Today, we dive deep into the journey of healing and resilience with Ann Cabano, a remarkable yoga instructor, filmmaker, and author.

One of the key takeaways from our conversation is the importance of giving oneself grace during the grieving process. Ann shares her personal experiences, including the tragic loss of her son to suicide, and how that event reshaped her understanding of life and healing.

We explore how loss can lead to profound personal transformations and the necessity of finding one's own path through grief, emphasizing that there is no right or wrong way to grieve.

Throughout the episode, Ann offers insights into her healing practices, including Reiki and yoga, and how they can serve as tools for others facing similar challenges.

Join us as we discuss the power of vulnerability, the journey of self-discovery, and the strength of the human spirit in overcoming life's hardest moments.

A Warrior’s Spirit can be found on all the major platforms at lnk.bio/daryl_praxis33

Be sure to like or subscribe so you never miss an episode!

Okay, There you go.

Hey.

Welcome back to another episode of A Warrior Spirit where we let the inner warrior shine in their light.

Today I have Ann Cabanano.

Cabanamo.

How do I pronounce that?

Cabana.

Cabano.

That was way off.

I have Ann.

I've known her as Anne.

Anne is a yoga instructor, She's a filmmaker, she's a.

An author, she's a speaker.

And to me, she's just an all around genuine, good heart and soul.

And I've been trying for almost 18 months to get her to come my show.

And I appreciate now that, now that the timing is right that you've agreed to do this.

So, an, thank you for joining me today.

I appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate your interest in having a conversation and your persistence in listening to whatever, you know, hit.

You have to get me here, so.

Well, I'm sorry about butchering the last name.

I've always just known you as An.

And so that's.

Okay.

You know what?

You actually pronounced it in a whole new way.

I haven't heard.

I've heard it every other way, so.

And it's fine because I answer to An.

Anyway.

Well, Anne, where did you grow up?

Oh, I. I.

Which part of my growing up, I was born in Michigan, and then I moved to Arizona when I was nine.

Okay.

So I feel like I did my growing up in Arizona, even though there's.

A big transition between the Midwest, Michigan, and.

And the desert of Arizona.

So what part of Arizona did your folks move to when you were nine?

Tempe.

Oh, Tempe.

And it was just.

It was my mom.

I've always.

Just had a mom.

I have a very.

There's a father out there somewhere.

He's just always been absent.

But my mom moved from Michigan.

I was born in Ann Arbor to Tempe, which is where I currently reside.

And I have been.

I've moved to a couple of cities, but I love Tempe.

It feels like my hometown.

So if you ask me where back home is, it will always be Tempe.

Yeah, it's a college town, but it still has kind of a smaller feel to it, you know?

Yeah, it's growing, right?

It's growing now.

But I agree, that's the vibe that Tempe has always had.

We'll see the impact of all this growth and the vibration of the city, but.

Yeah.

Well, I've known you for a while through a mutual friend.

I saw you do her photo shoot and.

And like I mentioned off camera, there's just an essence to you, that.

That is warm and drawing, you know, people to you.

And there's just kind of a vibe that, you know, isn't really easily articulated.

It's more of a feel.

And you just had this warm, inviting vibe and.

And, you know, it's been a pleasure to, you know, of watch you along the last 10 years now as you've grown, you're very artistic, very into the arts, very into the energy and the healing.

What got you into that path?

It's not a path a lot of people consciously choose.

It kind of chooses them.

That's.

You said it right there.

I mean, I.

When.

So when I was younger, I used to do this thing and like my fam.

Someone would have a headache or something would be happening in their body and they would say, come and take this away.

And so as, you know, a child into adulthood, I would take it away, like physically, energetically take it away.

And what's interesting is as a result of that, I feel I developed lumps in my breasts.

So I had to have lumps removed from my breasts.

I didn't have cancer.

They were non cancerous, thank goodness.

But I realized that I.

Well, I realized there must be a technique to do this without like injuring myself.

And I was working in hospice at the time.

I do a lot of different things.

If you ask me what I do, I am not going to be able to answer that question.

I am.

What.

What is it?

A multi.

Multi preneur.

Yeah, it's a way that I've harnessed my ADHD brain.

But I've been able to complete things in different directions.

So I'm grateful for that.

But I was working in hospice and this woman, her name is Joyce, was Joyce, still is Joyce in the spirit world.

And she.

I was rubbing lotion on her leg and she thanked me for touching her because people were afraid to touch her because she was dying.

You know, she had liver and colon cancer and.

And it becomes this big thing, you know, where people are afraid of that.

So that propelled me to sign up for a massage school because I thought, I'm going to touch people who don't get touched.

Because touch is everything.

It's healing, you know, it's.

It releases hormones in the body.

And when I was at the school, I signed up, which was actually the Southwest Institute of Healing Arts in Tempe, my favorite city.

I noticed they had Reiki training and I only knew it was called Reiki because at another person's house I was taking care of.

