Resources:
Website: https://kriscarr.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crazysexykris/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KrisCarr
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Full Transcript:
Today I'm excited to Welcome Kris Carr to the show. Kris Carr is a multiple New York Times Best-Selling author, wellness activist and cancer thriver. She's been living and thriving with stage four cancer for almost 20 years now. She's been called a force of nature by O Magazine and is a member of Oprah's Super Soul 100, recognizing the most influential thought leaders today. Kris is the subject and director of the documentary crazy sexy cancer, which premiered at the South By Southwest Film Festival, and aired on TLC and the Oprah Winfrey Network.
You may have seen or read about her in Scientific American, Forbes the Wall Street Journal or on Good Morning America, the Today Show, the CBS evening news or on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Kris teaches people how to take back their health and their power. Her work will change the way you live, love, eat and treat yourself. Find her at KrisCarr.com where she publishes an award-winning blog, and you can download her free wellness tracker.
Kris is also a magical unicorn. She's a mentor and an inspiration to me and I just have so much respect for her and how she lives her life I'm thrilled to be sharing her with you today. So let's get going.
Show Intro: Hello and welcome to the how we can heal podcast my name is Lisa Danylchuk and I created this podcast to share deep conversations that encourage us to move through life's toughest circumstances let's get talking about how we can heal.
Hello Kris Carr. Welcome.
Hello Lisa, thanks for having me.
Thanks for coming. I love you so much and I'm so glad you're here. I'm so happy to have you here you have no idea I've been just excited all day about it.
Me too honey
So I'd love to start off, um I've been talking about hey I'm starting a podcast and I've told a few of my friends secretly oh Kris Carr's coming on and they said like what's her story tell me about her and I was like oh she's gonna tell you, so I always start with I mean I've heard I've heard you tell your story in different places in different ways and and i always feel like Valentine's Day is that that start of a major journey for you, so wondering if you can kind of take us back and for people who haven't heard before just let us know what happened to you on valentine's day how many years ago now 19 years ago, 19 years ago you had just the sweetest no I don't know what word you used to describe it you had an interesting Valentine's Day.
Yes yes yeah. So I was diagnosed on um February 14, 2003, with a very rare stage four sarcoma that is incurable that I've been living with for the last 19 years and when I was first diagnosed we didn't know much about it and it's because it's rare like with many rare cancers or rare diseases oftentimes there isn't a lot that we know about it because there isn't a big enough patient pool for us to start to do studies and research and get funding and all that stuff.
Yeah so back then it was even less known um and so the first doctor that I spoke to suggested a triple organ transplant so I have tumors in my liver and both of my lungs and this I was in a very different profession. Wellness was not my passion. I knew nothing about the body other than I had one I think I got yeah it's there yeah, I have one you know and uh so I was just thrust into this world that was so foreign to me and with this very scary diagnosis.
I knew enough to say that that wasn't the path that I wanted to take and so I started to research and have second and third opinions, and I recommend that to anybody no matter what happens in your life. If you have one of those big wake-up calls, don't go with the first doctor that you speak to make sure you meet with a bunch of people because then you'll start to see a consensus or you know bedside manner. All the things that are so important when you choose your health path forward. And so I finally after you know given been being given an expiration date and all the different things from all the different oncologists found an incredible person who is basically my uh he's my co-partner. Right? He's my oncologist who's been caring for me for the last 19 years now and I haven't done any treatment. So what we do is we watch and while I'm watching and I have a slow-growing disease that's part of the reason why we can do that. But my disease can become aggressive, so it can start out aggressive. It can start out slow. It could change at any point, and so this watching practice has become my watch and live practice and really it was an opportunity for me to say, "if you only have a certain amount of time, how do you want to spend it?" You know regardless if you're at the time I was in my early 30s, now in my early 50s, how do you want to spend it? Regardless of when you get that news, right? Your mortality basically gives you that wake-up call, whether you want that call or not, and um I answered the call and I said I got to get busy living, and a lot of the things that I was doing at the time, I decided that's not how I want to spend my days. Right, and so I changed where I lived, I changed my career, I went on a very big and deep healing journey, and I'd say that my life is richer for it. It's not a gift. It's not something I want to give to you.
Thanks
There has been a lot of richness that has come as a result of my journey.
