The Gift of Tough Times: Tara Igoe (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Tara Igoe’s talk titled “The Gift of Tough Times” at TEDxLaJolla conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello, La Jolla. I love that I’m following the food talk because I have been popping sprinkles cupcakes downstairs like Tic Tacs. So, if I jump off the building at some point from the Sugar High, come find me; I’ll be down there. Or I could wash your car after this. I have a lot of energy is what I’m trying to say to you. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

In April of 2003, I traveled from my hometown in Massachusetts across the United States to where I was living in Los Angeles. Not for fun, not for some wacky adventure, but because my dad had just died. I was overwhelmed by the grief. And I became afraid to fly. I thought the plane taking me back to Los Angeles after his funeral was going to crash in a ball of flames.

And what were the odds of that? My dad had just died of stage four colon cancer. And like the plane’s going to crash too. But somehow that made sense to me at the time, because that’s how I lived. I was afraid to live. I was afraid to die. I was literally afraid to fly.

Facing Fears

I was used to stuffing down my feelings to try to create a false sense of certainty within myself, and it wasn’t working. But there was something about the loss of my dad, and I’m sure those of you in the room have lost someone at some point, and if you haven’t, you’re lucky. It broke me open and it made me want to feel things in a way that I had never felt before.

I wanted to feel the pain of the loss because somehow it connected me back to him and it connected me to myself. So I felt the sadness, I felt the anger that I felt toward his doctors for maybe not saving his life. And by feeling all of that, it opened up something inside of me. And it made me look at my life in a different way. And I started to look at some of the things in my life that weren’t working out right.

So I left a job that I hated. I started performing again, doing comedy and storytelling shows. And I started immersing myself in the world of personal development. It was a passion that I’d had before and I reignited it.

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A New Perspective

And it was actually at a personal development event that I met a bird. I met this bird, I was taking a break from the event, it was in Palm Springs, and I walked out into the hallway and this bird was in a cage, pushed up against a window, and looking at the open sky. So this bird with clipped wings in a cage, looking out at the sky that it would never fly in. And there was something about that that obviously broke my heart.

But I realized that beyond feeling bad about the bird, his name is Cowboy by the way, I understood how Cowboy felt because that’s how I felt my whole life. I caged myself, but my cage wasn’t physical, it was my mind. So I decided to get certified as a coach, I was a communications expert, but I decided to get a certification as a coach because I was so inspired by that bird, because I wanted to help other people free ourselves from the cage of our minds.

Love and Transformation

And I thought I had it figured out. And then in 2012, I fell in love, and I fell apart, I didn’t plan on that part. But my boyfriend at the time lives in Northern California and we were so in love that I decided to pack my bags and move everything, I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 19 years, to move everything, I said goodbye to my friends, my comedy, my career, basically everything that gave my ego a sense of identity and false certainty.

And I moved up north to this rural area where there are lots of deer, turkeys, and occasional peacocks, and more hair salons than there are people. I still haven’t figured the hair salon thing out yet, I have no idea. And so there was something about that, that chain of events that really shook me up. And I fell apart.

Within two weeks of arriving, I started to have severe panic attacks, so bad that I couldn’t even control them, and I had to go to the local hospital to get help. My normal coping tactics to calm my nerves weren’t working, nothing I tried was working. Even my cat Penny, who’s like a thousand years old and has like one tooth left, and if she was a person, she’d have a walker, like she could not handle all of the stress in our house and like hid in a cabinet for days. But I couldn’t hide like Penny, unfortunately, and so I went back to my love for personal development to try to find the answer to what was happening to me.

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A Journey Back to Innocence

And here’s what I discovered, and I hope that it helps you. And really at the end of the day, you know what, I’m going to give you these tips, but I have to say this. That little baby screaming in the audience a few moments ago, and those of you watching this may not have heard that baby, but that baby should just be put on the stage because it’s so precious, and it’s what we’re all trying to get back to. That sense of innocence and perfectness that we were once, we’re just trying to get back there to be that again, and we’re trying to find our way back.

At least that’s my theory on life.

So in my way to try to find my way back, here’s what I found out from people like John Gray. These are all relationship and communications experts. I had owned like every TV in the house, the DVR was set for the Oprah Winfrey Network. It was on like 25, I drove my boyfriend crazy.

And I watched a lot of Iyanla, Fix My Life, God bless Iyanla. So anyway, I listened to experts like John Gray and Harp Hendricks and Pema Chodron. And the two things that really helped me the most to move through that darkest period of my life, darker even than my dad’s passing, because it wasn’t something that I expected, you know, you don’t expect to fall in love and fall apart, was that transition equals transformation.

Embracing Feelings

These moments in our lives, whether it’s the loss of a loved one or falling in love, they, if we are on this path of consciousness, they are moments that can become triggers to bring up old stuff that hasn’t been healed. And apparently, like I had a tsunami of old stuff that hadn’t been healed because I cried for months, people. It was not pretty, and I’m so glad to not be crying anymore. So those moments, they are opportunities for us, they are gifts that if we can lean into them, we can get the gift.

And I also learned how to feel my feelings and to stop calling the thing we call stress and anxiety, just those words, they’re such negative connotations. And they’re such, in my opinion, a disservice to our feelings. We are human beings, we are meant to be here to feel and express ourselves, that is the richness of life, that’s what that baby’s scream was earlier.

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The Journey of Transformation

He’s not pondering whether or not to feel something, he’s just feeling it in the moment. Those feelings are our guideposts for life, they plug us into the universe and into ourselves. And I learned how to identify the things that I was calling stress before. So let’s say your boss at work is being a jerk and you tell your wife, oh my God, I’m stressed.

Instead of calling it stress, what’s the feeling? Oh, I’m angry, I’m angry at my boss because they didn’t pay attention to me in a meeting or they didn’t acknowledge my contribution, and I’m hurt because I worked so hard. Just by doing that simple thing, that’s what I did with myself, I felt it in my body, and I usually feel my formerly called stress or anxiety here or here, and I ask myself, what is the feeling? What am I feeling right now?

Just by doing that, it transformed me, and it was a long process, I’m not going to lie. I like what Nelson Mandela said to Oprah in an interview before he died. She asked him, like, how in the hell, she didn’t say hell, I’m paraphrasing, how in the hell did you survive 25 years in prison? And his response to her went something like this, “If I hadn’t been to prison, I wouldn’t have achieved the hardest thing there is to achieve in life, and that is changing yourself.”

Nelson Mandela was forced to face himself, and he had a choice in that moment. And he surrendered in that transition to come to his transformation, and he did, because he listened to his feelings, and he grew and became a man we all revered. Unlike that bird in the lobby, Cowboy, we hold the keys to the cages that we’re in, the cages of our mind, and if we find the right tools, and if we feel our feelings, we can come out of our cages and fly. Thank you.