January 6, 2025 • 40 mins
SEASON 2, EP1 - Uncomfortable Conversations: The Power of Raw Truths
In this episode of The Podcast, I share a deeply personal story about navigating loss, family struggles, and finding forgiveness in the most unexpected ways. Through a reflection on life’s challenges—including a moving meditation experience—I explore how we can uncover gratitude, purpose, and love, even in the hardest moments.
Join me as I take you on this raw and real journey, offering a fresh perspective on connection, resilience, and what truly matters.
In This Episode, We Cover:
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The experience of delivering a TEDx talk on the theme of “uncomfortable conversations.”
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The challenges and complexities of growing up with a parent who suffered from bipolar disorder.
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The impact of a sibling’s struggle with addiction on the family dynamic.
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A detailed, emotional account of a father’s sudden passing and the events leading up to it.
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A profound spiritual experience during a meditation retreat in Bali.
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A guided meditation designed to help listeners connect with gratitude and the essence of what truly matters in life.
If today’s episode resonated with you, take the next step and join The Toolkit – a free resource to help you deepen your self-discovery: https://courses.soulcarehealing.com.au/thetoolkit
Timestamps / Chapter Markers:
01:00 The TEDx Talk Experience
07:17 My Beautiful Bipolar Father
09:23 My Sister's Addiction Battle
15:51 My Dad’s Struggle
17:51 The Day My Father Died
24:09 A Spiritual Awakening
34:01 Guided Meditation
38:20 Life's Gold Nuggets and Silver Linings
Resources & Links:
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Soul Care Healing Website: http://soulcarehealing.com.au/
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Soul Care Healing Instagram: http://instagram.com/soulcarehealing_
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Soul Care Healing Facebook: http://facebook.com/soulcarehealing
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Email us at: hello@soulcarehealing.com.au
If you enjoyed this episode, SUBSCRIBE or FOLLOW. We’d be so grateful if you’d leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify—it helps more people find the show and join our Soul Care Healing community. Be curious, be brave, be you. And thank you for being part of something bigger with us.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:10):
Hello.
Hello, souls. Welcome back.
today I wanted to share with you a beautiful experience I had just recently. A small town near us puts on a Ted talk.
It is an independent brand associated with Ted, the famous now multinational, incredible platform for innovative ideas, thoughts, reflections of all sorts of people from all around the world.
(00:32):
It is just honestly, it's fantastic if you haven't got on to it. Ted's actually even got its own channel now. So, I was a part of of a speaking event that happened in this small town,
and the topic was uncomfortable conversations. I was thinking, there are so many things in my life that have been a little bit uncomfortable.
And how do I find a line in the sand of what's worthy of sharing? How do I get this message across, which is all a part of what Soul Care is about? Is that helping people to recognize that life is short, like, we we know this. It's said to us, but it's not until you literally have someone there one hour and gone the next that you actually really kind of fucking get it.
(01:15):
It is potent once you've tasted that,
once you've had that flavor in your mouth. So what I was thinking about when I was kind of scripting my talk that I was going to do, when I say scripting, that is a super loose word. If you know me, I am pretty much I do life fairly ad lib, so the fact that I was trying to create some kind of script to keep on point, to make sure I didn't fluff about, the created a challenge for me.
(01:44):
It's not normally how my brain works, but I'm getting better at it, folks. I'm getting better at it. So part of the talk series that I was contributing to was called Dead Talk. So it was a play on the word Ted talks dead. So it's part of a Gothic festival. Would you believe all sorts of people were walking the town?
In all sorts of get ups and costumes and, you know, my little country girl thing was like, Holy crap, everyone's come out of the woodwork. There's all sorts of people wandering around. We had witches and warlocks and dominatrix and happily married couples walking their dogs. It was such a plethora of people, and it's that whole idea that, wow, we come in so many shapes and forms and stories and opinions and methods.
(02:25):
And fundamentally, though, most of us just want to be loved and we kind of want to have someone that we can pour our love into as well. So my talk, I turned up to the bar and it was a fairly small space. It's a country town, so it's like, you know, exposed brick walls, a fireplace and I thought the room may have had a few people in it, maybe a bit of curiosity.
(02:54):
We weren't the main thing of the event, but we had generated a little bit of interest and I walked into this pub and it was wall to wall with people, and I had that moment of, oh fuck, what have I done? We've all had that moment, but I was really sitting in it and I'm starting to sweat. And I was thinking, oh my God, that's a lot of it's very people.
(03:16):
It was very people in the room. And there was a part of me that's like, no, this is what you believe in. This is the story you feel that humanity could benefit from. And that's what we're here for. That's what I'm living and working every day for, benefiting humanity. So we did this talk and I heard the first view.
And man, that was some really beautiful observations of life. The first lady was a Castlemaine local, and she talked about her love affair with this man as quite a lot older than her, and how he started developing dementia and the grief that she had in that he was still standing in front of her, but so much of him was going each day.
(03:54):
Another piece of him left her, and eventually it became to the point where his dementia created a level of delusion. And he also sort of took to wandering the streets and became really well known in that town as being this kind of eccentric fellow who walked around, he was a prolific writer, so he ended up in the end of his days before he was hospitalized, carrying around boxes of his writings.
(04:18):
And he was very well known for being in the street as his condition got worse and he was hospitalized, and they were looking and begging for ways to try and connect with this gentleman again. It was fascinating to hear how they used music to get to just the right snippet within his brain that still had a level of memory.
(04:39):
Oh, I could go on about all the different talks, but that one was just it hit the mark because it was all about connection with constantly searching for connection. Sometimes in my next story, connection comes from the most unlikeliest of places. So I want to talk about my speech that I gave, and I want to, I call it a speech because it was a little bit lecture, not going to lie.
(05:03):
I probably went in with the intention of being a little bit on my soapbox because I wanted people to get it. I wanted them to stop fussing over the crap and the minimal stuff in their life, and how they can find rejoice in gratitude and abundance and then create this energetic flow. That doesn't mean that life doesn't have its challenges.
It just means that you can get through them a little bit quicker to get onto the next good thing. Like that's what I was trying to get them to say. And so when my name was called and it was my turn to walk up to the front of the crowd, I turned around and it was packed. And these are not my normal crowd.
(05:39):
I want to make this clear. This is not my soul. You turn up to my wellbeing workshop. This is not women in their 30s and 40s, a couple dabbling in their 50s. We're looking at a very eccentric people in their 20s, through to mostly people over 55. Lots of gray hair in the room. I love an oldie.
(06:00):
Whether you're 75, 85, I love hearing stories. So there was people draped on the bar. There was people sitting hand in hand. There was people everywhere. And the first couple of people were literally about two feet in front of me. I could reach out and touch them. And as I turned around, I said to them,
My name is Gail Wilson.
(06:20):
I've come here to deliver my TEDx talk for you today. And it was interesting to see all eyes on me.
The thing about that crowd that I really appreciated is none of them had their head down in a sign they had turned up to witness. They had turned up to listen. It wasn't by some accident that they landed in that room.
(06:42):
And sometimes I feel like that's the moments when you realize I'm exactly where I'm meant to be, even if it doesn't always look the way I think it's going to look. And I started speaking and my talk went like this.