Yeah, a lot of people will describe that I mean in like super technical terms as "post-traumatic growth" like something awful happens that you would never wish on anyone ever, and yet, somehow it's this catalyst. It's a wake-up call or what you use the words "expiration date" like somebody gives you an expiration date and you go whoa, wait, what? And that reorients everything, right? Like where am I living? What am I? Who am I spending my time with? What am I doing and what do I actually want to do? So it can kind of allow maybe a deeper part of yourself to come to the surface.
Absolutely, but you know, it's interesting about post-traumatic growth as I'm learning more about it through the course of the work that I'm doing right now is it's post-trauma, so you have to go into the places that scare you and go into the difficult nooks and crannies of how you've constructed your life. Um, or what has happened to you in order to get to that growth. And I think that that was that's where the rubber meets the road, and it certainly has been on my wellness journey and also with all the people that I support and my students and people, my community, and so forth.
IIt's such a theme I think here, so far, is to like there's work there. It's not like, oh, this awful thing happened, but I also feel great and now everything's wonderful. It's like this awful thing happened, and I stopped, and I took inventory, and I changed, you know. I made different decisions, and whether it was like those decisions became really clear all of a sudden or there was like a fogginess first. There's, it's not even though the result seems so inspiring or so beautiful in ways. At the same time, like there's, there's really going into it there, right? Like facing what has happened and what it means to you, which I think takes a certain amount of, you know, people might call it strength or resilience or grit but, but it takes something to really courage I would just say to look at how is this impacting me and who do I want to be now? And it's almost easier to just like drink, or overwork, or over whatever to not feel and not ask those bigger questions, but there's a huge cost to that, obviously.
I love the way you described that. It's interesting you were reminding me of this, I think it's an Under Armor commercial and I think it's Michael Phelps. And it's so easy to look at these great athletes or whoever we look up to and say, "wow". You know you look at the end result you're saying, "I want that. That must be the coolest thing". But the commercial is really really focuses on those early mornings, and his practice, and his exhaustion, and you know all of the work that goes on behind the scenes that none of us see that helps us get to our greatness, our healing, and so forth. And so it's a beautiful path if you're willing to walk it. Yeah. I mean I imagine for someone like that it's like the blood test, and the optimal vitamin levels, and the changing of your diet and yeah they're like not pressing snooze at whatever am, and there's a lot of, yeah, and there's a lot of daily things that go into that.
The other thing that stood out in what you said is, you know, just living with this diagnosis. I mean, you've been living with it for 19 years now. You're such a like inspiration for thriving to so many people and and you, you know, the last couple years there's been a lot of keywords thrown around. One of them being living with uncertainty, right? Like, how do we live with this uncertainty? We're living in these these unprecedented times. We're living with uncertainty, and I'm like, okay Kris Carr has been living in unprecedented times for 19 years since Valentine's Day in 2003, and you know she's been living with uncertainty every freaking day, every moment, I'd imagine. And so, what has helped you in living that way? Like, what, what can we learn from you and all of these days? I'd love to do the math quickly, but it's not going to happen. But like all those days that have happened since you got diagnosed.
yeah, that's a great question. Um, you know I take it one day at a time. yeah. And, I try not to get too far ahead of myself. I am very mindful about not catastrophizing. Yes, So I would say that my disease has been a mindset growth more than anything else. Living with stage four cancer has really um given me a mindset workout, let's just say you know.
I've been doing these practices, so mindfulness, um, you know, I'm huge on meditation, and stress, reduction, and movement, and you know, all the things that can get us back into our body, back into the present. Um, grounding myself throughout the day, and, but sometimes even somebody's been practicing as long as I've been practicing you get tripped up. And so you can go to those places, those scary places where your mind gets taken over by all of your thoughts that are fear-based, and you go down these negative spirals. And I I had this little lump on my arm and I thought, "this is it". Yeah, I went to the place that I used to go to in my early days when it's like a cough, or an ache, or a new thing would make me think my disease has now become aggressive. So with I'd say you know the the classic cancer story you know we, we imagine that the patient gets diagnosed and then the point is to go through some sort of treatment and then the hope is to have remission. Yeah, and when you're through you're called a "survivor". Right. Right, so that's why I call myself a "thriver" because I'm not through. Yes. Remission is not something that I um actually focus on anymore. It's not something I try to attain. Yeah, it's not something I'm striving for. It's really like, "how do I feel today"? Yeah, and so, coming back to you know not letting your fears take you down and just noticing when okay, what if I just look at the facts here. How many years have I been living with stage four cancer? And there I haven't popped a new tumor out of in a strange place. Like what if I were to do a little detective here detective work here, "what is the chance that this has happened"? It's very soon. So really, it's about self-coaching, and self-soothing, and bringing yourself out of that place of I'm in fight or flight and I can go back and to rest and digest. I'll call my oncologist and say what's going on and then he was like, "it's a fatty deposit" you're like, "that's so glamorous" can I call it something else? I'll take it though.
