Photo: Cristian Asame - Unsplash

These days it feels hard to find a safe place to rest your eyes and nervous system. Turn on the news, and you see repeated footage of the catastrophic flooding and death in Nepal, the war in Iran, discussions of higher gas and food prices, and watch more people suffer. Our world does feel much less stable than it used to.

I’m a sensitive person and find my nervous system needs more tending these days. I know that morning meditation is needed to start the day calmly, and my regular exercise program. But what do I reach for the most? It’s gratitude.

You might wonder why I’m talking about gratitude at a time like this, but it’s exactly the right time to be grateful for every little thing in your life.

I’ve been here before — not this exact crisis, but one with far higher stakes.

When I was in a near-fatal car wreck in Baja, Mexico, in 2017, I experienced something I still don’t fully have words for during my third abdominal surgery. I had a near-death experience that was in a place of pure consciousness, in a black void between worlds, with no awareness of my body, hearing and answering not with my voice but telepathically. In that place, I was asked by what I believe was a spiritual guide how I chose to go through what was happening to me. And from somewhere that wasn’t my fear, wasn’t my ego (it was my higher Self), I answered: I don’t want to be a victim. I’ll take the high road and choose love and gratitude to heal.

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I didn’t have control over the accident. I don’t have control over war, or the climate, or the price of food, either.

But I’ve learned that control was never really the thing gratitude was offering me in the first place.

Gerontologist Dr. Lydia Manning spent years interviewing people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s — people who’d survived illness, loss, grief, the accumulated weight of a long life — trying to understand what let some of them thrive while others were crushed by the very same hardships. What she found wasn’t toughness, and it wasn’t optimism. It was transformation.

The most resilient people weren’t just surviving what happened to them — they were being changed by it, and gratitude ran through nearly every one of their stories as a thread holding them together.

Ruth, one of the women in Manning’s research, put it simply after her husband died: “If I didn’t have my faith, the things that have happened to me — I don’t know what I would do without it… there are too many unusual things.” She wasn’t grateful because everything was fine. She was grateful in spite of everything not being fine — which turns out to be exactly the point.

Neuroscientist Glenn Fox has spent his career studying what gratitude actually does inside the brain. In one striking study, he and his colleagues played recordings for people in an fMRI scanner — testimony from Holocaust survivors describing moments when a stranger helped them at real risk to themselves, in the middle of unimaginable danger.

The feelings of gratitude those stories evoked lit up brain regions tied to stress relief, moral judgment, and human bonding.

This wasn’t gratitude for a sunny day. This was gratitude discovered in the middle of the worst that people can do to each other — and it still worked.

That’s the gratitude I want to talk about today. Not the easy kind, for when life is going well. The kind that shows up anyway, in a world that’s genuinely on fire in more ways than one.

Here’s what I don’t mean by any of this: I’m not saying pretend the war isn’t happening, or that prices aren’t higher, or that the climate isn’t a real and serious threat. Being grateful for what you have in your life doesn’t ask you to stop caring, stop paying attention, or stop trying to make things better.

Gratitude changes your nervous system’s relationship to the parts you cannot control today — so you’re not living in a constant state of bracing.

Fox has a phrase for what develops with practice: HD gratitude — a higher-resolution, more finely tuned way of noticing. Not just the big, obvious things, but the small ones that are often overlooked when your attention is focused on everything that’s wrong. The neighbor who waved. The bed you slept in last night. The friend who texted “thinking of you” for no reason at all. You don’t have to fix the whole world today.

Find one true thing — your favorite cup of tea, the flowers you picked yesterday in a vase you find beautiful.

You just have to find the one true thing you’re grateful for, right now, in the middle of everything you can’t control. That’s not denial. That’s the high road — and it’s still available to you, even here, even now.

If this post gave you clarity or a new perspective, consider sharing it with someone who might find it helpful, and tap ❤️ or 🔁 to help more people discover it on Substack. Thank you!

XO, Sherold

What do you do to regulate your nervous system when the world feels crazy? I’d love to know.

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If this resonated, the articles that started my Unbreakable series are here → What Makes Some People Unbreakable and What Unbreakable People Know About Themselves.

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I’m heading out to one of our last camping trips of the season. Many of you have animals and will be interested in today’s interview with Karen Anderson, an animal communicator to whom I was referred 20 years ago when my brother was killed.

This conversation does touch on my brother’s case, but it’s mainly about Karen’s experience in communicating with animals. I hope you enjoy it and will let me know in the comments below.

Hello friend. I’m Sherold Barr, a master life coach and a writer.

Quick note before we start our interview today. I want to let you know that this conversation touches on the loss of my younger brother. And while I won’t be going into detail, I want you to know that going in. It’s not appropriate for young children, and it does deal with a situation in which my brother was killed.

That’s how I found Karen. A friend of mine mentioned your name. I had never even heard of animal communication, but I was so invested in trying to find out what had happened to my brother, who was missing for three years. That was really tragic for my family, and he was killed. It was 21 years ago.

Today I’m excited to talk with Karen Anderson. She’s a pet loss specialist, an animal communicator, a coach, an author, and the owner of a nonprofit pet sanctuary called Painted Rain Ranch. And that’s located in Washington. And she runs the pet sanctuary with her husband, Danny. The Sanctuary relies on private donations. And we’re going to talk about that once I introduce Karen, who can tell you about her mission to save overlooked and abandoned pets. And it’s just a really beautiful story of how she’s evolved into doing these rescues and saving these unwanted animals.

Karen, I am so happy to talk to you today and to really spread the word about what you do and how this is done now, because it’s been 20 years since I’ve talked to you. So why don’t you tell everybody how you got into this and what you were doing before? Some of your stories are on the podcast, and you can direct them to that as well. I would be happy to. And I can’t believe it’s been 20 years. Oh my gosh, it’s shocking.

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Karen: I got into this quite by, I’ll just say, divine intervention. I don’t have a good explanation because I sure didn’t grow up saying I want to be an animal communicator. That was not it at all. So, it literally fell into my world in a very unusual way. In fact, I had spent about 18 years in the mortgage industry. I didn’t know that. Hated it. Goes against every grain in every cell in my body. And this weird shift happened. I wanted to give back. I wanted to do something different. I felt like I was not contributing in any way. But this was weird, Sherold, because nothing happened to me. There wasn’t this, you know, big light bulb moment. It was just this strange draw or pulling sensation. I don’t know how else to describe it, but I felt drawn or pulled to get into law enforcement.

I know. Mortgage business to cop. How does that work? So, female cop, too. Exactly. Right. Well, that was the tough part because it was in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. I had left the mortgage industry.

I said, “That’s it. I’m done. I never want to go back ever, ever, ever.” Ended up going back. But for the time being, I started volunteering at a local animal control facility in Colorado that was housed under the sheriff’s department. So that was my exposure to the sheriff’s department that I ended up working for. I would ride along with the animal control officers. I would ride along with the deputies, and I caught the bug.

I don’t understand it, other than that this is just how things happened and fell into my life at the time. And I just rolled with it, loving every minute of helping animals with animal control right along with the deputies. And then I made a very big decision to go full-time as a deputy sheriff.

That’s where the animal communication snowballed.

That’s where it all came to fruition, and everything just took off from there because weird things started to happen to me on crime scenes. I would be there taking a witness statement or working with the victim or whatever I was doing, and the animals that were there- the resident animals that, you know, people have pets, dogs and cats or whatever- they started giving me accurate messages about what I was investigating. It’s crazy, right? I thought I was losing my mind. I really did. I thought I was nuts. Something’s wrong with me. I have some kind of mental issue. But at the same time, in my personal life, I was very much into the spiritual side of being more connected to pets, animal communication, and all that. So, these two things kind of happened at once, magically. And that’s where I realized that, as a law enforcement officer, you have to be in a state of heightened awareness just to go home at the end of your shift to be safe. That kickstarted my intuition. That supercharged, turbocharged intuition in me. That’s just what I needed to do. You don’t have to be a police officer to learn animal communication. Not at all. But that’s what I needed to experience.

My early days as a deputy sheriff were very interesting and very unusual.

I was getting very accurate, detailed information from animals on crime scenes about where suspects were hiding, who was the aggressor in a domestic violence situation. It was really mind-blowing, and I couldn’t tell anyone.

Sherold: I was going to ask you, how in the world- well, did you do extra work to begin to show you knew where to go with the direction? Did it help you get into it enough to solve it?

Karen: Yes. I started to pick up on things thanks to animals that were helping me. And as a rookie, you don’t know anything as a rookie. You think you know everything, but you don’t. I was able to do some pretty amazing stuff as a rookie and the only female officer in the department. So, it was a very interesting time. And the more I realized that the animals could tell me things, such as where a suspect was hiding and what had happened before I arrived at a crime scene, which was later corroborated by other eyewitness testimony.

Then I started to dive deep into animal communication.

So then I was paralleling that you’re doing both at the same time. Exactly. And it was fascinating to me. I was hook, line, and sinker in. I wanted to learn everything I could about it because it was just fascinating to me, especially when the information I was receiving from the animals was often more accurate than what the human witnesses were telling me. Interesting. Because the animals have no bias. They’re honest. They’re truthful. And in law enforcement, we have a saying: if someone’s lips are moving, they’re lying. Someone’s always covering up for someone else or, you know, there are always two sides to the human story. But the animal story was always accurate.

Sherold: Karen, I wanted to know how many years ago you were in law enforcement. You left law enforcement and started doing animal communication full-time because now you’re retired. So you have other people helping you, and they’re trained. You’ve trained them because you do trainings. Do you still lead trainings?

Karen: I do. I do coaching. Yes. We can see that on your website.

Sherold: My brother had asked me, I think about 10 years before he died, if anything ever happened to him, would I take his cats? And when someone asks you that, you, you know, I’m an animal person. I’m an animal nut. Let’s put it that way. I care deeply about animals. And I said, “Sure, I’ll take the cats.” So the worst-case scenario happened: my husband and I were in Barcelona. We flew back, got the cats, and flew them back home. And at the time, I had a giant yellow lab and a bichon. So and we were in a I was in a condo in Portland. So I had four animals, and two of them were so traumatized. A friend told me about Karen, and I got her number.

I was a skeptic going into those conversations [Sherold]

You and I talked. I was a skeptic going into those conversations. I had no idea that, you know, that this could happen. And we talked two different times. I sent those conversations to the detectives on the case. So, they had it. And what was uncanny to me was that, I think, one of the cats was named Catman, a black ebony Siamese, Byron’s favorite. Catman came through, and I asked, where was his body? You know, where was he? And do you remember that? Can you speak to that just a little bit? Because, uh, at the time I didn’t realize what was happening until his body was discovered later. I can talk about that.

Karen: Absolutely. And I get chills about it still to this day, and it’s been, you know, decades later, but it was so profound. It affected me so deeply because I didn’t know, going into it, whether I would be able to help you with any information. So, I was on the skeptical side of my own self, my own abilities.

I opened up to Catman’s energy. It’s literally just like you want to pick up your phone and call a friend.

That’s what it that’s what animal communication is. It’s opening a line of communication, texting or making a phone call, energetically speaking, of course. So, I opened up a space, a meditative space, for Catman’s energy to come through. And I use a photo to make the connection. That’s how I dial them up. And he was alive and well at the time. Both of the cats were alive and well at the time. And as his energy comes through, I can sense it. Much like when you’re standing in line at the grocery store, you’re looking straight ahead, but someone comes in line behind you. You don’t have to turn around, but you can feel them moving into your space. So, I can feel that. I can feel their energy come in. And it’s always a good feeling because animals are wonderful and amazing. So, I felt Catman’s energy come in. And I remember very specifically that I started getting flashes and images in my mind. Much like if I were to ask you right now, think about what’s on your kitchen counter next to your sink. You could probably get that image right in your mind. So that’s what it looks like. It’s just an overlay over what you’re looking at at the moment. And I started getting images of what happened and they were very vivid. They were very detailed.

I could see, interestingly enough, from the cat’s perspective because when this situation happened with Byron, the cats were under the bed hiding because there was, um, kind of a tussle, something going on there. Yeah. So, the cats were hiding, so I could literally see as if I were peeking out from underneath. So, I could see through their eyes, and I was watching what was happening in a mini movie of sorts, and then I’d get the flash of something, such as an article of clothing or what somebody was wearing. I shared all of that information with you, and it comes very fast, and it doesn’t linger. It doesn’t stay there for you to analyze it and go, “Oh, what have we here?” No, it’s as fast as it comes in, then it’s gone again. So I have to share it with you very quickly.

And one of the messages that came through that we had no idea what it was was that I kept hearing either two fours, as in the number four, or two forks, like a spoon and a fork. Two fours or two forks. I didn’t know. You didn’t know. We didn’t know what that was. And we both went I don’t know. Didn’t make any sense at the time. And a lot of the messages that come through don’t make sense right away. And it wasn’t until 3 years later, when you reached out to me and said,

“Karen, you won’t believe this.” But shocking. Yes. His body was found at 2424 Midway Road. Two fours. Two fours. It was incredible. And the two was in there too, but I didn’t pick up on that. But 24 24s, two fours, two fours. And so again, at that point I was not a skeptic. I couldn’t believe this. But then, you know, over the years, I began to pay more attention. I had other, my own animals. I think I did maybe another reading with you at some point or another session.

I’ve been listening to your podcast; somehow you’ve been on my radar again, and you know, I just roll with it kind of. If somebody’s on my radar, I don’t question it; I start paying attention. I’m a big fan of the Telepathy Tapes. And this year, season two of the Telepathy Tapes is all about near-death experiences. And there’s one on there about animal communication, with research they’ve done. And then I believe Rupert Sheldrick, who is a famous scientist. He conducted studies showing that dogs know when their owners are coming home, and he filmed the results.

But the thing that’s fascinating is, um, they’re going into near-death experiences. And since I had one nine years ago, um, as a result of a car wreck.

Karen, say more about that. I’m happy to. It’s the same thing. And to add even more credibility to what you’re saying, in my almost 30 years now of animal communication, I also do mediumship, which is communicating with deceased human loved ones, but also, Sherold, I’ve communicated with Alzheimer patients that are nonverbal, dementia patients that are nonverbal, and I’ve also had communication with several in comas in a coma in the hospital. Clear, bright, articulate, accurate, detailed information. Fully aware of who’s there, who’s with them, what’s happening around them. Fully aware. So, this is real. I’m getting goosebumps. I know.

Sherold: How has this changed you?

Karen: I started this back in the late 80s. Yes. So I was before any of this science was even close to where it is now, and there was nothing out there, and people just thought I was nuts. It just didn't have a great reputation, but I think it’s going- it’s changing now because of the research, you know, and is proving it. The science is there. Yes. And anyone who’s lived with an animal, a pet, a companion- anyone who has lived with a companion- you know that there is an unspoken, nonverbal language between you. You know it because you’ve sensed it, you felt it; you either knew something was wrong or you sensed what they needed. And I’m not talking about verbal cues, crying at the door, wanting to go out, or being hungry; I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the subtle energy that you pick up that something was either wrong, or they needed something, or they wanted something. Whatever it was, you’ve picked up on it. You have to share the same space. They’re with us almost 247. Mine are, and it’s something that you can’t really describe.

So telepathy, mind-to-mind communication, is just literally sending a thought from one mind to another.

That mind can be animal; it can be human, inner species; it doesn’t matter. It’s mind-to-mind telepathic communication. Every thought we have has an energetic substance to it. And that energetic substance goes out to our place of intention where we want it to go, and it can be received and understood by the recipient, and an answer can be sent back, or, you know, that message can get answered and come back. The sensitivity to picking up on telepathic communication is a skill anyone can learn. It is not something you have to be born with because we are all born with intuition. I just saw a huge light anomaly float by me. Not with my eye, but on camera. I don’t know if you saw that, but it was right over this shoulder. You know, I saw I thought I saw something. Yeah, something. I didn’t; my mind didn’t really pay attention to it. I’ll have to go back and look. Yeah. So, this is basically a skill, just like playing the piano, cooking, tennis, singing, whatever skill or hobby that you want to learn.

