Understanding Collective Grief and Reconnecting to Purpose

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another episode of Mindset Unlimited: Mindset Tips, Tools, and Inspiration for Women in a Time of Change. I’m your host, Valerie Friedlander, certified leadership coach, sociologist, intersectional feminist, artist, mom, and nerd. And today we are talking about the real reason you feel unmotivated: collective grief, and reconnecting to your purpose. Both of those have come up recently from several people, both directly and indirectly saying things along the lines of “I feel unmotivated, “I feel uninspired, “I’m really struggling. I feel like I’m burning out. I feel disconnected from my purpose, and those sorts of things. And quite frankly, I have felt them too. And I think it’s hard sometimes when we feel that way. One of the stories that comes up a lot is that maybe I’m missing something. Maybe something’s wrong with me, and maybe I’m just being lazy. A lot of the folks who come to me know that I’m like, it’s not lazy, but that’s a really big story that we have. That I’m just not trying hard enough. I’m just not pushing hard enough. And if you’ve been listening to this for a little while, you know that I’m what I’m going to say here, which is that rarely, rarely is that the case. And if it is, there’s a reason. So, as the title suggests, one of the big things that’s going on for people has to do with collective grief, and there are many layers to the grief. There’s a lot of individual grief, and then there’s the the collective grief that we’re experiencing navigating the world. I’ve talked about grief before, and the reason I’m tying this to purpose is partly because that’s the question that has come forward. Is like I feel untethered. I don’t know what my direction is. I don’t know what my purpose is anymore. And this is coming from people who feel historically very purposeful, and so it’s it’s hard when you feel disconnected from your purpose, and you’re someone who has a lot of who they are tied up in a purposefulness, in in a particular way of engaging in the world, and to feel disconnected from that can feel disorienting in some ways, and I speak from experience because I have been feeling that a lot, particularly since the passing of my father, the fall of last year, so almost a year ago, and also with the rapid pace of traumatic events occurring politically, economically, climatically-is that a word in the climate, the the climate catastrophes? So today, the things that we’re looking at our the lazy story that we tell that keeps us stuck, the impact of grief on the body and the brain, supportive ways to engage stress and collective grief, and purposeful living and meaning making in everyday life. So, without further ado, let’s get started. I was asked recently if I would do a talk on purpose, finding purpose, reconnecting to purpose, that sort of thing, or like that, I would offer a proposal. So that’s still in process, and I was thinking a lot about this, especially given that I have I’ve been struggling recently, and I know it’s really easy to see people who share about stuff or to be someone as someone who shares about things, tools, resources, has a lot of info about like navigating life and stuckness and all of that, and it doesn’t mean that it misses us. Not everybody shares about that, and you know, there’s stuff we could talk about as far as like people sharing when they’re in it, and how helpful is that? Like the stuff. There’s a lot of conversation about like trauma bonding or like things like, oh gosh, I can’t think of it, but basically oversharing sort of situation and. The emotional dynamics of relating to that, so it gets really tricky online. I’ve talked about like performative stuff before, and at the same time, I think sometimes we do need to see that people are human beings, and no one really should be on a pedestal, like as much as content creators have a lot of wisdom to share, and I suppose I should put myself among them since this is content. But there’s this pressure to have everything managed to well, you have all these tools, so you should just be able to do the things, and that it’s just, it’s just not true. It’s just not true.

