Ep #367: Tapping, Writing, and Finding Beauty in Grief: An Interview with Judith Lysaker

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, Episode 367: Tapping, Writing, and Finding Beauty in Grief: An Interview with Judith Lysaker.

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief, to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to. Here’s your host, Master Certified life coach, grief expert, widow, and mom, Krista St-Germain.

Hey there. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. I have another interview for you today, another client I want you to meet. Her name is Judith. It just occurred to me as I was reading the intro, I hope I’m pronouncing her last name correctly because I’m not completely convinced that I am. So, Judith, my apologies if I did not pronounce your name correctly. I love you.

I think you’re going to enjoy Judith’s interview even if I didn’t pronounce her last name correctly. She just has a lovely energy about her, so much wisdom. And she started Mom Goes On so early. I had forgotten until we actually got into the interview that she had joined only eight weeks after Paul died, which is relatively early when I think about how I was doing at eight weeks and what I was up for. And it was such a great reminder for me of how important it can be, how orienting it can be to find some structure in our grief and to have ways to make a contribution even when we’re not really confident in what we’re contributing. Just the opportunity to be part of something where we feel like we can contribute can really make a big difference.

And so, I hope you’ll enjoy learning from Judith. Judith is now a tapping practitioner and is certified in doing some grief work and is also combining that with her love of writing. And so I think you’ll just enjoy hearing from her and learning from her and her perspective on grief and on finding the beauty in grief. So, with that, we’ll get into my interview with Judith.

—

Krista: All right. Welcome, Judith. I’m delighted.

Judith: Thank you. I’m delighted too, Krista. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Krista: Right before I logged in, I had this moment where I thought, has Judith been on the podcast before? I feel like she has. And I actually had to go and check because I feel, I don’t know why, but I was just like, no. Oh, I guess not. Just in my head. So, I’m glad you’re here.

Judith: All those coaching moments.

Krista:: I mean, maybe. Yeah, you just feel like you know someone or you’re so, you’re familiar with their story and it’s like, have we told this? But no, but I’m glad. So I’ll just have you start, if you don’t mind, by introducing yourself and telling listeners a little bit about who you are and how you got here.

Judith: I’m Judith. And I got here because I lost my husband, like the rest of us get here that way. And he died suddenly, unexpectedly. I went out shopping. I came home. Went out shopping, he was on his Zoom calls doing his job, working from home on a Tuesday, and I came home and he was on the bedroom floor unconscious. You know, the rest is history. And so, I, like most people in those circumstances, was beyond everything. And yeah, so that’s how I got here.

Krista: Yeah. How long ago was that?

Judith: It’ll be three years in July.

Krista: Three years. Okay.

Judith: Or yesterday.

Krista: Or yesterday as grief time goes. Yeah. Or forever. I do feel that way too still. 10, it’ll be 10 years August 1st for me. And it does not feel that way at all. I can’t quite get it.

Judith: Time is not a certain thing. This is one thing that grief has really taught me. It’s something else. You know, it’s a phenomenon that we orchestrate our lives around, but…

Krista: Does it feel like it’s slowing down, speeding up, both?

Judith: It does both at different times.

Krista: So, paint a picture for us. What was life like for the two of you? Where were you in life together?

Judith: So, we had been married 32 and a half years and been together 33. And I had retired two years prior. He was still working. He was six years younger than me. And I was still figuring out what retirement was. A big shift for me. I’d been at universities for decades as a professor. And so, I was getting used to that and enjoying it. And he was still working intensely, but we were really enjoying settling into kind of a new way of being together where one of us was at least not constantly in the career mode, you know?

So, I’m grateful and still a little devastated, right? But the part I’m grateful for is that at least we had that moment. You know, we had a couple of years where we were discovering ourselves again, each other again, and our relationship. And of course, I desperately wish we could have stayed there and found out more about what that was about, that he had retired and we could have had that time. We never got that. But we did get that one shift. I actually can still feel it in my body and it brings me joy now. I’m really grateful that it can bring me joy now.

Krista: Can you describe what it feels like?

Judith: It feels warm. I can almost feel his leg against my leg and my shoulder against his shoulder because we would spend more time just relaxing together. So it feels warm and it feels good. It feels like, sounds so corny, but it feels like a gift I can take with me.

