Karen E. Herrick is the director of the Center for Children of Alcoholics, Inc. in Red Bank, New Jersey treating all types of people with psychological problems including addictions.
She wrote her book "You’re Not Finished Yet" which encapsulates her private practice work plus an additional two chapters on spirituality and spiritual experiences after she had a Holy Spirit experience during Holotropic Breathwork training. Her Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Naming Spiritual Experiences," & she learned 75% of the 133 mental health professionals she researched stated that they believed further education regarding spiritual experiences, near-death experiences (NDEs), and/or after-life experiences would be beneficial to them personally and professionally.
Get connected to your soul purpose
Her Books: You’re Not Finished Yet, Grandma, What is a Soul?, and Psychology of the Soul and the Paranormal.
Videos: You, I Can Live Without, Alcohol I Can't, Psychological Trauma and the Soul with Karen Herrick.
Connect with Karen
Her website, Spiritual Experiences Website, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Webinars.
Connect with Marci
Permission to Heal Bookshop - Buy books from the episodes & support independent bookstores.
The Permission to Heal podcast is a passion of mine. I need your help to bring more inspirational episodes to the world; please consider becoming a patron through PATREON.
This is where your PATREON subscription comes in. With your subscription, you get perks and swag and the meaningful contentment knowing you are helping me get PTH to the people who need it.
Karen E. Herrick is the director of the Center for Children of Alcoholics, Inc. in Red Bank, New Jersey treating all types of people with psychological problems including addictions.
She wrote her book "You’re Not Finished Yet" which encapsulates her private practice work plus an additional two chapters on spirituality and spiritual experiences after she had a Holy Spirit experience during Holotropic Breathwork training. Her Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Naming Spiritual Experiences," & she learned 75% of the 133 mental health professionals she researched stated that they believed further education regarding spiritual experiences, near-death experiences (NDEs), and/or after-life experiences would be beneficial to them personally and professionally.
Get connected to your soul purpose
Her Books: You’re Not Finished Yet, Grandma, What is a Soul?, and Psychology of the Soul and the Paranormal.
Videos: You, I Can Live Without, Alcohol I Can't, Psychological Trauma and the Soul with Karen Herrick.
Connect with Karen
Her website, Spiritual Experiences Website, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Webinars.
Connect with Marci
Permission to Heal Bookshop - Buy books from the episodes & support independent bookstores.
The Permission to Heal podcast is a passion of mine. I need your help to bring more inspirational episodes to the world; please consider becoming a patron through PATREON.
This is where your PATREON subscription comes in. With your subscription, you get perks and swag and the meaningful contentment knowing you are helping me get PTH to the people who need it.
PTH 53 Karen Herrick
[00:00:00] Welcome to permission to heal. I am Marci Brockman, and I am thrilled that you are here today. Today. I have had the privilege of speaking with Karen Herrick, Reverend Karen Herrick PhD is the director of the center for children of alcoholics in red bank, New Jersey, after a master's degree in social work, she originally began to educate families on the disease concept of alcoholism.
[00:00:26] Dr. Herrick developed a successful practice. Eventually seeing all types of people with psychological problems, including addiction. She wrote her book. You're not finished yet, which encapsulates her private practice work plus an additional two chapters on spirituality and spiritual experiences.
[00:00:44] After she had a holy spirit experience during a holotropic breathwork training, she completed her PhD and wrote her thesis on naming spiritual experiences during her therapeutic practice. She encourages some clients to visit with mediums, to aid in handling their grief and the loss of their loved ones.
[00:01:03] And we talk quite a bit about psychics. I shared my visit to the psychic that my mom, my deceased. Arranged for me to go on. It completely changed the course of my mental health journey after she died. It absolutely halted the guilt and overwhelming grief that I felt after her death.
[00:01:28] And really put me on. On much better footing and a much more spiritually peaceful footing. As I continued my mental health journey. And I continued to improve myself as a human being and as a mom and as a teacher and as a daughter and everything she, she is working to get the term, seen hallucinations into the world of psychology so that people will understand that healthy people have experiences seeing their deceased loved ones and that they're not abnormal.
[00:01:56] I think that that's an important thing. She wrote a book called you're not finished yet. Another one grandma, what is the soul and the psychology of the soul and the paranormal. And they're both available through amazon.com and Kindle and her office, et cetera. And the psychology of the soul in paranormal is also available on audible.
[00:02:16] I am going to get it on audible. I love audio books. I hope you enjoy this conversation that Karen Herrick and I have, we also talked about the three realities and we talked about Kroll young and, and William James, and we talked about synchronicities of life of thought. We talked about What people who are children of dysfunctional families, alcoholics, or addicts, parent families, or from within households where they didn't feel safe and they weren't getting the emotional support and the emotional needs that they have, and that they can, there are groups that they can go to Alanon and a Koa and an adult children of alcoholics and so on.
[00:02:58] There are. Is a lot to be said for joining like-minded people in community, whether that's through zoom or that's in physical spaces. We gain so much from the connection of community with other people. We learn that we are not alone in our. Internal monologue of crazy thoughts that go through our heads.
[00:03:26] We are not alone in, in any aspect. So many of us have similar experiences and just knowing that they're out there and that you are lovable and you are connected brings hope into your life in a way, in a way that nothing else can and, and helps create the compassion and empathy and love and brings meaning to our lives that we are all craving every single one of us.
[00:03:56] I hope that you enjoy this episode as much as I did. Thank you so much for listening. And if you enjoy this episode, as much as I think you will please leave us. A five-star review. Please write a review.
[00:04:11] Please share this episode and the podcast with your friends, your family, your coworkers, anybody you meet, who you feel that this could be of benefit or inspiration to. And please, I strongly ask you to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber of permission to heal podcast. I am a one-woman show.
[00:04:37] I do everything myself to keep the budget down. I do all, I find all of the guests. I do all the scheduling. I do all the research. I read their books. I do all the interviews themselves and all the tech, all the editing, all the sound and video editing, all the marketing, all of the graphic design,
[00:04:54] I do all of it myself and. Gloss a little bit of money each week to put the podcast out, but I am so driven by this mission to create a community that helps build empathy and helps build compassion. And self-compassion, you know, I'm a firm believer that we sometimes need to be reminded that. It's up to us, how we live our lives.
[00:05:25] We have this one shot at this iteration of our life on earth and it is up to us what we do with it. You get to paint and create your own reality and you don't need anybody else's stand permission to do that. You know, you, you want to go on a vacation. You want to learn how to paint. You want to take up French classes.
[00:05:45] You want to eat pasta for dinner. You want to sit in front of the TV and play video games for 75 hours, whatever it is that you want to do with your life, with your time, with your gifts, with your few decades or many decades on this planet is a hundred percent up to you. You get to decide it's your permission is all you need.
