The Remembering Way

It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever tried to do.

Maybe there’s someone you love so much that your need for them to be okay has started to press on them. Not cruelly. Just there, in the space between you. What if loving them means holding lightly what you want for their life, to make room for what their life actually is?

Welcome to The Remembering Way.

In this conversation, Bob Gauen asks me to go back to the hardest stretch with my kiddo Bee, when a distance had come between us. I tell him about journaling my worst nightmare, deciding not to abandon myself and not to abandon Bee, and seeing how my own fear had become a kind of judgment. About the finite mom who wanted so much, and the eternal self underneath her. About unhooking my well-being from whatever happened, and the joy that came, which sounds crazy, and isn’t.

Then Bob asks what the rest of us might take from this. I wonder aloud whether we’re making mini-mes, or being a clean mirror, and what happens when someone loves us without abandoning us and without invading. Bob says it’s super hard as a parent. It is. It sucketh. And the payoff is extraordinary.

Not answers. A wondering.

In this episode

* 0:00 - Before we begin, and who Bee is

* 1:45 - What is center-to-center loving?

* 2:24 - My worst nightmare, and not abandoning myself or Bee

* 8:28 - Holding lightly what we want for someone we love

* 15:27 - Letting go, and the essence that remains after death

* 17:12 - When we think we know what’s best for someone

* 20:57 - Love that neither abandons nor invades

* 22:44 - Giving someone room to stand up straighter

* 23:04 - It sucketh: the hardest thing, and the payoff

* 24:34 - Maybe for you it isn’t a kiddo

Mentioned in this episode

* Beatrice Bruteau: center-to-center loving, drawing on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

* Jim Finley: healing can happen in the presence of someone who neither abandons nor invades

* Episode 1 · You Can Do This Hard Thing: Bee’s story, if and as you’re ready. Listen to Episode 1 here

Before you listen

This episode speaks about my kiddo Bee’s death by suicide, and about the sexual assault Bee lived through in the months before.

Check in with yourself as you listen. You might listen with someone. You might set it down for another day. All of those are wise.

If you need support:

* 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: call or text 988 (US), any hour of any day

* Crisis Text Line: text HOME to 741741 (US)

* Alliance of Hope, for those bereaved by suicide: allianceofhope.org

* The Compassionate Friends, for families after the death of a child: compassionatefriends.org

* RAINN, sexual assault support: 800-656-4673, rainn.org

* Outside the US: findahelpline.com

There is always help. There is always someone.

This is a conversation

Whatever stirred in you today, let it stay. Don’t rush past it. That’s the remembering at work.

I’d love to hear where this lands in your life, and the questions you’re sitting with. You can send feedback and reflections here, write to me at [email protected], or leave a comment at elizabethlightfootjameson.com. I read them all.

And if this landed in you, share it with someone who might need it. That’s how this travels.

Ways to walk this together

The podcast is free. It always will be. You’ll find it at Broken Open, elizabethlightfootjameson.com, and wherever you listen to podcasts. If you’d like to help this work keep going, you can support it with a paid subscription. Nothing sits behind a wall, and nothing will.

The Bee Memorial Fund. If you’d like to help hold this work, and make room at the table for others, you can give through the Bee Memorial Fund. Gifts go through our fiscal sponsor, St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Estes Park, so they can be charitable gifts. More about Bee and the fund

Second Sundays: free, monthly, open to absolutely anyone, online and in Estes Park. Next: November 8, 6–7:30pm MT. This month: Re-membering. Come as you are. Details and RSVP

The Remembering Way: circles, soul coaching, and ways to go deeper in community: TheRememberingWay.org

Becoming Love: the community gathering around this work: becoming-love.circle.so/c/welcome-circle

Dedicated with Love

For Bee, my kiddo, my teacher, whose light did not go out.

And for anyone loving someone they can’t fix. You are not doing it wrong.

Until next time: keep rethinking the unthinkable. Keep noticing what you are noticing.

You are not too much. You are not too little. And you are not alone.

With love always,

Elizabeth Lightfoot Jameson[email protected]TheRememberingWay.orgElizabethLightfootJameson.comBecoming-love.circle.so/c/welcome-circle

Credits

Creative direction by John Harrison. Original music by Jonny Rodgers. The mosaic is the work of Patrick Raymond. With gratitude to Bob Gauen.

Second Sunday

Second Sunday is November 8, 6–7:30pm MT, online and in Estes Park, free and open to anyone. This month: Re-membering. Details and RSVP: https://becoming-love.circle.so/c/events-d39d8c/second-sunday-remembering-together-november2026

If you’d like to help hold this work, and make room at the table for others, you can give through the Bee Memorial Fund. Gifts go through our fiscal sponsor, St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Estes Park, so they can be charitable gifts. More about Bee and the fund: https://www.therememberingway.org/bee-memorial-page

Transcript

Elizabeth: It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever tried to do. I still am practicing it, but the payoff, the benefit, is so extraordinary.

Welcome to The Remembering Way. I’m Elizabeth Lightfoot Jameson. This is a podcast about rethinking the unthinkable, about how the very things we fear the most can become our deepest openings. I’m so glad you’re here.

Before we begin, please check in with yourself. I’ll be talking about my kiddo Bee’s death by suicide and the sexual assault Bee lived through in the months prior. There is always help. In the United States, you can call or text 988 any hour of any day, and a real person will answer. That and other resources are in the show notes.

Bee, B-e-e, non-binary, chose the pronouns she/her and they/them, and you’ll find I refer to Bee as both. Bee died in the summer of 2021, and Bee is still my teacher. That light did not go out.

And joining me today is my dear friend on the journey, Bob Gauen.

Bob: Yes, it’s good to be here with you.

Elizabeth: Welcome, Bob. It’s always a pleasure.

Bob: I wanted to go back and talk a little bit about Bee’s experience. Is that okay?

Elizabeth: Yeah.

Bob: In the depths of her suffering, you struggled to maintain a connection to her. A distance had formed between you two, and you said that you were not just dealing with Bee’s well-being; that you were dealing with your own grief, your own fears, your own sense of loss, and then you found your way to what you described as center-to-center loving. So, can you talk more about what that is?

Elizabeth: Yes. I think it’s important to say that I had been in my own hard times. I knew something about depression, despair, and really feeling that it was hard to see a way forward. So I could identify with Bee in that way. I knew that life could be really hard, and so my heart really went out to Bee, knowing that Bee wasn’t just making this up. It wasn’t just for show. It was really, really hard, and some people’s lives are hard.

And I really understood my own terror. I mean, to lose a child is my worst nightmare. I couldn’t breathe when I thought about not having Bee as a part of my life. And so the work of feeling those feelings, when this distance had kind of come between us, where I could feel Bee already slipping away, maybe had been slipping away since the sexual assault months earlier, but I had felt like we had a tether. Even then, when it felt like it had frayed as much as it did at the point that you’re talking about, I really sat with myself and journaled my worst nightmare, my fears. And in doing that, and turning it around after I’d really identified the pain and the fear, I got clear on some things.

One is I didn’t want to abandon myself, because I think we’re ofte…

We’ve been quiet for a few weeks. We’re back, with something new: conversations.

Not wrong, just incomplete.

Maybe what you were handed doesn’t hold the way it used to. The old way has come apart, and the new one hasn’t arrived yet. Most of us want to hurry through that place. What if it’s where there’s finally room?

Welcome to The Remembering Way.

This is the first conversation. My dear friend Bob Gauen sits across from me with questions he gathered from the first five episodes. For twenty years of preaching I read the room. Recording alone under a fort of quilts, there’s no room to read. With Bob here, there is.

