Ep.2 Death and Birth

In this special episode of the Relationship Matters Podcast, Katie Churchman will be stepping into the role of guest alongside CRR Global co-founder Faith Fuller, with the show guest-hosted by senior faculty member at CRR Global, Sandra Cain. Across the conversation, they discuss what they are learning about birth and death, which was inspired by their different life circumstances: at the time of recording, Katie was 24 weeks pregnant with twins, and Faith is navigating stage 4 Uterine cancer. This discussion covers a range of topics, including:

• The similarities between birth and death
• How birth and death can be a mirror for one another
• Myth changes and secondary identities
• Disappointed dreams, grief, and the limits of expectations
• The importance of presence
• The wisdom in uncertainty

Sandra Cain coaches individuals, pairs and teams around the world. Her background includes 15 years of experience at American Express with a variety of leadership and personal development roles. In addition to leading the CRR Global Core Curriculum, she is also Associate Director of the Certification Program and on faculty for The Coaches Training Institute. Her stand for this work is that since we’re already in relationships, we might as well be conscious and intentional about who we are, what we do and how we live.

Faith Fuller is co-founder and President of CRR Global. She is a psychologist and experienced trainer and coach with over 20 years of experience in working with organizations, couples and communities. Faith takes a systems approach to coaching, namely that all aspects of the system need to be addressed in order for effective change to occur. Her particular skill is empowering powerful, productive and joyous relationships in couples, partnerships and teams. She also has a background in consultation, team building, conflict resolution and community crisis intervention.

Katie Churchman is the host of the Relationship Matters podcast and a Front of the Room faculty member at CRR Global. As an ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC), certified in Organisational & Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSCC) & the ICF’s Advanced Certification in Team Coaching (ACTC), Katie helps leaders, teams & organisations find clarity & direction so that they can take ownership of goals and achieve results. Her coaching sessions are designed to deliver maximum impact and measurable growth specific to business objectives, professional aspirations & personal goals. Katie is passionate about bringing great communication skills & leadership development to organisations worldwide to build positive cultures & create tangible, sustainable change. Katie specialises in coaching individuals & teams across a wide range of areas, including Leadership Development, Change Mindset, Personal Impact, Presentation Skills, Effective Communication and Storytelling. She is goal-orientated, energetic & enjoys working with a fun, focused approach.


For over 20 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to build stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time

We believe Relationship Matters, from humanity to nature, to the larger whole.

Transcript

Key 

SC - Sandra Cain

FF – Faith Fuller 

KC – Katie Churchman 

[Intro 00:00 – 00:06] 

KC – Hello and welcome back to the Relationship Matters podcast. We believe relationship matters, from humanity, to nature, to the larger whole. In this special episode of the Relationship Matters podcast, I’m going to be stepping into the role of guest along with CRR Global co-founder, Faith Fuller, with the show guest-hosted by senior faculty member at CRR Global Sandra Cain. Across this conversation we discuss what we’re learning about birth and death which was inspired by our different life circumstances. I’m currently pregnant with twins and Faith is navigating stage four uterine cancer. This discussion covers a range of topics, including: the similarities between birth and death; how birth and death can be a mirror for one another; myth changes and secondary identities; disappointed dreams, grief, and the limits of expectations; the importance of presence; and the wisdom in uncertainty. So, without further ado I’m going to hand over the hosting of this episode to Sandra Cain who’s going to be guiding Faith Fuller and myself in a conversation around birth and death. 

SC – Welcome, I’m Sandra Cain, I’m here with Faith and Katie to talk about the great, expansive range between life and death. This is a unique conversation to have, and I’m delighted to be here with both of you to talk about what it’s like to be bringing life into the world and to be the one who’s going to be leaving at some point. We don’t know when, Faith, right? But you’ve been in that mental process of what is it to die. What is it like to end this life. Very happy to have you both here to talk about this. 

FF – I’m thinking that Katie you and I might want to just do a little bit of context for people who may not know the background. Let’s start with you - 

KC – Yeah! So, I’m pregnant, six months pregnant at the time of recording with twins! Twin girls, in fact. So, Faith and I have been having the most fantastic discussions around our different points in our life right now and I think that’s how this podcast emerged. 

FF – Absolutely, and for those who may not know out there, I have stage four cancer so I’m probably not gonna die this year but I probably don’t have a whole long period of time to go. So, of course, I’m dealing with how do you leave life as Katie’s working with life emerging, and after comparing notes a little bit, we just thought it would be super fun to talk about the similarities and differences between these two things. And I feel the need to say that I’m aware that to talk about dying, I don’t mean to make it trivialized by the humor that’s in it or the similarities with birth because it isn’t trivial but it’s got as much life and humor and differences and changes as any other part of life, so I’m going for it with this conversation with Katie. 

