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.

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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.

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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_/

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Nick Gonzalez entered the Army at 17 years old. He arrived at Fort Hood on September 10, 2001, and woke up the next morning to a world that had changed overnight.

What followed were years of military service, friendship, loss, survivor’s guilt, grief, and eventually, an entirely different way of living. Today, Nick is a husband, father, yoga teacher, owner of South Side Studio Yoga, and the creator of a free Veterans Yoga community here in Missoula, Montana.

In Part One, we trace the experiences and people that shaped him, including his friend Dave, whose death changed him deeply, and the dream that allowed Nick to encounter that grief in an entirely different way. We talk about survivor’s guilt, alcohol, the people we continue to carry after they’re gone, and how the experiences we never would have chosen can change the trajectory of our lives.

What interested me most about Nick’s story is what he chose to create from everything he lived through. For years, he has offered free Veterans Yoga every Monday night in Missoula, and now streams those classes on YouTube so veterans all over the world can join him.

That community currently gathers in a canvas tent in Nick’s backyard. He is now working to build a permanent yurt where veterans can gather safely and warmly year-round.

This is a huge part of why I created The Golden Thread, to create a space where stories like Nick’s can be told, because we never know what hearing someone else’s story might open inside of us or inspire us to create.

One more thread I still can’t quite believe: this episode releases September 10, 2026, exactly 25 years to the day after Nick arrived at Fort Hood. GOOSEBUMPS!

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.

You don’t have to hit rock bottom to know something in your life needs to change.

You can be successful. A good mother. A good friend. Someone who takes care of her health. Someone who knows all the “right” things to do.

And still have parts of your life that don’t feel the way you want them to.

That is where this conversation with Lindsay Sparks begins.

Lindsay is a registered dietitian and intuitive eating counselor who spent years helping women understand their relationship with food and their bodies, while privately beginning to recognize some of those same patterns in herself.

What followed was a much bigger reckoning with food, body image, alcohol, anxiety, perfectionism, motherhood, belonging, and the enormous amount of energy we can spend trying to manage ourselves.

We talk about the gray area that can be so difficult to name. When your drinking doesn’t necessarily look like a “problem,” but you’re thinking about it more than you want to. When you make rules and then break them. When you try to moderate. When you wonder if you’re overreacting. When part of you knows something needs to change and another part keeps convincing you that you’re fine.

Lindsay shares her own path to sobriety and the realization that there didn’t need to be one catastrophic rock bottom for her to choose differently.

And this is also a deeply personal conversation for me.

There were pieces of Lindsay’s story that felt so much like my own. We talk openly about our relationships with alcohol, the shame that can exist around it, motherhood, our bodies, and what it means to begin trusting yourself again after spending years overriding what you know.

Because this episode isn’t really about whether you drink or don’t drink. Or whether you eat the “right” foods. Or whether you love your body every day.

It’s about the relationship you have with yourself underneath all of it.

And what becomes possible when you finally start listening.

ABOUT LINDSAY SPARKS

Lindsay Sparks is a registered dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor specializing in women’s health, intuitive eating, and nutrition support during substance use recovery, particularly alcohol recovery. She provides 1:1 nutrition counseling and offers wellness workshops and nutrition presentations for groups and organizations.

Connect with Lindsay:

🌿 Website

www.feedyourspark.net

📸 Instagram

@feed.your.spark

CONTINUE THE JOURNEY

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

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What happens after you see something you can’t unsee?

After the breakthrough. After the realization. After the experience that changes the way you see yourself or your life.

What do you actually do with what you now know?

In Part Two of my conversation with Dr. Eric Russell, we go into the part of transformation that I think we need to talk about more: what happens after.

We go deeper into plant medicine and integration, and why making sense of a powerful experience is only the beginning. Integration asks something more of us. It asks us to look at our behaviors, our patterns, our relationships, and sometimes the entire life we’ve built around an older version of ourselves.

Eric and I also talk about the responsibility that comes with holding space for others in psychedelic work. We get into discernment, projection, the importance of doing your own inner work, and what can happen when a guide hasn’t learned to separate their own fears and stories from someone else’s experience.

