I greatly enjoyed my talk with Petia, an amazing energetic force. While Petia works primarily with women, I personally got a lot out of our conversation. Petia Kolibova is a women’s transformation coach who helps women who have been pushed down and been playing it small due to toxic relationships or unhealed childhood trauma to create a life that is true to them and their soul purpose.

Her mission is to help women who are on the path to healing from past wounds move through their limiting beliefs and internal blocks so they can finally do what they want to do, what feels good to them, serve other women in a powerful way online.

Petia pairs feminine flow with strategic planning to give entrepreneurs immense clarity + exact steps to transition from side-hustler to CEO.

If she is not interviewing on her podcast Unapologetically Abundant, working out, or reading, you will find her in nature disconnecting from the world, connecting to herself.

You can find Petia at: ℹ️ https://www.petiakolibova.com

Transcript

Brian Smith 0:00
Close your eyes and imagine what are the things in life that causes the greatest pain, the things that bring us grief, or challenges, challenges designed to help us grow to ultimately become what we were always meant to be. We feel like we’ve been buried, but what if, like a seed we’ve been planted, and having been planted, to grow to become a mighty tree. Now, open your eyes, open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true, infinite, eternal nature. This is grief to growth. And I am your host, Brian Smith. Hey everybody, this is Brian back with another episode of free for growth. And today I’ve got with me are SCOTT MALONE, and I’m going to read a very short bio for Scott and then we’re going to get started. Scott is a longtime acupuncturist, a martial artist and a meditation practitioner. I am especially interested in focus on the relationships between the energetics of the body, the heart and the consciousness. And to give you more information where you can find out about Scott, you for acupuncture and go to infinite pillar calm, it’s infinite. P i ll AR calm for energetic table work and consulting, go to esoteric consultant calm. And we’ll cover those again at the end of the show. But with that, I want to introduce Scott Malone

R Scott Malone 1:27
Hello, hello.

Brian Smith 1:28
Hey, Scott,

thanks for being here today.

R Scott Malone 1:30
Yeah, appreciate you having me up.

Brian Smith 1:32
Yeah, it’s great to meet you. Fascinating guy, we met through a mutual friend of ours, Jake, somebody Edie who recommended that I speak with you. And we had a short conversation and I think you’ll be really interested, are just be interested in hearing your story and how you got into energetic work and what your thoughts are between the body heart and mind connection? Yeah. So how did you get into this work?

R Scott Malone 1:58
Well, I have to say, so I’ve been a, I’ve been a martial artist forever. Both my parents are chiropractors. And so there was this, there’s a sense of healing in the family. So I would see somebody come into the clinic bent over and then over a series of, of days, I would see them, you know, better, you know, or weeks, I would see them standing up. And so I really, I really thought there was something to that there was something really interesting about about that. And when I realized, you know, my father, I would never have the last word if I was a chiropractor. So I thought, you know, I ended up going into acupuncture. And it was interesting, from a martial arts perspective, all the points that you would strike are essentially the points that you use to heal. So it’s like, it’s how you approach anything you can approach it with with mal intent or with good intent. But really what happened is, after I got back from India, my teacher, my teacher said, so what are you going to do now that you’re back from India, you’ve had this this trip? And I said, Well, you know, it’s thinking about, you know, there was a, it was a Sufi retreat for a month in India. And it went to a lot of Buddhist places, like we ended up at the mahabodhi temple. And so there was a lot of Tibetan influence, along with the speaking with the Sufi, because pure light was very much engaged with the Tibetans. And so when I got back, I thought, well, I said, You know, I think I may go to college and get a degree and teach Tibetan studies. And my teacher was Kurt, Ben wilts. He’s got a number of books. He’s since passed. But he said, because he’d been in the Scholastic world, and, and it had been pretty rough. And he said, Have you ever thought of acupuncture? And it was like, somebody hit me in the stomach with a bag of bricks. And, uh, probably about two weeks later, I was enrolled. So it just felt like that was something that you were called to. It was just yeah, it was just boom, it all of a sudden I was like, Oh, my God. That’s it. So

Brian Smith 4:20
and this was around college age this time?

R Scott Malone 4:24
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So probably, let’s see, I went to India in 94. Hmm. So maybe a little past college age. Okay. Okay. So yeah. And that was actually one of the things that I remember. It was the last day of the retreat, and everybody had gathered together and they were kind of, you know, being together one last time and I was just broken, the retreat broke me. And I was on top of this Tibetan monastery. In Nepal, the coupon monastery Everybody is together singing and I just remember sitting on top of the roof. And I just remember telling God, I was like, you either have to tell me what to do, or you have to take me out, because I just I can’t stand it anymore. And it started raining on me. Oh, okay. All right, I get it. I’m just going inside that. But then when I got back, you know, and I felt like it was a rejection at the time. But then when I got back, my, my teacher said, you know, what are you going to do? Have you considered acupuncture? And it was it and it all came together. So Well, yeah.

Brian Smith 5:39
So how do you train for acupuncture? Where do you go to do that?

R Scott Malone 5:43
So there’s schools everywhere. I think here, I’m in Colorado now. So I think here, there’s, I think, two in Boulder and one in Denver. Um, so essentially, it’s, um, I think now they’ve changed it. I did two years of prerequisites. And then I did all my time squished into three years, but I think now they’re moving towards a four and four. model. Okay. So it’s a it’s pretty extensive. And somebody somebody was saying, Yeah, it’s a little bit like going to med school and Chinese. Yeah, yeah. I don’t think that it’s probably as far as the hard sciences go, it’s a lot more on the theory, and then the instruction understanding of the points and, and how the, the whole body works in a in a holistic way. Mm hmm.

Brian Smith 6:31
So it’s interesting, you said, you know, opening, you said, there’s, there’s a relationship between the points that you strike in martial arts and the points that you, I guess, use in acupuncture,

R Scott Malone 6:41
right. So there’s, um, there. So basically, if you have the energetic system, and it depends on what level you’re sort of fighting it. So if you’re, if you’re, you know, boxing is doing enough damage, not somebody out. But if you look at some of the Eastern arts, once you start working with the energetic bodies, then you can use that energetic body to attack another energetic body. Hmm. So we have these meridians and lines running through us of the energy. And there’s there’s a study called democ. And in some Denmark, you have certain times of day where the energy is in different meridians. And you can attack different organs like that. But if you have enough energy, when you strike somebody you’re looking at affecting their energetic system it as much or more than just a physical, a physical attack. So there’s, there’s a point right here, it’s a pericardium, six empiric cardium, six in the body is used to open the chest, it helps with anxiety, it helps with stress, it can also the pericardium protects the heart. So people who have past traumas locked into the heart of the pericardium will take those hits, so that the heart is protected, it’s also known as the heart protector. And so when you activate the pericardium channel, one of the things you can do is release some of those past traumas that are that are locked into the body. But if you strike it, then it actually causes your whole meridian system to light up. So that the next strikes that you do on somebody in a in an energetic way, cause more damage. So

Brian Smith 8:26
yeah, explain to me the relationship between the different bodies. There’s, you mentioned the physical and the energetic, are there other bodies and how do they interrelate?

R Scott Malone 8:37
So I look at, I look at essentially the three the three centers the lower donchian, which is the second chakra, below the navel, right. And that’s, that’s, so we’ll talk about just the three from the Dallas perspective, but I fully recognize the rest from the Buddhist and the Hindu perspective as well. So that’s going to be your physical body. And so when you’re doing Qigong, the whole idea is to revitalize and build and strengthen the physical body and the energetic body, so that you work optimally as a human being, from a Buddhist perspective, so the Buddhists and the Taoist have the biggest influence and cheekbone with the Confucian, Qigong being kind of a distant third. So from the Buddhist perspective, you want to increase longevity, so that you have a longer chance to attain enlightenment. Hmm, so that’s some of the impetus for that, that that she goes on. Then you move into the heart center, and then you have other hotta So that’s the second the middle donchian and this is a good you know, obviously the emotional center and so you have your your emotional body, and then up in the upper Center at the Eisner or the Third Eye Center. Then you’re dealing more with the mud. So those are the three main bodies. But there’s also, to be honest, if you look at lead better, and the Thea theosophist, there’s the causal body and the spiritual body, and I don’t know that it ends, just your awareness of the bodies expands out, you know, there’s probably a cosmic body that’s connected, but you’d have to have a cosmic consciousness to tune into it or something.

Brian Smith 10:25
Yeah, but it’s from a Western perspective, we think of our bodies like I have a body. Yeah, a body. Yeah, and what you’re talking about an expansion of that, that I have multiple bodies, you mentioned the physical body and the energy body. So that’s a, that’s going to be a new concept of things, a lot of people,

R Scott Malone 10:41
you know, and the thing is, it’s one thing, it’s one body, it’s just the spectrum. And if you look at, if you look at, say energy, moving at a slower rate to a finer rate, you know, x rays to matter, you know, high energy, vibration, lower energy, vibration, but it’s all still the same thing, and you can’t separate it out. And I think sometimes people have this idea of, you know, they’re gonna work with one in, in opposition to another or solely without the other, and it just doesn’t work that way. I think one of the fascinating things about acupuncture, when you find somebody that works with it, a lot of acupuncture is, um, you know, it’s very functional medicine, my shoulder hurts, can you fix my frozen shoulder, and that’s all they want. And that’s fine. You know, irregular cycles, migraines, all of the the standard stuff that humans go through. But there’s a deeper level of acupuncture when you look at five element theory, and the five elements each have emotions attached to them. So if you have say, fire, it’s joy, lack of joy. And then if you have Earth, it’s um, nourishing the lack of being nourished worry. And then metal is grief, which would be say, large intestine and lung. And that’s the inability to grieve or the inability to stop grieving. And then you have metal water is fear. And then wood, lung and liver, gallbladder is anger, resentment, frustration, unfulfilled desire. So all of these home two different organ systems fire is heart and small intestine, earth, the stomach, spleen, pancreas. Let’s see water is kidney, kidney, bladder. So what you have an issue physiologically, sometimes it is caused by an emotional problem in the emotional body. So if you have, you know, somebody that lost somebody, then you might have grief. But we have a normal timespan for immediate, immediate grief for like the bright, shining, horrible grief. But after a certain time, it should sort of smooth out to a certain extent, anger is the same way you should be angry, and then it should pass. But when those things get stuck, when those emotions get stuck, then they can have a physiological impact. So you can have somebody who’s grieving very hard, and they can’t, they can’t reconcile, they can’t get over it. And what will happen is eventually it will start to weaken their lungs and their large intestine. Because the emotion of grief is the lungs and letting go is the large intestine. Hmm. By the same token, you could have somebody who is a longtime smoker, or they lived in a really they lived in like Old Delhi, and, or Beijing, and they’re constantly breathing in pollution. Um, ultimately, what can happen is they can realize that they’re, they’re sad all the time. They’re grieving all the time. Or they can’t let any little thing go. So it’s a it’s a two way street. And the The interesting thing about, you know, acupuncture and working with the energetic body is that it doesn’t really matter which came first. The body, the emotions will release.

Brian Smith 14:09
Yeah, that’s really interesting that you said that because you said it’s kind of like there’s that look, I can operate on a feedback loop. So yeah, either one can affect the other. You know, I think about grief obviously, my shows grief to growth, I deal with people in grief. So I’m glad that you said that. And I want to get back to how we can maybe use some of these techniques to help people grieve. But I also think about like depression we were so in the West are so caught up on like brain chemistry causing depression. Yeah. And I wonder if it can go both ways that our thoughts can cause our brain chemistry to change?

R Scott Malone 14:42
Yeah, I think absolutely. And in my, in my experience, that’s absolutely true. You can have people that are there and depression is one of those kind of catch all words who I always ask me what’s your flavor of depression? You know, because they’re the because that will kind of clue me in until what organs system that I that I need to work with you just scoot back a little bit. So yeah, I definitely think it does because the, you know, the energetic will affect the physiology. And if you look at the CI body, right, the the energetic system where all the meridians and the acupuncture points are, and that ci body is the interface between the physical body, and then your higher awareness. And so, but it can go anywhere, anywhere from the spectrum when I was I trained a little bit with the Sufi is in a work called the Rafi lat work. And it’s part of the Sufi healing order. And they spoke about, you know, the the physical, energetic mental, emotional body, and then they talked about spiritual body. And they were saying essentially, that any anything any imbalance in any of those bodies, the buck stops at the physical body. Mm hmm. So eventually, if it goes on long enough, if you have a spiritual crisis, and it’s unresolved, you know, and like we were talking a little bit earlier about, you know, people feeling like God rejected them. Yeah, you know, if you have something like that, and it’s unresolved, eventually, it will hone down into the physical body, it may take 20 years, but eventually it will show up in the physical body, because how can it not it’s all one thing, it just, it’ll have to filter through, you know?

Brian Smith 16:28
Yeah, well, all these things is I’m understanding it there, we, we tend to like to want to separate them out. But they’re all part of us. Right? We’re and it’s kind of like, they’re, they’re just different aspects of who we are. And, again, I think in the West, we really focused on just what we can see and touch and feel, right, we said, this impacts this, this is the answer to everything, you know, so if you’ve got a problem, take a pill, and the pill will will solve your emotional problem. But you know, I think it’s again, I think it’s it goes both ways. So in the case of what you do with working with the energy body, that can actually impact the physical body, and that’s, that’s kind of new to a lot of people.

R Scott Malone 17:09
Yeah. And, and to be honest, I really do a lot more just straight, energetic work, versus using the needles. Hmm. So the needles work. I mean, the needles somebody asked me, you know, it’s funny, because people go, so does, I’ll tell them something, and, you know, majan Oh, yeah. And I do acupuncture, and they’ll say, does that really work? Am I and it always blows my mind. And so my response is essentially the same. And, and it’s, it’s essentially, you know, it’s a, it’s 500 years documented, but possibly as many as 5000 years, and people are still doing it, you know, trial error, refinement, repeat, you know, so. So, the, the Beatles actually work. Um, but there was somebody who was talking, I think, I was reading a book by Damon Mitchell, who writes great books on Dallas neigong. His book is called Dallas neigong, which is a, it’s sort of a primer from I don’t know anything about yin and yang to I’d like to do Qi Gong ne Gong, which and they Gong is a higher internal energetic practice. But he was saying, in one of his books that initially, what would happen when you wanted to be a healer is your teacher would give you energetic practices to do to see if you could feel the energy in your own body. And then he would ask you questions to see if you had realized and been able to sense the energy in your own body? And if you couldn’t, then you were out? Because how could you be trusted with somebody else’s energetic body? If you didn’t even feel you’re out? Mm hmm. So and so it’s a thought that essentially, needles came along. because there weren’t enough people who were tuned in energetically enough to do the work that some people needed that extra stimulation with a needle into the pump. Because you have to think about what did they do before they had the metallurgy to make needles or you know, that they use these things called Beyond stones, which are like, very thin, pointed stones, where they, they use stone, basically kind of stone needles, and there’s some question as to whether they actually penetrated or just use pressure. But I think after, you know, after years of meditation and doing internal work, and really kind of tuning into the energy, I had this thought of, well, why why would I light up, you know, one point with a needle when I could possibly light up the whole channel and just balanced the whole channel. Hmm. So if, if, if I’m doing acupuncture traditionally, then I look at my diagnosis, I look at the signs and symptoms and then I pick the acupressure I’m sure meridians for my my prescription my point prescription, and I pick according to my diagnosis, the medical prescription, that herbal prescription. And then we do all of that. And the way that I know that it’s working is if your symptoms change, right. So what I say is I’m putting these needles in and they’re going to balance your lung channel, they’re going to balance your your stomach channel. But I don’t really know until there’s a secondary response. And you tell me that something got better.

So when I plug in energetically, and typically what I’ll do is have somebody on the on the table, and I’ll plug into the bottoms of their feet or their ankles, I’ll feel the the energy move into the patient, and they will typically feel an energetic sensation, start at their feet, and then move up to the top of their head, arms, legs, everything in between. So once I get a general sense of the energy in the body, then if say they’re having trouble with anger and resentment, I’ll plug into the liver channel. And they will actually feel that line, go up the inside of the leg. And so my thought is, if you don’t feel it, it didn’t happen. So it has to be a visceral sensation. Or a lot of times PE patients will try to they’ll try to say what you want to hear. Oh, well, no, I think I feel it. I think it No, I think so. So if you say I think then that’s a no, when you actually feel it, you feel it. So then that meridian will come up. And then once the meridians on both sides show up, then I’ll ask that patient, does the left side feel equal to the right side? When they tell me Yes, then I know it’s balanced because it’s the patient’s perception. Hmm, it’s not just Well, the needle says so it must be. I actually did an experiment with that where I did the needle strike, I checked somebodies energetic system. I did the needles, and it was more balanced. But it was in no way fully balanced. And it wasn’t really balanced all the way to the organ. So when it when the two sides balanced, then the organ itself will light up. And it’s interesting people go, I never knew what my liver felt like before. So they’ll actually have a sense of their liver. And they’ll tell me something like, well, I’ll say, Well, what does it feel like? Well, it feels hot and heavy. Okay, well let me know when it feels lighter. And when it’s cooled down. And so when the patient tells me, okay, the it feels it feels good. It feels warm, it feels full. Does it does it everything feel balanced? Yes. Then I know. And the patient knows that it is bounce?

Brian Smith 22:41
Yeah. Yeah, it’s, yeah, it’s interesting, because we again, we think about acupuncture, we think about needles, right? And right. Again, I think people go, Well, does this work? Because we want to know, how does it work? How does sticking a needle, in my hand, affect my liver?

R Scott Malone 22:57
Right?

Brian Smith 22:58
what’s what’s the mechanism? You know, how is this working? But it’s all it’s all. But what I’m learning over the years that I’ve been, you know, study or just living studying life, is that that’s all energy. And, you know, it’s so I talk to people that do Reiki and people do, you know, all the, we call it all these different things, but it’s all manipulated. But we have again, we have this reliance here on on, I gotta do something physical. And I think it’s interesting, because when we take pills, when we trust the pills work, we have no idea how they really work most most of the medications we take, we do not know the mechanism. And I don’t think most people know this. They think that they study and they’re like, I’m going to produce this pill that’s going to react, we don’t we just tried things. Like take this and see what it does. Oh, yeah, that one works. So then we produce more of those.

R Scott Malone 23:47
Yeah. Or they’ll be using a drug for one thing, and they’ll go, Oh, well, we noticed this beneficial side effect that so we’re actually going to use it for the heart now instead of you know, like erectile dysfunction, or whatever it is, you know, yeah. Yes.

Brian Smith 23:59
So all these things, you know, so we have this now we question things like acupuncture, which you said, it’s like, well, people have been doing it for 1000s of years. And yeah, and and it’s they do it, they’ve been continuing to do it, because obviously, it does work.

R Scott Malone 24:15
Well, and I think it’s interesting, too. I hear this sometimes where, you know, like, I like Reddit, and I’m a victim of doom scrolling, you know, occasionally. So, um, and you’ll hear people say, Oh, well, it’s some crazy herbal medicine thing. And it always blows my mind because herbal medicine is the first medicine. It’s, it’s the oldest medicine and half of the things that that we have as medicine now came because somebody decided to isolate some part of an herbal plant that seemed to do this thing. Right. So I just think that’s I think it’s interesting in a from a Chinese TCM, traditional Chinese medicine perspective. All medicines are toxic to the liver just in varying degrees. Yeah, so to assert, to a certain extent, you have aspirin, which is relatively baby aspirin, which is relatively benign. But essentially, it’s still slightly toxic to the liver all the way up to chemo, which is amazingly toxic to the liver. And the reason is, is because they’re not natural substances, and the body doesn’t recognize them as food. So the body recognizes herbs as food. Now, it’s, it’s dangerous to take a bunch of herbs that you don’t really know what they do. You know, I don’t think, you know, watching dr. oz and saying I should take a whole bunch of this, you know, because, you know, it seems like a good idea. You know, and he would probably even even, you know, he would offer some sort of idea of dosage or something. But people in the West are sort of like, well, more is better is better. Yeah. It’s just not, it’s just not. Yeah, I

Brian Smith 25:53
remember I talked to someone about homeopathy. And yeah, micro micro micro doses of things that are quote, poisonous, but everything’s poisonous to certain extent we drink too much water, you’ll die. Yeah, but you. You take homeopathy and say, we’ll take this and then you’re gonna wait, I’m going to paint it and then or teacher and make it and we can’t do anything. I need more.

R Scott Malone 26:16
Right? Well, here’s the thing. If you don’t recognize the energetic body, then homeopathy is is quackery.

Brian Smith 26:24
Exactly.

R Scott Malone 26:25
But look at I actually was curious about homeopathy. And it’s a whole nother study that I just didn’t have the bandwidth to jump into. Although I have utilized it on occasion. But you look at how many people in India utilize homeopathy? How many people in Europe utilize homeopathy? There’s millions and millions of people worldwide that utilize homeopathy and is recognized by the government’s Yeah, you know, it’s just in the West. If it you know, if it didn’t come from Big Pharma? Well, then, you know, and and that’s a whole that’s a whole other thing, right? Big Pharma versus homeopathy versus herbal medicine, you know?

