EP 427 The Many Scarred Woman Apprenticing With Grief | Siobhan Asgharzadeh

About this episode

Siobhan Asgharzadeh discusses the importance of embracing grief and death as generative forces in life.

Most humans aren’t taught to grieve. And that avoidance — of grief, of death, of darkness — might be the thing costing us the most. Siobhan Asgharzadeh is a grief guide, death midwife, and storyteller who has spent her life apprenticing to the forces most of us spend ours running from. In this conversation, we get into what it actually means to trust death, why our cultural distrust of it is keeping us small and stuck, and how grief — when you stop caging it — becomes one of the most generative forces in a human life. Siobhan lost her best friend at 33. A month later, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and lost her eyesight. What came out of that darkness wasn't just survival — it was the beginning of a deep and ongoing apprenticeship with grief, death, story, and the inner world. She calls herself a grief pilgrim, and this conversation will make it clear why. We cover the distrust of death as the root of cultural disease, what it looks like to build a real relationship with grief instead of just managing it, the wolf framework for working with grief at street level, why darkness isn't the enemy — and why our obsession with light is costing us, the medicine of story and…

People in this episode

Host: Traver Boehm

Guest: Siobhan Asgharzadeh

Topics covered

• grief
• death
• storytelling
• cultural distrust
• apprenticeship
• inner world

Keywords

• grief
• death
• darkness
• story
• cultural disease
• apprenticeship
• multiple sclerosis
• eldership

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