KC – And thank you for saying that, Faith, because I think the same about the pregnancy and the birth process. There’s a lot of concern and worry for people and I don’t want to trivialize that and this is coming from, as you said, our experience and we hope to hold this with lightness today so maybe it can be more accessible for people. 

FF – Exactly. 

SC – You know, it’s interesting, I hear what you two share in common is it’s personal, of course, and it’s not just personal. Like we say in ORSC, you’re aware of how other people might react to this but when it’s you, you get to choose. If you pay attention you get to choose how you approach it and how you are with such a dramatic change, and I know that it’s particularly compelling, I think, to have you here Faith in this place because you are so open and curious and in a state of fascination and wonder and all kinds of things, I’m sure, around having cancer and anger and grief, all of that, but you bring such a range of experience that I think is a really new way to model for people going through any kind of change. 

FF – Well great. I’m glad to hear it. And you know, I was just gonna say, Katie I wanna link up with you on this one because I think it’s a similarity - I may be dying but in myself I am deeply well. My experience of myself is that I’m in a time of my life that feels deeply well, although my body is doing its thing, and Katie I wanted to see what’s your experience of that? 

KC – I’m deeply well as well actually. I’ve had a wonderful pregnancy so far, so I’m feeling very fortunate and grateful. Something that just came up as you were speaking there Faith was around how in some ways your experience has been a mirror for me, and we often say we’re afraid of dying but actually I think many of us are afraid of living and I think that’s why this conversation is so important to have because one can be the mirror for the other and teach us a lot. 

SC – Well they’re both a giant myth change. 

FF – Yes! 

SC – We talk about myth changes and we’re in the business of myth change as coaches and it’s always about navigating between one chapter to another, but there’s a huge new chapter forming for both of you and it’s an interesting place to be before and knowing the chapter change is coming because we can be aware of it, at all different versions of it, but I want to start there - what’s it like for you knowing that you’re going to have twins and that you’re, eventually, going to leave your body? Like wow, we all know that we are but it’s acute for you, what’s it like to be on this side of that myth change for each of you? 

KC – You’re right, it’s sort of like the buildup, it’s that limbo phase. In some ways it’s gradual and that’s something I’ve noticed in this process, that you don’t arrive necessarily at a certain point. I think I assumed I’d feel a certain way at six months pregnant but actually how I am is different. So, for example I thought I’d be more aware of people noticing me being pregnant in public and I thought that might bother me but it actually doesn’t. So I think there’s something about the gradual transition, obviously it’s not always the case, particularly with death, that can be quite sudden, but I think for your experience Faith it’s been quite gradual to an extent, and I think that’s helping me with the myth change. But there’s also, it’s such a huge myth change because suddenly my family of two, me and my husband have become four. So, there’s only so much we can imagine over the edge, we just can’t really dream into what that will be like so there’s a lot of excitement around that next step. A lot of people have said to us that ignorance is bliss because this is our first and second so we don’t know any different, we don’t know what it’s like to have a single child, really there’s a sense of stepping into the unknown here and beginners mind I think has been helpful with that. 

SC – Stepping into the unknown, yeah, Faith, I imagine for you too? 

FF – Yeah, or actually, Katie, I was loving what you were saying about how you think you’re gonna be with a major change is not at all how you actually are in the moment. You know, I know that my own self, I expected lots of more drama around the fact that you know I have a terminal illness, and sometimes there’s drama, I mean it would be boring if there wasn’t, appreciate the drama when it happens, it’s colorful! You learn to live with it. Pregnancy is short but boy, it takes a lot of time, but I’m here to tell you dying can take a really long time. So, you adjust as you go but it isn’t necessarily how you thought it was gonna be. 

SC – That’s true of so many changes we have in life. I mean, you two are facing significant life changes and yet, even at the small scale I think… humans are wired in such an interesting way. You know, for safety and stability and security, of course, but when things change or we know things are going to change it sends us into a little bit of a spin most of the time and we have to find our way, I think that’s one of the ways to kind of master life if there is such a term. How can I be present with the spin that happens when something is coming but hasn’t arrived yet? Whatever it is – something wonderful, something difficult, all of the things, how do we navigate that edge change and do that? And that’s what we want in ORSC, right? To be more conscious and intentional about how we navigate that, so that’s actually a place I’d love to hear you guys talk about - how are you being conscious and intentional as you approach this next chapter? 

KC – It makes me think about, so in your book Faith you write about internal and external locus of control and I think as coaches we’re quite biased towards having internal locus of control. I am the master of my own destiny. And actually, particularly with something like pregnancy which is so unpredictable, or death, I actually think the internal locus of control when that’s in overdrive isn’t so helpful, and I really appreciated the dance with the universe. My husband and I weren’t sure if we were going to struggle to get pregnant because so many people in my family have but then we ended up with two children and so all these ideas about your life and this sense of control and planning and actually the universe has a different plan in store, and so I’ve really enjoyed that balance between internal and external, it’s not just handing myself over to the universe but there’s also this sense of and there’s a dance. It’s not just me and my choices, it’s also this conversation with the world around us which is quite beautiful to lean into and it feels lighter when I do that. 

