Rita Black: My guest today is Barbara Wansbrough, author of the Exquisite new book, wild Things, A Geography of Grief. In it, Barbara writes a series of letters to her late sister, letters that weave together walking nature and memory into a kind of map for surviving loss. It’s lyrical, it’s grounded, and it’s full of small rituals that show us what healing can look like when we stop running from our pain and start walking with it.

So lace up your shoes, take a deep breath and join us as we explore wild things and the wild healing that awaits when we dare to walk through grief instead of around it. So come on in.

Did you know that our struggle with weight doesn’t start with the food on your plate or get fixed in the gym? 80% of our weight struggle is mental. That’s right. The key to unlocking long-term weight release and management begins in your mind. Hi there, I’m Rita Black. I’m a clinical hypnotherapist, weight loss expert, bestselling author, and the creator of the Shift Weight Mastery Process.

And not only have I helped thousands of people over the past 20 years achieve long-term weight mastery. I am also a former weight struggler, carb addict and binge eater. And after two decades of failed diets and fad weight loss programs, I lost 40 pounds. With the help of hypnosis, not only did I release all that weight.

I have kept it off for 25 years. Enter the Thin Thinking Podcast where you too will learn how to remove the mental roadblocks that keep you struggling. I’ll give you the thin thinking tools, skills, and insights to help you develop the mindset you need, not only to achieve your ideal weight, but to stay there long term and live your best life.

Sound good? Let’s get started. Hello. Hello everybody. Come on in. So nice to see you. Please have a seat and let’s get cozy because today we are gonna dive into an interview with Barbara sbo, who is an amazing author of a book that is so poignant all about her grieving process with her sister. And I so know so many of us here in the Thin Thinking community just from being in my membership.

I know so many people going through some sort of grieving process. I hope that Barbara’s story and our interview touches you in a way. But this book is quite extraordinary. For those of you who love to walk and process, you are gonna really vibe with this book. So I can’t wait to jump into it with you.

Barbara started her career as a development executive on films such as Priscilla, queen of the Desert and Robert Altman’s Shortcuts. She has worked with Jessica Lang, Roman Polansky, 20th Century Fox, Gramercy Pictures, and she’s worked as a writer and editor for a lot of online publications. And then ended up as an event curator for the Brooklyn.

Library. But now she came back to Los Angeles in 2028. You will tell she is British by her amazing accent. But she this is her first published book and she wanted to say she hopes it inspires all all of you other late bloomers out there who maybe have a story within you. So let us dive in to my interview with the amazing Barbara.

Welcome Barbara. I’m so excited to have you on the Thin Thinking Podcast. Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here. Rita, Barbara, maybe just tell us a little bit about you before we dive into your book. Absolutely.

Barbara Wansbrough: Well, I have as you can hear, I am not American, but I grew up in, I was born and raised in England by an American father and a German mother as it happens.

So I’m not actually even English, but I was always enamored of America and finally came here in when I was about 24 years old in the early nineties and have, and it’s been my home ever. Sin California is really my true love and the, and the wilderness here and the nature and the fact that you can live in a city.

Go out of your door in the mornings and hike in the mountains or hike in the hills of Griffith Park Mountains. Might be a bit of a stretch Griffith Park.

Rita Black: But,

Barbara Wansbrough: but that, that is a very a theme that recurs in the book, this thrill at the wildness of the nature here. So I’m very, very happy to live here.

This is unlike anything I grew up with.

Rita Black: Right. And that is just so, so evident in your book, which by the way, it is November 11th, 2025 that Barbara’s book is dropping. And it will be if you are in where Barbara

Barbara Wansbrough: next

Rita Black: week

Barbara Wansbrough: in, in. On the pub date itself on 1111, I will be speaking at the Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Green, Brooklyn, New York.

That event begins at 7:30 PM and you can actually find details about it on, on their website, the Greenlight Bookstore or on Eventbrite. There’s ways of making reservation, but that’s not even necessary. You can just show up at the bookstore.

Rita Black: Yeah. So Barbara, when we were hiking, started telling me about, well, I heard about Barbara’s story first, and then she told me that her book was being published, which was based on her experiences through grief and hiking.

And so many of our listeners walk. Or, or aspire to walk. But I wanted to ask you first, like the, the themes in your book are really intimate and yet very universal and your sister’s letters that those, the letters that you wrote to your sister was your kind of guide through grief. Did you, did you start by writing the letters as a part of your grieving process, or did the letters come later after you began that process?

Maybe tell us just a little bit about how, what happened with your sister and how that process began.

