00:00:01 Kevin
My friends, if you are or have participated in the Compassionate Inquiry Professional Training Program, please join us from June 17th to June 19th at Renewal, a CI Summer Solstice Retreat hosted by Sat Dharam Kaur, an 18 CI facilitators from around the globe. In this immersive journey into renewal and transformation, you’ll experience guided practices, nature immersions, creative activities, small group workshops, connection circles, meaningful conversations, and much more, all designed to support your journey inward as we celebrate the Solstice in community. Tap the link below in the show notes to learn more and secure your place.

00:00:51 Pam
My best friend had said to me, I’m going to this talk in Toronto. It’s Gabor Maté. Have you heard of him? I’m like, I think so. I think I have one of his books. So I went, I was just blown away by Gabor. We’re in this massive auditorium. There were hundreds of quote unquote healers. So like therapists, psychotherapists, doctors, psychologists, all these people. And he said… one of the very first things he said was who needs therapy more than anyone else? And we’re like, addicts and people who have been abused. We were name calling all these people that need therapy and he goes, therapists. That hit me so profoundly, because it was in that moment I realized…. cause I, I do have to fix everyone. I came home from that conference and I said to my husband, if this ever becomes a course, I’m taking it.

00:01:45 Rosemary
This is the Gifts of Trauma podcast, stories of transformation and healing through Compassionate Inquiry. 

Pam Sommer, welcome to the Gifts of Trauma by Compassionate Inquiry. I’m delighted to be speaking with you here today.

00:02:10 Pam
Thank you so much.

00:02:12 Rosemary
I’m going to invite you, as we often do in Compassionate Inquiry, to set an intention for our time here together today. What would you like our listeners to gain through listening to this conversation?

00:02:26 Pam
Gosh, Rosemary, I think what comes up for me is, just sharing my journey through CI, through what’s brought me here. What’s coming into my mind is that it’s attainable. I have this story, often, maybe my boots are a bit too big for me or I’m trying to fill boots that are too big.

00:02:38 Rosemary
Wonderful, thank you. And my intention for our conversation today is that you be comfortable and you just are very fluid, allowing your heart to speak. As I will share this with our listeners, I got to be part of a year-long program that you facilitated. I interned with you. So I have seen you do your Compassionate Inquiry, your CI magic, with so many different people. And that’s what I’m really hoping will flow out of you today, as it always does, and just inspire people, because yes, what we believe about ourselves is not necessarily true. There’s so much more possible, once we get past that. 

I’d like to start Pam by introducing you briefly to our listeners just by sharing a couple of the dominant threads that show up in the tapestry of your life. Now professionally, you’re a Compassionate Inquiry practitioner and facilitator, which means that you lead the Compassionate Inquiry training. You’re an Emotional Freedom Technique, or EFT practitioner and you’re a registered massage therapist, and you’ve created an approach to support your client’s wellness that blends the art of EFT and Compassionate Inquiry with what you can’t not have, such a strong awareness of the body and how the body works, which would have come through your many years of working as a registered massage therapist. What would you like to add to that? Would you like listeners to know about you as we begin this conversation?

00:04:15 Pam
Yeah, that’s a great introduction. And I’ve also just taken training recently in becoming a Death Doula. I’m not practicing as a Death Doula yet, but… and maybe someday, just not quite yet. I want to say I’m a student of life but I feel like that’s so overused sometimes, but I think that’s really what it is.

00:04:32 Rosemary
Some of the things that really impressed me about you are… you live on a homestead/farm with your partner, you homeschool your two teens. Now they’re teens, but I’m sure that started a long time ago. And you take care, as you say on your website, which I think is so cute, of a farm full of freeloading animals. And you love being outdoors, camping, hiking, you enjoy practicing yoga. So you’re very much an outdoor person and a connected to the earth person. Is that correct?

00:05:05 Pam
Absolutely, absolutely. It is. I wouldn’t say we’re active homeschoolers anymore because our one son, our oldest, is in college, he’s now away at school and our daughter has entered her last couple of years of high school into the mainstream. But yes, we homeschooled all through public school and into their high school. I’ve always loved animals. My husband’s always loved animals and we’ve always had dogs and always wanted more animals, but just not the time and not the space. And then COVID happened and all of a sudden we have this time, because I… my mode of work as massage therapist, these animals just started coming to us. We have these five goats, we have a cat, we have three dogs. We’ve got ducks and chickens. We have pigs and not many of them offering us much then themselves as like these funny quirky little beings. 

Rosemary: Hence the freeloading.

Pam: Freeloading. They’re 100% freeloaders.

00:05:59 Rosemary
So you’re not getting eggs, you’re not getting bacon, you’re just loving them.

