This episode of Epic Begins explores the powerful transformation that can arise from adversity and trauma. Host Zander Sprague sits down with peak performance coach Jessie Torres, who shares her deeply personal journey of grief and healing after losing two brothers. Together, they discuss how to reframe tragedy as an opportunity for growth, finding light in the darkest moments, and channeling pain into purpose. Jessie shares strategies for cultivating resilience, alchemizing suffering into strength, and reclaiming agency in the face of unimaginable loss. Their conversation underscores the importance of choice – the choice to define our experiences, rather than let them define us. Listeners will come away inspired to seek gifts within their own struggles and embrace the epic potential that lies within every setback. This episode offers a profound roadmap for transforming adversity into triumph.
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The Epic Journey: Finding Light In The Darkness With Jessie Torres
I am so excited to welcome Jessie Torres to be my guest. Jessie, tell us who you are and what you do.
Zander, thank you so much for having me. I’m super excited to be here. As you said, my name is Jessie Torres. I consider myself a peak performance coach and life strategist. I enjoy and I believe helping people. I believe that my mission is to help awaken and to reconnect with our true essence and to heal within so that we can be the best version of ourselves. In a world of tons of mindset, we are knowing our way out of healing. It’s important for us to take a look at some of the things. We need to heal or our superpowers waiting.
Healing From Grief
I couldn’t agree more. One of the things I know that you and I share, unfortunately, is that we’re both siblings survivors, meaning we’ve both lost at least one sibling. I am sorry for your loss. I lost my sister many years ago.
Sorry to hear that.
It is a unique experience and certainly, there are lots of people who have also experienced that. Yet, I believe a lot of people don’t work their way through the grief. They’re don’t know how to heal from that. My question for you is, how have you been working your way through healing yourself from the loss? You lost two brothers, I believe.
I did. It’s interesting, Zander. It’s taking time because I lost my older brother many years ago and my little brother as soon as a few years ago. It’s always a shock, but it’s one of those things. It was a murder. It’s one of those things that you read about and you watch movies over. You don’t expect to happen to you. He was such a good man. You go crazy with trying to figure out what happened.
I remember that I was raised Catholic. I was then Christian and now I consider myself more spiritual than I do religious. At that time, I turned my back on everything like God and Universe. Whatever. I was like, “I don’t know if you exist, God. I don’t know. Maybe we just get buried under seven feet. Worms crawling out of our eye hole.” I was upset. I thought, “If there is a God, then I hate you for taking my brother.” That’s the energy that I was holding at the time. I didn’t know how to process it back then. I just knew that this wasn’t supposed to happen in my definition.
I can say that I, too, am a victim.
You understand the shock factor.
As I say all the time when I’m talking about it, there were many things I thought it would deal with in my life but murder was not one of them. I remember when my dad called to tell me. It was literally like on the computer, the 404 not found. I couldn’t process that. I’m not a particularly religious person, but there was a whole lot of why. Why did this happen? This is way too soon. This chapter has ended so prematurely.
To answer your question, I don’t know about you but what ended up shifting for me as you asked me how I processed through it. It was a moment of massive grief. I remember, at the time, my ex-husband was holding me and I was crying. Over his shoulder, I saw my brother. He’s standing there in white and there is white behind him. It looked like people but you know how it’s distorted? It’s a feeling more than it is what you’re seeing. It was all white and he just gestured. He said, “Everything is as it’s supposed to be.”
I didn’t know what it meant then but I knew it gave me calm. I knew it brought me to peace. I knew he was in a good place. From there, there’s all kinds of things that have happened in my life journey since then but I’ve been on a quest of finding my own connection to what is God, source, universe or whatever this place is that we go to when we leave our human suit.
Fast forward, my own transformation and my divorce that was very tumultuous and scary. After years of verbal, mental, and emotional abuse, coming to a place of apathy, wishing my own death and to come out of that in a desire to understand humanity. At that point, it was an act of kindness that woke me up. I call it another short circuit moment. I didn’t even know what to call it. I just knew. I had come to such a place of like, “If this is life, I don’t want to be here.” My kids saved me from taking my own life. When these people behave kindly, it created a short circuit that said, “I don’t know what this feeling is but if this feeling’s available, then life is worth living.”
