Anna Parkinson- Physician Heal Thyself

You know you need something, you're just not sure what. You've been listening, you're doing the work, but there's still this feeling that you're circling the same place, like you're waiting for the thing that finally moves you. Now maybe you've thought about working with me one-on-one. Maybe something's held you back, the timing, the money, or you're just not sure you're ready yet. I get that. And I want you to know there's still a place for you. I built a resource for exactly this moment, guided meditations for when the waves hit and you just need to breathe. Workbooks to help you get out of your head and onto the page, ebooks on what near-death experiences tell us about the people we've lost, and whether they're really gone, a full course for widows and widowers who are ready to find their way back to living, and a full course for the evidence of the afterlife. And all of it is available for pay what you want. Nobody gets turned away because of money. I think these resources are valuable, but I don't want to hold them back because you don't have the money to pay for them. You don't have to wait until you're ready for coaching. The next step might be a lot smaller than you think. To find out, go to grief2growth.com/store. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/store. And check out the resources I've made for you. Physician, heal thyself. We've all heard this. I'm not even sure I know what it means. But our next guest says that we can all heal ourselves. And have even real physical ailments. When Anna Parkinson was diagnosed with a brain tumor, she went on a quest for healing. What she discovered is that we all have invisible tools we can use to heal ourselves and overcome personal challenges. In this interview, Anna shares some of her secrets to self-healing. And she even talks about the time she met the Dalai Lama, and how he told her about the idea of different realities. Stay tuned after the break to learn more about these methods of self-healing.

Hi there, welcome to Grief to Growth Podcast. Your host is Brian D Smith, spiritual seeker, bestselling author, grief survivor, and life coach. Brian believes that the worst tragedies of life provide the greatest opportunity for growth. Brian says he was planted, not buried, and he is here to help you grow where you've been planted by the difficulties in life. In each episode, Brian and his guests will share what has helped them to survive and thrive. It is his sincere It's our sincere hope this episode helps you today.

Hey everybody, this is Brian D Smith back with another episode of Grief to Growth. And today I've got with me an author, her name is Anna Parkinson. I'm going to read a short bio as I always do. And then I'll bring Anna in. Anna is a former BBC journalist. She's now recognized as a writer, a healer, and a teacher. Her book Change Your Mind, Heal Your Body, where she describes the process of healing her own brain tumor, has helped many to understand their bodies, to heal, and to love their lives more. And her new book we're going to talk about today is Beyond Sex and Soup: Living in a Spiritual Adventure. And it shows how our common emotions like anger, jealousy, anxiety, or fear can be turned from powerful destructive forces into ways of recognizing and filling our— and fulfilling our path, explained through fascinating stories of her own experience. I want to read off Anna's website. We'll also mention this later, but I always like to make sure we get this up top. So her website is www. Annaparkinson.com. It's A-N-N-A-P-A-R-K-I-N-S-O-N.com. And with that, I'd like to introduce Anna Parkinson to Grief 2 Growth.

Hi, Brian, I'm really happy to be here.

I'm really happy to have you here, Anna. And I think healing is a really interesting subject that I'm always interested in talking about. And I know you've written 2 books on healing. So we're gonna, we're gonna be talking, I think, primarily about your second book, but Tell me about your first book. I think that's kind of what got you started on this journey.