Krista: Yeah, that’s kind of what I was thinking too. It’s, is that a surprise to you that you can kind of feel that? Or because I think for a lot of people, it’s not something that they consider accessible or possible.

Judith: It’s not a surprise now. I’ve felt it for a while now, but if you had told me I was going to feel this, I probably would have been angry with you.

Krista: Oh, yeah.

Judith: Yeah. Like immediately.

Krista: Don’t tell me. Immediately after he died.

Judith: Those first weeks, months, not possible to entertain that.

Krista: What do you recall from those first weeks or months? What was it like for you?

Judith: Kind of blank, really blank and a little desperate. And actually, I joined MGO only eight weeks after. I felt like I couldn’t make sense of my world. I know that’s a common thing. I guess I want to say out loud that these common things don’t feel common, and they’re not. It’s this thing about grief that it’s intensely personal and it’s universal, right? So my blankness, other people are going to say they felt blankness, but their blankness is different than my blankness. My despair is different than your despair. You know, I think that’s something I’ve really learned and it helps me to hang on to.

I did feel like I couldn’t make sense of things and I know I learned all about widow fog, but I also think it’s that when you spend decades making meaning of your world with someone else making meaning of your world and their world and you have this joint meaning making going on both socially, emotionally, and those magic neural pathways are being shaped by that meaning making and the way that you make meaning, the way I made meaning with Paul’s not quite the same as how I make meaning of things now. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but.

Krista: What are the differences that you notice?

Judith: You have to learn things over again. The way that I made meaning with Paul was a constant interaction, this constant bouncing back and forth of simple things like groceries and then ideas. We were both academics, so we had a lot of discourse around the content of our professions. So there was a lot of like collaborative thinking. And then suddenly that’s not there. Yeah, and suddenly.

Krista: How did your experience of grief, and I know that’s a broad question because what experience, right, there’s so many. But how as you reflect back on what you’ve experienced so far, how has it compared to what you anticipated? And I know you didn’t see his death coming, but just knowing what you knew about grief.

Judith: Yeah, I wasn’t prepared to lose him. I didn’t think about that at all. And yet I had experienced the loss of an adult child. So I had been through an intense grieving experience. And some of that was similar when I lost Paul. What I guess I, I don’t know if expect is the right word, what I didn’t anticipate the depth of was how completely my world had changed and there was no one to share that change with, or it didn’t feel like it. It felt like when we lost our son, we had each other’s arms to put around. You’re suddenly really on your own. I don’t think I understood the, I don’t think I anticipated how much the wind would be knocked out of me.

Krista: Had you had…

Judith: And how long it would take to get any wind back.

Krista: Yeah. Now that you look back on that, when would you say the wind kind of started to come back?

Judith: I think it’s still coming back. It’s mostly back, but I think really joining MGO really helped with that. And even then, I don’t think the wind was, I don’t know how far we could go with this metaphor. I hope this wind, I don’t know where it’s going. But what MGO did was I joined because I felt like I have to do something. I am responsible for staying alive. Sounds dramatic, but it wasn’t dramatic. I was suddenly responsible for trying to keep myself alive.

And I had heard your podcast and I thought I have to try something. I had absolutely no idea what to do. And that is very, such a debilitating place for me because I have ideas about everything.

Krista: Yeah, so foreign for you given, yeah.

Judith: It was so foreign for me to have like no idea how to proceed. And so, that gave me a place where at least I was with other people who might be equally as confused and a nurturing place and a place where, I don’t know if this is exactly what you’re asking, but I could kind of put my feet on the ground somewhere. Okay, I’m here. I’m in this group. I can log on every day and I can say something to somebody.

Krista: Yeah, that’s very orienting.

Judith: It was very orienting. It was very orienting. And that is not even counting the emotional support and the coaching and all that. I was so close to the loss that a lot of that, I think, it was a little early for me, but I would never say I didn’t do the right thing joining when I did. It was exactly when I should have joined because I needed that orienting, orientation. I needed to feel like I had some place to be and something to give.

Krista: Say more about the giving part.

