We were lucky to catch up with Susan Casey recently and have shared our conversation below.
Susan, so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?
As a young child, I could feel people’s sadness and had an inner drive to alleviate their suffering, but I didn’t know how to do that other than offer a smile and a hug. Insomnia plagued me because I would become overwhelmed with thinking up ways I could infuse hope into people’s lives and leave them feeling a sense of wonder in the world and all it had to offer. Of course, I didn’t have this level of sophisticated thinking at eight years old, but I did feel like my mission was to help sad people feel happy and offer the bright side to their sad stories. At twelve years old, I visited my grandmother in a nursing home and read to her. Shortly thereafter, I began volunteering at a local nursing home in my community and reading to the elderly on a regular basis. I would feel so overwhelmed with emotion at the end of my two-hour volunteer shift, I began to write in my journal as a way to process my sadness and soon, writing became how I made sense of the world and the heartache that seemed to fill it. Those two passions, writing and a desire to alleviate suffering, led me to pursue both my master’s in social work and a master’s in writing; the two went hand-in-hand for me.
Soon after I began volunteering at the nursing home, my oldest brother Jim, who was a junior in high school, was crossing a busy street during a torrential downpour and was struck by a car, throwing him 35 feet in the air. He remained in a coma for 10 days, followed by months of rehabilitation. Every day, I’d go to the rehab facility with my parents and watch my brother during his physical, occupational, and speech therapy sessions as he re-learned to walk, talk, eat, button a shirt, etc. It was during this experience that I met a social worker, and I decided I was going to earn a bachelor’s degree in social work. During my freshman year in college, a social worker came into one of our classes to deliver a lecture. In hindsight, I realized that the social worker was burned out and should not have been giving a lecture about mental health, but what she said was so powerful, I switched my major to English. Eventually, my life led me back to social work and at 26 years old, I returned to graduate school and earned an MSW (master’s in social work) degree. Ten years later, I returned to graduate school again and earned an MFA (master’s in fine arts – Writing).
At the end of my first semester in my MFA program, my mother had a catastrophic stroke, leaving her aphasic (a language disorder caused by damage in a specific area of the brain that controls language expression and comprehension.) As a social worker, I had worked in acute brain injury and was very aware of the mountain not only my mother would have to climb, but also my father and our whole family if we were going to offer the level of support my parents would need for my mother to remain home and have the best quality of life possible. It’s well known for those who work in brain injury how small a person’s life becomes with aphasia.
One by one, people began to disappear from her life because they simply didn’t know how to communicate with a person who could no longer use her words. I watched my mother’s facial expressions as she tried to communicate her anger and sadness as people talked about her in front of her as if she were a ghost. They were not trying to be cruel, they simply lacked the knowledge, compassion, and understanding, which included people in the healthcare industry. As my mother’s world continued to shrink, my father’s world did too. Their lives became a prison because she couldn’t communicate her needs, and my father couldn’t leave my mother unattended due to her substantial brain injury. This experience continued to deepen my understanding of the need for increased awareness of people’s suffering and compassion for that suffering.
Seven years later, my younger brother Rocky died of a virus that caused swelling in his brain while he was vacationing in Hong Kong with his wife and three-year-old daughter. My brother’s death changed the focus of my life, which ultimately led me to the book I wrote, my podcast, and the compassion series I’m now working on. I spent 4 years interviewing people all over the world who had lost a brother or a sister and wrote a nonfiction book on grief and loss. The title of the book is Rock On: Mining for Joy in the Deep River of Sibling Grief (https://www.amazon.com/Rock-
In 2021, I launched my grief and loss podcast titled L.E.A.P into Light and Healing which was recently rebranded to Rock Your Shine: After you’ve been cracked wide open, which is also what I’m calling my new business for all stories I produce. It was during the interviewing process for my book that I realized how much I enjoyed interviewing people and the deep need for hopeful stories among the grieving.