The more you practice, the more you work at it, the better you get. And that’s all animal communication is. It is a skill that can be sharpened and uh and honed over time. With practice and intention, but you also have to have the passion for it because it can be very heartbreaking, especially when it comes to pet loss. It can be very tragic when terrible things happen to people’s pets, or if there’s a breakup and the pets get separated. There’s a lot of emotional attachment there. And everyone’s different. My journey was to be a cop first. So I developed a very tough layer of skin. So I was able to work my way through it. And for some people, they can’t. They’re just too sensitive and it’s too painful and it hurts them too deeply. I’m not saying it doesn’t hurt me, but I’m better able to process and work with those emotions because it is extremely emotional. Think about the animals people consume, factory-farmed. Think about animals that are in shelters. Think about wildlife. You see animals being hit by cars along the roadside. There’s a lot that comes at you once you open the door to that sensitivity. You are now subjected to all of that, and it can be overwhelming. So, fortunately, I worked very hard at learning how to literally turn it on and off.

So when I was working, I was fully connected, fully dialed in, and focused. When I wasn’t working, meaning when I wasn’t in a communication session, I turned everything down. Didn’t turn it off. I just turned the volume down to cope, because otherwise it would be overwhelming, right? So, to go back to the mind-to- mind telepathy, everyone watching this, everyone listening right now, you’ve already done this. You’ve done this in some way, shape, or form. You’ve heard of mother’s intuition. I’m not a human mom, but mothers have an intuition about their children. They sense when something’s wrong. Twins: when twins know there’s something going on with the other twin, they’re nowhere near each other, but they know something is going on with the other. This has been proven time and time again. So, there is a science behind it. And I love that science backs it up, and it’s there. You just have to do your research. There’s also the quantum realm, which I’m fascinated. I don’t know enough to be dangerous.

Sherold: I’m fascinated by the quantum realm because I’m right there with you and going that direction because this near-death experience changed my entire life.

I went from materialism, the way we’re all brought up, to that’s an empty life. A spiritual life, an inner world, and I’m going to be fine no matter what happens to me out here. And that’s what we all need: an inner life, a rich inner life. So I’m right there with you, the quantum field. And we’re learning more and more all the time. I find that the more questions I ask about how this works? How can I do this? You know, how is this even possible? I find that the answers get more elusive. So, it’s one of those things where you just have to roll with it. You just have to go into it like you’re diving into a pool, and you just have to swim, and you have to enjoy the experience. When you start trying to peel away the layers of why this is working? How can this even be possible? That animal died.

How can you receive a message from something that is dead?

It’s almost as if the universe says, “No, sorry. You don’t get anything now. We’re shutting you down.” Part of it is realizing that there’s more to life than the physical reality you and I live in. There are far more things going on that we can't even wrap our heads around that we’ll someday all find out about. And you need this sense of understanding to be open to those possibilities. If you’re close-minded and closed off, which some people are for whatever reason, they’re not going to be as accepting, and they’re going to be the naysayers and, right, just the cynics and the ones saying, you know, terrible things about me, and you know, that’s fine. I’m not trying to prove anything to anyone. I’m just saying the science is there now to back up everything that I’ve been doing for the past 30 years. And I love it. I love that it’s finally catching up because there is proof, and telepathy has been around forever. The Aboriginal tribes were among the first to use telepathy to communicate with one another. This has been around for a very long time. This is not something new.

Native Americans commune with nature. They commune with everything around them: the animals, the environment. This is that: to you and me, it might seem odd or strange, but it has a history. Yeah. And I think the more and more I’m believing that we don’t see so much of what’s going on. We don’t understand that reality. And this, uh, for example, just the telepathy tapes, but there’s so much research going on with the quantum field and, uh, consciousness, which is what I’m very interested in because consciousness is tied to energy, and we’re all energetic beings, and that’s a whole fascinating area in itself.

Sherold: I just want to close the loop on my brother: the case is a cold case, and it may never be solved. But somebody will probably talk at some point. When I think Karen was involved those first few years, the material there was a second session that we did. I don’t really want to go through that, but there was also more very clear information about who might have done it, and the initials, and the investigator sent me a photograph of someone at the time who was, you know, in trouble and in jail in Nashville, but I don’t think they ever talked to that person. But it’s just my family has resolved, you know, it’s just it’s it’s an old case. It’s sad, but I just want to say to you that it was one of the more- I guess- I’ll never forget it. It was so amazing, and that’s why we’re talking today.

Sherold: It took me a long time to be able to talk to you, you know, because I think we talked about it before, but I’m really thankful to you. And can you talk to us now about what you do and your books, and how you support your sanctuary, especially the kind of animals that you take care of, and the vet bills you need help with through donations?

Karen: The vet bills are crazy right now. So, in the work I do now, I have a group of hand-selected colleagues I trained who are also animal communicators. They are specialists, and they donate a portion of their session to the nonprofit. So, let’s say you book a session through my website, through the nonprofit website. Your full session is tax-deductible because those proceeds go to the nonprofit to help the animals. And we specialize in hospice, senior, special needs, abandoned, abused, and unwanted companion animals. That’s who we rescue. We have 30 acres in eastern Washington. It’s beautiful here. It looks like Germany. Beautiful evergreen trees. Germany is so clean and so pure, isn’t it? Yes. And we rescued these animals that have been through horrific experiences. Some of their humans have died, and no one will take them. Whatever the situation is, we don’t care. They come here, and they stay here until their final breath. Sherold, we do not adopt out. So, we’re very different than other sanctuaries that are always looking to find a home for those animals. This is their home. And so, we have the honor of being their caretakers for life. And it is a huge, huge commitment. It’s also sometimes very heartbreaking because we take the ones that have so many health issues. So, we lose a lot, but we also save a lot, help them, and they get to feel like they have a forever home. They get to feel love. They get to feel love. That is remarkable. Yes. And they never have to go through the trauma of being abandoned or overlooked again.

This is my childhood dream come true [Karen]

So everything I do now- my books, I’ve written three books on pet loss and grief and animal communication, the afterlife proceeds all go to the nonprofit. My coaching, it all goes to the nonprofit. Everything I do now funds the nonprofit because we are faced with such high bills; the costs are just insane right now, and even good food in general. Have you seen how much a case of really good pet food costs these days? It’s crazy. It is crazy. It is. I had to go out and buy new food for Teddy, who’s stopped eating. I know. And then the cats are horrified. I know. And the cats want to snub their nose. It’s like, are you crazy? You know how much that costs? Everything I do now is supporting the nonprofit, and we do not get grants. We do not get federal funding. We are strictly private donations. We rely on people like you and those who are watching right now, kind-hearted souls who understand that we need more sanctuaries like mine, where we are helping the pets that are overlooked at shelters. I work with local agencies here. So, if they have a particular animal that’s been there for a terribly long time and nobody’s showing any interest in them, they come here. Oh, that’s amazing. Now, do you have- are you working? So these agencies or places will call you and say We’ve got these animals. Is that how it works? Yes. And unfortunately I can’t take them all. Unfortunately, I do have, you know, limits, and I am the sole caretaker. My husband Danny does the heavy lifting around here, but the primary caretaking is me. Wow. So I can only take on as many as I can give them my full and complete 100% commitment to. So that is restrictive as well. We didn’t want to expand to the point of having employees and all that. We wanted to keep it just the two of us this way so we could give better care to the animals here with us at the sanctuary. So, with those limits, we do the best that we can. And so when we have the space, then we bring in more rescues.

And it is truly the greatest blessing I’ve ever experienced in my life. They blossom here. We’ve had feral cats that now love being picked up and held; they understand what a home is and what peace is, and they sleep. You know, animals that are scared, they don’t ever sleep. They’re always on edge and always waiting for the next thing to get them. These guys are zonked out. They’re out there right now while we’re talking. Everyone’s enjoying a nice nap. So, that is my joy right now. That is my passion, and just keeping the awareness that we need to adopt seniors. We need to adopt the less-than-perfect ones, missing an eye, missing a limb. Maybe they have a health issue. We need to be more open to bringing those into our homes than just the little puppies and kittens that everybody wants. There are so many older pets that just want a place to hang out, and they’re very low-maintenance for the most part.

My books are on Amazon and Audible, and I believe you can get them in Apple Books. There are a couple of other places you can get them, and they’re in so many languages. I was amazed. Yes, one of my books, The Amazing Afterlife of Animals, is in five different languages right now. And on Audible, it’s narrated in my voice. I have my first book. I haven’t uploaded those audio tapes yet because I just haven’t gotten to them, but they will be in my voice soon; the other two are in my voice. The Pet I Can’t Forget is my most recent book, and it’s about the signs and messages animals send us and how to stay connected even after they leave their physical bodies. And my website, where you can find all these books, courses, and everything, is simply my name: karenanderson.net. So that’s where all of this can be found. My nonprofit, paintedrainranch.org

Sherold: Karen, I’m so glad that you were able to help me at the time, and it was a high point in a difficult situation, because I became a believer, not a skeptic anymore. It was a It was an amazing experience.

Karen: And I’m sure your brother has everything to do with this. And I know he’s listening now. And I’m sure he’s smiling right now because, oh, yeah. We’re talking about him, and they love it when we talk about him. Oh, he was very flamboyant and, uh, an amazing guy and very, very talented. Very talented. So, his cats were his entire life. And I had a visitation. I’ll just say this: with him, maybe about, I don’t know, 6 months after the cats had been there, and it was more real. These visitations are a dream that is so real you never forget it, like a near-death experience, actually. And he was waving. I had a condo in Portland's Pearl District, and I was looking down at the street, holding Catman, when he looked up, waving so happily, and got into an old-fashioned yellow taxi. It’s kind of a rounded type of taxi, and he was waving up at me, and he was so happy that his cats were taken care of. Yep. And it was a way that, you know, during a sad situation that he knew, he was happy.

Karen: I know both of his cats are with him now. Correct. Yeah. Oh, yes. Both of them passed away. Yeah. So they’re all back together again. And that’s the beauty of the afterlife: we are reunited again with the pets that we love so much. Those bonds of love never die. Just like the bonds of love that we have with our human loved ones, you know, we are connected for eternity. And that love continues on. And it’s beautiful. And you never have to worry about those in the afterlife. You never have to worry about your pets. There will always be someone there to greet them. There will always be a loved one or a being of light or someone special there if there isn’t someone already waiting for them.

I think a session, an afterlife session with your pet, can bring a tremendous amount of healing. It doesn’t make the grief go away. Nothing makes the grief go away, but it does soften the edges. It does. And it makes that whole grieving process a little bit lighter and a little bit easier, especially when you get an undeniably accurate message like all of those messages you received. It is an incredible experience. I highly recommend it to anyone who’s listening and is fascinated by this to look up Karen’s website and do this. I’ve done it, I think, at least twice, and it did give me an incredible, you know, I didn’t worry anymore. I really had a lot of peace. So I agree with you.

Thank you so much, Karen. It’s a pleasure to see you, and I hope that people will help support your work once they see this. I appreciate it so much, and it’s been a blessing. I want to thank you for trusting me because that is huge, and for giving me this opportunity to talk about it all these years later. Sherold, what an absolute joy. It has been. It’s been a joy to connect with you again. So, I hope we connect again at some point. So my, uh, joy would be that people help you, you know, learn about this through Karen, get the books, and maybe have some sessions so that this can go full circle.

Karen: I have a free app too. It’s called Pet Loss Hope and Healing. You can download it in the App Store and Google Play. I downloaded it: Hope and Healing. Okay, good, that’s a great resource. Thank you. That’s so cool. All right, Karen, thank you so much for your time today. We’ll be in touch. My pleasure.

Under our current regime, wild horses are being slaughtered. Read about it here and help by donating to the organizations trying to save them.

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Sherold Barr, Tuscany, Italy

The Happiness of Looking Forward

Hello my friend — it’s amazing that we’re halfway through the year! You have now till the end of the year to create experiences that will bring you happiness.

According to a survey by the Institute for Applied Positive Research, 97% of people report that vacation anticipation—just having a trip on the calendar—makes them feel happier.

John and I are on a trip as I write this. We are camping in our 19’ Airstream, Bambi, and we’re at a mountain lake in the Deschutes National Forest in Oregon for three days. It’s been heavenly to spend time in the forest and sit by the lake. It heals my soul.

While it’s easy to assume that happiness peaks during a vacation or after returning home, the truth is even better:

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It’s the Anticipation of the Vacation that Makes Us Happier.

This can be applied to any experience you want to have, not just a vacation. It’s the planning of something fun or exciting (a stretch goal) that rewards you with happiness before and during the experience.

Anticipation is one of the three doorways into joy—the one that lets you start enjoying something before it has even happened.

Anticipation is often the happiest phase. The most-cited study is Jeroen Nawijn’s research in Applied Research in Quality of Life, which examined 1,530 Dutch adults and found the 974 who took a vacation gained the most happiness in the period leading up to the trip. The results were similar with earlier research by Leigh Thompson and Terence Mitchell, whose study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that regardless of the type of trip, people were happier before the vacation than during it.

The benefit is strongest for experiences, not purchases.

A 2014 Cornell University study (Gilovich and colleagues) found that the anticipation of an experience brings more happiness than the anticipation of buying a material thing—partly because, as one analysis put it, we wrap an upcoming experience in an idealized version in our minds, while a physical object just sits there in the ordinary present. To get the most enjoyment from your money, research says to focus your discretionary spending on experiential purchases or travel — the researchers found that people thinking about impending experiential purchases, such as ski passes or concert tickets, have higher levels of happiness than those who anticipate spending money on material goods.

Why Planning Brings Anticipatory Happiness

• The Power of Anticipation: Looking forward to a future event triggers positive mental well-being and excitement.

• Dopamine Release: Savoring a planned reward releases dopamine—the “anticipation molecule”—which fuels your sense of motivation and pleasure beforehand.

• Stress Buffer: Thinking about a relaxing escape lowers your current stress, breaks up routine boredom, and gives you a sense of control—especially during uncertain times.

• Improved Energy and Sleep: Studies show that people with a trip on the horizon feel more energetic and even sleep better. The journey to happiness really does begin the moment you start dreaming.

The Science Behind the Joy

Why does anticipation make us so happy? Neuroscience offers some answers. When we look forward to a positive event, the brain’s reward centers—especially the medial prefrontal cortex—light up. This is the same area activated by pleasurable experiences. In effect, our brains let us “pre-experience” the joy of travel, weeks or even months before we depart.

Psychologists also point to the goal theory of well-being: having something to look forward to gives us purpose, motivation, and a sense of progress. Even during busy or stressful times, planning a trip can offer a welcome escape and a reminder that good things are coming.

Active Planning Amplifies It

The more involved a person is in planning, the more they anticipate it and the happier they feel; when the planning is handed off for a fully packaged tour, the anticipation drops. The joy lives in planning the trip yourself, not going on a tour.

The Afterglow Is Short

That’s the real argument for front-loading anticipation. Post-trip happiness tends to fade within a couple of weeks back into routine, and the length of the trip barely affects it. The practical consequence is genuinely counterintuitive: several short breaks across the year tend to produce more happiness than one long vacation, precisely because each one gives you another runway of anticipation. More things to look forward to beats one big thing.

How I’m Practicing This

I like having things to look forward to during the year. John and I are planning a trip to Spain this fall. He’s going on a nine-day cycling trip with friends. I’ll fly over afterwards to spend ten days in parts of the Spain I’ve never visited before. In the winter, we’re planning to live in Baja, Mexico for a month.

• This summer we’ve taken three camping trips in our 19’ Airstream, Bambi.

• I look forward to playing with my 3½-year-old grandson on the weekends I visit — lately we’ve met at a park, and it’s so much fun for me and makes me so happy.

• I’m looking forward to a second grandchild arriving this fall.

• And every month, I look forward to our High Road to Healing Gatherings, where I enjoy the community of paid subscribers. Each month I share a concept that we work through and discuss. This year we’ve had a small workshop on How to be Resilient, Fear as Rocket Fuel and the 100-Day Visualization Project. Upcoming workshops include How to Clear Money Blocks and the Spiritual Practice of Aging.

The community of women who’ve met with me twice as part of High Road to Healing’s 100-Day Visualization Project have started to do something new they can look forward to that will bring them a sense of happiness and accomplishment. We have a woman who wants to take the bar exam to become an attorney; a former nurse and clinical trial director who wants to be a writer to help people understand parts of the medical system; an investor who wants to sell a property; and a participant who wants to organize her life to help her feel better and do what she loves. I wrote four chapters of my book in 100 days. I have a lot of revising to do on two of those chapters. But I moved the book forward. That’s what counts.

How to Maximize Your Own Anticipation

Want to make the most of this happiness boost? A few tips:

• Plan your experience or trip ahead: The longer the anticipation period, the greater the happiness benefits. Even if your trip is months away, start planning now!

• Savor the details: Read about your destination, browse photos, and imagine the experiences you’ll have. The more vivid your daydreams, the more joy you’ll feel.