Brian Smith 27:06
Yeah, just to let people know, who might not know we’re talking about regardless thing about homeopathy, it’s taking a substance and using a very, very minute portion of it like you, you dilute it with water, like 10,000 times or something. And so it’s really more. So again, my, when someone was explaining to me, my Western mind was, well, that’s not enough to do anything. But it’s working on an energetic level more like, you know, what you’re talking about. And again, with, with the drugs that we take, that we put so much faith in,

R Scott Malone 27:33
we don’t know exactly how they work, either. So that’s often a chemical shotgun approach to something that needs a finer touch. Yeah, you know, we’ll do a broad spectrum, which means we’re doing a broad spectrum, because we’re hoping that somewhere in this, you know, will affect what we’re actually what we’re actually looking to fix. Yeah. And that’s why I think it’s interesting Chinese medicine. You never, you never diagnose herbs without a prescription without a diagnosis. If you look at migraines, or you look at headaches, there’s half a dozen different kinds of headaches, you know, if you, if you have it across the top here, you know, that’s, that’s a stomach headache. If it’s dull, your stomach is weak, if it’s dull, top, your liver is weak, if it’s pounding, and you have a typical migraine with photophobia, and all that, it’s a gallbladder headache. I mean, there’s so you can’t give the same, the same herbal formula for all headaches. And that’s why I think, you know, Chinese medicine, Chinese herbology. And, and a lot of Western or biology or biology practitioners, it’s very directed, because they understand the function of the herbs and how they affect the bottom.

Brian Smith 28:46
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

R Scott Malone 28:49
Go crazy, that stuff can’t work. And the other thing

Brian Smith 28:53
that that we talked about, you know, you went with acupuncture, for example, and this energy work that you do is, you know, you said that typical person might say, Well, my shoulder hurts, or I’m having headaches coming in for something physical, but it can be useful for much more than that. And what I want to get back to specifically you mentioned grief, you know, people that are going through grief. So how can, how can acupuncture help with somebody that’s dealing with grief.

R Scott Malone 29:17
So, so I’ve actually, I used to have tried to incorporate a lot of the sort of energetic stuff that’s a little on the Qigong spiritual side into my acupuncture practice. And so I’ve really decided recently to kind of split those into two different websites, like you mentioned, because I think a lot of people coming in for just a physiological issue. They don’t really and because they’re very sort of Western medically oriented, if I start talking to them about Qigong and energy, then they find someplace else to be. They just want a guy in a white coat to stick needles in them and then there is a thing you know, medic Western medical acupuncture, and it works So I tend to what I actually find is that when somebody comes in for a particular physical symptom, probably about half the time, that’s not really why they came in, there’s something deeper underlying it. And what it comes down to is does the person want to do they want to address that deeper issue. Because you know, things don’t happen in a vacuum. And it’s usually not just one thing, there’s usually a host of other things that are conspiring to cause this one symptom. So from an energetic perspective, from from a, from a straight needle acupuncture perspective, you can put needles into certain points to sort of activates that the lung and the large intestine for grief and for letting go. So from a straight mechanical acupuncture perspective, it actually it works really well you have, you know, right off the bone here, there’s a lung seven. And then there’s another point inside your arm, lung 10, these these things will help clear large intestine 11 will help you let go of things. So that does work. But what I’ve found is if I if I plug into the patient’s and basically the feel of the room changes, right and now we start talking about

Announcer 31:25
people dropping into a deeper, a deeper state, a deeper state of consciousness. We’ll get back to grief to growth in just a few seconds. Did you know that Brian is an author and a life coach, if you’re grieving or know someone who is grieving his book, grief to growth is a best selling easy to read book that might help you or someone you know, people work with Brian as a life coach to break through barriers and live their best lives. You can find out more about Brian and what he offers at WWW dot grief to growth.com www dot g ri e f, the number two, gr o w th comm or text growth gr o w t h 231996. If you’d like to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com slash grief to growth www.patreon.com slash g ri e f the number two gr o w th to make a financial contribution. And now back to grief to growth.

R Scott Malone 32:31
And in this deeper state of consciousness, often you will have people who have helpers, you know the Native American and talk about spirit helpers and gods. So in that state of consciousness that person’s helpers will sometimes show up. And sometimes their evidence to that person. I remember the first time I ran into this, I was actually in acupuncture school. And we had this big building. And they had the rooms were divided by sheets. So we had all these sheet bolts. And I had this woman can’t come in. And she I forget what she was being treated for. I think it was her knee or something. And so I put the needles in and the standard way is you put the needles in, you take a walk, you come back and check on the patient. And a lot of times acupuncturist will see, you know, two and three patients in the same out. So I took a walk, I come back and she’s got tears just streaming down her face. And I’m thinking, oh my god, I put something because I’m a student I put something in wrong. She’s been in pain. And she’s just been here crying for the last 1520 minutes. So I asked her I was like, what’s going on? Is everything okay? And she said, Well, she said, You know, my mom died. And she said, and we were angry at each other when she died. And so I was laying here and I had my mom, my eyes closed and my mom was floating over the top of me. And, and so I had this conversation with my mom and she said, you know, Honey, I’m not I’m not mad at you. You know, I love you How can I do anything but love you? And and she’s just they’re just streaming down her face? And she goes, Is that normal? Like, yeah, absolutely. It happens all the time. You know, but, but that was the first time I really got like, there’s something there’s something else to this beyond the bio physiological effect. I mean, they found that, you know, the meridian system actually lives in the fascia. So it’s an actual structure in the fascia that moves faster than the nervous system.

Brian Smith 34:45
There’s a lot of talk lately about the fascia. Yeah,

R Scott Malone 34:47
yeah. Well, so, so that was kind of, you know, I’ve always been, you know, interested in you know, meditation and meditative states and states of consciousness and awakening. And all of that, and I just started, you know, it started off, I was working on somebody, and I was I was, you know, trying to light up these channels and myself, and it was really difficult. And I thought, well, maybe I’ll just work on other people and get a better handle on it. And so I started lighting up the channels and other people. And then I started looking at, there’s a certain, there’s a certain level of balance that the body will will go to as a constitutional base. So their energetic body will and their physiological body will tend to balance first. But after a basic sense of pre flow and balance in the body occurs, that’s when things really start to get interesting. And that’s when people start to, they start to have experiences that are beyond, I’m here for my health. And sometimes I wait, you know, because I spend an hour, sometimes an hour and a half with a patient, you know, in a in a meditative state, and while they’re dropping into a meditative state, and then interesting, things will start to happen. And, you know, I have one patient and her father passed away. And I really felt his presence in the room. And she was really suffering because it was relatively recent. And so I just really, I just really sort of called him in as as much more as he was already there, whatever I could do to help his presence help her. And again, she had this, she had this sort of, and I think it was mostly unconscious, but some sort of communication with her father. And then it shifted. And it’s interesting, because sometimes I sometimes I have a sense of who’s in the room, and sometimes I don’t, but the most surprising one was, um, you know, I think we mentioned before I was telling you about, you know, the, the Baptist Church and how that kind of, I had an issue with that as a child, because they scared me. Um, so I’ve never really been terribly Christian oriented until I found Thomas Merton, and St. JOHN of the cross, and Teresa viola, and then that sort of shifted things

Brian Smith 37:16
up for a second talk about that, because we talked about that before we got on the air. So let people know about that. Because I think that’s a fascinating part of your background.

R Scott Malone 37:23
Okay, um, I’ll just finish this little bit, because it was so funny to me. So I’ve always been, you know, I’m like, a, I’d like the most Asian white guy you’ll ever meet, you know. So, um, so I’m working with this patient. And I’ve always been drawn to, you know, Tibetan Buddhism and the Hindu, you know, pantheon of faces of God and all of this. And I’m sitting here with this woman. And I have this sense that Jesus is there. And I was so shocked. In my mind, I went, Jesus Christ, what the hell are you doing here? And then I was like, oh, oh, I was like, I’m so sorry. I was, I was really just kind of shot. And, and he did the most Jesus thing. And he was like, Oh, no, no, it’s fine. I’m here for her. Not for you. I was like, Okay. Apologies. Carry on. So it’s just, it’s just interesting, because different, different folks show up for different people. It doesn’t have anything to do with me. So everybody has sort of helped along the way. Yeah. So um, oh, so we were talking about when my parents, my dad was a chiropractor. He ended up in this little town called senatobia, Mississippi, as a chiropractor, and nobody knew what that was. And so actually, one guy showed up in his office and said, Hey, I’d like you to come out. And it was a farming community. I’d like you to check over my cats. And he was like, What do you mean? He’s like, why here your cow cracker? So he was like, no, it’s so. So we had to do a lot of education. And one of the ways you integrate yourself into a town as you go to the church, and so he went to the Baptist Church. And once once we were old enough, then my older sister and I, he would take us to, to the church with him and mom. And so I remember this one day, they took me to where all the kids were. And they they had a picture of a boat. And there were two giraffes whose heads were sticking out. But then they had this long line of animals headed to the boat. And I remember as a kid thinking, there’s no way they’re all gonna fit. There’s just no way it’s not gonna happen. So I remember thinking, I wish I wish I could, you know, hear what the big people are talking about, you know, what are the adults talking about? So, they finished that story and they took us back in. And I remember this guy. His face was ready with Mississippians This summer, no air conditioning small one room, you know, Baptist Church. And this guy is red in the face and he’s yelling, and I’m sitting down. And he’s he starts talking about how we’re all sinners, and we’re all going to hell. And he started talking about a pool of fire where you, you burn but you never die. And as a kid, I remember thinking that the punishment didn’t justify the crime. Yeah. Because I was thinking, you know, I’ve stolen some cookies. I you know, and I knew it was wrong, but I, you know, they’re cookies, so I did it. But I didn’t think that it deserved burning eternally for it. So I asked my parents not to Don’t take me back because it scared me. And so my dad had always had some questions about religion. And so he, he went to the preacher for a private, you know, a private talk, and you start asking him questions, and he said, you know, well, you know, what happens? You know, if a child dies before, before it’s baptized, well, that baby goes to hell. It’s like, Alright, well, what about all the people in you know, in far countries that, that don’t either don’t know about Jesus or don’t, don’t worship? And he’s like, well, all those people are going to hell. And I think the, the straw that broke the camel’s back, as he said, you know, well, what, what about all the people who lived and died before Jesus? Well, all those people are burning forever in hell. And my dad asked him one other question, the guy just kicked him out. He said, Get out, you know, maybe if your faith was better, or something like that. And so my dad started looking, and, um, because he had questions that were not being not being answered. And so he came across a guy named Roy Eugene Davis and Roy Eugene Davis was Parma Honza, Yogananda was a primary chief disciple in the United States. And he was initiated into Kriya Yoga, by Roy Eugene Davis. And in Yogananda, his famous book Autobiography of a Yogi

was, it was huge, and that that book changed my life. And it was a very early reader. And I remember my dad leaving, and he was saying, you know, my books are in here, you know, you have your books in your room, but my books are in here. So don’t, you know, just don’t mess with my books. And, and so of course, I had to. And so I remember reading Autobiography of a Yogi. And I remember thinking, well, it’s just true. Like, I like as a kid, I remember thinking, this is this is somebody who is touched by God. This is somebody who God is working through. And, and so all the stories of the saints and the miracles in that book just absolutely deeply touched me. And, oddly enough, they didn’t scare the crap out of me in the process. So yeah, so I think that was kind of the that was kind of the take off point for me. And, you know, I was never, like my heroes, you know, my heroes, like the people that I looked up to, they ended up all being Hindu saints. You know, so I just, that was kind of my initial walk into the spiritual world was, you know, that sort of that just that Eastern path through India, and I remember, I was really frustrated. And I asked my dad, I said, you know, well, you know, these people are Christian. I was like, Well, what are what are we, huh? And my dad said, Well, you know, your mom and I believe this way. But you will figure it out. And you’ll note when you find it. At the time, I was just super, I thought, well, that’s a crappy answer. Like that’s, that’s the non answer. But it was actually, it was a huge, huge gift. Because I did I was I was never satisfied. So I just, I just kept looking that way. There’s a there’s a couple. I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Brian Smith 44:09
No, go ahead. Go on.

R Scott Malone 44:10
There was a couple of interesting stories that I wanted to tell about my dad in practice. And he said that there was this woman came into the clinic. And he said she was she was white as it goes. And he said, you know, Miss Jones, he said, I haven’t I haven’t seen you. And in months, he said, How are you doing? She said, Well, I’m fine. And he said, Well, you know, well, what brings you in? And she said, Well, you told me to come in. And he said, What do you mean? She said I was asleep in my bed. And I opened my eyes and I could see through you and you were standing at the foot of my bed. And you said that I needed to come in. And so here I am. So he had some interesting experience. periences like that he had another patient that we use this old mimeograph to make flyers and pass them out around the town. And he said that this patient came in and he said, So what brings you in? He’s like your damn flyers. And he’s like, well, was it someplace that wasn’t supposed to be? And he said, No, but I was walking down the street, the same flyer blew up into my face three times. So I looked at it, I was like, I guess I need to come see this guy. And then I think the one of the greatest stories I ever heard was, he had this this old farmer on his table. And he just lowered the table down. And he said, he heard he heard his death rattle. And his bowels evacuated. And he said, Nobody dies in my clinic. Hmm. And he said, I went over and I did a toggle recoil to the, to the Atlas. And he said, and when I did it right before it happened, he said, it felt like, like, all the hairs on my arm stood up, and there was a charge in the room. And when I dropped the adjustment on to his neck, all that energy was transferred any coughed. And, and and woke up. No. Wow. I just thought that was I just thought that was super, super interesting. That there is something there is a power beyond those that can work through us. Yeah.

Brian Smith 46:34
Yeah. You know, Scott, we remember you. We talked earlier, you were talking about your experience with the Baptist Church, and I was raised in the Pentecostal church. And

Unknown Speaker 46:42
so I had one second.

Brian Smith 46:45
So yeah, it’s got a little technical difficulty there. But we’re back. Um, yeah, you were talking about the Baptist Church and how it affected you. And I was I was raised in the Pentecostal church. And it was a similar experience. It’s, I think it’s interesting. Some people hear these stories about, you know, the burning in hell, and it doesn’t bother them. And they just they can accept it like that preacher. Right? It’s like, Oh, yeah, they’re in hell. Oh, they’re in hell there now. Yeah, I think most people don’t have any any concept of what it means to burn internally. Anybody just be so cavalier about the fact that anybody is burning internally and let alone the vast majority of humanity. Yeah. So for myself, I was kind of the same way as you and I actually said, my facebook profile. I’m like, I was, you know, born a Christian, because technically, I pretty much was no one’s born a Christian, but I was raised in the church. But then when I discovered Eastern religions, I was really drawn to the, I think, a lot of deep truth in that. But now, you know, it’s funny, I had a while I’m going to tell you the story no one has ever heard before. But I had a reading with a medium just last week. And my grandmother came through my grandmother was very religious and stuff. And she said, You’re doing great things. Everything is great. But don’t forget, like where you came from. Don’t forget the your foundation. And it’s funny to tell that story about Jesus because Jesus keeps coming up over and over again. And I interviewed a guy yesterday. Jewish guy, Orthodox Jew, had a near death experience at the ages three, and he said Jesus was there. And you hear when people say, oh, near death experiences, just wishful thinking. It’s just cultural conditioning. Well, this was right next to the last person he expected to see. Right, Jesus. So I think there’s something today when you so when you talked about earlier, you’re you’re in this room, and Jesus shows up. I mean, I think it’s pretty wild, because

R Scott Malone 48:35
I was so stunned. That’s why I was thinking, there’s something to this because I’m absolutely I’m absolutely stunned. Yeah, last thing I expected, I had another woman and she said that while she was on the table, Mary came to her and spoke to her. And I have to say, I had a, I had a pretty hard negative view of Christianity. Until when I was in acupuncture school. Um, there was a woman there and she was having her baby Christian. Christian baptized, I’m not sure. Um, so we went to this church and, and I know it wasn’t a Catholic Church, because the catholic church they in the Eastern Orthodox, they have the, the regalia is perfect, right? They look, it’s just awe inspiring, just to be there. And so it was some other form of a church and I remember the the guy came in and he had a stole on and in this really, like, terrible 70s green it said, holy, holy, holy on it. And I just remember thinking, this guy is like the used car salesman of of preachers. And so he gave, he gave a short talk, and then he brought the baby up. And so I was still thinking, you know, why am I wasting my Saturday here, and he brought the baby up. And there was A golden Chalice that had some oil in it. And this baby is not having it, this baby is done and been done. And it’s just writhing and he’s trying to wrestle this baby. And, and so I see him drop his two fingers into the oil. And then he looks up, and he holds his fingers up. I saw this clear beam of light come from above and attached to his fingers. And then when he touched it onto the baby’s forehead, the baby immediately settled. And the beam was now attached to the baby’s forehead. Hmm. I was thinking, Okay, maybe maybe it is everywhere. It just depends on the person. You know, it just depends on the preacher or the person and because I had already recognized that well, there are there awake people, their holy people in all traditions, but I’ve been really holding out because I had such a bad experience. And this one guy, you know, he changed all that. I was like, Okay, he’s, he’s to be able to do that. He’s tuned into the to the infinite. He’s tuned into the divine.

Brian Smith 51:13
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, in your right, we can sometimes because I think especially when we grew up in a tradition, we can see the flaws in it. And then we can become overly critical of Yeah, and I, you know, I’m coming back to you know, I quote the Bible to people all the time, because I was raised in that because there’s Yeah, there’s so much good stuff in the Bible, even there’s a lot of bad stuff, there’s, you know, there was it was corrupted, for sure is polluted. But there’s so much there’s so much good stuff in there. And, you know, we don’t we should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. And, and when we hear about these experiences with Jesus, you know, this guy, he had a beautiful quote in his book about how Jesus is basically the highest representation of what man can be. And he’s always with us of all time, and blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, this is what Christians should be saying about Jesus never taught this church, this from a guy who’s an Orthodox Jew.

R Scott Malone 52:08
Well, when you’re moved, you’re moved. And and it doesn’t and it at a certain point, if you’re so stubborn, that when something overwhelming presents itself to you, and you still turn your face away, then you’re just being an ass. You’re just being stubborn. Yeah. You know.

Brian Smith 52:25
So we, you know, we were talking earlier, before we got started, you you’d mentioned and I want you to tell this part about the guy that was using DMT, which is it’s a natural occurrence occurring substance that to develop people. Now, before we before you answer, it’s a naturally occurring substance. But if we take it kind of opens us up to other realms. So go ahead and tell us about that.

R Scott Malone 52:45
I want to find the guy’s name, it was something like

Unknown Speaker 52:51
he wrote a book,

R Scott Malone 52:55
field of diamonds, maybe he’s a, he’s a PhD. I forget his name. But his one of his book is something of diamonds like feel the diamonds or something like that. But essentially, he has a, he has a lot of things on YouTube and Vimeo, I wish I had his name for it. But he essentially did a number of tests a number of experiments with DMT, again, and again and again. And it was, I think it was DMT. And not LSD, but I could be mistaken. But he essentially did this over a number of years. And he just kept going farther and farther and deeper and deeper into the experience. And he had, um, beings that would show up and talk to him and guide him and show him what was coming and show him like the grand scheme of humanity over, you know, a million years or something like that. And he said that the last, he realized he just couldn’t do it anymore. Because the pain of leaving these rarefied realms, these heavenly realms, and coming back was just too great. And he just, he knew that he just, he just couldn’t do it anymore. If he, you know, expected to live the rest of his life.