[00:06:08] And you know, I say every episode, you only need your own permission to begin. So go forth and live the life that brings you love joy and meaning. I love you all. Thank you so much for listening now. Here's the episode.
[00:00:00] Lovely to see you, Karen, how are. I'm fine. Thank you. It's nice to see you too. Nice to see you as well. I when I was compiling all the, the bio information and info about your books and all the things that you've done, I, I kept coming up with questions, more things I wanted to talk about, but I think that we're going to not have an end of things to discuss, which is a good thing.
[00:00:22] So let's get to the six quick questions first, and then we'll just launch in. Cause I know once I start, we, yeah, there you go. So what six words would you use to describe yourself? Let's see, I wrote down quickly, responsible, honest, humorous, friendly, unkind, all great words. All right. What is your favorite way to spend a day?
[00:00:47] My favorite way to spend the days in the garden, walking my dog and maybe seeing a movie later and then reading a book. Okay. What kind of things do you grow in your garden? Mostly flowers. I do have a lemon Bush in New Jersey and I just brought it in right now and I have like 10 lemons. I'm very poor bushes.
[00:01:07] Like the Charlie brown Christmas tree, but I have, I have beautiful lemons. So but mostly I grow flowers. Nice. Nice. What kind of dog do you have? I have a standard poodle who is a party poodle. They call that in America, but it's in France. It's parte. Meaning she's two colors. She's black and white.
[00:01:26] Oh really? I'm not sure I've ever seen that before. I know most people haven't the party. People say that's how it was in the beginning, but I don't know that much about dogs. I just thought she was pretty that's good enough. What's her name? Her name is Emma. She's named after Carl. Carl Young's wife. Oh, is it.
[00:01:48] Okay. I did not know that. And he's my, he's my favorite psychologist. So I think I gleaned that from research. We've got a union among us. What is your favorite childhood memory? Oh, let's see. Probably going to my grandmother's farm in Kinderhook New York, which is upstate New York above all, no below Albany. And she had a horse and chickens and all kinds of different things. Nice, nice. Where there a lot of other grandkids or is it just you?
[00:02:18] I was, I was the oldest grandchild and I was the girl and she had had two boys, so she rather favored me. Nice. So that was nice. That's very cool. I like that. What's your favorite meal? And my favorite meal is. I love eggplant anyway, really. Wow. I'm very particular with the eggplant. It's gotta be, I don't have that much experience with it, but my mother used to make this.
[00:02:47] I never thought I haven't thought about this in a very long time. Is eggplant dip. She used to stick dip vegetables in our crackers or something. I remember seeing the eggplant halved in tinfoil and sort of resting on top of the burner and the stove. And she would sort of roast it on, on the stove top. I hadn't thought about that in 40 years.
[00:03:09] Wow. Wow. There you go. I'm going to have to try that. Maybe I'll set the house on fire. That would be good. You can also do it in the oven. That's probably the best way to do it. Okay. Number five. What one piece of advice would you like to give your younger self? Let's see, not to worry so much. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:03:33] I think a lot of us worry too much and overthink things and they're never as complicated as we make them out to be in our hair. Makes a lot of sense. And we're so creative. We think of things that would never happen. Oh my God. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. To say them out loud even just is preposterous. You know, like even this morning I was thinking something and I don't even remember what it was, but whatever it was, it had me next to tears and, and I remember saying it out loud and I realized it's just ridiculous.
[00:04:07] It's just ridiculous. It doesn't even make sense. I think maybe I was half asleep. I don't know. I would like to think I was half asleep. Number six. What is one thing you would most like to change about the world? Oh, wow. Not an easy thing. People taking more responsibility for themselves. Cause it seems like they are not now.
[00:04:27] Oh yeah. Yeah. Taking responsibility and being accountable for the things that they say. And they do. Yeah. I, I'm seeing a big shift. I've been teaching for 27 years and a lot has changed in the 27 years among the teenagers and among their parents. And, and I think that that's one of them, you know, they, they are not, they feel like somehow they are exempt from being accountable.
[00:05:00] I don't know what the cause of that is. Could be the internet. The anonymity of saying things on the internet could be a whole lot of things. I don't know. I think it's above my pay grade.
[00:05:15] Okay, so you are, if I get this correctly, the it's hard to see without the glasses on the director for the center of children, of alcoholics in red bank, New Jersey. Is that true? Yes. Very cool. I have my husband has comes from a long line of alcoholics and had to nip that in the bud himself.
[00:05:37] And my mom was an opiate addict and, and that's evidently you know, at the end of her life, that's what killed her. They said congestive heart failure, but that's not really what it was. And, and I think that having grown up, I was an only child and having grown up as the only child of an addict and of an undiagnosed bipolar and her whole host of issues created a certain pattern or template in, in how.
[00:06:05] Grew up and conducted relationships in my own life. And what I'm learning as I've been trying to untangle all of those webs is that, you know, being a people pleaser and, and well, all that entails feeling like I was responsible for her problems or that I was responsible for everybody solving everybody's problems, I think is pretty typical in children of addicted parents.
[00:06:30] Am I right? To be a people pleaser. Yes. Because in that way, maybe you're not going to get, you know, knocked across the room or punished overly punished in some way. Right? Yeah. I felt like when I, when I started piecing it together in my adulthood, like why I behaved that way or why I was choosing relationships, choosing to run my relationships that way and making myself crazy and resentful in the process of.
[00:06:57] I started to realize that that was really the only way that I could perceive to feel safe. You know, if I could make my mother happy, like that was my at eight years old, like that was in one in my capability anyway. Not really, you know, if I could make my mother happy, then she wouldn't yell. She wouldn't, you know, make me feel unsafe in, in all of those ways.
[00:07:21] And so I sort of translated all of that into my adolescent and adult relationships as well, because it was sort of the, the only way I knew how to be crazy, what we all do. So before we get too involved, tell me about you. What was young Karen? Like? What was your circumstances that led you to become the beautiful woman I see in front of me?
[00:07:46] Well, I was raised in an alcoholic family. My father was alcoholic. I was the oldest of three. It was four and a half years older than my brother. And then my other brother was 11 months after him. So they were more like twins was raised in upstate New York. I graduated high school at 16 and my father didn't believe in educating women, but even he knew he couldn't put me out in the world at 16.
[00:08:08] So I was sent to secretarial school, which was good. And so I still have those skills and I type over a hundred words a minute, which is helpful. Wow. Yeah. And I got married, I got pregnant and married in that order. Because you had to get out of the house at 18 and nobody told you how you were going to do that.
