36: How Golf Became Her “Movement Meditation” to Survive Grief

What do you do when the life you planned completely falls apart? After losing her husband following years of caregiving, Kym Coco rebuilt her life one moment, one golf course, and one intentional choice at a time; trading numbness for presence and fear for forward motion. In this episode, she talks about grief, reinvention, and the surprising way movement can pull you out of survival mode and back into yourself. From van life and “movement meditation” to the mindset shifts that changed everything, this conversation is raw, grounding, and full of the kind of perspective that makes you stop and rethink how you’re living your own life.

Connect with Kym Coco:

swagtail.com

instagram.com/swagtailyoga

In This Episode:

• (03:15) The motorcycle accident that changed Everything
• (08:45) The 3 Cs: cut the crap, connect, create
• (13:00) Creating purpose in the middle of caregiving
• (17:50) Van life, grief, and traveling to golf courses
• (22:55) How to pivot when life doesn’t go as planned

Connect with Daffney:

The Game-Changer Consult → This 60 min deep dive offers you clarity and insight into what’s possible for your next 60 days. Leave this consult feeling full of possibility and with the energy of purpose!

liftprowellness.com

Instagram | YouTube | Merch

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Sometimes it takes life falling apart, like a loss you didn't expect or a version of life you didn't choose, to realize that the way forward isn't about fixing yourself. It's about reconnecting with yourself. Today's conversation is not a service level motivation. This is about what happens when life goes sideways and how you find your way back without losing yourself in the process. Because the woman you're about to hear from didn't just move on. She rebuilt her life from the ground up using something as simple as movement. And by the end of this episode, you might start to see that being stuck isn't where your story ends. It's actually where it begins. Welcome to Don't Fing Shrink, the podcast, where we stop playing small and start showing up big. I'm your host, Daphne Allwine, and I'm here to cut through the noise, ditch the self-doubt, and get honest about what it takes to live and lead with unapologetic confidence. Each week you'll hear unfiltered conversations, powerful stories, and in real life strategies to help you take up space in your life, your work, and your world. So buckle up because shrinking is not an option here. Let's dive in. This month, we are going into the depths of what is keeping you stuck. We know our mindset, we know our physical body and our nervous system need to play fair and they need to play in the same ballpark to move forward. And one of the questions and one of the tough pieces I've gotten as feedback has been all the different ways people are feeling stuck. So with me today is Kim Coco. She is an author, a golfer, a coach, and she has a profound story about how physical movement, or what we're calling movement meditation, pulled her up and transformed her in life so dynamically when she unsuspectedly became a widow. Hey, Kim, how are you?

SPEAKER_00 2:01

Hi, Daphne. Thanks so much for having me. It is such a pleasure to be here with you and your listeners to talk about these big concepts of surprise, life goes sideways. Things don't turn out as you quite expect or anticipate. And this resilience we have, this courage, this ability to step into our life with confidence or step into the unknown with confidence is something I've found to be very helpful and capable for all of us.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Resilience is one of my favorite and unfavorite words. And the reason I mean this, sometimes people use resilience as an opportunity to say, oh, I've survived another thing. And that's not what you're doing. You've built so much resistance and thought leadership in this that you're actually moving other people forward in this corridor. Kim, I love your story. I love the way, and you, one of your very first books is actually, it's a co-authored book with your late husband. And I love the, I love the opening. I love how he's telling the story of this transformational moment in his life. Do you mind sharing part of that story and how you guys, as a couple, made this happen?

SPEAKER_00 3:09

Are you referring to Miracle on the Mountainside or just nothing? I am Miracle on the Mountainside. Yes. It's so funny. It's co-authored in the sense Steve had a remarkable life. He was driving up a mountain road in his just before turning 40, actually, hits shale, bike slides 40 feet, and he decides to jump the guardrail to save himself. Only in doing so, he finds a cliff and tumbles down, breaks bones in over 110 places, thinks he's dying, and surrenders because he's done his best. What else is there at that moment?

