My Grief 2 Growth Story

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.

Hi there, people have asked me why it is I do what I do, how I got into doing this. They wonder why I'm obsessed with the afterlife, being so focused on death and life after death. Well, I shared this with you with the hopes that it might inspire you and help you understand me a little bit better. I really can't tell the story without starting at the very beginning. So let me get started. I was raised in a fundamentalist church. Now that when I say fundamentalist, the viewpoint of God was that we were born in original sin, that we were deserving of eternal punishment, and that we could only be saved through the shedding of Jesus' blood and our acceptance of the shedding of their blood. That scarred me deeply because it didn't make sense to me. And I couldn't worship a God who would condemn me or anyone else to eternal torment for being just who he made us to be. This traumatized me because what I did was I pretended to love God. But I knew that he knew my heart. I did all the right things. I got baptized. I received the Holy Spirit. I spoke in tongues. But I knew I was just pretending. And even worse, I knew that God knew that I was just pretending. As I got older, I began questioning whether or not this view of God was true. I wanted to reject it. It didn't make sense to me, and it made me feel very bad about myself and about God. Rejecting it felt very reasonable to me. But if there was no God, then my fate would be annihilation. While annihilation is preferable to eternal torment, It wasn't exactly appealing. I was faced with an impossible choice of which to believe, that there was this God who was going to judge me and who I couldn't please, or when I died, I would blink out like a light bulb. The fear was so extreme that I had panic attacks on a regular basis. I would call it thanatophobia, the irrational fear of death that obsessed me. I lived with this dilemma for several years until I discovered Christian Universalism. Christian Universalism is the belief that Jesus' death, his sacrifice, was applied to everyone. And this is indicated in many places in the Bible. I think if you read the Bible, at least from the Christian Universalist perspective. Now, that made more sense to me. If Jesus' sacrifice was applied to everyone, at least God wasn't doing a double jeopardy thing where Jesus paid the price for everyone, but God was only applying it to a few people. If I pay your debt to a third party, then you don't owe that debt anymore, whether I accepted or not. But it still didn't make sense to me that God couldn't just forgive sin, or God couldn't just forgive us. God was always telling us in the Bible to forgive each other. Jesus was telling us to forgive each other. Jesus said up to 70 times 7. The Bible is full of these ideas that we should forgive each other, and to forgive something is not to demand payment. If someone pays you something, you haven't forgiven them anything. So this was a better choice to me. This Christian Universalism was brought to me, really came home to me, in a book called The Inescapable Love of God by a gentleman named Thomas Talbot. I've read that book several times. It lays out a very compelling case that God not only loves all of us and wants to save all of us, but God gets what God wants. There are a couple basic schools of Christian thought that don't believe this. One is that God loves everyone and wants to save everyone, but can't because of free will, that he respects our free will so much that he can't save everybody. The other school is that God doesn't particularly love everybody. There are just the, quote, elect, and the rest of us are basically rejects or rejects or throwaways, and that God doesn't want to save everyone, but he could, but he does save the ones he wanted to. So these are the other schools of Christian thought. So Christian Universalism was very appealing to me. This was the first time I saw a God that I could really get behind, who wanted to save everyone and would save everyone. And as I started going down the path of discovering more liberal theologians like Marcus Borg and others, the light was turning up brighter for me. But it still didn't make sense to me that God would have condemned us in the first place. But at least this was better, that he found a way to, to get around that. So later, as I kept doing more and more studies, I discovered a lot of other ways of looking at things. I started studying other religions. So I studied Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Taoism, Kabbalah, and a lot more. And as I studied other religions, I saw they had so much in common, so much of what they taught overlapped. And we tend to focus on the differences. But what they had in common, I felt like that's kind of where the truth lied. And then they also, amazingly enough, aligned with the teachings of Jesus. And I've always respected the teachings of Jesus. I still do until this day. So I became a bit more comforted that there was a greater truth out there. And I accepted that the afterlife was real, based upon my studies of these religions, but also on reason. I think it just makes reasonable sense, on science, like recent scientific discoveries, particularly philosophy, etc. So I became fully convinced of the reality that we all survive bodily death, and that none of us is cast into eternal punishment. And again, this conclusion was based on years of study. And that became the foundation for my life. And finally, I was comfortable with who I was and why I was here and where I was going. But then fast forward to June 24th, 2015. That was the day that my life ended in a very real sense. That was the day my 15-year-old daughter Shayna Elaine suddenly passed away. It was completely unexpected. On June 23rd, my life was normal. By June 25th, it would never be normal again. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't imagine living another day, let alone the decades everyone told me I would have to endure walking this earth. I would say, no, you don't understand. I don't want to be here. Now, someone who loses a spouse is called a widow or a widower. A child loses a parent is called an orphan. Losing a child is so horrific, there's no word for it in our language for the parent that's lost that child. It's something that we don't even like to think might happen. When a parent loses a child, You want to know where your child is. You want to know that your child is okay. And really, you want to be with your child, especially if that child is a minor like my daughter was. But you know, you have to be here. You have to be here on this earth and continue your life. But all I wanted to do was be with my daughter again. Now, I wasn't suicidal. But I had no desire to live. Every morning, I would wake up wishing that this was all a dream. I would wake up feeling like this world was actually a nightmare. And then reality would strike me again every single morning. And I had this, this reaction in my stomach and my gut, where it was like someone had punched me, would literally take my breath away. At that time, I couldn't even imagine the transformation that I would take, I would make over the next 7, 7.5 years at this point. I knew that I would never be the person I was before her death.. But I didn't even want to heal. I thought the best tribute that I could give to my daughter was to have people say, he was never the same again, because I lived such a miserable life and never had any joy in my life. And I intended to live a life of misery for however long I was going to be here. But I realized that I couldn't continue this. And I thought I should seek counseling. So I did. I went to a traditional grief counselor a few times.. And my wife and I actually went to a group counseling session a couple of times. And I remember one in particular. This was 7 years ago, over 7 years ago at this point, but I remember it like it was yesterday. There was a woman in the meeting whose daughter had passed away, I think about a decade earlier. And this woman was so bitter, she was so angry, so difficult just to be around, like it just happened the day before. I knew when I walked out of that meeting, I did not want to be that person. If I was going to stay on this planet, which I guess I was decided I was going to do, I knew that I could not continue on the path I was on. I was forced into healing, I had no choice. The option of being with my daughter wasn't available with me, I couldn't go be with Shayna right now. My wife and my other daughter needed for me to be here. Being miserable wasn't an option either. Because I didn't want to do that to my wife or my daughter or my other daughter or anyone else around me. The only option remaining was to heal. And to heal, I had to grow. So staying the same was not an option. So back to the books, I poured myself into learning everything I could about life, the purpose of life, where we come from, and where we go after we die. I get— I studied philosophy, I studied metaphysical schools of thought. I looked at cutting-edge science, including what I could understand of quantum physics or quantum panics. I looked at mediumship, I looked at near-death experiences, after-death communications. Some of the studies I had started earlier before Shayna passed, and I mentioned I was pretty convinced of the afterlife even before Shayna passed away. But I had a pretty good understanding when she passed, nothing like I have now, 7 and a half years after really doubling down on my studies. Now, relatively soon after Shayna passed, another thing I did besides going to traditional grief counseling was I joined an organization called Helping Parents Heal,. And I was a member first, and I was a volunteer group leader. And actually, I'm still with Helping Parents Heal to this day, and I'm a board leader with Helping Parents Heal. I found that Helping Parents Heal and other peer-to-peer organizations can be extremely helpful to people in grief. Peer-to-peer groups have helped me tremendously. And I'm still in several groups. Many of my clients have actually found me through some of these groups. They became clients when they realized they wanted something more than just a peer-to-peer group. They wanted someone who was dedicated to their healing, someone who could listen to them. And they wouldn't feel selfish for pouring their guts out, someone who wouldn't find what they were saying strange, and someone who could offer a tried and true way of moving forward quickly. So as a