How to Heal Your Grief: Thomas Attig on Loss, Meaning, & Relearning Life

In this deeply moving conversation, Dr. Habīb Boerger sits down with philosopher and grief scholar Dr. Thomas Attig to explore grief not as something to “get over,” but as an invitation into deeper humanity, meaning, and connection.

Drawing from decades of work in grief studies, Thomas Attig shares his understanding of grieving as “relearning the world” after profound loss. Together, Habīb and Tom reflect on death, love, spirituality, interconnectedness, and the ways loss reshapes our understanding of who we are and what matters most.

The conversation weaves together personal stories of family loss, spiritual transformation, applied philosophy, Sufism, gratitude, mystery, and the sacredness of being alive. Along the way, they explore questions many of us carry:

• How do we continue living after devastating loss? 
• What can grief teach us about love and meaning? 
• How do we move from sorrow toward gratitude? 
• What does it mean to live wisely in a fractured world? 
• How can grief reconnect us to our shared humanity? 

Rather than offering simplistic answers, this episode invites listeners into a compassionate and honest reflection on suffering, healing, connectedness, and hope.

Whether you are grieving, supporting someone who is grieving, questioning organized religion, or searching for deeper meaning in life, this conversation offers wisdom, tenderness, and profound insight.

Topics Include:

• Grief as “relearning the world” 
• Spirituality beyond dogma 
• Loss, meaning, and existential philosophy 
• Sufism and the religion of love 
• Gratitude as a path through grief 
• Interconnectedness and human compassion 
• Emotional pain as guidance toward healing 
• Hope, humility, and the mystery of existence 

About the Guest

Dr. Thomas Attig is an applied philosopher and internationally respected voice in grief studies. He is the author of How We Grieve: Relearning the World, The Heart of Grief, and Catching Your Breath in Grief. His latest collection, Seeking Wisdom in Death’s Shadows, brings together decades of reflection on grief, healing, and what it means to live well.

Transcript

Beyond Names: Spirituality for Anyone and Everyone

YouTube Channel: Beyond Names with Dr. Habib Boerger

YouTube handle: @BeyondNamesPodcast

Episode: 46

Host: Dr. Habib Boerger

Conversation Partner: Dr. Thomas Attig

Title: How to Heal Your Grief: Thomas Attig on Loss, Meaning, & Relearning Life

Description: In this deeply moving conversation, Dr. Habīb Boerger sits down with philosopher and grief scholar Dr. Thomas Attig to explore grief not as something to “get over,” but as an invitation into deeper humanity, meaning, and connection.

Drawing from decades of work in grief studies, Thomas Attig shares his understanding of grieving as “relearning the world” after profound loss. Together, Habīb and Tom reflect on death, love, spirituality, interconnectedness, and the ways loss reshapes our understanding of who we are and what matters most.

The conversation weaves together personal stories of family loss, spiritual transformation, applied philosophy, Sufism, gratitude, mystery, and the sacredness of being alive. Along the way, they explore questions many of us carry:

• How do we continue living after devastating loss? 
• What can grief teach us about love and meaning? 
• How do we move from sorrow toward gratitude? 
• What does it mean to live wisely in a fractured world? 
• How can grief reconnect us to our shared humanity? 

Rather than offering simplistic answers, this episode invites listeners into a compassionate and honest reflection on suffering, healing, connectedness, and hope.

Whether you are grieving, supporting someone who is grieving, questioning organized religion, or searching for deeper meaning in life, this conversation offers wisdom, tenderness, and profound insight.

Topics Include:

• Grief as “relearning the world” 
• Spirituality beyond dogma 
• Loss, meaning, and existential philosophy 
• Sufism and the religion of love 
• Gratitude as a path through grief 
• Interconnectedness and human compassion 
• Emotional pain as guidance toward healing 
• Hope, humility, and the mystery of existence 

About the Guest

Dr. Thomas Attig is an applied philosopher and internationally respected voice in grief studies. He is the author of How We Grieve: Relearning the World, The Heart of Grief, and Catching Your Breath in Grief. His latest collection, Seeking Wisdom in Death’s Shadows, brings together decades of reflection on grief, healing, and what it means to live well.

Transcript:

