Maïa Mercure: Holding Light & Dark

Ross Tayler: Today I'm happy to welcome Maïa Mercure to Sacred Sundays. Maïa is a registered death doula, shamanic reiki master, and plant medicine guide. She brings a deep well of lived and professional experience to her work, rooted in a lifelong relationship with grief and healing. Maïa's path began early in life when her father died suddenly at the age of six. This formative loss instilled in her an awareness of mortality and the human need for compassionate support through life's transitions. After moving through her own grief journey, she felt called to walk alongside others in theirs. Over the past few years, Maïa has invested in extensive training and dedicated over 200 hours of community service to her local hospice organization, sitting bedside with patients as they've taken their last breaths, offering reiki to palliative clients and grieving families, and facilitating advance care planning sessions and community death cafes. With a background in spiritual care, her approach is rooted in helping individuals and families find meaning, peace and connection in times of transition. She serves her clients with deep presence, compassion and integrity, committed to restoring death care as a natural and sacred part of community life. Welcome, Maïa.

Maïa Mercure: Thanks, Ross, happy to be here.

Ross Tayler: So good to have you. I've had the pleasure of attending two of your recent public offerings, which you refer to as death cafes, and they've been a really powerful experience. I'd love to continue the conversation here with you today.

Maïa Mercure: Absolutely.

Ross Tayler: Maïa is actually going to begin by sharing a reading with us, so I'll hand it over to Maïa.

Maïa Mercure: Okay, awesome. I just wanted to provide a little bit of context before I launch into it. This is a piece of writing that I found online and was really struck by, because it was probably the most accurate description I've come across of grief and what that feels like and how it changes over time. That's what I wanted to read for my offering today. It was written about 15 years ago online, and it was written anonymously, so all I know about the person who posted it is that he's an older guy, and I believe he's from Chicago, because he references O'Hare airport in this piece of writing. It was posted in response to someone asking, my friend just died and I don't know what to do, and this is what the man offered.

[Maïa Mercure reads an anonymous piece of writing about grief that she found online, which describes grief as coming in waves and scars as a testament to love.]

Ross Tayler: Wow. That is super powerful and relatable for sure. It's interesting, because as I heard it, I actually had a wave of emotion come up. I think before we started, you and I were talking about grief in general, and it reminded me of so much of the grief that I've had to go through. I've had to do it alone. We had talked a little about community coming together in different cultures when grief happens, so maybe that's the part that stuck with me, but as you read that, it made me remember the things that I've gone through, which is one of the great things about talking about this topic. So where would you like to start? Because we're talking about grief, and it's something that you've immersed yourself in, where's a good place to start for you?

Maïa Mercure: I'd be happy to talk about my own grief journey, because there's a lot of contrast in that experience, and parts of it might be relatable to different people. It shows two contrasting experiences of types of loss and the types of grief that can go along with them. I could start there if you'd like.

Ross Tayler: Sounds great.

Maïa Mercure: As you were reading in the bio, I lost my dad in a traumatic way when I was six years old. That's why I say that I've had a lifelong initiation into death work and working through grief. He died in 1999, so it's something I've been working through for about 25 years now. I've come to a place with that grief where, even though he died traumatically, I have a relationship with his spirit, and the grief doesn't feel crushing to me anymore. Like in that piece of writing that I just read, I really liked how he talks about how the waves start, and at first they're 100 feet tall and you get buried in them and feel incapacitated, like you can't move because the grief is so intense. Then over time the waves are 80 feet tall or 50 feet tall. He talks about the integration that needs to happen in order to move forward in life. Over the years, I feel like that's what I've had to learn to do with that grief. Because he died when I was a kid, it was a pretty disorienting experience. A lot of the grief that I had, I didn't understand, or it came out in different ways, like behaviorally. As I got older, I was able to be more intentional and work with that grief.