Brian Smith 54:13
Yeah, is a human being. Yeah. That’s fascinating. You told me that because we were talking earlier, you said, you know, I’ve interviewed somebody near death experiences. And we talked to Yeah, some of the side effects of near death experience. And one of them is a lot of times people have trouble coming back and living on this planet. So you know, I wonder, you know, because people say Sometimes I wish I could have a near death experience. I wish I got a near death experience. And it’s difficult sometimes to integrate that spirit experience to come back and be just be human. Yeah. And then the thing I also wanted to connection with the draw because DMT is a plant medicine or LSD with the guy who may have been using something called Iosco. These plant medicines seem to open us up to other realms, but there are other ways to reach these things true to yester Meditation and through the experiences that you’ve had in this energetic thing. And my personal belief is the brain is a filter. And the brain has been evolved to just show us what’s important to show us a saber toothed Tiger that’s running at us. Yeah, and we don’t see everything that’s going on around us. But if we can somehow lower that filter a little bit through some of these experiences from these medicines, or energetic states, we can start to open up to these different realms

R Scott Malone 55:27
in the in the Dallas perspective, that the filter is actually the upper chakra, the pineal gland. And it’s interesting, and I’m just going to mention this, a lot of people, when they talk about the Third Eye Center, they kind of put it forward in their head here. But it’s actually if you if you go a little bit back, behind your ear lobe, diagonally, it’s actually on top of the spine, so straight up from your spine, up into the brain, when it moves forward towards the front, it hits the pituitary, and a lot of people try to access the third eye in the mid part of their brain, not necessarily the midbrain, but in the middle part of their brain. And that’s actually the pituitary. So they’re missing, it’s usually farther back, but it opens up to here. And then onto the sides. I’ve had patients say that when it opened, it felt like there was actually a whole band of eyes around. But the upper Don tn is, is seen as a filter. And it’s a filter of all the information from all the other rounds. So from the beings around us, there are some people I know a woman named storm, and she sees all the beings around somebody, and she’s done it ever since she was a kid. And, you know, she would be talking to, you know, her friends. And then she talked to a kid that she called bet neck Jimmy and people looked at her like she was crazy. And they were like, what? And she’s like, Who are you talking to? And they’re like, well, I’m talking to bet neck Jimmy, and, you know, come to find out he was a kid who had broken his neck in the area, you know, 40 years before so. So that’s a filter. And, and I think there’s a, there’s a real sort of caution with working with the filter and till the lower bodies are fully integrated till especially the heart center, and that lower energetic center, or fully integrated, hmm. Because we have a tendency to want to check out and away so people couldn’t could see. And to me, I think it’s probably the danger of really advanced VR or something where people want to live in these fantasy worlds, and not live here and now. But if you’re not really rooted and grounded, there can be a tendency to want to live in these, these sort of transcendent realms. And so that filter keeps you from seeing probably all the spirits that are around and the animal spirits and who knows what else from whatever, whatever realm is around you. And drugs can i think if i think if the ethnic ends are used in the proper context, I think if they’re used in a context, that’s, that’s culturally proven, for spiritual reason, I think that you have and typically, those things are run by a shaman and the medicine man in any tradition, whenever something is going on. He’s the guy that protects everybody and everybody’s experience. So so he’s the guy that sort of puts the shield up around everyone to make sure everyone’s okay. So if you, you know, find yourself, you know, with a bunch of pod and you decide to go out into the desert, and, you know, it might be okay, but it might blow those, those filters open. Right. And I think that’s where you have some people who were, you know, who were in institutions, because they blew those filters open and they and they couldn’t get back. Like, if you look at Alex gray, the guy that does all that, that really interesting art where the chakras and the body Have you seen him? Um, he you’d probably recognize the picture but he shows all the energetic bodies and and he said that he did so many hallucinogens, that he almost didn’t make it back in it, and it took him years to integrate from coming back. So I just think those are useful

Brian Smith 59:22
in the proper context. And there’s, there’s a parallel there to the near death experience, because they they get blown open, and they sometimes are really trouble integrating. And, you know, I every time I interview almost every time we interview a near death experience, when they mess up the electronics, we have a connection. They can’t we’re not they might wear the watch anymore, but they have to constantly buy cell phones and the computers are always messed up. Yeah. And a lot of sometimes they’re like, you know, like we were saying earlier, it’s like, I don’t know if I want to go through all the crap we have to go through here. Because I just want to I want to escape. So I think that my filter is there for a reason. And sometimes it’s maybe good peak, you know, get a little peek. So we can, you know, yeah, remember who we are and when we start to get to down and too much into this, but and I want to ask this to you because this is why I say to people all the time, I think as human beings, we have to, we have to be grounded. And we have to be able to connect with this however, and we’ve got to be balanced between the between those, we’ve got to figure out what I’m too far down in this. I get too caught up in the day to day, I need to be able to get to that higher perspective. Yeah, but I can’t live there.

R Scott Malone 1:00:29
You know, there’s a great story I love um, Rabbi David Cooper, he wrote a great book called God is a God as a verb. But he wrote another book about retreat called silence, simplicity and solitude. And he said that he was at Big Sur, somewhere out in California. And he he’s a, he’s all about retreat, 40 day retreats, because that’s, you know, it’s in the Torah. And so, so he goes out, and he has this 40 day retreat, and he’s praying every day, meditating every day. He packs up all this stuff, and he’s coming back down from the retreat, putt. And there’s all this sounds going on. There’s all this drumming going on. And so the rainbow people were having a thing down there. So he goes, and he just joins, he hasn’t seen another human being for 40 days. So he says he sits down next to the sky on this log around a fire and they start talking. And he said, they were talking about this amazingly deep, spiritual level. And he said, at a certain point, he realized that the only way this guy was able to speak to him this way was because he was on mescaline. And he said, it made him very sad, because he realized that his experience was he was integrated into his body, his experience was his own, and he would not lose that. But this guy in, you know, six or eight hours, was going to lose all touch with that. Yeah, so I think I think from a, this is something that that will speak directly to your question. So when I was first working on people, I was really interested in Kundalini in the chakras. And so all the energy going up going up. And I’ve actually, I’ve actually figured out a way energetically to basically clear the pathway. So that if a person is ready, that will happen. unimpaired, right, so people run into trouble, when that Kundalini lets go if they have something stuck here or here in their head, and the energy bangs up against it, and and then there’s a burning, oftentimes, they’re short circuiting that happens. So if you clear that pathway out, then when the Kundalini ignites of its own volition, then it’s, then it’s a straight, a straight shot out. So when I was working with this, I found the seven chakras in the body. And then I also use a couple of in the Sufi tradition, there are three heart chakras. So there’s the one in the center, the one on the right is the spiritual longing. The one on the left is physical longing and love. And there are basically aspects of the same the same center. So So when I’m working with this, I was wondering will, what about up above, so I had a person whose crown opened up, and then they felt themselves rise up above their head to another place. And so there was another chakra or donchian above the body. And so what I found in doing this was I went up for shoppers above the body. And people tend to have a oftentimes a similar experience. At the fourth center above the body, there’s a people experience, the color, gold, and some sort of beautiful their ideal natural setting. And I had one guy who was a Christian who said that that was where Jesus spoke to him.

And so I was thinking about these these chakras up above the body. And then it occurred to me I was like, well, this seems very imbalanced, like why would there be chakras above the body and not below the body? And so I started, I started to I had one friend of mine who’s just recently passed Brian earnest, who helped me a real psychonaut, you really had a facility for the states of consciousness. And we basically went up for and then we went through the chakras to the root, and then we went down below. And so what I’ve ultimately found is seven centers above the body. And I wonder about this, like, Is there a seven the number is there? 12. Is there 100? Is there an infinite number? I think what’s happening is I’m recognizing in a way that I can understand. So it doesn’t mean that it’s true across the board that there are seven and people get hung up. There might be an infinite number. But at seven, it seemed to interface with infinity, whatever that means. And so when somebody goes into that seven center up above Oftentimes they have an experience. And then there’s a cascade of energy that pours down through the body. And once that cascade starts, it never stops. And then when it hits the root, then it moves down, and it will move down seven. And then somebody will have an experience down below. And then there’s another cascade of energy that pours up through the descending cascade. So you have the infinite below, pouring up through the body, and the infinite above, pouring down through the body. And I realized that they’re, they’re the same thing. And it basically becomes a pillar that moves in both directions from from every place. And I call that the infinite pillar. Hmm, interesting. Yeah. And after a certain point, what happens is those energies converge into the heart. And then what happens is, they connect out into the world. And so if you just have this, I’m always I’m always transcendence, then you have nothing to do with the world. If you’re very much in the body, and you’re very imminent, and you’re really just interested in the physical world and all that, then nothing comes out into the world, what we’re here to do is an offer to the world. So when we have that rooted balance into the earth, we are here, you know, get over it. And believe it we are here. But we’re also, we’re also in tune with this, this infinite above us as well, then we can actually ground more of that, to move out into the world in the Chinese, they say tn Ren de Heaven, man and earth. And what it means in a pithy way is man walks between heaven and earth. Yeah. But in a deeper way, what it means is, are a part of our function is to be conduits for the heavenly cheat to come down into the earth. When y’all reaches its apex, it turns into yen, and for the earthly CHEA to rise into the habits. When yen reaches its Nadir, it rises to its opposite. And what I found is, once it once that’s really set, and people have this really connection between heaven and earth, that often and just about every time it will converge in the heart, and they will have a sense of all of creation. Hmm. And it’s and it’s from here, it’s a sense of love. And then people tend to start to get about doing whatever their work is.

Brian Smith 1:07:30
Yeah. That’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. I love the way that you said that. I think that’s, that’s so that’s, that’s what I’m trying to say, in a very, not quite as articulate away. But yeah, it’s that it’s that balance that we need to have an energy flow between the heavens and the earth. And we have to be both at the same time. That’s sometimes why it’s so difficult being a human is yes, it’s finding that balance and not getting so caught up in the day to day stuff, but also not trying to escape it, you know, and that, well, everything’s good. It doesn’t matter what I do. And I know people I know, quote, spiritual people that say, this domain drives me crazy. It’s like, No, you shouldn’t be involved in the day to day stuff. Don’t worry about it. It’s all good. You know? Yeah, whatever happens is supposed to happen. No, we’re not here for that.

R Scott Malone 1:08:15
Yeah. If you’re not engaged in the world, well, then then really, what do you what you have is a selfish spirituality. And I think Chung yong trumper wrote a great book called cutting through spiritual materialism. Yes, that like spirituality. That’s just for me, just to save me just to end my suffering. Ultimately, it’s been hijacked by your ego. Yeah, you find and to me, I think that the measure of a man is the depth of his heart.

Brian Smith 1:08:42
Yeah. And frankly, I think that’s one of the problems with the way some people when they can say everybody has interpreted Christianity, it’s all become an individual salvation. What can I What can I get me? And that’s what we need to have that balance between that and the eastern which is it’s about the collective. Yeah, what what can I do for the world? I’m part of the cheetah. Yeah, I’m part of the team. I’m here. I’m not here for me, I’m here for you. I’m here for everybody else. And we got to beat we have to do both. We got to take care of ourselves and take care of the world same time.

R Scott Malone 1:09:15
Oh, I said, a friend of mine said because it because I’ve always been like, I’m gonna do it by myself, you know, and, and we’re all standing on the shoulders of giants, you know, wave after wave of humanity is, you know, brought us to where we are and all the spiritual teachers who have you know, Britain things, but and so I was very much in that I’m gonna do it alone. And my my buddy goes, he goes, you know, if we were meant to do it alone, there wouldn’t be billions of us. It just be you. Like, fine, but I do I just find there’s so much help. There’s so much there’s so many people that are just selflessly giving. You know, that nobody would get anywhere with without all of us and I love Tick, not Han has this one. And I haven’t read a bunch of his but this one, this one little speech that he did always, always touch me. He’s like, I love to do the dishes. And so he’s like, a lot of people hate to do the dishes, but I love to do the dishes. And essentially, while he’s doing the dishes for food, he’s thinking about the people that made the dishes. And he’s thinking about the people that raised the food and the people that transported the food, and the people that stored the food and the people that put it on the shelves. And he’s thinking about the whole chain of humanity that brought him to this place doing the dishes. Yeah. You know, and I think that’s where in the West, we that, that Western individualism is, it’s the it’s that darkness, the shadow side of it is it’s all me and not us.

Brian Smith 1:10:50
Yeah, well, you know, and I love that the practice of doing the dishes or when you when you eat, you know, the think about where the food came from, and the truck driver that drove it. Now, it’s a bag that will make you humble real fast, and look around to pick up any object on your desk. And think about where it actually came from and what it took to bring that together, the person that created that, that put that out into the world. So it was a great practices. And I think, you know, I’m glad to see that people in the West are opening up to some of these ways of the East, I think we can learn quite a bit from it. And I think we’re as a society, we’re kind of sick because of our individualism.

R Scott Malone 1:11:27
Yeah, I think it’s true. I think it’s true. I mean, you look at, you know, people in Norway and something goes on, they’re like, well, we’re all Norwegian,

Unknown Speaker 1:11:35
you know, the

R Scott Malone 1:11:36
French, well, we’re all French. So, you know, and here, it’s like, oh, well, I’m an Irish American, and that’s an Asian American, and, you know, the Asian Americans need trouble, well, then that’s their problem. And it’s just not true. We’re all we’re all here. And it’s just the the overall, we’re all humans. And I just think that any tradition, any tradition that advocates, you know, that advocates violence, and a tradition that advocates you turning away from somebody else, you know, it’s it’s not really a real tradition to me, you know, I don’t know, that sort of thing. Just the the constant in America, the constant barrage of violence, you know, I just don’t I just don’t understand it. Like, if you’re gonna be violent, be violent, but don’t equate it to a religion. Because, you know, it’s, there’s no, you know, all religions say the same thing. They all have that golden thread. It’s all the same thing. Yeah, you know, it and that same thing is not violence. It’s the it’s love. Yeah,

Brian Smith 1:12:42
you know, it’s we’re basically all one. What, Scott, I want to thank you for watching, it’s been really, really enjoyable. Anything you want to say, as we’re wrapping up?

R Scott Malone 1:12:55
No, I just, um, you know, I think I think, I think, a little bit of silence, I think, a little bit of stillness. And I think, you know, I actually just recently discovered the centering prayer from from the Catholics, and I absolutely love it. It’s essentially a non dual awareness, prayer to really help, you know, deepen that aspect of your heart. I think that anything that we want to do, you know, is is enhanced by, by deepening that by deepening this, this moral and physical compass in our body, if you’re too much in the body, come in, come into the heart, if we’re too much in the head, come down into the heart, but we need all of it.

Brian Smith 1:13:44
Right, right. Yeah, exactly. I want to tell people again, where they can reach you. So for acupuncture, it’s infinite pillar, calm, I N Si, Ni, PT E. pillar P. I ll AR and you described the pillar earlier beautifully. The Reggie did describe that. After energetic teamwork and consulting, it’s esoteric consultant calm, so you can reach out there.

R Scott Malone 1:14:07
And I do I do distance sessions. So the energetic stuff distance sessions as well. So people want that kind of work. There’s no distance when it comes to energy

Brian Smith 1:14:15
Hill. That’s cool.

R Scott Malone 1:14:16
Oh, it’s all it’s all here. I want to thank Jake again for introducing me. To you.

Brian Smith 1:14:22
Yeah. Well, I’ve been trying to get Jake on the show. So this is another shout out to Jake to come on. But, Jake cemal Yeah, he is a fantastic guy. And I think Jake for introducing us also. Yeah. All right, Scott, enjoy the rest of your day. All right. Thank you. I was gonna say that’s it for another episode of grief to growth. I sure hope you got something out of it. Please stay in contact with me by reaching out at www dot grief to growth calm. That’s grief the number two growth.com or you can text the word growth to 31996 at simply text growth. gr o wt h 231996. Since you’re watching this on YouTube, please make sure you subscribe. So hit the subscribe button and then hit the little bell here and it’ll notify you when I have new content. Always please share the information if you enjoy it that helps me to get more views and to get the message out to more people. Thanks a lot and have a wonderful day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Curtis Childs is the director and host of Off The Left Eye, a Swedenborg Foundation. Emmanuel Swedenborg was an 18th century Renaissance man, who late in life began having spiritual experiences and wrote about them in a series of books that are as relevant today as they were then. Swedenborg was ahead of his time when it comes to science and medicine and his in-depth knowledge of those fields helped him understand when angels and spirits revealed to him what the “Spirit World” is like.

You might wonder how an 18th-century scientist, politician, philosopher, and theologian you’ve never heard of can help you today. I wondered the same thing until I discovered the program. I have been fascinated by the insights I’ve picked up there and how so many relate to what people who have had Near Death Experiences tell us.

Curtis helps others understand how Swedenborg can help us understand things in the Bible and about the Spirit World that are often beyond our grasp. In his program, and in this interview, he makes these difficult concepts easier. I’ve been a fan for over five years. I was a little starstruck sitting down with Curtis and getting to pick his brain on Swedenborg.

for more about Curtis:

ℹ️ https://www.youtube.com/user/offTheLeftEye is the Off The Left Eye YouTube channel

 

Transcript

 

Announcer 0:00
Close your eyes and imagine what if the things in life to cause us the greatest pain, the things that bring us grief, or challenges, challenges designed to help us grow to ultimately become what we were always meant to be. We feel like we’ve been buried. But what if, like a seed had been planted, and having been planted, who grow to become a mighty tree. Now, open your eyes, open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true, infinite, eternal nature. This is grief to growth. And I am your host, Brian Smith.

Brian Smith 0:45
Hey everybody, this is Brian Smith back with another episode of grief to growth. And today I’ve got with me, they’re all special guests, but some are very special guests. And I would say Curtis childs is a very special guest, I have to admit I’m a little bit nervous is that every day you get to interview one of your one of your internet idols. But Curtis is the only read his bio. Curse it current. There’s a director of the host of the off the left eye program I told you I was nervous. The off the left eye program which is a YouTube program. Also it’s a podcast. While Curtis was obtaining his degree in communications from Oakland University experience an internal battle with depression that led him to question God and his lifelong interest in swedenborg. In theology, it’s a big word swedenborg in after a period of intense suffering, he recovered from his depression with the help of modern medicine, therapy and a return to spiritual out to the spiritual uplifting messages he found in swedenborg writings. So Curtis is now doing, he’s applying his education and his desire to help others finding peace. Through swedenborg insight by producing and hosting the weekly webcast. As I said, it’s called off the left eye. And Curtis is happiest when you can use swedenborg concepts to help someone solve something that they used to think was unsolvable. So with that, I want to introduce Curtis childs.

Curtis Childs 2:00
Hey, Brian, good to see you again. Thanks so much for having me on the program.

Brian Smith 2:04
Yeah, I guess that I’m really excited, a little bit nervous about having you here. As I was telling you, before we got started, I know your channels been around for a long time in internet years, you said it started in 2010

Curtis Childs 2:15
2010 is when we uploaded the very first

video to it. Yeah,

Brian Smith 2:18
I discovered it in 2015. And even that internet years, it’s like forever, the internet years are kind of like dog ears. You know. So it’s like seven years for every year. So the channels been around for a long time. I don’t even remember how I discovered I was just it’s one of those synchronous synchronistic things. But the channel is all about a guy named Emanuel swedenborg. So what I want to do is I want to give some people first of all, some idea who Curtis childs is and then we’ll talk about who may know swedenborg is right,

Curtis Childs 2:46
cool. Yeah, so that that bio right was written by somebody, you know, after I talked to them for a little while, and it places some of my origin story and my struggles with depression. Which there that’s one point of it, but there’s a lot I’m thinking about here on the grief, degrowth podcast, you know, I when I was six, my sister was killed in a car accident, actually, my whole family was in the car accident. And so, you know, grief and and sort of the the searching for you to do the people that you love? Are they still there? What do you think about to the mind of a six year old? It’s just that like, this doesn’t make sense. So this was part of, you know, what’s spurring me to look for what, how do you find a picture of life that that connects, or allows you to make sense of something like that. So I had had access to swedenborg spiritual tools my whole life. I mean, my parents went to a swedenborgian church, which is there’s not that many of them, but I was around one of them. And so I’ve always known that that was something I think the reason why we talked about the depression in that bio, was that was when and that was around 18 1920. Just about when I was starting college, when I really started to have trouble grappling with my mind, and what it’s like to deal with just an over overrun of anxious thoughts and depressing feelings. And it was really strange when it first came on, like what I couldn’t, I couldn’t put my finger on I would never thought to call it depression but it’s just as every everything negative got the dial got turned up and turned up. And so I started looking for what do I do to combat this? I mean, what what’s out there is a resource and there’s a lot of great resources, but the one that became the most potent for me was was this swedenborg message and originally Yeah, it was too much it was too technical, too theological. I got too wrapped up in it, I just need to back off. And that was when I really started to read a lot of near death experiences. And that was just as easy access to love and and hope. But then I started to to be able to peer into swedenborg message and find not just oh, here’s some sentences on a page, but this is talking about how am I works. And this has given me the tools and the leverage to move things and get out from things that I couldn’t before. And that had an impact on me. And led me to say, Well, if I found something that’s helpful, I better share it with everybody. So we started off the left eye to try to make accessible stuff that people might just walk right by, and not know that there might be something in there not for everyone, maybe but but for whoever needs it, we want them it to be an option. So that’s a little bit of me, and what sort of what drives the work that I’m involved with?