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Welcome to Beyond Names, I'm Dr. Habib. This is a space for spiritual seekers and soulful misfits, for the curious and the committed, for those grounded in a tradition, and for those who are not sure what they believe.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Whether you call the Divine God, Yahweh, Allah, Elohim, Brahman, Great Spirit, Higher Power, or you're still searching for language that fits, you are welcome here.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Together, we'll explore the intersection of spirituality and daily life, the wisdom of many traditions, and the ways we return to our true selves, to our source, to the light that each of us carry within.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I'm so glad you're here. Let's begin with introduction of our conversation partner for this episode, Thomas Attig. Thomas is an applied philosopher and revolution… excuse me, revolutionary voice in grief studies. Tom is the author of How We Grieve: Relearning the World, The Heart of Grief: Death and the Search for Lasting Love, and Catching Your Breath in Grief.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: His new collection, Seeking Wisdom in Death's Shadows: Collected Writings on How We Grieve [which can be purchased for a 30% discount at Oxford University Press with code aufly30], distills a lifetime of listening, reflection, and teaching into understanding and guidance for those who are mourning, for those who are caregivers, for counselors.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: To learn more about Tom and his work, please visit griefsheart.com. So that's G-R-I-E-F-S H-E-A-R-T dot com.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Tom, welcome, thank you for being here. I gave you a warning that I start every episode with the same question, which is, if you would, please introduce yourself to the listeners by sharing your spiritual story.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Of course, to the extent that you're comfortable, and to the length, as short or long as you'd like to make it, that you're comfortable.

Thomas Attig: Thanks for having me.

Thomas Attig: And thanks for that introduction.

Thomas Attig: I'm caught a little bit by surprise on the question.

Thomas Attig: And I'm wondering how I really do think of myself.

Thomas Attig: I was raised by a quite zealous conservative Christian mother and a father who couldn't be dragged into a church at gunpoint.

Thomas Attig: And mom was pretty severe in her beliefs, and we spent her funeral listening to the minister, ignoring the grieving persons in the auditorium who were listening to him in their sorrow.

Thomas Attig: That did not matter to him at all. My brother and I went to introduce him to our mother. 

Thomas Attig: He was a new minister.

Thomas Attig: And he said, in this church, we know what to do. And I don't need to know about your mother.

Thomas Attig: And we had a kind of fire and brimstone sort of sermon delivered to us about how our mother was in a better place, and if we ever wanted to see her again, we had to believe as she did, or it wouldn't happen.

Thomas Attig: I had warned my brother that we were going to have a not very pleasant service, but we were going to meet with our family and friends afterwards at my Uncle Dick's house. And we'll have a good time there, and we'll remember Mom and remember her well.

Thomas Attig: Which is exactly what happened. I actually wrote about him in one of the pieces that I've written as practicing, spiritual malpractice.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

Thomas Attig: It's not something I think anybody should do to anybody else – call their salvation into question in a circumstance where they're in the midst of heartache, having lost a loved one.

Thomas Attig: I had been disenchanted by my mother's church, many years before, and left church behind.

Thomas Attig: I couldn't believe the metaphysical claims.

Thomas Attig: And became a philosophy professor.

Thomas Attig: Still interested in what kinds of creatures we are.

Thomas Attig: And, what the possibilities for living a meaningful life are, and so on. 

Thomas Attig: And they went for years and years, and oh, about 15, about 18 years ago now, my wife and I, second wife, we decided to try church, and see what church was like.

Thomas Attig: And we signed on as Christians in what I would call a very liberal kind of Christian church, not as doctrinaire as that one had been for my mother.

Thomas Attig: And we founded a place where you can reflect on who you are, and why you are, and where you are headed.

Thomas Attig: And we found good community there.

Thomas Attig: As I think of how I think of spirituality, in one of the chapters in my book, I wrote about the contrast between spirituality and religion, as I understand it.

Thomas Attig: And I think I'm not much of a subscriber to traditional religious beliefs of any kind.

Thomas Attig: Although I… I can see a point in being very respectful of and appreciative of and a bit mystified by the origin of our being.

Thomas Attig: I, I think that spirituality has to do with looking for… searching for meaning where you can find it.

Thomas Attig: And I think it's meaning in two senses.

Thomas Attig: Meaning in the sense of understanding complex sentences about the nature of things -- beliefs and belief structures and so on.

Thomas Attig: And finding meaning in life.

Thomas Attig: And by meaning in life, I mean good reasons for affirming the value of living, and what it's possible for beings like us, with the capacities that we have, to find meaning in community, in love, in giving, in humility, in gratitude.

Thomas Attig: Those are spiritual matters for me.

Thomas Attig: And I found reasons for living in, in the quest of those things, and in satisfaction at having found them in lots of places.

Thomas Attig: And I see religion as cultural phenomena, quite different over the face of the Earth where many people find in religion and in religious teachings, means to recognize, understand, and devote themselves to those meanings that I would call spiritual.

Thomas Attig: And I find lots of people are put off by religion, and I think lots of things culturally have been done that have been harmful, rather than blessings for the people who turn in their direction.

Thomas Attig: Is that enough?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Sure, as you like. Thank you for sharing that, and for your honesty -- your being quite candid about your experience of your mother's church, and your mother's belief, and this particular pastor at her funeral.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah. I can relate. I grew up in a very conservative, exclusivist Christian church, and I, too, left that church.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I think this will be an interesting point of connection between your focus on grief and your meaning for spirituality being centered around a search for meaning, the meaning of life, finding the value of life, finding the values that constitute that, and living in pursuit of that.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Also, you mentioned specifically part of that use… of that orientation of where am I, you know, why am I here, and where am I going, as being part of that, an important part of that of that journey.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And in my case, it was… my father died when I was still in college. He was struck by lightning, so it was quite a surprise.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I had one older… one sibling, an older brother, who struggled with drug addiction and alcoholism and committed suicide...