00:06:04 Pam
Yeah, we do get some… we get some eggs and that sort of thing. But yeah, the majority of them are just hanging tight and enjoying life.

00:06:10 Rosemary
Before we move on, I’m just thinking, you must have been so busy when your children were younger, homeschooling them, working as a massage therapist, taking care of whatever animals you had at that point, homesteading. Talk to me a little bit about that. You’re off grid, is that right? Tell us about that. That sounds so interesting.

00:06:30 Pam
So my husband and I purchased the property that we’re on right now back in, I think it was in 2001. I wasn’t even 20 years old, I was just entering post secondary. We had found this piece of property that had nothing on it, not even a laneway. And it’s funny, like, I’ve noticed in my life, it’s not a cognitive knowing that something good is going to happen, but it’s in hindsight, I know I can trust that these good things come to me. We bought this property, much to the dismay of my parents. I used my student loan as my part of the down payment and sold my car. He had some investments, we had to scrape together enough for a down payment on a $30,000 property, which now is unheard of, for sure. It was busy. We didn’t know what we were doing, but we both just trusted that everything would fall into place. We decided to homeschool our children, which again we had no idea what we were doing, but it seemed to workout. We both run our own businesses which we didn’t know what we were doing and it’s working out.

00:07:39 Rosemary
You jumped into the deep end, because I’m thinking off grid. You’ve got to figure out wells, you know you need water, you need power, sewage, waste, so many things to figure out. Wow!

00:07:48 Pam
Nearly everything is self-contained on our property. We have wind and solar. We have a battery bank that… the wind and solar powers the battery bank and then we pull off of the batteries. We heat with wood. We do have propane for our hot water and our stove, but other than that we’re pretty self-contained. And back to the COVID topic, when it hit, we already home schooled our children. We weren’t really dependent on a whole lot of external resources. It seemed to be pretty easeful and I know that’s not the case for the majority of people around the world.

00:08:18 Rosemary
And do you grow any of your food?

00:08:20 Pam
Yep, we have a pretty sizeable garden and my husband’s parents just live up the road and they have a gigantic garden.

00:08:27 Rosemary
Gosh, so there’s… I’m just imagining layers like canning and pickling and preserving.

00:08:32 Pam
I go in bits and spurts. Sometimes I’m really keen, and canning, and then sometimes I’m not. I’m on a bit of a sourdough bread kick, as most perimenopausal women are right now.

00:08:43 Rosemary
So has that been a bit of a theme for you? Just jump in the deep end and figure out how to swim.

00:08:49 Pam
Yeah, it’s actually a really great analogy for how it’s been for me. Yeah.

00:08:54 Rosemary
Yeah, and it seems like your husband’s the same type of person, cause the…

00:08:58 Pam
Exactly the same, yeah.

00:08:59 Rosemary
Wonderful. That’s a great lead in what attracted you to working in the healing world?

00:09:06 Pam
That’s a great question, Rosemary. I’ll preface this story with… I met my husband when I was 16, which again, my whole family loves him and my parents love him or loved him and… but he was 20 when I was 16. So there was a bit of an age gap there, and young love… I wanted to stay near him. I don’t have this beautiful story of this is what I’ve always dreamed of, but again, trusting that things fall into place for me. I wanted to find something that I could do that didn’t take a lot of time, didn’t take me far away from home, and I could make enough money. So I was pulled towards massage therapy which was a condensed 2 year program. That’s what started my journey into the healing arts lifestyle.

00:09:53 Rosemary
Yeah, Thank you. And are you near enough people that were able to support? 

Pamela: Oh, yeah.

Rosemary:
OK. Because I have this picture in my mind that you’re somewhere way out in the middle of nowhere. I think that picture might not be accurate.

00:10:08 Pam
It’s not 100% accurate, but it’s there’s some pieces of it. We do live in the country, we’re surrounded by bush and farmland, but we’re not far from a pretty sizable town and other little towns around. So yeah, definitely a community that can support this healing work.

00:10:24 Rosemary
Wonderful. How long did you work as a massage therapist? How long did that last before you branched out into your additional practices?

00:10:33 Pam
Yeah, I’m still doing massage therapy actively, and I started in 2000. I was certified in 2003, so I’ve been doing it now for, gosh, now 20… What’s the math there, Rosemary?

00:10:46 Rosemary
22 years!

00:10:47 Pam
22 years.

00:10:49 Rosemary
Yeah, that’s interesting because a lot of massage therapists, they will not continue for that long.

00:10:56 Pam
And I think that’s where it was a blessing for me to have these other two modalities come in. So having EFT come in, Emotional Freedom Technique/tapping and Compassionate Inquiry because I can pull in other options for me to work without exhausting my body because it is extremely physically demanding job. And a lot of massage therapists do physically burnout and emotionally for sure, because there’s a lot that people share. Well, it’s an intimate setting. You’re touching people, you create the safety for people and people do open up emotionally. I think it can be very taxing.

