From Grief to Growth: A Journey of Healing - Episode 321

You know, life does throw you curveballs and you have more choices than you think you have. You know, you do have opportunities. You do have ways to take those steps forward. And if you are presented with a blank canvas, you get to decide what you want to paint on that canvas. The colors, the scenery, the landscape, the people that come along with you. And you're right, it doesn't make it better. It doesn't take the pain away. But I think it can really help us to see there is potential for growth and possibility and learning in everything that we go through.

So it kind of guaranteed everything that when we find ourselves enveloped in darkness, to remember that darkness, too, is a teacher. In fact, life begins in the darkness. We started in the darkness right inside of our mothers. And so when we break down Joseph Campbell's framework, each of us have to go into the cave to slave the dragon alone. It is a solo endeavor to go into the darkness and do that work. But the recovery happens in community. The recovering of that gift and the sense making and the meaning making, the healing happens in community.

Welcome to the Gladden longevity podcast with Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, where our passion is helping you to become an AJ hacker. On this show, we want to help you optimize your life energy, longevity, health and human performance with impactful and actionable information by answering four questions. How good can we be be? How do we make 100 the new 30? How do we live well beyond 120? And how do we live young for a lifetime? Now, here's today's episode of the Gladden Longevity Podcast.

Welcome, everybody, to this edition of the Glad Longevity Podcast, where we're here answering the five big questions in in our practice. How good can you be? How do you make 100 the new 30? How do you live well beyond 120? How do you live young for a lifetime? And how do you develop a 300-year-old mind? And today we are meeting with one of my clients, Elizabeth, who has a really interesting story about losing her beloved husband and the journey back from abject despair to health, both psycho spiritually and from a physical standpoint. We're going to be joined by Karen Sutton, who is a widow coach from the uk, who was incredibly helpful to Elizabeth early on for a couple of years. And also we're going to be joined by Mukti Devi, my partner, and who is trained psychotherapist and psychedelic assistant therapist. So it's a really fascinating conversation. I think you're gonna really find this inspiring and I hope you enjoyed as much as I did. In the recording. Welcome everybody, to this edition of the Gladden Longevity Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden. And today I'm joined with one of our patients, Elizabeth, and one of her coaches, Karen, and my partner who's been on the podcast previously, Mukti. And we're going to be talking a bit about Elizabeth's journey related to the loss of her dear and beloved husband and then how she's worked her way back to being in a very vibrant part of her life. So, Elizabeth, Karen and Mukti, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you.

Yeah. So, Elizabeth, why don't you, why don't you kick it off for us? Tell us a little bit about what happened. Tell us actually a little bit about your life before things happened. You were happily married, you have a daughter, you've got some businesses that you were running with your husband. Why don't you start at the happy part and then you can take us through the valley and then we can come up on the other side.

Yeah, sure. So I met the love of my life, Sandy, when I was 38 and he was 49. We were both divorced and had had backgrounds without knowing. Epic love. And that's what ours was. We, we fell in love and at 41, where I was 41, he was 53. When we were blessed to have a princess come into our lives as her daughter. And we opened businesses and we had a 20 year love affair. And it was a life I had only imagined in my dreams to have my husband also be my lover and best friend and adventurer. And then one day, waiting in the basketball line to pick her up, the doctor called and said that he had a heart valve that had gone bad, it had been defective since birth and that he needed a transplant. And so that all went well until it didn't.

So was this a. He needed a valve transplanted or a heart transplant? Just, just about.

And it was supposed to be.

Pretty routine.

Yeah. We got back to life and then very quickly, it all happened very quickly. He. His valve got infected and.

Yep, that's a big risk, right? Yeah.

And they thought he would come home and instead they ended up ventilating him and.

Okay.

My then 15 year old daughter and I held him and had to make the decision to pull the ventilator and my very sunny, very beautiful, very wonderful life went very dark. And I've heard it said that the level that you love, that is the level that you suffer, then you lose and. Yeah, with someone. And I found that to be very true. I felt as if my whole. I couldn't even. Like, I felt like I couldn't see color. Like life had just gone dark. And I had to fight for my life. To be honest, my husband's love for me was so great. My daughter was not with us at the moment that he was ventilated. And so his last wishes on earth was. He made me promise him out loud because he knew how hard it would be if he didn't make it, that I would find a way to make a happy life. And so his last breaths were a gift to me and still are. They drive me to this day because I know that's his.

Beautiful.

It's beautiful.

Yeah, it's really beautiful.

That night I found Karen. I went. I wanted to go with him. And not just on a. If thinking way, but it was almost physical. I had this physical drive to take my life to go with him. I wanted to go with him. And. And so I started searching that night. How do I. Or typed in how to survive widowhood. And I went. I went on YouTube and Karen's lovely face I found.

