How We Navigate Grief with Blair

About How We Navigate Grief with Blair

How We Navigate Grief is where we name what’s hard, share what helps, and move forward without erasing the past. It's like voice notes from your griefy bestie. howwenavigategrief.substack.com (https://howwenavigategrief.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Blair | How We Navigate Grief

Category

health & fitness · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

12 Jan 2026

Latest episode

16 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

39 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   16 Oct 2026

   The Glitter Crash: Travel Edition (And How I’m Fighting Back for Big Feelings Friday)

   You’re standing in your kitchen. The espresso machine hisses. Your kitchen. Not a Parisian café. Not a village in Tuscany where time moves differently. Your kitchen in actual life. That’s the glitter crash. What is a Glitter Crash, Anyway? A glitter crash is what happens when your brain suddenly remembers it’s supposed to operate on normal dopamine and serotonin levels. For 3.5 weeks, your nervous system has been bathed in novelty. New cities. New tastes. New conversations with strangers who become friends for a moment. Your brain was flooded with the good chemicals: excitement, discovery, zero routine, constant stimulation. Then you land. The clinical terms are familiar: post-vacation blues, post-travel depression, travel comedown, re-entry blues. Pick your poison. They all describe the same jarring emotional whiplash of stepping back into ordinary life after living an extraordinary one. The crash is real. It’s chemical. It’s also completely normal. But knowing it’s normal doesn’t make unpacking your suitcase at midnight feel any less empty. What I’m Doing to Combat the Blues I got home four days ago from Europe. Four days. My body is still operating on a different timezone and my heart is still half in the piazzas I wandered through. Here’s what actually helps: Get outside immediately. Not eventually. Not when you feel like it. Now. My first morning home, I walked for an hour before coffee. The same route I’ve walked a hundred times felt different. Maybe because I was different. The morning light was different. Moving your body out of the house breaks the spell of indoor melancholy. It’s not revolutionary. It’s just medicine. Keep the habits you built there. I spent weeks waking early, writing in cafés, moving my body. I could have surrendered to jet lag and couch time. Instead, I’m keeping 6 AM sacred. I’m still writing. I’m still moving. The structure that served me in Portugal can serve me here too. This matters: your traveling self isn’t a different person. Don’t abandon her when you land. Plan the next adventure. This one feels counterintuitive but it works. The glitter crash doesn’t disappear because you ignore it. It shifts when you redirect that dopamine-seeking brain toward something real to look forward to. I’m booking a trip for November. Nothing fancy. A long weekend somewhere. But my brain now knows: this isn’t the end of adventure. It’s just intermission. Reflect on what actually mattered. Not the Instagram moments. Not the “I’ve been everywhere” checklist. What felt true? What made you feel alive? For me, it was the quiet breakfasts, the conversations about grief with other humans, the way I could be alone in a crowd and feel held by it all. Those aren’t location-dependent. They’re portable. You bring them home. They live in you now. Lower your expectations for everything else. You just traveled 3.5 weeks. Your nervous system is recalibrating. Your sleep is weird. Your emotions are unpredictable. This is not the week to launch a new project or fix your life. Make toast. Drink water. Reply to emails slowly. Give yourself permission to be tired and not-yourself for a minute. Connect with other humans who get it. Text the friend who also travels. Call someone who understands that coming home is sometimes harder than leaving. The glitter crash thrives in isolation and feeds on the shame of not being grateful enough. It withers when you say out loud: I’m struggling with re-entry and that’s allowed. The Truth About the Glitter Crash The crash isn’t proof you chose wrong or wasted money or should have stayed home. It’s proof that you actually lived. You pushed yourself toward novelty and growth and the unknown. Your nervous system is processing that. Your heart is still there, partially. That’s not a bug. That’s a feature. The glitter crash will pass. The re-entry blues will fade. You’ll readjust to your normal dopamine levels and the ordinary will feel ordinary again. But something in you will stay changed. That’s the part worth protecting. So here’s my invitation for you: Where are you in your post-travel blues right now? Are you fighting them, surrendering to them, or already planning the next escape? Whatever your answer, stop punishing yourself for missing it. Get outside tomorrow. Plan something to look forward to. Keep one habit from your travels alive. And tell someone this re-entry is harder than you expected. Then keep going. The glitter crash ends. The memory stays. What’s helping you combat the travel comedown or post-vacation blues? Drop a note in the comments. I’m reading everything. XX Blair P.S. I am booking keynotes and workshops for winter and 2027. Interested in having me speak at your event or to your organization? Let’s chat: blair@blairkaplan.ca. Where’s Blair? * November 12 + 13, 2026, Los Angeles, California Alana and I will be in LA attending Endwell and Grieftastic. If you plan to be at either event, I would love to connect. * January 3-9, 2027, Marrakech, Morocco Join me and Happy Grieving for the Morocco Grief Retreat to kick off 2027. Grief can make the world feel small. Morocco does the opposite: it fills the senses without demanding anything from you. The souks, the spices, the calls to prayer, life continuing everywhere, in colour. And then there’s the stillness to balance it: a traditional hammam to let your body release what it’s been holding, pottery in the medina, a full day in the Agafay Desert where the horizon gives your thoughts somewhere to go. Daily grief workshops thread it together, always optional, always held by facilitators who have walked the path of loss themselves. Learn more and book your spot. (https://grieftrips.com/destinations/morocco/) * January 23-24, 2027, The Westin Lake Las Vegas Resort & Spa Join me at Camp Manifest (https://www.campmanifestretreat.com/pages/registration) this January. Rekindle the carefree joy of camp days—bonfires, group games, laughter under the stars—reimagined for adults with an intuitive, soul-nourishing twist. Step away from the noise of everyday life and step into a sacred space designed just for you. At Camp Manifest, you’ll be guided through a powerful journey of self-discovery, healing, and intention-setting alongside an intimate group of like-minded women. Over the days, you’ll reconnect with yourself, deepen your intuition, and leave with renewed energy to manifest the life you truly desire. How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading How We Navigate Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe (https://howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   5 Oct 2026

