Welcome to Healing From Within with your host Sheryl Glick Reiki Master Energy Teacher and author of the last book in a trilogy A New Life Awaits: Spirit Guided Insights to Support Global Awakening. Today I welcome Malcolm Stern, author of Slay Your Dragons with Compassion, a psychotherapist, author and co-founder of Alternatives, a spiritual group at St James Church In London. Malcolm may help us see that there is meaning and personal growth and love that can exist even in the worst tragedy.
Malcolm as listeners of Healing From Within have come to expect my guests and I share intimate insightful experiences in the hope that we may all come to understand our duality or the human and energetic or spiritual essence of life. With a clearer understanding of who we are and where we come from, we are able to begin to make better choices thereby creating more compassionate successful life experiences and discovering once again that we truly are magnificent souls with the capacity to love self and life.
In today’s episode of Healing From Within Malcolm Stern shares every parent’s worst nightmare when his daughter Melissa committed suicide in 2014 and his grief made him challenge every aspect of his work and life. In his book he offers ten ways to thrive even when it seems impossible. An important book showing ways to face your greatest fears and hidden sadness and to find ways past it all to regain balance, harmony love and acceptance.
When Malcolm is asked to think back to their childhood and remember a person place or event that may have signaled to them or to those around them the life interests work or values they might embrace as an adult for Sheryl senses that within the heart and mind of the child is a quest for life that has already been imprinted on their souls Malcolm tells us that as a child he wanted to be a doctor and heal people. A sensitive child and empathic he longed to serve and help others past the traumas of a physical life and became a psychotherapist and spiritual healer.
Malcolm also tells us something of his sister Beverly who had a nervous breakdown at the age of eighteen and had been a promising actress gaining the part of Brigitte in the Sound of Music on the West End Stage in London. One night she began hallucinating and yelling that the taxi drivers were coming to burn down the house. Her condition worsened and she was diagnosed as schizophrenic and was given over fifty- five electric shock therapies over the next few years. Her kidneys were damaged by her medication and she never regained her center. Malcolm was terrified by anyone who exhibited similar signals-a fear he has explored in depth in his own personal therapy learning it is hard for us to see the profundity of another’s pain when they are so close to us.
In describing his daughter’s illness he writes, “With hindsight, it’s easy to see that there was a point at which she was swerving between highs and lows, agonizing about life while at the same time travelling all over the country, partying, socializing and working. The stillness that is part of a healthy psyche was absent. She was all movement. Melissa had lost hold of her internal compass and extreme pieces of behavior emerged.
Sheryl says whatever the diagnosis: Bi- polar disorder schizophrenia depression or what Sheryl’s own younger sister had social psychological disorder it is all so hard for the families to understand much less deal with and often the person is dealing with several challenging illnesses . Sheryl thinks at times there is not a family that is free of a member who suffers the stresses of a physical, emotional or mental disorder that so powerfully affects their own lives and those around them. Perhaps in the scheme of soul life we all need to be surrounded by these experiences so we can develop greater patience and compassion which are higher Universal or spiritual soul goals.
Malcolm tells us something of working with Alternatives,