Why Grief Is So Hard And What You Can Do About It with Heather Lean

 

“You do have to change because “the same” is not an option.” – Heather Lean

 

Listen to the podcast here:

Highlights:

00:40 Coping Grief To Writing Books
14:55 Connection To Our Loved Ones
21:53 Don’t Let Fear Control You
29:13 Love, Authenticity, Caring
35:46 Move Forward, Live Now!

 

Are you holding yourself back from grieving? Join in as @myexpectation and @AuthorLean discuss why you should stop suppressing your emotions now! #expectationtherapy #epiphanies #podcast #grief #stress #self-pity Click To Tweet

 

 

Resources:

Books 

• Angel Grandma by Heather Lean

Quotes:

14:55 “In the process of falling apart, we learn so much. In the process of trying to hold ourselves together, we learn so much.” – Art Costello

22:39 “When you speak from your heart, those words can’t be manipulated.”  – Art Costello

24:56 “The power of your thoughts can keep you in good alignment even when the world is crazy around you.” – Heather Lean

26:19 “Try to control your feelings a little bit and not let the fear run you.” – Heather Lean

38:37 “You do have to change because “the same” is not an option.” – Heather Lean

 

Meet Heather:

Heather Lean was born in New York in 1981 and always enjoys reading and writing as a child. She is a huge animal lover and has owned every pet imaginable from hamsters to cats and dogs. As a child she envisioned she would become a veterinarian, but a later change of course in her professional career led her to pursue the Law. Heather is a mother of two children and after grieving the loss of her mother-in-law and her own mother, she took up writing again and found her happiness in it. She’s the author of Love Grows Here, Isn’t It a Miracle?, and Angel Grandma. She wrote Angel Grandma to convey the message to both children and adults that those we love are always with us even if we physically cannot see them. All of Heather’s books have a central theme of love. 

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Transcription:

Art Costello: Welcome to the Shower Epiphanies Podcast, today, my guest is Heather Lean. She’s the author of Angel Grandma, Love Grows Here. Grieving children, how we can help children process the impossible. She has a tremendous story, I’m excited to have her here and share with you, the audience, what we’ve learned in the grieving process and all the other things that life has thrown our way.

So with that being said, welcome to the show, Heather, can you tell us your story?

Heather Lean: Thank you, Art. Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. My story starts essentially about a year ago, my mother passed in April, April 4th of 2019. She was battling Alzheimer’s for nine years so it was a long time. We all kind of knew at some point this would happen, but no one was really quite prepared for it, myself, especially. I had two children at the time. One was one year old and three, and just a lot going on to handle. After the funeral, we were down in Florida, she was living in Florida, it came up and it was just pretty much back to life. You had to go back to life pretty quickly, back to work, back to all your duties, everyone else goes back to normal, but for me, I was stuck. I just felt the pity, I felt the grief for myself, I felt anger, I felt all these emotions and I didn’t really let them out, I just bottled it up and found myself, you know, I’m an attorney by day and a mom so it’s like two full as it is. But I found myself in the file room, just starting to cry as I’m pulling out files. And it just came out at these moments where you bottle stuff up so much and it’ll creep up on you. I had a coworker tell me: “Just take some time off, go do what you have to do, go grieve.” And I’m like: “I can’t, I don’t have time for that. There’s no time.” Again, I was just so focused, there’s work to be done. I have two kids, I can’t take time off to go to a spa, or just go to a retreat, or do anything for myself. And after that, I just started to search for something, some kind of coping, some kind of something to ease my emotions then I realized it was eating at me. Quite honestly, the first thing that opened the door was meditation, I was looking at, I think it was like Joe Dispenza had this meditation and he’s like a science background, he’s telling people how, kind of explaining the science behind the brain and how the emotions work, and we conditioning your mind and not letting all these emotions eat at you because as I know now, all diseases and all these things are from your body not at ease and I certainly was not. So I did one meditation and it kind of just opened the door. I mean, from there, I couldn’t even tell you what happened in sequential order, but I was like, I drive quite a bit. So I listened to a lot of audio books and it started a sync from there. After that, I was listening to Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, I was listening to Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now and it really opened this whole new world for me off the state because it taught me how to change my thinking and think differently about things.

