End-of-Life Support Through Spirit, Energy, and Ancestral Work with Christabeth Ingold

What if dying could be more peaceful, intentional, and healing for both the living and the dying? In this powerful conversation, healer and death priestess Cristabeth Ingold shares how her soul’s calling guides her to support individuals and families through death, grief, and spiritual healing. Her work spans the physical and energetic realms, blending bodywork, astrology, ancestral healing, and soul-guided practices to help people face the end of life with clarity and peace.

Christabeth works closely with the dying and their loved ones, offering bedside support and spiritual guidance as souls prepare to transition. She combines tools like Akashic records, oracle cards, energy medicine, and traditional Hawaiian Lomi Lomi massage to bring comfort and clarity during life’s most sacred thresholds. Her journey began early in life, feeling called to this path through personal experiences of death and loss. As a death doula and spiritual practitioner, she now helps others heal grief, explore forgiveness, and reconnect with ancestral wisdom.

Christabeth also speaks about breaking down the cultural and patriarchal systems that distance us from death, calling instead for a return to ritual, ceremony, and conscious living. Through her work, she invites us to examine how we carry emotional pain and how unprocessed grief can impact our physical health. Whether guiding souls to the other side or helping the living reflect on their legacy, Christabeth reminds us that healing is always possible and that we can always begin again, even in our final breaths.

www.soulfullynourishing.com

https://www.instagram.com/christabethli/

Transcript

Christabeth: [00:00:00] The invitation to be open and be curious. Break open the ways that we're thinking and what we think we know to be truth. And we can always come back to this is what's really true for me. But then as we are here in these bodies right now, how do we taste life? 

Jill: Welcome back to Seeing Death. Clearly. I'm your host, Jill McClennen, a death doula and end of life coach.

Here on my show, I have conversations with guests that explore the topics of death, dying, grief, and life itself. My goal is to create a space where you can challenge the ideas you might already have about these subjects. I want to encourage you to open your mind and consider perspectives beyond what you may currently believe to be true.

In this episode, healer and Death, priestess Christabeth Ingold shares how she supports people through the spiritual, emotional, and energetic layers of death and grief, blending body work, astrology, ancestral healing, and tools like the Akashic Records. She helps clients find peace, clarity, [00:01:00] and connection at life's end.

Chris Beth opens up about how her early encounters with death shaped her path. Why she believes death work is deeply needed in our disconnected death Phobic culture, she speaks about the importance of ceremony, ritual, and returning to ancestral wisdom. We explore how unprocessed grief affects the body, the role of forgiveness, and how conscious dying can also be a path to deep healing for the living.

Thank you for joining us for this conversation. Welcome Chris Beth to the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on. If you just wanna start us off, tell us a little bit about who you are, if you wanna share where you come from, anything like that. 

Christabeth: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so stoked to be here and see where we go.

So yes, my name is Christopher and Gold and I am a healer and a death priestess. I work in the whole human field and with our human bodies, and also a ton with spirit as well. I do everything from Akashic records readings to mentoring, and with my [00:02:00] death priestessing. That's a whole spectrum of different things I do.

Could be doing an astrological death chart with somebody's past loved one if they're looking to understand the death that like they were there for, they weren't there for, they didn't maybe know their grandmother who passed, but they wanna be able to look at the death chart to get a sense. And it can also help with healing and grief to actually sit bedside working energetically and.

Spiritually with the one who is dying and helping their soul transition, and so I'm happy to talk more about that too, that whole spectrum of stuff. I practice astrology, I love astrology, and I'm also a body worker, so I'm a licensed massage therapist, and my specialty is Hawaiian LMI Lomi massage, and I really love that body work.

It's my favorite. Just recently I've realized I've been practicing 10 years this year for Lomi. That feels really special. And it's also, again, like very. More deeply transformative and it's beautiful to support any kind of transition, [00:03:00] grief, anything along those lines. I'm a life coach, Oracle card reader and energy medicine practitioners have different types of energy work and energy medicine under my belt, and it's kind of just like meeting the client where they're at, pulling out the tools needed in that moment.

To really help just support their systems in the ways that they need support. That's the overarching work I do. It is my heart's work. I love all of it so much, and right now I'm located in East Hampton, Massachusetts. Originally from Western Mass, but I lived in Boston for a good 20 years. And then in this 20 year kind of like.

Full, full cycle kind of thing. Ended up moving back to Western Mass really recently. And also, I, I like to say too, I really hail from Switzerland as well. I was born there in recent years and I've always had a connection there and, and to my, especially my gross mutti there, my grandmother who in 2022 passed my connection there still is strong and beautiful and it really hit me [00:04:00] in these past couple years of like, oh yeah, like.

My first language was actually really hearing German, even though my mom spoke English and she's from the us, my dad's from Switzerland and his family's there. My first foods, the waters, all of these firsts I had as an infant were actually there. That is really the land I'm connected to. I often think about that when I think about who I am, like introducing myself to people.

