You Make Your Path by Walking with Suzanne Anderson

In this episode, my guest is Suzanne Anderson, she has worked as a psychologist, author, coach, leadership consultant, and transformational teacher for over 30 years.

We talk about her new book “You Make Your Path By Walking” which she wrote after her beloved husband took his life, and how she used trauma and loss in a way that was profoundly transformational.

Part memoir, part guidebook, “You Make Your Path By Walking” accompanies readers on their own journeys through the barren landscape of trauma and grief, offering comfort, guidance, and inspiration to make meaning out of loss.

Whether you are going through a personal dark night or struggling with these uncertain and disruptive global times, this book offers a proven pathway to allow the breaking down to be the breaking open into a whole new way of living, loving, and leading.

Her book will be released on June 13, 2023, it is currently available for pre-sale on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Make-Your-Path-Walking-Transformational/dp/1647424429/

Suzanne believes that the current time is an initiatory period, where individuals can grow and find wholeness through experiences of loss and uncovering their true selves. Simply seeking the light is not enough; true self-discovery happens in the darkness.

Suzanne describes how during transitional periods in a culture, shadow elements that were previously ignored or excluded tend to surface. It is important to understand and integrate both the feminine and masculine aspects of ourselves, we need a deep connection between the feminine and masculine energies.

She blew my mind a little with the concept of "Kill the Queen," which suggests that two powerful women cannot coexist peacefully and often resort to making each other wrong or feeling inadequate.

Her first book “The Way of the Mysterial Woman Upgrading How You Live, Love, and Lead.” talks about how we can move beyond jealousy and embrace our own sense of enoughness and wholeness.

Website: https://mysterialwoman.com
Facebook: @MysterialWoman
Twitter: @MysterialWoman
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mysterialwoman/ 

Transcript

[00:00:00] Suzanne: You want to be looking at? How will this allow me to be more whole, more loving, more present, more awake, more in this one precious life I have here, this incarnation? 

[00:00:13] Jill: Welcome back to Seeing Death Clearly. I'm your host, Jill McClennen, a death doula and end-of-life coach. My conversations with my guests may challenge you to think outside of the box of what you believe to be true.

[00:00:24] About death, dying grief, and living life. Thank you to everyone that sent in a donation or did the paid monthly subscription to the podcast. I really appreciate your support in this episode. My guest is Suzanne Anderson. Suzanne has worked as a psychologist, author, coach, leadership consultant, and transformational teacher for over 30 years.

[00:00:44] We talk about her new book. You make your path by walking, which she wrote after her husband took his life, and how she used trauma and loss in a way that was profoundly transformational. Her book will be released on June 13th this year, 2023. It is currently available for pre-sale on Amazon, and I'm including a link in the show notes.

[00:01:02] Thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the podcast Suzanne, thank you so much for coming on. I just finished reading your book that we're gonna talk a lot about and I really have to say that going into reading a book that was talking about somebody's loss of a spouse, I was like, oh, okay. This should be interesting.

[00:01:24] But I was so pulled into the story and I was not expecting that. The way that you wrote the story, I really do feel like I know you. I really was brought into your life and your experiences and I was very touched by the whole thing. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. It's a pleasure to have you on.

[00:01:45] Suzanne: Thank you, Jill, and I appreciate the transparency of, oh, here's a book I'll read and then actually letting it touch you and I'm really, really delighted to hear that it did. Thank you.

[00:01:56] Jill: Yeah, it really did. And I know the name of it “You Make Your Path by Walking” At first, I was a little bit like, I'm not sure what that means, and then you do get into it in the book of what that means to you.

[00:02:10] But can we maybe start off a little bit with why you titled the book in the way that you did and what that really means? 

[00:02:18] Suzanne: Yeah. The title actually came from a poem, one of my favorite poems by Antonio Machado, a Spanish poet, and I love poetry, and we may get into that as a kind of a practice, basically to hold us during times that are very disruptive, as I have gone through.

[00:02:38] But this particular poem I knew for a long time and I loved it. And it spoke about this moment kind of in between where you're leaving the past and there's something unknown in the future. That you won't know until you walk forward into that future. And this is one line. You make your path by walking in the poem and when everything happened that I'm sure we'll get into here, and my life really disappeared, my life as I knew it, this was a phrase in me, it was like a mantra that I just kept saying all the time.

[00:03:12] And I'm not sure like you said, I'm not sure I even really fully understood what it meant. Until I was living it. But I understand it more now, which is really during the times like I went through, or traumatic times, death experiences. Loss doesn't actually have to be even the death of a person. It can be the death of a phase of life.