Okay, well, you can't. You can't see this, but Karen has a lovely face. Just.

Yeah, thank you.

But Elizabeth. Yeah, so that's really interesting. I mean, such a deep love and then such a deep sorrow. Right. To your point. They're symmetric. And that very night. Interesting. You started looking. But it must have taken a little bit of time to find Karen or how did that work? Because I know that you ended up feeling pretty. I mean, like, fetal position and some things like that. Walk us through a little bit how all that came together.

Sure. No, I describe my early grief as if I was feral. That's the only word I have found to describe it. I would lay on the floor in the bathroom or in the closet. I actually made a bed in the closet. I couldn't get in my own bed because something about being in the bed just couldn't do it. I couldn't shower, wouldn't bathe. I would wail like an animal under the. You know, that's. That's the state I was in.

That.

That's the phys. And so I went to the doctor. They put me on antidepressants and sleep medicine and probably needed every bit of it. I'm off all of it today. But it was not.

And did the antidepressants have any impact at that point or. Not so much.

The sleep medicine did, knocking me out, so I didn't get worse. Sleep deprived was, I think, very productive because it would have compounded the.

Sure, totally.

But I did binge Karen and other. Something about YouTube was very cathartic because I didn't have to speak. I could wail, I could cry, I could be on the floor, but a person was talking to me, and there was something that. It was like a life rope that I held on to.

What kinds of things were you watching on YouTube?

Karen's podcast is on YouTube.

Okay.

So when I was in the car and I couldn't watch people, I would listen to other podcasts and hers, too. But there was something about being able to visibly see another person talk that was. I say it was. There's a. There's a scene. There's a great movie, the Young Woman in the sea, that Disney's put out about the first woman to swim the English Channel. And at some point that she's lost in the darkness and her father. And people light fires on the. Yeah. And I tell Karen, she's a fire lighter. That when I was lost in the sea of darkness, it didn't fix it. It didn't get out of the sea, but it. There was a light that gave me.

Some sense of direction. Yeah. And hope.

And hope.

Right. Hope for sure. So then you're. You're watching these YouTube videos of Karen, and did you connect with her personally at some point as well, or.

Yeah, very quickly. One day, my beautiful daughter. I was curled in the fetal position in my husband's recliner, and she came downstairs and she stood over me. I'll never forget it. And she said, mama, I've seen you do a lot of hard things in my life. And she put her hand over this, like, over me. She said, I don't know what you need to do to not be this. She says, but I need you to figure it out. I need you to be my mom. And she stormed back upstairs, and it was like someone took a bucket of water and poured it on me. Ice water. And I joined Karen's group and.

Okay.

And I'll never forget that first day I went on there, and Karen would put in the chat to put on there how. Like a number, how you were doing 1 to 10. And someone put a 9. And I'll never forget the first time I spoke in Karen's group. Alex. I thought, either they're a liar or they didn't love their husband because they couldn't get where I was from to a nine. That's not even possible, and it's not even plausible. And I'll never forget, because Karen has the beauty of Karen in a group. It wasn't just Karen's voice at that point. It was all these other women. And, and, and I remember that day. I don't remember anything any of them said, except for one thing Karen said. She said, Elizabeth, because I started to connect and think, okay. She said, it's like you've been transported to Mars and everybody else, you know, is still living on Earth and they're talking to you in Earth language, and none of them speak Martian, and everyone in this room speaks Martian. And so.

That's beautiful.

It was beautiful. And it definitely made the fires grow brighter. Like they were real that day. I remember thinking, maybe it would be possible. Maybe it would be possible that I could be where I'm at today.

Wow. So, Karen, tell us a little bit about your story. Thank you for that, Elizabeth. That's really very compelling. How did you get involved with being a firelighter?

Good question. Well, so my husband died in September 2016. He was 43. I was 39. And we had two young girls that were nine and five. And I very quickly knew that I didn't want to become a victim of his death, and I didn't want the girls to become a victim of it either. And in that, I mean, I didn't want us to be fine, to be defined in a negative way for the rest of our lives. I didn't want it to become an excuse for not being all that we could be and living a life as good as it. It could be. But I didn't know how to do that. So I then, like Elizabeth, went out sort of searching for other widows and other people that had been through. I needed to find my firelighters on the side of the cliff, and I needed some hope.

And.