• Share the excitement: Talk about your plans with friends and family. Not only does this strengthen bonds, but it also multiplies the happiness.

• Keep something on the horizon: Consider always having a future journey or experience in the works, even if it’s just a weekend getaway. The anticipation will keep your spirits high year-round.

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Sources: University of Surrey, “Holiday Anticipation and Happiness”; Cornell University, “Waiting for Merlot: Anticipatory Consumption of Experiential and Material Purchases”; Jeroen Nawijn (2010), Applied Research in Quality of Life; Thompson & Mitchell, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology; Institute for Applied Positive Research, “The Power of Travel Anticipation.”

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Photo by Gabino de Oro Tefrv/ Unsplash

There was a moment in the hospital after my third surgery and near-death experience when I sat in my bed and had a knowing that I needed to write a book about what I was going through.

For the last five years, I’ve been writing my memoir. I’ve worked with Al Watts of LA Writers Lab and, in the last year, Anna Wharton, a writer in the U.K.

This project has been the hardest thing I have EVER done. When I started writing, I experienced trauma as a beginning student in Al Watts’ LA Writing Lab writing class. I wrote from the place of the trauma. As the years went by, I gradually began to write a little better and understood the structure he was teaching.

As a new writer, I didn’t have experience with the craft of writing. It’s been humbling, but I’ve stuck with it.

Have I procrastinated? Heck yes!

But I never quit.

I’m proud of my focus and perseverance on this goal. I’ve found that writing has helped me know myself in a way that counseling has not been able to do.

Six years ago, I asked my mother to forgive me for all the ways I hurt her with my words. She forgave me, and since 1993, we’ve had a love fest. This alone has been healing. Mom will be 99 on Halloween and is in a nursing home in Atlanta.

I’ve decided to lead a follow-up 100-day visualization project. I want company and to help more paid subscribers accomplish a goal they want to achieve, but couldn’t get off the ground.

I shared with our first group of subscribers how to use James Doty, MD, a neurosurgeon's techniques. Doty’s book that describes his story of being taught this technique when he was 12 by a woman who worked in a magic shop. She could see that he was a young boy struggling in his family of origin. This act of kindness led to a massive change in Doty’s life.

Mind Magic: The neuroscience of manifesting and how it changes everything.

“When our attention is intentionally focused on what we want and why, change is possible,” Doty said. “It’s not about the universe; it’s about you.”

Doty said that your attention can be redirected in a way that can literally change your brain.

“With the right practice, we can strengthen our brain’s gray matter, the neural tissue that helps us learn and grow and ultimately leads us to realizing our potential,” he said.

Doty defines his method as the process of embedding our intentions into our subconscious.

What manifestation does is help create new neural pathways in our brain. Some scientists call this process neuroplasticity, but Doty likens it to a “superpower.”

“This superpower, molded by experience, repetition, and intention, enables the brain to form new circuits, and to prune away old ones which no longer serve us,” Doty said.

Join as a paid subscriber and listen to the wrap-up of our 100-Day Visualization Project tomorrow (Friday, July 31) from 1–2:15 pm PT / 4–5:15 pm ET

As a paid subscriber, you get to participate in our gathering tomorrow to hear what transpired for a group of us in 100 days of visualizing: how we wrote down our goal as if it already happened, and spoke our goal out loud daily.

When we work together as a group, we gather the support and energy to do things we might not manage alone.

New subscribers are welcome. Subscribe below.

If the work here has ever met you in a hard moment — brought a little light when you needed it — I’d love to have you as a paid subscriber.

It’s how High Road to Healing keeps going, and it opens the door to more than the writing. You become part of a warm community of kindred souls — people doing their own inner work who want company for the journey. And every month I host a live workshop, free to paid subscribers, where we gather, learn, and lift each other toward the change we’re reaching for.

A subscription is $50 for the year — about $4 a month — or $5 month to month. Either way, you make this possible, and you get a seat in the room.

Subscribe now

Please help others find this publication on Substack by hitting the ❤️ or 🔁 at the top or bottom. Thank you.

What My Dog Taught Me About Resilience

When my son Max was a freshman in high school, I did the math and realized our black lab, Babe, would be about twelve when he graduated. As he headed off to college, the house would feel empty. I decided to get another dog. I found a mellow yellow lab we named Dodger. Sure enough, Babe passed away during Max’s senior year.

By then we had moved to Portland. I rented an office two blocks from our condo and took the dogs to work with me every day. They were the best stress relief I ever had — I’d find myself smiling or talking to them just to break up the afternoon.

When John decided condo life meant smaller dogs, someone mentioned the Bichon Frise. Without doing much research, I bought one. We named her Pearl. For the first three years she drove Dodger and my office staff crazy. But eventually settled into the lap dog she was always meant to be.

Pearl’s fluffy white looks were deeply misleading.

At four months old she was diagnosed with a heart valve defect — a patent ductus arteriosis that hadn’t closed at birth. Without surgery, she would not live to see her first birthday. She had the surgery. She lived.

At two and a half, she hiked nine miles with John and friends up to Green Lakes in the Three Sisters Wilderness. At four, she tore her cruciate ligament running in the snow at our forest service cabin and had to have surgery again.

Our vet shook his head and told me Pearl was simply in the wrong body in this lifetime.

Pearl never got that memo.

She carried on from each setback with the same unselfconscious determination — heart valve, torn knee, nine-mile hike — as if the question of giving up or becoming Nervous Nelly had simply never occurred to her.

Then came three bullmastiffs.

One weekend when Pearl was almost five, I was out of town. John was walking the dogs home from the office when a woman opened the back doors of a van to show someone her four bullmastiffs. Three of them jumped out and went straight for Pearl.

John is a retired emergency physician. He knew to stay away from the dogs' front ends and started kicking their hindquarters to pull them off her. Somehow Pearl escaped and ran under a parked car. She was alive but in shock, with puncture wounds across her small body. John rushed her to the emergency vet.

When I got home and heard what happened, I was sick with worry. We brought her home a few days later. She had five drain tubes coming out of five bite wounds.

She had survived because the dogs hadn’t crushed or bitten any internal organs or shaken her violently.

The vet called it luck. I called it Pearl.

That night, I leaned over to check on her as she lay on her dog bed beside ours. I asked John quietly whether he thought she’d be mentally unstable after something like that.

Before he could answer, Pearl flipped onto her back so I could scratch her belly between the drain tubes.

I couldn’t speak. It was as if she were looking up at me and saying, "See?" I’ll be fine.

We started calling her the Trooper after that. In Pearl’s case, adversity didn’t break her. It showed us what she was made of.

I thought about Pearl constantly in the spring of 2017, when I was lying in a hospital bed at Sharp Memorial in San Diego for six weeks with eight drain tubes running in and out of my own body after a near-fatal car accident in Baja California. I had survived five surgeries in fifteen days. I was afraid, exhausted, and not sure what came next.

John had taped a photo of Pearl and our other dog Lilly to the whiteboard across from my bed. Every morning I’d look at it through the bars of the bed rail and cry — not from despair, but from something harder to name. Recognition, maybe.

Pearl had five drain tubes, and she flipped over for a belly scratch.

If she could do that, I could do this.

I had never thought of myself as someone who learned resilience from a dog. But lying there, I understood that Pearl had been showing me something for years — that the body can be broken and the spirit doesn’t have to follow. It’s what you make it mean that matters. You can carry your wounds and still turn toward love. That showing up, even in agony, even in a body battered or broken, is its own form of courage.

She was a Trooper.

I decided I would be one too.

Pearl lived to eighteen years old — a remarkable life for a dog who was never supposed to see her first birthday.

She was put to sleep during a pause between my seven outpatient procedures after I came home from Sharp Memorial. I was still healing from surgeries when I lost her. The grief was its own kind of surgery.

She didn’t get to see me recover. But she had already given me everything I needed.

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There was a moment, after the accident — sitting in a hospital bed in San Diego, six weeks in, my body wrecked, but something in me strangely lit up — when I knew I’d changed and had no language for it yet. The language came later. Some of it came through the work of a psychiatrist named David Hawkins, MD, and some of it came through the man I’m sitting down with today.

Kevin Scobie has facilitated more David Hawkins study groups than just about anyone I know — in fact, I found my way to him through one of them. Today we dig into Hawkins’ most famous book, Power vs. Force, and the idea at the heart of it: that there’s a line between the force we use to push the world around, and the power that doesn’t need to push at all. Once you feel that distinction, you start seeing it everywhere — in your work, your relationships, your own tired body.

I’ll tell you how I hold this material, so you can hold it the same way if you like:

I take the Map of Consciousness as a language for what we can feel, not a scientific instrument. You don’t have to believe every number to find the map useful. Take what serves you and leave the rest.

This conversation lives on both YouTube and here on Substack. Settle in.

I’ll see you on the high road.
XO, Sherold

Transcript
00:35 Sherold
Hawkins has written a number of books. Today, Kevin and I are gonna have a conversation about power versus force. And if you like this video, please subscribe to my YouTube channel. I also write, this interview will be over on Substack.

Kevin, why don’t you talk about how you got interested in this, and then I’ll share mine, and then we’ll launch into this discussion.

01:17 Kevin
Yes, thank you. I guess it was, you know, one thing kind of led to the other.
I don’t really know why I got interested in spirituality or consciousness, but one thing after another, like one author after another,
sparked my interest until I got to Dr.
Hawkins.

Dr. Hawkins work kind of recontextualized all the other works that I had read.
So back in the early 2000s, I was getting interested in Neil Donald Walsh and the Conversations with God books.

01:51 Kevin
And then after that, I was reading a lot of Eckhart Tolle. That was a preparation to start to understand what’s going on in consciousness, maybe a little bit in psychology, and then having that prep for Dr.Hawkins’work.
And then when I got into Dr. Hawkins’work, Maybe around 2008.

02:23 Kevin
I got super interested and could not put it down.
So yeah, just one after the other.
I read through maybe eight or nine of his books because he has written so many.

02:43 Sherold
After I came back from the hospital, I’d been in for six weeks for a car wreck and multiple surgeries. After my third surgery, I had a near-death experience.
What I experienced felt more real and vivid - almost like I was in a field of consciousness because I was anesthetized. My body and consciousness were supposed to be knocked out. However, I was more aware and conscious about what happened with a voice that talked to me, prepared me for how to come back from what I’d been through.
The voice said, you get to choose how you go through this experience.
What will you choose?
And I thought, I don’t want to be a victim.
I’ll choose the high road.
And I’ll use love and gratitude to heal.
That’s what I did.

This is free will 101. We always have a choice about our attitude and the meaning we make about what’s happened to us.

I got back from the hospital and I got out Hawkins book, Healing and Recovery, and read it all. I started to feel excited. That felt like the high road to me.

I read many other near-death authors - Raymond Moody, and you name it, to figure out what the heck happened during my surgery.
So I’ve been on a path for nine years too.
I found Kevin online and got into his David Hawkins’ study group.

So we want to share with you some of the concepts that we’re interested in.
Today we’re going to talk about Power versus Force.
And that was one of Hawkins’ most famous books.
Kevin, what would you say about his most important book, Power Versus Force?
And we can launch into that.

04:28 Kevin
Yeah, well, it’s groundbreaking because he discovered a new use for applied kinesiology. He didn’t discover applied kinesiology, but he discovered a new use for it and used it to help him develop a map of consciousness.
And the map of consciousness and pretty much the rest of his work really helps us to understand, clarify and re-contextualize basically all of spirituality, all of consciousness. All of religion, basically, can be contextualized into this very broad framework. I think a lot of people find it helpful. It’s very helpful. It’s very clarifying.

The Map of Consciousness helps us transcend duality, which you might not think from a work that has numbers on it and words and numbers. It helps us transcend duality by inviting your mind to move away from opposite orientation and dualistic orientation and move to more of a orientation based on relative levels of power.

So if your orientation around spirituality and consciousness has to do with relative levels of power (see Map of Consciousness below), then you can help your mind get unstuck and from being stuck in duality, being stuck in pairs of opposites.

It gives us a path forward. It’s one set of David’s tools. The way he did muscle testing was logarithmic.

06:27 Sherold
David resonates with us. It’s teaching us a lot more about consciousness.
So you want to say anything about that?

06:44 Kevin
Dr. Hawkins developed a scale, his version of a scale of consciousness through a lot of trial and error. They discovered they had to switch to a logarithm because
whatever numbers are used to describe levels of consciousness or levels of power for the human, it was far more wildly variable than they thought.
So in other words, the most powerful humans in terms of what level of power they are presenting on Earth within their body.

The level of power varies very widely from the weakest to the most powerful humans on earth so they had to come up with a logarithm because otherwise the numbers would be hard to describe in a chart. The ultimate power that’s available to human consciousness may not be as important for learning purposes as the relative power.

So looking at the relationship between different levels of consciousness, Dr.
Hawkins helps us look at the relationships between different levels of consciousness and see what is likely to be higher and what is likely to be lower.

That helps us orient towards what is the higher, what is the lower, what is the greater,
and what is the lesser without making explicit opposites, without making explicit dualities in the process.

08:38 Sherold
So one thousand would be Buddha consciousness.
Does it start at twenty with shame or zero at death?

08:52 Kevin
Yes, descriptively, twenty is shame. To my mind, the levels of consciousness start at either zero or one. I like to think of it as starting at one, but that depends on what context we’re talking. The human levels of consciousness go from one to one thousand.

09:17 Sherold
One thing I want to say about that is from my experience of having this near-death experience during my third abdominal surgery out of five I had in two weeks after being air evacuated out of Baja, Mexico to San Diego. I was there six weeks. I remember after the NDE sitting in a hospital bed thinking, I gotta write about this.
I felt so much energy - a different type of energy.

I mean, truly I was suffering, I was exhausted, all of that, but I was, something different had happened to me. I thought, what the heck is this? I wondered if anybody would notice there was a difference, something was different about me. And lo and behold, they did at the end of six weeks. I talk about this in my book I’m writing.
But the thing is that I felt so energized and up at a completely difficult time.
I didn’t know about levels. I didn’t really understand the map, but Hawkins has written about people who have near-death experiences can bounce up to this high level of bliss, and that’s where I was.
And then I went back down, of course, as I wouldn’t be staying at that level,
But I can’t help but want that back. My ego was offline at the same time.
So there was no negative chatter. Only peace. I wanted to figure this out.
That’s why I still care about it, because I think this whole concept of consciousness is broad and has a lot more implications for us than we understand.

Kevin, let’s talk about power versus force. What is power? What is force?
in terms of David Hawkins and Map of Consciousness. Why is that book so important?

11:52 Kevin
I think, again, it gets back to this idea of a lack of explicit opposites in the real world.
So the real world, the real universe doesn’t really have opposites explicitly that have
that are two sides of an equal coin. It’s more like when we talk about opposites, we’re talking about, like if you look at love and hate or love and fear,
if you look at them as equal opposites, that’s not gonna be helpful.
But if you look at them as one has a lower level of power and the other has a higher level of power that’s more helpful.
That’s a more helpful and useful understanding of the universe and consciousness and how it works.

12:42 Sherold
Love is up at 540. That’s where I was at the near-death experience.

12:48 Kevin
In the usual way, you might think that there are two polar opposites that are equal in power that are opposing each other. But this chart shows us that 100 is not the opposite of 540 or 500. Those two are not opposites in that way.

They might be descriptively opposites, but in terms of power, they are not opposites.
So one has more power, love, and fear has less power.
So when power vibrates in, I guess you could say, a distorted or a disharmonious way, when it’s not harmonic, when the energy of life makes discordant or not harmonic energies, we call it that it’s going below 200 on this scale. So it’s going below 200 and fear is below 200.

Sherold: And that energy is very dense, correct?
It plays out that way for the human.

Kevin:
And so Dr. Hawkins denoted that those energies that we call below 200 are described as force. So the energy, instead of having power, they have force, results in counterforce. So energies that are below 200, where force results in counterforce, are going to be by definition, by observation, they’re going to be out of accord.
It’s energy that’s out of accord with itself. It’s not harmonic with itself.

That’s why it doesn’t lead to life-serving phenomena in the world.
It does not lead to life-serving or life-abundant things in the world because of that discord.

Dr. Hawkins referred to it as force, energies below 200 as force.

Sherold
It’s a different type of pattern that energy takes on - it’s weaker. That’s what he found through the testing with the arm, the kinesiology test that he did. And people can still test it today and see by having someone say, something they love, like ice cream, and something they don’t like, let’s say brussels sprouts. And the arm will show where the power is. And basically the arm test shows truth.