   What an Online Grief Support Group Gives You Between Grief Trips

   Somebody tells you everything happens for a reason. Or your boss gives you criticism that was honestly kind of okay, and you completely melt down. Your next therapy session isn’t until next week. The next grief trip is months away. So who do you tell? That question is why Rachel and I built an online grief support group. I’ll argue that grief support which only shows up on a schedule misses most of grief, because most of grief happens on no schedule at all. Why is grief hardest in the ordinary moments? Grief often hits hardest in small, unremarkable moments, not on anniversaries or at funerals. Those moments arrive without warning, and that’s exactly when most formal support isn’t available. Rachel said it better than I can when she joined me on How We Navigate Grief: “Some of the most difficult moments are actually the everyday ordinary moments in between work breaks or on the way to work, maybe just before you sleep, just waking up on the weekends. Like all of those little moments can be some of the hardest.”— Rachel, founder of Grief Trips and Happy Grieving When I lost my mom over five and a half years ago, it was COVID. I had a grief therapist and a psychologist, and I read the books. I couldn’t travel, and travel is huge medicine for me. What I didn’t have was peer support. No grief group. Nobody I could text at 7 a.m. who gets it. Looking back, that was a really weird time in my life, and the missing piece was never information. It was people. What happens after a grief trip ends? When a grief trip ends, people go home with new tools and often a real breakthrough. Then they’re back in ordinary life, with the support suddenly gone. A grief trip is a one-week, in-person group travel experience where people grieve together while also experiencing the world. Rachel and I have been leading these together for over a year: two trips in Bali, plus Australia, the Maldives and Portugal. Morocco is coming in the new year, along with another Maldives trip. Some people are now coming on their second and third trips. I’ll be honest about what was missing (and why we built it). Every trip has a WhatsApp group, and it’s lovely. But it’s not structured. It’s not a program for continuing to move through grief and actually implement the tools. People told us so directly. They wanted more support. They asked what happens between trips. Someone might laugh or feel happiness for the first time in weeks, months or years on a trip, and then fly home to a quiet house and a group chat that slowly goes silent. A week is a week. As Rachel put it, grief isn’t something you compartmentalize into one week. Can travel help with grief? Travel can help with grief, though not always in the way people expect. For Rachel, the healing didn’t come from the destinations. It came from the strangers she met. Rachel’s dad passed away suddenly and very unexpectedly five years ago, during the pandemic. She was 27. She’d always loved travel, so she reached for it. It didn’t work, at first: “Going out, seeing a sunset, seeing that it’s beautiful and knowing it intellectually, but not feeling it is one of the most scary things I experienced early on in my grief. You look at the colours and be like, well, none of it feels that colourful anymore.”— Rachel, founder of Grief Trips and Happy Grieving The sunsets didn’t fix anything. What shifted things were chance meetings with other solo travellers her age who had also experienced loss. Some of those conversations gave her breakthroughs on the what-ifs and regrets she was carrying. Grief Trips and Happy Grieving were born out of those meetings, and I found her because I saw her advertising a Bali grief trip and got on the phone with her right away. How is a grief support group different from grief therapy? A grief support group is peer-based and coach-led. It is not clinical treatment. Rachel and I are not therapists or psychologists. I’m a grief and resilience coach, and we’re there to guide, push and pull people through using practical tools. Therapy matters. I had a grief therapist, and I’d tell you to get one. But a therapist is one person, for one hour, on one day. A group is a handful of people who’ve chosen to show up consistently over time, and who are there when the boss’s comment lands badly on a Thursday afternoon. I’ll say the part that might ruffle feathers. We can tell you things a therapist can’t. A therapist has to stay neutral. A coach who has buried both her parents, pets, ended a marriage, and suffered a miscarriage can look at you and say I’ve been there; here is what I did; now do it. “My mom died over five and a half years ago. My dad, four and a half years ago. And my marriage is in the middle. It’s ended recently. And people say to me, how are you doing so well right now? And I’m not okay, but I am because I have the tools and I implement them and I know what to do.”