His name was Odyssey.

He had progressive gangrene on his foot.

And one day I was doing what I call praying over it because as it progressed, it was very painful for him and there's nothing you can really do.

And I was praying over him how I pray.

And his daughter came in and she said, oh, that's so nice.

An.

It's nice of you to do Raiki.

And there, therein lies my journey to becoming, you know, officially trained.

And now I feel blessed because I'm trained.

I've taken tons and tons of training.

I'm trained in three, maybe four now because I took another training Saturday.

But I've been teaching reiki for over 20 years now.

That's awesome.

My, my wife, decades ago went to a medium, or not a medium, but a psychic.

And the lady told her, you have healing hands.

And I see you doing healing with your hands.

You're going to be doing Reiki.

And my wife had never heard a Reiki ever.

And so she, she tells the story that she walked out of there with her friend and, you know, her friend's like, well, how'd it go with you?

And she's like, that lady doesn't know anything.

She's, you know, talking about my healing hands and Reiki and blah, blah, blah.

And then fast forward, you know, 15 years from that time, my wife actually went to Sweeha, where you went, got Reiki certified, and now does Reiki healing for others.

So, you know, I, I think the chooses some and, and others just kind of stumble into it.

And it's such a beautiful thing because we're all energy and it's a gift that you are able to give, you know, those that you're, that you're helping.

It's interesting to me that you went into hospice because that's, again, shows me your give, your giver's heart.

Because that's not an industry that is full of joy and happiness.

And it takes a certain resilience to, to be in that environment all the time.

What led you in that direction?

Well, I, you know, like how Reiki chooses you.

I agree.

You don't choose it.

I, I always tell my students, I don't do Reiki.

Reiki does me.

And I feel like I have, I've always had this gene.

I don't, it's just like in my physical makeup, I was around my grandparents a lot.

They did, they helped in my great grandparents, actually, and they helped in raising me because, like I said, my mom's, you know, she was a young pregnant woman way back in the day.

And, you know, and so my Grandparents were always around.

And I observed so much as a child, watching my elderly grandparents work, you know, work with medication and have reactions and all the ailments and not being able to walk or, you know, all kinds of things.

And I don't know if, as far as the hard wiring of my brain, that contributed to it, but I do know about myself, is that I've always been able to show up to really hard.

Hard things that.

And do really hard things within, you know, the scenarios.

And so I just felt like I can do this.

Like, you know, it started with someone wanted to know if I would come and be with her parents because both her parents were in hospice.

And I ended up being with them for five years.

In hospice.

In hospice.

Wow.

And they.

They were.

He.

He was French and Greek and she was French and Hispanic.

And the reason I share that is because the.

The cultural difference in their home was amazing.

Like, I just felt like I was at home.

And anyway, I could go off on that tangent, but I just know that I could show up for Otis, say I could show up for Renee, I could show up for Joyce.

And.

And I did.

And so I didn't actually.

I worked with hospice patients, but I didn't actually work in hospice.

And I think that's me, because I don't want to follow rules.

I just want to love how.

I want to love, do what I know how to do and not worry about all of that.

And as a matter of fact, I. I recently just worked with another hospice patient until the end.

That was just in the month of June.

He passed.

So I don't know.

I. I can do it.

I know I can do is not joyful.

It is hard.

And I think I am able to dissociate in some ways.

Maybe that's the benefit.

Yeah, that's.

That's a.

Like, my wife is very empathic, and so she feels a lot of the world around her.

And that's something I've really had to work with her on, is to be of the observer, not the absorber.

Because she takes on so much of everything around her, and she's very emotional about a lot of it.

And so setting those boundaries and those barriers are a huge, you know, necessity for any person who's.

Whether they're in hospice, nursing, animal care, whatever.

You have to be able to set those personal boundaries so it doesn't impact you while you're helping others.

What got you into filmmaking?

Because you're very eclectic.

You're very, you know, diverse in the arts.

Somaking.

I.

So I Got into filmmaking.

It's, it's all sort of been an organic process really.

Again, when my, when my children were young, I filmed them, like, I just like obsessed over my kids.

I filmed them.

I just was constantly filming, filming, filming.

And so I had been familiar with the idea of trying to capture how I saw the world with video.

You know, I wasn't doing anything fancy or anything.

And then later on, as I worked in the mind body wellness field, I.

And I worked with so many, so many students, so many clients, just so many people supporting their process.

And I just, at one point I had this desire to show the world, whatever that meant, how I was seeing the world so that they can feel more empowered or learn more, more tools for healing or coping skills or be inspired or something.

And so that's really what led me into that world.

And you know, very mental health, mind, body, spirit, connection, focus.

And so there is a thread in everything I do.

Even though it seems like it's all over the place, it all leads back to like trying to support people some way or another.

And you, you have a film out on Amazon.

What, what's the name of the film?

I.

And what's the essence of it?

I know Mind, Body, Soul.

But yeah, so the, the film that really made a lot of traction.