But you know, it's just a reminder of where our where our fear-based thoughts can go, especially based on our own history, our own trauma, our own grief, our own, uh. The places in our body where we're holding all this step of motion and I have the opportunity to play with that on a regular basis. Yeah, I just had this thought. It's your unicorn horn. Is this where I go? Is this where go? What are you doing over there? Come over here. You go up here.
I just feel like people can relate so much to what you're talking about in terms of Covid, of like a cough, oh my god, I'm gonna die right. And, and I can't think of anyone who hasn't had that thought whether someone coughs across the room and they like run or you know, and we've been going through this of just being so attuned to every little shift, and you know you mentioned two things, and you know I'm a therapist so I think in these ways of like cognitive behavioral therapy. There's a list of cognitive distortions, right? That you know if you go through that that's like a great form of just self-reflection and growth, because you, mentioned, um, it made me think. You mentioned catastrophizing, but also makes me think of sometimes we'll call, "snowballing". They're like very close. Where one thing, it's like sneeze! I'm dead, right? Like, how did that, how did it go from sneeze to I'm too I'm dead? And how did it go from, you know, something in my arm, to you know, this is cancer? Or this is related? And it's obvious, like, of course, we're gonna go there. Of course, we're gonna go there and think that, but the important part again, is like, that little effort that mental work to go, all right, take a breath, back up, what do we know? Who do we want to talk to for support about this? It's not that you dismiss it, or ignore. It's just that you back up that zero to a hundred fear response and come back with some wisdom, right? You get regrounded, and you go, okay, "this is this is how we can address that".
absolutely so perfectly said and so you now have helped i mean thousands i don't know millions so many people on their health journey right whether they're living with cancer or wanting to just feel better what kind of healing do you feel like people are looking for when they come to you um depends so my audience um straddles two different groups of people yeah i have a large audience of patients specifically cancer patients but also patients of all sorts um autoimmune you name it and then i also have a lot of people who are just really interested in wellness and prevention and taking care of themselves who don't want to be patients yes i have people who are experiencing warning signs and they're like ugh i better get my shizzle together and i've got people who are in full-blown wake-up calls right so yeah um i would say that in the beginning people come often because they've had some sort of diagnosis or they come because they want to change their diet we're starting with what you're eating and i teach an anti-inflammatory diet but really i teach an anti-inflammatory lifestyle and so a lot of times people come in with the food or for the food um but what we quickly move to what's eating you right yes because yep food believe it or not is easier even if we come from a background or you know a lifelong experience of having a distorted relationship or an unhealthy relationship to food i think food is a vehicle but really it's what's going on behind it yeah um and so we quickly moved to that place and that's uh i think that that's where the real transformation starts to happen absolutely so you're doing your own it's like i mean it's therapeutic work right it's like okay let what are you eating what's eating you and then you provide this guidance that is really multifaceted right and i know you have a membership community where you support people and so you're not just talking about food and you know what's eating you there's all these different ways that you support people so i practice what i call the five pillars of wellness and so what we do in my my wellness community is we focus on optimizing what we're eating what we're drinking what we're thinking that's the big one that's the hardest one and how thing and how we're renewing and renewing for us is through movement and it's also through play yeah can you paint a picture of like what so this podcast is called how we can heal i feel like healing is a loaded word what does that mean how do we know we're healed like you you're saying you're you're thriving and you're living with stage four cancer so for you personally or in your community what do you resonate with that word what does that look like if someone's healed that's a beautiful word i don't i first of all i don't think there's an end point to our healing right um i would say for me that healing isn't the absence of something so for one thing for in my community or with me healing isn't the absence of disease but it's the presence of vitality yes and so when we're on our healing path where what we're trying to experience more of is vitality right yeah not necessarily like we we crossed the finish line we got the gold stamp we you know we're out of the woods we're in remission whatever it is it's like am i feeling better every day do i feel that vitality that life force am i happy am i joyful like more often than not because life is complicated it's messy and to expect it to be perfect is to be very disappointed because that's not how it works it's not it's never gonna be like that's another cognitive distortion all or nothing thinking oh it's perfect and it's awful oh it's this and it's that and one of the things i so appreciate about you is like i'm elated and excited and i love my new house and i'm grieving and it's complicated and i feel this today and i feel that today and it's it that's life but somehow we have been acculturated or conditioned to think it's like this on or off switch or emotions are like pick one you know they have those little refrigerator magnets where you put on the