For three easy payments of $9.99, Toni Filipone changed her life.
While watching a 1 a.m. infomercial in 1987 she found her obsession and it was Tony Robbins, the life coach and motivational speaker. It was his commercial for the series “Personal Power” that the then-12-year-old stumbled onto — along with the path that would change not just her life, but the lives of tens of thousands of people in the future.
This was the moment that Ms. Filipone would credit as the seed of her company, Master Grief. With her studies of Mr. Robbins’s work as its backbone, and her own relationship with grief, she seeks to change the perception of grief and to train counselors to help others. And it’s working. To date, she has trained 17,000 counselors.
With a huge presence online through TikTok and other platforms, Ms. Filipone touches thousands of lives every day. And here in East Hampton, she is making personal, face-to-face connections at a group that meets monthly at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter. New to the South Fork, Ms. Filipone is a native of Philadelphia.
Master Grief is not your ordinary grief support group, Ms. Filipone said. “The five stages of grief are for people who are dying — not for the living,” she said last week. As she sees it, we all know how to grieve, but we need to learn to embrace grief and let it live with our other emotions. Grieving, she said, comes from three places: the heart, the brain, and the mind. And the only one
And, by the way, Ms. Filipone pointed out, grief is not just a reaction to death. It can result from any changes you don’t want in your life — from divorce, to breakups, and career changes. You might find yourself lost after a marriage or relationship or job is gone and you have to readjust to life without it, she said. Many people can’t find their way out. “Grief makes you bitter or better,” she said.
Grief can even extend to the workplace, she said, calling the “quiet quitting” epidemic an extension of grief. “Quiet quitting” is a term for when employees expend minimum effort to keep their jobs but do not go the extra mile. Master Grief works with companies to help retain staff who may be suffering from grief-connected employment issues, which she said affect one in four people in the workplace.
A dyslexic child who was a target of bullying, Ms. Filipone remembers writing the “Personal Power” infomercial address down that early morning with her Hello Kitty pencil with the Troll doll pencil topper. She would later ask Santa for the tapes. She promised her single mother she would memorize the 24 hours of content in a year and donate them to the next person. And she did.
Two years later, she would see Mr. Robbins in person at an event in Atlantic City. She eventually got to know the man that as a child she “thought of as my father.”
“He told me, we are always preparing for something we don’t know we’re preparing for,” Ms. Filipone said of Mr. Robbins. That something for her came 14 years later when her partner died by suicide. She was completely lost. “I was sinking. I couldn’t get out of bed,” she said.
Four days later, she made her way to a grief support group not knowing what to expect. What she found as the members introduced themselves was a group of people who had been in active grief for eight, 10, 18 years. Ms. Filipone asked the members of the group how they had changed in that time. Some of the members could not answer and some just wept, she said. She didn’t make it through the group session.
That’s when the seed of Master Grief sprouted. She would master the process of grieving as she had mastered the teachings of Mr. Robbins earlier in her life. Four months later, she created the company from her bed. Her partner’s death had crushed her, but simultaneously “gave me a life of purpose and service,” she said.
“Do I feel surrounded by death? Yes,” she said bluntly. Her stepsister and cousin also died early and unexpectedly. But she is comfortable with that. “We are all always six inches away from death,” she added.
As for supporting those around us who have been touched by grief, Ms. Filipone offers this advice: “Grief is like a broken rib.” It is unseen but painful nonetheless. Tell the people you love that you support them no matter what they are feeling — even if they can’t identify that feeling themselves. “Tell them they don’t have to wear a grief mask,” she said.
Her Master Grief group is meeting at the Y.M.C.A. in East Hampton once a month, including this Sunday at 11 a.m. Registration for the free sessions is at bit.ly/4aPdtWG.
Ms. Filipone plans on expanding; more classes are in the works for Sag Harbor.
The Y.M.C.A. meetings are part of a three-part series. In January, the group explored grief beyond death — the idea that grief can result from any change you didn’t choose. On Sunday, she will discuss the effects of grief on the body — the physical weight of pain. In March, the focus will be on how we identify after a loss.
“You can grieve and live,” she said.