[00:08:27] So I fell in love with my high school sweetheart and we got married and he went, he went in the Navy and then I went to California to wait for him. And so had my first daughter there. , he got out of the Navy, we go back to New York, we go back to California and I have a second daughter. I go to work.
[00:08:45] He goes to college. So that marriage lasted about, I don't know, 10, 12 years because I had more of a goal of come on. Let's let's get successful here. And he was very relaxed. So what I learned from all that was, I was used to drama. I was used to chaos and somebody that was very relaxed, looked very, depressed to me.
[00:09:09] And, so then I, I married for the second time eventually, and I had my third daughter and he was my alcoholic and I always said, if I ever married an alcoholic, I would do exactly the opposite of what my mother. So eventually I realized I had to leave that, did your mother do she stayed? Okay. And then everything was what your father says, and I'm thinking, why aren't we listening to him?
[00:09:35] Because, you know, he doesn't even, you know, he's drunk most of the time. So anyway,
[00:09:39] So then I decided I had started a little bit of college so I went to a woman's center at a local college, and I said, I don't know whether I'm going to get divorced. I don't know whether I should go back to work or because I could get a job or if I should go to college, which was always my. So they put me in this room with all these pictures of women around on the walls that I'd never seen before.
[00:10:01] And, the first question was if you had all the money in the world and all the time, what would you do? So I put go to college and then 45 minutes later, after answering all these questions, it said, the last thing said, go back to number one and do it anyway. Wow. So I did, so I got my, I got my bachelor's in art with art therapy, which was sales, psychology, and art were the things that I studied.
[00:10:30] And then they said, well, you can't eat on this art therapy degree. And I thought you can't. And then, so I decided to go to Rutgers and get a master's in social work, because I had gone to some art therapists and said, what kind of masters would you get? And they said, get a masters in social work and you can, you know, use your art therapy can use any.
[00:10:48] And so then I S I had a private practice eventually, where I happened to come into this, right? When the adult child of alcoholic movement was starting in California. And I had a 12 year old daughter who had an alcoholic father and a therapist for a mother. So I thought, Hmm, maybe I'll go to this first conference.
[00:11:07] She can go to a group with teenagers and learn about alcoholism cause she was in denial. And, I can go and learn about adult children of alcoholics. And I told, I came back and I had happened to have been dating a guy that, worked in the alcohol field and he wanted to start some workshops. And I said, I took all these notes.
[00:11:27] This, this movement is really going to go. And I'll, I'll give you six workshops and I bet people will come. So we planned a brochure at a local church and started in the fall. And the first night 95 people came. The second week, 129, it just grew. And then I went to a local college and gave the same lectures and say I had 29 people in my class, 29 people came into my private practice and I thought that's how it was.
[00:12:00] So anyway, eventually I had to decide how I was going to get more clients, but that's how it worked. And I've been doing that. And then people started telling me, because I worked with addicts and alcoholics and drug addicts. They would tell me these spiritual stories about, you know, things happening to them that were really weird.
[00:12:19] And then I started taking some training, and holotropic breathwork which you lay down and you breathe to music and activate your Shakur system. And so when I did that, I felt another breath inside of me. And it was, it was crazy. But when I got up from that I knew there was a. And I didn't know what happened to me, but all the people that were at the conference with me, I knew we were all connected and I knew we were connected to everybody on earth.
[00:12:48] Wow. And I just felt this all and just, you know, it was, it was wonderful when I think about it. And then you had to go and you had to draw in a Mandalah cause it was very young in, you had to draw what happened, what you just drew. They didn't say draw, draw what happened? And I do a flower and sun and grass and and then we went to lunch.
[00:13:12] Well, I thought I had for lunch. So I thought I had been on that blanket for 20 minutes and I actually had been there for four hours. Wow. So I had a breathwork experience where, eventually I realized the holy spirit had come through me and I pulled my legs up. I was laying there and the, the, the breath went right through my vagina now.
[00:13:35] So I, so I thought I'm a channel, this is a channel. And then I thought who's breadth is that. And then they had said, don't think just breathe. So I just said, don't think just keep breathing. So I braise in the wa and the breath breathe with me. And and then I knew there was a God. Wow. I know. And then I started getting clients with really different experiences.
[00:13:58] What we would call, you know, spiritual experiences, but also very weird experiences where they thought they were crazy. And I was capable of telling them they weren't crazy. And that then I had to learn more about different types of spiritual experiences. Then I decided to get a doctorate and and my thesis was on going to college, naming, naming spiritual experiences.
[00:14:20] So I got that. And then I've written the last book was the psychology of the soul and the paranormal which talks about that. We have. Physical body and a spiritual body. Can you explain that? Sure. It's very simple when you're born that I know well, St. Paul and the Bible says we come in on the spiritual on the physical and we leave on the spiritual.
[00:14:45] Well, that makes sense to me. Okay. So, so anyway, when you're conceived and Adam, basically an Adam has placed in utero and around that Adam, your physical body grows and the Adam also grows, and that is your spiritual body. So you have this miniature of you that is growing along with the physical body.
[00:15:07] Now that's very nice. Normally that's called your astral body. It can leave. And I believe it leaves up the vagus nerve silver cord, which is the 10th and longest nerve in your body is the biggest nerve. And it leaves usually leaves out the top of you. Yeah. And the only purpose of your spiritual body is take your, take your soul to the other side when you die.
[00:15:33] However, now we have people that have out-of-body experiences that leave their body, get people to have near death experiences that go up and see their grandmother or their mother or whoever. And they come back in and they know what it's like to have been there. And they're not afraid of death anymore.
[00:15:50] Right. So knowing that you have two bodies, I think is very important. Also knowing that we live in this metaphysical system of, we have three realities. So first is the sensory reality where you and I are talking now. Okay. And we made this date and we're here. The second reason. Is the clairvoyant reality where things like meditation, telepathy, premonitions, different types of spiritual things happen to you.
[00:16:24] The third is what I call the trans psychic reality, which is where miracles happen, where people are cured from cancer, or you pray and, you know, and maybe a, a spirit breath goes through you, that kind of thing. So there's those three different realities. William James, and call y'all both believed they are our spiritual and psychological ancestors that we lived in many reality, these three realities.
[00:16:51] Okay. So then how would an average person go from the sensory reality into the clairvoyant reality? Right. Okay. Okay. How does the person get there from one to the other? So is a couple of ways. So you could go to an astrologer, you can go to a numerologist, you could go to a tarot reader to an inchi ringer reader.
[00:17:13] You could go to a psychic or a medium. Now you make that appointment in the sensory reality. You're usually going for one of these readings, because you'll have a question or you'll have a plant. I have a story. Yes. Okay, good. So you go, and it seems like the information is coming from the sensory reality, whereas actually all of these people are pulling from the clairvoyant reality or the paranormal from your aunt, from your unconscious to mediums unconsciously, the card readers, unconscious you're unconscious, and you get possibilities that you would never have thought of.
