A Father's Quest for Light After Loss

Join us for a poignant exploration of grief and healing with our special guest, Henry Cameron, a certified grief and survival counselor who has turned immense personal loss into a beacon of hope for others. After experiencing the heart-wrenching loss of his son, Cameron, to brain cancer, Henry shares his transformative journey towards rediscovering joy. His work with the Lost Travelers Club introduces the concept of Peregrines, offering a supportive community for parents who have outlived their children. Through thought-provoking discussions, we tackle the societal expectations surrounding grief and embrace it as a universal life skill that everyone experiences at some point in their lives.

Henry's unique perspective on grief is informed by the principles of quantum physics, providing solace by illustrating how energy and essence endure beyond the physical realm. He candidly shares his 15-year struggle to reconnect with happiness and his realization that names carry frequencies, a discovery that led him to carry his son’s name within his own. This episode sheds light on the often-unspoken challenges men face when expressing grief, emphasizing the need for cultural shifts to allow more open and honest conversations about loss and healing. Initiatives like the Lost Travelers Club are paving the way for such necessary dialogues.

The episode also takes you on a geographical and emotional journey as Henry narrates his decision to leave Minneapolis, a city laden with memories of his son. From Gloucester to the serene landscapes of the South of France and Southwest Spain, Henry's travels reflect his quest for personal growth amid life's transitions. Through stories of resilience in the face of life's unpredictabilities, listeners are invited to savor each moment and connect with their inner strength. Henry's experiences in arts, philanthropy, and mental health offer invaluable insights as he inspires others to embrace life's transitions and find meaning in every chapter.

Find out more about Henry-Cameron here:
https://www.losttravelers.club/

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/thelosttravelerpodcast/

Chapters

• 0:00 Discovering Universal Life Skills and Healing
• 11:55 Embracing Grief and Finding Joy
• 24:47 Navigating Grief and Breakting Expectations
• 31:43 Longing for Home
• 42:37 Embracing Life's Transitions and Growth

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the Lift One Self podcast, where we break mental health stigmas through conversations. I'm your host, nat Nat, and we dive into topics about trauma and how it impacts the nervous system. Yet we don't just leave you there. We share insights and tools of self-care, meditation and growth that help you be curious about your own biology. Your presence matters. Please like and subscribe to our podcast. Help our community grow. Let's get into this. Oh, and please remember to be kind to yourself. Welcome to the Lift One Self podcast. I am your host, nat Nat, and today I am delighted to be in the presence of Henry Cameron, and let me tell you, once you hear his story and you feel his palpable energy, you will want to subscribe to his podcast that I was on recently. So, henry Cameron, could you let the listeners know a little bit about yourself before we dive into the podcast?

Speaker 2: 1:03

Yes, Well, thank you for mentioning my podcast. It's the Lost Traveler podcast and it is all about universal life skills education for our time. We are all learning the same things and applying them daily. It's not a question of whether we're learning, it's how well we're learning them and from whom. And how proficient was their toolkit right? So that's really been the thrust of my work for many, many years universal life skills.

Speaker 2: 1:33

I'm a theater artist. I have the Folklore Theater Company, which is now the new Folklore Theater Company. It's virtual, which is kind of exciting. It's new territory for theater work and I also have a foundation called the Lost Travelers Club, which is an empowerment organization for what we call peregrines parents who have outlived our children.

Speaker 2: 2:00

Re-imagining the grief journey and empowering a sense of purpose again, that's the first thing to go when we've outlived our kids. And so how do we get back to a sense of purpose and bring value to not only our lives but the lives of others, in honor and in name of our children, allowing them to live on within us and through us? So, and I'm an internationally certified grief and survival counselor and therapist, and so I do that work as well online, and that has been incredibly healing for me. Not that outliving a child can ever be healed from, but the process of living can be healing, and so having achieved my diploma and certification internationally has opened up a channel of healing that I did not expect to discover in my lifetime. So that's kind of exciting. So my passions are my art, mental health work and philanthropy, and all under the arch of universal life skills. So that's a picture.

Speaker 1: 3:18

And it's as I said, listeners, you are not going to want to miss this conversation. Listeners, you are not going to want to miss this conversation because there's so much to unpack and I know some of them are like Peregrine, what is that Like? That just lit me up. Yet, before we get in that, would you be willing to do a mindful moment with me so that we can ground ourselves and open our hearts for this conversation?

