Sense of Soul - Grief, Loss and the Afterlife

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

Warning this episode maybe triggering or emotional for those who have experienced loss. Today on Sense of Soul we have Karen V. Johnson, JD, she is a graduate of Georgetown Law Center (J.D.), a former Fulbright Scholar in Afghanistan, and holds Masters Degrees in Public Health and Public and International Affairs (MPH, MPIA). Karen is a retired federal administrative law judge who practiced criminal and energy law for more than 30 years. She also is a former U.S. Army officer, Major, USAR (inactive).  Today she is part of the Four Winds Society and is a Master Practitioner of Energy Medicine. She has trained extensively in the techniques of Illumination, Soul Retrieval, Extractions of Energies and Entities, Divination, and Death Rites.  She joined us to tell us about her book Living Grieving: Using Energy Medicine to Alchemize Grief and Loss (Hay House, July 7th, 2021), her first book. When Karen Johnson's 27-year-old son Ben died due to a drug overdose, her world came to an abrupt halt. Enveloped in unbearable grief with no spiritual belief, Karen tried to make sense of everything while communicating with Ben's spirit in the Afterlife. Karen left her lifetime appointment as a Federal Judge of over 30 years, sold all of her belongings, and went on a 2½ year journey around the world in search of healing and understanding of the spirit world she was now communicating with. Communication with Ben's spirit increased during her travels, leading her to discover shamanism as her new path. 
 Visit her website: https://karenjohnson.net @karenjohnsonhealing If you or someone needs help: Text 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline Hours: Available 24 hours.   As mention in episode “Sibling To Sibling” creates Grief Toolboxes for siblings who have lost a sibling to suicide. (Currently serving the state of Colorado) https://www.siblingtosibling.org Visit Sense of Soul at www.mysenseofsoul.com Do you want Ad Free episodes? Join our Sense of Soul Patreon, our community of seekers and lightworkers. Also recieve 50% off of Shanna’s Soul Immersion experience as a Patreon member, monthly Sacred circles, Shanna and Mande’s personal mini series, Sense of Soul merch and more. https://www.patreon.com/senseofsoul Thanks to our Sponsors  KACHAVA: www.kachava.com/senseofsoul ATHLETIC GREENS:  https:// athleticgreens.com/senseofsoul

Welcome to the Sense of Soul podcast. We are your hosts, Shanna and Mandy. Grab your coffee, open your mind, heart, and soul. It's time to awaken. Hey friends, if you are looking for ad-free Sense of Soul episodes, you can find them at Sense of Soul Patreon. Become a monthly member at any level. You will also have access to our monthly SOS Sacred Circles, our mini-series, merch, and

MuchBorn. And it's a great way to help support our podcast so that we can continue to bring you inspiring episodes twice a week with our enlightened guests from all around the world. Check out our Patreon. Today we have with us Karen Johnson. She is a former federal judge who practiced criminal and energy law for over 30 years. She is also a former U.S. Army officer major. But today, she is a master practitioner of energy medicine and has trained extensively in the techniques of illumination, soul retrieval, extractions of energies and entities, divination,

and death rite. Karen's world would abruptly halt and make a major shift after the death of her son Ben. An unbearable grief with no spiritual beliefs, Karen tried to make sense of everything while being visited by her son Ben Ben Spirit in afterlife. Karen left her lifetime appointment as a federal judge and began her journey around the world in search of healing and understanding of the spirit world, which led her to discovering shamanism as her new path. And Karen is joining us to tell us about her book, Living Grieving, Using Energy Medicine to Alchemize Grief and Loss, and to share with us how it was that her son's unfortunate death led her from judge to shaman. We're super excited to have you on. Your story

is heart-wrenching, but also some very amazing gifts came out of that. You know, sometimes that darkness brings so much light. I think we can both relate, not in the same way, but Shanna wouldn't be on here podcasting and be where she's at without her father's passing. And I wouldn't be here on my journey without my brother's passing. So, you know, people have a hard time grasping when I tell them I actually have peace with his death. And it has brought so many gifts and people look at you kind of weird, like what, like, they think it's weird that you say things like that. That's what our society doesn't, you know, things that we know, cause transformational energy or things like getting married and becoming a parent. And grief is also transformational energy or things like getting married and becoming a parent. And grief is also

transformational has transformational energy, but we've got that off to the side like that. Oh, that talk about sadness, despair, hopelessness. So we don't want to talk about that, but you do there's, if you're open to the process, you can get a lot of gifts, a lot of transformation from grief and death. Yeah. My mom's best friend growing up, she was a grief counselor. And when she lost her husband, she stopped doing her job. She said, I did a disservice to all of my clients. I had no idea what grief was like. I think that in our culture, we sort of have this fast paced culture, you know, time's moving on time to get over it time to, you know, let's not talk about that. Let's talk about something else. You don't focus on the past. So I think we need to

restructure all that. And I like to tell people to think of grief as a journey and you're on your own journey and your journey is going to take as long as your journey takes. And you might be alone a long time in that journey, but eventually you're going to gather wisdom along the way and gifts. At the end, you're going to be able to create a new life out of the ashes of the old that honors your loved ones. So a lot of time in our culture, we idolize people who wear black for the rest of their lives and don't move on in their room isn't a shrine and they save all the clothes and they, you know, all these kinds of things. And it's sort of like, oh my gosh, this is the stereotype of the grieving widow, right? And what if it's not