Hi, my name is Gail, and I've come here to deliver my TEDx talk for you. But to start where I'm at isn't totally accurate. We need to go back in time. And I shared that during my 20s and 30s, I was a happy, bubbly young woman. I was always adventurous and curious. But then I had some challenges within my family.
(07:17):
I'd spend my teens in my 20s and beyond that, being one of the major supporters for my dad, who I refer to as my beautiful bipolar father. It wasn't so beautiful. Always at the start. There was this confusion for me. I grew up with a dad that was fun loving, a very thick Irish accent. He was playful, he was comical.
(07:39):
He was kind of like a big kid. And then if you life things kind of happened that de-escalated him. And then he started developing this shift in his persona. I didn't understand it at the time, and I just thought he was turning into an asshole, to be totally honest with you. We started fighting and yeah, I was turning into a teenager and I was pulling away and I was questioning their ideas, but it was different to that.
(08:06):
They it was a level of delusion and paranoia and stories that were like, not real. His account of things, of even our own conversations started to change. And when he would sit and dwell and chew on something that I had thought was just a simple moment in time, in a conversation we had. But somewhere in his brain it had been flipped and it had been digested, and it had assumptions attached to it, and poison had gotten in there.
(08:37):
So when he actually would contact me again to discuss it, he would be filled with rage and anger and I would cop so much verbal abuse and accusation. It was a really hard time, but I knew whatever was happening for him. As I became disconnected, things started coming up in society about mental health, and we started recognizing that he wasn't himself.
(09:02):
And it wasn't just a series of things that have built up. It wasn't just, that he was resentful and that his life hadn't gone the way he thought it would go. There was something else clawing at him. The fun part of that is, as I'm losing my dad, I also had my sister, my little sister, who's actually quite a lot taller than me.
(09:23):
So she's my little big sister. But she and I had had a fairly good friendship growing up, which had bedrooms. We'd talked, yeah, we'd had a few scraps, pulled each other's hair out a few times, but mostly we always came back to play and we shared our babies and we had a really great time. Through her teens, which is only 18 months younger than me, she started to change.
(09:46):
She started to hang out with people that were what my family would have called unsavory. She started collecting this group of people around her that he'd and smoked, and I thought that was the extent of what she was doing. It turns out it wasn't. And slowly but surely she slipped away from me as well. And she became a horrific crystal meth addict.
(10:09):
And I share these stories for you, not to make you well. The whole talking modem was about uncomfortable conversations, but what I've realized that there's so many stories about the person who is the addict and the person who is the mental health sufferer, but there's not enough stories shared about the pettiness, the person who supports or witnesses that and what they grieve in that process as they see their loved one changing.
(10:34):
So I saw my dad slipping away, getting into this fog of delusion. What's real, what's not real, and this paranoia about people chasing him and searching for him. And then I say, my sister slipping away, but also becoming unrecognizable in her behavior. Through all of this, I still worked, and I maintained a job, and I did all those sorts of things.
(11:00):
But I started to feel a real level of unrest. And later on, I recognized that I had been grieving for a family unit that had been so smashed apart that it was so royally fucked.
what I'm going to share is not to disrespect my family. We did the best we knew at the time. Later on in life, recently, we've had conversations about what we would do differently.
(11:26):
And part of that is what spawned this business and this podcast. And the book I'm writing and the course I'm doing. The biggest mistake we made is that we tried to hide it. We tried to hide my sister's addiction, meaning that we did whatever we could to get her out of situations or pay off the dealers or whatever we needed to do.
(11:47):
The same with my dad.
On his bad days, he hid in his bedroom. Sometimes, though, it couldn't be hidden because he'd turn up to my work and work and walk in the front door and blast me. And my poor boss would be like, what the hell is going on? Or maybe I'd receive a phone call on something he'd been stewing on, and I'd get on the phone call.
And I think I was talking to nice dad, but in fact it was nasty dad. On the other end of the phone call. So I want to talk about another incident in that in this moment, there is things that can take an unfortunate turn and things can get dark quickly. So as my sister got sicker and sicker, there was no intervention for her along the way.
(12:28):
We tried.
to get her into rehab centers, and she did a few.
But it was never more powerful than the hook that the drug had in her. And with dad, he went to a GP and we got him on a great mental health plan, and he was on really good anti-depressants until the day he decided, I'm quit.
I'm going to stop taking them now. I need a minimal, but we never really got given that memo. So what that meant was slowly over a nine month period, he would start to decline and we would see the ugly based raise up out of him again. We'd see this fracture and his disconnection, and we'd then go, oh, we know what's happened.
(13:11):
And through the course of his life, we had to deal with that multiple times. That rock bottom, the calling the cat team, the finding him in his room.
and throughout that time, I seem to be the person that he responded to the best when he was at his most fragile.
But I couldn't ever approach the room that he'd locked himself in as his daughter. I couldn't go in and go, dad, what are you doing? Because it wasn't my dad. Whenever I'd walk in that room and he'd be thinking that he was a little boy, but he'd be like 64, and I'd walk in and he'd be trying to hide behind a curtain or a lamp post, and he genuinely thought I couldn't see him.
(13:51):
So when I'd go in, I could tell instantly by the eyes that stared back at me at what age if the person I was talking to. So if I saw someone who was terrified and the eyes were really vulnerable, I knew that he resorted back to his younger version of himself. And then I would talk to that little boy and I'd say things like, hey, Joe, what's going on in here?
(14:14):
It's a bit dark. It looks a bit scary in here. Why don't we open the curtain a little bit and he might say something like, no, that's bad men out there. There's men out there that are chasing me. And I'd say, oh, come on, I've just been out there. There's no one out there except the car that you love working on.
And we'd open the curtain and we'd have to build these little bits of trust. And as he'd locked himself in that room and he had denied food that my mum had tried to give him over a couple of days, the stubble in his face would be back. He was normally a very clean shaven man and I would say things to him, why don't you come and sit next to me?
(14:47):
He'd tell me about what's giving you this fright and I could never go away. And like I said, I had to talk to him as if I was thinking adult boy. I spent so many decades of my life being the adult, even when I was very young. Slowly but surely, it's like I was familiar to him, but not in the role that I would play when he was really medicated and well.
And this unfolded constantly throughout life, this wellness, where he was the most awesome dad. He was medicated. He was a great pappy. He was so loved. But something would tell him that he was healed and so he didn't need it anymore. When we discussed it when he was well, he tried to explain that being on the level of anti psychotics and anti-depressants that the doctors had him on made him feel nothing, that he was so numb that he was existing and that there was a level of emptiness with it.
(15:42):
So when he was talking and laughing with us, he said he didn't really kind of get the joke. He was only laughing because he'd say, I'm laughing and it must be funny. So he's supposed to laugh with me. So he felt really removed all the time. And so when he'd get this level of medication where everything was well in his life, he'd go, yep.
Well, I reckon it's healed me. I reckon on fixed. I don't reckon I need this stuff anymore. It doesn't make me feel good. It was challenging over the years where we tried to tell him that how much not taking that medication affected his ability to have a relationship with us, and then later on in his life, that was why he stayed on it.
(16:22):
So he sacrificed a level of his own happiness to maintain his connection with us. Some would say that that's a pretty big, ultimate trip of love. Which is why it's such a shame when I say the next part. My sister was really bad. She'd been homeless for a little while, and she returned back to the family home where she lived in a caravan in the backyard.