Bless what a Blessing started out sort of as a training video for therapists who work with complex trauma, complex PTSD and dissociative identity disorder.

That's what we were focusing on.

And the film is about a woman named Maddie.

And Maddie, in essence was bred.

We'll just say that because that's accurate to be abused.

So she was raised in a cult, but she experienced horrific, horrific abuse.

And one of her therapists called it, you know, what, what was your term?

It's so, it's really powerful term.

It has to do with the individuals who suffered at Auschwitz and you know, in the Holocaust.

She experienced Holocaust level abuse.

And that's another interesting side note because we, we actually met a woman who is a Holocaust survivor and it was just profoundly moving.

But I didn't want to focus on what I would call trauma porn.

I'm not into like talking about all of the horrific things.

I'm into talking about what do you do now?

Because, you know, if, if someone is trafficked and then they're, you know, helped out of that, they escape from that.

People think, okay, they've escaped, everything is good.

But that like our mental health, like, it's, it's a process to heal and to find your path of healing and it's not the same for everybody at all.

And so this film really talks about her healing journey and the different methodologies she used, which were yoga and art therapy, along with cognitive therapy, of course, and equine therapy.

And what we do is really break down the biology of the trauma in the body and then.

And then apply the.

The holistic tool to it and to really explain, you know, so there's a little bit like, she did this, and as a result, she did this.

Like, that's the essence of it.

The film is called the Box out of the Impossible because she was kept in a box in.

In the ground.

Wow.

And, you know, even that, like, laying folded over in this box for thinking she's just gonna die there.

And then as an adult, utilizing yoga therapy to retrain her body, the safety of opening up and, you know, connecting physically to her body.

So that's what it's about.

So it's not.

It's a documentary.

It's not a traditional format of a documentary, but it's about content.

It's really about the content.

And.

And I think that anyone can feel hope or be inspired to get help, regardless if you've gone through something as horrible as that.

Well, we'll definitely drop a link to that film because, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of viewers out there who would love to be able to see, you know, this beautiful journey to healing, which is, you know, kind of what this program is about.

The.

The healing journey.

I like the term you use.

Trauma porn.

You know, we all have our stuff, but the essence of this show isn't the stuff.

It's where are you after the stuff and how did you get there?

You know, helping others to get there as well.

Quick side question.

The pendant on your.

On your neck, the lightning bolt, does that have major significance?

Yes.

Okay.

To me.

So there's a non traditional Raiki symbol called raku.

Okay.

And that's what this.

It's a lightning bolt.

And that's what this signifies to me.

And I purposefully purchased this to lay on my heart because my heart has had enough.

And.

And so raku is really about grounding energy, first of all, and separating energies specifically.

And so, like, if you.

If you are around me a lot, I always make this joke.

I'm all, bye.

Because it's a habit I form to separate energy.

You know, what's yours is yours and what's mine is mine.

Because, like your wife, when you absorb instead of absorb, right, you can become ill.

They can.

I mean, it's it can physically manifest in your body.

So you have to have a lot of tools.

And so that's what this is specifically for me.

I like the symbolism of that.

Speaking of, you know, hardships, and I don't want to do, you know, trauma porn, but you suffered the loss of.

Of a child, which nobody should have to do in any shape or form.

How long ago was that for you?

Because you don't ever remember the exact date.

Yeah, I lost my son.

And I know that from a parental standpoint, that had a profound effect for you, took you on a really mental decline.

Can you express some of what you went through and how you worked your way out of it, especially someone who is in the mental health field?

Yes, I sort of.

And I. I think that a lot of people can relate to this, whether you lost a child or someone really close to you that impacted you deeply by their loss.

But there's a level two, there's a shock loss that's very traumatic.

And so at that exact moment, I was in Boise, Idaho, on location, and we are in the middle of filming the largest funded film I've worked on to date.

So we had a huge budget.

We had, you know, we were almost all the way through the week.

We had one more day of filming, and we had just finished the day.

And I got a phone call.

And I got a phone call.

Let's leave it at that.

Because I really don't.

It's like, super, I will start crying.

But I divide my life now into what I call before land and after land.

Because I was this mental health advocate in the world.

I mean, I put on huge conferences.

I put on conferences about suicide.

I put on conferences about bullying.

I put on, like, homelessness.

Like, we talked about all the hard stuff.

I had a whole film festival conference that was about healing from trauma.

And this was my field.

This was my field.

And I like, in the mind, body, spirit world, sometimes they want to tell you that you're never broken.

But let me tell you, I broke.

I broke.

And it was during COVID And so it this, like, maybe someday I'll tell in maybe a written form the struggles I went through, even just getting home.

But it was devastating.

Just devastating, as you can imagine.

But I'm very close to my children.

I've always been very close, very cultivated.

You know what I thought was a connection.

And, you know, you and I were talking earlier, and one of the things that my.

My breakdown, right.

So I stopped everything.

