Ep. 95 – Finding Joy During Our Most Difficult Moments

TRANSCRIPT

Gissele: Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion podcast with Gissele

Gissele: We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for our amazing content. And if you’d like to support the podcast, you can buymeacoffee.com/loveandcompassion. Today we’re gonna be talking about how compassion can help us through the grieving process.

Gissele: And our guest today is Tony Stewart. He was a certified grief educator and author of the award-winning memoir, Carrying the Tiger, living with Cancer, dying with Grace, finding Joy while grieving,

Gissele: Tony and his late wife Lynn Kula painter, traveled extensively in India and Southeast Asia, staying in small hotels off the beaten track and eating delicious food with their fingers when cutlery wasn’t available.

Gissele: Hearing The Tiger is his first published book. Please join me in welcoming Tony. Hi Tony.

Tony: Hi Gissele Good morning, you. How

Gissele: are you? [00:01:00]

Tony: Thank you for that nice introduction. I am fine. And for those who’ve noticed, I’ve got a cat here who very much wants to be part of this discussion. Usually she’ll settle down now.

Gissele: Yeah.

Tony: Now that she’s, yeah, she’s more than welcome to be Perfect. Now she’s found my lap. Hopefully she’ll settle down.

Gissele: Beautiful. I want, ask you if you could share with the audience a little bit about how you became a grief counselor and author.

Tony: I would say it’s almost in the reverse order I studied.

Tony: To become a grief educator within the last year. It’s, the book is not informed by that. I wrote a book which has an extensive coverage of what happened when my wife died, and then of the grief that I journeyed through. And then the complexity of finding another relationship or finding myself in another relationship comparatively soon after my wife died, which was incredibly difficult for me.

Tony: I wrote that book. The book came out and I started to appear on podcasts to talk about it [00:02:00] and discovered that I found these conversations really interesting, and also that I knew about my grief, but I began to wonder whether my story was actually common and was I doing the world a service or a disservice?

Tony: It’s always a service to share your own story. Everyone’s story. Is their story and they’re real, and they’re real examples of things that happen. But I became really interested in what is this grief beast that I wrote so much about in my book? And what’s it like for other people and how can you help people who are grieving?

Tony: And so just less than a year ago, I took. An extensive course offered by David Kessler of grief.com. He’s one of the top experts in this field and became a certified grief educator. That’s not the same as a counselor. I’m not claiming to be a counselor, a therapist, a coach. Those require additional training that I don’t have, but I am available if anyone wants to just call me up and [00:03:00] talk.

Tony: I’m more than happy to help people to the extent that I can and listen and be there for people, and that’s what I try to do with that. I’m not trying to build a career for myself as a counselor, but I think it helps me understand, for example, when you ask me questions later in this conversation, I have both my own experience and also what I learned in the course sitting behind my answers.

Gissele: Be