We have tools, and we’re not perfect. We’re still human beings, and we still have struggles, and things are still hard. So that was another reason why I wanted to talk about the topic today about grief and about purpose, and also to address the biggest thing that tends to block us from engaging support and finding solutions. And I say solutions not like in a fix it kind of way, but in a how do I keep going, and how do I live well in times like these, and all of that? And the biggest thing that stops people is shame. It’s this idea that something’s wrong with you that you can’t just whatever. So anytime you’re like, if I could just, or why can’t I just? Usually, those phrases kind of indicate that there’s there’s some sort of pressure, some sort of underlying shame story that’s saying you should, and the shoulds are another good sign of that. Be able to, or should. feel a certain way, and when we live in a space where we have to make money, where there is no room for grief, where there is no room for recalibration and listening to yourself, everything is push and go. And of course, as I said before, there’s a reason for that because if we actually listen to ourselves, we might stop and not allow this to continue. And I say it collectively, not like as an individual. Well, if you just stopped, if you just listen to yourself and stop participating, then this wouldn’t be the way it is. No, no, that’s not fair. Collective problems need collective solutions, and they don’t want us to listen to ourselves or to each other or to be well. Because, well, being well-not wellness, but being well actually well-doesn’t make money. Yeah, I know that’s cynical, but it’s true. Sorry, not sorry. Sorry, not sorry. So they don’t want us to slow down. They being the people who are making money off of us, going and going and going. And so this is acknowledgement that it’s hard, especially if you’re someone who, like me, makes a living caring for other people, being a support, and it’s interesting because I see a little bit differently. Is it’s not about like being able to show up for people because I can still do that. That connectivity part is easy. It’s the content part that’s hard, and that’s what I was hearing from some other folks who are in service, but also folks who create because of a passion to create. Is this? It’s so hard to be in this online space to show up to produce, right? And I separate service and production, because it feels very different for me. While I do see this podcast as a way of being of service, I’m still producing something. Call it, you know, production for a reason. So, so it just that’s that’s the first piece of this is to just acknowledge like any the stories that relate to lazy relate to that need to push. One, it makes sense that you’d have it because we have to keep going and making money and performing and doing the things, and we do also have to take a step back and slow down, and that’s hard. It’s hard to do the things you know you’re supposed to do to take care of yourself, and then it becomes another should, and then that should becomes a should, and it just becomes a pile. So, this is the invitation. To care, to know that it’s not that something’s wrong with you. It’s just hard, and it shouldn’t be this hard, and it is this hard. So that’s first and foremost. The next piece that I want to engage is to talk about the different layers of grief. And one of the things that happens is when I get questions about stuff. Sometimes I have just my own thought. Well, I always have my own thoughts. I was about to say sometimes that happens. Now I’m pretty much always have my own thoughts, and I always want to dig in and know like what’s underlying this. Like, yeah, I have ideas about it, but what’s what’s also going on? To be able to give you some grounding in some deeper scientific information, historical information, something that tethers it a little bit more. It’s not just Valerie saying it. It’s there’s more here.

And as I was digging in, knowing that I wanted to look at the collective grief because that’s a big piece of what’s going on. If one person is experiencing it okay, but like we’re all feeling it at the same time, that suggests there’s more going on here, and it’s not just an individual thing. Also, grief processing isn’t meant to be individual. Our Western society has made it very individual, but it’s not supposed to be individual. Stress isn’t supposed to be individual, so and they’re related. So I’m gonna get into that in just a sec. But so I wanted to share three types of grief that I think is really important because as I was looking this stuff up, like collective grief, collective trauma, how grief impacts the brain; those sorts of things. I found this source that talked about the types of grief, and I went, “Oh my gosh, yeah, of course, of course, these are all present right now for all of us. So, firstly, I want to acknowledge the vicarious trauma that we’re all experiencing, and that doesn’t matter if you’re on social media or you’re not on social media. However, you’re existing in the world. I know a lot of people block off everything. I think most of the people who are listening this probably don’t block off everything because you know I’m talking about social context and all of that, so you probably pay attention to those things, and it’s still impacting us whether you see it or not. But especially if you see it, and sometimes it just pops up, and you’re blindsided by it. That happened to me with the horrible Nepal tragedy climate disaster. I scrolled right past it. I saw it and I couldn’t process it. I just couldn’t the magnitude of it. I couldn’t process it. And later I came back and I cried over it because I knew I felt that energy. And actually, before I go further, I do want to acknowledge that can feel weird? Like this isn’t my tragedy. This isn’t my disaster. Who am I to cry over this? Who am I to have feelings about this? It’s not mine. I should just be doing things about it and not having feelings about it. And I know that story. That story isn’t true. We do need to have our feelings. That’s part of empathy. That’s part of that connectedness. And yes, it might be something that’s so far away from us. And I think about like Star Wars, right? That that moment in A New Hope where Alderaan gets blown up, and Obi Wan is like, I just felt all these voices scream at once and get snuffed out. The point being that we are all connected. We are all in relation to each other in some way, we’re all part of this planet, and there’s a difference between feeling the pain and the horror of that kind of event and centering yourself in it. And I think that’s true in any of these spaces to feel the horror and the pain of family separation with the immigration enforcement stuff going on to to feel that with the wildfires with the just and there’s so many things I’m not going to name them all because I I know you know and there it’s it’s it hurts your heart and there’s a difference between feeling the pain of that and centering your pain. It’s still important to feel the pain of that. Part of feeling the pain of that allows us. To stay human and to feel that we need to do something, and when it’s thing after thing after thing, it’s hard to keep going and to feel that motivation becomes very demotivating, and so that’s what I wanted to talk about. The vicarious trauma is the emotional duress that results when an individual hears about the firsthand trauma experiences of another, witnesses it. There’s lots of studies being done about the impact of seeing it on social media and on the news. Not that you shouldn’t, and that when you do, giving yourself space to be with that, it’s still hard to process. It’s still hard to comprehend some things. So, talking about collective trauma, let’s look at these types of grief. There’s the collective grief that happens when a community, society, village, or nation all experience extreme change or loss.