What it did is it catalyzed my decision to then leave my current situation which, by the way, I’m grateful for my ex-husband and my father. It’s all good. I understand the divine order of it all. At least my belief system is I trust that everything happens for our highest and greatest good even the suck. If I look at that, when my little brother passed away a few years ago, I went into rage, which I don’t typically go to rage. I go to sadness, but here, I was like no. I already checked the box. I already lost a brother, like did that. This is not meant to happen.
I’m always asking, “God, if both of my brothers are meant to be taken, then what do you want with me?” Part of what I do is find the light in the darkest moment. I helped alchemize our pain into something beautiful or into power and purpose. I thought the memo or the answer was, “Jessie, you have to eat your own medicine.” Now because I had cultivated these tools. I had come to a place where even in my deepest sorrow, I was able to find the light, beauty and the magnificence of life, which is polarity. We get both. We don’t know light without dark. We don’t know positive without negative. It’s magnificent in its gut-wrenching pain. I could now connect to the depth of my pain was equivalent to the depth of my love.
The Power Of Choice
I talk all the time when I’m talking with other siblings survivors. I tend to talk to a lot of parents who’ve lost their child and I just remind people that when you’ve experienced a loss celebrate the rainbow that was that person’s life. My sister was 30 years old and I was 28. My youngest sister was 25 when my sister was killed. Not that I remember the first couple of years of life with my sister but there’s all these wonderful things that I can hold on to and I can celebrate, versus focusing on that dot.
A lot of times people just are so focused on, “I lost my sister.” “I lost my brother.” “My marriage ended.” Whatever. but the you’re right, there is light and there is dark. There is the sun and the moon. All of these things. Another thing that that you brought up and I think it’s important, especially when we’re on whatever our epic journey. I like to call what you and I experienced the epic unexpected because it is an epic journey. It’s not one that we would choose to go on, but here we are so might as well make the best of it. There’s choice.
Every day, I have a choice whether I want to talk about Lucy or not. There’s a lot of power with what goes on in our life. We can either have it define us or we can define it and I choose to define my loss and do some work in. I’m a little busier because I got some work to do for Lucy. You’re a little busier you’re because you’re probably doing some work for your brothers. That’s beautiful and awesome.
That’s such a great point. I believe that we’re always at choice point but society teaches us to hold on to a victim story because the more that we hold on to the victimization of like, “I’m a victim of this thing.” The more that we embrace our limitations the sicker we get and so on. It can get political conversation but they make more money if we’re sick. From that, it’s like we have a choice. It’s like, coaches will say, “Your past doesn’t equal your future.” I disagree with that.
It can but we’re not taught to grab the good to your point. It’s like, when I think of I went through abuse with my father, when I think of a little girl having to build traps to warn her when her dad was coming into his room. I can think about that and go, “That’s tragic that I had to do that.” It didn’t always stop him but it somehow comforted me to know he was coming and that seems tragic. That is true, but what I also see is a little girl that was resourceful, resilient, and courageous.
I didn’t know that I was going to need all those tools when I got my divorce but I was building and cultivating them. That is also true. This one disempowers me and makes me feel pain. This one empowers me and helps me fall in love with the aspects of me that got back up. Both are available but we’re not taught to seek it. I always say, you got to look for the gift in your pain because if you don’t, you will only remember the pain.
Another thing. Years ago, I was doing a coaching course and we had to read lots of books. It’s funny how when you’re doing that, you hold on to just one little piece of like a 200 or a 250 page book but it doesn’t matter. As long as you walk away with something. It was talking about Buddhism and the diamond industry. It was very interesting.