[00:17:51] If you hadn't made this appointment and gone. And usually people leave knowing something that they didn't know before and they're happier and they don't know why they're happier necessarily when they leave there. But in the clairvoyant reality, you are really in the now in right here, the sensory reality is the past present and future.
[00:18:13] And all of us can see what's going on in the sensory reality in the clairvoyant reality. Usually only one person sees or feels okay. And usually you get the feelings of, you know, I know I've gone to, you know, a psychic and I'll be driving home and I'll be thinking, Karen, you don't know that half of what she says is going to come true.
[00:18:38] Why do you feel so good? But I do. I feel good. I'm happy. You know, I'm my question has been here. And I really have come up with different possibilities in my life as a result of having these many types of readings. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah.
[00:18:56] Shortly after my mom died now I had, I was raised Jewish, but in a very traditional sort of, I don't want to say traditional, but sort of we, we celebrated holidays and we were all together, but we, we weren't particularly religious.
[00:19:11] And from the time, I guess from the mid eighties on, we really didn't belong to any, any particular synagogue. So we weren't particularly devout. Let's just put it that way. But my own sense of my own cosmology was really more leaning towards like a hard science atheist, you know, like you die, you're put in a box, that's the end of it.
[00:19:33] I wasn't really comfortable with that, but I wasn't really comfortable thinking about. God in the way that my grandfather imagined him to be a wizard old bearded guy with a gigantic tablet up in the heavens that worked for him, didn't work for me anyway. So fast forward a bunch of years now, my mother died and I was having trouble coming to terms with the grief of that.
[00:19:56] For many reasons, and I was on my way driving to school one day and out of the blue, I thought I need to call a psychic and this was not something I would've ever, ever thought to do before. And I got to school and the minute I had five free minutes, I Googled long island psychics. And I found this woman named Dawn Jo Lee, right in Smithtown, which is not that far from me.
[00:20:23] And I liked her webpage and I liked her face on her webpage. She looked like somebody, my mom would have been friends with and I called her office to make an appointment. And her receptionist said, normally we book 6, 7, 8 weeks in advance, but I have an opening for tonight at five 30. Do you want to come?
[00:20:44] Sure. Synchronicity. Right. So she knew my first name was Marcy. She knew nothing else. She had my phone number and I said, I'll see you at five 30 and I'm going to pay cash. And I walk in and Dawn herself opens the door. Hi, Marcy, how are you? I'm so glad to see you, your mom and your grandma already here, come inside and chat with us.
[00:21:06] And I was like, what the hell are you talking about? So I walk in and I sit down and she's got all these like fuzzy, velvet, Elvis posters on the wall. She's a big Elvis fan. And she explains her process. And I sat down on the couch and there is a two big tissue box in front of me. And within a second, she starts talking to my mom and she's like, stop yelling at me.
[00:21:30] I can hear you. You know, she's like, your mom just recently died. Didn't she? Because the recently dead always shout. Cause they don't think that they can be heard. Okay. So from this I said, nothing. She knew that I was divorced. She knew that I had a son who was into science and math. She knew that I had a daughter who was an artist.
[00:21:48] She knew, why I got divorced. She knew that my mom and I had had a bad falling out over my mother's drug addiction. And that I had cut my mother out of our lives at 18 months before my mother died so that I could not only save myself from that toxicity, but stop the intergeneration ality of the mental illness and the addiction from affecting my kids because she started terrifying them with her drug addicted brain.
[00:22:18] And I felt when she died, not only sad that my mother was dead, but terribly guilty. I hadn't been with her or that I had walked out on her and like all the stuff you're right. And, and so Dawn said, your mom wants you to know that you were right to do what you did, that she wouldn't have had the courage to do what you, what you did.
[00:22:42] And you were a better mother than she ever could be. That she, sorry, she wasn't everything that you needed, but that you need to let go of the guilt and, and be proud of yourself for being the mom that you are. And then she says, she looks at me and she says, does that make sense to you? And I'm balling tears and snot everywhere, like ugly, crying all over.
[00:23:00] And it was exactly what I needed to hear. Right. And there was no way, like people say, oh, you know, she's, she's a fraud, but she's not, there was no way you could have Googled that. I Google myself regularly just to see what my digital footprint is. And none of that information is there. She, you know, heard stuff.
[00:23:23] She, my grandmother was talking and my mom was talking and she knew, she just knew stuff. Lots of details of stuff that would be impossible for her to know. And I left there feeling happier and calmer and more relaxed and more at peace than I had felt in years, years. And now it was, it was absolutely amazing.
[00:23:48] And then afterward, I guess, cause I was more in tuned. I realized that she was in my house. I was alone. It was a Sunday night. My kids were with their dad and the toilet on the second floor of my house. And my mom had Crohn's disease in her earthly life. So if there's one household sound that I would associate with my mom, it's a toilet flushing, sorry, it's totally the truth.
[00:24:16] And I heard the toilet flush and I went and gee, that's interesting. And I felt like this heat just go down the stairs around the room, through me and out the back door of the house. And I was like, oh, hi mom, nice of you to stay. You know? And, and I kept having experiences like that and dreams where I would actually feel the hair on the back of my neck moving.
[00:24:40] I would feel her kiss the back of my neck, the way she used to, because she was a little taller than I am. And and I just knew she was there. I never actually physically saw her, but I felt her. I smelled her perfume. I knew she was there and it was always so insanely comforting. And, and I sometimes, I mean, you're the only one of the only people who've looked at me and said, yes, of course this is true.
[00:25:01] This is what you've said, but most people think I'm crazy. Well, yeah, that's what I hope to want to teach that this is all, this is really a part of life. And especially when you've lost someone and most people have guilt for about something when they lose a loved one or, you know, I couldn't help them unsaid.
[00:25:21] Yeah. I couldn't help them enough and all that. So if we just knew that there was life everlasting, which most religions say there is, but they don't explain that a spiritualism was a religion. It still is a religion about 1% of Americans are spiritualist now, but in the 1850s to 1900, like 20% of the population were spiritualist because they would go to St.
[00:25:45] Francis. And because it was. The civil war, you know, everybody lost somebody and they were trying to find their loved ones. So, they did a lot. We have a lot of research from then and a lot of stories and things like what happened to you? Like mom kind of walking through you, are you walking through her?
[00:26:01] There happens to be a new show on CBS on Thursday nights. I think it's nine o'clock it's called ghosts. It is, oh, I watched it. It's only been on two weeks. So I watched it last week in my daughter's house in Nevada, where I was once on vacation, crazy. I thought, oh my God, they made it crazy. There's too many ghosts in my opinion.
