Several years ago, Jim Morrison lay curled on his laundry room floor, crying and screaming in the throes of the lowest point of his life, feeling completely broken. The prolific American ski mountaineer had been reading Eckhart Tolle’s spiritual self-help book, The Power of Now. In that moment, as he gazed at pine trees just beyond the window, Morrison found himself drawn to taking a step toward finally facing his grief. He started by walking three doors away from his house and back, which he considered meaningful progress.

“I learned with each step forward, almost literally, that that’s all that I had to do,” Morrison said. “Just take one step at a time.”

Morrison’s relationship with grief began more than a decade ago. In the spring of 2011, his wife, Katie, a licensed private pilot, was flying a single-engine Cessna with their two children aboard when the aircraft crashed into a hillside near the Barstow-Daggett Airport in Daggett, California.…