15:49 Kevin
Yes, there are some qualifying factors about that. Both a tester and a test subject or just yourself, if you’re testing yourself, have to calibrate above 200.
So your overall level of consciousness needs to be above 200.
And the reason for asking the question needs to be above 200. The whole process, everything about the muscle testing process has to be integrous. Sometimes there’s even some, some things that could interfere like glasses or belts or bracelets or things like this that are around your body.
So there’s a lot of considerations when doing applied kinesiology and if all those considerations are met then yes the body tends to go strong with truth with statements even if they are not local or not local to your particular body you could be referring to something in the universe
No matter what they’re referring to in the universe, present or past, you can find out what the body’s response is. Is it weak or strong? The weak will be associated with the lower levels with force, and the responses that make your body go strong will be associated with the higher levels of power.

18:00 Sherold
I actually had six within that time. Then I had seven outpatient procedures.
And it was just like almost every other day something was going on, but I was just bouncing back. I do think it was because my energy was at a higher place.
If you’ve ever heard love heals, I totally believe that.

I lived my whole life pursuing the American Dream and I was pushing, I was driving and forcing my body even though I was tired. Underneath everything, I wanted to feel safe and secure. The more money I make, the more safe and secure I’ll feel.
That’s an illusion. After the accident, I changed and realized that nothing outside myself could give me security. It was an inside job.

That’s why I’m an advocate for a strong inner life.
I can make all the money in the world and not feel safe and secure.
If everything crashes, I’m not going to put my whole life on external things.
I think that I lived a path of forcing, you know, when you’re on a diet, you’re forcing.
When you’re all of these different things. I think that feels like force and power feels like a release.

20:24 Kevin
I think these creative flow moments denote a lack of resistance. So what pops up to my mind is there’s a lack of resistance going on. You’re doing something you enjoy, something you love. You’re allowing the creativity to flow. So you’re in a flow state.
And it’s noted by a lack of resistance. Now, we can’t really say one thing causes the other, like we can’t say that creativity caused there to be no resistance.
But those things sort of go together. The process of letting go or releasing allows you to expand and let go of the blocks and resistance. The ego’s normal process is resistance and to hold on or repel as hard as it can. It lives in opposites also.
The ego tries to make things either one thing or the other. So letting go and releasing is a way to soften that, soften the ego, the egoic tendencies and allow more energy and creativity and flow states to come through.

21:33 Sherold
That’s true. Dr. Hawkins also says these lower states are not life supporting below 200.
And above 200 is life giving. Which is where you find courage that’s the dividing line of power versus force is that 200. We’re living in a time where we can see force being exerted on us from the outside in our power structures,

22:07 Kevin
Basically, it’s a Gandhi versus British Empire was one Hawkins talked about.
Gandhi had almost no force and enormous power and power won.
No matter what Gandhi did, I guess you could say Gandhi’s action steps were a little bit secondary to the power that was going on. So there was a power and this is something that Dr. Hawkins tested. So what we learned from Dr. Hawkins’ work is Gandhi’s overall level of energy was quite high. The main critical factor in that struggle of Gandhi versus the British Empire was the power that was with him. And then the actions that Gandhi took while effective weren’t the primary thing.
The primary thing was the power and a little bit secondary to that.

22:59 Sherold
And you could say that was Jesus had that.
You know, we can think of other examples that are in that upper category.
I would say love and above.

23:08 Kevin
Yes. And when you’re talking about Jesus or the Buddha, you’re talking about very high levels of power. You’re talking about the power that can move all of humanity.
According to Dr. Hawkins’research, both Jesus and the Buddha moved the needle on the overall level of consciousness. Nonviolently moved it.
Dr. Hawkins’book is called Letting Go, The Pathway to Surrender.

I think that’s what goes exactly to what you were talking about is letting go of resistance. Because when you surrender, you’re not giving up.
That’s not waving the white flag.
It’s allowing and not resisting what is happening to you.

24:07 Sherold
My husband and I went back to Sharp Memorial a year later and saw my trauma doctor, Dr. Kill is his name (his real name). He said, everybody when they get into a hospital they want out as fast as possible. But you were in acceptance. In fact, you had to reel your husband back in several times.
I gave it up to God and I was in acceptance..

My husband, a retired ER doctor was in PTSD, freaking out because he knew the worst case scenarios and they kept happening.
I was over here pretty relaxed.
So that’s what keeps me working to understand consciousness.
And it gives me a path to live my life. I call it the high road.

25:28 Kevin
Yeah, it sounds to me like the human’s tragedy was God’s opportunity with you.
And then it ended up being your opportunity also because it’s really your own soul, your own consciousness.

25:45 Sherold
Energy’s freed up. We were whale watching just before we were in a wreck.
When I started writing, I did research on Jonah and the whale. There’s a concept called Metanoia. When God saves you, you’re responsible to give back.
And so what I’m doing here with you is my way of serving because I was saved.
My ego is not invested in who likes this and who doesn’t.
It’s my gift because I’m alive. I figured if it worked for me, it might work for you.
I know that it does work for you.
So can you talk about how an average person could look at this map from a real basic standpoint. Maybe a first step is looking at it.
Trying to figure out where they are and how to move up, get out of negative force into power.

26:53 Kevin
Yes, for a beginner, I would suggest reading any of the beginning of books that Dr.
Hawkins wrote - Letting Go or Power versus Force. Or you could just go right to the chart. Look at it and gently study it. Be gentle with yourself while you study it.
So notice that the ego, your own ego may come up and it may have something to say about it. I may even get scared by this. Just relax with your ego. Say it’s okay for now.
You’re just exploring consciousness. You’re exploring information about consciousness.
Look at that scale. Study it a little bit. See if anything pops out at you.
If anything sends a red flag or a white flag or, you know, just if anything pops out.
And then start looking at relationships, look at relationships among these different levels and these different numbers and how they compare.
And like we mentioned earlier, see how fear at 100 is not. The opposite of courage at 200 or love at 500 or joy at 540. So you see how these things are not opposites and they are different descriptions of different patterns of power. Notice and relax.
The ego is doing what it’s programmed to do, what it’s supposed to do, which is it’s trying to survive. It can’t survive with a great deal of truth going on. It tries to protect your past belief systems. It tries to protect your past and your past belief systems.
So notice that may go on and see if you can bring some heart into it. See if you can bring some stillness and peace into this and just look at it and just allow yourself to relax.

29:41 Sherold
And let’s go one step further.
You said the ego doesn’t like truth because I would say the higher self,
which is that part of us that’s connected to the conscious, well, to the divine in this field of consciousness that’s what I experienced in my near death.
So I did not experience the ego. It seemed like that was turned off.
So the ego doesn’t like truth.

30:10 Kevin
Ultimately, what Dr. Hawkins or some other spiritual work may call the ego, it’s a little bit different definition than the psychological ego. But what is called the ego and spiritual work refers to something that has at its core an illusion. So the ego naturally recoils from truth. It could inadvertently start to learn about truth and so forth before it catches on that it’s going to bring about its own undoing, you know, so the ego doesn’t always have an excellent guard against truth, but generally speaking,
it recoils when it tends to recoil from truth. And the more you believe it, the stronger it gets. The egoic mind engages in meaning-making.

And it often doesn’t look at what purpose the meaning-making is serving.
And if you kind of dive deeper, you’re willing to look at the ego in a deep way,
you see that the ego is sort of serving its own purposes, sort of serving, trying to be a separate, defensible... Being that is not united with the universe or united or sharing life with anyone else. So it’s quite a separate, isolated, trying to make a separate, separated, isolated life. And it uses meaning, trying to make meaning out of things.
It serves that purpose, separated, isolated.
You have to find out, is that your truth?
And that’s how you question it.
Is it really your truth?

32:55 Sherold
Kevin is there anything else you want to share about Hawkins consciousness or power versus force before we sign off on this conversation today?

33:05 Kevin
Yes, if you’re interested in this work, there’s a lot you can learn.
There’s many books that Dr. Hawkins wrote. So if any of you are beginners,
I would point you to either this book Letting Go: The Pathway to Surrender and you can just kind of sense I would also follow your interests.
Healing and Recovery was accessible.

If you want to basically understand these concepts, read or watch videos like this one.

Thank you for coming back and having a conversation today.
If you have any comments, we love to hear these comments.

So please share them on my Substack, sheroldbarr.com or YouTube.

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I’m Not Fearless. I Just Stopped Being Afraid of the Wrong Thing.

One hour before the accident in the middle of the Baja, Mexico desert, we’d been whale watching. A gray whale mother and her baby swam up to our boat to look at us. I felt an awe and a oneness with gray whales that’s unlike anything else.

They have an extra lobe of brain — the paralimbic lobe — that we don’t have, more elaborate than anything in the human brain, thought to process emotion in ways we’re only beginning to understand. And they make one of the longest migrations of any mammal on earth: roughly 10,000 miles, from the icy Arctic down to these warm Baja lagoons to give birth, and back again.

When I talk with the whales, it’s a love language, not unlike cooing with a newborn. It’s an awe-inspiring experience that’s exhilarating, and unmatched in my life.

For a decade, my husband and I traveled to Baja each winter. Every year we’d cross the desert of the Baja peninsula to the Pacific side to spend time with the mother and baby whales in the birthing lagoons.

When I’m looking into an eye the size of a grapefruit, the eye communicates so much to me. It’s a communion of curiosity and love. My energy moves to a higher state of consciousness.

An hour later, I was lying next to our van on a road in the middle of the Baja desert, bleeding internally.

I sat down with the Crossing Over NDE channel and told it all out loud, on camera, for the first time: the accident, the darkness, and what came after. My story is focused on how I changed as a result of my NDE. If you want the whole story, it’s here - scroll down to “Collaborations” on my YouTube channel.

For a long time after the accident, people called me fearless and resilient. I understood why. I’d come back from the edge. I didn’t seem rattled by the things that rattle most of us. But it was never quite true — and I want to be honest with you, because the honest version is the one that might actually be useful.

I’m not fearless. I do fear life sometimes. I just don’t fear death.

Those turned out to be two very different things. The fear of death went away after my near-death experience. Once you’ve been to the edge of death, it stops being the monster under the bed. It becomes almost ordinary. That fear simply left, and it has never come back.

The fear of life was harder. It’s the one I’m still working with.

Because death comes for all of us whether we’re afraid of it or not — there’s nothing to consent to.

Life is the earth school. You have to say yes to live. Yes to being seen. Yes to wanting something and risking that you won’t get it. Yes to choosing, knowing you might choose wrong.

The fear that quietly runs people is not the fear of dying. It’s the fear of fully living.

What changed isn’t that the fear of life disappeared. It’s that I stopped letting it drive.

The accident handed me a gift I never asked for: it took away the fear of the thing I couldn’t control. And somewhere in the long recovery, I decided to set down the fear of the thing I could.

I don’t have this tied up in a bow. I still get anxious and fearful. But I no longer arrange my life around not dying trying to stay safe. More and more, I’m learning not to arrange it around not living, either.

The NDE changed my whole life in an instant. The life before it was full of fear and insecurity.

My life now is full of gratitude for the NDE. The suffering and the recovery were worth it, because of what I know now and who I’ve become. The small moments — talking with my grandson, petting my dog, gardening, writing, camping with my husband and hiking in nature.

My life is now meaningful.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it with someone who might like it, and click the ❤️ or 🔁 button so more people can discover it on Substack. Thank you.

I’d love to hear from you. Please leave a comment and let me know what you take from this interview.

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XO, Sherold

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Hi friend —

I hope this finds you enjoying the summer, if you’re in our climate zone. And if you’re somewhere it’s winter right now, I hope you’re wrapped up warm. Things are quieter than usual around here, and I wanted to tell you why.

Teddy is recovering.

Our eight-year-old labradoodle, Teddy, had knee surgery last Tuesday. He tore his ACL and meniscus chasing squirrels in the yard. Teddy’s surgeon told me that he gets most of his referrals from squirrels! Teddy has a slow, six-week recovery ahead of him, with no walking except to go outside to potty.

We had to cancel the camping trips we’d planned for the next six weeks. It’s a bummer, but we want Teddy to heal so he can get back to his walks. Our 19’ Airstream, Bambi, is parked in the driveway for the summer, waiting on us. Our next adventure is a drive to Sisters, Oregon, for the annual Quilters Affair classes before the quilt show the first week of July. I can’t wait to be in nature again!

You can see in the photo above how Teddy feels about wearing the Cone of Shame. If your pet has ever had surgery, you know it well — it keeps him from licking or worrying at his stitches while he heals. But oh, those sad eyes.

Teddy’s a sweetheart and my best buddy. He’s my sidekick, coming where I go through the day whenever he can. Animals and nature are vital to me, and I don’t ever want to be without my animal friends as I age. Fingers crossed.

Me with Bambi, our 19’ Airstream.

Humans wear an invisible Cone of Shame, too.

The invisible cone we all wear

Here’s what I keep thinking about. Teddy’s cone is right there for everyone to see, and it’s doing its job — keeping him from licking the very wounds that need to heal.

We wear an invisible one, too. We call it shame.

Shame is one of the lowest, densest energies we carry. David Hawkins, PhD, MD, spent fifteen years developing his Map of Consciousness — a logarithmic scale running from 1 to 1000, with enlightenment (Buddha, Jesus) at the very top. Shame calibrates at just 20: the very bottom. Hawkins described it as bordering on death itself. (There’s a wonderful interview with Kevin Scobey, a facilitator of Hawkins’ work, if you’d like to go deeper.)

The cruel thing about shame is that, unlike Teddy’s cone, ours is invisible — so it grows in secret. And nothing stops you from doing the thing you long to do quite like shame you’ve never spoken aloud.

So this August, I’ll host a Zoom Gathering on how to release shame from your body — to get it out into the light before it can take root and spread.

**That Gathering is free for paid subscribers**, along with every monthly Gathering — including How to Use Fear as Rocket Fuel, How to Be Resilient, The Spiritual Practice of Aging, and the 100-Day Visualization Project. If you’d like to join a warm community of people growing more resilient as we age, you can become a paid subscriber for $5/month or $50/year. I’d love to have you with us.

Hit reply and tell me one fun thing you’re doing this summer— I read every response, and I’d love to picture where you are.

Join us — I think you’ll be glad you did.

High Road to Healing with Sherold Barr is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support this work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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XO, Sherold

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Hey friend —

I want to tell you about my friend Delayne.

Her house had been on the market for a month. She was getting frustrated, worried, starting to doubt the process. She had been working hard — using Dr. James Doty’s neuroscience-based visualization methods and Colette Baron-Reid’s meditative drawing practice to rewire her brain and get her home sold.

Since January 6, she had been drawing with intention. Bubbles of gratitude. Spirals to expand the frequency. She wrote her goal at the top of the page:

To evolve = the evidence of intention.

“I wanted to write and draw a love note to the Universe,” she told me. “Just looking at it made me feel calmer.”

On April 21, a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment became available — number 328, which in numerology is a number of stability. She signed the lease on May 2. Now she was ready to sell the house.

She made a new drawing to release it. Six frequency lines with the house as a portal, gratitude bubbles around the center. She visualized a buyer, thanked them and the house, and let it go.

And then — nothing. A month on the market. No offers.

That’s when I called her.

I told her to try something: stop talking about wanting to sell the house and start talking about it as if it had already happened. Speak in past tense. Feel the relief. Feel the excitement. Let your nervous system experience the outcome before it arrives.

Here’s the text I received from her last week:

“On Sunday 5/10, I spoke with you. You told us to say, ‘We are thrilled our home has sold.’ We have done that. And I took it one step further. I invited my two realtors over and we had a champagne toast: ‘We are thrilled the house has sold!’ On Friday, we got an offer. We countered, they countered back, and we accepted today. It worked! Thank you!”

Five days after the champagne toast, the house sold.

I am not telling you this is magic. I am telling you this is neuroscience.

What your brain is actually doing when you visualize.

Your brain is a prediction machine. It is constantly simulating the future based on past experience, asking: what’s likely to happen next?

When you visualize a desired outcome vividly and emotionally — feeling the relief, the pride, the gratitude as if it has already happened — your brain cannot fully distinguish between what you imagined and what actually occurred.

Research by Pascual-Leone established that mental rehearsal produces structural neural changes comparable to physical practice. The same neural circuits fire whether you are doing something or vividly imagining doing it.