Speaker 2: 3:42

Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 3:43

And, as you always hear listeners, safety first. If you're driving while listening to the podcast, please do not close your eyes yet you're able to follow the other prompts. So, henry Cameron, I'll ask you to get comfortable in your seating and, if it's safe to do so, gently close your eyes and you're going to begin breathing in and out through your nose and you're going to bring your awareness to watching your breath go in and out through your nose. You're not going to try and control your breath. You're just going to be aware of its rhythm, allowing it to guide you into your body. There may be some sensations or feelings coming up. That's okay. Let them come up. You're safe to feel. You're safe to let go. Surrender the need to control, release the need to resist and just be, be with your breath, drop deeper into your body.

Speaker 1: 4:54

There's probably some thoughts or to-do lists that have popped up in your mind, and that's okay. Gently bring your awareness back to your breath, creating space between the awareness and the thoughts and dropping even deeper into your body, allowing yourself to just be with the breath, keeping your awareness on the breath. Again, other thoughts may have popped up. It's okay. Bring your awareness to your breath, beginning again, creating even more space between the thoughts and the awareness and dropping deeper into your body, allowing yourself to just be, be with your breath. Now, at your own time and at your own pace, you're going to gently open your eyes while still staying with your breath.

Speaker 2: 6:11

How's your heart doing good nice?

Speaker 1: 6:12

calm now. Many may wonder why, henry cameron. So could you let the listeners know about your name and why it's hyphenated?

Speaker 2: 6:24

it's's a great story actually Several months after my son, cameron, passed from brain cancer when he was 13,. He was my only child, I was a single father, and so it was a real shift in my existence, I guess is a good way to put it. And when I was living in Minneapolis, minnesota, I couldn't go to the market without somebody falling apart in my arms because he was beloved in our community. We both were and are, and I found myself in a position of holding others through their grief journey early on without being able to really hold myself through mine, and so I needed to get out of Dodge and feel my smallness again. You know, when you're fighting in hospitals for two years and then out of hospitals and trying to save your child, you're something of a superhero and you're trying to be, and on the flip side of that, I felt like my scale was off. I needed to go find my smallness again, and the closest thing I could think of was the Grand Canyon.

Speaker 2: 7:40

And there are these long stretches of maybe 70 miles in the open desert where, before you even get to the canyon, where there's no civilization at all, you have to fill up your tank before you even go into those zones and it was about three in the morning and I was driving toward the canyon and it was anky, black, except for the headlights on the road and the stars. And there was one brighter star that seemed to be lower in the sky and I was hoping it was a gas station or something on the horizon. And I made it there and it's a little little enclave of three buildings in the beam of a hundred foot tall lamppost. There was a small motel, there was a, an indigenous trading post and a post office, nothing else. For miles and miles and miles. But it had its own zip code and I looked up and it was Cameron Arizona. Kind of a twilight zone moment, right, whoa, okay, here I am in the middle of nowhere in the dead of night and here I am in Cameron Arizona.

Speaker 2: 8:50

So I caught 40 winks in the motel and I woke up and stepped out. It was a beautiful day and there was a I think she was Zuni, I'm pretty sure she was Zuni and she was an elder and she was sitting on her blanket in front of the trading post selling jewelry that she had made. I bought this ring from her that's my Cameron Arizona ring and I asked if I could sit with her and have a conversation, I could tell she had a lot of wisdom and she invited me to sit and I said, said you know, my son passed away recently and I'm struggling with my own identity now because people will ask me new people in my life, who you know over the past months, of, who I've met, oh, do you have any children? How do you answer without crowbarring open your chest and pouring your most sacred personal pain out onto a table where the person you're telling couldn't possibly empathize because they hadn't been through it? And I said I've looked at every language that I can think of to find a word like widow or orphan, to turn to. That can. Let it be enough of an explanation. You don't have to go into it. And I couldn't find a thing, not in any languages. I looked in indigenous languages around the world, I looked in dead languages and ancient you know Sanskrit and everything else. There's nothing. And so I said is there anything in your culture or language that holds this?