Brian Smith 5:34
Hmm, yeah, I gotta say, you do make swedenborg accessible. And I downloaded the swedenborg books, and I haven’t read them yet. Because swedenborg is hard to read. And so I why I put it as you guys, you guys read swedenborg. So we don’t have to. And the great thing about off the left is is you make it accessible, you make it relatable, and you make it current because swedenborg lived in the 18th century. Yep. So tell us a little bit about Emanuel swedenborg, who he is because I, I’m almost 60 years old, I had never heard of him until I found out about your channel. And now I assume everybody knows who he is. But not everybody does. Know, I

Curtis Childs 6:15
think I think people should. And it’s interesting, you say like, swedenborg is hard to read. So we’ll do it. So you don’t have to. And I don’t think everyone’s got to read swedenborg it’s just like you can you can be really good at basketball without knowing physics. But you’re using physics all the time in basketball. So swedenborg is is describing something that I think is just true. It’s just how reality works. And so he’s he’s got this really comprehensive description to something that nobody else I think is really describing. But doesn’t mean that everybody’s got to end up getting into those books. What we’re trying to do is show you this is where it shows up everywhere in life. So Exactly. Yeah. So that that said, So swedenborg is a fascinating story. And super obscure not many people at all know about him. And I think the quick answer to why is he started to do all this weird spiritual stuff. But he was a scientist who was the scientist and inventor and back in the back in the 18th century. So 1700s, it was a lot easier to do science than it is now. I mean, now you get really smart people who study really hard and can only really master one little bit of a field because the fields have gotten so complex, and the things that people are doing is so technical, so hard to do. Back in swedenborg day, one person could really sort of master all of the disciplines. And that’s I guess, you get this idea of the Renaissance person. And swedenborg was one of those. Yeah, he was. He was in the Swedish government. He was part part of that mechanism. He was inventing things of all kinds. He was studying things, he had published books on every subject from like anatomy, to mining to everything in between, and was getting to be pretty well known in Sweden, and then across Europe, got to hang out with with royalty and important people, and was doing well, but then started, you know, through through this whole series of experiences. And that’s actually very well documented. But I’ll say, he started to change course, he had this event where the spiritual side of reality was made abundantly clear to him. And he suddenly realized that this is where all my training and learning how the physical world works, has been setting me up for because this is the final piece, he was always throughout his life, really interested in the human soul, and where where it is, we would now call consciousness reside, and how does that work, and trying to and he was definitely immersed in Christianity in particular, but religion of his father was a bishop in the Lutheran Church. And swedenborg was, was a practicing Christian and was very interested in reconciling faith and science. Because at the time when he was, this is when you really in earnest had people saying, look, science is debunking religion, that you’ve got these religious claims. But here we are, in this intellectual Renaissance, and we know all this stuff. Now we can explain how things work, we can develop technology, and religious explanations for the world are falling apart under scrutiny. So swedenborg and in the Bible, in particular, people were credit critiquing it as early any value in this document. And what swedenborg was finding is this way that the the tenants of religion, and what science was finding out about the world actually are pointing to a common reality. And so to him, this became his quest, and he’s changed course he started all the publishing he was doing and all the other kind of science stuff now he was just publishing about the Bible and its spiritual meaning Look what it’s actually about. He was publishing about heaven and hell and the life after death. He was and he was a lot of weird stuff. He was talking about how he could talk to angels talk to spirits. Go actually, you know, what we now call an out of body experience and go see what it’s like in the in the afterlife. So obviously, a lot of people thought he’s crazy. And he took his reputation took a hit in the scientific community, and because what, but it also took a hit in a religious community, because while there was a lot of stuff that he was validating of it from a religious viewpoint, a lot of it clashed with the Protestant doctrine of his time, there was there were teachings out there like faith, faith alone, the All you need is faith. And he was adamant that that was toxic, that that was leading people away from the loving life that Jesus Christ was trying to point people towards. He had a he had this audacious claim that, that

there could be multiple religious paths to heaven, that actually what your motivations, are you trying to do what’s right and good, that matters more than what doctrine you have. Not that there isn’t some doctrines that are more accurate than others. But that doesn’t, it doesn’t matter how accurate your ideas are, if you’re doing everything for selfish reasons. That’s what is in your spirit. So this was stuff that made the church manager churches mad at him, sciences laughing at him. And you know, he kind of evaporates. There was some people who, who saw value in what he was doing. But even even beyond that, what you just mentioned, stuff is hard to read. It’s technical, it’s, it’s wild. It’s out there. It’s a really, it takes a very specific kind of person to be willing to give it a chance. Yeah. And so it’s I and the people I work with did. And but once you get in there past, the confusing this past, the strangeness past that, wait, who is this? What you find in there, it’s like, it’s like you found this little weird door in the side of an old building. It’s just kind of an abandoned lot. And you opened it up, and well, this is interesting. And you start going down some musty stairs, and you get to the basement, and it’s just gold everywhere. They just if you imagine like in DuckTales, Scrooge McDuck, like this huge pile of this is like, wow, this is a treasure that should be in museums all over the world. This is, this is huge. But it’s in such a weird little place. That that’s kind of the feeling I get with swedenborg like, wait, don’t walk by this door, there’s more down there or get up there will be a better correspondence. But there’s more in there than you know. So we’re trying to just show people how to get past the initial barriers and into this. And the goal. What I mean by gold, is it stuff that is going to make your life better this stuff is going to answer questions, it’s going to clarify how to be a human being, it’s going to connect you to God. All that stuff, though, you just go look at the comments on our channel. It does these amazing things in people’s lives that I wouldn’t have ever even dreamed it could do. So we’re just gonna we’re just gonna make sure that there’s public access. Yeah, though. So there’s a couple answers to a couple other questions at once. Yeah, no,

Brian Smith 13:00
I appreciate that. And the thing is, you know, I was thinking about this before we started, you know, one thing about swedenborg, when you listen to the channel, he talks over and over again, about correspondences, kind of As above, so below, and science actually started the scientific method with the belief that there was a worldly creator that made an orderly creation. And we could we could understand the creator by understanding the creation, that was the driving force behind the scientific method. And I guess it was around swedenborg time, we started to fall away from that, and and started this idea of science and religion going to different directions. And you know, swedenborg, I think about this, as you said, he was kind of fighting with the scientists, and fighting with the church and think about, like, Jesus was fighting with the church and fighting with the government, you know, so that’s what happens when people are like, revolutionaries, when they get too far out ahead. And that’s the way I’ve used swedenborg is like, way, way, way ahead of his time. And then this other thing, but he was about he was almost 60, when he started having these experiences, is that right? Yeah,

Curtis Childs 14:02
mid mid 50s. Yeah, so it was definitely the second half of life. And, and so the life expectancy in Sweden in his time was like in your 30s. And so he was already ancient. By the time he started, he lived to be somewhere in his 80s. So it was definitely this. This he had had a whole life and career before this even started.

Brian Smith 14:23
Yeah. So today, I know you said you attended a swedenborgian. Church. I know there are a few. There’s actually I think even one in Cincinnati where I live, but they’re very few would you call swedenborg carnism. Is it a religion or philosophy? Or is it What?

Curtis Childs 14:40
Yeah, it’s it’s not a religion. Because those churches that they’re great, but swedenborg didn’t start a church, right? All what he did was he published these books and sent them to influencers. So he was trying to Send them to the leaders of the Lutheran Church. And he thought his hope was in there. Certainly some of his later works are really sort of Christian apologetics and reformation. He was trying to reform the church. And he was hoping he was hoping that his works would have an impact on that. But he also would write homeworks that were aimed at philosophers and try to get those out, he would try to get them to the universities. He was trying to get people to absorb a worldview, I think people have, it’s certainly a worldview that is full of all kinds of religious stuff. It talks about things like why didn’t churches do baptism? Why do they do communion or holy supper, it’s got sort of, it’s got a lot of commentary on what how a church should function and what it’s doing. So it’s, it lends itself to church stuff. But overall, it’s a philosophy because you’ll get, and you’ll have some parts of it that are, you know, I have his book, The Lord, for example, which is, I think it’s like 60%, Bible quotes. I just spent all his time in the Bible trying to show people look this, the Bible is pointing to what I’m saying, I’m not just making this is not something new or a departure. This is actually the Bible is saying, what my books are saying more than it’s saying what Luther stuff is saying right now. So but then you’ll have like, divine love and wisdom, his book appears with maybe quotes it once or twice in an entire, like, multi 100 page volume. So it’s really it was never meant to be a religious system. Primarily, it’s a philosophy that he was hoping would be adopted by existing religious systems. So I think there’s there’s been throughout the history of since swedenborg, died. You had early followers of his started reading groups and things. And then at some point after that, there was I think there was and I don’t I’m not an expert on this, this history of, of swedenborg influence. But there, I think there was a group who was saying, okay, should we start our own church based on this stuff, and some people wanted to some people didn’t. So they did. And there’s been mild success for those churches there. Yeah. There’s they’ve always had small numbers. There’s also been a second track of people who have been influenced by swedenborg, and gone on to influence the world but weren’t within a church system. The most famous one is probably Helen Keller. She was a devout lit reader of swedenborg, he wrote books, one called how I would help the world, which is about how swedenborg opened her mind, and made and actually was part of her drive to do what she did in the world. There have been actually a ton of other ones that we’ve done programs on this, you could go throughout history, a lot of artists and things would have been directly influenced by swedenborg, sometimes by people in those churches, but they’ve all existed outside the swedenborgian church world. So it’s a little of both, it’s still, it’s still all been relatively small compared to what I think it could do for the world. So we’re still trying to find out ways. And now the internet is obviously really helpful in getting an idea ideas like this out there. But also, it’s just people are people think for themselves these days, more than I think they used to, yeah, than it used to be. What’s this, something new couldn’t be right, unless my religious leaders or somebody are telling me it’s true. But now it’s more, what people will do is they’ll see something, and they’ll think about it, and they’ll make decisions. And that’s actually where swedenborg material thrives. Because he was always telling his readers, like, you’ve got to use your own rationality. And once you get into the ideas, there’s an order to them, and an ability to them and an effectiveness. And it just light bulb goes off. And you say, Oh, this is this is something. So I mean, that that’s how it has been for me and a lot of others.

Brian Smith 18:49
Yeah, I will put myself in that category of someone who’s been greatly influenced by swedenborg. And I talked to people about him all the time. And I and I refer people to your programs, you know, all the time. I’ll say this program this friggin up, I’ll post on my Facebook page, because it’s so enlightening. It’s so you don’t have to. This is my opinion. Anyway, we don’t have to accept everything as a system anymore. We can we can take what makes sense to us. And there’s so much in swedenborg. That makes sense. And I asked you earlier before we get started, you know, because I told you I consider myself a former Christian, I was raised as a fundamentalist. I was raised to read the Bible, literally. And none of that stuff makes sense to me anymore. And so I kept getting farther and farther away from what the Church teaches. And finally, at some point, I just say, I don’t consider myself Christian anymore, because I don’t believe in, for example, substitutionary atonement, and I believe Jesus died for the sins of the world. And I believe in eternal Heaven and Hell, I don’t believe in an angry God that punishes us, which is what a lot of what the Church teaches. And so at some point, I just okay, I’m not a Christian anymore. Um, would you classifies swedenborg as a Christian, or? I don’t know, you know, I’m asking you to say what he would say, but I think it’s interesting that he got it. You know, kind of thrown out of the church almost.

Curtis Childs 20:02
Yeah, his works were and I don’t know, all the details of it was works were put on trial in Sweden for heresy. And he was fine. He was pretty well connected. So he wasn’t in too much of a imminent threat. But at the time, the church and the government were the same thing. So right, you, you cross one, you cross the other. And he certainly made all kinds of statements that were illegal in that way. He did a lot of his publishing in London, and in Amsterdam, because those places had more freedom of the press at the time. To answer your question, though, according to the criteria that you just gave, you’re not a Christian, because you don’t believe in vicarious atonement, and all those principles you just listed? No, swedenborg wasn’t a Christian, because he didn’t believe in those things that you’re talking about. But according to his own definition, he was a Christian, his last book that he published was called true Christianity. Yeah. And in there, there’s been a lot of people saying, Who are you you’re not even a member of the clergy, or you’re not your ideas are heretical. And in the title page of that he wrote a manual swedenborg servant of the Lord Jesus Christ, right, right. Because what are you gonna say to that, and, and so clean board would say, might say you are a Christian,

Brian Smith 21:21
Brian,

Curtis Childs 21:22
because to him that you listed ideas, right with sweet, sweet Montez are two things that make us human, our will, right our feelings, and then our intellect, or our beliefs.

What, Matt, what makes you who you are is your will, what you love what you care about what you’re trying to do. your beliefs are a key part of that, but they aren’t the if the will want something, it will bend the mind to get justification for whatever it wants. So and really what for him, the church, whether or not you’re a Christian, whether or not you’re in the church, the church, and its smallest unit is inside an individual. So you could have any Sunday, a bunch of people sitting in pews next to each other. Some people may have the church in them, and some people might not. And the church is primarily driven by your heart and what you love. And this is why Jesus is always preaching repentance and the Pharisees. They were nailing the doctrinal stuff, weren’t they? Yeah, they had crossed every t they dotted every I, they were observing Every Witch, well, they did everything. And that was the only people Jesus ever really got mad at was them. And why is that? It’s because they, they had, they didn’t have love, they didn’t have the love that he was talking about. But that is what Jesus Christ is you. That’s what God is his love for the whole human race. And so if you it doesn’t matter what your religious ideas are, if they’re not founded on that love, every one of them is corrupt. Because if you’re, if you’re a real super religious person, meaning you have all these, all the concepts that you said that, you know, you’re not believing that, okay, so somebody believes him, they have the whole Bible in their mind. But what they love is their own eminence, and having power and getting to tell people how to live their lives. And that’s what they’re getting their thrills and their joy from and the reason they like the religion thing is because it puts them in a position of power, and they kind of imagine an afterlife, or they rule over everybody else, and everyone that they hate goes to hell, that is the opposite of Jesus Christ. And so if that’s what’s driving, you it doesn’t matter. You put put all the swedenborg even says that in the afterlife. All the ideas you have that don’t agree with your Will you just lose them, they eventually go away, because you you go to what you love. That is what what defines you. So I would say that what would swedenborg define himself as a Christian? And what he would say makes you a Christian? Is not that not that it doesn’t, that there isn’t an important role that the right beliefs can play. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have taken all this time to carefully parse out this theology, and explain like, for example, the vicarious atonement that you’re talking about that Jesus took on? He said, No, that’s not what he’s talking about. But here is what it’s talking about what Jesus Christ did do, which week that’s that’s a whole talk in itself, right? But it’s something here’s, there’s not, oh, the angry God that punishes us. No, that’s not true. But here’s why you read about an angry God in the Bible and what it’s talking about. So yes, he was he was trying to plant a flag and say that stuff that you guys are peddling right now that allows for you to commit all these atrocities and creates this loveless world. And it’s just really this hierarchy of power and money. That’s not Christianity. This that’s actually following Jesus and the message that He gave His Christianity but what Jesus was doing with the Pharisees were they come and say, hey, it’s the Sabbath. Don’t you help That person. And he’s saying, He’s saying, like, it’s not about the rules. It’s about the people. I mean, I’m paraphrasing, but in the story was a man made for Sabbath or was that was made for men. And then there’s a woman caught in adultery and they’re saying, you know you better you better kill her. That’s the law. And he and he says, I’m getting goosebumps just talking about it, because it’s so obviously this story about what’s important and about love. And he’s he, they’re all saying, well, you’re not following the rules. And he Jesus Christ, God is saying, I’m gonna tell you something about the rules. Right now. What’s Come on what’s reasonable? Okay, she made a mistake, has any of any of you not made a mistake? That’s what it’s the love that should have the truth at its disposal rather than the other way around? Yeah, it shouldn’t be that the ideas are putting us into this fundamentalist fanaticism. That is really a smokescreen that lacks our desire to control and attack each other really have the reins and that was swedenborg. His primary enemies were what he called, he calls them love of self and love of the world. I know that love of self people get antsy when I say that because it sounds like I know people talk a lot about like self love like because you beat yourself up in your head about I’m no good but you are good. It’s not that love of self is like love of your own superiority to other people’s love of dominating other people. Basically, I am more important than anyone else that’s that’s like the core of love of self and and love of the world is not like, Oh, I love to go visit Paris. But it’s not materialistic gratification that either of those two are driving you, they will corrupt every religious principle. Yeah, doesn’t matter. You can fill your head with every every verse of the Bible, every bit of every sacred texts in the world, that stuff is in charge, you’re in trouble. So to be a Christian? Well, you got to look at what’s what’s Jesus Christ really about? And when when somebody says, What do all the law and all the profits hang off of love God, love thy neighbor, go learn what those things do. Otherwise, you got all this stuff and nowhere to hang it? Yeah,

Brian Smith 27:03
I would I and when I say that, it’s it’s really, and it’s something that a lot of lot of people struggle with. Because we still consider ourselves to be followers of Jesus, I still consider myself to be a disciple of Jesus. But when people hear the word Christian in today’s modern times, and they think of the church, I am not a part of that church. And I like the way swedenborg uses the word church. And this is something you learn when you start to get into swedenborg. There’s different terminology, you have to learn. And the church is actually within people. The church is not the building. It’s not the organization. The church is within us. That’s it. So he uses the word differently. Now, swedenborg also uses the word, the Lord a lot. And he talks about Jesus says the Lord. So explain to people what swedenborg view of Jesus is.

Curtis Childs 27:45
It can be confusing for people, sometimes we’ll get people coming at our channel, and saying, Well, why if swedenborg is is so great, why didn’t you ever talk about Jesus? Why didn’t ever talk about Jesus? Why did he say Jesus? And he does sometimes, but what what you need to know the rights early and one of his earliest works is, and this I think this was a common practice in his day is, and again, everything he wrote was in Latin, so it’s about the translation, everything, but he says, When I’m when I’m talking about Jesus, I’m going to say the Lord. So whenever you hear the Lord, in swedenborg, works, that’s Jesus. And for swedenborg, there’s there was this Christian idea that there are these separate persons of God, right, there’s a father and a son and a Holy Spirit. And they’re one but they’re sort of different. And I, there’s a lot of interpretations of that. To swedenborg. There’s one God, and God is one in the same way that we are one. So we have a spirit, and a body, and then our actions. So if you want to break it down like that, so you have the father being the spirit, so the father is the, the God that you the entirety of God. So this is more than that I’m gonna be able to understand and you’re gonna be able to understand, Jesus is like the is the body of God. So if, like, if I’m thinking about really trying to know who you are, Brian, I could do a lot of stuff. I can go talk to people who knew you when you were a kid, I can I can interview you, you talk to you for a while. There’s a lot of stuff I can try to do, to I can study things you’ve made to try to understand you. If I really wanted to interact with you, I go to where you are, where’s your body? And we will talk are those zoom makes it so now I just got to be pointed at the right camera. Yeah. But what I’m trying to say is tell me if this is making sense. What I’m trying to say is there’s you and then there’s your body where you are and we know that we’re we’re more than our body but the body is important, right? So Jesus is, in essence, the way that we can connect with the infinite God.

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Curtis Childs 30:56
So Jesus is this point that somehow God did this amazing trick of Hey, I’m going to be able to present myself to you in a way that you can interact with. So that’s Jesus and and the Holy Spirit is the activity coming out of God. So once we were called divine providence, how God affects the world around us to lead us and teach us and do everything like that. So Jesus is to swedenborg Jesus’s god this is and and the incarnation of Jesus on earth wasn’t the start of Jesus like the divine human, which was already a thing. But Jesus was this particular way in which God had to, again, the human race was in danger of those two loves that I talked about love of self love of the world, taking over everything, like we had been so gone, we had gotten so enamored with this warlike, greedy way of life that that really, there was this whole, there’s real danger that that human beings would all destroy ourselves and that we would, we would lose our ability to love and understand what’s true. So Jesus had to come and rebalance everything. Yeah, praise and rescue us really redeem us all that stuff you hear about it, just the the sort of what’s under the hood, how did it happen is much different than there was God and God was so angry at us that he couldn’t help himself, and was going to just kill us all. And Jesus like it, there’s so many holes in that I don’t have to worry because I here I am Curtis, and I need if I get mad at my daughter, that’s that’s on me. Like I shouldn’t be doing that. Right? And the more that I if I lost my The more I lose my temper, the more people are like, well, you you know, you’ve got some anger issues, you got to get that sorted out. And and you know, you can’t, especially at a kid, but at any point, it’s not a good luck to lose your temper if you’re saying God lost his temper so much that he’s going to kill all these humans that, like don’t know what they’re doing. That makes sense, doesn’t make sense to me.

Brian Smith 32:53
Yeah, it doesn’t. And that brings me to a couple things I want to talk about is because that causes a lot of people to walk away from God, from the church, from the Bible, from Jesus from everything, because this this, this presentation of God is angry, out of control father, that is you know, yelling at is not only yelling at a toddler is going to tie her up and torture her forever. Right. And I remember when I was walking out of that I’m like, this doesn’t make any sense. And I hear swedenborg talk about God. And there’s this description in one of your shows where he says something like God could never even look at you with the cross look or something that that affects.

Curtis Childs 33:29
Yeah, that’s in his book, true Christianity. 56. I just know that because that’s such a great quote. He says, in reality, it’s impossible for God to even look at us with a frown. Because to do that would be against his own nature. Because God is love. So yeah, go ahead.

Brian Smith 33:45
No, that’s that’s fantastic. And I was reading something last night in another book, and they were describing this, this idea of God is like being the ultimate, loving, caring parent, that no matter what you do is always like, you’re always welcome to come back. You’re always, you know, quote, forgiven. That that and that. And that’s this idea I get from God from swedenborg, which is the exact opposite of what a lot of us are taught by the church.

Curtis Childs 34:11
Well,

what what do we admire, and human beings, like when we watch if you’re watching a movie, and you see a parent who, even if or anybody who there’s a character who’s doing something wrong, and the character seems unlovable, but someone’s able to love them anyway, and express goodness to them anyway? Don’t we admire that? Isn’t that something that makes you say, Wow, that is that person is a bigger person than I am? Yeah. Is God not gonna be better at that than there’s something that we admire in people that God can’t pull off? But also, whose fault is it that we all exist in the first place? Right? Like, why are we here? And if you think about God, you just think about your own kid and if you think about the heartbeat When you’ve got a parent who their little kid grows up, and you have them as like a one and two year old, and they’ve got all this innocence, and it’s just like joy, and you just are feeling like, they’ve got a, they got to do great, let’s say that they, they, they some hard things happen or something and they go down the wrong path and start to get into all kinds of criminal activity and released and they cut off contact with you. And it’s you still you really want him to come back, you know, you you would be you’re going to be devastated. And you think about God have it where do we get our love for our own kids for from, you know, as God, we are going to we’re going to love more than God is where where we get our love from? So I guess what I’m trying to say is God is can’t just, oh, you’re gonna go get tortured in hell, if they’re if somebody is getting tortured God’s there, and it’s hurting him more than than anybody. Yeah, so anything else wouldn’t, wouldn’t make sense. Or it would be that God wasn’t responsible, like I think about I haven’t had an aquarium, right. And when you’re going to get an aquarium, well, you got to follow some rules if you’re going to make life okay for these fish, because remember, they were just like swimming in a stream somewhere, and or in a breeders tank or whatever. And if you get an aquarium, first of all, you got to know there’s only a certain number of fish you can have in there per gallon, right? An ancient fish per gallon, otherwise, you’re risking the water quality and overcrowding, that’s going to lead to stress. If you if you have a fish tank, you better make sure that you’ve got enough time and energy to take care of it. And don’t get more fish than you can handle. Well, if if people just kind of get lost by the wayside, and God just oh, well, you didn’t follow the rules. So I’m kicking you off. And it’s like God put too many fish in the tank. And he can’t give us all because Wouldn’t it have been better if he never made a lot of us and just made enough that he could really make sure everybody did what was right. So obviously, God’s kind of has to have a plan to care for everyone. And can’t.

it all falls apart?