Thomas Attig: I'm sorry.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: shortly after college, and then not too… I mean, maybe… I don't know, how many years later.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I guess I was probably in my early 30s when my mother died of cancer.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I was like, oh, it's just me. It's just me.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So that really prompted me to say, well, okay, where am I? What am I doing? You know, why am I here? Where am I going? Like, because I just had this awareness of, yeah, something, something about my life is not working, and I don't know that I would have really had that kind of opening to start asking questions, and that opening to a search for meaning, had I not had these, these… these losses, the death of everyone in my immediate family. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, let's let that be a segue into you talking about the experience of death and the experience of grief, and how that relates to spirituality, a search for meaning, how we establish meaning for our lives, and value our lives, and what we are… what that… what you have found in your lifetime of research, what that invites us to.

Thomas Attig: Well, I… I started teaching because there was a new College of Health and Human Services on the campus where I'd been hired a couple years before.

Thomas Attig: This was the beginning of my teaching career.

Thomas Attig: And I've been trained in phenomenology and existentialism.

Thomas Attig: Phenomenology being a kind of philosophy and philosophical inquiry that involves both describing and interpreting the full range of human experiences. Anything that we experience is fair game.

Thomas Attig: And existentialism, which focuses on my understanding, on the challenges and how to meet the challenges of living a finite life, which is what is available to us, with integrity and meaning.

Thomas Attig: So there's a kind of a disposition to being spiritual in that broader sense in which I was describing things...

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Mmm.

Thomas Attig: as opposed to in the sectarian kind of sense of spiritual.

Thomas Attig: And I started teaching about grief and loss because the college was setting up a new…a new college on campus focused on health and human services, with programs in nursing, gerontology, social work, and child and family development, among a couple of others.

Thomas Attig: And I'd been teaching an ethics class for a while.

Thomas Attig: The other members of my philosophy department were beginning to teach what I call applied philosophy, and we called it looking at real-world problems and how to think about and address them responsibly and intelligently.

Thomas Attig: And I saw… it looks as if we could have a course on death and dying in this department.

Thomas Attig: I had never thought that I would ever teach a course on death and dying, but it just looked like a natural.

Thomas Attig: And people had been in my classes, selecting death-related ethical issues that they wanted to talk about, like abortion and suicide and killing and war, and the like.

Thomas Attig: And I thought, well, I could teach a death ethics kind of class.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

Thomas Attig: And they gave me the go-ahead to teach such a course.

Thomas Attig: And I thought seriously about what are my students really going to need.

Thomas Attig: And I thought they will rarely be addressing ethical classes or issues in their day-to-day work, but they will always be daunted by going into the room of a person who's dying.

Thomas Attig: Or facing a brother or sister of someone who is dying and trying to be helpful in some way or another. 

Thomas Attig: And I thought, I should teach about that.

Thomas Attig: And then I thought about how to do that, and I thought, what I'm really going to be asking my students to do is to reflect very much on their own views.

Thomas Attig: And their own experiences of facing death and dying, and feeling helpless in a room where someone's dying, or feeling like they really had something to offer.

Thomas Attig: So I decided I would have my students write a lot of self-reflective exercises thinking about aspects of their lives

Thomas Attig: And one of them was asking them to write about their three most important loss of experiences.

Thomas Attig: And I wanted them to talk about what it was like when they first learned about their losing.

Thomas Attig: And second, what it was like when it was at its worst.

Thomas Attig: And third, what was it like when it felt like you were coming out of it? Not that you had it all behind you or anything like that, but you felt like the worst was past.

Thomas Attig: What were some of the things that helped you get past the worst of it?

Thomas Attig: And they wrote hundreds of these things in the first years I was teaching the course.

Thomas Attig: And amazingly, no one ever mentioned 5 stages of grief.

Thomas Attig: There wasn't a single person who talked about a single stage of what they were experiencing.

Thomas Attig: They talked about how the world was different.

Thomas Attig: They didn't know what to do with the stuff left in the closet.

Thomas Attig: They didn't know how to clean up what had happened in the dining room when he fell and died. 

Thomas Attig: They didn't know how to talk to grandma. Grandma's son, their father, had just died, and they felt like they really needed to talk to somebody. But how am I going to talk to Grandma? She's just lost her son.

Thomas Attig: They talked about going to church or not going to church.

Thomas Attig: They talked about the difficulty of walking in some of their neighborhoods, because it was filled with memories of this person who had died.

Thomas Attig: They talked about conversations with some people, but not others. 

Thomas Attig: They talked… well, one young man talked about how he came into the living room of his home one day, and his father was there with a gun in his hand, intending to kill himself. And that young man wrestled the gun out of his father's hand. That was one of his first experiences.