Judith: I think human beings give. That’s what we do to be connected. That’s what we do to stay alive. That’s what we do to love. That’s what we do. And suddenly my main connection and my main place to do those things was gone. And so to be there, it gave me a place to give. I remember writing that one of the hardest things about losing Paul was that I had all this stuff to give and I didn’t know where to put it.

Our last child had left home 10 years before, maybe more, if I’m doing the math. So it gave me a place where I could give. And my way of being able to give was so, it feels like it was nothing now, but it was immense to me. And all I did was get on Slack and go to peer support. And sometimes I would have something to say, but I felt so vulnerable, but I often didn’t say anything. I would find one person that I could say something to, or two people I could say something to, even if it was, yeah, I get it. I wasn’t going for depth. I didn’t have depth. It felt like there was nothing there. I know that people describe this, but it felt kind of like going through the motions. Like I was on automatic, but it still was so meaningful to me to just be able to do that.

Krista: I love it. I never anticipated that when I created it. I never anticipated the value of that and I see it now. And I sometimes I wonder, I mean, I think that’s partly why people stick around so long. You know, even when they’re, they are feeling better, I think the opportunity to continue giving is really underestimated sometimes.

Judith: I don’t know if this is the right place to interject that, but I think about that when I think about the coaching calls, too. I was coached a lot at the beginning. I would sign up every single week. And then I didn’t, I do it less, do it very irregularly now, but being a part of the chat, it’s the same thing. You have an opportunity to support somebody. You have an opportunity to say, yeah, we’re with you. We understand something. We may not understand everything, but we understand something about this. And we’re willing to be with you in whatever your experiencing.

Krista: Yeah, be with you as you figure out what your understanding is.

Judith: Yes. We’re willing to just be with you. And that’s huge.

Krista: So huge. I, if I could go back, I always think about like, what would I tell myself in the early days, as someone who just had really swallowed the narrative of hyper independence of like, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, like, you know, if you can do it, you should and didn’t really think a group was for me. I wish I could have, I wish I would have had a similar experience sooner because I just tried to do it on my own.

Judith: That’s one of the, I thought about that idea of like, what would I tell someone in those early days? And I wrote down a bunch of things and then I looked at them and I thought, well, the first thing I would tell them is that they’re loved, that there are other people that know this thing that are in this place and that they’re loved. But more practically, yeah, find a connection and it might not be the connection you think. Often it’s not, I think, the connection you think, but find a connection that means something to you in some way and be faithful to it. Even if it doesn’t feel, you might not feel that much if you’re still in that acute grief. It might feel like it’s just something in my planner and I’m going to do it. But then it grows and it just grows and it brings the wind back.

Krista: Okay. So, I want to talk about writing and I want to talk about tapping. Where should we go first?

Judith: Okay. In some ways, they kind of fit in the same category for me. And that’s still the answer to the question of what do you do when you’re in this place where you don’t know what to do? And for me, finding new patterns or old patterns that I could reinvent and having rituals was really important, and doing things where I could connect to myself. We just talked about connecting to community.

So writing was that place for me. It was a place that I loved. I love language. I’ve loved language my whole life. I made a career of loving language. And it was hard for me at first to go back to writing because on the day that my husband died, I was very absorbed in a writing project. And so I did the what if for a while about, oh, if I hadn’t been so absorbed in that writing project, maybe I would have all the things we do to ourselves. But yeah, so writing was this place where I could sort of find myself, and it was also a place where I could mourn.

Sometimes I call my writing morning pages, but not in the traditional sense, in the M O U R N I N G pages. So I wrote every day and I wrote every day for hours. And that was a place where I could mourn Paul in that private way and do something that I loved, which was to play with language. So it gave me great joy while being in great pain to try to find the right words to express, describe, show what grief was like for me.

Krista: How did you decide what to write? Was it a particular structure or framework or just kind of whatever felt like it needed to come out?

Judith: I guess I have a structure and a framework that kind of got invented along the way, but is something that I’ve done in the past as well, which is I write kind of moments of being. I think Emily Dickinson calls them, but I try to capture these moments of, what does this moment feel like when I handed the death certificate to the person at the motor vehicle department so I could get his car to be my car and have her not meet my eyes. So I’ll just take scenes like that, but then also moments of just here I am trying to be a person in the singular when all I know how to do is be a person in the plural and try to describe what that we-ness is or try to say what it’s like to have absence be a presence in your house. An absence is living with you, or uncertainty as my new roommate. I try to describe those aspects of grief really as I’m going through them.