(16:50):
My parents were at loggerheads at what to do with her. And I say this to you. And in season one, there's three episodes dedicated to my sister, who is now the most incredible woman that I know, and she has shared a beautiful part of her story. But in this moment in her life, along her journey, she was not well.
(17:14):
She was living in a caravan at the back of my folks house.
Some things happened. My family were threatened by some people who came looking for some products that my sister was supposed to sell for them.
And my family were put under threat. I think we'd always been fairly removed from her drug use until that moment where someone came knocking on the door. My dad didn't stand up for the family in that moment, the way he thought he would. And the next day he rang me and he was really ashamed of the way that he felt so cowardly towards these people.
(17:51):
And that he hid from them when they came in, insisting on this and demanding that, and left my mum too. It.
In that same conversation that next day, I could tell that he was very stressed. He was overwhelmed. He was at his wits end, and he was at a point where he just wanted it to all be over, and he said, I'm going to have a fucking heart attack over this. And I did say, oh, dad, it's going to be all right.
(18:20):
We'll make some decisions and just get out of the house, go somewhere else for the day.
Later that night, I got a phone call dad's had written. You need to come to the house. I was doing someone's hair, and I said, I can't get there right now. I'll meet you up at the hospital. There was a lot of chaos in the background.
There was a lot of shouting, a lot of yelling, but they kind of accepted that for me. Like, everything was going to be okay. And then I get another phone call. You need to hurry. You need to hurry. You need to get here. And I said, oh, look, I'm just doing this lady's hair. I'm only going to be like a little bit.
(18:57):
I can send her home with their foils in. It's going to be okay. And then I get a final phone call from my aunty, who is a really lovely woman in my life. Now, this woman does not overexaggerate. She does not inflame any situations. And she really only gets on the horn to young if she's got something important to say.
(19:19):
And she rings me. Finally, the third phone call of the night. It's been half an hour now since my first phone call, and she said, Gail, I'm coming to get you. This is very serious. You need to go now. And I thought, oh, she's right. Okay, I guess it's time to go.
I didn't realize it in that whole half an hour since I received those phone calls. They already had the ambulance there and they'd been trying to race us. A man that had already died. No one had given me that piece of the puzzle. So by the time that I got picked up by my aunty and I arrived, all of the attempts were done.
(19:56):
He was just laying on the family footpath where I had grown up.
Dead. And I walked up and I just stood. What? There were so many people around I couldn't understand. There was people there that I'd never seen before. My sister was there with all of her acquaintance pieces, and there were so many of them, and they had beads in their hand.
(20:18):
And I was like, whoa! And there was people questioning other people. And I'm thinking, what's happened? And I just, I remember walking in the front gate and sitting down next to my dad and holding his hand, and his hand was so warm. And I remember saying to him, oh, dad, what on earth has happened? The other thing that really surprised me is how old he looked in that moment, that when you take away someone's laughter and the tone of their voice and eye contact and mannerisms, wow, how that changes the appearance of someone.
(21:03):
And as I stepped in and I shared this sacred moment for him, it was like I couldn't hear anything. I couldn't hear the conversations in the questioning, and I couldn't hear the sirens because as I arrived, sirens were going. There was no sirens anymore, was just silence.
And I had this little moment with him and it was so precious.
But then I kind of got really fucking wild. I'm like, what has happened here? Yes, I know that. My dad had already told me earlier in the day that he thought he was going to have a heart attack, and here it is on the floor right in front of me. But what the fuck is this other shit all the way around me?
(21:36):
And then I realized that maybe there was more to this story than I realized.
I had not spoken to my sister for about four years. I'd not seen her face. I had not witnessed her in any way, shape or form. I had totally disconnected to her. So seeing her for the first time and she was distraught and my poor mum was just shocked. We were all just like, what has happened to you?
(22:06):
My sister and her friends were the only ones who held the story of what had happened before. My mum had arrived home from work and before I had arrived there with my aunty.
Things had changed. The directory of the day. My dad had contributed to a series of unfortunate events that had led to his death.
And as I delivered this token, Moulden, I had tears rolling down people's faces. I had people looking at me like shit. I did not know this talk was going to go in this direction. And then I continued. But years later, I was on, meditation retreat in Bali.
(22:47):
I had had three children at this point and I had lived a very happy and successful life.
I was loving my three children. I was loving the primary school experience, I was loving my marriage. But there was something within me that still felt very sad.
In this time, my sister had done her rehabilitation and she too had her child.
(23:10):
I took an opportunity that came up for me to go on a yoga retreat to Bali. Through part of my grief, it created spaces for me to connect with new communities, and one of them was a fantastic yoga school. I went on this yoga retreat and as I eliminated all the business for my life, I can only tell you that what was reactivated in that space was this internal knowing and intuition that I always had as a child.
(23:40):
So I started to see things, and he things. And at some points of that, I actually thought I was starting to go a little bit crazy. Well, it ran in the family, so why wouldn't it get me?
One day while I was in one of the yoga classes and to be honest, many, many times that I've been doing random activities in my home have I felt this call to the sea, this call to go to the beach, and I nearly always go, yep, I just feel like I have to go. It's just in my bones.
(24:11):
It's in my cells. I have to do this.
I wanted down to the sea and I had the most amazing experience with the waves just exploring. That actually smashed me. There was no there was no safety. It was just this wild, primal connection that I witnessed and felt thoroughly and felt thoroughly liberated
(24:33):
a couple of days later, I was in a meditation, and the meditation was named forgiveness.
And I had the most extraordinary experience. While deep in this meditation and I went deep, I was in this absolute channel.
(24:54):
I was having a conversation, like a visual conversation with my children, and I was apologizing for the times in my parenting experience that I had stuffed up. I'd made shitty choices, or I'd lashed out and and the grace that I and shame that I held over that I was releasing it in this meditation is kind of an out-of-body experience.
When I could hear the guru saying to me, okay. And as we come back into the room, we're going to start moving our fingers. But I heard this second sound way off in the distance, but
(25:28):
clear as running water from a tap. And it said, wait, wait, stop. Don't go anywhere. Just wait. And I'll say, yeah, water.
And I could feel this like pull from here. But this absolute solidness in whatever this other entity or this other experience was that was cutting in through this meditation. And all of a sudden I drifted this way and I couldn't hear the yoga teacher anymore. I could just hear this person begging for me to stay. Wait, wait. Just don't go anywhere just yet.
(26:05):
Just stay. And through all this mist and all of this. What? My dad came running through this cloud. And he looked so vibrant and well and smiling like, oh my God, finally you're open. Fine. I you can hear and see me again. And he was so exuberant and I was shocked. I was like, oh, hi. What what the hell is going on?
(26:41):
And he was like, I've been calling you. I've been calling you for years. I've been telling you to come to the say. And I was just listening. I couldn't really say anything. And he said, you don't need to be forgiven from your children. They love you. They know you're they know that you're okay. You're forgiven. I need your forgiveness.
(27:03):
And he went on to say that he had so much apologizing to do for the way that he left the world. And he wanted to show me the last day to make sense of what had happened.
And I remember thinking, am I dreaming? Is this a movie? What is going on? And I was like, okay, right. So it was like he just I know I can only explain.