thing that you feel today and i'm like can we just broaden that window so i feel all of these i love that i'm so glad to say that because i think also that mentality keeps us moving on this treadmill of like self-care to do's right because you're always trying to get better and better and better as opposed to being like you're me good and awesome yeah and get it done like we're trying to get it done so then we can rest after or something yeah that's a big one you know i will say just from my own personal experience um i think a lot of us put our lives off for that day when we can check that box yeah and that day might not like your life might your longevity not you might not make it that far so you're you're waiting for this day where you can check off all your to-do's and say now i can live and that might be the day that you're diagnosed with cancer yeah that might be the day that you dropped a heart attack yeah so how can we live along the way every day not just you know one of these miles in these milestone moments or when we've accomplished this or that yeah they're making me think of my best friend's father who retired he was a teacher and retired and you know had all these plans to travel and died of heart attack and yeah that was a huge lesson for her and i think that's a huge lesson for all of us and i know you're going through that and went through some of this with your own dad who passed recently and and that he i think i remember you sharing him passing on some wisdom around that like some words he shared with you or no is that something he connected with you about towards the end he did he said you know love the golden years are for
i was like tell me about wisdom right there tell me more about what i can look forward to why don't you you said the golden ears are for [ _ ] you got to make your golden years now yeah right and so do i believe the golden years of [ _ ] absolutely not but do i believe that you have to make your golden years now absolutely i think that's just such profound wisdom it's about not it's it's about not putting off your life life luxury yeah absolutely it's a gift and i think we forget that and we get you know mired in our own whatever thoughts or doubts or questions and then sometimes it takes these wake-up calls like this and i'm curious for you you know you've had this long career as a wellness advocate and
i know from other conversations we've had losing your dad was huge right and i think you know everyone has their own relationship with parents and complications and all these things but like and everyone has their own unique experience with grief but people are dealing with that on a much larger scale right now and so i'm wondering what from your all of your experience having been diagnosed with cancer and learning all these things about yourself and you know revamping your whole life to focus on thriving now helping all these other people what from that has helped you as you've moved into i think is kind of new territory right and facing that that close of a loss yeah so i would say compassion a whole lot of self-compassion has been the thing that i keep coming back to when i go to new levels of grief and understanding grief and also um i would say that the the experience that i've had of living with stage four cancer is saying to myself you need to care for your disease yeah not try to get rid of it or get angry you know i've gone through all of the things and i can't get angry from time to time like you know what i mean but like what does it look like to actually care for your body care for cancer like what does that look like and accept it um and care for it and that's the same thing with grief so it's i've kind of applied that same thinking like accepting that i'm experiencing it and learning what caring for my grief actually entails and looks like and realizing that even though i've been through loss in my life including the loss of my former identity and the loss of our so-called safety when it's like when you don't know you're sick you think you're well and you know you've had this sort of teflon invincibility or you have all of these notions about what life looks like right and then all that changes when you get diagnosed and so um i have realized how much i haven't grieved certain parts of like i didn't really grieve the diagnosis because i got busy yup and i got busy taking care of myself and then others and like building a beautiful community and all that but my therapist told me something so wise it's just like you know when the grief train pulls in the station it brings all the cars yep very sure it does give this opportunity to go back and grieve things that you didn't know how to grieve or you couldn't access at the time are you too scared to or you know all the things all the things and so i underst i'm understanding now how i misunderstood grief yeah along the way and how it was very foreign to me um and i continue to learn a lot about myself in the process like most recently i'm really tapping into my judgment you know judging others for not asking me how i am it's been a year you know it's like life moves on their lives move on of course right i'm like
oh i am or judging myself shouldn't you be over this by now what are you you're you know you're acting like a child you know maybe if you were five but you're 50. and so i do not believe these things but these are the this is like where we can go yes great so just seeing all of those parts of myself and going oh where is this coming from and how can i put some care in that direction yes um so i don't know if that if that makes sense you but i'd say like the through line is how can i care for my grief yeah 100 it all makes so much sense to me and i feel like how can i care for this is it's not even directly responding to that judgmental chatter but it sort of shushes it like you're like okay yeah you know oh what if you were five or you're 50 all these like judgments and things coming at you and just like well how can i care for this right now and the other thing that stands out to me chris and and gabby mentioned this in a different way too is how hard it is to go there to really just see whatever the train is that just pulled up to the station when it has something like grief and again like i think people are experiencing this all over the world it's something i've experienced personally that you think about oh if i lose this person i'll be so sad and then the grief is actually so much more than just that sadness i mean my experience at least was like a truckload of you know getting hit by truckloads of truckloads of emotions yeah and and things that i that i wouldn't have expected and so i i think
