[00:00:00] Teri: The older I've gotten and the more that I've experienced in my life, the more I've really started to understand that we are all one and we're all connected.
[00:00:09] Jill: Welcome back to Seeing Death. Clearly. I'm your host, Jill McClennen, a death doula and end-of-life coach. Through my conversations with guests, I want to make you question what you already think about death.
[00:00:21] Dying grief and life itself, and to consider things that might go beyond what you currently believe to be true. In this episode, my guest is my friend Teri Brown. Teri shares with us her journey of personal growth and transformation. She opens up about the evolution of her spiritual beliefs and how they have changed her perspective on death and dying.
[00:00:39] Teri tells us about her experiences with psychedelics and their profound impact on managing anxiety and depression. While also sharing that self-acceptance and body positivity have been the most important part of her transformation. Thank you for joining us for this conversation. My guest today is Teri Brown.
[00:00:57] She's a friend of mine in real life, and I'm really excited to have this conversation today. So thanks for coming on the podcast, Teri..
[00:01:05] Teri: Thank you for having me, Jill. You're so welcome. I'm so happy to be here.
[00:01:10] Jill: I am so glad to hear that because I know it makes people a little nervous to talk to me about death, so when people say they're happy to be here, that makes me happy.
[00:01:19] Teri: You know, it's funny, I actually love talking about death. I'm one of the very few people I know that is really into depth in a weird way, and you wouldn't know by looking at me like I look like a super cheerful person. I've always been really interested in kind of what happened after death. I went through this period where I checked out every single book on, life after death in the library, the near-death experiences.
[00:01:42] I was reading all of those. I went through a real spiritual period where I was kind of just kind of, I don't know, questioning what I grew up with. I'm from rural Missouri. So really the middle of nowhere, the town that I grew up in had 2000 people in it. My dad's family was Catholic. My mom converted to Catholicism and when she married him and she kind of stuck with it, I think it was actually when I was in elementary school.
[00:02:09] I remember this period where they kept wanting to wake me up for church. And at one point I was like, Mom, I don't even know what I believe in. I don't even know if I'm Catholic. Why do I have to go to church? And finally, she was like, well, okay. When she kind of let me sleep in. And yes, it started as me just wanting to sleep in, but also me wanting to sleep in kind of started my spiritual journey in a whole other direction where I started questioning a little bit about what I was hearing.
[00:02:39] At that church, in particular, it was all about guilt. So I, I have all this shame and guilt, you know, that I carry with me from that, and it's been kind of an experience trying to shut it off. I'm 43, getting older. It's been great because I feel like I'm kind of growing into who I always was. But it's also one of those things that comes with a lot of regrets as you get older and you have all these realizations because you are like, God, why didn't I know this when I was 20?
[00:03:08] I could have been so happy all these years, but it is what it is. I guess I grew up with all the guilt and shame. Uh, if I did anything wrong, I thought I was going to hell. I believed there was a hell and a heaven in, in like the cartoon sense where you're up in heaven on the cloud or you're down in hell with a fire.
[00:03:26] Now, as I've gotten older and I've read more spiritual texts, I've gone more towards like a new thought movement. Not just motivational, some of it's motivational, but the way that they motivate is through old spiritual texts like the Tao Te Ching you know, those types of things. And so now what I believe isn't the cartoon heaven and hell, now what I believe is that.
[00:03:52] We are all God. Everything is God. God isn't a person, but to me, God is everyone and everything, and we are all part of it because we're all part of the same thing. And it's hard to get your head around. And at first, I didn't really understand it whenever I was reading it, but it did ring true to me in a way.
[00:04:11] And the older I've gotten and the more that I've kind of experienced in my life, the more I've really started to understand that we are all one and we're all connected. And that's really all there is. And yes, there are mysteries about when you die, and like I said, I've read a lot of books on your death experiences.
[00:04:29] I've watched all the Netflix shows and everything about all that. That kind of stuff really intrigues me because I feel like so many people are having the same experiences. I don't think it's good to just disregard it because of what you grew up with, like I feel like people should be questioning more, not just their faith, but their religion.
[00:04:49] If you are in a religion that's not allowing you to question things, then to me that's not a religion that's. A cult. I'm not saying that you know, religion's bad. I think a lot of people have great experiences with their churches and or they have really accepting churches or whatever and, and they're very happy.
[00:05:06] And as long as you're happy and you're not hurting anyone, it doesn't bother me at all. You can do whatever you want and I'm very happy for you to believe whatever you want. But what I believe might be a little bit different and I just wanna. Be able to have that belief without judgment or someone trying to push me towards what they believe.
[00:05:24] Jill: My beliefs have changed a lot. I grew up Catholic as well. My husband Steven, sometimes when I say things, he'll be like, oh, there's that Catholic guilt again, and I'm like, I know you just can't get rid of that To a certain extent, I'm sure some Catholic churches are not as, Guilty-ish. I don't know what the right word is, guilt-inducing, or maybe for some people it's not.