Barbara Wansbrough: Absolutely. Well, what happened was that it was just shortly before the pandemic that she was diagnosed and I flew over. She lived in London and I flew straight over there to see her through the initial surgery.

And then I returned in March, beginning of March of 2020 to see her again. And we sat with her oncologist and talked about the coronavirus and whether this would have any effect on anything. And I just remember that so clearly sitting in this doctor’s office discussing this. And then I, a few days later, I flew back to home to LA and two days after that, everything shut down.

So then. She was having chemotherapy for the, the summer of 2020 spring and summer, and I couldn’t see her, couldn’t go visit her because of the COVID laws. And I began hiking this trail. We just moved house and we moved into that house we live in now, and, and I, and we’re a five minute drive from Griffith Park.

And I would go over there and I would hike with my dog. He was always with me and have her on FaceTime, so I would show her the, the hikes. She would do it. What I figured out was a trail that’s around three miles and it takes me, I mean, I can do it in an hour if I’m really. Booking it. But, but if I’m just strolling along more and, and and all of that well, which I will explain in a moment, all of the other parts that, that came to be part of the walk, it takes an hour and a half or so, and I, I, so I would show her what I was seeing and, and sometimes she would hear coyotes howling and worry for my safety.

And I can remember specific moments in the park where suddenly a coyote would cross our tracks and I would be telling her all about it and hanging onto the dog who had in fact suffered a terrible coyote attack a few months earlier. So I was not letting him off the leash, but so she became very intimately acquainted with this walk. And then towards the end of that year, finally they relaxed the COVID laws enough for me to be able to go over and see her. And I went over with our younger son. Sadly our older son was having some tremendous difficulties at the time and had overdosed in the summer and was in rehab.

So my husband decided we should, he should stay here with, with the older one. And I went with our younger son to London and it turned out to be the last three weeks of her life, which we were not really prepared for that it was going to deteriorate that quickly. But, so I came back here at the beginning of January and the first morning I set out on that trail.

And, and spoke to her in my head as I walked that trail. And I did this every morning. I mean, I’ve been doing it every morning for three or four years now, but I, I, somewhere a few weeks into it, I started to create these shrines with, with what rocks that I found along the path that I thought were heart shaped.

And then I would bring rocks from other places. I’d go to the beach and I’d find rocks or shells there, and I would create these shrines. And I, there was one main one to begin with, and, and somebody then took one morning I arrived, then somebody had taken the sort of main anchor stone and I was distraught.

So I showed up the next day with. Bags and I loaded up all the rocks and then I was dragging them all over the park trying to find sort of hiding place. And then I started to relax about that whole idea. I mean, I do, there is still one main spot which has definitely been visited by other people. ’cause occasionally things were removed, but it, it’s largely stayed intact.

But at a certain, after a few weeks I, or months I, there were 75 different shrines to my sister. And all the while I was. Creating this, I was thinking, I want to write something, but I don’t know what format. I don’t know how to do this. And I, and then I had this idea about, I, there were all different ways of making lists.

I had of, because then the whole animal and nature part of it occurred to me that this was how I had sort of begun my life. We lived for the first 10 years of my life in the countryside, and it, I was all about playing outside. And then, so that made some sense to me. And then I, I was, I was struggling with how to get closer to her, to writing about her.

And then I, so it was, it was later on in the whole process that I suddenly thought I should write her a letter because that’s the most. Intimate way of, of, of speaking with her. So it wasn’t my initial thought, but then it, it made perfect sense to me. And then I, and then the idea of each letter having a theme to it, or an animal, or a tree or a Yeah.

Something that I encountered in the park. And it all felt very natural. And I will say that the whole process of writing this book, I mean, I’ve, I’ve written one other book before, but writing this felt very, it really felt like it poured out of me. Mm-hmm. There was, there was not, it wasn’t arduous.

And even the editing process, once I had the publisher in place and I worked, that was the earlier, the beginning of this year, that even that was fairly pleasurable. You know, I ne I didn’t ever sweat over it. It felt like it just. Emerged, which was a really beautiful experience.

Rita Black: That’s amazing. I wanted to say so many.

Like I said, so many of our listeners walk or aspire to walk or hike and sometimes to clear their heads, sometimes to process things. Manage stress avoid overeating. ’cause if we’re walking, we’re not eating. So what did walking do or hiking do for you with your grieving process that sitting still couldn’t?

Barbara Wansbrough: Oh. So much. I, I, well, I, I now wanna read you this quotation. Oh, please do that. I got that I just heard about yesterday, and it’s, it’s from Ki Guard, you know, who is not somebody I have read. So, but I don’t, so that shouldn’t intimidate anyone, but it’s just these thi this is what he said about, about walking, and it, it speaks to me.