[00:03:34] It can be the death of a, of health, of a weight that you were in your body before and that's all of a sudden changed or, or your children leave home like the end of the cycle, let's say a profound end of the cycle. There's sometimes a sense of that. I've just gotta get through this thing and then I'll get back to whatever my life was before and it'll all be okay.

[00:03:53] And this phrase you make your path by walking really says, this is your life now. It isn't that this isn't your life and later it will be your life again. When it's all back to some kind of other normal, it is that this is your life, and that is how you walk it. The choices you make moment to moment the way you are with what is, is what determines where you go. So that's basically it.

[00:04:24] Jill: I really like that. And something that I noticed in your book is you used the word shattered many times. I actually tried to go back through and count. You did. You did. And part of why I noticed it was that there's this term assumptive world grief, that especially if you lose a life partner, everything that you assumed your life was going to be is now no longer what your life is going to be.

[00:04:54] So not only are you grieving the loss of your loved one, but you're also grieving the loss of the life that you assumed you were going to have. And I did a workshop during the lockdown. Of 2020 because I realized that I was having assumptive world grief that everything that I was expecting I was gonna be doing that year, I wasn't gonna be able to do.

[00:05:17] And I called it Shattered Assumptions. That was like the title of it because it's like it shatters our world. So when I started noticing how much you used it in the book, I was like, it's such a perfect way to describe it. What it feels like when your life just so drastically shifts and changes. And as you said, there's not this moment where you're like, well, I'll get back to my life later.

[00:05:46] This is life. This is it. This is what we have right now. And I really did notice that you used that term quite a few times, shattered. I just thought that was interesting. 

[00:05:56] Suzanne: Well, I think that's, that's interesting. It's true that David's choice to end his life, which we need to let the listeners know that this was my husband dying very suddenly and by his own choice by suicide was so shattering to my identity, to everything, the way I saw myself, the way I saw us. Of course, as you described the future we had together. This way, I imagined us unfolding our lives together and also everything about my life. And because of when it all went down his business, what we discovered very quickly was that underneath a very deep part of his own choice.

[00:06:39] To leave this world was the shame around his business that was coming apart. Um, one of the things that we did that was so central for me was a ritual at the beginning, which was working with this shattering. I might just share that. Please. I was already in. This is also probably worth just establishing, a psychologist and I work in the space of development and specifically with women.

[00:07:02] But I've worked in the space of developmental trauma, so I'm working all the time with how you handle going through profound change. And I knew that one of the hardest parts is the, that the two-thirds of the iceberg, the sort of iceberg theory of, of the consciousness, which is two-thirds of the iceberg under the water, is the unconscious, one-third above, but the direction of the iceberg is, is oriented by what's under the water.

[00:07:29] That we have to, I had to address the unconscious as well as all the things I had to take in consciously when this happened. And one of the ways to do that, that's so powerful is ritual. Ritual was a deep part of my own life. You obviously as a, as someone working at the edge of life and death as well, you know about that.

[00:07:47] You know how to work with it because it's like a language that speaks to the conscious, unconscious, to the dark, to the light, to the whole being. And one of the things I did early on, because it was so shattering for so many people beyond myself, as you described to me earlier, that you had experienced as well that there was a whole enormous community around us family.

[00:08:16] We were well-known on the island where we lived in. He had a business in Seattle that was well known. There were many people were, were like, how could this be? How could this have happened? And their worlds were turning. One of the things we did early on was I invited all of our close in friends and family to a gathering at my house that a dear colleague facilitated who knows how to work in that sort of space as well.

[00:08:42] I took a vessel that David, he collected antique vessels from bowls from China and Asia everywhere, and this one had a little chip out of it, hundreds of years old, actually, a very precious vessel. And I stood in front of the, this is how we opened the energy of our time together, I stood in front of the stone fireplace in our house and one of my dear friends who was with me when we found David and very much involved, she also has worked in the Shamanic tradition.

[00:09:12] And she was rattling her rattles in this intense rattling, which you may be familiar with. And when we got to sort of the, this peak moment of the sound, this, this almost sounded like there were 20 rattles happening. I took this bowl and I smashed it on the floor, on the stone hearth, boom. So just like the whole room.

[00:09:36] Went silent and what it anchored in my own body, and I believe in the field with everyone who was there was there was no putting back together again. What was like, this has been profoundly shattered. I couldn't possibly put this vessel the way I'd shattered it back together again. That was over and it was extremely powerful for me because it's like it dropped me in more too.

[00:10:04] The reality of that this was the path I was walking forward on, and really there was very little that was going to be left of the life that I knew. 

[00:10:16] Jill: Yeah, that's beautiful. The ritual that you did. I personally believe very much in ritual in how it can help us to move through our experiences by bringing in.