So 

Jill: death priestess. I like that. That's really interesting. And do you. Do like, I like also the having lots of tools in the toolbox. I'm one of those people as well. I've got lots of tools in my toolbox and they're not for everybody. Not everybody I work with is interested. I. In meditation or energy healing, or I read tarot cards.

Not everybody I can work with is gonna be interested in it. If anything, actually I do tarot cards with like all kinds of people that aren't interested in the other things that I do. I feel like a lot of us need to have a lot of tools for working with people because everybody's different. [00:05:00] When you work with people, are they mainly people that are at the end of life?

I've never heard of that. Hawaiian. Style of massage. So I'm kind of curious about that too. What makes it different than others? Are you typically working with people that are dying? Are you working with them? If they find out they have a terminal illness and they're preparing, what's that typically look like?

Christabeth: So, you know what's so interesting? I've been reflecting recently from my younger life and how I got to where I am today. I keep finding. These ways in terms of how I came into my heart's work and what I'm doing, not just things I found that I love or like I stumbled into, or I've had my own hardship that brought me.

To the places I now am to offer what I'm offering, but I'm like, oh yeah, I've been death priest to sing my whole life. It's really part of my soul, DNA in this way. And so I feel like I've attended different deaths over my life in different ways, whether it was physically with a pet or even a little animal outside or even earth itself.

And then with [00:06:00] people, I've had friends that have had a family member pass, and I was there with them when it happened or supporting them through that. I find a lot of times souls. It could be somebody I know or somebody that I'm close to that knows somebody who is passing or has transitioned. And that soul will find me as a portal to help them transition and move on.

And again, some people don't believe in that, some people do, but that's my experience of it. I've found over the years, a lot of times that my energy field and my body's being used actually as this portal, I have specific ways to work with. Those dying that I could feel and sense like, oh, they're good.

They're at peace, ready to go. It's every death rate is unique. Sometimes there are beings though that are maybe needing a little extra help, a little healing before they can transition in those ways. And so I might tend to the person. A lot of times it's like people, like people know me, like, are like, Hey, can you come to my, my mother's hospital bed or visit my grandmother, or whatever it might be.

Or maybe energetically, again, I'm working with the person. I'm [00:07:00] not there physically. But I'm checking in on their systems with permission and helping them. Sometimes I know them and sometimes I don't know them personally, but it's like a person knows them with like one degree separation. And so it's been this really interesting journey with being, finding me and going, oh, okay, here's a portal we can use.

And I've honed that skill more and more because it's actually was really hard at first. I'm like, what's happening? Why do I feel so outta whack? And I was like, oh. Now I get it. Okay, now we can begin to deal with this and really help them. I don't know if I'm exactly answering your question, but this is what is coming to mind.

Thinking about this work and the ways that I keep stepping into it. Even when I have been bedside with somebody, there are energetic and physical things I can do with the body, with my energy work and body work to really help soothe the body, which can help soothe the nervous system. And so when I'm doing that work, I'm not.

Working on healing. Like if you came for a massage, we want things to move in your body. We wanna maybe heal some things, but when you have a dying body, it's [00:08:00] really about not moving anything. It's really offering that soothingness and comfort for peace. And so it's very different in that way from actual.

Massage therapy. Yeah. Or anything along those lines. And the Hawaiian lmi LMI massage. Again, very transformative. Full body massage. There's many lineages of lmi. LMI and I practice. I have the honor practicing many of them Hawaiian ancestors. Some of those can be used with. People who are dying and who may not be dying yet, but might be terminally ill.

I've definitely worked with people with cancer who recovered. The core of it really is offering forgiveness, forgiving ourselves and anybody else. It's a deeper practice of what else needs healing so I can feel more whole myself. Maybe somebody does. Transition. They do pass, they do die. So through that process though, there's still this way that we can offer forgiveness, that can help them feel more at peace and more healed and whole in themselves before they leave.

So yeah. Does that make sense? 

Jill: [00:09:00] Yeah, it does. It all makes sense. So many times people will say to me, well, when did you get into this work? And usually I'll say, when I took care of my grandmother at the end of her life, that's really what started me down this path. I think I've been doing the work all of my life in Shamanisms.

They talk about how a lot of people become shamans when they have a near death experience, like they die, and that's what triggers it. When I was born, I wasn't breathing. I kind of died and then came back. That experience really made me into who I am as far as the work that I do. I just didn't start.

Actively doing the work. Well, a couple years ago, but I had always been doing this work since I was a child. There's definitely been experiences where souls, I think, have visited me. I'm good at blocking it and being like, Nope, leave me alone. I don't want you. I can't deal with you. I like to focus on helping the souls that are still here in the physical body transition easily.

But I will [00:10:00] sometimes do that work with the soul if I feel like. That they really need it because you're right, it's very discombobulating. You feel like you're going crazy, like, what's happening to me? Why am I feeling things I shouldn't be feeling? Why am I hearing things even though it's not really hearing?