SPEAKER_01 3:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

The miracle rescue gave him a second chance at life. And he had this accident prior to me meeting him. That accident gave him the ability to breathe and move again, yet he didn't really want to live. He found himself as a victim waiting for other people to help him, afraid to step into a new chapter. What does that look like? I'm scared to tell my wife that I don't want to go back to our design business. I want to help people. I want to teach them the tools I'm learning about how my mind influences my body, how I can start to change the signature, the cascade of emotions going on inside of me and feel better, even though I haven't moved or changed my external circumstances. This ability and this willingness to say, I choose life, I choose to be a cooperative component, and I'm ready to craft something that doesn't yet exist and bring it into reality. He had that mindset when I met him because of his accident. And the book is a beautiful tribute to him. And it was also simultaneously something I was able to write after he transitioned. And it helped me evolve Kim as a writer. I got to use more dialogue and make it fictional. So even though Daphne, you've not met Steve, you could gauge his whole life and feel like you know him.

SPEAKER_01 5:10

Wow. Would you so here's your here's your woo-boo question of the day, right? Is it who we always were, or is it who we had to become?

SPEAKER_00 5:18

In what way?

SPEAKER_01 5:19

Well, you said he had an accident, and as a result, he learned more about himself. I often get stuck in that parallel, in that question, too, where I'm like, was this always who I was? Or did I have to evolve past this version of myself? So you got to know him as he was healing or as he was healing through this thing. Did you feel like you met somebody and then he dynamically became somebody even more evolved? Or what was that like?

SPEAKER_00 5:46

Can I answer your question with please do? I have in mind.

SPEAKER_01 5:50

Yes, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

You remember the game of leapfrog as a kid? Somebody would crouch over and you'd hop over them. I mean, I think of doing that as adults, and it seems so silly. But you play leapfrog and you hop forward one over the other. So I think of this idea that we're bigger than this meat suit. There's more to us than meets the eye. And we, you and I, let's say right now, we have envisioned something in the future for ourselves. Yeah. In a lot of different ways. Yeah. And that leaps into the future, but it's invisible because nobody else can see it yet. We might start talking about it. We might journal about it or imagine how it could come to be. It's not yet in solid form. And we have this opportunity to move forward in space and time. It's our turn to leap forward and become taking the steps, putting the things into motion to make that happen.

SPEAKER_01 6:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:45

And what I find interesting, I say we leap over, we're not leaping to that same spot because as we're moving forward, we've already surpassed that idea we've put in place. It's evolved again. So now that idea, the invisible, is moving forward. Our physical will have the opportunity to catch up in time and space, but we leap forward. So this idea that we are non-physical consciousness, spiritual, energy in motion, whatever you want to call it, it has this invisible element. And then we get to embody that and propel it forward, although that's constantly in motion. And I think of that the leapfrog formula as how we're creating over time. There's no definition because even the tomorrow that I'm going to be is different than now. And the ideas I set for tomorrow are going to be different. And so we just keep moving forward in this evolution, playing leapfrog into the unknown.

SPEAKER_01 7:39

I love this analogy. I like, I can't think of a better analogy. Thank you for saying that because you're right. You have no idea who you're going to be 24 hours from now. You have no idea. And I think the static belief is one of those things that probably actually makes us stuck as we've decided who we are, we decided who other people want us to be. We've decided, and in some ways, if we allow for that flexibility or that curiosity, we can actually jump past just about anything. Wow. That is such a dynamic point that I think we are afraid to think of, or we're afraid of considering that life could look differently. But then when circumstances show up in our life, we have a choice. We have a choice. And you had a choice. And I really found it compelling in your work with golfing and meditation with golfing, how when this chapter was, it probably felt like a tragedy to you. I mean, you you saw a decline. I don't know how much time you guys had together with this decline, but you were left with a really big job of moving forward because you're both very young.