[00:10:30] All of the different things. The physical world. Mm-hmm. The emotional, the spiritual. And I know throughout your book you talk about doing many different rituals to kind of work through some of the feelings that you were feeling. Cuz I have to say, even for me reading your book, I got really angry at him when I read that he had left you with such a mess.

[00:10:54]. And I don't know you, you know, I don't know you, I don't know him, but I just felt like, how could he do that to you? And the fact that you were also so transparent in the book about the anger, about all the different feelings, that it wasn't just the love and the loss and the, oh, you know, my husband and I miss him.

[00:11:16] Like that's what we hear a lot. People don't hear about the complicated feelings that come when you're grieving, and I really appreciated your honesty and your openness about all of those things. Mm-hmm. And the fact that you went very deliberately in a way of navigating all of your responsibilities to also make sure that everybody around you that was owed money was able to get that back.

[00:11:49] That you were so selfless at a moment that was just, I'm sure more difficult than anybody can imagine going through that. I was really, I was impressed. Honestly. I read your book and I really was like, I love this woman. I don't know you, but I really felt so just connected to you and to me when I read a book.

[00:12:12] That is something special. Cause I don't find that in every book where I feel really connected to the person. So I just wanted to tell you all of that.

[00:12:19] Suzanne: Thank you. And I should love to talk about those two things cuz they're really important things. I think you're naming, I'm not sure I'd say selfless. I think what happened for me, it's important to say this because I think it, and you were sort of hinting at it, but I wanna underline it.

[00:12:36] I think part of my, the identity that got shattered, was I was already a transformational teacher working with people, giving very, you know, I would say overextending sometimes at the expense of myself. And I think I did that with David actually. I, I overextended and wasn't wise in the way that I took care of my own resources.

[00:13:00] And, there was, there was a shadow piece for me there to, to work with as things unfolded. One of the things that I did that was really important for me was, there was a choice, and I write about this in the book. There was a choice at a certain point where I could have not become the PRS it's called, or the executor as I was named in David's will, and there were voices around me counseling that I really considered just walking away.

[00:13:26] We had separate businesses. We'd been married for 10 years, well, not married for 10 years. We've been together for 10 years. I had my own business. That was my women's leadership business. He had his business, and I just literally walk away. And go on with my life and not deal with this. This was gonna be a sinking ship and it was gonna take everything down.

[00:13:45] I did do diligence in a way I'd never done before where I had wonderful allies to help me because I needed that for sure. In those early days, people that had the capacity to do forensic accounting, literally go into his business and find out what the hell was going on here and show up in those environments, like actually learning what was happening.

[00:14:08] And then so I could say, get my analysis as much as I could logically, then listen to the signs and signals around me. Be in conversations with people, hear what I was getting back, and listen in ways that I get guidance to the subtle realm of what is correct and what was really gone. And I feel that's so important for me.

[00:14:31] Heroic. I'll just show up and do it for everybody else. That sort of selflessness was an identity I think I had. What happened when I actually went all the way through the decision-making and chose to take that role, it was so grounded. I would actually say I was self full and I was very aware of the whole field.

[00:14:54] Like I felt it was a risk. It was an enormous risk to step forward. But I felt I'd taken myself into account. I'd taken my own humanity and what it was going to be for me to start to live through showing up in his mess, basically. Although I felt I could do it, I wasn't sure I could do it, but I felt it was correct to say yes.

[00:15:16] Like that was the yes in my body. And so that, that felt very different. I was so committed to not doing what I feel David did, which was more of a spiritual bypass. I'll do this for everybody else, and I may get run over by the truck, but I'll just do it. So first I just wanted to say that. Yeah, yeah. And then let's go to the anger, because I think that's really important though were so many feelings, as I'm sure any of your listeners will know of going through a major loss, and if it has the suicide component to it.

[00:15:49] It brings another factor in. I knew in the work that I do is, is about being able to be present for our emotional experiences, actually learning to ride the emotional waves that our beautiful instrument of our embodiment gives us. And to do it in ways that don't take us down, down, down, you know, forever.

[00:16:12] Like staying over-attached and not doing it in ways that deny that you're feeling that. For me not wanting to do a spiritual bypass, I was very clear that if I got to forgiveness and it wasn't a guarantee that, that I would, I would do it over the rough terrain of my honest experience. I would live.

[00:16:37] Into the feelings. I did not want to be the carrier of that anger. That's something I knew was not gonna be good for me in my body, and, and I would have to go into those ways when they came and be with what, what it would be, what happened there that he couldn't have taken care of me in some way. His letter to me was helpful.