I stopped that film, which is still sitting on the shelf, because, honestly, I've been working up my courage to pick that back up.

And I really, like, don't owe anyone an explanation about what that means that's involved in that film, but that's just really where I'm at.

So.

I felt broken.

I felt.

I didn't know who I was.

I felt like everything I had done was just a big lie.

I felt like, full of.

I don't.

I don't know if.

Yeah, say it.

Yeah, full of.

I felt like I.

Everything.

Every message I had ever done was just full of shit.

And I felt extreme, like imposter syndrome, full of guilt, full of shame, like a failure.

Every negative thing you could possibly feel about yourself, I experienced.

And that was new for me because I've navigated the.

The world in this vibration of love.

And then I myself had suicidal ideations for the first time in my life as a result of that.

The impact is unbelievable.

And then I had to focus on my.

My girls because, you know, obviously they're impacted too.

Like I said, we.

We were the Wad family.

That was our nickname, the Wad family, because we were always in a wad.

And so it's more than like losing a leg or more than losing an arm.

It's like your entire life burns to the ground, and then you're standing there going, you know, what's happening in my body?

And so I lost friends because I think when big, huge stuff like this happens, everyone scatters.

People don't have the.

The coping skills to talk about the elephant in the room.

That's how I felt.

The elephant in the room.

The woman who lost her child to suicide, like the big fat elephant in the room.

And people don't know how to be when you're.

When you have grief in general, people don't know how to show up to that.

And so, first of all, I gave myself a lot of space, and I did not.

I never explained myself.

And I thought, well, at the end of this, we'll see who's still around.

And I do have some people still around.

Yep.

You know, well, it's.

As I was mentioning when we were talking about this earlier, you know, the.

The speech I recently gave, you know, it's.

It's about that hope and.

And finding a way out.

And some people, you know, don't find a way out.

But what happens to those that are left behind?

Because this is just my opinion and observer of my 59 years on this planet.

People are so not willing to be authentic.

That when tragedy strikes, they don't know how to respond in an authentic way because they haven't been authentic leading up to that.

And the other thing that I find that happens is that people have their own timetable on what that grief should look like or how long it should go on.

And they want to tell people, just get over it, you know, move on.

Well, that's not how grief works.

You know, I'm not sure that some grief ever leaves us and that we ever get over it.

It's managing it and moving forward, but it's different than just get over it.

And some people, I think are really.

And I've experienced this because my wife of her own illness, so I'm only coming at.

From.

From.

You know, she's been on her deathbed a couple times and all of her friends scattered too.

Similar.

Similar thing.

They.

They don't know how to just be a friend when you're not happy and joyful and you're, you know, happy.

Go lucky self.

They don't know how to sit with people who are in pain and are going through something horrific.

I'm so sorry.

No, that's okay.

They don't.

They don't understand how to just be a friend.

Like, sometimes you don't need to really say or do anything.

You just need to be with that person, you know, and be there fully present.

Right.

So she had a moment there.

We'll.

We're okay.

This is called the moving of energy.

Yeah.

In action.

Yeah.

And I recognize it.

So that's.

That's kind of, you know, if more people lived an authentic life, they would know how to be in those authentic moments and is like a heartbeat up and down.

If it's just level, then it's flatlined.

It need.

It needs those.

Those balances, the up and the down.

And people know how to be around you when you're up.

They don't know how to be around you when you're down.

And.

And we need more people who can authentically just sit with someone and.

And let them be where they are as they move through it on their own.

Yep.

I don't mean to screw up the timing of your thing.

Can I have one second to go grab a cough drop?

Yeah, let me.

I'll just pause this real quick and then we'll go ahead.

It's okay.

We just took a pause to clear some energy and move forward.

But do you.

Is that kind of what you felt during that?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I. I think my biggest lessons in life come from my own self awareness around what has happened.

And I've always called myself obnoxiously self aware, you know.

And so in this process, okay, energetically, I'm such an energy being.

I think this is actually divine in this conversation to, to happen because we have this idea that we have to be so freaking poised and pretend like stuff is not energetically or biologically happening in our body.

And it does.

Like this is a hard conversation.

Of course I'm choking.

Hello.

You know what I learned because I didn't understand what was happening with myself besides having a loss.

I didn't feel like, like that sounded really, like I was minimizing it.

But I didn't understand like cognitively what was happening because I couldn't think, I couldn't connect.

And you're, and you know, we started this conversation with me talking about being this, you know, my ADHD brain, like I am always in 50 million direction and I've learned to harness that.

And all of a sudden I couldn't even go in one direction with one thought.

And I thought my brain was broken.

I really, really thought my brain was broken.

And then I have the pressure of everyone externally expecting me to show up as who I was, not realizing I'm not that person anymore.

I mean, I am in essence, but I'm not.

And I, I just became really passionate.

This is how I got, you know, to the point to even have a semi clear conversation with you is understanding grief specifically.

I started researching grief specifically and this has become my platform now is grief and trauma.