[00:05:47] But I have definitely found that as a woman in the Catholic Church, for me, it really brought up a lot of guilt and a lot of shame, and I constantly felt like there was nothing I was ever gonna be able to do because I was gonna end up in hell. And the same thing. To me, it was like the clouds and then there was the fire, and I did not wanna be in the fire, but it felt like there was nothing I could do to stop that from being my reality.
[00:06:18] And now my spiritual beliefs, I think line up pretty well with yours and that. I feel like God is in all of us. I don't necessarily like to use the word God, but I feel like putting a name to it makes sense for humans because we need to kind of label things for us to be able to understand it. And so call it energy or universe, whatever people wanna call it.
[00:06:44] But it all does run within us, and we're all part of this same energy. We're all part of this same God. We're just different embodiments of it. We're different little individual beings, but yet at the same time, we're still all part of this whole, and unfortunately, we let things like religion get in the way of that connection because people just think their religion is that one way. And I like that you said that about questioning. I think for me that was when I finally decided to leave the Catholic church when I was asked the nuns that were my CCD teachers questions and I was getting a lot of responses of, well, you just believe that's faith.
[00:07:26] You just believe. And I was like, but I'm confused. And you're not helping me be less confused. Yeah. So that kind of, I think was my final straw where I was like, I don't think this is where I belong. This isn't for me. But I still miss sometimes some of the community. Part of being part of the church.
[00:07:49] My grandmother was very involved in her church and for her, it worked. It filled the need. And even as she faced the end of her life, her faith became even more important to her and she really did lean on it. And I have a lot of appreciation for that, that people can get peace and comfort, especially when they're facing something really difficult like illnesses and death and even grief.
[00:08:17] But it doesn't work for me.
[00:08:18] Teri: There was actually, I used to volunteer at a hospice. Then the pandemic hit. Whenever I did that, I had two women who I saw regularly. And I saw them almost the whole year. They just kept living. You know, I was supposed to go in and just kind of visit with them, but one of the women had recently converted to Jehovah's Witness.
[00:08:38] It really worked for her. She was so happy that she was converted because she was convinced that now everything was gonna be fine when she died. And it gave her that comfort like you said, and you know, if that's what you need, then great. I'm all for it. Just the dogma I think can sometimes be damaging. I know a lot of people who are capric and very happy with their parishes and maybe they feel a little bit more welcome in them, but to me, I just don't wanna be part of a community that excludes anyone for any reason.
[00:09:09] I feel like to me, God is more of a concept than a person, but to me, God should be all loving and should envelop you in love and not any judgment that's gonna make you feel guilty.
[00:09:24] Jill: It makes me think of how we were saying a little earlier, this God, this energy is within all of us, so how could we really disclude anybody Then, even if somebody doesn't fit what a Catholic should be, if we really believe that this God is within all of us, then all of us are connected.
[00:09:44] And so we should try to give people the grace that we want to receive, right?
[00:09:54] Jill: And then when we reach the end of life, if this God really is within all of us, then when we die, where does it go? Does it? Does it dissipate and go away? Does that God energy move into other beings around us? I love thinking about it because I really don't know what I believe.
[00:10:13] Teri: I have a belief on that. It's proven energy doesn't die. Energy just moves around, and I don't believe that the energy of our spirits is actually our bodies. I feel like our bodies are more of a tool. For our spirit to interact with other spirits in the world. I believe that when you die, your energy gets absorbed back into the everything of God.
[00:10:40] People have said different things who have had in your death experiences, and a lot of them have a really difficult time describing it because I feel like sometimes there just aren't words for what you believe or what you sense happens a thing I think about a lot, which is kind of weird I guess, but I always think, gosh, when you die, you don't have to look through your eyes anymore.
[00:11:01] Bodies are very limiting, so we only see what we can see through our eyes. And when you think about passing on, and you don't have to rely on your body to see, I expect it's more about feeling and about seeing. I don't feel like the energy ever leaves. I do believe in ghosts. You know that I live in a haunted house.
[00:11:27] I have lived in a haunted house. Like I think these things are kind of attached to me. I don't talk about it a lot because I know it makes me sound kind of crazy to a lot of people. People aren't super accepting of supernatural things. I've had a lot of supernatural experiences, especially in this house.
[00:11:44] I feel like those spirits, you know, just because their body isn't here doesn't mean that their spirit isn't here or that their soul isn't here. To me, death is more of a release of like, Ugh, thank God. You know? Like you get out of that limiting body and then you're suddenly unlimited. So I've never been afraid of death.
[00:12:03] I've never had a fear of it for myself. Although my largest fear is the death of a loved one. It's hard because you can have all this acceptance of death, but then you don't want to let go. Of the people around you while they're here. It's always been a little bit of a conflict in my brain because I do have such acceptance for myself about like if I died right now, I'd be like, I'm not afraid of that.
