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good morning and welcome to mosaic. always a privilege and joy to host mosaic on behalf of my cohost , most people who know me, they know i am a avid reader so some of my favorite kind of readings are memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, because they share so much of what a person has gone through, their life stories and i love them. so it is a great joy for me to have as my guest, rev. donna. who has written her memoirs , sleep , pray and heal and it is a riveting story of her life. so she is my guest and i am glad to have her. welcome. >> thank you, good to be here.

>> before we get into the book tell us about your background and your experiences. >> well i am from california born and raised. active in the united methodist church and ended up going to seminary, becoming a pastor, marrying my husband, having two little girls. loving every single minute of life and then, one day we went to a fancy meal at a 200 pound class partition fell onto my head and in that moment i sustained a disabling head and neck injury. i have not worked since and for 17 years i relied on a cane, opioids and a wheelchair to get around. >> but you have work. >> well, it has taken me eight

years to write this book and i do a little preaching with some of the head injury stuff, you have to rest in order to let the brain come online so to speak. so i do a little bit at a time and the spirit and spirituality has really helped me can -- find my way. >> i read the book twice, that's how riveting and compelling the story has been. i have moved by it greatly. we will get further into it, but your father is a great preacher. your husband is a preacher. he has his doctorate on spirituality. from howard thurman. >> yes and a phd from san francisco institute of integral studies. >> i had him on some years ago so it's great to have him. i

know he is in the audience and listening and eager to hear what you have to say. i'm sure he has read quite a bit of it. >> he has lived and read it and edit it out a few things. >> i love the book and how you relate to your family. your mom and dad and sister and hubert and your daughters. it was an amazing story. we will hear some more in the next few segments, tell us about this and why you chose those words to articulate your story. >> i will do that. >> okay, please join us in our next segments.

welcome back to mosaic, we are talking to rev. donna and her memoirs that just came out. sleep, pray and heal. i am always interested in titles of books, but not just the titles, but the chapters so tell us about how you came about with such a interesting title. >> after 20 different ones, this is the one that set right and it set right because, i

have written it for the general audience first. not necessarily for the church audience. i wanted a title that was not too churchy. there is one reason. another is that sleep, pray and heal are the three components that really come together where i found my path to wholeness and well-being which is the subtitle to the book. after my head injury, i had difficulty speaking , thinking. and seeing. i had double vision and my eyes would jerk as it would go across so i would get terrible stomach aches and dizziness from the ways my eyes would not focus. my left side was weak . i had difficulty walking and i have chronic pain. and so what my brain

injury rehab physician instructed me to do is for every hour up i want you to lay down one hour because the brain must rest to heal and if you overdo it you run the risk of developing seizures and we don't want you to do that. so i was in the, i was used to pushing it in order to get better. you go workout come into a little more, you do a little more, you go beyond and i was an over achiever. so, yeah, push the envelope, push the envelope and all of a sudden it was turned on its head and said go to bed, go to bed. >> you had a reputation of being a very good preacher so you had to change a whole approach. >> i had the reputation of being an excellent student and a great preacher and i loved being in charge and i worked hard. i would read at least a

book a week for servant development and all of a sudden i could not read a magazine article. i just couldn't do it. so i had to find a whole new paradigm for how to get through the day. and when you cannot count on yourself to figure things out, or you cannot count on your words to pray for you really don't know what you just did or the name of your nephew or how many cups of rice you put into the microwave into the pot in order to cook and two cups with four cups of water. i cannot keep track of coming to two or four. >> your chapters are captivating, but you have three sections that stand out. tell us about those. >> my first section i call

breaking open, the time of the accident when the glass fell on me and it broke me open spiritually because all the sudden when you cannot count on your words or knowing what to pray, i fell back to the beginning, the essence of the spirit who created me. i call it brushes of the spirit, the brushes of the spirit. you can feel it sometimes, kind of like a little wind. go this way, go this way and the second section is painting prayers because i cannot speak or know my players, i found in the down hours, what i was trying to work out what kind of sit with me and then i would paint it. so i painted my prayers. what was phenomenal , that i was not expecting, is the spirit would become, the message is a spirit about healing , inside of the paintings. like this one right

