How Nature and Daily Rituals Saved Me From My Darkest Grief
Finding true healing after grief requires intentional steps and the courage to integrate new practices into our daily lives. Award-winning author, entrepreneur, and executive coach Laing Rikkers shares how the sudden loss of her sister, Ginna, propelled her into her darkest season and eventually led her to discover the transformative power of nature and mindfulness. In her acclaimed book, Morning Leaves: Cultivating a Life of Beauty, Meaning, and Joy, Laing maps out how small rituals—like walking, writing, and grounding—acted as anchors during her recovery. Through her work as a coach and grief workshop leader, she now teaches others how to transform profound heartbreak into a doorway for deeper connection and clarity. Discover how nature and daily rituals can serve as essential tools for anyone looking to navigate their own path through loss and toward renewed joy.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR ABOUT THINGS LIKE:
- The tragic irony of losing a sibling to obstructive sleep apnea despite a career dedicated to treating the condition and raising awareness.
- Why grief can feel like being in a “washing machine” and how professional counseling provides the necessary stability to forge a path through the darkness.
- The seven simple grounding practices—Sleep, Eat, Steep, Walk it, Talk it, Write it, and Pay it Forward—that serve as essential anchors for daily resilience.
- How engaging in creative activities like poetry and journaling can help transform overwhelming emotional pain into something beautiful and meaningful.
- The profound shift in perspective that comes with tragedy, and why embracing the “here and now” is the key to living a deliberate, joy-filled life.
SOME QUESTIONS IRENE ASKS LAING:
- How did the unexpected passing of your sister, Ginna, reshape your understanding of your work, your purpose, and your identity?
- How did you navigate the emotional complexity of your professional expertise in sleep apnea and the tragic, unnecessary nature of your sister’s passing?
- What did your conversations with a grief counselor open up for you that you couldn’t access on your own during those dark days?
- Can you walk us through your “seven simple grounding practices” and explain why words alone aren’t always enough to process grief?
- How did your own grief reveal emotional, spiritual, and creative capacities that you didn’t know you had, and how did the act of creating your book, Morning Leaves: Cultivating a Life of Beauty, Meaning, and Joy, help you transform your grief into a vehicle for connection and light?
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How Nature and Daily Rituals Saved Me From My Darkest Grief
Everyone, I hope this message finds each of you very well. I am speaking to you from my studio in West Orange, New Jersey. I could not be more delighted to welcome Laing Rikkers, an award-winning author, entrepreneur, and executive coach whose acclaimed book, Morning Leaves: Cultivating a Life of Beauty, Meaning, and Joy, is now in its second edition with Red Hen Press and grew out of her own journey through profound grief after the unexpected loss of her younger sister in 2019.
What began as a personal practice of reflection and connection with nature has evolved into a compassionate, practical guide for anyone navigating loss, burnout, or major life transitions. Through her grief workshops, Lange creates nurturing spaces where art, poetry, journaling, and community help participants transform loss into resilience and renew joy. Her approach is gentle but powerful, reminding us that grief can be a doorway to deeper connection, clarity, and meaning.
Before stepping into this calling, Laing spent two decades in leadership and private equity. Her career has always centered on helping people and organizations grow with intention. With degrees from Harvard and Columbia and training in both executive coaching and grief support, Laing now speaks, writes, and teaches nationwide. Her mission is simple and profound to help people find strength in vulnerability, creativity in transition, and hope in the moments that challenge us most.
I am looking forward to talking with Laing, who is joining us from Carlsbad, California, about the devastating and unexpected loss of her younger sister, Jenna, and the profound ways that grief reshaped her life. We will talk about how working with a grief counselor helped her navigate her darkest moments and how simple outdoor rituals and long walks became anchors for healing and perspective. We will also explore how loss can reveal strengths we did not know we had, the grounding daily practices that support resilience, and heartfelt insights Laing has gathered along the way, wisdom that can bring light to even our heaviest seasons.
Finding Purpose After Loss
Laing, a warm welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me. It is great to be here.