00:11:32 Rosemary
I’d love to hear a little bit more about this because I only know about being on the receiving end of a massage. And as you’re saying what you’re saying, my niece also worked as a massage therapist for a short while, and she’s tiny. And she told me she got all the big, muscular men, and it was just physically too much for her. But she never mentioned the emotional aspect. So maybe you can share… like what? 

Pam:
Sure.

Rosemary: What happens as you’re working with a body. If I can just say that?

00:12:04 Pam
Yeah, absolutely. And I think especially in a small town, like I would consider where I live, small towns, the clients that I have, I see them regularly. So I know what’s happening in their lives, their families, their work, the dynamics that are happening for them. And because we are a regulated health profession and by law it’s confidential for us to keep information confidential. There’s a safety built in to that. And then in addition, you get to know someone so well, that safety is also created. There’s a safety built in, but then the safety created and people share intimate parts of their lives. And before I had the skills of EFT and then Compassionate Inquiry, it landed for me heavier than it does now. I would take that on. I had the belief on, and this is an old belief of mine that I had to fix. I had to make sure that they were better emotionally and physically than when they came in, and it was just too much, it was too taxing, and it took a toll on me for sure.

00:13:04 Rosemary
What was the toll, if you don’t mind sharing?

00:13:07 Pam
Absolutely. For me, it started physically. I’d get a lot of headaches. And this is really funny because I didn’t even know of it at the time. I had no awareness that this was happening at the time. I can see it now in hindsight. I would get a lot of headaches. And then around 2010, 2011, I herniated a couple of discs in my back, which doing a physical job, then, there was a tremendous amount of pain. I know now that it was raising a family, having a whole business, all of those parts, my, my parents being unwell, their health a lot piling up. That then led to some pretty significant anxiety and panic, physical manifestations of that and now I can’t remember what your question was.

00:13:56 Rosemary
Was it was really, what was the effect of taking that on being the person to fix?

00:14:04 Pam
Oh, gosh, yeah. Being the person to fix, it’s the straw. It’s literally the straw that broke the camel’s back. Like that sort of responsibility that I put on myself, was too much, and my body was, as Gabor says. The body says no, and it said no really loud. And I didn’t listen and I didn’t listen, and it kept letting me know.

00:14:22 Rosemary
So did you end up having to take a break from your work?

00:14:26 Pam
No, I didn’t take a break from my work. I started seeking out… like I was already seeing a chiropractor, which was incredibly helpful. I was seeing a naturopathic Dr. again, which was incredibly helpful and these different modalities, and I thought I’ll try acupuncture. And she’s this beautiful woman and she’s from the former Yugoslavia. And she said to me, you need to do this. And she was tapping on different parts of her body, and I didn’t understand what she was saying. And I, in all honesty, I thought she was a little bit crazy. That’s woo. That’s kooky. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m like, whatever. So then I went home and I was flipping through Facebook, to zone out and try to not think about all the things. There was something came up about this EFT tapping. I’m like, Oh my God, that’s crazy because it’s two things in one day. I’d never heard of this thing in my life. And then two times, it happened. So I looked it up and I can’t remember now. It was like 3 weeks or a month later. There was a course being taught a half hour from where we live, which is wild because again, like I said, we live in not a very populated, we don’t live in Toronto or someone really busy. It’s like OK, fine. And that’s what started me on this psycho-emotional spiritual growth.

00:15:48 Rosemary
Yeah, wow, 3, three hits all at the same time.

00:15:53 Pam
Yes. Which… I’ve never heard of it before my life, and it definitely was the catapult for me. I would not have found Compassionate Inquiry without that first step. I wouldn’t have been ready for that step, had I not taken the first one of tapping.

00:16:06 Rosemary
Yeah. Can you continue just to take us down this road? You went and you took the training and please continue sharing your story. This is fascinating.

