The Taproot Podcast - Growing Through Grief: Amy Pickett-Williams and The Light Movement

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

Growing Through Grief: Holistic and Somatic Approaches to Healing After Loss Grief is a universal human experience, yet it is deeply personal and unique to each individual. In this article, we explore innovative approaches to grief therapy that integrate somatic and holistic practices to help people grow through loss. We sat down with Amy Pickett-Williams, a grief therapist with over 25 years of experience, to discuss her work and the nonprofit she founded, The Light Movement. Here are some of the key insights from our conversation: The Many Faces of Grief While we often associate grief with bereavement after the death of a loved one, Pickett-Williams emphasizes that grief encompasses many types of loss, including: Loss of a relationship or identity after a major life transition Loss felt by those struggling with infertility or health issues Collective grief over global issues like war, terrorism and climate change The "everyday losses" we experience when things don't go as planned "Losses are around us all the time," says Pickett-Williams. "Every day we experience losses...and if we don't know how to work with them, it's just going to build more and more in our bodies, which can lead to physical issues and chronic stress." #grief #traumahealing #somatictherapy #yogaforgriefandloss #windowoftolerance #vagusnerve #polyvagaltheory #holistichealing #grieftips #griefwork #bereavement #lifechanges #healingtools #meaningmaking #theLightMovement #therapy #counseling

Wounded in similar ways, wounded in similar ways. It sounds like something that a hippie would say, but the truth is we're wounded in similar ways. Hi, I'm here with Amy Pickett-Williams, and she's going to talk about her nonprofit that works with grief. She's a psychotherapist with a long extensive history of working with a lot of issues, but especially grief and loss. And, you know, usually try and start the Taproot Therapy Collective podcast with kind of a silly joke or something. Doesn't feel appropriate here on a grief-centric episode.

So I think we'll just kind of go into it and I'll let you talk about some of your work and you know, I'll chime in as needed if needed. That sounds wonderful. That sounds wonderful. I'm excited to share and thank you so much for having me on your podcast. It looks like you guys do a lot to really touch the world. So it's an honor. Thank you so much. It looks like based on your information, there's a lot of overlap. So I'm curious to see where that Venn diagram, you know, kind of begins and ends. And I'm always interested in, you know, new perspectives on on old issues. Yeah, absolutely. So if you'd like, I'll just dive in a little bit about my professional experience and then how our nonprofit got started and some of the science behind why we have our nonprofit and the tools. Does that sound good? Yeah, that's great. All right. So I've been

a grief therapist for over 25 years, and my heart song is actually working with families who have experienced the death of a child. But in the years of doing this work, it's morphed into working with all types of loss, including a family member or close friend, a pet, and then reaching further. And a lot of times people don't think about grief and loss in regards to the loss of a relationship or loss of self-identity with transitions and fertility, loss of finance, homelessness, and even globally, that sense of loss of safety and sense of peace with what's going on inside our world in regards to terrorism and war and global warming. I mean, all of those different areas can trigger a lot of experiences and feelings of loss. And so when we have these feelings and these

emotions, I think what we found over the years is people aren't knowing how to work with them in order to grow with them. I think it's really important, a caveat, and I've said this for years as a grief therapist, is we don't heal from grief, but we can grow from grief. The scar is always there, but ultimately the hope is our tree or our plant or our cactus will grow around that scar and be able to, as we integrate, in order to find purpose and meaning. If we learn to find purpose and meaning in our loss, we can hopefully work to obviously changing our own selves, but in the more altruistic side, be able to change our world. And so that's part of why our nonprofit was formed. And I'm happy to go into the personal story about that in just a minute.

But the nonprofit itself has four goals. It's to remind people they're not alone in their grief. So much of the time when we experience loss, we feel like we're the only one and no one can understand us. And while that is true to a point, everyone has their own story. The emotions behind loss are universal. And our second goal is to teach these somatic-based tools, that mind-body connection. For some, it's that mind-body, spirit, or soul connection that can lead to integration and finding purpose and meaning. Our third goal is to connect with other resources that support people in grief,

like you, like your podcast. And the fourth one is to stand in solidarity for all people and all types of grief. And I'd love to share a little bit with that fourth goal, how this all came to be, because it's very connected to that fourth goal. I'd love to kind of engage you on two of the points you brought up, because I think that would be a good invitation. And for people who may feel like they don't work with grief, or they don't understand it, or that this isn't relevant to them. I mean, the first one is, like, you said that this is something that you don't, grief is some, you said in so many words that grief is something where it's not, what I see is a lot of cognitive kind of avoidant counseling be like, you know, like, oh, you're sad, and then you get happy,

or I had this bad thing happen, and I was sad, and now I got better. And it's like, what grief work is doing is dealing with something that is unhealable and irrevocable that you learn to grow around, you know? And I think without that perspective, it's hard to really do the work. And then the second point that you mentioned is that like that is a process of like everything, global warming, politics. You know, I saw people coming in with 20 in in 2016 that didn't lose a child, but they were still experiencing grief