(27:31):
It is like, what's that movie ghost where he's like just that just in. And I looked down and it was like my hands were his hands and now a wrinkly and old, and all of a sudden I was back in the family home and I was saying his day, and I was feeling what he was feeling, and I could feel his anger and I could feel this like frustration.
(27:54):
And he was pacing in the house.
his driveway was a shared driveway with lots of neighbors, but it was only gravel and it was on a lane. So if you did a bad enough wheelie, or if it rained a lot, it would kick everything out onto the street and he would be the one shoveling it up.
So he was very protective over. And if anyone did a wheelie, he would just be cracking it. And this day, my dad was sitting in and reliving the shame of the experience that the people in the house and had. He has how he hadn't interacted, how he hadn't stood up for the family and how he'd hidden and how angry he was.
(28:27):
And he saw this guy use his driveway. He was looking out the window and he thought, right, right, I'm going to teach this person a lesson. And so he I saw him, I am him, I'm in the car and I'm parking it over the driveway. So this man can't get out again. I'm blocking his truck. And then I come back in the house and I can see him eagerly waiting at the window like,
(28:48):
I've won, I've won!
And the guy comes back to the house and he walks up the driveway and he's knocking at the door, and he's saying to my dad, mate, you need to move your car. He blocked the driveway. I can't, I can't go out with my trailer on over the garage and I can say, my dad just go, this guy like, who the fuck do you think you are?
That's my driveway. And this guy recoil. Like, what? May I just need you to move your car? But my dad had lost it. He'd picked a fight with someone that was such, like an innate object. Really? And I said during my talking out. And how many of you have picked a fight with the wrong person? Someone else had copped the worst parts of you and it wasn't even meant and intended for them.
(29:32):
I think most of us have done that at some point in our life. So my dad was fighting and arguing with his men and he's backing away, and then he kind of comes around the side of the house and I'm, I'm sort of witnessing this growing argument. And the man just getting frustrated now, and he's starting to fight back like, dude, just move your car.
(29:52):
Come on, stop being such dickhead about it. Let's just do it.
And I can see that there is other people who've come to join the fight, and it's accelerating. Some neighbors that dad had a running feud with had come and joined in and were now calling my dad lots of names, and he's getting angry. And then I remember him running.
He's sort of running through the house, is getting my sister and all her friends and saying, there's a fight at the front and it's kind of all getting out of hand. I say, my dad sort of, they're on the fence and they're very aggressive, and he picks up some wood and he hits the fence and it kind of flings back and hits him in the head, and he touches his head.
(30:31):
And it's there's a bit of blood on his hand. And he starts to recognize that, wow, this has gotten so out of hand.
And in this moment, he also feels a tightening in his chest. He steps back. He trips over the decking. The veranda at the front hits his head, and as he stumbles up, he runs through the house to get a camera.
(30:55):
Comes back and he's filming everything, and all of a sudden the tightness in his chest changes to this squeezing of his arm like a monster has got hold of him. And in this meditation, I can feel a snippet of that pain. But I can also feel this fixation in my throat and this pressure building behind my eyes. And I remember thinking in the meditation, no one talks about this part of a heart attack, like I'm witnessing and feeling the sensation of someone else's experience and I can feel this pressure.
(31:31):
I can feel this contraction, I can feel this pain. And it's like a demonic claw on his arm. But worse than that is this fixation in his throat that he cannot get his words out. My mum, I can see his wife is pulling in the driveway to this shitstorm of a situation, and she's instantly got the people at her driver's door trying to tell their side of the story.
(32:00):
And there's a looney Tunes man living in his house, and he's had verbally attacked his man, and now he's lashing out at all of us. And she's sort of she's sort of having an altercation and all I can think my dad calls out to her. He just calls her name once, but it doesn't. He can't get the word out the way it sounds normally, and now he can feel himself disappearing into this abyss.
(32:25):
He actually wants to disappear away, and as he falls forwards and lands in her arms, he can hear all of this sensation in the moment
he's option to see has gone. He's got one foot in one life and one foot in another life. And in this moment he can hear these people begging for him to leave, saying, don't go.
(32:55):
Stay with his dad, stay a little bit longer. Come on, come on. You can hear this begging and feel someone's working on his body, but he's just got nothing left to give of this life. He's done, he's done. And as he slowly drifts away, he feels in his body and recognizes that wow, this is what true love feels like.
(33:25):
And in this moment, he recognizes had disconnected. His family had really become. But amongst all of that, all of the fear, all of the loss, all of the disconnect, they still what's love at the end of it. But we've lost the ability to give it to one another anymore.
And he went. He drifted away. And as I delivered this token.
(33:47):
Moulden, there are two ways streaming down people's faces. There are couples holding hand. There is the most sympathetic look. And then I did this one last final thing which I'll do for you folks. I invite you now to close down your eyes. Closing down your eyes. Hopefully not driving. If you're driving, do not close your eyes, but just take a moment to listen to this in another space where it's safe.
(34:16):
To close down your eyes, I want you to take five big breaths, nice and slow. Breathe in. And,
And in. And out.
(34:42):
And then. And out. And you feel your shoulders sink. And out. Breathe in. And out. You feel the muscles in your face. Relax and down. Breathing.
(35:07):
And down. And keep breathing. Gently. And listening to my voice.
And then. And now.
I want you to imagine that you're about to die. You have one foot in one life and one foot in the next life.
(35:38):
You're on the ground, and most of your senses have gone. Except the sense of hearing. You can hear your family begging for you. Now, I want you to visualize a curved group of people in front of you, and the pouring of love that comes from that, from your immediate people that you hold so clear and close to you.
(36:06):
And I want you to imagine that their face goes from turmoil to kindness.
Everything is settled, and it's your final chance to say goodbye. And then I want you to imagine that just beyond. Then there's another row of people.
That you've witnessed and have come to witness you. It might be the next row. Might be more people that you love and adore. Maybe people that it's been too long since you've caught up with.
(36:33):
Maybe it's been people you've already left this life and say goodbye.
And then beyond that, another row that makes all of the things that make your heart sing. Your activities, the places you go, how you spend your leisure time.
And then we have another arch beyond that. And that is your purpose. What do you do? What makes you proud?
(36:58):
Is it your work? Is it where you spend your energy? It's what you contribute, and I want you to witness and hold on to these layers of your life.
They are so dynamic. Can you feel that absolute gratitude for all of this goodness?
(37:22):
Now wake up. Tell me if the petty things that keep me going at night are really even with your worries. The fact that you get to wake up means you already one gigantic step ahead of my dad. You get a choice now to stand up and make every day count. You get a choice to invite people into your world that are worthy of you, and this journey of life that you're on.
(37:51):
You have the choice to love wholeheartedly, regardless of the outcome and your expectation. You get the choice to change your mind if nothing or something aligns with what you're doing right now. Think of this as hindsight. You have just witnessed all of the things that are most important to you and anything about and around that is just noise.
(38:20):
Get clear. Focus. Open your heart. Enjoy this precious gift that you have. Because if the worst thing that happens to you is that you get old, that's not too bloody bad. This is our first episode of the season and as we move through, we will be going through lots of real, relatable and real humorous moments in life where we are just here for a ride and sometimes we don't understand any or all of it.