The thing that I pulled away from it was that, in Buddhism, there’s this belief that things are not inherently good or bad. It’s how we interpret it. Let’s take something like the sun being out. Most people are like, “The sun is out. That’s a great thing.” If I’m a farmer and there’s a drought, maybe I see the sun being out as being a bad thing. Inherently, the sun being out is not good or bad. It’s how I choose to see what that is.
In our own life, the things that happened to us. Yet there’s a lot of stuff that happens that it’s not fair. It stinks. It’s not what we would use but how do we choose to deal with whatever’s going on. You’re right, we are all so much more resilient than we are all that we are. That victim story, you’re right. There are so many people I work with where it’s about the victim story. It’s me trying to encourage them to say, “You don’t have to buy into that.”
I’ll give a perfect example. I wrote my first book and sat on it for five years because I had all kinds of feedback through school that I wasn’t a good writer so I didn’t believe I was a good writer. I told people I was coming out with a book but I wasn’t because I was doing nothing for it to come out. It’s not like, “I’m waiting for them to publish it.” I get tired of hearing myself say that.
I put the book out and it was a book for other siblings survivors. An amazing thing happened, Jessie. People started telling me that they liked the book and it was helpful. It was shocking to me. Why? It’s because the story I was telling myself was, I’m not a writer. I’m not a good writer. Surprisingly, I seem to be a pretty good writer.
It’s also important to share our story. You don’t need to be a good writer to connect with somebody or write to be able to influence and connect at the heart-level.
Understanding Trauma And Its Impact
It’s also important to share our story. You don’t need to be a good writer to connect with somebody to be able to influence or be able to connect at the heart level. I’m sure your book was very heartfelt from your experience and what you want to offer a service to people. It’s like, we don’t do a service by holding back. I had a similar experience and I felt an energy whether it was God. It felt like a Christ energy but I was coaching. I was like in my own, “Who am I to say this thing? Who am I to blah, blah, blah?”
I had this voice that came down and grabbed my face and said, “You need to speak. You need to write and express. Everything you say is me through you. Let me.” I was like, “I’m getting in my own way. I need to get out of the way and allow what’s coming through,” because I believe all of our adversity has given us a muscle. I have this written on my desk. It says, “Let me,” so that I get out of the way. I just allow what is coming through to come through because one of the greatest gifts I’ve gotten was a gift from a lady back when I was working in corporate.
We don’t do ourselves a service by holding back.
We went to lunch together and I was sharing some of my story or whatever. She was like, “Can I write that down?” We ended the lunch with, “Where do I leave my $10 co-pay?” I was like, “What happened? What just happened?” I remember I walked away more inspired than her because I was like, “If there’s something in my journey or something in my storytelling that allowed her to see a different version of herself or woke her up to be inspired. I found gratitude for every part of my experience in that moment.”
From my dad’s abused to my husband’s abuse to my brother dying to my mom not listening. All of it. Gratitude was waiting for me. I didn’t know. That’s one of the things. I think we have a society that don’t know. We have high achievers and people that are getting momentum, but they don’t know why they’re stuck. They don’t realize that where they’re has a tie into a trauma moment when they were young. I go through the three pillars of trauma, which are undiagnosed trauma, unacknowledged trauma, and unresolved trauma.
People will say, “No, I had a great upbringing. My mom and dad were great. They’re still married. It’s awesome.” Here’s the thing, in the human experience, we all create meaning as you were saying, we are meaning making machines just in being a regular human. It doesn’t mean you have to have had abuse. I define trauma as what the child made meaning of in the moment of the experience or when safety was lost.
We have a society that doesn’t know that where they’re stuck has a tie into a trauma moment when they were young.
If a child is going to the grocery store with his mother and he’s playing in the aisle. Mom goes to the end of the aisle to grab something. She can see him, but he can’t see her. He lives up his head and screams for mom. She’s like, “I’m right here.” It was seconds, but that child, in his unconscious conditioning said, “I could be left behind.” “I could be abandoned.” Now, when mom walks out the door, he’s clingy, he cries and they don’t understand what’s wrong because no abuse.