FF – Katie you’re a living embodiment of emergence, literally, physical emergence with new birth and new babies and of changes that is emerging, and I love what you’re saying is that you can’t control all the change. You can decide how you’re going to be with what is happening but anything that happens in a pregnancy, you can’t control your body and it’s certainly the case with dying. My body, somebody said something to me that was quite comforting, they said ‘your body knows how to die’, and I know it sounds ridiculous to worry about that but believe it or not I was sort of like how do I die? How am I going to be? You know? Locus of control, do I want to be dramatic about it, do I want to be depressed? But events happen and the only thing we can control is our response to them. But we are both in an emergence process that we cannot control. 

KC – That’s such a great point, Faith, around actually we sometimes design how we want it to be and as you said before, what shows up is different. 

FF – Yes. 

KC - My husband and I, we have no twins on either side of the family, the twins are here naturally so it really is, in some ways, miraculous. But I think that really talks to the fact that there’s so much out of our lives that isn’t in control and how can we be with that? 

FF – Yes. 

KC – And that’s not always easy for us humans, at all. 

SC – No, we’re not great at that. There’s this great expression though that you’re reminding me of ‘man plans, God laughs’. 

FF – Yes! 

KC – That is so true. 

SC – It’s like we think we’ve got a really great plan about how it’s going to unfold and what’s going to happen next, and God, the universe, whatever it is outside of us is laughing at our ridiculous tendency to be human. It’s like ‘you think you’re in control this? Buckle up.’ 

KC – I love that. 

FF – Well, you know, I also wanted to circle back because Sandra you were talking about myth change and one of the things we have to do when we’re going through a myth change is basically when we’re being forced over an edge to a certain degree is you have to grieve the past. Certainly that’s easy to see in my situation where I have to basically let go of identity after identity as I become more sick. I have to let go of certain working identities, certain positions you held in a community, you have to let go and let go of the old way because I fully believe I have to strip all that down so that I can move into whatever will be next for me post death, and I happen to believe that’s true, but you can’t get there wearing the suit of armor that you’re wearing from the past. And I think that’s often not talked about much, Katie, in pregnancy but there is grieving in pregnancy. 

KC – Well I remember something you said on Conversations On Cancer a while ago about how cancer is a big mirror for your identity and suddenly you found yourself not as sharp as you identified with, you identified that your intelligence or being quite fit and active, and I’ve noticed the same in pregnancy in different ways. So, I’m incredibly active and whilst I’ve been able to keep up with doing weights and walking, certain activities like cycling 100 miles aren’t necessarily encouraged and also I’m just not able too, physically I’m out of breath, and that took me a little while to get used to and I’m still having to be kind and compassionate with myself around maybe needing to nap or take things slower because that doesn’t feel like me. 

FF – Yes. 

KC – Yeah, and that is interesting because you realize wow, that’s who I hold to be Katie, but who Katie is is changing all the time. 

FF – And you’re opting to give up a certain independence of being when you have a kid. I’m opting to give up an independence of being as I strip down different identities necessary to squeeze through the gate, so to speak. We’re both dealing with changes in dependance/independence.  

SC – Well I can imagine that constellation of many selves that get activated by all of this. So, there’s part of you that’s grieving what you’re saying goodbye too, but I just could imagine a wall filled with different parts of you that have to have their own process, all those parts of you have to cross this edge, they’re not all doing it at the same time, at the same pace, and I could imagine in both circumstances there would be times where you get surprised, maybe even get triggered by a part of you that comes forth that’s just really activated. So, I’m curious what you guys are noticing about that, the different parts of you that need to go through this process? 

KC – Yeah, I think there’s something around me that isn’t very patient. I think pregnancy, whilst you said it’s very fast Faith, in some ways there’s a slowness to it compared to the pace of our lives. 

FF – Yes. 

KC – And I think in myself I’m sort of like understand this, integrate this and move on, and actually it’s like I’ve actually got to slow down both physically and mentally and I think my body is really encouraging me to do that, but mentally I’m still trying to be on the treadmill. And so I think there’s something about those selves but there’s also new ones emerging for me and I’ve heard some fascinating research around the brain changes so much both for a mum and a dad in that first year or two, particularly during and after pregnancy because it helps you to be more of a caregiver, and so there’s parts of me that are emerging that haven’t probably been in the world in the way that they’re becoming now and so it’s also creating space for that. 

SC – Interesting. 

FF – I would love to hear more about what you’re noticing about evolving caregivers. 

