Krista St-Germain is a Master Certified Life Coach, grief expert, widow, mom, and host of The Widowed Mom Podcast.

When her husband was killed by a drunk driver in 2016, Krista’s life was completely and unexpectedly flipped upside down. After therapy helped her unfurl from the fetal position, Krista discovered Life Coaching, Post Traumatic Growth and learned the tools she needed to move forward and create a future she could get excited about. Now she coaches and teaches other widows so they can love life again, too.

In this episode we discuss:

• Why do traumatic situations often feel like a movie playing out before your eyes?
• What is Post Traumatic Growth: Scientists have now discovered that loss can actually be a catalyst for growth and a source of resilience and strength.
• The myths about grief stages: The popular “5 stages of grief” actually isn’t based on the grief of losing a loved one.
• What the widow/survivor fog is: Feel like you’ve been in a daze after losing your partner/child/parent? Forgetting to pay the mortgage? Forgetting to pick up the kids from school? This is VERY normal and Krista can explain why your brain might be feeling a little foggy.
• Why you must take care of yourself first: Remember the last time you were on an airplane? Didn’t your flight attendant remind you to take care of yourself before you try to assist others in case of an emergency? The same is true with grief. You can’t pour from an empty cup. Here Krista can share why you have to process your grief and trauma in order to ever be able to help your kids through their grief too.
• The truth about moving forward: You won’t move on, you won’t get over it, but you WILL figure out how to love your spouse/child/parent, miss them and keep on living.

You can find Krista at: https://www.coachingwithkrista.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 grief to growth and today I’ve got with me Krista St. Germain. I’m gonna read her bio and then we’ll get started as we always do. Krista is a master certified life coach. She’s a grief expert. She’s a widow. She’s a mom, and she’s the host of the widowed mom podcast. When her husband was killed by a drunk driver in 2016, Chris’s life was completely and unexpectedly flipped upside down. After therapy helped her unfurl from the fetal position. Chris’s discovered life coaching, post traumatic growth and learn the tools she needed to move forward and create a future she can get excited about. Now she coaches and teaches other widows so they can love life again, too. So with that, I want to welcome Krista St. St. Germain to grief to growth. Thank you, Brian. I’m excited to be here. Yeah, it’s great to have you here. I want to talk to you about your your story. What happened with you. And I know you said in your in your introduction, that therapy helps you. So I’d like to also find out what type of therapy you found that actually helped you to get through this.

Krista St-Germain 1:49
Yeah, so I had had, so my husband was my second marriage kind of my redemption story after the first marriage didn’t end well. And so I had met a lovely therapist, amazing therapist while I was going through my divorce. And so I hadn’t seen her in quite a while. But she was one of the first calls that I made after Hugo died. And so I don’t know in terms of style of therapy, if I would classify it much more than just by saying, I got a chance to tell my story as many times as I needed to tell it, to make it real to my brain. Because in those early days, it was so surreal. And I’m sure you know, most people who have experienced a loss can relate to that where you intellectually understand that what has happened is truly real, and that they aren’t actually coming back from a business trip in a week. But there’s just a part of you that doesn’t quite believe that. And so, just being able to talk to her and tell the story and not burden, at least I felt like it was a burden. The other people in my life, who either were grieving themselves, or who didn’t know what to do with my grief, was incredibly useful to me. I just needed to talk about the accident and talk about the details and, you know, share all of my regrets and the guilt and the anger and just get it out until I could come to terms with what had happened and kind of get back to that baseline of functioning. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Smith 3:22
So tell me about Hugo. Ah,

Krista St-Germain 3:24
he was lovely. It’s kind of a renaissance guy. He was. He was French Canadian. And he came to the town that I live in to work for Lombardi A, which is a company that manufactures jets. And so it was in us an engineer. And so he was just kind of geeky, right? But really well rounded. He could talk to you about anything. He was very shy, but had this boisterous fun, laugh, his accent, his French accent was very strong. He was just, he was all the things. To me, he really was kind of proof to me that true love is possible that I could be treated the way that I wanted to be treated, that there are people on the planet who will love you and accept you for all of your faults and flaws and darkness. And yeah, he was just an amazing guy.

Brian Smith 4:19
So how did you find out about his his passing? Were you?

Krista St-Germain 4:24
Yeah, I was there. So we had come back. Yeah, ironically, we had come back from a volunteer trip. So when I was in my early 20s, one of my sorority sisters was killed. And in her memory, we started a summer camp program for youth who are visually impaired. And so we were on our Gosh, 17th 18th year of that program. And so Hugo and I had been volunteering. It’s called Heather’s camp at Heather’s camp. And so we were on our way back home. We had driven separately he’d gone out a couple of days ahead of me and then I came out in my own vehicle. And so as we were coming home, I had a flat tire in my car, and I pulled off to the side of the road shoulder of the interstate. And he pulled up behind me off to the side blinkers on caution, lights, everything. And he just wanted to change the tire himself, we had paid for triple A. But, you know, his thought was, it’ll just be faster, I can do it, there’s a tire in the trunk, I don’t want to wait on triple A. And to be quite honest, it was against my better judgment, I felt that the whizzing of the cars coming by on the highway, you know, 80 miles an hour or so. And but I didn’t, I didn’t exist. I just said okay. And so I was standing on the side of the road facing away from the traffic but texting my daughter to let her know that we would be late because she was also returning from the trip. But she had ridden the bus with the children. And he was trying to get into my trunk to get access to the spare tire. And a driver that we later found out had meth and alcohol in his system. It’s 530 on a Sunday daylight, right? no brakes, just slammed into the back of the Durango trapped him in between the Durango and the Camry. And you know, within 24 hours he was gone. So I was right there.

Brian Smith 6:15
Wow, I’m so sorry. Wow. Yeah. So even though you’re right there, you mentioned earlier, the the shock, our brains just don’t want to accept something like this happens. Right? So what was it like in the early days and weeks following this? How is your brain functioning?

Krista St-Germain 6:34
Just so surreal. I recently, since I just moved, just move this weekend, I’ve been going through some of my old things. And one of the things that I looked at last couple of days was the journal that I kept, right after he died. I kept that journal for quite a while, but I was reading through some of my earlier entries. And yeah, just this, I can’t believe this happened, I can’t believe it felt like everything that I had wanted in the future just evaporated. Right, because not to say there weren’t other facets of my life that were important and well rounded, because there certainly were but my vision for the future was of us, right the trips who are going to take and the memories are going to make and we had just hiked mount Harvey or sorry, Mount Yale, in Colorado, which is a fourteener. And we didn’t train very well, it didn’t go well. But, you know, we had plans the next year to hike not Harvard. And so yeah, I just couldn’t really believe it. And I was so consumed in the early days, also, with what I should have done differently. In my mind, you know, I should have pulled up farther on the highway, I should have insisted we call triple A I should have had that tire checked before we left we should have left at a different time. All of these things, I after the fact was still trying to control that just couldn’t, weren’t ever meant to be controlled. But in the early days, you know, I was trying really hard to just control them. Also, you know, you’re focused on in the early days, just getting through the logistics. Right. So just planning the service and, and dealing with the insurance and of course, consoling my children. And, you know, his mother flew into town and didn’t make it before he passed because she lives in, in Quebec, and, you know, dealing with having the family in town and, and all of that just is crazy. We had also booked a trip we had bought in June, we had bought into a timeshare in Mexico. And we had scheduled a trip for the second week in August to take our children down there. So his son, my two children, and he died August 1, and the trip was two weeks later. So trying to decide do we still plan? Do we still go on the trip? And we ultimately did took my dad and took the kids and tried to do you know, tried to try to just be normal? But it’s just kind of a blur?

Brian Smith 9:02
Yeah, yeah, I think you know, the thing about losses like this, I was just sick before we get started, you know, every loss is unique, of course. In my cases, my 15 year old daughter and your case it was your your spouse, but in some ways they’re kind of universal. It’s that it’s the fog that we go through. It’s a surreal feeling like this couldn’t have really happened. It’s the that you mentioned earlier, the anger and the guilts the things that we think we should have been able to control this should have been omniscient, right, we should have been able to see that this dummy. And we should have said or done something different. I think that’s a very common experience that people go through. How did you learn to deal with that? How did you learn to deal with all those different things?

Krista St-Germain 9:47
something in me just knew pretty early on. I don’t exactly know why but something in me just knew that that would not bear fruit that I wanted. Right. So I could kind of tell that it was an Optional mind game that I could play with myself that if I allowed, it would go nowhere fast. And so somehow I was able to just kind of I don’t even know if it was shut it down, but just pivot a little bit in my thinking and just go, Okay, yeah, we could have done it differently, but we didn’t. And, you know, whenever we’re focusing on what we can’t control, then that limits our ability to focus on what we can. So what can we control here, here? Here we are, in this moment, this has happened? What aspects? Can we influence? And where do we want to put our energy? I think some of it maybe came from just a lifelong love of self development. And, you know, I started at 16, reading, a return to love with Marianne Williamson, and, you know, just always kind of on this spiritual path and self development path. And so this, I think, was, I had a lot of tools already, in my tool belt of life and life experience. And, and those things, they just were were available for me to play off of.

Brian Smith 11:10
Yeah, that sounds like yeah, you must you kind of were prepared, at least in some way to understand, you know, having done some of the self development work and knowing that that was a, it’s a dead end path. But it’s a path that most of us go down, at least for a while. Yeah, until we figure out that it’s a dead end path. And, and you talked earlier, you said, you know, what I want to kind of emphasize what you said about like you, we think about all the things that we’re missing out on all the plants have had. And that’s what we focus on, suddenly, we get very laser focus on that one aspect of our life, and how it’s going to change. So, and I’ve seen this for the benefit of the people that are listening, that have gone through this, because a lot of my clients are like, there’s something wrong with me. And I feel like the brain fog and all this stuff. And it’s like, no, this is a very common thing that we go through in this type of situation. I remember what Shayna you were talking about that, you know, all the logistics of a family coming into town and making. And so a lot of people go on autopilot for the first few weeks. They’ll even say, Well, I feel like I’m numb. I’m not feeling anything. It’s because your your brains just kind of you’ve gotten into robotic mode. You’re just doing anything I need to get done.

Krista St-Germain 12:18
Yeah. And I I’m in retrospect, I’m glad for that. Yes, I think if I had felt the full impact of the loss instantly, it would have so overwhelmed me that I don’t think I would have been able to function. So I think I’m really grateful that it did feel numb and hazy and confusing. I mean, there were still a lot of tears and a lot of railing. But to have felt the full brunt of it would have been just incomprehensible.

Brian Smith 12:46
Did you feel any resentment to an outside force, whether it’s God or anything else, the universe, you know, but you this is your second chance at marriage? And it sounds like you know, it was great. How did how did that play out for you?

Announcer 13:04
I mean, oddly, I didn’t.

Krista St-Germain 13:09
And I know a lot of people do. And I don’t want to say that I didn’t in order to make anyone else think that they shouldn’t be thinking the way that I was thinking but I think my belief was that God the universe was his love. Like, that’s where I come from. Right? Like so it’s all divine. It’s all love. And it’s not, you know, nobody’s out there trying to harm you. Nobody’s out there, you know, punishing you for wrongdoings of your past that. I don’t have to understand why it happened. And I don’t even have to believe there’s a purpose for it to have happened. But I don’t believe I choose not to believe that. You know, I don’t know there’s any ill will or anything to be mad about. It’s just like, Huh, okay, didn’t see this coming. This is not at all what I expected. This is not at all what I wanted. But yet, this is what it is.

Brian Smith 14:09
Yeah. Tell me about your your family. You mentioned you, you have children and you go has children. So how many what ages are they?

Krista St-Germain 14:18
Yeah. So at the time, my daughter was 12 and my son was nine. And then he goes son was 17. Yeah, almost at the time. And so it was Hugo’s, it wasn’t actually his biological son. It was his son from his first marriage, but he had been, you know, in Lance’s life since Lance was in diapers, so it was the only father he ever knew. But technically, it wasn’t his biological dad. So yeah, and Lance, you know, lived with his mother. And it was really rough. It’s really rough on him. Till Yeah,

Brian Smith 14:56
I can only imagine. It had to be really tough. My children and so you’re dealing with your own grief while you’re trying to help them deal with their grief, I assume.

Krista St-Germain 15:05
Yeah. Yeah, it was interesting. I didn’t expect. So I expected that my daughter would be the most sad. It’s interesting. So what happened is that for my son, the youngest, his biggest impact was realizing that people you love can die. Because he had never lost a grandparent, he had never lost anyone that he loved. And so for him, it became about the fear that I would die. Right. And I remember him saying, one time, I was tucking him into bed, and he said, Mommy, I hope I die a couple of seconds before you die. That way I don’t ever have to live any, any without you. Wow. And so that so it was a different kind of loss for him compared to my daughter, who she felt the impact of what she lost in the future. Even though she had never really lost anyone that she loved that was, you know, a close family relative either. She could see what Hugo and her relationship and that relationship would offer her in the future. She was looking forward to him. He was a barefoot water skier, a snow skier he was looking, she was looking forward to that. Right. She was looking forward to him helping her with math. He’s an engineer. So those things came easily to him. He was, you know, would have been the one helping her with calculus. Yeah. And she was looking forward to that she was looking forward to the French, you know, he was she wanted to learn French from him. And so for her, it was just a different kind of loss. And then for Lance, it was, you know, the loss of the only solid male role model in his life. At a very important age.

Brian Smith 16:43
Yeah, yeah. Very important age. Yeah. So, um, how are your kids dealing with the now it’s been about five years? Yeah, but five years coming up. So how are your kids doing with it now?

Krista St-Germain 16:54
exceptionally well, exceptionally? Well, I think my daughter must be an old soul. You know, she I remember one time we were in, we were at the cabin in Colorado, my dad’s cabin. And Hugo loved it out there. And I was saying something about how we were looking at the valley because it’s big picture windows in the house and looking at the valley and out. I told her I said, I wish she goes here to see this. And she looked at me and she was like, Mama, he’s here. Like, what are you talking about? Like? Could you ever think that he’s not here? And I’m okay, she’s got it. You know, good reminder. For me, of course, like I like, how did I drift away from what I know to be true. But, you know, for her, it was just kind of a done deal. I think. You know, Lance ended up graduating from school doing very well joining the Marines, and figuring it out for himself. But, you know, you never know what it would have been like, if he had had his dad here. I don’t know. But I think he’s done remarkably well. I put both of my kids in just a little bit of grief counseling. But, you know, they didn’t really seem to need it that much.

Brian Smith 18:05
That’s great. So how is I wish I said earlier, not every situation is a little bit different. And I know what it’s like for parents to have children, you know, pass. What are some unique challenges that widows face? That’s what are some unique challenges you face going through grief as as a widow?

Krista St-Germain 18:24
Yeah. Such a good question. There’s a lot, I think what’s most shocking to most widows is they are so not prepared for how it will impact every area of life, you often don’t realize how much you rely on your partner for aspects of your purpose, right for your thoughts about the future and what’s possible for you for yourself confidence, that’s always a shock. I think people perceive themselves to be confident and then do not expect how unconfident they feel going forward. Yeah, it just permeates every aspect of life. Solo parenting, right, all the pressure that we put on ourselves to be both parents.

Unknown Speaker 19:17
So not helpful.

Krista St-Germain 19:21
You know, the drama of when do you date again? Do you date again? How do you involve your kids in that? You know, do you go back to work when? Well, what’s the drama? If you get life insurance, money and how you spend it? what other people think of your choices? How long do you wear your wedding ring? When do you take it off? You know, all of these kinds of things that you just never really gave much thought to before? Right? And then then there they are.

Brian Smith 19:45
Yeah, I can only not even imagined, but I was thinking about that when I was thinking about interviewing you. Ironically, or synchronistically or whatever. We had a friend just passed away suddenly in March. She was 49 years old, a good friend might know my wife that I’ve known for over 20 years, friends with, you know, she and her and her husband, and, you know, went over to his house for dinner, you know, a few weeks ago, and just the dynamic of, and I was gonna ask you this, because when people you’re together as couples, right, but a lot of times when we’re married, we were friends as couples. So what happens when one person we’ve had, we’ve had people get divorced before, but when some suddenly one of your friends is single, you know, that’s got to be a weird dynamic for both you and for the other people.

Krista St-Germain 20:33
So much. So yeah, I just did a podcast episode on being a third wheel, because that’s how it feels. Right? Is Yeah, that you are the third wheel? And how do you interact with these people? And, you know, what, if they were your partner’s friends, more so than yours? And, you know, now you feel like the odd person out? And yeah, it’s just there’s a lot that relationships with in laws can be very challenging. Yeah, I’m watching a lot of a lot of my clients right now go through to this kind of, we’re coming back into a functioning society, you know, as things start to reopen, and, and there have been some elements of, you know, being at home that have been kind of easier to deal with, for some people harder in some ways, but easier in others, you know, now, my mom’s are going back to the baseball diamond and answering the awkward question of, you know, what is your husband do for a living? You know, those kinds of things, or, you know, just getting back out in the world and, and figuring out how to function without their person. That’s really a challenge.

Brian Smith 21:35
Yeah, I’m curious, did you have friends fall away with the with the sun just couldn’t handle it, or

Krista St-Germain 21:43
less so than I imagined, I was really lucky in that he and I worked together at the same company. And so I don’t think a lot of people have that luxury. And some people might not even think it’s a luxury, some people might choose to see it differently. But I just felt so surrounded, both by family who loved me and friends who loved me, but also by co workers who not only loved me, but loved him, and felt that loss felt the impact of that loss, and just rallied. So yes, relationships have changed over time. But if anything, I don’t know, people seem to come out of the woodwork to be kind to me.

Brian Smith 22:30
Yeah, that’s, that’s great. Because a lot of times when there’s a loss, no matter what the loss is, people just get awkward. And they don’t know what to say. And sometimes, yeah, it’s like, they just kind of go away. Yeah, and, you know, I and I want to go over some of the things because I know there’s no, you know, Pat answers for any of these. But when your clients, I’m sure they ask you questions, like, when should I start dating again? or How long do I wear my my ring? And you know, stuff like that? So what, what are those conversations like?

Krista St-Germain 22:57
Yeah, well, they’re always, you know, with the foundation of, I don’t know what’s best for your life that you do. Right. So let’s not use what Christa thinks as the authority here, let’s use what you think. And then also, just timelines aren’t relevant when it comes to these things. So you know, I wear my red wedding ring for I don’t know, a year. And then at a certain point, it felt like time to take it off. I switched actually switched it from one hand to another. And then at a certain point, it felt like it was time to take it off. With How long do you keep things, you know, clothing and memorabilia. And to me, it just don’t rush it, you do what feels right to you. There’s no reason to rush into any of this. You do it in stages, if you want to do it in stages, but it’s not going anywhere. You don’t have to hurry through that dating again. Are you looking to fill a hole of void? Right, because if that’s the reason, you probably won’t enjoy your dating experience or your relationships experience, as much as you will, if you go into it doing kind of some of that self work that sometimes needs to be done. And get yourself to a position where you realize No, actually I am whole and worthy and fully complete. And I don’t need I don’t have a missing piece that I need to find. You know or fill. I’ve got me. And in the reason I might want to date again is not to fill a void. It’s tough love to to find someone to love, right to experience more love. And then it becomes about giving and less about getting. And it’s more fun, right? It’s we don’t end up being so needy and clingy. And there’s less drama that way.

Brian Smith 24:28
Yeah, yeah, that’s I think that’s great advice. Because I would also imagine, and I don’t know, I just said, Did you have friends saying okay, Krista, it’s time to get back out there again, trying to fix you up.

Krista St-Germain 24:40
Yes. And I was not ready for a long time. And I don’t there’s nothing against anyone who’s ready immediately, right. The first time I went out I remember going out with someone and I didn’t think it was a date. I thought it was just me getting together with a co worker who I hadn’t seen in a while. And I realized while we were On this pseudo date that he thought it was a date and I was not ready, I went to my cart, and I just cried. I was really angry. That was probably the angriest I’ve ever been. Just that I did not want to have to date again, I had worked felt like I had worked so hard to find you go, right, right, right. Like, I don’t want to be here. I just want to go, you know, it’s just so unfair. And so I eased my way into it. I didn’t date until almost four years in three and a half, four years. Okay. But yeah, people do want to hook you up because they think it’s a problem. We’re socialized to believe that we’re supposed to be in a relationship, right, especially as women, you know, sometimes we’re taught to believe that our value is as a parent, as a mom as a wife, and that we can’t be okay. alone. And so people think they’re being very helpful. Mm hmm. For sure. Yeah, that’s not how I experienced it.

Announcer 25:52
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 calm. 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.

Brian Smith 26:49
So let’s talk about the you mentioned and some of the notes you sent me. You said something about post traumatic growth. So what is post traumatic growth view? And how does that apply?

Krista St-Germain 26:59
Yeah, so post traumatic growth, I remember when I heard about post traumatic growth, it was like the record scratch moment, you know, where you’re like, what, because I think everyone’s familiar with post traumatic stress disorder, but I’ve never really heard this idea of post traumatic growth. So. So, you know, it’s this, this idea developed by a couple of researchers to dashi and Calhoun in the early 90s, that not only can you bounce back from a trauma, meaning that you can get back to the same level of functioning and the same level of life satisfaction, which used to be the goal, right, it was to get back to where you were before the trauma. But these two researchers came along and offered the idea, of course, because they studied it, that you could actually achieve growth after trauma, that you could take that trauma, and then leverage it. Right and, and become more satisfied with your life live a life that you’re, that’s even more aligned with what you value that’s even more filled with possibility and deeper spiritual connection and better relationships, and, you know, stronger appreciation and all of these things. And so, this is kind of my biggest pet peeve. I think, sometimes we use this phrase new normal against ourselves, I don’t know how you feel about it. But yes, it’s never gonna be the same as it was when the person was in the flesh right next to us. But what I see is that a lot of people use that phrase against themselves. And they, they’ll say things like, Well, you know, I’m getting used to my new normal, and it said, with this resignation implied that life will never be as good as it once was, but I’m getting used to it. And so what I love about post traumatic growth is it just really, you know, blows that theory up, and says, No, you know, your losses, your loss, and you get to be the boss of your life, and you get to decide, if you want to grow, it’s not that it’s, you know, morally superior to do that. But you get to be the boss, and I just love that.

Brian Smith 29:02
Yeah, I think that’s, I think that’s really wise. And, you know, I have a lot of clients will say to me, will I ever get will ever get back to the person I was before. And I always say to them, I hope you don’t hope you become a person, you know? Yeah, otherwise, you’re just wasting this experience that you’ve gone through. And there’s, but there’s always this tension that, you know, we were always gonna carry that, that loss with us that pain that we’re gonna have that longing and stuff, but it doesn’t mean our lives can’t be good again. And I think a lot of times, especially in those early days, the biggest thing is believing that it can be good. Believing that we can actually, you know, do do well for us to do better. So I’m curious. It’s, you know, it’s been it’s a relatively short period of time since since you guys passing. How long was it before you decide to become a life coach?

Krista St-Germain 29:49
Pretty fast. So that was another one of the tools that I had had in my tool belt was I had been following a life coach, just listening to her podcast and so in a way Her tools and what she taught, but really not ever interested in being a life coach. In fact, I would refer people to her podcast and I would tell them to ignore the life coach part. I guess I just, you know, I don’t know, I’m from the Midwest, and maybe we’re slow to adapt to trends here. But I kind of thought maybe it was sketchy. So. But I got to that point where, you know, I was back to functioning, I was back to work, my therapist was saying, you’re doing so great, you’re so strong, you know, all the things. And I’m thinking in my mind, Okay, thank you. And I agree that I am doing well, but also on the inside, just feeling kind of hollow and empty. And thinking that there has to be more for my life than this. Like it can’t just be checking off the to do list and going to work and feeding the children and robotically going through the motions. And two things kind of happened at the same time. One was that my therapist said you should be a therapist. She had it all planned out. She said, I’ll help you get into an MFT program. When I retire, you can buy my practice. I mean, she was like, she was ready. Wow. And so that so in December, so if you died in August, in December, I applied for that MFT program, had to wait until the following September for it to start. And in January, the coach that I had been following started a program that I joined. And so I was taking another prerequisite for the MFT that I didn’t have from my bachelor’s degrees abnormal psych class. And I was showing up and being coached as a part of this program that this coach was running. And it was so powerful for me that six months, just really six months of that program, that I decided I don’t want to be a therapist, I don’t want to be a coach. First, I thought, well, I’ll just, I’ll just go through the MFT program. And I’ll do coaching on the side, as I work my way through the MFT program, because it was going to take a couple of years plus working full time. And then by the time it it came time to start, I decided no, it’s it’s the scarier path to become a coach. But this is calling me and I can’t ignore this call. And this is this is what I needed all the tools I was learning through that coaching program. Were the reason I was changing profoundly. Yeah. And I just decided everybody’s gonna think I’m crazy. And that’s okay. I’m just gonna go for it. So in September, I started training. So Hugo died in August, the next September, I did my life coach training in person took another three or four months to do the follow up and actually get certified and finish it. And then I quit my job in January. I know right, and I actually happened to quit my job to go and work for that coach on a on a trial, which was felt very safe to me, because she offered me it was a slight pay cut from what I was making, but it felt like a solid job. And it didn’t work out. The It was like a trial kind of job. And it just didn’t work for either of us. And but it helped me get out of my job. Right? It helped me leave that corporate world that I was in. And so I just decided, when that didn’t work out, I was just gonna throw myself into coaching and, and just go for it and not look back. And I didn’t. And yeah, you know, it was rough the first year it took it took a while to build a successful business. But, man, I can’t imagine. I can’t imagine actually still being at that job. Most people are being laid off production lines shutting down. Not deeply satisfying.

Brian Smith 33:41
Right, right. Yeah, yeah. This is your you’re a fantastic example of post traumatic growth. And you know, it’s interesting, as you’re telling your story, you were saying, You’re from the Midwest, I’m from the Midwest, I’m from Ohio, and I would hear about life coaches, and I would actually make jokes about life coaches, you know, there’s a, you know, there was a meal I actually posted before I became a coach and says, you know, eat more kale kale there, I’m your life coach. No, it’s I’m like, you know, we’re like, what is it just rich people that have life coaches that just have too much money? You know, what’s, what’s the deal with his life coaching thing, and with me, it was a friend that I happen to working with. She’s a medium and I do this work for helping parents heal. Yeah. And she said, Brian, there’s just life coaching class that I saw online, I thought you might want to take it and I was like, why would you think I wouldn’t want to take a life coaching class, and then I realized a lot of what I was doing with people was I was coaching them. And so it’s kind of like Well, yeah, I might as well do this, but it still feels weird when I tell people that I do life coaching but it’s so satisfying. It’s such great word.