meant to be that way? And what if by doing it that way, by keeping stuck ourselves, we're keeping our loved ones on the other side stuck too, from doing all that they can do on the other side. So it's not eternal slumber. My son is not slumbering. He's busy all the time and learning and growing and doing things. And we do have some work that we do together. We both transition souls to the other side. And so he helps me. So I kind of

have become a psychopomp sort of person. And he helps me, especially young men and women that died unexpectedly or died of overdoses. Suicides too, we've been fed a lot of information about though you're going to hell, you're going to hell. And so spirits get very stuck on the other side. They're scared. It's like, well, I don't know what that is, but that could be the, I don't know if that's the doorway to heaven or hell. So I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to stay right here. And so my son Ben's able to come and say, Hey man, I know what's on the other side. I'll help you. I'll show you. It's, it's really great. There's nothing like that there. And so, you know, we, we work together to help people cross over.

So, yeah, I think it's just sometimes we have to get rid of sort of arcane and outdated and outmoded concepts, maybe even their Western concepts of grief and how it's supposed to look. Because I can tell you one thing, you're never going to please anybody with your grieving. If you don't grieve long enough, they're going to say, well, you're never going to please anybody with your grieving. If you don't grieve long enough, they're going to say, well, that certainly didn't bother her. Right. And if you grieve too long, oh, she's not doing well. She needs to see a psychiatrist. She needs medication. Right. So there's no win. So you might as well go on your own journey of discovery. So what if we're finding out more things about ourselves and about life along the way?

You know, Mandy and I are both mothers. I just, I can't even imagine that pain. Do you mind sharing how you lost your son? Sure. Yeah. So Ben was struggling like many young men were. So he was trying to find his way and trying to start different businesses and not being very successful and never really wanted to go to college. super smart guy, never wanted to go to college. And then, so he decided

he was going to go to college. He was about 26, 25 or 26, but really, you know, felt like, oh, this is going to take forever. And I'm not sure my place here. And so I knew that he was struggling and I felt like we needed to have a real conversation about life, you know, what he was going to do because he had a lot of back issues. So things that he wanted to do that were in our family, like be in the military or go to police or border patrol firemen, he couldn't be because physically he had this hunchback sort of thing and had a huge surgery. So he had set two 17 inch rods in his back. So he felt like he was useless. He felt like he couldn't do anything he wanted to do. And so he was really struggling. So I'd gone

on a vacation to South Korea. And that afternoon, I was feeling sick, I was feeling nauseous, I was tired. And I got this call and someone hung up. And so I mean, I don't know, I just knew I had to call back. It wasn't a number I recognized, called back. This is detective whoever, right? And I was like, what, what happened? He's like, well, it's your son, Ben. And I said, what was he in an accident? What happened? Now, where are you? And I said, I'm in South Korea. He said, oh, okay. So he's dead. He died. And I, from what? He's like a heroin overdose. And I just like everything. I think my entire being just fell apart. And so it was, it was evening in South Korea. I couldn't even, there was not a flight out until the next morning. And wow. So, so it was,

it was just really big. And so while I was sitting at the airport, 12 hours later or so, Ben came and peered right in front of me, just like he was his big, happy six, eight tall, happy guy, you know, and then he faded away. I wasn't at all spiritual. So I had no sense of what was going on. And so I called my ex-husband frantically saying, I think he's alive. I think he's alive. He's, I think he's alive. You've got to call the ME and check. I think he's trying to get out of the refrigerator. I think he's, I think he's alive. So they all kind of humored me. She looked and said, no, I'm sorry, he's gone. And so that was sort of the doorway for me into the fact that there really is life after death. And I wouldn't have

believed that before. Before I kind of said, alive is alive, dead is dead. That's all there was to it. I didn't have that big coming to realization with my mother and father. They kind of died in the ordinary things, or in the course of things, at 94 and 89, and they had been ill. And I just didn't have that completely thrown out of the matrix experience. And so when I went back home, everything was so surreal. And Ben was around, I could sense him, could feel him fluttering, but I couldn't hear what he was saying. So about three weeks later, I ended up, my left brain decided I would see if there were any mediums in Fairfax County, Virginia, right? Because I didn't know any.

My life didn't include spiritual things like that and spiritual people. So yep, turned out the book had a list of people and one person's picture was bigger than the others. And I said, okay, I'll take her for lack of figuring out who else to take. And so I went to visit her about three weeks after he passed. And I said, you know, he's standing right there. See, he's making the candle flicker. That's where he is. And I can see him, but I can't hear him. Can you tell me what he's saying? And so we had a fantastic session and the things she said really sounded like him. She said to me, well, you know, most of my clients have no idea that their loved ones in the room, maybe you have some skills

yourself. And so that began my journey of all kinds of training. So I took mediumship training and crystals and cobble and anything I could get my hands on. And eventually, the medium also referred me to an evolutionary astrologer. And so the evolutionary astrologer told me, well, you're moving away from Uranus, shame, blame, guilt to this mystical path of Neptune. And I'm like a mystical path. What is exactly a mystical path? I had no clue, right? What is the mystical path? And so he said, well, someone who had a reading like you became a shaman. I said, a shaman? Are there shamans in this world right now? You know, I had no idea. So my left brain, you know, Googled it. Three weeks later, I ended up on a plane to Joshua Tree, California, began my first shaman training. And

