Natalie: Today on the show I'm speaking with Edie Weinstein and she talks about health overcome grief and how to move through it. She's got some amazing information. So, make sure that you stay tuned.

Natalie: Hi, I'm Natalie Ledwell and this is The Inspiration Show and today my special guest is Edie Weinstein. How are you, Edie?

Edie: I'm doing marvelously. Thank you for having me on your show.

Natalie: I know you're looking very colorful and everything there this morning. It's fabulous. Now, what we might do is introduce you to the show, is start with what your background is and what it is that you do?

Edie: Okay. Well, my educational background is that I have a Bachelor's Degree in Psychology and a Masters Degree in Social Work and I'd like to say that I'm not really a social worker, I just play while on TV although that's been my career for a lot of years. I've worked in psychiatric hospitals. I've worked with community male health. Right now, I do outreach drug and alcohol counseling for post or recovering with addictions. My real love, my real passion is writing and speaking. I've been a journalist since 1988. I've done interviews with some of the most amazing movers and shakers on the planet including his holiness the Dalai Lama that was in 2008 which was as you can imagine, dream into reality interview for me.

Natalie: Yes.

Edie: I'm also a speaker like you, I'm a bliss coach. I'm an inner faith minister. I teach people how to live their highest bliss. So, that's what I do. That's my work in the world.

Natalie: Right. So, what's your definition of living your highest bliss?

Edie: Well, everybody's is different. For me, it's this, you know having conversations with people all over the world. For me, it's about being in nature, being with family and friends, my connection with the God and my understandings. I don't know anybody what to own spiritually but for somebody else it could be being an artist or could be raising children. What else, working with animals. Just whatever lights you up from the inside, what makes you feel like a human sparkler.

Natalie: Yup.

Edie: I guess it's the way that I would explain bliss for me.

Natalie: Exactly. You know when I teach, you know the principles of law of attraction and you know and achieving a lot that you want. Step number one is always starting from a positive vibration. You know it always starting from their cause then when you start to set goals, you're always setting from a place of inspiration not a place of desperation. So, yes I love the work that you're doing there. Now, you also do grieve counseling and a whole bunch of other stuff as well.

Edie: Right. The grief counseling began in 1998. My husband and I had started visions magazine back in 1988 which was based in the Philadelphia area which is where I am now, Philadelphia-Pennsylvania area. And the magazine was about holistic health, wellness, spirituality, pieces social justice those kinds of things. And in 1992, we experienced what I lovingly call our year from health. We've moved down to Florida to start a second regional addition of the magazine and live in the sunshine. In February, excuse me, March of that year I had an ectopic pregnancy and I didn't even know I was pregnant and a bloat into fractured and I was hemorrhage to that. The next month, March of that year. Excuse me, May of that year my husband was diagnosed Hepatitis C which is a serious liver disease that left unsuccessfully treated will end your life. In August of that year we lost our home to hurricane Andrew. We were living in Homestead Farm at that time. So, we had a series of life events that occurred. The next year we moved back up to Pennsylvania and six years later Michael died. As a result of his illness and his death, I became an inner faith minister. I became an organ donor educator because he died waiting for a liver transplant and I also became a grief counselor. Knowing, grief isn't just up here, it's here, it's in me, it's everything, a whole body, mind experience. So, when I work with people who are living with loss and that's all of us frankly.

Natalie: Yeah.

Edie: We all had some kind of loss. I helped them to sit with it and it's hard and it's messy and you know the saying "We teach what we need to learn." I need to learn how to sit with my grief. I tend to push it aside. So, I know I'm just gonna keep on and on.

Natalie: Yup.

Edie: But when I'm with clients and when I'm with other people that have had losses, I'm able to sit with them in their grief and to acknowledge that there is no statute of limitations, there is no get no right, you get on with your life.

Natalie: Yup.

Edie: But there's no getting over it. And it resurfaces for the first; I would say eight or nine years after Michael died, around the time he went into the hospital for the last time and he was there five and a half weeks in an ICU. I literally lived there, didn't sleep at home until he died. My body would kick in to automatic, sleepless, anxiety ahhh, goad and that happens a lot for people. When their anniversaries with someone's death, when the persons birthday or special events come up in that in their lives that remind them of their loved one. Your body isn't gonna remember "Oh, that happened 10 years ago." It's gonna feel like now.

Natalie: Yup.

Edie: So, that's something for people to know with love.

Natalie: And sometimes it's scary too like to let go and be in the grief, it can be so overwhelming and sometimes you feel like it's like there might not a way back you know.

Edie: Yeah. And a lot of people say they don't wanna cry because they're afraid they're never going to stop.

Natalie: Yes.