i i don't know how everyone's process is going to be unique but it's like how do we how and when do we look at those truckloads and like what i'm gathering from you is like well one when they show up and when you're aware that they're there because sometimes you're it's not like you were saying to yourself okay chris let's go on this advocacy journey and not feel these feelings you're just doing what you're just responding right and responding in a really inspired and intelligent way and then later on this comes back around and i think what's really important i feel like for all of us to to learn and this is from my experience as a therapist it's like those things don't go away they hang out they just they just lurk they hang out and they wait for an opportunity and one of the things that i found in yoga was you know movement and rest and then space that the lurkers would come out in that space at the end seriously right like i'd like oh there's what am i crying about what's this oh i guess i am sad about something and i remember this like vividly going back to a friend and i had gone through a breakup my first year of college and went back to my roommate and i was like i just got super sad in shavasana i think maybe i'm like not feeling all of the grief of this breakup and she's like yeah you haven't really been talking about it much and i was like hmm interesting you know i get this stuff on a cognitive level but that was i wasn't expecting that right so i feel like that's such a an important message for all of us to know that like this stuff is there and we can pay attention to it or we can put it off and sometimes we don't have control over that timing but we can at least be curious and we can at least have that attempt to care i love you you know as you were speaking that was the word that was coming to me which was curiosity you know yes we approach our healing through the lens of curiosity as opposed to judgment or fear or frustration and just go that's interesting tell me more about that yes i'm such a therapist that's perfect say more about that well i've been in therapy for a whole lot of years and and have learned how to self self therapize i don't know but yeah i think when i'm when i'm struggling with my emotions when i'm struggling with whatever is coming up that is usually the place that i go to curiosity because i know that there's some riches in there if i'm willing to go and i think you said it so beautifully lisa is like there is no finish line we're not looking there's no they're there right it's this is a circular experience so we keep orbiting around the same things throughout our lifetime and each time we come back we understand a little bit more about ourselves we have a little bit more wisdom we may be also be able to create more meaning in our life as a result of it yes so it's this beautiful circular process i find that you know how i would define healing um and each time we come back we have this opportunity to feel more alive and to experience more of that vitality because we're releasing some of the things that are blocking us yeah
i love the curiosity too because i've definitely seen people probably myself at times too where you just want to go in there and get it all done like let me just let me let me uncover all like sometimes people use the term shadow work or things like that where it's like let me get in there uncover every rock sweep out from under it and then i can go live after that and so i really appreciate that circular dynamic you're describing of like every time it's an iteration and you slough off a little and you move through something and you know sometimes your whole system is ready for a big chunk to move through and sometimes it's not and we can't always control that but we can be curious and we can ask how can i care for how can i care for myself and how can i care for this this experience right and that stands out whether it's cancer whether it's trauma whether it's loss it's like well how can i respond to this and then there's this beautiful relationship happening rather than like a tug of war or a bludgeoning or whatever it is that we try to do sometimes we're like let me just take this thing out right it's like that was working we don't need an emotional colonic you know pretty messy messy but you know i know plenty of people would sign up for that be like yes please get it all out so i'm curious too in your experience of grief is there anything that's surprised you about it like i shared you know my experience of grief was different than i would have expected it to be is there anything that stands out to you that's just different or surprising um well you know i think it comes back to the grace that we're talking about and yeah even though i may not seem like a type a person i very much am a type a hyper vigilant get it done number one person and so the the the person who was diagnosed you know almost 20 years ago i definitely approached healing that way like get it all out and let's move forward you know and i made a lot of monumental changes that are so important and spectacular in my life but i i think most people can't can't approach it that way with success you know we need to go slow and steady um and even the stuff that i i thought i had really tackled it when i was 30 you know it's like i'm really starting to get it now