Episode 4: After the Breaking🌈

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Life After the Breaking: Grief, Coming Out & Becoming Who You Are

What happens when the life you knew breaks into a before and an after?

In this intimate and uncensored episode of Anything Could Happen, Diana Shinde sits down with grief coach Lina Iorgovan, founder of After the Breaking, for a conversation about grief, identity, coming out, spirituality, sexuality, embodiment—and the process of rebuilding a life after everything changes.

For Lina, one of the defining “tower moments” of her life was the death of her father, whom she describes as her best friend and lighthouse. His loss forced her to ask a question familiar to anyone who has experienced profound grief: When the light that helped orient you goes out, how do you become your own light?

From there, Diana and Lina venture into what it means to live authentically: questioning sexuality, coming out later in life, finding safe people, navigating religion and spirituality, reconnecting with the body, and refusing to believe that grief—or any other breaking point—has to be the end of the story.

In This Episode

🌈 What Lina means by a “tower moment”— when the architecture of your life comes crashing down

🌈 Losing a parent and learning to live in the world that exists afterward

🌈 Turning grief into purpose without pretending the loss disappeared

🌈 Why Lina describes her father as her “lighthouse”

🌈 Reiki, massage, yoga, mediumship and Lina’s holistic approach to healing

🌈 The body as part of our emotional and spiritual experience

🌈 Aura readings, dreams and intuition

🌈 Lina’s journey of questioning her sexuality and eventually coming out

🌈 Her father’s beautiful response: “It was not my place to tell you who you are.”

🌈 Religion, LGBTQ+ identity and maintaining a relationship with the Divine

🌈 Why support systems matter when we are discovering who we are

🌈 Sexuality, women’s pleasure and learning to inhabit our bodies without shame

🌈 Authenticity as a foundation for meaningful relationships and a meaningful life

🌈 Lina’s upcoming Tuscany retreat for women navigating their own “after the breaking”

About Lina

Lina is a grief coach devoted to supporting women navigating the heartbreak of losing a parent. As the founder of After the Breaking, she brings together her work as an intuitive medium, Reiki Master, massage therapist, and yoga teacher to offer a gentle, nurturing space for healing.

Blending psychology, spirituality, and holistic practices, she helps women find their way through grief, reconnect with themselves, and discover that even after profound loss, life can hold meaning, beauty, and hope again.

Connect With Lina

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/linaiorgovanmedium 

Instagram: @linaiorgovanmedium.yoga

Threads: @linaiorgovanmedium

Polished Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity, readability, and flow while preserving the substance and character of the original conversation.

Life After the Breaking

Diana: Welcome to the Anything Could Happen podcast. I am your host, Diana Shinde, and with me today is Lina Iorgovan.

Lina is a grief coach. She is the founder of After the Breaking, which brings together her work as an intuitive medium, Reiki Master, massage therapist and yoga teacher.

I’m super excited about this conversation because we’re going to be talking about life after the breaking.

Lina, could you start with how life broke open for you?

Lina: Hi, Diana. Thank you so much for having me today. It’s so nice to have this opportunity to talk about what happens after the breaking.

I had spiritual businesses before, but I shaped my present business after my coming out and, especially, after my dad passed away last year.

I call it After the Breaking because someone doesn’t necessarily need to die for a breaking to happen. It can be a divorce, losing a dream, losing a house, losing an identity—something that you’re grieving.

It’s what happens when you reach your breaking point.

After the Breaking is about rebirthing yourself after that experience and becoming the phoenix you always knew was there.

My focus is metaphorically—and sometimes physically, through massage—holding my clients’ hands as they go through that healing journey. I accompany them through Reiki, mediumship, coaching and my background in psychology.

I feel that we all need someone to hold our hand while we’re going through an unthinkable moment, because no one wants to have their life enter a “tower moment,” as we call it in Tarot.

Diana: Could you explain the Tower card and what you mean by a tower moment?

