On the nuances of grief and loss, personal rituals, and our willingness to be transformed.

• 0:00 — Introduction and Guest Introduction
• 3:04 — Marissa's Personal Story and Grief Journey
• 7:38 — Building a Grief Plan
• 13:24 — Understanding Trauma and Its Impact
• 17:27 — Boundaries and Self-Care
• 22:52 — The Role of Prayer and Rituals
• 28:22 — Memorializing Losses and Rituals
• 32:18 — Connecting with Nature and Finding Support
• 37:46 — Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Merissa Nathan Gerson is the author of Forget Prayers, Bring Cake: A Single Woman's Guide to Grieving, and her writing appears in Modern Love for the New York Times, The Atlantic, Playboy, Tablet, CNN.com and beyond. Merissa trained in Shambhala Shamatha meditation, graduated with an MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University, is a certified Sivananda yoga teacher, and holds an MA in Jewish Studies with a focus on inherited trauma as well as sex and gender from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. She was the Inherited Trauma consultant to Amazon's Transparent and is the daughter and granddaughter of war refugees. She is currently training to be a rabbi. Forget Prayers, Bring Cake: A Single Woman's Guide to Grieving came out in 2021 from Mandala Press for Simon & Schuster. This book is a companion for these times. As McArthur Genius Kiese Laymon describes: "Merissa Gerson has created a neon treatise on the art and necessity of grieving."

On tending to our interdependence, living life fully, and dying with attention and equanimity.

• 0:00 — Introduction
• 1:34 — Overview of Ann's Book "Traveling in Bardo"
• 3:55 — Personal Reflections on Grandmother's Funeral
• 7:20 — The Role of Practice in Embracing Impermanence
• 16:15 — Living with Attention and Interdependence
• 34:57 — Authenticity and True Nature
• 42:09 — Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Ann Tashi Slater writes for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Paris Review, and Granta, among others, and is a contributing editor at Tricycle. She presents and teaches workshops at Princeton, Columbia, Oxford, Asia Society, and The American University of Paris, and was a regular speaker at NYC's Rubin Museum of Art during the museum's 20-year run. Ann's new book, Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World was released by Balance/Hachette in September, 2025.

TRAVELING IN BARDO explores how we can find meaning and happiness in a world where change is the only certainty. Interweaving explorations of "bardo" between-states in relation to marriage and friendship, parents and children, and work and creativity with stories of her Tibetan ancestors and Buddhist teachings on the fleeting nature of existence, Slater illuminates what the teachings have to tell us in our contemporary lives. She relays vital wisdom from Tibetan culture, giving us a bold, new framework to navigate moments of change and live life fully. With a foreword by Dani Shapiro, the book has been praised by Elizabeth Gilbert, Melissa Febos, Sharon Salzberg, and Julia Alvarez, among others, and has been selected as a "Must-Read" by the Next Big Idea Club, co-curated by Malcolm Gladwell. In the midst of this shifting landscape, Slater invites us to embrace impermanence in a powerful way, rooted in ancient wisdom. During over forty years of writing and speaking about her Tibetan-American heritage and the relevance of Buddhism in Western society, Slater has come to see how Tibetan bardo views on impermanence can transform the way we live. A luminous guide to navigating transition and impermanence, it offers us the opportunity to find happiness in an impermanent world.

On the identities we no longer need, the alchemy of recovery, and mourning the person we used to be.

• (0:00) – Introduction and Background of Allison Derani
• (2:13) – Allison's Journey and Grief in Recovery
• (5:21) – Parenting and Self-Abandonment
• (7:04) – The Ambiguous Grief of Self-Abandonment
• (7:50) – The Liminal Space of Sobriety
• (18:39) – The Importance of Listening to Questions
• (22:57) – The Practice of Slowing Down
• (25:21) – Closing Thoughts and Future Plans

Allison Deraney is a woman in recovery from alcohol who credits sobriety for waking her back up to her first passion—writing. Currently a licensed real estate attorney, running her own business, she's writing more creativity into her days via her Substack, Dare To Be, and working on her first book, a memoir about the healing and revealing as we recover from the ambiguous loss of self-abandonment. Dedicated to speaking up and speaking out about living a conscious sober life, Allison lives in Massachusetts with her husband, two kids, and two rescue dogs, spending her free time wandering and wondering in nature, and cheering her kids on from the sidelines of the basketball court.

Allison's book-to-be is about grief; not the traditional kind, though there is some of that in there. The biggest lesson she's learned in recovery is this: Rejecting grief, in all its iterations, is a form of self-abandonment. Grief requires that we surrender to it. So does addiction, compulsion of perfection and aging.

It's a book that explores how my midlife journey is intersecting with the deeper parts of recovery in the most terrifying and beautiful way. It's a unique book in that it is written during the transformation. Because I am still in it. Sobriety has been my portal to Divinity and I'm here, feet planted on the threshold, weaving words to capture the experience as best I can.

https://allisonderaney.substack.com

Here are Allison's three favorite posts from her Substack, DARE TO BE, out of an immense pull to write through her sobriety.

https://open.substack.com/pub/allisonderaney/p/setting-off-our-own-fireworks-a95?r=rkt4u&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

https://open.substack.com/pub/allisonderaney/p/its-been-a-whole-hand?r=rkt4u&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

https://open.substack.com/pub/allisonderaney/p/my-permission-sticks-they-still-keep?r=rkt4u&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false