— Blair Kaplan, grief and resilience coach and host of How We Navigate Grief I teach these tools through my Navigating GRIEF framework, a five-part approach covering grounding, resilience, introspection, engagement with support, and forward movement. I call the resilience muscle the capacity to recover from hardship. It gets stronger the same way any muscle does: with daily, repeated use. What does the Happy Grieving online grief support group include? The Happy Grieving online grief support group is a rolling six-month program (join when you are ready) with two live calls a month, a private group chat and one-on-one time with both facilitators. Groups are capped at 10 people, and you can start at any time. The two monthly calls are different: * A workshop, webinar style, teaching a specific grief tool. * A hot seat call. A hot seat is an open coaching session where you bring whatever you’re working through that week and get support in real time. Calls happen at 9 a.m. Pacific, which is 12 p.m. Eastern and 5 p.m. UK time. Every call is recorded. Between calls, there’s the private group chat, with daily check-ins built around a gratitude alarm, because gratitude is a daily practice. Rachel and I are in different time zones almost all the time (she’s in Hong Kong, I’m in Canada), so someone is nearly always watching the group. You also get a private call with each of us, and we do some matchmaking to connect you with grief friends. We call them griefy besties. Members also receive: * A RESILIENT A.F. journal, mailed to you, which we work through together with guided exercises * $500 off a future grief trip * Digital PDF copies of every book The Global Resilience Project has published * $500 off being featured in a future Global Resilience Project anthology Pricing: $2,400 paid in full, or $450 a month for six months. Paying in full saves about $300. The first call is Wednesday, October 7, 2026. Details are at happygrieving.org/groupprogram (https://happygrieving.org/groupprogram/). Is a grief support group a good first step before a grief trip? For many people, yes. Joining a group first lets you meet the facilitators who will likely lead your trip, and meet other people considering one, before you commit to a week abroad. Plenty of people tell us they want to come on a grief trip, but anxiety tells them it’s too different from what they’re used to. What will happen? Who will be there? A group lets you answer those questions from your own living room. As Rachel put it on the episode, the point was never to make anyone stop feeling grief. The point is figuring out, once you feel it, how you keep living, keep feeling joy, and keep making meaningful connections. So here’s my invitation. If you’ve been carrying the small moments alone, the 7 a.m. ones and the post-meeting ones, come to the first call on October 7. Bring whatever is on your mind that week. We’ll be there. XX Blair P.S. This is a really good opportunity to see what it’s like to work with Rachel and me and to get a taste of what a grief trip is like with us. Where’s Blair? * October 15, 2026 Online The Reimagine Virtual Summit (https://summit.letsreimagine.org/) is coming up soon, and I’m a speaker! We’re living through a time of overlapping losses—personal, communal, ecological, political, and existential. Yet most of us were never taught how to navigate grief, support one another through adversity, or channel pain into meaning, connection, and action. Grief in Our Time is an opportunity to explore what becomes possible when we face life’s hardest moments together. Through storytelling, ritual, music, guided reflection, and evidence-based tools, we’ll create a uniquely human online space to hold grief, deepen connection, and imagine new possibilities for healing and growth. Hosted by Reimagine, who are a nonprofit that has brought more than 250,000 people together through programs and citywide festivals—and is now building a healthier, more human digital platform for healing, connection, and growth. * November 12 + 13, 2026, Los Angeles, California Alana and I will be in LA attending Endwell and Grieftastic. If you plan to be at either event, I would love to connect. * January 3-9, 2027, Marrakech, Morocco Join me and Happy Grieving for the Morocco Grief Retreat to kick off 2027. Grief can make the world feel small. Morocco does the opposite: it fills the senses without demanding anything from you. The souks, the spices, the calls to prayer, life continuing everywhere, in colour. And then there’s the stillness to balance it: a traditional hammam to let your body release what it’s been holding, pottery in the medina, a full day in the Agafay Desert where the horizon gives your thoughts somewhere to go. Daily grief workshops thread it together, always optional, always held by facilitators who have walked the path of loss themselves. Learn more and book your spot. (https://grieftrips.com/destinations/morocco/) * January 23-24, 2027, The Westin Lake Las Vegas Resort & Spa Join me at Camp Manifest (https://www.campmanifestretreat.com/pages/registration) this January. Rekindle the carefree joy of camp days—bonfires, group games, laughter under the stars—reimagined for adults with an intuitive, soul-nourishing twist. Step away from the noise of everyday life and step into a sacred space designed just for you. At Camp Manifest, you’ll be guided through a powerful journey of self-discovery, healing, and intention-setting alongside an intimate group of like-minded women. Over the days, you’ll reconnect with yourself, deepen your intuition, and leave with renewed energy to manifest the life you truly desire. How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading How We Navigate Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe (https://howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