This is why emotionally charged visualization creates stronger neural imprints than detached thinking. Your amygdala and limbic system act like amplifiers — the more emotional weight a goal carries, the more the brain tags it as meaningful and begins orienting toward it.

Here is the key insight behind past tense: when a desired future feels unfamiliar, the brain may not recognize it as relevant even when it is deeply desired.

Visualization familiarizes the brain with the outcome so that when opportunities appear, you notice them. You recognize them. You act.

Delayne’s brain — and her realtors’ brains — had already been to the closing. They had already felt the celebration. When the offer arrived on Friday, it wasn’t foreign. It was familiar. Expected, even.

James Doty, neurosurgeon and founding director of Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, recommends visualizing your intention for five minutes daily, writing it down, and repeating it out loud. Repetition is key — it is one of the primary ways new neural pathways are created in the brain.

Write it in past tense. Feel it as if it’s done. Let your nervous system experience the future you’re building.

And if you have a friend and a bottle of champagne — even better.

What this means for your 100-Day Visualization Project

This is exactly what we are practicing together on June 2 in our Zoom Gathering for paid subscribers. To join as a paid subscriber, the link is below.

I want to coach anyone who is hitting a wall — because there is always a thought or a fear that shows up when you go for something that matters. That is not a sign to stop. That is the sign that you are close to something real.

Not wishful thinking. Not positive affirmations pasted on a mirror. A deliberate daily practice of familiarizing your brain with the outcome you are moving toward — so that when the path appears, you recognize it.

My own update: I haven’t written in my visualization journal every single day. But I’ve picked it back up and kept going. I have written two of the four memoir chapters I wanted to complete by July 31st finished and in revision. I might actually be ahead of schedule.

Progress, not perfection. That’s the whole point.

Join me Tuesday, June 2 at our Zoom Gathering on the High Road.

If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, it’s only $5 a month or $50 annually.

I offer you monthly workshops on topics that will keep you on the high road - a path in life that is filled with courage, consciousness, expansion, gratitude and wisdom.

You can sign up now and I’ll send you the materials from our first Gathering. We’ll meet on June 2 and once again in July to stay on track.

Come as you are. Bring your wins and your struggles. Both are welcome.

Tuesday, June 2 / 1 – 2:15 pm PT / 2 – 3:15 pm MT / 3 – 4:15 pm CT / 4 – 5:15 pm ET / 9 – 10:15 pm GMT

This Gathering is for paid subscribers. Not yet a member of the inner circle? Join us for $5/month or $50/year — less than a dollar a week. I’ll send paid subscribers the Zoom link.

I’ll see you on the high road. — Sherold

I’d love to hear if you have tried this technique. Please leave me a comment or click the heart on the post to help people find me.

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Part 3 in the Unbreakable Series

Last month, I promised you something. I said there is a part of you that was never broken to begin with — and that it has a name. This week I want to tell you what it is.

Before the near-fatal accident I survived in 2017, I went through two unimaginable traumas and came out the other side traumatized but inspired to thrive. When my youngest brother, Byron, was killed in 2005 (it’s a 21-year cold case in Knoxville, TN), I knew that his death had meaning for me, but I got involved in the case trying to help keep it alive. I didn’t realize I was in prison in my mind suffering, while the perpetrator was free. I was in a Byron Katie intensive that weekend and set myself free. I had a Jungian analyst I worked with during this tragedy and for the next decade. This suffering set me on the path of personal growth. I turned toward my higher power for faith and guidance.

Then in 2012, when my son landed in the ER at age 28 with a health condition that was later diagnosed as a rare genetic disease that needed immediate medical interventions, I was on my knees again going through what all parents call “the unimaginable.” I found a calm place inside me that guided me. An acquaintance once told me she thought it was weird that I was so calm.

I have been in the void between life and death.

During my third abdominal surgery at Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego, the anesthesia came, I went under, and I found myself somewhere that had no edges, no floor, no ceiling, no wall to reach for. I had nobody. I noticed this without alarm — the way you might notice in a dream that the rules have changed.

And what I found there was not nothing.

What I found was pure love. Pure peace. Pure awareness. No fear. No story about who I was or what I had failed to be. No past to defend and no future to manage. Just — this. Vast space that was alive with spirit, abounding love, unhurried, completely at home with itself.

That was the Self.

Not something I achieved. Not something I earned through decades of spiritual practice. Something I simply was, when everything else was finally quiet enough to let it through.

I came back from that experience changed in a way I am still learning to describe. It’s hard to use our language to describe this liminal space. But the most important thing it showed me was this: underneath everything I had constructed — the businesses, the self-sufficiency, the belief that I had to earn my place — something was there that had never needed any of it. Something whole. Something that could not be broken because it had never been in danger.

Carl Jung spent his entire career trying to name this.

He called it the Self — always with a capital S — and he distinguished it carefully from the ego.

The ego is the small self. The constructed self. The accumulated identity built from childhood wounds, small ‘t’ traumas, social roles, survival strategies, and the stories we tell about who we are and what we deserve. The stories we spend our entire adult life suffering from.

The Self is something else entirely. Jung described it as the totality of the whole psyche — not just the conscious mind, but the vast depths beneath it, the organizing intelligence that is trying to move us toward wholeness whether we cooperate or not.

And here is what Jung said that stopped me completely the first time I read it:

At its deepest level, the Self is indistinguishable from the image of God within us.

It is our point of contact with the divine. What we call God and what we call the deepest Self are, in the end, the same encounter.

Jungian psychologist Edward Edinger put it this way: psychological development in all its phases is a redemptive process — the goal is to redeem, by conscious realization, the hidden Self that lies buried beneath our unconscious identification with the ego.

The ego is like a small island in the middle of an enormous ocean. We mistake the island for the whole thing. But the ocean was always there.

Every great tradition has known this. They simply use different words.

Hinduism calls it Atman — the eternal, unchanging essence of the person, which the Vedantic teaching says is ultimately identical with Brahman, the divine ground of all existence. The individual Self and the cosmic All are one and the same.

Sufism calls it the Ruh — the spirit or higher divine dimension of the person. The Sufi path aims at fana, the dissolution of the ego, followed by baqa, subsisting in God. The mystic Rumi spent his whole life writing about this dissolving — this losing of the small self into something vast and loving.

Christian mysticism calls it the Seelenfünklein — the little spark of the soul, the ground of the soul, the deepest center of the person where, in Meister Eckhart’s words, the soul and God are one. His teaching: to be full of God, one must be empty of self.

David Hawkins, whose Map of Consciousness I have studied for years, places the Self at the very highest levels — pure love at 500, joy at 540, peace at 600. These are not states we achieve through effort. They are what we find when we stop blocking them.

Different rivers. The same ocean.

The theologian Schleiermacher described higher consciousness as the part of the human being capable of transcending animal instincts — the point of contact with God. When this consciousness is present, he said, people are not alienated from God by their instincts.

Transpersonal psychologists — those who study the highest reaches of human experience — have found something consistent across thousands of research subjects:

The process of deepening connection with the Self engenders the highest human qualities. Creativity. Compassion. Selflessness. Wisdom.

These are not qualities we build or earn. They are what we find when we stop blocking them.

Psychologist Steve Taylor, who has studied awakening experiences for nearly twenty years, found that even brief encounters with this deeper awareness produce lasting effects — increased trust in life, confidence, optimism, a reorientation toward what actually matters. Many people described the experience as the most significant moment of their lives.

I certainly see my life as before the NDE, I chased the American Dream to be happy and successful. After the NDE, I found what I’d been searching for that was inside me all the time - my higher Self. And a deepening of my relationship with the God of my understanding. A rich inner life.

I was not looking for mine. It found me on an operating table in San Diego.

So what does this mean practically? What does it mean for a Tuesday afternoon when you are afraid, or grieving, or exhausted, or wondering if you have what it takes to keep going?

It means this: the frightened part of you is not the whole of you.

When one of my afraid parts rises up — the old familiar feeling of not being enough, the worry that spirals, the grief that arrives without warning — I don’t argue with it or push it away. I turn toward it from the Self. I let the calm, witnessing part of me speak to the frightened part.

Self: I see you. I know you’re scared. I’ve got you. You don’t have to carry this alone.

My higher Self has become my inner mentor. The Self is the part that can hold your frightened parts without being swept away by them. The part that can be present with pain without becoming the pain. It is not something you have to create or earn or travel somewhere to find.

The Self is what you already are when the noise quiets down.

I want to leave you with something to carry into this week:

• The next time fear rises, or grief, or the low-grade exhaustion of a long life with hard things in it — pause before you react. Just for a breath. And ask:

• Who is watching this? Who is noticing the fear?

• That noticing — that quiet witness that is aware of the fear without being consumed by it — that is the Self. That is the part that was never broken. That is what every tradition has been pointing toward for thousands of years.

You don’t have to earn your way there. You don’t have to be further along than you are. You don’t have to have had a near-death experience or a dramatic spiritual awakening.

You just have to be willing to be still long enough to notice what was always already here.

The high road is not a road to the Self. It is a road walked from it.

Have you experienced this quiet, peaceful place of knowing? I’d love to hear about your thoughts.

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What if the hard things were showing you something all along?

Most people spend their lives trying to recover from what broke them.

But what if nothing ever actually broke you?

What if underneath every loss, every grief, every season when you didn’t know how you’d make it through — something was there that the hard things couldn’t reach?

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If you missed the first two articles in the Unbreakable series, check them out below:

What makes some people unbreakable

What unbreakable people know about themselves

photo: TheFunkypixel from Pixabay

Hey friend — I’m at 30,000 feet flying back to Oregon from Atlanta, Georgia, where my mom lives in a nursing home. I love staying with my sister and her husband. Their house feels like a quiet sanctuary after the days I spend at the facility.

Each day I drive my rental car over and hang out with mom in the activity room with the other residents. I can’t say it’s fun. Mom used to be upbeat and positive, but she’s changed — I think it’s part of aging. She’s 98½ now, sleeps much of the day, and no longer walks. She gets around in a wheelchair.

It’s sweet to sit beside her. But I only catch her awake at lunch if I’m lucky. Some of the staff told my sister she’s up at night — a fall risk, so they wheel her out to the nurses’ station to keep an eye on her.

I’m glad I got to see her, even if we didn’t get to visit much.

Today's post is one I've been wanting to write for a long time. It's about the Self — the part of you that exists beneath all the noise, the worry, and the roles you play. I experienced it firsthand during my near-death experience, and I think it may be one of the most important things I've experienced.

Most people have never experienced a moment without the voice in their head.

You know the one. The narrator. The inner critic. The worrier. The one that wakes you at three in the morning rehearsing tomorrow’s difficult conversation, or replaying something you said ten years ago, or thinking about everything that could go wrong.

We are so accustomed to that voice that most of us assume it is us.

It isn’t. You are not your thoughts.

I first learned this in 2009 at a Byron Katie seminar. The chattering voice in my head — the one I had been listening to and believing my entire life — was my ego. It was not me. That realization changed everything.

The ego is simply your sense of “I” — the self you think you are. It’s the accumulation of everything you’ve been told about yourself, everything you’ve survived, and everything you’ve decided you need to be in order to belong and stay safe. Most of us live entirely inside it without ever knowing there’s something deeper underneath.

I know what that something deeper feels like. Because for a period of time during a near-death experience — while I was unconscious on an operating table in San Diego after a near-fatal car accident in Baja, Mexico — the voice went completely silent.

What remained was pure awareness. Pure love. Pure peace.

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A quality of presence so complete and so still that I didn’t want to come back from it. That was the Self. Not the self I had spent sixty-four years constructing and defending and performing. Something underneath all of that. Something that had apparently been there the whole time, waiting quietly beneath the noise.

What the great traditions call it

Here is what struck me most when I began reading about near-death experiences after I came home from the hospital: every major spiritual tradition in human history has a name for what I experienced in that dark void between worlds. They have been pointing toward it for thousands of years.

Carl Jung called it the Self — always with a capital S — to distinguish it from the ego. The ego, Jung said, is the center of consciousness only. The Self is the center of the whole psyche — conscious and unconscious, known and unknown, the part of us that touches the divine. Jung wrote that the Self is our point of contact with God — that what we call the deepest Self and what we call God are, in the end, the same encounter.

In Hinduism, it is called Atman — the Higher Self, the eternal core of the personality, which the Vedantic tradition teaches is ultimately identical with Brahman, the cosmic All. The individual Self and the universal consciousness are one and the same.

Buddhism, which resists the idea of a permanent self, nonetheless developed the concept of Tathagatagarbha — Buddha-nature. The luminous awareness beneath the ego. Not a fixed self, but the open, awake quality of consciousness itself, present in all sentient beings.

In Sufism, the mystical heart of Islam, the path moves through fana — the dissolution of the ego — into baqa, a state of subsistence in God. Rumi, the great Sufi poet, wrote endlessly about this — the self that falls away, and the divine essence that remains.

Christianity’s mystical tradition calls it the Imago Dei — the image of God within. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, wrote that the true self is not the self we build and protect, but the self rooted in God — the self that exists before we began performing for the world.

In Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, it is the Neshamah — the divine soul, the highest part of human consciousness, the breath of God breathed into each person.

Richard Schwartz, the psychologist who developed Internal Family Systems therapy, arrived at the same place from a clinical direction. He calls it simply the Self — capital S — and describes its qualities as calm, curious, clear, compassionate, confident, creative, courageous, and connected. These are not traits we build, he says. They are what we find when we stop blocking them.

The field of consciousness

Here is what I believe connects all of these traditions: the Self is not separate from the field of consciousness itself. It is consciousness, looking at itself.

David Hawkins MD, PhD, in his Map of Consciousness, calibrated love at 540 and bliss at 600 — the states most consistently reported by people who have had near-death experiences. These are not emotional states. They are states of being. They arise when the ego steps aside and what remains is pure awareness, pure presence, pure love.

The ego is not the enemy. It has a job — navigating the world, making decisions, protecting us from danger. But it was never meant to be the whole story. It was never meant to be the only voice in the room.

The Self is the deeper truth. The ground beneath the noise. The part of you that was there before the world told you who to be — and will be there when all of that falls away.

What this means for you

You don’t have to have a near-death experience to access the Self.

Meditation. Prayer. Deep nature. Creativity. Therapy. Moments of profound love or grief — these can all thin the veil between the ego and the Self. The mystics in every tradition developed practices specifically to cultivate this access.

The voice in your head is not you. It is a part of you — often a frightened, well-meaning part trying to keep you safe. But underneath it, right now, there is something quieter. Something that has never been wounded. Something that is already whole.

That is the Self. And learning to live from it — even for moments, even imperfectly — changes everything.

Does this article resonate with you? I’d love to know your thoughts. Please leave a comment.

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If this resonates with you and you want to go deeper, I’d love to have you join us at our free Gatherings on the High Road — our monthly live workshops for paid subscribers. We explore consciousness, healing, and what becomes possible when you stop abandoning yourself. Recordings and materials are sent within two days for those who can’t attend live.

Paid subscriptions are $5/month or $50/year.

I’ll see you on the high road.

XO, Sherold

Carl Jung called these moments synchronicities — events that feel deeply interconnected and purposeful. While some interpret them as messages from the Universe or Spirit, Jung saw them as windows into something larger than our everyday awareness.

Every synchronicity is a nudge. Some confirm you’re on the right path. Others redirect you before you make a misaligned choice.

And when you start recognizing them, something shifts:

You build a deeper trust with Spirit — and with yourself. You stop feeling so alone in your decisions. You notice more signs, not because they weren’t there before, but because you’ve learned to see.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with my friend Laura Gates, executive coach and host of Surrendering to the Signs.

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome everyone. I’m Sherold Barr, a master coach and writer. Today I’m thrilled to interview Laura Gates, an executive coach and spiritual teacher.

I’ve asked Laura if we could talk about her new podcast called Surrendering to the Signs.

Welcome, Laura, thank you so much for being here in conversation with me.

Laura: Thank you, Sherold. I’m delighted to be here, you know, I’m remembering being on your rooftop deck in your home in Portland when I went to the first World Domination Summit. You gathered the 2011 B-school attendees together, and it was so much fun.

When we kind of meet our other kindred spirits along the journey, and encourage each other. And then I took your Smart Women Make Money course. And we’ve followed each other and stayed connected over the years. I’m so delighted to be here with you.

Sherold: We connected and became friends because we realized we both were interested in spirituality - worlds beyond what we see every day in this reality.

Laura is an executive coach and facilitator who has spent decades working with leaders at Fortune 500 companies. She found a commonality that most people feel stuck. I would agree that many people, after working hard in their careers, begin to look for a deeper purpose.