because the way they thought things worked was not how they were working or something like that. And I think that when people tell me they don't work with grief, it's like, no, you just don't see it. Because I work with this as an identity disorder a lot, and I have a lot of people that say, well, I don't work with people where there's lots of different parts of them and it's like everybody has lots of different parts you may not have amnesia between them but you're ignoring the parts you know like you're letting

them fight with you you're engaging with the trickster and teenager and you know the mother wound and you're not separating them or you know whatever and to me it's like i i haven't um so many people who come in you're saying like, you don't want this to be real. You don't want to accept this. You're deflecting off of it. You're pretending your emotions are powerful over it. But it's just it just is what it is. You just don't want the world to work this way.

It feels like it's not fair. It's not right. You can't survive if this is the case. And that's underneath almost every issue, you know, in therapy. I mean, I'm not comparing every issue to something like the death of a child or the death of a loved one, but we accept, grieve, and process things that way. You know, the language of the stages of grief is relevant to how we deflect about our ADHD not wanting to do taxes, you know, like, I don't know, could you speak to that? Or is that something that you see? Oh, absolutely. I mean, losses around us all the time. And,

you know, it can be, you know, in the trauma world, people talk about big T, little t. And obviously, in grief, we can have little lesser losses, right? And sometimes grief, there is a important caveat, actually, a little speak to that relates to what you're saying though, is that not all grief has trauma, but all trauma has grief. So it depends on obviously our autonomic nervous system and how we're impacted by that experience. So every day we experience losses, right? Maybe we were working really hard on a proposal for our job and our boss said, sorry, this isn't going to work, right? That's a mini loss.

But the part in part with loss is that loss triggers loss triggers loss. And so while I maybe worked on a proposal for, you know, a big, I'm not a marketing person, but let's pretend like I am. And that my boss says, no, this isn't going to work for us. That may trigger those feelings of loss when our parents said in our childhood, you know, you're not doing this right. And you did this wrong. Right. And so it's important to know that it's, it can be accumulating. And if we don't know how to work with it, it's just going to build more and more in our bodies, which can lead to physical issues and can lead to chronic

illness and chronic stress. And so we have to be aware that, yes, we experience loss every day. And then how do we work with that? And the way I believe we work with it from a somatic perspective is looking at that window of tolerance. You know, Dr. Dan Siegel came up with that, and then Stephen Porges really broadened it with polyvagal theory. And one piece that I always share with my clients is if we are experiencing this loss accumulatively every day, and we're seeing it on the news, part of what we need to do is learn how to get back in our window, right? And I think of a window as that space of calm. Dr. Porges talks about ventral vagal. We could call it just our calming place. From a yoga perspective, it's called sakta. There's many different ways to look at that window.

And so one of the ways is we have to learn these tools on how to get back into our window so that we can cope and work every day. But the other piece that's just as important is how do we grow our window so that when we experience these losses after loss after loss, we don't go outside of it to that place of like intense anxiety or anger, or to the opposite, the bottom side, the part below the window where we're just immobile and we just can't function. And so one of the ways these somatic exercises can work is growing our window from like the size of say an attic window, which I'll see in my therapy office all the time to maybe a sliding glass door

window. So we can ride these waves when we experience loss. Yeah. And I think somatic experiencing has that idea of the window of tolerance. Is that similar? Yeah, that's a big piece of it. And any of the somatic theories really include that piece. And that's thanks to several different people. But Dr. Siegel and Dr. Porges are two big ones.

Yeah, absolutely.eter levine all of those big guys yeah can you and gals yeah pat ogden too um can you say anything about um kind of your early observations of putting these series together because i mean my experience with the psychotherapists that are like really driven that go on to connect with the whatever, you know, however they want to conceptualize, you know, this kind of their depth modality and somatic and experiential stuff is like, they already kind of knew it earlier in their career, they just didn't have the language, they didn't know the history of the profession, which isn't taught a lot of the time. And you know, you worked, you said with pediatric and oncology. I mean, did you start to kind of see early, like this is, was there any kind of seed of what you do now in that, you know, when you were putting that together? 100%. I mean, at the time I didn't know, like early in my

training, I was not taught somatics in my work. I mean, most of us in grad school, especially, maybe not now, but you know, I finished in the late 90s. And it's not evidence. Yes, you have to do CVC. It's the gold standard. Yeah, okay, good to know. Well, I mean, and so we were taught like talk therapy, right? And in reality, I was finding that, you know, sitting with someone and holding space is very, very important. And I and I believe in that 100%. But I think what I was finding in my work with children that were dying and their family members after the death was holding space only went so far, right? You can tell your story, but then how do you work with