here, i call broken gifts and that is broken ostrich egg shells. it was the two-year anniversary of my head injury and i was told by an attorney that for that two years, that's pretty much what you've got, permanent disabilities. >> did he bring them back from africa? >> he brought the exiles back from africa and they broke come just like these broken abilities of mine. i put them on across giving my brokenness to god. in that painting what the brushes of the spirit gave to me was, i was feeling so discouraged with having not healed as i hoped because i thought , if you have faith like a mustard seed you could tell them not to to move but that was not happening with my brain injury. was my faith not good enough? i wanted to return to normal and i thought that's

what healing was, but the painting of the cross and the egg shells, i saw a new portion born out of the egg shells and i thought women in the gospel healing is wholeness. i can be disabled, i can be hole. i can be disabled and healed. it is like new life, crucifixion and resurrection together. creating a new. that goes into creating a new, the third section. breaking open, painting prayers and creating a new with the same brushes of spirit i became in tuned with when they were moving and instructing me toward my path to wholeness and when it was my own mind telling me something because they are very different. quite an education. >> yes it is. it took seven or eight years, a lifetime. the way i read it. >> right, i have stories from my childhood and meeting my husband. the spirituality , the

give and take with god is , you know, that is the essence of the book. >> i love some of those pictures you have. we will see them in the next segment. i'm glad you brought that up. please join us. we hope that you will join us in the next segment on mosaic. thank you.

in one of our last segments we talk about painting prayers that donna has done. and mike, our cameraman will show some of the pictures she has painted. we will look them up, at this

point, there's one can you explain? >> i call this painting formed by tears, is self portrait, painted very quickly, and a hard spot i was in and it was my prayer about too much pain for too lo is that , well, i hated the painting because i thought i was supposed to be counting my blessings and stay positive and that's the way to get through it and as i watched this painting dry, i do want paint dry, the most boring thing you can do, watch oil paint dry for a month or two and i thought what a minute the brushes of the spirit show me that the tears are beautiful. >> in each story i can hear the solace. honest, authentic and angry at times. >> that's right. to give god your tears and tears are holy water at work, that's with the spirit brushes told me don't be ashamed, their holy waters that work moving through your. it is a beautiful thing and i

change my impression of tears. no longer am i ashamed and the brushes of the spirit moved with honesty. just like worshiping and spirit and truth. the spirit is a partner to truth. jesus says spirit is a partner to truth so the path to wholeness is always grounded in truth, whatever you are experiencing. in the first year it's like i should be better, let me take my mind off of it and it will get better. that did not work for me because i had a long journey. the only way to get fuel to move forward was to stay with truth and spirit, honesty. >> love the brushes of the spirit. i might use that as a title and give you credit for it. let's see another picture. tell us about that one. >> i call this rocking lost, one of the effects of my head injury is i cannot rock my baby

who was nine months old at the time. so i went through a lot, for a couple years being very angry that was stolen from me. i had to quit nursing, i cannot rock her, get sick in the car, anytime there was motion around me so i painted my prayer of this old rickety rocking chair. as the chapter in the book called the rocking lost about this painting prayer and what i discovered, i sewed the empty credit alarms in the mat out of the slippers that he wore and grew out of and that was really where my heart was. i was mourning the rocking lost and you know what, it was so amazing. finally in the moment i finished the painting, that monkey on my back, grief and anger over having lost that time with my infant finally left. i had taken it to god and

leave it there and leave him prayer and it was always back here. so angry. leave it there. when i finished the painting and i could touch the blanket sleeper arms i gave the grief a home to reside and that is brushes of the spirit showing me how to walk forward when you are sorrowful. >> what have not asked of until now, how long did it take you to do those paintings? >> well, three years, these are the brain injury paintings. the initial ones. some of them took five minutes and some took three or four months. it depended on where i was at and how honest i was being and there are a lot of paintings that are not there, that, the should paintings. you should feel this way, you should be this way, you should be doing