Our pleasure, truly. This is going to be a wonderful interview. Everyone does not know this yet, but I am announcing that you are a wonderful poet. I love your book. It’s beautiful. Let’s start from the start. You experienced the devastating and unexpected loss of your sister, Jenna, in late 2019, just before the world shut down. How did that moment and the circumstances around her passing reshape your understanding of your work, your purpose, and yourself?
Navigating the Shock of Sudden Loss
It was a huge shock that she died when she did. She was 46, and she was at home with her daughter. She had a nine-year-old daughter at the time and her husband. It was really unexpected. It is hard to describe how. How could that shock really just, I remember calling my mom and just saying, I think that there is a hole in the universe. It was devastating. She had had some symptoms of sleep apnea up to that point, which were snoring, daytime sleepiness, and that thing. Nobody knew that she was really ill in a serious way, so that anyone was concerned that she might die, and so it really blindsided us.
How devastating, how many years were there between the two of you?
Three.
You literally knew her all her life. You were the older sister, so it was a shock.
My only sibling.
I am so sorry. This is an irony we are going to tell everyone now about because you spent your career helping people with obstructive sleep apnea. What a coincidence. Only to lose her to obstructive sleep apnea. How did you feel? You must have been so upset because you could have helped her in some way. I do not know if she ignored you or whatever, but how did you navigate that emotional complexity of the realization while also trying, and you also had to stay steady for your family, and for your company? This was during the pandemic. How did you get through all that?
It was a lot. It really was a lot. The first month or two, fortunately, the pandemic had not started. We were lucky. We were able to gather and have a big service for her. That was really important to be able to be together. Otherwise, I was just in a fog for a bit, and it is just really at that point, one foot in front of the other. Immediately, the night that she died, I remember thinking this is going to be an opportunity to help other people, educate them, and bring awareness to the risks, particularly for women with obstructive sleep apnea or OSA.
I have done everything in my power to try to educate people and let people know. It is such an incredibly common condition. They estimate that about one in five people has obstructive sleep apnea, which is for people who are not aware, obstructive sleep apnea, when you are sleeping and lying down, the soft tissue falls back and blocks the airway. That leads to largely cardiovascular damage, but it is also highly correlated with stroke, cancer, and other issues.
Here you are in your life helping all these people, and your sister is ignoring you, right? You must have reached out to her a few times and said, “Sis.”
I sure did. I reached out to her a number of times. I sent her the name of a specialist who I was like, “This guy is five miles from your house. Will give you a device.” She was a big supporter of the company that I had co-founded. She was an investor. At some level, being the younger sister, she had sister deafness. Do too many bits of advice over the years. Also, she did say that she had spoken with her primary care doctor, and obstructive sleep apnea is classically associated with older, heavier men.
Women, while there are fewer cases than men, are much more disproportionately underdiagnosed because of that association. They never gave her a diagnostic test, in which she had all of the classic symptoms. It is just heartbreaking when they did her autopsy and found that she had an enlarged heart. That is part of the stress of not getting that oxygen in your heart. You have to work that hard. There may have been other underlying conditions that nobody was aware of, but it was just tragic. It was so unnecessary.
I’m curious, how did you, Laing, hone in on obstructive sleep apnea as working with that to start a company? What inspired that?
From Professional Success to Sleep Apnea Awareness
I had been, for twenty years, an investor in medical device companies. One of the companies that I was at for a number of years was a dental laboratory business. They made devices in the mouth, and there were a lot of other devices on the market, but we did not think that they were well designed, and they were not up to the standard of medical devices that you would find in the more traditional medical paths. The dental community’s standards were a little bit different.
We thought that there was an opportunity to bring medical standards into the oral realm. It has been very successful. The company has treated thousands and thousands of people. It is really a wonderful thing for people, because the typical treatment for sleep apnea, most people use what they call a CPAP machine, which blows air down. The problem with that is that about 50% of people who are prescribed one cannot tolerate it. There are social issues, and there are discomfort issues.
It’s not exactly the sexiest thing in the world when you look at that apparatus.
No, it’s not. People are comfortable putting something in their mouth, think Invisalign and retainers, and people have gotten used to the idea of sleeping with something in their mouth, and it’s comfortable, and you can take it out and put it in your pocket. It is easy to clean and easy to travel with. It has been a great thing for a lot of people.
