Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Sherry Walling on How to Engage With Grief and Find Hope After Loss EP 219

Episode Date: November 24, 2022

Today I talk to Dr. Sherry Walling (@sherrywalling), a clinical psychologist, speaker, podcaster, best-selling author, yoga teacher, and mental health advocate. Dr. Walling and I discuss her new book "Touching Two Worlds" and how to engage with grief and find hope after loss.  What We Discuss with Dr. Sherry Walling Dr. Sherry Walling and John R. Miles provide expert advice for those seeking hope in the aftermath of loss. Dr. Walling shares moving, intimate stories while proposing a broad range of recovery techniques and activities derived from neuroscience―like how to heal through movement, how to cry in public, how to look at how much time we give ourselves to grieve, how one accepts themselves when experiencing grief without expecting more from themselves, and how to cope with survivor’s guilt. To learn more about Dr. Sherry Walling: https://www.sherrywalling.com/  Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/dr-sherry-walling-how-to-engage-with-grief/  Brought to you by BiOptimizers and American Giant. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/Fs_3oAnVdlg  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Did you hear my interview with Robin Sharma, one of the top personal mastery and leadership coaches in the world and a multiple-time number-one New York Times best-selling author? Catch up with episode 209: Robin Sharma on Why Changing the World Starts by Changing Ourselves ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Gear: https://www.zazzle.com/store/passion_sruck_podcast Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/ 

Coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast. I think one of the real tragedies of suicide is that it's sort of a silly, it's a story. It's like, you died by suicide, right? It's a story where the end of the story sort of takes priority over everything that came before that. And I think when we talk about people who've died by suicide, again, that becomes like the lead, that becomes the headline. And so if you know someone who has lost someone that they love in this way, like, let's talk about all the other parts of that person's life.

Welcome to PassionStruck. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators,

scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to episode 219 of PassionStruck, which was ranked as one of the top 50 most inspirational podcasts in 2022. And thank you to each and every one of you who come back weekly to listen and learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world.

If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, or you would like to introduce this to a friend or family member, we now have episode stutter packs, which are collections of our fans, favorite episodes that we organize into convenient topics give any new listener a great way to get acquainted to everything we do on the show. Just go to Spotify or PassionStruck.com slash Startup X. In case you missed my interview from earlier this week, it featured NYU Stern School of Business, Professor of Marketing, and serial entrepreneur Scott Galloway, and we discuss his latest book, A Drift.

My solo episode from last week was on the science of motivation and eight ways that you can become and stay motivated. Now let's talk about today's guest. Dr. Sherry Walling is a clinical psychologist, speaker, podcaster, author, and mental health advocate. Her company ZenFounder helps entrepreneurs and leaders navigate transition rapid growth loss conflict or any manner of complex human experience. She hosts the ZenFounder podcast which has been called a must-listen by both Forbes and Entrepreneur magazine and has been downloaded more than a million times. She is the author of the best-selling book The Entrepreneurs Guide to Keeping Your Shit Together and of the new book

Touching Two Worlds which explores new strategies for finding wholeness in the aftermath of loss. We discuss why she is so passionate about the topic of Griven, as well as suicide prevention. The story of how she lost her father to cancer, and six months later, her brother to suicide. Why, like the neurologist, who gets brain cancer, or the autism specialist, who gives birth to a child on the spectrum. She was also granted the unwanted opportunity to use her clinical psychology on herself. We discuss the inner workings of grief and provide a navigational map for anyone who may be listening to find their own way in the aftermath of loss. Thank you for choosing PassionStruct and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.

Now, let that journey begin. I am thrilled to have Dr. Sherry Walling on the Passion Strike podcast. Welcome Sherry. Thanks for having me. It's really against the UCA, John. Well, I'm excited today that we get to talk about your new book, which just launched at the end of July. You've got a picture of it right there behind you. And I'll make sure that in the YouTube, we put a clearer picture so that the audience can see the beautiful cover design that you have. But I wanted to tell the audience that today's discussion is going to be on a topic that may be difficult for some people to talk about because it's a hard topic to discuss and that is the grieving process. And it's something

sure that you have become very passionate about on multiple sides of it. And since this show is really about how do you live intentionally and how do you live out your passions? I think it's an important one that we need to talk about because brief suicide prevention and other things need to be top of mind for people because they happen to each one of us at some stage in our life. But for those who are not familiar with your book, maybe you can give just a backdrop onto why you ended up writing it because it was the culmination of two events that happened within about six months of each other. Yeah, so I'm a clinical psychologist by training. So I think if we wanted to talk broad strokes, my passion has always been entire professional life, how to have helpful conversations about hard things. And this book is really in line with that. I started