(38:51):
Adulting is tough. Leadership as an adult is even tougher. Some days we get it right and sometimes we royally stuff it up. But that's all part of the journey. Every moment has a gold nugget and a silver lining. And through this podcast, I want to teach you on how you can embrace that, bounce back from life's challenges and find what might be missing.
(39:15):
That could be your real joy. So leaning. That was the most uncomfortable situation, but I hope it gave you a little bit of life's lessons, and I hope that what we have endured, you're able to not have to go through that process because it's all for something and it's all worth it. Take care, Soliz, and enjoy the rest of your week.
(39:43):
And that is all for today folks. I feel so grateful and blessed to be able to share these stories with you and to bring us together as a community. I'm Gayle Wilson and this is So Kate's podcast, naked. You can find further resources at my website, silk healing.com today here.
These resources are designed to support you and your family as you experience big emotions through this journey back to empowerment, healing and self connection.
(40:11):
Don't forget to follow and subscribe so that you can get notifications on the next episode as it lands.
Take care and just be kind to yourself.
Hello.
Hello, souls. Welcome back.
today I wanted to share with you a beautiful experience I had just recently. A small town near us puts on a Ted talk.
It is an independent brand associated with Ted, the famous now multinational, incredible platform for innovative ideas, thoughts, reflections of all sorts of people from all around the world.
(00:32):
It is just honestly, it's fantastic if you haven't got on to it. Ted's actually even got its own channel now. So, I was a part of of a speaking event that happened in this small town,
and the topic was uncomfortable conversations. I was thinking, there are so many things in my life that have been a little bit uncomfortable.
And how do I find a line in the sand of what's worthy of sharing? How do I get this message across, which is all a part of what Soul Care is about? Is that helping people to recognize that life is short, like, we we know this. It's said to us, but it's not until you literally have someone there one hour and gone the next that you actually really kind of fucking get it.
(01:15):
It is potent once you've tasted that,
once you've had that flavor in your mouth. So what I was thinking about when I was kind of scripting my talk that I was going to do, when I say scripting, that is a super loose word. If you know me, I am pretty much I do life fairly ad lib, so the fact that I was trying to create some kind of script to keep on point, to make sure I didn't fluff about, the created a challenge for me.
(01:44):
It's not normally how my brain works, but I'm getting better at it, folks. I'm getting better at it. So part of the talk series that I was contributing to was called Dead Talk. So it was a play on the word Ted talks dead. So it's part of a Gothic festival. Would you believe all sorts of people were walking the town?
In all sorts of get ups and costumes and, you know, my little country girl thing was like, Holy crap, everyone's come out of the woodwork. There's all sorts of people wandering around. We had witches and warlocks and dominatrix and happily married couples walking their dogs. It was such a plethora of people, and it's that whole idea that, wow, we come in so many shapes and forms and stories and opinions and methods.
(02:25):
And fundamentally, though, most of us just want to be loved and we kind of want to have someone that we can pour our love into as well. So my talk, I turned up to the bar and it was a fairly small space. It's a country town, so it's like, you know, exposed brick walls, a fireplace and I thought the room may have had a few people in it, maybe a bit of curiosity.
(02:54):
We weren't the main thing of the event, but we had generated a little bit of interest and I walked into this pub and it was wall to wall with people, and I had that moment of, oh fuck, what have I done? We've all had that moment, but I was really sitting in it and I'm starting to sweat. And I was thinking, oh my God, that's a lot of it's very people.
(03:16):
It was very people in the room. And there was a part of me that's like, no, this is what you believe in. This is the story you feel that humanity could benefit from. And that's what we're here for. That's what I'm living and working every day for, benefiting humanity. So we did this talk and I heard the first view.
And man, that was some really beautiful observations of life. The first lady was a Castlemaine local, and she talked about her love affair with this man as quite a lot older than her, and how he started developing dementia and the grief that she had in that he was still standing in front of her, but so much of him was going each day.
(03:54):
Another piece of him left her, and eventually it became to the point where his dementia created a level of delusion. And he also sort of took to wandering the streets and became really well known in that town as being this kind of eccentric fellow who walked around, he was a prolific writer, so he ended up in the end of his days before he was hospitalized, carrying around boxes of his writings.
(04:18):
And he was very well known for being in the street as his condition got worse and he was hospitalized, and they were looking and begging for ways to try and connect with this gentleman again. It was fascinating to hear how they used music to get to just the right snippet within his brain that still had a level of memory.
(04:39):
Oh, I could go on about all the different talks, but that one was just it hit the mark because it was all about connection with constantly searching for connection. Sometimes in my next story, connection comes from the most unlikeliest of places. So I want to talk about my speech that I gave, and I want to, I call it a speech because it was a little bit lecture, not going to lie.
(05:03):
I probably went in with the intention of being a little bit on my soapbox because I wanted people to get it. I wanted them to stop fussing over the crap and the minimal stuff in their life, and how they can find rejoice in gratitude and abundance and then create this energetic flow. That doesn't mean that life doesn't have its challenges.
It just means that you can get through them a little bit quicker to get onto the next good thing. Like that's what I was trying to get them to say. And so when my name was called and it was my turn to walk up to the front of the crowd, I turned around and it was packed. And these are not my normal crowd.
(05:39):
I want to make this clear. This is not my soul. You turn up to my wellbeing workshop. This is not women in their 30s and 40s, a couple dabbling in their 50s. We're looking at a very eccentric people in their 20s, through to mostly people over 55. Lots of gray hair in the room. I love an oldie.
(06:00):
Whether you're 75, 85, I love hearing stories. So there was people draped on the bar. There was people sitting hand in hand. There was people everywhere. And the first couple of people were literally about two feet in front of me. I could reach out and touch them. And as I turned around, I said to them,
My name is Gail Wilson.
(06:20):
I've come here to deliver my TEDx talk for you today. And it was interesting to see all eyes on me.
The thing about that crowd that I really appreciated is none of them had their head down in a sign they had turned up to witness. They had turned up to listen. It wasn't by some accident that they landed in that room.
(06:42):
And sometimes I feel like that's the moments when you realize I'm exactly where I'm meant to be, even if it doesn't always look the way I think it's going to look. And I started speaking and my talk went like this.
Hi, my name is Gail, and I've come here to deliver my TEDx talk for you. But to start where I'm at isn't totally accurate. We need to go back in time. And I shared that during my 20s and 30s, I was a happy, bubbly young woman. I was always adventurous and curious. But then I had some challenges within my family.
(07:17):
I'd spend my teens in my 20s and beyond that, being one of the major supporters for my dad, who I refer to as my beautiful bipolar father. It wasn't so beautiful. Always at the start. There was this confusion for me. I grew up with a dad that was fun loving, a very thick Irish accent. He was playful, he was comical.
(07:39):
He was kind of like a big kid. And then if you life things kind of happened that de-escalated him. And then he started developing this shift in his persona. I didn't understand it at the time, and I just thought he was turning into an asshole, to be totally honest with you. We started fighting and yeah, I was turning into a teenager and I was pulling away and I was questioning their ideas, but it was different to that.
(08:06):
They it was a level of delusion and paranoia and stories that were like, not real. His account of things, of even our own conversations started to change. And when he would sit and dwell and chew on something that I had thought was just a simple moment in time, in a conversation we had. But somewhere in his brain it had been flipped and it had been digested, and it had assumptions attached to it, and poison had gotten in there.