I just wish I’d had this quotation sooner. But anyway, above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day, I walk myself into a state of wellbeing and walk away from every illness I have, walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought, so burdensome. That one cannot walk away from it. If one just keeps walking, everything will be all right.

Wow. From his journals and papers and it, I, I very much have felt that, and I, I, I continue to do this daily hike and I need it. And when I can’t do it, I feel it in my bones that it’s missing. And I, I truly believe that all of the the, the way in which I have been able to survive this loss, which I never imagined.

I mean, it just didn’t occur to me. I don’t know, just didn’t ever occur to me that my sister was gonna die. And certainly not, certainly not at a point where we hadn’t been old ladies together. You know, I just thought that that was all still ahead of us and we had all of these plans for that point in our lives.

So. I, I truly don’t think I could have survived it without the, the physical sensation of putting one foot in front of the other. And I, I write about that quite a lot and I, I don’t know if now is a good moment to, to read that chapter. Absolutely, please do. Chapter about the chapter. I could keep calling

Rita Black: them chapters there.

I think it would be a great time because they can see not only what you’re gonna read about, but the way that you write through each chapter and, and, and maybe tell them at what point in the book this is, because I think so. So the brilliance of your book isn’t just I, I mean, you know, I’ve walked in Griffith Park since I moved here in 1994 and you know, I feel like you really uncovered so many things I never seen.

You’re such an observer. And a lot of the flora and fauna that I just took for granted you, you know, speak of so poetically, but also just the experience of what you were talking about, which is like grief and the surprise and the shock of your sister is, it’s just so hard to fathom. And then, and then your eventual processing of it through these letters to where she is inside of you and it’s, it, it feels like ex external to internal right from the start to the finish.

And it’s so you lay it out so beautifully and I’m sure anybody who has grieved anybody just will just see how beautifully you weave that all together. So please read from this part.

Barbara Wansbrough: I, I’m wondering whether I should include, there’s a, the letter before is about the monarch butterfly, just so you get a sense, because the, but maybe that’s too long.

I, I’ll read the, the water. There’s, this is the letter number 55, and there were, I’ve written 59 letters, so this is very much towards the end of the book and the, the theme of this one is not actually a plant or a, an animal, it’s water and walking. So I am sort of at the conclusion stage of these letters and just thinking about, thinking about the whole process in more general terms.

I think up until then it’s been very specific each. Each of the first 54 letters were, were focused on a plant or an animal. And this one is now called water and walking. It’s where I’ve sort of summed up what the, what the walker’s actually done for me, for my mental health. So here goes dear M, there are two massive water towers on the trail.

One has been painted with a scenic mural to blend into the landscape, which it fails to do entirely. The other stands tall and proud and plain on the summit, taller even than the Griffith Park Observatory. Perched one hill to the west, both are an institutional tan color. The lower ones sporting a scenic painting of Aspen trees and cottonwoods.

I re read about a new underground reservoir at the northern edge of the park, which will be the largest in the country when completed. Water has always been a source of contention in this city. The catching of it, the taming of it, the dispersion of it. Many people have lost their lives over it, and it continues to mark the divide between the rich and the poor.

Books, movies, songs, stories about water overflow. The history of California. Los Angeles is not a city with much respect for its history. Even during the 15 years we were away, I’ve been shocked by how many beloved buildings have been torn down or renovated. Beyond recognition, is it trying to wipe out its past obliterate shady stories?

Was our father always trying to do the same with his routine purges? Why did he never want us to keep anything? What was his thinking behind incinerating? Our schoolwork and my, my books insisting that we hang onto the bare minimum of personal objects refusing to allow US storage space at the family home.

Was he hoping to produce streamlined offspring with the ability to up and leave at a moment’s notice? Never weighed down by the impediment of possessions. He did not succeed with me. And I remember one of your greatest con, one of your greatest concerns after having been handed your death sentence was that you would be leaving behind stuff.

I move past the first tower turning onto a smaller winding trail that will take me to the one at the summit This way passes one of the original tree stumps with many heart shaped rocks. The gushing rains of the winter turned this trail into an overgrown mud bath, making it inaccessible for some weeks.

But enough of us intrepid hikers have battled through the undergrowth in recent days to clear a path, at least partially. I reached the road at the top and cross it to head down the path on the backside of the mountain. In the summer months, the slope can become treacherous. The sandy gravel offers no grip and sometimes it feels safer to run and hope to stop before lurching into the ravine.