She didn’t do anything wrong but now the guys 35 and he doesn’t know why he can’t keep a relationship or why he’s insecure or controlling. It all comes back to that moment. We don’t know to know. We’re not taught. That’s why I love that you’re doing this show because again, it helps us see through a different set of lenses. Lenses that we weren’t taught to use.
I believe that we all have epic things that we want to do. Be it write a book, start a show, run a marathon, start your own business, or travel somewhere. All too often, we all say, “Someday, I want to do this,” or, “I’d love to go here.” “I’d love to do that.” We don’t because in our own mind, we make it difficult or we worry that we don’t have all the steps. The fact of the matter is epic does begin with one step forward.
Oftentimes, that step Is not nearly as hard as we thought. For example, you were telling that story of the corporate world of having lunch with that woman. That, for you, was probably the step of, “People are interested in my story and I can help people.” What a moment and yet that step probably did not feel nearly as momentous as if you’d said, “Let me set up a meeting so that I can try and do it.” Trying to make things much more difficult and then they have to be.
Jessie’s Not Yet Moment
One of the things I love to ask my guests, Jessie, is in my book, Epic Begins with 1 Step Forward. It’s this concept of not yet and I love not yet because it’s so powerful because there are things that we’re doing that take time. We haven’t finished it. Maybe you’re riding a book. Has your book come out? Not yet. It doesn’t mean it’s not going to, but if you say, “No.” It’s such a hard stop. What are 1 or 2 of your not yets? Those things that maybe you dream of doing or you’re just like, “I want this?”
You nailed it. It’s my book. I started writing my book years ago and what I realized is that it was a not yet because who I am now is light years from when I first started it. It was not meant to be written then. It’s meant to be written now. I’m actively working on that to make that happen and I thought, “That was perfect because it was not yet back then.” It’s a, “I need to get it done.”
Congratulations on working on the book. I know it’s an arduous process. What I like to say is, the creation of the book is challenging, but what’s more challenging is the editing of the book. I know when I got my books. By the time I got done proofreading them and they finally got published. I prefer not to see my own book for about a month since I just spent the last two months reading my full book like 7 or 8 times. I’m tired of my own words for a moment. I love what I wrote but I have read this chapter so many times. It’s a very unique and fun process. Jessie, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us. What you shared is so beautiful and wonderful. I love the work you’re doing. How can people find you?
Connect With Jessie
They can go to IAmFierceGrace.com Fierce Grace is the name of my company and it is my mission in life to help awaken and heal the essence within and to help you be the best version of you so that you can serve humanity and love it forward. That’s my website. I also have a free gift for your audience. It’s called the 10 Step Guide to Freedom.
Basically, it is a resource. No matter what your situation, you can have an epic life. No matter how bleak it looks. No matter how you feel you can’t do it or you don’t have the resources. There are steps you can take right in the moment to live your dream. That will give you some steps and some guidelines to be able to do that and I’m happy to offer that.
How can people get that?
It’ll be a link that they can go grab it on there. If you go to IAmFierceGrace.com, you will also have the ability. If you just want to chat with me, I’m happy to offer a free consultation and see where you’re at in life and how I can support you.
You’re so generous and that’s wonderful. I will have that linked. I want to remind everyone, if you’re ready to begin your epic journey, go to EpicBegins.com. As always, remember epic choices lead to the epic life that you want.
Important Links
About Jessie Torres
For the last 18 years Peak Performance Coach and Life Strategist, Jessie Torres has coached thousands of High Performance People from all walks of life and various parts of the world that have achieved success and the highest level of fulfillment. Out of the top 120 coaches on the planet, Jessie ranked either number 1 or top 3 in every measurable category while working with the top coaching company in the world. Jessie is fueled by a passionate love for humanity and a burning desire to end suffering. She is driven to discover the truth of the client’s deepest potential and unlock the limitless opportunities that leave others in the dark ages! Bringing all levels of mindset, emotional intelligence, energy and strategy with an authentic, client driven approach. Jessie’s teachings will help you transform your life from pain or trauma into purpose and passion, what Jessie refers to as “Fierce Grace”.