what is now inside your body? And the science then came from that, right? In the mid 90s, we started recognizing it, but it really started about 10, 15 years ago, really recognizing that why we need to work with our body and that we do hold the space in our body. And if you think about it midline, we have the chakras from a yoga perspective, we have the endocrine system, and we have the vagus nerve. So whether you're looking at it from an Eastern or Western side, all of this is reconnected with our body. And from the vagus nerve perspective is, you know, it's the 10th cranial nerve and it's a bi-directional highway, but it really mostly goes body to brain over 80%. And so if we're just talking, we're not working

with what we're holding in our body with loss. And so early on in my career, well, I didn't know about the vagus nerve back then. I knew that when I would just do some breathing with a patient or their family, and I would just take a moment. And even if they were just mirroring what I was doing with that longer exhale, I would notice a little bit of calm. That's not to say that they weren't in such extreme agony, right? But they were able to take that moment in between those tsunami waves, which leads me to that tsunami wave. I do want to speak to this. This is really important in the grief world. Dr. Jill Bolt Taylor is the one that really recognized this. She was, I believe, a neuropsychologist or neurologist. And I learned this tool many, many years ago that I taught with clients, but I didn't know who came up with it.

So I had to do some research. But the way our brain works when we experience an intense, intense emotions of grief, our brains allow us to feel that feeling for about 90 seconds, and then it dissipates. That's not to say that another tsunami wave isn't going to come back up, but it's probably been the number one thing that way early in my career, I learned this. And it might've, it was probably before her, even people came up with it, but that our brain will only allow that intensity for a short amount of time. So it's in between those tsunami waves of the ocean, that reprieve that we're able to work with our grief. And even Victor Frankel spoke about that in his incredible quote about the stimulus and response. It's in between

the stimulus and response that we can work towards our freedom. And from my perspective, that growth, right, with our grief. And so I think going back to your question, learning that tool, and then what do we do in between that stimulus and response to help our clients? And that's where the somatic piece really grew for me. Yeah, I remember when I worked in hospice as like a social work student that I would notice that when I was getting people close to kind of an acceptance or realization of something, some part of their body would start to hurt and become intensely, like overwhelmingly activated. And then it would pop and release and they would express insight and they would express resolution. And so I didn't really know what I was doing, you know, like, but I knew pretty early on that if I could ask, like, where do you feel that in your body?

Or like when you sit without emotion, what changes for you physically? You could push people through that cycle faster, you know, the real resolution. And then and then the next, you know, 15 years was building a language to understand that thing. But if you kind of have to have that ability to see that connection between the brain and the body and that, you know, they are waves that kind of move of energy that and that, you know, they are waves that kind of move of energy that move around, you know, not to beat you. There's a lot of scientific language that we've got now, but there is a connection. And this idea that the body is just this go-kart that carries the brain around is kind of going out, even though academia and the AMA don't really

want it to, um, in clinical practice, it just sort of has to leave because it doesn't work. And I don't know. I mean, it seems so when you're doing training, when you're preparing somebody who's going to go in, who's a social work student, who's a, you know, an LPC or a clinical psychologist, and they've heard this stuff for a really long time. What's your licensure? What are you licensed as? Yeah, I'm a licensed clinical social worker and also I'm a yoga teacher. Me too. I was just curious about how, if your educational experience was any different from mine, but it sounds like based on what you said before, it probably was similar. But the, yeah, when you, when you come in to the room and you, you say I'm, I'm 20, I've never even had a child, let alone lost one. I don't, I can't understand. I can't relate to this person's experience. Yeah. I can't tie it back to something that I know.

And there's this insecurity that a younger person has. What would they learn at your trainings? You know, what would they learn from your experience or in work with you to be able to help, help someone with that? Yeah. I'm actually glad you brought that up because, first of all, I recently gave a workshop to about 70 Parkinson's patients and their caregivers. And at the beginning of the presentation, some of them were saying, well, I haven't experienced grief. And I thought it took me back for a minute, but it's because we think of it as death and dying, right? And in reality, in that training, in that first 20 minutes, we started talking about where have you experienced loss? And so that was really profound for them. And I mean, from my

perspective as a professional, I thought you're losing your sense of independence and health and your caregiver or your partner is losing the activities they used to do with you, but they didn't even think about it in that way until they started talking about it of recognizing, yeah, I have had loss, right? And so even in these trainings, if I have, you know, a newer social worker that has not experienced the death of a loved one, maybe they're younger, maybe a parent hasn't died or, you know, God forbid they haven't had a, hopefully they'll never have a child that dies. In that experience, we start talking about like, where are these losses in your life and recognizing that accumulation loss, you know, as we talked

about at the beginning of the podcast, even a proposal being denied by your boss, that's a little loss, right? And so if we start there of saying, hey, we all have these experiences. And if we don't work with them in our body, it's going to accumulate. And if we learn how to work with some of these like, quote, smaller losses, right, we then learn the tools for then when we do experience bigger losses, because we all do. It's like, like I've shared many times before, that's the one thing none of us are immune from, right? Then maybe we have the capacity to stay in our window a little bit longer, or we learn how to get back into that window, that window of being able to continue to go on, you know, every day. And when the time comes and we feel like we need extra support, there's so many grief resources

