What your grieving loved one wishes you knew | Nonny Maphoka Mbathane

Nonny Maphoka Mbathane is a soul who knows grief as a lifelong companion, and who has learned to channel that pain into care, artistry, and language that holds what so many of us cannot yet name. Nonny shares a sacred grief ritual from her culture and talks to what it felt like to lose both parents at a young age. She reflects on parenting herself in a world that moved on without pausing to ask if she was okay. The isolation, the fear, and the ways that grief becomes not just about death but about all the versions of ourselves and our lives that we have to let go of in order to grow. This is a conversation about giving language to experiences that so many of us carry in silence. 🍇 This is Soul Snack — a snippet from a longer Soul Session. To watch the FULL conversation: • YouTube: https://youtu.be/MdJ5AGWcgt8 • Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7zxbCtQMQ0YO3m0fgN11Kj?si=xKfXSUeaTG-MDsbtD9fucQ Key Topics Explored: ✨ What your grieving loved one wishes you knew and how to hold space without fixing ✨ The eternal aspect of grief and why we are not good at holding people through it ✨ Childhood grief, loss of parents, and the feeling of unsafety that follows ✨ Growing up in the wilderness: being surrounded by people but feeling utterly alone ✨ Indigenous cultural practices around death ✨ Why grief makes you grow up too fast and feel like you have to parent yourself ✨ Reparenting yourself as an adult and making safety an inside game ✨ Grief beyond death: grieving old versions of yourself, relationships, and life as it was ✨ The generosity of giving language to experiences that are hard to name ✨ How artists and healers alchemize pain into care for the collective body Chapters: Chapters

00:00:00 Welcome: We Are So Not Good at Holding People Through Grief 00:00:34 Grief Happens All the Time: Beyond Death and Loss 00:01:45 Early Grief Made Me Feel Unsafe 00:02:23 They Told Me While I Was Sleeping: A Cultural Practice 00:04:39 In the Wilderness: Surrounded by People but Profoundly Alone 00:05:39 You Don't Look Like It: The Invisibility of Grief 00:06:12 Safety Is an Inside Game: Learning to Care for Yourself 00:06:52 Becoming the Care You Always Needed 00:08:34 The Generosity of Language: Giving Words to Grief

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