It can manifest in the wake of major events. Some examples include war, natural disasters, or others that result in mass casualties or widespread tragedy. There’s cumulative grief, which is also known as compounded grief, and can be described as a series of losses that occur over a relatively brief period of time. Research shows that while the losses may relate to various causes, intensities, and areas of your life, they can be harder to cope with than individual losses because of the compounding effect. So one loss on top of another loss on top of another loss on top of a collective loss on top of an individual loss. Like all of these pieces compound, and then there’s anticipatory grief. This is most commonly known when someone has a terminal illness, and you are anticipating the loss of that person, or you know layoffs are coming, and you’re anticipating the loss of a job. Those sorts of things. So it’s also referred to as anticipatory loss or preparatory grief, it’s the distress a person may feel in the days, months, or even years before an impending loss, such as the death of a loved one. So we have all three going on right now. There’s the anticipatory, knowing that more things are coming, knowing that SNAP benefits are being cut, and more of those cuts are happening. The Medicare cuts are coming. Things like that. Knowing that climate disasters are only going to increase at this point, even if we were to start doing things like those sorts of things, knowing that that’s coming has the anticipatory grief? It’s compounding, cumulating, and of course, we’re all experiencing that. Add in any personal losses, like the loss of a loved one. It’s a lot, so take a breath, like I just did. It’s okay if you can’t process it all. You’re not lazy that you feel overwhelmed and disconnected and shut down. This is part of how the brain operates under grief because the brain is wired to keep us surviving, so the buckle down, zoom in, just get things done, and feeling like you’re just going through the motions and not feeling like purposeful about it or connected or motivated, but I just have to do the next thing in front of me. That’s normal. Not feeling inspired to do the more, whatever the more is, such as content creation. That’s normal. Under these conditions, that is a normal response to Have so be kind to yourself. This is not laziness. Nothing is wrong with you. You are operating the way you are supposed to when there are things going on that are wrong. So that’s the first, or maybe the second. Is it the second thing? I can’t keep track. Again, I’m in this too. You know, I have the the compounds of of all of the things we’re all going through, and then the loss of my client who passed, my the loss of my father. It’s it’s a lot, and again, there are different ways that we feel impacted, and different things that are harder or easier than other things, and you’re just not gonna know what it is. So, when that feeling, whatever it is, the thing that just goes, ah, this is hard. This hurts. I just don’t want to. Even things I wanted to do, I don’t want to do. It’s not fun. So I’m not saying that to be like, that’s fine. It’s not fine, and it makes sense. So I say this a lot because I want to counteract that narrative of like having to be a high vibe, right? Like, all right, I’ve talked about the ELI and the Energy Leadership Index assessment and the the seven levels of energy, and how we zoom in, yeah, that narrow focus when we’re in the more self-protective levels versus the expansive levels. Expansive levels feel so much better, and that doesn’t mean that the more constricted levels, where we feel the need to hide and pull into our shell and protect ourselves, it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with those levels. We don’t want to stay there, though. So what do we do about that? That’s the next piece that we want to talk about. Again, collective Trauma, collective grief-it’s collective, and our society has taught grief as individual. Like once you have the memorial, the group stuff is over, and you’re off on your own.

