I met Kris “out of the blue” when she contacted me on Twitter and offered to send a copy of her memoir, Heart Broken Open. Of course I said yes, though I had no clue about her connection to the late Richard Carlson and Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff series. After reading her book, it was clear that I had to interview her. She was so gracious and refreshingly down-to-earth. I highly recommend her book and website — she’s doing great work with survivors of grief. See all of my “5 Questions with…” interviews here.
________________ ♥ _______________
1. You talk about resistance as much as the grief process in your book. How does resistance and particularly regret (what you call the “ego’s talon”), affect our daily lives?
In grief, there’s a constant play going on before you accept your loss. It’s mental and emotional. What I found about regrets in my own process was that I was trying to re-negotiate the events to try and make sense of the confusion of grief. Regret is a key part of resistance. Your mind wants control over your life. Grief for me was a constant tugging and pulling. In my book, I describe it as toy soldiers coming over the hill to attack me with my regrets. I’d call them my “self-torture days”. Days I couldn’t pop out of this sense of, “Oh my god, if only I’d done it differently, this wouldn’t have happened. If I could go back…”
Of course the reality is, if anyone had told me — I knew this in my heart and soul — there’s nothing I could have done to change what happened. The way internal resistance works is this: using regret in my process as a way to hold me. That’s how it showed up. Resistance is not opening and not accepting what is. Regret is the greatest symptom of resistance in grief. It’s a very real part of the passage, though.
Spiritually at the time, I wasn’t as conscious as I could have been and that was probably my greatest regret. Had I really been in tune and living more consciously, I might have been able to read the signs [premonitions of Richard's death] even more clearly. I was definitely sensing and feeling them. There’s so much denial in life, especially living so closely to someone. I was 43; Richard 45. I had no real way of knowing that death was going to happen at that time. That last morning, he was eager to get on the airplane. Richard was very psychic; if he wasn’t meant to be on that flight, he wouldn’t have been. He was being called home. Right before he died, he wrote about loving kindness. Interestingly, he died on St. Lucia Day–the inspiration to authors and also the patron saint of love and kindness. All that synchronicity is so magical. What I’ve learned about losing Richard in the physical sense is that I’ve never lost him in the spiritual sense.
2. What’s your advice to women and men who are ready to step into their life purpose but don’t know how to take the next step? More »