And I will only show up authentically.

I will never pretend like I'm a okay if I'm not a okay.

Like you'll see me, I'll tell you, I'll cough, I'll choke.

I'll get a cough drop and suck on it while I'm talking to you.

Because what I learned, and I don't know if you know this, but do you know when our body goes through a loss or a perceived loss because our body can't tell the difference.

When we go through, like if someone's dying in hospice, there's a preemptive loss.

If your wife is going through what she's going through, there's a preemptive loss that's happening.

There's a loss of how life is, how we know it.

If there's a shock factor to it, it increases this.

But when you experience grief, we, we.

I'm going to pause the story for a second.

I'm going to tell you when I was giving that talk the other day to this room full of people and I, I asked the entire audience who's experienced grief, and everyone in the room raised their hand because, hello, that's what we have in common besides the heartbeat in our chest.

Right.

When we experience grief, our body swells.

Physically, it swells.

And when you have a swelling in the body, there's an energetic response to that as well.

So you, your cognitive functioning goes down because your brain is swelling, your blood vessels get constricted, everything in your system gets constricted.

You, you are at risk for heart disease or heart attack or heart, you know, there's, I don't know the technical term for it, the medical term, but you can die of heartbreak.

It's broken heart syndrome.

Wow.

And it looks similar to a heart attack, but it's specific to sudden loss.

Wow.

That's broken heart syndrome.

And that should tell you something about that.

Mind, body, spirit connection.

So our body swells, it's moving slow, we're thinking slow.

We cannot maintain the same rate.

And this happens biologically for approximately six months.

Wow.

So you're fighting against your body, protecting itself.

Right.

So when it's like, take two days off after the loss of your son and come on back and let's get to work, you're not going to be the same.

That's the first thing I learned about grief.

And that there's a whole, I teach a whole class on it because.

And it's, it's my integrative Reiki that I've developed a whole integrative reiki program that's focused on grief and trauma, period.

And we, we go deep.

But the second thing that happens in traumatic loss, sudden loss, is you get a mark on your DNA.

There's a stain that happens on your DNA strand.

And that is why you feel different, because you are different.

Your DNA has physically and biologically been changed.

Wow.

Right.

Why don't we talk?

I just want to know why we don't talk about, like, it's biology.

It's science.

It's like our body.

This isn't woo woo.

It's not mind, body, spirit, hol.

It's just a fact, Jack.

Right.

So when I learned about this, I started understanding what was going on with me.

You know, I'm like, okay.

And the other thing, the other part of this is, you know, there's fascia in our body, and fascia wraps all of our muscles and all of our tissues and holds everything together in our system.

And in fascia, there are actually neurological tissues.

There are, there are brain Cells and our fascia.

And so when something traumatic happens in our life, we feel it, we don't want to feel it again.

We store it away and our, we store the information away.

This is how our body works.

And then when you experience this constriction of loss, it squeezes all these things out of these corners of our body.

Which is why any time like if you go through a car accident or you get fired from a job, or you go through a divorce and you're experiencing something traumatic in your system, whether your brain recognizes it or not, this is why all your past memories start coming up.

Because they've been stored away, but your body's squeezing it out.

That's so fascinating.

And I'm huge into the psychology and the DNA and stuff.

That's why, you know, I follow Joe Dispenza a lot because Dr. Joe connects the science of what's going on with the psychology of what's going on.

And you know, to the outside world it sounds like woo, but he's a neuroscientist who has really done the science on this and it's really fascinating.

And you think back to all the traumas we experience in our life and how many markers that creates and how much change and most of us, you know, do this, you know, I'm fine, I'm good.

I got it handled.

You know, I, I, I see you, but I'm going to set you aside.

And we never really deal with it and we never really release it.

I've experienced the beauty of a trauma coach who, she calls it issues in our tissues, which is exactly what you were just talking about.

And she, through Thai massage and, and some other modalities, goes in and physically releases that from our body.

And I've, I've seen it firsthand on myself and, and I've watched as she's done it for others and to see the physical movement and tremors and you know, it's like a shockwave of energy that just suddenly releases from your body and there is a before and after, who you were and who you are.

And it's just amazing to, to watch.

So what tools or techniques did you use to help move forward?

I won't say overcome because you, like I said, we never really truly get, get over it.

But to move forward to where you could start functioning again and be a mother to your other children and be a productive person in, in life again.

What tools did you use to, to help move past the sitting with it to moving forward with it?

Yeah, I, so speaking about the Modalities that you work through.

You know, Reiki is just my language, and it's just one language of healing, you know, and so that's the language that I began to speak to myself the most.

But, you know, like I said, it's not.

It's different for everyone.

So Reiki might be part of your thing or not at all.

Thai massage might be part of your thing or not at all.

The.

The biggest thing I gave myself was grace.

I gave myself grace to find my way.

That was.

That's my very first.

Very first joke, because I had it.

I had a huge conversation with Spirit.