And I found a lot of peer support groups, which were amazing because, as Elizabeth brilliantly said, you know, they spoke Martian. And. And I found myself in a place where people were speaking a language I could understand and I could relate to. But I wanted more because I, as much as I could, find people that understood me and I could understand them, and, and, and there was a thread, I suppose, that. That brought us all together. What do we do with all of this? See, you know, it's all very well finding these spaces where you can talk about how awful something is, you know, the despair, the devastation, the heartache, the sadness. And I needed those spaces. I did. And I wanted to learn about grief. I wanted to learn about post traumatic growth. I wanted to learn how do we learn to live again around this loss. I wanted to understand me. I wanted to learn how to support my children, myself, so many things and, and I couldn't find that blend.

Yeah.

I eventually got myself a life coach and that transformed so much for me. And I went on my own journey of growth, of development. And I decided, do you know, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna be the person that creates the support, the grief, education, the compassion, and mix that with the growth and the awareness and help people to build that life around their loss that can be meaningful again.

That's a really beautiful response to a tragedy. Right. I mean, it's a really, it's the, it's the life giving response, if you will. I'm just curious. In the, in the group that you initially joined, it seems to me that this can be a group related to anything that people can come together to kind of commiserate and kind of wallow in the, the problem, let's say, or the, or the challenge. I don't have problems really with. Everything's an opportunity, but there's, but you can kind of wallow in that. And that's, that's reassuring and it's comforting to know other people are going through it. It sounds like in that group you weren't finding necessarily if you went out and found a life coach to help you do this kind of that energetic of moving out of the wallowing into the reclaiming life and reorganizing it and restructuring it to go forward. Is that, is that sort of true or how did that work?

That's spot on. That spot on. And it was exactly that. I wanted that and I couldn't find it. And I remember vividly, there was one day I was in this group and somebody said that they were 10 years into their journey and they were as sad now as they were that the day their husband died, they've never been happy again. Their life is miserable, they're in so much pain. And it scared me. And I thought that cannot be. Be my truth. That cannot be my story for the rest of my life. There's no way. And you're, you're right, you know, you can bring people together, but if there's no guidance, if there's no structure, if there's no education and support, we get caught up in narratives that just keep us looping round in circles and stuck in our situation. And that's not helpful when we're grieving, when we go through anything traumatic. We have to learn to rewire the brain. Right. There's a mental injury that's going on up here in, in our minds. And, and those loops will keep repeating because that's what the mind does. And we, you know, the, the, the stress response that we find ourselves in, our nervous system is all out of whack and if we don't deal with those things, we can't find a way to move forward. And we, we all need some guidance, we all need some hope. We all need those fire lighters. Right. As well as that sense of community.

Yeah, I think that's really well said. You know, the audience has heard me probably say this many times now, but really, I think all of life comes down to one thing which is optimizing the nervous system, which is, you know, how we think, what we feel, what we believe is true, what we believe is possible, how we define ourselves, the stories we tell ourselves, you know, all of what we're living in, reaction to. All of it comes down to optimizing the nervous system along with how we move through space and you know, can pick up a weight or go for a run. So it sounds like, I mean, kudos to you for recognizing, hey, this is, this is comforting, but it's not, it's not elevating. Right. And so I want to go find something that will elevate me to a space. So then you started your own group. So how long ago was that that you started your coaching or whatever?

So I started sort of doing one to one support in early 2020. And then in September, October time, 2020, I decided to create a support group and bring people together. I then to. To create a group and there was probably about eight people in that first group that I created. But the magic, the magic of bringing people together that are, A going through something similar but B, are determined to find a way through it and are wanting to learn or wanting to grow. And alongside their heartache there they are looking at how do I survive this? They're asking that question. And with the education and the tools and the understand. Honestly, it's magic. It's like a little bit of magic and it's just grown from there.

That's the best. Yeah. When you're doing something that's really great, it does almost feel like magic, I think. Yeah. So that's cool. So Elizabeth, just to go back to you now. So I understand now how Karen got where she is and what she was bringing forward. So you guys intersected and how did Karen end up impacting your life? Because it sounds like she had a major role in helping you to kind of swim to shore.

So she absolutely gave me the raft and the boat and the oars and the sail and to get to shore. There's no question I was drowning. And, and not just mentally, but physically. I mean, I put on £30. I was drinking every day. My arthritis went through the roof. I was physically decaying alongside mentally and emotionally and financially. Every way in my life. I was like bleeding out. And Karen was like likening it to a life preserver and a boat and tools. Is exactly that what was beautiful? I had the same experience. I went to grief groups. I had a woman. It's funny, it was 10 years. Say the same thing. It was 10 years and she still wanted to die. And I thought, this cannot be my life. Have to keep my promise to my husband. That was my driving force.

What was. What were the actual things that Karen did that you found most helpful? Like what were some of the rungs on the ladder or the. The oar in the boat that she gave you? What were those?