I thought, well, you know, I won't be like anybody else. I'll be older and too conservative. And they're all going to be, you know, touchy feely types. And I probably won't fit in. And I'll just leave and go to Palm Springs if I don't like it and get a massage and a facial, right? And little did I know that it was just perfect. You know, it's just where I needed to be when I needed it. I can't help but think about those hours between sitting in the hotel to the airport and then on the plane. I mean, what was going through your mind in that spot you were at and so far away in South Korea? Yeah. So, you know, I was just up all night calling family, friends, giving the news. And that's just over and over again. It's like being stabbed

over and over and over again. And then on the plane, just by the time I got to the plane, I'd been up all night, talked to lots of people. And I was just, you know, they were so kind and Korea airlines, I let the attendant know, and she, you know, kept everybody away from me and just allowed me to, they let me have a whole seat row of seats by myself. And so I, you know, I managed to get there. He's your only son. He's my only son. I have a daughter too. You do, you know, I managed to get there. He's your only son. He's my only son. I have a daughter too. You do.

You know, recently I helped put together this website called Sibling to Sibling. And it's for the siblings who have lost their siblings to suicide. Yeah. And so how far apart were your kids? About 20 months, 20 months apart oh my gosh okay that was that's my kids which one was older uh ben my son that's how my that's exactly my my two older kids are just the same 20 months apart totally different i mean she's like successful mega successful in every single way life was was easier. She didn't have the back issue.

So, you know, it was just like a totally different experience. When you say left brain, tell our listeners, you know, what you mean by left brain. We saw your bio. So we know your, you know, your past positions and what you did for a living. Can you talk about that? So left brain is that brain that gets us through every day that gets us through that talks about just the facts, only the facts, A plus B plus equals C. Let's do it that way. Let's not rely on any instinct that will lead you astray. You know, the right brain has to do with creativity, intuition, prayer, ceremony, those sorts of

things. And left brain is more oriented towards physical reality. And so successful, I was very able to turn off what I had a lot of experiences when I was very young with beings that I played with an invisible person that I played with all the time and a being that looked like an Indian chief that was in the basement, and they still are spirit guides that are around me, but I didn't know what that was. And I shut that all down because it was, you know, it was in those days, you know, nobody talked about those things. My mother said, don't tell anybody they're going to think you're crazy. Right. And so I kind of shut that all down. And for 30 years, I just plugged in and did what I thought I was supposed

to do. And then this experience kind of just threw everything outside of that. I, you know, when you're describing the two, it almost sounds like soul and ego, which I know it's, that's far more complicated than just right brain, left brain. Yeah. But it's kind of, it's kind of that too. Ego kind of keeps us safe. It keeps us in our fear box you know that don't go outside and then you notice as soon as you kind of go outside of your fear box it kind of goes away so but it's that part of us that ego centric part of us that wants to keep us safe and small and sameness familiarity feels good why do we have the same patterns often with people in the same dynamic

because it's familiar right we kind of know how it's going to turn out even if it's going to turn out badly but if we change things up we don't know how that's going to turn out and so we stay with what's familiar even sometimes way beyond the times we should yeah so you're a retired judge a federal judge and so you probably have heard a lot of horror stories and so I know I thought about that because you know sometimes I think that people get desensitized even from hearing stories but then when it's your own it's probably yeah it just happened to me for many many years and so yeah it's desensitizing but it's you know you can keep that sort of distance because it's not you not always but I mean sometimes you get sucked into wrapped up into

it sucked into someone's story but but when it's you and it's yours and it's your family, it's your child, that's a whole different experience there. You don't have to lose that buffer, that little distance, that thing that keeps us able to perform. And I just lost it completely. Basically, you know, you know, my friends, when I was preparing to retire, sell all my household goods, give away, sell, you know, everything, car, mortgage, had none of that and went on a two and a half year journey around the world to try to make sense out of death and grief. What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to go on? Does it make any sense? And I don't really want to go on. And yet here I am. I think that's what was so intriguing about your story is that you were very left brain. You have to be left brain as a judge.

You have to collect the facts and then make a decision based on facts. And also before that, you were in the army as well, which is very much left brain also. So I love stories like this where you hear people that are one way their whole life. And then it's just like, you get blasted open to this whole nother world, literally. And it's unfortunate that it had to come from your son's death, but in the same way, what a beautiful gift, but it sounds like you had these gifts at a young age, but because of the world's conditions, you pushed it aside. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it does it sometimes, you know, death is a, is the doorway. So spirit calls in many ways, softly, gently. And then if you don't get it,

how about an illness? How about death? How about this? Right. So answer the calling when it's gentle, or you could wait until spirit knocks you around a little bit. And I had to wait. I think at some point to the pool of the world, the pool of the everyday is like gale force winds keeping you in place. Right? So we got mortgages, we got kids, we got parents, we got the sandwich generation, we got husbands and all this kind of stuff, homes to clean, groceries to buy and blah, blah, blah. And you kind of get sucked into that surviving mentality of it all. And you don't have a whole lot of time or energy left to look around and say, gee, I think I just changed my life. Oh, how am I going to do that?