[00:12:24] I don't have a fear of my own death in any way, but if my son, I don't know what I would do. I don't know how I would go on that, even with all these beliefs, because it's not like I believe his soul's actually gone. If someone passes away, it's just. The thought of that hole that someone would leave with the death of a loved one.
[00:12:45] I liken it a little bit to whenever I was a kid, we would go to the lake and we would swim with life jackets and we could swim, but you're in a lake and it's like dark. You don't know what's under there. But every once in a while we'd take the life jacket off and we would be in the water without the life jacket.
[00:13:01] And of course it's really scary, you know, you can swim. But suddenly, like there's all this stuff around you that you weren't afraid of before when you had the life jacket on. And to me, that's kind of what death of a loved one is like. Like you know that you can do life without them. It's just the comfort of having them there and needing them around you is, I don't, it's just very profound to me that feeling of like having the life jacket of a person.
[00:13:26] I'm very lucky so far. My grandma's actually in the hospital right now, but she's not even, she's not super old as far as the age for a grandparent goes, I still have my grandma and my grandpa. Not many people my age have that, so I'm lucky that I've had her for that long, and now she's sick and I'm thinking about the mortality a little bit more, and I'm thinking, gosh, you kind of just think she's always gonna be there.
[00:13:50] And it's okay. You know, grandparents eventually pass on. She's hopefully gonna get through this bout, but I've been thinking about it more.
[00:13:59] Jill: I had talked with a spirit medium and one of the things that we talked about is this idea that like, yes, you know, we could have that comfort that our loved one's spirit goes on, but we no longer have the opportunity to interact with their physical body.
[00:14:17] And so even if we have that deep belief that like they go on, and maybe we will see them again at some point. If I can't touch my children, if I can't feel their hair, if I can't hold their hand, I don't care how old I am, it will never feel right to me that their physical body are gone, even if I'm okay with the fact that their spirit will be all right.
[00:14:41] And I think that's a big part of the grieving process is that no matter what your belief is, there's still a part of you that is now gone, a part of your experience, which is interacting with that person on a physical level. And I don't know how people go on after they lose their children, but they do every day.
[00:15:00] And I try to just appreciate the time that I have with mine, knowing that it could. Be me at some point. Also trying to teach them to not be reckless and to wear their seatbelts and not to do drugs. But then there's that part of me that's also like, but that's part of being a human, you know, like experimenting with the drugs and the alcohol and the sex and all these things that potentially could lead to their death.
[00:15:33] Is also part of the human experience that I don't necessarily want to rob them of. So then there's that idea of like, well, maybe experiment with the sex and the drug, but just do it in a way that's responsible or as responsible as possible. Or don't get in the car with somebody if you've been doing the drugs.
[00:15:51] Yeah, find a safe space. Call me like, yeah, exactly. Call me, please. As a human, I have learned to appreciate the limited time that I have in this physical body where I really did take it for granted, or on the even worse side of it. There were times when I hated it for so many different reasons. It just, I didn't want to exist in this body. And I know, as you know, an able-bodied white woman, that sounds so selfish to some people, like they would do anything to exist in this body. Yeah. But it's again, part of the human experience, I think. And especially I feel, our age range in the United States, we've been taught to hate our bodies.
[00:16:37] In order to fuel the capitalistic, you know, you need to bleach your hair and you need the wrinkle cream, and you need to stay as slender as possible and you need the bras that lift your boobs. And like all these things that were taught to believe about ourselves. It really had me at a place where I just was like, I don't really care if I die, cuz I don't really wanna be here anymore anyway.
[00:17:00] And now I'm kind of flipping around to this place of life is short. I'm going to appreciate being in this body now while I can because I'm not convinced in reincarnation. Even though I am technically Buddhist, I'm not convinced in reincarnation that this soul, this part of me is gonna come back. You know, the.
[00:17:20] Teri: God, I hope I wanna be done. I don't wanna have to start all over again. No,
[00:17:25] Jill: I don't want to either, so I'm gonna appreciate,
[00:17:29] Teri: I just wanna stay in the, in the universe. Yeah. Right. Wherever that, whatever happened. Stay there. I'm not, I'm not up for another round. I'm the same way. You know, I, I just get tired.
[00:17:42] I've really battled with depression, especially the last. Let's see here. What is it? 2023? Uh, probably the last four, maybe four, five years. I guess. I went through a really, really hard year, especially in 2019. Like I had something happen that really. Just put me in a shell. I really got just booted into a horrible depression.
[00:18:05] At the same time, Rick's dad was dying. Rick is my husband. For everyone listening who doesn't know him, his dad had glioblastoma, which is one of the most aggressive types of brain cancer. So that was the year Rick was flying back and forth to Denver to see him and take care of him, and then he passed away in December.
[00:18:25] Of that year, like the day after Christmas, he passed away. So he spent a lot of time there and I was really depressed, but I was also at the same time observing someone dying, you know, literally dying in front of my eyes. And I don't really think that his dying set me off so bad, but it really got me on a path of, it really set me on this journey of trying to understand more about death and dying. I was already really interested in it and kind of, and I'd read a lot about it, but I kind of wanted to explore my thoughts a little bit more about life also, and about what we're doing here and what our limits are as humans.