And I remember listening to Napoleon Hill, it’s actually Think and Grow Rich, but it’s kind of misleading co’z it’s more than just business and money. It’s a whole different, he talks about a wide range of things including the spiritual element. He’s like, when an idea comes to you, just go with that. Don’t silence it, don’t talk yourself out of it. And I was, so this is all kind of going on at the same time, but I had this idea and originally it was at the time I started to contribute to an orphanage in Africa. I just saw something on Instagram and I felt very connected with that because at the time, I was 38 when I lost my mom and here they are, they’re two years old, three year old, little children, they’re orphans, they have no parents. And I’m thinking to myself like, wow, so grateful that I had my mom as many years as I did. Here’s these children, and I saw pictures of them and they’re so happy. They are so little and I’m like, how is that? Like in our society, you just want more, and more, and more and more things, how can these people be so happy with so little? And I remember giving them just a little bit of money and I got this video back from them. I’m going to cry because it’s the first time in my life. I’ve always been like a giver, I’ve always wanted to help people in need and I felt always emotionally attached to that. But this hit me because I felt like almost there, they’re orphans, they have no parents and they’re sending me this video back, we love you, God bless you, thank you so much for your donation and it’s the children saying this to me. I opened up that video, my daughter was there and I just started crying. I was like, I don’t know, this is like touching me. T This felt better to me than anything I could buy. Before all this, I kind of got into that self therapy. I like buying clothes and shoes co’z it’s the thrill of buying something and then you get it. It’s just such an empty void I was trying to fill, and obviously, that didn’t do it. And then when I got this video from them, I’m in tears and my heart was happy, but I was crying and I’m like, Oh, my God, I got to do something.

And I was driving my car and I’m hearing Hill’s speech on this and he’s saying: “When you get an idea, just run with it.” So my first idea was I want to write a book and instead of giving money to them, here and there, maybe I can donate a net portion of the proceeds and donate to them and help the foundation that way. So that was the first book that I wrote, it’s actually, it’s a letter of love, I wrote it about the actual interaction between my daughter and this orphanage. I do intend to publish it, but I thought that was the only book I had in me. So now, I open up this door, and between meditation, between learning to deal with my emotions and really kind of harnessing all that to something productive. Now, I went home and I started writing books. I just thought this was the only book that I had. I’ve since written 10 children’s books, and Angel Grandma wasn’t the first one. I don’t think it was even the second one. It was something I knew I wanted to write in my heart. I knew from the beginning, before I even knew I wanted to write a book, I wanted to read a poem or something for my children. I kept putting it off because I wasn’t ready to deal with those emotions. I knew when I opened up that door, I didn’t want to cry, I didn’t want to do any of those things. And then I remember one day, I mean, this is after I wrote a couple books, I’m thinking of my mom so much, and I was in a grocery store and a couple of things happened, it’s a funny story but I was thinking of the salad dressing.

So I saw it in the grocery store and as I’m going to check out this I love you balloon gets caught in a conveyor belt, the cashier had to pull it out and it was like, okay, that’s interesting thinking of my mom, salad dressing, I love you balloon, and ‘m walking to the parking lot and I see like feathers all around me on the floor. And then I see them falling from the sky so I’m just like, okay, that’s a little weird. But I just went home and I’m like, I have to write this book, I think it’s just assigned to me. So within a day, I wrote it down, it all came out, flood of tears, but it’s not a sad book. It was me letting my emotions out about my mom, me knowing what I kind of knew in my heart that she’s still here and me having to write that down so I knew I wanted to do it, but I just wasn’t ready. And when I was, it just all came out and within a day, the book was written. I was like, I have to go with this book first because it was for me, but it was also for my mom. So I’m like, I wanted to get this out before her one year anniversary of her passing and that’s what pushed me to keep going. Even when things got little blips came up along the way or whatever, I knew because I was so in tune with this with my heart, for my mom, that this was the book that I wanted to go with first, I wouldn’t stop that’s why I chose Angel Grandma. I have other ones in the pipeline being illustrated so that’s exciting, but I knew I had to take this one first. So that’s the story behind it. And I wrote it several months ago. And the funny thing is I even asked a few people, you know, you get a bunch of opinions when you ask people things. Now, the timing with everything is the right time. I don’t want people to think I wrote this book for everything going on in the world and a bunch of us, no, you wrote this book for your mom. I couldn’t predict what was happening, but I don’t want to delay it because I really feel like it could help people. It helped me and people that have read it, it’s a comforting book. It’s not like a depressing book or anything like that, it’s just reminding people that they are still here with us. So I think that’s a message now that people could help them.