Walking is something I took for granted for decades, not so now, not since I forged your trail. It has become my medicine. Without it, I would wither. I tread carefully because I do not want to injure myself to deprive myself of even a day’s hike. The physical act of walking has reattached me to myself. It has reattached me to this city, which permits such wildness and such urbanization to coexist in a philosophy of walking.

Frederic writes, walking is a matter not just of truth, but also of reality. To walk is to experience the real. Reality is pure physical exteriority or as what might count as a subject, but reality as to what holds good. The principle of solidity of resistance. When you walk, you prove it with every step.

The earth holds good with every pace. The entire weight of my body finds support and rebounds Takes a spring. There is everywhere, a solid base, somewhere underfoot. There is no word for a bereaved sister, just as there’s no word for a parent who’s lost a child. There are widows, widowers, and orphans, but that is the extent of the lexicon For dead relatives, sometimes we are known as the forgotten mourners.

And in this new space I inhabit, walking has literally been myself and my solution. Soori Alando. It is solved by walking, is often attributed to Saint Augustine in a refutation of Zeno’s paradox of motion, but I have my own personal evidence. Walking has saved my life. It saves me every day from darkness, from pain, from nostalgia, from homesickness, from loneliness, and from heartache.

There is no ailment for which walking has not been a cure. I’ve chosen to walk a similar trail every single day. Sometimes I wonder if I should work, vary it, try different parks, different roots, and occasionally I do. But I always return to your trail because this is where I feel your presence. Thoreau writes of the dangers of exotic travel as a distraction.

There is no need to go far afield in order to walk. Walden centered his daily strolls around Concord. I clutch this piece of information close. It justifies my waning interest in traveling the world. I returned to this state, dragging the family to a home that made sense to me at the time. And now when I think about where we’ve been and where we might go, it rarely occurs to me that anywhere else could be better.

Right here, right now is where I maybe even we belong. I look down at my feet, which have carried me all these years, and I feel grateful for them. I want them to continue to carry me for decades to come. Not in any direction in particular, but simply for the joy of walking. The period of mourning of grieving, the loss of you has sometimes felt like a maze.

But slowly the fog is clearing. I see that it is not a maze, but labyrinth with one single continuous path to its center. There are no tricks here. I must simply keep walking when I reach the center. Maybe I will leave a rock for you there. But the point is not the destination, it is the walking. There is one entrance that also serves as the exit.

There are no dead ends. There are no false leave leads. Thank you, sister.

Rita Black: Wow. So beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. You know, I was just thinking about so many of our listeners are women and women in midlife dealing with family crisises death and you know, something that you bring up in that wonderful passage is walking with intention.

Really versus just going for a walk, you know, the idea of, oh, I’m gonna go for a walk, versus this idea that there’s just really intention behind every step you’re taking when you were starting out or when you were going. ’cause I, I know you used to go twice a day, or maybe you still do.

Barbara Wansbrough: I I do. I take a slightly different trail in the afternoons, so there’s some overlap, but but yes, there was a, a brief worrying moment a couple of months ago where it seemed like my dog was struggling to, to accompany me.

And I thought, oh my God, what am I gonna do? And I did. I did actually let him rest for a couple of weeks. And I went on my own in the mornings and it was just, it didn’t feel right. It was, I mean, I, it was still was good to walk, but I very much. Need his company clearly. But I do, so I do do it.

I do do two walks a day, but the, the morning one is the one I cannot live without.

Rita Black: Right. Do you still, you know, I know you’re not all the way through, would you consider yourself done with your mourning process or do you, do you think grieving is an ongoing thing Absolutely. That lives within you always.

Barbara Wansbrough: Absolutely. It does. And it, and it, you know, one hears this so often and it’s so true that, that it’s not linear. There’s no clear, it, it comes in waves and it’s unexpected. And I feel, I also, I feel some sort of guilt that, I did not have this response to losing my parents. I mean, I, my father died, my father was diagnosed when my oldest son was a week old, so that was intense.

So I was sort of dealing with, and he died when, when the, when my son was six months old. So those six months, it was very intense. And I, and I write about it to, in the, in the book as well about that experience. But I, I, and it was a terrible loss, but I still had my sister, so it. It’s just that I, she was the person and I guess she, she, she didn’t raise me.

’cause my parents were very much there and present and, and involved. It’s not, I’m not trying to say they weren’t, but, but my relationship, my bond with her was so fundamental to who I was. And she was there, you know, waiting for me to arrive the minute I was born. So I, and I, I write about this as well about how our I learned about sort of what it means to love someone from the experience I of, of being loved by her.

And I would say it absolutely is not it, it, it no longer, there was a period at the beginning where I would walk along sobbing, but, and I don’t do that anymore, but. But there’s sort of some, there, there’s some days that it just I, I think, God, I’ve dealt with this all so well. Could you, could you just come back now?