writing right after my dad was diagnosed with a softagel cancer, and he lived 18 months from diagnosis until eventually the cancer took his life. And then right after that, I lost my brother to suicide. So six months after losing my dad, lost my brother. And so I experienced this kind of compound grief of two griefs happening in close proximity to each other. And that grief then laid on top of my life and experiences as a psychologist. So this book is really part memoir,

but it's also part rethinking, engaging, interacting with the ways we do grief, quote unquote, as a society and things that I might suggest we change about that. Yeah, so in the book, you write about both your brother and your father in different sections, and then you bring it together at the end of the book, but how have those losses reshaped you in the way that you look at grief now from before when you were canceling many people about grief, I probably hadn't experienced it in this tremendous way that you have.

I think one of the things that has really shifted for me is the centrality of integrating physical movement into the grief process. As a psychologist, again, I do a lot of talking with people talking and listening. It's very verbal, very cognitive. Those are very important parts of grief, but I think I really felt grief in myself, right? I felt the slowness and the heaviness in my body, and so part of my grieving process has been to integrate all parts of my mind, body, soul. And that wasn't something that I necessarily had a lot of training in as a psychologist, right? I wasn't trained to tell people, hey, you should probably try a dance class or maybe it's

time to get back on your bike or maybe learn to sail. Like grief is a time where you counterbalance the heavy slow emotional reaction with movement and that creates sort of these new opportunities for integration and for health for people who are experiencing a loss. Yes, and I know in the book you talk about love throughout it, but why is it impossible to extricate grief and love? I think one of the ways that I talk about it in the book is grief as the shadow of love, that anytime you love, anytime you are opening your heart or giving a piece of your heart to another person to even hope or dream, you're risking loss. And not even risking, like almost assured that eventually loss will enter.

So if we have a very closed off heart, if we don't open ourselves up, if we're never vulnerable, if we have a brick wall approach to our relationships, grief isn't really an issue because it doesn't hurt so much when we lose or when there's a dissolving in a relationship. But when we're really open to love, the shadow side of that is to feel the emotional reaction of loss or disillusion. Yeah, so then what is the key to learning how to love through sorrow? Yeah, so then what is the key to learning how to love through sorrow? I think understanding that the pain that you feel is very painful and I don't mean to minimize it at all, but it isn't for nothing, right? It's part of the labor of love.

It's part of the counter part of love. So I think even understanding it that way helps to redeem it a little bit It's not like the pain of an injury or of pathology. It's not the pain of something's wrong. Something's broken. I'm not okay When we are experiencing pain as a result of grief It's because we've chosen to love we've given ourselves to love. And so that pain is going to natural byproduct of love. I think that helps to deep-affologize it. It helps to maybe treat it more gently as something that we can learn from or listen to,

or if nothing else, a very natural part of what it means to be human. Yes, and I had on Susan Cain, who I'm sure you're familiar with on the podcast a while back to talk about her new book, Better Sweet. And we talked really about this importance of this melanchonic outlook, the state of Better Sweet, sorrow.

Why do you think our culture has been so blind to its value? So I think it makes us really uncomfortable. I think certainly the circles that I run in, which are lots of entrepreneurs and business owners, that's who I primarily serve and work with. These are folks who really deeply believe in their power to build and create the world. and their power to build and create the world. And when we come up against the reality of the limits of our control, it brings about this existential crisis. Like we get real and comfortable

with the fact that we don't always get to make all the choices in our life about what happens to us. I also think that especially in an era where things move very fast, where information is immediately accessible, where I can push a few buttons on my phone and have a pizza at my house in 10 minutes, like we're just living in a culture of speed and grief, melancholy, those are not fast processes, they're slow, they're incubation periods, and we don't know how to linger in them.

So we're not really familiar with the value of these experiences. I also think we're afraid of them. I think we're afraid that we'll get lost. We'll get stuck in melancholy, stuck in depression, stuck in grief, and we won't be able to get out, which of course is almost always not true.

Well, I think it's the same thing in some ways. If you've had a traumatic experience or have experienced the consequences of abuse, and there's healthy ways you can get through it as you're aware in their unhealthy ways that you can get through it. I think the same thing happens as we process grief. And unfortunately, I think sometimes many of us don't give ourselves the proper time because how do you define the proper time? It's like how do you define how you should get over trauma? It's different for each person.

