Losing My Father at 13: How Grief Shaped My Life
The journey through grief—especially after losing a parent at a young age—can open the door to profound healing, spiritual growth, and inner transformation. In this episode, Irene Weinberg welcomes Gyani Richards, a grief educator with an M.A. in Transpersonal Counseling Psychology, a second‑degree black belt in Aikido, and more than 40 years of experience studying meditation and wisdom traditions. Gyani’s life changed at 13 when his father died, a loss that set him on a lifelong path of exploring mindfulness, body‑based wisdom, and the deeper meaning of sorrow. He views grief as one of the most powerful spiritual practices we encounter—an experience that reveals the architecture of our inner world and carries seeds of transformation. Rather than “fixing” grief, he serves as a compassionate guide, helping others create space where body, heart, and mind can shift and heal. Irene and Gyani dive into the principles of mindfulness that support emotional resilience, the hidden gifts within the grieving process, and the practice of Heartful Witnessing that allows true healing to unfold. Tune in for a heartfelt, insightful conversation about navigating loss, accessing inner strength, and understanding why healing is inseparable from our growth, evolution, and birthright as human beings.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR ABOUT THINGS LIKE:
- Transpersonal Counseling Psychology blends conventional and spiritual traditions to honor the integrated experience of the mind, body, and soul.
- Grief is a profound spiritual practice. It comes from the deepest part of us, revealing the structure of our inner world.
- Mindfulness and meditation help us develop the capacity to hold the immense size and intensity of sorrow.
- “Heartful witnessing” is crucial. Isolation makes grief more painful, so grief needs to be seen and shared.
- Body-based wisdom acknowledges that “the issues are in the tissues.” True healing must honor the physical, visceral experience of grief.
- The path of grief requires us to access inner resources like patience, trust, courage, curiosity, self-compassion, and self-kindness.
- Healing is inseparable from our growth and evolution. Being human is about aligning with this natural impulse to heal and evolve.
- Grief and love are co-mingled energies of the heart. Healing grief allows us to reconnect to our heartfulness, letting the deep joy of being alive surface.
SOME QUESTIONS IRENE ASKS GYANI:
- What is transpersonal counseling psychology?
- How did the loss of your father at 13 open your world and set you on a lifelong path of exploration?
- How did learning and practicing meditation help you in your grief process, and what have you discovered about some of the timeless principles of mindfulness that can guide us through grief?
- How does grief carry seeds of transformation, seeds that blossom most fully in a climate of Heartful Witnessing?
- How do mindfulness, body-based wisdom, and compassionate dialogue help us meet grief in all its dimensions – mind, body, and heart?
- How do you guide people who are grieving to access their inner strengths and inner resources?
- How did you turn grief into your friend and ally after your younger brother’s death, which was so internally disorienting for you?
- How has your experience with grief evolved over the years, and what advice would you offer to your 13-year-old self who lost his dad?
- Why is healing inseparable from our growth and evolution?
- When we are grieving, how can we allow ourselves to receive joy, and also be open to letting joy find us?
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Gyani is offering a FREE 30-minute Zoom consultation to gently explore whether working together feels like the right fit. A relaxed, no-pressure space to connect, ask questions, and see what’s possible. Email gyani@ourgriefpath.com
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Losing My Father at 13: How Grief Shaped My Life
I hope this message finds each of you so very well. I’m speaking to you from my studio in West Orange, New Jersey. I could not be more delighted to have the pleasure of interviewing Gyani Richards, who is joining me from Fairfax, California. With a Master’s of Arts in Transpersonal Counseling Psychology, a second-degree black belt in Aikido, and a certification as a grief educator, Gyani brings a unique blend of discipline, compassion, and insight into his work. He describes himself not as a fixer, but as a guide and companion on the grief journey, creating a space where body, heart, and mind can be transformed.