[00:26:24] But we'll all as we watch it, we'll all get to know each ghost. And this young couple have she has inherited this house and she wants to make a bed and breakfast out of it. And she can't see the ghost until in the first session, she falls down two flights of stairs and hits her head. And is.
[00:26:40] And then when she comes back, which happens if you hit your head, she can see the ghosts. And so the second story is how attached. She's already just say this to my listeners. Don't go out and hit your head, hit yourself. Right. But it's a, it's a funny story. I understand it's from a British film and that in Britain, there is a story of like that.
[00:27:03] For instance, they have a caved me on, we have a Viking guy but they have similar characters. So they've taken it, I think, from the British comedy. And of course in Britain, they have spiritualist churches and people do go and, and, you know, and get receive messages. Huh? But in the clairvoyant reality, this happens.
[00:27:23] And your loved ones want to talk to you, your mom wanted you to know. Yeah, I I'm firm believer that she's the one who planted the idea of talking to that psychic turned me onto her page or webpage and cleared her calendar for me. I have a very clear line that she was desperate to, to contact me. And this was the only way I was going to listen.
[00:27:46] That's where maybe I was having dreams before that. I wasn't remembering, I don't know, because after my meeting with the, with Don the psychic I was having like, subsequently like a lot of dreams that she was in. And then a dream of my grandfather who had pre-deceased my mom by about nine years, I had never had a dream about my grandfather before.
[00:28:06] And right. And he, he was just watching the Yankee. On a robbery or TV in a room with a ceiling fan and lots of like Cedar colored paneling on the wall. And he grabbed my hand as I walked into the room and I could feel his hand the exact way his skin felt. He always had the softest hands and I, I felt, and, and he just walked me around him and sat me down on his left.
[00:28:36] No, yeah, his left. And we held hands and watch this like 1970 something janky game. And we said nothing. And I was just infused with this overwhelming sense of wellbeing and peace and love. And I was all I needed. I'm tearing up to thinking about it. It was just, it was extraordinary. And that's a spiritual experience.
[00:29:02] Yeah. Yeah, and they happen to 40 to 50% of the population in the United States and great Britain. But a lot of people don't talk about them for the very reason that you said, people think I'm crazy. Yeah. I wrote about them in my book because it is, it is part of my, my makeup now, you know, and I'm no longer an atheist.
[00:29:23] I don't exactly know what my own cosmology looks like if I was to describe it, I don't really know, but I do know there's life after death. I do know that the purpose that we're here on this earth is to find love and give love. And that's probably just about it. And I think that that's enough. And, yeah, so it's amazing.
[00:29:45] Around the same time I found a book called proof of heaven, which is, was written by a neurosurgeon in Virginia. I think his name is Eben Alexander and yeah. Evan. Oh, Evan. Yeah. Yeah. So, so he, you know, the book, so he, I, so he had. Bacterial meningitis and was in a coma. And, you know, the, the part of his brain that was responsible for feeling and all of that was, was offline.
[00:30:11] They weren't sure he was gonna make it. He was in a coma for a week and he experienced heaven and love and, and like oneness with the universe. And in a way that was just so proactively described and so beautifully profound. And, and the, the girl who met him, this is just Mont blows my mind. But the girl who met him at the pearly gates, so to speak who he didn't know, but who clearly knew him, showed him, you know, her, his, his tour guide, this is heaven, so to speak.
[00:30:45] And I don't think words were expressed. It was all just in a language far beyond our comprehension. And then when he woke up and he was recuperating, he was looking through photo albums with his sister and he sees a picture. And his mother's photo album of the girl he saw up in heaven. And it was actually a deceased older sister of his who had died in childhood who hurt his mother.
[00:31:12] Never told him about it cause he was adopted. Oh, without what it was. I missed. Yeah. That's a great story for adoption people. Because he was adopted and he knew the adoption agency and he wanted to meet his natural parents and they kept stalling and that that sister had died. And then when they finally met him, they had a whole you know, an album that showed and I'm getting chills now.
[00:31:38] So yeah, with somebody here. Yeah, that's a great story. Totally changed that, you know, all of that, that book and, and the, the psychic, it all happened within a few weeks in my life. Like right after my mom died, like I kept feeling like all of these pieces were coming together, you know, songs that were meaningful to me and my mom would just suddenly start playing on the radio.
[00:32:08] The song I sang in her wedding just sort of showed up out of nowhere. You know, it's just amazing to me. I mean, I work with a medium in England, occasionally, and she says that the spirits pick the songs and it makes sense because sometimes I've had clients who, you know, after their loved one dies, you know, I walked into Macy's and they're playing this and I walked into Starbucks and they're playing the same song.
[00:32:34] And it's, it's my mother's favorite song. Right. Right. And so I do believe that they are, they do try to reach you and they usually try to reach you through, through electricity. Yeah. Yeah. So that's how they do it. And mediums and psychics, ceiling fans in our house, suddenly my, my daughter and I will be talking about my mom and the ceiling fan.
[00:32:55] We'll go on that's right. And lights go on and off and all kinds of things that they can play with. Yeah. That's amazing. Amazing to me, but it approves, we have that, there's another, another world where spirits live and spirits are a people without physical bodies and they can't talk, but they can send you some thoughts.
[00:33:18] Yeah. Yep. And that's how they communicate. I remember gotta be two years ago, right before the whole pandemic thing occurred. It was on my mother. Anniversary the anniversary of her death. I happened to be giving blood and I don't know what it is about October 9th, but I just realized I gave blood again this year on the anniversary of her death.
[00:33:43] Weird. Okay. And I was sitting there, you know, with the thing in my arm and I was watching, they had news 12 on and they're across the screen where the words to the moon and back, and my mother always used to say, I love you to the moon and back pretty common thing, I suppose, for a mom to say, I say it to my kids too.
[00:34:03] And it happened to be, yes, a news show about. A space launch of something, right. Obviously, you know, I mean, I'm not an idiot to think that news 12 is broadcasting directly out of my mother's soul, but I happened to look up just as those words were flashing on the TV, right in front of me while I was giving blood on the day that she died, the anniversary of her death, rather while thinking about her, that can't be an accident.
[00:34:33] It's a synchronicity and Carl Young talked about synchronicities that were only important to you, right. Or me, and we get, and that's how they, they use a certain anniversaries to send us messages and certain numbers to send us messages. Interesting. Any kind of symbol just, you can see a license plate that has a message on it.
[00:34:55] You know, different, different letters in different numbers. And look for those because they really are meaningful coincidences, which young said were synchronicities, meaning they were more important than meaningful coincidences, but in America we understand meaningful coincidence is much better. Why do you think that is?