at 50. you know so i would say that give yourself permission and know that it's going to take longer than you think it's going to take and that's okay yeah yeah that's i think such a consistent learning is this isn't something i necessarily have control over i have to you know there's the acceptance of in the case of grief the grief there's the acceptance of a loss but there's also the acceptance of the process after the fact and i think that one can almost be equally or almost as hard to like oh i've i've been impacted in this way or my life has been impacted in this way and this is how it is for now for today at least and accepting that can be really hard and i am with you on the you know type a i would go to all the like sweatiest yoga classes for the longest time and every chaturanga and you know it's like i gotta do it all check check check and sometimes it's a beautiful superpower and other times it you know we're chasing our own tail wow
so i'm curious too with with your dad if there's been like a spiritual connection or anything that you feel in the wake of that loss that's shifted for you or shown up for you
definitely um there's a lot to say there but i will say that i have
one of the things that i've experienced is a return to faith um and that is not something that comes easily for me or it hasn't in the last um as a decade of my life um and so and when i say faith i'm talking about faith in something bigger than me and so i have definitely experienced what i choose to believe are signs and those are so meaningful to me and it makes me realize um how important it is for us to actually take in our environments because we're getting we're getting information messages love taps support all the time but we're so often while i speak for myself i'm usually you know like caught in my own mishigosh my own stuff you don't necessarily see it yeah so whether you know a couple days after my dad died was valentine's day and he was always the first person to call me how's my valentine and you know you talk about how i'm doing on that day and you're always going to be my valentine and we just talked about where i was because it's obviously like a very monumental day for me and so this is the first year that that didn't happen and so i went after he passed he passed on february 11th and obviously valentine's day is the 14th and so i was in florida at the time and asked my mom she wanted to go for a walk with me on the beach and as we were walking and we go far beyond where people are and you know so it's pretty isolated and we see these three roses in the sand you know and it we just both stood there because he always gave us flowers you know so it was like these three roses and i thought i'm gonna choose to believe that that's love from my dad yes in that moment i'm going to choose to feel the love that i still have from my dad that love doesn't go anywhere and i think so much of grief is like you have all this love and now you don't know where to put it yeah it doesn't die you still have the opportunity to share it and even share it in your loved one's memory or or share it by connecting to the wonderful experiences that you had with your loved one but i think as humans it's so easy for us to go to the negative um and we're biologically wired to do so it's how we evolved and stayed safe and got to where we are today um we have to actively go to the positive and go to the love and so cut to one year later i was just down in florida with my mom because i didn't want her to be alone on the one year anniversary of his passing he said let's go for a walk again lunch now lisa stop it yes yeah another like this one it was one it was just one red rose standing up in the sand that's incredible and i said well i can't think of a time i've ever seen a red rose on a beach stuck in the sand like it i mean sometimes i think our logical minds go okay well let me explain or i'm shoot you know i'm choosing this but there's an element of wow here right there i did and again it's just like i chose to just be in that space if everything's possible and he's still with me in my heart and my love for him and the way i see the world and it was just like a wink yeah it's a moment of it feels like or is a moment of connection right when we feel like we don't have that connection anymore because that person we don't have that you know person cruising around in their body where we can go put our arm around them but i mean i've experienced this too where it's a moment of connection with that person and yeah we're talking about things where i don't know i can't explain i can't map it but it does feel and i have spoken with um people close to me who've lost people who feel like that that choice to just lean into it and allow the love that's so powerful to not have to know the end all be all this is how it is or this is what this me like this is how it feels for me in this moment and i'm gonna feel it and and i'm going to feel that connection to my dad or for me it was uh birds would fly over my head all the time after my brother passed like to the point where when i was out with like out with a friend at brunch or lunch and a bird would like dive bomb my head my crown chocolate dive bomb like come with it and i'd just be like yeah that happens now like all the time birds are just slow on me and i i noticed it and it was i had a bird follow me when i was driving back from seattle like the full length of the oregon coast like uh are you my mother like are you lost you need help no i mean i just feel like those moments where we get a little tap like you said that like this feels different the birds fly by me all the time some reason that one felt different there's some sort of connection here there's something and i think the choice to lean into that is really a brave and courageous one too because we do live in a culture here in the states at least that's that's like wants to know the facts and wants to have it all figured out and you know if we do have any of that beautiful type a accomplishment or whatever based energy we want to know for sure and i think leaning into the feeling and the connection in the moment is also really powerful