Yeah, I, I think the thing is that there is healing and there is self-healing, and both of them were a complete mystery to me until I got ill. And when I did, I was diagnosed with something that, um, was in retrospect, um, impossible for the doctors to deal with on a physical level. Of course, you know, our medical Medical systems are fantastic when you have an acute crisis, and I would not want them to go back to any other form of, of treating people. But the truth is that the source of the crisis is within you, because you are the bundle of energy. And it's very difficult for us to recognize that when we're when we're living our ordinary human life. Anyway, I was very lucky in retrospect, I would say, because what afflicted me could not be dealt with by the medical system. It was inoperable. And I was forced to explore everything I could to get better again, to get my life back. And I did. I explored, you know, diet and acupuncture and anything I could think of really. But the thing that I knew nothing about that really piqued my interest was healing. Because I began to understand that people could have a physical effect on my body just by having the intention to have an effect on my body. And I found that extraordinary. And So I persisted with it. I didn't necessarily like the effect, and it didn't send away the symptoms or the problem at first. But eventually I met a healer, an American called Martin Broffman, who gave me healing. But he also told me what it was that he'd seen in my energy and shifted. And that had a fantastically powerful effect on me because it was like my conscious mind was able to see what he had seen. And I recognized that as my stuff. I just didn't think it was important anymore. And I realized that if he could see it, I was still carrying it around.. And even though this related to stuff that happened when I was maybe, you know, 2, 3, pre-verbal, I was still carrying it around. And so that began a process in me of, of learning how to do what he did, which I did. It was like, suddenly I was being given a whole language which addressed the world, but in a way that I'd never seen it before.. And, and I also began the process of healing. So I was, I was involved in self-healing, if you like, sending away the physical symptoms, which eventually was successful. And that is why I wrote the Change Your Mind, Heal Your Body, because I wanted people to see that healing is kind of magic. Well, we describe anything that we don't understand as magic, don't we? But it is kind of magic. But it's also very logical. It's also something that you can grasp and do for yourself.. And so it's a process which I described in Change Your Mind, Heal Your Body. So I continue to heal people, and I also continue to give classes in healing yourself, in self-healing, because part of my joy in healing was to encourage people to stand on their own feet and to heal themselves. Because we all have our own story, we all have a really important story, which is our unique contribution to the universe. And we are kind of the living exposition of it. And I began to realize that, you know, what I'd written about healing was not really complete, because we tend to think of ourselves as not needing healing unless we're sick, unless we have some symptom. And actually, I knew from my own experience of healing other people and my own experience of healing myself, that the symptom is just the end of the story. And all the time, every day, we're nurturing other forms of negative energy, for lack of a better word, which we allow ourselves to carry because we think it's somebody else who is doing it, or somebody else who is creating this circumstance for us. One of the things that I kept on coming across when I was going through my own process of self-healing was paradox. You have to learn to embrace two things at once. You have to learn to walk a very narrow line between two realities. Because that is the essence of being a human being. And I can say a bit more about that. But in, in effect, that resulted in my writing this new book, Beyond Sex and Soup. Because I wanted to show how just the simplest everyday feelings like jealousy, anger, frustration, fear, anxiety, they are all— you don't need to get sick to have a pathway into making life better for yourself. Those very negative feelings themselves are potentially a pathway to your freedom, to your greater creativity, and to your joy. And so that's why I wrote this new book, Beyond Sex and Soup, to show you that your own feelings are the things that carry you on your spiritual adventure.

Yeah, wow. So let's, let's go back a little bit. Let's go back to when you got your diagnosis and you met this, this healer. Um, so what type of work did he do with you? Because you described it as he's a healer, but you also said you self-healed. So explain to me how that works.

So, um, let me just start by saying I knew nothing about healing. I mean, nothing. I thought that Reiki was a form of massage. So that's how much I knew. But what I found was that I would visit healers. I mean, I didn't go to a lot, but I— people come forward when you're sick, and they offer you things. And I just, I accepted every opportunity. And I found that it was all very mysterious. And I was a journalist, I was used to you know, getting to the bottom of things. And so I would sit in a chair, and I would say, well, this is wrong. And they would say, okay, well, I'm going to give you healing. And I would walk away feeling that something had happened, but I wasn't really sure what. I didn't know anything about it. And to a greater or lesser extent, that feeling would stay with me. Actually, now in retrospect, I would say that all of those healings helped. They helped shift me towards a place where I was able to accept the work that Martin did. Now I'll tell you about the work that Martin did. So eventually, I went to see this guy who was very so sure of himself. And, and funny and full of kind of witty stories. He was, he was a Jewish New Yorker. And he was, you know, very good. He'd been teaching a system that he had developed himself. But his great skill was that he was, as well as being a very gifted healer, he was very logically minded. He, I think, like me, he wanted to get to the bottom of things. And so he had devised a way of conveying exactly what had happened in the healing to the person who he had given the healing to. So for me, I have a very logical mind, this worked really well. And I would describe it now, like, when you offer yourself for healing, the person who is giving the healing is working from an unconscious level of their being, using that energy to communicate with the unconscious level of your being. And human beings constantly communicate on this level. And we just forget that that's how we communicate. It's really, really important. So this language is very powerful. But equally powerful in a human being is our conscious language, the language that we use to speak, that I'm using to speak to you now, the language that we use to pass exams or write books or whatever, really, really powerful too. And when we can use the two of them together, then we're motoring, you know, we're doing something exceptional by the nature of our humanity. And so when Martin had given me healing he talked to me about what it was in my unconscious that he had seen and shifted. And that allowed my conscious mind to catch up with myself, if you like, to catch up with my unconscious. He called this system Body Mirror Healing, and he devised it. Personally, I think that all healing is the same thing. It's just in different language.

Yeah, I was actually going to ask you about that because we do know of all these different energy healing modalities, and sometimes it's like, what's the difference between them?