Krista St-Germain 34:39
Yeah, because most people don’t understand what you mean when you say that you do life coaching they’re like well, you know, what do you mean what is that exactly? I think it’s becoming more familiar but yeah, it’s still less known than

Brian Smith 34:49
Yeah, it is. In a different aspects in some people are like I need a life coach helped me lose weight, you know, stuff like that, or I need a life coach and I and that’s stuff that I can do but my specialty is More around grief, I know, you’re not dealing with what you’ve gone through, you’ve worked with widows for the most part is exclusively with widows

Krista St-Germain 35:07
exclusively. Yeah, explicitly. And honestly, when I decided to become a coach, I really wasn’t planning to work with widows. I still I thought it would be too sad. Hmm. And so I just hadn’t done enough of my own work yet. And then at a certain point, I realized, oh, wait a minute, why would I work with anyone else, I would write, like, I have an insight into this experience. And, and there’s nothing else out there. At least at the time, there was nothing else out there like it, it was. So so it was really fun to go and create what I wish I could have found, right to take what I know about grief and all the grief studies that I’ve done, and then what I learned from my teacher and in certification, and then you just take all of that life experience. And, you know, like, it sounds like what you’ve done right, and then put it together in a way that helps a very specific problem.

Brian Smith 35:59
Yeah, you know, it’s really interesting, because I call myself a grief guide, and a life coach, and I put them both out there. I’ve done very little, I’ve done a couple people that are life coach clients, but most of them are coming to me because of grief. Yeah. And so I think we kind of attract the clients that that you know, that need us and that we can, we can help. And as I was saying, it’s really, when you can, when you can talk to someone and say I’ve been through what you’re going through, I think that gives you that gives you a lot more credibility with them. And they feel like they can relate to you. And it’s interesting, because I have people that I offer half hour consultation, people, I don’t know what this is about, some just sign up for half an hour. It almost always goes an hour, at least. They’re like, Oh, yeah, now I see what this is, you know, now, now I get it. So it’s really, it’s great. I really, I applaud you for taking that leap of faith to, to go out and do this and to allow this experience in your life to launch you into the next thing. Yeah,

Krista St-Germain 36:57
thank you. I’m so glad that I did. It’s given me so much more than I could ever give, honestly, the people that I serve, it’s so fulfilling. I just can’t imagine doing anything else now.

Brian Smith 37:09
So when you work with clients, what can a client expect? If I if I’m a widow? And I’m like, okay, I might reach out to her What? What would I expect a session to be like, or the process to be like?

Krista St-Germain 37:21
Well, I do groups now. So I don’t do any more one on one, or in the early days, I just did just exclusively one on one. And then at a certain point, you know, you hear the same stories over and over and over, you hear the same ways that people think there’s something wrong with them when what you know, is that it’s just grief. Right? Yeah. And so I got to that place where I thought, you know, if I could just get people together, not because we’re going to go around the room and each talk and share. That’s not how I do it. But because if one woman can hear another woman’s story and see herself in that story, and she can see, oh, it’s not me, there’s nothing wrong with me, I’m not broken, you know, I’m not damaged, this is just the way of it, then we can get some of those basic, but really challenging grief aspects, we can work through them faster. And then we can move on to the things that are kind of more individual. So the way that I run my program, it’s a six month program, all widows all moms, and I coach in a group setting. So I coach, you know, on zoom, Brady Bunch style, so everyone can see each other, they can turn their cameras off if they don’t want to. But I coach one person at a time while everyone else watches, which is amazing, because I find that our brain can be a little bit resistant. I don’t know if you’ve, if this resonates with you. But our brain can be a little bit resistant when we’re the one in the hot seat. Because the coaches is challenging you a little bit in a loving way. And it’s kind of sometimes hard to absorb it, versus the experience of watching someone else get coached when it’s not your life and your brain isn’t resistant, and you can so clearly see the issue. And you can watch the you know, the coach and the client work together on it and go, Oh, that’s what’s happening to me. That’s I’m doing that. Like she’s getting coached on the challenge that she’s having with her mother in law and her thoughts about her mother in law, you know, her mother in law’s telling her she’s responsible for her spouse’s death or whatever. And I’m having that, you know, a very similar challenge with my sister in law. It’s may be different, but so easy to leverage what other people are going through without the brain being in that kind of resistance state. Yeah, so we do a lot of group calls in that way. I do a lot of coaching online, we use an app so that you know, in between calls, because maybe something comes up tomorrow and the next call isn’t until Thursday or whatever. You know, they can come to me inside the app, a lot of celebrating a lot of training our brain to focus on what we want to see more of and then also have a self paced component to my program. So my goal is to To give people the tools that they need all the tools that I wish I would have had, you know, the pathway to work through the most common obstacles. Even if they don’t get it all done within six months, they’ll have it forever, right? And then I can set them up to be self sufficient at the end of the six months. So they understand grief, they understand how their brain works, they understand how to manage their emotional life, they understand as oddly as it sounds, how to feel their feelings, because nobody taught us this. Right. That’s the first thing I teach people is how to feel feelings. I teach them how to do Emotional Freedom Technique tapping, because I just am in love with that tool and position them well, that’s so that by the end of six months, they’ve worked through what they came to work through, and they’re ready to go.

Brian Smith 40:46
That sounds awesome. Yeah. And that’s, that’s the thing. I think a lot of people confuse life coaching with therapy or traditional therapy. And they think it’s like a lifelong thing. And one of the things when I was going through life coaching, training, and I loved that the program I took the guy was like, our job is to make people self sufficient. It’s not to make them dependent on us. We don’t want that we don’t want men that we don’t want. But clients shouldn’t have to come to us for years and years and years. If they aren’t, we’re not doing our job.

Krista St-Germain 41:12
We’re not doing our jobs, I could not agree with you more. Interestingly, I have, I think I have some lifers in my program. And I think it’s because they’re most widows don’t have other widows in their orbit, to really have that sense of community with and that is, the one thing I see is that a lot of them don’t want to leave. It’s not because they don’t have the tools. It’s just because they love the sport, and they love the environment. It’s not even so much about me, as it is about the community. And so, you know, I prepare them to graduate at the six month mark. But I also have an opportunity for them to keep going if they want to. And as long as we’re they’re not using that as a crutch. Yeah, it’s good.

Brian Smith 41:51
I think the community is very important. I mentioned a couple times, I’m part of helping parents heal, which is we’re about 17,000 parents have had children transition. And just that not feeling like you’re alone, like you’re not the only one that has happened to and to, as you said, the group thing, because we have calls and when people come on and say, Yeah, I went through this, or I’m going through this give of that I’m not crazy, you know, it’s not just me, and all these things, you know, the dealing with the family dynamics, you know, it’s like I said, what I was talking I was I was being interviewed on a program, and I slipped up because I was that’s when I was like bear grief. And you know, but parents, we’ve lost a child when we think that’s the worst. I mean, frankly, so I was talking with these people. And I said, Yeah, you know, I had the worst thing, you know, I lost a daughter, you know, 15 year old daughter. And this woman that was interviewing me says, I’ve actually got a foster child, and I just lost my husband. And she said, For me losing my husband was worse. Because it’s every aspect of your life. It’s it’s all day. And we know that when we get married, we can say it till death do us part, we don’t really believe that’s going to happen, right? Or it’s going to happen a lot where 90, right? And it’s not what happened till we’re 90, it’s not supposed to happen. You know why we still have kids in the house, it’s not supposed to happen. While we’re still you know, I said with my with my friend, this was sudden, I mean, she just she had a blood clot, and just was here one day in little Oregon. And next and we’re all you know, still, like my wife was in book club with her. And they’re like, this is just really surreal for us. And, and then, you know, trying to figure out how to deal with the person, the other person. So it’s complicated for everybody, I guess, is what I’m saying.

Krista St-Germain 43:34
Yeah, I think it’s just subjective. It’s each human having a different experience, because each human is interpreting their experience differently. Yeah. So you know, to your point, yeah, it’s, it’s not so useful to compare, because who are we to say what what I might experience is traumatic, might not be so traumatic for someone else, and vice versa. And that’s okay.

Brian Smith 43:55
Yeah, yeah, exactly. But I like to I like your idea of people being in groups and being able to benefit from you coaching other people. And I hadn’t thought about that before. But sometimes we do get resistant or defensive. someone’s talking directly to us. But if you’re talking to somebody else we can we can see the problem the other person. And so yeah, they need to listen to what Chris is saying.

Krista St-Germain 44:15
Yeah, or one person’s bravery, you know, will will just be so valuable to the rest of the people there because maybe they would have never brought it up. You know, like, you know, sex after grief. Like, oh, nobody wants to talk about that. But then somebody, I’ll bring it up. And then you know, you hear the echoes in the chat of Oh, me too. Me too. Me too. I’m so glad you said it. I was too embarrassed to talk about it. And so you can really, in a comfortable loving, supportive environment, bring up some stuff that’s just hard for people to talk about and normalize it.

Brian Smith 44:44
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I’m Chris how if people want to find out more about you, they want to reach out to you find out more about your program. How can they do that?

Krista St-Germain 44:54
Yeah, so they can go to coaching with Krista k ri STI calm or I love it. adding people to my podcast and don’t let the name deceive you my goal even though I only, you know, work on a paying client basis with women who are widows and moms, I hope that my podcast will help people who are grieving in general. And it’s called the widowed mom podcast. So pretty easy to find. So if they maybe aren’t a widow, but they just want to learn more, they can go to the podcast.

Brian Smith 45:23
Yeah. And actually, there was one other thing I wanted to talk to you about, cuz we kind of talked about a little bit before we get started. And it was about spirituality. And you said, you don’t specifically mentioned that in your coaching practice. I obviously make it a big part of what I do with my podcasts. And in my practice, so how do you? How do you help people have hope? How do you help people? You know, because, again, when we lose a spouse or something like that, we’re like, this is it. I’m just done. This is the worst thing that could ever happen. So how do you get people past that?

Krista St-Germain 45:56
Well, I think one of the biggest things that helps is just that they see my life’s example. Right? And then I always make a point of sharing other widows journeys, so that they can see it and other people too. So they don’t think that I’m a special snowflake. Yeah. Right. Because a lot of times, I think that tends to happen is we just people only show us the highlight reel on their, on their Instagram. And so they think, Oh, she must be special. So I try to tell a lot of stories. And then also, I know this sounds odd, maybe but at a certain point, I find hope is useful when you’re feeling hopeless. Right? But then also, how do I even want to see this? The need for hope, implies that where you are, is wrong. Right, the need for hope implies that we need to be somewhere in the present or in the past or mean, in the future in the past, as opposed to how do we stay in the present? Yeah. And find the beauty here?

Brian Smith 46:58
Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good point. That’s a really good point. Because Yeah, you’re right. Hope implies a future state. That’s different from the state that we’re in. So it’s, I guess, a matter of helping people feel comfortable with where they are.

Krista St-Germain 47:11
Yeah. Yeah. And live live in this moment. Yeah. It might suck. But it is. It is what we have right now. Right? And the good, I believe the good only exists, because we have the context of the quote unquote, bad. Right? We know joy, because we have despair. And so we’ve been socialized to believe that the bad is to be avoided. But really, if we want to look at it as a valuable part of our human experience, I think that opportunities available to us and I think that’s what adds rich and you know, a rich depth of experience. And you know, that’s appealing to me.

Brian Smith 47:56
Yeah, well, that’s, that’s a, that’s a hard lesson for a lot of us to take, right? Because we just went we just went joy all the time. We’re like, why would I? Why would I choose a life that has, quote, bad stuff in it?

Krista St-Germain 48:06
But we’re sold that right at every turn, we’re sold joy, we’re sold happiness, we’re supposed to be happier than we are. And that’s what creates so much suffering is this idea that we’re supposed to be somewhere other than where we are? Yeah. Right. When if we could just relax into where we are as uncertain and as sometimes painful as it feels, without thinking that we’re supposed to be somewhere else. We would save ourselves a lot of suffering.

Brian Smith 48:31
Yeah, that’s, that’s right. Very wise. Thank you. Any last thoughts you want to you want to share with us before we before we leave for today?

Krista St-Germain 48:39
I love this conversation. I’m just really grateful to be here.

Brian Smith 48:43
Yeah, well, it’s, it’s a pleasure to meet you. And I again, I applaud you for what you’re doing, which what you’ve done your for your bravery. And then for your sharing with other people to help other people come along through this, this journey that, you know, it’s we always talk, we have the garden sealed, this is the club nobody wants to be in. Yeah. And and being, you know, in a situation Sure, and I’m sure it’s something that you would have never, you know, wished or anticipated. But to take that and turn it into something beneficial. something beautiful, is just amazing transformation.

Krista St-Germain 49:21
You know, that’s one thing I would say, Brian, just to add on to that, because I think a lot of times people think, well, if I’m going to grow from the experience, then I have to be glad it happened. And I just would want to offer that we don’t have to be glad it happened to still choose to grow from the experience. Right. And yeah,

Brian Smith 49:42
yeah, that’s a very good point also, because, you know, it’s it’s a it’s, it’s hard because my daughter, it’s it’ll be six years in three days since she passed. And I, I only know one person that I’ve worked with and I’ve worked with hundreds of people who has said I’m I’m glad that much I’ll pass and not in not in a mean sense, but since I have a better relationship with them now than I did before, because it’s because of a deep spiritual understanding. But for most of us, we’re like, Yes, I’ve chosen to make something good out of this. And yes, you know, there’s growth that’s come through this, but I would give anything to have my my daughter back, you know, I would not my human at Brian would not choose this. And this is for me where spirituality comes in. Because I think from a higher perspective, I understand why I’m going through this. And from a higher perspective, I can get through it, but the part of me, and I’m looking at myself now looks, I see Shane over my shoulder, and I miss her every time I look at her. So I want people to understand that when we say that we’re taking something and we’re going to grow from it. It doesn’t mean that we’re glad it happened. It doesn’t mean we’re ever going to be glad that it happened. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have bad days that we don’t have bad times. I don’t I can’t speak for you, but I do. I still do. And I probably always will at some point.

Krista St-Germain 51:02
Yep, totally agree. Let’s move on to having just moved. Oh my gosh, all the stuff that came up just moving out of that house where I had so many memories and still had stuff to deal with and oh, yeah, grief, grief grenades everywhere.

Unknown Speaker 51:15
Yeah. Yeah, that’s the way of it.

Brian Smith 51:17
Yeah, they’re out there. And I tell people don’t try to avoid them. You know, is some people say I’m gonna avoid you can’t avoid the triggers. Now they’re out there. They’re all over the place. Just walk through the minefield and let them blow up. Amen. Thank you so much. Yeah. Well, thank you for being here. Chris. It was great to see you. Hopefully people will reach out to you and you know, learn about more about your coaching program. listen to the podcast, the widowed mom podcast if you want to hear more from Krista and then you know, hopefully if you say that she would be a good fit for you for Coach reach out to her. Thank you. Alright, have a great rest of your day. You too. Bye. So that does it for another episode of grief to growth. I sure hope you enjoyed it. If you like this content, make sure you subscribe. So click on the subscribe button here, and then click on the bell to receive notifications and click on all that way you’ll be notified whenever I release new content. Thanks for watching and have a great day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Anthony Chene attended business school and began a career in finance before realizing that was not his life’s passion.

After graduating in media journalism and audiovisual production, Anthony worked as a video reporter within companies, media agencies, and TV channels.

Now, Anthony works as a freelancer (DOP, director, or video reporter) for various clients, and develops his own projects (documentaries, videoclips, fiction).

I learned about Anthony from watching his interviews on his YouTube channel. Anthony creates beautiful films of interviews with Near Death Experiences and documentaries that answer the deepest questions about life, who we are, and why we are here.

I coaxed Anthony to come out from behind the camera and the microphone and to sit in the hot seat so his fans could get to know something about the man behind these life-changing works of art.

Anthony is based in France, and travels on a regular basis for his productions.

 

 

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 Smith back with another episode of grief to growth. And I’ve got with me today a guy I’m really really excited to talk to his name is Anthony Shen. And Anthony is a filmmaker who makes films basically about nd ease and about consciousness and who we are. And he’s really, really popular YouTube channel. I’ve been following Anthony’s work for a long time. And I’m excited to have him here today to get him out from behind the cameras in front of the camera. So we get to know a little bit more about Anthony and what makes him tick. And Anthony did go to business school before he became a filmmaker. After going to business school, he gradually worked in media journalism, and audio visual production. And he worked as a video reporter within companies, media agencies and TV channels. And now he works as a freelancer where he does he directs and does video reporting for various clients. And he also develops his own products, his projects that we’re going to talk about today, documentaries, video clips, and fiction. Anthony is based in France, but he does travel on a regular basis for his productions. You’ll find out the Anthony’s first language is not English, but he speaks English better than any of the nice big French anyway. So we’re going to have a good time here today. So if you do want to contact Anthony, I want to give you his website, and I’ll mention it again later. But it’s Anthony Shen, it’s a n t, h, o n y, ch, E and e.com. And with that, I want to welcome Anthony to grifter growth.

Anthony Chene 2:14
Hi, nice to be here. So yes, as you said, I’m French. So I hope my English will be good enough for the interview. I’m not used to have people interview me. So I hope it will be fine.

Brian Smith 2:31
Yeah, it’ll be great. We did a little pre interview and I’m sure it’s gonna be fine. I’m really excited to get your again, as I said earlier, I want your fans to get to know you a little bit and we’re going to talk about your work and all that kind of stuff. But before we do that, Tell, tell your fans something that they don’t know about what what would be like something that they would find unexpected about you. I don’t know.

Anthony Chene 2:56
Yeah, you already said like, I went to business school in France before I started to make videos as a as a job. So I never did any class in filmmaking. I just did a few classes in audio visual production. But so I learned pretty much everything myself, like the sound equipment, the lighting the camera stuff, you know. So yeah, that’s one thing. Yeah, to

Brian Smith 3:33
say your films are beautiful. There’s, there’s so well done. There’s so well put together the way that and I’m most familiar with your interviews, where you sit down people with ended, Andy’s just recently became aware of your documentaries, and your documentaries are really wonderful, too. So you’ve done a really great job of educating yourself.

Anthony Chene 3:54
Yeah, thank you, actually, when I watched this documentary, is this the old the older documentaries, kind of very critical of myself, you know, I, I think I always think I can do better. So I try to always find the details that I can improve. So

Brian Smith 4:14
yeah. So you you went to business school, and you’re working in the business world, and you weren’t really satisfied with that. So is that is that when you decided to get into filmmaking?

Anthony Chene 4:25
Yes, yes. So long story because it took me like, a few years to to make the transition from the financial, the business school and the financial world to the to what I’m doing now. So it was not very easy. But yes, I could not fit into this corporate world. So it was like a it was a failure for me. You know, I couldn’t do it. Like I had so many friends that were they were able to To have a career and as a financial analyst, or in so many jobs like that, and I couldn’t make it, you know, it was like, horrible for me. Yeah.

Brian Smith 5:11
So when you decided to get into filmmaking, do you think that was more of the artistic thing? Because you want to be creative? Or was it the spirituality?

Anthony Chene 5:21
No, at first, it was the creative side that I, I didn’t know the old the spiritual subjects I’m dealing with right now, I didn’t know these subjects. When I started as a filmmaker. First, I started to make videos for a few clients in, in France, in Paris, you know, just fine, try to find new, a few gigs has a colleague like jobs, to make money. And it was various for various companies for publishing companies. I did. So many small videos like that. And I had a YouTube channel about economic also about economics, sorry, about the financial crisis. So I did the same that I’m doing right now. But I was interviewing politicians, I was interviewing economists, about the financial crisis about the subprime financial problems that we had. And I got, like, Can I get bored with these subjects? Because you know, after a few videos, you always you’re always saying the same stuff, you know, it’s like, nothing is going is going in the right direction. It’s, there is a real estate bubble, a financial bubble, it’s going to explode someday, but it’s not. So it’s kind of boring after a few videos. So yeah. And that’s when I found the first videos about near death experiences. A few years, a few years ago, I was already like 27 or 28 years old, when I first heard heard about near death experiences.

Unknown Speaker 7:09
And

Anthony Chene 7:11
I was very, very curious about that, because I couldn’t make sense of what happened to these people. And so, yes,

Brian Smith 7:22
so I’m curious, what was your spirituality going into that I understand that you were interested? You were raised Catholic? Is that correct? Yes. Okay. And so what was your What? What was your spirituality when you first heard about these indies and had that line up with what you thought before?

Anthony Chene 7:40
I didn’t have any spirituality, basically, when I heard about these stories, because I am not, I don’t practice religion, you know, so it’s like, it’s, I didn’t have any spirituality. I don’t have any family. In this spiritual stuff, you know, I don’t have someone who is psychic or things like that. So it was very, very new for me. Okay, a whole new world open. Okay. And but I think that something resonated within me about this stuff, because I remember like, I also, I already said that in other interviews, but when I was a child, I, I had some some How can you say, some intuitions about the divine and things like that? So I think it’s like a, it was a, it was a part of me, you know?

Brian Smith 8:42
Yeah, I think that’s pretty common for us. I think as children, we kind of have this understanding of this knowing and then the adults teach us things, right. And they kind of that kind of goes away for a while.

Anthony Chene 8:54
Yes, I think the, the all everything I did in business school, it was not the real me, you know, it was just something I tried to become to fit in this, this world, you know, make a living and please your please your family and, you know, this kind of things, but it was not me. And what I discovered after I think it was the real, the real meat, in a sense. So it took me like 28 years to discover something about me, you know, it’s it’s kind of strange, but

Brian Smith 9:32
no, I think it’s very common. I think I think a lot of us go through that. So was there a particular event or something that triggered this this discovery?

Anthony Chene 9:42
Not really took me like, I remember it took me like I was 2728 It took me a few months. I was listening to a lot of interviews, I have read some books about near death experiences about about the Egyptian pyramids, also About the personal development subjects. And no, I didn’t have like a near death experience or a big awakening. But I did have some weird dreams, this period of time. Remember some dreams about people like it was a strange dreams about people telling me like that I had to do videos about these subjects. You know, it’s hard for me to explain that in English because it was a some kind of really weird dreams. It was not like a conscious thing. You know, I was not channeling anything, or I didn’t have during the day of big awakening. It was just during the night that I had this information coming. And I think it played a big part in this process, but I’m not conscious of it. You know, it’s,

Brian Smith 11:02
yeah, yeah. Well, a lot of people that have had nd ease tell us that at night, we visit with the other side, and we visit our loved ones and our higher selves. And so you think maybe that was your higher self or your guides saying you Anthony, it’s time to?

Anthony Chene 11:17
Yeah, yes. It’s always tricky to, at least for me, it’s hard to answer this question. Because I’m not a psychic. I’m not consciously psychic, you know, so I don’t really know, there is what we call the veil of forgetfulness in English, you know, so, so I really have a strong veil. Yeah, I don’t, I don’t really, it’s not, it’s not like I’m humble, or I play something I really don’t know. But I think there is a we all have a higher self, or maybe guardian angels or spiritual guides, as you say. And that, before we come into this world, we hope we all have a plan, you know, kind of a plan before and we have some checkpoints, I believe during your life, you know, at some point, you have to do some stuff. And if you’re not doing them, like for me, I was doing completely all the things that you have like maybe your higher self or spiritual guides, the wake you up, they give you some tips like you have to go back to your to your trail that

Brian Smith 12:31
Yeah, like like, it’s like a Yeah, like a course correction. It’s like, you’re you’re going along and you’re you just need a little nudge in the right direction.

Anthony Chene 12:39
Yes, but it’s very subtle, you know, right. Very, it’s, at least for me, it was very smooth. So you don’t, you don’t you don’t realize it, but I remember that I before that I was kind of depressed about but what was going on, like, professional in my own life and in the world in general? No, I was very depressed. So it’s kind of a feeling like you have to do something else in your life, but you don’t really know.

Brian Smith 13:11
Yeah, yeah, at first. No, I completely understand what you’re saying. And you’re right. And I think you’re it’s interesting as you’re you’re into this subject so much but I can still tell you a little bit skeptical and your your little your your intuition that you’re not speaking like Oh, yes, my guides came up and they told me that because I understand that feeling and you know, the dreams and waking up in the morning and having the aspiration

Anthony Chene 13:36
Yes, it’s Yes, it’s Yeah, it’s very interesting what you said it’s, I don’t feel I’m skeptical but I I just tried to be very accurate and, and honest about what I experienced, you know, yeah, I cannot tell people like yes, I can definitely know. My guardian angels are talking to me. I don’t really know for sure. But I I came to the conclusion that there was something guiding me because I couldn’t do my might myself I couldn’t do it alone. You know what I did like this American channel, this YouTube channel. Just today, it would have been too hard. I must have some help. Yeah, and that it’s like I have there are two parts in me like there is the regular hand Tony you know who is fearful and we just, I don’t get it most of the time. What I’m doing but there is a deeper part in me I can feel sometimes that is very confident about what is going on and I just on how can I say in English? It’s harder for me Sorry, but yeah. There is a deep Part of me that just no. Huh? Some sometimes you just know. Yeah, I can feel that sometimes.

Brian Smith 15:10
Yeah. That inner knowing that that Yes.

Anthony Chene 15:14
It’s not a belief just you know, I know what is going on? I I know what I’m supposed to do but at the same time on in my daily life, I don’t know. So it’s it’s really strange just have to show up in faith, I guess.

Brian Smith 15:31
Yeah, yeah I love how you put that and that’s that’s the thing I think about being human when the real challenges. Some people call it the small self and the bigger self, the ego and the higher self. So we have that that part of us that you know we’re walking around going like what is going on? But we can tap into that other part of us and says, Yeah, here’s what’s going on.

Anthony Chene 15:53
Yes, it’s all about, it’s always the same subject is Don’t, don’t be fearful. But it’s easier said than done, as you say in English. Yeah, very easy for me to say, okay, don’t be fearful and do this and do that. And but then you live your own life. And you are fearful.

Brian Smith 16:15
Yeah. So how did you? How did you get started with the the nd interviews? Who was Who was your first subject?