Art Costello: I think that’s great, you know, and there’s a whole bunch that you’ve covered that touches me. I don’t know if you know this about me, my experience with an orphanage in Vietnam. But when I was in Vietnam, I came out of, I was a Marine machine gunner in Vietnam and we were coming back off of the long range patrol and had been out for days and crossed this river into this village, that was about a couple miles from our main base. And as I came around the corner of this little hooch and started walking across through this little area, I looked over to my right and saw these two little eyes looking up through a chicken wire fence and just glaring at me. And when I looked at these eyes, I saw myself as a nine year old and I thought, Oh, my God. And when we got back to our base, I asked the chaplain if he knew what that place was where all the kids were. He said, it’s an orphanage. And he said: “I go there all the time, and it’s a Catholic orphanage. I prayed with the kids and helped as much as I could.” And I said: “Well, there was a little girl that I saw.” And he said: “There’s lots of little kids there.” I said: “Can we do something?” It was getting near Thanksgiving time. I said: “Can we do something to help them?” And I came up with the idea that we should have them at our main compound for Thanksgiving, they would fly in helicopters, they would bring us turkey and mashed potatoes, I guess you could call it Turkey, it was similar to mash potatoes. But I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if we all shared with the kids in the orphanage? So I asked the chaplain when he came back out to our compound, I said: “Do you think this could happen? If we could get the kids? A lot of Marines are all for it, we thought I’d be good.” He said: “Well, I’ll have to run it by the CEO, the company commander, to see if it can happen.” Because you bring kids in from an orphanage into the compound, they can be spies for the Vietcong and they can plot out everything we have in the compound, and it could actually be a detriment, but making a long story short, we got it approved.

The kids came and the day that they arrived on six pies, they were all jumping off the back of the truck. And the girl that I saw was actually looking for me and ran into my arms. And for the next two years, I left about nine months after that to come back home, but I had got my parents to help me support them, the kids. And it got into a big thing that we did that helped a lot of orphanages in Vietnam. But I continued to support her, and send her to school and all that. The Tet Offensive in 1968, father told me don’t send any more money co’z I had been sending money since 66 to support her. He told me that during the Tet Offensive, the orphans were used as a shield between the North Vietnamese and the Marines and Army, and they were lost. I guess the point I’m making is, every one of those rough, tough Marines that were out there with me, we felt so good giving back.

Heather Lean: Yeah.

Art Costello: It made it worthwhile, it gave purpose to everything we were doing, and that’s the important thing about giving when people give and open their heart. It’s a sharing night like no other, and it really, really benefits. You said you were asking around your work, you were asking for people’s opinions of shouldn’t you be doing this, don’t ever ask for anybody, just do it.

Heather Lean: I know.

Art Costello: Whether you’re doing it for all the right reasons, you’ve got the support of a lot of people behind you, just do it. Don’t worry about what other people think, just never worry about it. And sorry, you lost your mother. In 2006, I lost my wife for 38 years to ovarian cancer.

Heather Lean: Sorry.

Art Costello: I know the feeling of loss, you probably did a lot better than I did co’z when I lost my wife, I fell apart.

Heather Lean: Yeah.

Art Costello: But in the process of falling apart, we learn so much in the process of trying to hold ourselves together. We learn so much. And that’s one of the things that I’m noticing about our conversation today is that, I wonder what separates you and I, because we’re very similar in how we look at things and how we perceive and process, but there’s people out there who totally lose it when they lose somebody. I mean, I have a friend who I was with in Vietnam who is totally the opposite of me. I used everything as a learning experience, everything to him is being the victim. Vietnam is what ruined him, it ruined his life and all that. I keep on trying to tell him over the past 50 years, I said: “You know, it’s how you look at it. It’s how you perceive it.” And of course, he’s fluffed me off about it but have you put any thought into what makes you so different about handling the process? I think I have a handle on it. Hate to say this because I don’t want to sound elitist or like I’m above anybody, and I know you and I are both grounded in helping, loving, kind and caring, but I think it’s in the ability to intellectually process grief.