When Gyani was thirteen years old, his father passed away, a moment that broke open his world and set him on a lifelong path of exploration. In the wake of that loss, Gyani turned toward meditation and the great wisdom traditions, immersing himself in practices that have guided him for more than 40 years. Gyani believes that grief is one of the deepest spiritual practices we can encounter because it arises from the deepest parts of who we are. He has come to see grief as carrying seeds of transformation, seeds that blossom most fully in a climate of heartfelt witnessing.
I’m looking forward to talking with Gyani about the timeless principles of mindfulness that can guide us through grief, the unexpected gifts hidden within the grieving process, and how Gyani guides others to access their inner strength. We’ll also explore why healing is inseparable from our growth and evolution, how it connects to our very birthright, and more. This will surely be an enlightening and heartfelt conversation filled with many important insights.
Gyani, a warm welcome to the show.
It’s great to be here.
Decoding Transpersonal Psychology: The Mind, Body, and Soul Approach
It’s great to have you here. It’s such a pleasure to meet you, know you, and talk with you. I want to start by having you explain to people what the heck Transpersonal Counseling Psychology is. I’m hearing more and more that people are starting to get degrees in this, but it’s a blend of modalities and all, isn’t it?
Yeah. Transpersonal Psychology developed in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, and began to emerge into the culture probably in the mid to late ‘70s. What Transpersonal Philosophy, or Transpersonal Counseling, in my case, is, academically, a blend of more conventional psychological training. The other piece is what we could call the contributions of the great wisdom traditions, the spiritual traditions. It’s a psychology that honors both the mind, as well as our body and soul. It’s an integrative approach to looking at a human being.
It’s fascinating because a lot of people are in their heads. I’ve been in therapy, and it helps a lot. This adds another dimension that could be so helpful for people.
Transpersonal Psychology honors that we are much larger than this body-mind thing that’s having this conversation. We’re part of a larger ocean of whatever you would like to call that, whether it be existence, source, God, or divinity. Transpersonal Psychology honors or holds that this is the isness of this human plane. When we work with people and when we look at life that way, we hold it with a much more expanded perception rather than our little minds and little bodies running around.
From Grief to Spiritual Path: How Losing My Father at 13 Changed Everything
I love that. When someone’s working with you, they get the whole package, not just one slice. Let’s talk about how you got into this. It started with the loss of your father when you were thirteen years old. How did this open your world and set you on a lifelong path of exploration instead of drowning in your sorrow?
It’s interesting. When my dad died at 13, I was part of a family with a mom, a dad, and 5 brothers. That level of tragedy explodes the entire family system. When I look back on that, and I’ve had many decades to look back on that, I often wonder how we each made it through that transition. None of us were doing formal therapy or formal practice, but through grace, community, and family, we made it through. Not untouched, not unwounded, but each of us went on to live our lives.
For me personally, when I look back on that, 4 or 5 years later, what began to marinate inside of me, which ultimately led me to India to study with a meditation teacher and launch my life in that way, was this search, if you will, for something that couldn’t be taken. My dad was taken. Something at the soul level was like, “Is there anything else here that’s beyond the physical material world?” It’s always hard to draw those causal lines, but somewhere in my young soul and psyche, it said, “Look here. Move here.” Four or five years later, I had thrown myself into studying meditation and yoga and going to India. That was the life arc that the grief tragedy had catapulted me on.
Your dad, was he ill?
Yes. My dad died from cancer. He was 45.
That’s so young.
The brothers were between about 12 and 22.
You were 13.
I was one of the younger two.
How’d your mom do with all of that? That’s a lot.
Unbelievable strength. My mom is no longer with us now, but when I look back on that, I still can’t, in any way, mentally figure out how that one incredible woman held the family together and made it through. She’d never worked before. She was, back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, a housewife with lots going on and sending kids off to soccer practice. My dad died, so there was mom, holding this whole thing together. She did it, and she did it in an incredibly powerful and amazing way.
She gave you a gift because she rolled out a wonderful way to cope with something like this. For you also, when you started learning and practicing meditation, you discovered that timeless principles of mindfulness can guide us through grief. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? You launched into this whole other modality.