Krista: How has writing for you changed over the last three years? How are you using it?

Judith: I’m not writing several hours a day anymore. I think that in the early parts of my grief, writing was the way that I could get through the day. So it’s not that anymore. Now, I’m taking that and trying to turn it into like a painting, like all the paint is on the canvas, but now I’m trying to make it something that resembles more like a work of art than a personal expression. And both those things obviously can be true. So I was working from the inside out. Now I’m working from the outside in.

Krista: How much have you let others in on what you’ve written?

Judith: Not much yet, but I’m getting to the point. I’m getting there. That’s not exactly true. I have someone that I work with my writing and she knows all about the project and what I’m doing with it and what I’m trying to do with it, and she’s read part of it. I’m getting ready to have it be read by more people.

Krista: How do you feel about that?

Judith: You know, at first, I wanted people to read it desperately because I wanted people to, here’s what’s happening, you know? Now I don’t feel that way and I’m feeling of course nervous about it. That’s part of what you do as a writer is just like, you put yourself out there and, oh well, but I think again, this is part of something MGO has given me is that I now feel this real desire to see if anything that I have written could possibly resonate with somebody else to their benefit, even if it’s one paragraph, then how can I not do that?

Krista: Yeah. And the part of that is just being willing for it to not resonate with people and be willing for people to not like it and it’s just directly proportionate to whether or not we get to share it and connect. So how about tapping? Since that’s such a huge part of your life these days.

Judith: Where do I start? So, tapping, it’s another thing I learned from MGO, is about tapping. I’d never heard of it, and never experienced it, and never would have tried it if I hadn’t felt like I was so underwater and something had to help me. And again, I got, I have to do something. What can I do? Here’s something somebody says might help. Okay. I’m on board.

Krista: It’s weird, but I’ll try it.

Judith: Oh, it’s so weird and I’m not going to like it. And so I tried it and I got the tapping solution app and I did that, but then I really had a turning point when I worked with Melanie through MGO.

Krista: So for people listening, Melanie Faye is who, the tapping coach that I bring in twice a month to do tapping calls with Mom Goes On members. And also she’s my personal tapping coach. My kids tap with her.

Judith: Yeah. And now I do.

Krista: And now you do too.

Judith: But the turning point was, it was just October. So Paul died in July and my oldest daughter was three months pregnant when he passed. And here it is October and we’re planning for me to go to be with her when the baby comes.

Krista: In the UK.

Judith: In the UK. Yeah, I forgot that part because even getting myself out the door at that point, you know, was a big deal. So, I’m thinking this is something I desperately want to be able to do. And I didn’t know how I’d have the emotional resources to do that and not be just a needy, grieving, which no woman giving birth needs.

Krista: Exactly. Yeah. You don’t want to be that for your daughter, having just given birth.

Judith: No. No. And I know that having birthed my own babies. So I went on a tapping call and we tapped through it. I don’t remember much about that tapping call. I remember that I cried quite a bit. I remember articulating how much I wanted to be with my daughter. And somehow three months later I was on a plane. Now other things happened after that. I was coached on it, but that tapping seemed to like open the possibility to me in a way that I had not experienced before. It had opened a possibility that wasn’t cognitive. It wasn’t something I thought about. It wasn’t like, oh, I changed my mind about this. Now, eventually, yeah, I kind of did change my mind, but it was a body experience first. That’s when I was hooked.

And so I’ve been tapping ever since. And I guess it was last July, so almost a year ago I got certified. And again, I signed up for the class. Well, you know, maybe I’ll do this, but I don’t know. Oh my gosh. I did the class and then another turning point was volunteering in MGO and working with women who were in all kinds of grief situations and grief is, as we know, complicated. It wasn’t just sadness, it’s a whole bunch of other things like I don’t know who I am and I can’t trust myself and I’m afraid of everything. So, you know, I had that experience of being able to do tapping sessions with so many of my wonderful MGO sisters. And that taught me a ton and it was kind of like having intensive training and something. It was an intensive training. And so, I’m working to develop my own practice. I want to work primarily with grief, and it’s a unique way to offer love.