That’s wonderful. We should make sure that the show notes have the link to your company because there are people tuning in who may be interested in learning more about that, because you’re waking some people up to sleep apnea. I know that you found an exceptional grief counselor, which is right up my alley, and that was a turning point for you. Now you’re going for healing, which is motivated by the loss of Jina. What did those conversations open up for you that you cannot access on your own? You’re obviously a very resourceful woman on your own. What did they open up for you? How did that therapist guide you through those dark days? What was that like for you?
The Healing Power of Professional Grief Counseling
I was really very fortunate. The woman I met with, she was just able to help me forge a path. I was in such a dark hole. I did not know what it would look like on the other side of being in that darkness. I needed somebody to hold my hand and walk me through it because I did not know where I was going. I did not know if there was light to be found.
The fact that you had children and all of that, and that you were affecting them, I think it must have been very helpful also to have someone to talk to about it.
Somebody who I think can talk to anybody is helpful, but to be able to talk to somebody where it’s also a confidential conversation, and you could really let loose. I cry, I could get angry, because grief brings up a lot of emotions besides just sadness. It brings up old resentments and anger and loneliness and so many other things. It was also helpful to have somebody there to go, “This is normal. You’re not going crazy.
You’re not off on some truly unexpected path.” Obviously, everybody’s grief is unique to them, but there are things that are common for people to experience. It was just helpful to have somebody say, “This is okay. What you’re going through is part of the process.” When you’re in it, I used to describe it like being in the washing machine. You did not know which way was up. You did not know how to get out. To have somebody who could just say, “I’m with you, I’m here.”
When you’re falling apart when that person says this is very normal and it’s not a permanent condition, you will feel a little bit different. Also, a grief working with her and while unlocked, hidden strengths or parts of yourself you may have been ignoring that you did not even know about. Did that happen to you?
Absolutely, yeah. In particular, once lockdown happened, there was the shock, the grief, the fear. We were all so terrified in those early days of the pandemic about what was going to happen. I really needed to metabolize some of that energy and do something creative so that it did not eat me alive. One of the things that I started doing was a daily writing practice. I read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, which many people, I think, are familiar with. It’s a classic, wonderful book.
I had never been someone who journaled or wrote on a daily basis, and I found it to be very helpful. I started channeling things that I was hearing, and they are now what we call poems. I did not think of myself as a poet, or I did not think of myself as a writer, really. I was integrating what I was seeing outside with what I was trying to untangle about myself. I found the act of writing creatively to be just a tremendous tool to help me pull some of those things apart and get them outside of myself so that I could look at them and evaluate them and understand in a different way.
The act of writing creatively is a tremendous tool to help pull some feelings out to look at them, evaluate them, and understand in a different way. Share on X
It’s so helpful. You also help you to begin to cultivate beauty and meaning and purpose when things are feeling very overwhelming because now you’re getting practice and you’re learning better how to do that, right?
For sure. To have some structure. Yeah, I was getting up and doing this every morning, and it gave me a part of a routine that was very useful for me. Sometimes just getting out of bed can be hard. I had something I needed to do and something that I needed to share, and a special space to listen and be able to get out some of those things that were maybe otherwise trapped inside.
You must have felt believed in the mornings after you wrote what you had to say.
It was beautiful.
I just imagine. Now I want to talk to you about your seven simple grounding practices for self-care, because you also learned about that during this whole grieving process. I am going to say what they are, and I am going to let you explain to everybody what they are, but they’re sleep, eat, steep, walk it, talk it, write it, and pay it forward. You say that these practices gave voice to the soul. Words alone were not enough, and you’re such a wordsmith. That is very interesting and helped you with calm grounding and resilience. You want to talk to us about that?
7 Grounding Practices for Daily Resilience
Those are the things that I keep as my own personal checklist. When things feel off kilter, even now, I go back to that list and think through what’s off. Usually, if I go through them, I find that something isn’t quite right or I haven’t been as diligent. That’s fairly straightforward, just to always remember, I need to get great sleep, and I need to take it seriously. I need to have good sleep hygiene, and all of the things that we hear about the importance of that. If I am not getting enough sleep, it is going to impact my ability to cope.