Right. And so it doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel safe. And what about everybody else? And so we end up going right back to where we were. You know, I find it so interesting how guilt is so closely related to grief too. Just thinking about, I mean, even, yeah, I think that every single time I've ever grieved, that's like the first thing like, oh, I should have talked to them more. Or, oh, I could have saved them in this way. I mean, with my dad, oh, I shouldn't have brought him to the hospital., prevented it, which is, I don't believe that you can. I believe that these are contracts that we have before we even come here. So someone else's life is out of our hands. That's what I'm saying. Oh, for sure. Unless you take it.

You know, that's sort of the premise of my book is how do we get in touch with what's deep inside of us? Because a lot of this is unconscious baggage we're carrying around. And so what I like to do is have people sit in a ceremonial way. Because in a ceremony, when you have a candle, you have a piece of paper, and I like to have a pie pan and a pen and pencil. You get out of your everyday literal reptilian brain and you climb into your neocortex. And the neocortex is the brain of ceremony. And at the level of ceremony, everything can shift lightly like a feather in the breeze. When we try to move things at the physical realm

with our reptilian brain, it's all heavy and dark. We get stuck. We can't move. And so I have 16 exercises for people to, just like you were talking about, begin to write down what are the stories you're carrying around? I should have done this. I shouldn't have done that. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Things that make us suffer, suffer greatly. So the practice of non-suffering is getting in touch. Part of it is getting in touch with those stories that are ruminating and wrapping around your head, putting them on a piece of paper, writing it all down with radical honesty, because we're going to burn those pieces of paper. Nobody's going to see them. A lot of times people are very, I don't want to write anything down.

Somebody's going to see my children, my husband, my mother, my love, they're going to be upset. So we burn it. And the intention in burning it is to send it to spirit. So shamans use fire as a path of rapid transformation. And so we're taking it to the fire to release and opening our heart to new ways of perceiving, new ways of seeing the world, seeing senses. So each of the 16 practices has that releasing and that opening, releasing and that opening. So we go from being profoundly stuck in our grief, and then on the south direction of the medicine wheel, it's oriented towards the four winds, the Indian medicine wheel. So we get in the South, then we go to the West, and we come a little lighter, we go to the North hummingbird medicine, all of a sudden,

we're looking around, we're kind of resurrecting, if you will, oh, my gosh, so life is different, this person's never coming back. And life is different. And then we end up in the east direction of the medicine wheel. And we're with with eagle medicine where we begin to create a new life out of the ashes of the old that honors our loved one and so this process one of the east practices that i so love is called indigenous alchemy what the heck does that mean so i looked it up so indigenous means native or inherent and alchemy means transformation. And so what if we as humans are wired deeply for transformation? And as we keep ourselves stuck in our grief, that heaviness that is in us leads to all sorts of illnesses manifesting, autoimmune cancers, all my my client most of my client almost every client that comes to me with

a serious illness if we go back at the root there is an unresolved loss or grief or death or trauma of some kind so we want to move this energy we don't want to have this energy of grief stuck in us for our own sake, but also for our loved ones on the other side who, as we are stuck, we're kind of holding onto their kite string and keeping them back. I love the ritual part because, you know, it's so true how they say grief is like waves, how it comes in and out, which kind of reminds me of what you were saying of this in and out of letting go. And, you know, we do the whole funeral, you know, however many things you do before, you know, my family was Catholic. So sometimes that's a lot of things and then it stops and you go home and you're like, now what do I do? Right. Because what happens after that? Yeah. The next holiday, the next birthday, the next death day, the next, the next.

I always felt like put me to sleep between Halloween and Valentine's day, because all that's all in there is a whole bunch of holidays that I don't want to face. And I think a lot of people are like that. They just can't cope over the holidays. They're suffering greatly, you know, because this person's not there anymore. And we don't have good ways to honor them and bring them to the table because everybody's in avoidance. So let's not talk about that. Let's just party. Don't think about that. We're not going to talk about that today. Right. But what if you honored them instead? So I have this prayer bundle that I make. It's a

despacho. We call it despacho. It's an offering. So I call it cookies, cooking, and praying. So you can make this at your counter and use tissue paper and layers of tissue papers and all the things that they loved, all the little ingredients, little bits of this. So it's like rice and flour and pasta and this and that and herbs and spices. So you're making this beautiful layered bundle in remembrance. And this, then you fold it up and tie it up and then it can be at your table, right? So instead of trying to say, you know, what elephant in the room? Oh, we're not going to talk about that. And I'll tell you, you can talk about why not have this presence and then you can put it in a fire.

You can have little ceremony, rapid transformation again, with everybody's prayers for this loved one loss, you can bury it in the earth for a slower release kind of thing. So what if we changed it up a little bit? And this came to me actually from Ben, you know, cause I was doing my normal on his death day. Oh, Ben, no, I miss you. Oh, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he came and he's like, mom, you're kind of being a bummer with this. You know, I'm right here. Right. Why are you doing this? You know? Yeah. He's like, look, I'm doing stuff. He said, you know, at that moment, he's like, I'm in the Jesus pot. We weren't particularly religious. He's like, we're in the, I'm in the Jesus pot. It's not like anything

you hear at the Bible. It's none of that stuff. He's really cool. So you're pulling me out and you know that I'm perfectly happy and I see you all the time. So this is kind of a bummer. So what if we are kind of being a bummer? What if we could turn that around a little bit and view it a little bit differently? So you were bringing him out of a space that he was in when you were grieving and maybe calling him in by saying, oh, I miss you. I miss you. Yeah. Yeah.

