The Inter-Connectedness of Birth and Death

Patty shares a bit of her personal understanding of the Christmas story as she
understands it. As a mom, the story of the birth of Jesus in a stable, with only Joseph to
help brings a new realization of how hard that must have been.

Today Patty acknowledges that every birth brings a death and death also brings a birth.
In today’s world, we tend to see things as either good or bad. But that’s not how life truly
works.

This episode brings hope for all of us. Experiencing a loss or birthing something new
brings its own blessings. Learning to honor that part of your experience can bring
balance to your life.

As we move into a new decade Patty shares hope that we honor all the blessings of life.
She ends with a call to acknowledge the beauty of life and all your dreams and hopes
for what is yet to come.
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Transcription

(00:02) Welcome to the wealth and purpose podcast where people who are led by their hearts come to learn the secrets to creating wealth in a way that feels really good and live their purpose fully in the process. I’m your host, Patty Lennon. I’m an ex type-a corporate banker, turned intuitive business coach. I’m also a wife, a mom to two pre-teens, a professor, girl scout leader and well, Hey, you get it. Like you, I wear a lot of hats, whether you’re looking for inspiration to get started or strategies to get growing. I am here to help you create abundance in every area of your life in business. Welcome 

the day this episode drops will be Christmas and Christmas is a holiday. I celebrate it and it always gets me thinking about birth and death. And before I go any further, parents, if you’re listening to this with children around this particular episode is probably not appropriate for a young children. 

(01:05) So you may want to pause this and come back and listen to it at another time. And as I get closer and closer to Christmas day now that I am a mother myself, I find myself contemplating what it must have been like for Mary who essentially was, you know, as, as the story goes, a Virgin mother. So she, you know, opened herself up to so much scary stuff for the time that she was in. I mean, as someone who is unwed, who is pregnant, that was, you know, a sin punishable by death and how much courage it took Joseph to step up to the plate. And then now, as I thought about her being pregnant and in labor in a stable, how much courage that takes, you know, how much, how scared she must have been. I remember how scared I was and I had lots of help. 

(02:16) Um, and you know, we live in a society that oftentimes leads us to absolute thinking and polarized thinking where birth is good and death is bad. But the reality is that every birth contains a death and every death contains a birth. They are completely interconnected and are focus on a one without the other, eliminates so much of the opportunity, no matter what the circumstances for each of us to learn and grow and expand. And so I find myself thinking about, you know, as Jesus was born, take the religious significance off the table and really lean into the actual story of a woman and a man there in the stable and this baby is coming and under circumstances that just seems so difficult and this baby is born a baby that now is celebrated by so many people, a birth that celebrated by so many people. 

(03:25) But I really think about marrying what that must’ve been like because having had my own children, especially that first child, there is so much about your life that ends with the birth of that first child and religion or at least the religion that I grew up with. A Christian religion really doesn’t talk about that, what that means, especially for women. I think that’s one place where we lose track of bringing balance to everyone’s life because we haven’t focused enough on some of these significant moments, especially when it comes to the birth of a child. The birth of a child ends many, many things and we don’t have processes to deal with that. And oftentimes that then extends into our lives in so many areas. You know, we give birth to a new job, we give birth to a business, we give birth to, you know, a project. 

(04:29) Anything weak that’s new is celebrated and yet for anything that’s new, there is something that’s dying. And it’s almost as if if a birth is present, there’s no room to grief loss. And vice versa. If, if a loss is present, there is no room to celebrate birth because every death equally contains a birth. It can’t not, and this has been alive for me, certainly with being so open about my journey in grieving. My father’s passing in March and more even so alive for me right now is so many messages about the decade ending. And a lot of the messages that I’m seeing in social media have a lot of lack thinking in them. They have a lot of this is ending and what are you going to do to close it out properly? And there’s so much burden on that. But with the death of the decade, with the ending of the decade is the birth of a brand new one and that can be celebrated right alongside. 

(05:42) And that to me is the beginning of bringing balance to our lives. I think the contemplation for me personally about, you know, what happens on the other side of death and what it means has been so alive for me that this is really brought my own personal life into balance and it’s, it’s caused me to focus a lot of my sharing and my teaching and, and my social media and this podcast has a lot of, the messages have come as a result of bringing myself into balance more. And it was only with my father’s death that that was possible. Because what happens when you lose a parent or the opportunity that’s present when you lose the parent when a parent dies is to learn something new about yourself. Or at least that was how it was for me. And I haven’t lost someone who, and I, there’s no easy way to say this, but there are losses you can experience where the person that dies shouldn’t die before you, um, a child, a niece and nephew, even even a friend you thought was going to be on the journey with you a lot longer. 

