LightAngel's Healing Arts

I got to sit down and have a lovely conversation with Sarah Marie Shoulak and her many brushes with death. Her episode comes out tomorrow.

*Key Takeaways:*

*- Survival Doesn't Automatically Create Transformation:* Sarah experienced multiple frightening brushes with death, but none instantly became the moment that changed everything. Looking backward, she realized how long she continued living in unhealthy patterns despite everything she'd survived.

*- Humor Can Live Beside Heavy Things:* Sarah's family often responded to frightening circumstances with humor, and that dark humor became part of how she understood her own experiences—and eventually inspired Dead Serious: How Death Made Me Laugh at Life.

*- Turn What You've Carried Into Fuel:* Sarah encourages people to channel difficult experiences into creative expression—whether through writing, music, dance, poetry, art, or another outlet—instead of allowing everything to remain trapped internally.

*- Success Doesn't Mean You Aren't Struggling:* Sarah earned degrees, built a career, and appeared successful while simultaneously navigating substance misuse and other painful parts of her life. Allowing people behind that exterior ultimately created greater connection.

*- Releasing Shame Creates Freedom:* Sarah closes the conversation with what may be the clearest transmission of the entire episode: shame suppresses creativity, feeds imposter syndrome, and keeps us stuck. Releasing it brought her profound peace and joy—and you described that release as freeing yourself from a prison you'd created within yourself.

*A Question to Carry With You*
What have you already survived—and what would it look like to stop merely surviving it and choose what comes next?

New Podcast episode out today!!!! Episode 54

The Transmission:

- We cannot selectively numb ourselves.

When we continually push grief, fear, anger, trauma, shame, or pain beneath the surface, those emotions don't simply disappear. They seek expression—in our bodies, our behaviors, our relationships, and sometimes in the things we reach for to help us stop feeling.

Danielle discovered that alcohol could quiet the uncomfortable feelings. But when she stopped drinking, something unexpected happened: the rest of life became brighter too. Colors seemed more vivid. Food tasted different. Her senses returned. She realized that while she had been trying to numb stress and anxiety, she had also been dulling her capacity to fully experience everything else.

- Healing asks us to become willing to feel again.
But it does not ask us to do it alone.

Compassion isn't always rushing into someone's darkness and turning on the lights. Sometimes compassion is being willing to sit beside someone in the dark, reminding them through our presence that they are not alone. Danielle believes our stories can do the same thing: hearing another person speak the experience we've been hiding can become the first crack through which hope enters.

And as we heal, discernment becomes part of that process. We learn who belongs at our table. We become more deliberate about where our energy goes. We discover that boundaries do not require us to stop loving people; they simply allow us to decide where and how deeply we invest ourselves.

Sometimes the pieces don't go back together exactly as they were. Perhaps they aren't supposed to. As Danielle beautifully describes it, we can put the pieces back together while leaving a little space for the light to get in.

WATCH: https://youtu.be/G6AZ-MEGLo0

LISTEN: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2514860/episodes/19908794

This is Danielle Elliott Smith, and we had a great conversation. Her episode comes out tomorrow.

Key Takeaways:

*- The Secret Spiral:* Struggling with alcohol doesn't always begin young or look like the stereotype we carry in our heads. Danielle's problematic drinking developed in her 40s, and shame pushed her toward secrecy—which allowed the behavior to intensify.

*- Shame Can Keep People From Seeking Help:* Danielle describes recovery not as a simple matter of willpower, but as something that required compassion, community, and connection. Reducing judgment around asking for help became an important part of her work after treatment.

*- We Don't Selectively Numb:* Danielle realized she hadn't only been numbing stress and difficult emotions. Her entire experience of life had become dulled. When she stopped drinking, she became aware of her senses and surroundings in ways she hadn't realized she'd lost.

*- There Isn't Only One Path:* Recovery may involve a 12-step program, meditation, prayer, yoga, community, service, exercise, or a combination of practices. Danielle emphasizes finding what genuinely supports you and continuing to use it rather than abandoning it once you feel better.

*- Recovery Can Come in Waves:* Even years later, difficult seasons can awaken old desires. Danielle compares recovery to grief: sometimes the wave barely reaches your ankles, and sometimes it bowls you over. Honesty about those moments becomes part of continuing the journey.

New episode out today!!!!

The Heart of the Episode:

What happens when grief doesn't simply pass—but becomes something you learn to carry?

Host Elisha Light Angel sits down with podcaster Lou Jenkins for a raw and deeply human conversation about grief, loss, fatherhood, accountability, communication, and learning to live through life's darkest seasons.

Lou's relationship with grief began decades ago when he lost his mother, father, and grandmother in three consecutive years. Without the emotional support or tools to understand what he was experiencing, that grief spilled into other areas of his life, contributing to the unraveling of his marriage, struggles with identity, and what Lou describes as living in “darkness.”

Years later, Lou experienced the loss that changed him most profoundly: his 33-year-old daughter died after consuming ma*****na that, according to Lou, was laced with fentanyl. He speaks candidly about the guilt, questions, and pain that followed—and the devastating experience of burying one child and then traveling across the country days later to celebrate another child's wedding.

Together, Elisha and Lou explore what happens when grief compounds with earlier wounds, why communication matters when we're struggling, the difference Lou sees between being a father and becoming a dad, and how taking accountability for his own choices changed his relationships with his children.

The conversation ultimately becomes less about overcoming grief and more about learning how to live honestly alongside it—finding ways to speak what hurts, allowing ourselves to be heard, and remembering that we rarely know what another human being may be carrying beneath the surface.

WATCH: https://youtu.be/aCIEXH7kQa4

LISTEN: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2514860/episodes/19874774-episode-53-carrying-grief-that-doesn-t-go-away.mp3?download=true