volunteer with Helping Parents Heal, going back to the early days, I spoke with hundreds of parents who have lost children, running the meetings and bringing in guests. And these conversations, I learned what it takes to to integrate grief into your life. I met dozens of experts in grief and afterlife. And I met near-death experiences, people who have overcome all kinds of tragedies. This was a crash course and everything I needed to start Grief 2 Growth, which I started in 2019. Once I was on my way to healing, I became a certified life coach, and I became a grief educator. And I continue to add to my toolset that I use with my clients. I'm also a mental fitness trainer. I teach a method of thinking called positive intelligence.. And that adds on to the other things I teach. And that helps us to cement in these ideas. Because as we start to grasp these new ideas, we have these internal voices called saboteurs, who will tell us that they're not true, that's too good to be true. You know, this can't possibly be. And we all have these internal things that we wrestle with. So positive intelligence helps us deal with that. So that's another thing I fold into what I do. So what I've done is I've developed a methodology, it's a proprietary methodology that I call the Grief to Growth Blueprint. I'll give you a couple of examples. I already talked about— I folded some principles of positive intelligence in there. I've also studied near-death experiences extremely extensively at this point. And there are 4 lessons from near-death experience that I think are really key. One is learning to live with purpose. The other is trusting fully. A third is loving unconditionally. And a fourth is forgiving fully. So these are some things that I roll into what I teach. I've also developed a 4-step daily practice to build resilience. These are 4 things that I I do every day. And I have an acronym I use for them. The acronym is GEMS. And it's gratitude, exercise, and sleep, meditation, mindfulness, and self-care. So these are a couple of the principles that I roll into the program that I do with people. I was speaking with a client one day, her son had passed away a few years before, I think we've been working together for about a year at that time. And I asked her how she was doing because the holidays were coming up and his birthday was right around the holidays. I think his birthday had actually just passed. And she told me everything she was doing to honor her son, to bring the community together, and to make meaning of her time. And as she told me how she created new rituals for the family for Christmas, and the plan she had for the day of her birthday, the plans to be proactive, and to go out and actually celebrate, I realized that she was doing GEMS, which I talked with her before, and this is before I formalized it, and other things that we had worked on together.. And I realized that we had kind of come up, she and myself and other clients I work with, this thing that I put into a blueprint that I use now. So today, I am a public speaker. I'm a podcast host. I'm an author. I've spoken to several conferences. I do interviews with people on people's podcasts, etc. I was running a business my wife and I had for 20+ years. I'm shutting that business down, transitioning into Grief 2 Growth full-time. I don't like to call it business, though. It's more of a ministry. It's more of a service. I feel like this is my life's purpose, to help people to transition from grief to growth. Now, I don't believe it's enough to return to who we were. In fact, I think it's impossible. We will never be the same person we were. And hopefully that's not bad news to anyone. Because we— I'd say, why waste this pain? Why waste the pain that we've gone through? There's an old show called The Bionic Man or The Six Million Dollar Man. And in that show, this, this Man, Lee Majors, the actor who played the character, but his character was injured. And he lost a leg, an arm, and I think an eye. And they talk about how we can build him back better, faster, stronger. I say we can come back better from our grief event, whatever it is, you can come back more resilient, with more purpose in life, actually, with more joy, believe it or not, better able to forgive, You can do it. You can grow from what's happened to you. I can say confidently, 7 and a half years after my daughter passed away, that I know not only survived, but I have actually thrived during that time. So that's my story. I hope you find it interesting. If you have any questions, please let me know. I'd love to answer them for you. Have a great day.

Hi there, I'm really excited to tell you about my latest ebook. It's 4 lessons that you can learn from the near-death experience without going through all the trouble of dying to learn them. I've been studying NDEs for several years now. I am completely convinced that not only are they 100% real, but that there's some very universal wisdom that we can get from the near-death experience.

And I've distilled that down in this book into 4 short lessons.

And I've also given you all the reasons why I believe that NDEs are absolutely real. So go to www.grieftogrowth.com/NDElessons to pick it up for free. www.grief-the-number-2-growth.com/NDElessons.

I hope you enjoy it.