(08:37):
So when he actually would contact me again to discuss it, he would be filled with rage and anger and I would cop so much verbal abuse and accusation. It was a really hard time, but I knew whatever was happening for him. As I became disconnected, things started coming up in society about mental health, and we started recognizing that he wasn't himself.
(09:02):
And it wasn't just a series of things that have built up. It wasn't just, that he was resentful and that his life hadn't gone the way he thought it would go. There was something else clawing at him. The fun part of that is, as I'm losing my dad, I also had my sister, my little sister, who's actually quite a lot taller than me.
(09:23):
So she's my little big sister. But she and I had had a fairly good friendship growing up, which had bedrooms. We'd talked, yeah, we'd had a few scraps, pulled each other's hair out a few times, but mostly we always came back to play and we shared our babies and we had a really great time. Through her teens, which is only 18 months younger than me, she started to change.
(09:46):
She started to hang out with people that were what my family would have called unsavory. She started collecting this group of people around her that he'd and smoked, and I thought that was the extent of what she was doing. It turns out it wasn't. And slowly but surely she slipped away from me as well. And she became a horrific crystal meth addict.
(10:09):
And I share these stories for you, not to make you well. The whole talking modem was about uncomfortable conversations, but what I've realized that there's so many stories about the person who is the addict and the person who is the mental health sufferer, but there's not enough stories shared about the pettiness, the person who supports or witnesses that and what they grieve in that process as they see their loved one changing.
(10:34):
So I saw my dad slipping away, getting into this fog of delusion. What's real, what's not real, and this paranoia about people chasing him and searching for him. And then I say, my sister slipping away, but also becoming unrecognizable in her behavior. Through all of this, I still worked, and I maintained a job, and I did all those sorts of things.
(11:00):
But I started to feel a real level of unrest. And later on, I recognized that I had been grieving for a family unit that had been so smashed apart that it was so royally fucked.
what I'm going to share is not to disrespect my family. We did the best we knew at the time. Later on in life, recently, we've had conversations about what we would do differently.
(11:26):
And part of that is what spawned this business and this podcast. And the book I'm writing and the course I'm doing. The biggest mistake we made is that we tried to hide it. We tried to hide my sister's addiction, meaning that we did whatever we could to get her out of situations or pay off the dealers or whatever we needed to do.
(11:47):
The same with my dad.
On his bad days, he hid in his bedroom. Sometimes, though, it couldn't be hidden because he'd turn up to my work and work and walk in the front door and blast me. And my poor boss would be like, what the hell is going on? Or maybe I'd receive a phone call on something he'd been stewing on, and I'd get on the phone call.
And I think I was talking to nice dad, but in fact it was nasty dad. On the other end of the phone call. So I want to talk about another incident in that in this moment, there is things that can take an unfortunate turn and things can get dark quickly. So as my sister got sicker and sicker, there was no intervention for her along the way.
(12:28):
We tried.
to get her into rehab centers, and she did a few.
But it was never more powerful than the hook that the drug had in her. And with dad, he went to a GP and we got him on a great mental health plan, and he was on really good anti-depressants until the day he decided, I'm quit.
I'm going to stop taking them now. I need a minimal, but we never really got given that memo. So what that meant was slowly over a nine month period, he would start to decline and we would see the ugly based raise up out of him again. We'd see this fracture and his disconnection, and we'd then go, oh, we know what's happened.
(13:11):
And through the course of his life, we had to deal with that multiple times. That rock bottom, the calling the cat team, the finding him in his room.
and throughout that time, I seem to be the person that he responded to the best when he was at his most fragile.
But I couldn't ever approach the room that he'd locked himself in as his daughter. I couldn't go in and go, dad, what are you doing? Because it wasn't my dad. Whenever I'd walk in that room and he'd be thinking that he was a little boy, but he'd be like 64, and I'd walk in and he'd be trying to hide behind a curtain or a lamp post, and he genuinely thought I couldn't see him.
(13:51):
So when I'd go in, I could tell instantly by the eyes that stared back at me at what age if the person I was talking to. So if I saw someone who was terrified and the eyes were really vulnerable, I knew that he resorted back to his younger version of himself. And then I would talk to that little boy and I'd say things like, hey, Joe, what's going on in here?
(14:14):
It's a bit dark. It looks a bit scary in here. Why don't we open the curtain a little bit and he might say something like, no, that's bad men out there. There's men out there that are chasing me. And I'd say, oh, come on, I've just been out there. There's no one out there except the car that you love working on.
And we'd open the curtain and we'd have to build these little bits of trust. And as he'd locked himself in that room and he had denied food that my mum had tried to give him over a couple of days, the stubble in his face would be back. He was normally a very clean shaven man and I would say things to him, why don't you come and sit next to me?
(14:47):
He'd tell me about what's giving you this fright and I could never go away. And like I said, I had to talk to him as if I was thinking adult boy. I spent so many decades of my life being the adult, even when I was very young. Slowly but surely, it's like I was familiar to him, but not in the role that I would play when he was really medicated and well.
And this unfolded constantly throughout life, this wellness, where he was the most awesome dad. He was medicated. He was a great pappy. He was so loved. But something would tell him that he was healed and so he didn't need it anymore. When we discussed it when he was well, he tried to explain that being on the level of anti psychotics and anti-depressants that the doctors had him on made him feel nothing, that he was so numb that he was existing and that there was a level of emptiness with it.
(15:42):
So when he was talking and laughing with us, he said he didn't really kind of get the joke. He was only laughing because he'd say, I'm laughing and it must be funny. So he's supposed to laugh with me. So he felt really removed all the time. And so when he'd get this level of medication where everything was well in his life, he'd go, yep.
Well, I reckon it's healed me. I reckon on fixed. I don't reckon I need this stuff anymore. It doesn't make me feel good. It was challenging over the years where we tried to tell him that how much not taking that medication affected his ability to have a relationship with us, and then later on in his life, that was why he stayed on it.
(16:22):
So he sacrificed a level of his own happiness to maintain his connection with us. Some would say that that's a pretty big, ultimate trip of love. Which is why it's such a shame when I say the next part. My sister was really bad. She'd been homeless for a little while, and she returned back to the family home where she lived in a caravan in the backyard.
(16:50):
My parents were at loggerheads at what to do with her. And I say this to you. And in season one, there's three episodes dedicated to my sister, who is now the most incredible woman that I know, and she has shared a beautiful part of her story. But in this moment in her life, along her journey, she was not well.
(17:14):
She was living in a caravan at the back of my folks house.
Some things happened. My family were threatened by some people who came looking for some products that my sister was supposed to sell for them.
And my family were put under threat. I think we'd always been fairly removed from her drug use until that moment where someone came knocking on the door. My dad didn't stand up for the family in that moment, the way he thought he would. And the next day he rang me and he was really ashamed of the way that he felt so cowardly towards these people.
(17:51):
And that he hid from them when they came in, insisting on this and demanding that, and left my mum too. It.
In that same conversation that next day, I could tell that he was very stressed. He was overwhelmed. He was at his wits end, and he was at a point where he just wanted it to all be over, and he said, I'm going to have a fucking heart attack over this. And I did say, oh, dad, it's going to be all right.