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

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I don't think there is a difference. I personally, and I'm sure that people who have devised a system with a name would disagree with me, but I would say that it is all about the power of one, the power of connecting unconscious energy with another energy. That sounds maybe lesser than it is, but I believe that our unconscious energy is connected to superconscious energy. And when we have the intention to connect to that superconscious energy, whatever we wish to call it, we can focus that energy on the benefit, for the benefit of another person. But in my case, I learned healing from Martin. And I learned his system. And I learned his system simply because it works so well for me. And that's the way I give healing to other people. And I found that— I have found that shrouding people in common sense, logic, conscious thinking, instead of only mystery, is really helpful. Because the power of mystery— we have two languages in our bodies. And, and again, it's this paradox that I talk about in Beyond Sex and Soup. So I called it Beyond Sex and Soup because that is the language of our physical body. We need those things. They are why we're here, and they are part of our physical existence. But we're not here just to explore those things, because we have capabilities that go way beyond those things. And so built into our human body is this paradox that we are spiritual and physical. And they're not separate, they are part of the same thing. And we explore one through the other. And so I've completely lost my thread. But anyway, that's— that paradox is, is part of the healing process, to discover those, those parts of yourself where your conscious mind can review what you've held in, and you don't need it any longer. It's in your unconscious, but you don't need it any longer.

So just to ask you some, some more details, if you don't mind. So you were diagnosed with this inoperable brain tumor, which has been documented by your medical record, and so, and it's now gone. And what time, what time frame did this happen in?

Okay, so I was diagnosed in about, um, the end of 2002, and probably for the next, um, 18 months, for 2 years, I was doing— I was going from that point where the surgeon says, oh, you've got a brain tumor, and we're going to have to take it out. And I said, well, how? And he said, well, they just— either they kind of cut a line in down the side of your nose, and they go in to the center of your head through that way. Or else they just take the top of your head off. And they remove the brain and they go in underneath and they do it that way. Wow. So I was, you know, and then they say, we'll be in touch. So you go away and you have nightmares for, for, for actually about 2 months in my case, because the National Health System is wonderful, but it's not instant. Actually, so I went from that process, going through the process of being told by a surgeon, actually, no, we can't operate, it's too deep, we can't get in there. So we're just going to monitor you. And we're going to wait and see. And so they did, they monitored me every 3 months, I would go up and I'd have these scans, and then they would just say, well, We're waiting to see. And eventually I, so this went on for about 18 months while I was trying to find other things that I could do.

Mm-hmm.

Because I had a lot of symptoms. I was, I was completely cross-eyed. I was dizzy. I was sick, but I was also busy. I was writing my first book, which was about a herbalist who was an ancestor of mine, a 17th century herbalist who I was completely in love with. Because he was such a balanced and beautiful human being. And I'd read his books and I thought, this is, you know, this is really human. This is really someone in touch with the earth. And I said, the first thing I said to myself when I was diagnosed was, if I'm gonna go blind or die, I'm damn well gonna finish this book first. And so I just carried on. Finishing the book. And, and sort of looking for treatment. And then eventually, as I said, I found, I went for a healing with this man, Martin Broffman. And he said, okay, this symptom you have, this brain tumor, it all has to do with your relationship with your father. And I thought, really, you know, that was such a long time ago, doesn't really make any sense to me. But I can feel something strange is happening. And also, you've picked up an awful lot of other stuff that I really didn't think was important. And I went home, and the very next day, I was starting to edit the book that I had written. I finished it by this stage. This book about my ancestor, the herbalist. And I looked at the first line I had written in the book. I was sitting down to edit it, and almost the first line was, "I never lived with my father." Hmm. And it was, oh my goodness, it was like complete revelation that I had fallen in love with this ancestor's work. He'd written a couple of books in the 17th century, The day my father died. The day after he died, I asked my stepmother if I could borrow these books. I took one home that my father had, and I read it, fell in love with it. And the whole of the next, oh, I don't know, this project developed over time. But it was all, you know, I was like searching for who was this man, where did he come from, what were his origins, what motivated him. And that's what I ended up writing in my book. Book. And I needed to explain that the, the 17th century book that my father owned was not familiar with me until I borrowed it and took it home to read it because I never lived with him. But I realized at that moment that the symptoms that have developed also all, all started after my father died. And that this was exactly two sides of the same coin. Wow, wow. Absolutely. Only I was— because I had been working in my conscious mind, I was only aware of one side of the coin.

Makes sense.

Yeah, I was completely passive about the unconscious side because I wasn't aware of it.

Wow. So you start seeing Martin and you do this work. And so what did your doctors say? When did the tumor start to shrink, or how did that work?

