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 how it carried her through losing her sight, eldership as capacity rather than age, and what it means to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.
This one goes deep.
If grief, death, or darkness have been knocking at your door — this is the conversation to sit with.
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Ready to go deeper? https://www.manuncivilized.com/start
Join The UNcivilized Nation — a brotherhood of men doing the work: https://www.manuncivilized.com/thenation
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Connect with Siobhan:
https://griefpilgrim.com/
Instagram @grief_pilgrim
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Connect with Traver:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/traverboehm
Substack: https://traverboehm.substack.com
Website: https://www.manuncivilized.com
Chapter List
00:00 Welcome & Meet Siobhan
00:58 The Land of Taos & What It Asks of You
04:34 How Grief Found Her
08:35 Beginning the Apprenticeship With Grief
10:13 Learning to Trust Death
15:06 What Culture Gets Wrong About Death
21:09 Using Death as a Compass
27:37 Non-Human Teachers & Chronic Illness as Initiation
32:52 The Responsibility of the Initiated
35:10 Eldership as Capacity, Not Age
42:11 Losing Her Sight to Finally See
43:19 Lessons from Losing Sight
48:48 The Medicine of Story & How to Court a Relationship With Grief
54:23 Wrap up & Where to Find Siobhan