You know, I had it coming away from Spirit.

I. I had a whole discussion with Gus, right?

God, universe, spirit, because.

And it wasn't kind like, you know,.

Yeah,.

So there's that piece.

I had to give myself grace to be who I was in each moment.

A friend of mine came to my son's.

There's two parts.

There was the service at the funeral home, and then we had.

We shared food and showed a video.

So she met me outside of the second part of it.

She didn't want to go in, understandably, because she had lost her son by suicide.

And she pulled me aside.

And let me tell you what, when you speaking directly to people who have lost children, you cannot hear anything from anyone unless it's someone who's lost a child.

I could not hear any of the words.

I thought everyone was full of crap.

I didn't want to hear anything from anyone.

She pulled me aside and I could hear her, and she looked at me and she said, anne, this is what I'm going to tell you, because this is what my friend told me.

She said, you cannot grieve wrong.

You cannot grieve wrong.

You cannot get it wrong.

And that was the beginning of grace for myself and understanding that, number one, I'm not.

This, I guess, is a part of who I was before, but now it was showing up this way.

I'm not explaining anything to anybody.

Am I explaining one thing to anybody?

You either have staying power or you don't.

I'm not begging people to say, I don't have energy for that.

This is all about me.

Because my only job right now is me.

That's our only job anyway, is us.

This is our job.

You keep this vessel clean, you can show up for other people.

You don't keep this vessel clean, you're not showing up for other people.

Not in the authentic way I feel, of course.

That's my opinion.

But.

So that was my first.

It's a mindset of grace.

I just gave myself grace.

And let me tell you what, I got a lot of grief from a lot of people and, and I mean, like verbal grief, you know, judgment.

I got a lot of judgment.

So here I'm, you know, trying to heal from this, you know, life altering event and I got judgment.

But to me, I just feel like I move to a more authentic level and the people around me are more authentic.

And so that was, that was the first thing.

The second thing that I knew for sure working in the, you know, the mental health field is I needed to remind myself of my neural pathways.

And so I didn't want anything to do with anything holistic in the beginning.

Nothing.

Not even Reiki.

I didn't want anything to do with any thing that I did before because I felt like a fraud and that it was bull crap.

So I was doom scrolling, if you will.

And I came across this woman on YouTube that was talking about side gigs, okay?

Because obviously now I have to make a new living because everything I've done before, forget it, I'm not doing it.

So I go down this rabbit hole of her talking about side gigs.

You know, there are a lot of influences out there.

It's not really who it was, it was just the information.

And she starts talking about how to make a book or a journal at that point, how to make a journal and self publish it.

So she goes through all of these steps.

So this is the beginning, the beginning of something connecting for me.

Even though I didn't even realize it at the moment, I was just letting myself go, like, just go mentally.

And I, I.

That is part of how my brain works.

It likes to consume information, it likes to learn.

So I was like, okay, this is motivating me in some way that I can't explain.

Despite the guilt for feeling like I feel guilty for being alive and my son is dead, because that's an underlying theme.

Continuously, continuously.

So I said, what can I, what can I make a journal about?

What do I have already in my brain that I can make a journal about without putting any effort out?

And my brain said something to do with Reiki.

I was like, okay, I'll just do a 21 journal for Reiki just to go through the process.

No attachment, no, like connection to it.

I just know it's information I can regurgitate with no thought.

So boom.

I went through her process using information I could access that was easy to just access.

So I made the 21 day journal journey for Reiki.

So it's A whole journey of self Reiki.

So then I got.

I completed it.

I put it out there.

I said, hey, I made the same.

That's it.

Then I had someone say, well, you should teach a class around this, right?

Resistance.

Everything is resistance.

Resistance.

So I thought, well, I could teach a class around it.

Again, there's no effort on my part.

The information is there.

I've been teaching Reiki for ever.

It's no thought.

So to me, when we go back to the beginning of our conversation, we say, you don't do Reiki.

Reiki does you.

This is what I call the divine bait and switch.

All right, so the divine is like, I can't speak to you this way.

I'm going to speak to you this way.

So you're going to make a journal, and I'm going to trick you.

Okay, now you have a journal.

Okay, now I'm gonna have someone ask you, because if someone asks me, then I feel like I want to show up.

If it's easy for me, why wouldn't I show up?

So I started the journey of integrative Reiki.

I said, if I'm going to teach this class, we're going to focus on all this stuff I'm learning about grief.

And that is how I did.

I launched a rake, a Reiki one for grief class.

And in the process of all of that, I reconnected my spiritual neural pathways.

That.

That was the reconnection to spirit.

The next thing I did.

And so whoever's listening, they may have a spiritual language that's different than mine.

And.

And that's okay.

Just listen to your spiritual language.

Like, this is just one person's process of building neural pathways.

The second thing I did was I needed to connect to my body.

So I went through yoga training, yoga teacher training.