[00:19:04] Aging has changed everything for me. I don't feel depressed anymore, and I think a lot of that has to do with accepting myself. And being okay with who I am. I let my hair grow out, which it had been gray since I was born. I was born with a silver streak in my hair. I started coloring my hair in high school, and then I did it for over 20 years, and I just didn't think to stop.
[00:19:29] You know, there was never that option in my head that, oh, you don't have to color your hair. Like you can just be yourself. No, that wasn't like, I actually was allergic to hair dye when I found out I was allergic to hair dye. Someone was like, oh, you just let your hair grow out. I'm like, no, that's ridiculous.
[00:19:46] Like, what are you saying? That's insane. Once it got in my brain a little bit, I started kind of following people on Instagram who were growing their hair out. There's a whole Silver Sisters community of women who are growing out their hair from having colored it their whole lives. And I kind of got empowered to do it, and I was like, you know what?
[00:20:05] I was really depressed. It was that same year, it was 2019. I started growing it out. I'm like, you know, I just need to make some big changes where I'm happier being myself. I also had breast implants, really big breast implants that I'd had for years. I got breast implants when I was 20, almost 21. We lived in Los Angeles.
[00:20:24] It was the year 2000. Big boobs were everywhere, and I felt like I had to do it as it felt like something that I needed in order to be accepted in Los Angeles at the time. And then as the years went on, you have to have 'em replaced. I had 'em replaced. They made 'em bigger. I wanted 'em smaller. It's like, no, they have to be bigger or you'll need a lift, which this infuriates me, a doctor telling me I need anything cosmetic.
[00:20:52] So I listened. I went bigger. And it was too much. I felt like that's all people saw of me. I was coloring my hair. I had to eat enormous boobs. So after I started growing out my hair, I started to think about getting my breast implants out. And before it was just the same. I was like, no, I will never, ever do that.
[00:21:12] Like it's too shocking. People will be like, what? And then they'll all know, you know, oh no. They'll know that I had breast implants. Like, who cares? Who cares if they know I did it during the pandemic? In 2020 I got them out and I wasn't shy about it. I actually wrote a big post on my Instagram about it and like kind of talked about everything behind it because I felt like I had to, I mean, it's nobody's business.
[00:21:39] However, like to me it was cathartic to explain myself so that other people could see, hey, you don't really need this. Like this isn't, stop listening to people who say you need something. You need to look a certain way to be accepted. It really pisses me off that like I got really angry. I guess it's what happens.
[00:22:00] You get older and your hair goes gray and you get angry and I think my anger was really more pointed towards myself because I, I had fed into it and I had allowed that to be me when I should have just gone in and said, you know what? This is what I look like, deal with it, with my hair, with my body, everything.
[00:22:21] And I didn't, and now I am. And you know what? It's fine. Like, are my boob great? No. Were they better before? Yeah. Like they were beautiful, but you know what? I wasn't happy. They hurt. I felt like they were making me a little sick, but now I'm much happier in my body. I'm happier when I'm out in the world. I don't feel like I am fooling someone if someone compliments me, like on my hair.
[00:22:45] My first response was oh, I dye it with henna. It's, oh, thank you. You know, it took me three years to grow out, is what I'll say now, and it's just, it's really nice, but it also sets off that whole midlife crisis thing where, I mean, I call it a midlife crisis because that's what society calls it, but, Where you feel like, oh gosh, time's running out and now I'm on the other side of my youth.
[00:23:11] And then you start to feel how quickly time goes. I also feel like I've got a little bit of a new worldview on time and my understanding of how time works. I don't think of time as linear anymore because some things that were so long ago feel like they were so recent. And it's really hard to understand if you're a young person and you don't feel these things.
[00:23:34] That's one of the blessings of getting older, is that you get that perspective that you didn't have before. And yeah, there's regret over the decisions you made, but at some point, you just have to say, well, what can I control right now in my universe? Is that something I can control? No, you gotta shift your focus, and it's not something I've always been great at doing because of depression.
[00:23:55] Kind of puts you in a spiral a lot of times. And I have depression and anxiety, but I've gotten a lot better with it. And one thing that helped me was psychedelics. Technically they're not legal. As I said, I was really depressed. At the same time, I was exploring all of this new thought stuff, all the people who were like I hate to say it this way because I know people have a strong reaction, but like a secret type thing where people are like manifestation type stuff. All those things are a little bit spiritual. It's all about, I am God, I can do this because we are all equal. We're all the same, we're all part of something bigger.
[00:24:30] So I wanted to explore that a little bit and the way that I was doing it was through psychedelics. Now I tried mushrooms. Supposed to not go over well for me. I did do microdosing a little bit for my depression, and it did help, but I can't do like a big mushroom trip. It makes me really sick and anxious every time I've done it.