Lina: Absolutely. The Tower is one of the Major Arcana in Tarot.

The Major Arcana represent experiences that can expand over months or years. They’re experiences that happen in your life and shape you.

With the Tower, imagine that the life you thought you had is crumbling in front of your eyes.

It can be debt. It can be losing a job. It can be a realization: This life does not fit me anymore.

Even shifting careers can be a tower moment.

The image on the Tower card is a building collapsing. It’s like an earthquake in our lives. There is a before and an after.

Diana: I like what you pointed out about its significance. The tower is an edifice. It’s the architecture of your life—or at least a major component of your life.

When that comes crashing down, it isn’t necessarily going to be cleaned up in a matter of days or weeks. It could take years.

Lina: Absolutely.

My most recent tower moment was when my dad passed away. It shaped me in an incredible way. There is a Lina who existed before and a Lina who exists after.

After that, there was almost a domino effect—decision after decision. You might lose friendships. You might lose an identity.

There are all these losses that have an excruciating, beautiful pain to them. I know people and clients who have lost loved ones, dreams or something else important to them, and it shaped them into creating purpose from their pain.

Basically, what I’m doing now is creating purpose from my tower moment.

When Your Lighthouse Goes Out

Diana: I love that.

With death—especially the death of someone as significant as a parent or anyone you have such a deep tie to—everyone else continues moving through life, but your life has been altered.

Sometimes people don’t want to see other people grieve. They want you to act normal.

My mother brought this up to me about my father’s death. She said one of the hardest parts was that people would talk to her as if he no longer existed.

They were married for about 37 years. He was her best friend. She wanted to keep telling stories. She wanted to remember him.

How do you honor the grief?

Lina: I think honoring it is exactly what I’m doing right now.

I’m recreating my work. I’m expanding the love my dad had for me into a legacy of being there for women who have lost a parent and women who are rebuilding themselves.

I’m trying to become the best version of myself that my dad saw in me, because he had a way of seeing me that I could not see myself.

He passed away in June last year. That first year was like navigating uncharted waters without guidance.

I’m an only child. I left home when I was 20. My dad was in Romania, my mom was in Austria, I lived in Paris for about 12 years, and two years ago I moved to Germany.

My dad was my best friend and my lighthouse.

Imagine that you have this lighthouse—and then the bulb in the lighthouse goes out.

You ask, Where do I go from here? Left? Right? Where is the right direction?

When my dad died, I needed to become my own spark and my own light. I had to learn not to depend on someone else to hold that light for me.

Diana: The lighthouse is such a beautiful analogy.

What do we do when the light goes out? How do we orient ourselves?

You have this beautiful array of experiences—intuitive mediumship, Reiki, massage therapy and yoga. Have you used those things for yourself as well as your clients during the healing process?

Lina: Yes.

Everything began with my desire to connect with people without talking. I was shy as a child and very sensitive.

It started with giving massage to my grandmother and seeing her relief. I realized, I can provide care without needing to talk.

Later, I took massage classes in Romania and then in Paris and became a massage practitioner.

Around the same time, I encountered Reiki. My first experience was receiving energy healing myself. Eventually I studied psychology as well.

Everything I teach now is something I have experienced myself: Reiki, massage and yoga.

I’ve hosted or co-hosted retreats in Bali and Costa Rica. I continued practicing yoga and energy healing, and now I’m bringing these tools together for women.

The core is guiding women through grief, helping people connect with their loved ones in spirit, and understanding how our bodies speak to us.

Listening to the Body

Diana: You touched on the idea that the body keeps score.

When we experience something, it isn’t only an emotional or intellectual phenomenon. The body metabolizes it. It holds it.

Healing can happen on multiple levels.

Lina: Absolutely.

When I work with someone through massage, I’m looking at the body. Maybe the right shoulder is higher than the left. Maybe there’s more sensitivity in one area.