(18:20):
We'll make some decisions and just get out of the house, go somewhere else for the day.
Later that night, I got a phone call dad's had written. You need to come to the house. I was doing someone's hair, and I said, I can't get there right now. I'll meet you up at the hospital. There was a lot of chaos in the background.
There was a lot of shouting, a lot of yelling, but they kind of accepted that for me. Like, everything was going to be okay. And then I get another phone call. You need to hurry. You need to hurry. You need to get here. And I said, oh, look, I'm just doing this lady's hair. I'm only going to be like a little bit.
(18:57):
I can send her home with their foils in. It's going to be okay. And then I get a final phone call from my aunty, who is a really lovely woman in my life. Now, this woman does not overexaggerate. She does not inflame any situations. And she really only gets on the horn to young if she's got something important to say.
(19:19):
And she rings me. Finally, the third phone call of the night. It's been half an hour now since my first phone call, and she said, Gail, I'm coming to get you. This is very serious. You need to go now. And I thought, oh, she's right. Okay, I guess it's time to go.
I didn't realize it in that whole half an hour since I received those phone calls. They already had the ambulance there and they'd been trying to race us. A man that had already died. No one had given me that piece of the puzzle. So by the time that I got picked up by my aunty and I arrived, all of the attempts were done.
(19:56):
He was just laying on the family footpath where I had grown up.
Dead. And I walked up and I just stood. What? There were so many people around I couldn't understand. There was people there that I'd never seen before. My sister was there with all of her acquaintance pieces, and there were so many of them, and they had beads in their hand.
(20:18):
And I was like, whoa! And there was people questioning other people. And I'm thinking, what's happened? And I just, I remember walking in the front gate and sitting down next to my dad and holding his hand, and his hand was so warm. And I remember saying to him, oh, dad, what on earth has happened? The other thing that really surprised me is how old he looked in that moment, that when you take away someone's laughter and the tone of their voice and eye contact and mannerisms, wow, how that changes the appearance of someone.
(21:03):
And as I stepped in and I shared this sacred moment for him, it was like I couldn't hear anything. I couldn't hear the conversations in the questioning, and I couldn't hear the sirens because as I arrived, sirens were going. There was no sirens anymore, was just silence.
And I had this little moment with him and it was so precious.
But then I kind of got really fucking wild. I'm like, what has happened here? Yes, I know that. My dad had already told me earlier in the day that he thought he was going to have a heart attack, and here it is on the floor right in front of me. But what the fuck is this other shit all the way around me?
(21:36):
And then I realized that maybe there was more to this story than I realized.
I had not spoken to my sister for about four years. I'd not seen her face. I had not witnessed her in any way, shape or form. I had totally disconnected to her. So seeing her for the first time and she was distraught and my poor mum was just shocked. We were all just like, what has happened to you?
(22:06):
My sister and her friends were the only ones who held the story of what had happened before. My mum had arrived home from work and before I had arrived there with my aunty.
Things had changed. The directory of the day. My dad had contributed to a series of unfortunate events that had led to his death.
And as I delivered this token, Moulden, I had tears rolling down people's faces. I had people looking at me like shit. I did not know this talk was going to go in this direction. And then I continued. But years later, I was on, meditation retreat in Bali.
(22:47):
I had had three children at this point and I had lived a very happy and successful life.
I was loving my three children. I was loving the primary school experience, I was loving my marriage. But there was something within me that still felt very sad.
In this time, my sister had done her rehabilitation and she too had her child.
(23:10):
I took an opportunity that came up for me to go on a yoga retreat to Bali. Through part of my grief, it created spaces for me to connect with new communities, and one of them was a fantastic yoga school. I went on this yoga retreat and as I eliminated all the business for my life, I can only tell you that what was reactivated in that space was this internal knowing and intuition that I always had as a child.
(23:40):
So I started to see things, and he things. And at some points of that, I actually thought I was starting to go a little bit crazy. Well, it ran in the family, so why wouldn't it get me?
One day while I was in one of the yoga classes and to be honest, many, many times that I've been doing random activities in my home have I felt this call to the sea, this call to go to the beach, and I nearly always go, yep, I just feel like I have to go. It's just in my bones.
(24:11):
It's in my cells. I have to do this.
I wanted down to the sea and I had the most amazing experience with the waves just exploring. That actually smashed me. There was no there was no safety. It was just this wild, primal connection that I witnessed and felt thoroughly and felt thoroughly liberated
(24:33):
a couple of days later, I was in a meditation, and the meditation was named forgiveness.
And I had the most extraordinary experience. While deep in this meditation and I went deep, I was in this absolute channel.
(24:54):
I was having a conversation, like a visual conversation with my children, and I was apologizing for the times in my parenting experience that I had stuffed up. I'd made shitty choices, or I'd lashed out and and the grace that I and shame that I held over that I was releasing it in this meditation is kind of an out-of-body experience.
When I could hear the guru saying to me, okay. And as we come back into the room, we're going to start moving our fingers. But I heard this second sound way off in the distance, but
(25:28):
clear as running water from a tap. And it said, wait, wait, stop. Don't go anywhere. Just wait. And I'll say, yeah, water.
And I could feel this like pull from here. But this absolute solidness in whatever this other entity or this other experience was that was cutting in through this meditation. And all of a sudden I drifted this way and I couldn't hear the yoga teacher anymore. I could just hear this person begging for me to stay. Wait, wait. Just don't go anywhere just yet.
(26:05):
Just stay. And through all this mist and all of this. What? My dad came running through this cloud. And he looked so vibrant and well and smiling like, oh my God, finally you're open. Fine. I you can hear and see me again. And he was so exuberant and I was shocked. I was like, oh, hi. What what the hell is going on?
(26:41):
And he was like, I've been calling you. I've been calling you for years. I've been telling you to come to the say. And I was just listening. I couldn't really say anything. And he said, you don't need to be forgiven from your children. They love you. They know you're they know that you're okay. You're forgiven. I need your forgiveness.
(27:03):
And he went on to say that he had so much apologizing to do for the way that he left the world. And he wanted to show me the last day to make sense of what had happened.
And I remember thinking, am I dreaming? Is this a movie? What is going on? And I was like, okay, right. So it was like he just I know I can only explain.
(27:31):
It is like, what's that movie ghost where he's like just that just in. And I looked down and it was like my hands were his hands and now a wrinkly and old, and all of a sudden I was back in the family home and I was saying his day, and I was feeling what he was feeling, and I could feel his anger and I could feel this like frustration.
(27:54):
And he was pacing in the house.
his driveway was a shared driveway with lots of neighbors, but it was only gravel and it was on a lane. So if you did a bad enough wheelie, or if it rained a lot, it would kick everything out onto the street and he would be the one shoveling it up.
So he was very protective over. And if anyone did a wheelie, he would just be cracking it. And this day, my dad was sitting in and reliving the shame of the experience that the people in the house and had. He has how he hadn't interacted, how he hadn't stood up for the family and how he'd hidden and how angry he was.
(28:27):
And he saw this guy use his driveway. He was looking out the window and he thought, right, right, I'm going to teach this person a lesson. And so he I saw him, I am him, I'm in the car and I'm parking it over the driveway. So this man can't get out again. I'm blocking his truck. And then I come back in the house and I can see him eagerly waiting at the window like,
(28:48):
I've won, I've won!