SC – Yeah. Which parts of you are coming forward that you didn’t know about? 

KC – Yeah, so I’m noticing that I’m not so bothered by certain things, say, professionally and it’s not that I don’t care about my work but I think the stakes are a little bit lower now because there’s this really high stake going on for me in my life, and in some ways that’s quite refreshing because we can put so much emphasis on certain projects or presentations and I’ve just noticed that it’s not that I’m like ‘oh it doesn’t matter’, it’s just that I’m like ‘yeah, ok, we can work with that’. And so, in some ways my stress has gone down in certain areas of my life because I realize that there’s this thing that’s really important so maybe there’s a rebalancing there going on. 

FF – Wow, I love that idea. You have to loosen up because you sort of have too! There’s too many things on the plate and so the more trivial things are just like don’t sweat it because bigger things are happening and I think that’s great. You know I think, I have tons of selves that, a part of the process of letting go into the transition of death involves taking off parts as we’ve mentioned before, taking off armor, taking off selves, and before you can do that it’s sort of like when you move in a house, you’ve gotta go through all your stuff and you’ve gotta sort your boxes and take them out and ah, this isn’t working for me anymore. You have to unload and we’re doing this throughout our lives. In your case Katie you’re accumulating things like crazy, I’m sure, cots and equipment and all that. I’m on the other end, I’m throwing all that stuff out but in the process of doing that you have to identify all your selves and new selves do often come up, selves that have feelings of grief or selves that have feeling of, you know, parts of myself that I haven’t wanted to look at are suddenly saying ‘hey, remember me, you need to deal with me before you move along here sister’, and so aspects that experienced rage or if you feel out of control, they’ll all come by to visit. Not in a bad sense but in a sense of bringing home the troops, all those selves, because all of the selves that were marginalized seem to need to come home at this time of life. 

SC – And you talk about that like it’s the easiest thing Faith, like of course you’re doing all this great work. I’m just curious for you, what advice would you give somebody who doesn’t have the… you know, you’re a trained therapist, you created this ORSC model, you clearly have all these brilliant models and approaches accessible to you - for someone who doesn’t have that, where would you put them? 

FF – I would say stay alert to the process of what you’re feeling. When I was in chemo, I had a very ferocious temper part of myself that I didn’t identify with and that part of me showed up, to me it looked like a rat with red eyes, a full person sized rat that was malevolent, and I had to sleep with that self. All I’m saying is that when things come up don’t turn away from them, go into them, create relationship. Create relationship with every single thing that arises, don’t turn away, practice lion’s roar, look for the wisdom in it. You don’t need all the ORSC tools, just stick with it and create relationship. 

SC – And Katie, I’m sure for you, different parts of you are popping up like crazy, right? 

KC – Yeah well I love what Faith said around that presence with the process because I think with transitions it’s easy to sort of jump to the, with the end in mind, and I’ve noticed, a really good friend is going through pregnancy as well and it’s been quite a stressful process, so both her and her husband are very medical and so they say that they know too much in some ways but they’ve been worried about what could, what if, and I think something about staying with the moment because each day is different. And there is so much out of your control, particularly around pregnancy and also death and there is that release into that locus of control, but also I think being present, coming back to self every single day has helped because then you don’t just generalize and jump to the end. Dan and I are working with a coach and he was like what do you want to do in this time because this is a really special time for you two before you become a four and I think it would be very easy to skip over that because you’re thinking about ‘oh we need to buy this, we need to buy two of this’, and actually there’s still this now, this time together. 

SC – That’s what I hear from both of you, there’s a way that you’re wanting to be present and aware to the chapter that you’re in as much as, which is great in life in general, but especially acute when you’re looking at significant myth changes like you’re both facing. What helps you to stay present in this chapter? Because our minds are so good at racing all over and there’s plenty of material to race too. What helps you stay in this chapter? 

FF – I think the body does for me. I bet it does for you Katie, you’ll be in the middle of a podcast and suddenly somebody’s got their foot in your pancreas, like alright, I’m pregnant! 

KC – I was going to say the exact same thing, the body, and I think there’s something quite beautiful about trusting the body. I’ve never read a manual about pregnancy, I literally know nothing about babies, this is going to be the most hilarious learning curve for me and my husband. We don’t even know how to hold a baby, let alone all the other stuff. And there’s something quite beautiful about that in the way because my body knows. It’s somehow been trained to do this, and I have a real respect for the female body particularly right now because it’s got this wisdom that I don’t have to use my intellect to manage or micro-manage as we often do, and I think that’s powerful to trust in. 

SC – Well you can’t. It’s not even that you have too but you can’t. Your body is going to be pregnant whether your mind is onboard or not!  

KC – Exactly, exactly. 