Anthony Chene 16:24
So at first I did that. I did these interviews in French. I had, I still have a French YouTube channel. Much which it’s bigger than in English, because it’s older. Yeah. So I did, I did a lot of people in French at first with Yeah, you don’t know them in France, but some are quite famous. area. And then I had a very strong intuition that kept coming back that I had to do it in English in the US, because I knew California from my business school. Because I had to do international internships, to validate my business school. And I happened to find an internship in the Bay Area in California, completely out of the blue. And so I so then I used to go on vacation and in California a lot and in the, in the American West. So a few years later, when I started to be a filmmaker in France, I had this strong intuition to to go back to the US and do these same kind of videos I was doing in French to do the same in English. Oh, wow. That’s the story. Well, and it was a nightmare. It was it was horrible. Because it’s I have like almost no money, you know, all the usual stuff when you begin. And I didn’t know anyone in the family in the US or under just started to make videos. And I got some help. One way or another. I had, I had some people helping me like finding near death experiences like bah, bah, bah, back to normal Loma. I can say it in English. was working was working for helping ions. You know the association. Yeah. Yes. So she helped me find some people and also people helped me to find some people and I started to build this, this channel in English. So that’s the story.

Brian Smith 18:42
Yeah. Well, I’m really glad you did.

Anthony Chene 18:44
Yeah. It’s, it’s like the trips were not very easy to make. Like, I used to spend like two weeks in the US, you know, they come back and I did the editing in France. And that’s how I started in English. Yes.

Brian Smith 18:59
Do you remember how your first subject was in English?

Anthony Chene 19:01
Yes, it was the documentary called beyond our sight. Okay. Yes, experiences and psychic medium called to psychic mediums one called Terry Yoder, and as another call the seven sample, as well as for his near death experiences in the story. And that was my first documentary that I did in San Francisco. And he, again, the conditions that I had to make this first documentary was like, when I when I look back at what I did, it’s like, how come I was able to go through the process is first like, no, it was a impossible one. So that’s when I really had to follow the trust and follow the guidance, the intuition. Yeah, it kept coming back like you Have to go back to go back to California. Go back to California, do this stuff do this. So where does it come from?

Brian Smith 20:09
Yeah. So when this was coming back, would you say this was a waking thought? Or was this more of a thing in that dream state again? No, it’s

Anthony Chene 20:18
like, it’s Yeah, it was in dreams. In my dreams, I had some powerful dreams about coming back. And also during the day, like the idea, and I had many synchronicities and many science about going back to the US. And sometimes I got, like, angry at the other side, even if I don’t hear them. And it’s like, I’d say, okay, you want me to do that? Look, I won’t do it. Because it’s too much. It’s just too much like, I won’t do it. Unless you help me. Then like, a few days, or a few weeks, after that, I got like, exactly what I needed to go back. And it’s it’s repeatedly like, Time after time.

Brian Smith 21:07
Yes. It’s an interesting how that happens. You know? Yeah, it’s

Anthony Chene 21:10
really strange. Even when I talk about it, I thinking it’s doesn’t make any sense.

Brian Smith 21:19
But the great thing about you sharing that, and about the work that you do with the nd ease is, then we realize that we’re not alone, because a lot of us have experienced that, you know, and they’re like, Is this my imagination? Am I just making this up? I’m talking to myself? Yes. And yes, it’s

Anthony Chene 21:36
a great question to ask like, yeah, yeah.

Brian Smith 21:41
So, you know, good for us, that you you trusted all that. So, um, so now, how do you choose your subjects for your, for your, for your films, because you’ve got so many, and there’s so many people to choose from? So just curious what that process is like.

Anthony Chene 22:00
There is no real process, I try to listen to a lot of videos. I read a lot of books, and I try to, to see what could be what could be done. But as you say, usually I have so many things that I can do. And the problem is like, how can I organize myself then to do the all the subjects that I want to do?

Brian Smith 22:27
Right, right?

Anthony Chene 22:28
Usually, it’s this kind of question the other way around, because I have many, many ideas and many subjects that I want to too many documentaries I’d like to make. So it’s it’s an ongoing process. It’s and sometimes it’s it’s really strange how it happens, you know, like, people come to me or receive emails, or I received propositions at the exact the very time that I need. Yeah, the thing. So you never know.

Brian Smith 23:13
Yeah, well, you know, it’s just yeah, I think about nobody asked you that question. That was that was that logical side of me, right? saying, Okay, how do you do this? And yes,

Anthony Chene 23:22
yes. And I have it to this logical side, because I used to, I’m a, I’m a kind of, I’m a very, very mental, you know, very, I want to understand everything, I want to ask questions, right? I always want to get, I want to understand everything, basically. So I’m, I’m like that, but I, I learned that you, I just cannot. I it’s very, like, it’s very strange, because the when I when I talk about myself, like it’s the thing I understand the least, you know, I process my own process. Like, the the famous question, or I always have this question is like, Why do you do these subjects? You know, why? Why are you doing all this? And it’s like, I don’t have any simple answer. No.

Brian Smith 24:18
Yeah. Well, you know, it’s interesting that we’re having this conversation because you talk about in your films, and I’ve seen it when you did another interview, I saw with you this, this idea of intuition versus knowing rationally. And and I can tell you’re really deep thinker and people like you and I, we wonder, well, how does this work? You know, what’s, what’s the logical basis for it? And having to trust that this intuition goes beyond that?

Anthony Chene 24:48
Yes, yes. Yes. It’s, yeah, exactly. I think the creative process like I think Must be the same for musicians or for creative people like it, there is some part of the process that you cannot grasp. Right. Record channeling and unconscious channeling? You know, it’s very weird.

Brian Smith 25:16
Yes, yes, I can I completely agree. And and you know, so that the end, would you say we’re talking earlier, we’re talking like teasing this thing out which part of this is me? And which part of this is some something else or something outside of myself? And the answer is we don’t really know. Right?

Anthony Chene 25:31
Yes, because I was. I’m always very afraid of making things up. When you say, I look like, skeptical, you know? Because I don’t want to make things up for myself. No, I don’t want to become someone like, I’m, you know, I don’t want to lie. I don’t want to lie to myself. Right? To be very honest, as honest as I could about what I do. And and so I know, I’m not a psychic, I’m not a medium. And I think there is a higher plan for every one of us. We just have to trust what’s happening. And but, yeah, that’s what I wanted to do.

Yeah. I’m curious, because you said that, I think there’s a higher plan for every one of us. Did you have that idea before you started studying in these? Or is that something that came to you after you started listening to the lessons from indies? It was after, I think, after when I started to discover these subjects about, let’s say about spirituality. I understood a lot of things about myself and about my own life. Until then, was it before that it just seemed chaotic and random, you know, I, I went to California, I did this and did that and came from this part of the world and, and after that, I realized that everything was here for a reason. Nothing was random. And nothing is random. Everything has, when we say everything is perfect. It’s not that like everything is nice and cool. But it’s everything has a deep reason. Everything happens for a reason. And we have to find out even when it’s painful, and part we have to find out the reason and the meaning behind all this, why are we going through this painful event or things like that? So yeah, yeah. I think our choices we have the freedom to, to react, is there in wisdom, love and with faith or with fear when something happens to us? Hmm. So yes, I forgot your question. Well, I want to ask you, because you, you, I was asking you about this philosophy, you have everything for a reason. I was asking, did that come from the Indies? Because I did want to ask you, with your with your studying of indies for as long as you have, what are the lessons that are? And what are the lessons you’ve taken from indies? What do you want people to get out of your films?

I think the first big obviously, the first thing is that we don’t die. Like as we think we die. It’s not the body dies, of course, but who we really are beyond the thoughts beyond the body and beyond the emotions, who we really are. doesn’t die. That’s the main message behind the nerdiest experiences, it’s like, death is nothing. It’s just in the blink of an eye. So you go through this 3d world and there is something else. And then there are many messages behind the near death experiences. I think it’s also it’s like, everything happens for a reason, as I said, and also that when you go on the life with you on the other side, you understand that your actions that had an impact on other people, what impact you had on other people, and you experience other people, feelings and thoughts towards you as if you were these people. That’s one less you know, like, at some level, you’re not just the person you will think you are. You’re just a whole scene. It will everyone is the whole scene at some level and when you’re on the other side You just get that. And you experience the whole scene, not just the you you think you are. Okay, so that’s another lesson and so many lessons, but it’s always at the end, it’s always like, don’t be fearful things like that you live your live your life and follow your intuition. And it’s very hard to follow your intuition in this world because it’s like a whisper. The intuition is very subtle. Mm hmm. And in this one, it’s very stressful. It’s very everything. So it’s very hard to follow this little voice, but that’s the, that’s the thing we have to do. Yeah, yeah, many things I could say about.

Announcer 30:53
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. com. 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.

Brian Smith 31:49
If people were to learn the lessons, if people were to watch your films and take the lessons from how do you think the world would be different?

Anthony Chene 32:00
It’s a very deep question. I have I have a lot of mixed feelings about this world right now. I don’t know about you, but it’s can we save this world? How can we improve this world?

Unknown Speaker 32:19
I don’t know.

Anthony Chene 32:23
I think people will, will. I think we should have more power on ourselves. You know, we should do not listen to everything you’ve been told. And listen to yourself more to your true self. Like the that’s the solution. That’s the key the keys within who you really are. That’s the real solution. Because the reality we experienced this 3d world is like it’s just a dream. In a sense, it’s relatively real. It’s just a projection from inside out. So if we want to change this world, we have to project something else. But not just on a conscious level, like let’s say a one a better world, but we have to really, on the subconscious level on an emotional level, we have to project something else, every single one of us. So it takes a lot of time to change the world because we have to people have to change themselves first. Yeah. So I think it will take time, but I think it is there is an acceleration going on right now.

Brian Smith 33:39
I’d say you do believe there’s an awakening going on people are are.

Anthony Chene 33:43
Yes, I think so. But But there are also many other things going on. So yeah, I don’t know. I tried to focus on what I can control and what and what I can do, because otherwise I can I like everyone else. I feel depressed. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Smith 34:08
No, I understand. I guess I was asking the question that and I can in a fantasy way, if people if people could watch if we could if people could watch your films and awaken to the reality? Yeah,

Anthony Chene 34:21
yeah. I think it would be like the it’s a cliche, like a French word, but it’s like the end of the movie matrix. The one you know, hmm, if you really if I could awaken or everyone could awaken to, to to who we really are. It will be like the end of the movie like you when he says no, the bullets like they just stop. It’s really this kind of stuff. Like if you can awaken to who you are you you can project something else.

Brian Smith 34:58
Yeah, so let’s talk about that because I I know you mentioned a 3d world. And I’ve heard people talk about four D and five D, what does that mean to you?

Anthony Chene 35:07
Okay, so some hot questions. My understanding is that the 3d world is where we live right now in space and time, with the brain, the body and everything. Like we have to live in this 3d world. But that’s not it, there is more. And I think the 4d could be like the astral level. Like when we dream, when we go out of body. Some people can go out of out of body, it’s like another level of dimension, it’s right. It’s everything it at the same place, but it’s another vibration, you know, it’s a little higher. And when we dream, we can access this level and there is still a duality going on between good and evil. As we think you know, you can have a nightmare, you can have a good dream you can. When you go out of body, people often say that you can meet good entities or bad entities like demons or things like that. That’s the 40 plane. But you can go higher and higher, it’s not the end of it. So I think when you go beyond this astral level, when you can project your emotions very easily. When you go higher, you can. At some point, there is no duality going on, as we think like good and evil. Just one, everything is just one. And you just experienced that, but it’s beyond the words we can use. I think it’s beyond our understanding, you know, we are we are guys we want to, we want to understand everything. Right? Right. And we cannot get that like, there is no bad. And people will always say there is no bad things. Everything is perfect. Like, people will always say what about children dying? Hungry? What about murderers? All these kind of usual examples? And you don’t I don’t have an answer for why you don’t know, you just know that. This is not the end of it. What we are living right now, there is something more but it doesn’t mean that we have to escape this really well, because there is nowhere to escape is only here and now. So heaven and everything else haven’t died. It’s all here now. But we just cannot see it. Literally, we cannot see it. We don’t have we’re not conscious that it’s all here. And now. And that’s the job. We have to awaken. We have to remember. We have to remember who we are.

Brian Smith 37:47
Yeah. So do you. And this is another hard question, but I’m gonna throw out there. So what do you think the purposes of coming to this 3d world?

Anthony Chene 38:02
I don’t, the usual usual answer is to learn to run stuff, too. Because when you when we are in a body with thoughts and emotions, we can have a lot of experiences we can feel, feel different experiences that we can only feel here. But a lot of very often it’s like painful. And a lot of people like even especially right now, at this parallel period of time. There are a lot of suicides, a lot of depressed people. I know in France, I know it must be the same in the us right now. And the other part of the world that people just want out is want to like what’s the point of being here? Right? So but I think there is a point. And I think my honest answer would be like, at some point we are all every single one of us is God or the universe experiencing itself from a relative viewpoint. We’ve all heard the whole thing. Everyone is the whole thing experiencing itself from a fractal point.

Unknown Speaker 39:24
And

Anthony Chene 39:26
any time we have problems or questions about what’s going on in the world, or why am I here? I think the answer is to project something else to give to light your own to be your own light. And to project something. That’s the solution is the I think this is the solution.

Brian Smith 39:55
Yeah, I agree with you. And it’s interesting, you know, because that is always a tough question. Why are we here? Why does this exist? But you know, I think about the opposite. What if there were no evil? What if there were no pain? You know, life would be boring. You know? Imagine a movie, imagine a movie with no bad guy, where the good guy just he goes through his life every day, and nothing ever happens. Yes,

Anthony Chene 40:22
yes, maybe it’s here so that we are forced to do something were forced to evolve. Because it was the same in my life. In the beginning of the interview, I said, like about before I did this subjects. And when I was in finance, I was kind of not depressed, but not good about myself. No, like, what’s the point? And but thanks to the this kind of emotional suffering, I found other solutions other ways. I did this channel and I did a lot of things. But I don’t think that suffering is necessary. I think we, we should have other ways to evolve. Right? Right. You don’t we don’t have to suffer to evolve. But in this world, with our level of consciousness right now, it’s like, sometimes it’s the only way, you know, you have to suffer to get it.

Brian Smith 41:19
Yeah.

Anthony Chene 41:20
It’s horrible when you think about it, but we it’s because we are not wise enough. Sometimes, I think Yeah.

Brian Smith 41:27
Yeah. I’m sorry, to cut you up. But the duality gives us options. So you, we can come in this world, and we can focus on the world as you were doing when you were in Business School. Everybody says, This is what you should do. But you realize this is not satisfying me. This is not feeding my soul. There’s something there’s something more for me. So you’ve you’ve created this, this channel and this this great service, out of out of that realize that other thing was not for you.

Anthony Chene 41:58
Yes, basically, that’s what I did. Yes. But it’s, it’s not easy. Because on the one side, you can grasp something, you know, like, you will have a job, you will have money you will have friends, or parents or whatever, understanding what you’re doing. So you can grasp what you what you would have on this path. But on the other side, the intuition path, you don’t grasp anything. It’s like, I feel I have to go this way. But that’s it. Right? So you cannot even explain what you’re doing to other people around you. That’s why so many people when they change careers, or when they make another other plans in the life that they How can I say it in English, it’s Sorry, it’s hard for me in English sometimes to explain. A lot of people lose friends when they change plans, because you cannot explain what you’re doing what you have a deep intuition and you cannot explain it to other people. You’re left with your you are left with yourself.

Brian Smith 43:10
Right. Right. Well, it’s, it’s it goes back to that the 3d world. And I think for people like yourself, and people that have nd ease, they wake up to the reality that this world is not real. So the people that are stuck in 3d are chasing jobs and careers, and things that as you said, they’re tangible. They’re right here in front of us. But we know that they’re not real, that they don’t last.

Anthony Chene 43:35
Yes, yes, yes, yes. And it’s, yeah, for me, it’s one way I try to tell myself this story. Like, it’s good way to feel good about myself, because it’s what I experience on a daily basis. But sometimes it’s just, it was just, like a failure for me, you know, I cannot fit into this world. You know, it’s like you see a video game. It’s like a soul video game of people have cars on the, on the freeways and buildings and all this kind of stuff. And I said that I said to myself, there’s something I don’t get about this world. Like, how can how can I fit into this world? Why? Why does it feel that I am the only one that doesn’t fit into this world? And I’m not the only one I know. But that’s how it feels like it seems it feels like it. It’s, it’s not a good feeling. Hmm.

Brian Smith 44:37
Well, I heard your interview with Lee wedding. And you mentioned the fact when you were a little kid, you had this feeling of like a purple thing in your chest, I think was the way you described it. Yeah, that that connection and that. And when I was a child, I didn’t fit into the world either. And I would lie awake at night and say what is wrong with me or what is wrong with the world, that this doesn’t make any sense to me I was a kid during the Vietnam War. And I remember I watched on television every night people killing each other, and they would show the body count. And I thought, what kind of world? Is it when people go out and try to kill strangers? It’s just it never made sense to me. Yes, it’s that kind of feeling. Yes. Yes. So I understand what you’re saying. And I appreciate you. And I think that the thing I love about Andy are sharing this with us and you sharing it with us through them, sharing it through you, as it makes some of us not feel so alone. And we realized that there is something wrong with this world, there’s

Anthony Chene 45:34
something off? Yes, because I think right now, a lot of people are trying to fit into their life or their jobs or any, they, because they feel alone as a way. And, and you’re very, it’s not just about the lack of money, because you can always find a way to make money. Like, I say that, but I used to have a lot of fears about money. So it’s not an easy thing. But you, I always, I can always find a way to make money. But the hardest thing for me was not to feel alone in my job. Or in my, in what I’m doing. alone. I mean, not alone, literally in my life, but like, like, Am I right to do this? You know, is it? Is it? Is it complete? Nonsense. Does it make any sense?

Brian Smith 46:32
You want to have some sense of purpose, you know, and I was watching the film earlier, your film, who we are. And I think it was dean Raiden was talking about, you know, I know a lot of very wealthy people that aren’t very happy. And I think one of the problems with this world is once we get that wealth, and we think this is the thing, and then that doesn’t make us happy, then we’re even more depressed. Yes, we’ve realized that’s not the thing.

Anthony Chene 47:01
Yes. And yes, there is nothing wrong about having a very big house or several big houses and a lot of millions of euros or dollars in the bank account. It’s it’s a very nice thing to have. That it won’t, it won’t. It won’t bring us what we think it will.

Brian Smith 47:28
Right. Right. Bring us any meaning. Right. Yeah, exactly. So what I wanted to kind of shift gears a little bit. So I know you live you live in France, mostly? How are your films received in France? Or this this idea of spirituality? We? How does that go over there?

Anthony Chene 47:47
In France, it’s a little different than in the US. The general population is divided, like some people are awakening to these subjects. Some are not. But it’s but on average, and I have a lot of people interested in this subject in France. But the on the official level, like how can I say like the magazines, the TV Understand? Yeah. Oh, and so on, they hardly never share this kind of subjects. Mm hmm. There is no like Gaia, you know, gaia.com. And in the US, you have this website. We don’t have these. We don’t really have these kind of organizations in France. Yeah. It’s almost forbidden by the state. It’s kind of that’s a good thing to do in France.

Brian Smith 48:49
Yeah, it’s, it’s still, it’s still considered kind of fringe here in the US. I think there’s more, you know, the internet has helped a lot, you know, channels like yours, where it’s, it’s the democratization, right? We don’t have to get permission to put it out. You can? Yes, yes. It’s a little more open in the US. Yes. Right. And you can put an ideal, and I got to tell people, I mean, your films, you know, some of them have millions of views, and your interview is getting, you know, 10s of 1000s of hits. So there is there’s a real appetite for this that people you know, you mentioned earlier, you know, as we’re going through this two things we’re going through we talked right before, but we’re not going to get political but, you know, going through COVID and everything people are realizing this world is not making them happy. It’s not satisfying them.

Anthony Chene 49:40
Yes. And I wonder if it’s that the message we handle all this, behind all the things we’re living right now as a society, maybe it’s like, we have to get something and we have to get it soon. Like we have to get some And if we don’t, I mean, collectively, some not very good things happen and are going to happen, because it’s like, it’s not the choice anymore. We have to evolve now. Right?

Brian Smith 50:17
Right. We seem to and we, you know, it’s interesting, we talked about this earlier that sometimes people grow through suffering, and you’re saying you would be great if we didn’t have to. But as mankind, it seems like we need to hit a point of crisis, sometimes before we wake up.

Anthony Chene 50:33
Yes. And French spiritual teacher used to say, you don’t have to get a slap in the face every morning to evolve, you know, you can just get it without suffering. It doesn’t have to be that painful. Or you can just, it’s like, when you learn something, a new skill, you don’t have to suffer a lot. Every time you learn something. Sometimes you have to, but it’s not the it’s not. Not all the time. But in the Catholic religion, you know, I was brought Catholic. It’s a it’s a very deep belief, unconscious belief that we have in France, I think it’s like we have to suffer to this to deserve something. Hmm. It’s a it’s an unconscious belief that we have, like, if you don’t suffer, you have to show that you suffer that you that it’s hard, so that you can deserve something.

Brian Smith 51:40
Yeah, that’s a really good point. Because one of the lessons of the end, I think, is we make life way too hard.

Anthony Chene 51:46
Yes, Yes, I think so. Yeah, I think it’s truth. And yes, it’s very simple. The concepts are always very simple. And then it’s the application on the day, the life that is not very, not very easy. But it’s very simple. It’s like, follow your own intuition. And don’t be fearful. Don’t blame. Don’t spend your time blaming other people all the time and judging people, because very often, we think that our problems they come from, like other people around us. And it can be true on some level, but in the end, it’s just all about what we do. Yeah, what we project. Yeah. So we just, we, we lose time when we blame other people. And I blame Of course, when I say that, in my daily life, of course, I blame other people, you know, of course I am. Of course, I’m judging things. Of course, I’m fearful. So it’s, I don’t, I don’t want to like appear like, there is a difference between what i what i say right now and what I’m leaving. So just to be clear, I have to learn.

Brian Smith 53:11
Yeah, we all we all have that. So I guess my next question. So what do you do to enhance that inner knowing that intuition and to learn to trust it more and live from that?

Anthony Chene 53:24
I think the what I do like my videos for me, it’s, for me, it’s the best way to, to understand new solutions and new things. It’s, yeah, I found this way to evolve. When I made these videos, I learned new things. Every time I meet new people, I have new insights. So it’s a great way for me to to evolve. And I’m kind of like the, like the ocean also, you know, the, the waves the sea. So when I’m, when I’m just in front of the her, just put you just put me like one or two hours peacefully in front of the sea, and I get the messages very easily. You know what I have to do? flow is very easy after that for me.

Brian Smith 54:27
Yeah, we just arrived simple. There reminds me something that the john Butler said in your film, who we are is about, like, you know, we can’t really stop the thoughts, but it’s reaching that state where we can slow the thoughts down and whatever it takes to get us there. And so, yeah,

Anthony Chene 54:44
for Western people, yes. For for people like us. Yes. It’s a great way. I think people in India and Asian people in general, it’s maybe easier for them to meditate. And for us People in the West, we have a lot of thoughts. So it’s harder, at least for me. I know it’s very hard because I want to I want to think about everything, you know, I want to, to be rational about everything so. So a great way maybe it’s also to walk. No Western people, we have to walk in nature Walker, things like that. Because when we sit and we do not think, for a lot of people, it’s very hard not to think and not to have compulsive thoughts. Right,

Brian Smith 55:39
right. Yeah, we’re socialized that way. We’re, and we’re told, we’re told you should always be busy, you should always be doing something. And I’ve talked to many people about meditation over the years, and they’re like, I don’t I don’t have time. I can’t just sit for five minutes and do and do nothing.

Anthony Chene 55:54
Yeah, it’s a lie. But yes, that’s what we tell ourselves. Yes. Yeah. Because when, when we check what we do every day, like, usually, we had a lot of times where we just waste our time, we don’t do anything worth doing. You know, you say, I don’t have time. I’m so busy. But it’s not true.

Brian Smith 56:19
Yeah. So what are your What are your future plans? Are you planning to continue doing what you’re doing? What are some projects you have coming up?

Anthony Chene 56:26
Yes, I like to make bigger and bigger projects in the future English, like, I want my documentaries and films I do to be more and more professional, more and more impactful, more and more deep. Yes, that’s basically what I want to do. I’d like to work with other people as well, you know, like technicians and like, have very talented people. Like, also musicians, musicians, was the soundtracks. So that’s what I want. That’s the direction I’d like to take.

Brian Smith 57:13
So you’re doing are you doing everything on your own? Now? You’re doing all your production on your own?

Anthony Chene 57:18
Yes, but less and less, because the last interviews you saw on my YouTube channel, like the last three or four interviews, I wasn’t the one shooting the video. Okay, because I’m not I was not able to go to the US or right to other countries because of the crisis. This crisis. So I had people I paid people in the US to fill the interview, and I asked the I asked the question, through the questions through FaceTime through Oh, yeah. Yeah, in real time. So I have people’s filming for me, and also the music’s, but yes, I’d like to delegate maybe more in the future. Yeah. And of course, it takes more money. But I’ll find a way.

Brian Smith 58:13
Yeah. Yeah. Well, Anthony, I gotta tell you, this has been a real thrill for me, getting to know you. And I thank you for stepping out from behind the camera. And I saw get to see you and hear you. I know that that people are going to be so excited. I want to tell people I don’t you tell people where can people find out more about you? yet.

Anthony Chene 58:37
You think you told it like my website and Tony chen.com or my YouTube channel, you can find me very easily on YouTube and Tony Chen production. It was really good interview for me. But what I found is that it’s very, it’s harder for me to talk about why I’m doing what I do and my own life than talking about the other side. Sure, never been I’ve never had any any near death experience. But it’s much easier for me to deal with near death experiences, then to talk about my own my own life, you know, it’s very strange and very comfortable talking about why I do what I do. You know, I don’t have all the answers. And as a rational guy, it’s, you know, I’d like to be more accurate about what I do.

Brian Smith 59:33
Yeah. Well, the thing is, you know, we all have a role to play, you know, and and you haven’t had an MD I haven’t had an MD he and I interview engineers every day, but that’s my role is to get to bring their story out and get their story people and people want to know you are you’re very inspirational story. You’re you’re a guy who said I am on the path that I don’t really want to be on. This is not fulfilling me. I’m going to take this different path. And it’s it’s, it’s you’re gonna inspire other people to follow their dreams. So that’s why I wanted to bring your story out.

Anthony Chene 1:00:07
Yes. And just people, I know that a lot of people I personally know some people right now. They just want to change their life, their job or anything. And just, just don’t be fearful. And it’s going just know it’s going to be hard, right? But don’t be fearful and you will have a lot of health and we didn’t talk a lot about praying or stuff like that. But I think you can just ask things you won’t receive anything you asked for, like most people will ask for a million dollars. That, of course, is the basic thing to ask for. we all we all want peace in the world. But when we if you have one wish you will not wish for the peace in the world wish for a lot of money. Yeah,

Brian Smith 1:00:58
yeah. That’s a great welcome mission. We did. You did talk about prayer, though, earlier, because you said when your guides were telling you to do this, or this, you said I’ll do it if I get help. And then you got the help. Yes. And said you have to do? Yeah, yeah. Then you have to do so. There’s that challenge.