Brian Smith 37:03
If he does. And I tell you when I was a kid, as you were saying, given that analogy I was I was five years I was less than five years old. They were taking me to Sunday school and I’m hearing this stuff and I’m like, why did you even make me? You know why? Why would you put me in this risk of going into eternal torment. I regret it being born. It was, it was a terrible thing, I think to say to someone. And so when I read someone like swedenborg that describes what I believe is the true guide, the guide, the guide of love and a creator who cares for us. And he would never turn an angry itis. It’s just that’s why that episode is always stood out to me because I just I was like, this makes sense to me. Yeah. But it brings us back to the Bible, which a lot of us are caught up on because this God in the Bible, you know, he makes Adam and Eve, he puts the apple in the garden and he says don’t eat it and they eat it. And so they kicked him out. And then you know, mankind’s evil and he destroys all of them in the flood. And this drives a lot of people away from the church as well. I know, I know, people that have said, I have a good friend that said I was reading Noah’s Ark one day to serve Noah’s Ark, and he was an evangelical Christian works for the church. And just as an adult, when your mind reads that, it’s like no, and he rejects it. So he just rejects the whole thing. But as I’m listening to swedenborg, one of the things I love is there’s an internal and an external reading of the Bible, the word and you guys break down some of these stories, and totally redeemed them. By the creation story, Noah’s Ark, I was talking before we got on Ethan baylands ass, you know, and we let in Sunday school, we’d love to talk about biomes ask us, we could say the word ass. But even that story of the talking donkey, which makes no sense, you know, from from a literal point of view, you guys break that down? So talk about that internal external reading?

Curtis Childs 38:51
Yeah, actually, you know, reading the Bible, literally, as I understand it is a relatively new phenomenon. This is not how people used to read it. And I think the antidote to reading the Bible literally is just open it and start reading it, you’re gonna find so many things that make a literal reading impossible. And it just seems really obvious that it’s not even meant for you just opens to the creation story, you get these two creation stories back to back, you have stuff that doesn’t make sense. And it sequence very quickly. You can tell this is this is not what I was meant for. And if it was, if it was literal, if it was just supposed to be I’m telling you exactly what’s going on. The order doesn’t make any sense. What Why are we following the story of these few people in there? Why isn’t God saying this? do this right now. This is this is what you should do when you’re 13. This is what you should do when you’re 14. It’s just the whole thing is not set up like that. And even Jesus goes and talks about the inner meaning of scriptures when he’s on the road to a mass. And he says he opened up to the disciples everything about him in the law, the prophet Well, there’s no Jesus in the Old Testament, but here he is saying look, this is about me. So there is there is precedent there’s it is a book that is written in the language of God, which is what swedenborg calls correspondences. It’s the same language that you dream in. And it is the the language by which spiritual things and physical things can communicate. It’s and it’s actually a language that is written into everything. And that nature is a correspondence, just like the Bible is this is why you have all these religions around the world, where things like worshiping in a grove of trees or worshiping on a mountain, that these are sacred things to them, because there’s not just the Bible, is this. This in index of it is this bringing together of it, but it’s describing something that’s there and everything. So, correspondences is by the way, the the main undertaking that swedenborg went through. And when he published his first book, secrets of heaven, Volume One, he was going through the first chapter of Genesis, the first chapters of Genesis explaining what they mean. And this was something he continued on most of his work is explaining these parts of the Bible. And really quickly what I love about the internal sense, what makes me say, like, Oh, this is it, this has got to be it, because not only does it give you something that is intellectually and emotionally satisfying and insightful, but it also solves the frame of reference problem. So we’re here going through life. And it’s hard. And we struggle through all these things, and we need help from God, we’re feeling like God, where are you? Like, why aren’t you helping me right now? So God gives us this book, the Bible. So much of it is irrelevant to me. What? What do I need to know about Cain and Abel? Right? I get that it’s a I need to know about me. Okay, I’m well, and if we’re all God’s children, and this is God’s message, the whole human race? Why do some people get all these chapters I’m not in there. There’s so many people that aren’t in there, what’s, how is this and so much, we’re going to tell us all about how they built this one tabernacle, and why they should follow that. And you’re going to go these genealogies and do line by line by line and not mention any of the women and then with all this stuff, what you’re wasting time Well, this is your gift. To me. The Christian story is about you, that God does not talk about finite things, God is infinite. When God opens his mouth, he speaks infinite things. So everything in that book applies infinitely to everything. So the creation story is not the story, even if it was an accurate story about how the universe was made. Why do I care how the universe was made?

You know, there’s a long time ago. And it’s, it’s, that’s interesting. But it does, it’s not going to help me here as I’m in the depths of despair. And then I don’t care. And that’s not useful. But what the creation story is, is this is if you’re you’ve ever wondered what’s happening in your life, it’s the creation story. In those days, when when we are dark and void, when we are living initially, you start out you know, in your teenage years, or whatever we are in this ego driven, self centered, materialistic way of life. That’s where we are. And the whole point of God’s effort is I’m going to wake you up and bring you into the light. That’s what God is doing. Every day. Every struggle that we have is part of this difficult process, all those struggles and battles that you’re hearing about in the Bible, that that the Holy Land that we’re trying to get to, that’s in you, just like the churches in you there, there are there are these there are these battles that are happening there inside of you, there are these journeys, you were in the wilderness, there are these temptations, the whole story is about the absolutely complex world of God, rescuing us from all this stuff that that that’s trying to get us and so it’s in this language that is hard to understand initially. But as you start to get how it goes and as you start to understand that it speaks really to your heart ever have you ever read a part of the Bible in the Bible? It’s really a lot of it can be really difficult to stomach there’s times when I’m opening it up and I just feel frustrated at how it seems violent and seems nonsensical. It seems so dry and it just not what any but there’s other times when I’ll just read these verses, and it’s not even really about what they’re about but they just make like a bring me to tears. Something about him. I think about the one where the thief that’s getting hanged with Jesus says, Lord remember me when you come into your kingdom. Something about that like okay goosebumps and and of Revelation. When talking about the clear river or the water of life, I’ll just get these feelings around them. And that’s because there’s a part of us that understands what’s really talking about everything in there is the thief, the river, that’s the New Jerusalem. This is all stuff. That’s that’s written into the your story.

Brian Smith 45:00
Yeah,

Curtis Childs 45:01
the Bible is your story.

Brian Smith 45:02
Yeah, it’s written in the language of metaphor, which might the modern mind has trouble understanding, I think the people at the time understood it. And it was beautiful. That made sense. And then we come along. And as you said, it’s a relatively new development where people started reading literally. But again, you grew up in the church the way I did, we were told, that’s the way it was always. So I love about your show and your channel, is you take these stories, and when I read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, he, we, when I read it, just on the surface, I’m like, Who are these people? But when you guys break it down, it’s like, every, every character in every story is an element of ourselves. So the story and so when you talked earlier, at the very beginning, we talked about your journey. And swedenborg tells us how our mind works. When he tells us these stories over again and says, here’s the correspondence that Adam is represented, and Eve is representing this, and the serpent is representing this, these are all elements of what’s going on with us. And then it’s like, oh, and so I get so excited when I hear when I guess I have to share it with everybody. And I’m like, I hope somebody listens to them. Because it’s just, it’s beautiful, that that it it does tell us our story, who we are individually, you know, what’s going on within us and this journey that we’re all on from the ego driven thing. back to where we originally came from.

Curtis Childs 46:21
Yeah, it’s, it’s really, it goes from being a burden to a joy. And, and it’s, it’s a way that when it says like Jesus comes in the clouds. swedenborg says that the clouds are talking about the literal meaning of Scripture. And that in there is the potential for us that you can meet God in the book, like when you’re saying, Oh, actually, this does make sense. This is suddenly like, I understand how I’m being cared for. And that’s like, a, we’re reaching Jesus through the book, because it’s giving us this window into how God operates and what God is doing.

Brian Smith 46:57
I guess that’s a swedenborg talk is like a decoder ring for the Bible. You know, when we read it, we read it, it’s like, this doesn’t make any sense. And then I watched your episodes I don’t like I said, I don’t read swedenborg so don’t think I’m the smart guy that read swedenborg but I watch off the left eye. But when you watch the episodes, you’re like, yeah, this this makes you know, this makes sense to me. And you know, a couple of concepts like second coming, you know, that we heard as kids no judgment, you know, all that kind of stuff. But let’s talk about let’s talk about like the concept of heaven and hell. Because again, that’s that’s a pretty important thing, right? And growing up binary, you’re you’re good, you’re in you’re bad. You’re out, you worship Jesus, you’re and you don’t worship Jesus out, what would what is swedenborg his concept of this idea of heaven? And Hell,

Curtis Childs 47:44
yeah, it was a great one to touch on it. He’s most none of his books were that popular, but his most popular one was called heaven and hell. So it’s a good place to start. I want to be right before I jump into that, I want to say, if you’re looking for an easy way to start seeing that the literal sense of the Bible lends itself to some kind of internal sense. Do you remember before how I talked about you have the your your will or your emotion and and your understanding of that there’s these two primary parts of being a human being, look at the didactic nature of the Bible, how there’s always these pairings that go start reading the Psalms, they’ll say, your your justice is on the hills and your judgment on the valleys, like there’s always these two pairs. And we’ve looked at each of those because it has reference to the two parts of us. This is what’s going on in your heart. This is what’s going on in your mind. So just start to read the Bible that you’ll see it’s always this, this pairing of things. So that’s that’s just a little like, little cute. Yeah, have heaven in hell. When, when the pleasure of evil is felt as good, that is hell. That’s a quote from swedenborg. So you can be in hell. Today, when when I’m in the hell is made up of a series of feelings that are all related to this love of self love of the world that I talked about. Heaven is related to the two great commandments love of the Lord in love with the neighbor. So we we can be heaven and hell are are primarily just like the church is a state of heart and mind, Heaven and Hell are states of heart and mind. The couple of important things to clear up around that so first of all, Hell is not a God is punishing you thing that the hell that we talked about is when you haven’t heard defined by what you what you make the center of your life. And if you make hellish stuff, which is everything that you think of like being being mean to people, harming people, exploiting people, whatever it is, if your joy in either being empathetic to people or actually joy in harming them, you make that the center of your life when you make that a center of your life by willingly and intentionally doing it and justifying it That’s that it’d be that is hell, like you’re in hell there. And that kind of life attracts misery to it. And you might have times when you’re feeling good, but then there’s just there’s always this, that this negativity follows that stuff, right. And the more you think of, the more ego driven you are, the less at peace you are. Because even if you’re doing well, as soon as somebody doesn’t give you the praise that you want, or as soon as somebody crosses you in some way, you just swedenborg says, What is more easily upset than this than this low of self. So you have this stuff, and you can make hell or you can make heaven in that state of Heaven is.

It’s driven by love of serving people, that is the core of heaven that you there are different kinds of, I’m just trying to think of where you’d start because there’s such a complex concept, but it is about this. There’s different kinds of joy in life, Heaven and Hell are both centered around different kinds of joy. So Hell is centered around the joy in evil. Like there’s, there’s a reason why everyone does terrible things all the time. There’s a pleasure in revenge, right? There is a pleasure in exploiting people, there’s a pleasure in dominating people this, this, those are the pleasures of insanity, as swedenborg calls them that that makes up hell. There are other kinds of pleasures, though, if you think about the joy, knowing you made a difference for somebody, we’ve all experienced that at some time. You know, I know I did that. And it may be it sometimes it’s really vivid. Sometimes it’s kind of mute. That is, that’s having their the joy in doing something good for somebody is having. So the more you cultivate that, and the more you work on that, the more that what follows that is peace, because you grow to lose your desire to really worry about where you end up in the hierarchy of human beings. You lose your desire to control everything, you start to trust God, you find joy and doing good things that are inherently healthy. It allows you to have relationships where you’re loved and love and return and brings you into this state that’s called heaven. And the more that you following the other stuff, it brings you into the state of it’s called hell and so then if we get into that so the in this world we can vacillate between heaven and hell, and you you can have two people right in a church pew or in a room and one is deeply immersed in hell and the other is deeply immersed in heaven in the spiritual world, like I said, what you love makes you who you are. So in the spiritual world what you love the spiritual world is made by an ordered god it just like the physical world is so spiritual world, which is the afterlife or whatever you wanna call it swedenborg calls it the spiritual worlds and that’s what I was calling which will be like the the spiritual dimension just like here you have the physical dimension, which is not just the earth but it’s the entire universe. So the spiritual dimension has its own set of laws just like we have laws here and in there and now they correspond this language of correspondence right so in correspond means what what something does in the spiritual world its correspondence does in the physical world, for example, what gravity does here love does in the spiritual world, so gravity as I understand it, I know we’re evolving on that gravity is what why am I where I am is because of gravity. Basically, guy gravity is keeping me on the center of the earth am I pushing against gravity locomotion, that kind of stuff is moving me so that’s it’s also gravity is what pulls masses of things together. It’s why there was a planet right? gravity pulls it together. Love is like spiritual gravity. So there, what you love pulls you into community with other people who love the same thing as you. So if you have a bunch of people together, who all love serving other people and being useful and the joy in them and aren’t all hung up on themselves that sounds like heaven to me.

Brian Smith 53:50
Yeah.

Curtis Childs 53:50
You think about your knowing your neighbor cares about you. Just like you know, you can pull off the road on any stop on the highway and people there are going to care about you and be nice. And if you’re completely self centered, and you don’t care about anyone, you’ll do anything you can to get ahead you like making fun of people all that and you’re around a bunch of other people that are like you that’s that’s how hell right? That’s not gonna. So that is the basic principle behind heaven and hell and hell naturally. God is God is love of other people like Jesus, we talked about this Jesus is love, right? So when you’re in this state of heaven, it’s it’s not even your love that’s going through it’s God’s love so that that state naturally draws you to god this is this is you form a partnership because you you love you have the same interests. You get the same hobbies, right? You get along hell that I don’t care about other people. It rejects God. Like it doesn’t it doesn’t like that. You know that the light shine in the darkness and the darkness could not comprehend it. Because you’re every evil has its corresponding falsity. Right. So if I want to harm people, I have to justify it to myself and Some way not to say, well, it’s not that bad or they deserved it or I can get away with it, whatever it is, the people love darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. So in hell when God approaches God being love and truth, You don’t like it? Because the truth, for example, that everybody is just as conscious as you are. Everybody just as a human being that deserves the same amount of love and respect that you do. If you have built your life, around harming other people and exploiting them and believing you’re better than them. Do you like that truth when it comes? How does it feel? Yeah, I feel like heaven doesn’t feel like hell. Yeah. But if you if you care about the happiness of your, your neighbor, as much as you care about your own happiness, when that truth approaches that everyone, how do you love it? You welcome it. It’s like the sun coming out of the clouds. And you love it, and you soak it up. So that is I’ll stop there for now. But that is to give you sort of what’s what’s the building blocks of this? What? What is happening? What is hell? That’s it? Right? Yeah, it doesn’t matter how deep you are into hell, God is still loving you and trying to make your life as happy as it can be. But there are limits on how happy you can be when you made hell. The thing you love, because loving that stuff inherently limits your joy, it causes problems. Yeah, so So anyway, that’s a little bit of a mini crash course on what heaven and hell are so

Brian Smith 56:29
my understanding is that after when we die, when we pass, we go to like, kind of a middle ground, right? And then we kind of we kind of migrate to where we naturally fit in, whether that’s to us up or down, you know, just for simplicity sake, whether it’s upward towards heaven, or downward toward toward hell, is that correct? And God pretty much tries to make us as happy as he can. Wherever we end up.

Curtis Childs 56:55
Yeah, so no, even God cannot force you to love anything. Right? Human beings have this you’ve probably heard about free choice freewill. There is an essential component of being a conscious human being that is freedom and God does not violate that cannot or else Or else we wouldn’t be people you that that is essential. So even even though God can really want us not to love certain things, he can’t stop us. So, yes, wherever if you love a certain thing, right? God can’t stop you from loving it. God will. Hell is actually right. It’s a mechanism, the spiritual world place of hell that swedenborg saw. It’s a area designed to make the people in it as happy as you can be while you love evil things. Which is not which is to them even have there’s at the end of I think it’s divine love and wisdom. No, I think it’s divine providence. swedenborg says, has this funny encounter with a couple of people who are in hell. And he says, at the top of he says, forgive me for writing the rest this to fill out the rest of the page. Because there you had to have like your pages filled out for the printer. And he says there’s a couple of spirits from hell, so spirits being people who have died, right bodies and spirits. So metal people from hell came to swedenborg. And he wanted to talk to him. And he said, Okay, well, what do you want to say? And he says, Well, you the spirits from hell are saying, well, you’re writing a lot about heaven, and how great it is. Well write write something about hell to and swedenborg says, Okay, what do you want me to write? And they say, Well, everybody gets to live in whatever pleasures they really want. Even even if these pleasures are filthy, there’s just problems. There’s certain limits, you can’t go past. And we can’t really help it. So we get punished but and they’re basically like plugging the hellish way of life. They’re saying, like, Don’t Don’t be square, come down here. You know, and it’s, it’s a striking example of, even though even it actually during that encounter, swedenborg says, Well, if you if you can’t help hurting people, when you see them, like you’re just like an animal, and they get really mad and try to attack it, right. There’s no ego driven, right? But it shows two things. One, it shows like how destructive that kind of Hell is. But the other one shows that those people are not you think if there was a couple of spirits from hell coming up, but they would say, Please, we’re sorry, save us from this torment that we’re in your own. Nobody’s in hell unless you you’re there because you love it. Right. And it might well who would ever love getting tormented because it’s not if you love but a lot of people love evil. A lot of people love harming people. You hear like the stuff about the worst serial killers. There’s a lot of them that are like, they don’t do it because they have to they do it because they love to. Yeah. And if you’re going to do that, there are certain restrictions, you first of all, you can’t be around people because you’re going to hurt, you’re going to hurt them and we don’t want to get hurt. And also that stuff is so toxic, it’s going to attract all the other worst people around you. So God is like managing and trying to make the happiest existence you can have given the fact that you’ve made this terrible thing that’s the center of your life.

Brian Smith 59:56
Now does swedenborg ever talk about second chances, people I mean, I know people don’t want to get out of hell necessarily because it’s what they love. But it’s God’s still drawing them. And I know he doesn’t talk much about reincarnation, I don’t think so. Let’s turn to questions together.

Curtis Childs 1:00:12
Well, the whole the whole I, and this is his puzzle a lot of people because, well, so first of all the the whole of what God is doing through our entire life here is dissuading us from loving evil, you think about well, isn’t my house, isn’t my life supposed to be organized so that I’m happy? why are all these negative things happening? Who knows why particular events are going on? There’s a huge complex mechanism there. But in general, one, one thing that’s happening is, God is making it so that our life gives us a distaste for evil in to the extent that we can. So God is always trying there. And then in the world of spirits that you’re talking about, that is sort of like a centrifuge. So they’re just like in a centrifuge, heavy stuff, falls, light stuff goes to the top, there, there’s, there’s this whole period where it’s like, okay, in the afterlife, we’re here, we’re all kind of a mix of good, good and evil stuff, right? That that’s a problem in the spiritual world. Because that if you have both of them, they kind of start to pull you apart. So you’ve got to commit to one or the other. So there’s this whole process in the world of spirits to try to get everyone to commit to what’s good and true. And then if, then, so So there’s all these chances to try to end but then if somebody’s still choosing Hell, I don’t know. Like he doesn’t he at some points, he says, You can’t. You can’t, you won’t change or not, you can’t, but you won’t, you will. But then there’s also a lot of other places where he’ll talk about, you know, people who even their everything negative that nothing, that hurts can be allowed, unless some good is coming out of it. So even in hell, people are through these negative experiences they’re bringing on themselves are being purged of their desire for a particular kind of evil. So he does talk about people even there and even being brought up to where they can do some more menial, but useful things so they can get some of the joy of usefulness, because Heaven is all doing useful things with them. Everybody’s always improving their I don’t know is whether like, I would think, you know, if you think about what we’re talking about before with God and made each one of us and it’s like, going to think about the grief of God. We’re talking about grief, the grief of God of losing anybody to this right. Totally limited life. When is God gonna stop wanting to bring them into heaven? That’s, that’s all that the universe exists to provide a heaven for the human race. That’s, that’s what Providence is doing. So when, when is God gonna say well, okay, I give up on you. Right? That’s the whole point of anything. Yeah. So I would think, eventually, and we’ve got a problem to solve. But right now the human race is trying to solve the Coronavirus and figure out how to do so we’ve got the best minds on it, and they’re trying to solve it. Right? And you know, the smarter people are in the better technology they have, the better they can solve it. So God’s got a problem. All these people are loving, he think he’s not working on a solution. Like, what else? What’s he doing that? Like? What, what’s he spending his time? Yeah,

Brian Smith 1:03:09
there’s a guy that a philosopher the same as Thomas Talbot wrote a book called The inescapable love of God. And this is a concept that I love. Because what he says basically, you know, God never gives up on us, you know, this, this is one lifetime, but you know, we got never gives up on us. And if, if you are loving evil, you are diluted, no one who has a full picture of who or what God is, could resist guy. That’s why the books called the inescapable love of God. So there’s some sort of a shadow, there’s some sort of a veil, that we don’t really understand what who or what God is because we, we’d have to be attracted to God, if we really understood it. So here’s his thing is God’s always working to tear that delusion down that illusion down so they can be? And once we fully understand that, you know, how could you not? I mean, that’s because that’s who we are guides our Creator.