FF – I love it and you know it’s sort of like you don’t have to write a timeline for this, Katie. We’re used to production and doing things with creatives and like, you don’t have to do anything. Assuming it goes the way it goes regardless and the body does its thing, the same thing with dying. The body has its own process, the illness has its own journey and I can’t control it and it helps me to stay. However, one great thing about dying is when you’re on ramp is short, your ramp is short, it really presses you right into appreciation. You don’t take anything for granted. So that’s a silver lining on the dying process, is how very alive I feel. Dying is about being alive. We forget that - death is living. But, when you are approaching the exit you sort of go, ah, well, you’re much more aware of everything that you have and appreciating that in the moment. 

KC – It makes me think, Faith, about, I’ve been playing a lot with the lenses we look through lately as a meditation technique and we can look at, say, death through the lens of fear or pregnancy, as quite a lot of people do, you only have to go on the forums on Mumsnet to see that and I’m not trivializing that but there’s a lot of fear driven pregnancies out there and how does that shape your experience and I think that’s where we have more agency and more choice is around that response. Yeah, there’s so much we can’t control – if we’re gaining the right amount of weight, if something goes wrong, but that piece, that tiny little piece is actually where we have our power. 

FF – Yeah. 

SC – It’s really interesting to think about the body and mind difference here, because what I’m hearing and what you’re both saying is like bodies know how to make babies and bodies know how to leave, they know how to exit when it’s time. And the human part of us, the personality, the brain, all of those things, can complicate that immensely! 

KC – Yes! 

SC – The body doesn’t give a crap what we think, really. But we can make it a lot more complicated or harder on ourselves and frankly we do this all the time at a much smaller scale, much smaller scale, we make things more complicated and get in our heads as we say, we overthink things. It’s like this could almost be a podcast on the relationship between body and mind. You know, our body-mind spirit because I think that’s really kind of the backdrop of this, how do we navigate those three aspects of being human? Body, mind, spirit. It’s profound. 

FF – What I really love about that is, I think the first time I ever felt the power of the body, actually, Katie, was when I was pregnant. The body takes what it needs to create that baby and you can be jumping up and down or screaming or whatever, whatever the mind is doing the body just moves straight ahead and makes that baby and if you’ve got morning sickness, too bad, suck it up buttercup! You know? We’re making a baby right now! 

SC – I have a job to do. 

KC – Yeah! 

FF – And part of it can be scary, it’s like wow, you know wait a minute, isn’t this my body? Well, no, it’s not. Not when you’re pregnant. It’s our body, big time, there’s three of you in there. 

KC – Yeah, that’s so right. My twin midwife said in some ways you can think of babies like parasites, they take what they need. 

FF – They take what they need! 

KC – It’s a horrible metaphor for a baby but there’s something about that where your system now, I wonder where I end and they begin because we are very much an interconnected system right now and I think in terms of systems thinking it’s really made me appreciate that, because when I breath they’re taking some of that too, when I eat that’s going to them. 

FF – Well you know, I hope people aren’t grossed out by this but it’s kind of true of cancer too. Cancer takes what it needs. It grows, it uses my nutrients and I feel the need to say that I hold it as an ally. A friend of mine who’s dying said it was her rocket outta here, so there’s a sense that the body will do what it needs to do and I can be freaking out or whatever, I can be afraid or I can be angry and God knows I’ve been all of them and will again but the body is carrying me on a journey. 

SC – It makes me think that our bodies are just on loan, you know? We get them for as long as we get them and then, lots of theories about what happens when we’re gone but that’s part of what I’m getting from this, you know, our spirit, our personality comes into the body you inhabited for a certain amount of years and for some people not very long and for others very long, and I think about pregnancy and I’m like when does spirit show up? When does personality show up? It’s fascinating to think about that and, you know, when we die it goes with it, it leaves, where does it go? We don’t know. These are all big, big questions, but where does it go and where does it come from - it’s fascinating. 

KC – It is. Particularly with twins. So, we don’t know if they’re identical or not because they’re in separate sacs, but it could have come from the same fertilized egg, so you sort of wonder at one point their consciousness was one and then it split, and all of that, it’s so magical. I mean it’s science but it’s also just amazing and it has me awe-struck quite a lot of the time when I really think about it. 

SC – It really is. I love you said it’s science too because of course, all of this is science too, but when we let ourselves really see the magic in it, it changes everything. It’s astonishing. 

FF – And you know, people don’t think of it that way but the quality of the fact that you are never more alive than when you’re dying is a paradox! And I know that all the fear that sometimes takes place in pregnancies about death, you know, that the baby will die or you could die - most of the fear is about something going wrong, so both ends of it have fear and fear of the unknown and the edge crossing and so on. And both of them have wonder. There’s a certain wonder to the unfolding of a dying process if you’re paying attention. I think that’s a beautiful thing. I feel like we’re at a parenthesis on either side of life, you and I, at the moment. 

KC – Yeah. Well it’s something that you both said that made me think about the idea of meeting the system where it’s at and I think we have a lot of expectations of our bodies or our lives even, and we expect we should have 90 years, we expect to have two children and I know quite a few people right now going through fertility challenges and all of those expectations can be really challenging and I’m not undermining that challenge but I think we expect a lot of our bodies and our lives and that can lead to so many disappointed dreams and it’s not to say we shouldn’t dream but I think we have to keep meeting our system where it’s at and keep refreshing that because the body might have its own path, its own journey to go on. 

FF – Yeah. I’m thinking of all the women that I’ve known that had this really strong plan for how they were gonna give birth. They were gonna do it at home and they were gonna do it in water and they were gonna have these people there and there was gonna be people chanting and all kinds of stuff, and some people do manage that, I’m all for it – if you can, great. But I know at least one of those women ended up taken by ambulance to the hospital and she had a perfectly successful birth and baby, but it was cesarean, you know? And you gotta be able to, back to locus of control, let go and as much as possible deal with what is emerging the best you can. 

SC – That reminds me, thinking of high dreams and low dreams around this because how could you not, you’re constantly in that dream. We are when we don’t have significant events happening, right? We’re always dreaming about what might happen. I might have this for lunch, oh no, maybe I won’t, just benign things like that, but then you have significant events like birth or death coming and the high dreams and low dreams, I can only imagine for you guys. What are you noticing about that and how do you help yourself to stay… to navigate it or stay calm and present? Because it’s ripe for all that sort of extreme dreaming. 

KC – Yeah, and I think it’s really, it comes back to that expectation piece for me because you wanna dream and it’s gorgeous to dream but you also don’t want to have such a fixed idea of what it will look like. Oh, they’re gonna be sleeping through the night from, you know, one week - definitely not going to happen. You don’t want this fixed sense of reality because that’s when you can end up with that disappointed dream, so I’m trying to be somewhat fluid and allowing excitement to drive me at the moment. I do believe sometimes the narratives we hold in our heads somewhat shape our experience of our reality, they don’t necessarily change our reality but they shape our experience, so I’m trying to be driven by excitement as opposed to fear and being flexible in that myth change. But yes, I do think that expectation in some ways can be a blocker for that because if you have such a strong expectation around what your life should look like I think then it’s very hard then when something else emerges.  

SC – Yeah. Thanks to you and Marita for the language of dreaming around that, and Arnie Mendell. 

FF – Thank you Arnie Mendell! 

SC – And Arnie Mendell, of course, yeah. You pulled the thread into my world with his work. The holding it as a dreaming process, that has reframed so much for me in my life, especially when I’m having a difficult time and I’m getting like cranky or out of parenting, you know, if I can remember oh, I’m just dreaming, just that little 1% of me can watch and go hey, knock knock, you’re just dreaming. Doesn’t happen every time but it’s delightful when it does because it just gets a little bit of fresh air. And it’s harder to do the more intense the situation which, you know, you’re both looking at much more intense situations. Faith, what do you notice yourself around that? 

FF – Well, you know, I have a friend and she and I did a talk, we talked together about what she called the tyranny of the good death – 

SC – The tyranny of the good death? 

FF – Of the good death, yeah, and basically, both she and I had brothers who died with a really rough row. They fought it, they really battled it to the end, they were not at peace, they didn’t take care of their stuff that they needed to take care of. It was a rough ride, let’s put it that way. And yet both of them did it very much in their own particular style and I realize that progressives like myself have a theory of I should die, you know, in great peace and angelically and holding the hands of the people I love, being a good role model, doing a demo on death, you know? 

SC – I feel like those rose petals, soft music, bunnies and stuff. 

FF – That could be tyranny because then all I can do is disappoint myself! It could be quite painful, I may be a screaming mess by the end, I don’t know. But you have to meet what comes to you and be in right relationship with that as Katie and are sort of saying over and over again. When my brother died his wife and his two daughters put on Frank Sinatra’s ‘I Did It My Way’ and he did, it was very David the way he went out, and you have to be careful about what I project on how I should die or what other people project. People are gonna do it in their own typical way. 

SC – Well, you’re both experiencing a community event as well, you know, it’s an individual experience, no question, like as I look at both of you, holy moly is it an individual experience, right? Giving birth. Nobody helps you give birth. There’ll be people around but it’s gonna be you, and people around you aren’t gonna help you to die, or anyone to die, the body will do what it does. How are you with that? Knowing it’s individual and of course it’s not just about you but talk about that. 