Anthony Chene 1:01:16
So yeah, I tried to ask a, because it’s so easy. You know, as a rational guy, it’s too easy. You know, like, just ask with your heart. just too easy for me. Like, if it was that easy. Why is so much suffering in the world and all these questions, but I think it’s that easy. You have to ask, you have to visualize. You have to be true to yourself. And just the doors will open.

Brian Smith 1:01:47
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we’ve seen it in your life and appreciate you. appreciate what you’re doing. You’re you’re you’re very humble guy. You’re very you’re it’s been great getting night.

Anthony Chene 1:02:04
Yeah. And you too, like you make people very comfortable, you know, because it’s, it was like a stressful thing for me to do this interview, you know, to, to talk in English to. It’s not an easy thing, but you. You made it like, good, so

Brian Smith 1:02:23
great. Well, great. It’s been fantastic getting to know you and I will talk to you soon. Okay, thank you. Have a good day. Okay, so that does it for another episode of grief to growth. I sure hope you enjoyed it. If you like this content, make sure you subscribe. So click on the subscribe button here, and then click on the bell to receive notifications and click on all that way you’ll be notified whenever I release new content. Thanks for watching, and have a great day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

My work is largely about helping people change their perspectives. Rich’s book “Change Your Story Change Your Life” is about that same thing. Taking the same set of facts and telling a story about it that is beneficial.

Rich Curtis is, and always has been a guide. For a decade as a raft and backpacking guide and now as a real estate entrepreneur, best selling author, and success coach. Rich guides, coaches, writes, and speaks to help entrepreneurs, CEOs, adventurers, and go getters rewrite their stories, get unstuck and live their dreams. As a story expert, passionate student of neuroscience, positive psychology, and behavioral psychology, Rich believes in a world where people are invested in the process of being better tomorrow than they are today.

His life’s work, including his book, Change Your Story Change Your Life, has been about helping people get there. Outside of work Rich is a dedicated father of two, husband, traveler and outdoor adventurer.

 

You can find Rich here:  http://www.richcurtis.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 grief to growth. And today I’ve got with me, gentleman, his name is Rich Curtis, and rich Curtis as an author. He’s always been a guide, he spent over a decade as a as a raft guide. He’s been a backpacking guide. He’s now a real estate entrepreneur. He’s a best selling author, and he’s a success coach. He guides coaches writes and speaks to help entrepreneurs, CEOs, adventurers, and go getters rewrite their stories, we’re going to talk about what that means to rewrite your story helps him to get unstuck and how to live the dreams. And as a story expert, and as a passionate student of neuroscience, positive psychology and behavior psychology, which believes in a world where people are invested in the process of being better tomorrow than they are today. And his life’s work includes his book, change your story, change your life, have been about helping people to get there. So outside of work, which is a dedicated father of two we just talked about. He’s got two little energetic kids. He’s a husband, he’s a traveler, and he’s an outdoor adventurer. So with that, I want to welcome to grave to growth. Rich Curtis.

Rich Curtis 1:50
Thanks for having me, Brian. I’m excited to be here. I love the name. I love the concept of of taking grief and using that to to move forward and grow. So I’m excited to be here in chat with you today.

Brian Smith 1:59
Yeah, well, I love that you’re the title of your books, I think that’s a very important part of dealing with grief is the story that we tell ourselves. So what I want to get started with is asking you because I know You talk a lot about story. And people might say, Well, my story is just what happened to me that I can’t change my story, the story is what it is. So what does it mean to change our story?

Rich Curtis 2:22
Yeah, it’s funny, because in my coaching practice, I’ve run up against that as soon as we dive into narrative work, you get that? Well, no, this is static. This is truth. This is what it is, is what happened. But what you find when you start diving into the science of story, how our brains compile stories, and even how our senses work, our stories are heavily filtered personal virtual realities of what happened. In fact, if you, if you and I experienced the same moment, and we write our stories down about it, there’s a nearly 0% chance that we’re gonna write the same story about that that moment. And the, the science of that is really kind of interesting, where you’re parsing so much data, we’ve got like 11 million bits of information hitting us right now, while you and I are talking. Now, if you had to actively engage with all that information, you’d be just a quivering mass of overwhelm, you wouldn’t be able to do anything. And so your brain creates all these filters to filter out all the stuff you don’t need and the stuff you’ve already engaged with. And it makes these just intense filters for the world. No filters are essentially your stories. Once you’ve set those filters, nothing gets in or out that isn’t part of those filters. So for new information to get in, you have to be knocked off your game, or you have to actively do the work of suspending some of those filters. Now you are actively engaging right now with like 40 to 60 of those 11 million bits, depending on the study you read, right? So you’re parsing the data down to just an infant testimony, small amount. And then you’re compiling your stories from that tiny bit of information. Now you add to that, that your brain has an anthropological preset for writing bad stories, right, because there were 15 other hominids running around, you know, trying to become us become the dominant hominid and we didn’t win because we’re the biggest and the toughest, we won because we were the scariest and because we can cooperate. So we got really good at hearing a twig break in the woods and saying that’s a saber toothed tiger, I better run. I was great when there were saber toothed tigers in the woods. Now that most of us don’t live with immediate threats to life. Unfortunately, not all of us. But most of us don’t live with immediate daily threats to life. What our brain does is it patterns for the negatives. So you’re taking in the smallest bits of information, you’re filtering them through your emotions, and your past experiences your preset to pick the worst and most negative bits of information. And that’s what we’re writing these these stories from. So you can imagine, you know, 11 million bits of information, the average dictionary has about a million letters in it. So if I gave you 11 dictionaries that you can pick 40 letters, you can have duplicates, obviously we only got 26 characters writing a story out of 40 out of these 11 million letters, and then you hand me the same stack and told me to do the same thing. The odds that we’re gonna write the same story are essentially Zero. And so we think these things are truth and are empirical and are set in stone, but they’re not. And part of that is also because we’re in love with our senses, we think our senses are empirical, like, what I’m seeing of you on the camera right now, is not what you look like. And that’s a that’s a mind blower, right? Like I’m looking at you. But if I drew my picture you and you drew your picture you they’re gonna be very, very different. Because I’m filtering you through all the experiences I’ve had with other men, men with glasses, fathers podcasters. All these, these filters are in there to affect what I think of you and the picture we send to our brain. And one of the most powerful examples is the early astronaut program, they thought floating upside down in space would make the astronauts go nuts, they wanted to test it before they put them in orbit. So they strapped these goggles on them the inverted their view of the world for 30 days. And they couldn’t take them off sleeping nothing they had had to wear them and lots of disorientation and accidents and bumps and bruises and sued. But on day 26, one of the astronauts woke up and the world was right side up again, even though he’s still wearing his goggles, because his brain had for 35 years seeing the world right side up. And now for 26 days, it was seeing the world upside down. And it said, it doesn’t matter the picture that’s coming in, I know that’s wrong, I’m going to fix it. And it righted the world. And by the end of the 30 days, all of the astronauts experienced same thing The world is right set up again. Yeah, your brain is is literally changing what you see your sight is not an empirical picture of the world. It’s filtered through your experiences and your past emotions. So the first step in the process of engaging with doing narrative work and rewriting your stories, and especially your stories around traumatic events, like grief, is letting go of the concept of truth. Not in sort of this sort of political Post truth environment we’ve all just been through, I don’t mean it like that there are things that are true. When it comes to your stories and the way you compile them. This is not truth. This is just a version of the truth. And if you are the one writing them, and you are you’re the one writing these stories, you’re the one doing this work, even though it’s subconscious. Why Why would you write such terrible stories for yourself? Like when you think of the stories, not the stories you tell at a cocktail party, but the Late Night with a whiskey on the couch story that you tell yourself, right? You’d never say that out loud. You never stand up in front of a party of people and say, I totally suck at everything, right? I’m fat, I’m a loser, I’ll never get anywhere in life. You know, I’m a bad dad, whatever it is those stories, you tell yourself, you’d never say that out loud. But those are the stories you’re living out, and they’re affecting your life in a really dramatic way. So once you realize your stories aren’t true, and you’re in control of them, then you sort of have to step back and say, why am I writing such crappy stories for myself? Why am I living out such horrible stories? And then you can engage with the science in the process of rewriting them to take your life where you want to go?

Brian Smith 7:43
Yeah, yeah, I think something you said there was really important that I wrote that I want to invite you to the library. So it was very important. But what I want to emphasize something because I think there’s people have this question, why do we write such bad stories? Why do we focus on the negative and I say the same thing, my clients, it’s evolutionary, it’s the way our brains are wired is to focus on what’s wrong, so we can fix what’s wrong. And that doesn’t always serve us. So I want to give people it’s okay, if you’re doing this, right. Because we all do it. As you and I know talking to people, we know that when people come to us, they all do it. I’m a terrible person. I’m a terrible father. I’m just, I’m just a loser, everybody. I’m a poser. Everybody else is good. And I’m not.

Rich Curtis 8:25
Yeah, yeah. And it’s it’s hard to work in the personal development industry in a way that’s, that’s humble and walks alongside people, which is what you’re talking about is saying, hey, it’s okay, that you’re not broken, you’re not damaged, you’re not doing something wrong. You are living out your evolutionary destiny, this is how you’re wired to work. So we’re just trying to give you tools to help circumvent that and have better outcomes. And my brain works just like your brain, and I suffer in the same way you suffer. I just suffered enough that I got to a breaking point that I decided there had to be a better way. And I went out to find it. And I think that’s, I think sometimes we give people new names for their problems and let them keep them in the personal development. We’re like, Okay, I’m just, I’m just projecting or I had a bad childhood, or I’ve got a bad story. And it makes people feel better. I can name this thing. But then we don’t, we don’t force the issue of doing the work to actually fix it. Because doing the work doesn’t sell books, right? If you if the title of your book was spend the next six months doing the hard work of rewriting all the narratives in your life, so you can be better, right? That would sell approximately one copy to your mom.

Brian Smith 9:33
Yeah, exactly.

Rich Curtis 9:36
But four easy steps to change your life in 15 minutes, boom, you’ll sell, you know, 100,000 of those. And so, a little bit like those of us who do do this work, we need to step back and admit to people that this stuff is simple. It’s not rocket science. I’m not smarter than you. My brain works the same way your brain works. I just suffered enough that I was willing to do the work. Yeah. And and that’s it. The process is actually the doing of the work and unfortunately, it’s Like anything in life, it’s it’s work. It’s not. It’s It’s simple, but you got to you got to you got to slog it out, you got to put in the effort. And I think that so grief, the death of my mom is what forced me to, to engage with the work, you know?

Brian Smith 10:16
Yeah, I’m sorry to hear that that was actually led into my next question. I was wondering what it was that that prompted you to do the work because typically, again, evolutionary, we do the simplest thing that’s, that’s working or kind of working until it doesn’t work anymore. That’s, that’s, that’s evolution. That’s fine. Okay. But that’s not being lazy. That’s just being efficient. But it’s something that comes along and knocks us off that course, typically, that drives us to do this work. So for you, it sounds like it was the passing of your mother.

Rich Curtis 10:43
It was Yeah. And and sorry. I mean, the passing of parents always dramatic, and you think but how did that knock you off your game so bad, but it was, it was really sudden, and I had some bad stories that kind of compounded it. So my mom died about 41 days before the birth of my first child. So that was part of it was she, she never got to meet him. And my mom was she had five children of her own. And she’d never met a child in her whole life that wasn’t like her child under her protection. Immediately. She was just her whole essence. Her whole being was mom, all my growth and my friends growing up called her mom. So that’s, that’s kind of who she was. But she, the day she died, was really sudden and unexpected. So we thought that she had a hernia. And they sent us home. And she had an infection associated with that. And then the infection got out of control. And within three days, we were bringing her into the hospital. And then she spent about 14 hours in the hospital in the dying process dying from sepsis. And so part of that what made it harder for me was having been a raft guide and a mountain guide, I had this sort of classic male savior complex, like nobody dies on my watch. Right? Yeah. And then had a lot of experiences that confirmed that right? That’s confirmation bias. Like, I’d had heart attacks and broken ankles and cracked ribs and cracked heads. And I’d always gotten those people out safe, right. And so my mom had a DNR Do Not Resuscitate order. So for those of you don’t know what that means, that basically means that if we know this is only going one way, you’re going to die today, then you have to stop working on me and let it take its course, right? Which is counter to my training as a first responder in medicine, we’re trained, you just keep doing things until you pass out or give the person to somebody who knows more than you. Right? And so to sit on my hands and watch her die for 14 hours, was really really hard. For me personally, I think it hit me maybe even more than my other four brothers in a way because I’m so used to stepping in and doing things when when people are having that process. Yeah. So about two years after her death, so she passed away and I went into two years of just intense suffering. Depression, you know, I call them in the book that the failed stage frustration, anger, irritability, loss of self care, exile, depression, all of it. But what was amazing about it was, I was a functional dad, it was pretty good dad as good as a dad as I am today. Good as a dad, as I know how to be. I wasn’t, I was probably not a great husband, I was probably pretty challenging and emotional to deal with for a new mom. Unfortunately, my wife gave me a lot of grace, and I thank her for that. And I was really functional, you know, high earning entrepreneur in the real estate industry. And so from the outside if you went out and had drinks with me, you had no idea the depths to which I was suffering. You have no idea that I was getting up in the morning sitting on the edge of the bed and thinking is this all there’s gonna be for the rest of my life? Am I gonna feel like this? You had no idea that I was driving around town at you know, just ridiculous the unsafe speeds playing loud angry music on a couple occasions nearly picking fistfights which is completely out of my, my normal emotional range. Because I had so much anger and frustration pent up inside me. And it all came to a head I think some people have their epiphany is with like a religious leader on the slopes of the Andes, taking Iosco under the stars, right, I was circling in Costco in my truck, and having an argument with my brother and I was fighting with my brother over the phone. And I’d been circling the Costco long enough that even a security guard started to follow me in his little golf cart to try and chase me down and see him. And the combination of this I screamed in the phone to my brother, look, I’m failing you. I’m failing. And that’s my wife and we failed mom, we just stood there and watched her die. She fought for all five of us every day of her life. When we did nothing, we just watched her die. And when that story came flying out of me, I hit the brakes on the truck. The security guard got almost nailed me in the back of the truck. And I was just done. I was completely frozen in place because I didn’t know that story was in me. Never in the two years since her passing and I engaged with that concept that I said out loud I failed my mom I didn’t fight for her. Nobody my family had ever said that or even implied that that was something that happened that day. So that was the source of all my my pain. I was sticking your finger in the bullet wound like that. That was it. That was what was causing everything for me was this story and I didn’t even know it was there. And so at that moment, I had asked myself a couple of questions one is it true to Even if it’s true, does it matter even if it’s true? Is it serving me? And the answer was no, it’s not the truth of that day and it’s not serving, it’s practically killing me. And so I set into a two year sort of deep dive into the Science of Happiness and the science of story to figure out how to correct us how to change this narrative. And the first step was looking at that day my mom died. So actually went back to that day, and so well, at four in the morning, my dad asked me to get the DNR and so I get the DNR and I brought it down to the hospital, and I asked my mom to resend it, she was still, you know, cogent enough to do that, and you can resend it verbally and she said, No, she wanted to stand and I handed it over. Even though I knew what that meant. I didn’t want to hand that died, Doctor practically ripped it pulling it out of my hand.

Then my mom was deeply religious, and I’m not per se but so we got the priest in to do the final sacraments for her the Catholic priests to make her more comfortable. She we were not telling anybody the name of our son. So we’re keeping it to ourselves until he is born. And so I leaned over and whispered in her ear, the name of my son his middle name is is for my father is named after my father, so whispered that in her ear, so she would at least have his name to carry with her, you know, to the other side. Later in the day, my dad couldn’t they were married 50 years, their best friends had a tremendous relationship. He couldn’t get near her because of the hospital bed rail. So I got that. And I couldn’t figure that thing out. So I got the nurse over to get the rail down so dad could get closer get into bed and hold her. We called the whole family by the moment she died there. 18 people in the room, each of them had a hand on her in some way. You know, and then she had this mask on for oxygen. It was freaking her out. She never liked things on her face. And dad said to me that that thing’s freaking out. So I went to the nurse. I said, What’s that thing doing? She says, it’ll prolong her life. 10 minutes, I said, get that off of her face, you know. So I was able to go back and look at that day and rewrite the story of that day into I fought for my mom and every way I could while respecting her right to die her way. Yeah, because that is also true. Because the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life was to stand there and do nothing and put my hand on my mom and watch her go through the process of dying. I don’t know if you were present when your daughter passed, or if you’ve been present when anybody passed. But my reaction was to run from it. My reaction was to not experience it. I was crumbling inside, I wanted to run I want it to go, I want it to escape. And it took every, you know, ounce of resolve, I had to keep my hand on her leg, my eyes on her eyes and watch until she took her last breath. Right. That’s also the truth of that day. So you can say that I stood there and it did nothing and didn’t fight for my mom and just watched her die. And that’s true. But you can also say that I fought for my mom in every way I could while respecting her right to die her way. That’s also true. Both those stories are true. Both are written by me. One was destroying my life. One of them sets me free. And that’s the power of rewriting your narrative, especially out of a traumatic or grief of that.

Brian Smith 17:46
Yeah, I think rich that what you just said is so incredibly powerful. And and I thank you for sharing that with people. Because I think sometimes people feel alone in this thing that they’re going through. And we do we write, we write the horror stories for ourselves. Things that you know, if like, if you if your friend came and told you that story, you would say, You’re insane. That’s not what happened. But you but you tell yourself the story and you carried around for it for you know, until it pretty much broke you or until you realize, okay, this story is not working for me. And I think it’s really powerful to tell people, you can choose your story. You can’t choose your facts, right. But you can choose how you interpret those facts. And that’s very, very powerful.

Rich Curtis 18:30
Yeah, and it it comes, it comes with practice. And it comes with just making a decision about how you want to feel right, like, you have to sort of draw a line in the sand and say, from today forward, there’s going to be one person in the world that doesn’t tell me how bad I stuck. And that’s going to be me, right? Like I’m in control this thing I’m going to make a choice about how I want to feel when I when I talk whitewater raft guide school for 16 years. And we’d given these three mantras to learn how to guide and one of them was point where you want to go and get there, because people get in a raft and they try to drive it like a car, because that’s what they know, right? But driving a raft. The road is like a greased up Teflon conveyor belt that just keeps pushing you towards your obstacles, right. And so driving like a car doesn’t work. So what happens is, and they hear the guide, what they hear me saying, and it looks like it works is all forward. So they jump in the back and they they do nothing with the direction of the boat, they scream all forward, and we paddle until we hit something usually shore. And then they turn the boat away from that obstacle. Like you were saying people don’t change direction until they hit something until something knocks him off course. And then they paddle to the other shore. And then they paddle to the middle and slam a rock. And they do this until we get them to calm down and we tell them point where you want to go and get there. You need to initiate direction before momentum in your life. And part of the reason that we don’t take time to evaluate these stories and change our direction is that we’re moving a million miles an hour in our lives right now. We don’t have built in periods of self reflection. We don’t have built in patterns or time in our schedule to take and assess these things. And even have a moment to try to change that direction. So we’ve just got the pedal down, where you’re doing our careers, we’re taking care of our kids, we’re moving forward. And then we take a hit in life, and it knocks us off course. And now we’re going this way. And we go this way, until we hit something else. And life is not meant to be a series of hits that you take that drive you to an unknown destination, life is meant to be a series, of course corrections from those hits to get back to where you want to go. And as you know, after grief, the destination you’re heading for might not be the same one it was before. But it still has to be an intentional one. We want to be living an examined and intentional life and pointing to the end destination where we want to go. And our stories are how we get there. It’s how we program our brain to take us where we want to go.

Brian Smith 20:47
Yeah, I love that direction. Before momentum, I think that that is so awesome. Because we tend to just, I’m just gonna reiterate what you said, we tend to just go go, go, go go, and sometimes not even directly want to go in. And we don’t realize that we can, we could stop, we can, we could slow down and we can, you know, set an intention and set a direction. And that’s that’s exactly what you’re talking about today. So why is it you think that story is such a powerful, powerful tool for life change?

Rich Curtis 21:17
Well, it’s, you can think of stories of programming code for your brain. So if you if I was to sit down and program a website, right now, I wouldn’t type in the computer make the background red, right, nothing would happen, I have to type in some HTML to make it do that. And so story is that programming code for your brain, it’s how we access that filter database, we talked earlier, we have these filters that heavily parse the information, so we can go on about our days. And we don’t ever have a chance to get in there and muck with the filters and change them. And the way we do that the way we access them is through story. That’s the programming code to get it into your brain. So if you have an area of your life, that’s not working. And it doesn’t have to be something as dramatic as what I went through with grief. It can be anything you could be not where you want in your career, not where you want fitness wise, any you’re not where you want relationship wise, any part of your life that isn’t working for you, you can stop and say, what’s my story about this? Is it true? Even if it’s true? Is it serving me and if not, there’s a story evolution process, I teach in the book for you to go through and rewrite that story and change it. And so that story is so powerful, because it allows you to access that filter database. And the way it does that in the parts of your brain. It does that in a really interesting and compelling. There’s a woman in LA really brilliant neuroscience researcher Mary Helen Ember, Dino Yang, I cite her research in the book, she has a great book of her own, and some TED Talks, you can watch to look her up, she’s awesome. And she she focuses on education. But what she’s found is, if you tell someone an inspiring story, or an impactful story, maybe even as I was telling the story of my mom the day of my mom’s death, and you then put them on an fMRI machine, that you’ll see three different parts of the brain light up, and the midbrain lights up, which isn’t the most interesting part. The insula lights up, which is actually two parts your brain one left and right, responsible for your gut function. That’s where you get that gut feeling that tingling feeling when you hear an inspiring story, because you actually, you know, turned on the part of the brain that controls the gut function. So that part’s interesting. But the most interesting part is that it it lights up the medulla, the middle is like a little cluster back here, it’s the oldest part of your brain, it’s responsible for your biological survival, it does your mundane tasks, like keeping you breathing when you’re sleeping, keeping your blood pressure regulated. And so you’d think evolutionarily, we would have built an impenetrable firewall around that, right? Like, you take a hit there a big enough hit, and they can’t even keep you alive on life support for more than 15 minutes. This is a really important part of brain. But there is no firewall, all I have to do is tell you an inspiring or impactful story. And I can light that up, which means two things, you’re getting blood flow to it, you’re getting electricity to it, which means we’ve just changed you at the neural level in the survival center of your brain by telling you a story. So the conclusion that Mr. Dino Yang makes is that our social selves and our biological selves are are intimately linked. So our stories and our social interactions are intimately linked with our biological survival, these two things are not separate. And I would I would take that even a step further. To say that our our physical, our emotional state, affects our physical survival. With this interaction with story, that’s how powerful this is. So those when you think about if I can tell you an inspiring story, and I can light up the biological survival center of your brain, what kind of damage do you think you’re doing yourself on a daily basis with all the negative stories that you have, you know, playing the negative tape you have playing in your head all the time. And so we sort of have this perfect storm of being having an anthropological preset to write negative stories, stories having a dramatic impact on us. And Not having sort of processes and procedures in place to take an active role in the rewriting of those stories. And that sort of that perfect storm makes people suffer, like, and that was the biggest realization for me. After two years of depression, I wouldn’t have even during the time said I was depressed, it’s still a little bit painful because of some of the bad male stories I have from being the youngest of five Irish boys, to even admit that I was depressed. But I realized, if you look around, everyone around you is suffering. everyone around you is taking a hit. everyone around you is dealing with something. And that’s something that I didn’t really understand. before this happened, and in fact, the book subtitle had suffering in it. people hated that word so much it tested so poorly. Yeah,

Brian Smith 25:45
yeah, exactly. Yeah, people don’t want to talk about it, or face the fact that we are all suffering, it’s very unpopular to say so but, you know, I’m a big fan of Buddhism, that’s kind of like at the core of Buddhism, the Buddha says, life is suffering, you know, yeah, I can, we can, we can work our way out. But we have to first admit that yeah, it is when, because life doesn’t always go the way we want it to go.

Rich Curtis 26:08
Yeah, and I think that’s especially a Western fallacy. Now, and especially in the age of social media, people view their life as like, up into the right hockey stick on the line graph, right, like we go from, like, less good to kill in it. And that’s how this works. And that’s life is like this, you take these hits, you know, all throughout your life. And you can continue on up into the right trajectory, if you develop the skills, you need to course correct and bounce back from the hits. But if if you just take the hits, and let them send you where they’re going, then you’re kind of all over the place. And so that that suffering mechanism and trying to work beyond the suffering, using your stories, is kind of the core work of getting your life back on track is, you know, acknowledging that you’re that you’re suffering, and then being willing to to make that change. And for some people, they can do it before it gets really, really bad. And for me, because I just wasn’t willing to admit it or engage with it. It had to get really, really bad before I started to do the work.

Brian Smith 27:09
Yeah, well, that’s why I call it rock bottom. And that’s, that’s most of us have to hit that is was, as we were saying earlier, that’s just kind of evolutionary, we were going to keep going and keep going until we until we hit that wall. So how do we identify the bad stories in our life? The stories that we want to rewrite? How do we figure out which ones we need to work on?