[00:17:01] I will say that he wrote a letter to me to a few of his. His family and to me, I did come to the place. I would say the identity came online for me in the experience that could forgive him later. The who I was when it all first happened could not have forgiven him in any real way other than a spiritual bypass.

[00:17:24] But later I really could hold a space for the choice he had to make, the only choice he could make in his suffering, and also, that included being very real with the enormous impact that had on me and many, many others around. Yeah. 

[00:17:46] Jill: Yeah. I like that. You said that the you that was there when he died would not have been able to forgive that you went through this journey to get to that place where you could forgive him. I know in your book you talk a lot about different rituals and different experiences, but at those moments when you were really having to face that deep pain, was there anything that you really could turn to that you knew would help you get through that? 

[00:18:18] Suzanne: Well, there were probably the key things.

[00:18:22] First of all, knowing how to be with the feelings. Yeah, really how to, because there was. Anger. There was enormous fear. I lost everything at that point in my life in terms of my financial security. And I'd put everything into our shared estate from the home I'd sold, and there were many aspects of that that were very foolish on my part.

[00:18:43] You know, I'd take responsibility for that, but I was at a place where there was definitely fear, definitely enormous loss. So all of those, the grief, the sadness, the despair, I'd say it was the capacity to. Riding the wave is the best way I can say it. I had a practice in the middle of the night, which is often when we come outta the unconscious and there are these, the mind wants to grab all sorts of thoughts to stick onto all the feelings that are going on as you emerge out of sleep.

[00:19:18] And I'd have had a very long time meditation practice. I've had a lot of experience, let's say, of. Watching the mindstream, but whoa, this was, this was another level of not attaching to some of those thought forms. When I would wake in the night with these enormous waves of feeling, and often in a sweat as well, bring on a hot flash.

[00:19:41] I mean, I'd have the whole thing going on. I would see myself as a surfer, just would force my mind not to attach by basically not attaching. And I, like I say, that's a developed practice. And one you can develop while you're in the midst of loss. But it's certainly helpful if you have a meditation practice going into it so you can not attach to the thoughts that aren't helpful, that direct so much of our, of our attention.

[00:20:09] And I would just ride the wave and let the feeling wave pass. And it was sometimes like, I thought I'm gonna get thrown off this surfboard, I'm gonna drown. But no, it's just stay, stay, stay. And it would, and this is how the emotional body, it does always resolve and actually often quite quickly. And then I had a very deliberate practice of coming into the present moment.

[00:20:29] So this was something that I would do at this moment. I'm grateful. I'm here in my bed. I'm safe, I'm okay. It's like the mind scrambles to see all the terrible scenarios in the future and imagine them. It's trying to do its job for you, you know? But it's not very helpful at three in the morning. And, so just being able to, to actually, and this is you, make your pathway walking, come into the moment, like, land right here, right in this moment.

[00:20:59] I'm fine. I'm not under the bridge in a cardboard box. You know, I'm, I'm healthy, I'm okay, my cat is here. I'm in my body. So those are two things that stand out to me in the back of the book. There are different practices that I have put or that people I hope might find helpful, but. I just wanted to name those too.

[00:21:22] Jill: Yeah, yeah. Those are really helpful. I'm sure for a lot of people listening to be able to, you know, have some little tools that they can use. I've found in my own life, I also, I've practiced meditation for many years. I am actually technically Buddhist. I did take my vows because I wanted to devote myself to one path.

[00:21:41] I eventually got to the point where I was trying lots of things in life, and then I was like, no, you know what? Need to devote to one path. But I do have a pretty deep meditation practice, and I have found that the more that I've sat with my fears and my anxieties around death and dying and grief and all these things, my meditation practice has really shifted in that I am able to bring into my daily life.

[00:22:09] So much more of those moments of like, no, my life overall is okay. It's not perfect. You know, but again, I'm, I have a house, I have a bed, I have hot water, like I have all of these things. Did your experience change the way that you moved through the world now in any ways similar to that or even different?

[00:22:33] Like did that kind of change your mindfulness about life? 

[00:22:36] Suzanne: I think it accentuated it for sure, as you're just describing. Definitely. Sometimes I've described what happened in this shattering as like a plexiglass barrier between me and the world that I didn't even know I had. I could see through it. I didn't even know it was there until it was shattered.

[00:22:57] And then I was so much more in the world. And I would say that, I mean really in the world in terms of my compassion, of my sense of being part of a beautiful, multi-dimensional web of life. And it's this interesting paradox because there was a shattering also of the bad things don't happen to good people.

[00:23:20] I would've said I was a good person doing good things in the world, trying to wake up women and to serve and be ancients of change and these very important evolutionary times, and that like all of those good things I was doing. And then there was a way that I came. Into more contact with everything, with everyone.

