Episode 181: Indigenous Wisdom Conversations: What the Body Knows with Catherine Gairard
Aug 25, 2026What happens to the parts of us that don't go away when someone we love leaves?
This is Part Two of Julia Carmen's conversation with Catherine Gairard — harpist and musician carrying a lineage both French and Peruvian. Part One covered cultural ownership in the digital world and music as a healing frequency; this one goes somewhere neither of them planned.
Catherine's mother passed away earlier this year. What she describes since then isn't grief in the way grief usually gets talked about — a physical activation in her heart, images that weren't hers to produce, and a string of small, specific signs: knitting magazines she couldn't bring herself to throw away, a jewelry box repurposed to hold the paper slips she uses to force herself into new musical keys, her mother's voice arriving mid-embroidery to say, simply, that's so beautiful. Catherine believes she helped her mother cross over during a panic attack she didn't understand until later — and that the two of them are going to keep making music together, because everything in the physical is created first in the nonphysical.
Julia meets her here not just as a teacher but as someone freshly grieving her own sister. She tells the story of driving toward the ocean and yelling at her sister's spirit to get out of the car — a moment of very human, very unscripted grief, from a woman who has spent her whole life moving comfortably between worlds. It becomes the episode's real teaching: knowing the truth of the soul self doesn't cancel out the body's need to feel its pain.
