Season Three Episode One

Introducing Gretchen Miura Legend of Healing. Gretchen is a mindfulness teacher, avid maker and mother of four. Originally from New Jersey in America, Gretchen lives in northern Japan on the Oga peninsula where she and her husband run a Zen temple.  She hosts mindfulness retreats, classes and workshops in English, as well as traditional ceremonies and activities for the local community.  She sells her handmade bento bags, face masks and accessories at her online shop SORAbento. She is living a life focused on creativity, belonging and connection.

This episode is dedicated to Chris.

When Gretchen was 5, her 17 year old brother died in a car accident. This is the backdrop of her life since then. In this conversation Gretchen takes us on the journey of Chris, his death , her family, religion, and her path to acknowledging, dealing with and healing the suffering attached to her loss. And in fact the family loss.

We talk about Catholicism, Buddhism and try and tease apart the humanity of grief and loss, of joy and living. How her 4 children taught her so much about her brother, through the tenderness of the relationship of her youngest daughter and oldest son. 

Gretchen and her temple and family are quite well known and she has appeared in an NHK documentary about her temple and the people around it. She is something of a celebrity in the area! 

This is a deep and rich conversation that goes into the depth of grief, the rituals surrounding death. All the way to the end more and more learnings come out between us and we will have a part 2 later in the year because we didn’t even touch on Gretchen’s hilarious journey to being the parent of 4 and married to a Zen priest in a remote peninsula in Northern Japan! 

- The surprising joy the has come from meeting her grief

- Having authority over the suffering 

- The first and second arrows of loss

- That’s all there is! Hear her thoughts on enlightenment 

- Facing and dealing with grief creates fertile ground for magical experiences

- Grief, love, life and ritual 

- How her children brought her closer to connecting to her brother

- How faith brought the family through Chris’ death yet she struggled to connect with that same faith

- How she connects and can continue to connect with Chris

- Incidents that allowed stress to be dissolved 

- We have to take of one another 

- Universal truths and satori

Links & where to find her here:

Dairyuji Temple Instagram

Dairyuji temple in Oga Akita

Zeb Soto Sect 

Poet Laureate Joy Harjo

Online Shop: Sorabento

Griefworks by Julia Samuel

The word I was scrambling for is ‘flippant’.