Unknown Speaker 1:03:58
Yeah, well,

Curtis Childs 1:04:00
isn’t it true that the more you learn about people, the more you understand that love, right, then they say like, if people have prejudices, that solution is getting more in contact with people that they don’t usually get in contact with. If it just the more you like, the more you think you have a person in your life who you’re like, maybe like, in business with you and or you have some kind of contentious relationship, but the more you understand their life and their story, and what the more you know, the more love fills it. So I think this is exactly like what you’re talking about.

Brian Smith 1:04:32
What people reject is this false image of God, this guy, this angry guy that we were taught about this judgemental guy. I think that’s what people reject. Oh,

Curtis Childs 1:04:40
yeah, for sure. And why wouldn’t you? Yeah, is that not fair? It’s not good. Like, but I also isn’t it fascinating that God is, if I was that lovable. I would not be hiding it. What I mean is Curtis, if I was just if anybody really knew They just couldn’t help but just totally loved me. I’d be like walking around like everyone look how good I am. But here’s God, who is that inescapable, but his his back and way off? In swedenborg says that’s because God doesn’t want a love that was forced on us, right? Because that’s not really love. You think about short Love is a great thing. But but so is freedom. So is a lot, the greatest thing is love that is freely chosen without any threat behind it. Exactly. And without any compulsion behind it, there’s a certain elegance to that, it just like in a, you know, if people are gonna get married, like, it’s got to be this, like, we both want to do it. And it’s just like with God, if God just overwhelmed us with his charisma, then of course we do it. But this is the why do we navigate this weird life instead is because we are through these little interactions, learning what God is like, and that every little bit of love, that you interact, share with somebody every time you understand a person because God is we are human, because God is you start to see a little more of God. And so in this theater here, where you get to see love versus not love, and you get to see the right way to treat people and dignity and all that versus the wrong way to treat people in this free free world to choose their to love the qualities that make God who, who God is, then we can have a real relationship. You know that then we can so and then God can can Okay, yeah, I’m gonna give you everything. But I you needed to learn? Yeah, I don’t know how to phrase it. But no,

Brian Smith 1:06:43
I think you phrased it really well. I mean, I think we do. This is a place of choices. This is a place of light, and dark and good and evil. And we can we can choose and kind of test each test each out. Try it on, see how it feels, see what we love. But, you know, God is always drawing us, you know, always, always calling us always there for us always, on our side always rooting for us. And my personal belief is God doesn’t lose, God gets what he wants. Because, you know, one of the things I was taught in Christianity was, Well, God wants everyone to be saved. But Calvinism says that he doesn’t choose everyone to be saved. And arminianism says, Well, he can’t choose everyone to save. And I say God loves everybody in guy gets what he wants. So I think eventually, God will draw us all back to him. But we can choose whether that’s going to be an easy path or a hard path.

Curtis Childs 1:07:32
Right? And we’ll look at, look at all the going back to the Bible, the biblical narrative, and all of its violence and all of its confused, confusion. Isn’t it like life that we have? This story of isn’t like Jesus’s life. He showed up and you think, Okay, he’s God, things are gonna go great. We’re gonna go, right, yeah, it’s this total. All I’m saying is the chaos and the, in a confusing this of the Bible, remind me of life, that it’s it’s chaotic and confusing. And it’s that there’s this hidden Providence inside of it. That even though you’re you look at your life, and like, what if I was sitting down and designing my life, I wouldn’t know. I’m taking this part out, I’m putting this new part in am, I actually going to catch that bus when I’ve missed that. But but it is, like, I just can’t understand the decision making. But there’s a spiritual sense to our lives where all this stuff, we’re talking about this, this in ways you can’t understand God prepping you to receive heaven. It’s happening. It’s just like, it’s a correspondence. So it’s everywhere. It’s just like the body. You know, you’ve got we’ve got these bodies, and we sort of know how they work. But we all the stuff that’s going on inside there. Like I think of how if I was going to try to stay healthy, okay, what do I do? Well, I should eat healthy, put, put healthy food on my plate and eat it. And I’ll run for 15 minutes this morning. You think about that, versus what’s going on inside the body. Like how that food is broken down how those nutrients are distributed. There’s all kinds of problems and emergencies and things in my body that are getting fixed without even knowing it. Right, right. This is like what God is doing with us that we don’t really understand even what the point it’s like, what why go through all this? Well, it’s about our love and our and our will and that there’s, there’s this whole formation just like in the womb, all these conditions have to go just right for us to get formed. Yeah, so it is right now our spirit is getting formed in the same way. And each, each moment. swedenborg says every moment holds a series of consequences that extend to eternity. So like everything ripples out like the butterfly, if it ripples out forever, and you think about the processing power that’s needed to line that up. So that is he talks about like, you know, if you’re shooting an arrow, and you’re a mile away from the target, even the tiniest little deviation you get way out the target. It’s that’s how it is with the trajectory of our life. If God isn’t making these little micro adjustments all the time, they’re they’re that much care. But it’s confusing, because we can’t see, you know, like with life after death, 1000 years down the road and how this is going to help that. And, you know, it’s it’s I’m not trying to say life isn’t confusing and hard, but you can get some real peace at times out of this idea that okay, the reason it’s confusing, as hard as it is really complicated things going on. And the more that we start to understand is why the Bible is good internal sense, you got to understand what God is actually doing. Then it starts to make more sense, though, if we don’t understand the objective, we’re not gonna understand the day to day, but if we can start to look for it. swedenborg says, with divine providence, like the God’s guidance of our lives, you really, even don’t matter how spiritual you are, you’re probably not gonna understand what’s going on in the moment. Yeah, but you can start to look back at your life and see things and see, oh, I’m starting to see how good things came out of that.

Brian Smith 1:10:55
Yeah, let’s, let’s end, let’s end on on divine providence. Because I that’s, I think, a very important concept. And I’m gonna just tee this up by saying, I was talking with a client yesterday. And we were talking about my life, my daughter passed away, like five years ago, my 15 year old daughter, and that’s her. My daughter behind me, Shana. And, you know, we’re talking about, you know, bee bee bee being born a black man. And there was a time early in my life, I was like, why would anybody choose to be born black, I mean, that would be a silly decision to make. But if I hadn’t been born a black man, if I hadn’t had my daughter passed away, I wouldn’t be sitting here doing what I’m doing with you right now. It’s this experience that made me who I am. And my point is, that when these things happen, you know, earlier in life, you’re like, this doesn’t make any sense. But at some point in our life, we can start to see this come together. So talk about what divine providence is, and what was swedenborg his point of view on divine providence.

Curtis Childs 1:11:50
So divine providence is what is God working in our lives? It’s like this short version of it. And it is it divine providence has like specific goals and its goals all revolve around what lasts forever. So you know that weeping may last for the night. But joy comes in the morning. And I’m not saying swedenborg is adamant, even if it’s hard to picture this intellectually, he’s adamant that God doesn’t make bad things happen. But that there are certain things he can’t prevent, for the sake of the goal. So evil makes bad things happen. I’m not talking about like, if something bad happens in my life is because I was doing something evil, but you just think about, like, think about it like pollution. Because Because we’ve been polluting all the world for so long. I can’t go and drink from the river near my house used to be you could go to any stream and just drink from it. Right. That’s how you got your water, you just just drink it up. But because there’s we’ve been put because of all this, like pollution we’ve done for so long. That’s awful. We got to do a whole new thing. Now you got to filter your water and all that. So because there’s been so much love of self love the world, in the human race, there’s all kinds of negative stuff going on. In ways we can’t comprehend it. Bad things are unavoidable. Right? This is just part of what it is. So what Providence is doing, though, is is making it so that good is brought out of everything bad. And like you talked about, and I appreciate you being willing to share your story about Shayna and thinking about Yeah, so I there’s no way that with my sister with her like that God is saying like, well, this is I’m going to I’m going to take this person out of your life to teach you something, right? Like, I think that would be, that would be terrible. But for whatever reason, it can’t be prevented. And, you know, I’m going to I’m going to see my sister again. And she’s there right now. And who but who I am now because I’ve had to deal with that grief and that all that. I’ve learned some things. It’s been a hard a hard learning, but it’s like a same thing with me. Look where I am now.

Brian Smith 1:13:55
Oh, yes.

Curtis Childs 1:13:56
Yeah. And I wouldn’t be where I am without the hard stuff. So in the end, when I get to the other side, and there’s my sister and she and there’s Shana, and she’s happy and beautiful. And and you’re there and you’re having you’re reunited. But you’ve gained something, right. And now you you are somebody and then so then 100 years into the afterlife, 500 years into the afterlife, that stuff that God is putting in us now is still going to be bearing fruit. It’s like we’re putting some investment in but because of the way he’s opening your heart up. And because of the wisdom that you’re gaining, you think about if you’re if you’re an alcoholic, do you want someone who’s never had a drinking problem to try to help you out?

Brian Smith 1:14:38
Right, right now? No, absolutely all,

Curtis Childs 1:14:41
all the potent teachers that you know, all the stuff that I’ve the people who’ve developed the stuff that I’ve used with the help with depression. You know, they were struggling with depression, when the world goes through terrible things. You know, everyone always talks about like, Hitler and Nazi Germany, like Don’t Don’t be like that Don’t be like that. It was a, it was this like, terrible thing that happened. And you’d never say that was good. But look at what it’s done after that. Now we know what that is, we can say like, we’ve identified a kind of evil. No. And we and it’s almost like, like with, like with a disease once you’ve caught it once your immune system now knows, look at that. That’s it. We know how to fight that now, right? Without whenever something sort of veers toward that you can say, No, we know what that is. So. So there’s the, this is the way that human race can confront evil in in our individual lives, we can confront problems and like, Here you are, yeah, now making this huge difference in all these people’s lives, helping them deal with their own grief and everything. So divine providence, is looking first and foremost at how does that change what you love and what you care about, because that is who you are, and that is going to go that that is part of your eternal spirit. And And likewise, I didn’t have in the joy of heaven as being useful other people. So you don’t just think oh, in the world in on Earth, here, I’m going to help people deal with with grief or whatever. And then I’m going to who knows just sit around in heaven and be happy, right? Heaven is the joy of having a so so the stuff that you’re learning here, you’re going to be even better at it. And you’re going to be helping somehow in the afterlife. People with some and or you’re helping people here through who knows what it was, but that that work that that we’re putting in getting you to be able to do what you can do now, that’s going to pay dividends to the human race to eternity, right? Because you’re going to be held. So every day, you think about how much help you’re going to be given. So in the end, I you know, just think it’s just it’s in the end. Providence brings just unlimited good out of temporary, bad. And that that’s that’s what the equation. That’s how the equation balances. Yeah,

Brian Smith 1:16:55
I love that. I think that’s a great way to end. Curtis, thank you so much for doing this. It’s been it’s been I can’t even tell how much of a pleasure it is to sit down and talk with you. And I want to tell everybody that the channel is off the left eye on YouTube. That’s the name of the podcast as well. I believe I listened to the podcast because I listened to it while I’m walking. But everybody check it out. Curtis, any final thoughts?

Curtis Childs 1:17:17
Oh, well, this was fun. And I really enjoy you inviting me into this conversation. And I get excited. Whenever I’m talking about stuff like this. We think like we Yeah, definitely. Suffering leads to this joy in the idea of being able to end suffering. So there’s one part of Sweden Norway says you can’t really know what good is unless you know, it’s opposite. And one thing I can look back on everything negative I’ve gone through and see is it has Stoke this fire in me this enthusiasm for nobody should have to go through this stuff that we’re going through, and how can we how can we solve these problems? And how can we bring joy to people? And that that’s, I think, I wouldn’t care about that as much if everything was gone, right for me, I would have just been more interested in. Okay, well, how can I get the next thing on my agenda to continue to be obsessed with myself? Right? So, you know, I’m, there’s definitely times when I would have been upset to say this, but things I can see where we’re going, even though that I’ve had tons of times in my life, that I’m not saying it’s okay, God, I’m saying this is not okay. And I don’t think we’re supposed to get to the point where we’re saying this stuff is okay. I think you think about a kid who goes through something hard. You know, just because that’s the best metaphor. It’s like, No, of course, they’re gonna cry and be sad and, and God is not expecting us to not be being sad and be upset and be mad at him. And I’m mad at God all the time. But because you can’t help it, because it was so hard, right? But but in moments like this, I can look and say like, I think this is gonna be okay. I think we’re going to be okay. I think that in the end, it’s going to be just like the near death experience. People say like, once you see the full picture, like you’re saying, once that shadow is gone. I want to shake God’s hand and say like, you know, you know what, you did it the right way. And I’m just so excited for what we’re gonna do next.

Brian Smith 1:19:13
Well, thanks. Wow, that gave me goosebumps. Thanks, Curtis. Thank you. Have a good rest of your day. That’s it for another episode of grief to growth. I sure hope you got something out of it. Please stay in contact with me by reaching out at www dot grief to growth.com that’s grief the number two growth.com or you can text the word growth to 31996. That’s simply text growth gr o w th 231996. So if you’re watching this on YouTube, please make sure you subscribe. So hit the subscribe button and then hit the little bell here and it’ll notify you when I have new content. Always please share the information if you enjoy it. That helps me to get more views and then get the message out to more people. Thanks a lot and have a wonderful day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Judy Unger is a Shining Light mother. Judy’s five year old son Jason passed away in 1992 at the tender age of 5 years old. Jason had a severe congenital heart defect.

Judy’s grief journey was unusual in that it was 18 years later, in 2010, at the age of 50, that Judy really began processing her grief. She joined Compassionate Friends and even led a group after Jason passed. But, it wasn’t until her parents’ health challenges in 2010 that Judy was broken open and experienced a creative and emotional renaissance.

I met Judy just a week or so before we recorded this interview. She joined a circle I created on Insight Timer and shared with us her course: “Healing Grief Through Music“. Judy has repurposed songs she wrote early in her life and songs she wrote while she was going through her parents’ health issues into a series of 10 daily lessons that beautifully portray the highs and lows of grief. I found the course to be an excellent one for anyone in the early stages of grief or really any stage.

You can find out more about Judy at: www.judyungermusic.com

The Insight Timer course is free and is at: Healing Grief Through Music

 

Transcript

 

Announcer 0:00
Close your eyes and imagine what if the things in life to cause us the greatest pain, the things that bring us grief, or challenges, challenges designed to help us grow to ultimately become what we were always meant to be. We feel like we’ve been buried. But what if, like a seed had been planted and having been planted, who grow to become a mighty tree. Now, open your eyes. Open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true, infinite, eternal nature. This is grief to growth. And I am your host, Brian Smith.

Brian Smith 0:45
Hey everybody, this is Brian back with another episode of grief to growth and today I’ve got with me a fellow shining light parents Her name is Judy Unger, I met Judy recently, through an app that I use called insight timer, which if you’ve listened to the program before, you’ve heard me talk about insight timer all the time, and I formed a circle and inside timer and Judy joined the circle. Judy, I’m going to read your biography and then I’ll tell you why she’s here. Judy’s been a commercial illustrator since 1981. And illustrations can be seen in many well known food labels. for 30 years she focused on her art career in her family. She gave up songwriting and playing guitar, which was something she loved as a young girl. In 1992, Judy’s five year old son Jason died from a severe congenital heart defect. Judy wanted to be buried with them in Greece, Walder up for swelled her life up for almost two decades. And night and 2010 at the age of 50. Judy was caring for her parents and coping with the challenges she faced with the three surviving children. During that time she became exhausted, uninspired and sad. It was truly a miracle. At the age of 50, she was able to experience a creative and emotional Renaissance, Judy opened her heart to write the deeply painful experience of losing Jason, and her journey toward healing began sharing the story of his brief life transformed her, and the grief that she carried was lifted. finding joy after 18 years of sorrow was a gift that Judy had never imagined. Music was a magic carpet that lifted her over all of her stress. She was very close to both her parents, and it was hard to watch them suffer. But her songs ease their pains and she was especially grateful to both her parents witnessed her joy before they died. Judy is a passionate songwriter. His songs comprise a musical of her life. Many of her songs are dedicated to her son Jason should rediscover the songs composing her youth and wrote new songs that helped her cope with their current challenges. And that’s how I met Judy, because she’s taken some of her songs and turned them into a course on insight timer. And that’s where I spend a lot of time talking about today. Judy’s blog, my journeys, insight and illustrating my life, as rich people all over the world. Her book beside me always is available on Amazon and on Kindle. Judy also creates meditation music for insight timer, and we’re going to talk about her free course, which is healing grief through music, Judy wants is here today to convey your optimism and her belief that if she could heal, perhaps others could find hope with her story, if her words and music bring any level of comfort to another person, and she believes she has achieved more in her lifetime than she’s ever dreamed of. So with that, I want to welcome Judy Unger.

Judy Unger 3:14
Thank you. Thank you again for having me. I’m honored. Yeah, Judy,

Brian Smith 3:18
I’m glad you’re here. I am a believer in synchronicities. I think that people come across our lives that were meant to meet. And as I mentioned, in the intro, I use this app insight timer. I literally use it every day. And they have a new feature on there where you can create circles, and I created a circle and you came in. And you told me about this course. And I looked at the overview of the course I’m like, this looks fantastic. And there are 10 lessons, I will confess, I’m on lesson nine. I haven’t finished the 10th lesson yet. But it’s it’s it’s great. And it’s healing grief through music, which I’m a big fan of music. So tell me about First I want to I want to get a chance to talk about Jason. So tell me about Jason.

Judy Unger 3:58
Um, well, I was just gonna say about my course I should have named it healing grief through my music, but I shortened it to make it just more palatable because I really can’t say healing grief through music, you know, music to you, because I don’t know how everybody is going to respond or heal. I know people in grief that have told me that they cannot listen to music. it stirs up the memories and it makes them ill. And I understand that too. I did not have music during my grade. It was a long time before the music came back to me. And I’m grateful to that every day. Jason Wow. What can I say about little Jason, he lived five years. And he taught me so much but I have to be honest. When when he died. I felt different than other breed parents. I had this horrible revelation that I wish he had never been born or I wished he had died as an infant because he was very sick when he was born. He barely made it and my rationale for that was If he had died early, I wouldn’t have suffered as much because I grew to love him. I was his caregiver, he was fragile. It was my involvement and dedication that actually kept them alive. He almost died so many times. So having that burden and feeling that there was just only torture, and the fact that I have remaining children, I had another son, that was two. And later on, he was diagnosed with autism. And I didn’t know I thought it was great. He was screaming all the time, he wouldn’t talk. So not only did I lose this very articulate, old man who was five years old, after heart surgery, I had another child that wouldn’t stop screaming. They couldn’t even say, Mommy, so he was five years old. And I got pregnant right away. So I threw myself into my children. And that was my distraction, and also my survival, my coping. But it wasn’t even until I wrote about grief, which was 18 years after his death, that I learned that Jason’s name and healer, and I didn’t, I didn’t name them, knowing that it was just really astonishing for me. He was very worse. He was like a shining light, he sparkles. He was exuberance. I’m grateful that he didn’t really suffer. He could have suffered, I think in some ways I tell parents that have lost children worse than death is to see your child suffer. For me, I mean, that’s my belief. So my whole goal was to keep him from suffering to do everything during the short life that would make him comfortable. And when you’re a caregiver, I mean, every there is no good death in there. I don’t like to compare, because you’ll often hear the worst death suicides. You know, losing an older child is different than losing a young losing a young child. And I went through all that, because I was very involved with a lot of other bereaved parents. But I learned comparisons, just what is the point? You know, my grief is worse than your grief, it’s all bad, you know, there, there just really isn’t a point to compare. So it took me a long time. But eventually, I realized that I’m actually grateful that I had him. I don’t believe that I wish he would have died. It was just very hard to be a parents, to my surviving children. What kind of a parent would I be to my daughter who was born less than a year after his death? I was not going to sing to her. I wasn’t smiling. I was crying all the time with the pregnancy has been affected by all the grief. So that’s a lot, a lot to carry. Yeah,

Brian Smith 7:51
yeah, absolutely. Well, I wanna I want to go back to something you said earlier, before you start talking about Jason and the idea of healing through music. And I do have friends, who’s after the children have passed? It’s too. Music is too powerful. I can’t listen to it. I’m exactly the opposite. My daughter passed away in the summer, I walk every day. And I was listening to music and seeking out music that would help me heal to process the feelings that I was going through. So you write a little bit different for everybody. And for some people might take a while because your music was taken away from you for a while. And I know, another parent I work with who creates music and creates art much like yourself. And when his son passed away, he couldn’t even go near his instruments for for quite a while.