It’s interesting. At times when these grand intersections happen, it’s often many months or years later that we look back and go, “That’s what was cooking at that time.” At the time, I wasn’t necessarily consciously aware that I was beginning to practice meditation as a path of healing for my grief. Meditation and grief are perfectly aligned with each other in this one simple but profound way. The practice of mindfulness and meditation helps us develop the capacity to hold the intensity and enormity of what grief has us bear witness to. Without training and practice, our entire system, as we all know, explodes and goes crazy. That’s the natural response of the nervous system when deep loss occurs.
My whole orientation toward mindfulness and meditation as a healing path to grief is that it provides a larger space and ground in which we can hold and learn from this incredible pathway that has been given to us. It is not by our choice. Nobody goes looking for deep grief, but when it shows up, you have the choice to respond toward healing or away. Hopefully, we chose the one toward healing.
I love what you’re saying. When people go into deep grief, they think, “This is what there is.” You’re telling them they could look at it as, “What are the nuggets here? How am I going to grow? How am I going to evolve through this pain and this experience that I’m having?” which is a different way than most people look at it, right?
Yeah. Grief, because it comes from the deepest part of us, our deep heart and our deep soul. When it arrives, it reveals so much about the architecture of who we are and the anatomy of our inner world. Most of us, because we’re human, don’t have much training in how to attend to that. We’re never taught how to do that, but we learn it along the way, hopefully.
Because it comes from the deepest part of us, when grief arrives, it reveals so much about the architecture of who we are and the anatomy of our inner world. Share on X
It’s better to start earlier so you’re ahead of the game and you put your reps in, so to speak, so that when these huge life events happen, in any sort of loss. Loss could be the death of a beloved, the loss of our physical or financial security, or the loss of a pet. My son left for college a few years ago. That was a huge loss. All of these losses can be held in this deeper way if we have some practice behind us.
What is this thing about heartful witnessing that you say is the gift and opportunity hidden within the grief experience?
In the grief world, and you know this, grief needs to be witnessed. My personal and professional take on that is grief wants to be seen, heard, and grokked. The cultural conditioning is, “Don’t do that.” The cultural conditioning is toward a posture of isolation. Isolation on top of grief makes things way more complicated and painful. A lot of the work is about helping and supporting people to allow their grief to be witnessed by themselves and by others, with me, and by close members of the community.
Grief needs to be witnessed. Grief wants to be seen, heard, and grokked. Share on X
That’s great because you take them out of the deep pain and give them a higher view in a way. They’re witnessing their experience.
They’re witnessing from a higher place, but also witnessing from a very human place, from a place of, “In this moment, this is how my grief is taking shape. This is how my heart feels. This is how my body feels. This is the thought stream.” All of those things give shape to our grief. Grief wants to be shared that way. I see grief almost as a phenomenon that wants to breathe. It needs to respire. In-breath, out-breath. Bbb and flow. Bearing witness to grief helps us do that deeply.
The Body-Based Wisdom of Grief: Why “The Issues Are In the Tissues”
How is grief a deep spiritual practice to you, that it arises from the deepest parts of who we are? The other question I want to throw into that is you also talk about meditation with mindfulness and practicing that, but body-based wisdom, also. You mix body-based wisdom and compassionate dialogue to help people deal with their grief. Then, you’re saying it’s arising from this deep place of who we are. Do you want to expand upon that a little bit?
Sure. If we hold the assumption or the observation that as humans, we are a unique mix of body, mind, and soul, and each of us has what I call a snowflake unique mix of those three ingredients, when deep loss occurs, it jiggles that. It upsets that entire inner ocean. A primary part of that inner ocean is our body. It is our somatic experience. As someone said, the issues are in the tissues.
I love that. That’s cool.
Let’s remember grief and love are co-mingled energies in our deep hearts. When we’re deeply touched by love or grief, our bodies respond. Our bellies, our hearts, our muscles, and our sinews. Part of the support and part of the practice is helping people move from the neck down. Typically, in traditional psychotherapy, it can become a very head-up experience, which you mentioned can be helpful.