[00:23:42] So even as I'm now navigating this stage, which is coming out with this book, when this all happened, I was very clear I was not going to write a book. I mean, I was not going to make this into a teaching for someone else, I couldn't have. I was like down in the darkest of dark realms. It was enough to walk through, was deliberately going to walk through in the way that I'd spent years learning to do, let's say, that I was going to do, but I wasn't convinced yet that it was gonna be something to offer anybody else.

[00:24:18] So I'd say yes to that. Here in this moment where, where now I am bringing out this book that is what was manifest and I am walking back over some of the territory in these conversations. Like with you, I'm reliving some of those early experiences, especially those that were so powerful in the first year, probably when it's such a liminal space where that possibility of feeling yourself and feeling the world, it's so acute.

[00:24:49] So that's a really actually quite a beautiful thing at this stage of the journey. 

[00:24:54] Jill: And it was 2013? 

Suzanne: It was, yeah. 

Jill: Yeah. So it's just about 10 years now. 

[00:24:58] Suzanne: It is 10 years, exactly. 10 years. Wow. Insane that it's 10 years. I mean, I can't even relate to that. At the time, the first thing I had to do was I had a book, I was ready to bring a book out, the first book, The Way of the Mysterial Woman that I'd co-authored.

[00:25:15] And that was based on the years of research I'd done. That manuscript was done in 2012, the end of 2012. That was about to happen. So the first thing was to get back and finish that book, which happened, and it came out in 2016. And then I'm still living my life. And it wasn't until probably four or five years after David died that I thought, I need to write for me.

[00:25:35] I just need to write this, go back over that charred landscape, and see what pieces of myself I might find. Now with the ground I'm on. And then, then I did that. And then after I did that, I showed what I'd written to my editor from the first book and she said, you've got to do, this is gonna be helpful for people.

[00:25:56] So I think you should kind of craft it into an offering for others. And so here we are.

[00:26:03] Jill:  Yeah, I'm very happy that you did it. Thank you. Uh, cuz I do think it is gonna be helpful to people. And you kind of mentioned something a few minutes ago that made me also think how, in the book you talk about the experience was taking you to meet the Dark Goddess.

[00:26:19] I don't remember the exact wording that you used. And that kind of actually started me on a path as I read that I was like, I know of the Dark Goddess, I'm gonna learn some more. So I've actually been kind of diving into Dark Goddess work now because of your mention of it. And one of the things that I.

[00:26:36] Understand very much in a lot of ways is that we meet the dark goddess whether we want to or not. We have those moments in our lives where we have to go to the deepest, darkest places and face those shadow parts within us that we've done a really good job keeping hidden for a lot of reasons. I really loved that you had mentioned just now, even that journeying into the darkest places.

[00:27:07] Is there anything else you wanna add about that idea of like the Dark Goddess and not shadow work necessarily, but really coming in touch with our shadow parts?

[00:27:16] Suzanne: This was first really brought into our awareness, I would say, with Carl Jung, a psychoanalyst. The idea is very simple though. It's very much the work that I was doing and that I of course did at a whole other level than when this happened.

[00:27:32] It is basically to say that there are parts of ourselves when we're in our lives, when we're young beings trying to get love, safety, and belonging. We find, where can I get love, safety, and belonging? Oh, well these parts of me don't seem to work. When I'm angry, I get told I'm a bad girl, and I'm gonna put that in the shadows.

[00:27:51] Or when I'm in my powerful nature, some parts of ourselves just get tucked away in the shadow. It's not a mistake. It's actually a wise, what we call the adaptive child doing the smart thing. And if there are very difficult things happening in your childhood, Then the smart child does what it needs to do to try to be in that environment.

[00:28:14] Cause this is the unconscious and in our very hyper-masculine worldview, this is for men and women, we've tended to value the light, the young, the up and out and seize the day and do everything. That was 5,000 years of a particular paradigm actually. Before that, we had about 50,000 years of the great mother.

[00:28:35] We could say more of the clan and the connection to some of the dark cycles of the earth. So I do feel there is a necessary rebalancing that's going on right now for all of us. The thought larger level, you could say it's feminine and masculine needing to come into a new relationship because we simply need that consciousness to meet these evolutionary challenges.

[00:28:59] In the yin yang symbol, that Asian symbol of light and dark weaving together, dark is, is yin. It's the deep feminine. It is like a natural part of ourselves, and yet our more rational individualistic consciousness and worldview often says, that's bad. Don't go there. Don't ever go there. And the work I do is to invite women, a lot of the work I do with women in leadership is to learn to come into the dark because the dark is also the body.