And while you may have a few friends who check in on you, it’s not the same thing as recognizing that it’s it’s communal processing, and especially in a lot of spaces, a lot of jobs right now, where you’re not supposed to talk about politics, and you’re not supposed to talk about this, and don’t talk about that, and we don’t have tools to actually have nuanced and difficult, uncomfortable conversations. It makes it really hard because it feels like you’re alone and nobody’s doing anything, and the grief-the idea of labeling it grief-gets really confusing. So, grief. This is grief. The body carries grief, looking like things, the things that have come up most recently in the folks that I’ve been talking to: anxiety, irritability, feelings of emptiness, lack of initiative, lack of interest. So it’s important to know that’s part of what’s going on now. I also have a lot of folks who are entering perimenopause menopause phases, and so hormones can often also be part of it. Well, it’s all hormones, right? Like stress, grief, all release hormones. I’m going to talk about that in a second. And it is always good to get checked out to see if there are other things, because it’s not all psychological. Sometimes there are layers of our bodies changing, which also can hold grief as your body changes. That’s a whole nother level. So add add some more. Let’s let’s add some more things. Anyway, so I wanted to share an NPR article that was a conversation with clinical psychologist Mary Frances O’Connor, and she talks about grief and the brain, how the brain responds to grief. So what she said is that she’s often struck by the intensity of the emotions. Grief is like someone turned up the volume dial all of a sudden. The emotion that I think often interferes with our relationships and friendships when we’re grieving is anger because the anger feels so intense. You have someone blow up at a dinner party and you think, “What’s happening with them? and try to remember they’re grieving and everything is amped up a little bit. That is tough because if we’re collectively grieving and our response is anger. Oof! It’s it’s difficult. And so she goes on. Having said that, one of the things that we know is that grief is tied to all sorts of different brain functions we have, from being able to recall memories to taking the perspective of another person, even things like regulating our heart. Heart rate and the experience of pain and suffering. So a lot of different parts of the brain are orchestrating this experience when we feel grief. So remembering that these are all a part of it; these are all related. Another article that I’ll also link in the show notes from the American Brain Foundation, with neurologist Lisa M. Schulman, explains how tragedy affects the brain. The human brain handles emotional trauma and stress using the same set of processes. Traumatic loss is perceived as a threat to survival and defaults to protective survival and defense mechanisms. The response engages fight or flight mechanism, which increases blood pressure and heart rate and specific hormones. Grief and loss affect the brain and body in many different ways. They can cause changes in memory, behavior, sleep, and body function, affecting the immune system as well as the heart. Can also lead to cognitive effects such as brain fog. The brain’s goal: Survival, and so part of what both of these are relating to is how the brain operates. It releases these hormones, and one of the things I’ve talked about because it relates to stress, right? That one of these said about stress and grief being in similar spaces and the the traumatic grief in particular, but stress hormones, adrenaline, cortisol are the ones we think of. Those break things down, give us the burst of energy to survive to protect ourselves. Also, oxytocin. Oxytocin is the cuddle hormone. It says to connect. It’s really hard to connect when you’re very sensitive. So, the invitation that I would give you within that is forgiveness. Really practicing forgiveness, self forgiveness, forgiveness of other people, and part of that is the ability to apologize, to not make it. I made a mistake, therefore I am a mistake. The ability to go, oh, oops, I missed this. I’ll give you a real life example.