Later in my life, I lost my grandmother, who was very close to me, when she was 96 years old, and I was able to be with her at her bedside when she died. It was a really gradual death. She was in long-term care, 96 years old, and I received a phone call that she was no longer eating. I was able to take the day off work and go sit with her and just be present, and then she died that day. With how gradual that experience was, compared to losing my dad suddenly when I was a kid, it was completely different, and I grieved completely differently for my grandmother when she died in that way. I wanted to touch on the different types of grief and different types of loss. At a high level, there's complicated grief and uncomplicated grief. With a death like my grandmother's, where you have some mourning that the person is going to pass, you're able to go say goodbye to them and be present, and then they die peacefully and gracefully. Usually the grief that comes from that is not too difficult for us to integrate, and it's easier to handle than when someone dies suddenly or traumatically or violently. For the longest time in my life I was buried in my grief, and I think my grandma's death, 20 years after my dad's death, was an enlightening moment, because I realized that not all death had to be terrible and scary and painful. In letting her go more gracefully, I was able to see my dad's death in a different light and start working with that grief more intentionally.

Ross Tayler: I appreciate you sharing those two contrasting examples, because it really does show the differences in what you had to go through. For me, it makes me remember that both of my parents, when they passed, it was the uncomplicated version of death. The process wasn't really that challenging, because I knew it was coming and I could prepare for it, and there were no sudden pieces to it. I've also witnessed people go through those sudden deaths and how much harder that is. So I appreciate those two contrasting examples.

Maïa Mercure: Yeah, I can go into more depth too. Complicated grief can rear its head when you least expect it. It can be delayed. When someone dies traumatically, whether by suicide or overdose or murder, things that are really shocking to the system, our grief can come up in different and unexpected ways. On top of that, in circumstances like that, we're not only dealing with our grief and the sorrow from the loss of that person, we're also usually dealing with a lot of other things, like stigma, judgment, gossiping, whispering, pity, all these other things that come along with traumatic deaths. That's a whole thing in and of itself to deal with as well. It's not only the grief of the person we've lost, but working through all of that side of things too. To be honest, reflecting back on my experience as a kid, I actually think those other factors were more detrimental to my process of losing my dad than the actual grief itself. For me, the grief of losing my dad came later. It was quite delayed. I have a vivid memory of, this would have been in middle school, we were about 14 or 15, a friend of mine lost her dad. I went to the funeral, and the funeral happened to be at the same place in my hometown where my dad's memorial service had been held. I don't really remember much about my dad's memorial service, because I was six at the time. But to go to my friend's dad's memorial service at that same location a decade later was an interesting experience. She started playing a song on guitar and I just broke down in tears. I was sobbing and I couldn't breathe. It was really intense, and I had to leave and go sit. There was a back pond at the venue, and I went and sat by the pond and sobbed. Luckily my mom was with me at the time, and she sat with me, and eventually we had to leave. She said, do you want to get out of here? I said yeah, because it was such an intense experience. That was my delayed grief coming up, the grief I had never felt at my own dad's memorial service, coming up ten years later at this other memorial service. That's an example of delayed grief that can crop up.

There's also disenfranchised grief. That's another type of grief. It happens a lot with overdose, I would say. Disenfranchised grief is when the people around you might not feel like your sadness or your sorrow is justified. They might have a judgment about the person who's died, and then they don't see your grief as valid, which is really tricky too. That can happen with traumatic losses. It gets a lot more sticky and complicated depending on the relationship we had with the person who's passed and the way they died. That can really influence our grief journey.

Ross Tayler: Thank you for adding different layers, because it's important to consider. It makes me think of conversations I had working in treatment centers about grief and the five stages of grief, and it's way more than that. There's so much more going on when someone experiences a loss, and everybody is going to have their own experience. It's hard to see all of that, which makes me think about the role that you're bringing to the community and to those going through this, to guide them through that, support them to see the things they might not see, and bring a process that might be helpful. Can you say a bit more about that?