[00:24:49] Like I always have an intention where I want to meditate into it a little bit and explore the spiritual world doesn't work for me. However, you came to my house and did reiki on me, which I know a lot of people are like new age, woo woo. But you know what? Here's the thing about those types of things for me.
[00:25:07] I love all that stuff and whether it works or not, it makes me feel better whether someone else believes in it or not. It puts me in a spiritual mindset. It gets me thinking about the things that are bothering me and allows me to kind of release them, and you help that.
[00:25:29] Jill: In a way with Reiki, for me, I've resisted telling people that I do reiki because of the fear of being judged.
[00:25:37] And stigma. The stigma, and even because sometimes in my head, because I don't. Completely understand how it works. Mm-hmm. There's even that part of me that's like, I don't know, does it really work? Does it really work? But then enough people say to me afterward like, wow, I feel so much better. I don't know why or how, but if it makes people feel better, then isn't that the goal?
[00:25:59] Teri: Right, and it's not like it's hurting anything. I will try absolutely any treatment that's not gonna hurt anyone. I don't see anything wrong with that. People find comfort in religion. I can find comfort in Reiki. The idea of you like moving your hands over me isn't really that radical when you think about it as compared to like, established religions and the things that they do on a weekly basis, like eating a wafer.
[00:26:22] Jill: It really is not that different. And you know, if you go to science, we are made up of energy. Right? And that's really all that it is, is that, with my intention, I am helping to move your energy. It's very tied with this idea in traditional Chinese medicine that we get blockages in our energy field, and a lot of times these blockages are from our traumas and our grief and our pain and all of these things that we were never taught how to move them through our bodies.
[00:26:53] Right. So we keep them all in there, and then what they do is they make these blockages in our energy field that causes us to then have mental and physical pain. And so all that reiki does is help to rearrange the energy a little bit so that the blockages can kind of flow out. But it's not a cure-all.
[00:27:13] You have to still do some of these other things like. Work through some of your emotional traumas and pain, but it doesn't hurt and it makes people feel better. From what I've been told when I talk to people afterward, and I like to do it with my clients that are towards the end of life, because I feel like a lot of times their energy is just so different because they're kind of transitioning.
[00:27:41] Teri: There's probably some fear you can like you can address as well.
[00:27:46] Jill: Exactly. If I can help to ease the fear, if I can just give them a sense of peace. Then why not do it for people? I always ask permission because you're not supposed to do energy work on people. If you go in and you're sleeping I don't do that.
[00:28:04] Jill: All of these things combined together can really help, whether it's psychedelics or energy work. 2019 was a weird year for me as well, where I felt that just life was crumbling around me, and I was like, I don't wanna do this. Anymore, whatever this is. It's not healthy for me. I really feel like I was driving myself so hard that I was probably going to die early because of it.
[00:28:33] And that's when I decided to become a death doula and I was like, I'm gonna completely change my life. And then the world just kind of changed right along with me.
[00:28:41] Teri: I had the same experience where by the beginning of 2020, I was like, okay, I'm gonna change everything. I was on antidepressants, I was feeling a little bit better.
[00:28:49] And then, the world fell to shit. And not that it wasn't already on the verge, it kind of felt like there was this huge bubble that was, was building and building and building. Mm-hmm. And building and covid kind of burst the bubble, you know? Totally. It was no one thing, it was just, it was chaotic. It's been great because of your work and with what I'm doing spiritually, On my own.
[00:29:13] I feel like I'm past. I don't wanna say that because there are always gonna be days where it, it can come in a little bit, but the last time I saw you was a few weeks ago and you guided me through a DMT trip, which I was really nervous to do it. So for those of you who don't know, DMT is a psychedelic.
[00:29:32] And it's not technically legal, so it's not easy to find. And I do not have any more.
[00:29:37] Jill: And I did not provide it. I promise.
[00:29:40] Teri: You did not provide it. Nope. No, you did not provide it. But I really wanted to try it because I had heard of work that was being done with psychedelics for the depression, and I kind of just wanted to kick the last little bit and see if I could get to that spiritual place that I've been trying to get to with other psychedelics and also with meditation and everything else that I was trying.
[00:29:58] You came, you guided me through, and you did reiki first. I was very nervous to do it because I'd heard some horror stories. I wasn't really sure what was gonna happen, but I knew that my intention was that I wanted to get rid of my anxiety, and my depression, and I wanted to kind of just like see what I could see from the other side.
[00:30:18] And that experience is still with me. I'm still like, holding my mantra that I heard during it, I heard two things. I heard “You're okay” over and over and over. You're okay. You're okay. You're okay. It was what I was getting and I also heard everything is as it should be. And it's not that I didn't know that before, but.
[00:30:40] During that experience where you were kind of sitting next to me really calmly and you were playing with beautiful music and I was like singing the music and feeling it. I got this new perspective of how the universe works and how I fit into it, and it was a comfort that I'd never really felt before because I got this feeling that there's not a right and a wrong, there's just it.