Rich Curtis 27:28
Yeah, and the best way to do that is using one of two things. One, thinking about areas your life that just don’t work we all know the areas we struggle with, right? In fact, you’ll talk to people who have struggled with weight their whole life, and they lose 100 pounds, and they still feel the same, they’re healthier, but they still feel the same. And that’s because they haven’t rewritten that story, that the same story about their health, fitness and weight before they lost the weight. And the same story afterwards. And you know, I tell people, like when I used to climb mountains, I tell people, you know, put exactly what you need in the bag, because when we reach the top, there’s nothing there except what you brought with you. And that’s the same in life. If you can’t feel it, now, you won’t feel it then. Right? If you want to have self love. It’s not your self love isn’t on the other side of 100 pounds, it starts now. Right? And so when it comes to doing this kind of work, you know, you first you have to think about an area of your life that you’re not happy with that you’ve struggled with consistently that you’d like to make a change in. And then you just ask yourself some powerful questions. What’s my story about this? Right? And then you ask yourself, Is that true? And then you ask yourself, even if it’s true, is that story serving? Now, if it’s an area you’ve been struggling with, for a long time, whether the story is true or not, doesn’t really matter. Only that second question matters, is it serving, right? And if it’s making you suffer, then it’s it’s not serving you. So once you’ve identified that story, you can go into what I call the story evolution process. It’s not a full rewrite, because it’s still at the end is based in the same story, my story of the day my mom died, you know, we didn’t fight for my mom, we just stood there and watched her die versus I fought for my mom. And every way I could while respecting her right to die her way. Those two stories are still rooted in the same story in the truth of that moment. I just evolved that story from one that didn’t serve me into one that does serve me. And so the first step of that process, you know, once you’ve done the work to identify the area of your life, that’s not working. You said, What’s my story about this? Is it true and is it serving me? Then you got to write it down. So this thing is physically a part of you. You have neural pathways that go right to this, if you if I got triggered about the day, my mom died, boom, that story’s right there. Right? And the only way you can begin to work on it and change it is to make it not a part of you is to get it outside of you. So you write it out. And you and you just write the whole thing out with no filter, no trying to pretty it up, you just write it as it is. And then the next step is to say it out loud and actually encourage people to videotape themselves doing this when you set your cell phone up. And the first time you say it out loud, record yourself and people often balk at this And then picked up feels kind of funny. I don’t want to do that. But you will see on your face when you tell a story that’s causing you pain and suffering. You will see on your face. twinges, cringes tics, when you say the bad parts, when you say the parts that are hurting you, you’ll see it, you will see how that story is making you suffer. And that makes a big impact. And it helps you do the work of rewriting the story. Because after you’ve done that, after you said it out loud, you’re gonna start the rewriting process. And that’s simply just marking those parts of the story that don’t serve you the negative parts, the bad parts, parts that were causing you pain, the parts that you saw your face react to on the video. And I did this with my son recently in terms of distance learning. He’s a, he’s a seven year old kid loves learning, you know, if he if he goes to the internet, he’s on Nat Geo kids, right? He just loves school loves people loves learning. And he came to me and thrown a fit about going to distance learning during the whole COVID thing. And I hate school dad was like, really, that doesn’t sound like you, you know, and, and I said, Well, tell me your whole story. And I I’ve recorded it with my phone telling the story. And I played it back and I said, does that does that look good for you? Do you look happy? And he says no, I look terrible. I look terrible when I’m saying that. And I said, well, let’s get to the point where you don’t look terrible. And we redid the whole thing. And then we videotaped him telling you this new story, you know, which was you know, basically distance learning sucks. But I still get a chance to see my friends, teachers and learn. It didn’t deny the truth of it. I tried to get the distance learning sucks part because I thought it would you know, dad and I thought it’d be better for him to not have that part in there. And he and I said, Well, does that sound true? He says no. Distance Learning sucks. I said okay, then has to be in there. That’s the truth of it for you.

Announcer 31:33
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 calm. 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.

Rich Curtis 32:29
So the study was still true, but it was positive. And then you could see on his face when we re recorded him how light bright and fried. He wasn’t from that moment forward. We had no distance learning fights. You know, he he sat there and he did the work. And he felt better about it. And he moved on. So there’s a really and I teach this for kids too, with a combination with another bit of neurological research called power poses. This work is really powerful with kids, because they’re so malleable and open to suggestion. And really, you can really help your kids upcycle their results with this. So once you’ve said out loud, you sit down and do that rewrite. It’s just an iterative process. So you’re not going to rewrite the whole thing, you just gonna hit that first part that that hurts, rewrite that part, read it again, still doesn’t feel good. rewrite that next part, read it again and get to the part where when you read it out loud, you feel lighter, freer, happier. And you know, it’s right. Once you know what’s right, the fourth step is, like we talked about earlier to doing the work, you have to implant this new story in your subconscious. And you have to get a new neural pathway. So that this becomes the only story that’s triggered when you think of that event or that part of your life. That takes work. So I tell people, you write it down. And you at least tell it to yourself twice a day, tell it to yourself right before you go to bed at night. First thing when you wake up. If it’s an appropriate story, you can hang it up on your mirror somewhere else where you’re triggered to read it another couple times a day, that’s great. And you’re going to do this for at least 30 days, 60 to 90 is better, but at least 30 days to try to create that new neural pathway. And then you’re going to make a part of your lived oral tradition, you’re going to call up a trusted friend, someone you can share this with, you can go out to drinks, we’re all starting to be able to kind of do that, again, her dinner, and you’re going to tell him I was suffering. Here’s his bad story I had, here’s my new story about it, I’m doing much better now you’re going to share it. And by doing that, you’re going to start to rewrite that new neural pathway to where when you’re triggered, it’s only your new story that comes up. Right as of now, when I hear when I talk about my mom’s death, it’s only that I fought for my mom and every way I could while respecting her right to die her way story that comes up. The old one only comes up for the purposes of conversations like this. And if you find one day you get triggered and the old story rears its ugly head, you just go back and do the work. And so step four is that’s that’s the important part is is doing the work of making this new story, a part of YouTube stuff over and over and over again. Because you’ve told that old story a million times to yourself, so you need to work past that with the new one.

Brian Smith 34:46
Yeah, wow. That was awesome. I love that that the whole Philippines the new neural pathway, and I can I can say to people, because I work with people that are aggrieved, mostly parents, and they’re like, how do I get to where you are, and like, well, first of all, you have to understand it’s been six years. So it doesn’t happen overnight. And it really didn’t start happening for me probably really in earnest till about two years ago. So it took a while to really get there. But it’s that every day thing, it’s the it’s, it’s the reason why my daughter’s in my background on my zoom, because I look at myself in the zoom, I see my daughter over my shoulder. And that’s the story I told myself that she’s still here, I have pictures of my daughter in my house, the first thing when I opened my bedroom door in the morning to come down the stairs, I see a giant picture of my daughter, and I tell her Good morning. So this is a story that I tell myself over and over every day and have been for years, until I believe it until I’ve internalized it. And as you said, you know, doesn’t mean I don’t get triggered by the old stories and times. And I don’t feel bad for myself sometimes. But I can quickly switch back to the other story because of the neuroscience that you’re talking about all the work that we do to retrain ourselves.

Rich Curtis 35:56
Yeah. And that I think what you said is really important in that people, I think, often look at grief as as linear process. And we have these seven steps, which is great, you know, like the Kubler Ross stuff, and, but even Kubler Ross and I forget the gentlemen who worked with her, he wrote his own book afterwards as well. And then later kesar Yeah, and kesar lost his own son, yeah, later in life, and then experienced this. And even Kessler says the number one battle in his own life, and even in conversations with Kubler Ross about doing an update to the book, their number one challenge is always getting people to understand it’s not a linear process, you’ll recover a bit, and then you’ll take a hit, and then you’ll get triggered, and then you’ll cycle back into it. So these are the steps of grief, just like our life isn’t an up into the right hockey stick, neither is the recovery from grief, you’re gonna take a hit, and you’re gonna fall right back into that place, I tell people. And now this is a dated reference, some of the people listening might not be old enough to get what I’m saying. But your brain is like a record player. And there’s grooves cut in it. Some of them are shallow, some of them are deep and traumatic events and grief events, cut the deepest ruts. And when you take a hit in life, bang, the needle bounces, and it always lands in the deepest ruts. And so you’re always going to find your way back to that place. And so the key isn’t to have the goal be to a point where you are not experiencing grief. Once you’ve experienced grief, it’s yours for the rest of your life. The goal is to develop a set of practices and processes that allow you to overcome it, when it when it comes for you know, I tell people you know grief is a demon you have to make a home for you can’t exercise it, you can’t get it out of you. You find a place where it can live, where you’re in control of it, where it can’t come for you and bring you to your knees when you don’t want it to. But where it’s there when you want it. There’s moments where I want it. There’s moments where I want to sit down and think about the loss of my mom and experience that and reach through that void and use that grief as a connection to who I’ve lost. It’s not it’s not all bad,

Brian Smith 37:52
right?

Rich Curtis 37:55
But I have to be in control of it. If it can come from me like in the early days. And I shared I hate sharing this stuff, right doesn’t feel good to admit this stuff. But we need to say it especially as men in the early days. 41 days after my mom’s death, my son was born and I have a newborn. My wife had a traumatic birth. So she was laid up for several weeks after the birth. And so I did a lot of the early care with my son and I would the grief would come from I’d have to set him down in his swing, and then buckled down behind the kitchen island and sob You know, it would just come for me when I didn’t want it to when I wasn’t in control of it. It could come and take me down. I’m sure you’ve experienced. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And so the first part of the work is just finding a home for that grief, where it doesn’t come for you when you don’t want it to you can grab it and get it when you need it. But it can’t take you down when you don’t want it to. And that’s once you’ve done that you’re step one, you’re you’re you’re beyond the survival stage, you get your feet under you again.

Brian Smith 38:48
Yeah, yeah, I call that the white knuckle stage. Because I have clients that come to me that are early and I’m like, Okay, before we talk about healing, before we talk about growing before we talk about you know, transforming, we got a we got a white knuckle through through the first part of this, you know, the first and again, there’s no timeframe, six months year, it’s different for everybody. It’s just hanging on, you know, it’s just hanging on and getting up and doing the things you need to do. So I want people to understand this is not you know, we’re not we’re not making light of the work that is required to be done. And it’s not an easy path, but it’s something that you you can do and it’s worth doing. And I was just on a forum earlier day and someone said does the grief ever stop and people have different opinions about this? I don’t think it ever stopped. I think it transforms. I was just I’m by myself right now I work from home and just a few minutes ago before we get into I was thinking about my daughter right? I got a package in the mail as a birthday gift I bought for myself to remind myself my daughter and it came in and I was thinking about her and I’m like I got melancholy and that’s okay because I can I allow that to happen at certain times. But I don’t let it overtake me, and I don’t let that be my permanent state. My permanent state that I’ve returned to, is that, you know, I’m in control of this, and that we’re in control of this. And that, you know, I did everything I could do, as you said, with with your mother and stuff. And this is this is okay, this is my life, and I’m going to make the best of it.

Rich Curtis 40:17
Yeah, and that getting to the point where you’re not really trying to battle this thing. Like in western Western culture, everything is a battle. So part of the reason my mom’s death was so hard is because I’m used to battling death, we’re really good at fighting it right up until the bitter end. What we’re not good at is saying, this is your time, and I’m going to stand here and support you through it. We don’t get it. At least in Western culture, we don’t get cultural training and how to do that, and how to be present and accepted. This is what is supposed to happen right now. Right? And so like, one of my favorite quotes about grief is that grief, grief is love with nowhere left to go, right, the pain of grief is love with nowhere left to go. And being able to do what you did, except that melancholy reach across that void. It gives you a conduit for that love, again, for that love for your daughter, like, here’s this thing that reminds me of her, I’m going to pour a little love into that that’s going to hurt. And that’s, that’s the relationship. Now that’s part of the ratio. There’s no parenting relationship that doesn’t involve pain, any parents that are listening, you know, this, this is not for the faint of heart raising children. And same with my relationship with my mom, if I need to connect with her and reach across that void, there’s a price to pay for that. And that’s, that’s why I don’t believe the grief goes away. You just get to the point where you can manage it, and use it in a way that is appropriate in your life, I can grab it and use it to connect with mom. Or I can grab it and create meaning out of it and use it like in the form of the book to help change people’s lives. I say in the book that my mom’s last lesson to me, was how to recover from the worst day of my life. And now, because I’ve been a guide my whole life, then then my impetus is to teach as soon as I learned something that’s valuable. So she taught me through her death, how to recover from the worst day of my life. And now I’m on a mission to teach as many people to do that to change your lives one story at a time and get to the point where they’re in control of these things. We can’t stop them. We can’t prevent them from happening. But we can choose how we move forward and walk with them.

Brian Smith 42:15
Yeah, awesome. Yeah. So what are what are what are the core four? And why are they so important?

Rich Curtis 42:21
So I said, I did like a deep, deep dive, or I call it a personal PhD or a black belt in and happiness in the science of story. And so we talk a little bit about science and story. But I also found myself at a point where most of my life, I’ve been a pretty happy go lucky guy. And I could not get happy again after the death of my mom, I couldn’t get to that state where I could say to you, yeah, I’m happy. And that’s, it’s almost like if you’ve ever struggled with sleep, right? Like the worst part is struggling with sleep as you just sit there and be like, I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep and now you’re stressing about not sleeping, right? And so you can’t sleep right and having the same thing. Why am I not happy? How come I can’t get happy? Well, what used to make me happy. And you go through these machinations. And when you dive into the research, you realize that you had no idea what made you happy, everything you thought made you happy wasn’t actually what was doing it. And the Science of Happiness is a lot more simple than we thought this is really better living through chemistry, not not the chemistry find a shot glass or a pill bottle, but neuro chemistry. So there are predictable you know, neuro chemical chemicals, you know, say serotonin, dopamine that will create happiness in the brain, it creates the right neurochemical environment for happiness in the brain. Now if you’re still suffering from your bad stories, there’s no amount of doing these things it’s going to overcome that because you’ve got this sort of this Paul have this bad story hanging over you. So the first step is to get those stories out of the way. And then the core for our for daily habits that will help you create the optimum neurochemical environment in the brain. And if you do them every day, they have a synergistic effect. So the first one is getting eight hours of sleep a night, which now you’re on the other side you got adult children but right now I got a three year old and a seven year old I was up at midnight 150 in the morning 350 in the morning then they woke me up at 630 between nightmares and pee breaks and everything else right so it’s hard not everybody can swing getting a full eight hours of sleep every night but do your best and create a routine and practices of turning off your phone you know ending screen time early enough create a practice that gets you into bed to the point where you have the best chance at least of getting eight hours sleep a night. Yeah. And everybody here’s what I don’t like to do is add things to people’s health to do list without explaining why I think so much has been pop culture alized to where we’ve lost the why we just have the prescription you know and it’s like well, I got a now I got to eat fatty steaks drink kale shakes, brush my teeth for two minutes a day and now Rich’s telling me I got to meditate and get eight hours sleep and go for a run. I don’t have enough time my day to do I was supposed to take care of myself. I’m not trying to add things to your health to do this. I’m trying to give you sort of a lifelong practice. This can be done in less than an hour a day. It doesn’t have to be a morning routine. It’s an all day routine. Just get it done. And if you do it consistently, it really pays off overtime. So eight hours of sleep is most important because you have your amygdala which is sort of your, your drunken belligerent buddy at the bar who’s always ready for a fight. That’s the anger center, your brain, the amygdala. And then you’ve got your medial prefrontal cortex up here, which is your mild mannered accountant, buddy, Chip. And so when your amygdala gets pissed at the bar and wants to swing, you know, Chip, Pat’s on the legs is that guy’s not so bad. Maybe you shouldn’t knock him out, right? Well, when you miss one night of sleep, there’s a prefrontal cortex amygdala disconnect. And what we see is 60%, greater anger response to negative stimuli after missing one night of sleep. So all of a sudden chips not invited to the party, and you know, your buddies, they’re ready to swing on everybody. That’s why you find yourself grumpy as heck with your wife or with your children after you’ve missed a night of sleep, or why so many people get in so many fights early on when you have a newborn, because nobody’s getting sleep, everybody’s, you know, ramped up. And so why sleep is so important is because it keeps the natural checks and balances in your brain to keep sort of an emotional monitoring up there. And if you take those checks and balances off all sudden, you’ve got wild emotional swings. And as we all know, wild emotional swings are not a recipe for happiness or success. Yeah. And then the second one of the core four is 30 to 45 minutes of exercise, cardiovascular exercise, this isn’t like, you know, running wind sprints, you know, up at the high school, you could just take the dog for a walk, just get your heart rate up for 30 to 45 minutes. But what they find is, you know, they have equal rates of reduction in major depression, by doing 3045 minutes of exercise a day, as they do by giving people an antidepressant like Zoloft. Like the the Duke smile studies, they did both. And they found that they had equal rates of reduction in mass depression diagnosis, and 30%. Less recidivism back into major depression in the exercise group.

Brian Smith 46:49
Yeah, I just want to have you pause there for a moment, because I’ve heard that same research. And I think this is so important, because people will often turn to a pill for for depression or anxiety, whatever. And, and I’m not a medical expert, and you are either, so we’re not giving medical advice here. If your doctor prescribes it, you should do it. But there’s certain things that we can do. And this is one that I do myself, I walk for an hour, 45 minutes every day, and I found it just completely changes my mood. And if I can’t walk for a couple days, that completely changes my mood. So I just want to interject that.

Rich Curtis 47:24
Absolutely. And I do want to be clear that if you’re suffering from major depression, if you haven’t thought of harming yourself, going for a jog isn’t going to do it, you owe it to yourself and your family to call it the 800 number right now get immediate help for that. But this is this helps you with a general case of the downers or the Mondays or the pandemic blues, this helps you maintain a sort of a neutral to happy emotional state consistently over time. It’s not, it’s not a prescription for major depressive episodes if you haven’t thought of harming yourself, but it is just tremendously powerful over time to maintain your mental state. Yeah, yeah. So luckily, you know, I didn’t go there. In the two years, I was depressed, I never once had a moment where I felt like committing suicide or harming myself. And I’m very thankful and grateful that that wasn’t a place for whatever reason, that wasn’t a place I went to. But for so many people they do especially men, men in their 50s who lose work lose direction lose meaning in life, they tend to abuse drugs and alcohol and have high suicide rates because we don’t have the same built in social support networks that say women do. We just don’t reach out to each other to get help as much. And so yeah, you know, if you’re, if you’re man, and you’re listening, and you’re really suffering right now you need to you need to go get help, you know, go for a jog but call the 800 number while you’re on that jog. Get some help.

Brian Smith 48:45
Yeah. You were on number three, I know. I know. Yeah.

Rich Curtis 48:50
Number three is mindfulness or meditation. And you can see the results of this in as little as 10 minutes, you’re getting up to the point where you’re doing 20 minutes to an hour a day is better, but just 10 minutes of some kind of mindfulness or meditation practice gives your brain a break, gives you a chance to settle down and calm and get re centered. But it also over time consistently does some really interesting things in the brain. So you’ve got that amygdala, you know that that’s that anger center of the brain. Consistent meditation over years, you can start to see the effects in even as little as a few months. But consistently over years, they find it actually thins out the tissue in the amygdala. So you actually have a less dense mass of tissue working on negative stimuli in your brain. So you’re doing this thing that gives you a break brings your blood pressure down has all these benefits that people are aware of, of meditation, but one of the things I think doesn’t get highlighted is that it’s making physical structural functional changes in the way your brain works and reacts to negative stimuli. So your buddy who’s just really calm and serene all the time has been a lifelong meditator. His brain is actually different than yours. His brain is actually structurally different than yours and and he has different responses to things and you do. And that makes a dramatic difference. So even if you can only squeeze in 10 minutes, if you do 10 minutes every day, you’re going to change your brain in a profound way that will have lifelong impacts for you and all kinds of other great stuff too. Like they may see almost zero rates of dimension, and lifelong meditators, things like that these meditations really powerful in a lot of levels. But from a happiness perspective, it tamps down that response to negative stimuli. So remember, you’re more likely you’re anthropologically preset to bring in negative information, negative stimuli. And, and now you’re taking the time to get your brain to calm down and not respond so profoundly to that. Awesome. And so you can start to see how these have a synergy, right, you get eight hours of sleep, you keep the medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala connected, so it’s calming it down. And then meditation is thinning out the amygdala. So it’s calming it down. And then the exercise is dropping the serotonin and the dopamine and happiness inducing chemicals, and it’s calming it all down. All kind of work together to come brain for happiness. And then the last one is the daily gratitude practice. And this is where, you know, like a lot of people will click off on the podcast, because they’ve read like 52 articles about gratitude and, and they’re over it. They’re tired of people telling to be grateful for every little thing in their life. But the reason gratitude is powerful is because it helps you pattern your world for the positive. So you have that anthropological preset to bring in negative bits of information. Yeah, you take time during gratitude to feed your brain positive bits of information. So you now have more positive bits of information to compile your stories from it. Also, I think what’s gotten lost in the shuffle is the actual feeling of gratitude, right? So people tell you gratitude practice, get out of journal, write down three things you’re grateful for, boom, you do it, you’re done. You didn’t do much, you made a list you gave yourself. Yeah, you give yourself a positive, you know, bits of information. But the real work is to stop on each one of those things. If you’re saying, you know, I’m grateful for my son or my daughter, is actually stop and close your eyes and at least try to muster up the physical feeling of being grateful for that for at least 10 seconds, 30 seconds to a minute is better on each of the things you’re grateful for. And it’s bringing up that feeling of gratitude that’s going to do the work in your brain. And that’s going to do the work to create sort of a lifelong approach to looking for the good and the positive in your world. So you combine all four of those things, you get the bad stories out of your way, you combine all four of those things. And you remember that happiness is not beyond the next promotion. It’s not when you lose the weight. It’s not when you get married, it’s not when you graduate college happiness is now you have to fight for it every day. And you do the work and you do the core for you can create that right environment in the brain to have this sort of consistent happiness. One of the problems we have is we argue over the definition of happiness, and kind of the most widely accepted one is eudaimonia, which is like human flourishing, right, that sounds good. I want to flourish. But it doesn’t really get to the sort of the core of what we’re trying to do of creating this sort of vitality. And this this vibrance, to move forward in a consistent way in life. So we’re not looking for that giggling idiot happy all the time kind of happiness, we’re looking for that sort of vibrant, positive momentum, steadfast, moving forward, consistent happiness. And that’s where learning these tricks to make your brain do what you want it to do creates that over time by being consistent.

Brian Smith 53:11
Yeah, I gotta say, I guess I just stumbled across the core four over the course of my last six years, but I do all for those. And I find the very, very end that the gratitude thing when I first heard it, and people that are in grief, or people tell themselves bad stories, you’re going to go I have nothing to be grateful for. And I guarantee you no matter who you are, where you are, you have something to be grateful for. And so that practice I find is very important. But it’s You’re right, it’s not just writing a list. It’s it’s actually sitting with that feeling. And you started with the eight hours of sleep in the you talked about the mindfulness that was so wild, because I woke up about three o’clock this morning, I was having trouble getting back to sleep. And my mind was was racing, I was thinking about things. And I went back to my mindfulness practice. And I went back to let me just start taking deep breaths and counting backwards from 10. And focusing on my breath. And next thing I knew all those things that my mind was racing towards, they were like fading into the background. And when they would come up, I would just push them out of the way and I fell back to sleep. And I found that the mindfulness practice really helps with the sleep practice. It’s really just said, getting that feeling that understanding of I don’t have to follow these thoughts where they are because usually when we can’t sleep, it’s because something’s in our mind, something has got us chasing it, you know, and we can just say, No, I’m not gonna chase that right now.

Rich Curtis 54:31
You Yeah, it’s funny, you mentioned that because I would say that the gratitude practice is what saved me from the grief of the death of my mom, gratitude is what pulled me up. You know, I have a gratitude journal that I’m just religious with since I did this research. And that’s what pulled me up and started to get my feet under me happiness wise. But meditation, mindfulness is what has sort of gotten me through the pandemic, you know, with the stress and anxiety and shepherding a young family through this insanity, you know, of the global pandemic. We’ve just been through it. This sort of having sleep problems around that, especially in the beginning, using the mindfulness practice, to get me to sleep I’ve now developed, you know, the ability to really go to sleep, no matter what’s going on in my life, I can really just dig into that mindfulness practice and go to sleep. Now, I think some sort of pure meditation practitioners would, would poopoo that because they don’t want you falling asleep during your meditation practice. But I’ve got a pretty clear line where if I’m sitting up, I can stay awake. So I can do my seated meditation. But if I’m laying down, I can use that meditation reliably, like you say, to calm the mind and go right back to sleep. And it’s it’s really powerful and really pays dividends down the road using it that way.

Brian Smith 55:37
Yeah, it was funny, because as I was doing that, I was like I said, this was literally just last night. I had a meditation or a hypnosis session, like a week ago. And so I went, I went back to that feeling when I was being hypnotized. And the thing is, then I was fighting to sleep because I’m like, lying in my bed. And this person’s, you know, I was I was over zoom, and hypnotized me. And I was like, she said, a lot of times people fall asleep. So I’m like, Well, let me just go to that space. And I went to that space last night, I was out. So like, it’s like self hypnosis. But yeah, so those, those four things you talked about, I think, are really important. And they’re small changes, they don’t have to be like you said, you don’t have to go to the gym. You can take 20 minutes after after dinner and go for a walk, just get out in nature. And walk in, I was actually talking to a therapist, and she said, the thing about walking is it’s bilateral movement. So it’s actually helping, you’re engaging both sides of your brain. So it’s another reason why it’s a really great exercise.

Rich Curtis 56:34
Yeah, and that’s kind of touching on like, bilateral stimulation of the brain is actually really sort of core concept in actual technical therapy work to recover from grief, like EMDR. I don’t know if you’ve engaged with any of that. Yeah, I have. But yeah, that’s me, I did some EMDR. And, and that’s amazing, using, you know, using the bilateral stimulation of the brain to trigger the natural cleansing and consolidating process of memories and emotions, to help you have less dramatic responses to traumatic memories. And that’s for people who are really suffering for people with with PTSD and that sort of stuff. I, I can’t recommend enough, digging into EMDR and doing some of that bilateral stimulation to help this sort of natural cleansing and consolidating process of the brain. That’s, that’s incredible stuff. The science behind that is mind mind blowing.

Brian Smith 57:25
It really is, um, you We touched upon this before we got started, you just touched upon it a little bit I want to talk about in our last few minutes about why is it that men seem to struggle so much more than women do with stuff like this? And and we don’t see even ourselves. I don’t see people like you much in this field, you know, vice versa, you know what? It’s seemed like women are ahead of us on this on this thing.