I've tried to say to people, it's almost like if you're having a conversation with somebody that speaks a different language, where you're like, I don't really know what's happening here, but something is going on, so. So all of that for sure, but I definitely do try to stick with the people that are still physically in a body while they're here and just help them along.

But it is work that is so needed, I think, for both ends of the spectrum, right? Like sometimes people say when you are walking the line, a lot of us walk that line between life and death. I think on both sides of that line, there are just a lot of souls that. Need help transitioning. And I like that you mentioned the massage having to do [00:11:00] a lot with forgiveness because it feels to me with people that are living and with one person in particular, one soul in particular, that really got into my head, there was a lot of forgiveness that needed to happen with them and their sibling.

I know the sibling and I was like, you're gonna think I'm crazy. I think your dead brother's in my head. And he was like, I don't think you're crazy. Mm-hmm. It's totally possible. I was like, okay, good. I'm glad you don't think I'm crazy 'cause I feel like I'm crazy. But there was just forgiveness that needed to happen and it seems to me if we can find that forgiveness here now before we die.

It'll just help our soul transition, and that's part of what I try to do with people when they're at the end of life, is help them forgive themselves and forgive others so that they can move on. You know, their regrets, their shame, all the stuff that keeps us stuck, right? It just kind of keeps us stuck [00:12:00] here.

So it's nice that you do that work. People even early on, because I think we all have things even now, right? I'm 46, I'm healthy as far as I know, not dying anytime soon. But there's still things that I need to work with around forgiveness. And sometimes when I talk to people about forgiveness, they'll say, oh, well, you know, I'm just gonna let that person off the hook.

And I'm like, no, that's not, but forgiveness really is. Though, right? It's not, we have a very distorted version of what forgiveness is in our culture, and if anything, we need to forgive. For ourselves, not for the other person. When I read tarot cards, I feel like so many times I'm reading tarot cards and I'm like, look, this thing that you're holding on to is just causing you a blockage and causing you to torture yourself.

Just let it go. Yes, it happened. Yes, it's real. Also, it's not serving you anymore, it's just stopping you from moving forward. I feel like so many of us have those things. Let's work on it now. Let's [00:13:00] take care of it now. 

Christabeth: I love that. It's so sweet. And that point though, like just like you said, Jill, of working on it now, can help us now and help us today.

When it's time for us to transition, then it's like. We've done that work enough where if there's still work to be done, we can still engage with it. Or it's like I've been clean out enough. It really is like poisonous to our systems to hold something. As you were saying, it's keeping you stuck. It's not allowing you to move forward.

And the other thing too is we're all going to die and where there ways where we hold onto things that we don't forgive, forgive ourselves. Cells, right? It's not about letting somebody off. Where can I forgive myself so I can have peace in the ways that I've held onto this? Whether you forgive the other person or not, they're still gonna do what they're gonna do, but it's like I'm the one holding it.

So now it becomes poisonous to me. Well, how does that create disharmony and dis-ease in my body and make me sick and unwell and coming from this way bigger energetic perspective, that everything is [00:14:00] energy at the end of the day, whereas there are energy in our bodies that. Moves or stays in a particular way that creates the disharmony of the disease that can make us sick or ill.

There's also a difference between naturally dying because of whatever else might be going on and an actual disease. We maybe have had some poison in our lives that we didn't tend to or want to acknowledge. That's a whole other rabbit hole I can go down, but forgiveness piece. So coming back to that forgiveness piece allows us to.

Be more free. Be more open, feel better in ourselves. And have that peace. Have that peace so we can feel as well as we can for the very incredibly precious time that we do have here. 

Jill: Yeah. 'cause it is precious, and even if you live to be 90 or a hundred, it's not that long. Sometimes I think that freaks people out sometimes to me, it kind of brings me some comfort where I'm like, it's not that long, so why are we taking it all so seriously?

You know, I'm just gonna try to be here and experience. [00:15:00] I play this little game with myself sometimes when I get stressed out or overwhelmed or want to turn to something to distract myself, like my phone, I'll think to myself, all right, say you were a ghost observing this situation. You got to come back into your body for 10 minutes, what would you be doing?

And it's often not the thing that I was going to do. Mm-hmm. I would be watching my children and talking to them, maybe touching their hair. Maybe I would eat something that I really like. Maybe I dance, maybe I do some. Jumping jacks, but it's often not the thing I was going to do to distract myself from the stress and anxiety of life because life is stressful and there's a lot of things that cause anxiety.

And so sometimes when I play that game with myself, it really does help me understand that I'm not gonna be in this body for that long. And there's so much that we can do. In these [00:16:00] bodies that we're not gonna be able to do eventually, whether we move on to a different plane or get reincarnated. Okay, sure.

