Suffering, Surrender, and the Leap of Faith: How to Find Freedom on the Other Side of Letting Go, with Carrie Chown
Release Date: 06/27/2022
End-of-Life Planning: Why You Should Do It Now, and How, with Michelle Mathai
Andrew Petty is Dying
Do you have a plan for when you die? Do you have a plan for when your loved ones die? In 2001, Michelle Mathai was just two years into her first foreign service post as vice consul in Auckland, NZ. She and her parents were on a farewell trip around the island in anticipation of Michelle's imminent departure for a new post in El Salvador. In the blink of an eye, the trip turned tragic when their car, with her dad at the wheel and her mom in the back seat, careened off the road and into the mercilessly icy current of a glacial river. As water rushed in, Michelle was able to kick out the...
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Suffering, Surrender, and the Leap of Faith: How to Find Freedom on the Other Side of Letting Go, with Carrie Chown
Andrew Petty is Dying
What do you need to let go of? In her teens, alcohol became Carrie Chown's refuge from emotional pain. By her early college years, she was firmly in the grips of alcoholism. Carrie worked hard to keep everything looking shiny on the outside, but inside she wanted to die. Then, she was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension as a college junior and was told she had two years to live. Ironically, it felt like an answer to her prayer to die. In June of 1999, Carrie summoned the will and the courage to get sober so she could begin an IV treatment the following month. Remarkably, she survived...
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What Do You Do?: A Tool for Understanding Yourself Better and Finding Your Unique Path in Life
Andrew Petty is Dying
“What do you do?” We’re all familiar with that question. It comes up naturally when we meet someone for the first time in a social setting. Its usual purpose is to learn what someone does for a living to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. In this episode, however, we’ll REpurpose this old question in a new way to help you know yourself better and discern even more clearly the paths in life for which you’re uniquely made. It will become a new tool in your ongoing quest to live YOUR life with guts, gusto, and abandon. My Answer to “What do you...
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Have Time, or Time Will Have You: Escape Regret and Create a Life You’re Proud Of
Andrew Petty is Dying
This episode is a wake-up call, a call to get back in the driver’s seat of your life, a call to become the boss of your most precious nonrenewable resource: Time. Because if you don’t have time, Time will ultimately have you. And you won’t like the results. Guilty as Charged How many times have we heard someone say, “I don’t have time,” or “If only I had more time,” or said something like that ourselves? I imagine we’ve all done it. I sure have. If we’re honest, sometimes we trot out statements like these like badges of honor in an attempt to show...
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Rites of Passage: How Reviving Neglected Rituals Can Set You Free, with Amy Musson
Andrew Petty is Dying
What place do rites of passage have in your life? In this episode, my special guest is MY coach Amy Musson, and we explore why rites of passage matter and the surprisingly harmful consequences of neglecting them. It turns out that there's more at stake than you might have thought--if you've ever given rites of passage much thought at all. If you haven't given them much thought, then you're not alone. I think most of us in the materially affluent Western world today have largely neglected meaningful rites of passage. Emphasis on "materially affluent," by the way, because, as Amy and...
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The Making of The Alpinist's Marc-André Leclerc: A Transformational Conversation with Marc-André's Mom, Michelle Kuipers
Andrew Petty is Dying
"If I've learned anything in the last three years, it's that life and death are so much bigger than us. You embraced life and love with all your amazing energy, which still reverberates. You are still with us on walks in the forest, on windy ridges, in a sunlit moment after the rain, in the love, laughter, and music of your friends and family. You are there in dreams that seem more real than waking moments. Everyday I think of you on your timeless flight. I love you with all my heart, and miss you more than words can say." Michelle Kuipers wrote this heartrending caption for an Instagram post...
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How To Make the Most of Today: A Simple Framework
Andrew Petty is Dying
How do we make the most of today? This episode is short and sweet, banged out somewhat hastily during the current season of curveballs I mentioned in the previous episode–but banged out with love and goodwill toward you, my fellow traveler along life’s winding path, you who are waking up to the reality of your Mortality and courageously embracing it to live with guts, gusto, and abandon. So today I’m gonna give you what I’ve got and pray that it reaches the hearts of those who need it most. And what I’ve got is a simple framework for making the most of today–the only day...
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What to Do When Life Throws You a Curveball: Notes from the Field
Andrew Petty is Dying
What do we do when life throws us a curveball? On this podcast, we’re equipping ourselves with the mindset and the means to live with guts, gusto, and abandon. Growing in our ability to respond to life’s inevitable curveballs requires both evolving our mindset and upgrading our means. And as we get better at responding to life’s curveballs, we increase our capacity to live with even more guts, gusto, and abandon. In this episode, I’ll draw from my own recent experience to share with you what I’m learning in real-time about what to do when life throws us a curveball. ...