And I know for me, this caused me a lot of issues because in the span of seven days, I had an in-home robbery at gunpoint where I thought my life was threatened. And then five days later, my best friend came into suicide. And it was difficult for me to grapple with either one of them for a few weeks because I think the enormity of both especially things that happen in succession like that kind of hit you all at once in your body and mind just don't know how to handle and process it all. So for me, really the suicide hit first, and then it took longer than because

I was grieving for that for the reality of the physical assault to come through. So I can understand exactly what you're saying. I think, especially right at the beginning, whether it's traumatic bereavement, other kinds of trauma, your body, a mind, a like a tilted world. You're on this like terrible carnival ride, and it's very hard to find any grounding or weak calibration. And that's, frankly, that's totally normal. Like, it should feel a little bit like that when your world has been shattered. You don't want to stay there, of course,

but I think tolerating that you are there, or some period of time is, I think what's important for people to understand about some of these reactions. I think it is, too. And in the beginning of the book, you made a statement that wanted to explore some. And that is, you said, your personal grief has been accompanied by moments of feeling wildly lost. Yeah.

Which is I think something people can relate to. For you, how did that come about? And what were you experiencing? I think the thought that comes to mind as you ask that is a sense of detachment. It felt really jarring to be in the world without my dad. Even though I'm in my mid-40s, I'm a proper grown-up, I've lived on my own for 20 years, but for some reason I felt like I was a little kid again and my dad was gone. And so it

had this sort of destabilizing experience where I just didn't even know how old I was anymore. And it didn't last for a very long time, but in the middle of it, that sort of experience of feeling like an orphan child for a while was very dissonant with my lived reality as a professional adult person with children of my own. I think too, with my brother's death, there was also this feeling of lostness, right? Like you're supposed to, I'm making air quotes, but you're supposed to go through your life with your siblings. Right, you're supposed to bury your parents together alongside your siblings. You have the sense of journeying with them. And so to lose my brother in that way, when he was, he's

bit younger than me, he's 33, it felt so like a total disruption of the order of things. I think I also started to feel like afraid for my children or for other people that I loved, you know, if my brother could die in this way, were the other people around me also that vulnerable could I lose them at any time. So I think that sense of realizing lossness was really alive for a little while and then I had to reintegrate my worldview. I had to understand in a new way how people can come and go from my life. way how people can come and go from my life. Yes, and I'm sure during these periods of feeling wildly lost, as

you said, how does one accept themselves when you're feeling and your experience and grief or sorrow without expecting more from themselves? sorrow without expecting more from themselves. I think that's a really nuanced piece of self love and wisdom right there. Because it is a dance. There's certainly days in grief in all kinds of difficult emotional experiences where everything in you is, I am not getting out of bed today. This is not a day for getting up and going out into the world. And sometimes the wisdom is to listen to that. Sometimes the wisdom is to say, it's okay to take it slow. It's okay to not push. But sometimes the wisdom is to get up, put your shoes on, go walk around, feed the children,

make the phone calls, so the balance of when to push and when to really feel into your sorrow, I think is a little bit different for everyone. I am a pusher, I've been a pusher my whole life, so for me to say, I'm calling it, and I'm not doing much today, was harder work than forcing myself through it. So I think for people who are listening and trying to make that distinction, sometimes the harder thing is the stillness. And sometimes that's what's most needed. It certainly is.

Well, I wanted to talk maybe a little bit more about your father and then we can talk about your brother, but your father developed stage for a soft gale cancer. I can relate to this somewhat because almost two years ago to the day we're recording this, my sister was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and found out two to three months later, she had stage 4b pancreatic cancer. Now miraculously, she is still alive today, but for a period of time, we went into this kind of realm. Are you going to fighter? Are you going to succumb? And I think for my sister who's always been a fighter, has a 11 year old son succumbing,

was never even in the question. And in the book, you talk about this because I think your father's approach was very much the same way. Yeah, my dad was absolutely a fighter. He was a lifelong athlete and had a very classic. Do the work, get a good outcome, kind of experience. And for him, this was unlikely to be a winnable fight. And so he did rounds and rounds of chemotherapy, clinical trials, basically anything that any doctor would give him. He tried.

