67. Leaning Into Fear and Loss: Myra Sack on Losing a Child and Finding Her Way

May 7, 2025

In this deeply moving episode Zack sits down with Myra Sack, author of 57 Fridays: Losing Our Daughter, Finding Our Way and Executive Director of Emotion, Inc.—a nonprofit that helps people navigate grief through movement, ritual, and community. Myra shares her profound journey of losing her daughter Javi to Tay-Sachs disease, how that loss reshaped her understanding of fear and anxiety, and how the emotional tools she and her husband developed became the foundation for her organization’s healing model. Together, they explore how grief intersects with fear and anxiety, especially the difference between anxiety's imagined threats and fear's real ones—and how we can learn to "move with" both and harness the treasures that exist in intense emotional experiences. 

Throughout the conversation, Myra highlights the power of emotional granularity, intentional ritual, somatic motion, and authentic community as antidotes to the isolation and overwhelm that often accompany grief and trauma. She and Zack discuss how Emotion, Inc. is bringing these tools to others through its national grief-movement cohorts, offering not just support but transformation. Myra’s vulnerability and insight are a gift to anyone coping with loss or seeking to support others through it, and her message—that we can live in the land of the living and carry our grief—is one of resilience, love, and deep hope.

 

Zack’s Hack: Zack shares a powerful quote about grief.

 

Fear Less is sponsored by Mountain Valley Treatment Center.