this. i wanted bright stars, something beautiful but the creative spirit was not moving with that. so, a lot of paintings got off to the wayside because they were not telling the truth and that is where the spirit moves. >> isn't that something? i had the privilege of hearing and seeing smokey robinson a few months ago. he took about five minutes to do one of his songs cruising. it took them five years to do my girl which turned out to be one of the greats. >> formed by tears that is a five-minute painting because that was pallet to the knife to the colors of paint. >> let's see another one. tell us about this one. >> i call this tbi self-portrait, the glass fell . from the outside i look fine, but the inside looking out, this painting appears. broken

spaces where my brain is not connecting and the way i did this is i had thrown a mirror on the floor to see what happens when glass falls because that was my prayer. what happened to me when the glass fell on me and i cut a pastel drawing it myself into the same pieces as the broken glass. >> how long did that take? >> that was about four weeks. that is also on the path of me being up for two hours a day. i would do a little bit, lie down, do a little bit, get back and forth with sleeping , praying and healing. that gentle motion. >> let's see the last two pictures of the family before the next segment because we will run out of time but i want to see these pictures, what year was that? >> 1986. that is hubert ivory,

rev. dr. hubert ivory. we were married in fresno. >> your dad was there. >> my dad did it, we had so many ministers, baptists, christian methodist, episcopal, everything possible. that was a wonderful time. >> let's see the family, the daughters. >> that is with rocking lost with my youngest daughter and my older daughter and that's the first time i shared my painting publicly. >> wonderful, wonderful, how old are they now? >> 30 and 26. >> wow. >> they are not little girls anymore. >> i remember when they were little girls. that's amazing, i'm glad. thank you. we will have another segment and look forward to one more poem that she has and one more picture that we will see.

with rev. donna ivory , we talked about creating the new in the last segment of her book and i wanted her to read a poem , that i think would be so important during this christmas season in which we look for the new in the christ child and dancing with pain has been her story also, so this poem

expresses that, sure that with us. >> this goes with the painting dancing with pain that has me dancing with a body of broken mirrors. dancing with pain. i do not choose to have pain as my partner. following my every step. bending my body to its intention, holding me always with cutting arms, tripping me up to fall fully into its blunt and harsh body, reflecting distorted and exaggerated aspects of me. i do not choose to have pain as my partner. for three years now i have grown into knowing this partner of mine called pain, i have caught on to the ab of a stunning suspicious secret of pains way. why the secret? perhaps the face of pain is so gruesome my fears copter , pain follows rhythm, i step forward, pain

steps back for a moment. and then lickety-split pain steps forward again. i overdo too many steps at once, pain cuts in.'s i can do as long as i keep rhythm with pain, pain follows rhythm. with pain as my partner and i can dance, triple step, step together, side and back, tap tap tap, moving rejoicing feeling, exhilaration of freedom as body blends with restless desire of soul, i can dance. it is a precarious delicate dance i live with this nasty partner called pain, but pain follows and knows rhythm therefore i choose to improve my dancing skills. i will outwit, out step and out in print, keep up a joyous movement while keeping in rhythm with life's end while keeping in rhythm with pain while i become so advanced that i will take the lead. >> love it, i'm glad we took the time for that. better than

dancing with the stars anytime. would be left out, the website, how to get your books and any readings coming up. >> i have a website, adventures in healing. you can get there by my website and a facebook page adventures in healing. sleep, pray, heal found at any bookstore anyway. i also sell them on my website and amazon and barnes & noble. everywhere. >> grade, when is the next book? >> the next book is in 2020, i call it sleep, pray, fly, working with a healer and the brushes of the spirit and how i restored my ability to walk again. >> we can dance with pain and we can fly. i love that. thank you for being with us. i'm sure the congregation and the

audience listening will be inspired and lifted and feel resilient as of your example. >> the resiliency of christmas, the manger and everything going wrong. yet, the stars shining and jesus came. >> thank you for joining us. i hope that you have been lifted by the story that is in this memoir that is so gripping, you will be deeply moved if you read it. god bless you during the season and may god always be with you. brushes of the spirit, thank you for joining us.

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