KC – Yeah that took me a little while, I think. I’ve mentioned this to Faith a few times, there’s a lot of people who’ll come up to you and touch your belly or at least talk about it and I just find that quite uncomfortable sometimes, it was a strange shift for me and I realize it comes from a place of awe and wonder and it made me realize that I’m birthing these two babies but there’s a lot of people in my life who also feel connected to them and that is wonderful, but I think it’s strange to be on that’s the vessel sometimes, I’ll say to my husband you get the easy job because you get to be a part of this process but you don’t have to physically change.

SC – For sure. 

KC – And I do become the center of attention in that way. 

SC – Right, nobody’s touching his belly. 

KC – No one’s touching his belly, I know! And it wasn’t my favorite part of my body before pregnancy, so it feels like you are this sort of vessel. And there is this wonder and awe and I have to keep coming back to that when people are maybe overstepping my boundaries, but there’s also this appreciation that wow, it is a magical thing and I think a lot of these people are tapping into that, and so yeah, how do I feel about being the vessel? I think it’s strange and I’m still getting used to it. 

SC – It’s a weird paradox because it’s so intensely personal to give birth or to die and yet it’s also very much a community experience, of course people are drawn to pregnant women and fascinated by that and of course people are drawn to people at their end of their life and wanna be a part of that and serve and support. How about for you Faith, what do you notice there? 

FF – Well, two things. On the one hand it’s obvious you can tell I’m not shy about talking about the process, but people come with all kinds of ideas, their behavior changes in some ways when they’re dealing with me. Usually because I’m irreverent and light touched I can get them over that edge and we’re just people and I can talk normally about the process but I’m also aware that I’m a founder with co-creator Marita and people are going to need to do a process, just not for me, I’m long gone and I really don’t care, but people keep saying well you have to do something and I keep saying why? And they say well you’re not getting it, this isn’t about you! 

SC – It is about you though. 

FF – Yeah! 

KC – That’s interesting. 

SC – It’s fascinating to deal with something so intensely personal and also to have to navigate the community experience of it, it’s like what you’re both saying, you’ve got weird people wanting to touch your stomach and you’ve got people wanting to do ceremony and events to honor you and you’re like do what you need to do but let me do my own thing, it’s intensely personal and not just personal. It’s really quite fascinating and I think there’s good and bad to that as I’m thinking through it. It’s like part of me wants to champion for you both to just let it be your own thing but it is a community experience. 

KC – Well it’s interesting because I’ve been reading quite a bit about hypnobirthing and you hear about animals and they’ll go to a corner and they’ll give birth in private and that was my sort of ideal initially, before we realized it was twins, I liked the idea of a home birth and then obviously two makes it just more complicated and there’s gonna be two of everyone in the room, and so suddenly it doesn’t feel quite so sacred and personal, it feels very public! I don’t know about you Faith but is there a part of you that just sort of wants to crawl away in private? 

FF – Because that’s what animals do when they die too! They crawl away. I remember our dog was very sick and he crawled under the foundations of another house, they seek privacy for death as well so I totally get that and the drive I think to do what you need to do is different from the drive to, that society needs to do to protect you in the process and iit’s complicated that way.

SC – It is. 

FF – But I did get a voice over about that one time which was just sort of a voice that showed up in my head and it sort of said when I was thinking well, maybe I need to have this person to help that person because I worry about what happens to the people I love, Marita, my daughter, my closest friends, I worry about them. And then at some point this little voiceover kind of came in and it said so it looks like you’re trying to control your death and I can’t! They will have their experience and it is a big event for them, and I always wanna skip over that bit. It’s like there will be sequelae from my death, people will need to grieve, and that part is public.  

SC – It is interesting, you know, it’s, I know it’s an adage but you’re born alone, you die alone, but you don’t really. You do and you don’t. 

FF – You do and you don’t. 

SC – It’s a great paradox to that, it’s personal. It’s very much an ORSC thing, we say it’s personal and not just personal, everything that happens in a relationship there’s some truth to it that’s just for me and then there’s a systemic piece and then maybe a community piece in this context, right? And you guys still get to control what you can and that’s what I’m hearing from you both, where do I have choice in this, where do I get to have influence if not choice, and part of the rest is really letting go. 

KC – Yeah, and I think seeing it as a really fascinating mirror for yourself. I think that’s what I’ve found this process to be, it’s just really helped me to understand myself at a deeper level and I’m sure that will continue on the other side with the two girls, and I know Faith for you there’s been so much learning and I think to appreciate the richness in that because I’m sure if you were worried and panicked and fearful most of the time you wouldn’t be able to lean in like that, it wouldn’t be your dharma. 

FF – Yes, and you don’t want to miss the journey. Birth or death. 

SC – Life is short, stay awake for it. Right? Caribou Coffee has that as their slogan, and I think it’s about the best slogan there is. Great for a coffee company but great for humans, you know? Just to stay awake for the full range of experience that is our lives. And kind of the backdrop for this conversation has really been about relationship with, you know, so I think about what is our relationship with birth, what is our relationship with death and how to be conscious and intentional with as much as we can, so as a last place to look what are you learning about your relationship with birth and death as you go along this journey? 