I attempted it one time, and I was not ready for that because my brain wasn't thinking teacher, my brain was thinking yoga.

And the first time they said, you're going to have to present in front of the class.

I said, I am not a teacher anymore.

I am out of here.

And I dropped out immediately.

So the second time I took it two years later, I made it all the way to the end.

And of course, I've just integrated that into somatic work.

You know, like your Thai massage.

It's just, again, another language.

But when I went through yoga, I like, it's a very spiritual practice.

You know, I'm connected to my spiritual language.

It deepened my spiritual connection.

But the biggest thing it did for me specifically was connect me to My body.

I was like, this is my body.

Because when you're on a yoga mat, it's you with you.

Yoga isn't about, you know, upside down back bends with your leg in the air with grace.

Not for me and not ever the type of yoga that I teach.

It's about finding yourself, finding your body, connecting to yourself, connecting to parts of you.

So pushing myself a little further, a little further, a little further.

You know, that was that neural pathway.

Those are the two biggest things we can, we can step away from God or Gus or universe or whatever people want to call it.

We can step away and we can rail.

Believe me, I've railed a lot over these 10 years watching my wife go through her stuff.

And God never steps away from us.

He.

He is there waiting for us to come back and he'll give us little nudges, you know.

Last year I had an opportunity to go back to my hometown area for an opportunity to, to help a friend.

It turned out to be.

It was supposed to be a two month gig, right?

I call it, you know, the truck stop of life that God puts us on because you think that's your destination and it's not.

And he ended up, I ended up staying there for nine months.

Internal, indepth, solid healing from all my childhood traumas.

And you know, I can rail against God.

I can, I can say all I want, but he.

Okay, like you just said, okay, I can't talk to you in this fashion, so I'm going to show you this fashion.

Well, during this fashion, then I'm going to talk to you the way I wanted to.

And you know, we sometimes are, are led places, you know, that, that we think are whatever, but there's a real true purpose behind it and a true cathartic healing that that comes along with it.

And you know, commendable for you for actually, even in that moment, just stepping out, you know, and, and embracing that avenue.

Because you could have, because it was Reiki and because it was stuff you felt you know, imposter from.

You could have just ignored it all together and not even, even if it was easy, not even done it, you know, so stepping back on that road and on that pathway took a lot of courage just to do that part.

So, you know, kudos to you for, for doing that.

Is that journal, the book that is now full fledged.

How did that new.

How did the book come about.

Again?

Reiki, like has always called me.

It is my language.

The, like, it's just my language.

I, so I took this yoga, I Taught these classes.

I taught these classes classes.

And I witnessed people experiencing deep self navigation, deep healing, making connections.

I don't think we ever get to the end.

I think we are just on a journey of healing.

We don't.

There's no finish line.

There is no touchdown.

There's no, like, crowd cheering.

It's just knowing that giving yourself grace is knowing that you don't get to the end of it.

It's an ongoing process.

And even.

Even speaking to, you know, you talking about railing against God, giving myself grace, essentially, is what I know now.

Being graceful with myself isn't.

Is the reflection of what the universe is already doing for me, giving me grace in my humanity.

Because we are these thick, dense human creatures with all of these hormonal responses that are happening.

So in this process of this integrative Reiki class that I've been teaching and witnessing and fine tuning, there's a part where individuals are like, writing invocations and meditations and expressing their heart through this medicine.

And so I said, oh, my gosh, these are so, like, so beautiful and moving.

We should throw some into a book.

And so at one point I was like, you know, I know how to do that, like, thing.

Remember the.

I know how to do that.

It's a technical part of my brain.

It's.

It's easy for me.

Throw it in a book.

So I threw it out on Facebook.

And the first person that replied was not one of my students.

I was like, hey, students, do you want to throw yourself in a book?

The first person that replied was my teacher, mentor, and friend, Casey, who's the founder of Sweeha.

And she's like, I would love to be part of this, right?

And what am I going to say, no?

So I was like, okay, and teachers.

And then all of a sudden, before you know it, I have this, like, flood of people involved.

We ended up with 32 authors, and there's like 74 submissions.

And so I've just created a book called Reiki Meditations, Invocations and Prayers.

And I just created everyone's like, what do you want me to write about?

So I created a whole list of things for people to write about, and they wrote about all of it.

And then any gaps, there were them.

I just wrote the difference.

And so we did a book launch because Casey has this big vision about it.

She's always been, like, a little secret pusher for me in life.

She's.

She's like the divine speaking in my ear so many times.

And honestly, when I saw her right in there.

I was like, oh, no.

That's how I felt.

I was like, oh, no.

This is bigger than I was imagining already just by her saying so we launched the book.

I utilized the book in my yoga classes and in my Reiki classes all the way up to the launch.

So I'm the only one using them.

I'm reading all this stuff, going like, creating themes with stuff, yoga classes, integrating it into the, you know, whatever covering in Raiki.

And we launch it.

And it.

This.

This amazing collection of beautiful entries that self published that I put the whole thing together.

