertramp, and Pink Floyd all be singing about the same wound — and only one of them tells you how to heal it? In this video, I dig into four songs that shaped me at different points in my life, and a distinction…
A song comes on. Three minutes later, you don’t know if you just got sad or got healed. Maybe both. That’s what a handful of songs do to me. Earth, Wind & Fire’s “That’s The Way of the World.” Enigma’s “Return to Innocence.” Supertramp’s “The Logical Song.” Pink Floyd’s “Another…
Grief isn't a checklist of stages you complete. It's a seed that gets planted in you, and what grows from it depends on how you tend it. In this short film, grief guide and certified grief educator Brian D. Smith shares the philosophy behind Grief 2 Growth: an approach to…
The raw pain of abandonment and chosen separation lingers, shaping adult relationships. A childhood learned to suppress, pushing loved ones away for fear of further hurt. #AbandonmentIssues #ChildhoodTrauma #Adulting #EmotionalHealing #PersonalGrowth
Miist was five years old when her parents removed themselves from her life. Not through death — through choice. As she tells me in this episode, that distinction made the wound deeper, not shallower. She knew they could come back. They simply didn't. By 28, she had a terminal cancer…
A few weeks ago I was talking with a client. I’ve changed some of the details, but this happened. I’ll call her Pat. Her husband Frank passed about a month ago, after thirty-two years of marriage. She spent more than half her life with him. She can barely eat now.…
What if the loneliest moment of your life was also the moment something started growing? Miist was abandoned by her parents at five years old. At 28, she was handed a terminal cancer diagnosis. She didn't write her first song until she was 34 — and now her music has…
At 18, Maya Tiwari was given a death sentence — six months to live. Instead, she spent six months alone in the Vermont woods, and came back a different person entirely. That single decision set her on a path that led through 25 years as a Vedic monk, a pioneering…
What if the power you've been looking for outside yourself has been inside you all along? My guest today is Maya Tiwari — a spiritual teacher, humanitarian, and the pioneer who brought Ayurveda to North America. But before any of that, she was an 18-year-old given a death sentence: six…
Within two weeks of meeting John, Marcie Dean received a message she hoped was only fear: enjoy this, it's real, but he's going to die. He'd been getting the same feeling before they ever met. He was 38, healthy, five years younger than her. They chased down every explanation, found…
John made Marcie Dean a promise. If anything ever happened to him, he would come through in music. In June of 2023, John passed while saving his son's life during a boating trip off the North Carolina coast. What happened in the months after is the reason this conversation exists.…
When someone passes by suicide, the casseroles don't come. Neither do the cards or the phone calls. Jayne Madigan's sister lives in a neighborhood with a meal train for every birth and every death. When her 24-year-old son Brandon passed, she got nothing. That silence is its own second loss,…