I also read auras. When someone comes to my practice in Frankfurt, I can offer a holistic or spiritual massage: the hands-on massage, but also a reading and channeling if the person is open to it.

For me, the body talks.

When my grandmother died when I was 20, that was my first major heartbreak. I went to a bookstore and found Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life.

I became captivated by the idea of understanding what the body might be communicating—not negating medical explanations, but being curious about our bodies too.

I started asking my body questions.

You’re coughing. What am I not saying? What are you trying to tell me?

That became part of my spiritual and healing journey.

Diana’s Aura

Diana: Can you do aura readings online over Zoom?

Lina: Yes. Except for massage, I can do my work online—readings and coaching.

Diana: Then can I ask you to do one for me? What’s my aura?

Lina: I see blue.

My first contact with auras was in college when I was studying psychology. We had a transpersonal psychology teacher, and I was introduced to aura readings there.

Over time, as I worked on myself and practiced Reiki, I allowed myself to develop aura reading too.

We have different colors associated with the chakras. Some colors can be more prominent depending on what we’re experiencing at that moment.

For you, I’m getting blue and green.

Blue connects with the throat chakra—creative expression, speaking, assertiveness. We’re having a conversation and doing a podcast, so that makes sense.

And then there’s green, which I associate with Mother Earth and the environment.

Those colors can change according to circumstances.

Diana: I love that.

What do you think about dreams? I’ve met people who have an amazing presence, and then without consciously thinking about them, I’ll dream about them.

Lina: It depends on what happened before the dream.

Sometimes dreams are a continuation of our waking reality. Maybe something with that person is unfinished.

Other times the person can be symbolic. Maybe they represent a mentor, wisdom, growth or something unresolved.

I always look at the timing—not necessarily the hour of the night, but what is happening in your life.

Are you about to make an important decision? Are you at a crossroads?

There can be many reasons why someone appears in a dream.

Coming Out

Diana: Part of your breaking and healing has also been coming out. Would you be willing to share that?

Lina: I love this question because I want to leave a legacy in this world.

I love using my personal experiences to inspire people. Part of my legacy is holding the hands of people who have come out or are about to come out, as well as grieving women.

I was cleaning recently and found the first LGBTQ book I bought for myself when I was still questioning.

I came out publicly in 2024, around the time I moved from Paris to Germany. I told my clients and my parents.

I was completely convinced that I had first come out to myself in 2023.

Then I found that book, and inside I had written my name and the year: 2021.

I realized I had been questioning for much longer than I remembered.

Coming out is a journey, especially when you come from a background like mine in Romania, where LGBTQ people can still have a difficult time being accepted.

It took me years to accept that I wasn’t a sinner and that I deserved to be loved as I am.

At that time, I had been in a seven-year relationship that was deeply unhealthy for me. Eventually I became so exhausted by the heartbreak and self-hatred that I broke free.

I broke free from Paris. I broke free from the relationship. I broke free from businesses and friendships that weren’t aligned.

It happened step by step.

I started telling people close to me, almost testing the water: Am I still going to be loved if I come out? Am I still going to be accepted?

Eventually, I told my dad.

It was October 10, 2024.

He was the first person in my family I told.

My dad was an old-technology guy. He had an old Nokia phone, so I couldn’t FaceTime him and see his face.

I said, “Dad, I think I like women.”

And he said, “Well, I kind of knew since high school.”

I was shocked.

I asked him, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

And he said: “It was not my place to tell you who you are.”

Diana: Wow. What a beautiful answer.

Lina: He told me, “I love you. You’re still my daughter, and I love you.”

He also accepted the person I loved.

It was beautiful and heartwarming.

My experience telling my mother was very different. Religion entered the conversation, and I experienced judgment and rejection.

That experience, combined with the death of my dad, ultimately confirmed for me that I did not feel emotionally safe in that relationship.

Diana: Those are two very different expressions of Christianity.