Speaker 2: 10:30

She said well, in my culture your name would change, because your name is the expression of your identity to the world, and so I might refer to you as Henry, whose son is gone. That would become your name. I would introduce you. That way, people who are talking about you when you're not in the room will use that name Even if they think about you. They use your, they think about you with your new identity, henry whose son is gone. That way, people are holding you in your grief even when they're not around you. I thought, oh, what a beautiful expression. Right, it didn't quite fit into the global lexicon of introductions.

Speaker 2: 11:08

I didn't want to go around introducing myself as Henry whose son is gone, so I decided I just had this idea to hyphenate his name with mine, the way people do when they marry. Sometimes they hyphenate their names to as an identity, a new identity, to express to the world that they are bonded together. They maintain their individuality and yet there's this link between them. To hyphenate his name with my name is also a mathematical equation. It's Henry minus Cameron in the physical sense, and that was enough for me at that time to be able to express who I am now and who I was then, especially early in my grief.

Speaker 2: 11:51

And so that's the story. And so people around the world call me Henry, cameron, and it's also a frequency. You know our names when we speak them, carry a frequency. You know our names. When we speak them carry a frequency, and after, especially, a child passes, you rarely hear their name spoken again, even by family members, because nobody wants to upset you, right? They think they're going to be a drag or take you into a dark place. And I missed hearing his name and so I decided to add it to my name so that I hear his name spoken. That frequency, as I feel it alive in me, is now expressed through me and reflected back to me.

Speaker 1: 12:43

So, yeah, and reflected back to me, yeah, and you can feel the delight and that you've allowed yourself to feel joy again and still hold the grief. And you know, not push it away, not suppress it. Engage with the all the end, and both and more, not just picking one or the other. And I think, with grief, the journey of allowing yourself to feel joy again is really challenging. Was that your experience?

Speaker 2: 13:13

Yeah, it took me 15 years to reconnect with a sense of joy. It's not that I'm not a happy person, I'm inherently a happy person. Anybody who knows me can tell you that. That I'm not a happy person, I'm inherently a happy person. Anybody who knows me can tell you that. But I did feel for 15 years that my joy had left with Cameron.

Speaker 2: 13:33

And it wasn't until last year because it's this is the 16th year, um that I had this incredible feeling that well and it came after a series of what I call paralysis epiphanies I experienced sleep paralysis and at first it was really scary because I thought am I having a stroke? Am I dead? Am I in a coma? But then I realized it was my body's way of protecting me from waking triggers, and what that did was it brought me into another dimension of reality where I had control in a way that I didn't have control in my waking, and a lot of wisdom would come to me in my sleep paralysis state, where I could bring it across the threshold into my waking state. And that was sort of one of the things that eventually led to a book. But it was using quantum physics as a metaphor for the grief journey, the multidimensionality of it, the unpredictability of it, uh, the adventure of it, the wonder of it, the curiosity, the interconnectedness of everything. And that's really what brought me back to an understanding that death as if you're looking at it through a quantum physics lens, also called quantum mechanics, quantum theory um, that death is an illusion, that it's not actually a thing, that it's something we've been conditioned to believe is an ending of something where we now know it's been tested and proven that frequency energy does not die. It does not, it just changes form. It can't be created either, right, it just keeps going. Where did it come from? We don't know. We don't even know where consciousness is. Right, no scientist on the planet can tell you what consciousness is. We just know that we experience it. And so that that brought me back to when I broke out of that paralysis moment. That wait a minute.

Speaker 2: 15:50

Well, if death is an illusion, then what does that mean for my joy? What does that mean for Cameron's existence? He's still very much alive, right here. I know precisely where he is. This is why, when people say I'm sorry for your loss, I'm like loss. He wasn't a set of keys or a favorite scarf. I know precisely where he is at all times. I didn't lose a thing, except in the physical sense, right, but even that is to a degree illusory when you start peeling back the layers. And so I reconnected with my joy, because for 15 years I had been under the assumption that he had gone and that my joy, the way I experienced joy, the way people experience joy, was elusive to me. I couldn't really secure that, but it came flooding back into me with that realization that he's very much alive, living in and through me, and he never went anywhere. It's me that went somewhere else, right, the me of me separation of self.