3. 

   22 Sept 2026

   When Attending Synagogue on Yom Kippur Becomes Something to Fear

   I was sitting in our synagogue for Rabbi Rose’s final Kol Nidre service when I thought about my dad’s eyes snapping open. Rabbi Kliel Rose has meant everything to our family and to me, and now he’s moving to a new congregation in a different city. So I was already there holding grief. He has been a spiritual guide who’s been part of really important family events. Kol Nidre was starting, and we were sitting in a beautiful circle. The confession was about to begin. I was thinking about how this is the last time I’ll be in his congregation. While I was doing this, at the same time on Sunday night, September 21, while many families were gathering at Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville for Yom Kippur, a 29-year-old man showed up with a shotgun and opened fire on Const. Jeff Smith, who was stationed outside. Smith returned fire. Other officers responded. And in that exchange, 20 or 30 gunshots tore through the sanctuary’s stained glass windows. Twenty bullet holes in one window. Teenagers inside dropped to the floor. The president of the congregation, Norm Weddum, yelled at everyone to hit the ground. No one died during this specific incident; however, Smith is in critical but stable condition. Ward is in life-threatening condition. But here’s what I can’t unhear: the congregation was in the building when it happened. They were trying to observe the holiest night of the year, and violence found them there anyway. And this is one of my biggest fears of going to synagogue - being attacked. Why His Eyes Opened for the Drugs, Not the Prayer In 2022, my dad was dying. We got “the call” from the hospital and rushed there, and the rabbi came to his bedside. My sister Alana and I held him. The rabbi asked if he could pray, and he sang the Vidui. The confession. The unburdening. The prayer that says all the things we’ve carried wrong, all the ways we’ve failed, all the weight we’re ready to release. And we cried. It was beautiful. The nurses tried to wake him before we got there. They did everything. We couldn’t wake him, either. We thought we were saying one final goodbye. We thought this was it. Then the doctor walked in with more medicine (more drugs), and my dad’s eyes popped wide open. Not for the prayer. Not for us. Not for the unburdening. For the drugs. I don’t know what that means exactly. Maybe his body knew something his conscious mind didn’t. Maybe the soul recognizes medicine differently than it recognizes prayer. But I’ve sat with that image for long enough to know that sometimes the thing that keeps you here isn’t spiritual. Sometimes it’s just chemical. And sometimes those two things (the sacred and the survival) don’t align the way you hoped they would. The Vidui Is About Confession. So Is Yom Kippur. The Vidui is recited twice during Yom Kippur. You say it at Kol Nidre, which is where I was sitting. And you say it again at the end of the day, when you’re supposed to have done the hard work of atonement. The prayer uses plural forms: we have trespassed, we have been faithless. Because the tradition is that everyone carries shared human responsibility. It’s a communal unburdening. The Vidui is also a deathbed prayer. It’s the prayer for someone who’s dying, for someone ready to release their grip and move toward whatever comes next. My father heard the Vidui sung at his bedside. Our family heard it. And now I know the people gathered at Sons of Jacob in Belleville were preparing to say it together, as a community, as a way of releasing the year’s wrongs and starting over. And someone tried to stop that from happening with a shotgun. I’m not interested in spiritualizing this. I’m not going to say there’s meaning in the timing or that God needed them to learn something. That’s the kind of thinking that lets us sleep at night by pretending violence is part of a plan. It’s not. It’s just violence. It’s antisemitism. It’s hate. Trouble Finds Me People in my life have told me time and time again that trouble finds me. I don’t mean that dramatically. I just mean that I walk into difficult situations. I show up for hard things. I’ve made a practice of facing grief instead of running from it. But I don’t want to be caught in a mass shooting. I don’t want to be in a room full of people doing sacred work and have the windows explode around me. And I especially don’t want to lose the ability to go to synagogue without calculating risk. Without wondering if the officer outside is enough. Without checking the exits. Without feeling my nervous system spike when I hear a loud noise. That’s what learning about what happened in Belleville did to me. It wasn’t an abstraction. Some tragedy that happened somewhere else. It happened during Yom Kippur. It happened at a place of worship, to people in our community - the Jewish community. It happened while people were trying to unburden themselves, to confess, to