It’s like, right. And it’s very odd, this whole feeling around the pub, you know, publication of this book, because this is a wonderful, you know, dream come true for me to be writing and to be being published and to be recognized as a writer. But of course I’d give it all up in an instance if I could have her back.

You know, it’s, it’s not a, yeah, it doesn’t feel like a sort of fair trade. But I, you know, given the fact that I’m not gonna get her back, I, I’m very grateful to have this. It’s, it’s, and it feels very it feels very special that it’s. That this is the first book that I have published, and it’s about her, and it came out of my relationship with her, so it feels like a gift from her as well.

But I would say that it, it goes on and on and there’s no getting over it. And I’m sure that you know, people who’ve experienced and anyone who’s experienced the loss of anyone knows that you don’t get over it. You just learn how to live around it with it. But there are things that can help.

And I would say this sort of routine I have developed has been enormously helpful. Yeah, and I, and I also just like the, the Kiko Guard quotation, I mean, I think something happens when your legs move, something happens in your brain. I mean, I. I frequently sort of urged my boys my to, you know, get out there and get some exercise.

’cause it does change the way you feel. And it, there’s, there’s nothing that can’t, I mean, I, you know, I obviously, I don’t wanna, there are things that can, I mean, I also kept telling our younger son when he was, after my sister died and we were still in COVID and he was doing Zoom school from his bedroom and he was not well and he was losing weight and I kept saying, go out and get some fresh hair and drag him out onto the trail with me.

And he was actually not well. So he needed, you know, help from doctors. So, I, I’m not saying that everything can be cured by just walking, but I think that that one’s mental stability and, and. Sense of wellbeing is hugely influenced by, by this or can be.

Rita Black: They, they do say that the hormones emitted when you walk are the best problem solving best for problem solving.

And often I, if I hike alone or walk alone, I will ask a question because when you’re walking, your subconscious mind will respond. You know, if, if I say, you know, I’m trying to solve this problem, and then I’ll let it go, and then I’ll just go for my walk, and then the answer inevitably comes and I’m, I’m wondering if that kind of happened, if you ever set out intentionally on any of your days with a problem to solve either with your writing process or with just your sister and your grieving process.

Barbara Wansbrough: I, I would say absolutely and certainly, the, the process of of figuring out how to, how to write these, then figuring out every, I mean, yeah, every, all of it. Whenever I was stuck, I would head out to the park as well. And, and it in invariably that, that release that came to me and I, I and it is, I, I always carry a notebook ’cause I sometimes have had the most fabulous ideas.

And if I don’t write them down, I, I, it’s amazing to me how I can, you know, think have what I think is a brilliant idea for some, for some aspect of the writing, whatever it is. And I just think there’s no way I’m gonna forget that because it’s so obviously wonderful and shiny. Solution to this problem, and then if I didn’t write it down, it, it goes.

So, so I, I, I’m always equipped now with a notebook which I find that too, I find that helpful as opposed to typing into the notes app on my phone, which somehow doesn’t, it doesn’t have the same effect. But it, it is the writing with your hand on paper. I agree. The same as your legs moving. It, it, it does something different to how you process things and how you,

Rita Black: well talk about too, just a little bit about, I, I want to hear about a couple of things.

I want to hear about your shrines and how just collecting and creating them, because I think some of our listeners who. Going through grieving processes might find creating shrines or, or, or, or, you know, symbol symbols of either the person or the relationship helpful and just the act of ritual of creating it, how that was helpful for you.

Barbara Wansbrough: Well, I, like I said earlier, it, it, it’s curious to me now because I don’t remember specifically picking up the First Rock, but I, I remember thinking I was this is also because of CODI my sister had said when, when my son and I showed up in London, initially she was in the hospital and we couldn’t see her and we would, we would go.

This was for like, the first three or four days of our visit. And we would go off and find whatever it was she thought she needed, like, and or want felt like eating and we would deliver it to the hospital, but, and we would see her from the window, but we weren’t allowed to go in there, which was incredibly frustrating.

But then she, what am I trying to say here now? Completely lost my train of thought. It’s,

Rita Black: We were just talking about the ritual and having the touchstones, the, the, oh,

Barbara Wansbrough: so, so then yes, of course. That was it. I. She had said that, she said, I don’t wanna die in front of you. And I said, please, please rethink that.

But anyway, in the end, she didn’t, she hung on and she died literally as we were stepping onto the plane to head back to la And then I couldn’t, the, the COVID laws kept switching around in, in London and in, and I couldn’t go back to her funeral. So that was very upsetting to me, and I couldn’t, and then my, my brother-in-law said he was going to scatter the her ashes with us later on in, in Ireland on this beach in Ireland, but.