Speaker 1: 17:08

Uh, just, you know, to the psyche and grief. And if we're not given the tools and a different, you know, perception and construct of it, it does feel like a loss, it feels like you were robbed of something, it feels like you're the life that you knew has ended, which you know, and that has some facts of it. Yet we're not taught about the energy and being able to connect on the other side of love, to feel that frequency, to feel that presence, that energy, that existence, because nervous systems create other nervous systems, so that electrical frequency is. That's why there's an attachment and a bond. Yet just because it's no longer there, that life force is still there. It didn't die with that nervous system.

Speaker 2: 17:55

And that's grief, is a universal life skill. Every human being on the planet is going to experience, is going to meet grief, at whatever level, whether or not you have children, whether or not you have loved ones around you uh, who pass they, you know, we experience. With any major life change, we experience grief. We grieve our youth, right, we grieve, you know, moving to a different location, geographically we move, the beginnings and endings of friendships, you know, and all of those cycles, um and and when you hear something often enough, you're more apt to believe it. That's what conditioning is, that's what programming is.

Speaker 2: 18:39

It's like you've been handed this tape and you're expected to play it on a loop throughout your life and pass it on to your children. Right, you've inherited it, you've had to accept the inheritance. But when nobody tells you is that way, back in the closet, under a pile of old coats and blankets, there's a box full of empty tapes that you have access to anytime. And you know, permission is a powerful thing. You're allowed to pop out that old tape that was never yours to begin with and put in a blank and record your own music, right, and so this is the journey for me.

Speaker 2: 19:19

This is what, what brought me back to joy, what brought me back to opening myself up and I think being open is is key um, and and tapping into this childlike wonder of it all. There are so many things we'll never have the answers to while we're here in the physical state. Release it, release that need to know everything. Some things, it's okay to just lean back, take a breath and relax into it. You know, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's something that we have a lexicon around, grief that we keep perpetuating and learning, and the word loss is one of them, and so I avoid it and I try to talk about it. I think it's time for a new lexicon, because that will open people up to new concepts that they may not have met before.

Speaker 2: 20:27

And um, whole reason why I created the podcast I was gonna say I appreciate the platform here to be able to talk about it openly, because I know that I'm not unique in finding this um, people finding in different ways, in different words, but I think that there is there is a, a longing for a new way to handle and break through the, the vortex of mourning.

Speaker 1: 20:59

I call it so at the beginning you spoke about peregrine. So you created a title and if you could give I know the story, yet the listeners may not know, so if you could give them the story of how you got to this title and the reason why.

Speaker 2: 21:17

It was another sleep, paralysis, epiphany A Peregrine falcon flew down and landed in front of me and looked up and said it's time. And I broke out of my paralysis and I started researching the word peregrine, peregrine, and, and I've seen peregrine falcons my whole life. I've lived all over the world and it's native to every continent except Antarctica, right. So it's a universally recognizable symbol. When you go back to the Latin root of the word, peregrine, it means lost traveler, it means a stranger in a field, it means a pilgrim on a sacred journey and it ticked all the boxes it's genderless, it's wildly universally recognizable as a symbol in most cultures.

Speaker 2: 22:11

It represents courage, resilience, strength, and those are all things that we, as peregrines, must tap into to move forward in our lives. It takes great courage and strength and resilience to move forward beyond that event that's happened, even if it's expected, which in our case we weren't 100% sure but with that kind of brain cancer that Cameron had, he lived twice as long as they expected him to. So there was, you know, that aspect of the conversation about. You know he may not survive this, but it's in the, it's in the journey, right and. And so Peregrine fit, and immediately I changed my logo for the lost travelers club. It's now a Peregrine. I wrote a Peregrine manifesto which is on the front page of the website, and it's all positive language.

Speaker 2: 23:22

It avoids using the term loss. It avoids using the term loss no-transcript.

Speaker 1: 23:46

let's bring it back and make that part of the new lexicon I know many listeners will feel a sense of probably home, that feeling that they're seen and that somebody finally gets it. Because I know when you explained it to me also, when people, people would ask you, you know, do you have children? And you didn't know what to say Because it's like, do you even have the capacity to understand the grief that I'm going to? Just you know, show you and share with you? Yet Peregrine gives that title that somebody could be curious and let you know that they're emotionally available or they can just keep going and not have to open up that part, which I think is needed, because if somebody says I'm a widow, somebody will say, or I'm an orphan, or they'll see whatever capacity they have to open up that space. And I don't think it's. You know, a lot of times I think. Sometimes we think that people should have the capacity to see and feel our experience when that is harmful. It's harmful to us to put that expectation on others.