being okay with uncertainty i think has probably been my biggest spiritual path you know uncertainty about my own health uncertainty about the what's beyond this and just being okay with that and choosing to still anchor into love self-compassion and wherever this growth process is going to take me even when it's hard and so i think that's something that we can all benefit from because the world is always changing the ground underneath our feet is always changing is to be able to have that practice of saying and that's okay is i just can't keep you anchored through it all yeah it's so beautiful you're writing about this now you're you're translating this experience and wisdom into a beautiful book and i know having written a few myself that that is such a process as my canadian friends would say it's a process um so i just send you all the love throughout that yeah um and thank you for going through that process you know sometimes people are like oh i see this now i was just in a training recently on zoom where someone's like oh i have my book i'm not trying to sell it to you i was like sell it to me how many years did you spend writing that thing like how much wisdom is in that this is someone who teaches yoga for multiple sclerosis too i'm like you based that on your like come on like it's worth 14.99 come on anyway that's a sidebar but i want to talk about what's going into this book how is it different and what's that process been like for you so far well there are no recipes this time what happened ways it's different no green juice there's no green juice you know it's interesting because i think in some ways it's similar to my some of the experience i've had writing it is reminds me of my first book which was crazy sexy cancer tips um although this is not a prescriptive book this is really more so a teaching memoir so it's very story driven and it's it's flexing new muscles for me or expanding muscles for me um when it comes to memoir and so i for the last you know 15 years have been writing more prescriptive work um although i i use story
throughout always you know because i think that's people don't there's a saying i don't know who said it but like folks don't necessarily remember it could have been maya angelou so i'm gonna just completely butcher this but please welcome hopefully um people do not remember what you said but they'll remember how you made them feel and i think that story is just such a great catalyst for that and story brings us together it creates common ground even if we come from different places we can see ourselves and other people's experience especially if they're willing to really share the stuff that most of us try to hide because we want to come off better than we are or you know more together than we are rather and so um my first book when i had no idea what i was doing was just like she was a wild person like it was just like just roaring through the pages you know yes and thankfully i had editors that back then who protected me from myself but also who let me view myself fully and yeah and i think i'm coming back to that place in some way of just having even though i'm writing very difficult material and that material is working me um i'm having a lot of fun in the process and it reminds me just how um for me that that creativity is such medicine yes you know yeah creating things can be such a healing process and things come up you didn't even know we're there 100 and and flexing that creativity and growing your creativity and leaning on it and expanding it and challenging it um is very fun to me and especially when i'm talking about difficult things so i'm like okay this is tough i'm even feeling this you know i'm sobbing over the keyboard how can i delight someone in this process where is the humor like what are the other beats and and what kind of tone do i want to strike here in this scene versus where i'm going like how can i make this a page turner right so um hard and fun yeah yeah it also makes me think about uh suzanne o'brien who we both know who is coming on the show and she talks about just how we need to fold grief back into our awareness right and loss and end of life we just have to fold it back in it's like and there is i love how you talk about sort of pressing the right buttons around it right like let me what's the tone what's the flavor because we it doesn't just have to be this heavy thing we avoid it can be sad and all the feelings and and just normal and just something that is probably a part of all of our lives unless you're someone who you know everyone else is grieving and went before you know you had that experience pretty much all of us are going to lose someone or something we love and have that deep experience of grief so if we could like befriend it like you said care for it and bring it in a little more like get in here and i feel like with your book you're doing that right you're like bringing it into okay like health and green juice and positivity and jokes and and grief right it's like all so important and part of life well it's your full personality right so that there's moments at funerals that are hilarious yes do you know what you mean there are moments where you just like you cannot believe what you're reading or you want you start crying or you want to start yelling for the person like grief is a full body full spectrum complete emotional experience it's not just sad yeah right and so what i'm allowing for myself is to say like okay well what is that spectrum and how can i bring that to the actual work not necessarily through the prescription or saying this is what you can expect and this is what you do when you expect when you hit that but like i'm going to show it to you through the work yeah i'm so excited to read this book when i think it's 2023 yes we'll give it an ish date for now but i'm really excited to read it and again like i just think these conversations are so important to bring a little more mainstream and i think with the impacts of the pandemic we kind of have to and so i hope for anyone listening that is going through grief that they at least know i mean we all know we're not alone but then also that you know we're not alone in losing someone but also in the process after i think that's that's the really important piece that like you said we kind of tuck away i remember you know crying in public places and being like why isn't this normal why are people looking at me like this is weird other people feel this way today i'm sure of it like come on can we just be honest so in closing i'm just wondering on that note a lot of people are facing grief maybe for the first time what would you say to someone who's really in the thick of it right now