out there, many different grief theories and grief support groups. I will say a piece that's missing in all these theories is that somatic piece. So that's our hope is we teach these tools so they can then implement them into some of, let's say they run a grief group, right? And it's not just about, you know, telling their story and what they're going to do to focus in on the loss and then focus in on what they need to do every day of their life. But what are the going to do to focus in on the loss and then focus in on the, um, what they need to do every day of their life, but what are the tools to help them be on those sides? Well, and you say holistic grief a lot in your materials. And I mean, I like when I hear things like that, because I know that the person isn't just selling avoidance as the cure. And I think a lot of times

very medicalized psychotherapy and brief treatment, all those models that came out in the 90s that have solution focused or something in front of them. A lot of it is just, hey, think about something else. Now you're better in the room. Now I can pretend you're better forever. But there's not a growth. There's not an integration. You're just sort of moving something from anxiety to somatics or from the somatic reality to that one. Do you see that? Like, do you see people who felt like they did the work or tried to get help and it didn't work

and then come to you and that they make some kind of connection? 100%. Yes. And that's because they're so focused on the brain and talking and they're not working with where they're really holding their grief, which is a big part of their body, maybe in their heart, maybe in their belly, right? And so if we can do work on these tools to help within their body, then they can work towards growing with their grief. Do you have any kind of examples of how yoga plays into that, how you use yoga? Yes, yes. So yoga, I mean, the breath work is big, right? You know, the simplest one that we all use that maybe those of us that aren't in the yoga world is that longer exhale. But a lot of times we will say, well, how do you do that? Right. And so it can be that longer inhale, the slower inhale,

and then the even slower exhale through straw breath, like breathing slowly through a straw. And there's many more that I, if this was a five hour podcast, I'd go through them because I feel passionate about them. But the other piece is anything that relates to contraction and expansion is a lot about how we grow with our grief and trauma, right? Like we expand heart opening, opening our arms up, and that's allowing that vulnerability for people to see us for who we are and be able to support us. And then at the opposite, we contract in when we need some time just to be with our grief on our own. And if you can pendulate back and forth, that's a huge way we can work towards growing

with our experience and our grief. And so, you know, walking meditations are another one, that bilateral stimulation for those that know trauma, right? EMDR, even just that intentional walking or swimming is another way to work with our grief, getting in touch with both sides of the brain as we're working and processing our experiences. Do you ever do anything with labyrinths, walking labyrinths or figure labyrinths? That's kind of. Yeah, we actually we have a grief retreat coming up that has a beautiful labyrinth in November. And absolutely, that's a big piece to be able to do that. Yeah. And even if someone doesn't have a labyrinth, they can go to a park. Right. And just do their own labyrinth in circles, slowly going in with going in within themselves and then slowly walking back out. How do I go back out into this world when I feel like the world is continuing and I am not?

How do you see like the biggest misconceptions out there in the field? You know, other than just that the emotions are not somatic and that, you know, trauma doesn't have a somatic root at its end, you know, what do you see as like people talking about grief and you just hear it and you're like, oh, no, that's wrong. Yeah, that's a good question. So I'm going to give a lot of fondness to Elizabeth Kugler-Ross. And in her work, she brought grief to the forefront and how people, she believed, experienced grief. And she did amazing work. However, the work she did was with terminally ill patients. It was not with caregivers. And so I think the biggest misconception out there is there really aren't set stages. There's many different ways people experience their grief.

And it's not a beginning and an end. And so I think that's still talked a lot about in the grief or in the popular culture, popular world to recognize that it's a lot of chaos. Right. When we're experiencing it, it's not linear. And she knew that in her work. It's just, it got a little bit misconstrued over the years. So I would say that's a big area that needs to be talked more about is that it's not a linear progression. Yeah. The belief was that you go through the stages of grief like this. And if you go through them in this order, you're doing it right. And if you get stuck, you're doing it wrong.