Edie: What I tell them is you will eventually run out of tears. Losing enough fluid in your body until you're dehydrated and it happens. There were some days; there were some days back then where I experienced what felt like you know how am I gonna continue, because I've been so used to this life. What's gonna happen? How am I gonna do that? And there are some days when I would have what I called my transfusion propellant. Now, I believe in reincarnation. I believe in even life after death. I believe there something we go to beyond this existence and Michael would often come back to me and talk and in dreams and in you know. I joked at being a psychiatric social worker, I don't think there's anything, there's no psychopathology in my mind about seeing dead people that a few people that had been in your life, communicating with them. So, I would get messages from him in the form of symbols of what was it but twos after he died. My son and I went outside the yard and I'd asked for him to send me a message for my birthday and I hadn't heard from him. So, the next day we were inside the yard and we had some very dead ever green trees that we wanted and a neighbor helped us removed and he looked up into the tree and reached up. Now, this tree was six feet tall and I'm five foot four and he reached up and he called up a watch. Now, for my husband's birthday so many years before that I've given him an air oven sport swatch, you know the medal kind of watch. And the man handed it to me and I asked my son is "Did you put this on the tree like a joke?" And he said "No. I haven't seen it since Daddy died." Now, my husband was six foot tall and even if he had been near which you know the tree, there's no way he would have gotten it up there and I had mowed the lawn before he died because he was too sick to do it. Now, this is the other part, the watch was not water logged or rusted like you'd think it would be being in the tree for that long and the time on the watch was the time on the clock when we discontinued life support in his hospital room.

Natalie: Wow.

Edie: So, I've gotten messages like that from him. Now, you mentioned the scarf. There's a story about that. In 2008, my father died. In 2010, my mother died. And before she died, she was on Hospice for about six months and I would travel back and forth to port Lauderdale to be with her. Now, during that time period, I was in the process of writing my book called The Bliss Mistress Guide To Transforming the Ordinary Into the Extraordinary. You see there's a butterfly on the cover. So, I was in the process of writing the book and she said "You know you have to finish this book so I can read it." And I said "You're gonna have to live a whole lot longer. I know when you're dying." So, I read her a few chapters and I would type the other ones while I'm sitting by her hospital bed and I said "What do you think should be on the cover?" "Oh, there has to be a butterfly." My mother used to sit on their front porch and watched butterflies and you know she really resonated with them. So, I said "Mom, what do you think happens when you die?" Because we talked about all kinds of things about death and she says "I don't know." And I said "When you do know, come back and help me." She said "I'll come back as a butterfly." So, literally the day she died was November 26, 2010. It was a day after thanksgiving. And I was driving down to the airport; my cousin had driven me to the airport. On the back of a car directly in front of us was a butterfly sticker. That was the first one. When we got down to Florida and I met my sister down there. She came from New Jersey so we're taking different flights and my mother's neighbor picked us up and she said "I have a story to tell you. She said "You guys wouldn't think this is too weird." My mother had a suit picked up that she wanted to be buried in and it was hanging on the back of their, her door in her den and it was a suit that she worn for my parents 50th anniversary. I did a valuable asylum before them. And it was beautiful with pearl, white, pink suit and it was hanging on the back of the door. So, after my mother died, the funeral home came and took her body. Dianne and another neighbor Myrna were cleaning up the condo in anticipation with my sister and me arriving. And Myrna says to her "That door just closed by itself. I'm too freaked out to go and you go and you check it out." So, Dianne walks in and she looked at the door and go "Oh, my god. I forgot to give them some suit." That's just her telling this that you know I forgot to give them the suit.

Natalie: Yeah.

Edie: So, the next day we went to the funeral home, butterflies everywhere. This is November in South Florida not butterfly season. The day after that was the funeral. All around the funeral home, all around the grave site, butterflies everywhere. The next day I went to my mother's bank to open up an online presence you know so I could manage her accounts and you know how you pick an icon you know for your screen, the first one that popped up was a butterfly.

Natalie: Yup.

Edie: So, on my way to the scarf, on my way down to Florida I was talking to, I was on US air and this beautiful, red, spiky haired flight attendant walks past me and she looks at a book that I have opened on my lap. "Do you know who Sark is? Excuse me. The area my book can it be."

Natalie: Yes.

Edie: Sark wrote a book a few years ago called Glad No Matter What and it's about grief. Her mother had just died, her cat had just died and she just ended her relationship. So, I had done a book review or was getting reviews so I could have the book. I had it open on my lap and Jewele says "Oh, I love Sark." Now, how many people in the mainstream world even know who she is?

Natalie: Yeah. Exactly!

Edie: Yeah. She's loved by a growing circle of friends worldwide. But and I said "Your welcome to borrow the book while I'm on the flight and you know I'll get it when I get up." So, I bring it back to her in the galley and she starts crying when I tell her why I'm on the flight and I appreciated the sentiment that she's don't know that it's not just that. Because that day I think it was her best friend's birthday and her friend like died three years earlier and we talked about the butterfly connection. She hitches up her skirt and on her thigh, it's not a butterfly but it was a close cousin. It was dry and fly tattoo. So, Jewele and I since become friends and her name is spelled j-e-w-e-l -e-e- and she really is absolutely a jewel.

Natalie: Yeah.

Edie: So, when she came to visit a couple about a year or so ago she bought me this scarf. So, wearing this scarf reminds me of my mother and it's like getting a hug for Jewele.