00:16:15 Pam
Yes. So it was, I took the training and I started dabbling a little bit. We had to do some, like in Compassion Inquiry, we had to do some dyads and triads or practicums. And so we had to do that with EFT. Then I started branching out a little bit into having a few clients. And it’s funny because I had previously been given, my sister gave me the book, When the Body Says No, years prior, but I wasn’t ready. I was, again, just couldn’t hold the concept of it. My mother-in-law gave me the book, Hold On To Your Kids.  Again, I couldn’t hold the concept of it was just too much for me at the time. And then my best friend said to me, I’m going to this conference in Toronto or this talk in Toronto. It’s Gabor, Maté. Have you heard of him? I’m like, I think so. I think I have one of his books. So I went with her to this conference. The first day, the first full day, I had the biggest migraine of my life. I could just barely keep my eyes open. It was just so much. But I was like, holy crap, I was pulled right in to this information. I was just blown away by Gabor. And he said to us… we’re in this massive auditorium. There were hundreds of quote unquote healers. So like, therapists, psychotherapists, doctors, psychologists, all these people. And he said, one of the very first things he said was. “Who needs therapy more than anyone else?” And we’re like addicts and people being abused were Dane calling all these people that need therapy and he goes, “Therapists.”  And it hit me so profoundly because it was at that moment I realized, because I do have to fix everyone. I have to be the one to fix everybody. And that comes from my childhood. I’ve done a lot of work on that personally. I came home from that conference and I said to my husband, if this ever becomes a course, I’m taking it. And it wasn’t a course at that time. It was labeled Compassionate Inquiry, but I think it was in the works. I think Sat Dharam, in her incredible wisdom, probably had it mapped out in her mind. And that was back in 2017, I believe. And then in 2019 I was in the first cohort of CI.

00:18:31 Rosemary
Wow. They say when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. And I’m going to add a caveat to that. The student is ready, the teacher will appear, and the bookshelf is already loaded. 

Pam:
Yeah, 100%. I have that book. Yeah. 

Rosemary:
Yeah. Wow. What an amazing journey. Yes. So you took the CI training in 2019, and you are a facilitator now. You are one of the people delivering the training. So I’d love to loop back to your work as a healer, now that you have all these tools, you’re trained in EFT, you’re trained in Compassionate Inquiry, you’re a trained massage therapist, and you still offer that service. So with these additional trainings, when you have somebody, a body, on your massage table. I’m just wondering if you can contrast before and after. Before you knew about the body holding on to trauma physically. It being, as Gabor says, “We keep our issues and our tissues.”  How is it different?

00:19:39 Pam
Yeah, it’s definitely different. I actually had a client once who had an ab. reaction during a massage. And so that’s like a quote unquote, out of nowhere, big emotional response when I was working on one area of her body and I had no idea what to do. I was like, it’s OK. I knew it wasn’t physically painful for her because she had told me. And I wanted to get her tissues and find a way to get her to stop crying, because if you’re not crying then you’re good. So note the sarcasm there. So that was a really profound moment for me too. When I look back and now, and I’ve had clients since have a similar reaction, and with the training that I have… We always say in CI, “All parts of you are welcome here.” And so that part as well, on the massage table is welcome here. It’s safe. It’s appropriate when people share what’s happening for them in their lives. It’s often even expected to have those sorts of responses, and there’s nothing to fix. That emotion is the fix. That emotion that is coming through them is their bodies’ innate wisdom. They have that capacity to heal if they can step out of the way and trust that’s happening for a reason.

00:20:55 Rosemary
Yeah, yeah. Gosh, so you’re more comfortable when people have these emotional responses.

00:21:04 Pam
Which then makes them more comfortable to have those emotional experiences.

00:21:09 Rosemary
Yeah, I’m just wondering, I’m curious… There must be just so much more of a release for the people you work on now, with all of the learning you’ve undertaken between 2012… now the math, so in the last 13 years.

00:21:25 Pam
Yeah, absolutely. And if I’m not comfortable with them having an emotional response on the massage table, or if they’re sitting across from me for a CI or EFT session, they’re going to pick up on it. They’re going to know that I’m not comfortable. And then they’re going to hold back. There’s going to be restriction there. And then that could potentially just keep perpetuating that same traumatic constriction that it’s not safe for me to be who I am. I’m having this emotion right now, but I can’t express it because it’s not safe. It’s not being heard, it’s not being seen, and it might actually not be safe for me to have it.

00:22:05 Rosemary
Is there a lot more conversation now in the massage sessions where you bring CI in?

00:22:13 Pam
Yes, for sure. It’s not. How do I say it’s not structured? I don’t, in a massage therapy session, I don’t go into a CI session unless someone would request that because I think there has to be so much space and permission given and received, but within the massage therapy scope asking them what is that like for you? How does that feel? Lots of permission? What are you noticing?

00:22:48 Rosemary
I’m just thinking of personal experiences with massage therapy. Like I had a massage a couple months ago when I was in South Africa and she was exclaiming about how tight my shoulders were. And I was thinking if she had been CI informed we could have done like, it’s like, why would my shoulders be tight? The shoulder blade area. And that’s something that you could work through with your clients. Often I’ve been in a massage session and they’ve hit a knot. And it’s, “Ow!” What was that? Where did that come from? Because it didn’t make its presence felt until expert hands hit it.