um i would say don't push the river be gentle with yourself be where you are and i would just go back to the advice that i shared a little while ago which was give yourself permission and know that it's going to take longer there is no finish line you know you're not going to get rid of it cut it out make it go away it's a part of you and but it can grow you and that love didn't go anywhere and you can still share it and you can still experience it through the memories through the legacy um through how you're going to live your life you know like my dad impacted my life in so many ways and his impact is part of how i want to continue to live my life lessons that he taught me you know and so
you're not alone yeah and your dad continues to teach us because now i know the golden years are for [ __ ]
or i'll translate that to i'm gonna live my golden years now i want to live them now and so the golden years are great and they're happening now um what's what's next for you you're you're working on your book and that's coming out anything else you want to share with folks who are listening ways they can connect with you oh yeah i mean there's so much but i i tend to you know when i'm working on something i go deep um so that's really where my heart is right now but people can find me at chriscar.com if you want to spend some time i'm there and um i have lots of goodies for you there so come on over i'd love to get to know you yes get to know chris she is fabulous i do have one more question i just started asking this you know i just asked um a guy who's coming on the podcast this and he's like oh i feel cheesy answering it and i was like great we need yeah we need more of this what is giving you hope right now
oh that's such a great question um what's giving me hope
i don't know people give me hope i think that people are absolutely remarkable and even when we're being [ __ ] to each other we are we are we've got incredible capacity and so um i try to stay focused on the positive of our capacity because it's so easy to get sucked into the negative um but on a practical like just me level what gives me hope is joy and so i try to create as much of it as i can in my life um not through the big things but through the little things yeah the little moments of joy each day that just lift me up and keep a spring in my step and keep me hopeful yes i was kind of looking over your shoulder wondering if your dog was going to pop in because that's like the perfect example of little moments of joy for me i mean i have two dogs so i feel like they bring so much joy she just signed and farted so
she's with me he's here we were joking this morning that our dog boomy he'll like fart and scare himself and start barking so here's the lemony for you ladies and gentlemen and everyone people of the world listening that's what's gonna happen when you know we're in our our we're much later in life we're gonna i'm gonna fart and scare myself who is that and i will remember i'll remember you in that moment oh my god i'm so touched oh you know i'm as a as a type a accomplishment person i think done check i just i just completed my mission in life thank you so much chris thanks for bringing everything that you are here and for sharing it with us i'm so inspired by you i have so much love for you and i know everyone listening i'm sure feels lots of lots of similar feels so if you don't know chris well and if already go check her out at chriscarr.com i highly recommend everything and and all of the unicorn sparkliness that she is oh i have something for that there it is
and then we'll wrap with some applause there we go chris carr everybody thank you very much chris chris carr i love spending this time with you and all that all that goodness right back to you and thank you for doing this podcast it's already so important and i can't wait to see how it grows and feel honored to be one of your early guests
i love it thank you chris thanks so much for listening my hope is that you walk away from these episodes feeling supported and like you have a place to come to find the hope and inspiration you need to take your next small step forward i do want to make sure it's clear that this podcast isn't offering any prescriptions it's not advice or any kind of diagnosis your decisions are in your hands and we encourage you to consult with any relevant health care professionals you may need to support you through your unique path of healing for more information and resources please visit my website how we can heal.com there you'll find tons of helpful resources in the full transcript of each show you can also click the podcast menu to submit requests for upcoming topics and guests before we wrap i want to send thanks to our guests today to christine o'donnell and celine baumgartner of bright-sided podcasting and to everyone who helped support this podcast directly and indirectly alex thanks for taking the dogs out while i record i'd also like to give a shout out to my brother matt he passed away in 2002. he wrote this music and recorded it and it makes my heart so happy to share it with you now
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