Like, I formatted the whole thing.

Like suddenly was on three and then a fourth later bestseller list.

It was like so random.

We got.

We were like number two in the shamanism bestseller list, number five in the energy healing, number 15 in the meditation, which I thought was astounding with all the books on Amazon that are launching all, like, at all times.

And then we were on the spiritual energy mental health list.

I can't remember the fourth list because, you know, I just.

It's 300 and some odd.

But you know what?

It's never just 300 and some odd because you're talking about thousands and tens of thousands of books and how random that was.

But it's really an amazing book and I feel super blessed.

Like, I should show you the COVID It's an amazing collection.

And the COVID was actually done by one of my students too.

She.

She made a painting.

Like she painted a painting.

And then I utilized it to put in the book.

But yeah, it's something I actually use and I, I'm so grateful so many people wanted it as well, because I want them to love it as much as I do.

We'll put a link to the film and the book, you know, down below so that people can, can reach out and grab, you know, their copy as well.

As we're coming to kind of a close here, what if you were to be that person who pulled you aside and, and gave you, you know, some, some insight when you couldn't hear anything else, what would you say to those who have either experienced tremendous loss in that fashion or, you know, God forbid they actually do.

What.

What would you say, other than grace?

Because that's always key.

What is a.

What is a way to help with that grieving process?

Well, since everyone is different and everyone is at a different point on their path, the.

The only thing that I think I.

Well, there's a couple of things, but one of the things is only speaking for my own experience, and my own experience was that we have three choices.

We have three choices and one of the choices is to just die along with that person.

And another choice we have is to live like the walking dead.

Or our third choice can be that we live and we.

And we wake up and we become alive so that we can share what we've learned from, you know, this horrendous, horrible thing and maybe help someone else.

Someone else's Joey, someone else's son, you know, or daughter or aunt or uncle or anyone that is.

That's was my choice.

My choice was to stay alive and be alive.

And I don't know the divine plan.

I don't know the divine plan.

I don't know why my son was called back in the way he was called back.

Maybe I'll know that when I am dead too.

You know, the.

The other thing really is, what my friend Ellie said to me is you can't get grieving wrong.

And when I add on to that is you don't own anyone an explanation.

You don't owe anyone an explanation about what you're going through.

And sometimes, you know, in Ricky, there's this principle, just for today, which is in a lot of other things out there, you know, like aa, but just for today, Just for today, I'll get out of bed.

Or maybe just for this minute, I'll sit up in bed.

Just this minute, no pressure.

Just this minute, maybe just for this hour, I will brush my teeth, you know, because those things go way out the window in the beginning.

You just don't care.

Just for today, I'll give myself permission to laugh at that joke and not feel guilty and, and full of shame.

Just for this minute.

I can have shame in a minute.

But for this minute, I'm going to just.

I'm going to pause shame.

That's.

That's it for me, you know, and find your language.

Find.

Find your language.

Focus on your neural pathways.

You know, I'm a filmmaker and I haven't made a film since.

So I took a Film 101 class.

I went back to basics with everything.

The journal was going back to basics.

The class was going back to basics.

Taking this other class back to basics.

Teach yourself how to add and subtract again so that you can remember, you know, how to do sacred geometry.

It's very powerful because I think we all go through those three phases and some quicker than others.

Like we want to just join the death.

We want to live dead.

Or we then move past it and live life.

And I think those three stages are, are some are instantaneous.

Some are spread out more, more profoundly.

But I think that everyone who's experienced any kind of loss goes through those.

Those three elements, for sure.

The.

The living the life part and living it authentically and living it true to who you are.

I think that's the hardest part.

You know, I. I've often said, you know, dying is easy.

It's the living that's hard.

And, you know, getting to that.

That.

That place, I think, is very profound for you to.

To be in.

One last question that I ask all of my guests.

What does a warrior spirit or having a warrior spirit mean to an.

Well, at this point in my life, it is building my resiliency muscle.

It's flexing and flexing and flexing my resiliency muscle and being as tenacious and gritty as I possibly can in spite of all the other things I'm feeling.

I love that.

And the other thing that you said, I think is really key to.

Ties into something else you said.

Going back to basics and learning those things over.

If, in fact, we are imprinted on our DNA, and if, in fact, we do become a whole new person, it would be congruent that we have to learn certain things over again because we're learning them from that new person's perspective and that new person's point of view.

So I think those two tie in really well from.

From what you said earlier, so great perspective.

I appreciate that.

Thank you.

I hope it helps someone.

I. I think this will help a lot of people.

And, Anne, I know it took a long time for us to.

To get to this point, but I'm so glad that you, you know, the timing was right for you to come on and share your journey and share your story.

It's an important message, and I hope that others who are going through this will have the courage to reach out.

And, you know, I hope those who are listening, who know someone who's going through this will have even more courage to stand by them and help them as well.

So thank you for your time today.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'm.

Thank you.

All righty.