And I think what it does is it provides a structure and a process and a context where you can be with your broken heart and it doesn’t kill you. And we think we don’t want to allow that to happen. And there’s good reason for that, obviously, because we have to keep going. But when you’re in a tapping session with someone, you’re there, they’re there, you’re both tapping, and there’s both a relational attunement and this body thing that’s going on with your nervous system. And suddenly you have this place where your broken heart is welcome and it doesn’t feel so overwhelming.

Krista: Yeah. And it’s not like anybody’s trying to fix your broken heart either.

Judith: No, it reminds me of Pema Chödrön. She talks a lot about being with your feelings, as we do in MGO. She talks about having an intimacy with these things that we want to run from. And I think that what tapping does is provide you a place where you can have that intimacy and not want to turn away.

Krista: Yeah. Helps you feel safe enough that you can.

Judith: Yeah, you get a, you get this little safe haven. Yeah, so I think it’s a remarkable tool. I think the word tool almost does it disservice. It’s such a, you know, mysterious human phenomenon. So yeah, so I’m working with that and I’m trying to merge a little bit of writing with it, which is really interesting because writing is a way of documenting feelings, obviously, or documenting anything. Getting it on paper, but writing also brings out things. So we discover things when we write that we didn’t know we were thinking, that we didn’t know we were feeling. It’s a constructive activity. And tapping is kind of similar. When we tap, we might think we’re starting to tap on X. And then suddenly, these things come up.

Krista: Truer words were never spoken. Yeah. It’s like, surprise. Oh.

Judith: So when you just put a little bit of writing, not extensive writing, because you don’t want to interrupt the tapping experience. If you tap and then you pause and you just write a little bit about what came up, and then you tap on what came up. And then something else will come up and you write about that. But then when you write, something comes up when you’re writing and you share it and you tap on that. So I’ve done this with a group and it’s really quite interesting to see what happens. And it was a themed group. It was a group around loss. So people were doing that. But yeah, the two experiences, tapping and writing are both asking something from us. And then we have the opportunity to explore it sort of in a language-based way and in a body-based way and allow those two things to interact, which is really cool. It’s just really cool.

Krista: If I’m imagining somebody listening and they’re like, okay, but why should I do it? Like, what’s in it for me? What would you tell someone who said, I don’t really understand why I would want to tap. Like, yes, okay, my heart’s broken.

Judith: I think it allows a person to be in a space where their body gets calmed, but then the space that opens up has this creative potential. Especially when we think about grief as energy, which is how I like to think about it. We have that grief, we have that energy. We can try to push it down, we can try to push it aside, we can try to distract, and all those things have their place, right? We do those things. But when we’re tapping, it asks us to open that and use that energy. And we can have new insights. I don’t even want to use the word insights so much because it seems like it’s only cognitive, but I think insights are in the heart and the mind. The Japanese have this great word, which I can’t remember right now, where they link heart and mind. Heart mind is one word. And I think when we tap, we’re in our heart mind, and it opens that to new possibilities.

And that’s going to sound, I can hear my acute grief ears trying to take that in, and you want to say, no, there’s no possibility. And it’s not magic and it’s not that it happens overnight and it’s not that it always happens, but the possibilities of opening a new space that you don’t think exists for you where something can grow. Yeah, I think tapping is another way of being creative in the world.

Krista: It’s so interesting to hear how different people describe it and come to it and benefit from it. For me, it’s when I tap, it allows whatever is in my way of knowing what I know to fall. You know, it just kind of helps me quiet. And then when you said, like, sometimes you don’t know where it’s going to go, you don’t, but it goes where it needs to go in a way that always feels like, oh, yes, I knew this. Somewhere I knew this, and now I can kind of get quiet enough or feel safe enough for it to come up.

Judith: Maybe a more concrete answer to that question, especially for grieving women, is that it provides a place, and again, this may sound odd, but my experience has taught me that it provides a place where you can go back to that moment that’s still unresolved, but you don’t really want to go there, or you can go back and have that conversation with your person, and you can do that because, again, you’re being held in this safe space with another human being who gets it if you’re tapping with someone. And you’re, your nervous system is getting all that benefit and you can reconsolidate, I think is the word, but I might have it wrong, memories.