make peace, to start over. It happened while Jewish people around the world gathered for Kol Nidre, and while I was thinking about my dad’s eyes opening for the drugs instead of the prayer and while atoning for my sins. And a man was outside a synagogue with a rifle, deciding that his rage mattered more than anyone’s life. You Still Have to Go I’m going back to synagogue. I’m going back because our community deserves a congregation that shows up, and because my family’s grief doesn’t get smaller in my living room. I’m going back because the Vidui isn’t just about confession. It’s also about restoration, about saying the things you need to say out loud, in community, with witnesses. I don’t go to synagogue often but when I do, I’ll walk in with my head held high. But I’m also terrified. I guess I am supposed to have resolution and tell you that faith wins, that community is stronger than violence, that we keep showing up. And maybe that’s true? Maybe that’s necessary. I’m not sure I fully believe it. In reality, I will be sitting in a sanctuary and part of my attention will be on exits. Part of my nervous system will be calculating danger. Part of me will remember that on September 21, 2026, the people at Sons of Jacob were doing exactly what I was doing at the same time (gathering for Yom Kippur, for confession and atonement and the annual practice of becoming new), and they had to hit the floor instead. My dad’s eyes opened for the medicine because his body was fighting to stay. Mine will always keep scanning the room because my body will be fighting to survive something that hasn’t happened yet. That’s where we are. That’s what the shootings at synagogues have done. They’ve made the place where you’re supposed to unburden yourself into a place where you carry hypervigilance instead. I’m still going. I’m going scared. I’m going angry. I’m going because my dad heard the Vidui at his bedside and because Rabbi Rose deserves to know his community will keep showing up, and because the Vidui says we have trespassed, and the only way to say that and mean it is to be there, in person, in the room, risking the fear. Why should we have to choose between grief and safety? Why should Yom Kippur (the day we’re supposed to let everything go) be the day we’re holding onto terror instead? I don’t have an answer. I just have the memory of my dad’s eyes opening, and the image of bullet holes in stained glass, and knowing that this isn’t the time for the Jewish people to hide. We must be loud, proud and love our religion. If you’re scared to go to your synagogue, to your mosque, to your church, to anywhere sacred: you’re not alone. Trouble finds all of us now. But it doesn’t get the last word on whether we show up or not. XX Blair Where’s Blair? * September 28, 2026, Vancouver, BC My spiritual awakening and journey began because I came across Gabby Bernstein. When I learned she was going to be live in Vancouver, a friend and I got tickets. I am stoked to finally be in the same room as her and see her live. Will you be there? I’ll be in Vancouver for a few days after. * November 12 + 13, 2026, Los Angeles, California Alana and I will be in LA attending Endwell and Grieftastic. If you plan to be at either event, I would love to connect. * January 3-9, 2027, Marrakech, Morocco Join me and Happy Grieving for the Morocco Grief Retreat to kick off 2027. Grief can make the world feel small. Morocco does the opposite: it fills the senses without demanding anything from you. The souks, the spices, the calls to prayer, life continuing everywhere, in colour. And then there’s the stillness to balance it: a traditional hammam to let your body release what it’s been holding, pottery in the medina, a full day in the Agafay Desert where the horizon gives your thoughts somewhere to go. Daily grief workshops thread it together, always optional, always held by facilitators who have walked the path of loss themselves. Learn more and book your spot. (https://grieftrips.com/destinations/morocco/) * January 23-24, 2027, The Westin Lake Las Vegas Resort & Spa Join me at Camp Manifest (https://www.campmanifestretreat.com/pages/registration) this January. Rekindle the carefree joy of camp days—bonfires, group games, laughter under the stars—reimagined for adults with an intuitive, soul-nourishing twist. Step away from the noise of everyday life and step into a sacred space designed just for you. At Camp Manifest, you’ll be guided through a powerful journey of self-discovery, healing, and intention-setting alongside an intimate group of like-minded women. Over the days, you’ll reconnect with yourself, deepen your intuition, and leave with renewed energy to manifest the life you truly desire. How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading How We Navigate Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe (https://howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

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