Okay, so the first thing was there was understanding with incredible instant clarity that there was this amazing language that I could learn to speak as well as, you know, seeing a rational human being. And so I began to learn. Martin taught healing. He's not alive anymore. Otherwise, I would say he teaches it, but he taught and I went to learn from him. And I carried on also learning from self-healing methods, what was in my unconscious and kind of letting it go. So my family was very aware of this. I didn't go to my doctors and say, oh, by the way, it's all going to be fine now because I'm, I'm going to be healed. Because I'm just not made that way. You know, I just let them carry on, do their thing. But meanwhile, I started to do my thing big time. So this was By— it didn't— wasn't instant. By about 2000, a year later, I was still going for these scans. But instead of finding them really, really depressing, I was kind of mentally fighting back. I was kind of putting the energy out there that I wanted to be, and using it to protect myself from what I had felt was very negative energy. Anyway, I came home after about a year ago, incredibly, after about a year later, and I said to my daughter, she looked at me, she was so excited. She said, has it gone? And I said, no, no, no, no. But it's got a wavy line on the top. You know, I just knew that it was going to go even though the scan was not showing it yet. And I carried on for another year. And the scan, instead of showing this kind of ball, it showed a kind of collapsed, you know, like a sail when the wind has gone out of it, it just had collapsed. And I was ecstatic. I thought, that's it, it's going. And in fact, they didn't want to see me for a scan again for another 3 years, I think. Wow. And, or was it? I can't remember how long it was. But eventually, I went back, I just left it alone. I had a little operation on my eye to pull back the muscle that pulls it so that I could see straight again. And I just carried on healing, feeling better and better and better.. And then eventually in 2010, so this is 8 years after the whole thing had begun. I, there were some sort of signs around. I thought, you know, it's all very well to say you're healed, but you really need this verified. And I went back, I asked them to give me a scan. And I went back and it had virtually disappeared. There was a tiny little bit of scar tissue. That they could see where it had been, but it had just gone. So now I'm aware that, you know, we all have a separate story. I look back on this story, and I think there were so many things that were so lucky for me. But, you know, I think about the subject of your podcast, and I think And you will have heard people say this so much. But that terror, that grief, that horror was the only thing that really shook me out of my accustomed language and made me explore a bigger dimension. And the bigger dimension is so much better and so much more beautiful. That it is, you know, you look back and you say, oh, this was the best thing that ever happened to me. And of course, you know, it's horrible. Pain is a terrible thing. But pain is part of our growing process. It has to be. It's the only thing that makes us pay attention.

Yeah, I agree with you. And I've had this conversation so many times with people and they say, why do we have to learn through pain? And I've got my theory. But the fact is, it's just the way it is, the way it is. You know, we can think about why it's the way it is, but we can look at the human experience. And until we're shaken out of whatever it is we're doing, we're going to keep doing that thing. And so something comes along sometimes, to shake us out. And I love your language about the paradox, because I hadn't really put it that way before. But we are human and spirit at the same time. And you talked about the conscious and the subconscious, and the rational and the intuitive, you know, and we're both— and we, we tend to focus so much on the rational, and the conscious and the physical, that we ignore the the— which probably the bigger part of us.

I don't think that that's because we're stupid. I think that's because the way we're made. If you look— so again, this is what I've tried to explain in Beyond Sex and Soup. If you look at your physical senses, they are beautiful, you know, whether you're talking about your smell or your eyesight or your hearing or your touch, they are unbelievably sensitive and strong. And they are there to keep your body safe. And that they are there in every animal for exactly the same reason, to allow you to have a physical presence on the planet. What is unusual about us is our sensitivity to inner senses. I'm— I maybe I put that wrong because I think that animals also have sensitivity to inner senses. It's just that we have conscious awareness of inner senses. So, uh, you know, if you have a pet in your life, if you have a dog in your life, you and your dog will communicate. You don't have to talk about it, you don't have to think about it. You just— your dog knows when you're upset, your dog knows when you're meditating, your dog knows when it's time to go for a walk. All of— and you know what your dog needs. So animals always use this unspoken, unconscious language. And I believe that humans have used it, uh, for multiple, multiple thousands of generations in the past. And to a degree, we've sort of drowned it out by our focus, our concentration on the physical. And our focus on science has meant that we found it really difficult to trust what can't be measured. And yet, if you look at yourself, everything that is important about you can't be measured. You can't measure your love. You can't measure your hate. You can't measure your passion. You can't measure your imagination, your desire, none of those things. And from the inside looking out, these are the only things that matter. Your love, your memory, your desire, your imagination, none of them can be measured.

Yeah, I think you're absolutely 100% right with that. And it's interesting, as we start to break things down, and you talked about, I know you talked about in your book a lot about emotions. And sometimes we tend to be so rational that we say, oh, emotions are something that we should just ignore. Emotions are something we shouldn't care about. And I've come to the conclusion, conclusion, emotion is all there is. That's, that's, that's all that really matters, whether how we feel about things, whether we're happy or sad, or you said anger or love. It's, that's really all there is, is what is our emotions.

And the amazing thing about being human is that we have this capacity to be parents to our own child selves in the most beautiful way. So what we learn can relieve us of what we have carried as a burden on our unconscious for so many years. And there are techniques that you can use to do this. And obviously, that's well, maybe not obvious to everybody. To me, it's obvious that that's why I write books, to tell these stories, but also to share the techniques because they're so powerful. They're so simple, but they are so powerful because you have the capacity to be your own parent.