Rich Curtis 57:50
Yeah, and it’s it’s always dangerous territory to talk about these gender roles, because you always risk sort of dropping the cliches and tropes. But yeah, I think we I think we have some powerful stories about maleness that don’t serve us I talked about one of them that sort of savior complex. I had a like a ramped up on steroids version of that from being a guide. But I think that’s pretty innately built into men to sort of be that fixer, that Savior. And there’s a there’s a an emotional stoicism that men are raised with that doesn’t serve us and if you really dig into the the stoics there’s much to be gained there tremendous emotional resilience, and great stuff. But we’re the type of stoicism we teach our young men it tends to be compartmentalised, which is, you have two emotions, happier, pissed. And if you’re not happy, you’re pissed, then you’re then you’re not a man. Right? That’s it, like sadness, anxiety, fear, grief, all of that, but that’s for the pansies. Right. And that’s, and that’s, you know, at least still, you know, being a child in the 70s, you know, have a pretty old school Dad, I got a healthy dose of that. And these archetypal versions of maleness, having a really sort of bipolar, emotional range, doesn’t serve us. So when we take a hit like grief, and when we’re feeling the full range of complex emotions that come with that, and we’re being brought to our knees. We don’t want to admit it. We don’t want to tell you we don’t want to reach out for help. Or at least I didn’t I like in my family. We are a pull yourself up by your bootstraps. If you’re not bleeding a lot, Quit whining and get on with it kind of family. Yeah. And so to admit you were depressed was to admit weakness, right? And so I think men have all these things built in that, you know, it’s even something that we should be well passed by now, but it’s weak to cry, you know. And these things we get, I don’t know there’s so many places we get these things from because I’ve never told my son it’s, it’s bad to cry. He cries all the time when he gets hurt or whatever. Sure. But our family dog died recently and because of COVID and having nobody to watch the kids and couldn’t go with the dog, my wife went to put the dog down. And I, I was with her over FaceTime during that. And I was crying. I was sobbing, you know, it’s been our dog for 12 years. And my son said, well, Dad, you probably glad you didn’t go because you probably would have been embarrassed. Why would have been embarrassed? He said, Well, those people see you cry like that. And I said, No, it’s so embarrassing to cry when you’re losing someone you love. That’s, that’s an that’s the right reaction, you know, the normal reaction. So somewhere, I don’t know where he even got a dose of that story.

Brian Smith 1:00:30
Yeah. Yeah, that’s so sad. Because, you know, he said, You can’t we can’t protect our kids from everything. So we think we’re teaching the right thing. And then you find out that socialization is coming from somewhere outside of your influence.

Rich Curtis 1:00:44
Yeah, and so these stories of maleness, we need to rewrite those and we, you know, the most important work is on personal level, but then, in our work with our children, and our work with communities in our work with our other male friends, we need to start to rewrite these stories. And sometimes it requires you to maybe be a bit nosy or bossy. So when any of my friends lose someone now, I interject myself, I send them text messages, I send them, you know, DMS on Instagram, I send them, you know, call them, I interact with them, and just keep checking on them. And my male friends sometimes get annoyed or pissed about it. But there’s this sort of acute period of suffering, as you know, when when it first happens when you lose someone, everybody’s there, everybody’s checking, they’re calling you bringing you food and everything right. And that lasts a couple of weeks. Yeah. And then they didn’t lose that person, they move on. Right? Right. And then you’re there with every day of not having, you’re there with the everyday experience of that. And and we don’t have that support. And so men in general, reach out for those support. For that support. We don’t have that community, like women tend to have stronger social networks, like around parenting. And being a mom, they have mom groups they have, they reach out to each other when they’re having a hard day, they reach out to each other to get help with with breastfeeding or raising a newborn, they have these sort of built in communities that they develop more neatly. And men, our communities are more based on doing things together, you know, like going out and you know, fishing or whatever it is. Yeah, yeah. And so I think we’ve seen, we’ve seen a declining life expectancy in the US for three years straight. And what the research is showing is, it’s driven by middle aged men, middle aged men who have lost their job, especially like in the industrial Midwest, they lose their job in their 50s, they’re not able to take care of their families, they lose direction, and then they’re turning to alcohol and opioids, and then eventually overdose or suicide. And if those men had a stronger network where they could reach out and talk to people about what they’re feeling, get help for how they’re hurting, have other men who have gone through the same thing, tell them that, you know, there’s an end to this, there’s a way out of this and give them a pathway. I think we could turn that around. And so to me, when I look at men in grief, the best thing you can do, anyone who knows a man in their life, that suffering is to reach out to get in their face a little bit, to offer help to check on them, get them out of the house, don’t let them exile themselves. Don’t let them be alone. Get them out, get them moving, and then share with them your suffering. So it’s social media and this age of perfect lives. We seem to think that we make connections now by showing this perfectly glossed version of our lives. But it’s in showing the beautiful fallibility, the suffering and the pain and the humaneness that we make real connections. And as men, we got to start doing that we got to start sharing the the hard parts, too. I’ve been lucky enough. During the pandemic, one of my best friends just said, Man, we’re talking to each other every day, we’re both dads, we’re both suffering through the same, this is some crazy stuff we’re dealing with. Even if it’s two minutes, we’re talking every day, every single day for the pandemic, we check on each other. And we give each other a chance to vent and talk about what’s going on. And we just are there for each other. Yeah. And that is, I would say a more woman or more feminine arc type of relationship. Yeah, that’s not like a dude setup. Yeah. And we need to start to evolve past that and be those resources for each other as men and have these conversations. There’s even a great YouTube video of Anderson Cooper and Steven Cole bear talking about grief about the loss of their Steven Kobe lost his dad and his brothers and Anderson Cooper recently lost his mom. I’ve never seen like public celebrities having that kind of discussion about about grief being open as men about what that’s like. So just conversations like this, you know, help other men to sort of reach in and say, Yeah, okay, if he’s admitting how he’s feeling I can do that too.

Brian Smith 1:04:37
Yeah, that video you’re talking about went viral because it was so unusual. I saw another one you’re talking about and people are like, wow, isn’t this this is wild. The men are doing this. And I want to reiterate really reiterate what you said to anybody that any men that happened me listening, which there aren’t many, for the ones that are listening, is do that i after my daughter pass. I have a friend. He’s a former pastor me This is why he did it. But he would just call me up and say, let’s go for a walk. And because I, you know, he knows I walk everyday, but we would go, just meet at the bike trail and walk for two or three miles. And he check in with me and ask what’s going on and he’s done this for years just kept, you know, following up with me, and that’s really appreciate it. And I’m not the kind of person I’m not gonna reach out to somebody and say, Hey, I’m sad, I need to go, you know, talk to you, because that’s just not what what guys do. So we, we need to as guys, I love what you said, Get up in your friend’s face a little bit, invite them out, draw them out, and then share you know, after, after my daughter passed, people have known for like, literally two decades, neighbors, you know, we were on vacation together a couple of years ago. And Skye starts telling me stories about like, you know, his his mother and his family and stuff like that, you know, and I’m like, dude, I’ve known you for like, 20 years. He never told me this stuff before. But because I’m doing the podcast, I’m doing the speaking and stuff. My friends are hearing me a little bit. They’re like, they have permission now to share what they’re going through also. So being vulnerable, really helps to draw other people out letting them know, it’s okay to feel sad about this, or it’s okay to, you know, have these kind of emotions.

Rich Curtis 1:06:14
Yeah, my, my favorite moment of that was I was at a real estate conference out in Vegas. And we’re at the like, opening mixer thing, right, which is, you know, small talk and you pretend like you do more deals than me. And we all talk about how cool we are, right? That’s the kind of environment these things are. And this guy was asking me what I was doing at the time, I was just finishing up the book. And I said, well, what’s kind of one of the most exciting things in my life is I’ve just completed this book. Here’s what it’s about, I shared the story of the day my mom died. This guy was like a head and a half taller, me like 6465, you know, built like, you know, a breakout house, huge New Yorker, you know, and he starts telling me that the the day the Twin Towers came down. So after I tell him my story, he starts telling me, you know, I’ve been dealing with PTSD for decades now. And he said, I’m standing my apartment window across from the Twin Towers, when the towers come down, I’m holding my newborn daughter, and I watch this building collapse, and everything gets enveloped in smoke, and I’ve got this child that I have to protect, I don’t have an automobile, I have nothing. And I walked out of the building with her in my arms, and I walked out of the city and I walked across the bridge with her. And, and I’ve been struggling with the fear and anxiety and the PTSD from that moment since then. And it’s a constant battle in my life. He’s like, I’m trying to, you know, he at the time, you just bought a house in Costa Rica that he was going down, he bought some horses, because dealing with the horses gave him some sense of calm and serenity, but he was really still going through it. This is maybe three or four years ago, right? You know, so we’re almost two decades past 911. But this big dude, by the end of this, you know, 1520 minute conversation is huge New Yorker, bruiser dude has given me a hug. He’s got tears in his eyes. And we’re, we’re connecting around this shared experience of trying to push our way through the hard things in life, right. And so I like what you said about giving permission if you’re just willing to be vulnerable and just willing to be open with people. You’ll be amazed every time I do this and talk about this something like that happen someone shares with me what what they’ve been through. And then there’s an instant connection, we have so much separation now. You know, political separation and, and so many things we’re in fighting about in this country, when really at the core, we are all walking this life out and experiencing these same universal things and trying to push our way through these things. Not in the same ways we all have our own challenges, different challenges, some of us a lot more than others because of the structure. But we’re still having these universal experiences we can connect on and start to build some bridges and understand each other’s humanity and, and this experience of grief is one of them that we can definitely do that with because almost everybody you know has experienced this in some way or another.

Brian Smith 1:08:50
Now if they haven’t they will that’s just part of life. Rich. I want to say we’re coming up on about an hour maybe maybe a little over. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation with you today. And your book sounds really intriguing to remind people namely your book where they can find out about your book and where they can find out more about you.

Rich Curtis 1:09:09
Yeah, the books on Amazon and all three formats audio, digital, and print it’s called change your story, change your life. Search, change your story, change your life rich Curtis, it’s the blue and yellow one, you can see it back there behind my head. And if you want to find me, you can just check them out at rich Curtis calm, we’ve got individual coaching, group coaching, speaking, all that stuff, anything that I can do to support you in getting your story straight and moving forward in your life. That’s what I’m here to do. Thanks for Thanks for having me. It was a wonderful conversation. Thanks for being open and sharing your grief and doing this work as a man in the world. It’s it’s great to have some people out there doing that and sharing that and given a pathway forward for people to see that this is okay, you know,

Brian Smith 1:09:50
cool. Well, thanks for being here. Have a great rest of your day. You do. So that does it for another episode of grief to growth. I sure hope you enjoyed it. If you like this content, make sure sure you subscribe, so click on the subscribe button here, and then click on the bell to receive notifications and click on all. That way you’ll be notified whenever I release new content. Thanks for watching and have a great day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

After we have lost a loved one one of the most sought-after signs is a “dream visit”. We hear about them all the time. But, what do we know about them from a scientific viewpoint?

Dr. Joshua Black is a grief researcher, speaker, author, consultant, online course instructor, and host of the Grief Dreams Podcast. He has focused all of his MA and Ph.D. research (in psychology) on investigating dreams in bereavement (also known as grief dreams) and continuing bonds from many types of loss (including prenatal loss and pet loss).

Most of his academic research and publications have specifically been on dreams of the deceased. Dr. Black is considered one of the world’s leading academic experts in grief dreams. Due to the lack of academic research in this field, Dr. Black has focused his efforts on raising awareness on grief dreams through doing talks, interviews, and developing an online Grief Dreams course.

Additionally, he developed a grief dreams website (www.griefdreams.ca) and runs several social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @griefdreams).

ℹ️  https://www.griefdreams.ca

 

 

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 grief to growth. And today I’ve got with me Dr. Joshua black, and I’m really excited to interview Dr. Black says he’s his field of expertise a very unique field. He’s a grief researcher, a speaker and author, a consultant, online courses structure and he’s the host of the grief dreams podcast. He’s focused all of his Master’s and PhD research in psychology, on investigating dreams and bereavement, also known as grief dreams, and continuing bonds for many types of loss including prenatal loss and pet loss. Most of his academic research and publications has specifically been on the dreams of the deceased. Dr. Black is considered one of the world’s leading academic experts in grief dreams. Due to lack of academic research in this field, Dr. Black has focused his efforts are raising awareness on grief dreams, through doing talks, interviews and developing an online grief dreams course. Additionally, developed the grief dreams website and read several social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, at at grief dreams. So with that, I want to introduce Dr. Joshua black. Thank you for having me today. Yeah, it’s really I’m really excited to have you here today. We had to move this a couple times because of some some things that our calendars but really afford to talk to you about this, this field that people I think know a little bit about, but not a lot about. So how did you get involved in researching grave dreams?

Unknown Speaker 2:09
Like, it’s it’s a very interesting story, that, you know, it came really after my dad died, I wanted to be an elementary school teacher, that was my focus for my entire life. I like since I was a kid, I remember my dad telling me how that that was the best job to have because it has a good pension, and it’s pretty well paying paid in Canada anyways, it’s where I’m from. So I spent my whole life really going towards that. And then the fourth year, it took five years to finish my undergrad, the fourth year, my dad died, and it changed absolutely everything. And so the first time I really experienced a death, a significant loss in my life. And it was completely devastating for me. Like I remember getting that phone call, he was supposed to pick me up, it was around my birthday. And we’re supposed to go to a hockey game together and just never showed up. And so I just thought he slept in, he had some health issues, where it minimize what he could do. And so I just figured, oh, maybe he was just you know, had migraine or something he just couldn’t, couldn’t come. So I didn’t think anything of it. Two days later, I got a phone call from my aunt, who basically said that, you know, they found my father dead in his apartment, and, and he was just claps on the floor. And for me, like the amount of emotion that came out, was so scary, because one of the reasons because I was I still am a guy. But at that time, I really, I didn’t feel comfortable crying. So I tend to not cry. I don’t know when the last time I cried probably when I was a kid. And so those emotions are coming out, I haven’t felt those in for a very long time. And they just kept coming, the tears kept coming and like the, the negative thoughts and the of the future of like not being able to do stuff with them and not having any more memories. That really scared me and a lot of ways. And I had to sit with that. And I sat with that for about three days, I decided to do a eulogy, which was interesting in itself. I recommend everyone to do that. But yeah, I kept crying on stage for a good like five minutes before I could speak. But the emotions like I couldn’t believe how much emotion was coming out. You know, with that, and one of the reasons I should say too, because me my dad had a rocky relationship throughout her entire life. And one of the reasons was he had a he drank a lot to cope with his emotions. And so he had a lot of trauma he never actually worked through. And so I was scared him for the majority of my life. And we just never, you know, clicked kind of thing until after my mom and him got divorced. And it was about that year and a half there. That’s when we started rebuilding our relationship. And he acted a lot differently to me, I think, and I think there’s a story in that for me because I think that’s where the pain was coming from. Because if it was if I only thought if he died, maybe You know, two years earlier, I wouldn’t have felt like that would have been like, okay, you know, okay, so had a lot of resentment, a lot of pain for him, but because of the friendship that we’re really building, and he’s becoming the father always wanted kind of thing as a kid. And then for him to just die like that. It was it was such a shock. And it brought up all those, all those emotions. I remember wanting to after I get got the news, I want to do something special for him. And I was actually really considering dropping out of school and going to Israel, which was a trip he wanted to take me on the following year. And I was really grateful looking back now I had a partner who calmed me down and was pretty supportive to say, you know, let’s wait until you finish you’ll have one year left the school, let’s you know, finish that. And then you can decide on if you should do that or not. And so I’m so happy for that. Because it it’s amazing, the irrational decisions we can make, you know, when we’re in a state of grief, so I’m just so happy I had I had, you know, some support around me at that time. So anyways, I did the eulogy. I went back to school the next day, and all my sadness was gone. But the crazy thing was all my happiness and joy was gone, too. And so I was living in this weird gray state where like, there was no color left in the world. And I was in that state for about three months. And I couldn’t tell you, I tried everything. And nothing really gave me joy they used to. And so I just thought, well, this is life. Now. This is what grief is this is life. And it wasn’t till I had a dream, my father that everything changed. And so this is where my love for that topic really started. And so the dream was, I was just in my room was very, wasn’t like a bizarre dream at all, like I was in my so in the dream, I was in my room, and everything in my room was the same way. It wasn’t waking life, which is, you know, very unique in itself. At that time, a lot of clutter everywhere. So that is amazing details.

Unknown Speaker 6:56
Yeah, sure. And then a lot of other dreams that I have heard, you tend to be like, you know, weird stuff going on. So you’d wake up, you’re like, oh, that was a dream. But this was it. It was very realistic in that way. I saw my dad at the end of my room. And he looked so healthy, like I never like it wasn’t even a memory because I never even seen him like this before his energy was very light. As I said he a lot of trauma and issues going on, and waking life. So we always had this heaviness to him, where he just never dealt with his stuff. And but here he felt so light, like his energy was just so beautiful. And he just looked so healthy. And I walked up to him and I said, I’m gonna miss you acknowledging loss. And I said that I loved them. And then we hugged, and I woke up. And when I woke up, it was the most crazy experience because everything changed, the color was back into the world. Like, I don’t know, I didn’t know, I remember sitting at the edge of my bed and saying What was that? I wasn’t turning the dream. But I felt something changed in me because of the dream. And I still sit in the mystery of that moment. And I hear it a lot from other people where the dream itself changes people. It’s not really the interpretation, I can help in many different ways. But the dream itself had the power to change, like, where I was in my grief. And so I was able to have this joy back and I was able to regulate my emotions, I could have tears, you know, when I thought about him and stuff. So it was really a beautiful, whatever, that was a very beautiful point in my life, because I don’t know where it’d be, I’d probably still be in the gray. And I’d probably be doing something differently because of that dream. I then finished, you know, school, within probably, I think six months after that. And I applied to be in Teacher’s College, which was my goal the whole time. And the moment I got an interview to get in. I just felt something wasn’t right. And so I turned it down, which was for me looking back one of the craziest decisions I’ve made because I had nothing going I had no plan B there’s no plan B, I was going off a feeling and especially after grief. I don’t know why that was because I feel like I’ve been misleading in many ways. But you know, looking back, maybe because my dad was dead and to have that pressure to do it, that unconscious kind of pressure. But at the same time, I think there’s just another path that was just being led for let out for me. I just didn’t know what that was. And that following year was just as scary as to grief because I couldn’t find work and when I did find work wasn’t fulfilling. I’m like, is this life you know, is this life after you know, doing your your undergrad? I’m like, this isn’t what they told me. Every all the jobs I wanted you to masters for I’m like, I don’t want to do a masters. Right? Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 9:37
I don’t want to do any more school. And so I saw I worked you know these odd jobs and I want to find some meaning. So I went and volunteered at a hospice to help with the bereaved, and I did one on one support and group support and group support. And they had these questions about these dreams. So some people were sharing these positive dreams. Other people were asking questions why they didn’t have dreams other people want to know What these negative dreams meant. And you know, I didn’t really know, I didn’t know much about dream research at that time. And so I looked at the research, I still had an account for my school. So I looked at the publications that were available, and there wasn’t anything when it came to these types of dreams that I could provide them to give them any kind of understanding. And I was really shocked by that, because, you know, I thought, you know, most SUVs researched a lot, you know, a lot of people are just almost like cleaning up the trail, like the the laneways, Pat, like paved, and they’re just like, every research study is just moving a little, like an inch forward. Exactly. But there’s like nothing, it wasn’t a dirt road, I can really go off of it. So I couldn’t give him an answer. And then I had this moment where I was like, could I like, as I knew the impact it had for me, and their questions really interested me? and thought, like, could I research this topic? Like, is that a possibility for me? And then in my mind, I’m like, well, you have to know stats, you have to know research methodology, I’m like, I don’t want to know. And I didn’t want to be a researcher and for a lot, so I was really scared to pursue that, that goals. But finally, I settled down the nerves and said, you know, what, you know, why not give it a go, what’s the worst can happen, you know, I don’t get in or I go, when I fail, at least I tried, I can say I tried, you know, like, and so that’s really, so I had to, like, have courage to even, like, pursue this. And I did. And what amazing was I actually got through, and like, without some challenges, I gotta say, I want to quit many times, and the support of, you know, my friends, and the people who follow the topic and my platform were really helpful and encouraged me to how much this was needed. And so when I was at the, like, the lowest points of my, I guess, you know, masters or PhD, I had that to go off and say, you know, we got to keep persevering this, you know, like, we got to keep doing this. And so it spent a lot of time extra time, I felt like, I was like, two years behind everyone else tell you truth. Because everyone wanted to be a researcher, like, when I asked my colleagues that are in their masters, they like, Oh, I knew, like when I started University, so like, they already had this plan, and they really valued, you know, stats, and we said methodology. To me, I want to be a elementary school teacher, which I took those courses, but I didn’t, you know, like, I just got enough to get the good grades, like I didn’t retain any other information. So I had to learn all that over again. And then when I got my PhD is less like, was like, super smart. And I had a really sort of, you know, up my game on that too. And you know, but I made it through, you know, at the end of the day, I made it through. And by the end of that fourth year, I was at par with everyone else, if not, you know, in the sense of what I was doing a little bit, my career trajectory was a little different, because a lot of people want to be to do a postdoc, and to do all this other stuff and want to get into other areas. I’m like, this is the only topic on a research I get, I don’t want to be bothered with anything else other than this. And so I really directed a lot of my focus on doing talks and set up the website and the podcast, rather than, you know, do more research studies outside of my field, which a lot of my colleagues are doing at that time. So I just had a different kind of, I think, plan on why I was researching the topic, and then what I was going to do with it as I move forward. So that’s where it all sort of happened. And when I was in my Master’s and PhD those years, that’s when I really realized how vast The topic is like before. I’m just going off a couple of questions. Once I got in, and I started seeing the different biases, the different ways people see these dreams, started collecting the dreams and doing the research. I’m like, wow, this field is phenomenal. And it really, you know, changed the way I viewed these dreams in many ways, but also the way I approached them with people. And I think that’s one of the most important things of why I’m doing these talks is to validate the importance of this within the grief journey, but also how to use the sermon and provide a safe space for people to actually share these experiences.

Brian Smith 13:47
Yeah, that’s, that’s awesome. And I think it’s it is such important work that that again, I don’t know, there’s been much research done on it. I haven’t heard of any. And I know that, you know, when we have these dreams, and some of us do. And frankly, some of us say they don’t. Everybody wants to you know, I I’ve worked a lot with parents who have lost children. And we’re like, Why can I get more dreams? I want to I want to dream visit you know, it’s such a it’s a but people like so I want to just back up for us. And maybe you can find it what is actually a dream because we don’t we know we go to sleep we have this thing that we feel but what is a dream.

Unknown Speaker 14:21
A dream is really any thought feeling or seeing that you sort of remember when you wake up and so that’s sort of the definition of a dream. A lot of people think when it comes to dreams, it only happens in REM state but it’s not actually true. We actually dream throughout our sleep so and non REM and REM there are differences in the quality of those dreams. So usually non REM dreams are more bland. And in the REM dreams you get more of the emotion that’s going on but at the you know, near the end of night it’s not as as true. And the other interesting thing is in REM you tend to remember more dreams. So a lot of people would say if you remember a dream, it’s probably from Rome because if you wake someone up 80% of them Time, they’re going to be dreaming in non REM, it’s around 50% of the time. And so there’s just a little difference there. We don’t know where these Greek dreams fit in personally, like, you have to catch it in the lab to sort of understand where these powerful dreams come in. It’s probably around but you know, like, at the end of day, we just don’t know. And I think that’s the mystery of this topic, because they do act differently than other dreams. A typical dreams anyways, so there is this mystery of what actually is going on in the brain when these happen. And so yeah, that’s, that’s basically a nutshell the dreams, and I should tell you some dream research. So when it comes to dreams, 10% of the population doesn’t remember dreaming, even though for our knowledge, everyone is dreaming. It’s just the remembering is the issue. And so on average, one to two dreams a week, the public would say they would remember. And you can, you know, change that based on which kind of we can talk about that more, but you can increase your frequency of dreams as you move forward, just by valuing the topic. So you know, keeping a dream journal, listen to this, and you know, talking about your dreams with others, if you’re really trying to tell your mind that these are important. Now, our culture is really bad at valuing dreams. So why would you remember them? Right? And so there’s different ways to remember dreams a little bit better? We can go over that, you know, if you want to, but yeah, right. Yeah. Okay. Well, I

Brian Smith 16:17
do want to interject here, because my wife was one of those people for a long time would say, I don’t think I dream, because I don’t remember my dreams. And then after my daughter passed, and my daughter or the daughter was talking about dreams, and I was talking about dreams, and we do all these reading about dreams. Now my wife is remembering her dreams a lot more often. Because it’s what you’re saying that valuing the dream makes a difference.

Unknown Speaker 16:38
Yeah, it’s so amazing to and like, the more you you value it, the more you read through your dreams down, the more you can have and like, the more you just remember anyways. And so like I remember, like just trying this out, like research has shown that just by doing that, it increases your recall rate. And so for me, I usually have, you know, maybe three dreams a week, and I remember started doing this. And within a month, I was having three dreams a night that I could remember. And so I finally said, you know, this is enough like this is because it kept waking me up and write down. And so finally, I’m like, I’m only writing down like the ones that I feel are more meaningful. And so then my the rate of recall actually decreased, so you can increase and decrease based on that too, right? So interesting. Wow. Yeah. Which is really interesting. And so what I want to sort of say, when it comes to dreams, most people, on average, most people will have negative dreams. And that’s just because a lot of times we carry our stresses or worries to bed, or, or watching the news, or we’re watching a horror film or something that is going to be creeping into our dreams. And after trauma, what’s interesting is that these dreams become even more consistently negative. And so you would think after grief would be very similar in the sense that people are going to be having a lot of nightmares or negative dreams, if you just look at the pandemic right now. And there has been research to show that there’s been an increase in nightmares, increase of negative images from people, and you can just sort of see how that reflects the stress of individual and given a pandemic is a very stressful time, for many reasons. Financial is that you have the grief stuff, someone dies, you have work you have catching the virus in your own death and mortality, your loved ones, your mortality, there’s so much stress, people are dealing with even having to homeschool your kids like I can’t imagine what that would be like. But you know, like, you’re going to bed with all that. And so dreams reflect our waking life. And people just need to understand that connection. Because there’s a lot of clues and a lot of things that you can learn from your dreams. If you know how to sort of understand your dream language, I think that’s the most important thing is that everyone has their own unique language when it comes to the dreams as much as we want a quick fix. And we want to just google you know, what does an elephant mean? And then take that to mean what your dream means. It’s not the best way of doing it, you’re just going to sell yourself short. And you’d probably be led in a wrong direction. So like everyone’s like symbol of an elephant be different. But there’s also a story that goes along with the elephants. It’s very rare. You just have an elephant you wake up, you’re usually riding the elephant, you’re going around and meeting people or whatnot. Right? So there’s a story that goes along that helps people understand what the dream itself is trying to convey to the dreamer. Sometimes it’s very passive, and it’s just, you know, working through the emotions of the day. But a lot of times, it’s you know, there’s a lot of problem solving in there and basically allowing you to see what you’re working on still. Because the mind is so great at tricking you to think you’re further than you are in life. And you know, yes, sometimes I’ll give it I’ll give an example. That’s just in the pandemic. You know, when they like that it was that crazy. Everyone was buying toilet paper. Yeah. So around that time, I was like, Oh, I got this. I’m okay. I’m not too stressed. You know, like, I have a smile on my face. I was going through life. And then I had this really crazy nightmare where I was in my house I grew up in and there was a chandelier being taken down. And when I was taken down, I took some of the glass And I started eating it and then I having sort of having like a panic attacks, I realized that glass was stuck in my throat and I couldn’t get it out. I woke up with just a deep sweat. Like, like for me like the last time I had it was probably like maybe seven or eight years ago like I nightmares that I pretty cognitive my emotions and waking life. And so I tend to work on them in waking life. So it doesn’t have to affect me so much in my dream world. But anyway, so that was a such a big trigger for me that there was something I didn’t I wasn’t catching I wasn’t seeing Hmm. So I really had to look at that because I’m like, I thought it was fine. Like what’s going on? And then I realized, like, okay, let’s, if this was someone else’s dream.