Thomas Attig: They were all different. Nobody sounded even remotely alike. As they described it, it was all particular, particular life circumstances, particular daily lives that were upset.

Thomas Attig: And particular trajectories in life that were sort of knocked off course by what had happened.

Thomas Attig: I began thinking. I began writing in response to them. One of the very first things I wrote was on, what I call the phenomenology of grieving -- relearning the world.

Thomas Attig: And talked about how you wind up relearning how to live in your daily life.

Thomas Attig: A major character is now missing.

Thomas Attig: And it's going to make lots of differences in all kinds of aspects of your life.

Thomas Attig: And in the same light, it means that the trajectory of your life into the next chapters will be into different chapters, because a major character you expected to be there will not be there.

Thomas Attig: I fed this back to my students, they said, That's it. I've never read anybody talking about grief and saying such sensible things, but that's what it's like. My world has changed, and I feel daunted, frightened, puzzled, confused, overwhelmed, hurting terribly, and I guess I learned how to live in the world before. But this is new, and this is bigger than anything I've ever faced.

Thomas Attig: That's… they found me echoing their experiences, and I thought, I'm on to something.

Thomas Attig: And I got serious, and eventually I wrote my first book on how we grieve.

Thomas Attig: That came out about 10 years after… well, almost 15 years after I had begun teaching. Well, actually, 20 years after I had begun teaching. 

Thomas Attig: I've been doing this a long time. I’m a Methuselah, if you know…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Maybe not quite that old.

Thomas Attig: Yeah, so that's how… that's how I got into it, and how I came to…

Thomas Attig: What I'm known for is that thinking of grieving as learning how to… relearning how to live in a world that's profoundly changed by what's happened.

Thomas Attig: And what you described was a series of profound changes in your life, lumped into a pretty short period of time, which can be overwhelming.

Thomas Attig: I'm amazed you're standing.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Well, I was very fortunate in many ways in that I had made the decision to… I… I think when I… I finished undergraduate, I thought that I was going to continue in graduate school, and my experience in graduate school involved a little bit of disillusionment with the academic environment.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And so I took those tests, you know, like the Myers-Briggs and so on, and just made the decision to go to work in human services.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Like, made the decision that based on, you know, all these things that I know, I am learning about myself, perhaps what I should do is go to work in the human services field. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And so I was working in the field of long-term care for the state, and I had just come across a study that people in late stages of life who find themselves the happiest, spirituality is a strong component of their life.

Thomas Attig: There you go.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And so then that prompted me to say, well, what is spirituality? Because at that point, I really had no concept of what the word meant, what was associated with it, it really didn't… it just didn't have a resonance for me at that time.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So I was quite fortunate that… that that had happened shortly before my mother's death, and then when I came back to work after my mother's death, the, I started working with another person who was going through big life changes in her own life, and was finding herself exposed to Sufism at the same time.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And so when I heard this Sufi Shaykh say, and my listeners have heard me say this before, but this is the first time you'll hear me say this, is when I heard the Sufi Shaykh say those who know their religion well, you know, so whether the person who is Christian, or the person is Jewish, or the person is Muslim, those who know their religion as well, know their religions well, know that there is only one religion and that's the religion of love, and peace, and mercy, and justice, and freedom for all, without separation.

Thomas Attig: Amen.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And when I heard that, I thought, oh, this hits my heart much differently than my experience of the church that I grew up in.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And so I wanted to learn more, and so that embarked me on doing spiritual practices that really gave me a sense of strengthening, a sense of peace, a strength of… a sense of calm that I would not have had otherwise. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So it was… I approached it, in my beginning experience of spirituality, I approached it like a science experiment, like, I'm going to try this and see what happens.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: But then what happened as a result of that was that faith sort of snuck up on me. And I realized before long, oh, I'm doing all of these, in my case, because Sufism is the mystical path of Islam, I realized, without… conscious realization, but I was like, initially, and then at some point later, I realized, oh, I have, in fact, been observing all of the outer pillars of Islam without even really associating it with Islam or associating it with religion. I've just been associating with it with this inner experience of love, this inner experience of connection, this inner experience of unity, and wanting more tastes of that, you know, more tastes of the love.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, I was very…

Thomas Attig: I’ve had similar longings.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I'm sorry?

Thomas Attig: I've had similar longings and found bits of it in some institutions that I've connected with, and more of it in individuals who seemed to have their head on straight, and recognize the significance of good and bad experiences that they've had, and have pretty good judgment about where their alliances should be, where their compassion and love should be invested and hazards to avoid.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I will also say that I was fortunate in that – and I'm curious to hear how you'll react to this – but after the death of each of my immediate family, they visited me in my dreams for a period of time.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And my father was very, devoted to his religion and yet, he, I think maybe I was going to speak to his shortcomings, but I think maybe I'll leave that unsaid.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: But what I'll say is that for each family member, I received the gift of them visiting me in spirit, in dreams, and giving me a glimpse of what… of who they are in their truth, in their… in their deepest truth, in their essence.

