Grapevine Inner Wellness

When the gulf between you and someone you love feels impossibly wide, how do you stay in relationship with them?

I hold my hand flat, palm facing up.

This is how I think about relationships. Open. Not gripping. Not closed.
If someone wants to leave, my hand doesn't close around them to keep them. And if they want to stay, my hand is right here.

The open hand isn't weakness. It's the only position that leaves room for both of you to choose freely.

Because gripping looks like checking their Facebook. Posting things you hope they'll see. Rehearsing arguments at two in the morning that you're finally winning in your head.

All of that is a closed fist. And a closed fist around someone who isn't there exhausts you without moving anything forward.

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/E0_xFwOlgPY
Listen on your favorite podcast app: https://grapevinewellnessshow.transistor.fm/episodes/between-sessions-when-the-person-youre-grieving-is-still-alive

Grief is the normal and natural reaction to loss. That's the first definition.

But here's the second one, and it might change how you think about grief entirely.
Grief is the conflicting feelings caused by the end of or change in a familiar pattern of behavior.

Not death. Not even necessarily loss of a person. The end of something familiar. The change in something you counted on. The moment when the pattern you built your life around no longer holds.

By that definition, grief belongs to almost every significant human experience. And most of us are carrying at least one form of it right now without calling it that.

There are over 40 distinct types of loss a person can experience in a lifetime. Most people can name three or four. Which means most of us are walking around grieving things we've never given ourselves permission to grieve.

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/E0_xFwOlgPY
Listen on your favorite podcast app: https://grapevinewellnessshow.transistor.fm/episodes/between-sessions-when-the-person-youre-grieving-is-still-alive

Unrecognized grief looks like insomnia. It looks like depression. It looks like irritability and a heaviness you can't explain.

It hides in plain sight because we never give it its real name.

When a relationship ruptures, there's a very human impulse to stay connected in whatever way is available. In 2026, that's usually social media.

So you check. You tell yourself it's just curiosity. You scroll looking for evidence that the person misses you, or signs that they've changed, or proof that they're not okay without you.

But whatever you're looking for, the checking keeps you tethered. Every scroll is a conversation with someone who isn't in the room. And that tether makes it nearly impossible for your nervous system to process the loss as an actual loss.

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/E0_xFwOlgPY
Listen on your favorite podcast app: https://grapevinewellnessshow.transistor.fm/episodes/between-sessions-when-the-person-youre-grieving-is-still-alive

How many people are living a social media version of their best life, not for themselves, but for the specific audience of one person they're supposed to be moving on from?

The gym selfies. The spontaneous trip photos. The radiant, laughing, I've-never-been-better content, posted with one eye on whether a particular person will see it.

That's not healing. That's a conversation with someone who isn't listening, dressed up as confidence.

Performative grief doesn't move. It just gets a filter and a caption.

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/E0_xFwOlgPY
Listen on your favorite podcast app: https://grapevinewellnessshow.transistor.fm/episodes/between-sessions-when-the-person-youre-grieving-is-still-alive

What do you do when you lose everything in a single day?

On Valentine's Day 1884, a young man lost both his mother and his wife in a single day. But what he did next changed the course of his life, our country’s history, and it might change how you think about grief.

His story is the opening of our newest Between Sessions episode, where I explore the forty kinds of grief most people never acknowledge.

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/E0_xFwOlgPY
Listen on your favorite podcast app: https://grapevinewellnessshow.transistor.fm/episodes/between-sessions-when-the-person-youre-grieving-is-still-alive

In this clip, Seung "Bruce" Lee talks about kaizen, the practice of continuous improvement, and why he's only in competition with the version of himself from yesterday. He also shares a phrase he lives by with his coaching clients: pause for the cause.

Stop, look back, and actually notice how far you've come.

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/VDWYCrCTJ48
Listen wherever you get podcasts: https://grapevinewellnessshow.transistor.fm/episodes/he-burned-the-ships-and-rebuilt-his-life-in-lake-tahoe

In this clip, Seung "Bruce" Lee tells me about his next big challenge, a 72 mile circumnavigation of Lake Tahoe on his stand up paddleboard, gear and all.

Reservations are already made. The campgrounds are booked.

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/VDWYCrCTJ48
Listen wherever you get podcasts: https://grapevinewellnessshow.transistor.fm/episodes/he-burned-the-ships-and-rebuilt-his-life-in-lake-tahoe

In this clip, Seung "Bruce" Lee shares a piece of advice that's carried him through the last two years, one that he teaches his clients as well. Don't worry about the thousand steps between here and there. Just worry about the next one. Simple, and something he's actually lived by.

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/VDWYCrCTJ48
Listen wherever you get podcasts: https://grapevinewellnessshow.transistor.fm/episodes/he-burned-the-ships-and-rebuilt-his-life-in-lake-tahoe

In this clip, Seung "Bruce" Lee shares the moment everything shifted. He told his wife he didn't want to die working, and that conversation turned into a decision to buy an RV and live like he was dying, in the best possible sense. Months later, they left Maryland and hit the road.

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/VDWYCrCTJ48
Listen wherever you get podcasts: https://grapevinewellnessshow.transistor.fm/episodes/he-burned-the-ships-and-rebuilt-his-life-in-lake-tahoe