We talk about why this podcast, and why it doesn’t fit in a box: mystics of every kind, astrology, dreams and visions, poetry, wilderness, my story and yours. That’s what you get. About the words I close every episode with, and why they’re the ones I need to hear most. About the in-between: three nights and four days with a tarp I didn’t know how to set up, and what comes in sideways when we stop leaning on what we already know. About the people I’ve walked with at the end of their lives, and the ones who practiced letting go long before they had to. And about what we inherited, not wrong, just incomplete, and Rachel Naomi Remen’s catfish. How are we good catfish, putting back out what is good?

Not answers. A wondering.

In this episode

0:00 - Welcome, and Bob

2:19 - Why a podcast, and why now

6:19 - A podcast that doesn’t fit in a box

10:14 - You are not too much. You are not too little. And you are not alone.

12:32 - More in-between moments than settled ones

14:58 - The tarp, and what comes in sideways

16:28 - Letting go, at the end of a life

18:11 - Bob, the introvert at the dinner party

18:56 - Not wrong, just incomplete

22:28 - The beetles: difference that doesn’t compete

23:33 - The catfish

27:14 - Whatever is stirred in you today

Mentioned in this episode

Rachel Naomi Remen — the story of the man who chose catfish [“Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal”]

Thérèse of Lisieux — the little way: not through getting it right, but through our imperfection

Jim Finley and Cynthia Bourgeault — two of the wise voices I lean into

Mary Oliver — her poem on loving and letting go [“In Blackwater Woods”]

Kenosis — the mystic path of letting go, not clinging

Episode 2 · The Wilderness Between the Stories — where the in-between first came up - https://elizabethjameson.substack.com/p/the-wilderness-between-the-stories

Listen to Episode 2 Here

This is a conversation

Whatever stirred in you today, let it stay. Don’t rush past it. That’s the remembering at work.

And now it’s a conversation in the plainest sense. Bob still has questions from the first five episodes, and we’d love yours too: the things you’re actually sitting with, the ones without simple answers.

You can send feedback and reflections here https://elizabethjameson.wixforms.com/f/7515113450746414205, write to me at [email protected], or leave a comment at elizabethlightfootjameson.com. I read them all.

And if this landed in you, share it with someone who might need it. That’s how this travels.

Ways to walk this together

The podcast is free. It always will be. You’ll find it at Broken Open, elizabethlightfootjameson.com, and wherever you listen to podcasts. If you’d like to help this work keep going, you can support it with a paid subscription. Nothing sits behind a wall, and nothing will.

Second Sundays — free, monthly, open to absolutely anyone. Next: November 8, 6–7:30pm MT. Come as you are. Register here: https://becoming-love.circle.so/c/events-d39d8c

The Remembering Way — circles, soul coaching, and ways to go deeper in community: TheRememberingWay.org

Becoming Love — the community gathering around this work: becoming-love.circle.so/c/welcome-circle

Dedicated with Love

For Bob, who said yes to listening.

And for anyone standing somewhere in between, where you aren’t yet and you’re no longer. There’s more room here than it feels like.

Until next time: keep rethinking the unthinkable. Keep noticing what you are noticing.

You are not too much. You are not too little. And you are not alone.

With love always,

Elizabeth Lightfoot Jameson[email protected]TheRememberingWay.orgElizabethLightfootJameson.comBecoming-love.circle.so/c/welcome-circle

Credits

Creative direction by John Harrison. Original music by Jonny Rodgers. The mosaic is the work of Patrick Raymond. With gratitude to Bob Gauen, and to everyone who has walked this way with me, the easy companions and the hard ones alike.

Transcript

Elizabeth: All right, are we recording? Okay, here we go. Welcome to the Remembering Way. I'm Elizabeth Lightfoot Jameson. This is a podcast about rethinking the unthinkable, about how the very things we fear the most can become our deepest openings. I'm so glad you're here. And joining me today is my dear friend on the journey, Bob Gauen, and it is such a joy to have you with me.

Bob: Yeah, I feel honored to be here with you today and to talk about these first couple episodes of your podcast.

Elizabeth: Well, thank you. I have to confess that I do these episodes on my own under a fort of quilts that I have made to try to make this sound good, but then I'm completely cut off from you, listeners. You feel far away, and so I'm really grateful you're here, Bob. And no, we're not under a fort of quilts, but I'm grateful because your presence helps bring out something in me when I don't have your smiling face across from me.

Bob: Ah, thank you.

Elizabeth: Tell me a little bit about why you said yes when I asked you to partner with me on this podcast.

Bob: Of course, I've been a student in some of your classes and participated in a retreat that we did in the spring, and I took from that retreat a richness that I still can hold on to today. And so, when you ask me, there's not a lot of talents that I have, but I thought I could listen and come up with some questions that would help pull out from what you said in your episodes ideas and themes that we could all relate to and maybe start to implement into our lives.

Elizabeth: Yeah. Well, thank you. Here we go.

Bob: Why a podcast? Why this podcast, and why now?

Elizabeth: It was actually John who was doing the editing that suggested a podcast, and to be honest, it's much harder than I thought it was going to be. I have no trouble talking. I talk a lot. I talk easily, and that part is not hard. What has been much harder than I thought it would ever be is doing it alone, because you know for 20 years preaching, I read the room. I don't use a script. I mean, I know what I'm going to say, but it changes because I read the room. I know if people are with me. I circle back around if I'm seeing confused looks, or you know, I just there's so much energy I get back that comes right back into it, and people don't realize it's a conversation. It's one-sided on the one hand, but it's drawn from all the interactions that I have with people, and so sitting by myself when there's no engagement visible has been much harder than I thought it would be, and there are too many times that my heart isn't in it because I feel like, yeah, because I'm not with someone, and so we did a couple of episodes, just tell a little bit of my story, but it's never been about my story. This isn't a podcast about me; it's a podcast about a way of living and seeing that has been life-changing for me, and has been life-changing for other people.

And I know there's something here that more people are ready to hear, and maybe need to hear. And there's there's the part of me that says, "Well, who am I? You know, go listen to Jim Finley, go listen to Cynthia Bourgeault, go listen to all these other beautiful, wise people whom I lean into. Why me? Why should I have anything to say? And I've wrestled with that because it's a good question. There are plenty of podcasts out there. There are plenty of people doing this kind of work. But my story and my journey has been my own, and I've learned some things and brought some additional pieces to it, and the way that I frame it and understand it and help hold space for people who are on their own journey to engage with all of this in an accessible way, isn't like everyone else. Realistically, it's not like anyone else, and so I'm daring to put my voice out into the mix, not in competition, but because someone somewhere might be able to hear it through me that isn't going to hear it through another means. I feel I've been given both the heart of my life and the beauty of my life to be a voice for others. It's a lot of blood, sweat, and tears—more than I thought it would be, but we're getting there, and we'll find our way.

Bob: When you first started doing this, I thought of it as a spiritual podcast. But having listened to the first few episodes, it seems like it's more of a healing podcast or a podcast about opening up. Does that sound right, or should we not try to label it at all?

Elizabeth: I don't know how to label it. Yeah. And people say those people out there say you should have a target audience. You know, you speak to someone who's had a devastating loss, and how do they make it through? And I do speak to that, and I have some experience on that.

But that's not all. That's not all I'm about. I'm not only here for people who've had heartbreak or grief or loss or struggle.