[00:35:15] It's just a term that we use because synchronicity is a union term and maybe people are getting more and more used to it, because they will talk about synchronicities, you know, especially if they've been in therapy for a while. Yeah. But he said pay attention to those he had a famous case where this woman was coming for therapy for about a year and a half and she wasn't doing much.
[00:35:36] He didn't think anyway, she came one day and she had this dream and she's so excited about this dream. And there was this black bug in the dream and he she's telling him all about it and he thought, wow, she's really excited today. This is good. And then it was June in Switzerland and it was hot. So he got up to open a window.
[00:35:55] And as he opens the window, this black bug flies in, on the carpet and she goes, that's the bug. It's a bug was in my dream right now. That would have been nice. Right. However, it was from Egypt and it was a scarab bug and it was alive. Why would it be in Switzerland? Just because it was now the scare of bug is, they call it a bug for survivors because it lives in camel dung, because that's the only shade there is in the desert. So, you know, they think that they're very smart bugs, right. They found the only shade there is. So anyway, he just told that story over and over again, like everybody has their own synchronicity.
[00:36:33] And he said after that, her therapy just moved. Okay. So was this like metaphorically for her that she was a survivor that she would find a way to be resilient and all that? Yeah. So I don't, I don't know that much about the story other than that story, but he said pay attention in your own life and in the life of your clients, because these things happen and they are, they are very meaningful.
[00:36:56] Interesting. So the moon thing is very meaningful to you. Yeah. I mean, I say it with my kids. I said my son, when he was little, cause he's a numbers guy added, 50 million times. So I love you to the moon and back 50 million times, that's just a thing we say, I mean, he's 23 and my daughter's 20. We still say it to each other all the time.
[00:37:17] So it hearkens back to my mom and you know, my, and the kids changed it to evolve their own thing. It's wow. So, so do you blend all of this kind of stuff together when you're talking to your, your patients? So you use all sorts of psychology and Paris psychology or whatever works for them, whatever works.
[00:37:42] Wow. Wow. Yeah. I, I think it, it can be extremely helpful. I mean, I know that my own psychotherapy would not have gone as well or as quickly, or I don't think I would have ever, I might not have ever learned to forgive myself. Had I not had that experience with the psychic, you know, carried that grief and that guilt around unnecessarily forever.
[00:38:11] Who knows, who knows. And William James, who is the father of American psychology, he studied mediums. Now, when you study William James and psych class, They don't talk about the mediumship necessarily. They talk about, he was father of American psychology. He wrote two books on psychology, all that's wonderful, but he studied mediums all the time.
[00:38:36] And he called the mental healers. He and his wife lost a son who was a toddler. And at that time the maids in the house would say, oh, we go to this medium, this psychic. So Mrs. James went and then she found this one, psychic Leanora Piper. And she said, she's really good. She talked about where our son is.
[00:38:54] I'd like you to come. So he goes, because he's lost his son. And that becomes his white Crow because she was a phenomenal medium. And they studied her for 20 some years. I mean, how long do you have to study a person to know that she's not a fraud, you know, but that, but that was the big deal then that there were so many fraudulent people.
[00:39:14] That's why really mediumship has gotten a bad. So you have to go to somebody that, you know, you, you believe in, I believe in go by word of mouth and then just see what happens for you because William James said the best way to know what happens in a medium, with a medium is to see one that makes sense.
[00:39:35] But how many people yourself, people will say, well, you know, my religion doesn't believe that. And my mother wouldn't let me go. And you know, well, someday maybe you'd like to go. Yeah. I tell the story in my class at least once a year. And and last, last year or the year before, I can't, I can't quite remember.
[00:39:52] I had one student of mine. Who was very interested. Her grandmother had died. There were some, some very recent, very tragic death. And she told, retold my story to her mother. And they went to see the same psychic I saw and plot relief and, and connection and peace in their family. And it was just like, you know, I had chills just thinking about it when she was telling me the story.
[00:40:15] It's pretty amazing. So, so how, how can, how can this knowledge of the three realities help us develop our own wellbeing, our own peace in our own lives? Well, I mean, I think, I know I behave better because I'm, I know I'm going to go up there someday and One of the things I've learned about the other side is like attracts.
[00:40:43] Like, so I want to be with people I really like, and I want to be with honest people and people who like to read and all that kind of stuff. So I try to be good. I try to be loving. and you know, Carl Young believe that the negative ghosts, cause there are ghosts that played tricks on people and he believed those were people, never one who never went to the light.
[00:41:04] And also that they were people that never really completed what they were supposed to complete here. So he believed he had a sole purpose and your job was to figure out what your sole purpose was and to live it. And you had to live this life to the best of your ability. So all of that, I think knowing that there is life after this one and that there's supposedly, Brian Weiss, who's from red bank, New Jersey, he wrote a book.
[00:41:32] He. Puts people under hypnosis and they go back to pass lives. Can you do this? Yeah, you can do that. I have heard about that pastor he's in Miami and he has a book, many lives, many masters. You might want to read that when it's his first book. And I think it's, it's the best one. And he has a woman who came from an alcoholic family who will comes in.
[00:41:56] And, he know he put her in hypnosis and told her to go back to the origin of the problem. Now she was afraid of elevators. She had all kinds of problems. Well, anyway, she goes back to another life. That was the origin of the problem. Wow. And, and so she tells him things and he writes everything down, even though this is weird.
[00:42:16] And I think she even speaks in another language. I don't know if that happened the first session, but anyway, she leaves and two weeks later she comes back and she comes in and she says, well, I don't know what we did last time, but I'm not afraid of elevators anymore. Anyway, it's a great book. So in a past life, she had a problem with an elevator and a tray.
[00:42:34] I think she was close to the cave and they set fire in there to all these people. Oh, that'll do it. So, so anyway, in Yulia in psychology, he also believed that we have more than one life, that it would take more than one life to develop a soul. Yeah. So I write about this in my third book, the psychology of the soul and the paranormal.
[00:42:56] I talked about my life and how I, you know, how I grew and I talk about psychology in the beginning and it has a lot of things in it. Not just about your astral body and, but it does have that at the end. But if you want to get connected to your soul purpose, I think it's, it's important to be able to know how to do that.
[00:43:15] So how do we do that? Well, let's see one of the ways, Freud believed there was Freud and young, right. And young, came out of college and he was made an assistant of a mental hospital, which has a big job for somebody right out of college.
[00:43:29] And he was reading Freud because Freud said, if you had people lay down, they told you more. And what do we do with these people that come in other than to keep them clean and give them tea? And you know, so anyway, Freud believed in your unconscious it was all the stuff that happened in your family and then anything about sex.