And I think that was his way. In the I wanted to go on a cruise to Alaska. That was on his bucket list. It was something that he wanted to do. And he never went. And one of the reasons was that it felt difficult to miss chemo. Right. It felt like if he were to step away from any of that treatment, that he just wasn't comfortable with that trade off.

I think the other challenge of being a fighter in this way for this amount of time was that by the time he really recognized, okay, I'm probably going to die from this, by the time he entered hospice care, he only had one week left in his life. And so because that timeline was delayed, there weren't really a lot of meaningful conversations about what might happen in the event of his death.

There weren't meaningful plans made for the care of my mom, for example. There were just some things that we had to rush and do, right, in the last week, because a conversation about death felt really uncomfortable to him. And I honor that part of his experience. I can't claim to think I will do it any differently when it's my turn, but from where I sat, the fighting was hard because it kept us from him in some ways.

Well, I do think it was very touching how you were all around him when he did pass, which must have helped bring at least some closure for you and your mom, and I'm guessing your siblings. But at the same realm, that's got to be very difficult as well. And I wanted to take the question about the fighter in a little bit different direction because in the book you write that you've always been a fighter but now you feel like you're a former fighter. Why did you write that? I think when you're a fighter or at least my framing of this term, it's about being very outcome oriented, right? It's about winning the match or winning the game. It's a binary yes or no, did you succeed framing of a problem? I just

don't think like that very much anymore. And one of the reasons that really shaped that framing was actually the loss of my brother, because we all fought really hard for him. He went through rounds of alcohol addiction treatment, rounds of hospitalization. My husband and I, my children, my mother, like we really supported him and loved him. And the fact that he died in the fighting framework would then have to be logged as a failure, right? He didn't survive. But if I get rid of the fighting framework and think about the process, the effort, the amount of love exerted and offered, the length's gone to try to be supportive and helpful. Then I can find this footing and say, even though he didn't have a good outcome, he was

loved maybe with the best of our ability, right? He was loved well. And that is much more helpful to me, and honestly just feels truer. So I don't worry so much about the fighting, right? The outcome that comes from the fight as much as like the amount of love and effort and thoughtfulness that's invested. Well, since you brought up your brother, I did want to bring up as an awareness to the audience that in 2020, suicide was the 12th leading cause of death in the United States, and there were almost 46,000 suicides that year, literally 21 under that number. And for a period of about 20 years up until 2018, I think it rose by over 30%.

And I'm very close to it because in the veteran community, it's become a very big thing. Friend of mine, who was a classmate from the Naval Academy, ended up doing a TED talk about it that's gotten almost 3 million views, which is great for awareness.

But what he came up with and Ted confirmed was that if you look at the war on terror from the standpoint of military members who lost their lives, it's about 5,000. If you look at the same period and you look at it from veteran suicides, it's about 124,000. And if you add active duty suicides on top of it, the number was validated to be closer to 140,000. So this is an issue that really is impacting a lot more people than we think. And I think a lot of people look at suicide

in a light that you write about in the book that this person is just giving in, they're not fighting. And my own experience with it, knowing some military members who have been close with who have died because sometimes their signs like there were with your brother that he was in and out of rehab. Some of the military members I know were also facing substance abuse. But in other cases, how can anyone understand what's going on in someone's mind? What is your advice for someone in a situation where someone they know, someone close to them as committed suicide,

or it could be a loved one that they know was committed suicide. How do you recommend people approach the family members or friends of that person who has taken their life? Because I think oftentimes people go about it in entirely the wrong way. Yeah, I think one of the real tragedies of suicide is that it's sort of a silly, it's just story. It's like, died by suicide. Right? It's a story where the end of the story sort of takes priority over everything that came before that. And I think when we talk about people who've died by suicide, again, that becomes like the lead. That becomes the headline. And so if you know someone who has lost someone

that they love in this way, let's talk about all the other parts of that person's life. The greatest gifts to me have been when people have said, do you wanna tell me a story about Dave? And I get to tell a story about that time that we went kayaking and he lost his kayak in the river. We just, let's talk about their life because that's an extra loss

when someone dies by suicide is that it's shrouded in hush, it's shrouded in shame, sometimes in some scandal, and we lose the ability to really effectively remember who that person was. I would definitely remember who that person was. And suicide is its own kind of loss. And one of the reasons that I have decided to talk so much about this is because like, my brother was a great man. He was loving, he was kind, and he doesn't deserve to be relegated to the statistics. These are humans whose stories should be told.