00:23:21 Pam
Sure, exactly. And even just slowing in a CI session, when something arises, we slow, we give our breath to it, we give our space to it, we pause, we don’t rush through it. So much like a massage therapy session. If that happens, if my hands find that spot or you notice someone may flush, they may start to sweat, they might get goosebumps. The body has these reactions other than pain, that if we’re tuned into it ,and we can slow into it, allow that response to happen, sometimes words aren’t even needed.

00:24:01 Rosemary
So tell me Pam, how do you integrate your practices or do you keep them distinct? Would you ever bring EFT into a CI session? Or… I think it would be very difficult not to if something’s showing up in a certain way. So can you tell us about how and when you integrate and how that shows up?

00:24:24 Pam
Yeah, definitely. With CI and EFT, I use them together very often. I will often pull in EFT when the client is stuck with something, when they’re circling back over the same topic, often when they zone out, when they are going numb. When there’s a block. That’s the best way to answer it. When there’s a block and obviously always with their permission. I’ll ask them if it is OK, if we do some tapping, and I’ve explained it to them prior to. And when that happens, it’s like this magical opening 99% of the time that allows them to because it brings in that somatic knowledge that the body has to then process whatever it is that’s happening for them at that time.

00:25:14 Rosemary
Yeah, beautiful. And I’d like to just put something in here, too, for our listeners, because you shared your own reaction to your first experience with EFT. And I interviewed Gary Craig, back in 2004,

Pam:
Oh, yeah!

Rosemary:
Gary Craig, who’s the founder of the Emotional Freedom Technique. And it was still very marginally known. So I guess really what I’d like to put in there is if you come across this even just once in a day, I’d like to invite listeners just to be open to it. And if there’s resistance, just give it a chance, because as Gary used to say, “It often works when nothing else will.”

00:25:57 Pam
It really does. And my mentor in EFT, Susan Bushel, she said something went in the training. She said suspend your disbelief for a moment. Suspend it for just a moment and follow this. Let your body talk to you. And I use that often, because people… you look crazy. You’re tapping on your arms. You’re tapping on your face, under your arms. It feels so silly. Yeah, yeah. It feels so silly to do it, especially when you’re doing this. You feel like a monkey.

00:26:30 Rosemary
Yeah. And I’m curious too, Pam, because if we go back, chronologically speaking, you were in rough shape when you undertook the EFT training.

00:26:41 Pam
Yeah, a lot of back pain, a lot of anxiety.

00:26:44 Rosemary
Did the process of training in EFT have a therapeutic effect on what had been happening with your body?

00:26:51 Pam
A hundred percent, and very similar to CI, like in the CI program the first third of the year-long training is on the self and that’s very similar to the EFT training is the importance of… they call it a personal peace procedure. Having that practice of making sure that you’re a clear slate, or in CI we say, like a clear mirror. Because you can’t help someone if… you can’t be a safe container if you yourself are feeling unsafe or you’re jammed up and not that you’re ever clear and have it all sorted out, which is now I now realize, but doing as best as you can to keep that clear.

00:27:33 Rosemary
Yeah. And I’m wondering if you can just guide us through the arc of your personal physical healings. You had issues with your back. You had all this stuff going on. You took the EFT training and then you flowed into the CI training a few years later. By the time you had done all of that training, how were you feeling?

00:27:55 Pam
It’s certainly not gone, it’s certainly not healed, but I have the tools now. People talk about their anxiety and healing their anxiety and mine hit so hard… It was the day of my daughter’s 4th birthday and I remember that very clearly because she is a leap year baby so it was her first birthday. And the stories that were happening in my head were, you just need to make it through today because if you make it through today… I thought I was having a heart attack. My anxiety was so high I thought, after today I don’t want to say you’re not needed or I had none of those thoughts but if I could just make it through today then everything will be fine. So I went to a medical doctor, had a full check over, because I was convinced that’s what was happening. That I was having a heart attack. Then I went to my naturopathic doctor because I was prescribed some medications and my naturopathic doctor said can we try this first? There was some support there and I tried the acupuncturist, which I had already told you about. And then all of these modalities I’m still using today, to keep me in a state where… these modalities that I’m using today allow me to continue without the physical pain, without the highly anxious thoughts and patterns, and not that I don’t have pain and not that I don’t have anxiety because I’m human. I think those things come along with the human condition, but they’re manageable. They’re safe.

00:29:25 Rosemary
Yeah, so your attunement to your body is significantly heightened because it did have to really yell at you to get your attention.