SPEAKER_00 8:43

I like a few things you said there. The first, it's a unique challenge to be very health focused.

SPEAKER_01 8:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

To believe that health is ours, our birthright. We have the capacity to step into that, and simultaneously watch someone else on a different trajectory. And to not buy into that as your future, that leads to this idea of attention, continually shifting back to who am I? What do I know to be true? And I found that while we were in this different dynamic, he was on a different path than I was. We knew we were moving in that direction. I think your mind says, no, there's always the hope to heal.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

Right. Right. Is that a good feeling to keep? Was that helpful for you?

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Yes, and here's how. I just came up with this the other day. It helped me piece this together of why we did what we did and how I was able to stay present, have a mindset that health is possible for me and him. And you mentioned the word meditation a few times, which is really, I think, a fancy way of saying to become familiar with, to know ourselves, to be in the flow of all that is. So I used the three C's when he was sick. Yes. I didn't realize it at the time, but in reflection, this is exactly what we did. And this helps us find the flow of our lives. It might not be golf, it might not be caregiving. Whatever it is in our life, if you want to be present and awake and thriving in it, this helps. The first C is cut. Cut the crap. Cut out the things that aren't necessary. When we have all this vibrant energy, we can, I would say, tolerate mediocre. We can handle those annoying colleagues a little bit more gracefully.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

When I was in the caregiving mode, all that extra energy was gone. And we have moments in life where you don't have that extra bandwidth. I don't think you have to wait for that moment to cut the crap. However, it's a great strategy first. Let go of the unnecessary, delegate, simplify. And in that space, it's very tempting to want to fill it up. Instead of just scrolling or being taken on a whim by distractions, the second C is connect. You want to connect with yourself in a meaningful way, know who you are, know your values, know why you're making the decisions you're making. And that's your core essence. And when in the case of Steve, because we were on different physical planes in that he couldn't do much. And because I was caring for him, I couldn't go do much. We connected in conversations. We had audio recordings every morning over coffee. That became the Miracle on the Mountainside book. I've got several more in two inch binders here in my office that will be also become books. It gave him a purpose. He did not know what his future held, neither did I. And it didn't matter because we were doing something that lit us up in the moment. We could generate ideas. We could talk about life and death and spirituality and relationships and all of the juicy, juicy topics we liked. And when we connected in those meaningful ways, it did not matter what the future was. It was now. We were now.

SPEAKER_01 12:11

That's amazing. I think people need to know that. I was like, it is that moment of presence. Well, even when we, you know, consistently use the word meditation, which I'm glad you brought up, meditation is just presence, like being in this moment, no matter how difficult it is, no matter joyful it is. I mean, people tend to have thresholds on how happy they allow themselves to be, how uh deeply they feel things. You know, there's all these avoidance behaviors. And like you said, cut the crap. I was like, I can't tell you. And we just did an episode this week. It was how many people say they're busy, but that's really just a distraction that is really keeping you from focusing on what you said doesn't really matter, isn't useful in your present moment completely.

SPEAKER_00 12:52

And if we say we're busy, then we're often missing or not accomplishing the things that do really matter.

SPEAKER_01 12:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:59

The third C is create. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 13:02

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 13:02

And I will give you two examples of how that worked in the caregiving time. Steve's diet was extraordinarily limited. I love to cook. So what did I do? I created a cookbook. I had all of these recipes. So I would take Hodge Podge piecemeal, these ideas from a variety of blogs, and then I would put something together based on what we could do, and I would track the progress. It's a great cookbook. I still use recipes from it. It's fun, it's delicious. I wanted to enjoy this food. So did he. That was a way to be present.