On Surrendering to the Signs, Laura talks with people from all different walks of life about the challenges they’ve faced that have helped them find their purpose and align with their soul’s mission.

Laura travels around the world and has studied with shamans. She has always been immersed in her spiritual practice, but kept these two parts of her life separate until the sudden and unexpected death of her sister three years ago. When she went to her sister’s apartment, Laura found something in that room that she felt was assigned to her. She decided it was time to bridge these worlds and start this podcast. She recently completed the second season of Surrendering to the Signs.

Sherold: I’d love for you to tell everyone about a little bit about why you kept these the corporate and spiritual worlds apart.

Then how you merged them when you got the sign when the day you walked into your sister’s apartment and saw the sign.

3:23 Laura: Why I kept these worlds apart excellent question I would say that it’s interesting because I still have the same world. I’m still doing corporate coaching during the day and retreats and workshops on the weekends or online.

I listen to podcasts on my walk with my dog and it does feel more integrated and yet I still have this very corporate hat on. I felt like if I came out in the world as a spiritual person that there would be some kind of a judgment or criticism of me or it wouldn’t sound like I was professional. But I kept having experiences where people would say, ‘I read your LinkedIn profile and now that I’m meeting you and talking to you I’m realizing there’s this whole other part to you.

I realized I wanted to be a whole person and not these different sides. And so this is my intention to bring the whole me together and express all of me.

4:54 Sherold: What happened when you walked into your sister’s room after she passed? Tell us about the sign that you saw that day.

Laura: Well, obviously, my sister and I had a very close relationship. We were friends. We co-facilitated retreats. We traveled the world. We lived 15 minutes from each other, and we texted several times a day. Her death was quite devastating to me and quite shocking to me and I just will never forget I went into her room and in the middle of the floor was this podcast microphone and a podcast headset. I just knew I had to use them and do my podcast. I had to stop talking about, ‘I’d love to do a podcast…I’d love to write a book… I’d love to talk about these things. Just stop talking, dreaming and thinking and not doing it.

Then I called my ex-husband to tell him about my sister’s passing because he knew her from when we were married. We had not spoken in something like 20 years.

I have been married to my current husband for 23 years now. I am a huge music person.I didn’t listen to music for several years. It wasn’t until someone actually showed me a corporate assessment that’s called the Berkman Assessment.

My ex-husband is a photographer and a graphic designer. We talked about the podcast and things just sort of grew from there. I off handedly mentioned this about the podcast microphone. He said you have to do a podcast, and I’m going to help you.

It all really started with that box in the middle of the room. So it really felt like not only a sign from her, but just like an invitation from her from the other side in a way.

I was doing a team facilitation, and when I got this Berkman assessment, it talked about music. I started listening to music again and it really helped me. I was like, I know for me, music is therapy. Music is medicine and I’m talking all kinds of music not just classical or you know what are those sounds those binaural beats, but like I listen to everything from Eminem to Fleetwood Mac to you name it. I will listen to one song over and over and over — it’s like a it’s like a therapy that works on me until I’m ready for the next song.

I think music is incredible and it’s fascinating that Daniel came into this project. It’s like this intricate weaving because you’ve been talking about starting this podcast for how long.

Well, I started a blog called Surrendering to the Signs in 2012 - 14 years ago, something like that.

Sherold: Tell us about the goal of the podcast because you’ve interviewed some of the corporate executives that you’ve worked with. You’ve said that you wanted people to see themselves in these stories.

Laura:Yes and you know I had I had someone come to me the other day who was doing some work in my home and she said you know, I’m listening to your podcast and I found it so relatable. This is someone who I don’t even know if she finished high school, but it’s really about what is our spiritual nature and how do we tune into that.

The first season was a little bit more focused on trauma that takes us down that path like yours, which was one of those interviews about your trauma of nearly dying on the side of the road in Baja, Mexico and the miracle of an ambulance driving by. I mean, you can’t even make this stuff up.

of a situation or you know why I mean I could feel that about my sister like why did I lose my sister why did this happen instead of this is an ongoing relationship my sister is communicating to me through signs and symbols and how do I interpret those signs how do I interact with that information in a way that is enlivening to me that is supportive to me in my life and my

10:31 Laura: The signs are guideposts on the path. And so it’s not just about oh there’s a sign oh there’s a sign it’s oh there’s a sign and that sign is telling me something and the more that I can see the universe as a participatory experience as opposed to something is happening to me I’m the victim of a situation or you know why I mean I could feel that about my sister like why did I lose my sister why did this happen instead of this is an ongoing relationship my sister is communicating to me through signs and symbols and how do I interpret those signs how do I interact with that information in a way that is enlivening to me that is supportive to me in my life

I think that’s so beautiful.

One of the things that, when you interviewed me, when I was in that trauma nine years ago, I was searching for deeper meaning with my life.

And lo and behold, after that accident and then having these really unusual events perk up, the ambulance that was brand new that was not called to the scene, there was another ambulance called and this one got there sooner and it was being delivered to a hospital up north and it took us back to the hospital sooner.

We didn’t know, but I had internal bleeding at the time, a seatbelt injury. But that whole experience completely changed my life and that’s why I’m interviewing you now. I am very much into this deeper meaning that life has to help people understand more about that.

How do we surrender?

How do we look at acceptance so that we aren’t this, say, victim of a trauma, that we have a choice and that’s really it. So I appreciate that you are helping people find that deeper purpose.

Tell us about the spiritual people you’ve taken courses from, you’ve studied with shamans.

Oh my gosh. Energy healers. And you also have a master’s on this other side in organizational leadership. So tell us first about the people you’ve studied with and then I’ll ask you to, how did you integrate that guidance for these two fields together?

One of the things that I talk about in my podcast is how the teachers find us. And so I had this experience where I really thought I was gonna die on a train in Machu Picchu and a woman came up and did an energy healing on me. This was in 1989 and I didn’t know what energy healing was. I didn’t know what she was doing to me.

I just knew that I thought I was dying and she did some work on me and next thing, she kind of waved her hands around. And next thing you know, I was sat down to sleep on the train and woke up like an hour later, look a completely different person.

And then I returned to New York City and this is on the podcast. I interview my former manager from Citibank. I got a job. I was at Citibank when I left for South America then I came back to Citibank, whole story there. You can listen to that on the podcast.

But she invited me on a retreat in the woods outside of New York City and I went and it wasn’t until years later that I realized who these women were who were leading this meditation retreat because again, I didn’t know anything.

I just thought, oh yeah, I’ll go to a cabin, have some time out. I didn’t know, I really didn’t know anything. I was in my early, my late 20s. And it just happened like that.

Like I, people would show up, people would mention classes or teachers. So I’ve studied with Angeles Arrien who was the author of The Fourfold Way.

She had a one-year training program where you do vision quests in the woods and work with shamanic and indigenous cultures to understand how they operated, how, what tools they would use.

I’ve studied ancestral clearing with John Newton. I’ve walked with aboriginal healers in the middle of the Australian Outback. I’m hoping we’re gonna have the coach who took a group of myself and another group of people with him to the Australian Outback. This is something he does regularly. I’m hoping we’re gonna interview him on the podcast.

I’ve sat with Peruvian shamans. I’ve sat with Mayan shamans. I’ve done a vision quest in a national park over Labor Day weekend, which I would not recommend because I was sitting in a tent thinking I was all up on myself in the woods and suddenly on that holiday day, people are like walking by staring at me like, what is this lady doing?

I’ve done so many trainings. I mean, I could go on and on and on between all the list of people that I have studied with and who’ve gone before.

And I’m so grateful. I have a master’s in intuition medicine from the Academy of Intuition Medicine in Sausalito, California.

I’ve studied energy healing. Last year, I immersed myself in the tool of tarot, which I learned a long time ago because I was very interested in Jungian analysis and dream work and Jung incorporated the tarot into his work.

And so I’ve studied with a guy named Richard Knight who’s out of the UK. I just kind of follow my instincts to what interests me and the teachers who show up and the tools that feel important.

Right now, I’m really working on self-healing. I’m really working on keeping my energy calm, making sure I’m grounded, making sure I’m centered, scanning my physical body of like, where is the stress? Where is the tension? How can I stay calm?

Because we’re in a crazy world right now and my clients need me to be calm because I need to be centered. I need to be rested. I need to be well-fed, all of that. I’m so grateful.

I have a very large great Pyrenees and she needs to be walked a lot. And she’s sort of like my grounding force and she can’t be rushed. You have to be uber patient. A Pyrenees cannot be rushed.

So it’s like, you can’t take your dog out for a quick break. You gotta plan like at least a half an hour every time. So that’s kind of my therapy these days.

Sherold: Have you somewhat integrated since you’ve started this podcast?

How do you integrate it now with this corporate side or is it just a natural flow with you?Yeah, it’s interesting because I feel like the more tools I learn, the less I use.

Laura: It’s like fine-tuning my operating system so that I can really be present and really listen and not project my stuff onto my clients, not make assumptions about them, just really be in the moment with them.

And a lot of what I’m doing is either mirroring back and observing what I see or hear or asking questions to help them deeper their own self-awareness.

For some clients, I’ll occasionally pull a card beforehand and then we’ll get into the conversation and I’ll say, wow, I pulled this card beforehand and it exactly matches what we were talking about.

I don’t do it every time. I intuitively try to feel where people need support.

Sherold: Let’s talk about what are the signs and that, first of all, you said you spent decades developing your own sign language, which I love the whole idea of that.

So for someone who’s never consciously noticed a sign before, what is a sign and where do they start?

Laura: I’m trying to think where this even started for me. I do have one specific event that I remember very clearly.

It probably also was around the time when I was doing Jungian analysis work and paying attention to symbols and dream work and all of that. I think I was trying to hone my intuition and for me, those go hand in hand.

It’s like, signs kind of nudge your intuition to help you provide more information. So I had this one event where I was scheduled to travel to South America, I think it was 1999.

And there was like a huge uprising in Argentina and Buenos Aires and some of the outlying cities and they closed down the banks and there were riots in the streets and it was on the news. And of course my mother calls, she goes, you’re not going to Argentina, right? I’m looking at CNN right now. There’s no way you’re gonna go to Argentina.

And I was like, well, I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m going to another part of the country far away from all of that. I was really trying to figure out what to do because I really wanted to go on this trip. It was all planned.

I wouldn’t be able to get reimbursed. I was sitting at a stoplight on my way home that night. The trip was the following day. I pulled up to a car in front of me and it had my initials LFG and it had my birth year.

And I was like, what are the chances that there’s gonna be a car directly in front of me as I’m kind of asking the universe for guidance? That’s the other part.

I’m actively asking, show me a sign, help me see where I should go or just give me clear insight. And so that to me was like, I’m going. The universe is on my side.

So I knew that I had to fly through Chile to get to Argentina. I assumed, well, if I get to Santiago and it’s really a mess over there, I’ll stay in Santiago or I’ll come home. Like, I won’t be stuck. And it was an incredible trip and I’m so glad I went.

But that was sort of the beginning of, one of the ways I look for signs is I look at license plates. I see my sister’s initials all the time. I see my initials all the time. I see my birth year all the time.

So it’s, for me, that’s kind of like this, you’re on the right path. You’re going in the right direction. Keep going. I feel like I need a lot of reminders to keep going because sometimes I’m like, what’s the point?

Why are we here?

This is crazy, you know? And it’s like, keep going, keep going, you’re going in the right direction. I feel like I have a bit of a cheering squad that shows up in license plates and other signs.

23:03 Sherold: That’s hilarious. So when you ask, are you asking every day? I’m sure you’re asking when you go into a training and things like that, you know, guide me, give me signs or, but how is it that you live your life with the signs?

23:23 Laura: Well, I think it’s sort of always in the background for me of just scanning my environment and paying attention to my environment. Like there are paired hawks that live in my neighborhood. I’m always listening for them, looking for them. I feel very warm, fuzzy feelings when I see them.

It’s not like I walk around all day saying, I need a sign, I need a sign. I think that’s a little overkill, but I will, especially around decision-making. So for example, I had a whole crazy story where I went into a bookstore, a book practically fell off a shelf in my hands and I read the book.

I reached out to the author, and I met with him. And then he said, you know, we’re doing a retreat, and he just happened to be visiting near me.I went to have a one-on-one session with him. Then he’s said, I’m doing a retreat in Hawaii, if you want to come. I wasn’t sure and said, I don’t know, Hawaii.

I was living in San Francisco, so it wasn’t so out of the question, but it was money and time that I wasn’t sure if that was the right thing to do. It was on the Island of Kauai.

I loosely hold the question in my mind, sort of tucked in the back of like, hey, if, and I’ll say things like, not out loud, but in my brain, I’ll say like, please show me an obvious sign of what I’m supposed to do here.

If I’m supposed to go, make it obvious, make it clear.

So I was sitting at my desk, kind of this in the background, just doing my job, not really thinking about it.

And one of my colleagues tapped me on the shoulder and asked me a question and I turn around and I’m in my chair and he’s standing up. I turned around and so I’m eye to eye with his chest and on his t-shirt, it says, Kauai. Okay, I’m going, I booked the ticket, we’re going to Kauai. Like, it’s that obvious.

25:30 Sherold: Well, you know, you call your podcast, you use the word surrendering, which I love. Why did you chose that word rather than using the word following. Surrendering is a big part of a spiritual practice. I surrendered to survive and then, you know, had to put myself in the higher power’s hands to, you know, just to let go because I was not, there was no control. I wasn’t giving up just letting go of control.

26:11 Laura: You know, we live in a culture that does not like that word. It’s the white flag syndrome, I think, you know?

Sherold: Right, I think people think of it as giving up or acquiescing or complying.

Laura: That’s not how I see it. I see it as what you’re describing, which is I am letting go of control because, as I like to say all the time, if I were in charge of my life and, you know, had the game plan for my life, it would have been so boring and predictable because, of course, I’m like everybody else. I want comfort. I want my cozy couch and my Netflix and my cup of tea.

And, you know, life has thrown me all these curve balls that, thank goodness, because it forced me to grow, evolve and learn in ways that I would never have chosen, right?

So I think it’s the idea of surrendering is, okay, my ID may not always be the best idea and my way may not get me where I need to go, so I’m gonna step back and allow this kind of greater wisdom to guide me versus my own will and my own ego that wants a certain outcome because I don’t know where it’s all going.

I’m hoping there’s some greater wisdom that’s greater than my limited little human being perspective.

27:48 Laura: You know lately I’ve been kind of feeling like, and if not, so what? But it makes me feel better throughout my day.

Sherold: So can you tell us just a little bit about season one versus season two? For people who haven’t listened to your podcast, just give us the types of topics you covered and then the direction in the second season.

28:21 Laura: So season one was a lot of what you described, which is the turning points, the inflection points, and in particular, those that have been challenging or traumatic.

We interviewed you, we interviewed Rude, who was given a cancer diagnosis, and while he was a C-suite leader at a leading medical institution, you know, the coincidences of all these things are crazy.

Season two is bringing in more people in both executives as well as coaches and leadership consultants who work with executives.

So again, it’s this idea of bridging these worlds, right? Because the executive leadership world is the world that I live in, that I move in, and yet we’re all human beings. Executives are human beings.

They have kids, they have carpools, they have basketball practice, and I think I’m also trying to humanize people and create those commonalities.

And part of my goal was, hey, I’m having these amazing conversations with people one-on-one behind the scenes. What if we open those up for other people to listen in on?

In Season two, we’re dropping an episode about someone I’ve known for many years who went through a recovery experience. I wanted him to share his story because I don’t think we often hear stories from men in particular outside of an AA meeting on their journey and the originations of why they even started drinking in the first place. He has some amazing spiritual revelations that he had along the way as well.

And so the idea is come on in, have a cup of tea, don’t put us on 10X because we’re gonna play music that’s gonna have a certain feeling and a vibe that we’ve curated for you. And hopefully you’ll be able to listen to into a conversation that you would normally never have access to.

30:36 Sherold: So is there, for anybody listening, is there anything else that you wanna say about surrendering to the signs?

31:01 Laura: Yes, I have done a lot of training but I am a ridiculous learner. Like I just, I’m voracious. I used to be a voracious reader as a kid and now that we can access learning online, I’m just in like three or four classes at a time.

But you don’t have to be like me. You can just ask for a sign and pay attention. It’s really, it sounds ridiculously simple but it really is as simple as that. And you know, you have to overcome your disbelief of like, oh, that’s crazy or that’s not possible or oh, that happens to everybody.