I'm here for people who are just waking up and who want more of that taste that they've had, the spaciousness of how to live in a way that's permeated with who they really are? Well, those people aren't going to respond if I say, "Well, I'm here just for someone whose heart has been broken, and I'm here for people who want to parent differently, love differently. I'm here for people who want to lead differently, who are caring about changing the world because our world is hurting, and so there'll be times where somebody goes, oh, this is what this is, and then the next series of podcast episodes might be very different. I talk about Christian mystics. Well, I don't. I talk about all kinds of mystics and astrology or wisdom wherever I find it, dreams and visions.

And I'm going to weave in poetry, and I'm going to weave in, you know, wilderness fasts and indigenous wisdom, and I'm gonna weave in my own story and yours, and that's my learning curve to have the courage to stand in what I want to say and what I feel is coming through me, and I think many of us are trying to live not in a box. Many of us are trying to live not putting someone else in a box, and I think many of us are trying to live not by algorithm.

Bob: Right, labels are limiting just by their nature, and so why label something?

Elizabeth: Yeah, and some people aren't going to like it, and it's okay to be imperfect. Thérèse of Lisieux talked about the little way. It's not through getting it right. It's through our imperfection. And for a recovering perfectionist, that's big work.

Bob: Right. Plus, you don't know how that's going to be received. You don't know what message someone's going to pull from that. Right.

Elizabeth: Right. And as much as I prepare for a teaching, or back in the day when I was preaching more, or even when I'm writing or doing a podcast episode, I have a plan, but rarely does it go according to plan. I just start listening to what wants to come through, even when I have a theme or a direction I'm going to go. I never know what's going to come into my awareness or consciousness, and I've learned to trust that I've learned to just follow the lead of what's wanting to come through.

Bob: You end each episode with the words, “You are not too much, you are not too little, and you’re not alone.” Why those words?

Elizabeth: Because they're the words I need to hear every single time. Like many of you, I grew up feeling that I was too much, too messy, too emotional, too much, and that didn't feel okay to be too much, and at the same time, paradoxically, I felt like I was not enough. I know many of us struggle with imposter syndrome. Who am I to do any of this? And so both can be true at the same time. And in this journey of life, I've often felt alone, even though I've always had people who loved me. Sometimes I've adapted who I am in order to keep their love. That may not have been what was necessary, but I thought it was. And so, what I want to remind people all the way through these episodes and through their lives is I want that to become the mantra for all of us, because if I know I'm not too little or too much, and that I'm not alone, I can begin to live that, and see that about you, or the stranger at the grocery store, or whoever I might come across. Because chances are, they're feeling some mixture of all of those, and need to hear that message in how I relate to them, in how I look at them, how I see them and talk about them, and it's what I need to hear over and over and over again.

Bob: You describe the in-between as when the old way has come apart, and the new has yet to emerge. It feels like there are many moments during a lifetime when we're in between. Does that sound right?

Elizabeth: Absolutely. I think, I think there are more in-between moments than there are settled moments. We are always in process. We are always becoming. We are always ending something and beginning something at the same time, and there are clear markers for that. You know, there's a midlife, there's an adolescence, there's a time when you end a job or you end a relationship or you're just starting one. You know, they call it the honeymoon phase for a reason. They used to wear black armbands around to mark that there's a threshold between having someone in your life and having them die, and they're still there. The love is still there, but it's not the same.

Often we downplay the importance of the liminal season of the time between. Many of us are more comfortable clinging to what we know, whether it was a really good thing or not. We tend to like what's familiar, and we're hardwired that way, I mean, it kept us safe. If it's a new place and a new setting, I don't know what new dangers might be out there. The problem is our old patterns can trap us, and so that liminal time, that space between the wilderness, where we aren't yet, and we're no longer, we have a lot more flexibility there. We have room to breathe, to try things, to let go of things, to rethink the unthinkable, and that has become for me really the beautiful place. That there's some part of me that kind of always wants to be willing to let go of what I think I know.

When I did three nights and four days on a vision fast. I didn't know how to do a tarp. You couldn't have a tent. It was a tarp and a sleeping bag, and I didn't think in advance to look up how to set up a tarp. And I don't have a degree in tarp setting. It just isn't there, and so the first day I spent trying to set up a tarp to keep me dry, and when the wind picked up and the storm blew in, thankfully it didn't get me too wet, but it I had to redo it, and I had to just laugh about you know we rely so heavily on the things we already know, and we then miss what comes in sideways, what comes in around the edges, and in my experience, that's where the divinity tends to pop up. That's where the new, in a good way, has room because I'm not so locked in with what I already know, and I think it's a muscle development.

I've journeyed with a lot of people at the end of their life, many, many, many, many people, and I've observed how there are some people who are who have not developed that muscle of letting go and allowing the next thing, and those people have a really hard time in their dying process. It's kind of heartbreaking, and I get it. I get it.

But I've watched how others have practiced this loving and letting go. Mary Oliver's poem over and over and over, so that they don't fear the new or the next or the not yet, because they've developed this trust. They know that life is trustworthy, that love always has them, and so they then embrace the dying process as with sort of curiosity or humor or softness, and those end up being some of the most extraordinary moments.

And it's helped me to then bring that back into my own journey to say, how do I cultivate this? And it is the mystic path, is kenosis or letting go. Don't cling. So it's not just, you know, this liminal time. It's partnering with it and seeing it as gift as opposed to forced death march or forced family fun, as we used to say.

Bob: Yeah, that's great. In my life, I'm an introvert, and I like to know what's going to happen? So if we're going to a dinner party, I need to know when it starts, about what time we can start leaving, who might be there, and so this idea of kind of surrendering to what's going to happen is just hard for me. But part of this path helps me to open up to that.

Elizabeth: It is a process. I think for most of us. Yeah. I think most of us kind of like our comfort zone. So you're not alone.

Bob: You talk about suffering and the suffering we witness in the world today, and you offer that the foundations that we inherited were not wrong; they were just incomplete. And I assume you're talking about like the social and the religious and the political foundations of our world. Would you talk more about that idea?

Elizabeth: Absolutely. You know, we don't. We think of ourselves as independent and individuated, but we're very habituated to what our culture thinks. Our, you know, the world we grew up in creates a lot of what we think of as my distinctive way of seeing, and I think the more we can be honest about that, the better off we are. That I grew up with certain family and social and economic and all of that parameters. In a particular country, in a particular place in that country, and I had the benefit of moving a lot of different times and in very different places, living in Cameroon, Africa, for four months, or Hawaii, Florida, St. Louis, Boston—those are very different places, not just to have visited, but to actually live, and you begin then to realize how much we are informed by things that aren't uniform across cultures, people, families, Etc. And that alone was helpful to kind of recognize that one of these things is not like the other. That I come to my way of understanding something, and if it's radically different from someone else, it's because they were formed by some other factors, and it gives a little bit more grace to difference. I think when we begin to realize, I'm not just magically right about things; I'm just magically right within my own context.

It reminds me of how people talk about religion a lot of times. It's like this is the one and only religion. Well, of course that's how you might think because you're in it, and why would you not think that on some level if it's what you've chosen or what feels right, but how can you then say that everyone else is wrong, because each of those people are feeling that they chose the right one?

So I think there's work to be done to realize how much we are actually informed by forces that are not our individual choosing, and that matters because not all of what we inherited is very useful. We inherited a lot of black-and-white thinking. We inherited a lot of us-and-them thinking that my religion, my team, my family, my whatever it is is right, and yours isn't. That doesn't have to be that way.