SPEAKER_01 13:36

That's amazing. And no, it's exactly like you said, where it's it's basically coming into and feeling what's really going on. And I'm sure that these were not always easy, happy, joyful moments because there were so many up ups and downs. I can only imagine in that context. But that decision that you both made to be present probably made all the difference because the time you had was so important.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

And this goes back to that meditative element. We are not guaranteed the future. Whether he got well or he made his transition, that was less relevant. The way we were showing up for each other, choosing love, that's what mattered. And that's the choice we all get every day, every moment.

SPEAKER_01 14:20

Isn't that funny? Yeah, we don't need tragedy to really understand that the gift of now is is literally, and I don't mean to sound like a guru, but it's literally just living in each moment and being okay with not needing to be anywhere else at that exact moment as well. Wow. So it what a what a depth of relationship you guys must have had, like how how beautiful that love story is. And when he did transition, that must have been a separate situation because now you couldn't have those conversations. But I'm sure that knowing how powerful your mindset is, how did you make that transition?

SPEAKER_00 14:55

It honestly felt that first year like I was sitting on a teeter-totter opposite a sumo wrestler named Grief. And it was a wild ride and it was full of the spectrum of emotions. And what I'd like to say is it's all valuable. If I did not feel the pain, the sadness, if I had tried to shove it away in a corner and not express that, not let it flow through my system. Yeah, I would be numbing my capacity for joy. And I like to live big and vibrant. I wanted to invite all of it in. The negative emotions we get to learn from. We get to process. It was an expression of the love that I had for Steve.

SPEAKER_01 15:37

Yeah. I love that you said you didn't push them away a lot. I mean, that's the way we're taught a lot of times, is that there are good emotions and bad emotions, right? And it's, you know, grief, grief is bad, you know, sadness is bad. Now, any amount of anything that's too much or unregulated or or without support, I agree, can be a bad, bad thing. But I love that you also said how much of a teacher, because I know that for me, in all the loss and all the changes and all the pivots I did not expect coming in my life, that I then gave a I gave a graduation cap to a lot of those emotions because those were things previously I was happy to be like, I'm just not gonna deal with that. I'm just gonna set that on a corner. That's not an attractive thing to do. Nobody wants to see me sad, nobody wants to see me struggle. I love that you made them your teachers.

SPEAKER_00 16:28

I also like that science is showing now. We used to think of avoidance as a bad thing. And yet we find ourselves weaving through the moments where it's appropriate and we have the space and the wherewithal to address it. Yeah. And those moments where you are required to step up and handle the demands of your life. You don't want to be a meltdown. They do happen unexpectedly. We get triggered. I get it. Yes. And yet this fluidity to go between knowing when to process and step in and the wisdom to say, no, I'm gonna tackle these things I've already committed to.

unknown 17:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:05

There's a beauty in that dance.

SPEAKER_01 17:07

You're not kidding. And this this is can be where your mindset comes in, is when you were talking about this is the objective, this is the goal, is I'm gonna process these things. I'm gonna allow myself to process those. That when you say getting stuck or avoidance, because sometimes they sound and feel like the same thing, is avoidance can be a way of jumping neural pathways. Cause yeah, if your house is on fire, the last thing you're gonna be is like, well, I was having a bad day. So I'm just gonna sit here on the couch and let the house burn. No, you're you're absolutely right about that. And so I love that you you said that that we have some tools, we have some opportunities because we have that mindset, we have that nervous system that gets stuck in grief sometimes, but we also have the physical aspect or our moving meditation, which is where it sounds like you gained a lot of in your in your van life experience, which I want to hear this. Like Kim jumped in a van and as part of her process, started traveling to different golf courses all across the US. Is that right?

SPEAKER_00 18:13

That is West of the Rockies.

unknown 18:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 18:16

And that was that was a big choice for you to make. You you also had to like come up with there were a thousand excuses you could have come up with, right? But this seemed like the most obvious choice for you to get moving and connect with some of those things and not let yourself get stuck because you have you also have two dogs that you were like, oh, I have these two other forms that I need to take care of. So you put them in a van. Tell me, tell me how that works. What's the logistics on something like that?