My signs are my signs built on who I am and what my life is about and what’s familiar to me. You’re gonna get your own kind of signs and trust that and be open to it. The main ingredient for doing this is to be open. You don’t even have to really believe in it. Just be open.

32:07 Sherold: I think being open is the best wisdom that’s, you know, because then we’re open to so much more life. We’re gonna live a larger life.

32:18 Laura: I was listening to an interview with Tami Simon of Sounds True yesterday. She was interviewing a gentleman named Richard Rudd who has a system called the Gene Keys, which is sort of an offshoot of a system called Human Design, which I’m a big fan of.

And Tami Simon of Sounds True, she’s very skeptical, but she has all these spiritual people on her podcast. They all published their spiritual books through Sounds True.

Yet she’s very skeptical. And, you know, so not being skeptical doesn’t have to be part of the formula here. Be skeptical. I’m skeptical. You know, I doubt all the time. That’s why I’m asking for signs and confirmation and another confirmation.

Well, for people who want to listen to Surrendering to the Signs, I totally encourage you to listen to Laura’s podcast. You can go to surrenderingtothesigns.com and find the podcast.

It’s, I’ve listened to almost all of it and it has really been an interesting ride to hear these people’s experiences. You can also download Laura’s free ebook at surrenderingtothesigns.com.

Laura: And that is basically the seven keys to surrendering to the signs.

Laura, thanks for your time. It’s been fun talking to you. Thanks so much.

Thank you, Sherold. Lovely to see you.

Have you noticed signs in your life? Laura and I would love to hear from you!

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Image by Jerzy xxxxxx from Pixabay

I was sixteen years old when my father gave me the belief that would run my life for the next fifty-eight years.

He meant well. I know that now. He was trying to prepare my sister and me for a world he knew could be hard and unpredictable. What he said was simple:

Don’t depend on anyone. You have to take care of yourself.

I took it all the way to my heart.

I became a woman who was good at everything, being self-sufficient and ambitious to get some of the American Dream for myself. Dad always told me to be successful. To be successful, I needed to work hard. I worked so hard that I ran over my physical and mental needs.

I built two businesses, grossing half a million in the first one, and brought in six figures in income in the second one. I say that only to show you how ‘hard’ I worked to make money. I became too focused on making money.

I chased success the way our culture told me I should — achievement, forward motion, never stopping long enough to need anything from anyone. Including a spiritual life or getting in touch with my higher power.

I didn’t have a spiritual life. I didn’t have an interior life. I didn’t have a Psalm marked in my bible the way my grandmother did. I was operating on a completely different frequency — one where you earned your safety and security, and depended on no one. I believed that if I made a lot of money, I’d feel safe and secure.

What I didn’t know then was that I was also carrying more than I ever let anyone see. Losses that had no bottom. Pain, I didn’t have the tools to process. I kept moving because stopping felt dangerous.

For fifty-eight years, my father’s voice and my own willpower were the only things I trusted.

Then Came the Baja Desert

2017. A car accident that should have killed me.

And a brand new ambulance that was being delivered to a hospital in north Baja appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the Mexican desert — right after the crash.

I didn’t summon that ambulance. I didn’t work hard enough for it. It simply came. And in that moment, everything my life had been built on — self-reliance, control, achievement — became completely, undeniably insufficient. I surrendered my life to my higher power. I was helpless.

Six surgeries followed. My body had a slit from the breast to the pubic bone. Yet, I thought it was beautiful. It saved my life! I experienced a miracle - a shift in perception.

A planned future I lost and had to grieve. It was the one I thought I wanted, the one I had worked so hard to build. That grief was real, and it was not optional. I didn’t get to skip it.

During my near-death experience, a voice asked me:

You get to choose how you go through this experience. What will you choose?

I chose consciousness. I chose love. And that choice changed everything.

The Map I Didn’t Know I Was Walking

What I found on the other side of that grief was a map I didn’t know I was walking until I looked back at it.

Surrender. Grief. Acceptance. Love. Gratitude. Forgiveness. Trust. Faith.

Not as concepts. Not as a wellness framework. As a path, I walked on my hands and knees through the hardest years of my life.

The surrender came first, and it was the hardest.

For a woman who had spent fifty-eight years depending on no one, releasing control felt like dying. In some ways, it was. The version of me that needed no one had to go.

What replaced her surprised me.

I found that there is something richer, deeper, and more rewarding than anything the outer world has ever given me. I found that nature heals. That creativity is a form of prayer. That grace is real, and it doesn’t ask you to earn it first.

The women who already knew

I found that I had been surrounded by women who already knew this. My grandmother lived to 101 with Psalm 23 marked in her bible — The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil….

My mother, Dorothy, is 98½ and has survived losses that would break most people, carrying them on nothing but faith she never once put down.

They had an interior life I hadn’t yet built. A frequency I couldn’t yet receive.

The accident cracked me open to what was already in my bloodline, waiting.

I now trust what I can’t see.

Now I wake up every morning, and I pray. Not for what I want. Not for success or safety or control. I pray that my higher power’s (God of my understanding) will be done, not mine. That single shift — from my will to thy will — is the whole distance I traveled.

From don’t depend on anyone — to I trust what I cannot see.

If you’re reading this and you recognize yourself somewhere in that fifty-eight-year story — the achieving, the exhaustion, the quiet emptiness you don’t talk about — I want you to know something.

The way back to yourself exists.

I know because I found it. And I left the trail markers here for you.

XO, Sherold

P.S. This Wednesday, April 22nd, join me for our second Gathering on the High Road — the 100-Day Visualization Project. We’ll write together — just you and your own vision for what life could look like 100 days from now. I’d love to see you there. Details below.

Where Will Your Life Be 100 Days From Now?

That is not a rhetorical question.

One hundred days from now is August 1st. And the research on visualization is unambiguous: what you consistently hold in your mind with intention and emotion begins to shape what your brain notices, what you pursue, and what you create.

Alan Richardson’s famous study found that athletes who only visualized their practice — who never physically trained — improved by 23%. Nearly as many as those who showed up to practice every single day. Your brain cannot fully distinguish between a vividly imagined experience and a real one. That is not self-help. That is neuroscience.

But here is what most people get wrong about visualization: passive dreaming actually backfires. Research by psychologist Gabriele Oettingen found that people who simply fantasize about a desired outcome — without a clear process — are less likely to achieve it than people who never visualize at all. The fantasy drains the urgency.

Done right, visualization is one of the most powerful practices available to you. Done wrong, it keeps you comfortable while nothing changes.

Tomorrow — Wednesday, April 22, at 12 pm PDT — I’m teaching exactly how to do it right. In our Gathering on the High Road, I’ll walk you through the 100 Day Visualization Project: what it is, how it works, and how to build a daily practice that actually moves the needle on the life you want to be living.

This is not a webinar. It is a gathering — a small, live, intimate conversation with a community of people who are doing this work seriously. It will be recorded, so if you cannot make it live, you will still get everything.

This Gathering is for paid subscribers.

If you have been reading High Road to Healing as a free subscriber and wondering whether to upgrade, this is your moment. Here is what you get for $50 a year:

Monthly live Gatherings on Zoom — intimate, teaching-rich conversations on the exact topics this community needs most. Consciousness. Surrender. Fear. Resilience. The inner life, The Spiritual Practice of Aging. The practices that actually sustain you through the hard seasons.

Recordings of every Gathering — so you never miss a teaching, and can return to it when you need it most.

A community of people who are choosing the high road — not just reading about it.

That is less than $1 a week. For a year of monthly live teaching, a growing library of recordings, and a community that is building something real together.

The April 22 Gathering is tomorrow. If you upgrade today, you’ll receive the Zoom link in time to join us live.

One hundred days from now is August 1st. The question is not whether time will pass. It will. The question is what you will do with it.

Come join us.

XO, Sherold

Wednesday April 22 · 12:00pm PDT · 1:00pm MDT · 2:00pm CDT · 3:00pm EDT

Subscribe

It is called the Map of Consciousness. It was developed by Dr. David Hawkins, a psychiatrist and spiritual teacher who spent decades researching one question: why do some people suffer endlessly while others, facing the same circumstances, find their way to peace?

What he discovered is not what most people expect. It isn’t about positive thinking. It isn’t about willpower.

It is about the level of consciousness you are operating from — and the extraordinary fact that you can change it.

I recently sat down with Kevin Scobey, a longtime student of Hawkins’ work and a facilitator of his teachings, to talk through the map and what it means in practical terms. Here is what I want you to take away from that conversation.

The map is not a map of opposites.

This was the first thing that surprised me when I encountered Hawkins’ work. We tend to think of our emotions as opposing forces — love versus hate, fear versus courage. But the Map of Consciousness shows something different. Emotions like hatred and love are not opposites. They exist on the same continuum of consciousness, at different levels of vibration. As Kevin put it, “they are more like oil and water — different, but not opposite. They settle into their own likeness.”

This matters because most of our suffering comes from the egoic mind’s insistence on dividing everything into opposites. Good versus evil. Should versus shouldn’t. Right versus wrong. The map helps us step out of that battleground and see reality as a continuum instead.

Awareness itself is the first move.

The map runs from 0 (death) at the bottom through shame, guilt, apathy, fear, anger, and pride — all below the critical threshold of 200 — up through courage, willingness, acceptance, love, joy, and bliss, to enlightenment at 1000.

Simply knowing where you are on this map creates the possibility of choosing differently.

You don’t have to leap from shame to love in a single bound. You just have to notice where you are — without judgment — and ask: can I move up one level?

Kevin said something I have carried since our conversation:

Courage is the dividing line — and here is why.

At 200 on the map sits courage. Everything below it is characterized by what Hawkins calls force — stress, reactivity, craving, fear, shame. Everything above it is characterized by power — the kind that sustains rather than exhausts.

Courage is the dividing line because it is the first act of inward agreement with a positive direction. Below it, we react. At courage, we choose.

Moving through courage into the higher levels requires stepping into the unknown — and that takes genuine inner commitment. You may not know what freedom feels like until you are in it. But once you step through, the energy settles. You move into neutrality, then willingness, then trust. As Kevin described it: Courage destabilizes the lower levels so the higher ones can take hold.

Willingness is not hoping. It is deciding.

Above courage sits willingness — and this distinction matters. Willingness is not wishing things were different. It is not having one foot in and one foot out. It is deciding, fully, both feet in, and then being able to see possibilities that were invisible before.

I experienced this myself when I joined an expensive mastermind program years ago. I was terrified. Cold feet, chattering ego, every reason not to do it. But once I committed completely — once I decided — willingness arrived. And with it, a clarity I hadn’t been able to access from the place of ambivalence.

The decision itself is the thing. Both feet in.

Fighting reality keeps you stuck. Accepting it frees you.

My trauma surgeon in San Diego — Dr. Kill — said something to me I have never forgotten. He told me that everyone who comes to the hospital wants to get out as fast as possible. But I was different. He said it was as if I had accepted where I was.

And I had. I was having back-to-back surgeries — six total. What could I do? I accepted it.

Most patients in hospitals are running, with a desire to leave — combined with fear and anger. That keeps the body flooded with cortisol and adrenaline, which is counterproductive to healing. Moving into acceptance drops those stress hormones and lets the body do what it needs to do.

Acceptance is not approval. It is not giving up. It is simply stopping the war with reality — and that, it turns out, is one of the most healing things a human being can do.

Love is not just an emotion. It is a level of consciousness.

At 500 on the map sits love. Not romantic love, not conditional love — the kind of love that has no object, that is simply a state of being. Gratitude, joy, and bliss all live in this territory.

Hawkins discovered that for severe addiction and deep healing, the only energy that truly works is 540 and above. In some cases, love is the only thing that heals.

In my near-death experience, I chose love and gratitude. Hawkins describes the NDE state as potentially reaching 600 — the level of bliss. In my experience, you don’t stay there. You come back down to your own level of consciousness. The ego gets going again. But now you know that place exists. You know it is real. And you can use the map to find your way back.

The map is logarithmic, which means small shifts matter enormously.

This is perhaps the most important technical detail. The Map of Consciousness is not a linear scale. Each number is to the base of 10 — logarithmic. A move from 200 to 300 is not the same magnitude as a move from 500 to 600. The higher you go, the more exponential the difference.

What this means practically: small movements at the higher levels represent enormous shifts in actual consciousness and quality of life.

And Hawkins found that most of humanity — roughly 85% — operates below 200. The people who live consistently above that threshold are, quite literally, lifting the collective.

We are all here to be self-realized.

That is how Kevin closed our conversation. Whether we know it or not, he said, that is what we are all moving toward. The map is simply a tool for understanding where we are on that journey — and what is possible from here.

If you are in a hard season right now, I want you to hear this: where you are is not where you are stuck. Every level on this map is part of the human experience. There is no shame in being where you are. There is only the question — can I move up one level?

The answer, more often than you think, is yes.

Resources: David R. Hawkins — Power Versus Force and Letting Go: The Path of Surrender. Byron Katie — thework.com.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT DOWNLOAD

P.S. Zoom Gathering on Wednesday, April 22 for paid subscribers

It’s not too late to subscribe and attend all Zoom Gatherings for free. All you have to do is subscribe to High Road to Healing for $50 for the year and save.

Mark your calendar:

✦ Wednesday, April 22

✦ 12:00pm PDT · 1:00pm MDT · 2:00pm CDT · 3:00pm EDT

✦ 7:00pm GMT · 8:00am Thursday NZDT

The 100 Day Visualization Project

Here’s what I want you to know before we meet: Subscribers: your Zoom link will be sent to your email.

Visualization is not wishful thinking. It is not a vision board on a wall that you walk past without feeling anything. And it is not the same as hoping something will happen and waiting for the universe to deliver it.

It is neuroscience.

Researchers have shown that when you vividly imagine doing something — truly see it, feel it, experience it in your body — your brain activates the same neural pathways as if you were actually doing it. In one landmark study, basketball players who practiced free throws only in their minds improved nearly as much as players who practiced physically. Same neural pathways. Same results.

This is what 100 days of consistent visualization can do to a brain.

It can rewire it.

At our April 22 Gathering, we’ll explore:

✦ What the science actually says about how visualization works

✦ Why most people do it wrong — and the one shift that changes everything

✦ How to begin your own 100 Day Visualization Project

✦ What you want to do, be, or have — and how to make your brain your greatest ally in getting there

I’ll share the research, tell you a story, and give you three prompts to begin your own practice. Then we’ll share.

This Gathering will be recorded and sent to all paid subscribers.

Not yet a paid subscriber? This is a beautiful moment to join us.

$50 for a full year — Gatherings several times a quarter, teachings, and a community of women doing the real work of healing and becoming.

👉 JOIN HERE: https://www.sheroldbarr.com/subscribe

I can’t wait to be in the room with you.

With love,

Sherold

P.S. Come with something in mind — something you want to do, be, or have. We’ll work with it

Two Breathing Techniques That Actually Work (And I Use Both)

I want to share something practical with you this week — two breathing techniques that I personally reach for when anxiety creeps in or my mind won’t quiet down at night. They work quickly, they’re simple, and all you need is yourself and a few minutes.

Left Nostril Breathing

The first one comes from Kundalini yoga, and it’s called left nostril breathing. Back in 2016, I became a Kundalini yoga teacher — not to teach classes, but because I wanted to go deep into breath and mantra for myself. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done for my own healing, and this technique is one I still return to again and again. I love sharing it with my community because it works.

This one is especially good for those moments when your mind is racing, you can’t sleep, or you just need to come back to yourself. Three minutes is all it takes.

Here’s the beautiful thing about why this works: your body operates on both positive and negative electrical currents — it’s a finely tuned system. In the ancient science of Kundalini yoga, there are two energies: the Ida and Pingala. They intertwine as they move up each side of your spine and meet in the central channel.

The left side carries the Ida — feminine, moon energy, reflective, calming, cooling. The right side carries the Pingala — solar, masculine energy, bright, fiery, activating. In Western terms, you might think of these as your sympathetic (activating) and parasympathetic (calming) nervous systems. When we breathe through the left nostril, we’re intentionally inviting that calming, parasympathetic energy in.

How to do it:

Set a timer for three minutes. Sit comfortably cross-legged on the floor. Take your right hand and use your thumb to gently close your right nostril — fingers pointing straight up toward the sky. Rest your other hand in Gyan mudra: index fingertip touching your thumb tip, the “Seal of Wisdom.” Close your eyes.