KC – I remember something, Faith, you wrote about in your book around we’re always in relationship and I think about right now the twins are also in relationship with each other. It’s really helped me to appreciate those ever wider systems, some of them we’re not aware of but they’re all there and there’s this interdependence and I think for me, more so now than ever in my life, I’m noticing that relationship really is a two way street – I don’t get to decide what right relationship is, it’s both. If I’m thinking about right relationship with my body, my body gets a say too, it’s not just me deciding what that looks like and so that’s a really useful lesson that I’m continuing to remind myself of on a daily basis. 

FF – And you know, I would say that it’s a real relationship, whether it’s my relationship with my cancer or my relationship with my body having cancer or with death. It’s a relationship. That means you have good days and bad, I have fights with my body or with death, I have days where I just feel this is never going to work. There are days where I am infused with a sense of beauty and wonder and awe, it’s a relationship so I’ve got ups and downs and ins and outs and it’s rich. 

SC – Yeah. It is a true relationship and there’s conflict, there’s good days, there’s bad days, there’s repair bits sometimes. I’ll go for a walk, I hear you, or I’ll stop eating pizza every day, ok. There’s ways we are in relationship with the body and it’s one of the most fascinating pieces of work I’ve done myself in ORSC, you know, it’s not part of the curriculum in any specific way but this idea of relationship with. Relationship with the body, relationship with life, with death, with concepts and not just people, a wonderful place to look, so yeah, anything else you guys want to contribute that I haven’t asked? Just as we have these last couple minutes. 

KC – I just love the mirror that our conversations together have brought and thank you for holding this so beautifully Sandra. I think that death and life have so much to teach each other and yet whilst they might be those parenthesis as you mentioned, they’re also part of the same thing in some ways and so I think there’s a lot more we could learn from death and life by leaning in and not just dividing them into their separate categories. 

FF – I so agree. What she said. 

SC – Well it’s interesting to think about them together because I do, I think I do separate them. I’m not a parent so I haven’t had that experience that way, but it’s easier maybe to separate them if you don’t have children, you know, because I see life in a different way than a parent would. But that’s fascinating way to think about it, what is their relationship to each other? 

KC – Yeah and you go round like graveyards and you see the two dates and it’s death and life but that space in-between, it’s kind of a mix of both because obviously it’s somewhat life but many of our decisions are also driven by the idea of death, and so we wouldn’t be who we were if we had an infinite amount of time on this planet and so that space in-between is, in some ways, the third entity of the two. 

FF – I would agree, you know, and I would also say that life is...  every time you cross an edge you are letting go, there’s a little death and then there’s a new birth and then there’s a little death and there’s a new birth, every time you change job, anytime you try a new recipe, any time you cross an edge there’s a leaping over one way and so we get to practice birthing and dying all our lives, if we’re conscious, if we’re aware of it. So, I think we’re already doing it, but we don’t notice as much as we could. 

SC – Well hopefully from this conversation people listening will pay attention that way because as you said there’s many births and many deaths in day to day, even, in those little interactions, and it is a parallel process for the larger chapter changes that are life and death, so thank you both for being so honest and open about your experience together and separately.

FF – Sandra thank you so much for holding us and Katie, mwah, I’m sending you a big kiss to all three of you. 

KC – Aw, thank you both so much, this was a gorgeous conversation, thank you. 

[Music outro begins 45:13] 

KC – A huge thanks to Sandra for hosting that fascinating conversation between Faith and myself. It was a real treat to step into the role of guest for the first time on the Relationship Matters podcast. I’m walking away with a lot from this conversation and here are some of my key takeaways. How you think you’re going to be with a major life change may be quite different to how you actually are in the moment. Sometimes a secondary identity will emerge out of circumstances that may be very different from how you imagined yourself to be. Like any system we are also in a constant state of emergence. A silver lining to the dying process is that it can thrust you into a state of aliveness. Dying is about being alive and the closer death comes the more we may be able to appreciate about being alive. With death and pregnancy the experiences are both personal and they belong to our wider systems. You may be going through the experience personally and at the same time the impact and be impacted by the other people and systems in your life, the drive around what you need to might be different to societies drive to protect you and the process. Death and birth are often held as parentheses on either side of life and yet they inform one another so much. Death is a part of life and life is a part of death. Thank you for listening to the Relationship Matters podcast. If you enjoyed this episode please share it with your colleagues and friends so that we can continue to spread these ideas across the globe, and if you haven’t already, do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode. And for more information on the ORSC courses please visit CRRGlobal.com. For over 20 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time. We believe Relationship Matters from humanity to nature to the larger whole. 

[Music outro 47:40 – end]