Or if you go back, what you're doing wrong, is that what you mean? Well, and another thing about those stages of grief is like, I use those with almost all my patients because what they're describing is how we pretend that our emotional reality can have power over an external reality. Like, oh, my anger is magic i'm not gonna let that happen this isn't allowed i'm gonna act like my dad did when something wasn't allowed doesn't matter he's dead you know well it doesn't change anything i'm not i'm not gonna let this happen i'm gonna get up and make coffee like it doesn't matter she's you know there's the there are ways

that we deflect from an emotional reality and everybody everybody deflects like that, even if it's that I don't want to do my taxes. Like everyone deflects and says anger is magic. You know, like, well, if I don't think about it, it doesn't exist. You know, well, if I, you know, all of those, all of those things. And so I use them all the time. Like you've heard of brain spotting or emotional transformation therapy. Do you have any overlap yes yeah so we do a little bit differently because emotional transformation therapy is a lot of devices but it's like light color some other stuff we combine that a little bit with brain spotting

and you can see the pupil where you're on a spot but the person doesn't really want to go through it there's this resistance where it shrinks back down and you see that like sympathetic nervous system being like no i'm all in my head i'm all in my neocortex right now and i will not feel that and i'm always like because they're and i always like when i see that i ask the patient like hey it looks like you're telling me no and they're confused because they're not talking and i'm like no it looks like there's something that's like i will not go there i won't go there don't take this away from me i need this do you feel that energy and they're not thinking of anything consciously a lot of times like yeah i do what is that i'm like think about you're trying to wait make this energy go

away or you're trying to make this energy you're waiting until it's over or just outlast it or wait until somebody takes it away from you you know whatever metaphor works none of that's happening this is going to be here forever this is an emotional arc that you have to complete it's never going to go away how can you be bigger than it how can you be bigger than around it a lot of times i'll try and make them yawn because it makes the parasympathetic nervous system flare up and then all of a sudden because i yawned i can't be panicking anymore because i gotta and and then you see the eye slowly start to wibble and then open and it dilates really big and then they are just so tired and they think i made them tired and i'm like no that's how tired you were underneath this amount

of anxiety that's right you know maybe for a year this is how you were supposed to feel um but the thing is i did hypnosis like i did emdr i did uh a lot of like yungian and experiential therapies i did gestalt therapy you know for years before I ever knew the brain spotting existed. So like a lot of it, you still see that same arc, you know, it's, it's funny when it's an eye and you've got this visual representation, but do you, do you see things like that? Or is that, is that relevant kind of to, to, I'm trying to tie the stages of grief and back to the somatic reality.

Cause I do think the body and the brain are kind of doing the same thing, which is pretending that they can control something they can't control. And there has to be a release and acceptance. Yes. I would agree with you. Yes, it definitely, I think maybe the caveat with all of that is that it's the stages aren't in a row, right? And I think that's the pieces that these stages, maybe think of them more as like play sets, right? In our circle of grief that we experience different ones at different times. A hundred percent, we experience denial and anger and bargaining and, you know, all the different, there's many out there. I mean, many theorists since Elizabeth Kubler-Ross have come up with many, many more too, right? And so absolutely we experience those emotions and those feelings on a regular basis. And, but not everyone experiences all of them either, right? And maybe someone experiences a lot of them

and then years go by and they have another loss because surprise, loss is always knocking at our door. And then they experience those plus some more the next time, or maybe what they experienced the first time they don't, right? But the other part that I think is so important is, you know, when I say loss is always knocking at your door, I will say I'm very much a strength-based therapist, and I'm going to give a lot of credit to Deb Dana, who works with Dr. Stephen Porges, and she did a beautiful job of making the language more accessible to the general public. And so one of her beautiful gifts are glimmers, right? And so we have triggers all the time around loss. We can also find those glimmers, those places of hope, like connection, right? That co-regulation with another human being, like going outside and in grief work, I tease

some of my kid clients and say, you know, all of our grief is triggered by the five senses. And so they'll try to convince me, no, it's not Amy. You know, they'll say, no, no, no, no, that's not true. You know, the other day I was walking down the street and I saw this guy and it reminded me of my dad. I said, that's sight, right? And so, but then it's also important to note that all the glimmers are triggered by senses too, the five senses. And so we can have these triggers of loss when we see something and smell something and remind us of that experience of loss but we can also have these beautiful glimmers of you know this woman sat next to me the other day and um i didn't know her very well but she just checked in with me she noticed i was sad and it reminded me of my grandmother

right and it was a beautiful thing thing. And do you have like the name Light Movement and then some of your work before you that leads you up to that? Can you talk about your personal experience or the way the decisions to structure the nonprofit and the trainings in the way that you do? Yes, I would be honored to. And this is where at the beginning you say you like to tell a little joke and I'll add a little bit of humor in it. So, you know, I've been a grief therapist for many, many years. During COVID, our youngest son, we have three children, had some major health issues. And so we had to be home longer than most until he was vaccinated per his medical providers. And so my parents were huge supports for us during this time. And, but tragically during COVID, there was a freak accident. We were camping with my parents

and my parents own an RV, we don't, but they did. And he went to close his gate and there was a huge wind storm, which isn't super common in Denver compared to maybe other places in the country. And unfortunately the wind, the gate blew him over and he fell on his head and he ended up with a brain bleed. And two days later, we withdrew life support. Now, I'm going to backtrack a little bit. And that was a very, very hard, obviously very hard experience for our family.