Speaker 2: 25:00

It really is. It really is and to be able to identify, to empower oneself, to identify yourself as a peregrine. If you're not in a mental state or an emotional state where you feel ready to talk about what happened or to go deeper into it with somebody, a stranger or a family member or a friend, you can lean on that, you can use Peregrine as an anchor to say I'll only go deeper into it if I choose to. I'm not in a position where I have to try and it's exhausting trying to explain to somebody because they're bringing all of their conditioning to what you know. Outliving a child sign what you know. Outliving a child signifies. You know, you hear so many different phrases over and over again and that's how you know that it's a meme, right, culturally. Oh, you know, no parents should bury their child. No, parents should outlive a child. It's unnatural. You hear a lot and you have to go into the explanation.

Speaker 2: 26:05

It's perfectly natural from where I said, because it happened yeah, and that's those, yeah, those are so helpful yeah, but you know, I I've heard them my whole life especially out of north america, right, I remember people saying things like I don't have a creative bone in my body.

Speaker 2: 26:25

That was something that people would say all the time, or the phrase nobody's perfect. How often have we heard that? Right, but when you again, when you start to peel back the layers and and understand where that comes from, um, and I think for peregrines, maybe, maybe especially for peregrines, it's rather like losing an eye. Right, you can look at somebody and you have to look really, really close at somebody who has lost an eye and popped in a glass one. Right, you start to notice that only one eye is moving or something looks a little odd or a little askew, and that's kind of the experience is that you are looking at the world through a different perspective than everyone else in the room. Unless they've also lost an eye, then they kind of get it right.

Speaker 2: 27:22

And so there's that aspect to it where we need to be talking to one another. We need to be finding community in our grief so that we can. You know, grief is a very solitary experience. It's very unique to the person experiencing it, to the grief walker. But on the path there are many grief walkers and you can't compare one to the other, but you can walk alongside one another with a knowing right With that, looking at the world through a different perspective than most of the other people around you, and there's great value in that.

Speaker 1: 28:04

Yeah, and you know the work that I do is holding safe space, that you know that you're safe to like, as you explained I don't have the capacity to explain my whole or that you, when you want to feel it, you have a safe space to feel those emotions and they're not going to be shut down. I think in North America there's a lot of conditioning of not being able to witness pain. We're taught to be so adverse to pain where pain is embedded in life and we have such an aversion to it that it creates even more suffering because we don't know how to integrate it and let it, you know, strengthen us. So you know the safe space holding and allowing people to feel that's where the crux of the healing is. Yet it makes it that can somebody witness and not pull away, not complain like this again, cannot go on about oh, are you not over this yet? Because they are that a lot too, yeah, or your child wouldn't want you to feel this way.

Speaker 2: 29:09

It's like, how do you know what my child would want? I'm feeling this way because I need to feel this way. I meant to feel this way, otherwise I'd be feeling another kind of way, right, by using the word peregrine, especially to people who are just meeting you. Then they ask you what's a peregrine, and you get to talk about that. You don't have to open your chest up, right, you can keep it. You know, keep that force field around you, right? I think that's so important and what you're talking about is in our aversion to addressing pain and holding space for pain. Most of my clients in my grief and survival counseling are men and I've become something of a specialist in men's grief because we still are struggling culturally, globally, with the role of men and how men are, the expectations put upon men to sublimate their pain, to not show their pain to not be open to the full experience of our pain, and I'm sure there are women as well, and everyone in between, who feels the same way.

Speaker 2: 30:27

But when we're talking from a cultural perspective, there are so many expectations still put upon men fathers in intact families who have to hold their whole family through their own grief, still be a provider when they are very few safe spaces to lean into their own grief journey, and so I'm hopeful that the work that I'm doing with the Lost Travelers Club, with my work as a counselor and therapist, and also with the book I'm hoping that that opens up a broader cultural understanding and conversation about those expectations that we put upon men and where men very often feel trapped in a vortex that they can't break out of.