When you look at nature, it's this plethora. There aren't just a few beetles. There are hundreds of them, and leaves, and different kinds of trees, and grasses. I mean, there's always a whole array in just one small area, let alone across the globe, and the difference doesn't compete; it's beautiful.

And so, I think my commitment is: how do we look more closely at what we've inherited to discern whether it's actually life-giving? Does it make me more loving? Does it make me more connected to myself, to the other, to the earth? Does it make me more kind of spacious, or does it close me down? And when it closes me down, I think there are some questions to ask. What am I afraid of? What's happening here?

I love the image of catfish. Rachel Naomi Remen tells a story about a gentleman who's had cancer, and he was in a visioning process to try to use visualization to help in the healing of the cancer while he was doing radiation and chemotherapy, and but he was failing, and so they sent him over to meet with her, and she asked him about his life. And he was an air traffic controller, and he was very engaged in his life. You know, lovely family, and there was all kinds of reasons for him to want to live. And so she asked him what it was that was the problem with this visualization practice, and he said, "Well, they want us to picture something to move through our bodies to push away the cancer, to move the cancer out, and sort of visualize that. And they didn't like what I picked. They wanted me to use a shark, and she said, "Well, what was wrong with the shark? It's like, "Well, it's very aggressive, and it just I just it got bored. I didn't like it, so I just didn't do it. She said, "Well, I'm curious, what did you pick? And he said, "Well, catfish. He said, "What was that?

Elizabeth: He kind of mumbled, "Catfish, and apparently, as a child, he had loved catfish, and they would be in the waterways where he lived. And he actually had one as a pet at one point. And he went on and on, and he totally lit up about catfish. You know, as an air traffic controller, he's making decisions, split-second decisions all the time, and that's what catfish do; they're bottom feeders, and so they are going through picking out what's good, what's not. And anything that's not good, it takes it into its own system and puts back out into its environment something that's good, but anything that's good for the environment. it just leaves, and they don't sleep, so there's this kind of devotion and commitment. And she looked at him. She said, "Well, use that. That is a much better way to think about chemotherapy and healing. And to this, for years he would use this visualization long after he was cancer-free.

And I think of that sometimes. That's what we're about right now, in this season, when so much is changing in our world and in our own lives. How are we good catfish? How are we part of cleaning our environment and putting back out? And again, I think the test of is it making me more loving and grounded? Is it making others feel more loved and welcome? And is it connecting me more with the earth and all that is the divinity of all that is.

Bob: That's a beautiful way to engage the world with that kind of attitude.

Elizabeth: Right. Whatever is stirred in you today, let it stay. Don't rush past it. That's the remembering at work, and I would truly love to hear where this lands in your life, as our conversation hopefully shows. It is a joy to be on the journey together, and we are richer for the conversation that deepens this way. The show notes have it all: the second Sundays, the ways to reach me, the transcript, all of that. Until next time, keep rethinking the unthinkable. Keep noticing what you're noticing. You are not too much. You are not too little, and you are not alone. I'm so glad you're here, and Bob, that goes for you too. I'm so glad you are here, and that our listeners are here as well.

Bob: Yeah, me too.

Don't close the door if God hasn't closed the door.

Maybe you know what it is for the ground to give way.

For some of us it comes slowly — the floor thinning for years before we let ourselves feel it. For others, all at once: solid one moment, gone the next, and you’re left standing in the air where you thought your whole life used to be, and was going to be.

And then what? Because most of us don’t stop. We build.

Welcome to The Remembering Way.

The first time my own ground gave way, I was twelve, and my dad died. This episode isn’t that story — it’s what I did next, which was to build a whole life standing on ground that had already given way. A young marriage, chosen not from my center but from the wound. The shade that rolled up on the 101 when the call to priesthood arrived all at once. Three years of wilderness in Hawaii, and a priest who smiled and said, “Don’t close the door if God hasn’t closed the door.”

And my friend Lee, who at fifty-six bit into a sandwich he couldn’t swallow, and met his own dying by letting go of what life should be. That one taught me something I’ve since had to learn again with my kiddo Bee — that the suffering was never only in what happened. It was in my expectation that it should have gone another way.

But it isn’t a story about my marriage, or my ordination. It’s about the two places any of us choose from — the center, and the wound — and how long it can take to tell which one is doing the choosing. And it’s about the belief underneath so much of it: that you have to be healed enough, whole enough, worthy enough, before you’re allowed to answer.

This is my telling, pieced together from where I stand now. It’s given me a great deal, and it may still be wrong in places I can’t see. Hold it lightly. Take what is yours, and leave the rest.

Not answers. A wondering.

Before you listen

This episode names suicide once in passing, and it speaks about my father’s death and my kiddo Bee’s. Both are held gently here rather than told in full — but you know your own weather.

Episode 1 holds Bee’s story, and Episode 4 my father’s, along with support resources — elizabethlightfootjameson.com

Check in with yourself as you listen. You might listen with someone. You might set it down for another day. All of those are wise.

In this episode

* 0:05 — When the Ground Gives Way

* 2:09 — Love, Wounds, and the Pact to Stay Safe

* 6:16 — The Call to Priesthood

* 12:12 — The Wounded Healer

* 14:41 — Letting Go of What Life “Should” Be

* 17:17 — The Turnings: Becoming Who You Came Here to Be

* 20:08 — Different Ground, Nothing Wasted

* 23:02 — How the Pieces Fit Together

Mentioned in this episode

* Lee Lipsenthal — Enjoy Every Sandwich: Living Each Day as If It Were Your Last — physician, teacher, and friend, who met his own dying by letting go of what life should be

* Henri Nouwen — the wounded healer: called through the breaking rather than in spite of it

* The Gospel of John — what I was studying alone, wondering what I was here for

* Ring Lake Ranch, Wyoming — where Bee climbed Little Whiskey, and where we met Jim

* The Saturn return — the roughly twenty-nine-year cycle, and the quarter-turn check-ins in between

* Episode 1 · You Can Do This Hard Thing — Bee’s story, told fully

* Episode 2 · The Wilderness Between the Stories — the wilderness, and the mosaic this episode ends on

* Episode 4 · Living Inside a Name — my father, my great-grandfather, and the name that came down with them

This is a conversation

Whatever stirred in you today — let it stay. Don’t rush past it. That’s the remembering at work.

And I mean conversation. We’re beginning to build episodes around your questions — the things you’re actually sitting with, the ones that don’t have simple, easy answers.

So ask. Write to me at [email protected], or leave a comment at elizabethlightfootjameson.com. I read them all.

And if this landed in you, share it with someone who might need it. That’s how this travels.

Ways to walk this together

The podcast is free. It always will be. You’ll find it at Broken Open — elizabethlightfootjameson.com — and wherever you listen to podcasts. The writing there is free too. If you’d like to help this work keep going, you can support it with a paid subscription. But nothing sits behind a wall, and nothing will.

This fall, a new season. The Inner Alchemy of Wisdom: Remembering — September 13 through December 10. Small circles, online and in person here in Estes Park: the Companion Circle (1st & 3rd Tuesday evenings, 6–7:30pm MT) and the Core Circle (Thursday mornings, 11–12:30pm MT). https://www.therememberingway.org/inner-alchemy

Second Sundays — free, monthly, open to absolutely anyone. September 13, October 11, November 8, 6–7:30pm MT. Nothing is asked of you. Come as close as you long to.

Becoming Love — the community gathering around this work. https://becoming-love.circle.so/c/welcome-circle

Dedicated with Love

For my beloved Jim and kiddos, and for each and every person along the way, whether that season was short or long. I wouldn’t change any of it if I could.