And but I'm going to backtrack previously because I think this is really important and this is really what's motivated all of this. During my career, my dad was an attorney and he was a very, he was known as a humble giant and he was six foot five and he spoke nationally on mandated reporting. He was an education lawyer and preventing school violence. And his last big hurrah was to ensure all students, he wanted all students to have safe public restrooms and public schools, including transgender youth. And so he did these beautiful things for our country. And he always said to me, Amy, you should speak to your work in the death and dying. And I always

said, dad, I am a psychotherapist. I'm not a public speaker. No, thank you. But he always really encouraged me. So fast forward, we had, he had that horrible fall and he died. And during my grief work for my own self, my dad's always kept coming to me, but I was so busy during that time caring for my three kids, my mom, you know, my husband was amazing during that time. But I also saw in my practice, it went by the wayside. Well, then fast forward to last year, March of 2023, which is actually my birthday. And my husband and I finally got a weekend away. And we went to Ojo Caliente, which are these hot springs outside Taos, New Mexico. And my husband's a huge mountaineer and rock climber.

And so, of course, we're at the hot springs. And he says, let's go for a hike. And I said, Sure, we'll go for a hike. So we climbed up this big mesa to this beautiful mica mine, we got up there and there were shimmering diamonds. It was so beautiful. But I knew we had to go back down. And I knew it was very steep going up. So we started down the path. And about a third of the way down this mesa, there was this juniper tree that was strutting out from the ground. And I held on to the juniper tree. I hugged it being the vegan hippie that I am. My husband is not a vegan or a hippie. And he said, yes, Amy, I'm sure this tree has helped a lot of people. I said, I know this tree has helped a lot of people. Well, fast forward the last part of the

hike right before we're getting into the hot springs. It's like the steepest part. And my husband said, do you want me to lead? And I said, no, it's my birthday. I'm leading this hike. And I started down this last steep part and I tripped and I fell. I fell 40 feet. I ended up with 600 cactus spines. I ended up with a fractured tibia, a severe concussion, but I should have fallen a hundred feet, but something stopped me in the path where I only fell 40 and thus I'm alive today. Do you know what that was? The tree? It was another juniper tree. Oh, wow.

So the juniper tree stopped my fall. My husband was, you know, rushed down in adrenaline. We rushed to the hospital. And the nurse in the emergency room was like, you know about duct tape? Duct tape is going to pull all these spines out, but you got a year with these spines. So that's my little bit of humor. So obviously I'm not going to duct tape my hair, but we did use duct tape on many other parts of my arms and legs and belly and bum. And so anyway, we're there doing all these.

Do the spines stay in? I'm not familiar with this. They do. You can't just rip them out? They do. You've got to wait until they're. Oh, some you can't, you can't just rip them out. You've got to wait. You can rip out the really big ones. Like my husband pulled about a two inch one outside, like right by my spinal column, but the really tiny ones,

they stay in there for a very long time. Yes. So they check all my belly or check all my body. The good news is I did not have a brain bleed. I was terrified. I had a brain bleed, which is how my dad died. Um, my husband, they finally discharged us and they, my husband goes to get the car. Um, he comes back to get me in the waiting room. I fully pass out again. And, and I fully passed, he comes in, they readmit me. They want to make sure I didn't have a belly bleed. The good news is I did not have a belly bleed, but they found a mass in my belly. They told me to get back to Denver quickly.

They did some scans and it turns out I had cancer. So the juniper tree saved my life twice. And so in this time of recovery last summer, my dad's voice profoundly came back to me over and over again and said, Amy, it's your time to start speaking to this journey of death and dying and grief and loss. And so last year at this time in September, this is very significant. And I'll tell you why in just a minute, we got a group of 50 volunteers together to hold a solstice event on December 21st. And I offered a somatic-based talk. It's

on our website. And we had these faith representatives from every potential faith we could find. So Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Native American, as many people to come in solidarity, to stand in solidarity for all people and all types of grief. Now, September is significant because this was right before the horror of Gaza and Israel. And so we planned it. Then this happened, and yet we were still able to bring these faith representatives together and say, we believe that we all have to support all people and all not done. And so a group of volunteers, we formed this nonprofit that literally got 501c3 status this summer. And our goal is globally to teach these tools and from a social justice lens. So let's say someone from Africa takes our training and says, I love this, but I need a more fit for what fits for the people I work with. We hope they do that. Right. And so our message is global. It's, you know, Colorado nation and world to be able to get these messages out to support people

in their grief. And we did it and we've done it in such a short amount of time. And so we have trainings and these, and a retreat we're starting, our classroom platform is going to build exponentially. Our hope is we get someone in your state to take our workshop and then say, I want to volunteer for light. Our training is actually is tiered and it's very cheap for people that want to volunteer for our nonprofit. And so let's say someone said, I want to teach a class here and we'll do the donations to the light movement. Our training is really cheap for that reason, because we want to really expand it. And obviously our hope is we can get some donors donations in as well to, to make our mission. But right now we're all volunteers. How many people would you need to do a training like at Birmingham? Cause there's a couple of the clinical directors around that

have smaller practices or independent clinicians. I'll say like, Hey, we could all save some travel costs if we can try and get this new treatment to this area. Because that was our clinic's mission with brain spotting. Nobody did it. Everybody thought it was crazy. And now it's like, we're covered up with brain spotting providers in Birmingham. We've promoted it and talked about it and done all this stuff. So that might be about how many would you need to do a training locally? That's a great question. I would say, I mean, in a beautiful world, we could get around 50, but our training is virtual as well. So people can tune in online. We have both. Right now we're doing an in-person and virtual.