Now just breathe — long, slow, deep breaths in through your left nostril. And long, slow, deep breaths out through that same nostril. Let your belly expand on the inhale. Release all the tension on the exhale. This simple act connects both hemispheres of your brain and begins to regulate your nervous system almost immediately.

(Watch me demonstrate in the video above!)

Box Breathing

My other go-to is Box Breathing — a technique used by everyone from Navy SEALs to anxious humans at 2 am (I’ve been both 😄).

Picture drawing a square as you breathe:

1. Breathe in — slowly through your nose for 4 counts

2. Hold — gently for 4 counts

3. Breathe out — slowly through your mouth for 4 counts

4. Hold — gently again for 4 counts

Repeat until you feel your nervous system settle down. It really does work.

I hope these tools serve you well this week. Your body knows how to calm itself — sometimes it just needs a little invitation.

XO, Sherold

P.S. — Wednesday, April 22nd, I’m hosting our second free (for paid subscribers) Gathering on Zoom: the 100-Day Visualization Project. We’ll write together as a group, each of us mapping out what we want our life to look like 100 days from now. Then share what we want to accomplish. Visualization works! I’ll be writing intentions for two more memoir chapters — and finally finishing the trim paint downstairs at our home (doors and baseboards, you know who you are 😄).

P.S.S. Paid subscribers - I will send you the Zoom registration link this weekend. Stay tuned.

Hey friend - I’ve been thinking about resilience lately. Not the word — the word gets used so casually it’s almost lost its meaning. I mean the actual lived experience of going through something that should have broken you, and discovering that it didn’t.

It takes courage not to settle for a small life.

In February of this year, John and I flew to Loreto, Baja California, Mexico. You might be surprised to know that this was the third time we’ve returned since 2017 — the year we were there on vacation and, one hour after whale watching, our van was hit on a two-lane desert highway and I nearly died. For two decades, except for six years after the accident, we have returned to Loreto to visit our friends and spend time in nature. The Sea of Cortez, the mountains, the unhurried pace of a small Mexican town on the water.

What gives me the courage to return to the place where I almost died?

I have a knowing. A bone-deep certainty built from evidence — the accumulated proof of my own survival — that if I were ever to face something devastating again, I could rely on what I’ve already been through. Not because I’m fearless. Because I’ve done hard things before, and I know what I’m made of.

Let me tell you what I mean by that.

• Twenty-one years ago, my younger brother was murdered. His case remains unsolved in Knoxville, Tennessee. I had to find a way to carry that grief without letting it become the whole story of my life.

• Fourteen years ago, my son faced a medical crisis that required interventions that saved his life. If you’ve ever sat in a hospital waiting room not knowing if your child will make it through the night, you know a particular quality of helplessness that is unlike anything else. I sat in that room. I made it through that wait. And so did he.

• Nine years ago, I was in a near-fatal car wreck in Baja, Mexico. A medical evacuation. Six surgeries — two in Mexico, three at Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego. A six-week hospital stay. Learning to walk twice. A near-death experience in the surgery suite that changed everything about how I understand suffering, love, and what I’m here to do.

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When I look back at all of it, here’s what I notice:

I didn’t just survive those things. Something in me grew because of them. Not despite the suffering — through it.

The pain became a teacher. The challenges became a doorway.

I want to be careful about how I say this, because I’m not suggesting I’m special nor can anyone do this.

I do not let my ego get away with things like that — ha. I have sat with too many women who have been through as much or more, and I think it’s important that we never compare our traumas. Each of us carries what we carry. It hurts and we suffer.

What I’m saying is that something made the difference between being destroyed by these experiences and being transformed by them. I’ve been trying to understand what that something is, because if I can name it, maybe you can find it in yourself too.

— ✦ —

Looking honestly at my own life, I can see two things that have sustained me through every hard season, and deepened with each one rather than diminishing.

The first is a strong spiritual practice and a belief in my Higher Power.

Not a tidy, comfortable religion — a living, breathing relationship with something larger than myself.

A willingness to say, in the ambulance, in the surgery suite, in the middle of my marriage falling apart and being rebuilt: I’m in your hands. I surrender this to you.

Use whatever language feels true for you — God, Universe, Higher Power, Source. The name matters less than the act of opening your hands.

I am not a counselor. I want to be clear about that. In fact, I have gone through counseling during each of these traumas, and even now I see a psychologist to help me process childhood wounds.

The work of self-realization — of forgiving myself and others, of understanding what has been running underneath my choices — feels like the job of my lifetime.

I do not write from a place of having arrived. I write from a place of being deeply in it.

The second is what I would call a rich inner life.

The willingness to go inside rather than run away by numbing out or overworking. To feel what needs to be felt. To ask what this experience is trying to teach me. To sit with the part of me that is deeper than the fear — quieter than the pain, and somehow, always, still intact.

These two things together — the Higher Power and the inner life — have not made the hard things easier. But they have made them meaningful.

And meaning, I have come to believe, is what makes the difference between trauma that destroys and trauma that transforms.

This is not resilience as toughness. This is resilience as the discovery of what was always already whole in you.

I said there is something in you that is already whole. I meant that literally.

What I’ve come to call that wholeness has a name. Carl Jung spent his career pointing toward it. Every great spiritual tradition has mapped it. Psychology has been circling it for over a century. And in the void between life and death — in the surgery suite in San Diego, when the ego fell completely away and what remained was pure love, pure peace, pure awareness — I came face to face with it.

That is what next week’s piece is about.

Not what makes people unbreakable. But what the unbreakable part actually is.

Did you resonate with this article? If so, I’d love to know what you think. Please share this on social media as it helps people find this work. Sending lots of love your way.

XO, Sherold

Leave a comment

P.S. Mark your calendar:

────────────────────────────────

HIGH ROAD TO HEALING

Gatherings on the High Road

Our next Gathering on the High Road — April 22 🌿

The 100-Day Visualization Project.

This Gathering is for paid subscribers. Please consider joining so you can take advantage of the many Gatherings I will offer this year on Zoom.

✦ Wednesday, April 22

✦ 12:00pm PDT · 1:00pm MDT · 2:00pm CDT · 3:00pm EDT

✦ 7:00pm GMT · 8:00am Thursday NZDT

────────────────────────────────

Here’s what I want you to know before we meet:

Visualization is not wishful thinking. It is not a vision board on a wall that you walk past without feeling anything. And it is not the same as hoping something will happen and waiting for the universe to deliver it.

It is neuroscience.

Researchers have shown that when you vividly imagine doing something — truly see it, feel it, experience it in your body — your brain activates the same neural pathways as if you were actually doing it. In one landmark study, basketball players who practiced free throws only in their minds improved nearly as much as players who practiced physically. Same neural pathways. Same results.

This is what 100 days of consistent visualization can do to a brain.

It can rewire it.

────────────────────────────────

At our April 22 Gathering we’ll explore:

✦ What the science actually says about how visualization works

✦ Why most people do it wrong — and the one shift that changes everything

✦ How to begin your own 100 Day Visualization Project

✦ What you want to do, be, or have — and how to make your brain your greatest ally

I’ll share the research, tell you a story, and give you three prompts to begin your own practice. Then we’ll share with each other.

This Gathering will be recorded and sent to all paid subscribers.

────────────────────────────────

Not yet a paid subscriber? This is a beautiful moment to join us.

$50 for a full year — Gatherings several times a quarter, teachings, and a community of women doing the real work of healing and becoming.

👉 JOIN HERE: https://www.sheroldbarr.com/subscribe

I can’t wait to be in the room with you. With love,

Sherold

Leave a comment

Image by LoggaWiggler from Pixabay

Hey friend - I know through hard-won experience that having a spiritual practice as you age is critical to a life full of meaning. Things happen - we will experience health issues, loss of the people we love, and challenges managing life in a chaotic world.

While I’m not religious, I consider myself deeply spiritual. Things have happened in my life that feel like divine intervention. As I look back on my traumas, I’ve found the positive things in my adversities - it always got to do with love. Life has taught me that there is a higher power at work.

I’ve learned to trust my Higher Power (HP). However, when I’m in a worry trance, I have to pull myself back from the brink and recalibrate my nervous system. I hope you enjoy this article full of good research.

Dr. Lydia Manning spent years sitting with people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s — people who had survived illness, loss, grief, and the particular weight of a long life. She wanted to know what made some of them resilient while others crumbled under the same pressures.

Dr. Manning is a social gerontologist — a scientist who studies aging and is currently affiliated with the Scripps Gerontology Center at Miami University in Ohio — a leading institution in aging research.

What she found wasn’t what most people expect.

It wasn’t toughness. It wasn’t optimism. It wasn’t even a support system, though those matter. What she found, across hundreds of interviews and decades of research, was this:

the most resilient people weren’t just surviving their hardships. They were being transformed by them.

One of the women in her study had gone blind. When Dr. Manning asked her about it, she said something that stopped me cold when I read it. She said that as a child, a blind man had boarded with her family. She read to him, walked him downtown, listened to him talk about his life without sight. She had no idea then that she would someday lose her own vision. But looking back, she said:

“The Lord was preparing me for what was ahead. Blindness is both a blessing and a hardship. What I learned then helps me now. I learned how to trust God and myself.”

She didn’t just survive her blindness. She found meaning in it. She found a thread running through her whole life that she couldn’t see until she was standing in the dark.

Another woman in the study had survived not one but several illnesses her doctors had called terminal. Each time, she didn’t just recover — she accumulated something.

Skills. Strategies.

A kind of knowing that you can survive what you thought would break you.

That knowing becomes its own form of protection.

And then there was Ruth. When Dr. Manning asked her about her faith, she said:

“If I didn’t have my faith, the things that have happened to me — I don’t know what I would do without it. After my husband died, I still feel he helps me. No one could convince me otherwise, because there are too many unusual things.”

Too many unusual things. I know exactly what she means.

What Dr. Manning discovered across all of these women — and across the 64 people she studied ranging in age from 52 to 93.

The most resilient among them shared three things:

A sense of divine support, a maintained sense of purpose, and the practice of gratitude.

Not as a performance. Not as a coping strategy. But as a way of being that had been built, quietly, over a lifetime.

And here is what moved me most about her research: those three things — faith, purpose, gratitude — cannot be taken away.

You can lose your health. You can lose your independence. You can lose the people you love most.

But you cannot lose your inner life. You cannot lose your capacity for meaning. You cannot lose access to the force greater than yourself, whatever name you give it.

I think about this when I remember surrendering to my higher power and worrying if I would live as I was loaded in an ambulance in the middle of the Baja, Mexico, desert on the way to a rural hospital.

I didn’t have my health. I didn’t have my independence. I didn’t have certainty about anything. But something remained. Something that no surgery could touch.

That is what resilience actually is. Not the absence of breaking. The presence of something that cannot be broken.

The high road isn’t the easy road. But it is the one that transforms you. And according to the research — and according to every woman in that study who outlived her losses and kept going anyway — transformation is always available. Right up until the very end.

And say hello to my mom - Dorothy Barker - who is 98 1/2! This woman is part terminator - strong and resilient in the face of losses and tragedies. She is pure love.

Subscriber Gatherings in 2026

100-Day Visualization Project :: April 22, 2026

Mark your calendar:

✦ Wednesday, April 22

✦ 12:00pm PDT · 1:00pm MDT · 2:00pm CDT · 3:00pm EDT

✦ 7:00pm GMT · 8:00am Thursday NZDT

Visualization is not wishful thinking.

It’s not a vision board on a wall that you walk past without feeling anything. It’s not the same as hoping something will happen and waiting for the universe to deliver it.

It is neuroscience.

Researchers have shown that when you vividly imagine doing something — truly see it, feel it, experience it in your body — your brain activates the same neural pathways as if you were actually doing it. In one landmark study, basketball players who practiced free throws only in their minds improved nearly as much as players who practiced physically. Same neural pathways. Same results.

This is what 100 days of consistent visualization can do to a brain - it can rewire it.

At our April 22 Gathering on Zoom we’ll explore:

✦ What the science actually says about how visualization works

✦ Why most people do it wrong — and the one shift that changes everything

✦ How to begin your own 100-Day Visualization Project

✦ What you want to do, be, or have — and how to make your brain your greatest ally in getting there

I’ll share the research, tell you a story, and give you three prompts to begin your own practice. Then we’ll share with each other.

This Gathering will be recorded and sent to all paid subscribers.

Not yet a paid subscriber? This is a beautiful moment to join us.

Want to say hello or leave me a comment? You KNOW I love hearing from you.

XO Sherold

Leave a comment

Sunset in Loreto, Baja, MX last week.

Hey friend - first of all, thank you for being a new or loyal subscriber. Your contribution helps me do my work in giving back to help others stop suffering from their thoughts and emotions.

I’m so thrilled to host our first of many Gatherings for my paid subscribers on Zoom on Tuesday, March 17th.

Here’s your Zoom li…

Read more

Photo: Unsplash@ Jack Cohen

Hey friend - I want to share some news that surprised and made me happy today! Substack (the newsletter/media platform I use for my articles) sent me a notice that High Road to Healing now ranked 59th in Faith and Spirituality! I was amazed and it gave me rocket fuel to work to get down into the 40 categories.

I’m starting a podcast in April called High Road to Healing. I hope that you enjoy the videos/audios I’m putting together. Maybe that will help us get more people interested in starting a spiritual practice and learning what I’ve learned from some of my most difficult life events.

I’m so thrilled to host our first of many Gatherings for my paid subscribers on Zoom on Tuesday, March 17th.

Thank you to my new and continuing paid Subscribers for joining. I’m sending out your Zoom link today for next Tuesday’s Zoom. Stay tuned!

The topic is fear. Not because fear is the enemy.

But because fear and awe are often the same feeling—and learning to tell the difference can change everything.

The Gathering is for monthly and annual subscribers to High Road to Healing.

Tuesday, March 17

• 🇺🇸 Pacific: 12 pm

• 🇺🇸 Mountain: 1 pm

• 🇺🇸 Central: 2 pm

• 🇺🇸 Eastern: 3 pm

• 🇬🇧 UK: 7 pm — UK doesn’t change until March 30, so they’re still GMT, still a reasonable evening

• 🇳🇿 New Zealand: 8 am Friday — NZ doesn’t change until April 6, still workable

  High Road to Healing with Sherold Barr is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

  The Gathering will be an intimate, sacred Zoom gathering exclusively for paid subscribers.

• We’ll open with a prayer of release, spend ten minutes with the topic of fear.

• I’ll share what I’ve learned about fear in my life and how I’ve learned to work with it.

• I’ll offer you prompts to reflect on and write. Then we will share with the group.

This is the first of many Gatherings I’ll hold for paid subscribers.

And because I had a birthday a few weeks ago, I’m offering a special rate through today.

I’m offering 30% off $50. So you can get an annual subscription for $35 and attend all the Gatherings for a year.

SUBSCRIBE HERE

I want you there!

If you sign up, I’ll send you the Zoom link for the Gathering.

One question to sit with before we meet:

What has fear been keeping you from that would bring you the feeling of freedom?

Comments? Questions? email sherold@sheroldbarr.com

XO Sherold

Unsplash: Vlad Bagacian

The topic is fear. Not because fear is the enemy.

But because fear and awe are often the same feeling—and learning to tell the difference can change everything.

The Gathering is for monthly and annual subscribers to High Road to Healing.

Thursday, March 17

• 🇺🇸 Pacific: 12 pm

• 🇺🇸 Mountain: 1 pm

• 🇺🇸 Central: 2 pm

• 🇺🇸 Eastern: 3 pm

• 🇬🇧 UK: 7 pm — UK doesn’t change until March 30, so they’re still GMT, still a reasonable evening

• 🇳🇿 New Zealand: 8 am Friday — NZ doesn’t change until April 6, still workable

  High Road to Healing with Sherold Barr is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Gathering will be an intimate, sacred Zoom gathering exclusively for paid subscribers.

• We’ll open with a prayer of release, spend ten minutes with the topic of fear.

• I’ll share what I’ve learned about fear in my life and how I’ve learned to work with it.

• I’ll offer you prompts to reflect on and write. Then we will share with the group.

This is the first of many Gatherings I’ll hold for paid subscribers.

And because this was my birthday week, I’m offering a special rate through Thursday, March 12 till 9 pm PDT.

SUBSCRIBE HERE

I want you there!

If you sign up, I’ll send you the Zoom link for the Gathering.

One question to sit with before we meet:

What has fear been keeping you from that would bring you the feeling of freedom?

Comments? Questions? email sherold@sheroldbarr.com

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