00:29:32 Pam
Oh my gosh, absolutely. That’s a really great point, Rosemary, because my beautiful mother… both my parents are now passive, but my beautiful mother, she had like she was as strong as an ox. She was, like she charged through. She was like the strongest woman I’ve ever met, and wasn’t allowed the space to feel, wasn’t allowed the space to be vulnerable, quote unquote weak. And I learned that so well from her and I’m so grateful for that. And it came with the impact of anxiety, depression, physical pain, these patterns of trying to keep myself safe. I can even hear it in my voice as I talk about it, a little wavering in my voice. These traits that I learned to muscle through and push through, they worked to a really certain point of, to the point of… of breakdown. Yeah, so.

00:30:34 Rosemary
Is it fair to say that it’s sort of inherited? That’s generational trauma. Oh yeah. It would have come to your mom through her, possibly, maternal line.

00:30:45 Pam
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, it’s actually I was about six weeks into my CI training when my dad passed, and we were in my parents’ bedroom with my dad, my mom, myself and his nurse. And the nurse basically told my dad that things were wrapping up, like things were coming to an end. And I started to cry. And I left the room and my mom came out and we’re both… I was crying. She came out wiping her tears, saying, “OK, settle down. That’s not going to help anyone.” And I had this moment of holy shit, this is where it comes from. Like she had to do this. So with zero disrespect, with just honor to my mom because she had to do it. And she did it so beautifully. But I had this awareness because of the six weeks of Compassionate Inquiry training that I had. And like, oh my goodness, this is where it comes from. So I had the grace and the honor of having that knowledge when that happened, so that I could then circle back to that, which I did many times to work through that moment. But it was this awareness of, I don’t have to do it like this anymore.

00:32:02 Rosemary
Yeah, yeah. I have a feeling, I have a sense, that lesson… you were able to bring back when your mom herself passed.

00:32:12 Pam
Oh God, yeah, absolutely.

00:32:15 Rosemary
And help her find some peace and some relief from the pressure that was coming down through generations and generations. That, “Wipe those tears away. That’s not going to help anybody.”They can help the person who’s shedding the tears. 

Pam:
Absolutely 

Rosemary:
It’s so healing to just allow otherwise that grief, that sadness gets bottled up inside.

00:32:35 Pam
Yeah, one of my greatest gifts that I’ve ever received was to be able to sit with my mom, and my sister was there as well, when she passed. It was profound. 

00:32:48 Rosemary
Yeah, I have to ask Pam, is this in any way connected with your most recent training as a Death doula?

00:32:56 Pam
The teacher will come…. Every year. I have a theme of… this is going to be my… not my goal, but my intention for the year. And last year my intention was grief, to lean into that. So I took the death doula training and I worked a lot on the grief of my dad, the grief of my mom, and just grief in general. And it’s amazing because I’m like, God, I’m nailing this thing, I can talk about it. I’m good, I’m solid. And then September came, and my son went to college and felt grief that I’ve never experienced in my life. It was tremendous, but I was able to experience it, I believe, fully. I allowed myself to have the tears again. I can hear it in my voice now as I speak. It was so beautiful. It was so beautiful to be able to weep.

00:34:02 Rosemary
I’m so glad you said that. Thank you, Pam, because I had that same experience when my stepson left home. And it was so confusing, it was just such a strange feeling because there was grief for me and this emptiness in the house and happiness for him. It was so confusing.

00:34:22 Pam
Yeah, I don’t know what the right word is, but like the pride that you feel, this, like how just so proud you are of them and the depth of pain, which sounds so dramatic because he just went to college. But I would really learning not to judge my own experiences. This is painful. That’s OK.

00:34:45 Rosemary
Yeah, I think that’s going to be a great message for all the current or newly approaching empty nesters. The fall season approaches and more children fly the nest. It’s… be prepared. It’s a rite of passage. And what words would you share with people who are anticipating that, like they’re in the business now preparing, getting ready. What do you need? What do you need for your residence? What do you need for your accommodation? And then…

00:35:17 Pam
Gosh, just give yourself so much space. Let it happen. I heard someone refer to it as, “I’m not an empty nester.” And we’re not. We still have our daughter here and we actually have an exchange student living with us right now as well. So it’s like I need to fill those little gaps, which I’m not. But someone referred to it as “I’m a bird launcher, not an empty nester.” And it landed with me so well. Yeah, but to just feel it and, and I had such incredible support from my own CI therapist and my own therapist to just to allow me to sit with it and not judge that part of me that is sad and proud and happy and scared. My God, scared. Yeah.

00:36:01 Rosemary
Yeah, that’s beautiful. And just to loop back, I think probably a Death Doula is something that many of our listeners wouldn’t have heard of. Can you tell us a little bit about what role does a Death Doula serve and how is it different from working with a therapist around grief?