It’s interesting because we talk about the masculine and feminine so much in spirituality, yet your father was the one who was completely at ease.

Lina: My dad struggled with mental health issues, and I always said that he and I were the misfits of the family—the black sheep.

I love the Princess Diana quote, “I don’t go by the rule book. I lead from the heart.”

That was my dad.

He didn’t rule by the book. He ruled by the heart.

I understand him even better now.

Faith, Religion and Leading With Love

Diana: How would you help women who are questioning their sexuality or trying to feel confident loving women?

There can be so many mixed messages from society and religion.

My mother and I have had conversations about this too. She tries to follow scripture to the best of her ability, but for her, love ultimately has to lead.

Even if you disagree with someone, you still have to love them.

Lina: Absolutely. At minimum, there needs to be respect and understanding even when we don’t agree.

When I was in Colorado, I became friends with a wonderful Christian woman. We had talked about creating a retreat together where my spiritual beliefs and her Christian beliefs could coexist.

We respected each other’s points of view.

I love Jesus. I love God. I disagree with the church sometimes, which is different.

I was raised in the Baptist Church, and there were times when I felt profoundly disconnected from organized religion. I felt that people sometimes used religion to justify their behavior or to feel superior to other people.

To me, that isn’t love.

I have a personal relationship with Jesus.

Diana: What allowed your Christian friend to embrace you without feeling threatened by your beliefs or feeling a need to change you?

Lina: You would have to ask her, but what I felt was that she saw my heart and my spirit.

She respected who I loved because she respected and loved who I was.

We could disagree about things, but I respected her because I loved her as a person, and vice versa.

I feel that’s what religion is supposed to be about: loving one another. We saw each other as souls.

Wayne Dyer talked about us being spiritual beings having a human experience.

“Shut the Noise”

Diana: So how would you help a woman who is questioning her sexuality put the dots together and feel confident in herself?

Lina: When you’re about to come out or you’re questioning your sexuality, there can be so much noise in your head.

If I’m attracted to a woman, does that mean I’m a sinner? Is something wrong with me? What if I’m gay? How will my family respond? How will it affect my business? My children? My life?

There are also women who come out later in life—late bloomers—who may already be married or divorced and have children.

The first thing I would say is: Shut the noise.

Be with yourself.

Questioning your sexuality can be a deeply personal process. You don’t owe anyone an explanation while you’re figuring it out.

Shut the noise and become really, really honest with yourself.

There’s a difference between recognizing that another woman is beautiful and consistently experiencing attraction to women beyond friendship.

The most important recognition happens within yourself.

We have the longest relationship of our lives with ourselves.

If we are at war with ourselves, that conflict affects the relationships around us.

So shut the noise. Get honest with yourself. Befriend yourself.

When you eventually come out to other people, you need to be the trunk of your own tree. You need to be able to support yourself.

If I hadn’t developed that relationship with myself before speaking to my mother, I might have collapsed under the pressure of feeling that I wasn’t enough or experiencing conditional love.

Learning to love and accept myself supported me tremendously.

Diana’s Experience of Questioning

Diana: I want to drop in here because I remember being in junior high and wondering, Am I gay?

I was socially awkward. I didn’t feel properly feminine in the way I thought girls were supposed to be. I remember riding the school bus and thinking something was wrong with me because other girls seemed to understand boys and femininity in a way I didn’t.

I don’t remember ever reaching an answer.

Around that period, I made two very good friends who genuinely loved me, and I think that gave me a lot of security.

Later, in high school, I worked at a theater and met lesbians. It was my first time really encountering people who were openly living that way.

Someone hit on me, but I didn’t experience attraction to that particular person. I was curious, though. I bought my first book about it, and my dad found it. He had a sense of humor about it.

Then I largely stopped thinking about it.

Later in life, I realized that there are times when I find women extremely beautiful. For me, it’s very person-specific rather than across the board.

I’m also grateful that I live in a family where my husband, children, and I can have conversations about these things without stigmatizing or shaming one another.