That’s always first on the list. Eat is not only putting healthy things into my body, but also resisting putting on unhealthy things. By that, I am particularly thinking about drugs and alcohol. It can get tempting to try to numb oneself. That’s when you’re grieving or dealing with something really challenging, it’s a temptation. I always think that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. If you start adding other substances, it makes the line longer, and it’s just harder to get through things and harder to face them. To be really diligent about that, but of course, also putting healthy, nutritious foods into our bodies so that we’re strong and feel good.
You’re eating none of that fried food, processed food, and all that other good stuff.
Just minimally, right? At least stay aware of it. When I start to feel not so great. Look at it like, “I have been eating desserts.” I’m like, “What am I doing?”
Like, “I make sure what am I putting in my body?”
Exactly. That’s sleep and eat. Steep is more of a spiritual practice. That might be meditation. Might be prayer. It might be organized religion, depending on one’s cultural orientation, but I think it is always important to remember to pause and to stay aware of that, which is much greater than our individual selves and our individual worries.
Seeing things from a higher view.
To be able to ask for help and for peace. Those are the first three, and then walk it as a big believer in, you know, processing emotional stress, grief, or anger, or whatever it might be, physically. Getting outside and walking is the best. I also like to go, I go to bar classes, I like to be in a group, I like to move, I like to be inspired to move. Particularly when we’re outdoors, and we can connect with nature, it’s a very powerful healing tool.
I always say to myself and try to keep in the back of my head, it’s never a bad idea to go for a walk. I never come back thinking, “What was I doing? That was a waste of time.” It’s always a good thing. Walk it, talk it. It gets back to a little bit of what we were saying earlier, the importance of communicating and having someone listen and feeling understood. I think with grief, that sense of not being alone and feeling heard is really important so that you don’t go spiraling.
With grief, that sense of not being alone and feeling heard is really important so that you don't go spiraling. Share on X
I love the idea that you were talking to a therapist because your aunt Minnie may not have the right guidance for you, as you’re crying your eyes out, which a trained therapist does.
The trained therapist is also neutral. A lot of times when you’re dealing with a big loss, there are a lot of complicated relationships. If you’re talking to somebody else in your family or a friend, they have their own relationship and feelings. There is something really particularly fabulous about being able to talk to somebody outside of the situation and can see it more clearly. Talk it, walk it, write it.
In my case, it was actually writing but I think doing anything creative allows one to take the emotional challenges and pull it apart, roll it around, and then put it back out into the world as something different and something beautiful and something positive, something expressive and something that’s yours where you’ve been able to manipulate it and be able to transform it into something else and something that you can share because that’s also the connection of being able to share something. They’ve created something I think is very powerful.
Doing anything creative allows one to take the emotional challenges and pull it apart, roll it around, and then put it back out into the world as something beautiful. Share on X
It also gives a lot of comfort to make this lemonade out of the lemons you got and to be able to help other people with it.
For me, it’s been an incredible gift.
For both of us, I can totally relate to this and pay it forward, which is what we’re talking about.
The ultimate is when you can help other people, and you feel the best when you can see other sides of yourself and what you have to give, and that you are important to other people. I am on some nonprofit boards. I’m on the board of Feeding San Diego, for instance. That’s a really special way to help take care of the community. Doing things, doing grief workshops, = communicating with people like you, sharing my book. These are all ways that are really fantastic ways for me to be able to pay it forward. I love what you’re doing too. This is just an amazing platform that you’ve created.
Thank you so much. I’m very humbled by it. I’m just overjoyed and humbled by it. Like you, it came out of a tragedy, a profound tragedy, but like it’s just the same way. This is lemonade. Let’s talk about Morning Leaves: Cultivating a Life of Beauty, Meaning, and Joy, which I enjoyed, I must say to everyone. It is an award-winning blend of reflection, poetry, and nature-inspired art, creativity, presence, and healing. How did the act of creating, writing, drawing, and imagining Morning Leaves help you transform this grief that’s another vehicle you use to transform your grief into meaning, connection, and light?