00:36:21 Pam
Yeah, so it’s funny because I thought that I dreamt up that term. I thought I’m like, Oh my God, I’m on to something here. And then I was sharing this with my neighbor and she’s like, Oh yeah, there’s training on that. I’m like, oh, which is great. So a death doula is someone who is there for psycho emotional support of the individual who’s transitioning and the family. It’s not medical support. It’s very similar to a Birth Doula supporting, advocating the person that is either in birth or in death. So on either end of the life spectrum, everyone’s heard of a birth doula, and I think there’s so many similarities because there’s such, some people would say a veil there. There’s such an incredible amount of emotion happening on either end, and it’s creating that safe container holding them.

00:37:18 Rosemary
It sounds like they could be helping with practical decisions. For example, if you’ve got a loved one on life support and, trying to work through the decision, do we continue the life support? Do we not continue… all these very hard decisions?

00:37:33 Pam
Yeah. And maybe not even necessarily helping with that decision, obviously that’s a family and an individual’s decision, but moving through the emotion while that’s happening.

00:37:43 Rosemary
That’s what I meant because it’s the emotions that get in our way. So there’s a very practical aspect as well. Yeah. And a death doula could almost cross paths with a birth doula in the case of a miscarriage.

00:37:58 Pam
Oh my gosh, yeah, yeah. Wouldn’t that be a beautiful training or a beautiful modality to have would be someone who’s trained in kind of both ends and unfortunately sometimes at the same time it’s happening.

00:38:11 Rosemary
Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. I know there are a lot of us walking around with unacknowledged grief.

00:38:18 Pam
Oh yeah.

00:38:19 Rosemary
Though I think that’s the one gift of death, is that it gives us this opening to release, release that pain. Thank you. So you are still in the process of that training?

00:38:30 Pam
I know I’ve done the training and I’ve got my certification, but I’m just not practicing. I’ve got a little too much on my plate now with life, teenagers.

00:38:38 Rosemary
So it’s a tool in your toolbox that is just sitting there until there’s a demand. OK, yeah, I understand now. I see you as a guide and a teacher, obviously to your children when you’re home schooling and to the people that take your Compassionate Inquiry professional program training. Is teaching a natural thing for you? Is it easy for you?

00:39:03 Pam
I think so. I think that’s always been something I’ve been pulled towards. I co-opped when I was a student as a teacher or within a classroom. My job was a grade one classroom and after the year of cooping, I was like, that’s not gonna happen. That seemed not the path that I wanted to go into. And then which is really curious. It’s really curious for me because I ended up homeschooling along with my partner and the support of the family that we have around us. But I was definitely the one that was leading the charge on the homeschooling department.

00:39:39 Rosemary
I’d like to shift a little bit in the focus going back to your work as a Compassionate Inquiry facilitator. I noticed, because I was privileged to be part of the cohort, but you’ve been gifted by the CII administration to be in charge of a lot of the training of our Indigenous participants. And I’m wondering how did that come to be? Is there a reason that you were responsible for cohorts with a large number of Indigenous participants? Can you tell us about that?

00:40:12 Pam
Yeah. So when I led a training, a CI Circles training for a group, an indigenous community. Within that group, there was an elder in that group that had when when the year long training was brought up to this Indigenous meaning that was part of our cohort, she requested that I was one of the facilitators.

00:40:37 Rosemary
And how have you found that having Indigenous participants. Is it different to – obviously we train participants from around the world, it’s very international – but when you’ve got a significant number of Indigenous participants in your cohort, how is it different?

00:40:55 Pam
So the group that you and I were in, and then there was another group that I was leading at the same time, it was from a community of West Region Family and Child Services. And these individuals in this group were just the most incredible, knowledgeable wisdom and so much tremendous trauma that they’ve experienced in their community. I’m sure as you can remember, a lot of the time we would sit and listen. We would just be similar to what I am right now, lost for words with their stories and not the stories from the past, but the stories that are still happening now. It was never lost on me what a profound honor it was for me to be able to sit with them. And yes, maybe I was called the facilitator, but I took so much learning from each and everyone of them. Such courage and yeah, like just being that lost for words of I can’t even think of the right words.

00:42:00 Rosemary
For it, I learned a lot. I remember that Red Shirt Day session where we went totally off the curriculum and just listened to their stories. And you’re right, I was so impressed with this strength and maybe resilience is the right word. They’ve gone through so much. They are currently…

00:42:20 Pam
Going through so much.

00:42:22 Rosemary
Yeah, it’s ongoing. And there’s such a somatic connection. There was a fluidity between the emotions and the body. It was just so inspiring. And I think it wasn’t just you and I, I think the whole group were just blown away and… what they shared about what they’re going through. And they really did demonstrate the ancestral trauma because they’re still crying about things that happened generations ago. The residential schooling… that came up a lot.

