Thank you for joining us for episode 535 of Live Happy Now.

We all go through times of loss and grief, and it's human nature to want to avoid that pain.

But this week's guest offers an entirely different approach.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week I'm joined by John Silamparis, a psychotherapist,

mental health consultant, and author of Magic in the Tragic, rewriting the script on grief and

discovering happiness in our darkest days. John presents a new approach to grieving and offers

practices that help us look for beauty and the suffering and find purpose and joy,

not in spite of it, but because of it.

Let's have a listen.

John, thank you so much for joining me on Live Happy Now.

Thanks for having me.

I have been spending a lot of time with your new book, and I really like your approach to grief.

I think what's most notable for me is that it's relevant

not just to the loss of someone or something we love, but for any type of adversity. And that

really makes it a perfect book for us to be reading right now. Now, you discovered this whole way

of approaching grief in a really personal way. So I always love a good backstory. Can you start by talking about your

own grief journey? When I was young as a teenager, there was tragedy early in my family. And it just

happened to be that for me, I discovered that through the arts and through nature and through having awareness of things outside of myself,

I found a way to soothe myself because my parents who were very loving, but they were also very stoic and immigrant,

and didn't really have the tools or the know-how as to how to deal with it or how to help the survivors

of this tragedy to manage their emotions. So I had no intention of addressing the feelings.

It was just, no, let's just hope the feelings go away. So they didn't for me. And so I started

...