“In the process of falling apart, we learn so much. In the process of trying to hold ourselves together, we learn so much.” - Art Costello Click To Tweet

Heather Lean: Right.

Art Costello: Children don’t have that in what you’re doing to help children through that process is tremendous because they don’t know how to intellectualize yet their brain processes haven’t got there, but ours have, and we’re doing that. But there’s also adults who can’t process it, who fall apart. I mean, I fell apart for two and a half years, I was a jerk. I mean, I wasn’t the person that I was, or who I was, or could have been. I got back on track, my kids kind of helped me get there, but the biggest thing that helped me getting there was writing because after two and a half years of being a jerk, after my wife passed, I started writing, and writing is so cathartic and so empowering when you write and you see your words and I think you just process it differently.

Heather Lean: I think, yeah. I definitely always, I guess I got some experience in it. I’ve always been that, not to say the black sheep of the family, whatever, but I always thought differently. I was always intrigued by things, and I wasn’t really, I wasn’t brought up religious, I’m Jewish by nature. I’m married, my husband is Protestant, I didn’t find so much in religion so comforting. In some respects, yes. But I think with my mom, even having Alzheimer’s and dealing with that, she right away, like very quickly, just stopped talking and there was no communication. And some people were just like, and I saw my own family members were saying, she’s just a vegetable, she’s not there. I’m like, how can she just be, how can you just be not there? I mean, I get it, she’s not talking, but she knows me. Like I would go there and other people that kind of discounted it and just said, she’s no longer there. It’s not her, she’s just a shell. That’s what they got when they saw her. But when I was there, I had pictures, I was there with my daughter. I started crying anything now, but there was always something, there was always a connection. I felt that right away, like I got almost practicing in this spiritual awakening, if you want to call it that, as she was going through the ends of her disease because it just gotta be so bad that she could barely talk. She can barely swallow, but when I was there and she heard my voice, she would turn her eyes and would look to find me. I’m like, you can’t tell me that somebody, even if they lost all faculties of talking and comprehending that connection, that love connection is still not there. It’s there, maybe she’s in a coma in a sense but I feel like I would always be connected to my daughter, to my son if I heard their voice, if I noticed their presence. So that to me is where this all started. I think my willingness and ability to open up to something bigger than me knowing that there’s a spiritual connection because I saw that in my mom, and whenever, not everyone else, but some people were just like, it’s not her anymore. She was just not there. I just refuse to believe that, maybe I’m just stubborn, but you know what? I saw something in it that made me realize that she is still there, our soul or whatever that, that’s always there. And even when they do pass, they’re still with us. I feel that it’s not like I didn’t write this to patronize anyone and just say like, look, they’re all around us. I feel that, I’ve sense that, since.

A lot of things that helped me were meditation, quieting my mind, not listening to all those negative voices, and that’s really helped me even in the present day. With everything going on right now, I’m just, I’m more connected and I can calm everything down. So that really opened the door to me, to everything. I think that woman notation, and then I just haven’t stopped since then almost like eight, nine months, I try to meditate every day. The only time I have for me so I thoroughly enjoy it, but it actually calms me down. You’re right, it’s opened up this window. I didn’t ever think I was going to be a writer, I think I enjoyed writing as a child, but you know, I didn’t study, I was an English major, I didn’t go to school for that. But you know, I’m not writing for a newspaper, I’m writing from my heart. I can have someone edit and help me, kind of tweak it, but everything I wrote, it’s coming straight from my heart so I don’t think anything could be wrong in that. If people resonate with it or they don’t, that’s fine too but it goes back to the point of releasing it now during this time. I didn’t want to come up as insensitive, but that’s why people told me, look how you wrote a genuine book from your mom, and your love and the connection between you two so don’t worry about that. If people think that’s insensitive, so be it. I could help people.