[00:29:23] This is so much of us and the richness, the fertile soil of our dark nature. And I would say I knew something about that. That's a part of us. I'm saying my work. But then when this happened, it was life basically saying to me, okay, let's have you go down somewhere you've never been before.

[00:29:54] And I'd been through losses before, lost my mother. Quite young. Miscarriages, I would say I'd been through grieving cycles, but nothing of this nature. And one, you are really in the dark when you've really said, I, I will go where I'm being asked to go. You don't fully know if you'll come back. That was an interesting thing for me, and maybe some of your listeners find themselves there now.

[00:30:20] And I'd say that's is sort of like being open to what the dark will give you the offerings that can come through the openness in those times, and they may come to you externally. That can come by through events like what happened to me. But it could also be the dark cycle calling you that comes from inside and pulls you to investigate.

[00:30:49] So there's like learning to see in the dark. I'd say that. I think we need, as a culture, I believe we're in the midst of a, we could say initiatory time. It is a big initiatory time, the right time. And we don't have any rights of passage to go through initiations. And this is where I would say any of us going through big events of loss, for example, there's the opportunity to be in that in a way that grows us up.

[00:31:18] Actually is a rite of passage that lets us find more wholeness, you know, more of ourselves, but we're not gonna find that by just hanging out in the light more of ourselves is actually gonna be the uncovering that we can only do in the dark. 

[00:31:36] Jill: Yeah, that  loss of rights of passage, you're right in our culture now.

[00:31:40] You don't have that. Maybe we have sweet 16 parties for girls when they turn 16. I'm like trying to think of any experiences that felt like a rite of passage for me as I went through the different phases in my life, especially as a woman. There's the ma and the mother and the crone. I am coming out of the mother until hitting perimenopause where I'm like starting to make my way into that part and we just don't.

[00:32:08] Do anything to honor that and to make it kind of the closure that we need from one cycle in our life to move into the next. This idea too where our society, not just here in America either, I think around the world, humans, were at this turning pulley where. We need to make some changes, and some of that is gonna be facing some really dark parts.

[00:32:37] Mm-hmm. And having to be okay with it. We just fight it so much. We're so uncomfortable about the darkness, about the parts of ourselves and the parts of our cultures that we'd rather just not face it. We'll just push it off. Somebody else will deal with it.  

[00:32:53] Suzanne: We could see here in our culture a lot of what I would call the shadow masculine coming up.

[00:32:58] Right now and in the, over the last few years in our political environment and beyond, right? One thing we do know, and I write more about this in the first book, that whenever we're in a culture's sort of between cycles and we are in one of these pivot points now, there have been seven of them so far, and since the dawn of humanity, there's this time where there's some of the shadow elements that haven't been included get kicked up.

[00:33:24] And you either go into a Dark Age or a Renaissance for example. Those would be two examples of pivot points that this is surfacing is not necessarily a bad thing cuz it means it's actually there, right? These views, these ways of holding women the feminine, just as an example. But if we don't root out the shadow in ourselves, it's not gonna resolve out there.

[00:33:47] You know, we are the world, and for me, and I write about this in the book, there was a certain point and it took about. A year where I found someone who could hold me to really look at the shadow pieces of this journey. I didn't want to have to go through anything. I'm broken open anyway. I mean, everything is out on the table.

[00:34:07] Let's say. I wanna see what I can see and I won't be able to see everything. That would be overwhelming for the psyche. I will be able to see some things and I wanna see those. I wanna be able to own parts of myself that need owning now. And, uh, that wasn't something that wouldn't have been correct to do that in the initial stages.

[00:34:28] You need enough of your, your sort of ground under you to do that, but it is an important thing. The possibility is there that you can really grow into somebody. I don't have the view of, oh, this is was meant to be, or look at all the gifts that came out of this and, and the quickly reframing of something that's been so absolutely devastating.

[00:34:53] I will hold of you that there are many probability paths, and this was one of the options, let's say in my incarnation in David's. He chose that and when, as soon as he chose that, I was then on a new path. Then that path, that probability path, so that path I would walk, that was gonna be up to me. That was, I was gonna make my path by walking and the offerings of the time.

[00:35:18] They were like picking up. Stones or gems along the path that I found as I walked. But they are hard-earned. And because they're hard-earned, you wanna be watching for them. You want to be looking at how will this allow me to be more whole, more loving, more present, more awake, more in this one precious life I have here, this incarnation, you know?

[00:35:47] Jill: And I'm thinking how you kind of touched on it a little bit when you were talking about the shadow of some of it's also the power parts of ourselves that we've hidden away and, but right now in our society, as we're needing to pull up some of these shadows, some of that is gonna be a lot of us just learning to own our power.