[00:31:06] I think a lot of my anxiety. Comes from making the wrong quote-unquote decision. What I got out of that experience was the feeling that that's not a thing. You're moving through the world. As a being. Other people are moving through a world as they're being that really we're all just molecules. Like water is a molecule, airs molecule.
[00:31:27] Humans are made up of different molecules. So all we are is a bunch of molecules bumping into each other. Even the air. You know, like right now I'm bumping into other molecules. I'm taking up the space in the world. It was a really interesting experience. I kept my eyes closed most of the time cause I was afraid of what I would be if I opened my eyes.
[00:31:45] I didn't wanna see you and like see you be something different than what you were. I am a little nervous around psychedelics and so I think that always affects the way I experienced them a little bit, but what I experienced during that trip was I felt like I could see at a molecular level everything and everything was like a little gear.
[00:32:08] This is just the way my brain was kind of processing it at the time. Obviously, like it's hard to explain, but. What I would say was I was seeing each molecule with a tiny little gear, and so each movement or thought or action that you did moves the gear a little bit. Well moved millions of gears because there are billions, I don't know how many molecules there are, trillions, bazillions, whatever.
[00:32:32] Moved molecules and kind of moved you around in the world and it showed me that we are all just. A fabric of being. No, and it's how we're connected as a fabric of being everything is one thing because we're all molecules and we're all energy. I know it sounds ridiculous and it's really hard to explain, but at the time it gave me so much comfort because I just felt suddenly like, oh, okay, like this is fine.
[00:33:03] You know? You kind of just deal with things as they come. I was spending a lot of my energy. Thinking and worrying about things that I have no control over and worrying about maybe future actions or things that I wasn't even dealing with at the moment. You know, processing this whole experience with you and doing the DMT and also thinking about it a lot afterward.
[00:33:25] It changed my worldview and a really comforting way. When I say changed, however, I think a lot of these theories and thoughts and like all of the stuff I kind of had a little bit, I just didn't know it. Well, I should say I knew it cause I didn't feel it. So feeling it and understanding how it all works and feeling like, okay, there's this comfort of I can't do something wrong.
[00:33:51] I'll do what I do and it's okay. I'm not hurting anyone. If I'm not hurting anyone, or obviously I'm not gonna go murder someone or like rob a bank or whatever. Those people are making that choice and they're gonna live with the repercussion of his actions.
[00:34:06] Jill: Oh, it sounds so much like the near-death experiences where you can't really put into words because it's not about words.
[00:34:13] It's about that embodying the words that you've already read and heard a million times that we are all one, and that everything is honestly fine no matter what happens. It's all fine, it's all good, but to understand that, And really feel it and affirm what you logically believe to be true in a different way.
[00:34:36] That's why people do these types of drugs. And on my experience, observing it, it was interesting because you were laying there and you had said like, I'm gonna keep my eyes closed. I'm proudly not gonna talk. And I was like, that's great. And in some ways, You almost looked dead. It was just a very calm look on your face, and I was watching to make sure you were breathing and going through that whole experience.
[00:34:59] Thank you. Yeah, but observing it, I was like, wow, I can see why people will use these types of drugs as ego death because it did seem like your body completely relaxed and went into a different state, and then your mind was able to go somewhere, and then every once in a while towards the end, you would say something That peace was very interesting to observe because especially after giving you Reiki right, beforehand, it was very different even though you were still literally laying in the same place, the same position, like everything was the same, but your.
[00:35:37] Body just relaxed in a different way. The energy changed. It was really fascinating for me to observe it and to have you be able to say afterward, that was really useful because you were telling me what you had heard. Those like mantras and it's kind of what religions say again. If you get rid of the dogma of all of the religions, if you really get to the heart and the core of what they're saying, It really is just all that same stuff, that we're all connected, we're all part of this same energy universe.
[00:36:11] I don't know, God, I don't call it something, and in the long run, it's all okay. It's all gonna be fine.
[00:36:18] Teri: No matter what. Do you read Ram Dass or do you know much about Ram Dass? A short documentary on Netflix called Going Home. It's only like 17 minutes. It's at the end of his life. He's like gonna die soon. And he's kind of just reflecting on life and energy and he was one of the pioneers of psychedelic research along with Timothy Theary at Harvard back in the sixties before it all got criminalized, I guess. Mm-hmm. He had all these experiences. He and some other people hold up in this mansion for a long time. I can't remember how long it was. It was like a month or more, and they decided that they wanted to stay on psychedelics the whole time, so every four hours. This whole time they would take acid.
[00:37:01] And so they had this huge, profound spiritual awakening. And then after that, he went to India and met his guru who he kept throughout his life. He, brought acid or one of those things to his guru to try. He had tried it on the guru twice and it didn't have any effect on him. And the reason was that he was already awakened.
[00:37:20] And it was such an interesting thing to read because it really kind of reinforced my belief that these things are a great tool for understanding life in the universe and like your plates in it. But after that, he didn't use psychedelics anymore. He talked about their use and how great they were, but he kind of shifted his focus to just being love and sharing love and being kind, and kind of where I'd been trying to model my life with kindness.
