loss comes in many foreigners and usually in unexpected ways it can be devastating leaving you facing an uphill struggle to go on with life without someone you thought would always be there but life does go on and even in the deepest despair we can hope welcome to grief really with your hosts doctors gloria and heidi horsley brought to you by the open to hope foundation helping people find hope after show i'm dr gloria horsley with my co host dr heidi worsley oh heidi this is really an important show today and it's it's really important because we have the open hope website and we have over a half one million people visiting our site every year looking for h after a loss and we found that the nd thing most searched for on our site is parent loss yeah absolutely i mean a lot of people who is in their parents all ages that's right and they're looking for that kind of information on the show so  to to try to do more shows on parent loss because we know that you're looking for it out there so heidi we've got some great guests today and know one of them is a very good friend of yours and you want to introduce to talk about who's going to be on the show t laurie is my very dear friend and we met the st day of my dr program fifteen years ago i think it was and so yes she is a professor at university of san francisco and she's in private practice she is an expert grief and loss in resilience so i cannot wait to have her here i'm very excited to have her here and then we're going to have a special guest who's going to be talking to us about yoga and a couple of weeks ago we had lynn for sean on and it's very key so see ok well we were both of us were hoping the other would antonio but we're going to close the show with a fabulous band yes and that's the poly rock band from palo alto high school and  know and you're such an inspiration because i know i've referred a lot of people view because you have out so much trauma in your life and you just you know it been used so i don't know how you've done that talk about your loss done in the world and then at the time we never thought he would live at least you know my family just never did but he lived another six or seven years but he died when i was  fourteen coronary stuff and four years after that for five years after that my mother died of lung cancer so i was pretty young when both my parents died you were you were nineteen and had no one died and how that sort of impacted the relationship in the kind of the way that i experienced a loss as well which was profound kind of situation my mother you know i kind of frame it like she realize that there is a vulnerability that you have after after the loss of a parent absolutely especially i mean especially when you're when you're young and you're really you know people everyone's telling you what to do when your team are your you  adult everyone's telling you what they think you should be doing you know you want to do x you feel better right you know we don't always make the best choices but we really really try to you know i was wondering when you when you work with families where there's been a parent do you find that some of the kids get parent parent a fide to deal move into that spot and salute lee and that is that is probably i mean there's a couple of things that happen but to the most common things that i see are the kids who completely withdraw  from the family or the ones that sort of take the place of the other parent so parent who has lost a spouse and or a partner and the kid sort of picks up the slack you know they're feeling really depressed and they can't sort of you know they can't take care of this their business they don't do the laundry and the other kids the kids are all sort of picking up for that period and almost as if they're in some question you know the parent doesn't speak you know make sure the parents ok because the a nd parent absolutely you know i was just a sophomore i you know one of the choices i made was i graduated high school in three years instead of four at the time i had certain reasons why i did all of this is such a great career move for me but in retrospect as an adult i look back and i think you know it was really for me to get out of my house because it was so hard to be there as your mom said because my mom said yeah and i mean it is true you know you sort of take care of  better and they've got this child who is kind of running their life and absolutely absolutely and it's interesting because i wanted to go to school close to home and my mother wouldn't let me it was sort of like she said you need to get away you need to get away so in essence she sort of knew the structure of what what you know in her heart really needed to happen right and she want to have a normal abyssinians yeah i mean god bless her for doing it because yeah i mean easier for her to be closer i feel very grateful i feel you know my parents died when i was young but i know you know what i got from them was more than if i had spent a whole lifetime for many people their experiences so you really have internalized a lot of that wonderful ness i guess you could call it well the thing about you corey is you are seriously one of the most positive people and totally blows my mind that you were orphaned by nineteen i mean i've known you for fifteen years and because you're so positive all the time and so it sounds like part of what you did was to like you said internalize your parents and keep them forever like in your heart and your mind and your memories and i try to and you know in my work with teenagers who have lost parents you know as you as you guys know you you've written about working with teens in grief that you know if you noticed they're ok you know they sort of tell you what's going on and you sort of have to take their  kids do very well and they're ok without a lot of therapy others need a little more support but when i was young nobody offered anything there was nothing out there to really offer and i think the biggest thing is to be able to offer the kinds of services for teenagers who lose their parents so that they can they don't feel isolated they they do feel like other people understand what's going on and they don't feel like they have to hold it by themselves that kind of fits in with the whole thinking this is terrible this is awful and they could say i'm really sorry that this is happened to you and all that kind of thing because people are thinking about it and they think about it for years i mean it's people are pretty darn compassionate and now they're given the opportunity to express  answer being on the day and we want