Thomas Attig: You were a privileged man, that's good.

Thomas Attig: There are… People have those experiences all over the world, but not… not uniformly. 

Thomas Attig: And the real deal is really reassuring.

Thomas Attig: Good for you.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And it helps you think, oh, it helps you have a different perspective in relating to other human beings.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Because you realize when you're looking at a person that you're not seeing their essence...

Thomas Attig: Hmm.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: unless you… unless you really intend to do that, and in my case, have the ability to, for me, in my… in my… in the paradigm that I operate in, it's a matter of letting my mind about my heart, and allowing my heart to be in con… in connection to the divine, and allowing myself to be present with someone that is a much deeper way of being present than how we typically interact in our daily lives.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And it's only through that sense of alignment with the divine and that deeper sense of connection and presence that I was able to get a sense of who someone is and their deepest truth, but those dreams invited me to that.

Thomas Attig: Well, they're… they're a gift.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yes, they're a gift. Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So… I know people… I have loved ones who are currently dealing with grief.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I think, you know, grief is something that hits us all, whether we find ourselves grounded in a particular tradition or not, whether we consider ourselves spiritual but not religious or not, but there is certain commonality of the grief experience, and that we're not exempt from death and dying.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, what invitation did you have somebody who's going through that, that would help someone bring their experience of grief to allow them to grow in terms of this journey of, where am I now? Why am I here? Where am I going?

Thomas Attig: Let's… I'm sort of… At a loss as to where to begin.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

Thomas Attig: I, I think that typically, when you end up talking to someone who's in the midst of grief, the focus, is first, usually the sorrow that comes over you.

Thomas Attig: The sense of loss and deprivation.

Thomas Attig: And just the weight of it… the, the enormity of it.

Thomas Attig: This is not another small thing.

Thomas Attig: It's not a problem that you can solve, put on the shelf, and move somewhere else.

Thomas Attig: You're contending with a mystery. If you're solving problems, you're changing the world around you.

Thomas Attig: If you're contending with a mystery, you are having to change in response to something that is weighty enough that moves you to recognize that you can't undo this.

Thomas Attig: But it's more significant than a daily problem.

Thomas Attig: It has to do with why you want to live anymore.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

Thomas Attig: And for what reasons.

Thomas Attig: For what values. What matters to you most?

Thomas Attig: And… I think that a good part of what I've been trying to do for years, is to help people move from sadness, and the weight of feelings of loss to gratitude.

Thomas Attig: I was lucky to know this person.

Thomas Attig: I was lucky to be loved by this person. I was lovely to be… I was lucky to be raised by these people.

Thomas Attig: I was lucky to be taught by this man. I was lucky in so many ways, to be given things that I had nothing to do with discovering, creating, and so on.

Thomas Attig: And I think, honestly, that a key to living well is recognizing how little you really do to make your life what it is, to fill it with what it's filled with.

Thomas Attig: You are given, from the time you're born, the means to live, and you don't have the means to gather it for yourself.

Thomas Attig: It's given to you from the people who first feed you, and clothe you, and house you.

Thomas Attig: And then as you grow into life, you meet up with friends.

Thomas Attig: You meet up with other relatives in your family. You meet up with people who teach you. You meet up with people who guide you. 

Thomas Attig: You meet up with the product of others' loves and labors that are in your life there, and you've been given them.

Thomas Attig: And when you really get to it, you get to the point of seeing that we're all in a vast web of webs where everything is connected to absolutely everything.

Thomas Attig: And we're far from being isolated atoms floating freely in open space.

Thomas Attig: And when someone dies, the space hasn't changed except for one being is missing in it, and you haven't been changed at all.

Thomas Attig: But what's really happening is you are a web within a great web of webs.

Thomas Attig: And you have been fed along lifelines beyond counting and beyond even knowing.

Thomas Attig: All that have made it possible for you to have the life that you have.

Thomas Attig: And a time when someone is dying or has died is a perfect time to reflect on what you had in your life because this person lived.

Thomas Attig: And to move from the heartache of missing them now to the gratitude in continuing to love them and appreciating what they gave to you that's still part of who you are.

Thomas Attig: And I've been moved in that direction as I've been studying this for years and years.

Thomas Attig: I mean, there are little quotations, I can't remember them exactly, but, you know, the, the gifts given to you by others are yours for the rest of your life.

Thomas Attig: And the more time you can spend appreciating them, making good use of them, and so on, the better person you will be, and the better life you're going to live.

Thomas Attig: Studying this stuff for 40 or 50 years has driven me in that direction.

Thomas Attig: And we are… the product of a universe that is put together beyond our understanding.

Thomas Attig: And rich with abundance of all kinds.

Thomas Attig: And we get small bites that are sufficient for meaningful lifetimes.