Yeah.

And it's a beautiful thing to do for yourself.

So are the techniques included in, in both of your books or more in one than the other?

Both of my books are written as sort of personal stories. An editor told me a long time ago that, you know, people use the internet for facts and books are for story. And bless this man, I think he's right. But I always like to, you know, I only write books about healing because I want to teach, I suppose. And there are techniques in both of the books. So the techniques in the first book are more about healing your physical stuff. And a lot of the focus is on, you know, on calming yourself, on learning how to look inside, and so forth. But I've sort of stuck them in the back of the book. So if you don't get to the end of the book, or you don't, or you're one of those people that never reads the the bit beyond the story, then you won't get them. In the new book, in Beyond Sex and Soup, they're integrated into the whole book because I've written it as an exposition of, of us moving from what is most physical. And in, in the, the non-physical map of the body that the Hindus have, that, that will be the root chakra. You know, your, your physical skeleton and, and that primary part of your being. And I take it all the way through to what is least physical, which is the part of you that is connecting with the divine or, or is allowing divine energy into your being and exhibiting it.

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.grieftogrowth.com, www.grief2growth.com. Www.growth.com or text growth, G-R-O-W-T-H, to 31996. If you'd like to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/grieftogrowth, www.patreon.com/grief2growth, to make a financial contribution. And now back to Grief to Growth.

But you know, it's very interesting. When you look at these— when you look afresh at these, these issues, you come to some very, very old pieces of writing and teaching, you know, you come to, you come to bits of the Bible, or you come to bits of Rumi, or you come to ancient quotes from the Upanishads, the Hindus, you come back to the ancient.

Yeah, very much so. I think that you spoke about this earlier. We've become so enamored with the physical. We've done such a great job in the physical world, you know, we— with the technology you and I can use to communicate across the world at the speed of light, speed of electricity, all the different things that we've got done. We've become so enamored with it that we— I think we've forgotten these ancient ancient wisdoms that, like I said, that bigger side of us, that part of us, and we've kind of said, you know, oh, don't think, don't worry about your intuition. That's not really a real thing, because, because we can't measure it.

Exactly, exactly. One of the interesting things is that I think that, you know, you, you grapple with the idea of free will. So, so you as an individual have a choice about what to do with your energy. Yeah, your energy was delivered to you by your mother and father. And you can call it God-given energy, because they didn't actually know how to create a living human being, they just did it. And, and yet, once you're here on the planet, you can do what you like with your energy.. And we see that, you know, we see humans behaving like bad children in the playground. And it's very upsetting that, that those of us who consider ourselves good children can't stop the bad children from behaving badly. You can't, you never will. You never will. There will always be some people who choose, choose the negative. But you don't need to do that for yourself. It's not a reality. You have free will to create your reality.

I do want to ask you this question that I always ask whenever I talk to anyone who's a healer or talk— we're here to talk about healing. You know, there's my daughter behind me, you know, she passed away, you know, a few years ago, but she had a friend that, you know, passed away a few months after her that had a brain tumor, glioblastoma, and took her out very quickly. I interviewed a young woman, her name is Terry Dillion, who had ALS. She went all over the world looking for healing. And so I'll kind of end up doing healing and everything. And she, she passed away about a year ago. So as a, as a healer, what do you— can everybody be healed from anything? Or what's your, what are your beliefs on that?

I think it's true to say that anything can be healed. But I don't think it's true to say that everybody can be healed from anything. And so I think, I mean, I have worked with people who have had miraculous, well, you know, apparently miraculous recoveries. And I have worked with people who have died. You know, I haven't been able to prevent that. And I think quite early on, if you work as a healer, you have to take on board, that you are— the energy doesn't belong to you. It's coming through you, you're doing your best. But you're not responsible for the energy any more than my mother and father are responsible for the fact that I'm a living human being. They, they brought me into being, but they did not create my life. And as, as a human being working with another, I can use my energy, or I can use my intention to release things in their body, which they feel. Some people feel it really powerfully, some people feel it not very powerfully at all. But, but they, they healing, then I just trust the healing to do its thing. But that doesn't mean that everybody, everybody will, will be saved, or, you know, that it's too late. I, I worked with one man, and this is quite an interesting— he, his wife called me. She said, um, can you come and see my husband at home? Which I don't usually do, but she said, can you come and see my husband at home? Uh, he's just had his second operation at the same hospital that I went to for a brain tumor. It's a grade 4 and the doctors have said that they can't do anything for him. So, you know, as a human being, I'm thinking, oh my goodness, I'm not sure I can manage this. But you go along, you show up, you do your best. And I gave the healing just like, you know, maybe he had a sore toe or something. And after the healing, I gave him and his wife together the feedback, which again, I don't usually do, but they were operating very much as a, as a one person. And he didn't recognize— he accepted the healing. He didn't recognize the feedback so much. She recognized it as, you know, describing him very much. And Then afterwards, I— he phoned me and he said, I'm walking much better. Thank you. And that's great. And I was happy about that. But then I didn't hear and I didn't hear and I didn't hear. And you just think, wow, I wonder what happened there. And about a year later, someone with the same name popped up on Facebook. And I thought, could this be the same person? And I wrote him a direct message and he said, yeah, yeah, here I am. And anyway, I went to see them and it turned out that he didn't have cancer anymore. And, you know, the doctor said, what have you done? And he said, well, I had healing and homeopathy. And they kind of made the sign of the cross because they hate both of them. I can't say they hate both of those things, but they are definitely both not scientific. And, you know, here he is, he's still doing his thing today. So that was probably about 6 or 7 years ago. And, you know, so obviously, you want that to be the result. And it isn't always. But what I do do when I do healing is I give people what I— I do the healing, but I also give people what I consider to be the tools for self-healing. And I would always do that because the power you have over yourself is greater than the power I have over you by I don't know how many degrees, but it's very powerful.