00:42:54 Pam
Yes.

00:42:55 Rosemary
And the impact that had on some of the older ones and a lot of their parents were in residential schools.

00:43:02 Pam
Or even deem themselves.

00:43:05 Rosemary
Definitely a presence, a presence that we were privileged to witness.

00:43:10 Pam
It was 100% a privilege.

00:43:12 Rosemary
And I know that Gabor has done a lot of work in Indigenous communities. From your perspective as a Compassionate Inquiry facilitator, do you know if there are plans to get Indigenous people more involved?

00:43:24 Pam
Yeah, definitely. If the interest is there, it would be just such a welcome addition to the CI community to have Indigenous leaders, Indigenous involvement, if that’s something that’s of interest to them. And yeah, we’d love to support that in any way that we can offer.

00:43:42 Rosemary
Yeah, I’m really very hopeful about that connection because a lot of the Indigenous participants did say that they saw this beautiful agreement between the Compassionate Inquiry approach and their traditional approach. Like they went together quite seamlessly. There weren’t any points of jarring between what they were learning and what they knew from their traditional ways. We had a wisdom keeper in there. We had some elders in there that were very familiar with their traditional healing, and it was beautiful to hear that… that it was Compassionate Inquiry. The approach totally supported what they were used to. I think that was the word I was looking for. Supported. Yeah, aligned with. Yeah, Yeah, it was great. Pam, is there anything that you’d like to speak about that I haven’t asked you that we haven’t covered?

00:44:34 Pam
Right off the top of my head, I can’t land on anything. I can’t think of anything right now.

00:44:40 Rosemary
I will invite you just to closeout our time together with a few words that maybe you can leave with our audience, a few words of hope, a few words of inspiration, a few words of wisdom, something that people that are perhaps in that space you were in 2011, 2012, where the world is just a bit too much. And right now, look at our world, look at the chaos. So people who are getting very dysregulated with all that’s going on in the world, what would you like to say to them?

00:45:12 Pam
Gosh, that’s a really good question and I’m gonna bring my mom in here again. So when I was about four months postpartum with our son, who’s our oldest, I was reading all the books. There weren’t podcasts and there weren’t apps then, but I was getting as much information as I could so that I could, quote UN quote, do it right and be the best and not make a mistake and all these things. And I was referencing them and I was learning as much as I could. And I was in a conversation with my mom.vAnd I can’t even remember now what it was I was worried about. It could have been his eating or drinking or pooping. I have no idea, but I was telling her, the book said. And I can’t even remember now what it was. And my mom said throw the God damn book away. She said you know what you’re doing and it was so simple and I referenced it. I come back to it over and over and it’s so important to continue to learn and be educated and always remember your body knows you have the answers within you. And this is so much what we pull on with CI. We trust the client, we know that they have the answers, but we open up the space to allow them to find those answers. And that’s what my mom did for me in that moment when she said to throw that God damn book away. You have the answers. If we can pause, slow down, listen, we can learn what we already know. Yeah. So that’s that.

00:46:46 Rosemary
Thank you. That’s beautiful. So trust yourself. That’s exactly what came up in my conversation with Gordon Neufeld.

00:46:53 Pam
Amazing.

00:46:54 Rosemary
That I raised the question because there is so much… these days…. My daughter just had a baby and the number of books and experts and it makes us doubt ourselves, even the healing world. There are so many modalities. There are so many different approaches. 

Thank you for leaving us with that. Trust yourself. Your body knows best. You know best. You have the intuition and look at where it’s led you. It led you to jump into the deep end and become very adept at swimming in that space.

00:47:30 Pam
Yeah, I’m so grateful to you, Rosemary. Thank you so much.

00:47:34 Rosemary
Pam, thank you so much for being here and taking us on this sharing so vulnerably all of this personal journey you’ve been on. It’s been very inspiring and you ended on an exquisite note because you have lived a life where you have trusted yourself. And as you said, you’re human. There are doubts, There’s anxiety, there’s stress. There’s old, learned patterns, old programming, but you’re you’re still trusting yourself, you’re still forging forward, you’re still jumping into the deep end. Even your experience with the indigenous students, you’re following your heart. And that’s a beautiful example for us all. Pam Summer, thank you so much for being with us today on the Gifts of Trauma by Compassionate Inquiry. It’s been such a delight to have you here.

00:48:23 Pam
It’s mutual. Thank you so much.

00:48:25 Rosemary
Thank you. 

The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma, healing, transformation, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. 

Listen on Apple, Spotify, all podcast platforms, rate, review and share it with your clients, colleagues and family. Subscribe and you won’t miss an episode. 

Please note this podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for personal therapy or a DIY formula for self therapy.