So he comes back and forth. So, you know, spirits that are fully transitioned on to the other side and to heaven or nirvana, they're not in prison. They can come back and forth. So, you know, spirits that are fully transitioned on to the other side, to heaven or nirvana, they're not in prison. They can come back and forth. So he comes back and he helps me do work, help transitioning people and things like that. So, and I can talk to him. He does come in, you know, you can feel the presence of people.

It doesn't come like in that full form anymore. I think that's really difficult for them to sustain, but I can feel his spirit. You know, I can feel him around and I can difficult for them to sustain, but I can feel his spirit. You know, I can feel him around and I can call for him to come around. Does he send you any synchronicities or any kind of signs? You know, at this point, it's not so much synchronicities because I can actually hear him now. I can hear him and I know his presence, but certainly in the beginning, you know, I had an experience with a butterfly that stayed with me for a really long time. And so you can ask your loved one, Hey, what kind of thing will you be? What will you show me? You know, before they go, what will you show me? How will you talk to me? Or let's, let's make it butterfly. Oh, let's make it a wind chime. Someone talked to me about

a wind chime that will suddenly start to move when there's no wind and they know their loved one is nearby so it was father's day after my dad died because my dad died at the end of may and then it was father's day like two weeks later it's like oh i'm gonna hate this day right now this is terrible and i'm inside and i'm all sad and all these things my kids were in the backyard playing and one comes in and was like, oh my God, you have to come outside. And I'm like, okay, you know, I'm sad. I go out there and there was a swarm. And I, when I say swarm, like I've never seen it in my life of dragonflies and they were all over and they were hitting us and landing on us. And it was insane. It was so magical. Yeah. So those kinds of things are things you look for,

you know, and things you might miss, right? You might've missed that because you were staying inside. So Karen, I have a question. I, my story kind of is that I've had two near death experiences with some crazy synchronicities, a father and a son both saved me 18 years apart. It was wild. And then the father passed away shortly after he saved me. And then now he comes to me and gives me messages. And so that's kind of how it started for me. But the other day, I was on social media, and I saw a friend of mine posting about the loss of her daughter. I have been trying to get in touch with her on the other side for seven years, and I never heard anything. But on that day, as I was reading the post, I started hearing her.

Where do you think they are for those seven years? Where are they? Do they transition? Was she stuck? Because for seven years, I got nothing. And then she just flooded through. So that's my first question. My second question is when spirits on the other side come to me, they're very light messages. It's never anything deep. Like Celeste went from talking about her four drawers full of socks to missing her mom's spaghetti to telling her, you know,

niece that she loved her to talking about the about the birthday cards in her mom's drawer. I mean, all very light stuff. And that's kind of the same with every spirit that I talk to. It's almost like they're reminiscing about just these simple little things in life to let the person know, like, I remember these little things. It's never anything really deep. It's very just light and love and, you know, and fun.

Do you find that to be the same? Or what are your, you know, what is your experience? You know, that's such a great question. And every religion has its own interpretation of life after death and so because minds who um entrained together stay together they had trained together and so they come up with a similar mythology so in the indian mythology there's different levels before you get to the realm of the ancestors.

So you might be the realm of stone people, plant people, animal people, and then the realm of the ancestors. And so sometimes people are in the realm of the stone people for a while. They're there for their healing. And then the plant people, maybe they'll go up or wherever we find them. So in Buddhism, they have a different mythology, Christianity talks about the Buddhism, they talk about purgatory, right, different places where souls go that are kind of in between, not here, not there, but it kind of that in between.

So however, it is sometimes souls kind of either get stuck in between or they're somewhere they need to go for healing for a little while. So it could be that the seven years was maybe seven minutes to her, but she was somewhere where she needed to go for healing before she was ready for the next level sort of thing. And then, you know, they do sometimes reminisce about things that are very, very, very familiar. Sometimes they give specific information like where they died, how they died, you know, sometimes tracking for someone who was murdered to find out who the murderer was, things like that. Things will come up, but some of it's serious. It can be serious or maybe have a message like where they put some important papers that the person hadn't found yet, those kind of things. So different kinds of things can come through, memories and things like that. So do they leave the heavy stuff here because it's more like earthly and more ego?