[00:43:48] So sex was a big deal about the unconscious. So when he and young got together, young would visit him because he had more money. He would travel. A young, said the unconscious has five layers. The first layer is what happened to you when you. Okay. Okay. The second layer is what happened to your parents and how did that affect you?
[00:44:09] Okay. The third layer is what happened to your ancestors. People. We don't even know, but we have their DNA. And he said you were given jobs to complete by these ancestors many times. So that genealogy was important to him. So he tried to get his clients and he did genealogy with them. Well, that makes sense.
[00:44:30] 'cause I've been healing myself by doing those exact same three steps. Going back to the good that's what I like about young. He makes sense. Yeah. The fourth layer is your culture or your country. How does that affect you? Okay. The fifth layer is yourself slash soul. So yourself, he believes is the part of you that really knows your possibilities.
[00:44:56] Now, the more, when you have a, he believes you have a crisis. Now he had a crisis. So he said at 40, how you handled this crisis would be to integrate your unconscious with your conscious and you would become a whole person. And as you do that, your soul and self come up and they tell you what you, what it is you want.
[00:45:16] Now that doesn't mean that it could just happen at 40, because now people can have a car accident, 18 changes their whole life. Right. So usually though it is some kind of crisis and also some kind of crisis that brings somebody into therapy. Can it happen multiple times? I mean, cause I can think of certain junctures of my life where that seemed to reach a crisis point and yes.
[00:45:38] And help me change paths. That's right. Because you're looking for answers then and you're, you're more willing to accept things. Right. Cause you're in crisis. Help me. Right. Right. So crisis is a good thing. It's not just the closing of a door. It's an opening of opportunity really is ability and hope.
[00:45:57] Yes. Yeah. So as you go through this, these stages of your unconscious and developing them by bringing up the complexes so accomplished, you would have a mother complex, the father complex and inferiority complex, all that down there. So like this little mountains down there, and as we talk, you know, we, we bring all that up and, and we grow in that way and we go out into the world and I always tell my clients, half a life is showing up.
[00:46:26] You're not going to get any help, stay in bed with the covers over your head. Nobody's knocking on your door, you got to show up and then you meet people and you go to a medium or whatever happens. You watch a TV show or you get out there in the world somehow. And, and that's, you know, really important to do.
[00:46:43] So I explain all that in, in my book on the soul, which I think, I don't know is chapter. Okay. Well, I will link all the books. I mean, the links to all of your books in the show notes. So they'll all be there also contacts and websites and everything else. I'm giving you a lot right now. You know, there's a lot that I'm it's a lot to be a total person.
[00:47:04] Yeah, it is. It is. It is. And I, I think that having a curious nature and asking questions, and like you said, going out and, and being in the world and meeting people makes a lot of connections and helps us build upon what we already know and fill in the gaps between, between the things that are missing or the things that we still have to hunt for to figure out what our mission is and to figure out what, what our purposes are.
[00:47:42] You know, and the vagus nerve is your 10th and longest nerve in your body. So comes in at the top of your head, goes down around the amygdala, which is fight flight or frozen goes down your spine into your heart then into your stomach. So when I first started studying the vagus nerve, it was the polyvagal theory by Stephen Porges, which explains that what Darwin called this, the pneumo gastric nerve in the 1780s or nineties, I think anyway, he said your, your stomach tells your brain.
[00:48:11] Danger danger and your heart rate goes up. So it was for panic and anxiety of my clients. Right. And if they could realize they have this nerve in their body and that they feel it in the gut-feel of, you know, say Freud had a famous case where a little boy was being funneled in appropriately in his father's lap, nobody's home, but he and his father, why is daddy doing this?
[00:48:32] Mommy's going to be mad. How come this is happening to me? And so we can't fight or flee. So all he freezes and all that fear and anger goes into. And so then something else happened in that case where a cat walked in the room. So he displaces all these feelings about his father onto a cat. And then he comes into my office at 45 and says, I don't know why, but I'm afraid of cats.
[00:48:55] So you have to help me. I don't have any memory of a cat ever hurting me, but you know, when I see a cat danger, danger tells my brain and my heart rate goes up and I panic. So how did you unravel that? So that story, well, I didn't, that was a, that's a Freudian story, but people come in, like that will come in like that.
[00:49:14] And they'll say, I have no memory right. Of what I'm afraid of. Right. But it is, it's like, post-traumatic stress. That's what it is. Right. So I, that's why this Vegas nerve is just for every day for us realizing, Hey, it's my nerve. And I've got to calm it down. So if I'm panicked by whatever happens, I have to start to breathe.
[00:49:37] So when you breathe, you breathe into the count of four and you breathe out for a longer out-breath. So we breathe into four and then 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, as far as you can go out, which isn't the normal way we breathe. So you have to, you have to practice that. And if you have any trouble going to sleep, practice that, because that calms this nerve down and the stomach tells the brain everything's okay, we're safe, we're safe.
[00:50:06] Right? That's the first thing you need to know with the vagus nerve. Then my spiritual part of the vagus nerve, where that is the passage from. Astro body and your soul to leave. That's like, well, number two or three, but the Vegas nerve, you really need to be able to calm down so that you can just have a happier life and thoughts are real things.
[00:50:28] So if you allow yourself to think anxious thoughts, you're going to be right. So it's the thought, you know, and then somebody say, well, my anxiety gets worse. No, you allow your anxiety to get worse. Right. So, so what kind of thoughts are we having that allows that? Because you're allowing it? Well, it doesn't feel like that.
[00:50:49] I know that, but if we start to change our thoughts, you'll start to realize you are allowing it. Yeah. Yesterday I had a moment very early in the morning when I first got to school and my heart rate was elevated and I started sweating and I was very upset and. I sat at my desk and I have this little fan and I had this fan on and I was just breathing.
[00:51:13] Like, there's nothing wrong. You're totally safe. Something triggered something, let it go. It was a thing. It's not a thing anymore. Let it go. And it worked. And my heart rate went down and I stopped sweating and the anxiety went away and I was completely fine. It took a few minutes, but I was completely fine.
[00:51:34] Yeah. So that's important just for the, the person that is listening and wants help with anxiety or panic. So does meditation and obviously mindfulness how to connect with this. Oh, sure. Do thing. The, the stress or the anxiety in the Vegas nerve. It's all, it's all, it's all connected. So anything you do to calm yourself down?
[00:51:58] That's excellent.
[00:52:03] Very cool. Okay. So getting back to what we started talking about, and the very beginning of this with the children of alcoholics, I do. What kind of advice do you have probably can take 20 years to impart, but two to any listeners who we have, who were the children of addicts or alcoholics? What kinds of I don't know, support advice. How do you, if you're just at the beginning of your healing journey, you're just sort of starting to figure out that it's up to you to unwind all of this and heal yourself, where do they begin? Where do we, where do we begin with that?
