Many of you may have noticed that, on the right side of the blog, I installed a chat tool so you guys can interact with each other. This is all thanks to one of your suggestions so if you have others, let me know! I hope you enjoy it! If you seem to, I’ll keep it up. 

Blog member, Daniel Lucas, has been helping me with a number of things over the last couple of years, so I decided to give him the pdf file for the new book to return the favor. Here’s his review: 

Let me start off by saying “My Life after Death: A Memoir From Heaven” has been the only book I have ever sat down and spent an entire day reading, start to finish. In under 9 hours I have laughed, cried, smiled, shook my head with disbelief, and pondered life more than ever before. Through Elisa’s loving description of Erik, and Erik’s vivid recounting of his experiences in Heaven, I have gained unmeasurable amounts of comfort and wonder about what comes next. I spent most of my life fearing death, but always running towards it because of my depression, anxiety and PTSD, but after Erik’s description of his own struggles, and how it can get better for us here and now, I finally see a light at the end of the tunnel – no pun intended! I finally feel like I’ve come home after a long, dark journey with crashing waves, and blinding lightning at Sea. I feel like I’ve walked for years through a desert only to find the most beautiful stream. Thanks to Elisa and Erik, I feel like I’m finally home.

Me: Erik, we’re going to talk about emotional resiliency. By the way, I love you!

Erik: Hi Mamacita!

Me: Aw.

Jamie: He says hi to everybody else who’s watching, too. Do you hear any feedback?

Me: No.

Jamie: Maybe it’s in my head.

Me: It’s all in your head, Jamie.

Jamie: I have to work on that!

Me: I know! Erik, what do you think? Tell us everything you can about emotional resiliency because a lot of us are not. We have a hard time bouncing back from loss, from struggle, any kind of hardship.

Jamie mimics Erik putting the back of his hand on his forehead and flinging his head back as if to say, ”Woe is me.”

Erik: Bouncing back. What makes you think that bouncing back is a positive thing, Mom?

Me: Well you tell me.

Jamie (looking back and forth): Oh, he’s walking now.

Jamie laughs.

Jamie: He’s talking like a professor.

Erik (waving his hand like a professor and talking with a sense of great self-importance): Emotional resiliency and what it means to me.

We both laugh.

Me: Where’s your pipe and your ascot?

Jamie: He’s snapping his fingers and creating those things. He’s having a good time with it.

Me: Good.

Erik: Emotional resiliency. I don’t want anyone to get into the trap of thinking that there are certain standards for resiliency. This is where I believe—

Jamie: He’s got his hand up.

Erik:–that we get into a pit because we think that we’re not performing to what society or our culture says that we need to be performing to, emotionally. Like let’s say your dad dies. All right so—

Jamie (laughing): Wait, do it again.

Erik: Your dad dies soooooo somebody gives you three days off. Yay! So you’re supposed to be sad for three days, and when you get back, you’re supposed to be a functioning person. What the fuck is that? That’s just some stupid politeness that one single person said along the way thought that it would be good enough to offer advice on how to move through the grieving process. A lot of what our culture is presenting to us was designed by one single person, and then it was like, “All right. We’ll call that the norm.” There is no norm in emotional resiliency. With that in mind, we’re not going to pretend that time is important in emotional resiliency. We’re not going to say that if you’re sad, you’re going to take yourself out of the hole because being happy is better. I’m not going to say that if you’re grieving, you’ve got to get over that shit because it’s not serving you. You can be happy because it’s seen as better. What the fuck? We always have our eye on a goal like, “Be happy, happy, happy, happy.”

He says that with a wide horizontal grin. I can’t possibly describe it.

Jamie and I laugh hard.

Jamie: I can’t do it like him. He has his lips back. “Happy, happy, happy.”

Me (chuckling): I can see him doing that!

Erik: It’s important, yeah, but is it always your goal to do it that way? No. So we have those moments when where we’re (air quotes) off, when we’re not feeling good. Great. Go feel that. Emotional resiliency is based on being emotionally authentic. I kinda wish that we would start teaching ourselves all of the terms and labels of emotion because we’ve gotten used to like a block of six or eight, and then whatever we’re feeling, we kind of shove it into one of those labels when really it’s not like that. Emotions have subtle—

Jamie (confused): He said, “subtle outlines,” and he’s explaining it.

Erik: Let’s say you’re grieving, but at the same time you’re happy. Like your grandmother just died and she had Alzheimer’s for fucking five years. It was horrible, You’re grieving the loss of your grandmother, but at the same time you’re so happy that she’s dead because she doesn’t have to go through that shit anymore.

Me: Yeah.

Erik: So you have grief with happiness layered on top of it. We don’t have a word to describe that, so you have to look at the subtleties of it. Your grief is important. It helps—

Jamie laughs hard.

Jamie: He goes, “Wait. We’re backing up.” (Then mimics Erik making the beep, beep beep sound of a truck backing up.)

I laugh.

Erik: Your grief is important. What is defined as your denser emotions, your negative, lower vibrational emotions—as people, we have to label everything.

Me: Oh yeah. Of course. Us humans!

Jamie (in a “disgusted with humans” like of voice): Yes, us humans! Now he’s walking like a robot.

Erik: We have to label them so we’ll call them lower vibrational emotions because that’s how they resonate energetically. They’re really important because they help you define your personality, what your character is, where your ego is, and it definitely shapes how you view your environment. Where do you see unity, and where do you see separation? The bulk of emotions—the lower vibrations and the higher vibrations—actually help you perceive energy in different lights. That’s like going into a room, the light’s off, and you don’t see that I have four chairs placed in a random pattern. Turn the light on, and you see it. So lower, denser vibrational emotions are like coming in with the light off, right? There’s a certain quality to that. All of a sudden you can move around the room; you can bump into things; you can fall; you can heighten other senses, and this happiness, joy, these higher, fine tuned vibrations are coming in with the light on and you’re not falling down anymore. You’re getting those kinds of experiences. You know exactly where the chairs are but now you can look at the texture of the chairs, where they’re placed and why they’re placed that way. Each one hold valuable things, valuable experiences.