But like not this body. It's not gonna be the one that I have now. And so I. Use that as another tool to help me get very present and really focus on the things that are important. Because so many times, a lot of my regrets, a lot of my shame, a lot of the things I need to forgive myself for are when I look back even 10 years ago, of how I would let other things get in the way.

Of me focusing on what was really important. I do feel shame about that. I do feel regrets about it, but I try not to get stuck in it again. Sometimes I will, like I, I'm still human. There's still times where I wanna beat myself up about it, but for the most part, I try to use that as in all right, from this moment forward, I can do my best to not add to that, right?

To be present, to pay [00:17:00] attention to the things that are important. Because, yeah, this body, I mean, it is pretty cool. Even if your body's not perfect, no body's perfect, right? Like, I still have things that hurt. I still, you know, I get migraines, like the migraines are ugh, they're like terrible. But like, it's one of those things where I'm like, yeah, but also if I'm gonna get real honest with myself, usually when I get migraines, it's 'cause I'm stressing myself out, not focusing on the things that I want to focus on.

It's like my body's way, like you were saying. About the disease that your body will cause you to feel if you are not processing, if you're not honoring, if you're not doing what you need to do, I get migraines, eh, it's just how it goes. 

Christabeth: Yeah, totally. It, it's so interesting. I have a similar tool in my Kashic records readings.

A piece of it is looking at. Both the ancestral lineage stuff as well as other lifetimes, you can think about them as past lifetimes or lifetimes happen simultaneously. Whoever listens to this believes in this stuff. And so I think about it in terms of what choice am I making now even 10 years from now or say [00:18:00] in three lifetimes from now, I'm gonna have, I'm gonna be dealing with, and when I say dealing with, I mean like.

Am I gonna make a choice that's gonna be supportive to my soul, that's gonna be supportive to my energy and feel really good? Or am I making choices that someday I'm gonna have to go, oh shit, I really need to heal this now. Really look at, I started to think about that a couple years ago and I was like, oh, wow, that's a cool perspective.

I. To go, yeah, what choices am I making now? Maybe some point in my soul stories and my soul energy field will carry whatever I do. It's gonna be an energetic imprint. What's that repercussion gonna be? Is it gonna be something supportive or something not supportive? And what's gonna have to happen here?

And the same thing with the ancestral lineage stuff is talking about forgiveness with ancestors. Also, the dis-ease that can be carried down. Also, the incredible strengths that can be carried through our ancestral lineages as well. But a lot of times we have. Burdens and we have things we've been dealing with, whether our whole lives are suddenly at a certain age something pops up and we're like, what's this about?

Right? Like for example, you're suddenly like, what are these migraines [00:19:00] about? And then we go back. In your ancestral lineage, we could say 14 generations ago this thing happened and your ancestral lineage. That your soul's energy is sharing with us. And so it's like, oh, now it makes sense to my brain. Now I can put these things together as to why these things are happening.

And also now we can work with actually healing it. And when I'm healing myself, I'm healing the ancestors backward and forward as well. But coming back to tying it together and with that healing and forgiveness and how do I carry things bringing. Who I am and how I show up in spaces with those who are dying.

What am I carrying? How can I show up the best that I can for them? Having so many tools, what does the person need right now? Or if they do have loved ones with them, what do their loved ones need right now? Is there some sort of forgiveness that can happen that everybody then can have some other level?

Even if it's a little bit of healing, the person who's dying having more peace, the beloveds of them having more [00:20:00] peace and bringing in now the different tools to offer. 

Jill: This is probably a bigger question because I don't even know what I believe as far as what happens to us after we die. Do we get reincarnated?

Maybe reincarnation is even just that all these lives are happening at the exact same time. I mean, I've heard people say we could actually be in two bodies at the same time, and you could walk right past yourself on the street. Right? All of these things I've heard, I'm open to all of it, especially because I have had.

Experiences where I'm like, that wasn't me. There was definitely something else, and I think it was somebody else's soul. Why it was here, why it was trying to talk to me. I don't know, but. The idea when you're talking about like your ancestral lineage. I think sometimes when I think about it, I'm like, so my family, my physical body family, and my grandmother was Ukrainian, my grandfather was Irish.

Like there's that physical lineage that does [00:21:00] impact who I am, right? I was raised by people that were raised by people and we're just taught kind of along the lines. But then if I am reincarnated. And maybe spent a lifetime in India and maybe spent a lifetime in Hawaii. That is still part of my spiritual lineage.

Even my parents in that lifetime and my grandparents in that lifetime have shaped me into being who I am. Me, Jill, this soul, in a lot of cases, I don't have anything in relation to my parents. Like we are very, very different people. And so I'm like, I don't know where I came from. They raised me. Sure. But we're very different people.

So like, I don't know. I think about that and I'm like, so who actually are my ancestors? Like who would be my ancestor? Because like sometimes I do pray, meditate, whatever it is, and like I try to call in my ancestors to be like, look, I just need a little help and need a little guidance. And I'm like, but who are these people?