And then the conversation widens.

We talk about shedding identities. Outgrowing relationships. Grieving versions of ourselves we once needed to be. The strange in-between where you know you can’t go back, but you don’t quite know what comes next.

We talk about control, surrender, trust, and how incredibly destabilizing change can feel while you’re actually living through it.

Because a breakthrough can change what you see.

But then you have to go home and live your life.

And that may be where the real transformation begins.

This is Part Two of my conversation with Dr. Eric Russell. If you haven’t listened to Part One, you can begin with “When the Life You Built No Longer Fits.”

Connect with Dr. Eric Russell

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

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.

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

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If this episode resonated with you, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who may need it. Every listen, review, and share helps these conversations reach more people.

Thank you for being here.

❤️ Danielle

What happens when the life you worked so hard to build stops feeling like yours?

In Part One of my conversation with Dr. Eric Russell, we begin with his story: a childhood filled with curiosity, a career built in the corporate tech world, years spent living in survival mode, and the unexpected rupture that forced him to question the direction his life was taking.

But our conversation goes much deeper from there.

Eric is a doctor of psychology, plant medicine educator, and integration coach, and together we explore the intersection of psychology, identity, plant medicine, and personal transformation.

We talk about what happens when we suppress parts of ourselves in order to belong or succeed, and how difficult it can be to recognize that the life you've built around those identities may no longer fit.

We also begin exploring Eric's experience with psilocybin and the role plant medicine played in changing the way he understood himself and his life. From there, our conversation opens into some of the deeper and more nuanced pieces of psychedelic work: preparation, safety, integration, discernment, and the responsibility that comes with helping someone make meaning from a powerful experience.

This isn't simply a conversation about leaving one life and creating another. It's about what happens when something disrupts the way you've been living and you begin looking more closely at what belongs to you, what you've inherited, and what you may be ready to reconsider.

This is Part One of my conversation with Dr. Eric Russell.

Connect with Dr. Eric Russell

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

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.

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✨ Website
https://healwithdaniellemarie.com/

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

🎥 Watch full video episodes
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In Part Two of my conversation with Letty Feltenberger, we pick up where Survival to Self left off and move deeper into what happens when we begin to move out of survival and ask a different question: Who am I underneath all of it?

We talk about the versions of ourselves we created in order to survive, the ways we learned to numb, perform, people-please, or outrun what we were feeling, and what happens when those ways of being no longer fit.

At the center of this conversation is a question I keep returning to: What if our purpose isn’t something we’re meant to do, but someone we’re meant to become?

Letty shares how her relationship with purpose has shifted from asking how she is supposed to help or serve others to asking who she is when she allows herself to be fully seen and expressed.

From there, we explore curiosity as a pathway back to ourselves. The curiosity we naturally carry as children. The questions we slowly learn to stop asking. And what becomes possible when we begin turning that curiosity inward again.

We also go deep into integration.

Because a breakthrough, a breathwork session, a plant medicine experience, or any profound moment of realization can open something within us, but the experience itself isn’t the work. The work is what happens when we return to our lives. When the anger surfaces. When the grief arrives. When an old pattern gets activated and, instead of outrunning ourselves, we learn how to meet ourselves there.

We talk about ego deaths, nervous system responses, grief, witnessing, and what it takes to recognize the patterns we’ve been living inside and begin choosing differently.

And as our conversation comes to a close, we trace the thread running through Letty’s life and the experiences that have shaped the woman she is becoming.

This is a conversation about moving beyond survival, remembering who you are, and learning how to actually live what you’ve come to understand.

🌿 Website
https://aftertheexhale.systeme.io/breathwork

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

📘 Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/share/1CraAMFJtq/

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

UNBOUND
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✨ Website
https://healwithdaniellemarie.com/

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

🎥 Watch full video episodes
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If this conversation resonated with you, follow The Golden Thread, leave a five-star rating, and share this episode with someone you love who is walking their own path of becoming. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

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