(06:56) I have not experienced those losses. And so I’m not speaking to those. And it’s important if you’re grieving one of those losses that you allow yourself to feel what you’re feeling. I believe within all of that grief, there are opportunities, but certainly the grief needs to be held and honored first and foremost. So when I speak of this, I’m talking about losing a parent or a grandparent, a direct ancestor who holds space for us, or at least in the healthy relationships hold space for us. I spoken about the fact that when my mom died, it was like my emotional compass. And when my father died, it was like the anchor of my physical security died. And so with each of those death, I was able to give birth to finding that within myself. Now, does that mean I would choose their desks if I had the option? 

(07:55) No, I’d much rather have them. I’d much rather have them here than the lesson. Although I am so grateful for the lessons and would I have chosen for my children not to be born so that the single version of me, or not single, but the childless version of me that was free, that understood what it meant to walk through the world without having your heartstring permanently attached to other humans would. I’ve chosen that. Definitely not. The birth of my children are two of my greatest gifts. What I’m offering you though is to understand that for every every death there is a birth and for every birth there is a death. For every high there’s a low and for every low there’s a high, but life does balance itself. When we allow it to, and as I think about Mary and the courage she had giving birth to Jesus in them, what came of it is miraculous. 

(08:58) You know, whether you were religious beliefs or your spiritual beliefs are in alignment with what Christianity dictates the change that her current and that birth created on the planet is undeniable, along with the birth of many masters. And yet for all of that change, for each change that occurred because Christianity exists, there was something that died. Something had to disappear for something new to take its place. And when we’re constantly in that state of birthing and then pieces of us dying off, if those changes aren’t honored within ourselves and we don’t trust what we’re feeling, we can get lost. And, and the gifts in each of those can get lost. And so as we’re heading into the end of this decade, I want to encourage you to truly look at what are you feeling right now? Where is your heart calling you? What losses have you maybe denied yourself? 

(10:04) Because they were, they came at the alter of a birth of something you really wanted. Honoring the loss, grieving the loss doesn’t make the birth any less spectacular. And equally as you’re grieving a loss, honoring that within you is some excitement about what’s possible. Does not make you bad for finding goodness within something that was difficult or hard or excruciating. Birth does not discount death and death does not discount birth. They balance each other. And to me that is what I hope for this new decade for us as as a people is that we honor more clearly what is happening within ourselves and around us and, and honor the truth of what we’re feeling. Because I truly believe as each of us brings ourselves into balance, that’s what will create the balance in the world. And balance is the energy that will create peace. The energy that will create our neighbors having as much to eat as we do it is the thing that eliminates all the horrors on the planet and has to start with us. 

(11:21) My wish for you, for these last, um, days that we have left in this decade is look for what you wished the decade had more and fill these last days with that. I see. I’m play in the entrepreneurial space and so I see so many messages about, you know, making this year happen or making this decade happen in your business, but the reality is when I look at all those messages, and I think, but when you look back on this decade is that what’s missing is don’t, didn’t you do enough marketing? Come on, didn’t you post enough on social media, but did you rest enough? Did you enjoy your people enough? Or even if you did enough, wouldn’t you love more? Did you have enough fun? Did you drink and enough beauty? Did you create space for dreams and hopes and wishes? Did you love yourself? To me, as I look over the landscape of all the people I know personally, if we were to fill up the last days of the decade with what would bring it into balance, it would be love. 

(12:36) It would be beauty, it would be fun, playfulness, happiness, community, solitude. These to me are what will bring this decade into balance. And I would just encourage you as you’re wrapping up this decade to honor what needs to be honored to bring you into balance, to honor the deaths, to honor all the births, and to know that as this decade wraps up with it births a new decade, a brand new set of 10 years that holds so much possibility for you. And just trust that trust what is waiting for you and trust what you need in this moment. If you are celebrating Christmas, I wish you a very Merry Christmas and I want you to know that I hold you a listener dear to my heart and makes me grateful that you give me this time and space in your world. And I thank you so much for that. And as we pray on in our family this Christmas, I want you to know that I will be saying prayers of gratitude and appreciation. Yes for you. And I mean I truly thank you so much. Hey, thanks for listening. And if you know someone who needs to hear this message, please share this podcast with them. And if you’re feeling really generous, I love for you to leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. It helps us reach many more people and it fills my heart with so much joy when I hear what you had to say about what you heard, I am cheering for your success have been amazing day.