Judy Unger 8:37
Yeah. Well, what’s interesting for me is to backtrack on the journey. My music and songwriting was during the time before I had children before I got married. And when I got married, I put it aside because I became career oriented. And I also think I wasn’t connected to my heart, I began to suppress my feelings. I thought, I’m not really happy, but I’ve got to be a mature woman and accept that this is what married life is, and I just don’t feel like singing anymore. Then when I had Jason, who was my first child, he loved music. So it revived my music for that time just for him. It wasn’t about original songs. It was about whatever he wanted to hear. And he had his own little guitar. So after he died, the thought that I could ever sing again. It was like I did try for my other children because they deserve to hear a song or two, but my heart was, and I never dreamed I’d sing again. But here’s the little clue. A very tiny clue. It’s actually a big clue. When I was 17, I wrote a song named beside me always. And it was a it was for boyfriends. And it was just the feeling that he would still be with me in future. I have other songs like that. And then Jason died and I was absolutely in shock, and we had to hold a funeral. And I thought, I don’t think I can get up and speak. So I actually recorded a eulogy. And I wanted some poetry. So I thought about that song. And I decided, you know what, the lyrics are very much about him, somebody being beside you, I’m changing the lyrics. So I revised those lyrics. And I read the funeral. Of course, not seeing them. I couldn’t imagine singing, but I read them. I also had another song called saying goodbye, and another one called more than you know, but three songs that I went. And then I didn’t have music in my life, and the rediscovery of music is an entire story in itself. But it was 18 years after Jason had died, I felt very proud that I had survived grief survived. And that was a huge achievement, I considered it My greatest achievement. Because it was one foot in front of the others. And I sometimes don’t even think I had hope I was crawling, I found that it helped me to connect with other bereaved parents. And that was kind of like holding hands, I remember a grief coach said to me, You need to find someone going through it with you, I can’t really hold your hand, I’m far ahead, find someone also in the same at the same timeframe that you’re going through it. So I found some partners. And in grief, we learn how to walk again, and we shuffle forward. And I, I thought I had survived this, and then it reached a place of suppression, you know, I almost I didn’t cry anymore. I didn’t talk about Jason, I felt like if I talked about him in the beginning, I didn’t want to be with people that talk about trivial things, it would make me really angry, like, you know, I lost my child, and you’re talking about, you know, you’re upset about something mundane. But then later on, it’s like, if I was to mention them, I had a child to die. And then my friend would go, I’m so sorry. And then everything would focus. And then I felt like, I wanted to support my friend and not make them uncomfortable. So I didn’t bring it up. I didn’t say Today’s the anniversary of his death. I just kept it to myself. But I had support from my parents, and from a few good friends and years went by. Yeah, and I was not really happy. I mean, I was just surviving. I had my other children who had issues. I did not have a good marriage, but my determination was Greek was not going to destroy my marriage. So I stayed married no matter what. But the truth was, even before I had children, I was lonely. In fact, I think that’s why I had children to fill the void. So I had so much I wasn’t, I wasn’t acknowledging, and how did I wake up? What changed?

Well, what changed was the loss of my mother and my father, they were getting sick, and I took them in to live with me. And then my mother kept falling and getting sicker and sicker. And at one point, she was on a respirator for like six weeks, and I didn’t think she was going to make it. But I started to every night, I come home from the hospital and write to my family and my friends. And they were captivated by my writing. They said, You’re a really good writer. But it was because I began to share the details, I would tell them, you know, you know, the trick to I could see her blink her eyes and she’s communicating. And I think she’s gonna, you know, I mean, they were hanging on to my descriptions. And she actually slowly improved and she was released from the hospital, it was a miracle. But after that, I thought, you know, I want to keep writing. So I started my blog, my journeys and sites. And I was, I was kind of exhilarated by the idea, what am I going to write about? So I started out writing about what I’ve been through with my living children, you know, how difficult it was to find out my son that surviving had autism, and what I had to go through, and then, you know, having my daughter born right after grade, and then I had my third son, and he also had trouble. So I was just writing all these stories, but I wasn’t writing the hardest one. Yeah, that’s the one. So one day I went in the closet and I took the box out that held all this memorabilia. And I sorted through it. It was 18 years after but it came back is if it had just happened.

Brian Smith 14:43
Yeah, I could. Yeah, I could definitely relate to that. It’s been five and a half for me and you can go right back there just just like that. I do want to ask you a few questions. So it was 18 years before you really sat down to process your grief after after Jason pass. And I want to say This, I want people to hear that because I think it’s very important I work with with clients that was just telling before we start it. Usually it’s in the first six months to a year that, you know, they come to me. And I find they’re like, I’m going to be this way forever, you know, this is never going to change. And when you try to hold that hope out to someone that that’s that early, they just can’t see it. But, you know, it can take us a while to process and we all process a little bit differently. But the question was, did you were part of compassionate friends? Is that right?

Judy Unger 15:29
I was a leader. Yes.

Brian Smith 15:31
How long after Jason passed? Did you join compassionate friends?

Judy Unger 15:36
Well, that’s interesting. Not everybody wants support groups. But for me, it was something desperate. It was like, if I can’t be in a support group, I don’t know what to do. So I looked all over, I started I actually went to a general support group. And that was where I found my partner in grief, my friend and I connected because in this group, there were people that had lost a pet of parents. And we were just, like, scornful, like, oh, my god that has nothing compared to what we’re going through. That was my mistake. You know, at that time, I, I just was so angry, you know, that stage and her and I connected, but then I realized I need something closer. So then I went to a compassionate Friends Meeting, I went to different ones in the area. And here was the thing I would listen in if it was a baby. Or if it was an older guy wanted somebody that had lost the kid like Jason, because only they can understand what I went through a kid that had a heart defect or health issues, because I was a caregiver that was really hard, you know, to lose that, that space in my life. What do I do with myself, and somebody that had lost a child was an older, I had to clean out his bedroom, you know, you had an older child who didn’t have to deal with that I wanted that tool relating. And it was interesting, because I did meet a mother who had a child with a similar heart defect. And it taught me something. Isn’t it interesting, you learn from every person you meet, I beat myself up because my son died after surgery. And I kept thinking, I had another doctor with a different opinion. And this surgeon, my cardiologist recommended her but she really wasn’t a pediatric cardiology, heart surgeon. Maybe he could have survived and I had picked the wrong person or whatever was, yeah. And then this woman, her story was her son needed heart surgery, and she checked them into the hospital. And he died the night before surgery, he didn’t even have surgery, and he dies. So what did that tell me that told me, you know, it’s capricious, I mean, he Jason could have done it before surgery, it just, it is what it is, which is an awful thing to say. But I learned I learned from that. And then in the end, it turned out that there wasn’t going to be anybody that lost Jason only i that is the lonely part. That is the part that’s so horrible about grief. There’s no one that’s going through what you’re going through your personal love and devotion and the horrible loss.

Brian Smith 18:06
Yeah, well, you know, it’s both unique and universal at the same time. You know, it’s we all go through grief, we all we all go through one way or the other there, you know, whether you lost a pet or you lost a child, it’s grief. But there is something very unique about it as well. But a lot of things you said were very common, you know, anger, guilt, you know, what did I do? Could I have done something different? I think every parent goes through that no matter how their child passes, and just we think we’re superhuman, right, we should have done something different.

Judy Unger 18:36
How would I not save my child? That is the ultimate failure. We can’t say my child.

Brian Smith 18:41
Yeah. And the other thing, I’ve seen that also with parents, I guess I just don’t really have it. But I’ve seen it’s very common as I want to talk to somebody whose child died just the way mine did. You know, that’s it. My child was murdered, I need to talk to someone was murdered, because they’re the only ones that could understand. I think I think that’s something that we go through and kind of move through that phase too, before we realize that, yeah, child is losing a child.

Judy Unger 19:06
It’s so different. Now. I can’t believe the person I was versus the person I am. I mean, I’m helping people that have lost older children. They’re just like, I don’t have time to heal. I mean, I’ll be dead in 10 years. You know, it’s like, I just want to die now and be with my child, or the sadness of even a stillbirth or miscarriage. They don’t have any memories. You know, they didn’t get that chance. Right. That’s a huge loss. So my compassion has grown.

Brian Smith 19:34
So what are your what were your thoughts about Jason’s state, I guess, after he after he and I know she would use the word died and I’m part of a group called helping parents heal and we’re very careful with their language. So I don’t I don’t often use the word died. So that’s why I stumble over it because I don’t believe our children die. But um, so what were your thoughts about Jason after after he died? What did you think about where he was? Was he with you? Did you think about it at all?

Judy Unger 20:02
Well, you know, I, it was so awful that I wrote about it. And actually, I could read an excerpt that I wrote for my audio book. Because once I did write his story, and I began healing, I decided that I really wanted to share it. I recorded an audio book with his story and about my songs early on, like two years after that, but it took me another three years or four years till it got out there. And actually, when it got out there, I hired somebody to read the book, because I just didn’t think I could sell it that I didn’t have a professional speaking voice. But I realized that people appreciate the heartfelt nature of it. And actually, I’m inside time or having the live sessions have been wonderful. Because I decided to read the story again, it really takes me back. So let me pull it out real quick. And, okay, I’ll do a little segment on the name of the name of my book is beside me always, which is the song that that truly told my story. And the lyrics to beside me, always that song is so telling. Because even though I wrote the song, back at the age of 17, I still did this thing in the chorus, where the chorus that’s initial is, and when my tears are flowing, and I’m not sure where I’m going, I feel your love, and you’re beside me always in the breeze that’s blowing, you surround me in a breeze that’s blowing. But at the very end, I say, I switch it. And I say you would tell me when your tears are glowing, and you’re not sure where you’re going, just feel my love and I’m beside you always in the breeze that’s blowing on surround you in a breeze that’s blowing. So the whole concept was I’m looking, I’m wondering, and I’m feeling the breeze that’s giving me chills, you know, it’s like, I know he’s there. And now I hear his voice and he’s telling me, I’m there. I’m surrounding you. So when he dies, first of all, I had never seen a dead person in my life. I was innocent. You know, there’s this whole stage of grief before and after. You’re not the same person and you never will be and there’s never and the the absolute the always the never. But I choose to look at that as I’ve transformed. It’s changed my life. And I actually look at it now is a blessing. I didn’t use too bad to breed mother told me the word blessing upsets her. It’s like, Why are other people blessed, and I lost my child, so on curse. So I’m not saying like, I’m better than anybody. But I do say to myself that there’s something positive came out of it. It actually, I thought my songs were dead. That was a dead gone forever. But because of Jason, I injected all of my love to him into the music. Yeah, to me, which helps others. And he’s come back. He’s living in a different way absolute living through my music. So here is I just read this segment because it is so, so emotional.

Brian Smith 23:32
At this point, Judy reads a passage from her book, beside me always. And I’ve decided to take that passage and move it to the end of the interview. Some of the descriptions that are pretty graphic and I’m afraid could be triggers for people who are newly into grief or some of us who may have discovered our child’s body after they passed. So what I wanted to do was to move that to the end. I think it’s very important. It’s very uplifting. I think for people that are ready for that. It does end on a note of hope. But I decided to move it to the end because I didn’t want to possibly trigger anybody. So stay to the very end if you want to hear the passage and I will add it in there. Meanwhile, I’m just going to continue with the conversation right after the break.

Announcer 24:18
We’ll get back to grief to growth in just a few seconds. Did you know that Brian is an author and a life coach. If you’re grieving or know someone who is grieving his book, grief to growth is a best selling easy to read book that might help you or someone you know people work with Brian as a life coach to break through barriers and live their best lives. You can find out more about Brian and what he offers at www grief to growth.com www dot g ri e f the number two gr o w th comm or text growth gr o w t h 231996. If you’d like to support this podcast, visit WWE W patreon.com slash grief to growth www.pa t ar e yo n.com slash g ri e f, the number two gr o w th to make a financial contribution. And now back to grief to growth.

Brian Smith 25:19
Thanks. Thanks, Judy, for reading that that’s you captured really well there. You know, I can relate to pretty much everything you said. I think you captured it really well. And what I want to point out to people when they hear that, I don’t want anybody to think Well, I’ve got to wait seven years before things are gonna get better. Or, you know, everybody’s proof journey is unique. And and it depends on who we are the relationship we have with our child, it depends on what we what we do. You know, so there we can we all process things differently is what I want to say to people. So I don’t want anybody to get discouraged when they when they hear that that might be you know, you know, a very, very long time. So when did you When did you write that? You said that was pretty soon after Jason passed, right?

Judy Unger 26:05
No, no, I

Brian Smith 26:05
that was later. Yeah, yeah.

Judy Unger 26:07
Yeah. The story that I wrote was 18 years after his death. Yeah. It all came back. Yeah. Interesting. Because after I wrote the story, I felt differently. It was it. I was carrying all those details in here. And it was it was taking up space. Yeah, writing it down, suddenly, I could let it go.

Brian Smith 26:28
And I don’t want to put words in your mouth. But I want to ask you this. So feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. But it sounds like for a long time, you kind of suppressed your grief, you didn’t really express it. And then when you’re a parent, and this is very common to because it happened to me when my grandmother passed away. It was about three years later before another very emotional that triggered me to actually start processing it. So it sounds like that your parents that what you’re going to do the parents kind of triggered you to process what you’ve got there with Jason, is that right?

Judy Unger 26:58
I’m not sure how to describe it. I think I felt like I cried in tears. Like, there weren’t any tears left. It was like, I was done crying, and I was emptied out and I was tired. And that it suddenly occurred to me that I could survive. You know, survival just meant I always would grieve. I was always sad about his loss. But it wasn’t the forefront of my life. I wasn’t here and crying all the time. I was grateful for that. Because after many years of sitting in my car, and crying before I could get out and see my friends and pretend everything was fine. And I don’t think I was pushing it down. I actually reached a place I called zombie land. I had no feelings. And I think that’s a place where we don’t want to feel pain. So we choose not to feel anything. No pain, no joy flatline. And my parents had been a big support. So you are absolutely right. That was the trigger that Oh my God, my mother used to, you know, remember Jason with me. And now I’m losing her. And I don’t feel this connection to my husband, because we never shared our grief. And that was an issue for us, which is so common to, but I just I felt so alone in the world. Yeah. And then it’s like that space opened up after writing the story. And I became open. And what happened was a good friend had said to me, do you ever play your guitar anymore? And I like, Are you kidding? It’s in my closet for 30 years, you know? And one day, I just went in my closet and pulled it out. I was alone. And I What song did I play beside me always. I mean, I remember this song. And I started plants. And it was like, something came into me like his spiritual moment. Like I felt him. And then I went back and I played it the next day and hurt the way my fingers were really hurting. Yeah. And that was the beginning. That was it.

Brian Smith 28:54
That’s what happens. I think my thing is, I think grief has to be processed. I think it demands to be processed. And we can we can we can try to bypass it. We can try to stuff it down and it’ll sit there and then we’ll wait. But it’ll, but at some point, it’s going to come back until we until we invited in and go through it, you know, and yeah, there’s no way there’s no way around it. We have to we have to go through it. I remember as

Judy Unger 29:24
a as a leader, a person came into the support group. She had just gone off antidepressants. After five years. It was like it was her first day knowing her story.

Brian Smith 29:34
Yeah, you know, thing. antidepressants are interesting. You know, I’m not a medical doctor, I don’t get medical advice and people. Some people need to be on medication. So I always preface it with that. But I’ve been on antidepressants, and it’s what you described as Zombieland. And I realized I didn’t care about anything. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t sad. I was just like flatline. So sometimes we need that in the early stages of grief for it and the shock and it’s overwhelming. We need that to zombie out but it Some point we’ve got to we’ve got to look in the eye and face it and go through it. And I think with you, if I remember correctly as I was listening through the lessons at one point, you said, You started doing hypnotherapy? I think that was 18 years. Right. Jason had passed away.

Judy Unger 30:16
Yeah, it was. It was interesting, because I did not feel that I could benefit from any kind of counseling. I tried going to a counselor, I’ve actually she was someone who had lost a child. But she seemed to be like a cheerleader. And she’s like, something good will come out of it. And I was like, Are you kidding me? I don’t want to hear that right now. Right. And I was done with her. And then of course, I tried a few other therapists. And if they had lost a child, what the hell did they know? You know, it turned out my best therapy was other parents. They know. And that was my Savior, anybody that had lost a child, not, you know, hugely close, but it could see them and they were those were the only people I wanted to be with. And it was a shock to me, when the leader of the compassionate friends group I was going to she had lost two children, which I can’t even begin to believe. He asked me if I could take over, I was not even one year into my grief. And I’m taking over a grief group. But all I did was sit there and let everybody tell their story. That’s what we do. Yeah, and I don’t,

Brian Smith 31:16
I don’t want to get in comparing groups. But I’m part of helping parents heal, as I said earlier, and I have never been part of compassionate friends. So I’ll preface it with that. But we strongly believe in talking about the continuity of life, and our children’s still being with us and celebrating our children. And I know for me, that’s made all the difference in the world. You see, my daughter is over my shoulder. Because I literally believe that she’s with me all the time. And she’s she’s inspired me to do what I do. And I was fortunate that I found this group, you know, only a few months after Shane, that passed away. And I think that helped me to process the grief and being around bereaved parents. I mean, like you said, we went, we had a conference. It’s been three years ago now. And we were at we were out in Scottsdale, Arizona, all his parents were together. And it was funny, because we were just having a great time. We’re laughing and your happy hour and the hotel, people walk through. It’s like, Who’s that group? It’s like, Well, those are the three parents. But it was just being around people that understood us. Where we could be ourselves. We could we could cry together. We could laugh together. And we could process like, what does this mean? What do I do with this? You know, so when someone tells you that hasn’t had a child pass, or something good is gonna come out of that she want to smack him in the face. You don’t want to hear that. When another parent tells you that that’s 10 years in, you know, then you say, Well, okay, maybe maybe they don’t maybe that can happen.

Judy Unger 32:37
Yeah, it makes me think about my song that, I guess you know, I don’t focus as much on the transition of the afterlife because I’m trying to just live in the present to get through the life that I have. Because I do know a lot of great parents where they’re just looking forward to dying to be Yeah, yes, but my song angel in the sky right away reminded me of your daughter. Because Shana means beautiful. And my mother used to call me Shana put them meaning beautiful face and the lyrics of that song or a dream about your sweet embrace your sparkling eyes, your beautiful face, and you are my angel in the sky like a butterfly, you flew away and couldn’t stay, we had to say goodbye, I still cry. So you must know I miss you. So my angel in the sky. And the second verse is a and when I die, you’ll take my hand, my lovely light, just not in sight. So I definitely believe that when I die, he’ll be right there to help me and be there to see him again.

Brian Smith 33:42
Yeah, and you made a really important point. We don’t want to live just to die. And and I and that’s a face that I’ve went through. And frankly, sometimes I’m still there, where I look forward to seeing my daughter, we have to live this life. We have things to do while we’re here. And I know. So we there has to be a balance, you know, but we can we can also get so caught up in this world. And you talk about this, and I forgot which one of your songs or which one of your lessons you talk about. It’s really important, though, is that, that always the absolutes that we say I will always be sad, I will never see you again. This is for fitness for return. I was talking with someone just the other day and they said, for eternity for the rest of my life. I will never see her again. And I’m like you just said two opposing things there. The rest of your life is not eternity. But that’s the way we feel we’re going through grief.

Judy Unger 34:35
Right? Love is forever. Right. That’s the part, the suffering. I mean, one of the things I often dealt with is, do I feel guilty to tell someone that I’m healed? What does that mean? I mean, healing represents a scar. I mean, I call it the amputation of my soul, the part that people can’t see that you’ve lost something there’s a sympathy for that. You carry it. And then the whole idea of healing is I’m not letting go of love. I’m letting go of the suffering and my son. He doesn’t want me to suffer. I mean, that’s a truism where you say, Oh, the person you’re grieving doesn’t want you to suffer. Well, that doesn’t take away the pain when your ends. But I wrote the story of healing and it was an image, I was in a prison of grief. And that was actually a term another brief person told me she says, I’m in a prison of grief, and there’s no escape. Yes. And you’re, you’re angry, like, what did I do to be in this prison? What is my crime, that I am in prisons, and there’s just like, No way else. And then, one day, I, I was able to leave that prison. And I kept going back, because I wanted the other prisoners to know they could lead to but I kept wondering how in the world did I leave the prison. And then I saw this image, it was my son, and his face was like a light. And he handed me the key. He wanted me to leave, he did not want me to live in a prison. He was giving me the key. And that I wrote a song about

Brian Smith 36:13
Yeah. And and I love that what you said there. And because it’s interesting, because as I’m listening to the course, I hear sometimes you say, grief, I’m over my grief for my grief is ended or grief ends. And then other times you talk about how we, you know, we are always in grief. And we talked about that before we get started. And I think it’s both that you said just so eloquent, right? Did the suffering can and that continual, terrible feeling, but we still missed them. I think he used this analogy in one of your songs or, and one of the lessons and it’s one I learned a long time ago, that when our loved one is ripped away from us, there’s like a hole in our heart. And it’s raw, and it’s painful. And that hole eventually scars over and it leaves scars. There’s still a hole. But I think you said the holes filled with love. That wasn’t one of your lessons, right? Yes.