I think that's an excellent answer because I sometimes teach people again, and you, I think you said this earlier, we call things that we don't understand magic. And we use words like miracle because we don't understand them. If I went to a medical doctor, a medical doctor, and they gave me chemotherapy or radiation treatment, we would say the chemotherapy or the radiation treatment cured my cancer. If I go to an energy healer, and it doesn't always, right? Some— a lot of times it doesn't.

Yeah, I have to say it doesn't always. Yeah, absolutely.

So it doesn't always. So we don't, we don't say, well, that's not real because it's not 100% effective. I would say similar with energy healing, because I've heard people say, well, why didn't it work for me? Or why didn't it work for that person? But I— something I always have to tell the story because I think it's so powerful. I have a friend who was in a terminal illness. She— her body was dying. And she went to a very famous healer and, and to get healing. And the way that they put it, whether she put it in the healer put it was she wasn't physically healed, because she did— her body did die. But she was spiritually healed. And she, she released all kinds of trauma. And I think that that's sometimes our path is that, you know, because we all, we are eventually our bodies wear out.

I agree with you absolutely 100%. I mean, we're all going to die, right? That we do know. And, you know, one of the things that is in Beyond Sex and Soup is the death of my mom, because this was happening all the way through while I was writing the book. And in fact, she was such a dynamic and powerful person that this process of dying really lends a kind of— what can I say— it lends an extra dimension to the life that we're living. You know, our life is so precious, because it's not going to last forever. And, and it is full of possibilities. And if we think it is going to last forever, and it doesn't change, then not only are we fooling ourselves, but we're wasting our time and wasting our energy. And, and, you know, this, this perspective of my mom, leaving the life that she had loved all the way through the book really does help to kind of give it a bit of an edge as to what you can do with your life.

Yeah, I think again, kind of like we were talking about pain earlier, mortality is a very important part of our experience here. Knowing that, because if you think about the things that we have in infinite amounts, we take for granted. We don't— air, water, air, we just take it for granted. But the fact that we know that our lives are limited does make those, those moments more precious. So that's, that's something to really hold on to. But I do want to talk more about Beyond Sex and Soup, because I think it's really important important that, you know, it's great that you had this, this healing story and your first book about, you know, from the, from the brain tumor, but what if we could prevent that? What if we could prevent the disease? And you talked about that in a little bit. So talk why it's so important to, to read Beyond Sex and Soup before you get sick.

Because we make ourselves miserable all the time. We make ourselves miserable. We, we, we, we, for example, we suffer terribly from anxiety, a lot of us. Anxiety is an invention. We have invented something that hasn't happened yet and decided that it's a reality. And the more that we respond to that reality, the more our physical body goes, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. Because we're sending down signals, we're like the boss of the spaceship. And we're sending down signals to this brilliant machine that we're in charge of, which is our physical body. And, you know, I mean, personally, I only have to watch a horror movie on the television for my body to go into tailspin. Because for me, it's a reality, and I'm there. But people, we create our own horror movies all the time. So that's one thing. We make ourselves miserable, and we really, really don't need to. The second thing is, that we have this capacity through our sensitivity, through our imagination, to be in touch with the energy that we are a part of, the energy that we take for granted, the air, the earth, you know, the sky, the, the growth of trees. That is in itself a very physically energizing component. And yet, we block ourselves off from our environment by considering that emotions that we experience are someone else's fault or someone else's responsibility. And that can get to a very extreme place where you know, we don't talk to our sister because she has done something wrong. And we don't think that we are any part of this exchange. Or, or, you know, we feel oppressed by our boss. And, you know, we're infinitely— our creativity is more and more suppressed. So we don't kind of ride on this wave of exchange, which is actually essential to our being. It's essential to our creativity and our communication. So these are kind of nuggets of feeling disconnected. And actually, it's like, if we can just pick up on our negative emotions and look at the roots of them, we discover that we have the ability to turn the switch. So where we feel anxious, we can look at the roots of that, which obviously I, I try to explain in Beyond Sex and Soup. And, and we can then use our, our energy, our imagination, to reverse damage that we may have felt that we've carried with us for a long time. Because the exercises that I discuss are really exercises of the imagination. They're positive imagination, if you like, as opposed to negative imagination, which is what anxiety is. And, and it has a physical effect. Your body will respond in, in just as much of a positive way as it responds negatively to your negative imagination.