Speaker 1: 31:21

We are recording. I'm in Canada and you are in Spain and, as you said, you were in Minneapolis. I cannot say the word, my brain's not going to let me say it, but you were in the US.

Speaker 2: 31:37

Minneapolis.

Speaker 1: 31:38

Minneapolis, minneapolis, yeah.

Speaker 2: 31:40

Borders Canada.

Speaker 1: 31:43

You were in Minneapolis, and that's where you know Cameron transitioned, yet you made the decision to move to a whole different country. Yeah, what did that experience? What did it look like for you? Because I know some, as we say, grief is subjective. They wouldn't want to leave the area because they want to still feel them in the environment and feel like you know, it might be the home, it might be the park. They still want to be there because that's where they feel their presence. You know so deeply. Yet you made the decision to move, not just somewhere outside in the US, you moved to a totally different continent, across the ocean. So what invoked that?

Speaker 2: 32:31

Well, I've been traveling my whole life. My father was a cultural diplomat for the US government back in the 60s and 70s, before there was even a McDonald's outside the US. There was a time, and that was what his agency was to do was to bring American culture overseas. It was basically all appropriated culture wrapped up in a red, white and blue ribbon and said hey, we made it better. Now you can buy it back from us. So, anyway, it was an interesting way to look at the world.

Speaker 2: 32:59

But I was very, very um, for many, many years when I came back to live in the united states, I never felt american. I never felt that that was my homeland, even though I was born there. Um, I felt kind of like a fish out of water, I guess. And cameron was born in minneapolis, he was born into and left from the same house. So for 14 years, 13 years, he, he, um, that was home right and was only home for me because he was there. And and, of course, my community. We had a large and loving community. That was the hardest to leave behind was a sense of community. But I felt like I felt a compulsion that I had to move, I had to surround myself with a different environment. Since he was a little boy, cameron and I had talked about moving to Massachusetts Gloucester, massachusetts, about 40 miles north of Boston, where I had been right after high school. I had been studying art in Boston and one of my instructors said you have to go up to Gloucester and see the light there, because it's just stunning. And I took the commuter rail up there and it hit me in the solar plexus. I feel destiny calling here, and so Cameron and I had always planned on moving to Gloucester Massachusetts when he was done with high school, but he graduated early, at age 13, and I moved there. For both of us that was the first impulse. Again, it was hard to leave my community. I haven't been back to Minneapolis since. I'm not one to go back anywhere.

Speaker 2: 34:54

My pull is forward and I was in Lawster for about 10 years. That's where I started the Folklore Theater Company to preserve and protect the stories that are dying, with the people that carry them. How do we know who we are if we don't know where we come from? Not that we have to live there, but to know more about ourselves through our stories. We're a storytelling species and Cameron loved stories and folklore and fairy tales from all over the world, and so I had after 10 years, I had an opportunity to join another company that was looking to create an international touring theater company that was rooted in those liminal spaces, the spaces between the spaces. So, as an experimental theater, we were looking for to play in the space between the human physical experience and the human call it, spiritual experience. Right, where's the middle ground between the two? They equally define us as humans, and so where do we, you know, move across that threshold, and so that's what the theater was, and I was like, yes, this is right up my alley, I love this. We were going to be, uh, establishing our base company for touring in the uk, and so we were exploring areas in the uk.

Speaker 2: 36:21

I lived there for a couple of years and we were waiting on some funding before I was going to get my residency in the uk and this is pre-brexit and so I had some downtime, and so I decided to travel a little bit. I had never been to the south of france. I thought I'll go, you know, rent an old, rustic farmhouse in wine country. I mean, it's the romantic in me and so my service dog, flat Stanley they call them assistance dogs that mitigate disabilities. We went and rented this 500-year-old farmhouse Beautiful, beautiful place, and it was winter, it was early January, and so there were no tourists around. That's my favorite kind of travel and we were there for a couple of weeks and then I thought, okay, where, where? Next? And oh, we're close to the border of spain. I've never been to spain or portugal.