Thomas Attig: And it better be okay that we're small and insignificant, because we are.

Thomas Attig: And it better be okay that suffering's okay, because we suffer, and we will.

Thomas Attig: And it better be okay that we don't understand fully, because we never will.

Thomas Attig: And it, it better be okay that change is probably the only constant in life because that's the way it is.

Thomas Attig: And I don't know if it's from philosophy, it's from religious influence, it's from whatever influence or stories that I've come to know in my lifetime that I've sort of distilled out that kind of an understanding.

Thomas Attig: And you can call it religious if you want. I have a little bit of difficulty doing that because I associate that with the formalities of doctrines, and so on.

Thomas Attig: But, you know, I've…

Thomas Attig: If there were a religion that centered on what I've just been talking about, I'd be a religious person.

Thomas Attig: Most of them aren't.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Well, I don't know that this is the time or place to get into the, the discussion of religion versus spirituality, there have been other episodes where that's more a central point of the discussion.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I'll just say from my own experience, I think of I heard the idea that true religion is to return you to your origin.

Thomas Attig: Hmm.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, it's like a… a roadway with guideposts, or, you know, with guideposts or guardrails. It's to help you to get where you're going.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And if it's not doing that, you know, if it's not taking you to love, if it's not taking you to peace, if it's not taking you to mercy and compassion and justice, then something's off.

Thomas Attig: Yeah.

Thomas Attig: Well, part of what's necessary is to have a forgiving mind, because it's humans who are telling the stories and promulgating the faith, and so on, and we're imperfect, and we all have to, contend with imperfections in ourselves and others our entire lives, and the imperfections can get away from… get in the way of seeing things that probably have to be seen more constantly and carefully, but it's hard to do.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, setting the whole religion versus spirituality discussion aside, I just want to offer our listeners a recap, if I may. Hopefully this is helpful. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: But the things that I heard you say that are keys to living well -- One is gratitude. If you can be grateful that the loved one was in your life.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And can be grateful for the… what you received by having that loved one in your life.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And a general sort of gratitude in addition to that, number two would be… and maybe you would separate this, maybe this is just… maybe not, maybe it's just how I heard it, but I heard you speaking to an acknowledgement or an awareness of… that so much of our life we are given from the moment of conception.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: In my paradigm in spiritual tradition, we believe that the sperm and the egg is joined by an angel. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Like, that there is the holy presence of love from the very beginning. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: That joining does not happen without angelic presence. You know, so… but that's not specifically what you're saying, but that you invited me to rethink of that in my own tradition, because you're inviting this awareness of how much we are given, whether it's the air, or the water, or…

Thomas Attig: There is a reason that within a lot of traditions, there's talk about providence, because providence is sort of being given this, that is our state of being. We are on the receiving end of, I mean, having a moment alive.

Thomas Attig: The way we are alive.

Thomas Attig: It's spectacularly out of the ordinary for physical stuff. 

Thomas Attig: We are enriched beyond measure, just by having been granted by whatever mystery we conjure up a setup of the way things are that enables us to breathe, to think, to see, to hear, to love, to hurt, to hunger, to feed, to give, to receive.

Thomas Attig: And if we had that for 15 minutes, that'd be spectacular enough, but we get to live whole lifetimes.

Thomas Attig: How is it possible? Does anybody know how inert matter becomes enlivened in a way that we can understand.

Thomas Attig: I mean, these tiny little things, these zygotes that sort of meet up inside the woman and eventually become bodies that emerge.

Thomas Attig: That's a very complex process.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right.

Thomas Attig: Oh, it becomes alive!

Thomas Attig: We don't understand very well.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: No, we don't, yeah.

Thomas Attig: It strikes me as miraculous. It's just unbelievable.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, yeah. So that reminds me of one of the other things that I took from your resp…your offering of keys to living well is awareness of the mystery and acceptance of the mystery, and acceptance of the unknown, also acceptance of change, acceptance of the -- you mentioned the word insignificance, the… 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So to me, hearing you talk about the miracle of life, and how sacred life is, how holy and precious life is, there's both this sense of this expansiveness of the miracle, the wonder, the expansive wonder, and the awareness of our insignificance in in in consideration of the whole.

Thomas Attig: Yeah. In proportion to the size of things, and just physical size, and physical energy, and physical this, that, and the other thing.

Thomas Attig: And then throw in about 20 other dimensions that, you know, can't be measured with measuring rods and thermometers and the like. But it's all so vast.

Thomas Attig: And here we are on what may be a very, very tiny corner of this vastness that is the only corner that's like it, where there may be remote corners innumerable that are so remote from us that we can't even detect that they're there.

Thomas Attig: This is a big universe, and figuring out how to even ... time when it started. And the scale of it is… is…

Thomas Attig: They measure it in light years, which is how long it takes… a year of light traveling as fast as it travels.