Absolutely. So Karen has a laid out program. She has three sections of her program. I've done every one of them. I've done one of them twice for two years. I did her program. There's the beginning. Because in early Greek, which is, you know, zero to two years mine, I would say by six months. She let me join her other program. Early grief is simply getting a nugget of something every week. She would give us something. And I would say if she had told me to stand on my head for all day, I would have tried. But she. She gave us tools like I didn't know anything about the nervous system. And she would give us resources. And example is I tried everything she gave us. I remember I did a sound bath. And I remember laying there thinking for the first 10 minutes or so, I paid for this. I'm paying money for this. And then somewhere I came to at the end and I thought, oh, okay, I'm gonna go home and buy a sound bed. This did something. I don't know what it did, but I went home and bought a sound bed. And so she gave us every week I had something tangible I could do, you know, go outside. She had like. She had like basic things to do that were always go outside, move your body journal. But she would give you prompts. It wasn't just journal. Here's 10 prompts. Write on these things. She had a Facebook group where you could interact with other people on it. So it was never just commiserating. And then she has. She has an intense one year program. I did it for a year and a half where she gives you videos and homework and even the practical things like as a widow, money, sex, alone. How do you deal with. How do you live on Mars? How do you. And one of the biggest ones. Let me say this, one of the biggest ones in our culture, for me and for everybody I know we are a grief illiterate culture. Our culture will make you sick physically as well as grief if you follow what everybody else says, which is distract yourself, ignore, ignore it, move on. Karen's philosophy teaches the exact opposite, which is feel your feelings. Walk through the darkness. And that has been key to my healing.

That's beautiful. Really. You went from commiserating with people, actually, into constructing the future. Right. Is kind of what it feels like and creating a future. So that's interesting. I've. I've had. I've lost both parents and my sister. Right. So I know some things about grief. Not. And I've gone through a couple divorces also, so there's some grief there.

Absolutely.

But it is interesting, the depths of despair that you can fall into, and then you have to find that light and kind of pull yourself forward to create meaning and to create opportunity again. But once you. Once you can cross through that, all of a sudden, it's not that you stop. I still will tear up at times when I think about my sister or my mom or my dad. The way I describe that to myself is it's me honoring them to have those tears. But I don't live in that space. I live with them cheering me on, so to speak. Just like I believe your husband's cheering you on right now. Right. He's so proud of you. He's so happy for the progress you've made. And yet it's still possible to, you know, tear up at certain times. And I think there's a sweet balance in that somehow when you can get to that place. I don't know if that's your experience as well, but so.

And I can share this if you want to put it in the show notes. I actually, I got so many questions from teachers, doctors, social media counselors of how I was transforming how I was doing it. But I made a couple of documents on the basics of Karen, and one of them is she gave me a language for just that. Dr. Gladden, like when I cry, which, you know, I do often. You seem. When someone will say, oh, I'm so sorry. I'll say, no, no, no, no, no. The love on my face. I love my tears. And what she taught me, she puts language, she says, we bring our person with us. We live Alongside the grief, we carry their love with us, and we build a life with their love. I feel like I have Sandy with me every day. And his love, the seeds I plant in my life and the garden I'm growing is the garden of our love. And so there's no sense of having to leave them behind.

Right.

You know, celebrate them. In fact, the one time I got to meet with Mukti, it was very, very helpful because she gave me some ceremonial things to do to bring him into every day of my life. And then you're not creating more grief because you're not having to leave them behind. You're bringing them with you.

That's right. No, that's great. You don't have to leave them behind, and you don't have to leave parts of yourself behind either. All. All of you. A phrase I learned from Mukti is all of you is welcome. And you're able to bring all of it. And yet you're also able to thrive because you're still, still growing that garden and in many senses growing it together, which is super sweet thing. Now, I know Mukti knows a ton about grief and mourning and things like that. And Mukti, do you want to speak a little bit to grief and mourning and kind of your take on what's happening here?