Some of the best conversations my husband and I have had as a couple have come from discussing taboo topics around human sexuality. We make it safe to share our desires.

I love what you said about noticing when you’re asking yourself the question, giving yourself time, and becoming secure in yourself.

Then, when you reach a greater level of certainty or knowing, you can share with people who feel safe.

Otherwise, it can be very easy to crumble.

Lina: Yes. A support system means so much.

Even if you simply have a doubt—Oh my God, am I gay?—talk with someone you trust, someone with whom your nervous system feels safe.

Support is everything.

Unfortunately, there will be people who don’t understand you. Those people may simply not be your people.

It took me a long time to understand that the love and validation I wanted from my mother first had to come from me.

For me, it wasn’t about becoming something. It was about unbecoming in order to become who I actually was—revealing myself to myself and living authentically.

Authenticity

Diana: It’s the suppression.

Lina: Exactly.

Let me ask you: What do you think is the highest vibrational emotion?

Diana: Joy?

Lina: I always thought it was love.

But what I learned was: authenticity.

Being authentically yourself attracts authentic partnerships, authentic opportunities and a life experienced through authenticity.

Diana: I can see that.

When you meet someone who is truly authentic, there’s something powerful about it. Almost awe-inspiring.

Lina: It took me a long time to understand.

When I first came out, I identified as bisexual. Eventually I realized that lesbian felt more accurate for me, and I love identifying that way.

Other people identify as queer. There’s pansexuality and many other ways people describe themselves.

It’s an interesting palette of language within the LGBTQ community.

Diana: I think that language reflects the complexity of human sexuality.

Sometimes people outside the community can react with, Oh goodness, another term.

But those terms have meanings. They can help us describe experiences that simplistic stories about relationships, love, and sexuality don’t always capture.

Women, Sexuality and Pleasure

Diana: So much of sexuality is kept closeted for human beings in general.

We even use phrases like “private parts,” which can communicate that these things are so private that we shouldn’t talk about them.

But if we don’t understand our bodies or what gives us pleasure, how can we communicate that to someone else?

Women’s pleasure in particular can be intricate. If women aren’t taught how their bodies experience pleasure—and their partners aren’t taught either—you can have people seeking the same outcome without knowing how to get there together.

Lina: Absolutely.

I was thinking about this recently while finding my old LGBTQ book and journals.

How many women have repressed their sexuality because it didn’t feel safe to talk about?

And I don’t only mean being gay. I mean sexuality and pleasure more broadly.

I grew up hearing messages like, you should only have sex when you’re married, or that masturbation was sinful.

Sex education focused on things like condoms and rules rather than teaching that sexuality can also be beautiful, that creating life is beautiful, and that experiencing pleasure can help you discover yourself.

When you repress a part of yourself, that part still needs to be heard.

For me, the sacral chakra is especially interesting because it’s associated with the reproductive system, creativity and pleasure.

The womb is literally a place of creation. We give birth not only to children but metaphorically to creative ideas, businesses and new possibilities.

And pleasure isn’t only sexual. It can be beautiful sheets on your bed, giving yourself a massage, enjoying your senses and allowing yourself to experience life.

Women are often taught to be the good daughter, the good wife, the good girl—to sacrifice that part of themselves or think of it as dirty.

Diana: I love that because in Indic spirituality and the chakra system, we begin at the base and bring the energy upward.

So much comes from that foundation: healing, childbirth, joy and pleasure.

And throughout this conversation, I love that you retain your faith.

I’m a practicing Muslim, and I love Islam. I think it’s a tragedy when we create barriers around faith that essentially say, No entry. You’re this. You do this. You’re sinful.

That isn’t healing.

A person can lose touch with the Divine because they’ve been confined by somebody else’s definition.

We have this life. To go through it without understanding our own bodies, without enjoying them, without allowing ourselves to experience connection—it seems like a tremendous loss.