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Ignore at Your Own Risk: How Your Relationship with Death Affects Your Quality of Life, with Dr. Frederic Tate
Andrew Petty is Dying
What is your relationship with Death? It may seem like an odd question, but your answer to it has everything to do with your quality of life. My guest on this episode shares actionable insight into this relationship so that we can optimize our quality of life. Introducing Dr. Frederic Tate Dr. Frederic Tate is a fascinating human with a perspective on Life and Death forged in the crucible of end-of-life care. A trusted friend connected us, so I knew Frederic was someone I should get to know. And I took an immediate shine to him from afar when I learned that he grew up in the...
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What Do You Want?: A Path to Purpose and Fulfillment, with Chris Slota
Andrew Petty is Dying
What do you want? It's a simple enough question at face value, but it can be far from easy to answer. Many of us have never truly tried to answer it. Many of us have never been aware that it was important to do so. And many of us are a lot better at knowing what we DON'T want. Failing to answer this question can lead to surprisingly harmful consequences--but answering it can put us on a path to unprecedented purpose and fulfillment. Don't just take my word for it, though. In this episode, my guest, Chris Slota, gives us unfiltered access to the remarkable personal...
info_outlineWhat do you need to let go of?
In her teens, alcohol became Carrie Chown's refuge from emotional pain. By her early college years, she was firmly in the grips of alcoholism. Carrie worked hard to keep everything looking shiny on the outside, but inside she wanted to die. Then, she was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension as a college junior and was told she had two years to live. Ironically, it felt like an answer to her prayer to die.
In June of 1999, Carrie summoned the will and the courage to get sober so she could begin an IV treatment the following month. Remarkably, she survived six years with pulmonary hypertension and received a life-extending double lung transplant in December 2003. After the transplant, Carrie was told that she might only have two more years to live.
With a handful of years of sobriety and intensive recovery work now under her belt, Carrie emerged from the transplant physically, spiritually, and mentally aligned. She was ready to live. She moved out of her parents' house, started working, got married, and bought her first home.
But she lost sight of all of the gifts in her life during an excruciating seven-year infertility journey.
There's more to this story, and Carrie fills in the gaps in the conversation that follows. But what I've just shared with you sets the stage for the insights and wisdom that Carrie offers in this episode. At face value, it's a gripping tale of human suffering, perseverance, and the will to live. But on a deeper level, it's a master class in how to find freedom on the other side of letting go.
Meet Carrie Chown
Today, Carrie is a Life, Health, and Wellness Coach and Reiki Master Practitioner. She has a private practice in Woodland, CA where she uses traditional coaching, energy work, and unique life coaching experiences to help her clients move beyond the things that hold them back and create lives full of passion, purpose, and wellbeing.
Some Episode Highlights
- Carrie shares what she had to let go of in each of the three monumental surrenders she’s experienced in her life–addiction, terminal illness, and infertility–and what freedom she found on the other side of letting go.
- How to know when to keep fighting and when to surrender.
- Carrie’s take on the purpose of suffering.
- The necessity of detaching from the outcome.
- How letting go makes it possible to see other options.
- The difference between suffering that heals and transforms and suffering that destroys.
- Carrie’s take on her leap of faith–why, how, and how it turned out.
What Do You Need to Let Go Of?
Letting go is not a popular idea in our hard-driving Western culture. But one has only to consider how physically and mentally unhealthy our culture is--unprecedentedly so, in fact--to realize that there's much about how we live today that needs to change.
So perhaps letting go is something all of us need to practice more. Letting go of our demand that life be a certain way and accepting what actually IS, instead. Letting go of our demand that our partner meet all of our needs and assuming full responsibility for own wellbeing, instead. Letting go of our tireless efforts to prevent future catastrophes and accepting that much of the future is completely outside of our control. Letting go of our need for our kids to fit our mold and nurturing their unique qualities, instead.
Examine your own heart and observe your own life to discern where a surrender might be calling to you. Look especially closely at those areas in your life where you consistently experience a sense of stuckness and frustration, a pushing-back from life as it resists your repeated attempts to create a different reality.
What freedom awaits you on the other side of letting go?
Let Me Know!
What stuck with YOU from this episode? Message me on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn @AndrewPettyCoach, or email me at [email protected]
I'm taking a creative break in July to have adventures with my family and give my heart and mind an opportunity to reset and be refreshed. The show will return in August with two episodes that I'm really looking forward to. From her own heartrending experiences with loss and caregiving, Michelle Mathai will teach us how to have the hard conversations with our loved ones about end-of-life issues NOW--before end-of-life issues become a reality. And terminal brain cancer warrior, Pam Blackburn, will offer her final word from the sacred space she now inhabits between life and death. If these sound like hard episodes to look forward to, much less listen to, then lean into the discomfort and tune in anyway. They might just be the episodes that you especially needed to hear.
I’m so glad you tuned in today, and don’t forget to follow this show. I’ll see you again in August on Andrew Petty is Dying, Lord willin' and the creek don't rise!
Let’s Connect
If this episode helped you, I'd love to know. Find me on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, visit my website, or email me.
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