you to say we're going to introduce our next guest and then we want to take some questions but what i want to say to everybody out there right now the most important thing i think that same corner right now as if you are a parent and your absolutely well now claire yeah and now we're going to meet antonio you haven't met him i have heidi where you met him here but i spent some time with him at the conference association of death educators i were truly good friends and when she died of a stroke at the age of fifty four i was pushed into a split personality disorder that allowed me to not get in touch with when two and a half years i have not had an accident and yet what my body was expressing was quite clear i had a broken heart a few years later my teacher and mentor lynn profession and outstanding s from the san francisco bay area asked me to design a routine with your got exercise to address the physical symptoms of i was thrilled hearing someone ignore much that grief impacts also the body and so i created the yoga for grief relief my program is not intended to help individuals not quite the opposite it helps grievers being in touch with the palette of symptoms of grief so they can understand and also determine that new identity that emerges after an important as in many other moments in my well antonio i love what you said about there in the palette and i think that is so great because you think of the palette of all the things about our life it's not just it's not just one thing sometimes you think about grief in some big black hole  happens and the truth is that grief affects the mind the body and the spirit in particular ways and so that's why i think it presents such a wide palette palette of feelings and emotions and  experience was that when the pain of grief would come and this usually would be in the morning you wake up as it usually happens and you realize your new reality the pain would come and i would just switch like with a little switch and under and they all shared this amazing quality that while being able to be up for normal teenage things or young things at the same time they had this depth and this this ability to get in touch with some of these aspects of life a spiritual aspect so i was interested in what they had that i did so i got the techniques meditation techniques from a physical standpoint i was doing olympic gymnastics at the y m c a there was this famous yoga class that all the pretty women were going to and i decided to go and i put a vertebra out of place and the nd time i went there the teacher said but you seem to do things pretty well how long have you been practicing it is this is my nd time he said what this is a teacher's training course that's right and he said stay put your bird abroad back in place so of course that put me in the center of the class for two months they said yes i'll do it and i learned st hand you fix if you get ther that was years after when she was in south america directing health spa and they needed a yoga teachers so i was directed to her i was referred to her we met and in the course of the st conversation therapists and anxious individual and they say calm down it's cruel because a person who sanctions can't come down and read so i wouldn't say just open but that's that's the st thing you need to do just stretch the picture all muscles in a way that all the type of emotions that are contained or held in those muscles can experience a change as your muscles do and then if you can follow up with that change and work with that then you start operating a change in your process and you're going to find a loss all the sudden they'll start to cry well that's why ok precisely that lightening the heart because they're opening their heart and because our bodies naturally our bodies are master survivors so when we have a situation as loss which  so also because grief is related to the hard to the emotional heart and for yoga too and i checked out of the place where the energy of emotional bonding lives in the body when we have a problem with that we tend to close animals is a whole different show but absolutely animals the bonding we have with animals is very similar to the bonds we have with humans in the way in which we can draw support from just holding so much research about how  it helps our physical and mental health just holding in petting them and bonding with them is a man so absolutely yeah antonio do you have something special you do to remember your mom my work i would say that my work is what i do because every time i can assist other individuals in going through the process of grieving and through loss i am reminded that she didn't die in vain and after all even though it took me two and a half years to start and then complete what she wanted that was for me to be and live individual and not be defined by my grief i continuously do so in helping others not be defined by their grief i find that i'm sitting in relationships that service aspect of filming yet when we can finally move about in the service to other people it is so boring and because as we do it for others we're doing it for ourselves absolutely that they used to play for me from you know i was just playing one today from like otis redding or just things that make me feel so connected and you know you and in my case and it's interesting how the body and what the mind was to remember because around the time of my mom's birthday my body starts to feel some of the symptoms i felt back when she died so i know the time is coming and that's when i do a little you know lighting a candle in just celebrating her life and thinking that through me there's enough to be deferred continues on and i asking for the light to eliminate tonight in my process as she did when she was li things st of all convince him that he's not a girly thing yoga was passed for him brother to brother and from fathers to sons for for thousands of years before actually getting to the west and having women take over it the  him we're not going to talk about it we're going to do some things they can come to the class and have any experience in their body and then they will be in a position of choosing whether they want or not to talk about it because as you know sometimes we don't like to talk about so much things but i rather experience them that one more show me antonio's website and you'll see that real men do  hope dot com where you can listen to radio programs watch past episodes of grief relief read articles and few books you can also join them on twitter and facebook and put your events on their international calendar thanks for watching and remember