And for everyone standing in front of a door they’ve decided is closed, sure they have to be healed enough, or whole enough, or worthy enough first. Maybe it isn’t closed. Maybe it never was.

Until next time: keep rethinking the unthinkable. Keep noticing what you are noticing.

You are not too much. You are not too little. And you are not alone.

With love always,Elizabeth Lightfoot Jameson[email protected]TheRememberingWay.orgElizabethLightfootJameson.comBecoming-love.circle.so/c/welcome-circle

Credits

Creative direction by John Harrison.

Original music by Jonny Rodgers.

The mosaic is the work of Patrick Raymond.

And with deep gratitude to all who have been walking this way with me — especially my family and friends, the Inner Alchemy of Wisdom Core Circle, those in soul coaching, and all who have joined me in other offerings. You have shaped this more than you know.

Transcript

When the Ground Gives Way

Maybe you know what it is for the ground to give way. What I mean by that, for some of us, it comes slowly — a gradual erosion, the floor thinning under us for years before we let ourselves acknowledge it, or feel it. Or perhaps it happened all at once — solid one moment and gone the next — and you’re left standing in the air where you thought your whole life used to be and was going to be. Maybe it’s already happened to you. Maybe you can feel it beginning even now. However it comes, you’re not alone in it, and it’s not the end of your story, even when everything in you says it is.

Welcome to the Remembering Way. I’m Elizabeth Lightfoot Jameson. This is a podcast about rethinking the unthinkable, about the very things we fear the most can become our deepest openings. I’m so glad you’re here. The first time my own ground gave way, I was 12, and my dad died. And what he was carrying went back further than him to my great grandfather, and it came forward past him to my kiddo Bee. That’s a story I’ve told elsewhere. Today, I want to tell you what happened next, because I built a whole life standing on ground that had already given way. Perhaps you know something about that too.

Love, Wounds, and the Pact to Stay Safe

I married young. He was a good man. I want to be clear. Like me, he’d lost his father young, not the way I had lost mine, but the impact was the same. Two people carrying the same kind of loss, finding each other young and tender. At the time, it felt like recognition and relief in some way. Someone who understood what no one else around me did, and there was something real in that.

But I realized later that we had kind of created a pact. We’ll keep each other safe from the pain. We’ll protect each other, and that’s real. It’s just limited. It’s what we do before we’ve done our own work. We fall in love with the parts of ourselves we can’t yet own, and we set them on the other person. I poured all the good in me out onto him because I couldn’t claim yet what was true in me, and I fell in love with that outsourced light, not because i…

Maybe you’re carrying a name that was never really yours.

Not only the one on your birth certificate — the whole story that came with it. Who your family needed you to be. What you had to become in order to belong, or stay safe, or survive. A role you’ve worn so long you’ve half forgotten it was ever a costume.

What would it mean to set that story down, and claim instead the name that was waiting underneath all along?

Welcome to The Remembering Way.

This episode goes through my family — the house in Lynchburg with a stage on the third floor, the name I met in my father’s lap, and the three-by-five card he left behind. But it isn’t a story about my family. It’s about the rule book yours handed you: the one nobody said out loud, that you learned by watching what was accepted, what people did, what they didn’t do, and what happened when someone colored outside the lines.

The question underneath it: how many generations died soul deaths — or actual deaths — rather than rock the boat?

Everything I say about my father is what I pieced together over fifty years out of fragments. It’s a story I made so I could live with what happened. It’s given me a great deal, and it may still be wrong in places I can’t see. I don’t want to take a man who was so much more than his final act and turn him into an explanation. Hold it lightly. Take what is yours, and leave the rest.

Not answers. A wondering.

Before you listen

This episode speaks openly about suicide — my grandmother’s father, my father, and my kiddo Bee. Three generations, named plainly.

Check in with yourself as you listen. You might listen with someone. You might set it down for another day. Or it may be that this one isn’t for you. All of those are wise.

If you need support:

* 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988 (US), any hour of any day. Chat at 988lifeline.org. Videophone service for people who are deaf or hard of hearing and use ASL. Veterans press 1.

* Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 (US)

* Alliance of Hope — for those bereaved by suicide — allianceofhope.org

* The Compassionate Friends — for families after the death of a child — compassionatefriends.org

* Outside the US: findahelpline.com

There is always help. There is always someone.

In this episode

0:00 — The Names and Stories We Inherit

6:14 — My Father, Depression, and “Rethink the Unthinkable”

11:20 — The Family Rulebook: Grief, Perfection, and the Wound Beneath

17:40 — Breaking the Pattern and Reconciling With Yourself

19:05 — The Stories Hidden Inside Our Names

22:01 — Claiming Elizabeth Lightfoot

27:13 — Changing the Family Legacy

32:06 — What Will You Carry Forward?

Mentioned in this episode

* Stephanie Kallos — Broken for You, the novel about inherited china and the mosaics made from it

* A. E. Housman — A Shropshire Lad — “many a rose-lipt maiden and many a lightfoot lad”

* Upper and Lower Slaughter, Gloucestershire — the villages named for a muddy place at a crossing

* The surname Slaughter has more than one origin. One line traces to the sloe tree — the blackthorn, a fruit tree, from Old English slāh (”sloe”) and trēow (”tree”); sloes are the fruit in sloe gin. Another traces to Old English slōhtre, a muddy place or mire, sometimes a deep valley or ditch — the derivation behind the Cotswold villages of Upper and Lower Slaughter, which sit at a crossing of the River Eye, sometimes called Slaughter Brook, and appear in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Sclostre. Lynchburg, Virginia takes its name from John Lynch, a Quaker and a ferryman who carried people across the water - some say he was an an abolitionist as well. A fruit tree, a muddy crossing, and a ferryman. The names held all of it the whole time.

This is a conversation

Whatever stirred in you today — let it stay. Don’t rush past it. That’s the remembering at work.

And I mean conversation. We’re beginning to build episodes around your questions — the things you’re actually sitting with, the ones that don’t have simple, easy answers.

So ask. Write to me at [email protected], or leave a comment at elizabethlightfootjameson.com. I read them all.

And if this landed in you, share it with someone who might need it. That’s how this travels.

Ways to walk this together

The podcast is free. It always will be. You’ll find it at Broken Open — elizabethlightfootjameson.com — and wherever you listen to podcasts. The writing there is free too. If you’d like to help this work keep going, you can support it with a paid subscription. But nothing sits behind a wall, and nothing will.

Second Sundays — a free gathering, in person and online, once a month. Come as you are.

Becoming Love — the community gathering around this work. New offerings this fall.

Dedicated with Love

This is for my dad — every part of him, and all of it more than what happened at the end. And for my family, origin and chosen, whose love grounds me.

For Bee, who knew how to claim a name long before I ever did, and whose continued presence even in absence is such a gift.

And for everyone carrying a name, or a story, or a weight that was handed to them before they had words to question it. There may be another story in it. There usually is.

Until next time: keep rethinking the unthinkable. Keep noticing what you are noticing.

You are not too much. You are not too little. And you are not alone.

With love always,

Elizabeth Lightfoot Jameson[email protected]TheRememberingWay.orgElizabethLightfootJameson.comBecoming-love.circle.so/c/welcome-circle

Credits

Creative direction by John Harrison.

Original music by Jonny Rodgers.

The mosaic is the work of Patrick Raymond.

And with deep gratitude to all who have been walking this way with me — especially my family and friends, the Inner Alchemy of Wisdom Core Circle, those in soul coaching, and all who have joined me in other offerings. You have shaped this more than you know.

