From Grief to Grace: How to Transform Your Deepest Pain with Dr. Tanya English

Introduction to grief and the guest's healing work 0:00

Hi friends, I'm your host Dr. Elizabeth Samanta, the intuitive psychiatrist and you're listening to Stepping Into Soul Power. Friends, you know, there is war and we are going through it. The loss, The greed, There are moments right now where we're being brought to our knees and wondering how are we going to get through this? What do we do? And the next guest, she is a energy healer. She's a chiropractor. A blues singer and spent over 35 years studying the places where the body and spirit and soul come together.

And she had lost a child in stillbirth and was able to transform that experience, grow from that, and now she helps other people walk through grief to grace. Dr. Tanya English, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be here with you. For our listeners that are new to you, can you tell us a little bit about that journey? How you got to the point where you are really helping shift the way people experience and process grief? He said back, and this is in 1994, I was finishing up chiropractic college, which is after I did an undergraduate degree, after i went to massage school, After I'd been in practice for a while.

I said, well, i just want to do chriopractic as well. I think that'll really help. At the end of my time there, I was pregnant with my first child and I, was 33 and going through a pregnancy that was great. And then it worked out that he didn't make it. It was really just being there in the hospital and a voice came to me and said, do you really believe that everything happens to the highest good? Or do you just say that? And I thought, okay, so this is where the choice comes in. I can choose to believe that or I could choose not to not believe it.

Stillbirth, loss, and choosing meaning 2:25

And then I went down that road for about 10 minutes and I though, that's no good, I'm not going in that direction. And I said, no, I'm going to believe that everything happens to the highest good. So show me the good, show what's good about this. Show me where there's something in here that is adding to me, that's supporting me. And to my left was my husband who was helping me breathe because they had over-medicated me and I would exhale and not inhale. Wow. He'd say, take a breath, baby. I'd breathe.

My sister-in-law, I call her, she was my sister in law. She was a nurse and she helped me push and it was really an intense experience and to hold him and name him, and we dedicated him to God and just to be in that whole experience, not wanting to let go of him but knowing that he was going to have to leave me. was very difficult, obviously. I mean, nobody wants their baby taken away from them. Yeah. And I had to really think about how I was going to approach this in my life. Iwas a healer.I was doing healing.

i was helping people heal. So when I say I'm a Healer, I don't mean that I am doing the healing for people. . I mean, i'm like the Healer GPS. And tell you which direction to go, where this can happen and, you know, turn right,turn left, do this and help people get to their own healing because I can't do the Healing for anybody. We have to do our own healing. So that's why I say I'm a healer. I am not doing the healing, I m the healers GPS. And in that situation, my confidence went completely down because here I was trying to have a baby, a natural thing.

And it didn't happen. I'm also working with other people to help me have a great pregnancy. And that was great. But then it, when push came to shove, literally that didn' happen and there were people around us that were blaming others for this happening. We decided we were not going to blame anybody because life and death happens. And we had to explain this to my husband's two little daughters who were waiting for their baby brother to come. So how do you explain to a five and a six year old? What do say?

And that's a great question. What, I mean, what do, you say, well, we said was everybody dies. We're all going to do it and it's okay. And if it wasn't okay, there would be people who didn't do. Yeah. They also knew about Jesus. So they, they understood death isn't the end. There's more to whatever degree that age can do that. But we said some people die when they're sick. Some people will die. When they were old, some, people died in an accident. some People die because they are just done and he fulfilled his mission very quickly.

And so our son, Edward Oliver fulfilled, his, mission in nine months, nine, months and 10 days. And so that's the way we looked at it. He came to bring us together and the situation that we were in melded us. So we can't break apart. In fact, I gave my husband this as a... as a gift one year and I have a couple things attached to it. But this is a tag, it's called a Tag and it is two pieces of copper that are melted together and its stronger than either one of them would have been separately. Wow, that that's so beautiful because people have different experiences when especially when a child dies and you somehow you your family came together, but there are people who like they separate after that.

Yeah, they do. And the first thing that I saw when we were looking at the ultrasound, because we we're trying to have the baby at home, we went to the hospital and they put us on ultrasound right away and we could see that his heart wasn't moving. We both could that we knew right way. I looked at my husband and I said, are we okay? And he said yes, were okay. He knew what I meant when I Like, this isn't gonna separate us. We're together. And he said, yes, we're okay. Then I could go through with what I had to go though to be able to bring the baby out.

into the world, just being able to have that knowledge that we were really okay, that nothing was gonna separate us. We were having our own separate experiences of it, but we weren't coming together all the time and it was like beyond words. So at one point I was, after we'd come home, I taking a shower and I could feel myself starting to faint and he walked into that bathroom and caught me.

Family support, remembrance, and the power of music 7:50

I didn't call out or anything, he just could feel. So we're very connected. Sounds like it. We were like love at first sight pretty much. Oh, so this was meant to be. Yeah, it really was. And because of Edward Oliver, who we called Eddie-O for short, Eddie O, Um, we, We really felt like this is a really good opportunity that's being placed before us. Nobody wants to join this club, but 20,000 people a year do. And that one in every 175 births. And it's something that happens and people shove it under the rug.

And people have asked me like, did you hold your baby? Yes, we held him. We dressed him, my husband bathed him we had time with him and when you take something like that away from a woman who's just given birth, you're damaging her. And so to be able to have that time with him, yes, it was short and no, he wasn't able see me, but I saw him and I held him. And after we came home, I had a buckwheat hull pillow that I would hold occasionally to help feel that weight in my arms. There's all kinds of stages that you go through with something like this.

Like then my milk came in, oh, there's another thing, Our neighbor who had come over to see the baby and I had to tell her he didn't make it, watch your face fall, had brought me a plant of sage. And it turns out if you chew raw sage leaves, living sage lives, it dries your milk up. She didn' know that. Hey, someone's looking out for you. Exactly, exactly. It's really true. Uh, I feel like, okay, so this was a big deal. I had to think about like why is this happening? This would be the first question that I asked myself.

What, what did I do? First of all, the what ifs does all come. That's not helpful because you can't change the past. It you have to deal with the present and the future. The past is already done. So what-ifs don't really help. And you have, well, for me, I had to decide, you know, is this going to bring me down or am I going persevere? And I decided persevering was the best course of action. And, and I asked God, put me wherever I need to be for healing. I don't care where it is. We ended up that summer at the Mississippi Valley Blues Fest and went into the tent stage to see the blind boys of Alabama saying because I'd always wanted to them and I had a healing and that experience.

And I felt waves and waves of love flowing through me going around me it was just an amazing experience all the way around and. When I met my husband a little bit after that, we were at separate stages. And he looked at me and he's like, you're different. Are you okay? And I said, yes, I'm really okay. He said it was like when Moses comes down from the mountain and his hairs turned white, he goes, You were different? Yeah, it looks, music cracks something open. Vibration. Yeah. For people listening who haven't really explored music or sound as a healing portal, what would you invite them to try?

What's a good first step? Well, I just think most people want to listen to some sad songs when they go through a breakup. That's why, because it's helping them heal. It's help them experience their feelings in a really safe way, in really beautiful way. The way that you can start is listen to your favorite music, or turn on the radio if you still do that, go to YouTube, whatever, and pick something that has words in it that respond to. There was a really great song by Judy Gold called From a Distance that was popular when I was going through this.

And when I hear that song, it puts me right back there. And I, because that sense memory is so connected, It's like smell, you know? Smell is a very good catalyst for a memory that you have. So when i smell toast and coffee together, I'm at my grandmother's house. You know, its, You have that. It is the same thing with music. and it doesn't matter what music it is as long as it's positive. As long as it's growing on you, you know, there's some music that's not going to be that helpful. That's going agitate you more.

But I started singing blues later, like about 25 years later. I. Started singing and started my band and ended up playing at the Mississippi Valley Blues Fest myself in the tent. Wow. big full circle there. And I'm also friends with a couple of the guys in the Blind Boys who were there at that performance in 1994, Chuck and Ricky. Ricky's still singing and Chuck's the road manager. They were like, yeah, we were, there we remember that. But they don't remember me, they remember the performance. So I kind of think of them as my godfathers because they helped me heal so much.