Transforming Grief into Creativity: The Story of ‘Morning Leaves’
As I mentioned, I started writing in the morning. I did not start with the intention of writing a book that was not on my bucket list of things I was planning to do, but it was really the context of my niece having lost her mother, really. This question, particularly at the beginning of the pandemic, what if something happens to me? What about my children? Have I left them with enough resources and information, and do they know me well enough, and all of these things?
I typed up what I had been writing in the mornings and thought, “This is at least a start for them to really know a bit more about who I am.” I typed them up and started organizing them. In going back and rereading them, realizing that while for me, they are very particular and about things that mean something to me, and I can share some of that with my kids. There’s also something more universal about the way they’re all botanical metaphors, and they’re all about.
I love that.
Thank you. They’re really about looking at ourselves and understanding who we are, and I think that grief cracks things open, and you see things differently after a big tragedy, and I think the awareness of who you are and how you’re living and are you the person you want to be? Are you living the way you want to live, and you realize the brevity of life and all of those things? I typed them up and organized them. I have some friends who are professional writers, and I shared it with them and said, “What do you think? Is there something here?” I got nice encouragement to keep going.
I added an introduction and some context to the story, and it developed into a book, and it’s just been the most beautiful and unexpected gift for me. My sister was a book person, and she had done the Radcliffe Publishing Program, and she’d worked in publishing in New York, and she worked for a literary agent. She has done a number of different things in the book world over time. In addition to other things as well, I have this sense of her sitting on my shoulder, chuckling. It was not really what I had pictured. Yet it’s been the most rewarding, fulfilling, beautiful gift.
You also have the ability to reach out with the beauty of who you are and really express yourself to people, and it’s a wonderful vehicle. The other surprise you got is that you felt your sister’s presence while writing. Now this opens you up to spirituality. Tell me all about that because that’s another passion. How have you had experiences beyond feeling her presence, and what did that feel like that shifted your understanding of what remains after we physically leave?
I do not have great words for it because I do not fully understand it, but I have a sense of her being with me often, and I think that the way that you can smell something, like sometimes I can feel her spirit. I feel it right now, and I know I have an ongoing relationship with her. Obviously, it’s different from the one we had before. In some ways, we’ve gotten closer and understand one another differently, and I think we are more compassionate and empathetic toward one another. The relationship has just evolved, and it’s a bit different.
Practical Advice for Starting Your Healing Journey
It’s a beautiful thing. I’ve had the same experience with my husband. He’s still around, but the relationship seems to be getting deeper, even somehow. It’s true. I want to ask you, if someone here, who I’m sure there are quite a few people here, is tuning in the midst of their grief, what would you want them to know about the possibility of starting their healing journey through walking, talking, and writing? Have you got guidance for them about that?
We’ll start with walking. Sometimes, just literally getting outside does not have to be strenuous physical activity, but even just walking around the block. The light is really important. Seeing things that are alive, of recognizing the cycle of nature and rebirth, and particularly, spring and summer, you know, where you hear the birds, and there is something very powerful about that. We’re animals, we have our animal nature, and to be able to get outside of our technology and to be able to really look and feel and sense, I think, is really deeply important.
We’ve been talking about the importance of connecting with somebody else, ideally and professionally, somebody to talk to, and somebody who can help make sense of what you’re going through and make you feel less alone. There is nothing more devastating than that crushing loneliness. We’re all here together, and there is a big network of people who are available to help.
To do something creative, to do something fun, to create beauty, to sense beauty, and to even take that darkness and pull it out of yourself and look at it and pull it apart and be able to see the facets of it, and then put it back together in a way that you can share and use that as other ways to connect with people. There’s an organization that comes out of research at the Harvard School of Public Health called The Foundation for Art and Healing. They’ve done a tremendous amount of research on the power of creative work in helping people get through grief, loneliness, and depression. It is a very tried and true way for people to work through difficult times.
Now they get this terrible grief that they’re dealing with. Through what you’re telling them, they can really open up and rebirth themselves in all kinds of wonderful new ways. Absolutely. It helps them to do that. I know you also have grief workshops, and you work with people through grief workshops. How do you help all these people who are grieving turn their heartbreak into resilience, clarity, and renewed joy? Mean, tell us about them. Do you have one coming up soon that maybe some people would like to participate in?