We may switch to just virtual as well. And we'll offer this training in October, and then we're going to offer it again in February or March. So we'll do a 20 hour in October. I know right now on our website, it says a 40 hour, the 20 hours for like anyone, anyone and everyone. The one in the spring will also be another 20 hour plus another 20 hours for any yoga teachers to become grief sensitive and trauma informed practitioners. Is that something that like a social worker or LPC would get a CE for?

If somebody's listening. Yes, we have. We have CEs through Spiritual Competency Academy through California. And most of us in the mental health world know that if California approves it, including clinical psychologists, APA approved that most states it's reciprocal. I know in Colorado it is. And they say that 90 that most states it's reciprocal i know in colorado it is and they say that 90 of states it's reciprocal well one of the things that is uh any of the ce providers that we talk to i'll give them this tip because it really does work um is that like especially social work boards but really all of them nursing and lpc boards too

there's this big focus on offering an ethics only requirement because there's ethical issues or people, they, anyway, they think that you can solve ethics issues through CEs. And so like our board, I think it's like up to like eight hours of ethics that I have to get, but there's no requirement other than ethics be somewhere in the title of the event, you know? So if a lot of people, if, if you, if you search for the ethics of grief or the ethics of working with grieving people or something, it's like, that makes that event now much more valuable to me because I don't have to drive eight hours and go to the seminar over here. I don't have to spend eight hours in Tuscaloosa at this one thing. I can get something

that I actually want that also is, um, yeah. Cause I, you know, I'm just one of the most ethical people alive and i don't feel like i need any more training in that in that area yeah totally kidding yeah no that's helpful feedback for sure we're learning we're learning though the whole ce model so we're thrilled that we got it right especially the apa part because they are hard yeah that one's that one's not easy but once you get it though everyone gets reciprocity everywhere. So you pretty much can sell to almost every state with APA. So that's awesome.

Congratulations. Yes. Yeah, thank you. Well, I hope social workers and LPCs all take advantage of this. Sorry to cut you off. I just want to continue to remind people that you can Google this stuff. We'll link to all of it in the show notes. But you can find it and hopefully sign up for it. I'd love if the people at Taproot, I'd like to get one of your trainings in the future.

The next couple of months are pretty hairy for me. But, you know, it seems to be something that's growing and increasingly more needed. I would love for you to attend. That would be really fun. And obviously we have that virtual option, but we can definitely talk about offering something there at some point. But the good news is the beauty of one of the glimmers of COVID is it's opened up this world of being able to do it virtually too. And when you, can you say anything more about like the integrative nature of it, how somebody could be a provider that does Jungian therapy or

gestalt therapy or somatic experiencing or sensory motor and that, you know, they don't have, it's not like it's not something they can use because it isn't explicitly from those modalities. I mean, it seems like what you're doing is at the intersection of a lot of different things. So I just want to give people the opportunity to hear the relevance of it for them. Yeah, I think many, many, many, many different theories in psychology just don't touch on the body part of it. And so if we can get in touch with how we work with the body, that will help as a therapist, because many of us were trained how to do talk therapy, right? And then the other part is including somatic experiencing and different somatic type theories out there.

We are experts in grief. Right. And so we want to bring in that grief piece for people that already may know about body based work, but understand how the science of grief, how it works in our brains and our bodies in order to work towards integration and finding meaning and purpose. And it's important to say finding meaning and purpose. And it's important to say finding meaning and purpose, I never mean that things happen for a reason. Some people believe that from their background, their religious faith, but that's not what light stands for, because that's not true for everyone. It means how do I move forward as I've grown with this grief? What can I do with this now? And that part is really important, the caveat that I think is really important for people to say. Like I said, I have clients in there that in here in my

office every day that say, I believe this happened for a reason. And that's okay, because that's part of their process. But that's not true for everybody. And that's not true for most every parent who's experienced the death of a child. And yeah, there's not a formula for it. Those are the, those are the, the trainings that I'm kind of suspicious of is where it's presented like, this is the right way that you treat this one thing for all people. Right. And I think the individual nature of what you, what you guys have put out there, what I seen um really kind of speaks to the thoughtfulness and the wisdom of it yeah absolutely absolutely do um do you see like or i'm you haven't done the training but do you in the training or in in your work do you kind of link greek back to larger kind of cultural and political forces. I mean, I think it was, I think it was like in 2016,