And the fact that they died in a certain way doesn't negate who they were. Well, I wanted to move the conversation to ask you a series of questions about process and grief. And one of them would be, if a person's experience in grief and there are many problems for them to work on as they're processing it, what's your recommendation on how you identify the priority? Well, I guess sometimes there are lots of logistical things to grief.

There's paperwork that must be done. There's forms to fill out. There's things to be packed There's paperwork that must be done, there's forms to fill out, there's things to be packed. I think that's less important. I guess I might reframe your question a little bit rather than to say grief is a problem or there are problems to be solved in grief, but I would maybe encourage people to listen to what grief is trying to tell them maybe encourage people to listen to what grief is trying to tell them about what's important to them. And I think one of the best ways to do that is to write. If you are living in grief and you feel like all you want to do is just go sit under a tree, maybe listen to that, right? Maybe there's some wisdom in what the grief is leading you toward, and by writing about it or

writing it out, you can hold some of those lessons or even prioritize them. Does that make sense, John, or is that what you are getting at? Yeah, it does. I think we experience when we're grieving emotions like you would come in a trauma or abuse, such as anxiety or depression, or it could even lead to an eating disorder or a chronic health issue, but in the case of anxiety and depression, might it not be pathological, but instead an evolutionary benefit as a way of responding to stress or grief, that maybe is just something that our body naturally does in response to it. Yeah, I think to know that if you are in grief, your body is going to be disrupted for a while. And that part of grief is to accept that. Have curiosity about whether that disruption is causing longer-term problem.

For example, if you feel disrupted and you keep being drawn towards drinking to try to turn down some of that physiological elevation or arousal that you feel, then you're creating another problem for yourself, avoiding or being aware of the things that you are doing to help work through the strength of those emotions and trying to be very mindful of doing that in a way that's not going to cause other damage to you, I think is really important. You don't want grief to be the seed for other problems or other pathology. Yeah, and I think this is a good follow on question to that, and that is as we were recovering from grief, how do we rewrite the default assumptions to accommodate or make room for the reality of what has happened. Yeah, I have a whole section in my book about shattered assumptions, which are the ways that we see the world that have to get reorganized after grief.

So I think first off, we just want to know that's got to happen. Like, for example, as we talked about earlier, I grew up in a family where effort led to outcome. So if you worked really hard at something, you were gonna have a good outcome. And that was the sort of default assumption that existed in my family's life. But then we encounter these experiences where all effort was made and the outcome was terrible.

So does that mean then for me, don't worry about exerting effort anymore because the outcome doesn't matter or does that mean then for me, don't worry about exerting effort anymore because the outcome doesn't matter, or does that mean then for me, the world is just very unpredictable. So I have to reorient around what's happened and create a new set of assumptions for myself. And that is the work of grief that I think is really helpful to have a clinician or a therapist or a coach

or that is helpful to do in dialogue with someone else because someone else can often hear where you may be getting stuck or where your assumptions are no longer fitting and can help you rewrite them in a way that is more consistent with who you are. I think that's an important thing for people to realize. And I think finding coping mechanisms is another important thing. And you go into a few of them in the book. And one of them is a chapter where you reference the special art of crying on airplanes. And I thought maybe you could talk about that and how is being in grief on a plane both, as you say, excruciatingly uncomfortable

and strangely comforting. Yeah. So this time in my life when my dad was sick and following his death, I was on airplanes all the time. My dad lived in California. I live in Minnesota. So I was flying back and forth a lot. And so I got really good at like being on a plane and crying.

And to be honest, most of this book was written during these plane flights. And so I had to get real comfortable with my own emotional expression. And so that's figuring out these real simple strategies. Like I would wear a sweatshirt with a hood on it. And once again, I have a PhD. Like I don't usually walk around with like hood over my head. I'm not the right age and just not my vibe usually. But the hood gave me like a little bit of privacy and I could just be in my own inner world a little bit in a way that felt really helpful. And it felt very compassionate toward myself to be like,

I'm on this plane, my dad's dying, I'm probably gonna have some feelings about it. I can force myself to keep a stiff upper lip. Or I could just wear a sweatshirt and put some earphones on and let myself have a moment. Most people aren't going to be bothered. People don't. People care, but they don't care, right?