[00:52:45] Okay. Well, I think, I think a good place to begin is to learn that you were raised with three rules, don't talk don't trust and don't feel.
[00:52:53] Because you couldn't trust the parents cause they were not with it. Even the people that don't drink are usually affected by the, like, my mother was crazy. Cause my father was drunk again and she, you know, didn't have time for the kids. So don't trust, don't talk and don't feel so those write those down.
[00:53:10] Number one, you'd have to learn what, what am I feeling right now? I might not know. So we start with feeling words and then don't trust what you, you have to learn the kind of people you want to trust to be around and maybe take some, you know, kind of critical guilt ridden people out of your life.
[00:53:32] And so that you have good feelings about who you're with and, and you know, they help you have some self-esteem sure and guilt about eliminating the toxic people in your life. That's right. And, and learn to talk. Now that's kind of where the vagus nerve comes in, because if people are come from, you know, a house where there's addiction of some kind or mental health, you know, maybe one of their parents was schizophrenia or something.
[00:53:58] They. Because they learn not to go out to the world of trust. Right. And so how do we go out? Then we will join groups. You know, one of the best things of course, for children of alcoholics is to join a group, an Alanon group or a group for adult children from alcoholic families. Um, and, ACOA groups are wonderful.
[00:54:20] Now they have them online now because of COVID. But I think some of them are opening up so that you could really go and meet and some people say, well, I'd rather go online. Well, okay. So go online first and get used to being on a zoom call, you know, which one is some people and see what that's like, right.
[00:54:38] And, and listen, and try to take in and relate to the people that, that have the same problem that you have. And I love what bill Wilson said when he said to go to an AA meeting. If you were an alcoholic, there'll be people there who probably will be drinking because for an AA meeting, you'll only have to have the desire to stop.
[00:54:58] So some people go and they drink. So take like an at the meeting though. Well, sometimes they look drunk or they smell bad or whatever. So take what you need and leave the rest. He would say, so find somebody in that meeting or on that zoom thing that you, you can relate to leave all the negatives.
[00:55:16] Don't. Tell me about the negative. What did you find there that you could relate to? Okay. Makes sense. And then half a life is showing up. So when you show up, then, you know at a 12 step meeting meeting is great because do you want to help with the coffee? Do you want to help put the chairs? So they give you something to do, right?
[00:55:37] With all that nervous, awkward energy. Yeah. Wait. Right. And then when you're looking at people, don't look into their eyes. Cause that's very difficult. Look right here between, on your top of your forehead, right above your nose. And when you look at that and you talk to people it's not so difficult to talk.
[00:55:54] And they think you're looking at their eyes. Right. Cause it's right there. That's right, right, right. But, but realize you're not alone. And that's the biggest thing is to realize you're not alone in all of the crazy thoughts in your head that you have the internal monologue that you have, that you break yourself with everybody.
[00:56:13] It's the same thing. That's right. They do. Yup. So you have to stop doing that and maybe make an I am list. Okay. That's a good exercise. So you would, and it would take maybe months to make this list. So you put down the words of what I am, what now you can have a good list and a negative list, and I guarantee you, most people will give you the negative list first.
[00:56:38] Yeah. But no, it has to be a good list. And then start with that and start with somebody. You could finding somebody you could trust and maybe go to a meeting or just go to a meeting show up. And if you're not happy there leave, but at least walk in and see what happens. That's good advice. Good advice for pretty much anything, whether you're a child of an alcoholic or not.
[00:57:01] No, you and lots of people when I first started in the eighties when I went to that first conference of national conference, then I came back and, you know, there's 14 characteristics that you have coming from an alcoholic home. And people would come in after a while and say, Hey, I have those characteristics.
[00:57:19] And nobody in my family drank. Oh, good. So what happened in your family? So what we found out was that your emotional needs weren't met in this. Right. Because two people were busy about addiction, but maybe they were busy about religion or they just, they were going to be successful. So they didn't pay attention to you.
[00:57:38] Right. Building a business too busy, you know, years and years ago, I was a preschool teacher and I had one little girl. She was only three. And she was exhibiting all sorts of problems, problems, problematic behaviors. Right. When I contacted her mom about it, it turns out that she just had given birth to two special needs, identical twins and was spending 99% of her waking hours dealing with those twins and completely ignoring her three-year-old.
[00:58:06] And it was already evident that there was a problem. Yes. After our emotional needs weren't met. And that is, you know, the basis for most people that have problems in social situations. So you really need to get yourself out, maybe go to a church group or just walk with your name.
[00:58:25] Once a day or every other day, just try to do something with somebody else. And you'll start to feel. I mean, there are all sorts of art groups. You know I belong to a group called women sharing art right here on long island and we go on outings and we go look at art together. Although I usually can't because I'm teaching, but they go to art and we have exhibits and we create art and share them.
[00:58:46] And we have workshops and stuff and belong to a community choir. And it was just a bunch of random people who liked to sing. And we just got together and sing, you know, it didn't have to solve the world's problems or anything, but just being in a group with actual other three-dimensional live people near you, changes your whole outlook on life.
[00:59:07] You feel that positive energy, especially when you're creating something like music or art or something. For me, that's like lifeblood. I feel like that just as a resurgence of connection and love and hopefulness and all of that. So. And that's what most people need to be able to do that. Yeah. Yeah. So find something that interests you and just do it.
[00:59:35] Do it. I had a guest on a few, a few weeks ago Dr. Jesse was talking about this, that, that joining groups and volunteering, or being a part of a community creates compassion and empathy and wisdom within us that we need to bring meaning into our lives.
[00:59:55] Absolutely. And it, it all is all part of the lovely fabric of our lives,
[01:00:02] wow. Well, Karen, this was fabulous. I'm glad you enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. I'm glad. I'm glad. You know, I love doing this podcast. I feel like with each episode, I'm growing as a person and I'm learning so much and I'm so grateful for, for the whole process of this. And thanks, thankfully, if there's one positive thing that came out of this pandemic, it's that I discovered zoom.
[01:00:31] Yes. Cause this wouldn't be possible. You know, I have to have people into my house and ha or find a place, a studio, like, I don't know, even though how the logistics of this would be. Right. But I, I, you know, I've had podcast guests who live in, in Australia, I mean, right. France, Canada, you know, not going to happen otherwise, but right.
[01:00:52] Amazing. Well, this has been delightful. Thank you so much for your time. I will put all the links to all of your amazing things into the show notes. And so if you're not driving, you can scroll down and find all of it there. Thank you so much, Karen. This was wonderful. Well, you're entirely welcome.