[00:36:10] And when I understood that part of shadow work. Cuz at first I was under the impression that the shadow work is like, you know, the jealous parts of me, the angry parts, like all that stuff. And then when I was like, well no, some of it's actually the parts of me that are just the powerful, that show up in the world.

[00:36:31] In a way that I had to learn to hide for whatever reason because I was told was bad or whatnot. And even for me, some of that was my feminine because I learned at a young age that in some ways the feminine then attracted too much attention right from men that I did not want. And so I went into an industry of food service that's very masculine dominated.

[00:36:58] So I didn't wear makeup and I wore uniforms that were very frumpy. They physically hid the feminine. But then also my energy started to shift where I had more of the anger and I had more of the like masculine kind of personality traits, but it was really because my feminine was just, I had to hide her.

[00:37:19] And now I'm learning that I need to bring all of that out in a way that feels safe for me. Right. It's definitely been a journey of having to learn to do that. Like how do I bring more feminine out? 

[00:37:32] Suzanne:Well, how do you, right? And then you, you'll enjoy my first book The Way of The Mysterial Woman. Yeah.

[00:37:36] Because that's all about the feminine masculine and really understanding even what that is. What is it to be experiencing? My feminine, by the way, I don't have the view that the masculine was a mistake in evolution, I think 5,000 years, which is what it's been inside. A more masculine paradigm, let's say, of wholeness was evolutions moved forward.

[00:37:59] Now there's another move here that is going to, and it, it is absolutely going to require the feminine to come into relationship with the masculine and it's not swinging back to the goddess. Mm-hmm. That's not what we're trying to do. There's a deep connection with our own feminine nature, men and women, and weaving that together with the masculine.

[00:38:19] We have to get that masculine unhealthy though. And so in some cases, like you're describing, that is the parts of our powerful nature that are more the stands we take and the boundaries we set. I mean, really important masculine capacities got left behind cuz those weren't the right things to do.

[00:38:36] And sometimes the jealousy, for example, those we could say the darker shadow negative shadows. They're also about our power because, you know, one of the things I've talked about in the work I do is something called Kill the Queen, which is two powerful women can't be in the same room at the same time.

[00:38:56] So I have to either make you wrong or be jealous of what you have or make myself not be good enough, you know? Yeah. I, I'm gonna drop myself down, but two queens, no, that's not possible. So that's the move. The move is really dealing with that. For example, jealousy in that domain where you can drop into your own enoughness, like your own wholeness.

[00:39:21] I am enough just as I am. And then when I can do that, I can celebrate the potency over there, and all of a sudden I have more power. Um, because what's hidden under the parts of ourselves, whether it's the golden shadow let's say, or the negative shadow, is simply more of our true nature. It's also. One of the things I've seen over the years with anger for women in particular is the disowning of anger.

[00:39:49] That emotion is also the disowning of the ability to know what I want. That's what the anger's trying to tell us. I'm not getting what I want. That's what we did as a little child. We rattled the crib and I want these, and that's there in our little bodies for a reason. But then if we don't have access to that emotion, um, because we split it off into the dark, it wasn't good, then we don't know what we want.

[00:40:14] We often will see anger out there everywhere, but in here, you know, I'm never angry. So the thawing of the anger actually gives you access to this important part of yourself. Now, acting out of your anger, that's a different thing. That's obviously not what we're suggesting, but knowing. What the emotions trying to carry to you, the information that's really important.

[00:40:38] Jill: Hmm. I've had  this life journey of struggling with friendships with women and the way that you said it there about like the Kill the Queen idea. It's an experience that I've seen play out and I'm watching it now with my daughter who's nine of like the way that women just interact with each other. And I've noticed with my work around death and dying too, is that some of what holds up that dynamic between women is the fear of death of that.

[00:41:08] If she is as powerful as me, if she gets as much attention as me, that means I'm gonna get pushed out. And if I get pushed out, that means I'm like left out in the cold to die. Right? It really tapped into our deep fears of survival. But man, I hate it. I really don't like the dynamic that our society has raised women to interact with each other.

[00:41:35] Suzanne: Well, it's a moment-by-moment thing. I'll notice sometimes this is sort of turning toward the feelings that are so much a part of what this book is about. But I notice when I maybe see an email comes through of somebody doing some great program and it sounds, and in my space, you know, And I'll feel the sort of two little things will happen.

[00:41:57] I'll feel a, a wave of kind of, wow, they're so lucky. Envy. Maybe the, maybe the quality of the, the emotion there. Mm-hmm. And then I can feel right on its heels. The I'm not enough or that they're doing something so much better than what I'm doing. So the wave, that's the little mechanism we're in. And again, this is where mindfulness is helpful because you know the opportunity in those moments.