Unknown Speaker 20:37
I can look at this. I’m like, okay, what’s the chandelier? Well, a chandelier provides light to a large space. I go, what’s similar to that that’s going on in my life right now. And so I started thinking, I’m like, Oh, the news does that the news provides stories to a country, right? And so for a large space, I’m like, so I’m breaking off and must be reading a lot of it and jesting it. But what am i ingesting is actually caused me great pain and suffering. I don’t know about it. I was like, this makes sense. Because what it was doing at that time, as much as I felt calm, I was reading a lot of news throughout the day. And that was actually very detrimental to my mental health. And I didn’t even know it. And so I really had to take a step back and say, Okay, why are we looking at the news? Oh, to feel safe, how many times you need to look at it to feel safe. And I’m like, okay, maybe you know, once or twice if it’s gonna happen, Betcha it’s gonna be like the headliner, you don’t need to go on to like, you know, 10 different articles to understand. Toilet paper is running out like this, right? And so I made a list when like, how can I actually problem solve this? So like, Okay, what do I need to feel safe? And so you get some extra food and that sort of stuff? And like, Is there anything else that you need? And it’s like, no, so then, okay, so then the, the need to, to look at the new so often wasn’t as important for me. And so it was just maybe once or twice in the morning, I would look at an article. And that was it, I wouldn’t look at night. So that was the big thing. Like, dude, I really stopped that. And I never had an experience like that, since I haven’t had a nightmare since that day. So it’s just really understanding that, you know, there’s a lot of knowledge that we can gain about ourselves, I always like to say dreams can be our best friend, who is, you know, can tell you the truth when you don’t want to hear it. I think that’s sort of, you know, what a best friend supposed to be anyways, is to really give you the heads up and when you’re off the off off your rocker and, and thinking that you’re going north, but you’re really going south.

Brian Smith 22:29
So is the dream, our subconscious trying to communicate to our conscious mind? Is that what it is?

Unknown Speaker 22:34
Do you think? Yeah, right. But I know other people who have different theories of you know, based on their religion, and based on their belief in the afterlife and stuff, they may see it as differently. But yeah, for me, it’s just like, it’s a guidance. If it comes from inside or outside of me, it doesn’t really matter. Like, I’m not too concerned, I’m just gonna, I’m just gonna use it.

Brian Smith 22:51
Yeah, well, that’s a good point. That’s an excellent point, you know, because the thing is, you know, as we talk about dream visits, you know, people will say, Well, I just have my normal dreams. And then I have my nightmares. And then I have my grief dreams, or my dream visits. And they’ll say, it’s a totally different quality of experience. It’s kind of like the way you described the dream with your father. And, and you wake up and you feel there, it’s reminds me when people have Indies, when I say it just changed my entire perspective on everything.

Unknown Speaker 23:22
And many of those dreams can be like that. And it’s also you know, it’s important to say, we talked about these positive drains a lot. And I think a lot of topic, a lot of the conversation does go there. But there’s a lot of negative frames that also happen that also have very similar qualities to some of the positive dreams are very vivid, they’re very real, they’re one on one, they may not give you a positive feeling, but they stay with you for their entire life, too. So sometimes a lot of people who are spiritual take those as a haunting, and there’s cultures that believe that that is a negative visitation. So as much as a lot of you know, press goes to these positive dreams, there is a lot of negative dreams. And just in my study, I just sort of state so when I looked at sort of how frequent these these are, and just the general public, I found that’s one of the amazing things I found was like how common they are. So after spells a loss within the first year to is 86% of people had a dream of the deceased after pet loss, it was 78%. And after prenatal loss, it was 58%. And then there was a study done with children 55% had a dream after their parent died. And so it’s it when you start looking at those numbers, you realize how common these actually are, then when you sort of look at are they positive or negative experiences. Because if you remember when we talked about just how common negative dreams are, in general, then after trauma, you would think a lot of dreams after grief would be negative to so especially deceased in it. But as you’re saying, this is where it gets interesting because it goes against typical dream research that most these dreams are positive. So when you ask someone, you know, the content, if you ever had a positive dream and you sort of give a lay on with that. means around over 90% of people say they have at least one positive dream of the Seas when it goes to negative around 30%. And of those 30%. What’s interesting is that those individuals will also have a positive dream at some point. And so what it says to me it probably is going on is that people are having more negative dreams in the beginning. And as they work through their trauma and their grief, they’ll have more of these positive dreams moving forward. We don’t know that for sure. We need to do more longitudinal research for that. But that is what I’ve heard on my podcast a lot. And what I’ve just heard with talking to other people, but yeah, there’s something there and I think within so within those beautiful dreams, so they’re acting differently than normal. And as you said, like a lot of them have this very beautiful space that is being provided with just love and peace. Like it is absolutely amazing. Like the deceased will say, amazed, like really why stuff. They really help the dream out in many different ways to feel loved to deal with some of the problems that we’re facing. But just the presence of love is one of the things I find is the most remarkable because a lot of times we seek that in life and never achieve it because we have so many worries and so much fear that is just under the surface. But in this dream, it’s like, none of that matters. It’s like all you have is this space of love, and what that can do to someone. And so when we when I look at my dream, yeah, I realized the importance of being able to say goodbye to my father, because his death was sudden I realize that the saying I love you as important aspect of that dream, because I never said that to him. And probably since I was six. So it’s something that I needed to say that never got a chance to say, Well, he never said to me too, so let’s not put the blame on me. Eric, yeah. And then the third thing was this peace, that peace in the dream was different than any other dream I had. Even the dreams that are positive, I have don’t have that level of peace in them. So there’s something else going on? That’s probably very beneficial to us as we move forward through grief.

Brian Smith 27:03
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I was we’re doing this or talking about this. I was thinking about recollection of dreams. We talked about how you can actually recall more dreams. But do we have any idea why we recall some dreams and don’t recall other dreams? or Why? Some people seem to recall a lot more than than other people do.

Unknown Speaker 27:21
Yeah, when it comes to dream recall, there are theories out there. Because we can’t see each dream, it’s very hard to understand why remember certain dreams over others, especially when it comes to this the deceased. A lot of people will say, you know, you remember dreaming because the vividness of it. So the more vivid a dream, the more emotional dream is, would be different factors. If it’s in RAM, you may have a better if you’re waking up in RAM, you may have a better chance of catching that because RAM is very similar to our waking state. And so it could be you know that but yeah, so there’s little, there’s still a lot of mystery on it. But when it comes to these streams, it’s very interesting because they tend to come up at very important times in people’s lives. And so I’m not sure if they’re just not remembering the dreams or they’re just not occurring, right? That’s a question that we won’t know until we be able to see dreams in general. It could be people are dreaming of deceased more than they’re actually remembering it and that’s interesting. So then then it’s like why remembering certain dreams at certain points in our life over others.

Announcer 28:18
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 dot grief to growth.com www dot g ri e f the number two gr o w th calm or text growth gr o w th 31996 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 and yeah,

Brian Smith 29:21
you know it’s interesting because I in the community I run a lot of people believe that we actually leave our bodies every night and we basically astral travel and we meet with our guides and our loved ones and stuff like that and we don’t recall that so we’re we’re kind of back and forth between you know two worlds and so when we you know have these these grief dreams we call them dream visits that we believe that we’re actually with you know our loved one again but with the great dreams or have you noticed any like common Natalie’s with the dreams versus regular dreams and give you some examples for me. It seems like they’re usually once I have the really short. They’re usually not they’re not very long. And when I would see my daughter, I would always know she’s not supposed to be here. So I get very excited because I you realize, you know, this, this is supposedly happening. And then it would be somewhat lucid because I would know I was dreaming. And then I wouldn’t want to wake up. But I would always I would get excited, I’d wake myself up. Some of the things that I went through is, Is that normal? Do other people have that?

Unknown Speaker 30:22
I’ve heard that. Yeah, they definitely do seem shorter than other dreams, even just the word count that I’ve collected, like I’ve collected over 1000 dreams. And just when you compare that with other dream research, it tends to be a little shorter. But that also could be you know, what people are writing, because when I captured the data, I didn’t go after a dream sample, which most people would in their research, I would have to recreate sample. So a lot of people you would assume are not dreaming Theseus, so they’re not, you know, wanting to talk about their dream. So maybe that’s reason why it’s a little shorter. So it didn’t didn’t add enough detail to the dream, they sort of just cut to the chase of maybe what was most important to them. So yeah, we don’t do more research on that. But yeah, a lot of people will say that, you know, they’ll know the Sisa data, they’ll know that they’re dreaming. It’s not as common as I think. Like, like, for me, like I knew my dad was dead, but I wasn’t lucid in the dream. Like, I didn’t realize it was a dream. In that moment. A lot of people are like that, where they could acknowledge the person’s that but they won’t say this is a dream and become that lucid. What was the other one? You’re saying?

Brian Smith 31:24
Well, I would say, it’s short, it’s lucid. And then I was for me, I would like always get excited about seeing her and wake up. And I didn’t want to so I’m like, yeah, so I started actually trying to, when I was in it, say, okay, just don’t get it. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 31:41
And that’s just love right there. It’s just excitement. And, you know, at the end of the day, you know, the dream may have ended, even if you didn’t get excited, but at the end day, it’s just something to smile at. But that’s how much love you have, you know, for your daughter, maybe last year, and for you to sort of take it as a visit. It just makes it that much more special to you believing that it was her right. And so, you know, there’s just something to smile and say, Oh, right, okay. Like, like, how can you change that without like, trying to decrease the outlay. I think that is one of the most important parts of the dreams, just feeling that and that’s just love coming to the surface, you know?

Brian Smith 32:13
Well, like you said, there is that and you can’t really even describe the feeling of love, but just one of the things, you know, when you have it. And I found that when people have that, though, and I know a lot of people have had these types of dreams and like, you know, I could just feel the love, you could feel that they’re okay. It’s just that reassurance that they’re okay, that we’re going to be okay. But it’s interesting, because we, a lot of times people will take those positive gyms we visit but then the negative dreams will say, Well, that was just a dream. But is there something to be learned from the negative dreams also? Of course, yeah. Well,

Unknown Speaker 32:45
first is using discernment, right? Some people who, as I said, will take those dreams as a visit also, depending on where they’re where they are. Right. And so it’s it’s really understanding, like when we call things a dream visit, it’s just really understanding that that actually complicates a lot of things, for people in many different forms. And just for before I go on the negative frames, people, just in my own research, when you look at, you know, who are having these dreams, like that was one of the common concerns that why I started the research was you know why some people are having these dreams and other people aren’t. And so the spiritual people would always put themselves down if they haven’t had a dream. And then they’ll be jealous of others. They’d say, oh, maybe he didn’t cross over properly. Maybe he’s mad at me, because I had to like maybe sell the house or something. Yeah, or couldn’t give them that type of funeral that he wanted. Or maybe, you know, the afterlife is they forgot, they forgot about me kind of thing. And so I want to give a scientific explanations, sort of understand that a little bit more. And so what I found and in replicating the research, is that dream recall was the most important factor. So what it’s saying is that people who remember more dreams in general, remember more of these types of dreams. I think that’s interesting. For a lot of people, when you start asking them, if they didn’t have a dream, you know, what the recall rate is, usually it’s pretty bad and pretty poor. And so I usually connect the dots for them. And for them, you can see this weight goes off. And because all those reasons, negative reasons where they put on it, it are now sort of this valid, and now because the research people can hold on to that and say, Oh, I just didn’t remember maybe the dream that I did have. But within that study, so in both studies, I looked at spirituality, because a lot of people thought, so I wasn’t gonna put it in, but people sort of made me put it in thought that people who are spiritual will have more of these dreams. I guess it’s a good theory. Anyways, it’s not true. So people who are spiritual or not, are both having similar dream experiences. difference is, is in the content. So maybe in a spiritual person, we’ll talk about the afterlife, or they’ll talk about, you know, I don’t know what heaven looks like or what death is like something like that. We’re in people who are not spiritual, they won’t but they still have that loving quality. They’ll even say they’re okay, like they still have those kind of comments that still say that they love them, but they just won’t have that other stuff in it. So, you know, but for those people what I want to sort of mention, you know, when we label these as Maybe a dream because it’s a somehow we can put off others. Because if you’re not spiritual, your guard and your wall goes up the moment you hear it’s a visit, and you don’t want to share those experiences anymore. And so I really tried to get people to understand that, you know, there, it’s the quality of the dream, I think the most important to ask and then ask how they feel about it. Because some people based on their culture, religion, that is not that would be frowned upon, in many ways to call it a dream visit, right. But it’s a great moment together, and whatever you call that living in the mystery of that moment, and that in itself can allow people to share these a little bit more freely, because most people hide them if they don’t get asked. And I think that’s why people thought it was rare. But you know, for a spiritual person, they’ll let you know right away if they think it’s a visit, because you know, like, they’ll say, just the wording they use. I think that’s beautiful. And I always I never discourage that, because I’ve seen in even in my research, how these dreams help people believe more in afterlife and help people regain their faith, which is really rocky after someone dies. I understand sort of, like, How could this happen. And so you sort of see how it’s beneficial for people. And when it comes to these negative for dreams, these dreams has been shown just in my research when they’re distressing, that they relate to trauma symptoms, and they also relate to unresolved feelings of guilt or blame. And so a good example of this is just understand, like dreams represent our waking life. So a good example was a widow her said like her husband died. And she had this dream, a repeated dream of her husband coming to the door, and telling her that he’s still alive. And then, you know, basically wants to get back together with her. But she says, Oh, no, I’m dating someone new. I can’t. And she’s like, how can you still be alive? Like, how could you make me think that you’re dead? Like, how can you be such a mean and heartless person to do something like that to me? Then he said, You know, like, the moat He’s like, then he’s like, well, if we’re not gonna be together, well, then give me all the money that you inherited, then I’ll leave you alone. And she, she said, No. And then he began to chase her. And so he had this repeated dream over and over again, she thought it was a negative visitation. And then when you start asking about these points in the dream, that are, you’d say, are are important. The one is getting back together, and her being in a relationship. And so that’s one of the issues, right, like how difficult it is for someone who has a partner die. And then to start a new relationship, like you’re, you’re trying to love two people at the same time. And it’s very difficult in our culture, because it’s always been frowned upon. And so for them, like you have to sort of figure that out. And then you have the difficulty of the other partner. Are they even? Do they even want to know about your partner that died? Or they even you know, is? Or are you hiding your, your love to make them feel better? Kind of, right, exactly. It’s a very difficult position to be in. And then on top of that, you have this money. So when you ask her about the money, she said, the most hardest thing after the death was actually accepting the money, because he worked so hard for it. And she felt it was so unjust, that he worked so hard, and she’s the one that gets suspended or keyman. So she’s sort of working through that still. And she’s spending some of that money on the new relationship. So if you see that there’s this complex thing going on, and the mind is trying to say, you know, you got to work through this because whatever you’re doing isn’t working. And because a dream is repeated, like that is a flag that you know, there is something that you’re not getting in waking life that the mind is really good at, if you’re not going to get it they’ll tell you again, either in the same way or in a different story. If you track your dreams over you know, over weeks you can really see if you’re making progress or not based on

Brian Smith 38:38
strength I’ve been having the same dream for years.

Unknown Speaker 38:43
Right? Well, there’s something important there right and he’s drinking trigger, especially your feelings can trigger certain dreams and there’s probably clues in there to help you understand that because you’re not like I don’t feel at the random at all. They’re really telling a story to us to really help us be more healthy and waking life.

Brian Smith 38:59
Yeah, I want to reiterate a couple things you said that you said some really profound things there that I really want to make sure the listeners heard one is when people say I’m not having these dream visits, there’s something wrong with me my loved ones mad at me or this I don’t we don’t have the connection whatever. I think it’s really important. Like you said to ask how many dreams are you recalling in general and that the fact that there’s a correlation there so hopefully that will take a lot of pressure off of some people and there are ways that we can improve our dream recall as you said, by valuing it by journaling I think setting an attention I’ve heard people say I want to have a dream you know just just maybe trigger that subconscious thing I want but I also want to ask you about you had this visit or this dream with your father I using the visit where we had this dream with your father and it changed your life. What was your belief in the afterlife before that? Did it change that or what were your thoughts about that?

Unknown Speaker 39:54
Yeah, I don’t know. It’s very interesting cuz I when I look back at that I am spiritual and but when I look back, I wasn’t asking for it. At that time, I think I’m still developing my my faith in many ways, as I still am, I guess I’m trying to understand this crazy world. And then, and understand myself as I learn more about myself my idea of God or whatever changes significantly. And so at that time, you know, I, when I even look at that dream, I don’t even I don’t think I’ve ever even classified as a visitation. It was just a dream that changed me and I still look look back. I’m like, I would even say it’s visitation. I don’t know, because it was just something that I didn’t put a wasn’t a interpretation. I don’t think I’ve ever really put an interpretation on that dream, per se. It’s just me just how crazy it was. It changed me. And that love is the thing that I keep the most and like, I don’t I get them that I don’t know. Right. Like, like, you know, if it really matters to me, but that I but I wouldn’t I do know for certain is that dream changed me. And so what can I learn from that dream as I move forward? And this is really, I think what’s possible when it comes to love. And so my goal has not been trying to prove the afterlife is real, you know, really it is or it isn’t, I’m going to die. It’s gonna happen. Not like, it’s not like, my belief isn’t going to determine anything. And so, but what can I do? Now? Like, okay, I can learn what’s possible for a human. And I think that there are different levels of love. And if I can dream, a scene like that, or an emotion like that, why can’t I live that in waking life. And so that’s always been my goal moving forward, is trying to get to that place in waking life. And not just need a dream to get me there. Like, I’m really working hard to really try to understand, you know, myself, who I am, what stresses me out, what am I attached to? And what’s holding me back from love. And a lot of people, you know, I’d say, like, we do get attached to these experiences, because they make us feel good. But then when we go to waking life, we’re like, I just want another one. Rather than saying, you know what, yeah, what can I do to increase the chances I can actually have that while I’m awake? Yeah, I think that’s where I’m at. It’s just, it’s less about, you know, what is after, and more about what can I do now. And a lot of these dreams that people share, they have so much wisdom that I gained from them. So that’s why I love asking about these dreams, because there’s so much you can take from it. When it comes to what love is and the words that they say there. It’s just very remarkable. From where I’m sitting to be able to utilize these dreams as a way to rethink what life is and how to process how I see myself as I move forward.

Brian Smith 42:25
Yeah, well, I want to ask you about I don’t know if you’ve heard of this phenomenon or not, but I’ve heard of people that were someone will be deceased. And someone else will have a dream the widow come to visit them, and tell them they’re okay. before anybody even knows this person has been deceased. So have you heard about this happening?

Unknown Speaker 42:43
This is where it gets really wild when it comes to these. These dreams because even on my website, there’s history, I put these people who can have these dreams, as you said, before they even know the person is dead. And I think there is something very beautiful about that and tell our people sit in mystery. There’s a lot about life, we don’t know and think that we do know, even when they think that we know what the afterlife is. It’s just I think insane in itself. Because we just don’t know. But we do know that like for to believe that there is one okay, but to understand what it’s like, I don’t know if we can even conceive of what that is. But right, right with our minds, right. And so there’s a lot of times we have to sit in the mystery of life. And to understand that we may be wrong in different ways, but there’s certain things you can be certain of anyway, so these dreams really make you sit in that mystery. Because they’re having dreams very similar to what someone would have after they know the death person somehow that moment knows of the loss. And that could be like some people would say, oh, that they visited them in the dream. And so they let them know that they basically died. And we’re going to be okay, so that’s one possibility. The other is, let’s say if you’re not spiritual, there must be a connection that people have that goes beyond time or space that people will just know. And I hear that with, like, you know, parents with their children, they just know something’s wrong. They always have this like radar, and they call on something is. And so there could be the strings of just attachment, and then love that allows us to know, when you know someone has died too. So either way, whatever the possibility, it changes the way we understand human beings, just by the occurrence of that. then other times when it comes to, I think some other dreams you’re saying about people having dreams for others. I think that is a really fascinating topic, I collected a lot and people came on my podcast and talked about it. It’s more rare. But someone could have a dream that’s actually meant for someone else in the sense that the character in the dreams of the deceased will tell them to share a message with their father or their mother or whatever. And sometimes that person doesn’t even really even know or really is that close to that individual. And so it takes a lot of courage for someone to have a dream and then share it because it could end up really someone calling you crazy or they just don’t believe you and stuff like that. But for the most part, a lot of people have said the powerful impact it has on others. A lot of times they never had that dream themselves. So it’s very interesting when you start looking at that, and that’s more research that needs to be done on that topic, because it does change the way we we see ourselves and like what’s possible with us. And there’s just so much more we just don’t understand. We’re trying to, like, I guess, go on Mars and land on Mars. And we don’t really even understand, like what we are capable of. Right? Like, it’s just it’s very interesting how we keep pushing the boundaries externally. But internally, it’s still really similar to where it was prior.

Brian Smith 45:27
Yeah, well, there’s just some of the reasons that I believe there’s something more to it than just our subconscious is, you know that that phenomenon I’ve heard of happening, not often, but it happens when people will, will dream about someone else being deceased before they even know. And if you just mentioned another one will, it’s like, it’s almost like they can’t get through to the one that they’re trying to get through to. So they’ll go to the cousin or the art or the neighbor down the street even and say, Nope, the neighbor come up and say, you know, I had a dream, but your your daughter last night, I barely knew her. But she came to me and came to tell me to tell you that she’s okay.

Unknown Speaker 46:00
Yeah, it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful when people said have the courage to be able to actually share that. I do want to mention, when we said we talked about some of these positive trends, there is a there is a category that should be of concern to anyone who works with the bereaved. And that’s a theme called Come join me. And here so kids can have this, it seems. And then also adults, but it’s where the deceased is either dragging the dreamer, basically, to the afterlife, or the dream or the deceased to try and convince the individual to basically kill themselves to join them in the afterlife. And it’s a very positive scene in the sense of what the person how the person is interacting with the individual. But these are really rare, but they seem to sort of point to mental health issues and suicide ideation. And so, you know, in my studies, I sort of saw how people who had those types of dream has really high forms of trauma symptoms. And then there’s been other people that it’s highly related to complicated grief, and you see it even across cultures, with indigenous people in Georgia. And so their thing is, if someone ever has that type of dream means you’re going to die soon. That’s the myth. And so I think any if you’re in a hunter gatherer, gatherer society, if you’re dealing with trauma, you’re not going to be, your memory is going to be off your cognition is going to be off and reaction time, so I can see you slipping, or it could be that they, you know, they do kill themselves also, and I, and I, you know, when people when we, when we say, ask about these dreams and understand where it is, because if you take if you tell someone, you know, these are dream visits, right? All of a sudden, that person will say, oh, then I’m supposed to kill myself, to go to the afterlife, because this is a positive dream. That’s what I really have to ask, you know, what’s the dream before we label it? Just to know, will that complicate the individual brief in any way? And what are their beliefs? And so, you know, with that, I cannot, I can definitely see people probably have taken their life because of some of these dreams, because they believed it was what they were supposed to do. And in grief, you know, like, our cognition is not the greatest like we are impulse control and reaction time in the sense of what we do. I was about to go to Israel and like dropped out of school, right. So if I had one of those dreams, how easy it is, for someone to just take that next step, because they believe the dream was telling you the truth. And so just being aware that there’s said, like, there’s so many types of dreams, that I’ve seen that I think I am in a privileged position to understand the landscape, which, you know, that’s what I’m really trying to talk about this stuff, because a lot of people only hear certain aspects, and a lot of them are these positive dreams. And that’s beautiful, and it’s great. But there’s also this other landscape that hasn’t been talked about. And that’s sort of the importance of understanding and using discernment, when we sort of talk about these dreams and how people’s beliefs and how they interpret their dreams affect the grief journey.

Brian Smith 48:41
Yeah, that’s some really excellent, another excellent point you made there about that. You know, because it’s interesting as you were telling your your path, how you were doing one thing in your undergrad and then decided to go into psychology and going to dream research my, my daughter, when when my other Shana passed, when my daughter Kayla was in the medical, she was on a path to become a physician’s assistant. And after Shayna passed, she realized this is not really what I want to do. So she she changed. She made she majored in psychology and undergrad, and then they are masters of mental health counseling. So you know, it’s interesting that like, when we’re in grief, we have to be careful about making big decisions, because we don’t, our cognition is not great, but also, it can actually put us on the path that I think that we’re meant to be on. Or us that i think that i think that you know, and you took this dream that you had from your father and you said, Okay, this this changed your life and change your life work. And people might have heard of this. And I was looking at your website before I get on so I’ll give you you know, but I’d heard it before about Paul McCartney. After his mother passed, and everybody knows the song, let it be. And there’s a line in the song. You know, Mother Mary comes me everybody assumes This is the Virgin Mother. But Paul McCartney had a dream of his mother after she Pass, come in ham. And the lyrics are when I find myself in times of trouble Mother Mary comes to me speaking words of wisdom, let it be. And in my hour of darkness, she’s standing right in front of me speaking words of wisdom, let it be whisper words of wisdom and that that song is just so profound. And as he’s relating this dream to James Carville, like 50 years later at James Carville, what’s the guy’s name, going to court and court games, relating it to him 50 years later, you know, you can see him tearing up, I mean, you can see that, that that dream still impacts him to this day. So there’s, I think there’s something very profound about about these these dreams.