Where are they coming from? Are they the Ukrainian people or are they [00:22:00] somebody from, I don't know, a lifetime? That happened 500 years ago. But then I've also heard that we could reincarnate, like I could actually go back in time in my next life. Yeah. So just because right now this is 2025. I might die this year, get born again into a next lifetime, and it might be 15 hundreds because time doesn't move the same way, but the whole thing makes my brain go like, woo, that's a lot.

But I love it. I love to think about it and talk about it. 

Christabeth: Me too. It's so fun because this is where we also get to break down, just even if you don't have to believe in any of it, but just that open curiosity and wonderment of like. How does that also land in your system when you talk about it or think about it?

Our brain likes to be in this linear dimension and think particular ways. We're taught to think particular ways as well. How are we interconnected with all of these things? Anytime I do any kind of opening with any session or work, I always do a beautiful kind of honoring or inviting in, right? The ancestors and the [00:23:00] beautiful energies that are gonna support the work that I'm doing and all of that.

And I always bring in the ancestors that are connected to. Both our bone and our soul. What is the ancestors that we embody through our blood and our bones, but also the ancestors that our souls, our energetic fields, like who the essence of who we are is actually connected to which we, we might not physically know in this life, but our soul knows, our energy knows, and our other lifetimes know because we've.

Lived other lifetimes in other places and other realms as well. Like not just on earth, in this universe, in the multiverse, we could intergalactically. You know, we've been potentially lots of places and have had lots of experiences. Who are our soul people? What have we learned and how to tap back into that and what's gonna be helpful around those pieces.

But yeah, coming back to breaking down the bounds of how our brains operate in terms of that linear process, that keeping things in a box process. Maybe none of it is true. Maybe all of it is true. I always just come back to what feels true for you. You know what feels true for me? Like when I'm thinking about [00:24:00] things or hearing something new or talking about it, how does my body respond to some of these things?

Sometimes I'm like, yeah, may I don't know if I believe in that or I'm open to learning about that, or, that sounds really cool. And there's certain times where it's like, oh my God, that feels so true in my body, that I'm interconnected into like the Star series for very specific reasons, for example, or other parts of the world, because maybe I've had in my.

Past, quote unquote, like a lineage there that I was connected to in some way, shape or form. I just feel drawn there. I just get it, that kind of thing as well. Yes. It's so interesting, like where we go, where we don't go. I mean like after life is what I'm talking about here. And again, if you believe in that, don't believe in, it's like.

As I'm speaking about this, what I wanna say really is the invitation to be open and be curious. Break open the ways that we're thinking and what we think we know to be truth. And we can always come back to like, this is what's really true for me. But then what do we get to as we are here in these bodies right now?

How do we taste life [00:25:00] if we're able to be more open-minded and hear different perspectives and think differently, and how does that add to our lives? And give to us as well and nourish us. While we have the time here, even if it is like 90 or a hundred years, because it could be tomorrow and 

Jill: I don't know.

Well not, but it could be. And yeah, I think there's this resistance to things that we don't believe to be true when somebody else says it, rather than opening ourselves to it. And again, you don't have to believe it. But just opening yourself up to thinking about it. It's like a trigger for so many people.

If you say something that I don't believe to be true, it's like you're attacking me and I need to shut it down. Rather than just being like, okay, I'll just open myself up to hear and think. And again, you still might at the end not believe it to be true. It doesn't hurt you to open yourself up to thinking about it either, right?

It does seem like it then opens us up [00:26:00] to questioning more of what we believe. Because when I was first learning about reincarnation, you know, going 20 something years ago, I remember reading in a book where somebody said, why is it any harder to believe that we live more than one lifetime than it is to believe that we only live one?

And it's just because that's what we were taught. Yeah. And so when you think about it, I'm like, yeah, really? Why is one weirder than the other? Just because I was taught growing up South Jersey Catholic girl, this is what I was taught to believe. And so at that moment, it didn't make me believe in reincarnation.

It definitely made me question a little bit, so maybe it was just 'cause that's what I was taught to believe and then it was like, oh, well, what else was I just taught to believe that might not be true, and that just leads us down this place that can be uncomfortable. There's nothing wrong with being uncomfortable.

There's nothing wrong with feeling a little discomfort and saying, well, maybe [00:27:00] that isn't actually true, just because my mom told me, or my teacher or my priest, or whatever it is, told me it. Doesn't mean that it is true, but then we will get met with resistance from the people that we love. Because sometimes it's like, you know, we're again very patriarchal like society of like, you do it because I told you to do it, and I'm the parent.

And so when you're like going to the parents and you're like, Hey, maybe this isn't true, they wanna shut it down, which makes us uncomfortable. But that's a bigger problem, right? That doesn't mean it has to be my problem. I could still question and think things through and hopefully the people that love me will still love me, even if I don't believe what they believe.

Right? I try. That's kind of where I try to go. Mm-hmm. 