Maïa Mercure: Yeah, sometimes people don't even realize they are in grief. That's something that comes up. Even for myself, just recently this past summer, I was feeling a little lethargic and I didn't really know what the cause was. It took me a couple of months to clue in. I was like, why am I feeling like this? It's summertime, I should be out enjoying the sun, and I couldn't pull myself out of bed some days. Eventually I realized, oh, I'm in grief. It wasn't grief from a death loss. It was grief from a connection that felt deep for me and that had ended. It was grief from that, not a death loss, but even still. Even I, as a death doula who works with death and grief all the time, took a couple of months to clue into the fact that I was actually in grief. Once I realized that, I thought, yeah, it makes sense why my chest is feeling heavy and all this stuff. Then I started working with that grief and working through it. I think the biggest thing in working with people in community is first recognizing that we're in grief, and then intentionally working with it at our own pace.

The thing about working with grief is that we want to titrate the experience in order to integrate it healthily. If we are just sitting in our grief and not able to ever come out of it and experience any joy, it's really hard to work through that sorrow. What I think a lot of people don't take into consideration in their grieving process is how essential it is to still connect with our joy and experience joy. Sometimes when we're in grief we feel guilty about that. We've just lost our person, and we don't want to go out and have a great time with a friend or something like that. We feel like we almost need to be at home grieving sometimes. What's really helped me work through my grief is that titration experience of holding both the light and the dark. Of course, in the beginning stages of grief, we are just buried in it, like the metaphor of the hundred-foot wave coming at us. In the beginning stages, that is what it feels like. But over time, once we start to rear our heads out of being buried in it, we can start to slowly experience joy in our lives again, and that's what helps us eventually integrate that sadness into our lives. It makes me think of the Temperance card in the tarot deck. It's usually depicted as an angel holding two cups, pouring between them. That's how I picture integrating and working through our grief, being able to hold both the light and the dark simultaneously. You can't really have grief without joy, and you can't have joy without grief. We develop our capacity to experience joy by having the courage to face our sorrow.

Ross Tayler: I really appreciate what you said, because it highlights something else for me, which is this piece around, if we don't confront our relationship to death, are we really living? I think that came through in the reading you shared at the beginning. They're both interconnected, and yet it feels like my experience, culturally, is that my relationship to talking about death has been stunted. I think of being confronted with death by a friend who lost her son, and I had no idea what to do. I think I actually avoided the whole situation because I couldn't step towards it. That was the best I could do. It really makes me wonder, when did we start to avoid the topic of death instead of confronting it and having it be a natural part of our everyday existence?

Maïa Mercure: That's such a good question, because community death care used to be part of our natural cycles and rhythms. People used to care for their own dead at home. That's where the idea of funeral parlors comes from. It used to be the front room in people's homes. If someone died, they would have a wake in that front room, and there would be children present, and it wasn't a weird thing at all. It was just part of life. The community would gather around and support the grieving family members. That's how it used to be, and then over time we started outsourcing the dying process into the medical system and into funeral homes. That process disconnected us from community support and that whole process. I believe that's where our avoidance of death comes from, because back then it was such a natural part of life that we weren't avoidant and it wasn't really taboo. I would say that started about a hundred years ago, when we industrialized the whole process, instead of dying at home, dying in hospitals. With that process, sometimes family members might be there at the bedside in those final moments, but a lot of times they might not be. Then with what happens after, sometimes we're able to go in and see our loved one who has passed in the hospital, and sometimes they get whisked away to be embalmed by the funeral home. Depending on the funeral structure, it might be an open casket or not. There's a disconnect that happens in losing the loved one.