He, he was very in a tremendous state of grief himself. And while I thought that we would be able to sort of comfort one another, he didn’t really want anything to do with me at that moment. And I, I, it took me a number of months to understand that this wasn’t actually anything to do with me. This is just, everybody grieves differently, but, so I didn’t have anything tangible like a funeral or a cremation or I wasn’t.

So I think that that’s part of the reason why I thought I, I will build my own shrine to mm-hmm. My own sort of grave as it were, even though she doesn’t have a grave. ’cause she was cremated and scattered. But, you know, we, we both were raised Catholic very much with the whole grave thing. So I, I think that that’s what the inspiration was to actually create the first shrine, as it were.

And I. Then, you know, when you start looking, it’s amazing how many rocks are sort of heart, heart shaped and, and, and how, you know, if you, and it, it is a matter if they’re not absolutely perfect, you know, you get the idea of it and it, and then when I would, there’s a, I have a favorite beach hike in Malibu, and I would go there and there’s this one beach there that seemed to just yield endless supplies of heart shaped rock.

So there are many of those in Griffith Park as well. And also shells. So I, I, I created these spaces and sometimes I would have them more out in the open. And then I, you know, after a while when I, once I got over the idea of other people being on the trail and sometimes helping themselves, once I came to terms with that, I was more free in creating these things.

And sometimes it was. In the branches of a tree or in the, in a tree root, a fallen tree root. And, and I would sort of stick them all amongst the roots or, or, and the main one is at the base of a tree. And it, and it, the, the, it is actually sort of roughly heart shaped. The, all the way that the rocks are all laid out on the ground, but it’s all different ways.

There’s, they’re these sort of rock faces in the, on the trail as well where I’ve sort of studied them with little, studied them with little rocks or shells or whatever. And and then there was one spot in particular. There was not an, a very intrusive place and there was shell and I would put shells there.

I don’t know why I chose to only put shells there, but I noticed that they kept disappearing and, and this went on for some weeks. And I would go to the beach and come back with more shells and put them there. And I thought, God, it’s weird. Is there some squirrel that’s building an incredibly elaborate

Rita Black: house or something?

Well, each, each shrine sounds like a different adventure.

Barbara Wansbrough: It, well, it very much was that. And, and then one morning I came by this particular one and there was a piece of the shells had been taken. There was a piece of paper there and, and it just said, thank you. And I thought, oh my goodness, this is wild.

And so I with had my notebook with me and I, I left a note saying, I’m so happy that you, you know, tell me more, basically. And then we launched into this. This relationship that carried on for a year, we exchanged, I was exchanging notes with this stranger almost daily. And then we would tell one another if we were going out of town for whatever reason.

But we started to leave these notes and then little gifts for one another. And it, it was. It blew my mind. I mean, I thought, my God, this, I, I thought this is my sister communicating to with me from the other side. And a few weeks into it she, and I assumed it was a woman, rightly so, but I just assumed it must be.

But she left a note say, asking if I wanted to meet for a cup of coffee. And I thought, no, I don’t, you know, you are my sister in my head. I can’t cope with the reality of what this is. So I just didn’t, I ignored that and we carried on exchanging notes until almost exactly a year later where I came by one day and it was right after a sort of freak rainstorm had happened in the summer in August.

And she, I found. This sort of ward of paper behind the rock and thought, oh no, it’s a breakup letter. And I sort of had to open it up very carefully so it didn’t disintegrate. And sure enough she said, you know, I believe this has come to an end now, you know, it’s meant so much to me. It’s been life changing, but it’s come to an end.

And I, I recognized that I never wanted anything to end. It’s just like, I can’t, that this is not the way I, I yeah, I, this is not how I live my life. I have a struggle with coming to the end of anything. And I, but then she did leave her email address and by then I had written three course of the book and I, and she was in it, and this whole relationship I had with, so I thought, well, I have to find out how this ends now.

And we met up and what was so extraordinary about. Meeting this woman, she’s much younger than me, probably 25 years younger than me. And she for her it was a completely different, seeing the sort of mirror what she was experiencing and she was coming across my shrines and she was imagining somehow that they’d been placed there for her and for her benefit.

So her interpretation, when she first saw the shells, she explained to me that she had been in. At the beach and she’d been looking for a particular kind of shell. I don’t remember what they’re called, but but a particular shell, which she felt if she could find one, she said to herself, it would somehow tell her that she would, had been right in, in moving to Los Angeles, which she had done just a few months earlier.