Christabeth: Yeah, absolutely. And as you say that, there's a couple things I'm being reminded of or thinking about, and one is that patriarchal perspective in society we've been living in for so long now. Really, our ancestors didn't live that way for longer. But it's like a burden.

The ways that like you have to think this way. You [00:28:00] have to be this way. You have to show up in life this way. You even have to die a particular way these days, or be a particular, like don't be a brown person in America and die because you're not gonna get. The care you need or the tending to, or whatever it might be.

Right. There's also these political pieces connected to it as well. Racial pieces, social, all of it. Thinking about though, really how, even with the death work piece, there's, I feel like a reclaiming of like, listen. The funeral industry and the death industry has been what it's been only for like a hundred years.

Mm-hmm. But I know for myself growing up, even until recent years, I had a particular idea of what it looked like to die and how the body was tended to afterwards. And this is a point of learning other cultures, learning other places in the world, and how they do things as well. Where it's like, whoa, so many other places in the world don't do death the same way.

I'm not saying one way is better than another, and I am saying how we're doing it. Today, now is not [00:29:00] healthy in our culture because we're so disconnected. Our ancestors have done it completely differently. They were so connected to, it was just part of life and it was part of culture and society, and it was a beautiful celebration and now there's so much trauma that's incurred.

I. Or grief that's shut down and people aren't given the time and space to process grief. 'cause God forbid you have a feeling here in this culture now and again, I'm talking about more of this patriarchal lens of like, this is how you do it. This is how you don't do it. And if you don't do it, you're gonna be punished.

This particular way I. And I come back to forgiveness where it's kind of like, now you're gonna feel this way and now you're gonna feel guilty about whatever it might be. And the ways that my mom died last week and I have to be back to work this week already, but I can't function. But you have to come back, you know?

'cause this is how we built things and this is the patriarchal way. So feeling like this reclaim. Breaking down because our systems are totally in the middle of breaking down right now as we record this. It is like 2025. The breaking down of our systems right now is really painful and also we have an incredible [00:30:00] opportunity to do it differently and bring forward, being able to have people die more peacefully in more beautiful ways, to have the opportunity to die, the good death, whatever that might be, and people like us and all of our other people.

Supporting that in beautiful ways where it doesn't have to be an emergency and it doesn't have to be traumatic or like, oh, somebody's died. You gotta just like call the coroner and like come get the body kind of thing. And yeah. And so the other thing that as you're speaking I was thinking about was having kind of coming back to this.

Spiritual energetic lens. Having these experiences more recently about actually doing some shamanic journeying and getting very clear that I have some Irish ancestry. I know I talked about my Swiss, but I also have some Irish. My Irish ancestry is calling me forward very specifically to do this work, and I have the chills so bad.

Even if I say that I was shown in another quote, unquote, past life, whether it's happening simultaneously now or. Way back in the day, I was a death priestess in that culture and I was also tending [00:31:00] to the death and helping the family have ceremony at home's funeral, because that's what we did. All of these beautiful.

Things that I was able to support in that process for the person dying and the beloveds that were left and grieving. I was a banshee. There was keening. I didn't know that banshee was a real thing until I learned about it. I was like, oh, that's what was happening. Once that soul memory got activated, then the energetic DNA I'm carrying in this body and this life right now is activated.

Spirit has said, no, we're claiming you to do this because you've actually done this before. This is what you've done before out of probably a gazillion things, at least in that lineage, in that. Past life or past lives of being a death priestess in this way, bringing all of these ways forward, doing things differently.

And it's not necessarily new. And as you brought up, oh, I have so many tools, right? Like these tools may not be new because they might be ancient, but it's like we're remembering them again as we break down the patriarchal structures within our brains. Within our mind, within our bodies somatically, and we're reclaiming ourselves and we're [00:32:00] doing things differently, thinking about things differently, thinking outside the box and basically saying, hell the fuck.

No, we're not gonna do this anymore. We're not gonna do life like this anymore. And that we all have a spot at the table. No matter who you are, there's an equal spot for everybody here. So fuck the patriarchy. Basically what I'm getting to through all of that, but the way it all interconnected into this topic of death.

So 

Jill: yeah, and that, that's where I said to my husband a couple of days ago. I'm like, I feel like this is the death rattle of the patriarchy where it's loud, it's scary. It's not pleasant to be around when people have that death rattle going on because we think that they're suffering, they're usually really not.

It's just the body's shutting down. It's just a natural part of the process. Unfortunately, I. It seems like so many people, indigenous people, women, people of color in the United States, we've all been saying like things need to change. And like it wasn't changing. Mm-hmm. [00:33:00] And so now we had to do it the hard way.

And I don't wanna live through this, I don't want to experience this, but I don't have a choice, so I'm just gonna make the best of it that I can. They're breaking a bunch of stuff. That means that we can rebuild. Until it got broken. It didn't seem like they were rebuilding it any different. They were just going along.