When they used to die at home, we would see them lying in front of us and see their lifeless body, and we could tell, okay, this person is no longer living. It takes our psyche a little while to process that, but to see that in front of us is healthier. Our nervous system is able to integrate it, again this concept of integration, at the pace of that happening. It probably happens over a few days. For example, in home funerals, you might have your person at home, and they might die, and you might spend time with them for three or four days. Over those three or four days, your brain and your nervous system have a chance to catch up to what's actually happening. Whereas if somebody dies in a clinical setting, and you may or may not be at their bedside, and you may or may not be part of the process of preparing their body after death or the memorial service, there's a lot more disconnection. It interrupts the natural flow and the natural rhythm. It does something to our psyche, kind of short circuits it, and we start to spin out a little, because we don't really know what's happening to our loved one, and we might not necessarily see them again. For the psyche, there's no chance for our nervous system to see that, okay, this person is no longer living. That part doesn't happen. It's harder for us to integrate that experience because it feels like that person has gone to some elusive place, like Neverland, and it makes it harder for our brains and nervous systems and bodies to reconcile that loss when it happens in that way.

Ross Tayler: We might get stuck in the emotional trauma that comes from the experience, and we're not actually able to move through that in a natural way.

Maïa Mercure: Exactly.

Ross Tayler: The work that you do brings some support and guidance to that process, so that it isn't what you just described, the way it's become.

Maïa Mercure: Mm-hmm.

Ross Tayler: One of the things I notice in the work that I do is that losing someone is the time in our life when we get confronted with emotions. If we haven't got a connection with feeling our emotions, it can often surface when we lose someone, and that increases the intensity of it, and perhaps we're even bringing other emotions that aren't related to that loss. It feels like it's too much, because when I talk with people about emotions, it's a difficult topic to engage with. We're very much in a culture that is mentally focused and disconnected from our bodies in a lot of ways, and to be disconnected from our bodies is to be disconnected from our emotional experience as well. There's a lot happening when we lose someone that we may not have ever experienced.

Maïa Mercure: Yeah, that is a pretty common experience, where we might have buried grief, or any emotion that's buried, really, and losing someone can reignite that. It's like my example with my friend's dad who passed, and I experienced my own grief ten years later by going to that memorial service. Sometimes we bury those emotions so deeply in our body and try to forget about them, but it's inevitable that something in our life, whether it's a death loss or any other type of big experience, will trigger that again. We're doing ourselves a disservice by suppressing those emotions instead of letting them flow through and actually experiencing them and having the courage to feel them, because they're going to pop up at some time or another. We might as well try, at our own pace, of course, to work with those emotions, so that we don't end up in a situation where we have a debilitating breakdown because we've suppressed so much of our emotion.

Ross Tayler: It seems like another factor that plays into this is that we live in a culture that is moving so quickly. I remember when I was working full-time, a lot of people get maybe one day off, and maybe three days off if it's a family member. I just remember being so shocked by that. That's not enough time. Because we're moving so quickly, we also don't get the proper time to grieve unless we take it intentionally. A lot of people are being asked to keep going or go right back to work, which in some ways can be good, because you're surrounded by community, or at least some community. What would you say about that piece?

Maïa Mercure: Yeah, I always thought that one to three days of bereavement time was crazy when I was in the corporate world too. I think there are cultures around the world that have different rituals around this, where they'll take eight days or a full couple of weeks and really just care for the grieving people. I love that approach. It's so much more community-centric and so much more supportive. I do think one to three days of bereavement is not a lot of time. But in some ways too, it depends on the way the person has died and the type of loss, because, again, that idea of titration, at the very beginning of a loss sometimes we're not really emotionally equipped to deal with our grief anyway. Some people cope with their grief by overworking. I'm not saying that's the healthiest approach, and I'm not saying that's the way to go, but a lot of the time people aren't ready to feel their grief at that stage anyway. A better approach might be, sure, a few days off to attend the funeral when it first happens, but then allowing that person, let's say, a month off whenever they need it, whether that's three months down the line or six months or a year down the line, to carve out proper time to feel their grief. That might be a more supportive approach, but everyone is different. Everyone grieves differently, and everybody feels their grief at different times. It would have to be up to the individual to say to their workplace, six months later, hey, I'm starting to really feel my grief come up and I want to work with it, can I take the summer off to go visit my loved ones or just be out in nature, whatever that may be. In an ideal world, that's how I would suggest we handle grief, to take time off when we're ready to feel it and ready to intentionally work with it. At the same time, with titration, most of us don't feel all of our grief all at once. So it's building in practices where we can start to feel that, and then developing the capacity to come out of it too, and come up for air, so that we're not always under those waves, buried under the grief, but coming up for air. It becomes a cycle. Even me today, 25 years into my grief, I still get grief that comes up, but I feel it in waves and a little bit at a time. Then I'll come out of that experience and go do something that does bring me joy, and then go back into that grief when I'm ready.