SPEAKER_00 18:41

Logistics are really wonderful. If you have everything in this small space and you're okay in the small space, it's simple. Life is clear. The dogs love it. There are so many smells and sounds and friends to me. They love it. What I enjoyed about it is you can get up and go anywhere because you have everything with you. If I stepped back in time, back in 2022, Steve says, Girl, you are gonna need structure when I'm gone because he knew I'm spontaneous. I like to travel. And we had a relatively nomadic life going between Florida and California for a decade. Structure could have looked like staying in one place, volunteering, something consistent other than my dogs to get out of bed for every day. Yep. I chose golf because play, especially play and sport, require us to show up. I can't hit a golf ball if I'm missing Steve, or if I'm afraid of what my life is going to look like. Be a total hack out there, showing up and being present, working on my skills, going back to basics since I hadn't played the game in a while, being out in nature, smelling, feeling my feet on these carpeted fairways, hearing the bird song, feeling the air on my skin, maximizing my senses in the moment, yeah, kept me there. And the social element, which is a wonderful way we step out of ourselves. I was playing my own game, but yet I got to meet other people. And even if after four hours I didn't like them, it was fine. It was a time-limited contract.

SPEAKER_01 20:20

That's good. Yeah, I love Strangers.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

And so it was a really great way for me to have forward progress. I didn't have to figure out my whole life. It was well, what course am I gonna play next? What course did somebody else recommend? Where am I gonna go next? And it's so easy to get caught up in figuring the whole thing out, at least for me. It gave me a way to show up, do my best, refine some skills I had, start to love life again, trust other people, trust the generosity of other people. Yeah. And now I have doors opened that I didn't see before because I was willing to go out there and keep showing up.

SPEAKER_01 20:59

That's the phrase, that's the phrase that pays. I'll put it that way. It's no matter what thing in front of you feels sticky, feels stuck, you know, if you're if it's a job, a career, a sport, you know, and and you know, even in an emotional grieving period like you, we're just showing up to the possibility and just being physically there, not not very much different than you were experiencing when he was starting to make his transition, is you were just in the moment in any way possible because you were talking about cooking, and cooking is one of those things. We we did a whole episode on this where you can't chop your finger off if you're busy, you know, thinking about your, you know, like you don't want to chop off your finger while you're thinking about doing your taxes. Like cooking can be your meditation. Driving, that's that one of the biggest ones for me. Driving can be a meditation because you are hearing, seeing, you're in a direction, you're going somewhere, there's some purpose, but you can still physically be in your own body. You're not avoiding anything. So So that's huge. Did you improve your score and your and your game so great in that in that chapter? I'm sure you're still on tour, right?

SPEAKER_00 22:09

It feels that way sometimes. I have a grind of wanting to improve and you balance out that play and lightheartedness, and that naturally improves.

SPEAKER_01 22:20

Like you're literally now dealing with something when you play golf, it's not life or death. If you had a game where you've played better before, I didn't say good or bad, I said if you've played better before, or your expectations weren't met for that game. And I know that you also mentioned that you were really excited about what your next station was or what your next course was. And then your dog had an injury. So you had to start over. Like, there are a lot of pivots out there and that adaptability to say, okay, this is not life or death, because you've seen life or death.

SPEAKER_00 22:51

Yes. And we have the joy of still living when those hiccups happen. I often use pivot as the acronym that always starts with the pause. If you're rushing into the next step without the moment to reflect, to have clarity, to listen to your instincts, to trust that voice inside to help as you move forward. It's very easy to want to rush to the outcome. And you might not like what you get when you get there if you've just had the blind ambition to go. And some wise friend told me before I started my hundred course adventure, consider it like a framework. You're building my whole life, right? I'm starting over without Steve. Let the space in that pause deconstruct the past. And in that pause, in that space, you're open to elements that would fit the whole of who you are and where you're going. Don't try to fill that space so fast. So as much as I was on a mission to improve as a golfer, you weren't trying to replace it. Yeah. And actually, it's funny. I did, I went out there thinking, oh, I can do it on my own at first. I recognize coaching. I still keep coaches in a variety of spheres of my life.