Well, you know, it depends on how you see that. It seems to me that when we pass, you know know we can go lightly or we can go with a lot of baggage depending on what we've dealt with in our lives some people you know if you haven't dealt you haven't said your goodbyes i forgive yous i love yous i'm sorrys carrying a lot of baggage a lot of hidden secrets and you know these kind of things you go in a heavier kind of state you take what you are with you you don't become something else unless you know you've gotten work through a lot so that's why with shamans we work with the person before they die we do what's called seven chakra illumination we've worked to bring up all the heavies and help them to say their goodbyes i'm

sorry i forgive you make telephone calls i need to make do all the heavies and help them to say their goodbyes. I'm sorry. I forgive you. Make telephone calls. I need to make, do all the things they need to do before they die. So they can die lightly so they can go lightly and they don't have to carry all that heavy karma that they came in with. So, but you know, every, every mythology is a little bit different with that, but. I think it's so fascinating that Ben came to you so fast. Like, I mean, instantly, he was standing right there in front of you, you had to have thought,

am I losing my mind? Am I crazy? Like, I mean, you go from this completely left minded person who you're in the military, you're a judge. And then all of a sudden, you're seeing your son standing in front of you. And then you're telling your loved ones to go check the fridge to see if he's alive. I mean, they had to have thought you were losing your mind. Absolutely. No, that's the way I interpret it. It never occurred to me that I was seeing his spirit. I just said, Oh, Oh, he must not be dead. Right. I couldn't wrap my mind around his being dead. And then when they said he was dead, then it was sort of like sitting in the plane going, what was that? Was that my imagination? Right. And then I get off the plane and I'm thinking it must've been my imagination. Right. And then he's around all the time. I can feel him. I can sense him. I can kind of feel it's like he's anxious and beating his little wings, right. Anxiously

trying to get my attention. And so then I was thinking, I got to go see a medium. I got to go see somebody about this. Because if I tell a psychologist or psychiatrist, oh, they're going to put me on some heavy medication, right? You know, we laugh about that. But realistically, it was sad back in the day. You know, if you were to even tell your husbands that they were sending you off to the psych ward.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, you off to the psych ward. Absolutely. Absolutely. And here I am a federal judge. I can't be going off and being medicated for stuff like this. Because you get reviewed and all kinds of stuff like that for clearances. How long after this happened did you pack up and go on this journey, this two-year journey? It took me a little while. I mean, it took me about, he passed in 2014 in November. So I was on my way. I had finished shaman school

and I had done a vision quest and I about June of 2016. So almost two years, but maybe a year and a half. So it was a while of, I mean, I think sometimes you just have to go through the intense loss and suffering. And then I began looking at it and trying to talk to him more and saying, Oh, maybe there's something here. And then Shaman school really helped me to see how, see it in a different light. Didn't understand grief and loss. I felt like I needed more. Can we talk about the cover of your book? First of all, I love the color you picked for the cover, but talk about the bird, talk about how you chose it.

Sure. So I like indigenous alchemy. So alchemy is basically transferring base metals into gold. It was a middle ages thing. And then, but so metaphorically we're doing the same thing with our journey through grief. We're transforming our heavy, heavy heaviness into lightness and in a new way of living. And so that was the gold I wanted. I love the gold. And then the bird coming down, it's like pure energy. You could see the energy of the bird. So it's not a bird that's like fleshed out fully. It's those little pixel dots. So it's the energy of it coming down, you know, coming down and to us for transformation. That is so ironic because when I had my near-death experience, I saw my brother, he passed away in the war in

Iraq and I saw him in like his full desert storm outfits. And then it dissipated into little gold flakes all around him. And then it was just our soul. How, and it was those little pixels of gold. I wrote about it. Yeah. I think. Yeah. Yeah. So how did you get to the point where you wanted to write a book and share this with other people? Oh gosh. So in the beginning, you know, I was just thinking, oh, this will be a blog, maybe a travel blog. Right. And then everywhere I went, I ended up being attracted to temples and churches and talking to different shamans and shamans in Africa and Sufi masters in India and Hindu temples in Bangladesh. And so all around the world in

Taos, the Hanuman temple. And everywhere I went, I was attracted and I was collecting information on grieving and dying. And, and also I kept practicing with the four winds and teaching and these 16 practices are associated. Alberto Viotto does this so beautifully with the four winds medicine wheel. So it just came to me like, oh my gosh, this is how to help people. This is this transformational journey. And one time, you know, I was sitting and it was that map of the bereaved. So the bereaved go through the same process as our loved ones do from transition, resurrection, rebirth.

And we know this from Christ and from Egypt. This is a mythology, an ancient map of the dead, but it also applies to those left behind. We go from transitioning from having this person with us day to day to not having them and then resurrecting and saying, oh my God, you know, this is really real. He's not coming back. And so how is life going to be? And then if we're really fortunate and we really do this deep work, then we get to reborn. We gave me creating a new life out of the ashes of the old. So everything was downloaded to me. And so many people told me, oh, well, you know, you don't know the right people and how are you going to write a book? It's tough to get a publisher and it's tough to get an editor. And how are you going to do?

Everything just showed up. It wasn't hard for me at all. And the book wasn't hard for me at all, because I even now I look at it and I think, wow, wow, I don't remember writing that. So it was kind of came from my higher self and, you know, downloaded. That's how it came to be. It wasn't like I set out to write a book. I set out to figure out about the. We have a lot of guests that come on that use the word downloaded. You know, what does downloaded mean to you? Are you channeling it?

Are you receiving it from Ben? Are you receiving it from a higher spirit? Are you receiving it from God? Are you receiving it from spirit guides? You know, are you receiving it from all of the above? Right? I think all of that, everybody, I think everybody, my guides, angels, archetypes, Ben, ancestors, everybody was, I felt like I had this big council in the sky that was saying, okay, go here next. And all of a sudden I'd be playing somewhere else. Oh, how about this? Oh, I need a babysitter for my little dog. Oh, here's babysitter. Oh,

here's this. And then when it was time to stop journeying, my suitcases, the wheels started to fall off. You know, I had expensive suitcases and, and so it happened one time and I'm like, oh, I got to replace the suitcases as a a bummer trying to go through the airport with two suitcases with one wheel. I mean, it's, it's impossible. So, and then the second time it happened, I'm like, oh, that's very odd. Right. And it was, and then the third time I got it, I'm like, oh, this is a message time for you to stop.