Finally, in January of 2023, I gave my notice to officially end my 30-year corporate career in mental health and give my full attention to the podcast and compassion series along with other grief and loss services.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
A news story recently aired about my new adventure. Here’s the link: https://www.youtube.com/
My Youtube channel features my grief and loss podcast: https://www.youtube.
The podcast: Rock Your Shine: After you’ve been cracked wide open
Purpose: On this show, I sit down with people from all over the world to hear their transformational stories on their deep grief and loss journeys. And it can be grief and loss over any kind of loss, not just the death of a person
Currently working on: Compassion Series
Overall Summary:
As a mental health therapist, author, and podcaster, I’m on a mission to elevate human consciousness and foster human compassion by producing a series of inspirational and impactful documentary stories about the most marginalized, oppressed, vulnerable, and ostracized populations in our society who have inspiring/transformational stories to share about their own awakening; people who understand the purpose of their lives and how powerful and spectacular they truly are regardless of their current life circumstances.
It is my hope that these stories reconnect people to their hearts and help them to realize they have the ability to do anything that lights them up. Perhaps the stories will remind them of a time when they were children; a time when they lost themselves in their imaginations; a time when they could create anything and no one told them their dreams were too big, or their imaginations were not realistic. I want to give the heart a mind and the mind a heart and let wisdom flow through the stories by the way we tell them and inspire people to rediscover their expansiveness and the magic that lives inside of them.
For now, populations will include people who are: incarcerated, homeless, veterans, and adolescents in the juvenile justice facilities to name a few. When we begin to close the gap between the “us” and “them” mentality, we also begin to awaken to the truth that we are all equal, born into a different set of circumstances. When we open our hearts to each other, we begin to suspend judgment. As the Compassion Institute at Stanford University so eloquently writes: Each of us is shaped and conditioned by the systems and ecosystems in which we breathe, live, and work. In order to collectively move toward a more caring and compassionate society, it is necessary to redesign existing systems so that they are more life-giving, humane, and compassionate.
These narratives I’m committed to producing will illuminate the interviewee’s painful and transformational journey, infused with tenderness, love, motivation, and hope. As guiding beacons, these stories will have the capacity to empower the interviewees and the listeners to embrace their own inner light, forgive their own transgressions, and integrate their life-altering experiences into the tapestry of their lives, enabling them to flourish into their authentic selves, where true compassion is born. We all have our own wounds and carry our own baggage. We all have the capacity to hurt each other and ourselves. I’ve never been interested in the mistakes people make; I’m interested in what they’ve learned about themselves through their experiences and how these experiences have awakened them to their true nature. Until we accept our humanness and reconcile with and forgive ourselves, we are unable to cultivate compassion for others’ suffering. Given this understanding, I felt called to begin by raising awareness and compassion for our most vulnerable and marginalized populations.
Other services I currently offer:
1. Individual Grief and loss coaching:
I provide coaching, not therapy, in our individual work together. I rely heavily on my gift of intuition to guide our sessions together. What does this mean? I deeply listen and feel what is and what is not being said, ask guided questions, and provide insights and guidance to help accelerate your healing.
2. One and Done:
Do you have a dilemma and need an objective point of view to help you gain an elevated perspective? Not everyone needs therapy or coaching. Sometimes you just need a bird’s-eye-view of the situation to help gain clarity to a complicated (or what seems complicated) situation.
In our 45-minute call together, either by phone or zoom, I will listen to what is both being said and not being said to bring you a deeper awareness and understanding of the situation by asking you provocative questions that will help you to arrive at your own truth. You will know the next steps to take so you can breathe easier, feel lighter, and more able to Rock Your Shine.
If you need a little help to untangle the knots in your stomach and quiet the relentless chatter in your mind, book your call with me.
3. Letter Writing:
Not a talker? Not a processor? I’ve got you covered. Write me a letter. I may not be able to respond to every letter, but I can promise you three things:
I will read your letter.
The act of writing the letter and sending it off to me will help to alleviate your suffering.
And I will say a prayer and offer you light and love in your healing.