They're strangers. They're not that invested. So I think it was actually very helpful for me to give myself that license. And once again, the people around me were usually pretty compassionate, slash, and concerned. Well, another coping skill that you got into is actually one that I got into as well ironically. And that is, we did it in different forms, but I was doing Acro for a while, Tim Ferris style. And there are different forms of Acro.

I was doing your typical, what you would think you would see when in circus comelen or acrobatics or cheerleading. And the type you did from what I understand is using silks. What do you down this path? Well, I had a background in yoga. I was a yoga teacher. And then I moved from California to Minnesota and I needed an indoor activity. So I found myself accidentally in an aerial yoga class, which is where there's piece of fabric suspended from the ceiling that helps deepen your stretch. It's more of a supported stretch. As things began to unravel with my dad and brother, I went much deeper into this practice

so that I was training five times a week and really training to be more the circus level of tricks and performance, that not the level that you'd see in Cirque du Soleil, but more similar to the people who are artists on the fabrics. And it was such a gift to me, to just have something that was very different than every other part of my life,

that was playful, also challenging, required a lot of strength and flexibility. And it really became a teacher for me in the things that I needed to have within myself in order to move through or move with these grieving events more fluidly. Yes, and it certainly also brings some elements of self-confidence to bear as well. Plus, there's a great community aspect, at least what I was part of. When we would go out here and do it on the weekends, we would have everything from Auralist out there

to maybe 20, 25 of us who were doing Acro to people who were doing tightrope, juggling. So it's a fun community to be around. Well, you're the second Auralist I've had on the podcast. The first is a friend of mine who's an international performer named Jen Brick or Bauer who actually... She's a friend, Instagram. Yeah, she's great, but don't know how either one of you has the physical strength to do it, because it's a lot harder than it looks.

For sure. It is a lot of strength, but it's funny. It's a lot of strength, but it's also just a lot of technique. And I think that's where it's a good lesson for grief because it feels like there's a message that if you're doing something hard, you have to like muscle up to be strong enough to get through it. And while that is true in Ariel, there's also a lot of learning how to use your strength really well and very strategically and very effectively that helps you do hard things. So I was grateful for the lessons in nuance and technique that help make hard things less difficult.

Which is something that is your personal slogan and something that you help thousands of clients with. So I'm glad you brought that up. So with that, you know, there's two ways that you do that. You actually have two podcasts. One of them has over a million downloads. Congratulations on that. And on that one, you're talking more about mental health advice. If the audience isn't familiar with you or that podcast, can you talk a little bit more about it? Yeah, that project is called Zen Founder,

which is also the name of my company. And that's the work that I've been doing for almost 10 years now, really thinking about mental wellness, mental wellbeing for business owners, for people who are founding businesses, running businesses. And yeah, that's a big part of my life's work and the bread and butter, but it, we think about mental health from a really holistic perspective. So that includes relational health, physical health, cognitive health, emotional health, spiritual health sometimes, to think about how to optimize creativity and problem solving

and energy, all the things that go into what it takes to create a business. And then your other podcast is really diving into psychedelic recovery from grief, trauma, abuse, which is something we've covered here a couple of times recently on the show because it's right now in stage two for psilocybin in stage three for MDMA clinical trials. What do you cover on that podcast around that topic? Yeah, that podcast is called Mind Curious and it's a partnership between me and MindCure, which is a Canadian based psychedelics company. And that is really an open-ended exploration of how psychedelics can support mental well-being. So we've did a deep dive in

IBegaine, which is something that looks to be very promising for treating opioid addiction, alcohol addiction, brain injury. We've done episodes certainly on psiban MDMA and just the larger landscape of how psychedelics may enter the conversation around mental health care and what people need to know in order to be like savvy consumers of that when it is rolled out and legalized. Well, I wanted to make sure we introduce those. I always like when other podcasters are on the show to somehow promote the shows because I think it's valuable.

I don't think any of us in the podcasting space, I don't look at it as competition. I think we all have our voice and if someone benefits from it, then I want to get the word out about it. Well, I wanted to end our discussion by talking about two different sides of grief. The first is grief. Let's face it, it's a very isolating journey. And when I had Kate shut on the podcast, December last year, one of the things that she brought up was how horrible at times it was for her in the way that people approached her about her grieving process. And in the book you talk about this as well. And I wanted to

get into how based on your experience through this, would you recommend someone approach someone who is grieving? And why is it important to refurries the question that so many people often say, how are you to something else? Oh, yeah. How are you? Is there really overwhelming question? Because when people are in grief,