That's very interesting. That's so interesting. I love that you had that awareness. My husband's suitcases have been falling apart and he, he keeps buying new ones and they keep breaking and they're expensive too. Maybe it's time for him to quit traveling. Yeah. I mean, it's like when you start to look for synchronicities in life and you see

things happen to you, you first time you may not get it, but it's like the universe, like, okay, smack her again. She's not getting it. How about this suitcase? I always choose to be slapped around. It's like, I just don't get it the first time. God's always slapping me. You know, Karen, I went to this cacao ceremony with a drum circle with a shaman friend. I think he was from Puerto Rico and he talked about death in a way that I'd never heard before that transition and I always say I love this what he said he said our first death that we experience is when we leave our mother's breast and how

each transition in stage is a death in itself and it should be celebrated I thought that was so beautiful it made me just think of it differently and I mean you know also impermanence you know I learned you know from the Buddhist traditions allowing everyone to have their own transformation even though we want to hold on to them so badly but it it's each one of our journey. And so are those the things that helped you? Yeah. You know, every death thing for every death thing, there's a birthing. So shamanic work is sort of like breathing. You know, we breathe in fresh air. We breathe out the old stale air. We have a death thing. We have a birth thing, you know, that's all that balance, everything in harmony, everything in balance. So if you can look at it that way, you know,

rites of passage, passage from being single to being married, you know, we have this big party, but we don't really talk about the energetics of that. Wow, we're entering a new state of being becoming, you know, a parent, that's a new state of being, becoming a grieving a widow, a grieving mother, new state of being. And so these are big transitions, you know, divorce, losing a partner, losing a business, so many transitions, and we kind of ignore them, like we'll have a birthday party for a child. And it's like a party, we don't talk about another circle around the sun, right? So they're no longer that baby. Now they're a toddler. Now they're, right? And so honoring all these passages

that we've kind of lost in our culture. We don't think about that entirely. Yeah. So do you talk to other spirits or only Ben? I talk to a lot of different spirits. Yeah. Yeah. So I, you know, in the beginning it was before I learned how to, I mean, I have time when I'm open to spirits and times when I'm not, because I can't deal with it every day, all day long. So in the beginning, you know, I would wake up and they'd be spirits all around my bed, trying to talk to me, tell this, do this, do that. I'm like, finally, I was like, everybody out, out of my room. And to my surprise, they left. Right. And then they would be in the hallways and now, and I'm like, okay, everybody out of

the hallways and then everybody out of my house. And then I learned with shamanism. So there are times when we hit call the, we're coaches. So it's our eighth chakra energy. So when you see the halos around the Christ and the saints and Buddha and all that, we all have that open, expand that eighth chakra. And when I'm open, I'm open for all sorts of things. When it's closed, I, I, you know, I have to be closed for business. I have to rest. I have to sleep. And I can't, there's not enough time in the day for me to transition every soul that needs

help. Oh my gosh. Yeah. You know, I wanted to ask you, because I imagined you going to this, these shaman classes, my first shaman class that I went to, I, I was going there for a specific reason too. I wasn't just going, I wanted to meet my ancestor who had been coming through and he was a shaman. So was like a while ago well actually it was a medium that told me I needed to go to the shaman and it was her shaman that trained her so I go and everyone's going to go into their journey to meet their spirit animal but not me I'm going you know

I have my own idea I can't wait to meet this ancestor. And so I did see animal actually, the animal led me to this place. But what about you? Did you follow the rules? Or did you see actually, I should ask, did you see your son ever in any shamanic journey? No, because I think he was already with me by the time. Yeah, it was a little different for me. I never saw my dad either in a shamanic journey. It's very interesting. You know, it's always intention. So if you do a journey with the intent to see where your father is in the various realms,

you know, see if he's stuck or needs your help, you might have that experience. You might find that he's in the realm of the ancestors. Fine. Doesn't need any help to move up. Right. Okay. Really, sometimes what you, journeys are all about setting intention. he's in the realm of the ancestors fine doesn't need any help to move up right okay really sometimes what you journey is all about setting intention so if the intention is to meet a spirit a particular one you probably will or a power animal or work with them so that's why those

intentions we set okay live something you can you can journey to three past lives. So I was having this dream about this red caped old man. And he was very, I know it was in like the time of the Egyptians. And I think maybe he was a sage or a druid or something. And unexpectedly, and I did not set my intentions. He shows up in my drum journey. And I'm like, what are you doing here oh unexpected yeah sometimes that happens something else will kind of fall in now that you're right i think with journeying is you're not really in this physical realm so you're not

in this heavy energy you're kind of in another realm somewhere and so entities and energies have an easier time coming through. This physical realm is very dense and very heavy. Karen, have you learned anything from the other side that has changed your life? And particularly from your son? Has he shared any information that you would be willing to share with our listeners? Sure. So you know, if people sign into my website, they get eight things, spirits on the other side, wish you knew. So karenjohnson.net. So you get that for free for signing up and you get my newsletter and my classes and all that kind of good stuff. But I think one of the most

important things is that something we don't think about is as we stay stuck in our grief we keep them stuck too they we prevent them from fully experiencing all they can on the other side because we're kind of holding on to their kite string and i think that for me was such a big reveal um and that they also that they will contact you in various ways that there will be synchronicities, there will be butterflies, there'll be things that will remind you of them and to know that they're around. And know that just because they're around doesn't mean they're stuck being they might be stuck, but they also might be fully crossed over and just come into visit for a moment.