I do them periodically. My website has a list of events that I am doing, and I just completed one last week. They’re just beautiful. You get a group of people and have them share their stories. Everybody’s story is a bit different, but there are common threads between all of them. I think that for people to feel more connected to other people and that there are other people who have experiences like theirs is important. That particular workshop was a writing workshop, and we were in a space where we could all go outside.
Were you in California?
We were in California. We were in the San Diego area, and people wrote really beautiful things during the time that we had together, and some people like to share them, and other people like to share the experience of writing. Some people choose not to share it all, but just the idea of being together and thinking through some of the things that we’ve talked about of like, how do I incorporate this into my life and how do I create some routine and structure that’s healthy and positive and will help me down a path to get to the other side of this and really find the meaning and the joy that can exist on the other side of a bad loss.
I would bet you that there are people who bond with each other and make new friendships from these workshops, because now you start, sometimes your friendships start to change when you’ve been through something like this. New people with more of a commonality for what you’re experiencing.
That’s very true, that some friends just do not get it or aren’t there or aren’t comfortable with what the intensity of what you’re experiencing and they fall away for at least a season and other people rise up and maybe there’s somebody that you know, maybe it’s somebody new, but then you you end up with connections that are deeper and deeper in the moment.
I’m understanding where, where you’re vibrating, where you’re at now. What is the Laing tip for finding joy in life?
The most important thing is to be focused on the here and now and where you want to put your energy and your time and to appreciate being alive and being present and connected to other people and to not do the shoulds and coulds and all that, just go do it.
The most important thing is to be focused on the here and now and where you want to put your energy and time and to appreciate being alive, being present, and connected to other people. Share on X
I learned from a therapist, she said, “Stop shooting yourself.”
Yes, exactly. I’ll read you the dedication of my book because it’s related to this. It says, “This book is dedicated to Jenna, who abruptly left too early, cracked me open and whispered today, now.”
There you go.
That’s how I try to live now, really, this is it. I do not know if I have tomorrow. It’s easy. We all hear those kinds of platitudes. Yet when you’ve experienced somebody actually disappear the way you did and the way I did, it brings it into much sharper focus that not really now.
I’ll bet you’re an even better mother. I’ll bet you’re an even better partner because now you are more conscious. The people in your life whom you love. What happened to me is this could be like it was for me the last day. You do not know. The last time you spoke to Jenna, you did not know that another day would come when she would be totally gone. It’s made me very conscious of how I talk to the people in my life and make sure that the ones who need to know who I want them to know know that I really love them. You never know if that’s the last thing you hear from someone.
It’s very important just to stay deliberate, thoughtful, and present.
Laing, in closing, I’d like to share this special quote from your book, Morning Leaves, Cultivating a Life of Beauty, Meaning, and Joy, with our audience. It’s a beautiful quote, and it applies to what we’re talking about. “At the end of my eulogy, after describing her many accomplishments, her irreverent wit, and her inclination to celebrate, I suggested that all we have is now, right now, as in today. Go carve out the life you want and celebrate the milestones and the people you love.” Thank you for reminding us that grief is not an ending, it’s a doorway. On the other side, there can always be connection, meaning, and hope. From my heart, I wish you abundant blessings always.
Thank you for having me. It’s been wonderful.
Thank you. Much appreciated. Thank you so much.
Guest’s Links:
- Laing Rikkers
- Connect with Laing Rikkers on LinkedIn
- Connect with Laing Rikkers on Instagram
- Morning Leaves: Cultivating a Life of Beauty, Meaning, and Joy
- The Artist’sa Way
- The Foundation for Art and Healing
About Laing Rikkers
Laing Rikkers is an award-winning author, entrepreneur, and executive coach whose personal journey through grief inspired her book Morning Leaves (Red Hen Press), now in its second edition. Drawing on creativity, nature, and simple daily rituals, Laing offers a practical and compassionate guide to navigating grief and life’s many transitions.
Whether facing personal loss, burnout, or major change, her heartfelt insights and actionable tools help people find resilience, meaning, and joy—even in the darkest seasons.