[00:37:47] Just shifting my focus if something is upsetting me, which has been a big thing, especially in the last few weeks. I've really done that and I, I told Rick last night, I feel like I'm not depressed anymore and I feel like a big part of that is shifting my attention away from those things that bother me, the political climate, and.
[00:38:07] Wars and like, of course, there's so much that you could focus on that's really awful going on in the world. It's not that I wanna ignore those things, but what I'm doing differently is I might read a headline or read a little bit about something, but if it starts really upsetting me, I shift my focus away from it because I don't wanna give my energy to the things that are negative.
[00:38:28] I wanna try and give my energy to the things that are good. I think that it's better, and I think more people need to do that rather than trying to find a scapegoat. Or rather than trying to focus their hatred towards anything, I think they need to find the thing that they can focus their love towards.
[00:38:42] That's what I've been doing, and it really has affected my mood greatly.
[00:38:45] Jill: Wonderful. Yeah, and that really goes to what I try to stress. Is just the being in the moment, and again, this is not me, this is, you know what a lot of spiritual teachers teach is that we read things, we hear things, and then our brain thinks about it, and we think about stuff from the past that annoys us, and then we think about what we're afraid of in the future, where if I could just bring myself back to this moment.
[00:39:12] Then I can usually be okay with whatever's happening because in this moment this is fine. Like yes, there are shitty things going on around us right now. I'm not going to ignore that, but I can't change that. I can only start with myself, then the couple of people outside of me. But other than that, I can't change the wars and all these other things.
[00:39:35] And so, yeah, but if I can focus on this moment and bring myself to a state of calm, Then I actually have the ability to react in a different way versus the anger and the hatred, cuz I really don't like feeling that way. It's not a feeling that I want to feel. And so when I feel my body going that way from reading something online, I'm not gonna put my head in the sand about it, but I'm also not going to give it my energy.
[00:40:06] Teri: I've been blessed with a father who challenges me on those things. He likes to bring up politics pretty much every time I talk to him, even though I've asked him repeatedly not to, but I've kind of shifted my view of how he and I talk.
[00:40:19] I try and rise above it. If he starts to bring up anything that's upsetting, I'll just kind of say, “okay”, move on. But no, I'm not gonna change his mind. Mm-hmm. He's definitely not gonna change my mind. No. You just gotta accept him for how he is and move on. And it's as much as, as difficult as it's been, having a very, very strange relationship with my father during the last.
[00:40:42] I don't know, five to 10 years. I can see now that it's also been a gift because it's been an exercise for me and shifting my focus and not getting upset over the things I can't change. And working on interpersonal relationships. And even if they're not perfect, at least you, I can still say, I love, you know, you need to see.
[00:40:59] I love you. And if that's all I get out of him, that's good. That's okay. He loves me so what are you gonna do? What's funny is mortality also comes in there because my dad, a few years, I think might have been 2019, it was all around the same time. My dad got diagnosed with chronic leukemia and diabetes in the same week, and he has the same chronic leukemia my grandma has.
[00:41:21] Adding that to our relationship. I don't know how much it changed it. I mean, he still gets very angry and I can still get a little defensive sometimes, but I do feel like it added a little bit of understanding of, oh, well this isn't gonna be here forever, so I'm gonna try not to be upset over the things that he's saying to me right now, because I know that it's just how he is But he could be gone tomorrow.
[00:41:45] Jill: And that's a great way to view it because we often do get so caught up in the arguing with our loved ones where when they're gone, yes, that's still gonna be part of the reality of your relationship together and who they were. But is that what you wanna remember or do you wanna remember the moments when you're able to have the conversations and you can just let go of some of the other stuff and continue the conversation without getting, I think Pema Chodron, she's a Buddhist writer, she calls it “hooked” like without getting hooked by their comment because that's really what they're doing, even if it's not a conscious thing.
[00:42:26] Exactly. It's a bait. And if we allow ourselves to get hooked by it, then we fall into our patterns of responding a certain way where if we can change that, then we can really have a better existence in the long run.
[00:42:38] Teri: I just wanna die happy. When I was volunteering at the hospice, I think that gave me a great view of life, because you know when you're there at the end.
[00:42:48] And maybe you don't have anyone, or maybe you have someone who doesn't come in very often, but like the women that I was volunteering with didn't have big families and came to visit them, which is why they had volunteers coming, going for an hour a week and spending time with them. It brought them joy whenever they think about those little things.
[00:43:04] So those are the things that matter. Later on, I was very lucky because I would see these women and they had dementia. And so the person that I was visiting with might not be the person that their families remember at all. One of the family members, I remember her talking about how they didn't get along and she had all these views that didn't line up with hers when I was meeting one-on-one with this woman.