Transcript

The Names and Stories We Inherit

Maybe you’re carrying a name that was never really yours — not only the one on your birth certificate, the whole story that came with it, who your family needed you to be, what you had to become or believed you had to become, in order to belong, or stay safe, or survive. A role you’ve worn so long you’ve half forgotten it was ever a costume. What would it mean to set that story down, and claim instead the name that was waiting underneath all along — to claim your very own self.

Welcome to The Remembering Way. I’m Elizabeth Lightfoot Jameson. This is a podcast about rethinking the unthinkable. I know something about inherited names, the ones that weigh you down, and the ones that set you free.

This episode does speak openly about suicide. If today isn’t the day for that, please attend to your own well-being first and foremost. And if you’re struggling right now, there are resources and support listed in the show notes.

How many generations died soul deaths — or actual deaths — rather than rock the boat? That question is at the heart of this episode, because every one of us carries an inheritance we didn’t choose. Stories handed down to us before we had words to question them. Patterns that belonged to someone else’s survival before they became ours. Dreams to carry that were never our own.

For generations, the heirlooms handed most of us were some combination of sweet, beautiful stories, alongside pain, buried and transferred forward. Unhealed trauma nestles as comfortably among unpaid bills as silver spoons. Abuse, meanness, expectations that no longer fit and had to be met anyway, at the sacrifice of the person meeting them. And most of the time, we don’t even know we’re carrying them. They just feel like who we are.

I remember as a small child sitting in a car in Lynchburg, Virginia, the grown-ups all talking about a huge mansion that had clearly fallen on hard times. My grandmother grew up in that house. The dining room sat 24. Her father was the local physician. He built a house three stories tall with a stage on the top floor, so that his five children would write and enact plays. But no pressure.

She was 2…

What did you love to do before anyone was watching?

Who were you before you learned who you were supposed to be? Before you figured out what earned love, and what didn’t — and quietly became that instead. Maybe you can feel that one still. Maybe you’ve forgotten them entirely.

This episode is about the one you were before the world shaped you — the one you still are, underneath all of it.

Welcome to The Remembering Way.

This isn’t really a story about my childhood. It’s about yours — and about a question so many of us have carried since we were small: is it safe to be me? Am I welcome here too? I’ll tell you about a vision I was given, a sanctuary of light, and what I found waiting there. But the vision isn’t the point. The point is the radiance it revealed — the one that was never mine alone, and isn’t yours alone either. It came to me in the language of vision; it’s my telling, not fact. Hold it lightly. Take what is yours, and leave the rest.

Not answers. A wondering.

This episode touches on the death of my child, Bee, in 2021 — gently, but it’s there. If you’d like the fuller story, and support resources if you need them, Episode 1 holds both.

In this episode

* 0:00 — Before anyone was watching (welcome · the radiant child)

* 1:19 — The easy baby, and the nurse who said “let her cry”

* 2:16 — The stories we make to earn love

* 4:13 — Bee, the somatic work, and the stuck place: a vision comes

* 5:06 — In the vision: the mirroring & the mirror that leads to the sanctuary

* 8:00 — The trinity — Bee, little Bethie, me — and inviting the shadows in

* 11:32 — The scared old man, and up and down the stairs

* 13:28 — Two weeks later: the vision completes · living from the center

* 14:41 — We are all beings of light: Michelangelo, Eckhart, the aperture

* 16:50 — Still human · dancing as who I am · the frame we can’t see

* 20:04 — Is it safe to be me? Room enough — free together

Mentioned in this episode

* Somatic experiencing — the body-based practice of turning toward the stuck place with tenderness (developed by Peter A. Levine)

* Meister Eckhart — “not that I’m God, and not that I’m other than God… both at once”

* Michelangelo — the figure freed by taking the stone away

This is a conversation

Whatever stirred in you today — let it stay. Don’t rush past it. That’s the remembering at work.

And I mean conversation. Some episodes will be given over to your questions — what you’re wondering about, what’s sitting unresolved, what you’d want to ask if we were sitting together.

So ask. Write to me at [email protected], or leave a comment at elizabethlightfootjameson.com.

And if this landed in you, share it with someone who might need it. That’s how this travels.

Ways to walk this together

The podcast is free. It always will be. You’ll find it at Broken Open — elizabethlightfootjameson.com — and wherever you listen to podcasts. The writing there is free too. If you’d like to help this work keep going, you can support it with a paid subscription. But nothing sits behind a wall, and nothing will.

Second Sundays — a free gathering, in person and online, once a month. Come as you are.

Becoming Love — the community gathering around this work. New offerings this fall. Becoming-love.circle.so/c/welcome-circle

Dedicated with Love

This is for Bee. My kiddo, my teacher — radiant, powerful, whole, and full of light, then and now.

And it’s for the radiant child in you: the one who was there before anyone was watching, who is there still, waiting to be remembered.

Until next time: keep rethinking the unthinkable. Keep noticing what you are noticing.

You are not too much. You are not too little. And you are not alone.

With love always,

Elizabeth Lightfoot Jameson

[email protected]TheRememberingWay.orgElizabethLightfootJameson.comBecoming-love.circle.so/c/welcome-circle

Credits

Creative direction by John Harrison, assisted by Izzy Fischer.Original music by Jonny Rodgers.The mosaic is the work of Patrick Raymond.

And with deep gratitude to all who have been walking this way with me — especially my family and friends, the Inner Alchemy of Wisdom Core Circle, those in soul coaching, and all who have joined me in other offerings. You have shaped this more than you know.

Transcript

Before anyone was watching (welcome · the radiant child)

What did you love to do before anyone was watching? Who were you before you learned who you were supposed to be? What did you love? Maybe you can feel it still. Maybe you’ve forgotten it entirely.

Either way, this is what this episode is all about.

Welcome to The Remembering Way. I’m Elizabeth Lightfoot Jameson. This is a podcast about rethinking the unthinkable.

Today, the radiant child, the one you were before the world shaped you, the one you still are underneath all of it. Welcome, so glad you’re here.

The easy baby, and the nurse who said “let her cry”

There’s a story in my family that was always told about me, the youngest of three.

I was such an easy baby. No one ever knew when I was awake because I never cried. I was just up there playing with my toes, apparently.

And when they told it, they told it with love. But underneath was another story. And that was the story of the nurse, Miss Mack, who was assisting my mom.

I was literally just a few days old. And Miss Mack, who said to my mom that you have to let her cry. And so I learned not to cry because no one was coming.

And yes, I was happy and played with my feet until someone realized I was awake. But underneath, I’d already decided that reaching out simply didn’t work.

The stories we make to earn love

We learn, we adapt to the situation that we’re in.

And therefore, even as an infant, I coped. I made a decision on some deep level that the way to live in this world was to be what other people needed me to be.

And throughout our lives, as young children, over and over again, we may not get what we need.

And so we make up stories because we don’t fully understand. We figure out a story that makes sense to us. We’re not enough.

We’re too much. Really, it doesn’t matter exactly what the story was of what happened to us. It’s what we did with it that matters.

It is the way in which we created a story and a pattern, a way of coping that came out of what happened to us or didn’t happen. And we think that that is what love is.

And so we tell these stories about who we are and about how we have to be in order to earn the love or secure the resources, the ways in which we’ll be taken care of so that we become what the environment teaches us is necessary.

And then we hope that we’ll be OK as a result, but we don’t realize the many, many ways and times that we have given up something important about who we are in order to be there for someone else.