Wow. So when you open your mind to like being able to do healing yourself and ask for what you want, which is very important. Ask for healing. And when it's offered to you, take it. When you're going through that, it is so important for you to just go for it, just say yes. What do you think keeps people, because you made a really good point, people can give stuff to you, and people are going to offer. What keeps you from saying yes? I think a lot of times people think they're supposed to be strong and that strength means you do it all by yourself.

But it takes a village to not only raise a child, but it also takes the village. To be a villager, you have to rely on others. It takes a village to be a Village. But I like it. You have to let people in. People are going to say things that are terribly inappropriate and you have just let it go because they don't know what to Most people don't know what to say. I had a friend who, when we had the memorial for our son, she brought a balloon that said, it's a boy.

Breathwork, tapping, and moving through grief 15:20

And I was, I have saved that balloon, and I still have it. What happened when I saw that was like somebody recognized that we have a baby. That we actually had him, he was there. Instead of just mourning his death and wondering how are they going to get through this, you know, It was a celebration of who he was to us. And we had everybody go outside and blow bubbles afterwards and think about where that bubble could go. Instead of having a lot of sadness around it, it was a more uplifting experience for people.

in my opinion, I guess. But what it's done for me is help me understand that the greatest tragedy that you have is also an endless well of blessings. You can sit in your stuff and you can experience it and I recommend that feel all the feelings and don't worry about it dissolving. A lot of people think that healing grief is all about talking about it. And it's not all that talking. There's also some other things that you can do energetically. It's really important to do those things. Can you talk about that?

Like what energeically, what are you supposed to be doing? It's different for everybody, but there's some tools that I teach people to help them get through those times when they're feeling overwhelmed with grief, because you can be in the grocery store and it just hits you. And so what I teaches is four count breathing. I've been teaching that for 30 something years, and, it's just breathing in for four counts, holding it for for counts. Exhaling through your nose for 4 counts and breathing out for and holding out 4 count.

So it is in hold, out hold. to get your nervous system to calm down because we need to balance the nervous systems all the time. We need regulate and that helps us to move through things and not ignore them. So you're not avoiding the feeling, you just helping yourself move though it. So that's one thing that you can do. I also teach emotional freedom technique to my clients and patients that ask for it, that want it that need it. And so we do different things with tapping. So the emotional, freedom, technique is the tapping technique and what you're doing there is you are regulating your nervous system.

You're regulating, your energy flow, because every place where you tap is an acupuncture point. and so you tapping on all the main acupuncture points that there are. And as you do that, it brings your system down to neutral so that you're not having these intense highs and lows. And that's really, really helpful. I also teach people how to just pray for themselves because a lot of times people don't pray themselves. And so we, they pray everybody else, but not for me. Listen, you got to put yourself first at some point.

Why wouldn't you do it when you're going through something like that? You are the one that is experiencing it. if you want to get more out of it, because I believe grief is a doorway to deeper healing. It doesn't happen so that you'll ignore it. That's where the problems come in. it happens so you have an opportunity here to walk through that door and receive all the healing and all of the joy that's actually in there. So that is why I say, count it all joy. Yeah. How are you going to count it all joy if you're thinking about how, what a victim you are.

Can't think like that. I mean, people do. Yeah, of course, because you having this terrible thing happen, it's awful. But you can't stay there. I went to a support group, my husband and I, went the support at the hospital. One time we saw people who had been going to that group for seven years. They had not moved on. There were people in that that were throwing themselves on their baby's grave with their toddler next to them. It's not healthy to do that. You have to move on, time is going go on and time doesn't heal all wounds, it will scab them over.

But unless you take action, you can't heal it. I see. So make the decision to take the opportunity to walk through it rather than... Absolutely. Avoid it... I'll say this. We walk the valley of the shadow of death, we don't pitch a tent and live there. Okay, my father-in-law was a pastor so I Wonder in your opinion if grief could speak if it could look a person in the eye and tell them what they meet You know what? They truly needed from that person. What do you think it would say? I love you Always I Love you Because grief is the imprint of where love has been.