[00:43:27] And we were just kind of friends, like we would talk about stuff girls talk about sometimes. She thought she was 17, but she's like in her nineties. She was adorable. It was kind of fun just being there and being like the person that she was excited to see at the end. You realize that those moments are the things that you wanna create more of for people, and the only thing that really matters is connection and how you can positively impact others and trying not to negatively impact other people.
[00:43:54] It's not like I can always do that. That' also been difficult, once you start to really assess and be honest with yourself about how you're negatively affecting other people. Like no one wants to have that conversation with themselves, but when you do it and you face it and you're like, okay, I shouldn't be doing this or this or this.
[00:44:12] It makes you feel better whenever you don't do those things. I guess that is what religion's trying to do in a little bit more of a dogmatic way where they're making you afraid to do the bad things, but really you kind of have to come to it on your own, otherwise, it doesn't mean anything. Otherwise, you can just be one of those Catholics who do all the bad things and then goes and confesses it and does more bad things, like that's not. That's not better than anything else.
[00:44:35] Jill: You do come across that you see the people where you're like, oh, I know what you're doing, but yet somehow you're able to feel okay with it because you go to the priest, and you confess your sins.
[00:44:46] Teri: I think we all just need to look inside ourselves and in the world and see how our actions affected our people and then adjust accordingly.
[00:44:56] Jill: The way to die happy, I think you're exactly right. That is the way to die. Happy to live our life as our life, not somebody else's, but also to move through life, not causing other people harm to the best of our ability.
[00:45:09] Teri: Yeah, I mean, that's impossible to do honestly. When you do make mistakes and then you do harm other people, I think the best thing that you can do is to forgive yourself, forgive the other person, and move on.
[00:45:22] And I know that that's, Probably one of the hardest things in life to do is move on from those types of things and those types of hurt. But forgiving yourself I think is kind of key to it all.
[00:45:31] Jill: That is very hard to do, to forgive ourselves for anything, it's very hard.
[00:45:35] Teri:. I think that's a big part of what's caused my depression is that, I get very down on myself.
[00:45:42] I just pile up all the things that I, I've done in my whole life that. That could have been disturbed as bad or something I said to someone like 25 years ago. Still, it'll still echo in my brain. Oh, why did I do that? I think that's humanity though. If we didn't do that I'd worry a little bit about you.
[00:45:59] Maybe there was, maybe there was like a psychotic thing going on if you didn't think about how you hurt people. I guess the key is to acknowledge that and let it pass and learn from it.
[00:46:11] Jill: Yes, you have to acknowledge it. You have to feel it. You have to process it, but then let it go. Learning what you need to learn and then being in this moment so that you're able to take what you learned from that experience and move forward in a way that is not causing that same damage, that same harm to somebody else. Is there anything else that you want to leave the listeners? I could put a link to your band's, Instagram if you want to. Terry's in a band.
[00:46:42] Teri: So I'm in a band. I also do music on my own, and I'm with a band called Throwback with a 3 because we're cool.
[00:46:49] Jill: I'll put the link in the show notes to your music and your band so people can check you out.
[00:46:54] Teri: Thanks, I appreciate that. Yeah. In our band, we all are songwriters, so we all sing our own songs and I also do my own stuff. Anything that doesn't really fit in the throwback I kind of record and do on my own.
[00:47:08] Songwriting is definitely my biggest therapy. Sometimes I'll write a song and. Not realize that I had an issue until after I read what I’d written back. And then I'm like, oh, I'm working through something with this song. And when I first started, I had the same theme on everything and it was all about letting go.
[00:47:27] And I didn't really realize that you know, that I, that I was doing it until like a few songs and I'm like, yeah, these all have kind of the same theme. I actually wrote a song when, when we were in Denver and Rick's dad was passing. The energy of him. I was in the other room even I could feel his energy from the next room, I would just sit there and as tears would stream.
[00:47:48] And I was just like crying and crying like I was just overwhelmed by thinking about. Trying to connect with him and understanding what it was like to be in his body and have so little control over what was going on and his fear, you know, and I wrote the song during that time actually that I haven't released, cuz it's super sad.
[00:48:07] But the lyrics are, maybe tomorrow I'll let go. Never today. I need to release it. I just haven't, maybe I'll, maybe I'll make a little video of it and put it up so that. People from here.
[00:48:18] Jill: Yeah, please, if you do that for sure. Let me know. Thank you for being here today. This was cool. Really fun. It was really interesting.
[00:48:26] Thank you for listening to this episode of Seeing Death. Clearly. My guest next week is Alison Keppel. Join us next week to learn more about palliative care and the role of death dollars in hospitals. Allison is a palliative care social worker at a local hospital where she mentors me as a death doula volunteer.
[00:48:44] And in this next episode, Allie and I discussed palliative care and how it differs from hospice care. Allie also opens up about her personal experience with loss and how the death of her father at a young age impacted her and her family's lives. If you're a death doula or work in a hospital and have been eager to incorporate the support of death doulas, you don't wanna miss this episode, Allie offers some tips on establishing a death doula volunteer program in hospitals.
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