Over the summer, we went to visit my mother, and we picked up my dad’s car, and we’ve been operating as a single car household, and my mom offered us to take this car, and I said yes. And I did not realize the amount of emotion that I would have around driving my dad’s car, particularly because he didn’t really let other people drive his car. I mean, he he did, but like, if somebody was gonna borrow a car at my parents’ house, it was my mother’s car, not my dad’s car. And driving his car really brought home his absence. Like, the reason I’m driving this car is because he’s not driving this car. I didn’t realize how emotional that would be for me, and my husband and kids had gone ahead to visit his mom before while I was wrapping some stuff up with my mom, and so I went to go meet them, driving this car away from where it was my dad’s, and had a lot of feelings about it. And when I showed up, everybody was excited to see me, and I was excited to see them, but I was having a lot of feelings. But there wasn’t really space to share that, and so I ended up getting a little snippy, a little tense. And my husband asked me about it, and I said, “I’m having a lot of emotion. And as that conversation went on, it it didn’t connect. We didn’t connect very well because he had certain expectations about yay, she’s here, and every this is how this is going to look. And I hadn’t given any kind of indication that maybe that wasn’t what was going to happen. Probably because I didn’t know, but I also because I was trying to be in a place that I wasn’t, and I didn’t share that. Hey, I’ve got a lot of feelings going on, and later we came back together after some tense interchanges, which gave me the opportunity to have a really good cry that I needed at that point. So, not that I would say that was great or anything like that, But we take what it is and go with it. And when we did come back together, I was able to apologize that I didn’t let him know, and he apologized that he took it personally, and that he didn’t show up for me the way he wanted to show up for me. And so again, now. Ability to forgive each other for not being perfect, for making mistakes, for not knowing better, for having our own feelings and not connecting the way we wanted to connect, allowed us the opportunity to come back together, to repair, and to hear and see each other, and hold space For the experience that we’re going through in our own ways, and so that’s the invitation that I would offer you when it comes to the anger part of all of this, the hypersensitivity, because it really is. It’s like, as the example that I gave my husband was like, it felt and feels a lot like there’s a layer of skin that was peeled off, and it’s very raw, and so everything, even the gentlest touch, feels painful in some ways, especially the more to the surface my grief is. So, be gentle with yourself. Forgive. Ask for forgiveness. Those things are really important because we’re human. We’re navigating this all together. I know it’s so cliche at this point, but we are all in this together. And boundaries, honesty, saying, “Hey, this is where I’m at. This is what I need. And if somebody can’t show up for you like that, rather than trying to force them to be that. Find somebody who can be that. I’ve used the analogy before of going to the hardware store for bread. If you keep going to the hardware store for bread, you’re going to keep being disappointed. The hardware store is not going to give you bread. Now you could ask the hardware store, “Hey, would you be willing to stock some Bread. Hey, maybe they say yes, but that is not generally the place to go for the bread. And if you’re, it’s like beating your head against the wall. And I heard that analogy the first time in 12 step rooms.

So you know, recognizing when someone’s not able to do that, it’s not kind to either of you if you keep insisting. No, you need to you need to stock bread. It doesn’t mean that you can’t go there for anything. I mean, the tools they’ve got tools, they’ve got plenty of things, lumber, all this stuff, great things, important things, and I got bread, so don’t go there for the bread. So that collective part, because we need each other, we need each other. So the other piece that I’m going to add, the the final kind of awareness piece that I’ve nodded at as we’ve gone along is that collective bringing it together. So I’ve mentioned a personal experience and the individual interactions. I also want to share as I was looking at the idea of healing and collective grief. I found an article by Priya Parker, who is the author of The Art of Gathering, And she also talks about how grief is seen as an individual thing in Western culture, and it’s something to be processed alone, which doesn’t feel quite right. We need each other. She shared a quote from a book by Carla Fernandez. The book is Renegade Grief: A Guide to the Wild Ride of Life After Loss I have not read this, but it is going on the list. And the quote from this book is: “I see it as the ultimate initiation. I see grief as a sharpener of our senses and an enhancer of our ability to connect, I see it as an expander of our empathy, and as an express elevator that brings us closer to the burning core of the human condition. And I think that is a really important note, an enhancer of our ability to connect. We can really connect deeply around this journey that we’re on through grief, be it the individual grief that we experience, the personal grief, or the collective griefs. We can come together through that experience, as long as we allow the oxytocin to carry us forward, we recognize that there’s a value in what we’re going through. There was another quote that now I have to find it. Oh, here, this one is from The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, where she interviewed Amy Cunningham, who’s a funeral director. Asking why it’s important to grieve, and she said, “If we do not grieve, we cannot be we cannot be transformed by our grief. If we do not grieve, we cannot be transformed by our grief. Grief is an opportunity to transform, and I’m not saying this as a like way of of placating or a I can’t think of the word right now, but we don’t want to have to go through grief. But grief is part of the human experience. What’s happening right now in the world is awful, and it shouldn’t be happening. And that doesn’t mean that we can’t take the opportunity to be with our feelings. Actually, let me rephrase that: we need to take the opportunity to be with our feelings, so that we can transform and not continue this to be in connection to our feelings, to our humanity, which is the whole range of feelings. So, the other side of this is the importance Of a full range of emotions, so not just high vibe, not just sitting in grief, but all of it-grief, celebration, joy, sorrow-all of it is important. And so sometimes when we’re really in grief and awful things are happening, we feel like, well, how could we enjoy this? How could we celebrate this? How could we do this fun thing? We need all of it. We need all of it. In some aspect of it, we need each other to hold all of it. So one of the things that I want to offer within this, I’ve given you my my giving grace and forgiveness invitation, and now what are some ways to connect to each other through this process of Grieving. Priya has a few, and I also want to invite some layers to that. One is naming the ache. Name the grief. Acknowledge it. Say it out loud. Share it with a friend. I’m grieving this. I feel this this hurts. Naming it gives it some room to be instead of denying it and pushing it away. It also allows for being witnessed, for being seen in that grief.