That's an excellent point. I don't think I've ever heard it put that way before, that anxiety is really a product of our imagination. And we do have— our imaginations are very powerful. They're very— I've heard people say, like, our brain reacts to, like, imagining something the way it does if something actually happens. You mentioned a horror movie. We have physical reactions when watching a horror movie. Our palms get sweaty, our heart starts racing, you know, etc. And we don't usually think about what if we flip that around? What if we use that imagination for, for positive things? So I love, I love the exercise you're talking about there.

And, and we live in an amazing age of communication. Fantastic, that's great. But don't forget how much negative stuff comes to you on that wave of communication. Masses and masses of daily blast, you know, and it can be hard to resist. I mean, I have felt physically depressed by the war in Ukraine and my powerlessness to do anything about it. And yet, even that, which is such a negative experience, helps us to see, yeah, this is true, that people will always behave badly. They will always behave badly. You cannot wave a wand and, and take away that free will, if you like.

Right.

But it's how you respond to that. And one of the things that that distant drama should tell us to do is to focus on what is in front of us, what is, what is good about the life that we have, and focus on that. And then do what you can I mean, there's little that we can do except maybe, you know, give shelter or money or whatever is required of us. But we're not participants in that drama. But we do have to soak it up and deal with it.

Yeah. Wow. That's so powerful because, you know, the war in Ukraine, COVID, we've all— we've gone through these things and those are the big things. But I think about something small that just happened last night. You know, Will Smith smacked Chris Rock on the Oscars. And I was on my way to bed when it happened. I just— and I saw it come across the internet. And I realized I was trying to go to sleep and I was upset about it. It's like, this does not involve me at all. But it's that, just that mass communication, that something happens in Hollywood, 3,000 miles from me, impacted my mood as I was trying to go to sleep last night. And then on Facebook this morning, that's all anybody was talking about. So this communication thing can cut both ways.

Interestingly, I hear even more thousands of miles away, they were talking about it on the news at lunchtime. And I can't remember who it is, but he said, oh, this is all in Will Smith's autobiography. He said, in his autobiography, He says that he is the facade of the, you know, the smiley, avuncular man, if you like, is an act. Inside he has so much anger and frustration because when he was a child he felt he couldn't protect his mother from an abusive father. And yeah, dead right. It's all in his autobiography. And if, one was— I'm not going to tell Will Smith what he should do— but if one was in a similar position and you were carrying that anger, that anger is really harming your creativity, it's harming your joy. And you have the capacity, and, um, if, if you want to live a joyous creative life, the, the duty to, to deal with that anger, let it go. But you can only do that with your brilliant conscious mind, right? I can't tell you to do it. I can show you how to do it. I can't tell you to do it.

Exactly. And that's what I love about your book, because we don't teach this. I'm actually working on a coaching thing right now, uh, Positive Intelligence, Positive Quotient, to, to start teaching people these techniques on how to control your own mind. Buddhism does a great job of this. And we don't— but we don't teach that much in the Western world. We teach science, we teach math, we tell kids go out and become engineers and, you know, all this kind of stuff. But we don't teach how to go into our inner world and really start to control that. So that's why your book, I think, is so important for people to understand. First of all, you can have an influence on your emotions. I'm not gonna say you can control your emotions, but you can have an influence on it. You can you can choose the way you look at things and to not identify with like, oh, I'm angry, or I'm sad, or I'm this or that. No, I feel anger, you know, even changing that language can be helpful.

Well, actually, you find— so for me, anger is really fascinating. I've dealt with quite a lot of anger myself. And coming back to the theme of your podcast, When I got sick, when I got seriously life-threateningly ill, I realized I had to get rid of this anger because I needed my energy to heal myself. And the first thing I had to deal with was extraneous emotion that really, you know, I was taking up too much energy. So I did a lot of work on anger and transformed the relationship with the person that it was. Because I think that anger is simply, it's like, it's like a tug of war. It's a tug of war with whoever it is that makes you angry. And, and so long as you hold on to your anger, you're continuing that game, that tug of war. And if you take responsibility for the anger, if you can say, 'Okay, you make me really angry. What is it in me that allows you to make me really angry?' And if you can find that, you can let that go. You can't let the other person go, you can't change the way they behave, but you can— if you can find the thing that allows them, if you like, to get their hooks into you, you can let that go. You have huge power there. And as soon as you do, you know what, they don't get their hooks into you anymore. It's like having a tug of war with the other person. You let go of the rope, they fall over. Yeah, yeah.