Unknown Speaker 50:40
Well, I hear from a lot of people they’ll utilize, they still remember these dreams, you know, 4050 years later, and they still remember how to feel like that feeling of love can still be, you know, they can still look back at that and carry that with them in many ways. And it provides them that comfort as you move forward. And for a lot of times, it’s that thing that actually, when people look back, it can be that thing that really helped them work through their grief in many ways. I’ve had, you know, people that were about to kill themselves have a dream of deceased, you know, talk him out of it. People who are, you know, addicted, had a dream, and it changed them until like, you can see, like, the significant moments and of people’s grief journey. Change because of these dreams. That’s why like, it’s really interesting how a lot of people don’t share them. That was any research on them. Because like, oh, people just resilient? Well, it could be they’re also having these dreams that are helping them become resilient and work through some of the stuff outside of let’s say, you know, traditional means, I think, you know, that is a very beautiful quality of these dreams. And it’s like, why shouldn’t we we should know as much as we can. Because it seems that there is some type of inner knowing or knowledge that is guiding us to how to work through grief. And if we can understand the concept of what’s going on, we could work and help people a lot better in waking life. Because they’re said, there’s so much wisdom, even Mr. Paul McCartney Let it be like, I remember hearing that I was so shocked because I was in love with that song. And now I’m like, wow, like, that makes it even more beautiful. Yeah. And the way he said like, and, and there’s so many. So even on my website, Greek dreams, I’d say there’s so many other points in movies and TV shows that capture these dreams when I started looking. And I said, like starting like every kid, every time I look at a movie or, or comes up, I’m going to write down and like the amount of shows and places where I’ve seen these dreams, you can tell it’s affecting a lot of people that they’re putting it in their movies, and they’re putting in their TV shows in ways that are capturing the importance and the beauty of the topic. For the most part, there are a couple that will put in negative dreams. And I think that’s beautiful, too, because it just showcases and raises awareness. But the beauty of these dreams help change people. I remember one of my just side note, one of my favorite movies growing up was Braveheart. And one of the reasons was my dad’s favorite movie was Braveheart, too. So we always watch it together. And then, you know, I never realized until I was in my master’s program, I put the movie on again. And there’s three grief dreams in there of him dreaming of his deceased wife. And I think that’s probably the record. I haven’t seen more than three right now. But like I go, how interesting that is one of my favorite movies that I was hired to actually had these experiences. And I didn’t even realize it wasn’t conscious of it until after I started, you know, looking for these around. And I think you know, there’s something to say about that. And I think there’s something special about that, just in my own journey where I look back, and like my dad’s tied these dreams. It’s not just I had my own, but it was in one of our favorite movies that we add to

Brian Smith 53:37
that as well. That is really cool. So tell me about what you offer to people I know you’ve got it, you’ve got a course you do one on one work. So

Unknown Speaker 53:45
tell me about what you offer. So to raise awareness, I like I was doing, you know, before the pandemic, I was doing a lot of talks and workshops, and so I kind of stopped and so I decided to do an online course and so it’s nine and a half hours that someone could take and it really helps you understand, you know, some stuff on sleep dreams, but you know, the majority of time grief dreams and all the landscape like we we talked about an hour, so it’s probably another nine hours of like conversation on the topic that we just didn’t go into it because it’s so vast in the sense of what’s there. So if someone wants to learn more and wants to talk about these more, I think that’s a great starting point, you get a certificate at the end of it. And then you’ll feel it’s people who you know, have these negative dreams or just want to talk more about these dreams I offer the one on one group dream consulting, and just you know, it’s just it’s sad there’s not a lot of people that know the information so I’m just trying to help people the best I can understand how a lot of there are a lot of clients that have negative dreams and so it’s really you know, how it applies to waking life and what it’s trying to teach us to move forward with that and then you said like I got the grief dreams podcast so people who want to know more about the just want to hear more of these stories, like that’s the place to go because a lot of the people that come on majority of them have really positive life changing experiences. I I think that’s phenomenal. Even The last guest we had on was in Gara. And she talked about, you know, meeting her thing was her grandfather and she asked what the afterlife and then he told her what the actual life was like, I think that’s kind of cool in the sense of these answers and questions people have about life they they can get from the deceased to so

Brian Smith 55:15
yeah. I love what you’re saying it. And it’s interesting because I’ve studied near death experiences to a fair amount and their grief dreams remind me of that without the trauma, you can have some of these experiences. And I also love the way you put it, you know, you don’t have to believe it’s the afterlife, you might believe its inner wisdom, or the subconscious, whatever, whatever works for you. But there is there is you cannot deny the wisdom of it, you cannot deny the message of it, the beauty of it, and the way that it can transform, you know, people’s lives. So I think the work that you’re doing is just so, so very important. And I love just a short amount of time we’ve been able to spend together today, I’ve learned a lot, you know, in terms of their types of dreams, I didn’t know I didn’t know about the Come with me, you know, dream, you know how maybe we can interpret these negative dreams, I thought you get a great, great example that woman, you know, with, with her husband and the other person in the life, and that’s got to be a really, for no complex situation, you said, trying to, you know, honor your wonders on the other side, but live your life while you’re still here. So seeing that come through in the dream of being able to understand what what the dream is trying to tell you. So it’s all just amazing.

Unknown Speaker 56:29
It absolutely is. And that’s why I love talking about it. And one thing we didn’t mention is how these dreams change over time. So you work through your grief and like so it’s not really your dreams aren’t about grief anymore. And these dreams are the seeds will pop up in time to other needs that you have and times of suffering. So let’s say if you get divorced, or something you may have, or something tragic happens, you may have one of these dreams, and it’s been 10 years since individual died, but they’re offering you support and comfort. I’ve seen a lot in the pandemic now, which is very interesting of how the deceased are coming to offer support in many different ways. Either just being together to reduce the isolation, or to provide them questions are asking how they’re doing in the pandemic, and then an end of life, which is interesting, you’ll start seeing these frames again. And they’re basically helping people transition from life to death. So they’re providing a lot of comfort for the individual in those final final days. And I think it’s, I think that’s one of the other really unique things of this research, or just this topic is that, you know, it’s not just one dream at one moment of life, it’s like, once it happens, it keeps happening and certain moments of your life that are very important. And so like, why did why is that and how come we don’t have those dreams prior? Like that? I don’t know, like, but it is there’s a lot of mystery, a lot of research still needs to be done. So hopefully people know it’s a safe space. Now, I think explore research wise, I think you know, that’s maybe one of the reasons why people didn’t do research prior because it was really tied with the afterlife a lot. But I think it did a really good job to say no, like, everyone’s having these. Let’s just talk about the subject and the non judgmental way. And people can take it as they want. You know, like, I’m not as long as it’s comforting. You know, like, I don’t really care what you take it as it’s when it’s distressing. It, let’s work on that. Because that’s going to cause you to limit what you can do and where you can go with your healing.

Brian Smith 58:13
Yeah, well, you mentioned something that I taken a note and I hadn’t brought it up. But I guess we have a couple more minutes. So I do want to get into it because my father in law at near the end of his life had dementia. And he would he would talk about all these things crazy, like dreamlike things. So my theory was he had lost the separation between dream life and real life. I’m like, I don’t know what was going on with him. But it seemed. But when he would talk about people in his fantasies, they were always deceased, like, consistently, they’re always people who were deceased. And I thought that was a really interesting observation I did not make at the time. But later on, as I look back when I’m like, seeing them back, he was like tapping into the other side as he got as he got closer to the end.

Unknown Speaker 58:58
Yeah. And that, you know, there’s research has been done a lot of research coming out of hospice Buffalo, with Dr. Kerr, and Dr. Pay grant, that are really looking at these end of life dreams and visions. And it’s very hard to separate the two at end of life because their sleep is so sporadic. But, you know, same thing. So they’re having these dream experiences. And sometimes it could be the dream experiences tied into waking life. So it becomes a vision. But yeah, they’re there. And they tend their research found that there’s tend to be an increase in these as they approach the end. And so that in itself is just it’s very fascinating to me, on you know, how these continue to support us and why can’t we have them every day? Like why do they show up this quote unquote, random? I don’t know. And I think you know, that’s, that’s one of those mysteries that you’d have to sort of sit with and be patient and I think if anything like we teach our kids to be patient, I guess these dreams teach us to be patient as adults.

Brian Smith 59:52
Yeah, well, you know, it’s even the whole the word afterlife, you know, because what it to me what it says is consciousness is something that is Bigger than we understand just it’s not just in our brains, there’s something that’s, that’s everything, it’s undeniable, we’re somehow connected to something larger than ourselves or to each other, in some ways that we don’t understand from a materialist point of view. And I love the way you’re going about it academically, it’s not a matter of faith, it’s not a matter of I have to believe this. But also not to shy away from the fact that these things are actually happening. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 1:00:27
I’m glad you like that, right. Some people may frown upon some of the stuff I’m doing. And I’ve just because of their belief system, and what they sort of see the extremes to be. And so yeah, it’s just, you know, the love and support that, you know, you give for allowing to be on your platform, and then everyone else, I just sort of thank you all for continuing to raise awareness on the subject, because it’s just so important to my heart, but I know, it’s impacting a lot of people just around the world. And I think for me to do research that’s affecting the world is such a place, I’m in such a place of gratitude, because most people, their research never gets read. And for this, to have an opportunity to actually change the way we support people. You know, in just a matter of doing a master’s in PhD, I think that’s just a remarkable part of where I’m sitting at that, like, you know, like, the legacy of just my father’s is actually moving through the world. Yeah. And for me like that, that means a lot.

Brian Smith 1:01:17
That’s very, very cool. Well, I want to tell people where they can reach you. It’s Dr. Joshua black, and he’s at grief dreams.ca. So you can find more questions and answers on his website, the course is available there. You’re available for one on one consulting. So I’m just I’m so thrilled to put this episode out. I think it’s a really important episode that’ll help a lot of people.

Unknown Speaker 1:01:41
Hey, I’m happy but then thank you again for having me on. I really appreciate you valuing the topic.

Brian Smith 1:01:47
Alright, well have a great rest of your day.

Unknown Speaker 1:01:49
Thanks, you too sweet dreams, I hopefully get another one of those dreams tonight.

Brian Smith 1:01:54
So that does it for another episode of grief to growth. I sure hope you enjoyed it. If you like this content, make sure you subscribe. So click on the subscribe button here, and then click on the bell to receive notifications and click on all that way you’ll be notified whenever I release new content. Thanks for watching and have a great day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Do we get to choose when we die? If we don’t choose, who does? Is it God? Is it me? Is it random? Which answer resonates with you? Which answer has evidence to support it?

This is a question from a listener. If you’d like to have a question answered, let me know. So far, I haven’t gotten any easy questions. But, I’ll take a swing at anything you want to ask.

If you have a question you’d like me to answer, drop me a line and I’ll include it in a future episode.

If you’d like to talk to me privately, I’m available for one-on-one consultation.  Uou can book a session here:

https://grief2growth.as.me/30-minute-complimentary

 

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 brief to growth. And I am your host, Brian Smith. Hey there, what does it answer a question that I got from one of my listeners slash viewers. So I appreciate you guys interacting with the last video, I deal with the questions and I’ll keep these going as long as you’re interested in it. And this is a you guys don’t ask easy questions. This is a question though that’s very common that comes up and I’m gonna, I’m gonna frame the question that number, I think, maybe expand it a little bit. So the question is, when we cross over when we when our bodies stop functioning, when we die, to put it simply, do we have a choice of coming back? We have heard reports of people who have had near death experiences that have been given choices, or been given a choice to come back and they’ve chosen to come back. We’ve also though, frankly been told the people who have been given a choice to come back or have not given a choice. And we’re just sent back. So the question that this was prompted by the fact that this person’s loved one their their son, passed in a similar way to my daughter. He was a young man. Sudden, unexplained death. My daughter was young, she was 15, sudden, unexplained death. And so when we hear someone who’s had a near death experience, and been given the choice to come back, we think, well, this person was so young and vibrant, and love life so much. Why weren’t they given a choice to come back, because I know they would have chosen to come back. So the thing is, frankly, we don’t know that they would have chosen to come back we have heard people, even people who were mothers had young children that were here that were given a choice or not given a choice, but were told you know that they had to come back and they decided they wanted to stay because it was so great there and they knew everything was here was going to be okay. So we don’t really know what we would choose or what our loved one would choose if they had been given the choice. And frankly, we can’t know if everyone gets a choice. Because it’s a said, we know that some people don’t get a choice, and they’re sitting back without having a choice. We don’t know if people cross over and don’t have a choice and are required to stay. And so one reason when that might be required to stay is that their body can’t sustain life. So if your body can’t sustain life, then of course, you wouldn’t be able to come back. So I want to take this question of whether this person may given a choice and I want to expand it a little bit to do we choose when we die?

Because this I think is the broader question. Do we do we choose when we die? And if and so let’s go through this. So I always like to start off with as what do we know? So we’re gonna start off with what do we know for sure, we know for sure that 100% of the people that are born will die. There’s there are no exceptions. If you’re born, you die, you’re going to die. That is the plan. The questions are where are when and how does the things that are variables, but birth comes with 100% chance of death, the number one cause of death is birth. So we know that and you know, so we sometimes get upset about the timing of things, we get upset about the way things happen. But we know that death is inevitable. So the thing is, do we choose when we die? And so let’s look at what the let’s look at what the options are as with the evidence for each of those. So one option would be that it’s random universe is just a random place. Things happen. And we come in and we die whenever, whenever we die. And we can look at the evidence for that. And someone can make a case. Yeah, it seems to be pretty random. Another option that we might look at is that God determines it. So God determines when we’re when we die. And I know people that believe this. And for some people, this causes them great anger, because God has chosen to take a loved one earlier than we thought they should have. For some people. This brings them great comfort, that God in His infinite wisdom decides when it’s a right time for us to go. And people accept that and it’s okay with them. That one doesn’t really work for me. But if it works for you, then fine. I was visiting with someone just a couple days ago, that had a loved one that passed suddenly very young. And they were comforted by the fact that they believe in God’s divine timing. And the guy determined that so it could be random. It could be God. It could be that we Choose, either alone are in cooperation with a team of on the other side. So this is an interesting thing, because we can clearly see as the human part of us zoom inside of us that we don’t choose, we see people die in accidents, we see people fighting to live, and we see them dying anyway. So we know the evidence doesn’t show that the human part of chooses when we die, but there is the possibility that we choose as our higher self as our soul, if you want to call it that as our oversoul. And as a possibility that we choose when were in spirit, when we’re going to die, and we plan that out. So these are the options that it’s it’s random, that is chosen by God that we choose, it could be pre determined, it could be freewill. So these are the options. So what what is the evidence for each of these scenarios. And so the evidence random, as I’ve already stated, is pretty much there, you can make the case that is random, it certainly looks random from outside perspective, the evidence that God chooses, you know, there’s no way to really know that. That is a that is a belief. And you could say that maybe based on scripture, somebody might say that God knows the, the number of hairs on our head and the days of our lives. So that could you could call that evidence or something that might lead us in that direction. When it comes to whether we choose or not, I believe there’s a great deal of evidence for this. And this is what I believe we’ve had people that have had between life regressions, where they’ll go back to when they’re and lead life between life. And they’ll remember planning their life out and how things were supposed to go. We’ve had you know, mediums tell us or people coming through mediums telling us that it was determined when they were ago that there was nothing that can be done about it. We’ve had people who’ve had near death experiences that have said everything is just as it should be. And that we we are, it’s determined when we’re going to go. I remember Dr. Mary Neal, when she had her near death experience when she was in spirit, she was told that her son would die at a very early age, I believe was around 18. And it was about 10 years from when she had this experience. And know in spite of whatever she did, or whatever she believed, or whatever it did come to pass that her son did did pass at that time, I happen to know someone who was an intuitive and medium who says that she knows when people are going to transition, including herself and her loved ones. And so in that case, at least what she’s reported to me, there’s really no choice. But there’s some people that have said that we have multiple exit points, that there are multiple points in our life where we might have, we might choose to go. But we can’t apparently go past that last exit point. So that’s, that’s pretty determined.

So the thing is, whichever these things we choose to believe, we can find some amount of evidence for it. I think the preponderance of the evidence points to the fact that somehow that we choose either when we’re in spirit before we come here, or as our higher self, how long we’re going to be here. And I think we choose it that way. And it may not it may not fit in with what our human point of view is, you may you might say, well, who would choose to pass it at 15, for example, who would choose the pass as as an infant, and in some cases, even our people have had children that pass in their 30s or 40s, and that their life was too short. And who would choose that so as our human self, we probably wouldn’t choose that. But as our higher self and seeing the bigger picture, we might choose that for the benefit of our soul for this incarnation, and or for the benefit of our loved ones. Another thing I want to say while I’m talking about this is I think it’s very important is especially with young people, we view their their transition as a tragedy, that their life was cut short that they weren’t able to enjoy their life, and that they should be here and enjoying all the great things about life. Well, there’s a couple of things that’s that’s actually kind of wrong with that point of view. And I want to play with Azhar, first of all, their lives were not cut short. They, we when we transition continue to live, in fact, we live more abundantly a better life. So when we think about our loved ones, and we think about what they’re quote missing, keep in mind that they’re not really missing anything that they have, they have moved on they have graduated, I would call it to to a higher level. The other thing is that kind of comes from the point of view that this one life is all there is where it’s a one and done point of view. So if you’re going to come to this earth, you would think you want to stay here as long as possible to get the most out of it as possible, because you only have one shot. Now, again, you might you might believe that. I believe there’s enough evidence to show that we come to this earth over and over and over again. And that it’s not just one shot. So in any one life, that life life happens to be short or tragic or full of pain or whatever. Our souls don’t view that as a loss because it’s just one experience out of many. So those are my views on whether we choose when we die, who chooses when we die. And we can examine those. And you can examine those and determine, first of all, which one makes the most sense to you, which one has the most evidence for for it. The other thing is, try each one on because we can’t, frankly, really know this for a fact, while we’re here. So try it out what makes you feel comfortable, what brings you peace, what brings you joy, and if any of them, don’t bring you peace, and jump, don’t bring you joy, then you don’t have to choose to believe that there are other options you can choose that do have evidence, I’m not just saying choose which one feels best to you, or makes you feel the best. I don’t think it’s all about wishful thinking. For me, I feel more empowered by knowing that there’s a plan that I participated in the plan, not that just God impose this on me. And God put me here and said, This is what you’re going to do. But it’s a cooperative thing. It’s where we are co creators in our lives. And even though things happen in my life, that human Brian, my ego, might not like, I choose to trust the things that happen for me or for my own best good. And for the best good of everybody and everything in the universe, in spite of how it might look right now. And that’s what brings me peace. And that is what I found, frankly, a lot of evidence for. So those are my thoughts again, I like to hear what your thoughts are. What am I saying that might be right, but when you might say that might be wrong. And any other questions you have, just let me know. So have a great day and I’ll see you soon. So that does it for another episode of grief to growth. I sure hope you enjoyed it. If you like this content, make sure you subscribe, so click on the subscribe button here, and then click on the bell to receive notifications and click on all that way you’ll be notified whenever I release new content. Thanks for watching, and have a great day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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 brief to growth. And I am your host, Brian Smith. Hey there, what does it answer a question that I got from one of my listeners slash viewers. So I appreciate you guys interacting with the last video, I deal with the questions and I’ll keep these going as long as you’re interested in it. And this is a you guys don’t ask easy questions. This is a question though that’s very common that comes up and I’m gonna, I’m gonna frame the question that number, I think, maybe expand it a little bit. So the question is, when we cross over when we when our bodies stop functioning, when we die, to put it simply, do we have a choice of coming back? We have heard reports of people who have had near death experiences that have been given choices, or been given a choice to come back and they’ve chosen to come back. We’ve also though, frankly been told the people who have been given a choice to come back or have not given a choice. And we’re just sent back. So the question that this was prompted by the fact that this person’s loved one their their son, passed in a similar way to my daughter. He was a young man. Sudden, unexplained death. My daughter was young, she was 15, sudden, unexplained death. And so when we hear someone who’s had a near death experience, and been given the choice to come back, we think, well, this person was so young and vibrant, and love life so much. Why weren’t they given a choice to come back, because I know they would have chosen to come back. So the thing is, frankly, we don’t know that they would have chosen to come back we have heard people, even people who were mothers had young children that were here that were given a choice or not given a choice, but were told you know that they had to come back and they decided they wanted to stay because it was so great there and they knew everything was here was going to be okay. So we don’t really know what we would choose or what our loved one would choose if they had been given the choice. And frankly, we can’t know if everyone gets a choice. Because it’s a said, we know that some people don’t get a choice, and they’re sitting back without having a choice. We don’t know if people cross over and don’t have a choice and are required to stay. And so one reason when that might be required to stay is that their body can’t sustain life. So if your body can’t sustain life, then of course, you wouldn’t be able to come back. So I want to take this question of whether this person may given a choice and I want to expand it a little bit to do we choose when we die?

Because this I think is the broader question. Do we do we choose when we die? And if and so let’s go through this. So I always like to start off with as what do we know? So we’re gonna start off with what do we know for sure, we know for sure that 100% of the people that are born will die. There’s there are no exceptions. If you’re born, you die, you’re going to die. That is the plan. The questions are where are when and how does the things that are variables, but birth comes with 100% chance of death, the number one cause of death is birth. So we know that and you know, so we sometimes get upset about the timing of things, we get upset about the way things happen. But we know that death is inevitable. So the thing is, do we choose when we die? And so let’s look at what the let’s look at what the options are as with the evidence for each of those. So one option would be that it’s random universe is just a random place. Things happen. And we come in and we die whenever, whenever we die. And we can look at the evidence for that. And someone can make a case. Yeah, it seems to be pretty random. Another option that we might look at is that God determines it. So God determines when we’re when we die. And I know people that believe this. And for some people, this causes them great anger, because God has chosen to take a loved one earlier than we thought they should have. For some people. This brings them great comfort, that God in His infinite wisdom decides when it’s a right time for us to go. And people accept that and it’s okay with them. That one doesn’t really work for me. But if it works for you, then fine. I was visiting with someone just a couple days ago, that had a loved one that passed suddenly very young. And they were comforted by the fact that they believe in God’s divine timing. And the guy determined that so it could be random. It could be God. It could be that we Choose, either alone are in cooperation with a team of on the other side. So this is an interesting thing, because we can clearly see as the human part of us zoom inside of us that we don’t choose, we see people die in accidents, we see people fighting to live, and we see them dying anyway. So we know the evidence doesn’t show that the human part of chooses when we die, but there is the possibility that we choose as our higher self as our soul, if you want to call it that as our oversoul. And as a possibility that we choose when were in spirit, when we’re going to die, and we plan that out. So these are the options that it’s it’s random, that is chosen by God that we choose, it could be pre determined, it could be freewill. So these are the options. So what what is the evidence for each of these scenarios. And so the evidence random, as I’ve already stated, is pretty much there, you can make the case that is random, it certainly looks random from outside perspective, the evidence that God chooses, you know, there’s no way to really know that. That is a that is a belief. And you could say that maybe based on scripture, somebody might say that God knows the, the number of hairs on our head and the days of our lives. So that could you could call that evidence or something that might lead us in that direction. When it comes to whether we choose or not, I believe there’s a great deal of evidence for this. And this is what I believe we’ve had people that have had between life regressions, where they’ll go back to when they’re and lead life between life. And they’ll remember planning their life out and how things were supposed to go. We’ve had you know, mediums tell us or people coming through mediums telling us that it was determined when they were ago that there was nothing that can be done about it. We’ve had people who’ve had near death experiences that have said everything is just as it should be. And that we we are, it’s determined when we’re going to go. I remember Dr. Mary Neal, when she had her near death experience when she was in spirit, she was told that her son would die at a very early age, I believe was around 18. And it was about 10 years from when she had this experience. And know in spite of whatever she did, or whatever she believed, or whatever it did come to pass that her son did did pass at that time, I happen to know someone who was an intuitive and medium who says that she knows when people are going to transition, including herself and her loved ones. And so in that case, at least what she’s reported to me, there’s really no choice. But there’s some people that have said that we have multiple exit points, that there are multiple points in our life where we might have, we might choose to go. But we can’t apparently go past that last exit point. So that’s, that’s pretty determined.

So the thing is, whichever these things we choose to believe, we can find some amount of evidence for it. I think the preponderance of the evidence points to the fact that somehow that we choose either when we’re in spirit before we come here, or as our higher self, how long we’re going to be here. And I think we choose it that way. And it may not it may not fit in with what our human point of view is, you may you might say, well, who would choose to pass it at 15, for example, who would choose the pass as as an infant, and in some cases, even our people have had children that pass in their 30s or 40s, and that their life was too short. And who would choose that so as our human self, we probably wouldn’t choose that. But as our higher self and seeing the bigger picture, we might choose that for the benefit of our soul for this incarnation, and or for the benefit of our loved ones. Another thing I want to say while I’m talking about this is I think it’s very important is especially with young people, we view their their transition as a tragedy, that their life was cut short that they weren’t able to enjoy their life, and that they should be here and enjoying all the great things about life. Well, there’s a couple of things that’s that’s actually kind of wrong with that point of view. And I want to play with Azhar, first of all, their lives were not cut short. They, we when we transition continue to live, in fact, we live more abundantly a better life. So when we think about our loved ones, and we think about what they’re quote missing, keep in mind that they’re not really missing anything that they have, they have moved on they have graduated, I would call it to to a higher level. The other thing is that kind of comes from the point of view that this one life is all there is where it’s a one and done point of view. So if you’re going to come to this earth, you would think you want to stay here as long as possible to get the most out of it as possible, because you only have one shot. Now, again, you might you might believe that. I believe there’s enough evidence to show that we come to this earth over and over and over again. And that it’s not just one shot. So in any one life, that life life happens to be short or tragic or full of pain or whatever. Our souls don’t view that as a loss because it’s just one experience out of many. So those are my views on whether we choose when we die, who chooses when we die. And we can examine those. And you can examine those and determine, first of all, which one makes the most sense to you, which one has the most evidence for for it. The other thing is, try each one on because we can’t, frankly, really know this for a fact, while we’re here. So try it out what makes you feel comfortable, what brings you peace, what brings you joy, and if any of them, don’t bring you peace, and jump, don’t bring you joy, then you don’t have to choose to believe that there are other options you can choose that do have evidence, I’m not just saying choose which one feels best to you, or makes you feel the best. I don’t think it’s all about wishful thinking. For me, I feel more empowered by knowing that there’s a plan that I participated in the plan, not that just God impose this on me. And God put me here and said, This is what you’re going to do. But it’s a cooperative thing. It’s where we are co creators in our lives. And even though things happen in my life, that human Brian, my ego, might not like, I choose to trust the things that happen for me or for my own best good. And for the best good of everybody and everything in the universe, in spite of how it might look right now. And that’s what brings me peace. And that is what I found, frankly, a lot of evidence for. So those are my thoughts again, I like to hear what your thoughts are. What am I saying that might be right, but when you might say that might be wrong. And any other questions you have, just let me know. So have a great day and I’ll see you soon. So that does it for another episode of grief to growth. I sure hope you enjoyed it. If you like this content, make sure you subscribe, so click on the subscribe button here, and then click on the bell to receive notifications and click on all that way you’ll be notified whenever I release new content. Thanks for watching, and have a great day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai