84: Tim Ringgold - Adversity Is The Instructor

Imagine surviving the murder of your 5 friends and facing addiction head-on, only to realize these hardships were preparing you for an even greater adversity.

My guest Tim Ringgold is a TEDx speaker, author, and owner of Sonic Divinity Music therapy.  Having studied the healing elements of music in preterm and childbirth experiences, pain management and addictions, Tim’s passion for music turned out to be one of the greatest gifts he could give his child.

Tim understands the gifts and the complexities of parenting a child with a severe disability, what it means to find hope, lose hope and feel helpless.  Pulling out his secret weapon that is proven to reduce stress, diminish the experience of pain, and help cultivate resilience, Tim found a way to connect with his daughter Bella preterm, during childbirth and in her final days. 

Tim would suggest, “when we have a human experience with music, we realize we are not alone”.  Join us for this episode to discover how Tim and his wife walked through this season of their lives and the resilience practices that helped them heal after loss.

Website: www.timringgold.com 

Transcript

Cindy Thompson - A Resilience Project Podcast

Building Resilience Among Humans One Conversation At A Time

EP84: Tim Ringgold – Adversity Is The Instructor 

Cindy Thompson: Hello, friends. I am Cindy Thompson, and this is ‘A Resilience Project.’ This is a space where stories are shared and possibilities are discovered. I invite you to partner with me in cultivating resilience among humans, one conversation at a time.

Cindy Thompson: Imagine if finding your life’s purpose could also serve as a resilience practice during one of your life’s hardest seasons.  Losing a child is unimaginable and can lead many to believe it is not possible to ever find joy again.

 Walking with too many parents following the loss of a child has been one of the more challenging aspects of my work.  There is nothing I, or any counsellor can possibly say that will make their child come back.  Although there are several recommended practices that I might recommend in addition to creating a safe space to process their grief, but it never feels like enough. 

Even as a counsellor or therapist, it is natural to feel helpless as you witness the deep pain and grief that is associated with loss.  Always on the lookout for resources and practices that are effective and proven to add value to the process, I specifically invited this guest on the show so that we can learn more together.  And after having this conversation, I am a believer.  

 My guest this week has a studied the power of music in healing.  Tim Ringgold could not have anticipated the gift his experience would bring to their daughter Bella at birth and in her death.  Tim refers to himself as the soundtrack Bella heard prior to birth, during her birth and in her last days.  

 Tim is a TEDX speaker, author, music therapist and founder of Sonic music therapy.  Tim understands what it can mean to have a child with severe disability, to find hope, lose hope and feel helpless.  Pulling out his one secret weapon that is proven to reduce stress, reduce the experience of pain, and help cultivate resilience, Tim found a way to connect with Bella in a meaningful way, despite the overwhelming challenges.  

 Find out how Tim and his wife walked through this season of their lives, and what has helped them to thrive following the loss of their daughter Bella.

 Here is my conversation with Tim…

 Cindy Thompson: Tim, thank you so much for being here on A Resilience Project.  I am really excited about this conversation today and to see where it's going to take us.

Tim Ringgold: It's great to be here.  Thanks for having me.

Cindy Thompson: My honour.  As a therapist, I am interested in all kinds of therapy that might help people.  It's not one size fits; people might seek a specific approach that works for them.

Cindy Thompson: It could be play therapy and music therapy, as you do.  I'm excited to learn from you today and more about the value of music and the power of music in helping people with their resilience practice.

Tim Ringgold: Yeah.  It was a journey of my experience with it as a musical human because all humans are musical beings.  It's in our DNA, and we are wired for it.  We are rhythmic beings.  Our body runs on rhythm.  It's the fundamental organizing principle of everything that happens in the body from the cellular level up.

Tim Ringgold: Rhythm is inescapable and a baseline for wellness.  When things are out of rhythm, that's when things become maladaptive, pathological diagnostic.  Our culture tends to tell a story about music.  And because rhythm is the fundamental organizing structure of music, we tell ourselves stories like some people have rhythm and some people don't.

Tim Ringgold: That's not true.  Some people are more coordinated than others.  That's true, but that's not rhythm.  They're two different things.  As musical beings, all humans are musical.  There's no known culture that doesn't have music at the center of it.  It's evolutionarily it's everywhere.  It's cross-cultural.

Tim Ringgold: In our culture, we told this story a while ago about music, and it created this kind of divide that's not cross-cultural.  That's very much western European culture that expanded here into the United States.

Tim Ringgold: Then music technology reinforced it because you no longer needed to make music to listen to it.  In the last 120 years, mainly you started in the United States and Western culture, you began to develop this idea that there are a few people who have this myth called talent and that the rest of us don't.

Tim Ringgold: But even as a music listener, we've all had profound experiences with music, profound experiences whether they were at a concert and it was that feeling of unity and oneness in the audience and with the band, the energy, with the artist that was happening the way that time disappears, inside of a musical space the way self can disappear inside of it.  There's a real sense of oneness and connection in the way that someone can be rescued from the isolation of self in their bedroom through someone else's lyrics and their told story.

Tim Ringgold: And that resonance between what it's like to be a human, having a human experience, and then artists articulating their understanding of it, and then us as listeners resonating with what they say.  We're resonating as human beings, but we're also resonating as musical beings.

Tim Ringgold: We can accept that into us and realize I'm not alone.  That as human beings, as social animals, human beings have to have the experience of not being alone; otherwise, we die in nature rather quickly.  Music's just this thread that's through us all. 

Tim Ringgold: Throughout my whole life, it was there, and it rescued me.  I could climb Pinnacle Peaks with it.  I was raised Catholic, and when I was a junior in high school, I sang a solo for Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Square on Wednesday of Holy week in front of 13,000 Catholics who had all come pilgrims from around the world seek his audience.

I am on the mic, on the steps of St. Peters.  I got to experience these pinnacles with music, but music also pulled me out of the deepest valleys simultaneously. 

Tim Ringgold: The idea of translating that into a functional modality to help people in an allied health model.  Kudos to the pioneers of the music therapy field for doing the hard work to take this very ephemeral, subjective, qualitative phenomenon, which is music and try to put it into this box of western quantitative medicine and say that it doesn't always work, but it does work in specific ways.  It works enough to where at least we have found a place in Allied Health where I can help people with music as a clinical instrument by day.  That is just amazing because I get very little pushback.

Tim Ringgold: I wouldn't want to use that to help me feel better, said no one ever.

Cindy Thompson: It made me wonder, where did you get inspired to choose the music therapy field over others?  As a younger person, I can hear you were already very involved with music, but I wonder about the chicken and the egg.  Was it some of the life events that happened that you found soulless in music yourself?

Cindy Thompson: Or was it the other way around where you could get inspired by the music, felt personal value in it and wanted to share that with more?

Tim Ringgold: Yeah, I knew that I wanted to help and heal.  I knew that about myself.  That was a part of me that wanted to express itself.  I only found a structure for that inside of music when I was 32.  Growing up, I was an athlete and artist, and I first discovered physical therapy.

Tim Ringgold: As a patient, I ended up on the table as an athlete.  And then, I started to work in physical therapy.  But for me, it was just tissue and protocol.  And after a while, I was like, this isn't the whole self.  There's a self inside the patient that's having the experience of the tissue not working, an experience of not being able to do what you love because your body's not working.  Who's treating that self?

Cindy Thompson: Hmm.

Tim Ringgold: That was the question I had.  And how do we go deeper than the tissue?  I found that physical therapy couldn't. 

Tim Ringgold: I was a performing artist, and I was reaching and inspiring people with music and touching and moving and helping many people with music as a performing artist.  The lifestyle was disastrous and unhealthy.  They say sex, drugs, and rock and roll in that order for a reason.

Cindy Thompson: Okay.

Tim Ringgold: Going knee-deep into the rock and roll world, I went into everything that went along with it.  And I know for myself just the amount of risk-taking I was taking with my body daily in that world.  I understand why everybody dies young.  I got it because I was in it.  I'd be dead or in jail today.  Easy.  I was burning through my nine lives as a cat, like burning through them.  Thereby the grace of God, am I still walking and talking.

Tim Ringgold: Whoa, this is not sustainable.  My wife and I were engaged, and we got this cheesy book as an engagement present, and it was the hard questions.  A hundred questions every couple should ask before tying the Knot.  And oh, gag.  Okay, we'll check it out.  We open it up, and it's got chapters on like different aspects of life and just asking each other questions you don't usually ask to see where there's alignment and where there isn't and where you might need to create some cooperating, and we got to the chapter on career.

Tim Ringgold: What do you see yourself doing 5, 10, 20 years from now?  My wife at the time had just gotten her M B A, and pulled out pie charts and graphs; she was using hand signals to denote her career progression.

 She had it down.  On the other hand, I looked into the black hole of the music industry, and it was, oh, just soul-crushing.  Oh.  And she told me, if you want to go back to school, we can afford it.  We lived right near Arizona State University at the time.  I went on their website and scrolled A to Z. I got to music performance, no music composition, no music education.  No.  And then these two words were side-by-side music therapy.  What is that click?  It took me to a page, and it had two paragraphs.  The first paragraph read like my dream job, and the second read like an autobiography.

Cindy Thompson: Wow.

Tim Ringgold: I realized I could get a degree in being myself.  Because it was who I was, it was what I was doing in bands, but just the structure of being in bands was disastrous for my health.  Working in Allied Health or education, I would work the same hours as my wife.  I wouldn't be travelling, and I wouldn't be in bars.

Tim Ringgold: All the bad stuff would be immediately eliminated.  And I'd be working in Allied Health, which is what I wanted to do as a physical therapist, but I'd be treating the self inside the patient.

Cindy Thompson: Mm.

Tim Ringgold: I immediately filled out my application and never looked back.

Tim Ringgold: Now, it took a fantastic amount of adversity.  I failed my audition the first year I got a coach, and I sang every day for a year straight.  I failed my audition again.  Then this small school in Southern California that was ten times the tuition, I drove six hours for a 60-second audition.

Tim Ringgold: Six hours, sang for 60 seconds, got in my car, drove back home, nailed the audition, got in, got a scholarship, but it was ten times the tuition.  We had to move from Arizona to Southern California.  I had to return to school for five years, full-time in my thirties, plus a six-month unpaid internship in another city.

Tim Ringgold: It was brutal, but nothing was going to stay in my way.  It was so clear that this was a self-expression to become a music therapist.  All the paths had been pointing towards this.  So it was like, okay, what do we got to do?  As they say, when you seize who you are, it isn't like what you do.  What do you do?  It was who I am, so I got the experience of just being myself.  I haven't worked the day since 2008.  That's my lived experience right now.  People are like, you retired, and I was like, no.

Tim Ringgold: I just found who I am and get paid to be myself.

Cindy Thompson: That's the dream! 

Tim Ringgold: Yeah.

Cindy Thompson: And as I listened to that, I can imagine it maybe didn't feel so difficult to give up the rock music field because you still got to be in music.  You still got to work ahead at something you are passionate about.  Often, people might be in a band early in their lives and then grieve when that day comes that they're not making it and have to get another job. 

Tim Ringgold: A real job.

Cindy Thompson: Yeah.  A real job.  I love that.  I know after that, some other adversities happened.  You had five good friends die as a result of murder. 

Tim Ringgold: In 1995, I still lived in Connecticut, and I was 22, and I was at a concert at a club, shouting my brains off and just 10 minutes away from there, my five best friends were murdered by their landlord.

Cindy Thompson: By their landlord?

Tim Ringgold: Yeah, I went to five funerals in four days.  I would get up, bury a friend, get as hammered as possible, pass out, and then wake up and have to do the whole thing again the next day and the next day, and then two on Sunday.

Tim Ringgold: I had no frame of reference for that level of trauma or adversity.  It was uncharted waters.  They don't write movies like that.  No audience wants to go through that.  It was just unprecedented territory.

Tim Ringgold: I did everything to numb the pain.  I drank, smoked, watched porn, ate food, and did everything I could to fry my brain cells to get through that, but nothing worked.

Cindy Thompson: To numb out... Mm-hmm.

Tim Ringgold: To numb out.  But the night of the last funeral, I was like, oh, hell yeah.  I need some music.  So we went to a show by a famous musician who I'd never seen but I had heard of.  For two hours, I found peace.

Cindy Thompson: Wow.

Tim Ringgold: Nothing I'd put in my body for that week prior had numbed that pain.  But the music did.  It was where'd it go?  It's gone.

Cindy Thompson: Hmm. 

Tim Ringgold: After the show, I walked up to the musician, and I said, listen, there are reasons why you knew you were playing here, and there are reasons you didn't.

Tim Ringgold: Here's one of them.  A week ago, my five best friends were murdered, and I've been in hell ever since, and you're the first person to bring me out.  And I put my hand on his chest, and through my arm, I just gave him back the peace he gave me. 

Tim Ringgold: Tears burst out of his eyes.  It was this profound moment of connection and this full-circle experience.

Tim Ringgold: An interesting piece of this story.  I had played at all of my friends' funerals.  I'd played music, and it was deeply healing to my community.  People would come up to me, and they wrote about it in the local paper, but it tore me up to do it.  It wasn't until I was the audience member and received the music that what everyone else had been saying to me all week made sense.

Cindy Thompson: Okay.

Tim Ringgold: Oh, this is what everyone was talking about.  Except I was up there, and they were down here, and now I'm down here.

Tim Ringgold: I realized I could feel great during great pain because let's be clear about this.

The music didn't.  Heal or end or stop the suffering.  It was a respite from it.  It was a temporary relief from it.  It was a distraction from something else that was still going on.  The grief and horror, and trauma of my friend's murder were still present, but I wasn't present to it because of what music does to the brain.

Tim Ringgold: I had a full body vacation body, full mind vacation, and full spirit vacation from that.  We need breaks.

Tim Ringgold: We need breaks, so that's important to remember.  You can feel great even inside the greater sense of pain or suffering that you're going through, and it can be authentic.

Cindy Thompson: Those moments of peace within the storm give us some respite and a chance to catch our breath.  It's not necessarily taking it away, but it's in that place that we might feel re-energized to cope with that next stage.

Cindy Thompson: You spent an entire week there with your friends passing.  You had so much for your brain to process.  It needed respite at that moment.

Tim Ringgold: Yep, a hundred percent.  Our mind, body, and spirit need recovery time. 

Tim Ringgold: Everybody prescribes themselves music intuitively.  We all do it.  That's what a playlist is.  That's what a CD was.  That's what a blank tape or a mixtape was.  We prescribe ourselves music to move us from point A to point B.  Whether we're multitasking to music or using the music at the moment to help us move through something or get away from something, we can move closer to something.

 Tim Ringgold: With music, we can move away from something.  With music, it's versatile, and when I was getting my degree, I was so frustrated because so much of it was so intuitive that I would joke that it was tales of the obvious. I was paying $900 a credit hour to be told stuff that I had already lived and intuitively knew, but I lacked the language and the research.

Tim Ringgold: Once I was given the language and the research, I could talk about it inside the Western Medical model in a way that validated for many people what they were already experiencing.  That's what I had to figure out to help elevate the efficacy, and the utility of music for people as a tool was to say, listen, I'm not going to tell you anything you still need to learn.

Tim Ringgold: I'm just going to explain how and why, and now it's going to make sense to you, and you're going to rely on it more, and you're going to feel good about using it this way.

Cindy Thompson: What came next? 

Tim Ringgold: My wife became pregnant, and now we're suddenly going to usher in a child.  For my semester's grand rounds project, how does music help at the beginning of life?

Tim Ringgold: This transition can be challenging for infants, particularly preterm infants and C-section babies. Music could help. 

Tim Ringgold: I read the research and couldn't believe how transformational music is to preterm infants and newborns.  That's so cool.  So, sure enough, I did all the things for my daughter that I read about.  All three of my children, we quote-unquote, did everything that all the research shows that music can help in this journey.  What was fascinating was that with my second daughter, I had just gotten that NICU certification.  My second daughter, undiagnosed, was born with a rare fatal childhood disease called epidermal isis, bosa, or EB for short.  It's a skin disease where your skin's not connected to your body because your body fails to produce one protein that acts like Velcro to hold it in place.

Tim Ringgold: Super rare, so it doesn't show up in ultrasounds.  No one saw it coming.

Cindy Thompson: Okay.

Tim Ringgold: My daughter became my first patient, and luckily I could show up as a clinician for my daughter and do all the things the research indicates to help my daughter through her transition into life.

Tim Ringgold: This started with me making music with her in the womb and then in the operating room during the C-section and before every surgical procedure.  And then throughout the day while she's in the isolette.  I was able to practice music therapy with my daughter.

Tim Ringgold: What a lucky, amazing cosmic, ordained, providential.  Throw whatever phrase you want on it.  Here's the fascinating thing: she had a skin disease, so that you couldn't touch her.  So she's in a plastic box, but her ears worked so the music could touch her.  So oh, I could touch my daughter musically when I couldn't touch her physically.

Cindy Thompson: Hmm.

Tim Ringgold: As a dad, dad's like to do stuff.  We want to solve things, and we want to fix things.  What do I need to do? 

Cindy Thompson: Mm-hmm. 

Tim Ringgold: To be able to do something when you can't touch her, oh, it was just the most incredible relief that, as her dad that I was of use.

Cindy Thompson: The fact that it's such a helpless feeling when your child is in the NICU or hospital, and you want to do something, but often it's so out of your control.  This gave you something you could do that gave you a sense of having influence.

Tim Ringgold: Yes, And purpose, and my wife is grounded.  She could focus on work when she had the primary job, and I was like, Mr. Mom.  She could focus on her career for eight hours, and God love her.  I have no idea how she was able to do it.

Tim Ringgold: The average is like 65 professionals walk through the patient door in a 24-hour period.  It's a revolving door.  Because of my training, I could not only administer music therapy to my daughter but also interact and talk with, co-operate, and collaborate with the treatment teams the whole way and not be in the way and, as a clinician, feel comfortable. 

 Cindy Thompson: When you were able to play music or sing to Bella, could you physically see evidence of the impact that was having on her?

Tim Ringgold: Oh yeah.  With EB, since your skin doesn't have Velcro. If you bump into it or rub it, it either peels right off or separates the layers, and body fluid goes in and creates these vast blisters that can be two inches, three inches, four inches, or six inches in length.

Tim Ringgold: Nothing like anything you've ever seen.  All those blisters break down into open wounds.  A kid with ES body is covered in open wounds, covered in open wounds.  You must change all the bandages every day or every other day.  If you're lucky, it was a three-hour surgical procedure.

Tim Ringgold: Guess who gets to do it?  Oh no, not the wound care team, mom and dad.  You have to suddenly become a wound care expert with no prior training, and you have to use these state-of-the-art, $ 10,000-a-month supplies like advanced burn unit supplies and somehow keep your wits about you while you're working together with a baby.

Tim Ringgold: You can't say hold still.  Baby doesn't have language.  It's a baby.  It does what babies do; it rocks, it rolls, it does whatever.  Oh, my goodness.  What a recipe for disaster.  Wound care.  The most stressful thing because changing those is excruciating for the infant, and it's incredibly stressful for the parents.

Tim Ringgold: It's just the worst.  We used music with every bandage change, and let me tell you; it was the most peaceful, sacred bubble we would go into because it would calm us, and calm parents equal calm babies because babies pick up on the emotional signals that their parents are giving off.  So if we're relaxed, that triggers relaxation in the infant's nervous system.

Tim Ringgold: Secondly, music acts basically like an analgesic.  The brain doesn't process a pain signal at the same time it processes a music signal, and the music signal triggers a biochemical reward in the brain within 32 weeks of gestational age; the human brain prefers music over environmental sound, and it will seek it, and it will focus on it.

Tim Ringgold: When you put the music on for the baby, it's calming the baby's brain from the pain signals.  It calms the parent's nervous system from the stress, therefore reinforcing the baby's calmness.  It was like magic.  Clinicians aren't supposed to use the word magic, but let me tell you, you turned on the music, and suddenly, Bella would just be lying there.

Tim Ringgold: What do you need to do to me, dad?  What do you need to do to me, mom?  She'd be making eye contact with us the whole time.  Cooling.  We'd be cooing back and forth.

Cindy Thompson: Hmm.

Tim Ringgold: This is like a 90-minute procedure.  It could be two hours, and it could be three hours.  With the setup, bath cleanup, bandages, and everything together, it's a three-hour tour.  It's a long time from start to finish.  When the music ended, she'd return to being a baby.  It worked, and we used it every single time.  It was a game-changer.

Tim Ringgold: Medical staff would cry watching us do the bandage changes because they had never seen anything like it.  I was lucky enough to have been trained that if you use the music this way and this type of music, it will produce this result.

Cindy Thompson: And there was lots of research that supported what you were doing there.

Tim Ringgold: Outstanding research. 

Cindy Thompson: It is a sad story because Bella lived for how long?

Tim Ringgold: She only lived 17 months.

Cindy Thompson: Yeah.  Such a short life.  I'm curious whether it was so short and you couldn't have known how it would turn out. Did it give you a sense of comfort somehow to see that you got to have those meaningful interactions in those ways?

Tim Ringgold: Oh, a hundred percent.  Her journey's sad, but it's also not sad.  I'll explain it like this.  No one guarantees quantity, so all you're left with is quality, but we live in a quantitative culture.  We think long is better than short, but that is sometimes true.

 Tim Ringgold: The 17 months she had, the quality of those 17 months and the quality of our time with her, the quality of what we did while we were alive, how we took care of ourselves, how we took care of our family, we thrived, my family thrived.  It was phenomenal.  Full stop. 

Tim Ringgold: When you learn that there are best practices for handling adversity, increasing resilience, and managing stress.  There are best practices out there.  They are well-researched.  Do them and do all of them.  Don't just do one.  Do all of them.  And it transforms your experience of what you're going through, and it did for us.

Tim Ringgold: I'm grateful that we went through what we went through.  I'm grateful that from a spiritual perspective, we all chose this journey to have it together.  She chose us as her parents and we played this game together while she was here because the number of lives Bella impacted was phenomenal.

Tim Ringgold: I wrote a blog about her journey and blogged about her regularly to keep friends and family in the loop.  Very quickly, we realized something special was happening with Bella.  Then she became a candidate in this clinical trial to find a cure.  People worldwide followed this clinical trial, and the doctors couldn't tell anyone what was happening because of HIPAA, but I could as a parent.  I chronicled the journey because I wanted other parents to have as much information as possible about whether they wanted to go through the journey.

Tim Ringgold: It was pretty gnarly. It was a bone marrow transplant for an infant.

Cindy Thompson: Hmm.

Tim Ringgold: Anytime bone marrow transplant is brought up, it's because you're at the 11th hour.  You're out of options.  People followed her story all around the world.  The comments I would read daily on her blog gave me the strength to show up without fear and have at it again the following day.

Tim Ringgold: We had a yearbook journal at the door of her hospital room, where we invited the staff.  How has Bella taught you?  What has Bella taught you, and the entries there are extraordinary.  The NICU nurse who became a wound care specialist because of Bella, my wife, and I changed her career trajectory by meeting Bella and meeting us.

Tim Ringgold: We heard so many stories like that, that we realized everything that happened was awesome.  It was like a net awesome with some funky, intense, hard stuff inside of it. 

Tim Ringgold: I was physically fried from the journey.  People were like; I don't know how you did what you did.  I didn't know what I was getting myself into.

Tim Ringgold: Find yourself in the situation, and you ultimately have to say, do you lean into this, or do I run from this?  My life story tells me to lean into the suck.  When you lean in, there's real power.  You resist and run from it; it just chases you down and is worse when it catches you.

Tim Ringgold: So just lean in, and that's where the power is.  That's where the transformation is.  That's where the healing is.  So we just leaned in, and we had an amazing, amazing experience.

Cindy Thompson: Hmm.  It's almost as if Bella was born with a purpose, even though it was a short time.  We can't always see that when we lose a child or loved one.  We can't always see the blessings in it, but I appreciate the things that you guys did so that you could also get that feedback from the staff in ways which was meaningful to them.

Cindy Thompson: We sometimes get that.  We might then leave the hospital or the treatments and walk away and never have contact with them again.  But you had a testimony that you could hang on to.

Tim Ringgold: Yeah.  I don't know if I was like persona non grata at this hospital or if I was seen as her hero, daddy.  It was boot camp.  I made clinicians cry.  When it was time to check people and wake them up and get out of autopilot mode, I was the century. 

Tim Ringgold: Some of the staff wanted to give up on Bella because she had spent 99 days in the ICU after the bone marrow transplant went south.  I wrote on the blog Bella needs your support, so cool.  Hundreds of comments on the blog from around the world.  Two friends printed them on coloured paper and cut them into hearts or butterflies.  Strung them together, and we lined the walls of her room and had to walk through it like seventies disco beads.

Tim Ringgold: You could not treat my daughter without being fully aware that the world was watching you and that the world was rooting for her.  That's pretty intense.  I'm a pretty intense guy, and I was like pulling out all the stops.  One of the doctors, at one point, walked up to me and said, I saw this movie this weekend.  It was with Brandon Frazier, and it was called extraordinary circumstances, and it was with Harrison Ford.  It's about this doctor and this husband who were trying to find a cure in time for the wife before she died.

Tim Ringgold: He goes, and I thought of you, and I was going to ask if you had seen it.  Then he said, but then I thought, you're living it.

Cindy Thompson: Wow.

Tim Ringgold: You're that guy.  You're the hero in the movie.  It was the most touching thing to have this clinician be moved.  As a clinician, you sometimes have to turn your heart off, not just to have it break, as to some of the things you see year in, year out.  To have him make that and give that to me was an honor.

Tim Ringgold: Thank you because, as a dad, there's only so much you can do.  I'm dreaming and thinking up everything I can to make this a powerful experience for everybody involved.  Bella's legacy is that every kid that comes along with EB after Bella will have a better shot.

Cindy Thompson: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ringgold: Than the kids who came before.

Tim Ringgold: That's meaningful and what gives us peace.

Cindy Thompson: Mm-hmm.  With all that you and your wife went through, I know that you also have a sobriety journey in that you quit drinking.  You were heavily relying on some of those addictive patterns to cope.  Where did that change? 

Tim Ringgold: Yeah, so a couple of things.  My first sober journey was actually with sex.  That was my kryptonite.  I walked into my first 12-step meeting in a church in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2003.

Cindy Thompson: Okay. 

Tim Ringgold: The rock and roll world where I made that comment about sex, drugs and rock and roll.

Tim Ringgold: I could quit drinking for a month.  I could quit smoking.  I could stop doing anything, but women, I'm just powerless around them.  I was in a personal growth program called Landmark Education. Let me tell you that their content is phenomenal.

Tim Ringgold: It was inside one of their programs that I saw that I had this giant hidden side of me, that I was trying to keep a secret and that it just wasn't going to fly anymore and that I couldn't operate with this version of myself and trying to start a foundational relationship that would turn into a marriage.

Tim Ringgold: They just were incongruent. Something was going to have to give.  At the risk of losing my relationship, I disclosed my infidelity history to my, at the time, Angelique was my girlfriend.  I said I have to clean this up for me, and it may cost me you.

Cindy Thompson: Okay.

Tim Ringgold: If I don't do this, there will be no you anyway because I'll never ask you to marry me with this background of infidelity.  So we're just going to be stuck, rinse and repeat in limbo where we are right now.  We had been together for four years, and nothing was happening because I couldn't take the next step. After all, I had this giant secret side of me that I couldn't control.  I could handle and control so many other things that I didn't understand, and I was utterly powerless in this area.

Tim Ringgold: It didn't make any sense to me, and I just leaned in and got honest.

Tim Ringgold: She did something fascinating, which was, she said, the type of person I want to be with is the type of person who's honest.  The type of person I want to be with is the type of person who would be willing to risk it all, to be honest! And that vulnerable.

Cindy Thompson: A big part of your decision to dive deep within yourself happened even before you married and had Bella.  I asked that because of what you needed and the presence you required to be there for Bella, you must have done a fair amount of work before you got to that point.

Tim Ringgold: Oh yeah.  Listen, resilience is like cardio conditioning.  You don't buy it at the store.  You develop it, and you build it through practice.  1995, my friends are murdered.  I go through that journey.  1997 my dad dies of cancer.

 Tim Ringgold: I go through that journey.  2003, I came out and entered the 12-step world.  I go through that journey.  I felt like I was fighting for my life in the early days of my recovery.  My life was on the line because as I dried up and sobered up in my thinking, I started to see all the disasters and near disasters that I had covered up and narrowly avoided that, if left unchecked, where was this going to lead?

Tim Ringgold: It was a lot of work.  A 12-step is brutal, rigorous honesty, and the 12-step is just unrelenting.  By the time we got to Bella, I had been leaning into the muck as a practice, and I had developed some resilient muscle tone conditioning and cardio for that journey.

Tim Ringgold: So grateful for all the adversity I had met along the way because all of it was training for Bella.  Bella was like the big leagues. 

Cindy Thompson: That was like the big concert you were preparing for.

Tim Ringgold: Yeah.  All these other warmup gigs took us to the big stage with Bella because that was the big stage. 

Tim Ringgold: Just grateful for everything I went through along the way because I feel like muscles build under stress.  They require stress.  It's called resistance training.  We think about our cognitive, mental, social, emotional, and spiritual muscles; metaphorically, they build similarly in my experience.  I look at all adversity as strength training, and it works.

Tim Ringgold: In adversity and tragedy, you can get bitter, or you can get better.  We know that there's post-traumatic stress disorder, but we also know that there's post-traumatic growth.

Cindy Thompson: yes.

Tim Ringgold: I just made it a mission early on that everything I go through, it's strength training for the next thing.

Cindy Thompson: Hmm.  Our mindset is so critical to our resilience practice.

Cindy Thompson: You have shared so much here, Tim. You have been feeding us resilience practices all the way along as we've been talking.  Is there anything we've missed that you would like to add?

Tim Ringgold: Yeah, let me share one gratitude practice.  Before I went to bed, I would get on my knees and think about three things from the day I was thankful for. 

Tim Ringgold: I would get off my knees, and I'd go to bed, and then I would wake up in the morning, and I would slide out of bed onto my knees, and I would think about three things coming in the day that I was excited about.  I would already prime my brain for what's going to go well.

Cindy Thompson: Yes.

Tim Ringgold: My radar would go up for what's going to be exciting and going well.  When I'm back in this same posture, will I look back on these same three things, or will hidden surprises waiting for me?

Cindy Thompson: Hmm

Tim Ringgold: That's the mindset I would set, and I would use that posture of kneeling to trigger that state.

Tim Ringgold: When Bella died that night after I blogged, I got on my knees as I always did because it was a habit at that point; it was a practice.  I started to become aware of all the things.  I was grateful for that day.  They just started cascading into my awareness, all by themselves, because it was a practice.

Tim Ringgold: It wasn't like, I better do this now when things are rough.  I did it every day.  So on that day when things were rough, it still worked.  Then I had the observed experience of it happening.  I was kneeling, and I was like, oh my God.  Oh my God, I'm grateful. 

Cindy Thompson: On the day that your daughter died. 

Tim Ringgold: Yes.  How is this even possible because the narrative of the day your daughter dies is the worst day of your life?  There's nothing worse, not true.  The authentic experience, I was grateful for everything, the way they happened, the way they did. 

Tim Ringgold: There was a litany of magical things about that day that was unlike any other Monday before it.  It was a unique day, even to the point where it was Columbus Day, and Ang didn't have to work.  Allie, my other daughter, wasn't at daycare that day.

Tim Ringgold: All these cosmic coincidences that conspired down to the fact that the birth song that I had written for Bella and was playing when she was born when her heart rate went to zero, the song happened to come on during the playlist that was playing in the hospital room.  I orchestrated the first one for sure.  God orchestrated the second one, so as her heart rate goes to zero, her birth song comes on, and I'm singing and harmonizing with it.  I'm singing my daughter back to heaven as I take all the tubes out of her.

Cindy Thompson: Hmm. 

Tim Ringgold: As the guy I am and was, I couldn't have scripted anything cooler.  There was no more beautiful way for me to say goodbye to my daughter than precisely the way it happened.  It was amazing.  Being able to be present that night as I went to bed, I went to bed. Wow, cosmic. 

Cindy Thompson: Mm-hmm. 

Tim Ringgold: This is amazing.

Cindy Thompson: It's like your brain was primed to notice what was still good in the day and to look for those blessings.  As you said, it's a practice.  That's a great example.  Yeah.

Tim Ringgold: I know that it works even on the day your daughter dies.  If you work it, you can't mess with me.  That's like the ultimate field test.  A stamp of approval, like this stuff, works.

Cindy Thompson: In your Ted Talk, you talk about that birth song, what you sang to Bella, and the song you created for her.  It's special how you have done that and to hear that story even further. 

Cindy Thompson: Tim, I think there's likely to be a sequel to this somewhere later this year because I feel like there's more that you have to offer us in resilience and to talk about your four-step formula, and we'll prime the listeners to stay tuned for that. 

Cindy Thompson: Thank you so much for being here today, for sharing your stories, being vulnerable with us to impart the knowledge, wisdom and key learnings that you've taken away from your experience in all those ways.

Tim Ringgold: I appreciate that.  Yeah, thanks for having me.  It's my joy.

Cindy Thompson: It has also been my pleasure.

 Cindy Thompson: I am in awe of the rich insights Tim has shared with us in this conversation! I am mindful that we are speaking about the loss of Bella that has also allowed for time and healing to occur.  In no way would I expect that anyone going through loss at this time might have this same lens or perspective but hope perhaps there might be some practices that will assist in the healing process.  

 I personally have made note of several thoughts, comments and quotes from Tim and will try to capture some of them for you here.  

 Music provides us with a human experience and reminds us we are not alone

We can move closer to something with music, and we can also rely on music to move away from something.  Tim mentioned that music provided respite and temporary relief from his grief.  Like a vacation.  

When we lean into the challenge this is where the real power can be.  If you resist it and run from it, it chases you down and eventually need to work through it.

Resilience is like cardio conditioning; you don’t buy it at a store; you develop it, build it through practice

Tim mentioned that he was grateful for all the adversity he went through prior to Bella as this allowed him to build his resilience muscle.

In adversity you can get bitter, or you can get better.

Gratitude as a practice.  When you need it, this skill will become second nature, your brain becomes primed for what went well today.  Tim also found the habit of kneeling to be part of the habit and his brain responded accordingly.

 There is so much to learn from Tim, that I am going to have him back at a later date to pick up where we left off.  In fact, we didn’t even get to cover some of the questions I had hoped to ask, because Tim opened up the possibilities for learning even more from his experience.  

Tim has done extensive work with clients struggling with addiction and offers a lifeline to anyone who is ready to harness the power of music to stay present, open up and be creative.

In invite you to visit Tim’s website where he will send you a meditation that her calls relaxation vacation. 

 Question: Do you lean in or do you run from the challenge you are currently facing?

 Question: How has adversity been your instructor?  

Quote:  The power of music to integrate and cure…is quite fundamental.  It is the profoundest nonchemical medication.” Oliver Sachs 

 “Art and music shine a light of meaning on ordinary life, and through them we are able to confront the things that trouble us and to find consolation and peace in their presence.”  Roger Scruton

 And remember friends, Adversity is inevitable while resilience is a practice.

 Cindy Thompson: Thank you for listening to this episode of ‘A Resilience Project.’ We would not be doing this podcast without you. If you or someone you know has an inspirational story or is helping to build resilience in their community, please e-mail me at cindy@aresilienceproject.com. In fact, e-mail me either way. I would love to hear from you. My hope is to feature an episode periodically on your letters of resilience. I'm very interested in hearing your story of how you have tackled hard things and what worked for you. With your permission, I hope to share some of these stories along the way with our listeners. Also, check out my website, aresilienceproject.com to learn more about our amazing guests.  

Your presence here is important because together we are cultivating a village of resilient individuals. You are creating a space for their stories to be shared and a sacred space for learning to occur. I also have a favor - I would love for you to go to your preferred podcast platform, rate and review the podcast so that we will know how we're doing. I also would like to express my gratitude to the amazing team of volunteers that have jumped on board to support this project. You will find each of those beautiful people on my website on the team page.  

As you go about this week, I invite you to think about one way that you can continue to grow your resilient muscle. What is one thing you can start with today? See you next week.

HELPFUL RESILIENCE INFORMATION

Definition of Resilience

Capacity to cope with and recover quickly from setbacks, difficulties, and toughness; to adapt well to change; and keep going in the face of adversity.

Types of Resilience - how the body deals with change and recovers from physical demands, illnesses, and injuries. 

Physical Resilience how the body deals with change and recovers from physical demands, illnesses and injuries.  

Mental Resilience ability to adapt to change and uncertainty.  

Emotional Resilience ability to regulate emotions during times of stress. 

Social Resilience community resilience – ability of groups to recover from difficult situations.

Areas of Life or Situations That Require A High Level of Resilience:

·      Resilience in Adoption

·       Resilience in Adults

·       Resilience in Anxiety - Depression

·       Resilience in Body Image – Eating Disorders

·       Resilience in Change

·       Resilience in Children

·       Resilience in Chronic Illness

·       Resilience in Death & Dying

·       Resilience in Divorce

·       Resilience in Immigration

·       Resilience in Non-Profits

·       Resilience in Marriage

·       Resilience in Parenting

·       Resilience in Post Secondary Education

·       Resilience in Pregnancy

·       Resilience in Racism

·       Resilience in Relationships

·       Resilience in Suicide

·       Resilience in Teens

·       Resilience in Trauma 

·       Resilience in War

·       Resilience in the Workplace

 Traits, Qualities and Characteristics That People with Resilience Possess:

·         They are authentic

·         They adapt to change and see it not as a challenge, but an opportunity

·         They make commitments and keeps them

·         They feel in control – strong internal locus of control

·         They have close and secure attachment to others

·         They set personal or collective goals

·         They become stronger with the effect of stress

·         They learn from past successes and mistakes

·         They view themselves as survivors – Survivor mentality

·         They have a good self-image

·         They are confidence in ability to make good decisions

·         They have a sense of humor

·         They have an action-oriented approach to life

·         They have patience around people

·         They have optimism in face of uncertainty

·         The have Faith or some belief in a higher power

Ways to build Resilience in People

·       Create more purpose and meaning in all that you do

·       Develop a good support system – supportive network circle that they can engage for help

·       Maintaining positive relationships

·       Work towards developing good communication skills.

·       Develop the capacity to make realistic plans and to carry them out

·       Maintain a well-balanced routine lifestyle of diet and exercise

·       Practice emotional regulation to manage your feelings, impulses and emotions 

·       Practice good problem-solving skills to rationally develop solutions

·       Find ways to help others

·       Set time aside for journaling

·       Develop new skills to respond differently to situations. ... 

·       Turn setbacks into opportunities for growth. ... 

·       Maintain a healthy perspective. ... 

·       Maintain Proper sleeping habits

·       Practice meditation

Organizations that promote and support Resilience

Resilience Quotes

Resilience Books

Resilience Courses