Welcome to the Grief Portal
What if grief isn't something we move on from — but something we learn how to be in relationship with?
The Grief Portal is a grief-tending podcast hosted by psychotherapist, author, and fellow griever Dani Hickman.
Here, grief is not treated as a problem to solve, a stage to complete, or an experience we should hurry through.
Instead, we explore what becomes possible when we create enough spaciousness in our bodies and our lives to actually meet what is here.
Together, we'll explore grief through lived stories, conversations, ritual, somatic practices, reflection, and the wisdom of people who have learned to walk alongside sorrow.
Some episodes will offer practices and new ways of tending grief.
Some will hold stories of the thresholds grief has carried people across.
Some will simply make room for the things we rarely know how to say out loud.
Because the portal isn't only the loss itself.
It is the threshold grief ushers us across.
The person who enters is not exactly the same person who emerges.
There is no timeline here.
There is no hierarchy of grief.
And there is no expectation that your suffering must become meaningful before you are ready.
All gates of grief belong here.
My hope is that when you leave an episode, you feel a little less alone, a little more resourced, and a little more courageous in your willingness to be with your own grief.
The Grief Portal Care Packages
Because support often fades long before grief does.
In the days immediately following a loss, there may be meals, flowers, phone calls, visitors, and people checking in.
And then life begins moving again.
But for the person grieving, the relationship with what has been lost is only beginning to change.
The Grief Portal Care Packages are being created as a form of ongoing grief tending — something tangible that arrives and says:
You have not been forgotten.
Your grief has not been forgotten.
You do not have to carry this alone.
The first collection will include a series of packages arriving throughout the early months of grief. Inside, you'll find intentionally curated objects, practices, and sensory supports created to nurture the grieving body and heart.
Each package is an invitation.
Not to move on.
Not to make meaning before you're ready.
Not to become better at grieving.
But to create a little more room for what is already here.
The first collection is coming soon.
Join the waitlist and you'll be the first to hear when they become available.
You can join for yourself, or because you'd like to send a Grief Portal Care Package to someone you love.
I'm Dani.
I'm a psychotherapist, entrepreneur, grief tender, and fellow human learning what it means to live alongside loss.
My relationship with grief changed profoundly after the sudden death of my father.
Like so many people, I discovered that grief was not contained to one event or one season of my life. It touched my body. My relationships. My nervous system. My identity. My understanding of love, safety, belonging, and what it means to be alive.
Over time, I became less interested in asking how we "get through" grief and more curious about another question: How do we become more capable of being with it?
The Grief Portal grew from that question.
It is an extension of both my professional work and my own life as a person grieving — a place where clinical wisdom, somatic awareness, ritual, story, spirituality, and lived experience are allowed to coexist,
I believe tending grief asks us to create spaciousness. To slow down enough to hear what sorrow is asking of us. To become students of our grief. To allow ourselves to be witnessed. To remember that grief was never meant to be carried in isolation.
And, when the timing is right, to become curious about what grief may be opening within us.
Not because every loss needs a silver lining. Not because suffering is inherently transformative.
But because grief changes us.
The Grief Portal is a place to honor that change.
I'm glad you're here.
— Dani