Natalie: Yeah.

Edie: So, that's the color of the scarf. So that's the butterfly story.

Natalie: Wonderful! Alright! So, okay, it's not unusual for us to get messages from love ones, we shouldn't be frightened by it. So, what do you think is the number one thing that people feel most about grief?

Edie: Oh, that it will never end. That they'll always be lost is that they'll always be alone, that they don't know what to expect when they die. When my mother first found out that she you know was going on hospital, she just has her heart failure. She was scared. She became an eighty-six year old little girl. She cried. She said "I don't wanna die." And I said "Do you think Daddy's gonna be waiting for you?" Because they had an amazing marriage, they were married almost 52 years and she missed him terribly and I really think that the diagnosis was just a heart failure but I think she died with a broken heart. And when he died I said "Are you gonna be joining him anytime soon?" And she said "No. I've still got a full life." She lived two and a half years beyond that. Had she died first, I would have had maybe a day between my mother's and father's death cause he cannot live without her.

Natalie: Yup.

Edie: There is no way.

Natalie: Yup.

Edie: Nina told me that. So, I think that's what people are afraid of. Now, as she got closer to death, she started having more dreams where I knew what they were. She kept asking me "what do you think they mean?" She would have dreams where my grandmother would come to her and point a finger for her to grab and she would have, one was beautiful dreams. Around the time she first was diagnosed where she was on a water slide with two small children and she said "I wasn't really looking. I was really scared when I thought I was at the top of the slide but at the time that I got to the bottom of the slide, I was having so much fun. What do you think it means?" I said "Mom, what do you think it means?"

Natalie: Yeah, yeah.

Edie: And I say "Yes, you go. Come on." And then the other really beautiful dream was about a month before she died. Their anniversary was October 14th and when my father died she kept this wedding veil and she kept it on the night stand and she kissed it goodnight every night. Well, that night or around that time she had a dream that they were walking on a beach together and she gave him back the ring, she put the ring back on his finger. Shortly after that, I couldn't find the ring. It just disappeared. So, who knows maybe he did take it back.

Natalie: Yeah.

Edie: It wasn't anywhere. And when she died and I cleaned up the condo, the ring wasn't there.

Natalie: Right.

Edie: So, I think when people realized that death doesn't have to be a grim reaper but it's that it's something that happens to everyone. We have what I call spiritual amnesia and I think that's why we fear death is that we don't remember what it might have been like or reincarnated in this life.

Natalie: Yup. Absolutely! I know and that's the thing I think if you can live life without fearing death, you'll live life from a completely different perspective. You know your choices are different; your decisions are different, the way that you live is completely different.

Edie: Oh, absolutely! When my husband was in the ICU, a message came through to me and again I believed that there are spiritual messages that we get but are not psychotic voices. And I was saying to, I was having you know this God wrestling sessions, that's what I call them and I would say "He's mine and you can't have him." God would say "No, he's mine. He's a loan to you like everybody else in your life." So, that really has stuck with me that there is nobody in our lives that will not someday die or leave us or that we will someday die and leave them. And we can look at it as moribund and morbid and scary or we can look at it as "I'm gonna suck the juice out of the bottle and just do whatever you want." I get what I can from living life, living juicy.

Natalie: Yeah.

Edie: I guess that's how I would say it.

Natalie: I love that. I love that.

Edie: Thank you.

Natalie: Edie, thank you so much for joining me today. There's actually more information I wanna go over with you but I might record another show with you.

Edie: Okay.

Natalie: Because you know you've got so much information to share but this has been fantastic.

Edie: Thank you.

Natalie: Cause I think you know, a lot of us especially if we have love ones that are not well, that are you know close to the end. It's kind of painful for both parties, for the person that's leaving and for the people that are staying behind. And I think that you know the way you presented the information today has really made it seem like it's not the end, it's just a different transition, it's just such a different phase.

Edie: Right. Well, actually this is the perfect timing because I have a radio show that I'd mentioned to you called It's All About Relationships and some blog talk radio, Thursday nights, 8'oclock Eastern Standard Time and its www.VividLife.me. This week my guest is Karen Berg. I don't know if you're familiar with her but she wrote an amazing book about reincarnation.

Natalie: Right.

Edie: And about that that it's a, it's not the end it's the beginning. So, she's gonna be my guest this week so a lot of what we're talking about here is connected with that There Are No Accidents.

Natalie: Yeah. Wonderful! Now guys, if you click on the banner to the side there, you can actually go through to that website and find out all about the Edie Show there. So, thanks again for joining me Edie.

Edie: Thank you, my pleasure.

Natalie: Now guys I encourage you to share this video and all the information in it. You can do that by clicking the Facebook and the Twitter share buttons above. And if you haven't done so already, make sure that you put your email on the box above there because I'd love to send you my Manifesting with the Masters Video E-Course. Includes masters like Bob Proctor and John Assaraf and Joe Vitale. It's valued $87 but of course I'd like to give it to you for free but you have to put your email in first. So, until next time, remember to live large, choose courageously and love without limits. We'll see you soon.