And if we lose faith in the process, we can also lose access to something that genuinely brings enlightenment, inspiration and meaning.

Lina: I could talk about this for hours.

It makes me sad because we can have beautiful relationships with each other and beautiful relationships with God, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna—or whoever someone believes in.

It’s important to have faith in something.

And I think we’re invited to be gentle with ourselves and give ourselves time.

I’m slightly hypocritical saying this because I have so little patience sometimes!

Diana: I love that you said patience because I have it tattooed on my body now.

“And glad tidings to the patient.”

I realized I needed that quality.

The Voice and the Art Within: Tuscany

Diana: I’ve loved every moment of our conversation, but I also want people listening to be able to meet you.

You have a retreat coming up in Tuscany, correct?

Lina: Yes. It’s June 13–20 next year.

I chose those dates because I wanted to celebrate my new self and celebrate women who are in an “after the breaking” moment.

It will also mark two years since my dad passed away.

The retreat is called The Voice and the Art Within.

We want to give voice to ourselves, give voice to our grief and create art—to alchemize grief.

There will be yoga, workshops and journaling. We’ll visit Lucca and Florence. We’ll have a private chef and stay in a beautiful villa in Poppi.

But beyond the logistics, my intention is for these ten women to feel that they are not alone.

To enjoy life.

To eat.

To cry.

To practice yoga.

To experience stillness.

To shut the noise.

And to make memories.

When was the last time you really had fun and invested in yourself? When did you go somewhere you had never been and allow yourself to feel?

We live in such a busy world.

When do we allow ourselves simply to take a break and feel?

Diana: I love that you’re holding it around the anniversary of your father’s passing.

In Sufi Islam, there’s a concept called the ʿurs, the death anniversary of a great soul. The imagery is that the person who has passed is like a bride returning to the Beloved. Death becomes a state of reunion.

So there’s something beautiful about you bringing these women together around that anniversary and inviting them to reunite with their authentic selves.

And there are only ten spots!

Lina: Everyone will have a private room. We’ll have a pool, a private chef and transportation during the retreat.

Everyone will also receive an hour of massage with me.

That’s part of why I’m limiting it to ten women. I want to give my full attention and offer my gifts toward their healing.

If a woman feels that she needs to be with herself and take a break from children, husbands, work or overthinking, she can DM me and we can talk about it.

I would absolutely love to have her there.

Where to Find Lina

Diana: And people can connect with you through Instagram and Threads, correct?

Lina: Yes, and through my website.

That’s where I’m most active right now: my website, Instagram and Threads. People can also email me through the website.

It’s After the Breaking.

Diana: Fantastic. I’ll share links to all of that in the show notes and description.

Lina, I’ve had so much fun talking with you today.

Lina: Thank you for inviting me. It’s such a pleasure.

We met through a Hay House workshop in June, and it’s amazing how everything happened.

Diana: I didn’t know when we met that you had lost your father around that time.

Lina: Everything happens as it needs to happen.

Diana: It does.

Thank you, Lina.

Lina: Thank you.

Diana: Take care.

About Anything Could Happen

Anything Could Happen is a podcast about the people, experiences and ideas that remind us just how much is possible in a human life.

Hosted by Diana Shinde, the show features candid conversations about growth, identity, relationships, health, spirituality and reinvention—and what can happen when we remain curious enough to keep becoming.

About Miraculous Day Coaching

Miraculous Day Coaching empowers women to create meaningful change through curiosity, mindset, consistency, and intentional habits.

Transformation doesn’t have to happen all at once. Sometimes it begins by getting curious about what’s possible—and taking the next right step toward the life you want to live.

Learn more: miraculousdaycoach.com

Disclaimer: This podcast explores personal experiences and spiritual and holistic perspectives. Statements made by the host or guest about health, psychology, energy work, sexuality or spirituality reflect personal perspectives and experiences and should not be interpreted as medical or mental-health advice.