And I think that’s very real, only because I’ve experienced it, you know? I know it’s written about theoretically. I’ve seen it happen. So it is a place where you can do that kind of work.

Krista: Yes. In a way that doesn’t flood you. If you’re working with a person who understands what they’re doing, right, in a way that doesn’t flood you or…

Judith: Yes. It doesn’t flood you.

Krista: I’m watching the whatever season of The Pitt is out right now. I think it’s season three. I don’t remember, but it’s just the other day, the man that I’m dating and I, we were talking about it, and I watched the CPR scene and I was just telling him, like, it’s just such a, it’s such a testament to tapping that I can watch that scene and my body doesn’t go back to where it used to go back to, right? It actually feels, I can be with the characters in the movie or in the show without my heart beat racing and without, you know, the memories of everything that I went through and watching and that’s absolutely because of tapping.

Judith: And even within the tapping sessions, I’ve had women experience feelings of real joy and peace and happiness that they are able to be in that place again instead of dreading it or avoiding it or so yeah, there are these moments that, it’s mysterious. It’s still mysterious to me. I think that’s part of the beauty of it. And it’s really taught me about the beauty of grief. It’s taught me that because you’re able to be intimate with grief, you’re able to see more of it than the part that’s eating you alive. And it does. It eats you alive. But when you’re in a tapping session, you see the parts that the tenderness that’s growing in you because of the grief, the love that is still there and wants to go out into the world still. There’s a real beauty to that. There’s a real beauty to that. There’s a beauty to the idea that grief is an experience that we all have. And it ultimately allows us to love each other more.

Krista: So writing, tapping, where else is life going for you?

Judith: Well, it’s going to England very soon. So I’ve been a little preoccupied with that. I haven’t thought about this, so I’m just throwing it out. I mean, I’ve thought about it, but not in this context. I’m figuring out what it is to get older. That’s a place life is going for me, that I’m entering a part of my life. I’m selling a house that I’ve been in for 22 years and I’m leaving a state that I’ve been here for 30 years. Where I’m going, just looking at the actuary, what do they call them? The tables that tell you how long people usually live. There’s no way I’ll ever live in this new place as long as you’ve lived in the current place. And that doesn’t cause me to feel despair. I feel like my life is opening up to how do I want to be in the world as I’m leaving it? Again, I don’t mean to say that I’m dying.

Krista: Yeah, I mean it’s math, right? It’s math.

Judith: Yeah. So, that’s why tapping and writing, because those are ways that I can enter the world in authentic, loving ways. At least that’s how I experience it.

Krista: Sounds like it’s very – you’re going into what is next in a very intentional, conscious, purposeful way.

Judith: And maybe looking back, maybe in a more intentional way than ever before. I mean, certainly when I decided to go to graduate school and decided to have a career, nothing was accidental. It was all intentional, but this has a bigger feel to it. Like, this is the capstone, girl. There’s not a lot of do-overs after this chapter. You know, this is, so, and I don’t feel the pressure to get it right. I feel the pressure to let things fall away. Not the pressure. I feel the invitation to let things fall away.

I read this just the other day in Parker Palmer. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Parker Palmer’s work, but he was is very apropos and maybe is apropos for some of the people that would be listening to this podcast. He says, as we grow older, or in this case, moving and having lost a husband, it’s not about what you want to hang on to. It’s about what you want to give yourself to. That works for me when I look at the books in the living room and trying to decide which ones are going with me, and it works when I decide much bigger human relationship kinds of things. It’s not about what I want to grasp. It’s about what I want to give to. Yeah, that’s the important thing to me right now. That’s the title of the next chapter.

Krista: I love it. I also love that kind of clarity doesn’t require that you know anything about how it’s going to be. There’s so much you don’t know, and yet also you do.

Judith: For me, I don’t have any clarity when I’m facing it. And then when I put that in my mind, do I want to hang on or do I want to give myself to it? It’s almost instantly clear.