Speaker 2: 37:21

My aunt, my mother's sister, lives in a tiny village here in the Southwest of Spain, near the border of Portugal, and so I called her up and said hey, how would you like a couple of house guests for, you know a few days? And so she said, yeah, come on down. So I took the train to Madrid and took a you know, rented a car and came down here Beautiful area, very remote and after, I think, the first day she, she met her neighbor outside and told him I was here visiting. He said you know, if he wants to stay longer than a few days, I just remodeled my mother's house in a village 15 minutes from here and I'd be willing to rent it to him for cheap, right? So I thought, well, yeah, that sounds good and we're so close to portugal that, you know, I could use this as my home base and travel around a bit. So I did and we signed a lease month to month and I, uh, after the first month I was like, yeah, I'm gonna stay another month because I'm really loving it.

Speaker 2: 38:22

And it was in the middle of the second month that COVID hit and I could not leave the country. Americans were barred from traveling to Europe at that time. Airports were closed down, you couldn't leave your house or you would be fined like 600 bucks. So I thought, okay, I'll just stay put. In most of Europe, especially in this region you are, if you are, uh, from a different country, non-european country, they have an arrangement where you can stay for up to three months without a visa it's like a tourist pass and then if you want to stay longer, you have to leave the country. You can come back, usually for another three months, but then that's the country. You can come back usually for another three months, but then that's the max. You could stay very, you know, during a year.

Speaker 2: 39:12

So by then, and once they lifted the, the state of emergency, and people were able to go out again with masks, I talked to my colleagues and said you, you know, rent is cheap here in Spain. The cost of living where I am is so inexpensive, why don't we consider using Spain as our home base, versus the UK or the US, where property is much more expensive? And for a touring company, housing was the big ticket item. Right that you? You have to house your, your company, you have to build you know complex for building sets and costumes and music rehearsals and all that stuff. So I looked into it and and they decided that it was a good idea for me to seek residency here instead of the UK. And so I did.

Speaker 2: 40:08

And they have a kind of residency in Spain called Arraigo Social, which means a social route residency. And if you could stay in the country undocumented for three years without any kerfuffles with the police, and keep your nose clean, don't travel too much, just stay close to home. They give you your residency because you've planted yourself as you've rooted yourself in a community. Everybody knows who you are, you participate in events and festivals and people invite you to dinner and you invite them and it's you kind of create your space. It's a beautiful thing and rare, and so I decided to go that route and so I stayed for over three years and applied for my residency, got it within two weeks. I mean, it was so fast.

Speaker 2: 40:58

And here I am and I love it. My house is 800 years old. It's gorgeous. Look at my ceilings. See that. It's such. It's such an amazing place and the people are kind and gentle and interested and curious. The culture, the food here is amazing. I haven't seen an airplane in the sky in now almost five years that I've lived here. That's the life I want at my age and this stage of my life. Everything I do is virtual, it's online. So we have fiber optic cable, we have Wi-Fi, everything you need and all the food is local and I know all the farmers and I see the animals romping in the fields and it's perfect.

Speaker 1: 41:50

Everything it hits everything, of being fulfilled in wellness and wholeness and being with you. Know the ground Right now, as we're recording this there was a flash flood. You know, six hours from you, in Valencia. Is that how you pronounce it?

Speaker 2: 42:09

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 42:11

How is it for you as a human being, you know being so close and to such a big disaster? You know, and nervous systems feel energy. How are you holding the space for yourself with this?

Speaker 2: 42:26

the space for yourself with this. It's not unfamiliar. Last year and the year before, we had torrential rains here in my region and we had flooding. The cars were floating away. It was not to the degree that it is there right now, because it's not. I mean, we have mountains here. My village is in the foothills of a small mountain range, but I'm remembering the tension of that time when we had torrential rains. And this is a rural community, so people understand the cycles of nature, they are so connected we're in the heart of nature here and and they understand the cycles and that sometimes destruction has to come for new growth to come.

Speaker 2: 43:16

And I think it's the way I'm holding. It is metaphorically, um, that what? What do we have to learn from this? And what do we have to learn from this and what do we have to teach from this experience? Right, we can look at something and call it a tragedy, or we can look at it and say I was one of the lucky ones who triumphed. I walked through this fire and I came out of it. I breathed air. Today, there are millions of people around the world who did not have that privilege, and so really holding that moment, holding that every moment is transitional, right? There's nothing static here, and so to surrender you used that word earlier.