SPEAKER_01 24:08

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 24:09

It's so wonderful to have the outside eye and say, oh, let's move your thumb over a quarter inch. Let's have you stand back from the ball an inch. Oh, there your ball flights straight again. Isn't it so great that you can work with people like you and me and a whole host of other people out there that can look in and go, you don't need to change everything. Just tweak it a little.

SPEAKER_01 24:30

That's that's all it is. I it I love that you make that so approachable that it is like you have a hundred acres to build on now, right? You have a whole different and like filling it up with a bunch of distractions and outbuildings and and and shiny, glittery objects, you have this amazing opportunity. And I hope somebody who's listening can hear this too, that even if your world has been upheavaled and you're starting from new or you feel like you're starting from from where you used to be, it's really a blank canvas. Like it is this beautiful blank canvas where you can grow the grass under your feet and hack some golf balls for a while to see how far you, you know, see if you want to build a range in your back, your back 20. I think that's really profound, is that we're always in a rush to get away from the discomfort. And that pause is where the healing is happening, where the curiosity is built, where we have to put our ego away to build something better. And that's where, you know, you wouldn't build a house without an architect. I love that you're like, you have coaches. I love coaching. I love working with other coaches for that exact reason is you're not an architect in every sense of the word, but working with someone who does that is so profound. Again, you are working with people right now, right? This is part of your work is using golf as meditation for them. How does that work? Or how how are you getting to work with people?

SPEAKER_00 25:54

I work with clients in two ways. The first is I have monthly workshops. Because if you're not a golfer, all of these mind-body tools to find alignment, yes, to keep harmony and cohesiveness in our whole system, it benefits us in whatever capacity you want to use them. So I do a monthly workshop and we cover different elements, a different tool each month. And I say tool because there is so much information out there, which is wonderful. I love that we have access to this. Yes. And it's nice to know am I doing it right? How can I refine this for me? Get live feedback and learn to implement them in a way that serves you. So the brilliant becoming is the monthly workshop I do. And then I do the focused golfer. And this is where I do work with female golfers one-on-one to build unshakable confidence on the T and sync game-winning putts. And I do this because women are a minority in the sport. I can't tell you how many times I'd have a concerned look in my direction. Can she hit the ball? Where am I going to go to the bathroom if she's out there with us in our foursome? Right. Yeah. And to show up, know that you have the skills, that golf is one avenue that you get to let allow your confidence to shine and then radiate into other areas of your life, it's so much fun.

SPEAKER_01 27:16

And it's also a cool sport that I have not got enough into, by the way, that it's not age-specific. And like you said, thank you. It's not gender specific because your mechanics and the way you move is very specific to your body. So when you said about like individual support and saying, I have longer arms and a shorter torso. And, you know, as part of that moving meditation or putting those things together, it is nice to have another set of eyes. Kim, how can people find you?

SPEAKER_00 27:46

The best way to find me is swagtail.com. That's the hub. You can listen to the first chapter or read it of Miracle on the Mountainside, get a whole host of articles about mind-body connection, find resources that work for you, and then learn more about taking a class or working with me in the focused golfer.

SPEAKER_01 28:08

I love this work you're doing. It is so huge and so impactful because you know it's not just about your golf swing. It literally is about all the things that make up your body, that make up your mechanics, makes up who you are and how you can interweave and make these things work together and move past just about any hurdle. If you know a golfer out there, or at least somebody who's trying their best, yeah, check out Kim's website and all of her resources. And if you love a good storytelling book with a really important outcome for getting on stuck and moving forward in something, and it doesn't just have to be grief. Check out these books. It's a great anthology. Kim, thanks for being with us today, and thanks for not fucking shrinking.