Good morning. Yes, thank you. Thank you both Karen and Elizabeth. And Elizabeth, thank you for sharing your story. Greatly beneficial to hear the journey you've been on. I'm a psychedelic assisted therapist and a background in transpersonal psychotherapy counseling. And we were talking about this before the record button was turned on. Transpersonal means dealing with states of consciousness beyond the limits of personal identity. So really zooming out to identify with the whole of creation and beyond in the psychedelic work. You know, psychedelic medicine is encountering a renaissance right now. It's called the third wave. It is. I think I'll say this as an assertion. I think it's impossible to do psychedelic therapy medicine work without studying grief, loss, death, and dying. Because at the very simplest explanation, we're constantly dying to identities. And on the other side of death is a birth, something new waiting to be reborn. And so to be great at learning how to die. And the Buddhist framework helps us live really, really well. Thanatology is a field of specialists of doctors who study grief and bereavement and dying. And Karen, I'm sure that you know this, they explain the difference. And Karen, this speaks to that deficiency in American approach to grief, specifically around bereavement and death loss. There is a difference between grieving and mourning. Grief is a state. It's an emotional state of grief. Mourning, however, is the act of sorrowing. And in cultures around the world, people have rituals for sorrowing. They go to the wailing wall, for example. They shake, they move their bodies. And what we know from somatic psychology is that emot e dash motion, it requires movement to move the feeling. And so there are practices to sorrow, which we are all very well have the opportunity to learn here in the West. Otherwise, without sorrowing, as you experience laying on the floor, scream, crying. This is so common and appropriate. Honestly, without sorrowing, people can live the rest of their life grieving. And so we very. I'm actually, underneath my sweatshirt, my T shirt says, feel your feelings. It's so appropriate to feel your feelings, to move through the act of physical sorrowing. And like a wave, energy moves in waves, right? It crests and then it falls. Feelings do the same. And again, referencing the Buddhist psychology framework, nothing lasts forever. This is the state of impermanence. But that also includes joy. So when we learn how to die in each moment, dying to joy, dying to grief, dying to whatever is in the present moment, it really helps bring into focus the intimacy and pristine wonder of the nowness, which is always a gift.

Yeah, it's quite beautiful. It's quite beautiful when you can step into a place of now. One of the things that's had a real impact on my life and this is that we tend to go through life doing a lot of efforting, right? We're trying to get things done. We're trying to make things happen. We're trying, we're trying, we're trying. And one of the most interesting ways for me to kind of flip that on a tread, inverted, if you will, is to. Is to just go in and receive. So, for example, we could do a podcast, and I can be efforting in the conversation, or I can be here actually to receive. And when I come in to receive, it automatically puts me into the present moment. It's like, I'm here to receive. I don't need to effort. I'm here to receive. And the gifts that I have to offer, I will offer. But in the reception, it creates presence. And so, you know, all joy really comes out of the present moment. And so it enables me to just kind of let go of all the rest of it and step into from a loving place, creating joy, which is really what I've discovered to be my purpose in life. From a loving place to create joy. And everything I do is focused on that. And sometimes when I'm efforting and trying and resisting what is to try to get to where I want to go, I can get caught up. But if I say no, I'm here to receive and receive the blessing of what's happening, it frees me up. It's like, oh, okay, I'm just here to receive. And now I can take that as kind of fuel or yarn or whatever to weave, whatever it is I'm weaving. And so it's. It's a really. Been an interesting kind of inversion technique that I've picked up recently. So.

Yeah, I love that. That's really beautiful.

Yeah. So, Elizabeth, so then part of your journey has been with Gladden longevity. And in the last little bit of the thing here, why don't we talk a little bit about. About what happened there?

Absolutely. And I think one thing led to the other, to be honest. I think to go from wailing on the floor to wanting to live a full life again, I saw the power of coaching and I started going down podcast rabbit holes, and I was in a miserable physical state at that point. And I listen to tons and tons of podcasts, and I think you are the best of the best when it comes to it. Dr. Gladden, I did a lot of research. I used to be an engineer, and I looked at a lot of them. And not only the best of the best technically, but the spiritual and emotional caring consciousness, intention that you bring, I think also is extraordinary. And I was so fortunate to be able to start working with you six months ago.

And.

And it has had the same impact on me, but in a different area as Karen. When I started working with Karen, I didn't believe it was possible that I would ever be happy again, that I could have a happy day with anything possible. I was just trying to get to where I wasn't on the floor. And today I have more happy days than not. And even when I have sad waves, I ride them and I come back to a place of joy. And so when I started with you, I was in abject pain all the time. I had. I would say now, which is miraculous. IBS and grief makes all things physical that are not good worse. Because grief is physical.

That's right.

I was struggling with the feeling that, could I live in this body for the rest of my life? Would I be miserable in my body for the rest of my life? I'm turning 60, you know, just like our society says all the wrong things about grieving, they say all the wrong things about aging. So it's like you're turning 16. It's downhill from here. Well, that's not encouraging. And even the things that they give you, like the resources they give you on grief, are less than helpful. As you often say, the just get healthy does not work against an avalanche of physical issues. And so working with you is. Yesterday I broke down and cried because I'm going for a picture procedure with a doctor that you had recommended that I believe is going to put me over the mountaintop. And I cried because the idea that I could become fully alive again, every time you feel that kind of joy, it's again without my husband. And so I have to feel the grief that comes along with it. But I've gone from I don't know that I can live in this body and how am I going to stand that and age to I wonder how long I could live and I wonder how good I could get. And I'm in a completely different. My. I've come out to your facility, and it's been just like with Karen is. It's been intense. One of the reasons I teased Karen when we came on the podcast before we started recording that I miss her because I'm not going to her coaching anymore and that it shows that she did her job. And one of the reasons I'm not going to coaching anymore is I've been spending all my time with your program, Dr. Gladden, and.

Because it's.

It is time, resources, energy. And it was the same with Karen. And it's the best investments like that I could possibly make because I'm not flown down several times. I've changed my diet. I thought I had a good diet, but I changed it even more. I've gotten all that, the supplements and the hormones and a little bit of medicine. And it was so interesting that I was holding a manager's meeting with my team. I run a business the other day, and one of them told me, they said that it was like the lights had come back on. They had hope again that our company would grow and that their ceiling of opportunity, they had felt like opportunity had closed on them because I was the source of opportunity.

Sure.

I wasn't sharp. I wasn't seeing things, making things happen. And, you know, one of my family members told me recently, they said, it's like you're coming back to life physically, energetically, and. And, you know, just like with Karen, Dr. Gladden, the. The. The journey with Karen, it was not like, oh, light the fires. I'm gonna swim over there. Yay. It wasn't like that. It was like, there's a fire. Fire. Waves hit me. I'm drowning. Where's the fire? More waves. I'm drowning. Where's the fire? Did I see a fire? Is there really a fire? It was a one step forward, three back, three, four, painful and hard. And then I would get a bigger glimpse of the fire. And it's been very similar with you. I think when people come to work with you, if they have issues like I did, they need to have a vision which you are great at giving them. But also realize it's going to be a journey. It is not going to be. You're not carrying magic pills that will transform. You have the tools, but they're going to have to get the sail up and the winds are going to come and they're going to come in the wrong direction and they're going to have to row those oars and tides are going to pull them off stream and it's. But it's so worth it because just like with caring someone being stuck in grief when you're stuck in a health. I was stuck in a downward health spiral and I am definitely now in an up spiral.

I love that. I love hearing that. It's really, really precious to me to see the interplay between, you know, the psycho spiritual and the physical. Right. And kind of to this point of journey, the way that we sort of characterize it for each client is that everybody's on their own hero's journey, right? And the hero's journey way that I would state, that is we're on our hero's journey to reclaim our birthright, to live young for a lifetime and unencumbered by traumas that we've bumped into that impact us. Right? So be. Because when we're, when we live young for a lifetime and we're unencumbered, it really frees us up to bring all of our gifts forward. And that's, that's actually why we're here. You have so many gifts, Elizabeth, and you have so many people that you can impact at your company and your community. And to see you come back to life, right. And be living from a youthful position and also, you know, from the psycho spiritual centered position that you have. You know, you're you, you now are unencumbered to the point where you can create for so many people around you. And that's, that's why we're all here at the end of the day. So it's such a beautiful story. I mean, going from, from extreme happiness to extreme despair, but then reinventing yourself and restructuring Your life to come back. It's really, it's a hero's journey that you've been on. So kudos to you.

Well, and that's one of the reasons I wanted to get Karen in this story on your podcast and also introduce you to her community is for sure you can't necessarily walk those journeys that turn. I could not walk that journey by myself.

That's right.

Flail in the water, trying as I might.

That's right.

I don't have the tools.

And.

Both, you know, Karen can speak to it, but the, when you have devastating loss, it can destroy you physically, too. It can destroy, it can destroy you. And you need help and resources. And.

It'S a great point you're making that it's really impossible to do this alone and there's too many moving parts. And I think, particularly when we're, when we are grieving or we are living in reaction to a trauma that we've experienced, we're somewhat handicapped in the resources as we have internally. Right. Even to see the problem, sometimes even to recognize what's actually happened. And so being able to work with, with people to help you see where you are, see where you can go and see the steps to help you get there is so clarifying. Right. And Claire, when we have clarity, we're energized, but when we're in despair, we don't have clarity. And so we're, we're suffering, but it takes. It takes. And now that you're where you are, what I love is that you've even started a group, I think where you were doing some things with, with 100 is the book I wrote. 100 is a new 30. And so now you've become a light into other people's lives. Right. So this is like the full, the full journey.

I, I, I feel like I, when you're, when you're blessed to have people give you light like the two of you have given me, then it's your responsibility to share that. I share it everywhere I go. I have told hundreds of people about both of you. Like, I, like I will put in the, in the link, if you, if you don't mind, I'll put in there the papers I've given out for Karen and with you, I have a book so I don't have to, I didn't have to make my own papers, but I have flyers I give out about. It's not just about Karen, but it's about grief coaching because someone may have lost, not be a widow they may need. And it's the. It's the other resources Karen taught me about. She gave us lots of resources, put us in lots of directions, just like you do. And with you, I have the book. I hand them out like crazy. Because if you're fortunate enough to find someone who gives you a lantern, then you need to turn around and tell people, hey, these people have lanterns.

That's right. Right. No, that's really great stuff. Karen, what's your. What's your take on Elizabeth's journey? I mean, and you've seen a lot of people now go through your program. I'm just curious to get your take on her.

I think it's amazing. You know, I obviously see people come into my world utterly devastated, can barely string a sentence together, cannot talk through the tears, and there's so much pain. And much like Elizabeth said at the beginning, you come into my world and you see other widows further down the line, and you think, oh, my God, they're lying exactly like Elizabeth. They clearly didn't love their husband as much as I do. You know, you tell yourself all these stories because you just think it's so impossible getting to a place where you could be a 9 or even a 10 out of 10 again. As much as you want it, you can't see it. And then, you know, watching Elizabeth and many other women coming into my world, and obviously, you know, we share online, we get to know each other. I was so fortunate. And I actually got to meet Elizabeth in person when I came over and did a retreat in Florida in January. So that was really special. And just watching that transition, it's slow. You know, I'm not going to say it happens overnight because it is. It is a slow process, and it takes time and energy. And, you know, we've got to be patient with ourselves in these times, haven't we? Watching exactly. Like you've just said, watching people come back to life, watching them just hold themselves that little bit stronger with that more confidence, that belief in themselves. And you hear them talking about the moments that they've enjoyed, the things that they've achieved, you know, where they've overcome fears or limiting beliefs or they've discovered something about themselves that they never thought was possible. It just. I find the women I work with so inspiring and so uplifting, and Elizabeth is absolutely one of those women. I know where she was when she came in. I've been in a similar place, and it's awful. And to come here today. I haven't seen Elizabeth for a while, and I can just see her energy even through the screen. You know, the way she's holding herself, she's lighter, she's brighter, she's helping others, and she's still working on herself and trying to pave that path forward. And it's such a beautiful thing. And this is hard sometimes for people to understand, but I think our darkest moments are often a really powerful portal of transformation. They. They give us the opportunity, and it's not easy to think of it like this, but to. To really open our eyes, to think about who we are and what we want and who we want to become and how we want to live our lives. You know, so many of us just on this hamster wheel of life and, you know, deep grief, trauma, all kinds of things that happen to us if we allow ourselves to be open to the possibilities and the opportunities that lie within that darkness, amazing, beautiful things happen. And Elizabeth has done that. She's allowed herself to be open to those possibilities, to those opportunities, and she has flourished. You know, every time I offer something, she's there, she's taking it. She's all in. She's invested, she's committed, she shows up, she does the work, and it. It works and it pays off. And. And it's just incredible. It's mind blowing. And it keeps me moving forward because, you know, when you see what other people are doing, you kind of think, I want to keep moving, I want to keep going. Because life. Life is exciting, expansive. Life is incredible.

It.

It will knock you down, of course, but there's also. People out there will help you rebuild and. And find a way forward. And. And Elizabeth does that. And I suspect she goes on to. To help others find their way as well, because she's, I would imagine, one of. One of those. Those lights on the flames on the side of the cliff now. Herself.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Elizabeth is a light on the cliffs of Dover there, right on all the cliffs that people are looking at. I think, you know, you said something that is very true in my life that I've come to realize that there are no problems, that there are only opportunities. Everything that happens that could be construed as, well, that's, you know, a bad thing or not a good thing or whatever. Quite honestly, I've learned that that's an opportunity. And it's also. There's a sense that the universe is kind of pushing me in a particular direction. It's closing some, taking some things away that will open other things. And in that a, you know, staying present to the moment and receiving that doesn't make it easy to lose someone. But it does give you a sense of const, or a construct rather, to know that there is an opportunity even in the darkest moment. And looking for that opportunity is, you know, so critical to your own personal growth and then how you actually make your contribution going forward. So super, super cool.

It is, it is really cool. There's a lovely TED talk by a man called Jason B. Rosenthal, and he lost his wife. And he, he talks about having a blank canvas presented to him after his wife died. And, and, and actually, you know, had somebody said that to me after my husband had died, I, I'd have been triggered and annoyed and angry and probably would have wanted to punch him in the face, in all honesty. So I get that these messages have to land at the right time, but, you know, life does throw you curveballs and, and you have more choices than you think you have. You know, you do have opportunities, you do have ways to take those steps to, steps forward. And if you are presented with a blank canvas, you get to decide what you want to paint on that canvas. The colours, the scenery, the landscape, the people that come along with you. And you're right, it doesn't make it better, it doesn't take the pain away. But I think it can really help us to see there is, there is potential for growth and possibility and learning in everything that we go through.