Bee, the somatic work, and the stuck place: a vision comes

As I mentioned in episode one, in 2021, my youngest, Bee, died. And about a year later, I was doing some somatic work and somatic experiencing is based on the premise that our emotional wounds are caught in the body itself as scar tissue.

And you bring your attention toward the stuck place, toward the place in your body that hurts with tenderness and presence, and you stay with it. And over time, it begins to soften and open and reveal its story so that you can let go of whatever it is that’s been trapped there. And I knew there was this hard stuck place in my core that had been there a long time.

In the vision: the mirroring & the mirror that leads to the sanctuary

And as I was in this process, a vision came. In the vision, I was a toddler down in the basement, the parish hall of the church I grew up in at coffee hour. And there was so much holding, so much fear, so much panic and desperation. I was looking around frantically, trying to read everyone else, these big people towering above me, trying to mimic them, to reflect them so they wouldn’t be angry or scared or unpredictable. It was exhausting. But even when I got it right, they could move at any moment in a way I didn’t anticipate, and while I was mirroring one, another would shift and I couldn’t keep …

The old story has come apart, and the new one hasn’t arrived yet.

You know the place. Something you counted on has broken — a role, a body, a certainty, a whole way of life — and what comes next hasn’t shown itself. Every instinct says to hurry through it.

What if the wilderness in between isn’t the detour? What if it’s where the clarity comes?

Welcome to The Remembering Way.

This is the story of my own wilderness — my father’s death when I was twelve, and decades later a brain bleed that took the life I’d built. But it isn’t only about me. It’s about the passage we’re all making together — the great collective breaking of so much we took for granted, and the choice it keeps putting in front of us: to grip what’s ending, or to midwife what’s being born. It came out of my own living, and it’s my telling, not fact. Hold it lightly. Take what is yours, and leave the rest.

Not answers. A wondering.

In this episode

* 0:00 — The wilderness is essential (the collective breaking · incomplete, not wrong)

* 1:55 — Welcome · loving wilderness · cairns as wayfinders

* 3:53 — Not every cairn is yours: discernment, and trusting the ones before and beside you

* 5:06 — The wilderness between the stories · the wound (Dad’s death at 12 · Nouwen · Chiron)

* 7:11 — The 50s: rector at St. Simon’s, and the Living School

* 9:03 — The fall, the brain bleed, the ICU

* 10:36 — The year of trying, and letting go of the role

* 11:30 — The functioning cliff · learning to live with it

* 14:07 — Kenosis: the tomb that is also a womb

* 16:09 — Loving what is · the “I am” at the center

* 19:48 — The mosaic: Broken for You, and the image of the podcast

* 23:53 — Victim or midwife · inner sovereignty

* 26:01 — We don’t do this alone · the circle, the ripples

* 27:55 — “The Unbroken,” by Rashani Réa · where are you learning to sing?

Mentioned in this episode

* Henri Nouwen — The Wounded Healer

* Chiron — in astrology, where the wound and the gift are one and the same

* The Living School (Center for Action and Contemplation) — with Richard Rohr, Jim Finley, and Cynthia Bourgeault

* John of the Cross — “the dark night of the soul”

* Kenosis — the mystic practice of letting go, of not clinging

* Stephanie Kallos — Broken for You

* Jett Psaris — Hidden Blessings

* Rashani Réa — “The Unbroken”

This is a conversation

Whatever stirred in you today — let it stay. Don’t rush past it. That’s the remembering at work.

And I mean conversation. Some episodes will be conversations with others who are walking this way. Others will be given over to your questions — what you’re wondering about, what’s sitting unresolved, what you’d want to ask if we were sitting together.

So ask. Write to me at [email protected], or leave a comment at elizabethlightfootjameson.com.

And if this landed in you, share it with someone who might need it. That’s how this travels.

Ways to walk this together

The podcast is free. It always will be. You’ll find it at Broken Open — elizabethlightfootjameson.com — and wherever you listen to podcasts. The writing there is free too. If you’d like to help this work keep going, you can support it with a paid subscription. But nothing sits behind a wall, and nothing will.

Second Sundays — a free gathering, in person and online, once a month. Come as you are. August 9th Second Sunday

Becoming Love — the community forming around this work. New offerings this fall. Becoming-love.circle.so/c/welcome-circle

Dedicated with Love

To the people of St Simon’s Episcopal Church, Arlington Heights and to my family

For everyone standing in the wilderness between the stories — in the time before the breaking, in the thick of the density, or just beginning to feel for the shards. You are not walking it alone.

Until next time: keep rethinking the unthinkable. Keep noticing what you are noticing.

You are not too much. You are not too little. And you are not alone.

With love always,

Elizabeth Lightfoot Jameson[email protected]TheRememberingWay.orgElizabethLightfootJameson.comBecoming-love.circle.so/c/welcome-circle

Credits

Creative direction by John Harrison

Original music by Jonny Rodgers.

“The Unbroken” by Rashani Réa — shared with her permission.

The mosaic is the work of Patrick Raymond.

And with deep gratitude to all who have been walking this way with me — especially my family and friends, the Inner Alchemy of Wisdom Core Circle, those in soul coaching, and all who have joined me in other offerings. You have shaped this more than you know.

Transcript

ELIZABETH

Every wisdom tradition knows the wilderness not only exists, but is essential. Actually, both kinds are the beautiful wilderness — one you set out for on purpose, and the one you stumble into, or more often that stumbles into you, unbidden and unwelcome. The in-between, where the old thing has come apart and the new thing hasn’t emerged yet. We can’t escape this season in our lives, and maybe we shouldn’t want to, because this is where the clarity comes.

We are living one of those times together — a great collective breaking of so much that we’ve taken for granted, so much that was good, even if it wasn’t really good enough. This life is both beautiful and heartbreaking, and the sheer volume of suffering unfolding across our planet right now is devastating. And the breaking is showing us the cracks in the foundations that never held well enough to begin with. What we inherited wasn’t wrong; it was just incomplete, and the breaking is how the incompleteness finally becomes visible, and how we get to see it as clearly as it needs to be seen, so that we can start over, so we can choose again.

ELIZABETH

Welcome to The Remembering Way. I’m Elizabeth Lightfoot Jameson. This is a podcast about rethinking the unthinkable, about navigating the crucibles of our own lives, and the larger breaking and birthing we are living inside — not alone, together.

ELIZABETH

I’ve always loved wilderness — rock scrambling, camping, hiking. Being in and around it fills me with joy, even as it grounds and anchors me into the preciousness of the present moment. Some trails are marked by cairns — piles, small or, on occasion, even very large piles of rocks that strangers before us have left along the trail to help guide others on the way. These wayfinders remind me we are never alone, nor do we need to make something out of nothing. There are incredibly wise ones who have walked before us, who have gifts to share as we seek to find our way in new and uncertain times.

Much of what we’ve inherited simply no longer works. The rate and scope of change is too massive. Our landscape looks nothing like the ones that others have walked, and at the very same time, it is well worth our while to find the gifts hidden for us, often waiting for just this moment to reveal themselves as not just trustworthy, but life-changing.

And here’s something easy to overlook: not every cairn is for you. Some cairns lead to incredible new expanses. Others lead to a rock scramble that may be right for someone, but perhaps not you. The cairn itself cannot tell you whether the path it marks is yours. That’s a discernment only you can make, but your body knows, and deep down you know. And sometimes the one walking beside you can see more clearly than you can — the friend behind, watching the slope, seeing what you cannot from where you are. Trust yourself. Trust the ones walking before you. Trust the ones walking beside you.