We talk, we see, and we dialogue, but a deeper way to honor the depth and the opportunity of grief is to allow our experience to drop down. I use a metaphor of taking the elevator down a couple of floors. We begin to embody, “There’s grief in my belly. It feels in my back.” It’s a visceral, palpable experience. It helps us expand the way that we can hold it and eventually heal it.
Someone comes to you, and they’re grieving tremendously. You’re offering yourself as a guide and a companion on their grief journey. How do you inspire them? They’re crying their eyes out, and they’re upset. You’re inspiring them to access their inner strength and their inner resources and deal with patience, trust, and courage they didn’t even know they had. It’s going to lead to transformation. Can you give us a little picture?
Sure. The first invitation is that we need to slow down and begin to allow any timeframe that we have about the healing timeframe to dissolve and become irrelevant. As you and I know, it is irrelevant. The stages, the tiers, the levels, and the timeframes. Our culture has embedded us mythically with so many, I feel, unhelpful timeframes about grief. People are like, “It’s six months. It’s a year or two years. Shouldn’t you be over it?” A part of it is, in the beginning, allowing people to tell their grief story. That’s the first piece, bearing witness. It’s like, “Tell me who your beloved was. Tell me about your loss.”
Grief begins to slowly reveal itself in this dialogue that we have. Over time, people begin to see and drop into these deeper places of themselves, and they can access what I call innate qualities. As unique humans, we all have curiosity. We all have trust. We all have patience. We all have courage. We, unfortunately, don’t spend a lot of time developing those, but grief gives us that opportunity because the grief path will require that we need each and every one of those qualities to slowly braille our way with baby steps along our grief path.
That’s wonderful. I’ll bet you that when you work with people, they discover parts of themselves that we’re never ever in touch with. It’s, in a way, a wonderful discovery that they’re a package and all of these other parts are there because they probably spent a lot of time in their heads.
The other thing that I noticed with everyone who walks through the door is that even amongst our closest friends and our closest family members, the bearing witness to grief component is still kept very private and isolating. When people come in, they say, “I can’t even talk about the depth of my loss and my pain with my spouse or my best friends.” No shame, no blame. It’s just that our culture hasn’t trained us and taught us that that’s the healing direction of allowing this breath of grief to inhale and exhale. With little steps, we begin to do that, and it begins to reorient them in the direction of healing.
Turning Grief into an Ally: A Personal Story of Loss and Practice
That sounds great. I want to ask you because I know you lost your younger brother a couple of years ago. How did you practice what you preach with your brother and his death, which was so disorienting for you? How did you turn grief into your friend and ally during your immense grieving path?
My younger brother, Pete, died about a couple of years ago from cancer, like my dad. He was 63.
Was it the same type of cancer?
It was a different type of cancer. He was arguably my closest brother of the five in age and in heart full connection. We were a couple of years apart. That was an incredible loss. For those tuning in and for you if you have brothers or sisters, it seems like each loss has its own flavor, whether it be losing a spouse, a brother, or a parent. They each have a unique way of opening this grief portal. When I lost my brother, it was so rearranging and so out of left field because he was so healthy. He was a sign of health. He played tennis. One year, he got diagnosed, and within a year and a half, he was gone.
Fortunately, part of the silver lining, if we can talk about loss having the silver lining, was that I had had decades of training, both in mindfulness and meditation practice, and a couple of decades practicing a Japanese martial art called Aikido, which is a moving meditation. All of these practices helped me develop a pre-existing condition, a way to hold this loss. It was still deeply painful and deeply disorienting, but I felt like the container that I had built over decades could hold it in a way that I probably couldn’t have before.
That’s great. Not only that, but when people come to you, you’ve already done this yourself, too. You practice what you preach, in a way.
Hopefully, we practice what we preach. Otherwise, it doesn’t have legs.
Let me ask you a question. How has your experience with grief evolved over the years? Looking back, what would you tell your thirteen-year-old self? What advice would you offer to that little kid who lost his dad?