And she wanted some symbol of having made the right decision and she hadn’t been able to find one on the beach. And then she came walking in the park in Griffith Park the following day and just thought and found one of these shells. Oh my gosh. She thought, you know, how, what is that doing here? So for her, but she thought some, there’s some divine intervention here that is speaking to her.

So we were having this parallel experience, but hers was entirely separate entirely. It was, it, it was really a beautiful thing to have met her and had this. And, and we, as we spoke not that long ago, and she was, you know, she said, you’ll be in my life forever. It, it feels very magical.

Rita Black: I was gonna say magical.

Yes. Yeah. That’s so great. I wanna just I have a couple more questions, Barbara. One is that you mentioned in your book, you, you speak of walking through rather than getting over grief. So it’s a very subtle but very powerful difference. Many people fear and myself included, I remember when my mother died, that fear that grief is going to consume them, right?

So they avoid it. So what did you discover about the paradox that moving toward grief is what helps release it?

Barbara Wansbrough: You know, the, the, I I. Don’t write about this, but it was absolutely in my head. And, and it was, it was a children’s book that I read hundreds of times when the, when the boys were little, I don’t know if you are familiar with it, called We Are Going On a Bear Hunt.

Do you know that book?

Rita Black: I think I’ve heard of it, but I don’t think we had it or read it to our children.

Barbara Wansbrough: Oh, it’s a, it’s a glorious book. I highly recommend it. And it, it’s called, it’s about a, a father and four kids who are going on a bear hunt. But, and they encounter various obstacles and each time, and it’s very simplistic.

It’s, it’s a board book. But each time they encounter like mud and they say, oh no mud, we can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh. We’ve got to go through it and it’s squelch, squelch, squelch, squelch. And it goes to the next thing. And it’s like, uhoh, we can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. We’ve gotta go through it.

And somehow this got stuck in my head and I thought it’s really important that I pause now and, and experience this because I think that my, up until this moment in my life, I think I, I had become very practiced at either compartmentalizing a situation or being in complete denial that it was happening.

And, and not allowing, not giving myself or anyone else the grace of actually being present in it. And I think that because I paused and literally, ’cause I had the words of that. That we are going on a bear hunt echoing in my head, I just thought, I need to meet this and actually stay with it. And I would also say that I was helped enormously in this path by somebody who my sister introduced me to.

And it was sort of the last gift she gave me. And she said to me, I want to give you a course of sessions with this woman I know who has helped me so enormously. With, with her work, with my sister’s work, my sister ran, started and ran this charity to help young people who were le who leave foster care.

And at the age of 18, they. In this country as in England, they are just left to fend for themselves. And so her goal in creating this charity was to provide young people with both psychological and practical support and help them find careers that they would enjoy, not just jobs. And she made all of these connections and she was helped by this woman who called herself a life coach.

She was not really a therapist, but she had, when, when my sister received her diagnosis, she sort of switched her help to helping her deal grapple with that, which she did with the use of a lot of poetry as well. And so I had a zoom session with this woman when my sister was still alive. And I mean, I was clutching any sort of connection with my sister, so I.

Liked this woman well enough. But then we, after she died, we set up this schedule of appointments and we spoke maybe every three weeks on Zoom for a couple of hours. And she was really instrumental in helping me helping me be aware of myself and my, because there was a point where she said to me a few months into this, we spoke for about nine months, so probably we spoke 10 times or 12 times, and she said.

I think that you haven’t actually accepted the reality. This was a few months in. You haven’t accepted the reality of your sister’s death, and you need to let go of her because she needs to be free to go on her own path. And I mean, it never occurred to me. It never occurred to me that I needed to let go of anything.

I was just clutching all of the memories and all of the love to me. And it, it was really a big deal to to, to understand grief. And I, it was a, it’s been a revelation to me that of, of sitting in something and allowing yourself to absorb it and experience it and give yourself that instead of trying to push through or trying to, to avoid it.

Because it will come back and get you, I’m sure of it. I mean, I’ve experienced that in other, other moments of my life where I haven’t dealt with something. It does, you don’t get away with it. So it’s No, it, it’s

Rita Black: It’s like trying to submerge a beach ball underwater. Yeah. And it always pops back.

Barbara Wansbrough: It really, really does.

Yeah. So that’s yeah, this, this woman was very helpful to me and then when I started to sort of lean on her in the way that one might. Lean on a therapist. She was like, hold on a second. You know, we’re, we are done here. You know, she’s like, I, I’m not qualified to do this next part of your journey if you need it.