So, oh well now it got broken and it's going to unfortunately impact women and people of color and indigenous people the most. That's the really unfortunate thing of it. You know, they will be the ones that are going to have the worst consequences from a lot of these things. But if we do live more than one lifetime, this is just one experience and supposedly we chose it anyway, right?

That there was part of me that was like, I wanna be born so that I'm around for 2025, because it's gonna be an exciting experience. Even if it's painful, it's gonna be interesting. But I try to not get [00:34:00] attached. To any of the outcome, any of the experience. 'cause again, I could have a heart attack and die tomorrow.

I could get hit by a car and die tomorrow and won't be here for any of it anyway. So why worry about it while also just trying to do what I can, which to me is, you know, I have two children. So I'm gonna raise my children and be there for them and support them. One's a young white man. Raise him to be the best that he can be when everything else around him is trying to pull him one direction.

I'm still trying to pull him this direction to be like, you know, no shame. There should be no shame and guilt, or a white man. But also you need to understand your privilege and you need to use it for good. Don't be a dick. 'cause I'm not raising anything like that. That's what I 

Christabeth: try to 

Jill: do. 

Christabeth: So thinking about, all of us have our own roles here, like there's ways for each of us to be engaging as skillfully.

As we can in our lives to try to make the best of our lives in [00:35:00] whatever way we want to make it. Whatever, that, and all of us might have our own definition of like having a good life, having a good death. What does that mean? Do that the best that we can with the resources that we have. Also, how we impact others, right?

Like raising kids, how are you impacting them? Having community, friends, family, neighbors, global community. How are we, what's our impact here? What do we want our impact to be here? What do we want to be attached to or not attached to? Finding ourselves way too attached. This is actually not healthy for me, but if I detach and refocus that energy, how then do I get fed and how do I feed the world with that impact as well?

I think those pieces, the impact of things, the impact of our actions of who we are and what we're standing for. We are our own individual unique selves, and yet we're a microcosm ourselves, but we're part of the macrocosm. What's that impact there and how do we. Through our actions wanna be steering the ship.

Not everybody's not gonna be on board. We're not all gonna be on the same ship. A lot of us aren't gonna wanna be on the same [00:36:00] boat as other people. But where can we steer it in a way that can be supportive for our humanity, for people and the earth too, moving forward. Mm-hmm. And then like, and so what's my soul gonna be doing in the future?

You know, future quote unquote future life. Yeah. Thinking about what's gonna happen now and then what's gonna happen in that future, and what if I'm my own ancestor, five generations from now. It's like, oh, I've come back to be my own ancestor. What have I done well and what have I done now that I gotta deal with some bullshit I left behind?

Any messes I've left behind. Yeah. Yeah. And it's 

Jill: hard because, you know, a lot of us, the messes that we create in this lifetime. Is often because of things that happened to us. Again, either things that we were taught to believe that aren't necessarily true, but we clinging to it and so we are fighting everybody, or we were hurt and traumatized and because we don't know how to process that well, we hurt and traumatize other people.

And so there is some [00:37:00] of that where it's kind of outside of our control. What happens to us? But hopefully we do get to a point where we say, okay, these things happen to me. What am I gonna do with it? You know, am I gonna use it to help make me more compassionate for people that have also had really bad things, even if it's not the same bad thing as me, they've had really bad things happen to them, so am I gonna be more kind and compassionate towards them, or am I gonna let it make me angry and bitter, and then just take it out on everybody?

I try to choose the other path, but in the past I was fighting everybody. My trauma was making it, but it wasn't a conscious decision. I wasn't doing it on purpose, and I had to really get to that point where I was like, oh, this is really weird. Like why do I fight people around the same time of the year all the time, like physically fighting people.

Verbally fighting. Fighting online, fighting in the streets, where my husband's like, you're gonna get yourself killed one day. Like, why are you fighting with this [00:38:00] guy? It just was coming outta me. Eventually I started working through things in my head and I was like, oh, that's 'cause you didn't ever deal with this trauma that happened to you on this weekend, and it's coming outta you whether you want to or not.

Once I was able to deal with it, once I was able to process it. Did a shamanic journey like that weekend, I planned a whole ritual. I did a cacao ceremony to process it. That was a couple years ago. Now the weekend comes and goes and I'm like, oh, look at that. Doesn't mean it's easy, but also it wasn't easy what I was doing that was terrible.

I would always feel terrible afterwards. Fighting with people makes me feel so. Crappy physically, emotionally, for days. It's like a hangover afterwards. That was terrible and I was doing it every year for like 20 years. I did the hard work, but you have to also be honest with yourself. Sometimes it's okay that these things happen, but there was guilt and shame.

I had to let all that go to none of it was my fault. [00:39:00] That's okay. Being a human is really interesting. 

Christabeth: If nothing else, it's quite a journey I find it to be, and this is just my perspective among billions of perspectives, but I find life to be. All sorts of flavors. What flavors am I consciously and unconsciously eating?