Speaker 1: 44:19

So, to surrender you used that word earlier, surrendering to the transitional quality of a moment, I think, is where I sit with most things right now in the world. I hear you, I hear you. So I know many of the listeners are like OK, where do I get in contact with Henry Cameron? So can you let the listeners know about the podcast, about the book, about the services, the therapy, all that you have to offer? Send them where they can get in touch with you.

Speaker 2: 44:41

Just go to my name, henry Cameron Allen, dot org, and it's no hyphen in the website, because you can't put a hyphen in a website. So it's Henry Cameron Allen, all one word dot org, and it's no hyphen in the website, because you can't put a hyphen in a website. So it's Henry Cameron Allen, all one word dot, org. And there you have access to everything that I'm doing, from my arts to my philanthropy, to my mental health work and the podcast. Everything is there. That just makes it easy for people to find me.

Speaker 1: 45:17

And you know, at any time, if there was any kind of opening or you felt that there was a calling, that's your limbic system, you know, signaling to you that Henry Cameron possibly has something for you in your journey. So reach out to him. Don't ignore the little tugs, the little ahas, the little you know, hair standing up, even maybe the tears that may have fallen in this conversation. Reach out to him because he has the lived experience to hold space, to show you what is possible and what you possibly could access. Is there anything that is on your heart that you would like to leave with the listeners, to empower them?

Speaker 2: 45:55

I think I want to bring it back to that message of the moment, the powerful recognition that a moment is not a static place. I heard a metaphor recently I'm a king of metaphors, I love metaphor that life is like a cigar and the enjoyment of a cigar is the drag on the smoke and the smell and the wafting, the beauty of the movement of the smoke and all of that. The ember of the cigar, which is called the cherry of the cigar, which I love. It's kind of a dual metaphor because it's like the cherry on top of the sundae. The cherry of the cigar represents the moment and it's the space between what has been and what is yet to be and everything behind that ember. That cherry is ash. Let it be ash. It's a reminder of what was that. You experienced it, that you dragged on that smoke and you enjoyed what you could enjoy of it.

Speaker 2: 47:07

Sometimes you feel a little nauseous and you have to put the cigar down for a minute, let the ember go out, but you can always reignite it, right. And that space around the cherry, around the ember, is unpredictable. It's not a regular structure. Structure, right, it's irregular and there's so much cigar left to enjoy. But you've got to be the one to pick it up, reignite that ember and enjoy the cigar. And so I love that for a metaphor for not only the grief journey right, the ash is ash, there's no going back. You can't turn it back into whole cigar. It's past, it's a reminder of what's past. It's not that it's not important, but it's a reflection. It's an exercise in reflection, but there's still a lot of fresh tobacco yet to smoke. And tobacco is medicine, and and if you treat your life as transitional, as uneven, unpredictable, I think we might enjoy it a little more the curiosity, the wonder, the joy that's in the smoking of it.

Speaker 1: 48:25

So Thank you for that. Thank you for that visual. I think visuals really impact people and then they get to. They're like oh, that's what you're talking about. They need that visual to really reinforce what that space is and, you know, really understanding that time is a tool. It's not a toy, and we don't know how long we'll have the tool for. So use it to your best ability. And, yeah, I want to thank you for doing the alchemy in your life. You've taken the impurities and you've turned them into gold. Yet you haven't kept that gold to yourself. You're sharing it with others in a very profound way. So I want to thank you for sharing yourself and giving us the most valuable thing you have in life, which is your time. So thank you for honoring us with that valuable gift and being here with myself that I get to engage and be in delight with you and also share that with the listeners.

Speaker 2: 49:25

Thank you. Thanks for holding space and creating this beautiful platform to share.

Speaker 1: 49:31

Please remember to be kind to yourself. Hey, you made it all the way here. I appreciate you and your time. If you found value in this conversation, please share it out. If there was somebody that popped into your mind, take action and share it out with them. It possibly may not be them that will benefit. It's that they know somebody that will benefit from listening to this conversation. So please take action and share out the podcast. You can find us on social media on Facebook, instagram and TikTok under Lift One Self. On Facebook, instagram and TikTok under Lift One Self. And if you want to inquire about the work that I do and the services that I provide to people, come over on my website. I'm into a discovery call liftoneselfcom. Until next time, please remember to be kind and gentle with yourself. You matter.