they might be like 10 different things at once, right? Lots of emotions mixed together. And so I like a much more specific question. Like, how can I support you practically? Can I bring a meal next Tuesday? Can I have somebody come over and mo your lawn? Like providing that practical help? I think another thing that can be really helpful

is, as I mentioned earlier, to invite someone who's in grief to tell a story about the person that they've lost. If they wish to, just being on the choice, the invitation, saying something like, if you feel like talking about your brother Dave, I'd love to have that conversation. I'd love to listen to you, remember some stories about him. So if you'd like to do that, I'm up for it. If it's not today and another day, please let me know. I'm happy to listen. I think when we give people choices, that helps to offset or counterbalance the sense of lack of choice that they've had as part of loss. I think not presuming how people feel is really important. And most people are going to say, okay, or they're going to say fine.

And that's more like an attempt to end a conversation. So I think asking with nuance, asking specifics, like, what's made you laugh today? Are you laughing at all right now? Or what's been your low point today? Has there been something that's you laugh today? Are you laughing at all right now? Or what's been your low point today? Has there been something that's really hurt today? Those kinds of questions are much more nuanced and they're more helpful. And Kate mentioned some of those, but she also said the self-lex acts that other people did on her behalf, whether it was someone bringing her a meal,

someone cutting her yard, someone just doing something nice for her because sometimes you just don't know what to say. And an act can be just as powerful if not more. I was just wanted to add real quick, just the reminder that grief doesn't end in the first two weeks. Sometimes there's a lot of like shock in a tension right after somebody has died, but it's often like the six week mark

or the three-month mark that your friend may really need that follow-up phone call or that text or send them flowers, just that sort of act of love as time goes on can be really helpful. Okay, and for the parents who might be listening to this, and I know you're a parent yourself, what is your perspective on raising children to value sorrow, longing, compassion, and disappointments?

Yeah, this ends up being quite a theme in my book because I was grieving while my children were pretty young at the time they were 8, 8, and 12, and it felt very important for me to have lots of conversations about grief with them, as preparing them to be grief literate humans. I wanted them to have a deep sense of what grief is and when it happens and what it feels like. So that they wouldn't be like shocked or surprised when they encountered grief in their lives. And that's, I have a lot to say about this and

I know our time is running out, but I feel like that's something that we can all do better is to be more grief literate. And to start those conversations early on in our lives before we've experienced maybe big griefs so that we aren't so overwhelmed when that happened. Yeah, I think that's good advice and I wish we could have dove in a little bit deeper on that because I think it's an important topic. I did want to end by asking you, what do you want readers to take away from touching two worlds? There are two things. One is I really want it to feel like resonant so that people do feel less alone in their own grief, that they see pieces of themselves in my story or my experiences and what I've written. I do hope that people also are take away a sense of that this is a love letter, right? That there's a great deal

of love and affection that's pouring out of me towards the people that I love in this book. And so when we reframe grief as love, it softens it a little bit. Yeah, so that takes us back to the beginning of the whole episode where that's where we started from. So, sure, if there is someone listening who wants to learn how to get in contact with you, and of course, I'll put links in the show notes, how can they find you? Yeah, I'm at Sherry Walling on Twitter and Instagram. And this book has its own website called touching to worlds.com. But then I also have Sherry Walling.com,

the umbrella of all of my different pieces of my work. And then of course the podcast is Zen Founder. Well Sherry, thank you so much for being so vulnerable about this story. One that must have been hard for you to tell, and I really appreciate you coming to the PassionStrike podcast and talking about it to our community. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me, John. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Dr. Sherry Walling and wanted to thank Sherry for coming on the show. Links to all things Sherry will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we

feature on the show. It helps support the show and makes it free for listeners. Videos are on YouTube at John R. Miles where we now have over 400. Please go check it out and subscribe. Advertisers deals and discount codes are all in one convenient place at passionstark.com slash deals. I'm at John R. Miles both on Twitter and Instagram and you can also find me on LinkedIn. You're about to hear a preview of the Passion Stark podcast interview I did with Herbert Professor Dr. Joshua Green and we explore the science of effective given. We are

naturally inclined to pay attention to and focus on the things that are closest to us geographically and culturally and socially. So there's kind of this mismatch between where our feelings naturally go and where we really have the most opportunity to do so. Remember, we rise by lifting others. So share this show with those that you love and care about. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with someone who can use the advice from Dr. Wallin that we gave here today.

In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life, action strut. you