Ross Tayler: Even myself in this moment, and through this conversation so far, I'm realizing that going to the death cafe and having the prompts and the conversation that we have was really organic and light and flowing. I've got this energy in this conversation of treading lightly and noticing emotions coming up. To me, that's a reflection of how much energy this topic holds that is wanting to move and wanting to be expressed. Yet even in my own experience, I've got a lot to learn and a lot to experience. It's really interesting to notice all of that in me, which, like I said, is a reflection of the importance of this topic but also our avoidance of it.

Maïa Mercure: Yeah, and that's why I always emphasize so strongly at those death cafes to take care of yourself for the days afterward, because even if you didn't feel sorrow come up in the circle last night, talking about those kinds of topics can elicit grief and kind of catch you off guard. Something we talked about last night at the circle, two days from now you might find it brought up something that reminded you of a loss you had, and then you might start to feel that emotion. That's why I always emphasize so strongly, take care of yourself for the next few days after those circles, because grief can be a little unpredictable and catch us off guard, and we want to be prepared for when it does come up to welcome that emotion and that sadness and make space to feel it. Whether that means going for a walk in nature to move that through you, or a reiki session to move that through you, whatever your practice is, it's important for us to welcome that feeling in instead of suppressing it. That's also why I say at the death cafes that if tears start to flow when we're in conversation, let them. Don't try to suppress them. It's a safe space, being in community like that, to feel held in that. It's not like, if you start crying, you need to leave the room and experience that alone. You're completely welcome to stay in the circle and let the tears flow and let that emotion move through you while you're in community with us. That's just part of it. In our culture, our grief does tend to be really buried within our bodies, because we're not a culture that openly expresses our grief a lot of the time. That's why it can crop up unexpectedly. For a lot of us, it's buried in different pockets of our body, and it'll get triggered by talking about something else, or a different loss, or a different emotion, and it'll bring it up.

Ross Tayler: Totally. When you think of the work that you're doing, where do you hope to see things changing, say five years from now, as you do this work?

Maïa Mercure: That's a great question. I envision community death care becoming a bigger part of our society again. I have this intention of having a space where people can come and feel held at the end of life, and their family members can come. There's a space that exists like this already in Victoria, called Maid House [?]. There's one in Toronto too. The first location started in Toronto and then they recently opened one in Victoria. It's for people who are opting for medical assistance in dying. They've already gone through the process, they've been assessed by physicians, all of that, and let's say they don't want to die at home because their spouse might not want the memory of them passing away in their bed, for example. It's a space that people can go to to have their final moments with their family members, and there can be ritual infused into that experience. After that, the family can opt to have a home funeral if they'd like, or to use a funeral home. It's a lot more intentional of a process. So where do I see my work going in five years? One of my intentions is to potentially have a space where people can come and experience the whole spectrum of feelings that come up with death and grief, but also a space where people can actually come to spend their last moments with family members, where I can help lead them through ritual and ceremony that is supportive to the moment their person passes, and also support them through the grieving process. That's my own individual vision for the next five years.