Oh. That's a writer down there. I love it. It really is it doesn't matter if it's the death of a baby or your best friend moved away when you were five It's still grief. It still hurts and it still means that there was love there So when we concentrate our attention on the love, it is also a focus situation Where are you gonna focus your attention? Are you going to focus it on? The loss are going focus on it the Love that was there You get to choose. You have free will. What are you gonna choose?

And you have to chose it maybe every other minute. When you're fresh in grief. And that's okay. I wonder because I think sometimes you're not in the midst of it. Sometimes it's someone that you care about deeply who is grieving. What acts have you recommended that might be helpful for people who are watching others go through grief? Well, let them talk. Don't tell them that they're ready to talk, don't shut them down. Encourage them to talk about their loved one. Encourage them talk to about what they miss.

Encourage to them about the love parts of it. If they're stuck on how it's so unfair, tell them, this is not a hamburger. Unfair is paying $12 for a hamburgers. This is fair or not fair, right? It's not or fair. It is life and death. Big difference. So we need to treat it as if it's a sacred thing. Because it is, when someone passes. We know that there is a change in the energy in a room when a person dies. Yeah. That's scientifically proven. It doesn't mean they disappear forever. it means that the vessel that held them, the body, is done.

Love, grief, and supporting others 23:05

And that's okay. But we have to remember what the spirit of that person is. And if you're not religious, that's okay. You don't have have religion, but you have the base it on something. There are a lot of people who are atheists too. They don' believe in God or they don'' believe a higher power or any of. That they still get through it somehow. But they. It's because we all have grace. And we can tap into it at any time. That healing experience I had, I've had it again in other places. And it's just that recognition and that alignment with the fact that love is always there for us.

Right. All we have to do is put ourselves in the way of it and align, line up with it, and then you'll feel it. It's happened to me in other different places. And it doesn't have to be like some fabulous place like Sedona. It happened me and Sedon as well. Doesn't to have be there. Could happen on your back porch. Happened to there, it happened at the ocean. That happened lots of different times and it usually has something to do with nature. Because those blind boys, they're a natural amazement.

One of my good friends, Gloria Hardiman, alligator records recording artist, was best friends with the last original blind boy. His name was Jimmy Carter, not the president. And he was nearby and they were talking and she said, I want you to meet my friend, Tanya, who's been to your concert and had this experience. He said I definitely want to So I ended up having dinner with them before a show when they were nearby. And it was just an amazing experience to be around them. I've met them many times after that.

Just to see the amount of love that they have for each other and for what they're doing is really beautiful. And that's what blues does, man. They sing mostly gospel, but they do have some blues tunes in there. I can't sing gospel because I cry when I sing a hymn. Really? I cannot sing and cry at the same time. It's very difficult. But blues, I do sing. A couple of really sad tunes, it's cathartic to be able to do that. And it is healing. So I encourage people to let their voice out. Even if you think you sing badly, you can still sing, I like that.

I love that even if you think you sing badly, you can still sing. Absolutely. You can. Maybe you. Can't carry a tune in a bucket, but you could string words together a little bit. And also think about what you're doing with opening your throat chakra, which is speaking truth to power. I love it. And I'll just add something. When you sing, when you hum, it actually activates the parasympathetic nervous system. It does. If you don't know, parasympathy nervous is rest, digest and heal. The opposite is the sympathetic, which is fight or flight or freeze.

So that humming. Are we getting a sample? Yeah, I'll sing it a little bit. Worried blues, worried blues. Give me your right hand. Cause I can sing my song and I sure don't need no band. Thank you, thank you. Oh, this is such a treat. I'm glad you think so. Yeah. So I had another son, by the way, just so you know, I did have another sun. He's about 30. he just turned 30 in February. A musician, he's a construction person. All kinds of cool stuff like that. And he used to put his hand over my mouth and go, Mimi, don't sing.

I showed him. Well, we appreciate your beautiful voice. You know, I know you've done quite a bit in the grief world and even written a book. I wonder if you could speak to that. There's the book. I'm chapter 20, so my name isn't on the front cover. It's on back cover, but I am chapter 18 in this book, 20 Shades of Grief. And my whole story is in that book is, in the chapter. It's lots of different stories of grief of people going through it and how they did. And there's also, I have a gift in there for people of the seven lessons I learned from my greatest heartbreak, which if you want that, you can get in touch with me and send me a message.

I'm on Instagram at Dr. Tanya English or Facebook. Um, Tania are English on Facebook because they don't want you to put your doctor name on there. So. We want to talk about, like, how do you get through it? And those seven lessons are how you got through them. We've talked about some of them already today. Asking for help, receiving help when it's being given. Let people help you. And then remember that people are going to say awful things and you just have to let it go. Unless you're ready to teach them, which most people aren't when they're in grief.

Yeah. Being able to kind of brush aside some of the things that people say and just, just as you want grace, give them grace.

Voice, vibration, and the guest's healing methods 29:25

Yeah, they don't know. People don' t study it and it's not, in this culture we don t talk about it. It's starting to happen more and more because there's all these grief groups that you go to and all different organizations that are experiencing that. that help you experience it. But I think what I do that's different from that is we don't talk about it so much as we do to heal it, so when we're healing, we can go there, but we end up at a better place, and we might start out low and leave feeling more and more neutral and hopeful about life because that our natural inclination as human beings.

to be more hopeful about life. I like that. And I think, I love all the, you talked about a couple of different, it's like you use breath work, You use emotion freedom technique, like energy psychology. Then also just the power of prayer. Like prayer is. This is a big deal. Yeah, and we can close with a prayer, but I also do a lot of other techniques that are always working on the root cause. As a chiropractor, we wanna find the route cause, now I've gone beyond moving bones. I don't do any forceful adjusting, I use an activator to adjust.

It's a handheld instrument that delivers an adjustment really fast. So people don' have to be twisted and pounced on and all that. What the other part of that is, is it's great to go from the outside in, but let's go to the inside out, and that's our subconscious. So I work with many techniques that work on subconscious emotional memories that override present time. I'll say that again, subconscious, emotional, memories, that overwrite present-time. And a really short way to say that is a trigger.

That's what a triggered is. It's a subconscious emotional memory that's overriding what's really happening in present. So having a different reaction that doesn't fit with what is happening now, that because it's triggered. Something that happened in the past and it is being triggered and now it happening again. We want to remove those or neutralize them. I'm not going in and pulling things out. but we can neutralize them. And there's techniques that I do, like bio-energetic synchronization technique and MAP technique, which is a really great, elegant technique that we love.

It changes how you think. When I see a technique which changes the way you That's the technique I want to do because that's what's causing all the problems. It's up here. Yeah. Our beliefs can make us or break us. And it's not just beliefs that we decide to believe. Its beliefs are taught to us from a very early age. Pre-dispositions, how do I get through this? How do i get fed and nurtured? I have to what they tell me so I better be quiet, or I better not be happy, right? So these are all things that coping mechanisms that we work out when we're too young to know what that even means.

So we get ingrained with these ideas, and they're very hard to break if you're trying to do it as a habit from the outside. But when you go into the subconscious, so much easier, So much freer, really cool. Love it, love it. Dr. Tanya English, blues singer, chiropractor, energy healer, keeper of treasure in the dark places. Where can our community find you and continue this journey with you? I'm all over the place. So I am on YouTube, Dr Tania English. I m on Instagram as DrTanyaEnglish and also Healing with the Blues.

My website is QuantumHealingInternational.com. quantumhealinginternational.com. Also, I have a website, healingwiththeblues. com. That's where our band is on that. And there's a little bit of the story there of what we went through. All of those places are available to you to hit me up. Let's get working. let's clear up those misconceptions that we've had since we were little, tiny, Be free, because that's where the peace comes from. Love it. Thank you so much, Dr. Tanya Inglitch, for being on the show.

Thanks for having me, Elizabeth. I really appreciate it If you haven't heard it yet today, I appreciate you. The soul in me honors the soul and you." If you'd like to see more episodes like this, please subscribe or click here. And friends, if this spoke to you, leave a comment below. We would love to hear from you!