I would look back and tell that thirteen-year-old young man or boy, “Trust the process that you will not be in this life-shattering pain forever. The most important thing you can do now is to attend to your grief and your sorrow. Turn towards it, not away. Be patient and have incredible mercy on yourself.” Self-compassion and self-kindness are probably at the top of the list of many qualities that are essential resources. I would tell my young thirteen-year-old self, “Trust that you will evolve. You will open into brighter days. Spend your time holding, trusting, and sending love and kindness to yourself.”
Healing Is Our Birthright: The Inseparable Link Between Grief and Evolution
That, in itself, is a wonderful lesson to people. You also say that healing is inseparable from our growth and evolution. We’re singing my tune about healing. You also say healing connects to our very birthright. Would you like to tell us the Gyani interpretation of that? Why is healing inseparable from our growth and evolution? People who are not healing are in one spot, and those of us who are healing are transiting to another spot.
I feel like when we get born, back to our transpersonal perspective of this, which means a holistic perspective, getting born gives us the opportunity to learn as much as we can about this curriculum of what is a human being. What is this incredible rainbow experience of mind, body, and soul? What are we doing here? The grief, the joy, the sorrow, the celebration, the whole spectrum gives us, it seems, endless opportunities to wake up to our own ongoing answer to this question, “Who am I? What is a human being? What is our opportunity here?” That’s the sole seed.
The grief, joy, sorrow, celebration—the whole spectrum—gives us endless opportunities to wake up to our own ongoing answer to the question: “Who am I? What is a human being? What is our opportunity here?” Share on X
Why do you say that at some point in our lives, hopefully sooner than later, it begins to dawn on us that our healing is what being human is all about?
To be a human being is to be an evolving being, even biologically, but certainly, spiritually. It’s this question of how deeply, closely, and intimately we can align with the healing impulse. We come in as a seed that wants to heal, open, and evolve. A lot of our jobs, which sometimes are difficult jobs and sometimes incredibly blissful jobs, are, “How can I align with this evolution, such that at the end of it, when I take my final breath, I can go, ‘I lived the entire rainbow human experience as best as I possibly could.’”
“I’ve graduated, and here I am.” Do you have a special offer for our audience?
I do. If you’ve been touched and if you feel that something about my conversation with Irene has resonated with you in your heart and your mind, then feel free to reach out. I’ll gladly offer a free half-hour consultation to see if it would be helpful to work with each other.
The Ground of Heartfulness: Receiving Joy Even While Grieving
That’s great. What is true joy, and allowing something to truly and deeply touch us? When we are grieving, how do we allow ourselves to receive that joy and also be open to letting joy find us? I know so many people close down.
The grief and love originate from our precious, treasured human heart. The process of being with our grief and allowing our grief to open and heal allows us more deeply to drop into this ground of heartfulness that we are. The clouds of grief may come and go, but with our trust, patience, and curiosity, that deep joy of being an alive, opportunity-filled human can arise more and more.
The process of being with our grief, allowing it to open and heal, allows us more deeply to drop into this ground of heartfulness that we are. Share on X
That’s beautiful. Thank you. In closing, I want to express my heartfelt thank you for this enlightening interview that has illuminated how mindfulness, body-based wisdom, and compassionate dialogue can help us meet grief in all its dimensions, mind, body, and heart. May you continue to inspire those who are grieving to trust the current, discover their inner resources, and find healing along the way. Thank you so much. I wish you abundant blessings.
Thank you so much. It’s been a great journey with you.
Thank you. As I like to say, to be continued.
Guest’s Links:
About Gyani Richards
Gyani Richards, MA, is a grief counselor who helps people navigate and heal in their journey through grief and loss. His personal experience into this field began quite early when his father died when he was 13.
Shortly thereafter, he began exploring meditation and the great wisdom traditions of the world, practices which have defined the last 40 years of his life. He has an M.A. in Transpersonal Counseling Psychology, a second-degree black belt in Aikido, and is a Certified Grief Educator.