And also the other thing, the biggest thing for everybody, you know, when you're lost in grief, and a lot of people have before someone dies, they're also a caregiver, right? So you're giving care, you've got someone who's in addiction of opioids, you kind of on the edge for years, they've been overdosing and not overdosing. You don't know where they are and what they're doing and then kind of waiting for that to happen, to get back in touch with beauty, do something every day that brings beauty back into your life and get in touch with those things that used to bring beauty. Maybe it's a sunrise. Maybe it's a sunset. Maybe it's an art show. Maybe it's a flower. Something every day so that you're not just digging the neural networks, the neural pathways of grief, loss, deeper and deeper in your brain.

Now you're also reinforcing beauty and coming back to, this is this process of coming back to and creating a new life out of the ashes of the old. So every day, if something small doesn't have to be big, doesn't have to be, but every day, something that brings beauty. And I ask people to get a piece of paper and put it on the refrigerator with a magnet, practice beauty, practice beauty every day. Give us kind of like just a little summary of how your book is set up. Like, do you give people tools? Do you give them rituals that they could do? Like, what does your book look like? Yeah, so it's structured on the medicine wheel. So it's called a Southwest, North and East. And it's got four practices in each direction, practices that

people are familiar with, like non judgmentjudgment, non-suffering, non-attachment, practicing beauty, non-doing, non-engagement, certainty, fearlessness. So these practices, there's 16 of them to sit down and you can do one a day. You don't have to do them all at once, but just think deeply about them and have a fire, a candle nearby and a pie pan. That's so if anything spills over, you know, it falls in the pie pan, nothing magical about the pie pan and a pen and paper. And so you're going to burn things like old, you know, things that have been rooming and eating around in your head, judging, who are you judging? Maybe you're judging yourself.

Maybe you're judging your loved one. I certainly judged Ben. I was mad at him. This isn't supposed to happen. Right. I was furious. And a lot of times we all don't speak ill of the dead. Why? I did something really stupid. Right. So yeah, I wasn't happy. I was mad and, you know, furious. And so, you know, so we want to get in touch with all of those things that we're holding so tightly that we might not even know that we're holding tightly and go through that entire process. So 16 practices and we do it as a group. People sign up for my classes and it's a five week class.

So we have an intro class and then we go through each direction. And so that you can see how other people, they too are suffering. They too are trying to find their way. They too don't know what to do. They don't know if they should look a certain way or act a certain way or be a certain way because society doesn't help us to go through grief. Right. Can you tell everybody where they can find your book?

You already threw out your website, but do you also have social media that they can follow? I do. So my website, karenjohnson.net, I have Facebook, Karen Johnson Healing and Instagram, and it's on Amazon. It's published by Hay House. So Living Grieving, Using Energy Medicine to Alchemize Grief and Loss is the name of the book. So you can just go on my website, you can click, you can get to the book there. Awesome. You know, I have a handful of particular people that I'm going to send your information that I think could really benefit from not only just your story because they can relate to it, but also could really benefit from your wisdom and experience and helping them. So, oh, thank you. Yeah. Yeah.

That's why I do these podcasts because it's always those people that I can touch those people that I can help that are ready to look at things a little differently. Yeah. A couple of them have keep using the word stuck. They're stuck in their grief. I'm sure you can relate, but when I lost my brother, you know, I also lost a piece of my mom, a piece of my dad, a piece of my other brother, because we all changed, you know, and my mom's never, you know, I always say this a lot, but she's never really been the same. And then on the flip side, when you go through this journey and you're awakened to this new world, like you've been, you also lose friends in this journey too, because they don't align with you anymore. And they think that you're crazy talking about spirit guides. And that's

how me and Shanna started this podcast because we were like, we can't be the only ones experiencing this. And thank God I had her to talk to. And now it's time for break that shit down. Get in touch with what you really want. If you didn't have to worry about money and family and responsibilities, get in touch with that soul part of what you, that what your soul really, really wants. And even if it seems improbable or impossible, once you connect with what you really want, you begin to see opportunities and synchronicities that you can't see from that stuck place. Well, you've been awesome, Karen. Thank you so much.

Listeners, don't be afraid. I mean, there's no religion when it comes to this stuff, you know, I mean, you can find so much wisdom in some of these ancient practices. These are not new age, they're very old and still done today. And that holds a lot of credit, I think with me that these practices are some of them are over like 10,000 years old. So yeah, I think it's very beautiful. You know, they're very helpful. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on. Good talking with you. Thanks for being with us today. We hope you will come back next week. If you like what you hear, don't forget to rate, like, and subscribe. Thank you. We rise to lift you up. Thanks for listening.