Reframe Your Life

After a two year hiatus, Reframe Your Life is back. It took a special guest to get me to record another episode. Ann Douglas was Canada's go-to expert on all things parenting for decades. Now that her kids have grown up and left home, she's turning her attention to the glorious messiness that is midlife.

And she hasn't just been researching it; she's been living it: trying to find her way through all that messiness-career curveballs, mental and physical health challenges, a house fire, relationship highs and lows, the death of a parent, and so on.

Ann is the author of twenty-five non-fiction books, including many bestselling titles in the parenting category, such as The Mother of All® series, and a passionate and inspiring speaker who delivers keynote addresses and leads small-group workshops at conferences & online events.

We had a great time talking to Cait Flanders author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller The Year of Less. It may seem like an odd time to publish a book about opting out and yet, as we discovered, this is the perfect time to get serious about leading an intentional life.

Art crashes into life for author Erica Cantley when she finds herself behind a podium in front of a class of high school seniors, teaching HAMLET as her father died, thousands of miles to the south in Costa Rica.

Interspersing interactions with her teenage students and memories of her father, desperately sick and difficult to reach in his adopted jungle home, Cantley guides her students through HAMLET -- written four centuries ago -- while reflecting upon the impending loss of a parent in the never-ending now.

The result is a powerful memoir of a love that will not die, the timeless story of the bond between parent and child, the magic created by a gifted teacher and willing pupils, and finally, the exploration of the timeless themes of HAMLET, the study in the transition of power through the generations.

For those of you who aren't acquainted with Hamlet - don't let that deter you from this book or podcast.  The themes in this book and discussion are themes we can all relate to in our lives. 

Our guest this week  is Anne Bokma . She is an award-winning freelance journalist and the author of My Year of Living Spiritually: From Woo-Woo to Wonderful—One Woman's Secular Quest for a More Soulful Life published by Douglas & McIntyre in October 2019.

A leading expert on North America's 80-million strong "spiritual-but-not-religious" demographic, Anne was the award-winning "Spiritual But Secular" columnist for the United Church Observer (now Broadview) for four years before writing her popular My Year of Living Spiritually blog for the magazine.

Anne also leads workshops and gives presentations on topics relating to spirituality and writing, including how she left a fundamentalist religion, the importance of finding community, how to live a more soulful life and what it takes to tell a good story. She is the founder of the 6-Minute Memoir “Speed Storytelling For a Cause” event, which features storytellers sharing tales on a common theme within a strict six-minute time limit. The event has raised more than $45,000 for local charities in her hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, since 2013.

Christa Couture reframes the experience of loss for us in her beautiful memoir, How to Lose Everything.  In this interview we talk about the questions she gets asked most frequently, her story of loss and the writing process. 

Synopsis of her book: 

From the amputation of her leg as a cure for bone cancer at a young age to her first child’s single day of life, the heart transplant and subsequent death of her second child, the divorce born of grief and then the thyroidectomy that threatened her career as a professional musician, How to Lose Everything delves into the heart of loss. Couture bears witness to the shift in perspective that comes with loss, and how it can deepen compassion for others, expand understanding, inspire a letting go of little things and plant a deeper feeling for what matters. At the same time, Couture’s writing evokes the joy and lightness that both precede and eventually follow grief, as well as the hope and resilience that grow from connections with others.

Evoking Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, Couture explores the emotional and psychological experiences of motherhood, partnership and change. Deftly connecting the dots of sorrow, reprieve and hard-won hope, How to Lose Everything contains the advice Couture is often asked for, as well as the words she wishes she could have heard many years ago. It is also an offering of kinship and understanding for anyone experiencing a loss.”

This week we sit down with Rebecca Eckler and talk about her latest book and how she manages to be so bold in her work. Anyone in a blended family or thinking about attempting to bring two families together will benefit from this book. 

Rebecca Eckler’s newest book chronicles the hard truth of what it’s really like to make a blended family.

Blissfully Blended Bullshit is a witty, engaging, refreshingly candid chronicle of a modern family’s journey as they blend households. We follow Eckler as her partner and his two children move in with her and her daughter. Then, thanks to a reverse vasectomy, they add a baby to the mix. Readers go along for the ride in this poignant, often hilarious tale, as everyone attempts to navigate their new roles: the children, the in-laws, the exes, the ex-in-laws, and even the dog.

Lighthearted and intimate, this is an indispensable story about a family determined to make blended splendid, and the juicy truth of what it’s really like behind closed doors in what is rapidly becoming a typical family makeup. 

What are your heart's desires? And how do the choices that you are making support the desires and dreams you have in becoming a reality? I explore the topic of desires in this week's episode of Reframe Your Life.

A very basic definition of desire is a strong feeling to want or have something. We have lots of desires. I desire to be healthy. I desire to have good friends. I desire a good night’s sleep - especially after a restless night of sleep. You may have some beliefs about desires that make it difficult for you to trust them.

Here are some beliefs I have heard about desires:

• You can't trust your feelings or desires.
• Following your desires will lead you to destruction or harm.
• The heart is wicked and not to be trusted.
• Feelings are not scientific or factual
• You shouldn’t make decisions based on feelings or emotions

What messages have you heard around desires?

I remember the mixed messages I received over the years around desires, emotions, feelings, faith and spirituality. One day I read, “God gives you the desires of your heart” and I started thinking about things differently. If my very desires were given to me by the Creator then how could they be bad?

Do you like clothes? Do you love fashion? Do you enjoy putting together outfits? Or are clothes more utilitatrian for you? My mother has told me I've always loved fashion. I remember riding my bike to a casket factory and dumpster diving for silk remants to make my Barbie doll clothes when I was a kid. (Clearly that was back in the day when ten year olds were out exploring the neighbourhood on their bikes without parental supervision.) My friends and I would go find all kinds of beautiful fabrics and come home and hand sew outfits. And it wasn't just my dolls that were well dressed. I started carrying a purse when I was 5. I worked in retail stores throughout high school so I could buy clothes with an employee discount. I can tell you what I was wearing in all of the significant memories of my life.

So when I started looking at the bigger impact of my clothing purchases it was disturbing. Was I supporting garment factories? I had no idea how much water it took to make one T-Shirt. (It takes 2700 litres of water to make one T-Shirt.) This awareness that my choices were actually hurting people and our planet created a crisis for me. Then to top it off the first time I went to Cambodia I saw first hand the living conditions of garment workers. It was deeply disturbing.  

When I returned to Canada I decided to start being more thoughtful about my purchases. And I took to social media to find out more. On Instagram I discovered this week's guest, Leah Wise. She is a writer and blogger based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her expertise in the fields of sustainable fashion and social justice have afforded her the opportunity to write for publications such as Elephant Journal, Mind Body Green, Relevant Magazine, and Christianity Today, as well as on her own blog, stylewise-blog.com. Over the past five years, Leah has created successful influencer marketing campaigns with dozens of ethical brands on her blog platform. Leah has been named a top sustainable blogger by Bustle, ORIGIN Magazine, AGAATI, FeedSpot, and Moon Cloth, and has received various write-ups on ethical lifestyle blogs and brand websites.

Here are some of the highlights of what we talked about and links to some of her articles for more on those topics.

It's our two year anniversary! We want to thank you for being with us on this journey. We had no idea we would be still recording two years later - we weren't sure how it would go but here we are! This journey has taught us a lot. We've been learning just as much as our listeners from the topics and guests we have discussed. And as a result we are also continually reframing our lives. After all Reframing Your Life is not a one time thing.