We are guided by what has worked and what hasn’t, but in each of us, we have to choose every time we come across something new. What do I inherit from the past that works in this new context, and what is no longer helpful? And what is new and emerging?

ELIZABETH

The wilderness between the stories is hard because you’re neither here nor there. The old patterns, the ones you’ve known, no longer work. They’re broken. They’re not enough, and yet you’re not really clear on what’s coming. There’s a disorientation, a discomfort that most of us wouldn’t choose, which is why it often takes things breaking, or losing things, or having the ending of things to propel us…

Maybe there’s someone you love that you cannot fix.

A child. A parent. A lover. A friend. Someone whose pain you would carry in your own body if you could — but you can’t. Maybe you’ve worn yourself down trying.

What if love was never meant to be a rescue? What if the deepest love doesn’t save someone — it stays with them?

Welcome to The Remembering Way.

This first episode is the story of the person who taught me that. My kiddo, Bee. But this isn’t a story about me. Bee is my particular. Yours will have another name — a diagnosis, a leaving, a door that closed, a life you thought you’d have. The losing is not rare. It’s the most ordinary thing there is.

The question underneath is the same for all of us: how do we live from a center that doesn’t depend on circumstances?

This is a podcast about rethinking the unthinkable — about how the very things that break us can also break us open. About the courage to go toward the heart of things rather than away. And about the radiance that turns out to be hidden in the very darkness we most fear.

Not answers. A wondering.

Dedicated with Love

This is for Bee. My kiddo. My teacher. Whose light did not go out.

It’s for everyone who loved them — who still carries them, still hears them, still catches them out of the corner of an eye.

And it’s for you, whoever you are and wherever you’re standing: in the breaking, in the long dark that never tells you when it will end, in the ordinary Tuesday where you’re just trying to keep going. You are walking this way too. You are not alone in it.

A word about how to hold this

This is my story, and my telling of it. It’s the meaning I have made — and am still making — out of what happened. It isn’t fact, and I don’t offer it as one.

Others who loved Bee carry a different version, and theirs is not less true than mine.

So I offer this as a wondering, not a verdict. Rethinking the unthinkable was never about arriving at the answer. Hold it lightly. Take what is yours. Leave the rest.

Before you listen

This episode tells the story of my kiddo, Bee — their life, and their death by suicide. It holds grief, and it holds love, and it doesn’t look away from either.

You will hear Bee’s own voice in this episode.

Check in with yourself as you listen. You might listen with someone. You might set it down for another day. Or it may be that this podcast is not for you. All of those are wise.

If you need support:

* 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988 (US), any hour of any day

* Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 (US)

* Alliance of Hope — for those bereaved by suicide — allianceofhope.org

* The Compassionate Friends — for families after the death of a child — compassionatefriends.org

* RAINN — sexual assault support — 800-656-4673, rainn.org

* Outside the US: findahelpline.com

There is always help. There is always someone.

In this episode

* 0:00 — Before we begin (content note · 988 · you are not too much)

* 2:07 — Bee, in their own voice: why they wanted to make movies

* 2:54 — Welcome. Meeting Bee: the thousand-watt smile, Selma, the moon ritual, the river that ran deep

* 6:53 — Bee at thirteen, speaking in church at their confirmation

* 7:30 — Little Whiskey Mountain: ten feet at a time, and what it taught us both

* 11:03 — “You Can Do This Hard Thing” — Carrie Newcomer

* 11:37 — When it got harder, not easier. The locked unit. Byron Katie, and the night something broke open in me.

* ~19:00 — Center-to-center loving. The river. The blackbird. The puzzle with one piece missing.

* 25:42 — A message from a stranger, on sacred land

* 28:21 — We are always in the river — and the river extends before and after

* ~31:30 — Gratitude, unbidden

* ~33:00 — Mary Oliver, At the River Clarion

Mentioned in this episode

* Byron Katie — Loving What Is

* Beatrice Bruteau — center-to-center loving

* Pierre Teilhard de Chardin — the transformation of consciousness

* Ann Voskamp — One Thousand Gifts

* Mary Oliver — “At the River Clarion,” from Evidence

* Carrie Newcomer — “You Can Do This Hard Thing”

* Sarah McLachlan’s version of the Beatles’ “Blackbird”

* The films Selma, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and I Am Sam

This is a conversation

Whatever stirred in you today — let it stay. Don’t rush past it. That’s the remembering at work.

And I mean conversation. Some episodes will be conversations with others who are walking this way. Others will be given over to your questions — what you’re wondering about, what’s sitting unresolved, what you’d want to ask if we were sitting together.

So ask. Write to me at [email protected], or leave a comment at elizabethlightfootjameson.com.

And if this landed in you, share it with someone who might need it. That’s how this travels.

Ways to walk this together

The podcast is free. It always will be. You'll find it at Broken Open — elizabethlightfootjameson.com — and wherever you listen to podcasts. The writing there is free too. If you'd like to help this work keep going, you can support it with a paid subscription. But nothing sits behind a wall, and nothing will.

Second Sundays — a free gathering, in person and online, once a month. Come as you are. August 9th Second Sunday

Becoming Love — the community forming around this work. New offerings this fall. Becoming-love.circle.so/c/welcome-circle

Until next time: keep rethinking the unthinkable. Keep noticing what you are noticing.

You are not too much. You are not too little. And you are not alone.

With love always,

Elizabeth Lightfoot Jameson [email protected]TheRememberingWay.orgElizabethLightfootJameson.comBecoming-love.circle.so/c/welcome-circle

Credits

Creative direction by John Harrison, assisted by Izzy Fischer.

Original music by Jonny Rodgers.

Also heard in this episode: Carrie Newcomer, “You Can Do This Hard Thing” — used gratefully with permission · Sarah McLachlan’s “Blackbird” · Kanye West, “Ultralight Beam.”

The mosaic is the work of Patrick Raymond.

With gratitude to M, who helped The Remembering Way — and me — find our voice.

And with deep gratitude to all who have been walking this way with me — especially my family and friends, the Inner Alchemy of Wisdom Core Circle, those in soul coaching, and all who have joined me in other offerings. You have shaped this more than you know.

Bee’s voice appears with love.

Transcript

ELIZABETH

Maybe there’s someone you love that you cannot fix — a child, a parent, a lover, a friend — someone whose pain you would carry in your own body if you could, but you can’t. Maybe you’ve worn yourself down trying. What if love was never meant to be a rescue? What if the deepest love doesn’t save someone — it stays with them?

Before we begin, I want to share that the Remembering Way goes toward hard places. It doesn’t look away. There are episodes that speak about suicide, about sexual assault, and about things that break your heart. And so I ask you: please check in with yourself as you listen. You might listen with someone else. You might set it down for another day. Or it may be that this podcast is not for you. Above all, I want to remind you of something many of us forget in the hardest moments: there is always help. There is always someone. In the United States you can call or text 988 any hour of any day, and a real person will answer. That, and other resources, and ways to connect with me and with the community gathered around the Remembering Way, are all in the show notes. You are not too much. You are not too little. And you are not alone.

BEE (archival)

You know, there’s this moment in really good movies where the main character — they’re in kind of a tough spot, and so they just do what they can. And you really see that character grow as a person, and that moment is so important. And maybe it’s something that I just look for. But the real reason that I want to make movies is that I want to inspire someone someday. And that’s what really matters to me.

ELIZABETH

Welcome to The Remembering Way. I’m Elizabeth Lightfoot Jameson. This is a podcast about rethinking the unthinkable — about how the very things that break us can also break us open. And I want to tell you…