Nov 26, 2022
“Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.” ~ Oscar Wilde
Guest Introduction:
Today’s guest is Lynn Principe and I know that you are going to love her if you are not already a fan.
Lynn is a Certified End of Life Doula, Conscious Dying Coach, Educator and Lifecycle Celebrant. Her passion is walking with dying people and their community in their final days by providing support in creating end of life plans, being a loving presence at the bedside and offering ritual and ceremony services. The honor of being with the dying has inspired her to dive deeper into the practices of living life with more intention.
Hello friend, Welcome to another episode of Exploring the Seasons of Life podcast.
I’m your host Cindy MacMillan, Integrative Life Coach and self-care advocate for women with a big heart on a spiritual journey who are ready to lead healthier and happier lives and improve their emotional well-being.
I interview coaches, spiritual explorers and thought leaders from all walks of life about beginnings, endings, and the messy bits in-between. Self-love, well-being, and mindset are at the heart of our conversations because once you change the inside, the outside will begin to change as well.
In this season of the podcast, I’m inviting you to lean into well-being. Well-being takes into account the entire person, body, mind and spirit. It’s feeling good and functioning well; it’s experiencing positive emotions such as contentment and gratitude; it’s developing your potential, having a sense of purpose, and experiencing close relationships.
Here’s a glimpse of our conversation:
Welcome Lynn. Thanks so much for coming back on the show. I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation.
2:52 In the past year, I think I performed about 30 funerals and being able to dive deeply into the lives of others and start to look at what really matters. And honestly, what really doesn't matter, is so informative to me. And it sounds cliche, but it's true, that love is the thing that matters at the end of the day, you know, that is our legacy.
4:39 There's an author that I often go back to, Francis Weller, he wrote The Wild Edge of Sorrow, and he talks about grief. And there's more to grief than just losing someone that we love, although that's a huge one. And that's the one that we most think about when we talk about grieving. But there's so many other types of grief, such as ancestral grief, grieving for our planet, grieving for the life that we wish that we had, or the love that we wished we had that we didn't have.
6:16 I'm an empty nester now, a newly empty nester, and there's grief there. You know, I miss the daily rituals of a house full of children. So, I think that I'm starting to look at the grief that we all live with every day – it gives us the chance to give us some grace towards ourselves and towards one another, maybe we can be a little more patient with each other - could be a unifier.
9:30 So where we are currently, we just had some midterm elections. And when I sit with people at the end of their lives or perform their funerals, I'm not thinking about who did you vote for? Or how we're different. And I think that you know, death can be an equalizer in a lot of ways. It's taught me to stop making assumptions and start looking at all the ways that we are similar, and how, at the end of the day, we really want the same things. So that's a big teacher for me.
11:52 I'm actually having a Friendsgiving celebration for the first time at my house. And for the potluck, I've asked people to bring a dish that invokes a memory of a person or an event, so that our table will be full of all of their people and their memories. And people can share the stories if they like to. So just creating opportunities to share I think is a great way to acknowledge our grief.
30:49 I created the Gratitude and Grace program. Because, like I said, we think we have more time, and maybe we have a ton of time. This goes for end-of-life planning, you know, people think, you know, they're going to wait to do that, when they're dying. And that's actually the worst time to plan these things. What I think is magic about it is, once you do the things, you do the work you, you do your soul work, whatever they may be for you. The time that you do have, like I said, whether it's short or long, has a different quality to it.
You can find Lynn Principe at:
Website Instagram
IF YOU LOVED THIS EPISODE WITH LYNN PRINCIPE YOU’LL ALSO LOVE THE CONVERSATIONS I HAD WITH:
Conversation with End-of-Life Doula, Sue Phillips
Lean Into the Seasons with Barbara Friesen
Grief Comes in Many Forms with Bobbie Rae Boyer
Grief and Secondary Losses with Nesreen Ahmed
The New Face of Grief with Katie Rössler
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👉 Contact me to get started on your journey. My e-mail is Cindy@CynthiaMacMillan.com or go here to my doTERRA website.