You know, one of the things that's so critical looking at this through a biological lens is that we talk a lot about resilience and robustness. And if, if you're robust, it's basically the ability to withstand an unexpected challenge and be minimally impacted. That's what it is to be robust, to be resilient, is to be confronted with an unexpected challenge that impacts you, but you're able to recover from it. And a third element is anti fragility. Antifragile. There was a book written by a gentleman, Nassim Nair, I believe, called Antifragile. And basically the tenet in the book is that no language has ever had a word that's the exact opposite of fragile. Because we think of strong, we think of tough, we think of whatever. And, and what he was postulating was that antifragile is that when you are met with an unexpected challenge, yes, you may be impacted by it, but it's not that you recover from it, you actually come back stronger from it. And so. Right. So this idea really in longevity is because we know that every eight years resilience is cut in half biologically. Right. And that's why aging is an exponential process. So if we can have this idea both psychically, spiritually, physically, that we're here to actually become more robust, improve our resilience and actually be anti fragile for the things that we've gone through and all of a sudden have gone through things to come back stronger and better, fuller. That's what I've adopted and, and try to adopt into or teach to the clients that come through here. Because then it's like, oh, okay, well, that is the light over there is becoming anti fragile. Maintaining my resilience, maintaining my robustness, that kind of thing.

I love that the visual that kind of comes to mind you with you talking about that is the, the sort of the ancient art form of kintsugi in Japanese culture, when they repair their broken bowls and vases, don't they, with the gold lacquer and it feels like, you know, that's a lovely visual representation of just embracing all the cracks and the breaks that life throws at you, but knowing they, they come along but you can still be strong and robust and, and resilient and find a way back.

And more beautiful.

Quite honest beautiful and more beautiful and more beautiful.

Yes, yes, I love that.

Yeah, that's the anti fragile element, right? More beautiful. Quite beautiful. Mukti, do you have any final comments.

That you'd like to make such a rich conversation? Some of the takeaways I'm hearing is that the darkness, when it's not if, but when we become enveloped in darkness at some point in our human lives. Because I don't know about you, but I signed up for the platinum package of human life, so it kind of guaranteed everything that when we find ourselves enveloped in darkness, to remember that darkness too is a teacher. In fact, life begins in the darkness. We started in the darkness right inside of our mothers. And so, you know, when we break down Joseph Campbell's framework, each of us have to go into the cave to slay the dragon alone. It is a solo endeavor to go into the darkness and do that work. But the recovery happens in community, the recovering of that gift and the sense making and the meaning making, the healing happens in community. And so that, that is really, I think what I'm hearing in this conversation. Karen, I'm not sure about you, but when I work with clients, especially in the area of post traumatic growth, I tell them up front that I want. My goal is to work myself out of a job. And so if I've done it well, there will be a time when they don't need to resource me. They can always return when they hit another obstacle in the road, but that they can ultimately know that this is about liberation, to go live their lives fully and freely. The last thing I want to mention is simply some resources that are potent in the work that I do. William Bridges has his book Transitions, which is in its 40th year of production. And it's an excellent, excellent resource for how we are constantly moving through, through many micro depths of identity throughout life. And I think that, again, if we can practice knowing that we're already doing this when the big losses arrive, we have been training and flexing that muscle so we become more skillful at living and dying. Spiritual luminary Pema Chodron, her book When Things Fall Apart, probably one of the top five resources of my life, I think. Lastly, I just saw. I want to share with you and Karen, and I want to share with the world. Come See Me in the Good Light is currently streaming on Apple tv. And it's the most beautiful documentary about the poet laureate Andrea Gibson and their journey through cancer and transition beyond and how their diagnosis led to an awakening that allowed them, and now people watching the documentary to embrace all of it as gift. All of it as gift.

Beautiful.

Yeah.

So thank you for the opportunity to be part of this conversation. And Elizabeth, I'm so inspired by your rebirth. You're birthing yourself into new possibility and how exciting for all of us.

Yeah. Beautiful. Karen, where can people learn more about you? How would they get in touch with you?

So I have my podcast, the Widow Podcast. I'm also on YouTube and Facebook and Instagram. Karen Sutton, widow coach. Or there's my website, Karen Sutton dot com.

Okay. Beautiful. All right, Elizabeth, thank you so much for, you know, the vulnerability of sharing your story. And also congratulations on all the triumphs that you've had. You've become a beacon of hope for so many, and that's wonderful. And Mukti, thank you for your input. Really always appreciate it.

And thank you for the invitation.

Yeah. Okay.

Thank you for having us on.

Thank you.

Bye.

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