Thomas Attig: And it's not 2 or 3 light years, it's a gazillion of these. This is a big place.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yes, yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: In Sufism, there's a name, a divine name, a name for God, that's associated with a God's greatness, and an explanation ... one of the explanations that I've heard of this divine name that refers to the greatness, the vastness of God, is if you were in a vehicle that traveled the speed of thought and you travel past a million suns, you would still only get a glimpse of the creation. So, how much greater is the Creator?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, I know that's not necessarily what you were saying, but I just am pointing out the places of resonance between what you're offering and my own tradition.

Thomas Attig: Well, and there, there are similarities, themes that I think, and alternative expressions, or attempts to express the ineffable in the languages that religions find for themselves, and they seem to be stretching into the same inscrutable, substance that shapes the context where we all live.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yes, yes.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: The great mystery is the term that… the term that comes to mind, yes.

Thomas Attig: Yeah, it works for me.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah. I'm also reminded that one of the ways you talked about the similar expressions, one of the other things that I got from your offerings of a key to living well is our connectedness. This sense of our inner connection.

Thomas Attig: Oh, yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, yeah.

Thomas Attig: And it's…

Thomas Attig: There are things that scientists have been doing since they've been doing what they do that just missed the mark on how connected everything is to everything else.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

Thomas Attig: And what they seem to be wanting to do is to break it down to the smallest particles rather than to realize and value, and understand the depth of, and the richness of the interconnected between everything and everything.

Thomas Attig: It's a much cozier place to live, if you see it that way, than if you see it as a pile, a huge pile of atoms.

Thomas Attig: It's, it's not like that. We don't experience it that way. Thank God we don't.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah. 

Thomas Attig: I got to get past this pile of something I want to hug, and I don't want to hug atoms and particles.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, yeah.

Thomas Attig: You probably don't either, necessarily.

Thomas Attig: I find myself saying things that sound kind of sunny or funny, but, I mean them, I'm pretty sure.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right.

Thomas Attig: And as I said, I think earlier, we don't… we don't live more or less scientifically, we live more or less wisely.

Thomas Attig: And wisdom takes into account all this connectedness and all the… unknown or mystical, aspects of what we know and what we don't know, and what we are capable of embracing and what we're reaching for, I think, pretty uniformly.

Thomas Attig: Although there are a lot of reachers who aren't reaching much.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Indeed. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And wisdom...

Thomas Attig: Yeah, and there's...

Thomas Attig: We're living in interesting times, a lot of people would say, and the capacity of people who have incredible capacities to do wonderful things, and to love and care, and invent and grow in understanding, and so on.

Thomas Attig: Saying no to that, and just saying, yes, I'd like to accumulate more...

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Mmm…

Thomas Attig: The capacity to do that, the capacity to ignore the capacities that could bring you happiness and connectedness and love and all the good stuff for the sake of piling up coins and bills that have nothing in them of sustaining value is pretty disappointing.

Thomas Attig: Lately, I've been thinking a lot about human beings, and how can human beings do some of the things that they've been doing for a long time, and seem to be doing in spades now? 

Thomas Attig: And you wonder how is someone who's capable of caring for a fellow human being and raising them to adulthood, and so on, wanting to waste their time piling up bank accounts and so on.

Thomas Attig: How can that be attractive?

Thomas Attig: But it sure is.

Thomas Attig: We disappoint me.

Thomas Attig: I’m sure I’m disappointing people, too.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I… I am currently undergoing a situation in my neighborhood where I am experiencing feelings of disappointment. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I am… I, too, echo your experience of looking at humans who are behaving in ways that are not loving and not caring and are not in any way, seeming to be aware at all of our interconnectedness, of our interbeing.

Thomas Attig: It seems to be so easy to ignore.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And for me, a fundamental definition of being human is to recognize that each of our experiences different and to care about what somebody's experience is.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, that's two parts. One part is to recognize that the experience is different, two is to care what the experience is.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And it seems to me that we… that many of us are forgetting what it is to be human. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: We're forgetting what it is to see each other, and to care what each other's experience is.

Thomas Attig: And that's just heartbreaking.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: It is heartbreaking. Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And part of what you're doing in offering these keys to living well is inviting us to remember our connectedness, inviting us to remember what is meaningful. You mentioned love, and giving, and gratitude, and generosity and humility, so, I'm not sure…

Thomas Attig: What am I going to do?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: But that's… but those are the words you mentioned, and if we can reorient ourselves to those, then we can… we can create… we can contribute to a better world, and in… in the ways of… of… in the words of one of my teachers, it's, you know, as you said, Where are you? Where are you standing? Where are you heading? And she offers, and, What do you want to contribute?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, and do you want to contribute love? Do you want to contribute justice? Do you want to contribute compassion? Care?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And if not…

Thomas Attig: Yeah, you can live an alternative life. How much can I take? How much can I pile up? How much can I accumulate? How much can I control? How much can I manipulate? How much power can I have?

