What if grief has something to teach us about living?

When someone we love dies, our understanding of life changes. We begin asking questions we may have never considered before. What happens to love after death? How do we continue living when someone who was part of our world is no longer physically here? And what becomes possible when we allow ourselves to fully experience grief?

In Part Two of Broken Open by Grief, Danielle Marie and Stefanie Joseph continue their deeply personal conversation about death, love, presence, and the ways loss can transform our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Through their experiences of losing people they deeply love, Danielle and Stefanie explore the relationship between grief and love, the meaning we make from loss, and the possibility that death has something profound to teach us about being alive.

This conversation is an invitation to sit with the questions, honor the complexity of grief, and consider how we might carry our love forward into the lives we are still here to live.

About Stefanie Joseph

Stefanie Joseph is a writer and mother currently working on her memoir, No Words Were Spoken Yet So Much Was Said. Following the death of her sister Jen, she began questioning everything she thought she understood about death, grief, grace, and love.

Her writing explores what happens when we allow grief to become a teacher, what death can reveal about living, and how our relationships with those we've lost continue beyond their physical presence.

Continue the Journey

🌿 Join UNBOUND, my free community where we continue the conversations from the podcast through reflection, astrology, plant medicine, and intentional self-discovery.

UNBOUND
https://www.skool.com/unbound-4628

✨ Website
https://healwithdaniellemarie.com/

📸 Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/iamdaniellemarie_/

🎥 Watch full video episodes
https://www.youtube.com/@iamdaniellemarieofficial

If this conversation resonates with you, please consider liking, subscribing or following, sharing it with someone who may need it, and leaving a review. These simple acts help support The Golden Thread and allow these conversations to reach more people.

There are some losses that divide our lives into a before and an after.

The person is gone, but the love isn’t. And somehow, we’re left learning how to live in a world that kept moving when ours stopped.

In this deeply personal conversation, I sit down with writer Stefanie Joseph, whose sister Jen’s death changed the way she understood grief, love, presence, and what it means to truly be alive. Stefanie is currently writing her memoir, No Words Were Spoken Yet So Much Was Said, an exploration of the lessons death has taught her and the relationships that continue beyond physical loss.

Stefanie and I found each other through a podcast, only to later discover how closely our stories mirrored one another. Within months of each other, we had both lost the person we considered our person: her sister Jen and my best friend Jessi.

We talk about those final weeks of Jen’s life, the hummingbird that became her unmistakable sign, and what it meant for Stefanie to stay fully present with her sister as she was dying. We explore the signs and synchronicities that can keep us connected to the people we love, and the stillness grief asks of us when everything inside wants to run from the pain. Pasted text

We also talk about what grief begins to reveal when we allow ourselves to actually feel it.

The ways we numb. The ways we hide. The identities and survival patterns we’ve carried for years. The relationships that change. The thousand smaller deaths that can follow the first one. And, slowly, the return to ourselves. Pasted text

Stefanie says grief is our capacity to love.

I believe grief can become a portal.

This conversation lives somewhere between those two truths: in the love that remains, the presence death can awaken in us, and the question of how we continue living when someone we love is no longer physically here.

This is Part One of The Grief That Breaks Us Open.

If this conversation speaks to you, please follow or subscribe to The Golden Thread, share this episode with someone who may need it, and leave a review. Every like, share, and review helps these conversations reach more people.

Continue the Journey

🌿 Join UNBOUND, my free community where we continue the conversations from the podcast through reflection, astrology, plant medicine, and intentional self-discovery.

UNBOUND
https://www.skool.com/unbound-4628

✨ Website
https://healwithdaniellemarie.com/

📸 Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/iamdaniellemarie_/

🎥 Watch full video episodes
https://www.youtube.com/@iamdaniellemarieofficial

What do we build from the things we survive?

In Part Two of my conversation with Nick Gonzalez, we move deeper into the life he created after the military, loss, grief, and survivor’s guilt, and into the practice that would eventually change so much for him: yoga.

Nick shares how yoga teacher training challenged his ego, what it meant to go from needing to prove himself to simply showing up and doing the work, and how the practice eventually became something much bigger than his own healing.

We talk about leadership, asking for help, learning to receive, and the vulnerability that comes with building something you believe in when you can’t do it alone. Nick also shares the heart behind his free Veterans Yoga community and why the space he created for other veterans has become something he needs just as much as they do.

Today, that community gathers in a canvas tent in Nick’s backyard here in Missoula. He is working to build a permanent yurt where veterans can gather safely and warmly year-round, practice together, connect, and know there is a place they can come back to.

This is one of the threads I love most about Nick’s story. Something helped hold him, and eventually he created a space that could hold other people too. Now, through The Golden Thread, we have an opportunity to help him continue building it.

CONNECT WITH NICK + SUPPORT VETERANS YOGA

🧘 Practice with Nick

https://www.southsidestudioyoga.com/classes

🎖️ Free Veterans Yoga online

https://youtube.com/@yogawithnickg?si=-D9hVikmG9KWA7Id

🏕️ Nick’s Veterans Yoga Yurt Project

https://www.southsidestudioyoga.com/about-4-1

🤍 Donate to help build the yurt

https://redwillowlearning.org/make-a-donation/

📸 Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/southsidestudioyoga/

CONTINUE THE JOURNEY

🌿 Join UNBOUND, my free community where we continue the conversations from the podcast through reflection, astrology, plant medicine, and intentional self-discovery.

https://www.skool.com/unbound-4628

✨ Website

https://healwithdaniellemarie.com/

📸 Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/iamdaniellemarie_/

🎥 Watch full video episodes

https://www.youtube.com/@iamdaniellemarieofficial

If this conversation moved something in you, please like, subscribe or follow, share, and leave a review. These small actions help The Golden Thread reach more people.