[00:42:21] For me, it's not that that won't arise, it's, it might still arise in us and we're tied into the, to the collective unconscious, but I have a choice at that moment. Well, how I respond and my practice is to shift into a blessing, be like, Like literally into a blessing. Wow. That is so beautiful. I bless you.

[00:42:42] In your program that you're offering and all that you are doing, and I'm saying the work is in the moments when the old pattern, the old consciousness rises up, and as long as we're in human bodies, I think it'll keep rising. But then, you know, there's the saying, it's a, it's a beautiful quote. I don't have it exactly, but it's from Victor Frankl.

[00:43:04] Who was an Auschwitz survivor who says in essence, between stimulus the thing that happens out there, and response there is a space. And in that space is our freedom and I love that. So we're really trying to get more space and that's the work is more space between the stimulus. In this case, the example I was just giving, there are a lot of responses I could have had, but if I have more space in there, First of all, I have to notice what my response is, how I'm triggered by a situation or by somebody.

[00:43:41] And then have enough space to be able to choose something different. And in my view, this is how we repair not only our own neural networks, cuz this is, there's a strong neuroscience to this, but also how yeah, the collective consciousness gets shifted because some of us are doing the heavy lifting. It's just easier to go with that basic, yeah, Kill the Queen.

[00:44:03] That's definitely easier. Throw yourself under the bus or throw her under the bus. Either way, we have the neural network already wired for that have had for a long time, and it's harder to go upstream and say, no, no, no, no. I'm not gonna go there. Gonna go there.

[00:44:18] Jill:  Especially when you feel yourself getting pulled into it, even when you don't want to be.

[00:44:23] You're like, this is not what I want, but yet here I am getting dragged along anyway. Ugh, this was amazing. Now, your books, they could be found on Amazon or where should people go?

[00:44:36] Suzanne: Everywhere. Okay. Everywhere. Well, I always like to say, go to your local bookstore. Yeah. No order it. I mean, if people are lucky enough to be somewhere or you can do that, but, but they are everywhere.

[00:44:49] This book, you can pre-order and “You Make Your Path by Walking”, and the other book, “The Way of the Mysterial Woman Upgrading How you Live, Love, and Lead.” That's available on Amazon. 

[00:44:59] Jill: Beautiful. And I already have all of your links. I'll put them in the show notes so people can find your website, and find you on all the social medias.

[00:45:07] Is there anything else that you wanna share before we close it up? 

[00:45:10] Suzanne: I think I just would share that if anyone feels a resonance with what I'm sharing, that I'd love to know and I'd love to be connected to you. My website is mysterial woman.com and that'll be, I'm sure in the show notes. I say that because I, I feel we are in this cycle now on our beautiful planet of needing to find resonant communities where we can go through what we're going through, and not feel alone to recognize others that are thinking.

[00:45:44] Like I'm thinking that, yeah, it is a hard time I'm going through, but I actually can go through this in a way that helps me be more, me more whole and actually, Live into a new life. I mean, live into a life that you couldn't even have imagined. I would say the life I have right now, when everything fell apart, I couldn't have imagined I'd be where I am right now, and that's possible, but I don't think we need to do it alone.

[00:46:10] Jill:I agree. We don't need to do it  alone. There are people out there that want to connect and will support all of us throughout whatever we need support with. So definitely if people would like support. Reach out to Suzanne again. All the links will be easy to find in the show notes. And thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time out today.

[00:46:29] Thank you for listening to this episode of Seeing Death Clearly. If you would like to get a copy of Suzanne's new book, You Make Your Path by Walking, it will be released on June 13th, 2023, and is currently available for presale on Amazon. I'm including a link to the book in the show note. You can also find her first book that she mentioned, the Way of the Mysterial Woman in the show notes.

[00:46:51] My guest next week is Kat Zammuto. Kat's mother and her husband died very close together, so she shares about the grief she experienced for both of them, as well as how she navigated dating again in her forties and about the podcast. She started to help her in her discovery of herself in her new life. If you enjoyed this episode, you can help support the show by sharing it with a friend or family member that may find it interesting, subscribing to the show on your favorite podcast platform, and leaving a five-star review.

[00:47:20] The podcast also has a paid subscription feature where you can financially support the show. Financial support will help keep the podcast advertisement free. And will allow me to create more content. Any amount larger, or small will help. I appreciate all of you listening to the show and supporting me in any way that you can.

[00:47:37] There's a link in the show notes to do the paid monthly subscription or a link to my Venmo if you'd like to do a one-time contribution. Thank you, and I'll see you next week for a new episode of Seeing Death Clearly.