But she was just very helpful in the time that we had together and, and very clear and very straightforward about it. And she also fed me a marvelous diet of, of poems that have been really enormously helpful as well.

Rita Black: Wow. She sounds like a grief doula of sorts. Yeah,

Barbara Wansbrough: she was, she was really, I mean, that wasn’t her training, but she really managed to help my sister and help me, so

Rita Black: That’s lovely.

Hmm. So my last question, Barbara, and then I’ll let you tell our listeners how to, find your book. If you could go to the back to the first year after your sister’s death, and what would you say to yourself or to anybody who is just beginning the journey of grieving, you know, like what, what would be the first steps or your advice?

Barbara Wansbrough: I think that the, the, you know, I, I’ve also learned, and I talk about this in the book, that I am a, a proud member of Al-Anon, which I joined because of my son, but and his problems, but it didn’t take me long to understand the, the dynamics of the house I grew up in and my father’s drinking. And I think that I, I was never taught.

To be kind to myself. Hmm. That was a form of self-indulgence is what I was told as a child. You know, you don’t, you, you need to take care of other people, but you don’t look at yourself. And I think that I, it’s taken me a, a long time to understand how wrongheaded I believe that is now, and that taking care of yourself.

It’s like they say in Al-Anon, you put on the oxygen mask on yourself before you turn to help anyone else. And I think to be gentle and to allow yourself to another lesson of Al-Anon is about pausing and not feeling like you must be doing. But I think to be gentle, to be gentle with yourself and just to actually listen to what you need.

And it, it sounds so simple, but I think that so rarely do any of us do that. We’re so caught up. And especially I feel like in our world and in this country and the whole way it’s was formed about, you know, working hard and just moving forward and making progress and being successful and all of this stuff.

It’s not conducive to Serenity. And I think that I think that I. I think learning this, this book has been helpful. The experience of losing my sister, the experience of having a, a child who is an addict. The, all of these different things I think, have taught me about the value of self-care as well.

That that has a place and and it, it should be looked at and given space.

Rita Black: Wonderful. I think our listeners would really agree with you. We talk a lot about self-compassion, self-care, so I’m glad that you’ve found that program and I, I think our generation of women were absolutely taught to look after others and put ourselves at the bottom of the totem pole.

So it’s something that’s just, and I think we’re biologically wired that way somehow as well. A little bit, yeah. Tell us how I’m gonna put the link to your book in our show notes. And please, please go and get you will not regret. This is a great book for you or probably many people in your life who could understand grief or are going through grief themselves.

It’s a, it’s a great exploration and powerful and uplifting exploration of grief.

Barbara Wansbrough: Well, thank you so much for this, Rita. I will say, and I hope that well, I’ll make sure you get a copy of it. ’cause the actual physical book is a very beautiful object. The publisher has done a really incredible job, and it just looks so.

Where is it? It’s just a, I mean, this one’s covered it, but it’s a beautiful Oh wow. It’s a beautiful book. It, it just, and the quality of the, everything about it feels really, so I I Wonderful holiday gift. Well, it really is. ’cause let’s face it, the holidays have got plenty of grief stuffed inside them as well.

Oh my goodness. Absolutely. So, I, I would highly recommend it as a stocking stuffer, but it, it will be available as of as of Tuesday, next Tuesday, 1111 in, in bookstores and for order on Amazon promises to get it to you the following day. So Wonderful. Yes, so it will absolutely be available.

Rita Black: Terrific. And I will put, if you wanna give me the information for your appearances at various bookstores about the country I will put those in the show notes as well. So thank you so much for coming on The Thin Thinking Podcast. We’ll look forward to having you back on with your next book. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Rita. Thank you. If you’d like to experience wild things, a geography of grief for yourself, I’ve included the link in the show notes. And if something in this conversation stirred something within you longing, a loss, or maybe a curiosity about your own rituals, I invite you to begin your own walking meditation this week.

It’s just step outside. It’s a perfect weather. Breathe. Listen, not just your thoughts, but to what’s beneath them. Because as we learn today, walking can transform not just your body, but your grief, your habits, and your relationship to life itself. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you again, Barbara, and join us here next week.

And remember that the key, and probably the only key to unlocking the door of the weight struggle is inside you. So keep listening and find it. I will be here with you next week. Thanks for listening to the Thin Thinking Podcast. Did that episode go by way too fast for you? If so, and do you wanna dive deeper into the mindset of long-term weight release?

Head on over to www shift weight mastery.com. That’s www shift weight mastery.com, where you’ll find numerous tools and resources to help you unlock your mind for permanent weight release tips, strategies, and more. And be sure to check the show notes to learn more about my book from Fact to thin thinking.

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