Jesse Moss is the Senior Marketing Manager at Experience Camps, a free grief camp for kids. Before she worked at Experience Camps, she was talking to her friend having one of those classic conversations about how to find a job that you find meaningful, and her friend told her about the nonprofit for the first time. She knew she wanted to work there but they didn't have any job openings at the time, so she signed up to volunteer at the camp. And serendipitously, a job opened up a few days before she went to camp so she tried it out and loved it. It was especially meaningful because her brother Jordan who died by suicide who was 3 years younger than Jesse had also gone to camp with her, and so it was a special experience they got to share when they were kids.

In this episode, we talk about how much of grief can be psychosomatic - she describes doing a grief retreat with a death doula and therapist and about 60% of the retreat was spent in silence, just focusing on the body. She discovered an amazing leg swinging machine that really helped her to process the grief that was in her body. She also started running marathons after her mother died a few years ago, and last year a week before Jesse ran the New York City marathon, she got this horrible pain in her hip, and her grief therapist told her to name the hip and talk to it and miraculously...it worked. The pain went away.

Lastly, we get to hear some incredible stories of grief camp: there's a bonfire on the last night where the kids can say the name of the person they lost and say whatever they want about them, and there was one kid whose dad died who said he had not been able to get a full night's sleep ever since his dad had died. He had told the other kids in his cabin about this and they all decided to push their beds around his bed, and that was the first night he had slept through the night since his dad had died.

Links:

Experience Camps Website: https://experiencecamps.org/

Experience Camps Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/experiencecamps/?hl=en

Link to leg swinging device mentioned in the episode

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