Another one she names is building rituals and care practices, so creating things together is a beautiful way. Doing something together, so maybe it’s building something with blocks. Even could be building some blocks. It could be creating some piece of art. Maybe it’s painting or drawing or something. Those sorts of things, those creative outlets, are wonderful ways to express your grief, to express your emotions, to express the joys and sorrows and all of those things. Another thing that blocks people oftentimes from allowing room for grief is that they’re afraid it’s going to take over, and that they’ll never come out of it again. And so, giving yourself some space to grieve, and that could look a variety of ways. Again, it could look like a collective activity, a group activity, some sort of ritual activity that gives a container for the grief. It could also look like telling a friend that you you need to have space to be heard to share a story. It could be could we get together and watch a tearjerker movie and just cry together and let those feelings out. It could be that you prefer to do that alone, and so you want to have room for your grief and to just sit in it. But you contact a friend first and say, “Hey, would you check on me in a few hours, a couple days? Would you reach out and just see how I’m doing? Because I’m in it right now, and I want to give myself some space to be in it, but I also want to make sure I don’t get stuck there. That’s a way of asking for help, and there’s also, of course, reaching out to a professional, someone who is trained to help you hold space and to witness you. Another layer. To this, that think I’ve nodded at, which is the meaning making of grief, the storytelling of grief. When I mentioned the collective trauma and the wounds of meaning, so I don’t think I read this one yet, which is about collective memory. There’s an article: collective trauma and the social construction of meaning. So, this is looking at more historical collective trauma. What happens from here later? So, not necessarily the compounding components and all of that, but it says collective memory persists beyond the lives of the direct survivors of the events and is remembered by group members that may be far removed from the traumatic events in time and space. Subsequent generations of trauma survivors that never witnessed the actual events may remember the events differently than the direct survivors, and the construction of these past events may take different shape and form from generation to generation. This trauma is a crisis of meaning, and it’s how we collectively make meaning of an event and the stories that we tell. So we can have personal stories. There’s a lot of healing in telling the personal stories and talking about the person who we’ve lost. There’s also a lot of value in talking about the meaning that we’re making and storytelling. There’s talk of how we tell stories into the future and imagine into the future who we want to be, the people that we want to be, imagining, telling stories, creating through our imagination, and I think that storytelling component is really special and important. Another point that is made is storytelling promotes a culture of community. It decreases isolation, elicits support and empathy, promotes emotional catharsis, reduces stress levels. Again, that collective work broadens perspective and strengthens continuing bonds with that loss, the person that we’ve lost, the place that we’ve lost, the thing that we’ve lost. Storytelling is essentially an exercise of meaning making. So intentional engagement here is a key component, and this brings me to my last concept that I want to invite to you, which ties to the idea of purpose. And I mentioned at the beginning we’re talking about reclaiming purpose, and when we feel like we’ve lost our sense of purpose, especially when we were doing something that felt purposeful, and now suddenly doing that doesn’t feel purposeful anymore. How do we reclaim the sense of purpose as we navigate loss, and I look at purpose as the way that we move in the world, the actions that we take, that we do them purposefully.