everybody that I saw right left, it doesn't matter. They felt like they lost and they were really angry. And so the people who would come in would say, you know, if they were right leaning, well, everything's woke and it's communist and it's terrible and I should be able to fix all of it, but I can't. So there's no point. And then all the people who were left-leaning would say, you know, there's social justice and discrimination and legalized murder and all these awful things. And I should be able to fix all of it, but I can't. So there's no point. And kind of taking

each person and saying like, okay, look, what you're saying is you should have all the power, but you don't. So you just are going to abdicate and have none of it. And I think that that is an adult. I think that that is basically a grief loop and that what you have to do is recognize like you don't get it. These problems go back to the bronze age. Go out there and find something meaningful to do that affects a small amount of people and help yourself accept this is what we get. We have the ability to connect a small group and what we're able to do. We never get to be the get. We have the ability to connect a small group and what we're able to do. We never get to be the Messiah.

We never get to be the center of it. You know, the hero myth is something that left alone leads to just this kind of inflation and ambivalence. So, and they all found something meaningful to do. You know, I didn't agree with all their politics or something, but that didn't have to, because what they went out and did was good and something I did agree with. You know, that didn't have to because what they went out and did was good and something I did agree with.

We didn't have to have complete parity. And I think connecting our political neuroses and our sort of cultural anxieties to grief is something that as a therapist for me has been really useful. Do you do that or see that? You may not agree with that. I'm just curious since I have a grief expert on. Oh, I mean, a hundred percent. Right. And I will say

just, I mean, in my community, probably people know that I being more of a hippie, I see a certain type of population, but that's not necessarily true. Cause I also work with a lot of kids from some of the private schools and they are really opposite in what they believe in their families believe than what I do. But we all have experienced this loss of feeling like our country is going in the direction that feels safe and at peace. Right. And so absolutely. And it's, and it's the understanding of that universal experience, right? Even though you, Joel, have experienced different things than I have, we know that we both have experienced loss, even if we were on opposite sides of, say, a political spectrum, right? And so, which I sense we're probably not because we're social workers, but you never know.

So I think it's important to know that, yes, and it's trying to find that connection with different people of saying, yeah, we know this. This is hard. This is hard. And that helps also decrease judgment, right? If we can find that we are connecting together, we can decrease some of our judgment. Well, that's beautiful. I really appreciate it. Is there anything that we don't quite get to or anything that you feel like is relevant or helpful for the show that you want to include

in your message to therapists about grief or your message to people that may be interested in some of your offerings and classes? I think I guess the biggest message that I'd like to really share is that we all experience loss, all of us. And there are tools that can help us integrate it and finding purpose, which thus means that there is hope. Well, that's beautiful. Thank you so much for coming on and for your time and then i my computer is a big all-in-one thing i can't pick up the webcam easily but i was going to show you this wall behind you has a lot of paintings from emile bistrom um of the talos transcendental art

movement um that i've got because they kind of recommend one of them reminds me of kind of a yungi and alchemical thing and the other one reminds me of brain spotting. And then there's tapestry. That's beautiful. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. So I really appreciate it.

We'll link to all of these things in the show notes. If you're in the Alabama area, whether or not you want to try and receive services through Taproot, there is a grief charity that we work with, Be Brave for Isla. So anyone that's had a recent death of a child can contact Be Brave for Isla, and they're able to get some sessions reimbursed locally if there's a person who hears this. And then we have the ability to submit those forms internally if you come here, but it isn't just something that we administer. It's a good thing. And then, so we'll link to that. And then we'll link to everything that Amy talked about, different parts of her site with some events, and that will be hitting YouTube and the podcast library pretty soon. So thank you so much. And hopefully we will be talking again as this grows and your offerings change. We'll be back here in, you know, your two years. So thank you so much.

Our virtual classes are good for anyone, including all of your clients there. And we'll be building that platform in the next month. Well, that's wonderful. That's great to know. Yeah. We're just licensed here, so we can't see anybody outside of Alabama. So it's always great when we have a guest that can see people that are outside of this area. So I'll link to all of that, and thank you so much. Hey, guys. I wanted to go ahead and give you that information again on the podcast. It'll still be in the show notes, but if you want to go to light, L-I-G-H-T-M-V-M-T.com.

Again, that's L-I-G-H-T-M-V-M-T.com. Again, that's L-I-G-H-T-M-V-M-T.com. That is the website where you can find all of the other work that Amy's done. And the theme music for this episode is Jeffrey Seiler from his new album, Definitely, used with permission. Check it out. We have an interview with him. And you can also check out his album anywhere albums are sold. Wounded in similar ways

Wounded in similar ways It sounds like something that a hippie would say But the truth is we're wounded In similar ways Oh Oh