Judy Unger 37:01
Yeah. Love is love is the key. I mean, yeah, it was love that got me surviving. Because I still loved my other children. I love my parents. I felt that that was the only reason to go on. Because there was no other point. Yeah, but I also had a concept from angel in the sky, which of course was very important that I still cry. It’s okay to cry. I still cry about my son. Does that mean that I’m still in deep grief? No, it’s acknowledging the feelings. And the healing is the part where I used to anticipate the day of his death. And his birthday, I mean, a birthday is even sadder than a death day, because are passing transition day. The the birthday represents the fact that he will never grow up, he’ll never get married, have children, even all the things that you wish for your child, that will not happen. But now I can, his birthday can come and I feel peaceful. And I remember him and I sing songs for him. And an angel in the sky, I came up with this concept Angel here on Earth. He’s in the sky, I’m honored. And by honoring his legacy he lives on his name is mentioned, he becomes alive to me. And it also means by helping other people. It’s a beautiful way to keep his memory alive.

Brian Smith 38:20
Absolutely. And I think that’s the balance that we talked about earlier. You know, we don’t want we don’t want to bypass, you know, this life, and just say, Okay, I’m just gonna wait till I die. And then I’ll see him again, right? He’s still here with me, I can still honor him while I’m here. And they and our loved ones, whether they’ve transition, whether it’s a parent or child, or, you know, spouse, or whatever it is, they don’t want us to be miserable. And sometimes we hold on to that misery because we think the pain is we confuse it with the love. And if we let go the pain then we’re letting go of the love.

Judy Unger 38:54
Exactly.

Brian Smith 38:56
So what I like to do is, let’s talk about the course because I want to explain to people what it is if we guess we haven’t explained it very well. So it’s, it’s 10 lessons. And each lesson is a song that Judy has written and she actually cites the lyrics or recites the lyrics. And then you talk about the meaning of them for you. So let’s go through just real quickly, maybe, you know, a couple minutes or 30 seconds or a minute on each song on each lesson. Sure. So the first one is so real.

Judy Unger 39:27
Yeah, the first line is this morning, I woke up and it slipped my mind that you’re not here with me anymore. And it’s about that shock where you wake up and you have this peaceful feeling like you still remember there you can call them and then all of a sudden, it hits you like a shock to your hearts. And again, the beauty of the healing for me is I look forward to waking up in the morning but for so many years, so many years. That was the worst part. I did not want to wake up. I didn’t want to wake up to face this. That’s what song is about.

Brian Smith 40:01
And every season.

Judy Unger 40:04
Well I talked about him when he died, the weather became cold, he died at the beginning of autumn. So every year when the season would change, the dead leaves were like his body crumbling into a pile of dust. It was just triggering the memories, but then the memories of summer is last summer on Earth. and spray it was like each seasonal change was so sad. And I it was my first song that I wrote as an adult woman, because I didn’t know I could write songs again. And there I was playing my guitar again. And this song came to me I could write a new song. And the lyrics were sad it was when you left from life, I withdrew. And a piece of my soul died to life and death are a mystery. And my sadness will always be every season, you come back to me. And you know, I thought I change it to and my love will always be and I tried to sing that. It didn’t feel authentic. So I left it, I left it because it’s a testimony to how I feel how I felt before I healed.

Brian Smith 41:11
I think it’s a part. I think that’s important. Because what I love about as I’ve gone through this, I can remember being in each one of these stages, and and it makes you feel less alone when you hear someone else singing your emotion. So I’m glad you left it the way it is. Beside me always. Well, I

Judy Unger 41:28
feel like that what I’ve covered. I mean, yeah, of course. But the main thing was, it’s so cool that I could write a book about this story. And it’s on. It’s on Amazon. And it’s also an audio book, which is very close to my heart. Because I have some recordings on there of Jason’s voice him and I conversing and yeah, yeah, so that song actually is what brought me inside time. Yeah.

Brian Smith 41:54
And you have recordings of his voice and one of the songs and one of the lessons. I love that

Judy Unger 42:00
book. I just say real quick. When I did the book, I had someone promoting it. And she says do a meditation album to go with the book. So I’ve never done meditation albums. So I did a meditation album. That’s how insight timer found me. So it’s just part of the story.

Brian Smith 42:14
Yeah, Hang on.

Judy Unger 42:17
Hang on was just about all the ways that I found to hang on. And I even say at the end, when I was grieving, I did all these things until the day I arrived, when I realized it can’t become easier to hang on. The sun started shining down and life became bearable. If you find yourself slipping, there are hands to hold you if you look for them, you are worth it. Don’t forget your loved one is folding into. I didn’t realize when I was making on. I thought it was it was the loneliest journey ever. It wasn’t till later that I realized that

Brian Smith 42:52
absolutely. set you free.

Judy Unger 42:55
Well, that was actually about letting go of my father. He was very sick when I wrote it. And it was I need to set you free. I hadn’t done it yet. It doesn’t express that I’ve done it’s like the struggle. And the words that brought me tears were your smile, your touch, your voice, your face, your essence, I will never replace. And that makes me cry, because that’s the part we feel that we’re going to lose. We’re going to forget how they smell how they sounded. And it does get harder, and you don’t want to let go of that. And at the same time, the pain is so great. But then when my parents both died, I sang that song to them as they were dying. And my mother, I finished the song. And I said I need to set you great. And her book her last breath. It was like so eerie. That song helped to set me free. Yeah,

Brian Smith 43:48
yeah. I just say when I when I heard I heard you’re saying the lyrics and I saw the lesson title. I was like, I don’t like this one. But I love how you tied it into your parents and studying there. That physical existence, you know, go free. Because for me, I’ll never let Shayna go free. So that’s just that’s just my my little thing there.

Judy Unger 44:07
I love the word essence. That’s the part. Yeah, yeah. Are there?

Brian Smith 44:11
Yeah, absolutely. It’s not forever.

Judy Unger 44:15
Well, I remember going to a Greek site where I had this lesson was one word for grief. And I mean, I have the list here. agony, anguish, eternal, alone, forever excruciating. It went on and on. But what was the most, most repeated word forever. So I thought, this is the song I’m going to write. And it was really, you say your pain will always be there. And every day is a nightmare. I remember so well, living with that kind of Hill. So that song was a change, because Hang on. I was so excited about healing from grief. I wanted to tell everyone you can do it. And I was a cheerleader. And I thought, you know, that’s not compassionate enough for me because I didn’t like it when people do that. To me in the early stages, I’m gonna write a different song. I remember so well when I was more like, I know what you’re going through, and then the whole thing, it’s not forever, it feels like it’s never going to change. You know? So that’s why that’s why I wrote the song.

Brian Smith 45:15
Yeah, that’s the thing that breaks my heart more than anything. When I’m talking to someone. When I hear that forever. It’s for it’s forever, I will never see them again. It’s always going to be this way. I will always feel this way. And you You’re right. It’s the hang on thing is is okay. But it’s like, but there’s hope. And, but it’s going to be for a little while, you know that there’s work to be done.

Judy Unger 45:37
The funniest part though, is the songs. I’m writing for others. For me, right. I was going through a really terrible divorce. And I kept listening to hang on. And that got me through it. My own song. It was like I was talking to myself.

Brian Smith 45:49
Yeah. Somewhere I can’t see.

Judy Unger 45:53
That was anticipatory. I, I was losing my mother now. And I decided, you know what? I hold on to the love and heals me. You’re not gone. You’re just somewhere I can’t see. I won’t drown in misery. Because your love rescues me. That’s the chorus. And it was just a way to tell myself, I can get through this group grief because I know they’re there. And I just can’t see them and their love is going to save me.

Brian Smith 46:21
Okay and clear.

Judy Unger 46:24
That was about finding clarity. And the biggest line in the song for me was the ending line. It’s never too late to turn your life around. No reason to wait. And the irony was I was waiting. I was terrified. I decided to end my marriage. And I didn’t know how to do it was horrible. And the whole thing about clear was, it was like beautiful music I could hear I opened my eyes, life became clear. The music was like clarity. Because I’m writing these lyrics that are like a script. It was bizarre. It was like there is my own song is telling me hang on. And it’s not forever. It was like, I better listen to my lyrics. So when I wrote that it’s never too late to turn your life around. And I was waiting. I thought I guess I better stop waiting and live. Thank God for my songs because I did write a song music saved me. Is that not true? Because if it hadn’t appeared, I might be in the same situation. The zombie lands.

Brian Smith 47:26
Yeah, my shining star.

Judy Unger 47:29
I love that one especially. It’s your breath, I feel you whisper in my ear to heal. That was about being alone and sad. And he’s there, you know, in my heart, you will stay I’ll hold on to our love forever. Every night. The stars above remind me of your love. It was just a song that that celebrated. Like he’s my shining star. He’s what I what I look to to get through every hard time.

Brian Smith 48:04
Awesome. And finally the key.

Judy Unger 48:08
That was the story I told about my prison of grace. And the revelation. It didn’t come till the very end of the song It says you came back to bring me the key. So here’s the the switch in every season, I said, and my sadness will always be every season, you come back to me. So I didn’t have a picture that he’s coming back to me every season. But a sad, sad picture. But the key is the evolution of healing because now it’s you came back to bring me the key. The key that allowed me to leave the prison. He didn’t come back. What a beautiful ending. Yeah,

Brian Smith 48:48
yeah, I love the arc. You know, it’s interesting, because I can see the arc and the songs. But also there’s hope, with the and within each song too. So there’s, you know, they start off, sad, and they and they can you can see more hope in each one. But there’s always some hope in it. And I love the way that you’ve laid it out. I was talking to you beforehand. You don’t include the actual songs in the lessons, and I’ll let you explain why.

Judy Unger 49:16
Oh, well, that’s because the lesson is just kept about 15 to 20 minutes. I figure if people want to hear the song, it’s available so they can look for the vocal Medley also have all of my course and all those songs and music on Bandcamp. But on insight timer, it’s free, and the course is free. So yeah, the best way to access the music. I mean, I have three songs that I love. Beside me always angel in the sky and my shining star that are just complete meditation versions that are about 20 minutes, and then I have them as a medley called heavenly healing meditation songs.

Brian Smith 49:55
I find that very spiritual. Awesome. Well, I want to tell people So if you get an insight timer, it’s a free app, you can download it to your iPhone or Android. There’s also the insight timer website. And I’ll put a link to the course in the show notes. Sure, but the course is called healing grief through mood music. So if you get insight timer, look for that. It’s by Judy Unger. Judy, if you want to find out more about her go to Judy Unger music calm it’s Judy. And it’s u n g r music.com. And there’ll be links to all the courts and you have a free course and insight timer, which is one that I’ve taken. And you also have a paid course if you’ve got the premium version of insight timer with more. And the other thing is the music that you songs that you use in the course are also available through insight timer for free. So look to the songs for the songs

Judy Unger 50:41
are also on. Some of them are on iTunes. I mean, I have on my blog, all my recordings for free as well on the Judy, younger music under song stories. It’s interesting because I’ve written 52 songs, somebody said to me, You have a full deck that actually, I have one for every week of the year. But I have enough songs to start another course. So the one that’s a paid course is called songs of healing and hope. And they’re not all grief songs. They’re songs about communication. I ended my marriage and, and all these songs about finding clarity, but I’m starting to write another course I don’t know what I’m going to name it, but I just go song by song, my Bible. It’s like each song has taught me something. Yeah, what you said about growth. I call my song song seeds. And I call my songs my song garden. those seeds were planted when I was young, and now I get to grow them. And you were talking about grief on your site about your berries. But who knows when you’re buried, what growth is going to come from that. And that’s reminds me of the butterfly. The grief is your darkness, you’re in a cocoon, and one day will emerge.

Brian Smith 51:48
And that’s a great point. And you know, it’s funny, I was just talking with someone the other day about the whole idea of about being in a cocoon, there’s a couple of things, you know that when the caterpillar goes in the cocoon, it takes patience, it takes a while for that Caterpillar to come out. So don’t rush your grief process. You know, and and God, it’s great that you after 18 years that Okay, now I’m going to start really processing my grief. But it’s still it takes us all a while. The other thing about a caterpillar, it would love that analogy. It’s a beautiful analogy, Caterpillar to a butterfly. But when the caterpillar crossing the into the cocoon, what people don’t realize it, it actually releases this digestive enzyme, and it becomes suit basically, it just just itself. So at some point in that process, it’s just a liquid mess. And that’s what we feel like when we’re going through grief. But we’ve got all the components, we need to rebuild ourselves and rebuild ourselves into something better. So when people say, am I ever going to be the same after my grief? I say I hope not. Because otherwise you’ve wasted all this pain. You’ve got to take this and make something out of it. No, that is so true. That is so true. Yeah, I

Judy Unger 52:54
think about the fact that people probably thought I had healed after 10 years. I mean, of course I I was coping, surviving. And this is the thing. I went from being a survivor of grief to healed and what was the difference? healing represents joy. But when I found joy through my music, that’s when I discovered healing. I didn’t know about it, and I had no idea that would ever happen. I did not believe I would ever. I mean, of course, yes, there’s laughter and this and that. But I mean, the joy of looking forward to waking up in the morning. And I think my appreciation for my life is so great, because I suffered so much. I’m so grateful that I don’t wake up with that pain that I can look forward to every day that there is such joy with my songs. And people will say, Oh, your music is so sad. But when my music makes me cry, that’s what heals me. It releases those tears. I wanted to make me cry. It has to be so beautiful, that it burrows into my heart and extracts those words, those words that help to heal me.

Brian Smith 54:04
Yeah. Well, you know, it’s interesting, because I remember after after Shayna passed away, and I was, you know, don’t listen to music every day, and I would take my walks. And I was thinking why do I like to listen to sad music, but I and I just just the other day I put on a song. I was like, I know this song is gonna make me cry. But there are times when you just need that you need that release. And then the music kind of takes those emotions that are that are tied up inside of you and brings them out.

Judy Unger 54:29
Exactly. I mean, I didn’t have music and I didn’t listen to music for all those years. I was grieving I call it. I was screaming in silence my hands. And I had that opera, replaying his death over and over.

Brian Smith 54:45
Yeah, what do you think? I want to thank you for putting your course out there and for making it available to all of us and I’ve already recommended it to people. I’m doing this podcast and recommend it to everybody that’s listening. If you’ve gone through any kind of a grief situation to get inside time or get the course go to Judy’s website and, and take advantage of it. You know, I appreciate you, you putting it out there.

Judy Unger 55:08
Yeah. And I think also what’s very cool now on insight timer are the live sessions. And I started doing them because it’s an opportunity for me to actually have a live session where I’m not reading a script I’ve written I work really hard to write these lessons. Now unlike you, this is why I had good practice with this today. I get to talk about the song and I play my guitar. I actually sing the song so then I can play beside me always. And I can sing to my son. It takes courage because I don’t think I’m you know, the Super Singer. But this is exactly what I want to be doing. I’m living my dream.

Brian Smith 55:44
Awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks, Judy, for being here and have brightens your day.

Judy Unger 55:48
I love looking at Shana, I want you to tell to tell you, it’s like there’s this light to the side of her face. And it sort of parallels you. And it’s lighting your face. And I can feel like she’s right here with us.

Brian Smith 56:04
Oh, yeah, she is she is absolutely thank

Judy Unger 56:06
you again. And to anybody listening. I just say never give up hope. Absolutely.

Brian Smith 56:15
And now, here’s a passage from beside me always by Judy Unger.

Judy Unger 56:21
When I say the opera began, I am describing my torture thought process during bereavement. It took at least 10 years before the opera of Jason’s death stopped. I would describe the opera as those last moments before the curtain dropped, and I touched my dead child. Those events played out in a looping format for me every day for years, I relive the last moments of my son’s life over and over again. It was truly the only way that something is unbelievable as his death could eventually be accepted. After Jason had his heart surgery, I went home because he was alive and I could collapse. I told my husband I would he would be there and I would stay with our younger son. I came home passed out on the bed with my baby, my two year old in the darkness. Suddenly I woke up and I see wave of dread came over me that sent chills throughout my body. I had a pit in my stomach that was deeper than anything I’d ever experienced. in terror, I will myself to stay calm. My fear only increased with the jarring sound of the telephone. The voice on the other end said I needed to come to the hospital right away. She said my son was not doing very well. I found out later Jason had already died when that call was made. I experienced the worst panic attack of my life. I could not stop shaking. My heart pounded loudly I could not hear or think where the hell wear my shoes, my role my glasses, my keys. I woke up my younger son and shrieked as I brought him to this babysitter. The drive to the hospital was the longest drive of my life. I thought I was having my head explode. My heart was pounding and pounding. I ran through hallways, I couldn’t remember where the pediatric intensive care unit was. Suddenly I saw my husband at the end of the hallway. He was running towards me crying loudly. He saw a piece gone. I started screaming we we were all screaming and crying so loudly because the unthinkable that happens. There was no way for me to have prepared myself for this. My husband was always shy and discreet. I had never seen him cry before our sobs and Wales went on and on. The surgeon came to see us she was crying too. I dismissed her go away. I decided I didn’t have to listen to any more medical jargon about cardiac abnormalities ever again. We were told we had to wait they needed to fix our child up in order for us to see him. It was soon time for me to go in and facing that. My son would be the first dead person I had ever seen in my life.

I could not see his freckles because his face was frosty white. The most shocking part was his blackened lips. His eyes were open, unforgettable, lifeless and empty. I will never forget those eyes for the rest of my life. Only the night before. Those same eyes were intelligence sparkling with joy and laughter. There was no question he was gone. And this was only a course. He felt so cold. I held on to him as long as I could. I cried and cried. And so the bereavements period of my life began and Opera In my mind over and over, it had no melody or music. It was endless and it went on and on for me. Well, life continued for everyone and everyone else around me. I collapsed in shock. What about my continued existence? I wanted to be with my son. I wanted to be dead. Where have you gone? He needed me so much. How could it be possible that he didn’t need me anymore? It didn’t seem possible. I went to those places over and over again. He’s cold, he’s hungry. He’s scared. He’s alone. He needs me. The truth was that I needed him. I had been his caregiver. And I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I went home and into his bedroom and covered my head with his pillow, the one that still had his odor on it. I cried enough tears to Bill an ocean. Why was I still alive? This was too much pain to possibly live with. books have been written about the stages of grief. I have lived all of those stages. The numbness was bizarre, there was no sense of time. Eating, sleeping living, seemed outside the realm of what it once was. There was no purpose for anything anymore. There was no way to control the endless parade of intensely painful, repetitive thoughts. I looked at the sky. Could he be there? I looked at a bird at a butterfly. Could he be visiting me? I strained to hear his voice again. Was he calling for his mommy. There was no color in the world anywhere. There was nothing but Shades of Grey. Within a day the weather became cold. I felt the season changed on the very day he died on October 6. Life continued for everyone and everything else around me, it did not seem possible that it could get any worse. It did not seem possible that it could get any better. It was what it was empty, sad, excruciating, endless. When I finally connected with other bereaved parents, we all agreed about such things as it was much harder in six months than the day it happens. Six months mark the absolute lowest moments. It’s six months, the support was gone. Everyone expected me to get on with my life. It was time to just get over it. At six months, the shock was just starting to wear off. And the painful reality was only just beginning. The first year was extremely painful. Every event was the first, the first Mother’s Day The first birthday. It was horrible. Much I wasn’t there to celebrate it. And then the second year was worse than the first year. I believed i’d survived the first year but it wasn’t getting any easier. It was discouraging. It felt like life as I knew it was not worth living anymore. There was truly no hope of getting better. I met another bereaved mother once and she said to me, it took me about seven years and seven years the agony will subside and you will definitely start feeling a little better. Well, she was right about that. In those agonizing years, I raised my other children, I had to get used to the idea of not taking care of Jason anymore. I had done it so well for five years. I didn’t know how to stop suddenly.

I was always proud of my survival, and I considered it My greatest achievements. But As the years passed, I felt like I was wounded and damaged. I seldom mentioned migraine. And I just learned that being angry, isolated me and led to further loneliness. One day I decided surviving wasn’t enough for me anymore. I expressed my honest feelings through writing and music, and I unburden my soul. I never realized how much energy was required to hold everything in. I believed I was incapable of happiness, after suffering the loss of what I had so deeply loved. I thought the best times in life were behind me. But I’m so grateful because I don’t feel that way anymore.

Brian Smith 1:04:32
That’s it for another episode of grief to growth. I sure hope you got something out of it. Please stay in contact with me by reaching out at www grief to growth.com that’s grief, the number two growth.com or you can text the word growth to 31996. That’s simply text growth gr o w t h 231996. So if you’re watching this on YouTube, please make sure you subscribe so that the subs scribe button and then hit the little bell here and it’ll notify you when I have new content. Always please share the information if you enjoy it that helps me to get more views and get the message out to more people. Thanks a lot and have a wonderful day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai