Welcome And Why This Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to Healthy Mind, Healthy Life, the podcast that believes healing is not a destination but a direction. I am Archita and I'm so glad you found your way here today. My guest is Nikki J. Bogger, an international actor, transformation coach, and guided meditation creator based in Los Angeles, whose work sits at the intersection of emotional healing, inner transformation, and the quite courageous practice of feeling what we have been taught to push away. Today, we're going somewhere tender and necessary grief, meditation, and the emotional work that allows us to move through loss without losing ourselves in the process. So, Niki, welcome to Healthy Mind, Healthy Life. It's really wonderful to have you here today.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

Hi, Arjeda. Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

Thank you for being here because this conversation is going to be really helpful and important for a lot of listeners out there, and I am sure that they are looking forward to it as

Emotional Honesty As The Throughline

SPEAKER_00 1:12

well. And Nikki, before we step uh deeper into the conversation, I want to start somewhere personal. So you have built a life that spans performance, storytelling, coaching, and meditation. And that's a quite uh range of uh you know ways of reaching people. So, what is it that connects all of it for you? And what's the thread that runs through everything that you do?

SPEAKER_01 1:39

I think the thread that runs through everything I do is emotional honesty. Um, performance, connection, writing place, coaching, meditation. It all comes down to being really honest about where you're at and how you're feeling. Because it's easy to be honest about what you're thinking, relatively, but what you're feeling, that's a whole different ballgame, and one that is entirely underestimated so far.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

Absolutely, and that kind of emotional honesty is you know not that easy to achieve. So I'm sure it must have come from a place of practice and dedication as well for you. And I'm really excited to know how you, you know, started this journey, how you navigated through it. So that brings me to another question.

What Grief Really Includes

SPEAKER_00 2:33

Um, Aniki, I'm curious. Um, when people think about grief, there's often an assumption that it's tied to death. But grief shows up in so many, you know, different forms. The end of a relationship, a career that didn't become what you hoped for, the version of yourself you had to leave behind. So, what do you think is the most common misconception about what grief actually is and what it includes?

SPEAKER_01 3:01

I think you pointed that out very nicely already. I think the biggest, well, the first biggest misconception about grief is that it's just sadness. It's not. There's a whole lot of other emotions in grief and they they pop up randomly, and you never really know what you're getting or where it's coming from. But you know, there's anger, there's regret, there's relief sometimes. There's this end of pathways and everything that comes with it. There's depression. So it's a whole mix of things. And the other biggest misconception is exactly what you pointed out. It doesn't just come from losing someone in your life. It comes from lost opportunities, lost futures, lost ideas about yourself. Um, even if you're on a trajectory that moves you towards something you really want, you're most likely still gonna grieve the version of yourself that you're leaving behind. And there's not enough talk about that, especially not in the transformational workspace.

SPEAKER_00 4:05

Absolutely. I think that is one of the biggest misconceptions about grief, that it is always sadness. But sometimes it's also nostalgia. Um, you know, it it has a lot of feelings, it uh the feeling of you know having to let go of something that you have uh, you know, held on for so long. So yeah, it can be different things for different people, and there's no one rule book to follow. So that's really important to know, and that's such an important expansion of the conversation because when grief only lives in the category of death and loss, so many people end up suffering without the language or the permission to acknowledge what they are actually going through, and unnamed grief has a way of you know becoming something else entirely over time. Now, um yeah, now uh Nikki, let's go

When Grief Goes Unprocessed

SPEAKER_00 5:03

a little deeper into this. So, when someone is in the middle of grief or buried underneath it, what are the deeper emotional patterns that tend to form? What does unprocessed grief actually do to a person, to their body, their sense of self or their ability to feel joy?

SPEAKER_01 5:23

That's a good question. And I'm I'm not a professional in psychariatry, so I wouldn't want to make assumptions there. Uh, what I can say though is that it's a very individual experience. Like I think it's very different for every person and very reflective of what you're actually letting go of. Um, let's take parents, for example, you lost a parent. There's usually more emotions going on. Sorry, give me one second. There's usually a lot more emotions going on. Like, you know, you may feel that you're finally free from something. You may feel that there's no more expectations now in this relationship because the relationship is gone. There may be a freedom from pressure. Um, you may feel that you lost your purpose. Because for so many of us, we want to live up to our parents' hopes and dreams. We want to make them proud. So when that is gone, what do you do now? Like, what's even the point in doing anything now? And there may also be a little bit of relief. There may be anger that they left you alone, right? That they left you with a mess. There may be themes surfacing after, um, where you realize, wow, what my parents did there was not the greatest, right? And I have to carry this now, so there may be anger and frustration. So there's a whole lot of things going on, and it literally can be anything emotionally that you feel in the process of grieving. And it comes in waves. And really the best thing to do about it is to accept where you're at and not be judging yourself for what is happening.

SPEAKER_00 7:26

I think you framed it beautifully, Nikki. And what you shared, there's just something so honest about it. Uh you know, the idea that grief doesn't need to be solved or spoken. Uh sometimes it just needs to be felt and witnessed, and and the stillness of meditation creates exactly the kind of space where something that's been waiting for a long time finally feels safe enough to surface. So thank you for sharing that, Nikki. And now let us bring this into the everyday life.

Daily-Life Signs Of Hidden Grief

SPEAKER_00 8:02

So, for someone who is grieving right now, maybe not dramatically, maybe not in a way that anyone else can see, but quietly uh carrying something heavy. What does unprocessed grief look like in the texture of daily life? In the small signs that something is waiting to be felt.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

I uh think for a lot of people it shows up in this undiagnosed depression uh or overwhelm, actually. Like, yes, you're making yourself go through your day, you know, you're making it work, you you're figuring it out, you're surviving, but you're not really enjoying yourself. And it takes, you know, force, you have to force yourself to do it. Uh while, quite honestly, you most likely just want to hide in bed under your blankets and never come out again. And acknowledging that is really important for a start, again, without judgment. And and you don't have to tell this to anybody. You can do this by yourself and just acknowledge for yourself, this is where I'm at. And you have to be really, really kind to yourself in this process. You can't be like, oh, it's just this little thing, just get over it. Right? You wouldn't, you wouldn't say that to anybody else, right? No matter how minuscule it might seem, what you have lost, or how unimportant mentally, it can still really hurt emotionally, and that's okay. So it's really important to be kind to yourself and give yourself that space. It doesn't have to be long. It really shouldn't be days or weeks, right? Because then you're in, you're just gonna dig that hole deeper that you're in. But you know, you give yourself a few minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, you sit down and you just breathe and sit with your emotions. And things will come up that you were unaware of before. Um, and then you just allow them to be, and the moment you allow that, they will start going away.

SPEAKER_00 10:16

Absolutely. I think that's a great advice. And I feel what you just shared, a lot of listeners will be able to resonate with it. And I I have read a quote somewhere that, you know, uh it goes something like, you know, you should start treating yourself the way you treat others. And I think something that Daddy just shared, it it resonated a lot with that quote for me. Because oftentimes we don't treat ourselves the way we would treat other people if the same thing happened to them. Just like you said, that uh, you know, get over it, it's not a big deal, but it would be a big deal if it happened to someone that we cared about. So I think that's that's really needed, and that's how we should start treating ourselves as well.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

That brings me to, let me add, yeah. Yeah, please go ahead. Yeah. I would I would say even treat yourself as if you were treating a six-year-old child. Like if you think of a six-year-old child, you wouldn't be like, oh, you dummy, get back up and get going. Right? You would give them a hug for a stuff for a start, right? And then you would sit them down, and then you would talk to them about what's happening, and you know, give them some cookie cookies or something. Make it nice and comfy. And that is exactly how you should be treating yourself.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

Absolutely. You know, we oftentimes forget that uh there is an inner child inside all of us as well, and we need to start treating them better as well. But what you just shared, it also brought me to another point, Nikki.

Grief In The Body And Energy

SPEAKER_00 11:54

Uh, what tends to happen in the body specifically during uh this process? Because I think a lot of people intellectually understand their loss, but haven't felt it in the way the body needs them to. So, what's the difference between knowing your grieving and actually moving through it?

SPEAKER_01 12:14

Well, again, I'm not a professional in the medical sense. What I'm trained in is energy work. And energetically speaking, that energy gets stuck in your body. Now we have different layers of the energy body that we approach in different ways. Um, but I think there's, well, there's a lot of more ancient medicinal approaches that already acknowledge that, that when energy gets stuck in certain parts of your body, it can manifest in well like a lack of well-being, and the simplest way of putting it, leading up to potentially, you know, pain, disease, whatever, like just that part of your body not functioning in its ideal way anymore. So, energetically speaking, there are places in your body where grief tends to manifest itself. It's usually in the heart and lung area, it's where your heart chakra sits. Um, and then as an expansion of that, your shoulders and arms, because your shoulders and arms are the expansion of the heart chakra. It's what you use to hug other people and to help and to share, right? So anything in that area, if you're experiencing discomfort there already, it may be stuck energy from grief. And the best way to move through this is of course, first of all, you should always check with a health professional and make sure that there's nothing serious going on. But on the energetic side, it's breathing through it and meditating and allowing it to let go. A very, very easy exercise here is breathing into the area where you feel the stock energy and breathing out longer than you breathe in, and allowing that breath to carry the energy out of your body. That is a very gentle and very easy approach. Five minutes a day are totally enough. So it's something you can do anywhere, anytime, and it's going to be so beneficial for processing the emotion and also helping your body recover.

SPEAKER_00 14:33

That was really, really helpful, uh, Nikki. And I think that's something a lot of the listeners uh needed to hear as well. So thank you so much for sharing that. Um, you know, the gap between knowing and feeling, that's uh where so many people live for years. The mind has processed the story, but the body is still holding the weight of it. And what you're pointing to is that real healing requires both, not just understanding, but actually letting the feeling move through. And now it makes so much sense why certain parts of our body react differently uh when you know we are grieving or feeling a certain kind of emotion. So that makes a lot of sense, honestly, Nikki.

A Safe Way To Start Meditating

SPEAKER_00 15:16

And um, Nikki, for someone who is ready to start doing this emotional work to stop managing or suppressing and actually begin feeling, where does the journey begin for them? Uh, if someone is brand new to meditation or to sitting with difficult emotion, what's a gentle and safe place to start?

SPEAKER_01 15:36

A very, very easy place to start is just with a simple exercise of consciously breathing in and then breathing out twice as long as you breathe in. So if you breathe in, you count to three, and then you breathe out and you count to six. And you do just that for two minutes, three minutes, get up to five minutes. If you can just do that, that will already be a very, very beneficial exercise for you. The next level to that is you focus on your body and you try to feel where there's tension in your body or a lack of well-being in your body, and you do that same breathing exercise into that specific area and allow the air that you breathe out to release the tension and to carry that energy out of your body.

SPEAKER_00 16:29

I'm so glad you shared that, Nikki. And that uh accessibility piece matters so much because grief doesn't wait for the perfect conditions, it arrives at inconvenient times, in inconvenient amounts. And having a practice that meets you wherever you are, just like the one that you just mentioned, um, not just on a cushion in the perfect quiet room. That's something people can actually return to again and again. So that kind of accessible practice is exactly what so many of the listeners needed. So, thank you for sharing that.

Staying Stable When Healing Feels Slow

SPEAKER_00 17:04

And um, now, Nikki, let's let's talk about the longer arc because emotional work and grief are not linear. There are days of real openness and days when the weight comes back heavier than before. So, how do help people stay with the process even when it doesn't feel like it's working? When there's still there's still feels empty rather than healing.

SPEAKER_01 17:28

The best thing you can do, which is very hard to do in itself, is to have stability all around you. Like if you have um a reason to get up in the morning because you'll be seeing someone or you're going to work, if you have a reason to go to bed at night, if you have a reason to have three meals a day, um, if you have a reason to go for a walk and get some sunlight and get your body moving, um, then these things become a lot easier and they don't feel like this uphold battle, right? So you want to treat yourself like a houseplant: water, sunlight, nutrition, um, and uh people to the extent that you can handle. And you want to do this on a daily basis, really. It's so important to give yourself the space to grieve and your alone time to sit with your emotions, but not allow yourself to just fall into this hole and stay there, right? Because if you do that, you will just dig deeper, you will continue to dig deeper because more things will come up and and they will come up eventually, but you don't want that to happen all at once. You want to still try to have a life, and even though it may sound impossible or really hard to do, to you know, go talk to someone or go do that walk, leave your apartment and be in the sunlight for a few minutes, your body will feel better. And that will help your heart and your mind feel better too. So the more you can stabilize your body throughout this process, the easier it will be for your heart and your mind to process what has been happening.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

That's a great advice, Nikki. I I love how practical and grounded that honestly is. Because you're not asking people to change everything overnight, you are just asking them to take that first step. And I love that metaphor that you just shared to treat ourselves like a houseplant. And it's it's so important to give them the love, the nourishment, the water sunlight that's necessary, and that's exactly what we need in life as well. And you know that that entire reframe from resistance as failure to resistance as information is one of the most compassionate things we can offer someone who is struggling because the grief that won't move usually has something uh it still needs to say, and the work is finding a way to finally hear it, and I think this conversation has helped people do exactly that. So, once again, thank you so

Reassurance For Anyone Grieving Alone

SPEAKER_00 20:24

much. But Nikki, before we close, I want to ask you something for the person listening who has been holding their grief alone for a very long time. Maybe they have told themselves they should be over by uh over uh it by now. Maybe they're afraid that if they actually let themselves feel it, they won't be able to stop. So, what would you want them to hear right now?

SPEAKER_01 20:47

I want them to hear that you will be okay. No matter how it feels right now, no matter how you're struggling. I totally get it. I was there, I lost all my parents and grandparents over seven years while I was building a life abroad and didn't have any friends or anybody. So I'm not talking to you from, you know, a purely scientific standpoint. I talk to you from experience, and I promise you, I absolutely promise you, that you will be okay. You will get through this. Life will get better again. You will find your way out of this, and you will figure out how to love yourself and how to love your life again. You just gotta take one step at a time, give yourself the grace and the love you need, stabilize as much as you can, and allow your emotions to be and then flow through you so you can open up for something better again.

SPEAKER_00 21:51

That's really, really reassuring, Nikki. And I'm sure a lot of listeners needed to hear this today in order to feel less lonely, and this conversation has helped them um, you know, realize that they are not alone in this world, and this too shall pass. So this has been such an important and tender conversation, Nikki. I know it will reach people who really needed to hear it today.

Where To Find Nikki And Closing

SPEAKER_00 22:18

So, for anyone who wants to explore your guided meditation work, connect with you, or find out more about what you offer, where can they find you?

SPEAKER_01 22:28

The easiest way is on Instagram. You either find my personal profile, which is at Nikki JBorger, Nikki with 1K. Um, or I have another page which is called Light Warrior Dojo, um, with underscores in between Light Warrior and Dojo in between all three words. Um, yeah, that's where I share a lot of my work, and that's the communities that I will keep growing from here for like-minded people who are not accepting their darkness as their guidance system, but who are choosing to become better and work on themselves and bring their light into the world.

SPEAKER_00 23:13

Amazing, Nikki. Thank you so much for sharing that. And we will make sure to include all the details in today's show notes so that it's just one click away, and our listeners can reach out to you whenever they need to. Amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you, Nikki, and thank you to everyone who showed up for this episode because listening to something like this takes a quite kind of courage. You had to be willing to feel something today, and that matters. If something stirred in you during this conversation, please don't push it back down. That stirring is your grief or your healing or both. Asking for a little more room. Give it that room. You deserve it. This is a healthy mind, healthy life, and if this episode touched you, share it with someone who is carrying something they haven't yet been able to name. Sometimes the right words at the right moment are the beginning of everything. New conversations are waiting for you wherever you listen to podcasts. Until next time, be gentle with yourself. Grief moves at its own pace. So does healing, and both of them are part of the same love.