Me: You’re not tripping over them either.

Erik: Yes! So, don’t run from the negative or lower vibrational emotions and see them as bad or less valuable. If we start turning our head away from this, we’re throwing away fifty percent of our emotions. Emotional resiliency will require you to acknowledge what it is, but I want you to look at it in layers. You might have the grief, the joy and then the scared, you know, fear on top of it because who are you going to be now that your grandma’s gone? You just spent the last 5 years helping her with her Alzheimer’s and now all of a sudden you’re free. New definitions, you know? So look at how you’re feeling; look at the layers of it and what each is offering to you. Every day, you have to be strong enough—this is what I would call the resilience part—you have to be strong enough to say, “How am I feeling today?” A lot of times, we don’t check in, and we just think we’re carrying over what we had yesterday. You had a shitty day yesterday? You went to bed, you woke up and (he snaps his fingers) you’re like, “I’m going to have a shitty day today, too.” What’s up with that? Why are we resigning to where we were in the moment prior is going to place us where we are now?

Jamie (Leaning back in the chair, laughing): Stop! Go over there. (She waves her hand dismissively to the right.) He just came up behind the camera and he goes (she waves her hand in front of the computer) “That’s bullshit.”

Me: Erik you are something else!

Jamie: It was like a really bad magician’s maneuver. I don’t know what he’s doing. Stop, Erik!

Me: God, who knows what he’s going to pull out of his hat?

Jamie (shielding her eyes): I’m just going to stop looking at him if he’s going to do that.

Erik: The moment prior has no influence on the moment that you’;re in, When you wake up, you have to ask yourself, “How am I feeling?” Because you might feel relaxed, happy, rested and hopeful. And you can take these and shape the day in the way you feel is necessary. I think another downfall that we have when it comes to having emotional resiliency—

(Chimes tinkling)

Jamie: He’s messing with my chimes.

I laugh.

Jamie: I’m not looking at him.

Me: He is for real? He’s messing with your chimes?

Jamie: Yeah, did you hear them go off?

Me: Yeah.

Jamie: Yeah, he’s being really obnoxious.

Me: Erik, you’re such a pest!

Jamie: He’s doing it visually so that I will mess up and smile and laugh. Do you know those oversized hands?

Me: Uh huh.

Jamie (making movements like she’s putting gloves on): He’s got those on.

Me: Like clown hands?

Jamie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They remind me of Mickey Mouse gloves.

Me: Oh yeah. Right.

Jamie: Erik you have totally gotten me off track.

Me: Just go on, Erik.

Jamie: Just do it to other people. (She nods her head at Erik and says,) Yeah, others.

Me: You can come over and be obnoxious with me afterwards. That’s fine. Jamie needs a rest.

Jamie (pointing at the camera): Go to everybody else’s house that’s watching this!

Me: Oh, yeah! Guys, he’s been known to do that. He can split himself into infinite Eriks so he can check you out and punk you no matter where you are in the world.

Jamie laughs and shakes her head.

Jamie: We need to do the, uh, “Erik has Mickey Mouse Hands” club. See how many people can see Erik with Mickey Mouse hands.

Me: That’s a good one, and count the fingers because I think Mickey Mouse only had three fingers or something like that. Four fingers.

Jamie: Weird, yeah.

Me: Yeah, kind of weird. Okay, and go oooooon.

Erik: So it’s important to check out how you’re feeling so that you can design where you want to go in your day. That’s another downfall, the way that we design how we have to feel throughout the day, we give too much permission to other people to shape how we feel. So when you go out in public, you know, you don’t want people to see you cry. Well why not? Why can’t you cry? That doesn’t make you less of a person. Throw those shoulder back; hold that head up high and just get a good tissue.

Jaime mimics him blotting his eyes.

Erik: It’s okay to express your authentic you. When you do that, that’s your emotional resilience as long as you can look at, “What are you feeling? What are the layers of it?” because most of the time you’re just grouping it into one of six. You just remembered the way that you should feel. Then decide, “What am I getting out of it? What do I need?” Sometimes your need can’t come from how you’re feeling so you have to have a choice of changing it. You know, emotions come from within, Mom. They don’t come from an external source.

Me: Yeah, but when you start sobbing in public, they’re going to come up—well first of all, some of them are going to be like, “Whoa. What’s going on?” But some of them might just do the pity thing, and it seems like that could make you worse. You might feel more sorry for yourself and that can put you into that lower vibrational space. So what can you do about that?

Erik: Yeah. That comes from each individual, right? So someone might be staying sad because they like the victim energy that the environment gives them. So they have an unhealthy pattern with energy. It’s not really an unhealthy pattern with emotional quality because they’ll be able to verbalize, “I don’t like being sad. I don’t like being like this. I want to succeed.” They can visualize it, but they don’t know how to get the supportive energy from their environment without being a victim. That’s like a different thing. That’s like a schooch, schooch, schooch.

Jamie wipes her hand to the right like she’s scraping crumbs of a table.

Erik: That’s a different topic.

Jamie (Laughing): Schooch, schooch, schooch?

Me: I tell you. This is fun! This is fun today.

Jamie: You just have to lighten the mood from what just happened prior.

Me: That’s true. We just got through interviewing Jeffrey Dahmer so we need some comic relief! Okay, anything else alone those lines?

Erik: Ding!