This conversation is part of this month’s theme: how the personal and collective can get entangled. To go deeper, check out my reflection piece, When Personal Pain Meets Political Heat and join me in a guided meditation practice Being With The Bigness Of These Times. Enjoying these? Give them some love by liking, subscribing, or forwarding to a friend!
So many “small talk” conversations I have these days start with how the world’s on fire. The bigness of these times is palpable, and the weight that comes with paying attention is a lot to hold.
What do we do with the weight of the world? How do we work with it in a way that’s constructive? Use it to move forward?
To answer these questions, we need to take a deeper look at what exactly it is we’re carrying. What is held in the weight that we feel? Is it solely due to the current event in front of us — the war, the murder, the political madness? Or are there other, deeper layers we’re also in touch with here?
In this episode, I sit down with my dear friend Ning Tendo to go deep on these questions — to explore the bigness of the world’s pain, the many layers held in it, and the role that collective healing and spiritual discernment play in helping us work with them.
Ning is many things. She’s a grief specialist, dream yogi, and spiritual practitioner with a Master’s degree in Spiritual Psychology from Columbia University. She is the founder of Multidimensional Mama, where she works with bereaved mothers to help them understand the deeper layers of their grief — layers that conventional frameworks on emotions often don’t recognize.
Her work teaches us that we are more connected than we tend to realize, and that pain—and healing— move through those connections. In her work with mothers, grief is not simply emotional distress — it reflects an enduring bond, a deeper structure of spiritual connection that most coping mechanisms don’t account for. She shows us that without language or tools to make sense of what you’re experiencing, there’s no way to work with it.
These same principles apply to what we’re feeling from the world. Most often we’re not just reacting to the headline in front of us. What feels like “too much emotion” is actually contact with multiple layers of pain and connection at once — ancestral, intergenerational, historical —held in the larger field around us. It’s why what’s happening in the world can feel so personal, and why personal pain can be intensified by what’s happening globally.
Healing begins when we can start to name those layers, recognize what is personal and what is collective, and become resourced enough to work with what’s present without collapsing into it.
This conversation was such a treat. We explore:
The bigness of grief — beyond conventional frameworks
How collective fields amplify personal pain
Entangled stories across generations
How to know when what you’re feeling is collective
Holding both — opportunity and injustice
Grounded spirituality and working with rage
Compassion without erasing accountability
Why we need collective healing spaces right now
Spiritual boundaries in healing work
And much more
If you’ve been looking for ways to better understand what you’re experiencing these days, grab a cup of tea and join us. We hope you enjoy.
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Connect with Ning Tendo
About Ning
Ning is a spiritual healer and dream guide specializing in helping bereaved mothers heal the profound spiritual wound created by child loss. Through her pioneering Soul Reunion Method, she helps mothers transform their grief by reestablishing sacred connection with their children through dreams, rituals, and spiritual practices.
Her approach integrates multiple wisdom traditions with modern understanding, drawing from over 12 years of Tibetan dream yoga practice, extensive study of Western sleep science, and deep immersion in African mourning rituals. This unique synthesis is further enriched by her seven years of experience in spiritual healing and constellation work, as well as her formal education - a Master’s degree in Spiritual Psychology from Columbia University with a Spirit/Mind/Body focus.
» Multidimensional Mama website
» Connect with her via Instagram