Art Costello: I think when you write from the heart, when you speak from the heart, right from the heart, and act from the heart, can’t do any wrong. There is no right or wrong to that. It is who you are, it is this authentic. And authenticity is picked up by people faster than anything else. People pick up, I mean, you’re an attorney and I don’t know what kind of law you practice with. When you do depositions and stuff, you know almost beforehand what is coming from somebody’s heart, and what is coming from somebody’s coaching, the deposition and all that kind of stuff, or on the stand, I mean, words can be manipulated but your heart can. And when you speak from your heart, those words can’t be manipulated, they’re from your heart. You’re right, if somebody doesn’t like it, that is their prerogative, that is their thing. There are a million other people out there that need to hear your message. The timing of your message will be perfect because we’re going through this pandemic right now and people are living in fear. I mean, I know you’re in New York and New York has hit the hardest of any place in the country. Massive amount of people are dying every day.

“When you speak from your heart, those words can't be manipulated.” - Art Costello Click To Tweet

Heather Lean: Yeah.

Art Costello: And people need to hear this message, Heather, they just absolutely need to hear it.

Heather Lean: It’s weird too co’z I had originally planned on launching the book right before, my mom passed away on four four, and then her birthday was on four five so it was like, Oh, I want to get everything out and launched all this stuff before her birthday, and then with everything going on, I kind of got pushed back anyways. So yeah, I had this all planned out before any of this stuff happened, but you’re right, it’s a little crazy dealing with the fear and I’ve definitely allowed myself to get caught up in that for a little bit. But then I keep reminding myself the fear, the stress, anxiety, that’s doing more harm than I think., Obviously this is very real, but when you’re lonely not to get old, techie and stuff like that, but when you’re loading your body to that kind of constant stress, I’m not a doctor,, I don’t know specifically all the the technicalities behind that. But when I was dealing with the stress, just even with my mom and her sickness, I got run down with so many colds and stomachs, I let the stress eat at me. I mean, even when she got diagnosed, I was counting in my head, okay, I have 20 more years left before I’m going to get diagnosed. It was that kind of crazy mentality that I was letting get to me. And someone actually asked me that recently like, Oh, are you worried? You’re going to get the disease from your mom God? I was like, you know what? In the past I was, but I’m not living in that reality anymore. I’m not going to let my thoughts dictate what’s going to happen to me. Maybe I am susceptible to it, but maybe thinking I’m going to get it is going to trigger something in me. So the power of your thoughts in keeping in a good alignment, even when the world is crazy around you, I just think, I can’t believe where that point enough, I’m dealing with friends and people who are in extreme fear. Obviously there’s some, you gotta be cautious, you gotta do the right thing but this fear it’s like, it’s eating at you. You need to find another more productive outlet and I’ll even send them meditations. I’m trying to help them, like do this meditation, calm down even if it’s just for an hour just to relax yourself, do something, turn off the news for a little bit, you don’t need to see the numbers every single second. I’m not telling people to not realize what’s going on, but I think when you’re in constant fear mode, it’s not helping you. I can’t control outside, what’s going on in the world, I can only control my thoughts, and my feelings and how I react to it. You got to slow down a little bit, that’s my only recommendation I know. New York is bad now, I still take all the precautions when I go out. If I have to go out to go food shopping or something, I try to get it delivered, but there’s no delivery available, your kids at home that are eating nonstop. But I think that’s the only message that I can tell people, just try to control your feelings a little bit and not let the fear run you.

“The power of your thoughts can keep you in good alignment even when the world is crazy around you.” - Heather Lean Click To Tweet

Art Costello: That’s what I do with my clients right now, I tell them to take all the precautions you can. Every possible precaution not to contract this terrible virus, you do all that. But at some point where you just have to say, I have faith. I have faith that I’m going to be okay, that everything is going to turn out the way that God planned it.

“Try to control your feelings a little bit and not let the fear run you.” - Heather Lean Click To Tweet

Heather Lean: Right.

Art Costello: And that’s in faith. But I have a friend in Toronto, Dr. Brindusa Vanta who is doing research over the past 10, 15 years on the correlation between stress and fear in correlation to your health, and the numbers are staggering, the people. She is working with cancer patients that have been diagnosed and who go into that mode of fear of, I’m going to die from this disease and all that. She studies the people, most of those groups that don’t believe it, who I’m going to be, and I’m going to do this and all that. The numbers are staggering. The numbers are staggering for people who have positivity in their life versus that negativity. And I believe that positive and negativity in our lives come from our expectations. That’s my area, my expertise is expectations. When your core expectations are based in the positive, positive things happen throughout your life. When they’re based in the negative, negative things happen. I can’t remember if it was Henry Ford who said that, who you are is who you think you are. That is maybe one of the truest statements I’ve ever heard. I have a question for you, and I’m not going to try to put you on the spot. Just quickly, you think you could identify your three core expectations?

Heather Lean: As far as what I want in the future?

Art Costello: Just what your three, everybody has core expectations. I give you some hints. Mine are love, connection and integrity, those are my three core expectations. Everything I do, I do with integrity, love and the power of communication.

Heather Lean: Not that like I steal yours, I think all the books I’ve written have come from a place of love. The love I had was a connection with my mom. And then the other books I’ve written, it’s actually being illustrated now, Isn’t it a Miracle? and Love Grows Here, so I’d say that’s the central theme and more so than anything. I want the books to get out there so that I can help people so that’s my motivating factor here. So I guess that, you know, and then to help orphans, and help children and give back to children. So yeah, I think everything that I’m doing right now is authentic. I’m writing from my heart, I’m not writing like I’m researching or whatever, anything like that. It’s an idea that comes to me and it’s something that I feel. It’s just funny because, I went on this spiritual path on my own, I voluntarily looked for coping and to get me through this grief and I think that a lot of people now, it’s like forced solitude, forced introspection and it’s not comfortable to a lot of people. I did it willingly on my own, but I think a lot of people are struggling now because it’s under forced, their home, they can’t go out, can’t go out and can’t be around friends, and all these emotions that maybe they put off for a long time and now it’s surfacing. I’ve seen that in some friends and some people I interacted, and I think now is just the timing of the books too. It’s me on this spiritual path, but I think it could help. It’s written for children, but it’s coming from my heart. My hope is just like even parents that don’t have time to deal with their own emotions, if they’re reading those books to their own children, it could help them as well. I think to me, it’s like a love of authenticity. And then just the willingness to want to help people, and that’s all my books so far.

Art Costello: I’ll tell you what I think they are, I wrote them down before you and I went into this part of the conversation in the early part of this, I wrote down these, these are what I feel are your three core expectations, love, authenticity, and caring.

Heather Lean: Oh, my God.

Art Costello: Those were the three that I wrote down, and I believe they are. I think that that makes you who you are. People buy who you are and how you make them feel more than anything else. And when you come from the place that you do, then you’ll be okay. Everything’s going to work out, use this whole experience as a learning experience because it’s all meant to teach us something so we can teach others. If we all taught our children what we have learned through this living process that we go through, our children would be so much more advanced, but they have to learn these things themselves. That’s one of the things I love about children’s authors, because children’s authors are all trying to teach children’s lessons to help ease them into this thing we call adult life, which is ever changing every single moment. It’s changing faster than we ever could have imagined with computers and all the things. The world is connected much more. I’m going to be 73 in August, and if the world has changed so much since I was a kid, and then I think back of your mom and dad, and my mom and dad, and my grandparents and all them, how this world has changed. When I was in college, I did a paper, this is even before videos were even popular, but the professor asked us to do interviews with people that we admired. I had a real difficult time trying to find somebody. Not to find the people I admired, there were a lot of people that I admired, but I wanted somebody really interesting so I went to a nursing home and I found a woman who was 103 years old who still had our faculties. She had wit, humor and stories that were just great. She told stories about seeing the first airplane, seeing the first movie, seeing the first photographs, things that we, in the 1960’s, were taking for granted, all the things she had seen, the great depression, and what it had done and all the things that she had learned. And she said to me: “Life is always changing.” What has kept me so young is I’ve changed with it. I’ve changed with life and I thought, that’s pretty cool. She lived all these years and she saw massive change. I got to thinking back on my own life, my mother, who I also have Jewish blood in me, my grandmother turned Catholic to marry my grandfather back in the 30’s, I guess 20’s or 30’s, that time must’ve been something. They were in Brooklyn, they were in New York, but my mother was someone who lived in the past. She did not live in the present or future. I can always remember my mother saying, I wished I had done, I wished I had this, I wish my father had done this, her dad was very wealthy, worked in WallStreet in the 20’s but lost everything during the great depression when the stock market crashed. And her thing was, I wished, I wished, I wished. You can wish all you want, it doesn’t change a thing. What changes something is when you stop wishing and you start doing something about it. That’s what we should be teaching our children and trying to teach our children.

Heather Lean: Absolutely. I agree. Not gonna point the person, but I have some of my family, same thing too, blames everything on the circumstances of his life or whatever, and growing up. But I grew up in a divorced household and it wasn’t easy. I could blame everything on all the things that I went through in my life based upon, because my childhood was this way, or I grew up this way, but what good does that serve? I totally agree with that. You have to move forward like, I’m not living in the past anymore, I’m living now. I’m living from my now and I’m enjoying it, even everything going on has brought on a new perspective. My kids are a little crazy now, they’re like two and four so they’re like bouncing off walls. Some days are very hard to wrangle them and keep them occupied, but I’m enjoying time with them. I think we’re all forced to go through that. Now we’re living in the now, and I hope in a sense, it doesn’t go back to the rush, rush, rush. No one can sit down and eat dinner together, no one can sit down and spend time with their family, because I think we all need this to realize what’s important. It’s not about the car and the clothes, it’s what brings you happiness. Everything in my past has led me up to this, has led me up to now so I can’t be angry at the circumstances. I can’t say like, I wish my parents never got divorced, I wish this never happened, it’s all made me who I am today. I’m grateful for that because even after my mom’s passing, I would love to have her back. But obviously, there’s some other plan in place that maybe I would not have even, I probably would not have opened up this door. It’s what makes you, like pushes you to uncomfortable, that makes you realize you have to change. You have to grow, you can’t stay where you are. If I stayed where I was, I’d probably still be depressed and self pity and saying, why me? We lost two grandmothers in less than two years, my husband’s mom and then my mom. So in the beginning, I was like, I have no grandma to share anything with like, who can I send 10,000 pictures of my kids to? No one’s going to want to see that. And I was having that self pity, it was just me in that loneliness. I had to move out of it because it didn’t serve me, it made me sick. I was like, I have to find another outlet. You know, this whole path, it’s been a spiritual one, but it’s been like an awakening for me because I do have faith that whether or not you believe in God, source, spirit and anything you want to call it, I believe there’s something greater than us and we have a purpose here, maybe I would not have realized this purpose that I feel I have now. Not everything happened to me up until this point so I can’t be anything but grateful for where I am right now, even despite all the circumstances. And you do have to change because the same is not an option. It’s not a good place today.

“You do have to change because “the same” is not an option.” - Heather Lean Click To Tweet

Art Costello: I think you’re 100% on point. I mean, that is it is. And you said, eloquently that you just can’t stay the same. No one wants to live in that space. Though, people do. I mean, there’s people that do live in that space. And I guess that’s what you and I are trying to tell the world, that you don’t have to live in that space. It is a choice that you make and you either choose to stay in that space or you can move out of it. I think you’ve given everybody enough information and tools here to move out of that space, and that’s what makes Heather Lean is so beautiful. That’s what makes those eyes sparkle and smile on the world.

Heather Lean: Thank you.

Art Costello: I can’t say enough, thank you for that. I don’t know a better way to end the show than on that note.

Heather Lean: I have some tears in my eyes now, you make me cry, but I really appreciate this.

Art Costello: It’s okay to have tears in your eyes because I have joy in my heart from hearing you and having you share this. I want my audience to reach out and be able to share with you and learn more about you. Where can they do that?

Heather Lean: The book launch is actually coming up the end of April on Amazon so it should be Angel Grandma on Amazon. They can follow me on Facebook, it’s HeatherLeanAuthor, and Instagram is the same, HeatherLeanAuthor, and Twitter is just authorlean so they can find me. In search of Lean, L-E-A-N, you’ll find it on.

Art Costello: It will be in the show notes so everybody will have access to your website. I’m going to encourage everybody to really connect with you. You’re special, you’re a gift to the world and you’re going to have great success with your launch on your book. I’m going to encourage everybody in the audience to grab a copy and you won’t regret it. It’ll really help you through this time and place that we’re all at in this country. And just thank you, Heather, it’s been a pure joy. I’m going to tell the audience where you can get a hold of me, Art@expectationtherapy, my email and expectationtherapy.com is the website. I’m going to let Heather White take this outta here. Heather Lean, thank you very much for being on the show.

Heather Lean: Thank you for having me, it’s my pleasure. 

 

 

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