Generally speaking, for this field of death work, I'm envisioning more community death care. The first step of that is community death cafes, to familiarize people with talking about death and bring that topic out of the shadows and destigmatize it. That's step one. Home funerals would be another step. Then our society becoming more comfortable feeling our grief, a lot less suppression and a lot more openness around people grieving around us, and us knowing how to support that and having the capacity to support each other. We can't grieve alone. Grieving is better in community, where we can feel supported. As a society we need to learn how to hold each other in that. By always avoiding talking about death, we're preventing that grief tending from being able to happen amongst each other, because all of us are too scared to cry or to feel anything, and that doesn't allow for the rest of the process to happen. The first step is getting more comfortable with the topic of death and feeling our emotions in the first place, so that we can support each other in them.

Ross Tayler: You're reminding me of something a wise friend of mine often says: you don't get extra points for doing it alone. It really seems to fit here, because going through loss with others and being supported in that process must have a huge impact. I think about how that circles back to the death cafes, giving that experience of being in community and having the conversation and being nurtured in a safe space. That's really the beginnings of a shift. If you could speak to someone who's listening to this podcast and is trying to go at it alone, what might you suggest or offer to them to step into something that is supportive and has community, like a death cafe? What would you say to help them make that step?

Maïa Mercure: Do you mean someone who has experienced a fresh loss, or somebody who is scared of talking about death?

Ross Tayler: Someone who is scared to talk about death for whatever reason that might be, whether they've lost or they're scared to lose, or it's something they want to talk about but don't know how to.

Maïa Mercure: What I would say, from my experience in this field so far, is that so many people are avoidant of talking about it, but once they do talk about it, they feel a sense of relief and openness and they just feel freer. It's like this big thing that we build up in our minds, like with anything taboo, not just death. The more we avoid it, the more of an elusive, big, scary thing it seems. Once we start to unpack it, that's when we realize it's not actually as scary as it seems. In my work there's a process called advance care planning. It's when you think about what you want the end of your life to look like, document that, and talk about it with your loved ones. A lot of the time, clients are a little apprehensive to go through that process in the beginning, but once they've gone through it with me and they have all of their end-of-life wishes figured out and documented, they feel much more free to go out and live their lives, because they've delved into that and realized it wasn't as scary as they thought it would be. They feel like they've gotten that out of the way and can go live their best life.

A lot of times people are apprehensive to talk about death because sometimes people think, if I talk about death, it's going to make it happen sooner, or all these weird notions we have. With that process in particular, a lot of people find it really life affirming, because they realize how much choice they have in the matter. People don't realize that you can have a home funeral, for example, or that you can make your wishes known. Whether you want to die alone, or other people want to die surrounded by people, thinking about what you want your end of life to look like can be very customized. We're lucky in the society that we live in, it's kind of a luxury to be able to think about that, because we're not facing war or famine here in North America. We live in a society where a lot of us live to older ages and can think about what we might want in an ideal world, what we might want our death to look like. Some people might want rock music and people drinking beer around their deathbed, and other people might want to be out in nature with heart music playing, or just one candle lit and not as much talking. For people who are scared to think about death or talk about death, what I would say is that you might surprise yourself in how good it actually feels to unpack that topic, and you might realize there's not as much to fear as you might think. Just by starting to talk about death, you might learn a lot and realize that it's not that scary. Maybe I'll throw the question back at you too, because the point of the death cafes is to start unpacking that. When you've come to the last couple of death cafes, how have you felt when you've left? Was it a little daunting and scary to come in and talk about death? What have you realized in coming to them?

Ross Tayler: I think that's why I asked the question, or was trying to stumble through asking a question, because I was hoping that someone would hear what they needed to hear to be able to go, and you throwing the question back at me is perfect. I'm really so happy that I've gone to the last two, and I left feeling lifted and energized. I really appreciated the level of conversation and dialogue, in the different directions that the topics went, in these two experiences. It was very supportive. I love the connection that formed between everybody there by talking about a challenging topic. We ended up talking about things that were really organic, based on the prompts that you provide. It was really great. I love it.