Thomas Attig: Why does anyone think those are good roads to go down?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Well, I would say that they have succumbed to illusion.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And that they are operating in a world of illusion.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And we can only hope and pray that we all wake up. That collectively, that collectively we wake up, that collectively we engage.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: In my tradition and in my… in my way of, of thinking about what's happening in the world, I feel like there's two things that we must do, and that is, one, we must sort of reflect on where we are, and what we want to contribute, as we've just said.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: The… we must connect to… in this experience of multiplicity, in this experience of this intense struggle between the light and the dark, between a lack of humanity and humanity, it's important to spend time connecting to what we hold as sacred -- connecting to what our highest values are, to connecting, you know, if you're in a theistic tradition, connecting to the divine.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: To spending time, because if we can cultivate that awareness, that sense of unity, of divine oneness, then we can be in the presence of the multiplicity without losing ourselves, without losing our humanity. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So that's the invitation, that I… that I'm hearing, in my tradition, and the invitation that I'm hearing in your, advice, is Love. Care. Connectedness. Humility. Giving.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So these are… these are points of commonality, and it's through these things that…that we can, contribute to a world of hope, and a world of love, and work toward a world with justice and peace.

Thomas Attig: If I were… if I were to summarize the conclusions that I've come to in this little book here and then monthly in my studies through the years and reflections through the years, I agree.

Thomas Attig: I, I just think that when people look at grief, naively, I think they see nothing but something to avoid, something to get over, to put behind you, to loosen the grip of it.

Thomas Attig: And it's entirely negative.

Thomas Attig: And it's just awful. Grief is just awful.

Thomas Attig: And my reading is that we have emotional and other difficult reactions to what's happened to us.

Thomas Attig: And people tend to think of those things as sort of like being hit over the head, something to be avoided.

Thomas Attig: And people think of emotions as things to be expressed.

Thomas Attig: And I think of emotions as sort of like a pain in your head when something's going on in your head that you should pay attention to. Or pain in your knee.

Thomas Attig: There may be an injury there, there may be something that needs attention.

Thomas Attig: And you've got this wonderful physical system that signals you that physically you've got a need here, you've got a need there. 

Thomas Attig: And through modern medicine, we've learned a lot about how to read the signals that our body is giving us, that point in the direction of promoting our health, rather than further deterioration, injury, and the like.

Thomas Attig: And I think of our emotional lives as doing the same thing for us, socially, psychologically, in all the other dimensions of our life, where we live consciously.

Thomas Attig: And the idea that grief, when you go into the depth of it and don't just express the things that you are feeling but attend to how your hope... your hopelessness, points in certain directions to what you need.

Thomas Attig: You need hope. Your alienation from other people. 

Thomas Attig: All kinds… Everything that these emotions… what the substance of what they express, as opposed to just express them so you can get rid of them, dispense them out into the world without doing anything in their light.

Thomas Attig: I think grief is hopeful.

Thomas Attig: Because it's telling you things that you need to do. Pay attention.

Thomas Attig: Things you need to do socially, things you need to do for yourself physically, needs, things you need to do for you as an individual, for you as your family, for the people you care about, for the community that's been affected, and so on.

Thomas Attig: If we… if we came to see our emotions as, like, our physical aches and pains, pointing to aspects of who we are that need attention and need active response.

Thomas Attig: They tell you what you need to do.

Thomas Attig: What you need to do in conversation with the people who need to talk to you about the loss that you have in common, that tell you what you need to do to put your family back together in a new way, that points you in the direction of hope for yourself, hope for your loved ones who still live.

Thomas Attig: Hopes that your… the people who died had, that you can use to shape life among those of you that survive the person, and so on. 

Thomas Attig: If we… if we stop seeing grief as just negative, but as a kind of an inner sensory capacity that can point you in all kinds of positive directions as you live the next days and years of your life, you've got a better hold on what grief is about.

Thomas Attig: And it's the kind of stuff I try to catch in the book.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Well, thank you for… for sharing your wisdom, the conclusions of your book.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Thank you for inviting us to look at grief and all of our emotional experience as invitation to new life, new directions, new life within, new life, in terms of the larger world.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, thank you for… for being here, thank you for your lifetime of work devoted to grief, and thank you for the great conversation.

Thomas Attig: Thank you. This has been very nice, I appreciate your having me on board.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And thank you to all listeners for joining us on Beyond Names. Before we go, briefly, if you would pause and take one breath, reflect for just a moment on what stays with you from this conversation.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: May something you heard today help you reconnect with the light in your own heart. May you grow in compassion, clarity, and courage.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: May you find your way again and again back home to the divine, however you name it. If today's conversation spoke to you, please like, share, and comment on this episode. Please follow and subscribe to Beyond Names. To make an appointment with me, please visit https://www.habibboerger.com/. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Until next time, may you be light, may you consciously participate in growing your light, and may you share your light.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Peace be with you.

Thomas Attig: And with you.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Thank you.