Krista: Yeah. So in that way you kind of do, you kind of know, okay, well I just keep returning to the same question. I keep using the same guidance and making decisions from the same place. So I don’t know what it will look like, but I kind of, I know what it will be like in a way.

Judith: Yeah, and at the same time, I know that in two days I might read something else because that’s how I am. And I’ll go, oh, that’s also a really… Generally, I’m lucky and they don’t contradict.

Krista: Was there anything that you had really hoped we would talk about today that I haven’t asked you about? I’m glancing at my notes. I don’t think so. I don’t think so. Okay. So people are going to want to know how to get in touch with you. I think they will. How, what’s the best way?

Judith: So maybe this is something to just briefly talk about. The best way is I have an email that is tappingintogrief@gmail.com. One word, tapping into grief. And that’s the name of my website, so TappingIntoGrief.com. And that maybe sums up what I’ve been trying to say in so many words is that we want to tap into it. We want to go into grief and be there with it. And there’s so much to discover there.

Krista: I love it. And people can hire you. You’re accepting clients?

Judith: Oh, yes, I’m accepting, sorry, yeah, I’m accepting clients and I’m trying a couple of new things. I’ll be offering a tapping and writing group again, and I’ll also be offering kind of a silent tapping group where, one thing I’ve learned is from the wonderful women that I’ve had the opportunity to work with, thank you so much, is that so often I hear, I really want to tap. I just haven’t done it. I just don’t do it. And this would be a place where you would come for half an hour, 35 minutes. We’d have a little group. We would just tap together. I would lead tapping through the points. We would keep a journal of our tapping experiences and I would offer a few thoughts about tapping and, so it’ll be a good place for people who just want to try it out.

Krista: Will you be speak, like actually, is it kind of no words tapping or are you intending to tap with words?

Judith: I will tap with some words, but they’ll be very generic words. And then there’ll be periods of silence. So I will guide into the tapping. You know what it reminds me of is if you’ve ever been to a guided meditation. So often guided meditations will begin with kind of a settling set of phrases, and then you might have a period of silence, and then you might have a few more sentences and then periods of silence. So it won’t be complete silent tapping because silent tapping on your own is hard.

Krista: Yeah, okay.

Judith: So they’ll have the group support. They’ll have some language support, but as with all groups and has always been for me in my teaching is you follow the group.

Krista: Yeah, what the group needs is you adjust. Yeah.

Judith: And what the group needs is what happens. And then people have opportunities to share their tapping experiences, which I think is sometimes a really nice thing. Instead of I do the tapping and I leave or I do the tapping and I’m done, but to be able to say this happened and that happened and. So there’ll be a little bit of conversation afterwards as well.

Krista: Are you working with only widows or grief more broadly?

Judith: Grief more broadly. Yeah. Any kind of grief.

Krista: Okay. Amazing. Well, as you know, I’m a little picky about who I recommend and feel comfortable letting my clients work with. And I am so excited. You know this, but I am so excited that the world will get to, people who want to tap with you can. I think you, I think you, it is a natural fit for you. And I think people are going to be in really good hands with you. I know that they are.

Judith: Oh, thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you so much. And the opportunities I’ve had to work with tapping with the women in MGO have those experiences, I’ve been the experiences that said, oh, this is what I have to do.

Krista: It’s just been so mutually beneficial. It’s helped them, it helps you, it just, it kind of grows into its own thing that will continue outside of Mom Goes On. And it’s a beautiful thing. Thank you so much for being willing to come and talk about your story and people to work with you.

Judith: Thank you. Thank you for having me. It’s always wonderful to talk to you.

Krista: Same. I totally agree. I totally agree. All right. So TappingIntorGrief.com and tappingintogrief@gmail.com. Amazing, Judith. Thank you so much.

Judith: Thank you.

If you like what you’ve been hearing on this podcast and want to create a future you can truly get excited about even after the loss of your spouse, I invite you to join my Mom Goes On coaching program. It’s small group coaching just for widowed moms like you where I’ll help you figure out what’s holding you back and give you the tools and support you need so you can move forward with confidence.

Please don’t settle for a new normal that’s less than what you deserve. Go to coachingwithkrista.com and click Work With Me for details and next steps. I can’t wait to meet you.