Letter writing is a safe place to process and release what’s cluttering your mind and weighing heavily on your heart. If you don’t want to send the letter to me, write it anyway. You can bury it, burn it, tuck it inside a book or leave it on your computer. The power is in taking action to get your thoughts on the page, which will help to alleviate heartache.
If you do choose to send me your letter, it will be placed in a drawing. At the beginning of each month, I randomly choose 3 to 4 letters to respond to on my monthly podcast bonus episode.
Please send your letters to [email protected]. And remember, even if I don’t respond directly, I will say a prayer and offer you light and love in your healing.
4. 6-Week Virtual Grief and Loss Course:
I created the L.E.A.P Course for those of you who are ready to open your minds and hearts and surrender to your grief. Through our weekly 1-hour group coaching calls (limit of 10 people) and weekly journaling exercises, you will cultivate a deeper relationship with your heart (your inner light, higher wisdom, soul, whatever language works for you), where you will gain new insights and wisdom as you surrender to your suffering.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Skills I most appreciate in myself and advice to others early in their journey:
1. Maintain a curious mind and open heart
2. Listen to your inner truth to lead you on your path to your higher purpose
3. If you don’t know what lights you up, find out, and do more of that in the world. The world needs you to engage in what you’re passionate about. In other words, the world needs you to Rock Your Shine
4. No matter what you do, or how you feel about yourself or others, always approach a problem, a frustration, a disappointment, with acceptance and love. Acceptance doesn’t mean you asked for it, or condone poor behavior, etc. When you accept life, you are able to approach your life from a place of responding to it rather than reacting, which relieves suffering. We feel deep suffering in our unwillingness to accept what happens to us.
5. Get curious. Approach what you think of as problems, as a challenge, an opportunity, and ask yourself, “Now that this has happened, what do I do next? What are my next steps?”
6. Always remember that all things that happen to us are for us to learn more about who we are as spiritual beings who are having a human experience.
How to develop these skills:
1. If you don’t engage in a spiritual practice to quiet the mind (like meditation), begin that today. You can’t listen to your inner compass if you don’t spend time getting to know yourself. You can only get to know yourself when you learn how to quiet the chatter in your mind. This is where you will begin to listen to your intuition, your soul, your guides. This takes practice. Start small. Be still and breathe for 5 minutes. There are hundreds of guided meditations on Youtube. Beginning with guided meditations is a great place to begin.
2. Be mindful of who you spend time with. In order to get the messages from our higher self, we have to clean up our energetic field just as we have to clean our physical body. If you spend your time in negative energy fields, it will cloud your energy too.
It’s easy to know if someone’s energy is good for you or toxic to you. Pay attention to how you feel BEFORE you spend time with them, and how you feel AFTER. Do you feel energized? Happy? Content? Drained? Annoyed? Angry? Pay attention to patterns. If you have felt angry the last 5 times you spend time with X, maybe it’s time to re-evaluate that friendship/relationship. It’s family, perhaps you limit your time.
Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?
The number one obstacle is harnessing funding for my podcast and the Compassion Series I’m working on. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to build a social media platform that would help me get sponsorship for the podcast. While I’ve been writing grants to secure funding for the Compassion Series to pay for a videographer and editor, I’ve had no time to begin interacting with my social media followers.
Solution: I have been creating content for my social media sites to provide a tip a day to help people elevate their vibration and Rock Their Shine! I will also begin to pitch the podcast to potential sponsors. I’m hopeful that I will find the funding necessary to support the podcast while I create the Compassion Series.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://
rockyourshine.com/ - Instagram: https://www.
instagram.com/susan.casey/ - Facebook: https://www.
facebook.com/profile.php?id= 100045701809031 - Linkedin: https://www.
linkedin.com/in/susanecasey/ - Youtube: https://www.youtube.
com/@Rockyourshine
Image Credits
I purchased the pictures from istock. I hired a graphic designer for my Rock Your Shine logo and the icons (heart, butterfly, dragonfly,) Here’s the link: https://www.yellowwooddesignfarm.com/ And I’ve also included the cover of my book. Thank you for this opportunity!