And the guy comes back to the house and he walks up the driveway and he's knocking at the door, and he's saying to my dad, mate, you need to move your car. He blocked the driveway. I can't, I can't go out with my trailer on over the garage and I can say, my dad just go, this guy like, who the fuck do you think you are?
That's my driveway. And this guy recoil. Like, what? May I just need you to move your car? But my dad had lost it. He'd picked a fight with someone that was such, like an innate object. Really? And I said during my talking out. And how many of you have picked a fight with the wrong person? Someone else had copped the worst parts of you and it wasn't even meant and intended for them.
(29:32):
I think most of us have done that at some point in our life. So my dad was fighting and arguing with his men and he's backing away, and then he kind of comes around the side of the house and I'm, I'm sort of witnessing this growing argument. And the man just getting frustrated now, and he's starting to fight back like, dude, just move your car.
(29:52):
Come on, stop being such dickhead about it. Let's just do it.
And I can see that there is other people who've come to join the fight, and it's accelerating. Some neighbors that dad had a running feud with had come and joined in and were now calling my dad lots of names, and he's getting angry. And then I remember him running.
He's sort of running through the house, is getting my sister and all her friends and saying, there's a fight at the front and it's kind of all getting out of hand. I say, my dad sort of, they're on the fence and they're very aggressive, and he picks up some wood and he hits the fence and it kind of flings back and hits him in the head, and he touches his head.
(30:31):
And it's there's a bit of blood on his hand. And he starts to recognize that, wow, this has gotten so out of hand.
And in this moment, he also feels a tightening in his chest. He steps back. He trips over the decking. The veranda at the front hits his head, and as he stumbles up, he runs through the house to get a camera.
(30:55):
Comes back and he's filming everything, and all of a sudden the tightness in his chest changes to this squeezing of his arm like a monster has got hold of him. And in this meditation, I can feel a snippet of that pain. But I can also feel this fixation in my throat and this pressure building behind my eyes. And I remember thinking in the meditation, no one talks about this part of a heart attack, like I'm witnessing and feeling the sensation of someone else's experience and I can feel this pressure.
(31:31):
I can feel this contraction, I can feel this pain. And it's like a demonic claw on his arm. But worse than that is this fixation in his throat that he cannot get his words out. My mum, I can see his wife is pulling in the driveway to this shitstorm of a situation, and she's instantly got the people at her driver's door trying to tell their side of the story.
(32:00):
And there's a looney Tunes man living in his house, and he's had verbally attacked his man, and now he's lashing out at all of us. And she's sort of she's sort of having an altercation and all I can think my dad calls out to her. He just calls her name once, but it doesn't. He can't get the word out the way it sounds normally, and now he can feel himself disappearing into this abyss.
(32:25):
He actually wants to disappear away, and as he falls forwards and lands in her arms, he can hear all of this sensation in the moment
he's option to see has gone. He's got one foot in one life and one foot in another life. And in this moment he can hear these people begging for him to leave, saying, don't go.
(32:55):
Stay with his dad, stay a little bit longer. Come on, come on. You can hear this begging and feel someone's working on his body, but he's just got nothing left to give of this life. He's done, he's done. And as he slowly drifts away, he feels in his body and recognizes that wow, this is what true love feels like.
(33:25):
And in this moment, he recognizes had disconnected. His family had really become. But amongst all of that, all of the fear, all of the loss, all of the disconnect, they still what's love at the end of it. But we've lost the ability to give it to one another anymore.
And he went. He drifted away. And as I delivered this token.
(33:47):
Moulden, there are two ways streaming down people's faces. There are couples holding hand. There is the most sympathetic look. And then I did this one last final thing which I'll do for you folks. I invite you now to close down your eyes. Closing down your eyes. Hopefully not driving. If you're driving, do not close your eyes, but just take a moment to listen to this in another space where it's safe.
(34:16):
To close down your eyes, I want you to take five big breaths, nice and slow. Breathe in. And,
And in. And out.
(34:42):
And then. And out. And you feel your shoulders sink. And out. Breathe in. And out. You feel the muscles in your face. Relax and down. Breathing.
(35:07):
And down. And keep breathing. Gently. And listening to my voice.
And then. And now.
I want you to imagine that you're about to die. You have one foot in one life and one foot in the next life.
(35:38):
You're on the ground, and most of your senses have gone. Except the sense of hearing. You can hear your family begging for you. Now, I want you to visualize a curved group of people in front of you, and the pouring of love that comes from that, from your immediate people that you hold so clear and close to you.
(36:06):
And I want you to imagine that their face goes from turmoil to kindness.
Everything is settled, and it's your final chance to say goodbye. And then I want you to imagine that just beyond. Then there's another row of people.
That you've witnessed and have come to witness you. It might be the next row. Might be more people that you love and adore. Maybe people that it's been too long since you've caught up with.
(36:33):
Maybe it's been people you've already left this life and say goodbye.
And then beyond that, another row that makes all of the things that make your heart sing. Your activities, the places you go, how you spend your leisure time.
And then we have another arch beyond that. And that is your purpose. What do you do? What makes you proud?
(36:58):
Is it your work? Is it where you spend your energy? It's what you contribute, and I want you to witness and hold on to these layers of your life.
They are so dynamic. Can you feel that absolute gratitude for all of this goodness?
(37:22):
Now wake up. Tell me if the petty things that keep me going at night are really even with your worries. The fact that you get to wake up means you already one gigantic step ahead of my dad. You get a choice now to stand up and make every day count. You get a choice to invite people into your world that are worthy of you, and this journey of life that you're on.
(37:51):
You have the choice to love wholeheartedly, regardless of the outcome and your expectation. You get the choice to change your mind if nothing or something aligns with what you're doing right now. Think of this as hindsight. You have just witnessed all of the things that are most important to you and anything about and around that is just noise.
(38:20):
Get clear. Focus. Open your heart. Enjoy this precious gift that you have. Because if the worst thing that happens to you is that you get old, that's not too bloody bad. This is our first episode of the season and as we move through, we will be going through lots of real, relatable and real humorous moments in life where we are just here for a ride and sometimes we don't understand any or all of it.
(38:51):
Adulting is tough. Leadership as an adult is even tougher. Some days we get it right and sometimes we royally stuff it up. But that's all part of the journey. Every moment has a gold nugget and a silver lining. And through this podcast, I want to teach you on how you can embrace that, bounce back from life's challenges and find what might be missing.
(39:15):
That could be your real joy. So leaning. That was the most uncomfortable situation, but I hope it gave you a little bit of life's lessons, and I hope that what we have endured, you're able to not have to go through that process because it's all for something and it's all worth it. Take care, Soliz, and enjoy the rest of your week.
(39:43):
And that is all for today folks. I feel so grateful and blessed to be able to share these stories with you and to bring us together as a community. I'm Gayle Wilson and this is So Kate's podcast, naked. You can find further resources at my website, silk healing.com today here.
These resources are designed to support you and your family as you experience big emotions through this journey back to empowerment, healing and self connection.
(40:11):
Don't forget to follow and subscribe so that you can get notifications on the next episode as it lands.
Take care and just be kind to yourself.
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