It reminds me, I saw, I saw that quote recently. I thought it was great. It said, you know, your family knows how to, how to push your buttons because they're the, they're the ones who installed them. And I, that, that to me just, I love little memes like that because it just, you know, it comes up to me. I'm like, okay, Don't let people push your buttons. But the, but the ones that are closest to you, they know exactly where they are. They know exactly how to push them.

And isn't it interesting that the ones you're most angry with are the people you love most?

Absolutely. Yeah.

I just—

I want to ask, I understand you interviewed the Dalai Lama once. And he said something to you about multiple or more than one reality. So tell me about that.

Yeah, that was very— this was really right, it was a long time ago, and I was a very young BBC reporter, and I heard that the Dalai Lama was going to be in Ladakh, where I happened to want to go anyway, right up in the Himalayas, the north of India. And so I said, I'm going. And I said to my bosses at the BBC, I said, I'm going to do an interview with the Dalai Lama. Well, actually, I got there and it was kind of chaotic, and the whole country was so excited about the Dalai Lama coming. And eventually I wound up in this tiny little room with about 20,000 monks, the Dalai Lama sitting calmly in the corner on the only chair in the room, and me and two other reporters. And we were just with the fans whirring, we were just all asking our questions. So, excuse me, I asked a political question. And in retrospect, it seemed like so cheeky. I said, so what if you did get back to Tibet? What makes you think that, you know, the Tibetans would be happy to see you because they've grown up, this new generation, completely under Chinese rule and maybe they don't want the old Tibetan way. And he said, he said, when you're young, you see with one eye and hear with one ear. And when you're older, you see with two eyes and you hear with two ears. So I thought, what am I going to do with this? What are my bosses going to think of this? Anyway, I took it back and we played the interview. And, you know, he wasn't, if you like, the world superstar then that he is now. And years later, when I was writing my healing, the first healing book, Change Your Mind, Heal Your Body, I listened to this again and I thought, oh my goodness, I understand what he was talking about.. And I had, as I said to you at the beginning of our chat, I said, you know, I looked at the book that I'd been writing, my first book, and I saw how, yes, it was one thing, but it was also a whole other thing, which was my emotional history as well. And that was the other eye, if you like, the other ear. And I, when I came to write Beyond Sex and Soup, I thought, you know, it is very curious that the very The very first symptom of the brain tumor that I had was double vision. And now I'm writing a book where I'm actively saying what you need is double vision on your life. Wow. It is not just as it appears to be. It's, it's the other eye that you need to bring to, to what you see and what you experience.

Wow. Wow. That was, that's great. I'm glad I asked you a question. That was a great answer. That's amazing. Well, Anna, we're coming to the end of our time. I want to give you an opportunity to say anything, any last thing you'd like to say to the audience about yourself or your book or anything else.

Okay, well, um, all I would say is that I love healing, I love writing, and I love teaching. And I have in the last year started to teach the principles of healing and self-healing So I do have an online course, a couple of online courses actually coming up. I've got one that starts on April 3rd. And of course, this wonderful world of communication that we're in enables people to participate in that wherever they are. So I hope that if you're interested, you'll not only get the book and maybe write me a review if you'd like to, but also have a look on my website, look for these online courses and And I hope to see you there.

Awesome. So go ahead and give your website again to make sure people have it. I know I said at the beginning, but I also want to give it at the end.

Okay. So it's www.annaparkinson.com. And on there you'll get some guided meditations, which you can try out for free, some description of healing, some talk about my other books. And also under events, the workshops that are coming up.

Awesome. And it's been really great meeting you. Thanks for spending your time with me today.

I've really enjoyed it, Brian. I'm really happy to talk to you.

Have a great rest of your day.

You too.

Thanks for listening to Grief to Growth. Brian hopes that you find this episode helpful, and will come back for future episodes. Brian's bestselling book, Grief to Growth: Planted, Not Buried is a great resource for anyone who is coping with grief or knows someone who is. If you enjoy the podcast and would like to support it, there are 3 things you can do to help. The first is to share the podcast with someone that you think it will help. The second is to go to iTunes, rate and review the episode. The third way you can support the podcast is by becoming a patron head over to www.patreon.com/grief2growth. That's P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/grief, the number 2, growth, and sign up to make a small monthly donation. Patrons get access to exclusive bonus content and knowledge that you are helping to spread the message of grief to growth. For more about Brian D Smith and grief to growth, Visit www.grief2growth.com.

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