Maïa Mercure: Yeah, and to go back to your earlier point about me not calling them death cafes, that's actually very intentional on my part. What I've found since I've been involved in this work is that people are very afraid and avoidant of the word death. I call my death cafes Soul Talks, Living Well, Dying Well. They're done in death cafe format, but that's the title I give them, because if I just put up posters out in the community that said death cafe, I feel like fewer people would come. Same with my title. I belong to an association called the End of Life Doula Association of Canada, and when I started this work, I used to call myself an end of life doula, because it's softer. I've since transitioned into calling myself a death doula, because I think that part of my responsibility as a death doula is to destigmatize death. I'm trying to do my part in destigmatizing it by calling myself a death doula instead of always softening it down to end of life doula. Maybe someday, instead of calling my death cafes Soul Talks, I will transition to calling them death cafes. A little more about death cafes too: it's actually a global movement. I didn't come up with the idea of a death cafe. They're done all over the world with the intention of destigmatizing the topic of death. I didn't invent them. I just have my version that I run here in Nanaimo.

Ross Tayler: I remember when I was in Squamish, there was a death cafe offered, and I didn't go, even though I was curious. I just didn't understand what it was about. So I appreciate that you're describing them in a way that feels more accessible. I also appreciate that you're wanting to destigmatize the very topic that there's so much resistance to. All right, we unfortunately have to wrap up the conversation, but I always like to close with the question: what's one simple way someone could connect with the sacred today? What would you say to them?

Maïa Mercure: I love this question. I would encourage folks to set up an altar space if they can. I think of altars as a way for us here on earth to call in spirit. It's the intention that we bring to that space, whether it's just lighting a candle, or maybe we have crystals around it or photographs or meaningful objects. I think of an altar as a signpost from down here on earth where we're trying to call in spirit to come commune with us. It can be really simple. I have a few altar spaces. I have one in my reiki studio, where I have all my shamanic tools that I use with clients and oracle decks. Then I have my own personal altar out in my living room above my fireplace, where I have photographs of my ancestors who have passed, and that's a bit more personal to me. Even something as simple as a candle, with the intention of lighting it and calling in spirit, can act as an altar. We had someone at the death cafe last night say that she calls in her grandmother's spirit by having a teacup on her altar and pouring her grandmother orange pekoe tea every morning, inviting her to walk with her that day, which was really beautiful. I think it's about the intention behind it, not necessarily what the space looks like, but the intention with which we keep that space. If we have flowers on it, changing out the flowers so that our ancestors always have fresh flowers there, keeping it clean and dust free. So how can people call in the sacred? One of the easiest ways is to create a little altar space in your home, or even outside, and make it an intentional space where you're calling in your ancestors.

Ross Tayler: Thank you for that, I love that. I actually did light a candle this morning for my ancestors because of the inspiration that came from last night.

Maïa Mercure: I also have a candle that I lit before we got on this call.

Ross Tayler: Nice. And Maïa, if anybody wants to stay connected with you, where might be the best place for them to find you?

Maïa Mercure: Probably my website. That's the easiest way to connect. I do have an Instagram page, and I also have a Facebook page, but probably the website is the easiest.

Ross Tayler: Excellent, and we'll make sure that all those links are in the show notes.

Maïa Mercure: Perfect, awesome.

Ross Tayler: I'm really grateful to have had this conversation with you, Maïa. I also appreciate that I had this experience of being a little bit knocked off center, which I think is nothing but a good thing given the topic. I appreciate the level of knowledge that you bring to this topic, the level of passion, and the way that you navigate it with ease and create a simple way of looking at it, even though it's a very complex topic. I appreciate your guidance and your wisdom, and it was great to have this conversation with you.

Maïa Mercure: Aw, thanks, Ross. Thanks a lot for having me.

Ross Tayler: And to everyone listening, thank you for tuning in. Until next time, take good care.