So, purposefully telling the stories instead of the automatic-I said that really weird-the automatic, the autopilot storytelling that we do when we’re not thinking about it, where our subconscious and our collective experience is just telling the narrative for us as we go along and we do the things. What are the stories that are being created without our intentional engagement? So the invitation is to intentionally engage the stories, which can be hard to do because, again, that part also means sometimes being with the grief of the story, the grief of the the shift of the story. But you get to choose how you tell the story. So there are two quotes that I want to end with when it comes to this idea of purpose, because I think they tie very well with what I’m expressing as far as how we connect to purpose, and they honor two people who we recently have lost, who made a big impact in the world through the way that they showed up and performed in public and in private. First is Dolly Parton. She said, “Find out who you are and do it on purpose, and do it with purpose. That to me isn’t speaking of some far off later out there eventual thing. It’s who you are, and who you are is continuously evolving. It’s not static. It’s dynamic and. So, finding out who you are is a continual process of discovery. There’s no getting it right and then you. It’s taking the time to purposefully look at yourself, to explore yourself, to know who you are now. The things that I find when I think about this vision of myself and who I want to be. What is what is my purpose in showing up? Is to be present. To be present is a big piece of that for me. And so, how can I be more purposefully present with what I’m doing and who I am and what I need? And that’s being curious, asking that question: What do I need right now? What would be supportive? And maybe I can’t give myself the thing that I need right now, but then I can ask, what would help me move closer to that thing that I need? So maybe it’s I need someone who can really listen to me and hold space for me, and I don’t have that right now. Everybody’s so busy in my life. Okay, well, what’s one step closer to that that I could get, and maybe it’s hey, could we schedule a time on the calendar with someone who I know is able to hold that space? Maybe it’s looking up every day, doing a little bit of research on a professional, on a coach, on a therapist, someone who I can hire to hold that space for me, and if I don’t have the money for that, what would it take for me to start setting aside some money so that I could get a little bit of support? Or is there some sort of religious person that I feel aligned enough with that I could go speak to them? Those sorts of things, like you, you find what that is for you. But those are the kinds of things that just because the first thing isn’t there doesn’t mean that that’s it. There’s not any availability. And I will invite you. I have a free exploration call that you are welcome to schedule a time on my calendar, I would be happy to talk to you. And I think that’s the other important thing to remember. A lot of people look at AI and and reach out to AI these days, which I have lots of thoughts on. But there is something, and I’ve talked about this before, about that person connection, the change that happens when you interact with another human being. That it’s a gift to the person holding space as much as it is to the person who’s sharing. When both people are willingly showing up to that, so I invite you. There’s no pressure on my calls. I am not going to push you to to sign up for any coaching packages. If you decide you want to chat about that, we will.

But if you just needed to talk for a minute to to get something off your chest, to process something out loud, to share something, I do currently have some availability on my calendar, so reach out, schedule that call. And the last quote that I’ll share is from Tim Curry, and it’s not actually his quote, but it’s a thing that he said in the Rocky Horror Picture Show: “Don’t dream it, be it, be it. You don’t have to have the dream come true for you to be that dream. Be that person. And I will mention that sometimes when we can’t be the dream that we have, we beat us. We beat ourselves up over it. This is not an invitation to that. It’s thinking about that dream, the person that you want to be. Don’t dream it. Be it. If you’re struggling, if you’re in it, if you’re feeling disconnected, untethered, any of those things, how would the dream show up for you? In that moment, in that, in the dream of who you would be, how would you show up for you? I can guess that the dream of that wouldn’t be that you’d be mean to yourself; it’s that you’d be kind to yourself, that you would support yourself. So rather than engaging the initial impulse of, “Well, I can’t be it, that’s okay. Where are you right now? What does the dream say about how to show up for you right now, where you are? Because purpose isn’t in the future. Doing things with purpose exists right now, in this moment, you do it because it matters, right now. And the last, the very last thing here, one of the things that I’ve been doing is exploring a book called “Being a Quaker, and I’ll see if I can link to it in the show notes. But as as a Quaker, one of the things we ask a lot is we do queries. It’s about exploring because Quakerism, at least the unprogrammed version that I grew up in, is experiential. It’s not about a dogma. It’s not about a be this way or do we believe this. It’s about experiencing the divine, experiencing that which calls us. So we ask a lot of questions, and so one of the questions, one of the queries that I’ve been sitting with a lot is, what does love require of you? So I’ll leave you with that. What does love require of you? I am sending you so much love, and please don’t hesitate to reach out. I’m here for you, and I will talk to you all next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai