Season 1: Episode #1
What makes a hero?
According to Philosopher and Scholar Joseph Campbell, a hero is an archetypal figure who takes a journey from his or her ordinary world, goes out on an adventure, through a decisive crisis wins a victory, then returns home transformed with gained wisdom to offer others. This podcast explores real people, real stories and the pivotal moments that changed the course of their lives forever.
Death teaches us. You know, as a nurse, I had seen it. I had been with babies, old people, every age in between. I had seen what death looked like for another person. I really did not know or understand what it was until I lived without Justin for first a day and then a week and then a month, and then years. And now it’s been 17 years and death is still teaching me.
After 18 plus years, I ran into Lisa DeLong at a memorial service for the 27 year-old son of a mutual friend. That day we inducted another Mom into the club of which Lisa and I had been members for many years: Mothers who have lost their child to cancer. We both shared the knowing of what the days ahead would be like for this newly grieving mom the shock, the emptiness, the seemingly endless tears, the search for meaning, and the now what?
I’m Belinda Lams and this is The Moment When…
Lisa DeLong is an international speaker, author, spiritual teacher, cannabis nurse, ballroom dancer, a wife, and a mom! She inspires audiences with a powerful reconnect-to-purpose message using writing prompts, Salsa dancing, and humor. Audiences are transformed as they recognize the value of their life experience and remember who they truly are.
Her memoir, BLOOD Brothers, is touching the hearts of readers all over the world and is required reading for nursing students.
I’m trying to remind myself how we know each other and our connection from history. What do you remember?
I remember us being at HOC church. Your little Aria was there. Justin was in jr. high., believe in 7th grade. Maybe a little younger.
He was the success story. Leukemia survivor. I remember meeting you and thinking, Oh my heart immediately going out to you. You were I the throes of treatments and what all the me ant. I remember telling Justin to go tell Aria something encouraging like You did it. You went through all that. Now look how big you are.
He was friendly but kind of a shy kid you know. Like He wasn’t so like bold you know. But he did. He went over to her and said very kindly, hey, just said, hey, you know. I know this is hard right now, but you can do it. Kind of cheerleaded her.
As a Mom that was such a proud moment for me and I thought those are the kind of memories you want to have, you know where he was uplifting someone in the midst of or just post his own experience. So that’s, that’s really what I remember.
I don’t know if this is true or just my imagination has created this memory. But I remember, I thought I was in Costco and ran into you and was telling you about Aria and the dilemma and you said, “Don’t worry. Justin’s been out 5 years. He’s fine. She’s gonna do great.”
That was very profound for me at that moment. It was like, oh, ok. He made it so she can make it, so this can work. So it gave me that loft, that that I needed in that period of time.
Anyway, that’s my memory of you. And now we have new memories. Let’s go into your arc, your story arc. What was your quote unquote ordinary world before you had your pivotal moment?
My ordinary world was…it was like perfect. I…I was a nurse. Mother-baby nurse. Married my HS sweetheart, Dave. He’s a teacher and he was the jock and I was the cheerleader. Literally. You know, like I look back at our wedding photos and we look like we’re 12. (laughs) We look so young and our life was so idyllic, you know. We got married. We bought a little house in the suburbs. We had our first baby, a little boy, who was just the most angelic, sweet kinda kid. Easy, one of the those easy kids that tricks you into having more.
So he was teaching. I was, you know, working as a nurse. And so we were very community oriented. And uh, such a strong faith base. Our church was local in our neighborhood. It was so perfect. Perfect is the right word. Everybody was in good health and everything was going along in a lovely way.
And then…um, everything changed in a day. It just all changed in a day.
Lisa and her family got their call to adventure when their perfect life suddenly took an unexpected turn.
So I took Justin in for his kindergarten check-up and the pediatrician took one look at him and said, “You nurses, you know how to take care of everyone’s kids but your own.”
Wow!
And I immediately started to cry bc I couldn’t see what he saw. As a nurse, my eyes were not trained to see what he saw. But…Justin had his first bone marrow aspiration that day without any anesthesia, in an adult oncologists office, and I had to hold him bc all of the nurses were on their lunch break. And we went home and sat by the phone and received the news that Justin had Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, the most common kind of childhood cancer.
So there we were with Justin, uh, entering that world where children were bald and frail and pushing IV poles and in hospital gowns and all of a sudden, he was that child. And we were parenting him through that. So, it was the years to follow that really just kept teaching us, you know. Kept teaching me. He had a challenging first year. Challenging in that all cancer treatments are challenging. Miraculously he was only inpatient for 2 weeks out of that whole first year. And he was considered a high risk case in that he had a high white cell count upon diagnosis. But he went into remission relatively easily and everyone was pleased about that. Lost his hair. He was all kinds of blood transfusions and platelet transfusions and all of…just like the St. Jude’s kids poster child. You know?
But then, a year later, he started maintenance therapy …you never would have known he even had leukemia at that point. And so, 3 years into that, we, he finished that up. We added another child into the mix and so we had our boy and 2 girls. and we were running around like most American families were, you know…sports and activities and church and all these fun things. And it felt good. It felt like we had beat the odds. He beat the odds. We were doing it and 80% cure rate. And cancer really became a thing of the past. I didn’t want anything to do with it. I didn’t join any support groups. I didn’t read about it or think about it. It was just…you know it wasn’t a thing anymore
In the middle of 8th, Justin’s 8th grade year, I was, uh, pregnant with my 4th baby. My oops baby, which I was always judgey about women who had babies at 40 and I was, you know like, I’m never having a baby at 40 and there I was, already having my 4th. And so that was very humbling. (laugh)
So I was adjusting to life with this new baby and our family adjusting to all that and…All 4 kids caught the flu and Jessica got better and Joelle got better and baby Jacob got better but Justin did not. And it was discovered that his leukemia was back and it was back with a vengeance. He was on treatment for 5 months and relapsed again. And was on 2 weeks of the hardest chemo he’d ever had when he developed a condition called ARDS; adult respiratory distress syndrome. And in the ICU struggling to breathe.
The moment when can manifest in various ways. Sometimes it comes in a whisper. Sometimes it comes in a storm. For Lisa, it arrived as a mystical message she could hardly believe…
The most pivotal moment for me was the night he was in ICU and I fell asleep next to him, next to his bed. I was sitting in an uncomfortable chair and had my feet propped on the bed and I was kind of leaning back and I dreamt that I was at his bedside and that he was being resuscitated and that I was standing at the door of his room with my hand on the steel cold door frame of his, of his room. Just standing there, watching him being resuscitated and that I yelled 3 times to let him go.
And then, the next morning in real time, the Intensivist came in and told us, told Dave and I that Justin would need to be intubated; that his breathing was becoming too labored. We went into the room next door and prayed for him. And honestly, what my prayer was, that if he were to recover from all of this…this more chemo that was ahead as he was being prepared for a bone marrow transplant and more isolation and more suffering. If he was going to endure more suffering and not live anyway, that G-d would take him. I just asked for mercy. I asked for him to not suffer. And we, we each prayed. My brother was there as well.
And while we were in that room, I heard them call a code blue. And I ran over to the door, held on to the steel cold door frame, and watched them resuscitate Justin and yelled, “Let him go, let him go, let him go.” Just as I had seen in my dream.
Lisa began to understand that dreams could come true, though they may not be the kind she wanted. She wondered and questioned what had happened to her. How was she able to receive this information prior to Justin’s death? This began a new chapter of questions. And it was also a chapter of learning how to grieve this tremendous loss.
Death teaches us. And so, as a nurse, I had seen it, I had been with babies, old people, every age in between. I had seen what death looked like for another person. I really did not know or understand what it was until I lived without Justin for first a day and then a week and then a month, and then years. And now it’s been 17 years and death is still teaching me.
In those early days when my grief was fresh, I was in so much pain. All I wanted to do was die. You know, I would lay in bed at night and just asking G-d to take me in my sleep, cuz this was too painful. I I couldn’t do it. And even though I had 3 healthy children grieving as well, and my husband, all I wanted to do was be on the other side. All of a sudden the other side mattered. Like what is heaven? Is it real? What does it look like? How…can I connect? How does all of this make any sense? And so…I think when tragedies like this happen, I had to make sense of things.
I’m Belinda Lams and this is The Moment When…Today we’re talking with Lisa DeLong about the pivotal moment when her son Justin died from cancer. When a dream became reality, she was awakened to a new awareness about life, death, spirituality, and mindfulness. Her story continues…
Jacob was just a baby. Jacob was 9 months old when Justin died. He was probably about 18 mos. old by the time we had moved from the house that Justin grew up in into another house bc I was afraid that there was something in the house maybe that would have contributed to his relapse. I had it tested for electromagnetic fields, I had it tested for asbestos, uh, the water, everything. So I just thought, I can’t raise another kid here. I’ve got this little baby, I’ve got the girls. So we moved and..
We were in the new house and boxes all over the floor and the girls and Dave were at school and I was home alone with Jacob and I was just staring at the portrait of Justin that we used for his memorial. It was on the floor leaned up against the wall and I couldn’t stop thinking about him and I kept staring at his picture bc I didn’t want to forget what he looked like. And…and I looked over at Jacob and I had this thought. I thought I am not going to love this baby. I’m just…I’m not going to love him. I’ll make it look good on the outside. I’ll take really good care of him and no one will know that I don’t love him fully.
Wow.
But I’m just not going to do it. I’m never, ever ever ever going to let myself love like that again. It’s too painful. I can’t ever risk that again.
And...all of a sudden, Jacob crawled up on my lap. And he slapped me across the face as hard as he could. Like just pow, whacked me across the face (laugh). And then he grabbed my cheeks and he forced me to look in his eyes, and, and I realized I was not making eye contact with him but he looked in my eyes and I knew what he was saying. He was saying, “I’m here. Love me. I’m here. Love me.” And he literally was in my face. He was too young to talk. But that’s what I knew. And of course, I just hugged him and slobbered all over him. I was crying and snot coming out my nose. And I just rolled around on the floor with him and kissed him and I thought…why would I think that? I’m not gonna fear my own kid. I’m not gonna fear loving my own kid, you know?
My biggest fear when Justin was first diagnosed was if he died I would live without joy. Like I would just live a joyless existence if anything happened to him.
And then, over time, and in that moment with Jacob and many more moments like that with Jacob, I realized that I could still feel joy even though I was in so much sorrow. And so that fear of living a joyless existence really dissipated pretty quickly. And it didn’t mean the sorrow wasn’t there. It just means that they co-exist.
Lisa continued to examine and revise her beliefs about life. One such belief was the idea that lightening doesn’t strike twice. The odds are in our favor. If we are visited by a tragedy, there is a high probability that it will never happened again. Right? That belief was shortly revised as well…
About 4 years after Justin died. I was giving back to the community. I felt the flicker of…like I’m a nurse. So it felt good to want to take care of people again or even care about anybody else again, you know. I became a bereavement facilitator so I could help other grieving families. And,I was at our family arcade night, which was one of my roles as the family outreach coordinator to put these parties together for families who have kids with cancer. So I was surrounded by all these families who I knew, who had kids with cancer. And I got a call that Jacob, who was then 6 years old at the end of his kindergarten year, that he had leukemia too. And I just thought, I cannot do this again. There is no way. I mean there is no way I should have to do this again. I’ve done everything right. Like what is this all about?
And I remembered the first time around with Justin when he was first diagnosed at 5, I thought bad things happen to good people. Right?
Right.
And I thought, well I’m not immune. You know? I’m not immune. And so, I felt much more accepting of the experience. But the second time around, I was like oh, Hell no. This is, this is one big fat major fuck up. It cannot happen again. It can’t. It’s so unjust. It’s so unfair. And also because my eyes were wide open to how painful this was going to be to my daughters and to my husband and to my family. You know like…oh my G-d, it was just too much.
And so, I remember I walked out the door of the arcade and I sat down on the grass and it’s kind of like my legs just gave out. I couldn’t bear my own weight and I just…this is so trippy but…I looked up at the sky and there was a skywriting airplane going by and it wrote 666 across the sky. What the heck is that? Why am I seeing this right now? And I can still see it in my mind right now like it happened yesterday because it was so trippy. …Jacob was 6 years old and the day, that day when I was looking up at the sky was 6/6/06 when he was diagnosed.
To me it was a “you’re not alone” moment. “We see what’s going on in your life “moment where there was literally a message written across the sky for me to feel, at some point, not then. Bc at that point when I saw it, I was like Oh my G-d, is that the devil? It’s the devil’s number and all these things you know. And I was just so freaked out. But later, over time, I started to see more and more synchronicity in my life.
Like when I tell that story now, I’m like, man that is so awesome cuz there was more going on to make all of that synchronize; his age, his…the day of diagnosis. All of that now is such comfort to me that, that there is so much orchestration that goes in on our lives so that we can have the experiences that we came to have and experience greater wisdom.
It’s all about expanding spiritual awareness. That’s all it is. In the moment when you’re having those things happen, you just can’t help but pause, right? And think, what is this about?
The DeLong family experienced déjà vu as they re-entered the oncology world of bald and frail children, pushing IV poles in hospital gowns… just as they had 10 years before. This time with their second boy.
We went in the doctors, went in the exam room and the doctor told us it was leukemia and we just freaked out. Dave slammed his fist against the wall and I, I just let out this guttural wail like I was a wounded animal. I had no idea I could make a sound like that. And Jacob got so scared that he pulled off his IV band and he threw it at the doctor and he said, “"I’m calling 991 on you.” And it was so, so funny. You know I was like, that’s the way Jacob. You know, you’re a fighter. That’s right. We’re going to fight this thing you know.
I feel for the doctors and the nurses that, that were working with us that day because I just thought man, I hope somebody has their back right now because we’re like mama bear and papa bear right…we are freaked out. We are so freaked out. We are gonna scratch and resist anybody that tries to hurt our kid and, and you know, fully aware of what this disease was going to be like, what this treatment was like and what the outcomes could be. You know, it’s terrifying.
You’re listening to The Moment When…
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Today we’re exploring death, tragedy, and how it changes us with my guest Lisa DeLong.
Although she was not spared the double strike of tragedy, Lisa was given mystical messages, foreshadowing, and synchronicities as she traversed each ordeal.
The day that Justin died, I remember being in the ICU and we were standing around his body and his oncologist came in and I was holding Jacob in my arms and she, and I looked at her and I said “Tell me this can’t happen again.” And she said, you know, “No it won’t happen again. It’s not that kind of leukemia.”
But I also remember there was a woman, at uh, when Justin was…well after he relapsed we were at City of Hope, um. Dave met a woman in the elevator who said that she’d had 2 kids, her daughter had aplastic anemia and died and then sev…and then years later, her son also had aplastic anemia and died. And so he came back and his eyes were like wide like a deer in headlights. Justin was 15 and we were hoping he was going to survive this thing. So to meet someone who actually lost both of her children was so scary. I don’t even want to know that information. You know? And yet, I remember this. I was sitting in the IV room with, with Justin and I looked over at Jacob bc he was in a stroller and I just had this thought like oh my goodness, like that’s a possibility? Like that could even happen.
Lisa’s perfect life had shattered in many ways. Her Christian background slowly faded as she quietly retreated inward; no longer finding solace in church. She used that time to read anything she could about grief, death, heaven, and near-death experiences…searching for comfort and reassurance as she weathered these new storms.
And I just wanted something to quiet my mind when I was in major freakouts and so the one scripture that remained in my memory bank, only this one—there were no others at the time—”He has not given me a spirit of fear, but of love and of power and a sound mind.” 2 Tim. 1:7. And I was so surprised that I remembered it …I was at children’s hospital and Jacob was receiving a difficult treatment and I went into the bathroom stall and I was just crying. And I just thought, I can’t, I can’t bear this. It’s hard for him. It’s scary. I don’t know if he’s going to live. It’s…I was just out of my mind for a while. And, all of a sudden that scripture came back. And I put my face in the corner of the bathroom stall. It was a corner stall. One of those big handicapped ones. And I just wedged myself into that corner and kind of leaned my head against the wall and I just said that scripture over and over and over and over and over again. Until I could compose myself and gain some strength and composure to go back into the room where Jacob was. And I loved that, I loved that scripture because I think it’s the most truthful, the most truthful words that resonate with who I am now. That I am not fear. I am love and I am power and I am a sound mind. So, it it really helped over the next few months when as Jacob was going through treatment. And he got very very sick.
Lisa knew that bad things could happen to good people. She knew that lightening could strike twice. And she also knew that she had a threshold where enough was enough. Again, she experienced another moment when…
This was another pivotal moment along the journey, the crazy journey was when he developed a condition called VOD. Venal Obstructive disease. And he was basically bleeding out. He was, his gums were bleeding. His liver had become so toxic from the chemo therapy he had been receiving that his liver was holding onto platelets. The portal vein that runs through the liver, when this happens starts, just holding onto platelets. And platelets are what make clots, cause our body to not bleed. And it was shunting all the fluid and platelets in his body backwards. And he was very very sick. And his oncologist sat us down and said, “If he doesn’t start urinating in the next 24 hours, that he’s not likely to survive.” Dave went back to Jacob where he was having difficulty breathing and they were packing his gums cuz they were bleeding. It was just so intense.
I remember walking out the door of that room and walking down the hall at Children’s Hospital LA and there’s these big windows that open; giant ceiling to floor windows. And I looked out. And I put my hands on the window and I saw the Hollywood sign and I see Sunset Blvd. and cars buzzing by and you know, a woman pushing a stroller and a man with a briefcase and all these things and all this life going on out there. And I just thought, what the hell am I doing in here again? I can’t do this again. And I raised my fist to G-d and I said, “Quit picking on my boys.” And I just cried and cried and cried. And all of a sudden, I felt this sense of peace pour over me from the crown of my head to the bottom of my soles. And I knew that Jacob would live. It’s like it came into my body in my marrow. I knew it in my marrow that he would live.
This is another one of those very profound spiritual experiences where I thought, what is happening? I felt completely euphoric., I thought How can I be this happy when my son is dying? What is happening? And I, I didn’t say anything to anybody. I’m sure that if anybody who saw me if somebody was walking by, they probably thought I was crazy cuz I was just crying and I them I’m standing there frozen and then I’m looking totally smiley. It was just, I mean, I could only imagine what it looked like.
And I walked back to Jacob’s room and he looked exactly as he did when the doctor had told us the news. I just sat there next to his bed and waited. I just thought OK. Here we go. I’m waiting for the show. Show me how he’s going to live, cuz I know he’s going to live. It’s just a matter of time, so…let’s do this. It was just such an intense confidence. And I didn’t say anything to anybody. I didn’t tell Dave this experience. I just totally kept it to myself.
And at about 3 in the morning, Jacob woke up saying, “Papa, I have to peepee.” And so we both, kind of fell out of our chairs and Dave held the urinal there and I’m telling you…like the sound of warm liquid on that plastic urinal was the sweetest sound (laughing) any mother could ever hear, any parent. And then that, he just kept peeing. All night long was like a peepee relay team, you know. We were dumping it and at one point the urinal was so full that Dave held it up high and he said “Liquid Gold baby.” Like this is it, you know.
And the next day the team came in, the medical team and they thought, they thought that his, Jacobs chest xray had been mislabeled bc all the fluid that had threatened his life the night before was completely gone. And they fully expected to come in and find out that he expired through the night. That’s how sick he was.
So later when I wrote Blood Brothers, my book, we gave a copy to Justin’s Intensivist, Dr. Arsenewy at the City of Hope and he said, “when I got to that chapter about Jacob, he said, I thought I was going to read that he died too. Bc in my 20 year practice as an Intensivist, I had never seen anyone survive VOD.”
So we got our miracle. We really did.
When bad things happen to good people, people often come to a new understanding of the way life works in attempt to reconcile their cognitive dissonance. In her journey through precarious terrain, Lisa came to her own conclusions from a wider lens of interpretation…
Our kids come to us with their own agenda. They come with their own soul plan. And Jacob’s was to be this leukemia victor at that moment and stay with us. That’s all it was. And Justin’s life was fulfilled.
How do you see death?
It’s simply fulfillment. It has nothing to do with…us as a parent. It has nothing to do with us. Other than to teach us to be an experience. But we don’t have control over it …we didn’t do anything wrong. It’s just their own timeline.
So, for about the past 10 years, you know I had dreams where Justin visited me. I had, sometimes I would just know stuff. I’d have the sense that he was there. He was never not there is what started happening. I just didn’t know it. And I had, after he died, I had 3 different encounters with people who had gone to mediums and come to me and said, “I know you don’t believe in this stuff” but one of them specifically said, “Tell your friend Lisa that if she comes, he’ll come. Justin will be here and talk to her.” So, it’s a message. You know, and that happened 3 times. But the third time that it happened, I could not deny it anymore. And I went to see a medium. He was, and as soon as I sat down with him, Justin came through. And he was a Christian man who had this ability to connect and had fought it his whole life bc he didn’t really want it either and he was afraid. And anyway, he finally accepted it.
It was the first time I ever went to see a medium. At that time, it was the most healing experience I’ve had. So this thing that I had been taught to fear, again, you know, especially in the Hispanic culture. It was like no no no. Hay Dios mio. You Know. We don’t hear those. You don’t go there, you know. No Ouija boards or that kind of thing. Just don’t do it you know. And then, of course, in the Baptist church, uh, same thing. You don’t go see a medium. You know? I didn’t tell anybody.
So over time, I mean, it’s been 17 years since Justin died and none of this happened quickly. About 10 years ago, I started meditating and inviting Justin uh through free writing. I learned from other mediums how to do this, and I started putting it into practice. It was a free writing exercise with Justin that led me to my speaking career. I was totally freaked out about work and how I was going to get a job and what to do with the story and the book. It was not an easy book to sell and I was quite tired of trying and I was just really fatigued about talking about cancer and death and all this stuff. I was interviewing for a coaching job for, in the healthcare field and, and I don’t really know what I’m doing. I just really want to speak but they weren’t hiring speakers and…So I did this freewriting exercise and um what I wrote was, what he told me was, “Mom, you’re not going to be employed, you’re going to be deployed.”
And so, while I was on an interview for/with this organization, the gal interviewing me said, uh, just so you know, some of our staff, both our speakers and our coaches, we use, we have what we call our deployment team and we deploy you out.
Were you just laughing?
OMG! I was in my kitchen and I started dancing, jumping up and down and I was cheering with Justin. It was like, in my head I was Justin! Look look! I got it! I got it! That’s the word, It’s the word that I needed to stay moving forward with this company bc it wasn’t obvious. It’s like following the little breadcrumbs. You just keep going and…but it was that word that stopped me from saying, no this isn’t the job for me. I’m not going to go further cuz it didn’t make sense at the time, but that word made me say, OK sure. I’ll interview for a coaching position. Sure, I’ll attend your conference. Sure I’ll meet your top speaker at the end of the day and he liked my TED talk. Cuz I gave a TED talk, and complimented me on my TED talk and asked if I was on their speaker’s bureau. “I was, I was told you’re not hiring speakers.” And he said, “Well I’d like to think you’re the kind of person that a company like ours could make room for.” And I was on their bureau 2 weeks later and filling in. It just all happened. Just like that.
You know, our loved ones on the other side see the bigger picture. They’re still connected to us. They love us. it’s benevolent. They want to help us. And if we get into the right mindset about it, they can.
And so, that was a really pivotal moment for me bc there were so many times I was doing these free writing exercises and/or having a dream or something. You know and I was like, you know what? I’m just making all this up to make myself feel better.(laughs) Those kinds of things just happened more and more and more. So, I’m a synchronicity junky. If I don’t get a hit everyday or every couple of days, I’m like what is happening? Like c’mon Justin. C’mon spirit team. Hit me. Like (laughs) I want the excitement. I love the thrill of being connected.
As goes the myth, after a hero goes through a challenge and wins a decisive victory, they also receive an elixir comprised of rewards. With this elixir in hand, they begin the journey home, as a new version of themselves. Not only have they learned new lessons and been through a transformation, they now bring these gifts to others in their ordinary world.
Yeah. So he works with me. And I’m becoming more open about that. I’m starting to share that actually and the workshop that I’m starting to give is called From Child Loss to Channeling.
That’s so cool.
How to become your own medium. Yeah. And that’s like as of 2 weeks ago. Yeah. So this is all new stuff.
So how can people participate in that?
I don’t have anything on the calendar yet, but I will soon. And any information or updates will be on my website which is Lisasolisdelong.com. I also started a philosophy that I call Cage-Free Thinking.
Tell me about that.
it was inspired by my chickens. I started raising chickens 2 years ago and the first time I let them out of their cage, they just went flying and flapping their wings and like jumping in the air and kicking each other and it was just the cutest thing. And I…they were so celebratory and exuberant. And I just thought, this is how we should live. Like what cages have we built for ourselves? What cages have we built around our mind? And it was such a great metaphor for some of the spiritual teaching I was hearing in from other leaders and teachers in the New Thought Ageless Wisdom world. And it made me start looking at my own…every time I’m in a situation where I have a decision to make or if I place judgment on someone or some thing, I think, what beliefs have I created around this situation or person that has limited my mind and my perspective? So, it’s also a something that I’m starting to teach is that practice of just sitting with, looking at your thoughts and identifying them and becoming cage-free in your thinking. And again these are all brand new things that I just started. I never thought I’d be teaching meditation and channeling my son.
But here’s the 3rd piece that totally blows my mind. And that is cannabis. Cannabis came into my world 2 years ago when my daughter moved to Oregon and she met weed farmers; cannabis farmers, who found out that she had a leukemia survivor brother. And they said “Get him on CBD right away. He needs to be taking CBD. It prevents cancer and supports the immune system.” And so they sent me all this information about the endocannabinoid system and how it affects the immune system and…all the health benefits of this plant and I just thought, Oh my goodness, I’m a medical professional. How do I not know this? Why is this not mainstream?
So the more I learned, the more again, I just followed that curiosity. And so now, I’m in the process of becoming a cannabis nurse. So, I’m in the cannabis world of people who take the plant seriously and who acknowledge the intelligence within the plant, which I love. I love plant medicine. I’m a voice for that now as well.
So Justin helped me in all those things. My family is so supportive. Jacob’s a senior this year. He just took his senior pictures yesterday. And I have room, I have room for this stuff now, you know? And, and I want it all to be used for good. It’s important.
Well you’re doing it.
But isn’t life good that we can have this conversation and laugh and be proud of each other and joyful for each other as moms who have both experienced this. This this devastation. You know?
I left Lisa with a few thoughts about the way I see her essence as a hero…
You have a yes in you and it’s guided you through all of this. When something has come that felt true enough, you said, OK. Yes. Willingness to expand. Willingness to abandon or jettison things that weren’t working anymore; ideas, connections, involvements, whatever. That you were willing to release them. That’s maybe a nicer way of saying it and become…you. And that’s a beautiful thread in your life that I see. And here you are and who knows what’s next but you’re here. And you help people and you help yourself. You’re, you’re a gift. Thank you.
Thank you. That’s such a sweet observation and I appreciate your mirroring that to me. I don’t always see that you know, in real life. I’m just putting one foot in front of the other. And uh, but you have affirmed what I would like to continue to see in myself and in my life. I, I want to see more of that. I’m, I’m gonna write on a post-it. I’m going to put a yes on a post-it and I’m gonna put it on a mirror and I’m gonna remember what you just said to me so that when I’m freaking out about something, I’ll be like, No, Belinda said, I say yes. (laughs)
You can find Lisa DeLong at her website lisasolisdelong.com. There you can learn more about her and discover her work with Channeling, Cannabis, Cage-Free Thinking, her TedTalk, as well as order her book Blood Brothers.
The Moment When.. is produced by SoulMine Productions
Music is composed by Jeff Lams.
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