Nothing is Required: Trauma-Informed Gong Listening

You Were Not There

JS Worldbridger Season 1 Episode 101

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0:00 | 6:49

You Were Not There is a deeply personal spoken word piece that confronts the gap between lived experience and distant observation.

This song speaks from the reality of being present through every stage of a loved one’s decline—surgeries, chemotherapy, hospice, and the final moments where the body lets go. It gives voice to the weight carried by those who stayed, who witnessed, who held on when there was nothing left to hold onto but love.

At its core, this piece is about truth and authority.
 It draws a clear, unapologetic line between those who were there—and those who were not.

It is a response to careless words, to jokes and comments about cancer and hospice that ignore the depth of what those experiences actually mean. It reclaims the narrative from those who speak without understanding and returns it to the one who lived it.

This is not just grief.
 This is memory.
 This is witness.
 This is boundary.

And above all—
 this is the voice of someone who stayed.

The opening moments of this episode include a short excerpt from Regulation Before Release.

This excerpt is offered as orientation and stabilization before the main content begins. It is not an exercise and does not ask the listener to relax, process, or change anything. The sound is shared as structure—something steady that can be present while the nervous system settles at its own pace.

Regulation Before Release was created for moments when grounding and co

The opening minutes of this episode feature an excerpt from Nothing Is Required of You, a listening piece that anchors the tone and ethics of this podcast.

This excerpt is offered as orientation—not instruction. There is no exercise to follow, no breath to control, and no expectation to relax, heal, or change. The sound is shared as presence—something that can be nearby without asking anything of the listener.

Nothing Is Required of You was created for nervou

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Nothing is required of you here.

SPEAKER_00

You were not there when her body went heavy, not tired, not resting, but heavy in that way that tells you something is leaving. You were not there when her voice broke open, when pain spoke louder than breath, when the room changed and never changed back. You were not there when she asked for release, when staying became harder than going. You were not there to hold her when gravity took her, when we felt that shift between here and not here. You were not there for the bathroom trips, for the lifting, for the waiting, for the slow undoing of a body that kept trying. You were not there for the surgeries, for the chemotherapy, for the long stretch of days that blurred into endurance. You were not there for hospice, not the real hospice, not the kind that lives in your bones and your breath, in the way silence never sounds the same again. You were not there for the smell of it, for the way death arrives before it's named. You did not watch your mother die. I did. So don't stand in my space and make it small. Hospice is not something you joke about with me. Cancer is not something you get to turn into a sentence just to hear yourself speak. You don't get to laugh near it, you don't get to soften it, you don't get to carry it lightly. When I carried all of it. So understand this. Whether I ever say it out loud or not. There are things you do not get to speak on in my presence. There are lines you do not cross in my space. And this is one of them.