What's feeling really yummy? What am I overdoing? What is really bitter and not great? Do I need a dose of something that's not great so I can actually get to those better parts or so I can reflect? I be more self-aware. I went through a lot of deep dive healing in my twenties, but it helped me. Heal what needed healing for me to become more self-aware, more connected to who I am, more embodied of my higher self, so I can be who I am today.

And it's a continuing process. There's always a layer of something happening, but I've learned how to become more and more aware, but I'm still so unaware of many other things. That's part of me, and I'm connected to. The best we can just have that awareness and engage with ourselves. So many of us may have a [00:40:00] lifetime of patterning of something conscious or unconscious that we just continue to do.

It can be something supportive or not supportive on our death bed. As death is greeting us, how are we coming to terms with ourselves and how we carried ourselves through our lives, what we engaged with and didn't engage with what we wanted to heal and didn't heal? How does that continue on so it can be healed at some point?

Something supportive for us as our souls. Continue on. Yeah, that healing piece. That's my heart's work. How can we help you get deep into the deep stuff from all angles? That's life's ancestral. This life's to transform this. How do we alchemize this? It can turn into something beautiful and maybe it's a lifetimes process.

We have an opportunity to start right here. Right now. One of my dearest teachers, Kobe Kowski, always says, begin again. She taught me that phrase. I don't know if she made it up, but that's the first time I heard it, and so I. I still hold that years and years later after working with her is like, yeah, begin again.

In this moment, even in that moment of death, in our last breath, we have, how can I begin again right now? [00:41:00] Bye. Gone out of this body, out of this experience that I'll never have again, as Krista Beth, 

Jill: once this body is gone, it'll never be the same. People in your life. I don't know, maybe souls. We do try together, but it's still, it's not gonna be my husband, it's not gonna be my children, it's not gonna be my community.

It's not gonna be this. And. None of this is perfect. That's okay too. Love it. We are just about at our time, so if somebody wants to work with you, do the need to be in person, how would they find you? And I'll put the links in the show notes. What's the best way for people to find you? 

Christabeth: Thank you. Some I offer a lot of this work is virtual.

Or, and that could be Zoom, that could be the phone. That could not be any of it. It could be like energetically we're doing something else. And then I like check in or it can be in person. I'm based Massachusetts, but I'm a Sagittarius and I love to travel, so I'm all over New England. That's my website. So my business name is Soul Fully Nourishing, and so my website is ww dot.[00:42:00] 

Soul fully nourishing.com. I'm also on Instagram, just my first name with LI on the end of it. So it's Christabeth Lee, LI. I'm on Facebook and that's also my name, Christabeth Ingold. You'd have to friend me though. And those are the three places to be in touch and check out. All my offerings, and with the death preexisting and death care, it just continues to unfold and evolve.

There might not be every single little piece up there, but I can talk about this work all day because there's so many different aspects I can offer to somebody who may be terminally ill, somebody who knows they're dying, but not actively dying yet. So many actively dying. The moment of death, post death as well, and also the loved ones and the ones that maybe.

Grieving or whether that death is like a very old death or like a really fresh death, that there's lots of different ways to support them through my work. So, 

Jill: Hmm. I love it. And yeah, this work is so hard to really narrow down and explain. I. Because [00:43:00] it does feel like it's so encompassing of so many different things, and so I get it sometimes when I look at my own website, I'm like, that doesn't say half of what I actually think.

It feels like I do with people, but it's the best I could do with the language that I have, so I try. Well, thank you so much. This was a pleasure. I really enjoyed chatting with you. I will put the links in the show notes so people can easily find it. Thanks so much. Thank you so much. In my next episode, Megan Mar shares how the death of her mother inspired her to become a death doula.

She talks about discovering this path through hospice, volunteering, and how that experience changed the course of her life. We dive into how our culture often avoids conversations about death, leaving many people unprepared and full of fear. Our conversation explores how end of life doulas offer emotional.

Spiritual and practical support filling the gaps where medical care ends. Megan reminds us that doula training isn't just for professionals. It's valuable for anyone [00:44:00] who wants to support loved ones through death, grief, and caregiving. We also talk about how aligning with nature's seasonal cycles can help us feel more grounded.

And how caregiving, especially for those of us in the sandwich generation, can feel overwhelming. Megan offers insights on how small, thoughtful acts from friends and community can make a big difference during some of life's most difficult moments. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or family member who might find it interesting.

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Your contribution will help keep the podcast advertisement free, whether your donation is larger, small. Every amount is valuable. I sincerely appreciate all of you for listening to the show and supporting me in any way you can. You can find a link in the show notes to subscribe to the [00:45:00] paid monthly subscription as well as a link to my Venmo if you prefer to make a one-time contribution.

Thank you and I look forward to seeing you in next week's episode of Seeing Death. Clearly.